Art Williams Jr. recounts his Chicago upbringing amidst gang violence and counterfeiting, detailing how he mastered printing 1996 $100 bills using layered techniques and color-shifting ink. After legal battles involving an $80,000 fake cash bust and a federal raid on his father's operation, Williams turned to art, selling works to the Rizzuto family for $75,000 and creating a Rolls Royce wrap for $800,000. His journey from prison to high-profile exhibitions with Frank Gehry and Arnold Schwarzenegger illustrates a profound redemption, challenging narratives of inevitable failure while exposing deep societal fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Notorious Money Counterfeiter00:09:36
You are the world's number one most notorious money counterfeiter.
I was, yeah, yeah, I was.
Arthur J. You were, not anymore.
Not anymore, yeah.
I still make money, but just on canvas, you know?
But no, I was known to be the first to break the $19,600 note.
So, yeah, so it's when they came out with all the new security features like the watermark and the strip and marking with the pen.
And, um, And so, but my story started before that.
You know, I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the projects with a single mom.
She dealt with mental illness, bipolar, schizophrenia, all that.
And it was real spiritual, her mental illness, in the sense that, you know, and I learned because I've been around a lot, it was just she would see demons and angels, she would talk to stuff, and she would see things that other people didn't see, you know, and it would drive her into the hospital pretty much almost.
Once a year, you know, I've seen my mom run out the house butt naked screaming, God's coming back.
You know, like, oh, how old were you when this happened?
I was like 11.
Yeah, no, I mean, the mental illness was uh intense with my mom.
You know, one time she uh packed the car up and drove to New York saying that she was meeting Jesus.
I think I was about 10 then, yeah.
So, um, yeah, it was heavy, heavy, heavy, you know, but uh, you know, I my mom was great too, though, right?
When she was when she was good.
She rocks.
She worked at a little diner in Chicago.
And she, you know, I'd go up there every day almost and get a shake, get a burger, you know.
And she would take us to church every Sunday.
We would, you know, we went to Lutheran church, right?
Every morning we would have to say our Father who art in heaven, I'll be thy name.
You know, we'd have to say our prayers every morning before we could leave the house.
And it's so funny because I used to get mad because even my friends would come over and she'd have them praying with us, you know, right?
And I'd feel so embarrassed, like, man, come on, my man, I don't want to do this right now, you know?
But they would, right?
And my neighborhood was dangerous.
We probably should have been praying.
I had six of my friends murdered by the time I was 18.
Yeah.
I'd been shot, you know?
They had gangs.
There was my neighborhood, it was Satan Disciples.
And then the next five.
Satan what?
Satan Disciples.
Satan Disciples?
Yeah.
And they don't worship Satan.
I know it probably sounds like it.
But it was just Spanish gangster disciples that came off that.
So you had two forms of gangs in Chicago.
You had people and you had folks, right?
People were like Latin kings, vice lords, you know, and then the folks were like the disciples, Simon City Royals, right?
Ambrose going on, right?
So in each one, you probably had 20 or 30 different variations of gangs, right?
With the people, because you had the Latin counts, right?
I mean, you could go on, probably 20 or 30 gangs there.
But when he went to prison or jail, they would all be one.
Right.
So the Satan Disciples were with like the Maniac Latin Disciples, La Rasa.
Why'd they call them the Satan Disciples?
You know, I think it was just kind of like when it was first organized.
It sounded cool.
Right.
That sounded pretty cool.
Yeah.
I think it was like in the 70s when it came out.
And that's when like AC, DC, and all that shit was rocking, you know?
And so, you know, that's how I think maybe that came about.
it took on its own.
I mean, it grew.
Were they white?
No, Latin.
Hispanic and white.
Hispanic and white.
Okay, mostly.
Right?
It started, I think, on Taylor and Racine.
And I used to walk up and down Taylor Street, man, a million times, you know?
And that was a crazy place.
We got into it with the Black Disciples, man, and we just tore the whole street up.
Like, it was bad.
They killed one of our guys.
And, yeah, man, it didn't turn out too well.
But, yeah, so, you know, growing up in the projects, you know, you had to deal with the gangs.
And so for me, you know, I actually quit the gang when I went to jail when I was like 21 for some bullshit.
