How One Drug Smuggler Shipped MILLIONS in Marijuana Through UPS

When I mail pounds, I'm trippled back in, making them look like they're the shape of a book. I'm taking the air out, I'm lining them up like Legos, I'm double boxing. - How much cash are you shipping back at a time? - He just wanted jewelry. It was all genuine gold or diamonds. I would just exchange jewelry for them. I did a dope boy university piece for Youngbuck, and then that led to me doing G-Unit pieces for everybody in G-Unit. I'm living extraordinarily. - Justin Campos is a drug trafficker from East Texas who ran a multi-million dollar interstate marijuana operation where he smuggled thousands of pounds of high grade weed every month from California to Texas inside of UPS and FedEx boxes. He also operated a legit marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles and was on the ground floor of the legal weed rush back in the mid 2000s. Justin takes us inside the fascinating underworld of the black market marijuana industry. The growers, the brokers, the sellers, and the schemes that he used to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, including making high-end jewelry pieces for rappers like Rick Ross and 50 Cent. Make sure to follow Justin on social media and stay tuned for his coming YouTube channel. This is a wild story that reminded me a lot of how I used to get it when I was in the streets. You're gonna love this guy. It's Justin Campos right here on the Connect with Johnny Mitchell. (upbeat music) At the time when Bud was still kind of in a gray area, like now it's pretty much completely legal. Yeah, but in those years that you were running, it was like half legal, you know what I mean? Well, seeing another thing that's crazy is at that time, and how old are you? I'm 40. Okay, so you remember the days when shit was 450 and ounce for some high-drowing shit, you know? When people were spending five grand on a pound of weed. That's why when I met my dude in Vegas, he was putting me on, he was putting me on stack packs. And this was in 2014, 2015, you know, $1,000 pound, that's a game changer back then. Right, so stack pack is what? A thousand bucks, they call it a stack, like a stack of racks, stack packs, a thousand each. That's what he was charging me. I was able to charge 24 and couldn't even keep enough of them. 'Cause they were going like that. And what year was that 2014? 2014. So you're a generation after me. Yeah. Like I was having my run when everything was still illegal. Like the last black market era everywhere. Like, medicinal it was legal on the West Coast. But nothing was wrecked yet. No, but it was still, competition was so tough that you had to start mailing and moving it across the country to make those million numbers, right? So, but you were running when California, Oregon, Washington, parts of the East Coast were legal. Like, we were fully legal. No, when I was in Cali, my dispensary was a medical dispensary. Right. They went wreck a year after I was locked up. Okay, so you were operating in a gray area, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was like, that seems like the sweetest time. Oh yeah. Because there was so much plausible deniability if you got rated, you'd be like, oh, no, I'm sorry. I missed some paperwork. He said he had a headache. So I showed the to him, right? When we get to it, I'll tell you how easy it was to set up that dispensary. The paperwork was filed by an attorney. I just gave him fucking like 2,500 bucks. He did it all, explain to me. It's those days were great. Now it's like a million bucks. If you want to open a dispensary in LA. Well, that's why the black market is thriving again in California because they put up so much red tape. You're like, okay, so literally you have to be a private equity fund or a cartel to afford to open up a dispensary. And now all the dispensaries look like fucking Starbucks and Apple stores on the inside of them. Right. What did yours look like? Well mine was mainly just, I just had a bullshit as a front for an address, but we were doing deliveries. That was our bread and butter, all deliveries. You remember weed maps? Weed maps. I'm just gonna ask you about that. Yeah, it was like 800 bucks a pin and we paid for four pins and we picked them in different areas that we would service. And they would just call. People would call. We had a process. You have to send a copy of your ID and your med card. And I did follow all the rules out there. Like if your med card was out of date, I wouldn't sell to you. So how busy were you doing that? Constantly. Constantly. I had two drivers. My phone never stopped ringing all day long to the point where I lived on the fourth story of my condo and like I'd call my driver, whether it was my pops or my boy Norman, whoever was gonna be running, I'd say hey, I'm gonna text you the address. Let me know in your back. I'm gonna drop it down to you and I lived on a corner unit and they would just pull up and then I would just put the delivery all the shit in a bag and just drop it down to him. You'd get it, hop back in the car and then go on the next delivery. Literally trapping. Literally. I'm talking 24/7 to the point where I had to change my hours on weed maps so I could close down for at least six hours. 'Cause we were never sleeping. And like on the weekends, sometimes I'd have a two, three hour wait because I'm running deliveries. My girl's answering the phone. My dad's running deliveries. My homeboy's working for me. He's running deliveries on the weekends. He had another guy that he would call to work for me just on the weekends to run deliveries. It was literally non-fucking stuff. And what's an average delivery? Usually it's not that much, I had a $100 minimum. So people would usually just hit that $100 mark just to get me out there. But so that's like an eighth. Oh no, back then, I was still killing price. I was doing eighths for like 60. So it was usually like two eighths or a $100 quarter and I throw some edibles in and shit like that. But I did have a lot of big spenders. Like I ended up serving O'Shea Jackson Jr. son or O'Shea Jackson Jr. - Ice cube son. - Ice cube son. I got pictures of that. Like right before we closed at like 2am we got a call and it was a big ass order. And it was like, I was like, it was like four grand. I was like, I don't know, man. But I was in a greed and he's like, fuck it. I'm gonna go do it 'cause he was on Duhini. So I'm like, I ain't gonna get robbed on Duhini. - That's where he is. - Yeah, that's all the rich people. So my boy Norman, I met him out there but he's still a good friend. And he's like a six three black dude. You know, he's big. He ain't afraid to shoot a gun. He ain't afraid to fight. So I'm like, hey bro, run with me to make this delivery. It's kind of sketch. It's a $4,000 order right before we close. So he rode with me. We went and this Indian guy, nice ass fucking building. This Indian guy's waiting outside and he's drunk as fuck and he walks over to my window. He's like, you got this shit? You got this shit and I was real weirded out bomb. And then all of a sudden next day I know my fucking light comes on in my car and this black motherfucker's getting in my back seat and he's got a hoodie on. So I'm thinking we're about to get robbed. Some shit's going on. And see, I brought all my guns from Texas, right? I didn't know that was a no-no, but I had them out there anyway. And so, you know, I'm getting ready. I'm reaching and my homeboy's reaching. I look at my rear view mirror and I'm like, I turn around and I'm like, man, you look familiar as fuck. And nice ass chains on shit. And the Indian guy's still standing in my door. He's like, you not know who the fuck that is? You not know that's those shade jacks. And this is when straight out of Compton. I can't remember straight out of Compton's out or if they're doing like the promo for it, but it was around that time 'cause that's where I knew him from. It's him playing his dad on the movie. And I'm like, oh shit, it is. And he's drunk as fuck. Like he eyes barely open. But they ended up paying. We hopped out the car. We took photos. It was on Christmas Eve too. So the picture I have with them, I got like a fucking ugly Christmas sweater on and shit. But I served them and then they called me two or three times after that and bought from me every time they were in the Doohini area. And so this is cash business, still, right? Even though it's medically. No head square too. I would let people pay with square. Okay, so then, but you're operating under an LLC. So you can take that cash technically to the bank or you can't, because banks are federal. Yeah, technically you could at that time you couldn't. It was the guy that helped me set my deposit or set my shit up, told me not to figure out a way. This is an attorney telling me, figure out what you got to do with it. You don't deposit this in the bank. So like I would pay my rent every month, not in cash, but I'd go to like a check cashing store and I'd buy a fucking money order for fucking 6,800 bucks. And I'm fucking giving my dad cash and then he's writing a check to pay like my car insurance, my car no shit like that. And then he's just keeping the cash on him and deposit it like bit by bit in the bank, like a couple of hundred bucks here and there. It was a pain in the ass. So it's weird because the California laws make selling weed legal, but because of the federal illegality, you have to become a money laundering. Exactly. So now you're committing another felony, another federal crime. And it's fucked up because it's like, I'm trying to do shit the right way, but you won't let me. And did you guys have foot traffic into your physical brain? No, like no, like because well, some people, because, but not much. Most of it, if I was going to meet somebody like in person, it was really a deal that I shouldn't even be doing. You know, it's like they reach, they were, I can't remember the, I think it was four ounces was the most somebody could buy or maybe it was two ounces. But if I was going to meet you at myself. spot that it was registered to. It's because I'm selling pounds to you're one of my you're one of my boys from back home or you were referred to somebody I know so but everybody else and you could even go on weed maps and it would just say delivery only. You just have to have a physical address to set up a delivery spot and to actually set up a dispensary. I said, so I had to have that visit. But it was you never advertised it. I got you. It was just advertises delivery only. Got it. And then were you also selling wholesale there? Not in LA. Not there. Because it wasn't worth it. No. Price was too low. Everybody had to wait. I had a couple guys that would buy wholesale from me. But when they would buy wholesale it was just because they were transplants too. And I was the only guy they knew in the game. Like this one dude, cool as fuck. He lived in New York. So he would buy wholesale for me. And I was still putting attacks on it. And he could have got it cheaper. I'm sure. But I was just the only person he knew. And in 2014 at this time, what's a good wholesale price for a pound in LA? A good price was like 14. I met this. I don't want to say their name. But oh, like they were called foot hill farms, right? Hunter Biden. Yeah. Hunter. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was foot hill farms. And I met these guys. I think they were somewhere in NorCal and they were blessing me between 12 and $1,600 a pound. And this is indoor. Yeah. They indoor gas in LA at that time was fucking stellar. But my guy that I was telling you about in Vegas, he was who was supplying me when I was still in Texas hustling out there before the dispensary. And there was some shit that happened. The dude who introduced me to him ended up getting murdered at one of his video shoots. And like he just disappeared. He fell off the map. He was gone. But my money was so long by that time that I was already in the midst of registering my dispensary that I pretty much just went out there blind. It's a fuck it. I'll just find a plug out there. And at first, I didn't do that because another dude that would supply me here and there who I met through the concert industry or the, yeah, the concert promotion industry. He was the guy in Wolf Creek in Oregon. He was a badass growers. His prices were a little more, but he's who supplied me when I first opened my dispensary. So I had all the paperwork from my dispensary pretty much giving me the right to possess as much as I want. You're allowed to have four ounces for every person in your collective, right? So the first trip when I went to re-up, it was a risk because I didn't have any paperwork other than like my registration paperwork. But I would go up to Reading, California, and he would meet me in Reading. So he was legal in Oregon. So he had all his paperwork driving through Oregon, and then we'd meet Wright as the border cross. And then he'd handed off to me real quick. And now I'm legit to drive it all the way back. So how much weight is that? Well, we were getting like fucking anywhere from like five to 10 pounds at a time. But I was re-up and from them every two weeks, sometimes every week. It got to the point. Once I got my plug, but that was just what got me started. Okay. How much, how much can you move through this retail delivery service? How much are you moving a week? Like on a, like once things were booming and going like five to seven pounds a week. Yeah. And in 100 pops, that's a lot of profit. That's a lot of profit. Non fucking stop around the clock. To the point where it was running so well, but I kind of got to the point where I was fucking over the shit. Like it was just, I was, I was thinking about like, I was two hands on. I'd got to the point. I was just going to put on my owner cap. Like, like, let's take a step back. Me hire. I was talking to my boy Norman. My guy that was always with me. I was talking to him about him managing it. Let's bring it on two or three drivers, figure out what we're going to pay him. And, but around that time is when the shit hit the fan anyway. How, how much? If you're paying 1200 for a pound and then selling it out retail, how much do you make? What's your profit? Bro, don't give me line. That was still long ago, but I would usually clear at a minimum after gas, after paying my driver on average anywhere from two to three grand a pound. Like, so I mean, we were doing very well. Like very, very well. I love doing that shit. But it just got to the point that it really was too much. Yeah. It's exhausting. Yeah. It was non stop. But I did, there, in some pounds, we would make more than others. Like, I had this other dude who I forgot about a lot of these people until now. It was Fernando. And I met him through my guy. It was one of his childhood friends. And he started growing. And his grow was like a small op. He was doing like some shit in his house type of thing. But every, he was pulling down maybe five pounds, seven pounds, something like that. But he would hook me up for fucking 800 a pound. And it was gas too. So it's like when I would get that, those would be really big licks, you know. And then Fernando started getting better. And he started paying people to basically rent out their house to grow in it. So he started popping up where he'd call me and say, Hey, you know, in three weeks, I'll be ready. I should have around this and this. And he got to the point where he lined all his houses up. He started taking clones from one and starting them also. He'd fun. Got to the point where he's serving me like 20 pounds at a time. You know, of course, he's only coming through every two or three months. But I just had a bunch of shit. Like if, if my guys from Flint Hill Farms were like low and worn around or weren't ready yet, then I would call Fernando. If he wasn't ready, then I was case I could always go to Oregon or meet my guy in Oregon. But his numbers weren't as good. He's like, he's the bud that I used to get started. But once I got things flowing, he was the least profitable. So I found in town guys instead. Well, that's the guy's a that level of the game. That part of the game, the supply chain. That was the best place to be in that era because there's so many growers and so many people with weight that they're competing for guys like you. Dude, you know what I mean? We got to the point once our because you know on weed maps, you could leave reviews. It's like door to ask for weed. But it's like we had five stars. It was either five stars or four stars. I can't remember but we were our stars were maxed out. And we had great reviews. You could leave reviews on there, leave comments. People knew my dad by name, people knew me by name. We're very personable. We'd always hook people up with a little extra. If we had like some shake or something, I'd throw a fucking eighth a shaken for free on top of their order. Just a little shit like that. Great customer service. And it got to the point where sales reps would reach out to us and be like, I'm from blah, blah, blah farms. Can I get an email for you? We're going to send you a price list. And then you want to set up a meeting. We'll have a we'll have a rep in our area. And this was still medical. But these guys would schedule a lunch. Take me out to lunch. Talk to me about numbers. Bring me samples of product. And but the guys I realize like the corporate, these guys would show up in like suits and shit. And their number still couldn't compete with like the guys that were just showing up in flip flops and shorts that were smoking a blunt with me. You know, they were like, but they were they had bigger money on the backend. But they you could just tell that they weren't they were just following the green rush. They weren't really about it. But I did have this one girl I met. And I can't remember the name of her edible company. But she actually came through and had incredible prices on edibles. And it was believe it or not. Edibles at least at that time were selling amazingly out there. Like they were really fucking I would have people that would call me and just one edibles. They'd place two three hundred dollar order in edibles. Well, that's a whole section of market now. Especially like older people. I know people that like I think my parents take edibles. They'd probably never smoke weed in their life. You know, not the U.S. So like that's it's a whole just vertical by itself. You were also while you're running this dispenser. Are you still mailing? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that was a section. That's a whole other section of your business that's fully black market fully. 100% 100% and you got started with that lick when you were still out in Texas, right? Yeah. See my guy that I was serving in Texas. He was really I had two guys that when I would get the the bud from my guy in Vegas. I had two guys I would serve. One of them was my main guy and my other guy. He was a great customer. He would literally buy a pound a day. Like he would come by and buy a pound. He would go to work and and he would just sell ounces to his friends at work. And he knew a lot of people because he was one of the guys. And when he got off work every day, he'd go and sit at a bar and Tyler called Daniel Boons. He would sit in there all day long and he knew everybody. And and they always knew he had that guess. So he would just sell ounces and he'd be like, hey, I'm coming back. I'm bringing you the money for this pound and I'm going to pick up another one. And like so those were my main two sales guys. I got to the point when I was in Tyler that I wasn't even I wasn't even doing hand-to-hand combat anymore. I'm not going to sell you a third ounce or any of that shit. I'm putting the weight off on them. And and this is Tyler Texas. So you grew up in Tyler Texas. Yeah. And that's East Texas. 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Well, see my guy in Vegas, he was he was going up to the Emerald Triangle. Like so I'll back up. So when I got in the game, it came from I was a big concert promoter in my town, right? So everybody knew my name. And that was my that was my main thing, a concert in jewelry. So I ended up meeting this guy through the music side of things. And and well, there's this guy named Stevie Stone. He signed new, he was signed a strange music. And he told me, Hey, I got this guy named Hollywood will and he wants to buy a chain from me because at this time, I'm doing chains for everybody. And he was like, he wants to buy a chain from you. So I said, cool, give him my number because I had done chains for tech nine. I had done chains for Stevie Stone. Like so my name's already kind of going around those circles. So I get a call from the from the guy Hollywood will. And he tells me the chain he wants. And it's nothing major. It was like a silver chain. It wasn't one of these crazy $20,000,000 chains. So I tell him, cool. I quoted them. The chain was only like $2,500. It was a pendant with his name on it. So fast forward, I get the pendant done. I call him and I tell him, Hey, your pendant's ready. If you want to shoot the money, I can mail your chain off to you. And he was like, Okay, how do you want me to pay you? And I was like, man, cat at this time, like the really the only thing there was was like PayPal. There wasn't any of this cash app in Venmo and Zell and shit. And so I said, man, you can Western Union it or whatever you want to do. And he was like, what do you want blood for it? And I was like, and I'm selling, I'm selling weed at this time, but I'm just sourcing locally and shit like that. And I asked him, yeah, or asked him how much is it? And he was a killer price. I couldn't believe it. He said, he was telling me it'd be between a thousand and twelve hundred bucks. So at this point, I'm already up because I'm doing like the pill mill hustle. I'm already selling but I'm doing jewelry. I'm doing concerts. So I'm like, I have nothing to lose. Like worst case scenario, I send this due to chain and he sends me a fucking bag of hay or something like who gives a fuck. It's too grand. So I give him the address. He shoots it. I send the chain, the package lands and it's fucking pressure. It's like some fucking pressure. Even though it was a strand. I hate. I know you probably remember when it would pop up blue dream. I never remember gave a fuck. I was not a weed nerd. Okay. Anybody that watches this on though blue dream is like back in the early or in the mid 2000s, like the 2010s, 11s and 12s, it was like blue dream was fucking everywhere. But he had sent me two pounds of blue dream and it was fucking gas. Like I was able to get it off for a G a pound. Yeah. A thousand bucks a pound. That's wild. And this fucking pressure made the Lord strike me down, right? So I call them. I sell that shit immediately, right? And I call them and I'm like, dog, how much more of that shit can you get? And you just flipped it. You just get it. Yeah. Yeah. I smoked a couple of blunts and I fucking handed it off and it was gone. Finito is immediately left. And what can you sell that for? And those days I was selling all my pounds for 24 to 25. Oh, yes, 100% because at this time in like 2012, 2013, like pounds are 3200 and up. So when I come in the game with 2400, people fucking would go crazy, especially because most of the guys I was fucking with, they were busing down. They were selling pounds, they were selling ounces, they were selling QPs, all that shit. So the dude made God rest his soul. Hollywood will. He said, my guy has as much of it as you want. He goes up to the Emerald triangle. He's got as much as you want. So I'm like, damn, how can I get in contact with him? Right? So in this time, I'm going back and forth that I just started going back and forth to LA myself because I knew a couple of people from the music industry out there. So I'd go out there and I was trying to meet plugs. You know, you see everybody that they're like, man, I don't know anybody, but I'm going to go to California and I'm going to get a plug and I know people that and I did that. But it was just like, they weren't great plugs. I was just, they were just middlemen, right? So, but he tells me this shit. And I'm like, I've heard this before, but I have nothing to lose. And he was like, he's a rapper and he has a video shoot in LA with French Montana next week. Just come out there and I'll introduce you to him. So blind fate, me and my son's mom, we fly to LA. I go to this video shoot of this guy. Don't even know, but he was the real deal. Like, French was there. Drones are flying, fucking, he's flying. And this is once again, this is like 2012, 2013. And this dude's ahead of the game. He's got drone shots. He's got a Porsche. He's fucking the video's crazy. The song's crazy. So he's directing French. No, no, he's in it. He's a rapper, right? And so this is Hollywood will's best friend, right? So I go to the shoot. You can see me in the video, too. Can you tell us the rapper's name? His name's JG. Okay. So if they look up JG French Montana, it'll pop up, right? And the video's crazy. You'll see 2012, 2013. It's fucking crazy. So like, I end up meeting this guy, decent guy. And he's like, yeah, bro, like I got you on whatever you want. And so I'm like, cool. And then he tells me the numbers. And that's one thing that I, I respected about will. He didn't tax me or nothing. He gave me the same number as boy gave him, but will wasn't hustling like that. He was really just focused on his music and shit. So I end up, uh, I'm talking to JG. And he's like, I got you however many you want. So I'm like, let's start off with 10, you know, and I asked him, how do you want me to to pay you? And because I had brought money with me and he was like, man, don't worry about it. Like, give me the address. They'll be there when you get there. That's how you know it's the plug when he goes, just pay me when you, when it's settled. Yeah. He said, he said that means he's got a warehouse for him. He's going to get it off. Bro, that's that he's probably the first time I ever saw a million dollars first time. It's when I said, because this started a run where I'm fucking with this guy like for like six months straight. I'm with him all the fucking time. So it's like, he ends up shooting the shit for me, makes a phone call. You know, he really was on boss moves. We didn't always agree on everything because I was a little more low key and he was a little more look at me. But like, man, he made the call. We chilled in L.A. Got to know him. I met a couple other people. We hung out and he was like, you know, we'll figure out the money shit on the back end. He was like, well, told me you do jewelry. And so I may, I may get some chains or something from you and put that towards your tab. So sure enough, I end up going back to Texas. I go to the spot. They're there. They're in a moving box and this shit. Bro, for probably, I guess that was the big harvest up in Norkow, but for fucking months, I was getting very white. That was like the only strand I could get. And I do think that it was probably some depths, but they were depths that were so good. They passed his ends, especially in this era. And depths is greenhouse, right? Yeah. Okay. So as opposed to pure indoor. Yeah. This is, I think it's depot lighting. I may not be 100% right, but I think it's partial light and sun, kind of like a combination, but it's not outs. It is, I know it isn't a greenhouse, but don't give me line. But but at that time, people didn't know. And I'm in, I'm in Smith County. I'm in East Texas. It all looks like indoor. Yeah. I'm not in Houston or Dallas or Austin. So these guys are just like, this is fucking pressure. So and tell us about how the boxes that he sent it through the mail. Yeah. Tell us the process because that's how I moved all my shit was. Well, then, then you're going to hate this, right? This dude was the worst shipper that like when I mail pounds, like, bro, I'm triple vacuum. I'm fucking making them look like they're the shape of a book. I'm taking the air out. I'm lining them up like Legos. I'm double boxing. Wiping, wiping everything down with Lysol wipes and fucking. I'll even spray it with some fucking for breeze or something. Bro, this guy was just, or his people would just spin the turkey bag, tie a knot in it, vacate once and throw it in a fucking moving box. And I'm talking, we had one time that I lost a pet because of how shitty he smelled it. But it's, bro, he's using big fucking two, three foot moving boxes, dropping the pounds in there. I'll put 15, 20 pounds in a box sometime. Two or three fucking straps of tape, drops it off and like, I swear to God, man, one time I pull up to the spot and the package was got delivered. There was like no fucking, nothing underneath it. So like, if you push the box down too hard, your arm will just like go in it. Dude, they, the, the post office literally had taped one of his boxes back shut because there were so little tape on it, but I was like, bro, this is, I swear to God, I brought that box inside and I let it sit there for like a week. I didn't rip it open in case, in case the fucking feds or somebody kicks the door and I can say, hey, that was to the wrong house. It's right there. I never even went inside. My name's not on it. Yeah. 100%. But yeah, he did pack like shit. But and he sent it through USPS through the post office. Yeah. USPS. Or he liked UPS. I didn't like UPS. I got Jack by UPS a few times. I did too by the end we only used FedEx by the end. USPS was good, but back then they didn't have a good tracking system like they never jacked us. They jacked me one time for a package of money. But they would never usually touch the boxes, but they were unreliate. The tracking was on my mind. So I couldn't tell my people on the other end, hey, yeah, and if it was late with FedEx, you would say don't touch it. It's a dead package. Because it's got to be there by 10 a.m. because I paid for next day. First delivery. But with USPS, it was too unreliable. So you didn't know if it was just legitimately they were running behind or it was the Fed's. That's true. Because USPS, I mainly use USPS because, you know, there, you know, USPS being a federal, which you know this, but they can't open your box without a warrant. They're not supposed to FedEx and UPS, they're privately owned companies. So when you agree, they can open your box anytime and fucking search it if they want to without a warrant or anything like that. But they're also subject to federal regulation. So they have feds in the US, in the UPS and the FedEx sorting facilities. There's always feds there with dogs. Oh, yeah. So it's like the airlines, they're private, but they're regulated by the federal government. So one thing though, but about USPS is they would. I can't even, but I just got used to it, but you drop a pack off. You see the first scan where you dropped it off. You see it leave that sort of facility and then no update, no update, you're like, what the fuck? And then you're starting to get worried and then you check the tracker and it's like, it's out for delivery. It's like, fuck, there were no scans in between there. But no, but yeah, he was a horrible packer, right? But he would just put so much weight on me. I just kind of, and I always ask him, hey, bro, you know, you need to pack these a little better. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're better next time, send it next time it wasn't better. And did you guys have an agreement like if a pack got lost, he would eat it. Oh, yeah. He didn't even care. Yeah. He didn't even care. Like, there were times packed and show up on my A bro. There was one time email with UPS and the pack even said on their seas to the tracker lit up red. I can't remember what it said exactly, but it was pretty like confiscated. I called them fucking freaking the fuck out and he's like, I don't worry about it. It happens. I'll fucking over and I'd you another one. Just give me another address and I gave him another address and he, and we just burnt that address. We couldn't know. Nobody ever like went by. Nobody ever like showed up to talk like even when I ended up getting in trouble, none of that shit was ever mentioned to me again, you know, but that shit would just scare the fuck out of me, you know, I think they were so inundated in that era because so many drug dealers, drug wholesalers from the West Coast were shipping at such crazy volume that if it wasn't like a hundred pounds or more, they would just say, they charge it again. Yeah. Or they would burn it. I don't know what they would do with the sea's product. Like, I'll tell you this, I'll get back to my story, but this is as of recently, one of my guys in Houston, I say recently, but like 2022, 2023, because I would give them shit. They still dabble or there were guys that I knew still in the game. So I'd kind of connect my people with them. And one day, he just, he quit fucking with me and then, so it was just fine, you know, and I went over to his house to chill and he just had some fucking gas. I'm like, damn, bro, where are you getting this shit from? He's in Houston and he was like, man, I got a plug at UPS. I'm like, you got a plug at UPS and he was like, yeah, bro, he said, he sells me everything for 500 a pound. He said, but I have to buy it blind. So he, he broke down what happens to me. This dude is like, I guess one of the managers at UPS and every time they hit a package, they fucking, I don't know if it's every week or every month, but the law enforcement does come to pick up the sea's, the sea's products, right? I don't know what they do with it, but this manager, my guy knows, puts everything in the room, right? It just builds up in a room. And then before they come, he'll go in there and just grab him pounds. So my boy said he has to buy it blind because he don't know if he's going to get some top notch, or if it's going to be some bullshit ass outdoor. But he said he was doing it with that guy for months and months. He may still be doing it to this day, but they just let all the sea's product just build up in a room until Harris County Sheriff's Department come and picks it up. So they're all, he said all the guys that work in the management side at UPS are going in there and taking pounds. Of course. Why wouldn't they? Who would? Why wouldn't they? There's too much for the feds to come pick up every day in Houston, come on, bro. I'm sure some of the sheriff's are selling it off themselves. Texas is so corrupt as fuck. Yeah, especially man, I don't want to go on a tangent, but look up or your viewers can look up this cop named Pac-Man, just just type in Pac-Man Harris County. Sean Penn. No, no, no, no, no, no. But the dirtiest fucking law, you know, I think he's in the feds right now for a murder case. He fucking, they kicked the door on some real training day shit. They kicked the door in to do a robbery and they hit the wrong house. They said the people like try to shoot at him what they didn't. So him and his squad killed the people in the house ended up and they said, oh, we got a tip about fentanyl or some bullshit like that, but they were at the wrong house. And that opened a whole internal investigation and then the feds came in. And I remember watching this in prison on the news and I swear to God guys I was locked up with like everybody in like fifth ward in Houston, new Pac-Man, that was like his area. And man, once all his cases went under review, like attorneys and were coming to talk to the guys who were involved in cases like if Pac-Man's case sent you to prison, a lot of guys were getting brought up from all the DA's were coming to talk to him attorneys were coming to talk to him because there were guys that I'm in there that swore, I mean, they weren't innocent, but they said it wasn't as bad as they made it sound, but Pac-Man fucked me over. Like he was putting cases on people like dropping dope on people and type shit and then robbing people. Yeah. There were people I talked to that he was doing a whole investigation on them. Then we'd go and fucking rip him, still arrest him and then take fucking, you know, a kilo or take 20 pounds and leave two or three on him and then take the rest of the shit or hit him, leave the