And they tried to get me to go to church because they made me like one of the jefes of the section I was in in the jail.
So in the county jail, you got all these different divisions.
I think Cook County holds like 32,000.
It's like a little city in that damn jail, right?
And man, it gets real political in there with the gangs.
Yeah.
Oh.
Especially back then, like that was what, like late 90s, man.
It was intense, man, you know.
And so they tried, you know, they would have to give these reports of how many members you had in your pod, you know, how much you had in the commissary.
And like when people come in, you give them gift packages, you know, as soon as they come in, give them, you know, soap, toothpaste, you know, all that good stuff, deodorant, right?
And so we would have to do reports.
So I would do it, and they'd be cryptic, right?
You had this little, Cryptic thing that you would have to write everything in, right?
It was really trippy how they did this.
And so I would write the reports every week, and then we'd go to church, the church service, and you'd turn the reports to the main, right?
So when you go to church, because there'd be what 12 divisions, 30 pods, man, it'd be like 30 different leaders at church.
And this shit was crazy because you'd have 30 over here, and then you know, 30 over here from the people, 30 over here from the folks, and then you'd have the priest.
Given the sermon, it was the craziest thing I had ever seen.
Wild.
Oh, well, that's how I ended up quitting because they wanted me to keep going, right?
I would be the one doing the reports.
And I started feeling guilty about it.
Like I wasn't feeling right, you know, especially given how my mom took it.
You know, I went to church a lot, prayed a lot.
And even though I was a rough kid, I still had a certain morality in me because of that, I believe, and still do to this day, you know.
I really do check myself whenever I feel that I'm getting off track on something.
Even when I was counterfeiting, I would help people.
But my point being is, it was making me feel guilty, right?
Going down to church, turning in these reports, and then being a part of this gang meeting at church while he's preaching.
And it was weird because he would preach through the whole thing.
The guards wouldn't come and break it up, which you would think they would, right?
But all the guards were paid off and they were part of the gang too, you know?
And so, like the third time, the guy that I was sending with the report, He came back, he said, Hey man, they said, you gotta be there next week.
I'm like, I gotta be there.
I'm like, Nah, man, I can't do that, man.
And I sent him again.
He comes back that time, he said, Hey, if you don't come next week, you know, they're gonna take this position from you and they're gonna have a problem with you.
And I still couldn't go, right?
The following week came, I didn't go.
He came back.
They wanted to give me six matches as a violation, right?
A match back then, that's what was a violation.
You remember the old wooden matches?
Yeah.
Yeah, they'd light the match and let it burn while three dudes are just pounding on you.
Three matches, Could kill you.
They wanted to give me six.
They were so pissed that I told them I wasn't.
That's how long they would hold them on you, then people beating you for that long.
Yeah, they just so.
So, if they gave you a match, a match was the usual, typical violation.
Two matches, you really did some shit.
Three matches, they're trying to just get you out of it.
These they gave me six, six.
That was like the complete dead sentence.
I was done, double life sentence.
Oh, it's terrible, man.
And uh, dude had a bad look on his face, and then um, the they gave it to a different dude, this maniac, D act, it was his name, real cool cat, and uh.
And so he's like, hey, listen, man, we're going to take you.
Got to go to your cell.
We're going to do a little meeting and we got to decide how we're going to handle this with this match situation, right?
And just like three days before that, man, the GDs gave a dude a match violation and it killed him, right?
So that's just literally three days before this.
How many people die?
Oh, back then, man, with the gang stuff in prison.
I mean, who I don't even know, you know?
I mean, a lot, I'm sure back then, I mean, not as much.
You ever seen anybody die?
No, in prison, not in prison, no, no, no.
I seen someone get stabbed.
That's not a good look.
Right.
But no.
Yeah.
So anyway, they did their little thing.
I literally went to my cell.
They told me to go to the cell.
I literally got on my knees.
I said, man, if this is the way I got to go, then just let it be quick.
Let this just happen right away.
Let me get the hell out of here.
And they came, got me.
And they said, man, we all talked about it and we like you too much.
You can't do this.
Because I was good.
Good time with them, actually.
Most of them, you know, I was in there for like probably like five months, you know.
So we had anyway, so they gave me one match and let me pick the dudes and swore the room to secrecy.
It was crazy, and I wasn't allowed to leave the dorm because then they would know I wasn't all beat up and you know, and so I had to stay in the dorm, I was like on dorm lockdown, you know, yeah.
And uh, but it was cool, I that was how I quit, you know, I was done, you know.
Federal Reserve Hacked00:15:01
But growing up in the projects, that the gangs were intense, and your dad left your life early, right?
Yeah, yeah, he took off when he was when I was.
You know, well, he the first time he took off, so I was like nine, came back and got us, kidnapped us, took us to Oregon.
Uh, and then for some reason, unbeknownst to me, about a year later, he took us back to my mom.
But my mom was homeless, she was living in a Salvation Army shelter.
Um, and um, yeah, he just dropped us off and left, you know.
So, wow, so you lived with them for a year in Oregon and then they came back to Lobster Valley.
Did he explain anything to you?
Like why he was doing what he was doing?
Well, I mean, at that point, no.
No.
I ended up finding him like 22 years later.
Wow.
Up in Alaska, right?
What was it like?
Did it consciously, did it affect you consciously at the time when he like came and dropped you back off and then left again?
Did you think about it a lot at that age?
Do you think it had like a residual effect on you?
Did you have any feelings towards him, like anger?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, a lot, a lot of feelings, right?
I mean, he just abandoned us, you know?
Yeah.
You know, I didn't, I didn't.
At that time, well, I mean, I didn't know what we were going to go through, right?
We ended up going into the, you know, from the Salvation Army, we ended up in the projects on the South Side, right?
And I'm just a little boy.
Yeah.
It was 84, I'll never forget because it was the year the Bears won the Super Bowl, right?
No way.
Yeah.
The year the Bears won.
So it was like right after they won it, the charity van from the Salvation Army dropped us off at the projects and it was like snowing and cold.
Going to an empty project apartment with nothing.
We were like sleeping on crates with mattresses for probably three to six months.
I don't even know how long, right?
Yeah, that was the tough time.
Those were tough moments, man.
I'm sure you remember every bit of that.
Yeah, I remember it all.
I remember it all.
I thought I was Bruce Lee.
I swear, because I wouldn't go outside at first because I was nervous.
It just looked so dark out there.
Plus, that's in the wintertime.
So, Chicago, it's dark and cloudy all the time, anyway.
So, it's just gloomy.
And then you're in this dirty brick project, you know?
Right.
And.
I used to like to, you know, I was always into Jeet Kune Do and martial arts and working out, you know, and I used to love taking like a broomstick and using it like a staff.
Yeah.
And so I remember I would sit upstairs, you know, looking out and just kind of playing with my stick, imagining me just being able to get through the shit, you know.
And even I even ran away, you know, I didn't want to be there in the Sears Tower.
It was, it just looked so cool to me, you know.
And so I ended up running away to the Sears Tower with my little brother.
Yeah, that was the first thing I did that was just like, I'm going to be free.
Right.
And we ended up falling asleep in the lobby.
And the cops were called and they took us back to the projects.
And I remember when they brought us back, I knew that we weren't leaving.
Like, this is it.
And I remember telling the cops, man, I don't want to live here.
I don't want to live here, you know?
And he said, man, this is just where you have to be.
You know, and he was right, it was where I had to be, you know.
And from that moment on, you know, it was just dealing with a lot of uh poverty stuff, right?
Poverty is rough, right?
It yeah, it creates all kinds of things, but it could also, what I'm learning now, is it could create greatness too, totally.
Some of the greatest people, some of the most interesting, most accomplished people came from that, yeah, from that, yeah.
And those are the ones that I find because now that I'm an artist, I've been able to meet all kinds of people from congressmen, I hung out with congressmen.
McCarthy, Speaker of the House, Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?
He gave me my first shot with my art like almost nine years ago.
No, we had a show at Arnold Schwarzenegger's house.
It was awesome, man.
I sold 500,000.
It was just insane, right?
So my art has allowed me to be around so much.
Rolls Royce, I did a Rolls Royce show in 19.
It was just unbelievable.
Really?
Yeah.
Rolls Royce gave me a Rolls Royce.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Here's a guy out of prison.
I was driving a Rolls Royce around.
Some kid starting from 11 years old getting thrown around in the projects.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, how old were you when you got introduced to counterfeiting?