dope and then take all their money, you know, just dirty shit. How many cops were involved? How many dirty cops? I think there was four. I think their squad was like four or five of them. Yeah. But Pac-Man Cox has a story about that. He was serving time with a cop and that's what they were doing. They were hitting drug dealer's houses and they accidentally kicked in some old lady's house. And this is like, I think it's in like suburban Atlanta. She was like an 80 year old retired teacher and she squeezed on them and they fucking shot her dead. Damn. Yeah. And they tried to like, you know, but they couldn't, they couldn't say all what we thought we were serving of war it for this retired teacher, but they only got like a decade or so I mean, they didn't get life bullshit and think about all this shit they got away with. Of course. Of course. So you're getting like, you're really drug trafficking at a high level. Well, I mean, I never considered it drug trafficking because it's just weed, you know, but yeah, in the eyes of the law, yeah, it was because it gets to the point, right? So my guy in Vegas, he's just, he's dropping it off on me. As soon as he can send it, it's touching down. I'm dropping shit off with my people and I would always give people a week, but it got to the point. The gas was so good and the numbers were so good that I would have people waiting. So it's like, I didn't have to wait a week because I would always front and I wouldn't have to wait a week to get my money back on the front. My guys are calling me like, Hey, you know, my guys are ready, you know, as soon as it touches down, but we'll have the money. So it's like, it would touch down. I give it to my guy 30 minutes later. He'd be back with a cash. So now I'm having to get multiple addresses because he's sending 20 to this spot, 20 to this by 20 to this. by. So we were doing it like that for fucking probably close to a year. Hey, if you've ever used nicotine before a workout thinking it would help your focus or your pump, you've probably noticed the opposite. For me, it killed my pump. Made my recovery slower, it spiked my heart rate, and it left me crashing hard. That's exactly why I switched to ultra pouches. I got one in right now. These are 100% nicotine-free and zero caffeine. They use neutropics and adapted gins that give you a smooth, steady focus and energy that lasts one to two hours without the vasoconstriction, jitters, or crash. I popped one in about five minutes before my workout and I'm getting better pumps. You can see them shacked, sharper focus, and solid energy without feeling on edge. They've also been huge for killing cravings when I'm fasting or dieting because they have a shorter half-life than caffeine. They don't wreck my sleep. Yeah, most of these old pouches that I would put in would have me up at night. I've been using these for a few weeks now and they're a total game changer. My favorite is watermelon. I've got that in. It tastes like sour candy. It tastes like a sour patch kid. If you want that pouch feel with real performance benefits and zero nicotine, you've got to try ultra. New customers go to takeultra.com and use code connect for 15% off. That's takeultra.com with the code connect for 15% off. I'm telling you, for you workout guys or for people that are trying to deep focus at writers or people who work at a desk, I cannot recommend these pouches enough. And when they ask you where you heard about them, please tell them that our show sent you. It really helps and supports us. Go grab some ultra pouches and how are you getting? How much cash are you shipping back at the time? Well, this is when I'm still in Texas. This is when I'm. That's what I mean. How are you getting this cash back? I would either fly with it, but this is what was such the lick with him. I would fly him cash out, but his money was not. He just wanted jewelry. It was easy for me because at this time, I'm already making jewelry. He wanted a big custom piece with his record label on it. He went and got a quote at one of the jewelers in Vegas and they told him something crazy. I can't remember the exact number. It's been a long time, but they quote him like 70,000 or 60,000 and I told him, "Man, I'll do that for you for 40 bows." He's like, "All right, bet." So I'm selling them for 2,400 each and then I'm locked in with the workshop and everything. My boy makes everything. Well, he doesn't, but he's got a team of people that make everything. And it was all genuine gold or diamonds, whatever he wanted, but I'm getting these pendants made for $12,000, $9,000, $14,000, whatever the case may be, and I'm getting bows and return, and I'm getting 40 of them. He paid me. I remember he paid me 40 bows of some fucking gas for a pendant. So every time it came time for me to pay my tab down and I'd say, "Hey, I owe you $50,000. I owe you $30,000." He just said, "Well, what all do you got right now?" And it would just get to the point where he didn't even care. I would take. I'd say, "Well, I got a couple bracelets. I got a couple pairs of earrings, and I would just take pictures." And he'd say, "Well, how much is that? How much is that?" And then I'd fly out and I would just exchange jewelry for him. We did that forever, forever. So he was basically just taking payment and jewelry? 99% of it was in jewelry. How is he converting that into cash? Or is he paying his connects in jewelry? Well, at a certain point. Here's the thing that I noticed. I didn't really ask questions, but the more I got to know him, I saw that. Now, keep in mind, I'm not the only guy he's serving. I'm one of his small fries. He's going to the emerald triangle and picking up 1,500 pounds at a time. So the 20, 30 pounds he's sending me, that's not making a dent. He's got other people locally to him and he was sending shit to people in New York and I don't know how he got the money there and shit. But he had more than enough to. He was basically just spending his profit with me. He had his own shit going on. But here's another thing. He got a couple Rolexes from me and I know one time. He was getting it on the front, too. I know one time it came close to him having to pay because he had called me back and said, "Hey, do you want to buy one of these Rolexes back?" Which I did because my money was super up at the time. But I got to go up to the triangle next weekend and I got some shit I'm going to sell. I got to go pay my people. And that's when I ended up going down there getting with him. Because at that time I was making music, too. And he went on tour with me across Washington and Oregon because I was opening for a Stevie Stone Technines artist. And since he made music, I brought him on with me. And that was around the time. He was about to have to pay his plug. And that's when he had close to a million dollars in cash. Because you know, he had money stacked up, but he had just sold like a side-by-side. He had sold him or say, he was just gathering his cash up and then went and re-upped. But with me, like in my mind, it was big shit getting 100 pounds in shit. But in his eyes, that really went in shit. If he loses 10-20 pounds, he didn't give a fuck. So if you're moving 100 pounds a week. No, I was not a week. Not a week. It was just like, you know, I mean, maybe more like a month, you know, like, but there was never, my guys would take as much as I could put off on them. But I usually would get 20 to 40 at a time. Right. And then like, look, when I ended up finally moving to Cali, it was because like, I just bought the G-wagon. But you must have had, if you're not paying your plug in cash, you must have had a fuck load of money. Yeah. Well, when I moved to LA and opened my dispensary at about 300,000 in cash, saved up, you know. But also, I'm living extraordinarily, if you will. Like, I'm fucking, I'm where, I'm buying Rolexes for me too. And I'm buying, I'll send you pictures. I've got fucking three huge custom chains. When my platinum star, that's the name for all my companies would always be platinum star, whatever my dispenser, it was platinum star, healthcare. So it's a platinum star records was the concert promotion. So I had fucking three huge diamond pendants that I would wear. And how do you, how did you learn the jewelry trade? So it's like when I was doing the concert promotion shit, I didn't have any plugs to big jewelers and, and Houston or Dallas. So there was one jeweler in my town locally who I knew all the other like all the rappers and all the dope boys went and fucked with him. So I met him on a whim and just went in there and said, Hey, introduce myself. And I, I, I got a pendant made because I'm hustling at this time. So I, I'm sitting there, I'm telling him what I won and he is like drawing up the design. And so I pay him for the pendant. And then I paid him half. And then when they got finished, I went and picked up, I paid the rest and I picked it up. So mind you and they really do extraordinary work, you know, like the work that he was doing and his team was better than what like at the time, what TV Johnny and Houston was doing and was better than what King Johnny and Houston were doing. And so when I would throw these concerts with, you know, ESG or zero or Charlie boy or whoever I was bringing down, they would all see my pendants and be like, damn, bro, who did your chain? And I would tell him, oh, yeah, my guy at Treasurer's, he did it. And so in the beginning, I was just referring people to him, right? So then it got to the point where I'm sending so much, so many customers his way. He told me, and he would always kick me off profiter or I'd go in and have him get me a watch or a bracelet. And he would take something off because he sold this for whatever. And, you know, but he told me, man, let me just give you the game, like we can partner up. So he started teaching me about like clarity, cut settings, you know, when it comes to Rolex is like all the movements, the single quick set, double quick set, shit like that. So he really put me on. And then so what really started is, I was making music at the time. And I ended up getting on the hostile takeover tour with tech nine. And which technized the biggest independent rapper in the world. And this was like 2011. And it was like tech nine MGK and a couple of smaller acts that were signed a text label. And so that's what really like catapulted me because I was able to do a chain for tech nine and people started seeing text chain and asking. And then then I did a chain for Stevie Stone. One of his hit the guy signed a strange music is label. And then Stevie is who told me about will because will was a musician and will had called Stevie to get a feature. And just in conversation, you know, will saw Stevie's chain and said, Hey, man, who did your chain? And he was like, Oh, man, my boy Campo did. I'll give you his number. And that's how I locked in with the Vegas guys was through that connection. But I'd also just been in the music industry so much through concert promotion. Like, so when I made music, I had a, I had a manager, I had a whole management group called Yachty University, right? So one of the artists that was under the same management was this guy named Trady. He had a couple big songs in like the 2006, 2007 era of music. His biggest single was gutted bitch. It got, it was so big that they got a DJ Khaled remix and everything, right? So, but he was signed to Miff Hitz, which is Jive records, right? So my management had a lot of ties at Jive records. So fast forward to where I'm like hustling and shit. it, Ron Stewart, who was at Jive Records at the time, he transitioned to Atlantic. He got another job, but my management group still knew him from his Jive Record days, and he ended up reaching out to me because he needed a wedding band. He was about to get married. So I did his wife's wedding band. I did both of their wedding bands, and I just hooked them up, right? So they were going to break Tidalassign, Tidalassign had just signed to Atlantic at the time, and then Ron had reached out to me about getting a chain for Tidalassign. And so I made a chain for him, and I asked if I could give it to him personally because I'm trying to build the jewelry shit too while I was always trying to legitimize my street weed money because I'm getting pounds in from Vegas and Cali. So as far as everybody else was concerned, they didn't know what I was doing the outside looking in. Everybody just thought, I was like this big celebrity jeweler, you know, because they always see me like holding up a chain with Tidalassign, Tidalassign posting on his Instagram like Campo just made me a sick piece. And so everybody else was just like, man, Campo is always in LA, and he's doing chains for all these rappers. And you were you doing a concert business still? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I was doing the concert shit. Now when I finally quit doing the concert shit was when I moved to LA to start the dispensary. Got it. But I was still doing the jewelry shit. I did the jewelry shit all the way up until the time that I ended up getting locked up. And are you sourcing the diamonds, man, my people, my people took care of that, but what they do. So that diamond diamonds are pretty worthless. There's no scarcity. Yeah. Some of them do. Some of them don't. They're starting to learn that. We're starting to figure out. You can grow them in a lab. You don't have to get them to some African kid. Yeah. Very true. Conflict free diamonds is what they call them. But at this time, like, I think lab diamonds, I'm sure they were a thing. But like like moist and I wasn't a big thing yet. Like now moist and I it's huge, which isn't even a diamond, but it'll hit with a diamond tester and then lab diamonds are a thing. But mind you, this was a little bit before all that. So people really weren't concerned about it. Their thing was more about clarity. They just wanted VVS diamonds. They weren't really specifying if they wanted lab diamonds or if they wanted natural diamonds. We did mainly just use natural diamonds. We weren't in the business of fucking people over or getting one over on them. We were trying to do like high quality work. So they would brag about us and refer us to other people, you know. So were you making a profit or were you just using as a mechanism to launder your street work? A little bit, a little bit of both. Honestly, from that, most of the time, I would make sure that my boy made profit. But I was just building my home, use it career at the time, that I didn't care about making profit. I was making so much money off the bud that I didn't care. I just wanted a chance to be able to go give 50 cent of chain and take pictures with them and get his contact and get a follow on Instagram or something like that. So I didn't care. I'm damn near Hagglen for these celebrities to my partner saying, I know we can do it cheaper than that. Like I can't go to him and tell him 30,000. He can go to anybody and get it for 30,000. So then he's making calls because like I'll be real, but really set us apart and made the shit cheaper was that, you know, you got people like Johnny Day and shit who they're doing a lot of work in their workshop in Houston, Texas. They got people back there setting stones, making molds, all that stuff. My guy was in Broadway square mall. Still is. Great work. Treasure's Tyler, Texas. Go see him. But he had people in India. So here's how all this shit works. The reason why a chain or let's see like like a lot of these rappers are paying a hundred thousand dollars or 70,000 for a pendant, right? So when you break the cost of that pendant down, it's only 15,000 in gold and it's another 15,000 in diamond. So why are they paying 60 grand for it? So their reasoning is, well, because all the labor that goes into it, we have to make them old. We have to set each stone individually, which that is a real cost. And some of these master jewelers are charged or gemologists are charging 15 dollars to set a single stone. And if you've got, you know, 600 stones on this pendant, do the math. But when we would go through India, that labor shit didn't exist. So we were able to come in lower because we're pretty much just paying for material. We're sending an AutoCAD 3D mold, like a diagram, send it to them, they make them old. And then we just have to design it, pick out the cuts, the clarity, what we want. They quote us a number with labor, they quote us a, they'll call it worked. So it'll be, you know, 40 ounces of gold will be the price, but 40, or not 40 ounces, excuse me, 40 grams of gold worked and 40 grams of gold. So we want to know the work price, like how much is it going to be all in? And they would quote us the price, and we would fucking send it, pay for it. So even doing that, I learned my shit, but I was just a glorified middleman too. So you were just doing whatever company in America does, offshore, but I'm thinking it's some groundbreaking shit at the time, you know, I'm 23, 24 years old. So off of a $60,000 chain, what's your profit? Questions are usually on, on those days, like anywhere from 40 to 60%. But that's what, that's what all these jewelers are doing. Like now, like when, when I was messing with jewelry, it was more of a honest time, right? You didn't really see a lot of wrappers outside of like 50 cent in tea pain and like you had to have platinum plaques and multiple number one records to have a $50,000, $60,000 chain. You know, now some guy you've never even heard of that's got 300,000 followers on IG will have a $150,000 chain, but you know, but margins, even now we're going to be, you know, 40 to 60%. But like I said, that's how we came in. Okay. So a fast forward through all these people that I was doing jewelry for. Who'd you hang on? Who'd you do jewelry for that we would know? Okay. I did the Thai dollar sign piece. I did the black bottle boys piece for Rick Ross, not the, okay. So there was a black bottle boys piece that Johnny Dang did and then I saw it and I ended up linking up with Rick Ross through Savvy Davis Jr. Who back in those days, he was the vice president of Mayback Music Group, which is his label. But I ended