I was 15 when that happened.
My mom was working up at the diner.
I got in trouble for stealing a car.
We were stealing cars at this time.
And one of my mom's friends, he was just an old time dude from the neighborhood.
She couldn't leave work.
So, he came up to the police station, signed me out, brought me around.
And he signed me out of the.
He signed me out of jail and we were walking back to the restaurant where my mom was at.
He was just giving me this, like, because I was a roofie and I had already been in some shit at that point.
You know, I've been in Juvie Hall a couple times, 1100 South Hamilton.
I visited that place many times, you know.
And so I was at that point going down a road of just like, it was not going to be good, you know, gang banging, you know, just doing a lot of dumb shit, man.
And And so he told me when we were walking back, he's like, listen, you know, you're a smart kid.
And I've heard that a lot of times throughout my life.
You're a smart kid, but just do dumb shit, right?
And he says, you know, I need some help.
He said, if you could calm down, you know, I hate seeing your mom all uptight about you.
And so he brought me in, you know, and he was an old printer, but he printed the old way.
And it was the old 100 with the little face, right?
So it was, you remember the little, do you even remember the little face hundreds?
It's been so long.
85.
Pull up an image.
What year?
85?
85.
Just look at the 8500.
Pull up the 85 Hondo.
Yeah.
So, so he printed those.
All right, this is how long we're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, it was like, I mean, it was it that was like, so that would have been like 89, right?
They didn't come out with the new note till 96.
There you go.
This guy, you remember these?
No, you don't remember them.
Hell no.
Oh, damn.
I feel old now.
I mean, I'm sure I've seen them.
Well, I was a little kid when those were around anyway, right?
Well, they changed them in 96.
So, so this note here, this is what he printed, right?
These, you know, do you still ever see any of these floating around?
No, no, never.
No, those are gone.
Yeah, so there would be no money, but anyway, what happens when they come out with a new bill?
They will.
They slowly take these out of, out of, and how do they do that?
Through the banks, right?
So so so, hundreds.
There's a reason why there's serial numbers on the money.
Yeah, right um actually, the way that the currency paper, currency work was pretty fascinating.
How they would move it right.
So there's different reserves, 12 federal reserves right there in, and how they used to do it is is, if there was a shortage of cash in one of those sectors right um, they would pull from another federal reserve that had a little surplus and ship it to this Federal Reserve.
Now, how they would do that is when you say you go to McDonald's and you pay for your food with a $100 bill, right?
When McDonald's is going to do the drop right at their bank, right?
Their bank is going to run that through a counter machine, right?
Once it comes out of the counter machine, all hundreds, and I think it's all, for sure it's hundreds and it might be 50s, they put them in a different stack, right?
Go back to the Federal Reserve that's in that sector.
Right.
And then when it gets to the Federal Reserve, then it goes through a different point system.
So I would get my money when nobody knew what I was doing.
So I was the first, literally, I was the first that broke the 9600.
So when this thing.
What do you mean when you say broke the 9600?
All security features, right?
You hacked it.
I hacked it.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Just, yeah.
So when this, when they, when they, when they, when it was time to replace this, they came with the new bill and it was to, to, to, To get rid of all the counterfeiters.
And the new bill had a big face.
Find the 96 100.
It had a watermark in it.
There you go.
Boom.
Right.
So, color shifting ink, security thread.
The security thread would glow red.
Right.
So, like if you go to a strip club or whatever, the UV lights are everywhere and the UV would glow red.
Right.
I think a 50 was green, a 20 or 50 was blue.
Anyway, so I was the one who broke all these.
I broke, I even, I even at one time, And the money evolved always.
It always got a little better, right?
I'd figure something else out.
And I was, you know, like one time I was using a certain glue and I gave some money to my boy, one of my friends, Tommy.
He goes down to Jamaica with it and the money falls apart on him while he was spending it down there.
He said he was going to Jamaica and I said, Here, take 10.
He's like, Bro, this is great.
Thank you.
He goes down there, him and my boy, Scotty, they rent a big bus.
They go over to the club, they fill it up with girls, they're buying liquor, they're having a great time.
After like the second day, one of the girls comes to his hotel and says, Hey, you know that money that you gave us?
It's starting to fall apart.
I said, He goes, What?
He's like, Yeah, it's starting to fall apart.
We don't really understand why.
So he runs back and tells Scotty, Scotty, we got to leave now.
We got to get off Jamaica right now.
Because they were spending it at places that probably weren't too nice about finding out.
That it was fake money, yeah.
Jamaica, yeah, yeah, they were partying, they were having fun, so you just let's use the imagination on that.
So, they ended up getting off.
So, when he came back, I'm like, wait, that's terrible, right?
So, then I go back into the lab and I started testing different sprays, right?
Different adhesives.
So, the money always got better.
And I actually, the adhesive I found was so strong, I could wash my money, damn, right?
You go put that in the washer and it'll come out good, right?
So, that's what would happen by making the money and using it.
I, if I would, the world was my testing ground, right?
Like for a certain thing, like in the gas stations, the Arabs, they like to feel, right?
So they'll know right away.
They got that touch.
They got a touch, man.
And that's who I used to tell.
To see how good the feel was, I would purposely go.
Yeah, for sure.
Purposely go.
Wow, do a test drive with the Arabs.
Oh, for sure.
They were the best.
That's incredible.
They were the best.
Yeah.
If I needed to know, Because the thing is, I was a cautious cat.
I didn't go out like this is what I'm doing.
And then I'm a perfectionist.
I want it to be right.
I mean, my bill eventually was called the hybrid because I combined the old technology and the new technology.
So when I was being.
Mentored by the old time, I turned him Da Vinci because he would tell me crazy stories about Da Vinci.
Yeah, I was going to ask you to walk me through that like the first time he introduced you to this stuff.
Yeah, so when it was, I was an apprentice, right?
I didn't even get to use the press, I got to move ink buckets and paper and shit like that, and you know, just help him because he was old and and so he and he and he trusted me because my mom, where was he doing all this?
It was in an old warehouse, you know, just in Chicago.
And you were a young kid, he brought you there, he just like, yo, come check this out.
It was awesome.
You want an internship?
I loved it, and but and I and I watched, right?
I mean, I'm that's but that's.
One of my superpowers, man.
If I see something, I know it.
You know, that's how I turned into an artist.
How much money was this guy printing?
Oh, a lot, a lot, a lot.
Yeah, he was getting down.
I mean, that's what he was doing.
And in my neighborhood, Bridgeport, which is a Southside borough, right?
It's called the Low End.
It's right by White Sox Park.
I'm a White Sox fan.
Yeah.
And so you got Chinatown, which is from 22nd to like 26th.
Then you got the Bridgeport 26 crew.
So if you ever look up like Chicago Outfit, there were there were three like main places you had uh, you had Taylor Street, you had Ogden and then you had 26th Street right uh Ogden, they were more like the real upper class cats, you know, um mafia guys.
And then Taylor Street was more like the bookies and the, the loan sharks and stuff.
And then 26th Street, where I was from, they were the killers.
Oh, they were the ones that they went to when they wanted someone taken care of right, and that's the neighborhood I grew up with.
That was the cats I grew up with, right.
Eventually um, I love my neighborhood.
I mean, I'm going right.
Yeah, it's still.
So, okay, so you meet with this Da Vinci guy, this Italian dude named Da Vinci, right?
Yeah, so I spent some time with him.
He ended up.
How old was he?
He was probably like 60, 62.
In his 60s.
And he brings you to his warehouse where he has this massive operation printing money.
Yeah, yeah.
And what was your initial reaction?
Did you ask him any questions, like who he was doing it for or anything like that?
What were you doing for him?
My first thing was just that it was money, right?
This is money, you're printing money.
It was an excitement because I was so poor, right?
And now I'm seeing a guy that's literally printing money that could change my life, right?
It was.
It was a shock, right?
But more important, I think mainly it was just excitement, just being really excited that I'm going to learn how to create something that I'll be able to take care of my mom.
And I mean, I started thinking about all the shit I could buy.
You're a kid, right?
So you're thinking about all these different things.
And with him, what I loved about him is he brought me in to help him, but not help him, right?
Like he would never let me go near the press, right?
I could watch him.
I could watch him burn the plates.
But there were certain things, you know, that I just wasn't allowed to do.
Right.
I didn't know who he was selling it to.
And I didn't really.
And he, you know, he, he told me that ask is least, don't, don't ask questions.