up meeting him through just the industry ties that I had and I saw the black bottle boys piece that Johnny Dang had did and it looked like dog shit. And I asked him like, how much did he pay for that? And he told me it was like 55,000. So the agreement we made, I said, it didn't even look photorealistic. It was the, the Bel Air, you know, Rick Ross's champagne. It was the Bel Air logo, but instead of it saying Bel Air champagne, it said black bottle boys and it, and it, and it looks at the, the labels badass, but the, the chain, the pendant that they made them, it was just the shape, the silhouette with black diamonds and then with pink diamonds, it said black bottle boys. It looked like some elementary shit. So I told Savvy that and I said, look, I can do this and it'll be photorealistic. It'll be perfect. So the agreement we made was we'll take it, but we're not going to pay for it unless he likes it. So that's how I got in with the, the bigger rappers. I'd already done the shit for Tidalasson, which by the way, the pendant we made, it looked just like the fucking, it looked just like the actual image. It was a, a maculent, it had the two, the two champagne bottles on it, had them bayback music group label on it or logo on it. So we did that. I ended up a new young buck, personally, just through the concert scene who he was signed a G unit records 50s label. So I did a dope boy university piece for young buck and then that led to me doing G unit pieces for everybody in G unit, like 50 Lloyd Banks, Tony Yeo, kid kid was with him at the time, and young buck. I did all theirs, Andy Boy, we the best, he's one of DJ Khaled's guys. I did some we the best pieces for them. I did the tech nine piece, man, I've just, I kinda got the mix. It's interesting, the jewelry business is like the concert promoting business is that it's always and music, rap, hip hop, it's always one degree away from the street, from drug dealing. Like there's always an intersection of drug money into all those businesses. Well, and it's like even when you're around some of these big, big artists, they got platinum singles and billboard chart charting artists like, you know, they may not be, but man, shit, some of the guys in their entourage, they're still after this show, they're going to go sell half a brick to somebody, half a key of soft, whatever the case may be. This is kind of a, you know, not to, not to trail off, but it was crazy when I did the unit pieces. for 50 cent, right? They flew me out to Philadelphia. They, I met him at the electric factory, 50 G and it was doing a show. And I was really cool with Young Buck at the time. So I would just chill with him and we'd go to LA and party and shit like that. But I was never chillin' and partyin' with 50. I would always ask a man, show 50 what I did, put me on, give me a chance. So finally 50 said, cool, make the G unit pieces. So they flew me out to the electric factory, right? And-- - That's in Philly? - Yeah, I was in Philly and that was the venue. So they let us in and Young Buck came and let me in the back. So I'm there with my guy. We're takin' pictures and shit. So all the G units out there and there's a big pool table backstage, right? And everybody's drinkin' Hennessy, smokein' blunts, playin' dice, like bein' loud as fuck. You know, Young Buck's introducing me to everybody but everybody's out there set 50. And then some of my mind, I'm thinkin' "Damn, it's 50 even here." Like is he gonna big time me and my-- And I got all their chains in my backpack. And then like Buck told me, "Hey, yeah, in a little bit, "I'll take you to get 50 as pendant." And I'm like, "All right, cool, cool." So like 20 minutes goes by and he's like, "Come with me." So we walk down this hallway and then Young Buck says, "Hey, give me a second." He knocks on the door, he walks in there, he's in there talkin' to 50. We're standin' in the hallway. And then a couple minutes later, he opens the door, he's like, "You're good, come in." So like me and my boy, we walked in there and you know, they're all out here, smokein' blunts and fuckin' shootin' pool and shootin' dice and shit. 50's in there with his glasses on. - Yeah, reading Warren Buffett. - Bro, his lab tops open. He's got like soft, oriental music playin', swear to God. And we go in there, he's like, "You guys want some tea "or some coffee or shit like that?" And just a totally different vibe. But at that time, he had just sold vitamin water. So he's on his $200 million shit, you know what I'm sayin'? - Yeah. - But that was a cool story. - Wow, that's fuckin' dope. And so, and they pay cash. - Yeah. - So four chains. - No, they got five pendants. - Five pendants. - But I hooked them up, I did 'em for like 12, 5 or 15,000. It wasn't anything outrageous. I just, they just told me what they wanted and truth be told. I've seen all the other guys wear 'em. I've never seen 50 put that on, you know. 50 got one, you know, I even had the box with their name on it and everything, but I think that was just some shit. Young Buck kind of did as a favor for me to help me get in the door. You know, it looked good for me, takin' pictures with 50 with the chains out and for social media. But all those guys, like they went on Jimmy Fallon Live around that time, they were promoting, I think the last unit album they made together, I could be wrong, but, and they all were wearing the chains, I made 'em on Jimmy Fallon. So I took a screenshot of that and like, Young Buck was takin' pictures with all the chains on and sendin' 'em to me. But that's, and that's just what I would do is, you know, like I said, I was makin' so much money off the bud. I wouldn't focus on makin' money off the jewelry. I mean, I guess I should have been. Today's episode is proudly sponsored by Cloak. 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They find where your data is being sold and they wipe it. Even better, their app lets you instantly create unlimited burner emails, usernames, and phone numbers. So every time you sign up for something new, that website gets faked out. They get fake info instead of yours. I love this. You're not just hiding, you're turning the tables on the whole data broker game. They also monitor the dark web, block spam calls with AI, include a VPN, a password manager, and even $1 million and identity theft insurance. Incredible. Protect yourself right now. Go to cloaked.com. That's clo-a-k-e-d cloaked.com/connect. Run their free security scan if you don't believe me, OK? And get 30% off any plant. That's cloaked.com/connect. Privacy isn't dead. It's cloaked. Well, how do you launder that? If you get $50,000 about for $5,000 or $60,000, do you-- I mean, you're not going to ask those guys to give you a receipt or an invoice. No, I would. I would. OK, how does that work? Well, I would literally just type up a letter and then have an agreement or have something. Things weren't digital like that then, but I would just have something printed before I go because what made me start doing that wasn't even the foresight of me thinking about money laundering. I started getting pulled over when I would fly in the airport. But I see when I flew to LA one time to re-up before I had all my plugs in place, I flew out there with like 20 grand, which wasn't shit, but it was all in 20s. And TSA pulled me to the side. And like, they scam my bag because I had it in my carry-on. They scam my bag. They pulled me over. They said, hey, come talk to us. What do you have this money for? And I told them, I'm a jeweler. I'm going to LA to buy Rolex, the jeweler that I'm doing the deal with. We don't have the same bank branch. And I don't want to have to wait for a wire to clear. So I'm just flying out with the cash. And a lot of people think that you can only fly with 10,000 or less. Can you explain that? Because that's what I thought. Well, I swear to God, I can't count how many times I flew with 20, 30, 40,000. Never had no problems. - And you put it in your check luggage? - Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - Yeah, I go through TSA with it. I would put the cash in my backpack. But see, then I started learning the game, right? I realized just, but it looks fishy. The only time I ever got pulled over was when it was all 20s, right? Because you got to think even five grand in 20s is a shitload of fucking 20s. But like, man, hundreds, you know, you can have 20K and $100 bills and still fit it in your wallet. You're, I mean, your wallet won't close, but you can, you know, so I flew to LA to Denver. I would have just the cash on me when I would go to re-up. I would just have the cash on me and I would literally leave it in my wallet. And so many bills in my bill fold, the bills won't fold, but I put it in there and put my, I put it in my shoe and never had a problem. And then-- - Well, do you know the legality? - Oh, no. I just know if I was flying with too much cash, I'd bring two or three of my homeboys with me. And I would put 20 on him, 20 on him, 10 on him. And we'd all go through different lines. - And then just keep it in your wallet and then it doesn't look like, yeah, you've got a wrapped in cellophane and wrong band. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - It doesn't look like drugs. - That's a dead struggle. - Yeah, okay. - So we would just, and then I told them, if you ever get pulled over, just say, hey, I'm going to LA or I'm going to Denver, wherever Vegas, wherever, and I'm a jeweler and I'm picking up a watch and the jeweler wants to be paid in cash. And that's what I told them and I never had any issues, but that's what got my brain working to where I'm like, damn, I need to have like an agreement wrote up. - Some paper. - And then so even when I was going to reapp or going to pay a plug, I would still have like bullshit documentation. But then I'm like, if I'm going to do something for real and sell these jewelers and I'm going to fly back or sell to these wrappers and I'm going to fly back with cash, I need to have a bill of sale. So then this way I'm really telling the truth. - For sure. - Okay, I'm trying to fly back home. I can say, oh, will Rick Ross just pay me 35 grand? Here's the paperwork. Here's the signature to his manager. And but I never even got question. Nobody ever said anything to me. - Wow, that's amazing. And then are you able to take that to the bank? - Yeah. - So you can under your LLC, you can go to the bank and you give them that bill of sale or do you need to? - Yeah, well, later on I did at the beginning, I would just drop cash and kind of just, they would never say anything. I would just fill out forms, you know. - Because it's over 10 grand. - Yeah, it's over 10 grand. But then when they would ask me what's it for, then that's when I would start bringing the receipts to give to them. But honestly, at that time before, I rarely even put my money in the bank. I was the type of guy that would have, you know, 30 grand in a shoebox, 40 grand under my mattress. I was real big on cash as king. I rarely started flukking with the banks until I moved to LA and then people had to pay me. Then I couldn't keep flying back to East Texas to get my money. So I just, I had my pop set up account and account. I had my son's mom set up an account and then I would just tell my guy, hey, y'all go drop this and this bang. go drop this in this bank, but one thing I was going to tell you, but a sidetrack is I have my main guy gave shit to and then the other guy that would sit at the bar and shit and he just knew everybody. Well, he ended up getting over served at that bar and then he was like five minutes away from his house because he lived like across the highway from me. He was like five minutes away from his house. It was raining really bad. He ended up getting in a car crash. He fucking killed a teacher, killed her son, and killed a foreign exchange student. Right? So he's in prison. My boy Carl Crabtree, he's a good guy. He made a horrible decision. And they stacked. He got 60 years, three times and they stacked all the citizens. So he'll never see the light of day yet. And that was the guy who was moving product. Yeah. He was like, he was moving quite a bit for me. He wasn't moving as much as my main guy, but he was literally good for a pound every day. Maybe every day and a half, two days. And it was like, and I was charging him more. I was charging him $200 an ounce. And that shit, that's $3200 a pound. And he's coming through. So when all that shit happened, that was around the time that I was already thinking about moving to LA. But let me tell you this. So I'm getting everything from my guy in Vegas. He's sends me everything. We're together all the time. So I'm exchanging jewelry with him. Or when I do fly out to him, he wants cash. I'll take him cash. Everything's good. And then so, but he's really flashy. He's really loud. He's really obnoxious. When we go to restaurants, he disrespects people like, look, I flew out to New York with him when he wanted to meet one of the reps that I knew in Atlantic Records. And when we land, and I think we flew into JFK. I can't remember exactly. I don't think it was LaGuardia. But we land, right? And he gets two rental cars, right? And he had got like two escalades and a Mercedes, or a escalating a Mercedes. And we go and we get in the rental and we get back to the hotel. And he tells me like, damn, man, I can't wait to smoke. And I was like, damn, do you know people out here, you know, thinking he was like, nah, bro, fuck that. He unlocks the bag on his luggage, unzips it, had like a fucking pound in his checked bag, had a bottle of fucking pro meth and coating cough syrup. And he just he flew with it. And I remember my mind was so blown. I said, dog, I got to quit my mind. I thought I got to quit fucking with this guy. Like if he's moving like this through the airport and he's flexing all this cash on social media and he's shipping you 20 pounds at a time. I'm like, like, he doesn't even give a fuck. He don't give a fuck at all. And like, so in my mind, right then, I start thinking, I don't think I'm going to keep fucking with this guy. Like, I think after I'm going to get this done and I was already thinking I'm wanting to go to LA at this time. Like, man, I'm just going to finish up this deal that we guy. And then I'm going to go to LA after this. I'm done. And this is JG. Yeah. Yeah. JG went worth. Yeah. No, but so but it's crazy how things work. So we do that deal in a new York at Atlantic records. We get all that worked out. What happened? You got a record deal? No, no, no. He wanted a radio play. So I knew some of the people that were originally at jive that were now with Atlantic. And he had the single with French Montana that we met him at the video shoot on. And so he asked he wanted to get it on the radio nationwide. So I use some of my contacts in Atlantic records. So we flew out there. We worked something out with radio play and shit. Okay. Yeah. So you were telling me off air that it's a federal crime now to pay. Yeah. Payola. Payola. Yeah. Explain payola. Well payola is basically like where a label pays a radio station to spin their artist music. You know, a radio station. It's supposed to be equal. A radio station. A radio station supposed to play all artists equally. Right. So I guess payola is they don't want one label like Atlantic or like universal to be able to monopolize all the radio station. So essentially it's like an antitrust law. Okay. Because it's like you got to think whatever Atlantic's not the biggest label. I think universal is. But if payola still existed, no other labels would be able to. Now they could. But this is during the time of FM radio and satellite radio now streaming. You know, but back then if you wanted to blow up, your son needed to be on the radio. And so payola is illegal because universal could just go to every label and throw wads at cash at them. And then they would just play universal artists. Right. You know, so they made it illegal to do payola, which was how the business worked forever though until recently. Yeah. Like that's why you have, you know, the predatory record labels of, you know, back in the day is because they had all the connections to all of the radio stations. Oh, yeah. You know, and the mob was involved. Of course. A lot of it. Okay. That's interesting. So now they do it. But you say it's like more they have to kind of bribe them. Yeah. And now it's like bribery. Like it's kind of like, Hey, it'd be really nice if you could play our new artist single at all the prime time hours. And you know, we loved, uh, you know, give you, you know, we're going to give you guys court seats to the Lakers. Right. If you don't mind, we'd really appreciate it if you played our artist new single, you know, it's kind of like wink, wink, nod, nod type of thing. Right. And oh, hey, we just happen to have a couple extra Mercedes down here. We're going to send them to, you know, the program director at one of the biggest hip hop stations in LA or power or, you know, shit like that. And, you know, just so they find ways to kind of sugar code it. So how were you guys pulling this off? Well, because, and I don't want to get them in trouble, because he's still at the label. But I just, I've known this guy. I did jewelry for him. I met him through my manager. He's who he got me in contact with Tidal Assign. And, um, I just knew, you know, if he wasn't able to do it, he would know someone that was. So he was able to facilitate radio play for this guy. And, uh, so, and, and we had set the deal up. And he was like, yeah, just tell him to send me the record and send me the, uh, the money. And I, you know, and I'll send on the paperwork and we can get it done. But JG was like, nah, fuck that. Like, if I'm going to do it, I want to go down there and do it in person. I want to go to Atlantic's office. So I told him that. And then he's like, fuck it. Y'all can come. So next day, JG bought all our tickets. We fucking flew to New York. We went to the Atlantic office, which was crazy to even get upstairs. You know, it's like, you can't, you know, there's a lobby, but they had to fucking like scan our ID and print us a fucking, a day pass pretty much that we stuck on. Then we got off on the floor that to scan it. And this was back in like 2012 type shit. 2013. Yeah. It's very, uh, sophisticated shit. Yeah. Well, after the era of shug night, yeah, barging into radio stations, you know, threatening to, yeah, baseball bats and two pocketing shot in the stairway of those places. Yeah. Yeah. And I can't remember exactly where it was at, but, uh, but I know Atlantic's office. I'm midtown. Yeah. It was somewhere. Yeah. It was somewhere in Manhattan. But we go there. We do the deal. Uh, everything's done. But then that, okay. So that's how it was. So did you give money? Did it was this bad? Well, I don't, I'm not, I'm not it. All I know is missing. It'll stop you. I had nothing to do with it. I was just middleman, the shit. My buddy won a radio play. I knew a heavy hitter in the music industry. So I just fucking put them together. But I do remember JG ended up calling me because back in those days, you could track your, um, your, your, your spins like labels could, uh, every song had like a tag pretty much like a digital tag number. And I can't remember the name, but there was a website that labels could, uh, pay to access, right? That all the labels use and you type in the number, the tag number to the single you're working. And you can see what regions are your strongest, how many spins each station, uh, how many spins you got per station, what city it's in, all that type of shit. So, um, my guy ended up getting that and looked up his tag so he could check his radio spins. And he called me pissed off. He was like, ah, I'm getting radio play, but it's all between midnight and 3 a.m. And I was like, well, you didn't specify like what time you wanted. Y'all just made the deal. I wasn't even thinking, you know, that far ahead of the game, I just, you wanted to be plugged in. I plugged you in. Don't be mad at me. So they took his money and then stuck him in the middle of the night pretty much, you know. So you ultimately, you decided that you were going to quit receiving weed from the West Coast in Texas. Well, yeah, you decided to just pick up and move to Callie, move to LA was why was that because it became legal out there. No, no, no, let's see, here's it. I just wanted to. open a dispensary, right? 'Cause I saw the industry changing and the more I would go to LA, I just saw how much money these dispensaries were making in my mind, I'm thinking, damn, you know, this is LA, the land of the bud and they're charging more on quarters than I would be if I sold them back home. So if I'm able to sell them back home for fucking $70, $80 a piece, why don't I just come out here and sell them for $100, $125 a piece. - Legally. - And that was my big thing. My son was about to be born. Shit was just getting too high, like people were kind of getting locked up, people were talking. I ended up getting robbed. I got set up by a guy that I would front small amounts to. He set me up to get robbed at gunpoint and I was just like, I was just fed up with the shit. But what made my decision easier is, so I knew from that New York meeting, I knew that I was done for the time being with JG. So JG, we do that and he calls me and he said, hey, I got a video shoot at the Palms Casino in the Hugh Heffner Suite if you want to come out. And I was like, nah man, I'm good. Like I got shit going on. I'm going to fucking finish moving this shit that I got, I'll catch you on the next one. So he's like, all right, cool. So like, and I'm like, hey, I'm going to start severing ties with him. I'm going to, I've already started reaching out to my other guys that are plugged in. Their prices aren't as good, but at this point, I'm just like, fuck it if I need something, I can get it from them. And I'm, but I'm really just trying to get this shit moved like, tidied up so I can, you know, transition out to Los Angeles. And so I get a call in the middle of the night, right? And it's, it's, it's JG. And I'm like, why the fuck is he calling me? And I'm thinking he had that video shoot. Maybe it's a pocket dial or something like that. And he calls me and he goes, hey man, Will's dead. The guy that introduced me to him, Will's dead. You're not going to hear from me for a while. I'm about to break this phone. Just, just keep that shit I sent you. And I'm like, Will's dead. He said, yeah, I can't explain it, but Will's dead. I'll reach out to you. Yeah, you'll hear from me when you hear from me. So I'm like, all right. How much shit did you have? Like, I can't remember. There's like 30, 40 pounds something in between 20 and 40. I can't remember exactly, but I'm like, come up. But at that time, at that time. Thanks Will. Yeah, RIP brother. No, at that time, I was already, I'm already up. I'm up six figures. I'm already up fucking 200 bands at this time. Should've been up way more, bro. Yeah, but I would have had three million on me. By the way, in the comments, they're gonna roast you on that. How'd you only have 300K if you were moving 40 pounds a week at 1,400 a profit a pound? Bro, I'm throwing concerts, not all concerts are wins, some of them are losses, some of them are break evens. I'm driving a fucking brand new G wagon that I fucking got off the lot. I got fucking Rolexes. I'm paying rent on two different houses. I'm paying fucking, I just brought a son into the world. So I'm getting him the best of the best of the best, everything, I'm throwing on anybody, anytime anybody's got a problem, I'm there to solve it. Somebody needs fucking five grand, 10 grand, I got you like, I was fucking, but I took, and I was fucking, flashy shit like, it's a difference between me and you. I'm cheap. Yeah. And I should've been, but I ended up finding out how Will passed away, which they can even, I even looked it up the other day because I told this story on MatSpod, but I looked it up and I just typed in Hollywood Will, Hollywood Will, Palm Shooting, and this is, the story was told to me and it looked a little different on the news report, but so basically they were at the video shoot, a fight broke out. I was told by some of the guys in JG Circle that Will and his brother were fighting, but in the news report, it said that him and his brother were fighting two other guys, but a security guard got in the middle of it to break it up, which it wasn't even really a security guard. It was just one of their friends playing security and he pulled a gun out. I guess to pull in a gun to break the fight up and in the midst of it, Will got shot in the chest and Will ended up dying in the hospital, shit like that. So that kind of put, which was crazy, I told that story on MatSpod and I remember I looked up JG when I came home, I was just like, man, I wonder whatever happened to JG. You know, I was just going to touch base with him, see how he'd been and shit and I couldn't, I called everybody that knew him from LA and they said, man, I ain't heard of that guy in years, you know, something and maybe he's in prison, maybe something happened to him. And then, but when I told that story, I'd seen somebody commented on Mat's video and the last part I did and they were like, JG just uploaded new music to his YouTube. So I guess they fucking searched him up and shit and so I guess he's still out there. I even seen a dude in the comments say, which, you know, people bullshit in the comments, they said, I know exactly who he's talking about in Vegas, that dude's still running the fucking game, you know, but see, like he wasn't the best rapper, but man, his money was so long, he was getting songs with fucking French Montana, Snoop Dogg, juicy J, like, you know, he was, yeah, pay old all the way around for sure. For sure. Okay. So, but that kind of, he's out of the picture now. So your plug is gone. Yeah. We'll go to Cali to kind of restructure your operation and find a new plug. Yeah. We'll see it that time. I went down to LA and I started looking into how to open a dispensary because at that time it was medical. So I found a guy that was literally just like a marijuana attorney attorney, that's kind of like what he specialized in. And I told him I wanted to set up a dispensary. He charged me like 2,500 or 3 grand and said it'll be turn key, like I'll get you ready. Just give me two weeks. So I paid him and then I started looking up like houses and condos and shit like that. And really, I just kind of put the game on ice. I would use a guy locally to like serve my guy that just to kind of keep him in place. I really wasn't making much money. I just didn't want to lose any clientele in case this LA shit didn't work out. I wanted to keep my guy fed, you know. Okay. So who did you leave your Texas business with like the jewelry shit? No, I'm talking about the weed. Oh, but I was the only one that ran the Texas. I was doing it. Okay. So didn't did you not leave a guy there to see the work, but we weren't really like, it wasn't really my business where I was just his plug. You know, I'd get it. We didn't ever split money. We did. That's what I mean though. Okay. Okay. Who were you serving when you went out to Cali? My main guy, my main guy that pretty much that would move 90% of the shit because I really only had two people that I would dump all my way down. That's all you need. Yeah. And I didn't even, like I said, like nobody even thought I was a drug dealer. I was just like, I knew all the rappers. I was a concert promoter. I made music. I'm always on tour. I'm always with, you know, a fucking major artist. I'm always an LA. I'm always in Miami. So I had a really good public appearance. Nobody knew what I was doing. As far as everybody was concerned, I just smoked. You know, so I, but yeah, my guy out there is who I was going to leave the game to. You know, so I ended up getting the weed attorney. He got everything ready. Turnkey. I found a spot in LA at the Palazzo East and then we started packing everything up, moved out there. And then I started, but when I got out there, that's when I was saying I really didn't have a plug, right? I had met a guy that was an organ and I met him through the whole concert scene because when I went on tour with Stevie Stone and I was opening for Stevie, there was a green tree promotion. They had fucking booked this whole Stevie Stone tour and Stevie Stone called me and asked if I wanted to come on it with him. So when I went on tour with him, I ended up getting to know this promoter really well. And he's in there. And this is all through, we're doing the tour, all through Oregon and Washington. And so he ended up knowing people that were in the game out there and he's just like, oh, man, I got guys with the best smoking organ and in my mind, I'm just like, man, Oregon don't know shit about blood. We have the best. He's probably still to this day and the cheapest. That's what most people don't know. We have the most weed and it's the cheapest and it's the best, even better than Callie. This shit was bad. But at the time, I'm just like, man, I'm going to LA and I always buy shit from the dispensaries when I'm out there. And then my guy, my main plug's getting shit from the triangle, Oregon don't know shit about that, man, so this dude put me down with somebody in Oregon, fucking pressure. I'm talking, he had this shit called Willie's Purple Goo. I've never seen it again, never heard of it. This shit was like a vibrant purple, like a purple I've never seen. It was so purple that people were asking me if he was dying it, like is this color natural? And I'd say it was, he had one cannabis cups. He had his big strands. He always grew as Willie's purple goo. Lam's bread, not Lam's breath, Lam's bread. And he had like two or three of them that he always had. But he would always grow the same strands. He was fucking with genetics. It was, but it was all just gorgeous. And he-- - And that was indoor. - Yeah, pure indoor. - Yeah. 100% indoor. And he was a little more than my Vegas LA guy was, but the quality was a step above those stack packs I was getting. - And what was he giving you pounds for? - Like at that time, some of it was like 15. He was, but at this time, I didn't mind spending the 15, 16 on it. 'Cause I'm using his shit for retail. You know, so-- - And by that time in LA, if you're trying to compete on weed and meat maps, you need the best shit. - Exactly. And then, and I'm still turning a profit. I don't know off the top, but I'm still like sell, if I'm selling a $100 quarters, $125 quarters, like bro, the profit's there. I can afford 16, 15, 100 on a pound. So that's what I did when I first got the LA. I set up, I didn't do a physical store for right. I fucking set up four pin points on weed maps. And you were at weed maps was ahead of its time. I'm sure it still exists now, but it was ahead of its time. You could update your menu daily. You could take pictures, you could, you know, you get reviews, you get ratings, all that shit. And so I would always just update, like I was saying, like my paperwork had me legit to ride with it. He was in Oregon, I was in Cali. I drive up to Reading, he crossed the line, you know, throw me a fucking duffel bag. I'd put it in a couple of times he drove it all the way down, but sometimes I would go right to the edge, he would bring it and then I drive back. And then just take pictures, put it on the menu, and we ran for close to a year and a half, like, but the whole time that we're doing this shit, this is when I start Mellon, but I'm still Mellon, but back to East Texas. - Okay, so seeing how sloppy your old plug was in Mellon, did you tighten things up, like did you actually perfect the art of shipping a pack? - Yeah, man, my packages were beautiful. - Okay. - My packages didn't even look like fucking, they were, look, we really, I had that shit down to a science, right? I would always double and triple vac, make sure, and make sure I wear gloves the whole time, wiping the bag down. - Change out gloves every step of the way. I used to have like four pairs of sweaty gloves after I was done, just cake to the THE, 'cause every time you place, every time you, you go to the next step of bagging up, you change gloves just to make sure that there's no residue or anything that's gonna get on the box. - And that's what I would tell people, that they, you know, you defeat the purpose of, if you're, you know, weighing your shit up, you know, you're weighing out of a turkey bag with five pounds in it or something, you're weighing out your pounds with a cup on your scale or whatever, and then you're touching it, and then you vac that, and then with your same gloves or bare hands, you're putting that inside of another bag, and you know, you're cross contaminating everything. - Exactly. - You know, so, but yeah, I had it down like, I would always, I had certain size boxes I liked, and I would always at least triple that, sometimes double that, but most of the time, I would triple that, and then I'm bubble wrapping everything, and then once they're in the box, I'm buying a slightly larger box to put that box in. And see, some guys would go the extra mile, and they would get like that foam spray, and I didn't like that shit, that made it too messy, it was too weird, like, just do it clean, but I would always make my shit look like it was, and I would put business as the return. So I would find a business in my neighborhood, there was this aquarium store, and I would use the fuck out of their address. So I would send stuff to my boy, but it would be the name of the aquarium business. And so then, and then right by my condo, NLA, on Houser, there was, I think it was, I can't remember, it wasn't voodoo donuts, but there was this donut spot, right? Trayhos donuts. - I can't remember. - Pink sign. - I can't, and I don't think it was Trayhos. - Give me the Houser and what? - I can't remember. - It was on Third and Houser. It was across the street from that coffee bean. - Yum donuts. - Yum, bro. Yes, it was yum, but over in that same shopping center, there was a mailbox store, like they do FedEx, UPS, USPS, they would mail all my packs. - Right, so you never actually walked into a post office to do it. - Never, I would just pay the premium to ship with them. There was a little bit more, but I would go in there with fucking four or five boxes and give them the addresses, and they didn't mind. They'd see me, hey, how are you doing? We hadn't seen you in a couple of days. You know, it's like, I'm sure they knew what it was, but nothing ever stayed. I was so paranoid, right? I'm not paranoid, but just on my shit that, like if I was gonna send packs out that day, I wouldn't even gonna smoke. I wasn't gonna have like, smoke on my clothes, and then I'm gonna pack all my shit up, and then I'm gonna set it outside. So in case, if in the middle of doing it, I'd put it on my balcony, because in the midst of like, if I get a call from the dispensary, if I gotta get something ready, I just didn't want that smell anywhere near the box, and it may have made no difference, but I was. - But you could sleep good. - 100%. - And you know that if a box gets picked up, it's not 'cause I fail, it's just the luck of the dog. - It ain't because I was pack, the way I packaged it. - And how many are you getting in a box? - I usually would not do more than five. - Wow, so you go in with 25 pounds of gas sometimes? - Yeah, at its peak, but like. - Okay, so how many, if you're paying, is this the Oregon $1,500 weed? - Well, this was through the Oregon guy. I was doing the same shit, whether it was through the Oregon guy, then I transitioned to the foothill farms guys that I met. Their prices were a little better, and their quality was still good. It wasn't quite Oregon, but these guys would bring it to my, they'd show up to my door, knock on the door, drop a fuck, they'd come in with big ass bags, un-simple, and just let me go through 'em and pick 'em out, you know? And then they were so tied in, 'cause they had their own farm, they'd be like, "Oh, well, which ones do you like more?" So we can bring you more of those next time, or what kind of shit are you looking for? 