Right.
Don't, there, it wasn't for me to really inquire.
Cozy Back Streets00:02:19
And that was my neighborhood.
And even, even now, I don't ask someone, you know, what's your, what, what's your job or how much money you make?
I mean, it's still, I think it's, it's just kind of like, you know, stay away from it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially in that world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so in that world, it's, it's, I even have been in meetings where I'm like, hey, I don't want to hear this.
I'm out of here.
No, for real.
I'm telling you.
I've been in stuff where I'm like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let me just walk out this room right now.
I do not want to hear this shit.
Right, right.
So he, but he taught me how to be, you know, he was a street guy too.
You know, I said my neighborhood was rough.
It wasn't, you know, it was, we had the gangs, you know, like the poverty side was Halsted Street.
That's where I was, right?
But then where the Italian neighborhood was, you know, they had money, right?
They're big houses over there.
It's like, it's, It's kind of a trip because you're so close to downtown and you had projects over here and you had projects over here, but then you had this little area that was super, super clean, super, super safe, right?
Like the Italians kept it like in a way that, you know, it just felt very cozy.
It's the only way I could really explain my neighborhood, man.
So what happened to this guy, Da Vinci?
Well, he ended up disappearing after about a year.
One year.
You were working for him?
I was nine months, a year, you know?
Yeah.
And he ended up disappearing.
Just one day stopped showing up.
Just gone.
Didn't show up to the diner.
Didn't show up to nowhere.
What do you think happened to him?
I mean, he could have taken off.
He could have got killed.
I mean, you know, the thing about my neighborhood, too, is people found in trunks and, you know, mob hits.
And, you know, I mean, it was a part of reality, right?
You know, I mean, and dealing with that type of money, right?
You know, who knows?
Who knows what happened?
You know, I mean, and it was painful for me because, you know, my dad left and, And so I was all I already had, you know, issues with older men.
Right.
Because it was like, it just felt like it was always being abandoned.
Yeah.
You know, I got some real good older men in my life now.
I love them.
I love Kevin Murphy.
Unbelievable, man.
I mean, I got some great people in my life now, man.
Unbelievable mentors.
And but there was a time where I wouldn't let no one get near me.
Stopbox USA Sponsor00:02:55
Yeah.
Emotionally.
Right.
Right.
I was locked down.
I was locked down like solitaire.
You know what I mean?
Like I wasn't, you know.
And I went back to the streets after he left.
After he left, you went back to the streets.
Yeah, I started going back into the gang shit and the boss shit.
You didn't try to take that money forging process, try to replicate it?
Well, I didn't have the knowledge.
I didn't really know what the.
And even when I first did try, I turned the shit purple.
But that was down the road, right?
It took me a minute to figure it out.
So even though I was able to spend some time with him and see what I took from him mostly was the offset press, right?
When I revisited breaking the 199600, I knew that it couldn't just be done with printers, inkjet printers.
When I started to do it, inkjet was just coming out.
Lasers were just coming out.
Photoshop was like Photoshop 3.0, right?
Yeah.
We're talking about way back, right?
Right.
I remember that.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a long time ago.
And so they were good.
Now they have all kinds of security features in them, so you can't use them.
I'm sure that's probably because of me.
Like, I probably had it.
Oh, for sure, man.
I probably changed a lot of things for what I was doing because I was able to take things that you can acquire easily, right, and produce something that the Fed spent hundreds of millions on.
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My money wasn't just ran through an inkjet printer.
You know, it went through some really intense stuff, right?
How did you make it?
What?
You want to hear that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I mean, we would use the old technology, like I said, which would be the offset press, right?
So the first phase would be the imaging, right?
Get all the files right, right?
So we would.
So in Photoshop.
Yeah.
Some of it would be in Photoshop.
Some of it would be burning it.
Like we had a camera.
We'd put the.
We'd put the.
It'd be a Newark camera.
You'd put the bill up.
You'd take a picture of it.
You'd develop the film, right?
And then you'd burn the film onto a metal plate.
It's really fascinating.
A metal plate.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, you could read it out.
You got this little red tape.
You put on the numbers, get rid of all this stuff.
How do you burn the image onto a metal plate?
Well, it's a light, it's like a light burner, right?