'Cause they would only come over with, you know, a small amount of what they had. They were, I don't think they were local, local, but they may have been in Bakersfield, maybe. I don't quote me, but they would. Where are Sierra Hills at? - The Sierra Hills? - Yeah. - I don't know. - Okay. - There's a Sierra Madre mountains, but that's further north. - Okay. - And east, but it could've been in the central valley. - Yeah, no, I'm not sure. - That's Central Valley, so that they're coming from the north, north and east. - I don't wanna lie, I just know that either the guys I were dealing with, their people were growing it, they were directly tied to us, so they'd call me. But I got to where I would, you know, if my guy in Oregon wasn't ready, I have my guys here that were ready, I just always had a rotation. So it's like, but yeah, I would, I'd walk in and just have, well, see, but here's another thing, when I'd walk in, all the boxes were going to different addresses. So like, my guy that I would send stuff to, he had his address, and then he had a different, he had another address, somebody he let, that let him use that, and then I still had my childhood home, which I got rated in, I still had that home out there that nobody was living in. - So did it worry you that you were shipping to kind of a small town? - No, because Tyler's a small town, but it's not like a one-stoplight town. It's like, there's, you know, 300,000, 200, 300,000 people in it, like there's a lot of people out there. So it didn't really worry me 'cause I was so far away and I was thinking, I'm never gonna go back. So it didn't really cross my mind. - Well, when I used to ship to people that lived in these small towns in South Jersey, I would always find addresses in Philly, 'cause Philadelphia is a huge area. So you're never gonna make, I was always just suspicious or worried about postal people seeing a small business and aquarium business sending a bunch of boxes to different addresses in a small town, didn't really make sense. So that was level paranoia I would go to. And so I'm like, okay, let me ship to a huge metropolis where it'll just get lost and all the different commerce. - Yeah, I get what you mean. No, this town was big enough that like, they're not remembering like the package that's gonna show up two weeks later, they're not gonna be like, damn, did they say, it's not that small town. There's still a lot of hustling and bustling and you know, there's tons of people out there. So that really didn't worry me. - And your people in Tyler, what were they paying? - I was paying, I was, usually my rule of thumb was always to put a thousand bucks on. You know, if I can't make it at least at $1,000 a pound is not worth my time, you know. So I would always, that's why sometimes it kind of got towards the point where when I had Oregon shit and I'm telling him, Hey, bro, these are 26, you know, I had them so spoiled from the, the North Cal Vegas shit that he was used to paying, you know, 2000, because I'm getting them for a wreck. I'm charging him to. So now when I'm at 26, he's just like, damn, dog, you're jumping up on me, but I'm like, you know, the price went up, like it's not the same people, the quality's better. So he liked it more when I had the football farms guys, because their prices were a little better. He could do 22, 23. He just didn't like doing the 26 and shit like that. Well, they don't need the premium premium because it's Texas. And that's exactly what, especially at that time, he didn't give a fuck, you know, and he, and now he liked it for himself, but it was a harder sell because, you know, he's paying more. So he's charging more. I ended up finding out that he had one guy that he was dumping a lot of shit off too, because he would call me and tell me like, Hey, I need you to make sure that because sometimes I would be chill with it. I wouldn't always go in there with four or five boxes. I also had shit I had to do. So I'd be like, Hey, I'm shooting you out, you know, 10 to day or 15 a day. And later on in the week, I'll send the rest of them out or, or you need to pay me for these before I send more, because I started kind of separating myself from it. The more money that I was making in LA and the bigger my dispensary was getting the more of like the, or the less I cared about this shit, because it was a pain in the ass. So I would start sending like kind of less and less over time, but he had a guy that would want sometimes 20, 30 at a time. So, and he would call me and stress me, dog, I need to, I got to have 20 all at once or I need to have 30 all at once. So I would, I would make sure he got him, but he, he didn't like the price. I would tell him, bro, just because you're buying 20 at a time or 30 at a time, like the price isn't going to drop. And I told him, I was out there first hand, Callie numbers, like, bro, 30 pounds, ain't shit. You ain't going to get that big of a price break on 30 fucking pounds, especially not in that era, because even though the weed is tremendous, you don't have, it's not like growing, buying from the cartels that are, you know, harvesting tens of thousands of pounds of outdoor. It's like people don't have that much quantity. So they don't need to give you a price break. Exactly. They only have 200. Exactly. And then you also have to think, especially them, I'm sure they still do it now, but out there, you know, they know exactly how much each pound cost them to grow, especially indoor. They know how much power they use per plant. They know how much they were spinning on new, they knew, they knew everything. So they have a, like, I can't give you a price break because the same way I want to make a thousand a pound, that guy wants to make 500 pounds. Right. It's a margin. It's built in. Exactly. It's like a, any, it's like a restaurant, like I have to make 30%. That's the largest. Yeah. And so, but I would, you know, we did that. But I'm sending him everything. And I would just go to my same spot by Yum Donuts, legendary fucking ball knowledge. But, uh, but I would always use that spot. I would use mainly that aquarium business. I never had any issues with that. I never had any problems. And how would they get the money back to cash? Okay. So that's when he started dropping money into my bank. This was the beginning of the end. Okay. So explain this, this hustle. I had a bank of America count. And I had a local bank out there called South Side Bank that's only in, uh, I guess East, they may have them here, but it's only in Texas. It's not in, it's not in Cali. But so at first, I would, when it came time for him to pay and I always knew you don't do the over 10 grand thing. So I'd just be like, Hey, you know, go to the bank and put in nine grand, or if he only owe me 20 grand, I'd say, Hey, put in five, five K and one account, five K and another and tomorrow go drop five and five. And then when it was bigger money, like if you owe me 40,000, I'd say, well, drop nine and nine. And but then it got kind of a pain in the ass using the same two accounts. So my dad went and had my dad open an account for me. I have my son's mom open an account for me. So now he's got options. So he'll go over to one bank of America and drop, you know, eight or nine K into my girls account. Then he'll go to another bank of America and drop eight or nine K into my account. And then so on and so forth. So we did that forever. But here's what's crazy. Um, I remember I learned what's it called, uh, fuck, it's the type of bank that bank of America. And I don't know if it was just because maybe they knew what I was doing, but I would let the money kind of stack up. And then I'd be like, cool, I'm going to go pull this money out of Bank of America, you know, because and I was also dumb too. I wanted cash like I didn't I didn't like having money sitting in a bank then it kind of made me nervous because I'm thinking at any given time they could freeze my account. So man, but I know that looked even worse like, you know, 20 grand just hitting account and I'm there two days later trying to pull it out, but I'm young and dumb at the time. But I remember when I would go to Bank of America and I'd be like, yeah, I want to withdraw $20,000. They would tell me like, oh, well, we only have 5,000. We can take out. We'll call the La Sienica branch and they may have, okay, I just got the phone with La Sienica. They have 10,000. You could go get it. It was just always a pain in the ass. And there's a there's a name for that type of banking structure, but I can't remember what it was, but fractional reserve banking. Exactly. That's what it is. I'm not sure that that's actually fractional reserve banking. You think they were just bullshitting me? It's they don't even know what that fractional reserve banking means if you put in a dollar to a bank, they can create out of thin air so much percentage of that dollar. It's the essence of the fiat currency system that we live in, which is the reason why inflation never ends and everything gets more expensive because that is what when the government wants to stimulate the economy, they lower interest rates so banks can literally create more money out of thin air. And that's why the value of your money goes down every year. And that's the source of all our problems. Just give you kids an economic lesson right there. So that's what they're describing. Is it really fractional reserve banking? They just, I guess don't have enough cash on them. I just thought it was crazy. I thought it was weird, but they did that to me like two or three times, right? Now can I ask you this? Go ahead. I was I never did that at all my years of like cowboying in this business. I was a dumbass. I would mail the money back to saying or or at because it's again, it's just money. Yeah. So you can spray that down vacuum seal it and you could put it. You don't even have to overnight it. You could put it on FedEx ground delivery. And it's the, you know, your odds of getting back are very high if you do it right. See, here's where I took a big L-melod money. So that's why we started doing this. I see what happened. So I thought I was going to be smart or not me, but I had money sent to me. That was vacuum sealed. And like I had left some of these big posters, right? But they weren't, weren't posters. They were like cloth paintings and shit. They were, they were kind of on like a cloth. You could roll them up, right? And, but they were like a cloth material. So I told my boy, just vacuum seal the money, put the money in between the fucking poster and then buy one of those big tubes and mail it to me, right? So he mailed it to me and and this was small. This was like a dry like a small, it was only like 10 bands, but I was, it was FedEx. So I was checking the tracker and it was weird. It said it was out for delivery and then just the whole day went by and never got it. So I'm calling FedEx. I'm like, hey, you know, that was a piece of art I had. It didn't, it didn't show up. It said it was out for delivery and never got delivered. So I'm going back and forth with FedEx's, uh, fucking customer service. So the next day, and I just knew, I knew already. And the next day I get this shit, I open it, the fucking paintings in there, the art, I enroll it. There's wet newspaper in it. So we're going to go wet fucking newspaper, right? So we tighten up. That's when I'm like, well, bro, just they jacked you, FedEx jacked me 100% jacked me. I mean, to be fair, FedEx is the reason that I got locked up is because it was a package of money that was being mailed. So it can't happen. Uh, it just seems, seems like better odds though of shipping it and putting it into getting the federal government involved putting money through the banks. I was, bro, I was looking back at it now. I think the same thing, like what the fuck was I thinking? What are you going to do? But that's, but that's, I've heard that is a method is where people go to different accounts and they put in, yeah, you know, but you're going to burn yourself out doing that. And that's what I did. But looking back on it now, I'm like, I'm so fucking dumb for doing that shit. Everything happens for a reason. But, um, and maybe I was supposed to learn a lesson because I did learn, but just I'm like, damn, man, I tripped the fuck out. Really he tripped the fuck out because, uh, well, I'll get to that. So we did the whole melon thing. He melded a couple times. But and see, when I first started getting shit from my guy in Oregon, I would mail him cash sometimes, you know, and I never had problems with it. And I would do the same thing. I triple vacate, like make it look like a book. Box inside of a box and never had any any trouble. Hey look crazy story that So this was back when I was still fucking hustling But I mean before I moved to LA right I was hustling out there and I'd given my guy an organ a test run, right? so I fucking Sell the sell the load. I have the product out there. I got shit from him and JG And so I go to send them the money, right? And it was 20 something thousand. I vacuumed seal it I send it to him. I'm talking to him on the phone. I'm telling him how good it is You know, let me know when it gets there. I sent it FedEx, right? So Couple days go by and I had filled the you know how the FedEx packing slip It's your name their name phone number and shit like that. I didn't put I put my name But I didn't put my phone number, but I put his real name and his phone number, right? So he calls me and I would either I think I overnighted it or two day I can't remember but he calls me and he goes hey, bro. I got a call from Tarant County Police Department and they told me that they Had that package of money and they want you to call them so I'm like what the fuck? So first thing I do is I call an attorney, right? And I just kind of spit ball to the attorney what it what's going on and now at the time my guy has a well He told me I said would you tell him it was for he goes well I told him that I had a a Plymouth feather duster For sale. It's like a muscle car. He was like I told him that I had a Plymouth feather duster for sale and that you were in it Come down and pick it up and that was the money for it that That you didn't want to deal with banks and I said what do you say he said he said that was fine You just need to call them. So I'm kind of weirded out. So I call an attorney the attorney tells me like no You should be and I lied to the attorney. I'm like. Oh, yeah, I sent my my buddy this money for a car and the cops Confiscated it through FedEx and he's like no, you're fine like if they ask you any serious questions You give me a call, but you should be fine. It's not against the law That's what the attorney told me and I did Google how much cash was it? It was like 20th 1,000 or 20 it was under I Ended up googling anything less than 25,000 At least at that time you could send through the mail. I don't know if that's changed, but So anyway, I call the tarant officer Tarant County Detective or whatever right so he tells me Hey, we got a package Our dogs hit on it. We tested the money. It has traces of MDMA and methamphetamine but all money Exactly has drugs on it. It was just bullshit. Yeah, and then he was like what was it for so I told him what my guy told me And then I told him he was like well, why do you have this much cash? And I said look man, I'm a jeweler You know, I do jewelry. That was always my scapegoat I do jewelry for all these major rappers. It's a good one though It was and I was like and I got all this cash on me You know, I got I got the the receipts to prove it. They pay in cash a lot He I saw a car. I wanted it. I didn't want to have to go to banks I just sent them the cash and when I go back out to Los Angeles on business next week I was gonna fly out to pick the car up and drive it back and he's like, okay Well, I need to do a little bit of investigating and I'll get back to you. So I'm like cool whatever so my dude in Oregon He went ahead and gave me some more shit because he knew that I I did pay and and he wasn't really worried about it either But oh he was but not really to the extent to where he felt like he got burnt or anything So but yeah, they called me like Ten days later and they're like, yeah, you know, we made a couple phone calls. You're good You can come out here and pick the money up He goes we we can't give it back to FedEx and ship it for you You have what county is this it was in Tarant County. It only made it like three hours away from the origin facility Which was where Tyler I said that the Tyler to Oregon it got popped in Fort Worth So it was like two hours two and a half hours away. That's crazy. So never made it on the plan. No, no Fucking apparently according to them. I guess they were running dogs through the warehouse I don't I don't know is all sounded weird to me, but this was long before this was another one of those things That was really weird, but never came up later was never mentioned in my discovery Right, so they weren't so well like wasn't like they were building this huge indictment over years It never never came back up. I just thought that was you know, we were talking about melon cash Yeah, that's another thing that spooked me. I ended up getting the cash back Re-shipped it to my guy business went on. Yeah, but that was another reason why I was so willing to because it's like that shit Happened and it was a close call and then the time he did Mel cash They ripped it and fucking jacked me and it's like man big-time people, you know Send people on private jets. Oh, yeah, you know big-time coke dealers will put people on a private plane With two hundred fifty thousand L.A. and fly that ship back or or they'll do millions millions in a private jet It don't matter or well, but they could still search you people have been popped on private jets all the time, but Yeah, and a lot of others, but they some people will go as far as Even weed trappers in the West Coast. They'll just fly commercial over there pick the money up and drive it back So it just depends man. I mean it's again. It's all probability that nothing will go smooth forever Oh, no, no, no, no, no, like one of the guys what he like I do that I knew his method was He'd send shit out and he'd let people Build up the money that they owe him and he would fly in and he would buy like a piece of shit fucking car and then he would Hide the money in the car and then he would pay to ship that car back home And he would have fucking you know a hundred thousand and it and ship at home and and that smart, you know But also I never like when I get to the point where I'm in L.A. and I'm sending shit to my my guy in East Texas The money never really built up to where he sent me a hundred K at a time, you know It's like if I'm sending them fucking ten pounds He's gonna owe me anywhere from you know 24 to 26 thousand. I said I'm 20. It's 50 bands So it's like it's not worth it for you to go through all that Castle and pay all that extra expense. Yeah, you're in that middle ground where I was where you're dealing with Even though it's a lot of money. It's still like a boutique level. Yeah of the game You know, but it's a million dollars still. Yeah, I should add it's up Yeah, so and so and a couple times which this did pop up in my indictment One time I did send my then girl down there. Well, I didn't send her down there She was there visiting family and shit her my son went and I said hey, you know My guy has some cash. I'm just gonna have him give it to you and so go pick it up for me right my girl never met up with them Nothing he left the cash like it was one of those houses like if you drive up He had a car port and his laundry room was outside of the house It was like a door in the car port and then the house was over here He stashed the cash in the laundry room for and he said yeah, just tell her when she gets here to look in the laundry room It's behind the the detergent container. I got it vacuum sealed It just tell her she can grab it so I call her I tell her that she picks up the money. She didn't even fly with that cash back She left it at the house that we had out there and then That and that should happen and then come to find out that was when they went through me and him's text message and red Fucking months of text messages and shit that was their sole reason for indicting her and saying that she knew what it was for We read y'all's text you told her what the money was for so tell her she needs to get an attorney because she's getting indicted and Were you operating on burner phones? Yeah, I was operating on burner phones until I fucking moved out the LA Then I'm just like running my business from one iPhone Trapping on another iPhone, but then like and I had a separate phone But at the end of the day, I got in place and it's a hundred percent on me. Yeah, so I'm I'm going from running my business and Hitting my custos and talking to You know my friends and family all in the same line even though I got three different phones, you know And so I was pretty much handling everything and then I did have a iPhone 5c that was my dispensary phone line and But so after that shit happened like She went down there one time grab the cash. I'm like, man, fuck it You know, just drop the money in these bank accounts. I know it looks fucking sketch now that I look back at it But at the time I'm just like man, it's fucking five grand and five grand like they don't give a fuck so Long story time you say fuck it in the game. You got to stop yourself. Yeah, you can never say fuck it No, I got the felony to prove it. No, but so we're still doing that shit. I'm melding everything back You know things are going smooth, but But what set everything off was He had to drop. It was 24,000 that was like that weeks Balance, right, and I told him like, hey, just and he got to the point. I didn't even have to tell him He had damn near had these account the account numbers memorize He would fill the deposit slip out. He would put the cash with it put the amount he'd drop it and he would come me, hey, I just dropped X amount into this account, X amount into this account, but he went to the bank and he was in a hurry because he had an event he was going to because he was a DJ, right? And he didn't have time for all the back and forth. So he deposited 24,000 in a one bank account all at one time. And I read in my discovery packet, that's where it all started. That's where it all crashed. So that, and that was like a small regional bank. Yeah, it was south side bank in Texas. And so that alerted the IRS. Well, no, okay. So here's how one day I'm standing there with my dad, who was my dad's account. I'm standing there. We're getting the business started for the day. I'm telling them all the deliveries we have lined up because people would pre order for the day before. Like, hey, tomorrow, when you guys open, can you do this, this, this, and they'd go ahead and put their orders in. So I was talking to my dad, like, hey, we got this. And because we would sit there and we would, when five orders came in, we'd put all the addresses in the GPS and kind of coordinate our route. Like, hey, we'll stop here first. We'll stop here. Then here and shit like that. So my dad gets a call from the bank and they tell them, hey, Mr. Campos, we just wanted to make you aware that you had a cash deposit. But the money smells so strongly of marijuana that we can't put it back into circulation. But we're still going to make the money available to your balance. So he's like, okay, so he gets out the phone and he tells me that. And I'm just like, and dude, at the time, I'm like popping a bunch of like lower tabs and narcos. And I'm smoking a bunch of weed like, and I was really kind of like a sh, not a shitty person. I had a good heart, but like, I was like kind of rude and like, didn't give a fuck. I had a bunch of money. He couldn't really tell me nothing. Like, if I didn't think about it, it's not a good idea. You know what I mean? And my dad told me that instead of like listening and being like, damn, man, we should take it easy. And I just, I cut my dad. I said, is the money there or not? He's just like, yeah, it's there. I said, okay, cool. You know, in the story, like, let's fucking move on. But it wouldn't have mattered even if I did change the way I did. It was, that was the goose was cooked from that moment. It was done for. So what happened is, and I learned this from my discovery packet, the bank tellers were talking about how bad the money smelt of weed. And this was like some serendipitous ass bullshit. Like, it was just meant to be. I was a goner because like the security guard working over here is the two bank tellers talking and says, hey, I just work security here part time. I actually work with the Smith County Sheriff's Department. Like, do you have the information on who deposited the money and where it's going? And she said, yes, he came through the drive through. He fucking showed his ID and he's like, cool, just give me the info. And I'll forward it to my buddy in narcotics. And that's what started everything. So from there, they start watching him. They, they really, you're a guy and, yeah, and Tyler, okay, they start watching him. Now I'm still just living life. I'm making deliveries. And then, you know, they're watching you in LA. No, no, they had no fun. And it's crazy because I saw in my discovery packet, Smith County was calling LAPD and saying, hey, and they, they laughed at him. Of course. Yeah. They take a, get in line. You know, we got these guys. Yeah. Everybody in LA is doing this. Exactly. And they're like, oh, and so he owns a dispensary. And he, so he owns a dispensary. And they're like, yeah, he owns a dispensary. And the cop even told me that like when he was raiding the house, he was like, I had to wait for you to come back as LAPD. What didn't he help to us? You know? Yeah. Well, of course they wouldn't like saying a car was stolen in LA. Yeah. It's like, can you do something about it for real? There's a homeless person. Oh, no shit. Bro, but they really thought that they were going to fucking get something done that way. But, but in LA, I was a fucking law biding a small business owner. They wrote about platinum star healthcare and the LA times and the fastest growing family owned dispensary service in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills area. And life was just fucking super good. We're having a great time. You know, um, so how did they eventually get that? Was it the sheriff's department who rated you in LA? Well, no, nobody rated me in LA. I got rated when I went back to Texas. Okay. So, so what happened was from that moment, they start watching my guy like a fucking hawk, right? But we still run business as usual. And I'm melonum as usual, you know, 10 pounds every two weeks or every, it's really on the basis of if he needs it, you know, sometimes it gets to the point where I'm like, hey, bro, you need to fucking pay up. It's been a little while. And then other times it's like three days later, he's ready to pay. And I'm like, fuck dog. Like, you know, you slow down, you know, but we still just do business regularly. And then one day he calls me and he tells me one of his guys got popped. And so one of his main guys that he was given shit to got pulled over, right? And the dude had some weed and a gun on him, right? So I guess he goes in, he makes bond. He goes back to my guy and he tells him, hey man, they arrested me and they know everything. They know that that you're getting it from Campo in LA. They know that he owns it a spencerie like they know everything. And uh, so he flipped. I don't think his guy flipped. I don't think he flipped. He may have told them a little, but the cops in Smith County, they're like small time, a small town mentality. They like to talk shit to you. The whole time I was getting rated, they were talking shit to me, like saying personal, I've been waiting. I'll tell you about that. But so he tells my guy, they know everything, right? And I did find out through my discovery packet that once my guy made the deposit in my dad's account, he looked up my dad on Facebook. He found my dad's account on Facebook and my dad. And this is on the discovery that my dad put his occupation with COO of platinum star healthcare. We had a page on Facebook and everything. They clicked that. Now they see that I'm the owner, right? So now they're looking at my Facebook. Now they already know my guy's name. They're seeing all our ties. They see this stuff we're talking about on our board. And we weren't talking about anything like business wise, but they just see like how friendly we are. How much we're talking and shit. And uh, so they just start putting the shit together. And uh, so my guy, he's really not moved by it. He's just like, damn bro, he was more along the lines of, man, I'm going to quit selling to him, but he told me that they know everything that we're doing. And I'm like, yeah, I don't really think as long as he didn't say it, just quit serving him. Like you don't fucking matter. He's like, all right, cool. So he quit serving that guy. And then, so we had a little bit of that load left. I don't know how much he had left, but he leaves his house. And this was like a day or two after that guy gets out on bond. He's leaving his house and he gets pulled over, right? But he's riding clean. He don't have shit on him. And uh, but he said the cops, you know, now they're telling him to his face step out of the car. We know what you're doing. We're going to search this car. We have reason to believe that uh, that you're involved in drug trafficking. Like and they're telling my guy, he's just not saying shit or he's telling him no, no, but they're like, we know, we know you're getting it from Campo. They're telling him the same shit. We know it's coming from LA. We know you're getting it from a dispensary, you know, and they tear his car apart. He said he's pulled over for like, fucking two hours. They tear his car apart and they don't find shit. And the cop told him, I remember his name. It was Greg Harry. That was the cop that popped me. Greg Harry and the other one was something Mackie by the bitch asked mother fuckers, right? They took it way too personally. But they tell my guy, we may not get you today. We may not get you tomorrow, but we're going to fucking get you all. So they drive off. My guy goes home and my guy calls me. He tells me everything that happened. He's freaked the fuck out. So now I'm kind of getting freaked the fuck out. So he's like, bro, we need to put a pin in it. We need to quit. So I'm like, fuck it. I'm cool with that. I've really just been wanting to find a reason to pull out of this shit because LA is going great. You know, this is more of a hassle than a benefit. Yeah, there's money being made. But man, I look at it like there were times I'm scrambling to re up in LA and I'm like, fuck, I shouldn't have sent my guy 10 pounds yesterday because now I got to re up on the fly before I open. I could have just saved this shit for me and made even more money on it. You know, you're doing it legit. Yeah. You're like, you're operating in that, that perfect gray area. LA, why risk the, the federal shit? 100%. And, but my guy, I'll never forget. And not that it's his fault, I'm the one that made the decision, but I talked to him before I moved to the day I moved. And he said, dog, you know, I need you. Please don't forget about me. Like, I don't go out there and fucking start here to spend. I said, dog, I got you. Don't worry. Because he was, you know, the man now, he's used to making a certain amount of money. So I'm like, I got you. I wish I would have just said, no, bro, if you want it, you need to fly out to me. But instead, I was just like, fuck it, you know. So now he's spooked, so we don't, we quit fucking around. I don't send shit back to Tyler for at least nine or 10 months, you know, I don't send shit to him. So it's not even in my mind anymore. Like that's done, that's, that's that chapter's closed. We're working the dispensary, we're fucking doing our thing. And so we go back to Smith County, me, my son and my then girl, right? My son's like a year old, we still have a house there. It was the house, it was my dad's house. So it's like, but when I would go there, we'd stay there. My dad's still in LA at this time, you know, he's doing his thing, working the dispensary while we're gone. And so we're chilling at home and we're there that first day. And we eat dinner and we're just talking about all the stuff we're gonna do while we're here at home, like restaurants, we've missed, you know, 'cause we hadn't been home and, or I haven't been home in almost a year at this point. So like, so we already have like our whole day plan for tomorrow. And we fucking go to sleep. And like my son's mom was up like 10 into my son and like six o'clock in the morning. And then like, and I was asleep. And then I just wake up and she's just shaking me. Yeah, you gotta wake up, you gotta wake up. I think the cops are at the door. And I'm in a dead ass sleep and I'm like the cops are at the door. Like, why the fuck would the cops be at the door? Like, 'cause in my mind, I'm like, we don't even, I don't even break the law here. And you know, and like I said, I hadn't meld bud there and fucking eight or nine months. Why would the cops be at the door? So I think somebody's fucking with me. Like, now I do have the cash I brought, like 10 or 11 grand and I've got two pounds of bud that I had meld down there before I got there. Just so I had smoke. And so if I wanted to serve some people up, now that I'm back in town, I wanted to give them some of that LA gas that I brought in the shit. 'Cause I had some of that Sierra shit at the time. So I had that shit and it was just out. I had it like a, oh my counter, just plain view in the kitchen. And I'm thinking my girl's tripping, right? So as I go to the front door, I hear search warrant, open the door, certain that as I go to reach for the door, that motherfucker just comes off the frame and they hit it with the fucking battering ram. And this is a still door, right? And they literally tore the whole frame. Like the door didn't come down the frame then. Bro, at first I thought I was getting robbed. 'Cause these motherfuckers came and ski masked up. Assault rifles, don't move, don't move. I got my dog, RIP Gizard had him for 18 years, but my actual dog, I'm all teased. I went everywhere with me, he's barking like a motherfucker. And I'm like, I put my hands on it. Just don't shoot my fucking dogs, you know? And my girl, or my girl at the time, she's like cradling my son. It was some traumatic ass shit and they're fucking, and it made me fucking sick. 