So you'll have your negative and then you'll have your metal plate, and the light burns through the negative and it burns it onto the plate.
That plate allows whatever is burnt onto it is what'll print onto the paper.
It's really awesome, man.
It's really.
Do you have any photos of this stuff we can see?
Like, is there any photos?
Like, look up an AB Dick 360.
You know?
Yeah, look up that.
You could look up some old photo equipment, old printing photo equipment.
Newark used to have, so you can't even get stuff now, right?
It's all scrapped, it's all dead.
Yeah.
You know, I actually, I'm like, man, if digital goes out, we're screwed.
No one will have anything to print with.
The paper is super unique.
How did you duplicate the paper?
Look at that.
I love that machine.
I make love to that machine.
Oh, boy, the sound of it.
Wow, how much was that thing?
Oh, that thing weighs 700 pounds.
I made a piece of art out of one, man.
How much did it cost?
Oh well, back then, I mean these, these were one color, so what.
So what was really cool with the way I made my money is they.
They never could have imagined that I would use a one color to print money right, and usually the old counterfeiters the old counterfeiters when they would print they would try to run the bill all the way through, and what I mean by that is all the colors on it, right?
So you would need like a two color right, or a four color Heidi Right Hodenberg, right to, to get your, your border, your face, your numbers, your seals right, your back, your back is usually one color with shades, right so?
So for me, what I did is is I used the machine and I would run it through a couple times.
So I would have a plate that would just have the border and the face, that's it right, and it would be three of them, right?
And I?
Well, the first thing I would do is is I would color the money, right so.
So the background of of money is a real like a light cream green, I would call.
Yeah, it's very very very, and it changes in different colors.
The inkjet could never replicate it, right?
So people that used inkjet printers.
They call them p notes.
Do we have any cash in here?
I don't have any cash, so it'd be nice to have one to look at while we yeah, it would be kind of cool.
Sorry, continue so so so, so when you, when you, when you print money with an inkjet printer which a lot of cats started doing after me um, they were called p notes, right And with the NeatJet, you're relying solely on the Photoshop and for it to match the colors, right?
And it couldn't, it can't do every single shade variation at that time, right?
You would get the background, it would be a little bit off.
You would get the border in the face, it would be a little bit different gray, right?
You would get the serial numbers, it would be more of a forest green, right?
I mean, I could go on and on what would happen, right?
And so, if you have, and I say this, if you have little things that can screw up a big thing, right?
If you have a bunch of little things that aren't right, then the big picture looks like shit.
Yes.
And that happens with anything in life, right?
You better, I've learned even as an artist, man, everything has to be point on, right?
So, with the money, it's the same way.
And that's why a lot of people would get popped with them because the banks would pick them up quick, right?
As soon as it would come through, the banks would stop it, Secret Service come in, watch the cameras, bam, they got you, right?
So they were able to kill it pretty quickly.
But with me, it would be a little bit more difficult because with the offset press, I'm not relying on the inkjet or the computer to give me my color.
I'm mixing my own colors, right?
So my first process would be just to get the color of money.
Right, that tint, which was real difficult because you had to use like a clear and then just a little bit of color, so you'd have you know, so I mean, when I say little, I mean super tiny.
You weigh it, right?
I'd weigh it like weighing drugs, but it's weighing the color, yeah, weighing inks, right?
So you have a little bit, you know.
So even with my art, I'm the same way I have a little book anytime because I mix my own colors for everything I do, be really hard to counterfeit my art.
Sometimes I've used 13 different shades, man.
I do some real intense man, but with.
You have a little book.
So if I'm using a little bit of forest green, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, I'll mark it down how much I'm going to, you know, I'm going to weigh it so I could always make it the same way.
That's why you mark down.
So I'm going to use, so say I want to, say I want to make, you know, an ounce of ink, right?
And it's going to take, you know, 0.02 of this, 0.02 of that, and 0.02 of that.
And then the rest of it is going to be the clear, right?
I want to be able to do that every single time.
I need, I need to have it.
To be perfect recipe every time right yeah, and so I would have these different colors wrote down right, that was how I would figure that out wow, and so I could always go back to it, and I and so, if I ever had to get rid of the equipment which i've done many times the one thing that I always kept was my my, my recipe, the recipe book I had to right, and that would be the thing that could have really, you know, screwed me.