'Cause they're acting like I'm some cartel motherfucker. I hear them in the kitchen. They're like, it's clear, the kitchen's clear. And they're, I'm like, dog, you know, I'm fucking selling weed. But in my mind, I'm still just like, what the fuck is all this about? You know, and they tell me, we're here on a money laundering search warrant, right? So it's mainly just Smith County Sheriff's Department. I lived in a town called White House, which is Pat Mahomes went to school at the same high school I did. It's a suburb of Tyler. It's kind of on the outskirts of it. And there's, it's all Smith County Sheriff's Officers. It's one White House PD, I guess to make it legit. I guess they had to have somebody from the direct jurisdiction there. And then there's two guys in fucking FBI windbreakers, right? So they tell me, they pulled me outside. They pulled my son's mom to another room. And they keep my son, like she, they keep them together, right? They were kind of kind to them, right? And, but they got me in cuffs. And they got me in the front yard. And when they brought me outside, I've got no shirt on. Keep in mind, at that time, I weighed like 350 pounds. So I'm just fucking fat as fuck. I'm in my fucking boxers and I've got no door. No fucking door. My fucking socks are, I got weed socks on. And they're like pulled all the way up. The cops are talking, I remember the main cop was like, oh, how fitting is that? You know, that's all you care about. It's marijuana. And he was just some fuck, he's a huge man, dude. I looked at him. Nobody likes you. He likes cheats on you. Hey, guys, dude, he's a cuck. He gave big cuck energy. And like, fuck, I ended up looking him up. I don't know if it was Greg Mackie. I hit up one of them when I got out of the pit. Like I said, Greg Abbott. No, no governor Greg Abbott. Oh, yeah, Hot Wheels. No, it was, it was, it was Greg Harry. And I think it was Adam Mackie, but I looked one of them up. One of them is still in Smith County law shit. But the other one works for the department of Homeland Security now. And because I was Google in home and shit. But so they take me outside. They're talking shit. And they're just, they're like, I told y'all, I told y'all, I was gonna get y'all. And I'm just like, what's this about? And they're like, it's a money laundering search warrant. And then they told me and my son's mom, as I was walking out, as of this morning, your bank accounts are all property of the US government. And they fucking set down a stack of papers just showing like the accounts they seized, the amounts of money that was in them. And what's crazy is all the while, my dad's still in LA just, he's fucking sound asleep. How much money they seized? All together, it was 325 grand. That was all in banks. Yeah, that was, and that's in the fight. Like when they look it up, like if you look up the news story with my name and shit, some of them are conflicting. Some of them say 375 and the other one says 325, but it was closer to 325. And that's FBI, right? Yeah, that was the feds as who seized the actual bank accounts. So I wanna wrap up and we'll jump over to the Patreon so you could talk about kind of how this all concluded. Real quick though, tell us, tell us what happened, what became of this, the charges in the prison time. Okay, so I ended up originally me, my son's mom, my codifin, his girl and my pops, and the first guy that got pulled over leaving, we were all charged with first degree engaging and organized criminal activity on the state level. The feds didn't prosecute, but we did. I'll get hit with a first degree felony that was from five to 99 years in the state of Texas. So the feds seized your money, but the state charged you. Yeah, it's wild. And see, to my understanding, it's like we were talking about, they go on the point system. I had a squeaky clean record. There was no violence. I would have done like a year in the fucking feds if they even sent me. But I had so much plausible deniability too 'cause I had all the letters and receipts from the jewelry and I'm dying on the hill that all that cash was from the fucking jewelry I'm selling. Here's the receipts to prove it. I can back it all up. I got letters from these guys. I got pictures with them, and I was telling them the money that that guy dropped in my account. Him and his wife had got a divorce. And I was like, he needed money to repair his house 'cause they were gonna sell it after the divorce. I had loaned them that money. 'Cause they only knew, he only had to show his ID on that $124,000 deposit. So the rest of the deposits were just nine grand, five grand. Nobody showed any ID. So I was telling them the 24 grand, it's 'cause I gave them money to remodel his house so we could sell it. So I'm dying on that hill. And then, so my attorney calls me 'cause I still got arrested for the two pounds of weed I had when they raided me. And then, but I ended up bonding out on that. And then my attorney calls me, he goes, you're good. Go back to L.A., the feds aren't gonna prosecute you. I'm gonna get you probation for the marijuana. That's a state gel felony in Texas. I'll get you two or three years probation. You have no criminal history. You're good, get the fuck out of here. So I'm fucking happy. I'm telling my son's mom, hell yeah, we're good. They ain't gonna fuck with us. - But they didn't unfreeze your accounts, right? - Oh no, that shit was gone. They did tell us, 'cause I had 11 grand and they took that too. - Right, that was fast. - Could you, I'm sure you could have sued them or given them all of the paperwork to try to get that money back, right? - Well, that was kind of the plan that I was going because, all right, so they had taken cash from me too. And when they arrested me and then they were telling me there was this form I had to fill out and I had to prove where it came from and all this type of shit. And then, and they actually delivered me the form. I guess it had to be hand delivered, kind of like a registered type of person. Like a sheriff dropped me the paperwork off. They showed up after I was on bond. But that was the plan. When I bonded out, I'm like, I'm gonna get this fucking money back. We're gonna get back to fucking LA. I'll fucking do the probation for the state gel felony we charge. No big deal. So that was the process of what we were doing. I told my attorney, hey, let's get the money back. Let's do what we gotta do. So he calls me like a week later and he said, hey, I got some bad news. you need to come back because Smith County is picking up the charges and they're charging you with first degree engaging in organized criminal activity. And he was like in their charging your fiancee and they're charging your dad. So y'all all need to come down here. They did a secret indictment. They called me this morning. You guys have to turn yourself in by tomorrow night. So then we all flew down there. We met at the attorney's office ahead of time. My co-defendant and all his people they had they had to do the same thing. They went and well actually I think they went and got them and like they just showed up at their house and arrested them. But he didn't have an attorney like I had an attorney from day one you know and he ended up getting an attorney. But they I had that lip plus I was out of town. They wanted to I should have just never came back. You know as you think about going on the run. Yeah. Oh fuck yeah. Where would you have gone man? I was looking up like Ecuador, Spain, Portugal. I was really looking at places. I was at the fucking target over there by the Beverly Center. And I was walking the one that has the indoor parking garage with the elevator on it. And I was walking around. It was googling places with no extradition. And then I'm sitting there telling my son's mom about it. She's like we can't our son's one year old like we can't grow up or we can't let him grow up and you be on the run. Like we just need to face it. She's the voice of reason. She's like you know she's a wise woman to this day. We're still very close friends. And she's like just we're gonna get you got an attorney. We're gonna face this head on. We're gonna get through it. Like yeah. So that's what we did. Wow. So it was really your your baby moms. Oh yeah. I was ready. You went to prison. No. No. But I was ready to fucking yeah. I was ready to take off. But then when she said that I started thinking like did you have any cash anyways. We still we had some some money in LA. Yeah. Like from the dispensary. Yeah. But nothing crazy. Like fucking you know I was just letting my fucking bread stack up in those accounts. There was fucking the the bud that I still had. Like I can't remember an exact number. But like 10 pounds 15 pounds is what we had to work the dispensary. And then I'd brought the fucking 11 grand with me back and you know but I was just letting the money build up. Yeah. I fucking yeah if your people look it up they can see but there was like. Were you paying tax on it? Hell no. Yeah. That's part of the problem. That was the bangers. If you could have been if you were filing like you know with the IRS and store orderly for a 1099 or something. Yeah. Which is I didn't know any of that shit though. And like so. But that is what I should have done. And that's why when I was fighting the charge at a state level I'm telling my attorney can we just pay taxes on this shit? Like aren't the receipts good enough? You know it's all legit and he's just like well they were going through your text messages and they got in your phone and they were going through your because at that time I had my MacBook my iPad and my phone all on the same shit. So they couldn't get in my phone but they're on my fucking iPad or my MacBook and they're seeing everything. So that's how they built most of the case. Everything through your iPad through my iCloud account and then through my co-defendant's girlfriend who got charged she gave the cops her phone. So they that's how they built their side was through her phone and they pieced that together and then they pieced my side through he and I conversation my conversation with my dad my conversation of my son's mom. So it wasn't like they had a bunch of cooperation. No. And it wasn't like they didn't have any wiretaps. Oh no there was no fucking wiretaps. There was no bro they even lied and said like the day I got in town. I hooked I met up with my homeboy but my my guy was giving everything to but I wasn't fucking I wasn't like giving him anything like I had those two pounds but I didn't give him any of it at all right and they had said which I saw on my discovery packet they had said that they witnessed him because they were watching when I got in town and they told me that they witnessed him come over and they saw him leave with boxes that they believed were full of either money or marijuana. And that's shit never even happened. Like they didn't ever catch us with any fucking weed other than the two pounds I got caught with they didn't have any control buys it no control buys nothing. It was all off the strength of those fucking text messages and I'm so fucking dumb and naive that you know my first attorney is telling me to fucking at first he tells me they want to give me 35 years and if I take the 35 years that my dad and my son's mom will get probation so I'm like what the fuck so then he gets it down to like 24 years and he's telling me like this is a good deal and I in my mind I'm like I've never been in trouble like is this a good deal you know we're all out on bond we're half into fucking piss weekly the court still let us go back to LA to run the dispensary while I'm on pretrial supervision I swear to God they would let us fly back to LA to run the dispensary they were letting us check in there to piss once a week at the probation there and they would fax the results back to Smith County and then once a month we had to do an in-person visit until the until the case was resolved I did that for nine months right and so he's telling me when I go in and visit him he's telling me like 24 years is a good deal and I don't know how serious my charges and organized crime is a very serious thing and and it's a multi-state drug smuggling ring and my mom like it's just fucking weed it's really just two friends like I was just selling sending my homeboy bud and he was making his money well he was I ended up firing him right I fired him he's telling me you can't fire me it's not that easy it's the that's the best deal you can get so I ended up hiring Jason Parrish great fucking attorney if you're jammed up in Smith County column he's federal and state he fucking starts seeing all the bullshit that my first attorney buck files horrible attorney and in the city everybody says he's a great attorney that's why my girl gave him 15 grand to represent me because he's supposed to be this hot shot attorney and shit man he fucking seldom me down a river he's fucking telling the DA shit that I told him and confidence like these motherfuckers are knowing shit that wasn't in text messages and I didn't tell them so how the fuck do they know it and yeah you think when you're young you think 15 grand is a lot to a lawyer okay I pay my lawyer 20 grand and I told these cartel guys in the county jail they go oh that's why you're fucked yeah there's 20 grand they got a retainer 100 grand yeah I was like oh we better up this yeah you're doing 50 but well see I ended up firing that attorney and I got Jason and Jason fucking really saved my life he got now all of them like my dad and my fiancee at the time they got a probation for engaging an organized criminal activity so if they ever fucked up on probation they wouldn't went to prison for that serious ass charge my charge my attorney got my charge and since it happened to me they had to reduce the charge of my co-defendant too you know so I got money laundering and he got money laundering so I ended up getting my shit down to seven years right so at one point like I'm going back and forth and my attorney had got it down to four years right and then I'm just like you know because he's actually presenting the information for me like hey this is the list of everything that he did and that was cash and and yeah he made like like for the he's he presenting a list of information my attorney is presenting the information to the DA the list that I gave him with the jewelry the seals the cells he's accounting for the cash he's speaking on my behalf buck files was just trying to get me to sign for shit right you know this guy is actually fighting for me and like so there was a DA his name was Matt Bingham and he he had agreed to give me four years right and this was right before Christmas and I should have taken it Christmas miracle right so I'm telling my uh my attorney I'm like man just tell him to give me probation you know knowing what I know now I'm glad I didn't do probation I would assign for 10 years probation if they would have given it to me and had your uh baby mom and yeah they had done it on probation for how long eight years eight years and I would have been willing to sign for 10 years just so I didn't have to get locked up and be without my son and be without them I've never been in trouble and uh so he offers him the four he tells me to talk about or think about it and that will reconvene after the holiday right so I finally I start talking to some of my home boys that have been to prison and they're like dog and ain't shit four years I go down there and do a year you'll make parole you're good so I'm like fuck it I'm gonna do it so after the holidays ends I call my attorney I call Jason I said shit tell him I'll do it tell him I'll take the four just to give me a couple weeks to get my fair in order and he's like okay so he calls him well now that DA he's not there anymore there's a different DA that came in at the beginning of the years and he was like He goes, no, I'm not giving him fucking five years. I'm not going to give him anything less than, or he goes, I'm not going to give him four years. I'm not going to give him anything less than 10 years. So my attorney called me back, he goes, hey, look. You know, this attorney's name, everybody called him Mr. Biggs. I think his name was actually his last name was Big, like Mr. Biggs, but he was the DA. And so my attorney's telling him, amen, like they had already told him four. He was ready to take it. So long story short, they compromised and we come to seven. That was in between the four and the 10. So I signed for the seven, I fucking, go and do five and a half years on the seven. - What'd you get out? - I got out at the beginning of 2021. Went in in 2016. - Damn, went through COVID and all that shit. - I got out right as COVID started to pop off. Like I was like, luckily I wasn't in prison when it was locked down. And it wasn't too crazy yet. It was like, we were watching it and seeing the shit break out on the news and shit like that. But it wasn't, you know, when I got out at the beginning of 2021, it wasn't too awful. You know what I'm saying? - It's wild. - Now I know like a couple, I could stay in contact with a bunch of my guys in there when I got out and then I would, they got out and they're like, no, I got to the point. Like in the state of Texas, when you get out of prison, like they have release units. So even if you're in the panhandle or if you're in Houston or if you're in the Dallas Air, wherever they send you to a release unit or the release unit that's closest to the address you're parole into. And but dear and COVID, they told me that they were just letting you out from the unit you were housed at 'cause they weren't running fucking chain. They weren't running any of that shit. Like if you're parole day hit, your people would just come to the prison that you were housed at and then you walk out the front door. But I had to fucking get on chain. - The worst. - Yeah, fucking a month before I got out, I'm going from unit to unit to unit to make it all the way from South Texas, all the way to fucking West Texas where I got out at and I'm fucking. - That's a lot of strip searches. - A lot of strip searches, a lot of spin in the night here waking up, now we're backtracking to pick up some guy, spin the night, it was to me a month to get home but I got home. - So what are you doing now, man? What are you got going on now? - Then now I'm doing the podcasting thing on my day job, I work in oil and gas. - You're working like the fields? - No, no, no, stop it. - No, I do not have Mexican. - No, hell no, no, and that's crazy 'cause all the motherfuckers speak Spanish and I'm half Mexican but I don't speak Spanish, so they give me a lot of shit. But no, I do like equipment inspection. That's my thing, it's pretty laid back. It's more of like a knowledge based thing. - Well, what do you want to plug? What do you want people to check out? - Man, just keep checking me out. I'm gonna be doing more podcasts. I got a couple more lined up. I'm working on my own podcast. I'll give you my YouTube link so you can put it in the description and then my TikTok and all that stuff. - Hell yeah. - I got a lot more in store. - You're a hustler, man. - Man, I gotta get it each and every day. - I saw and heard a lot of myself in your story. So that was a hell of an era, man. - Game recognized game. You had to be there. - Yeah, oh, it was an exciting time. - Yeah, man. - And bro, I ain't get a full shit. I have to come back because there's so much shit that I wanted to touch on that but this podcast will be seven hours and we can't go on. So, you know, next time for sure. Incredible story, Justin Campos, man. Thanks for coming in. - Thank you for having me. - Of course, all right, you guys. We'll see you over at patreon.com/theconnectshow. Peace out. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)