You know, which they never got.
But how did you find the paper?
Well, it was.
You know, that wasn't nothing brilliant just, that wasn't hard.
Well, it was hard Yeah, but it was an accident, right?
And that's usually how most inventions happen, right?
Accidentally.
Yeah, I guess.
They do.
I mean, Velcro, I like going on with the accidental inventions.
Well, so we were, that was our big hang up, right?
So when me and my ex wife, Natalie, were looking to do this, we were able to get the files for the printing down, right?
And that way we're going to use the old offset technology to do the color of the money, the border in the face, right?
But then we would use the inkjet for the numbers and the seals.
Right, and that little hundred on the bottom.
So I would combine the two, because we could change the serial numbers with the inkjet, whereas with the press it was a pain in the ass.
You could only do three at a time, and then you have to change the plate every time.
It's just a real mess, right?
So for that though, and I I, I was told I was the first one to ever change all the serial numbers right, really.
So yeah, I got to the point where I was changing every single serial number that was had never done, been been done before.
Man wow yeah, I mean I, I was a scientist with that Man, you know, I mean, I wanted even the shift in color.
You know, I, I, I, the house was the Walter White of printing money.
Oh, yeah, I loved it, man.
It was great, you know, but for me, it was more of the, you know, even like how I just felt recently finishing this mural I told you about that I'm down here for in Fort Lauderdale.
It's 30 feet by 22 feet.
I've never painted anything this big, hand painted it, right?
And I remember walking up to it when I came down and I'm like, man, can you really do this?
Like, do you really think that you can do what you're about to do?
Right and and I, and I started to wonder because I had, I had never done it.
You know where was I going to start?
How was I going to do this?
How's it gonna mix colors?
How is it gonna do the blending?
You know I had.
I really didn't have any idea, you know, but I believed I could right, I believed I could do it and and I believed I could figure it out, however long it would take right, and when I was finished with it which I just finished with it on friday it got me emotional, thinking like wow man you, you figured it out, Right, same thing with the money.
Right, keep trying, keep trying, and that's what we did.
We literally ordered paper from everywhere.
Like, and back then, you had the yellow pages, remember the yellow pages?
Yeah, yeah, little walking finger, of course.
Right, there was no internet back then.
I mean, they had the internet, but it was mostly in like the colleges and the libraries and stuff like that.
People didn't have it at their house yet, you know.
And so, and I did use the internet for some stuff, I that's how I learned how to um layer the money.
Right.
So, like I said, most counterfeiters would try to print the whole part of the bill at one time.
Right.
I went to the Treasury Department website, which was online.org, gov, whatever.
Right.
And they literally showed you in videos how they printed it.
First, we printed this, then we print this, then we print that.
And I said, hey, wait a minute.
I could do the same thing.
I'll just print each thing by itself, make sure I get that perfect.
That way, I ain't trying to get the whole bill perfect because trying to get the whole bill perfect wasn't working.
Little bits would come out different.
This would be a little darker.
I couldn't get those.
So I said, let me do it like them.
And so I just broke each piece down and would get the registration perfect and run it.
It took a little longer.
And then each bill would have its own.
Then you'd do an inkjet printer for the serial number.
Serial numbers and the seals.
And the seals.
Yeah, the seals.
The serial numbers, seals, and that little hundred.
This little hundred, I would end up.
Spraying over with the house of color shifting ink, right?
I got that from walking through a parking lot, seeing a car, the color shifted, right?
And then I come to find out when I went to go look into the company, they were the same one that made the ink for the reserve, right?
It was crazy.
You're talking about like the chameleon looking color cars?
Yeah, yeah.
House of color was the one who came out with that.
So you called the company that was painting the cars as chameleon color and you said, let me get some paint.
I got it.
It was crazy.
And I figured out how to use it on how to get it on the paper.
I'm not going to say how, but.
I figured out how to get it on there.
It was awesome.
Why can't you say how?
I don't want someone else to try.
Oh, okay.
There's a lot of things I left out, you know?
Oh, okay.
Like, even when I, you know, there's a book about me, The Last Counterfeiter.
Uh huh.
And there's, there's, because I've heard of people reading my book.
Is that your book or someone else wrote it?
Someone else wrote it, Jason Kirsten.
It's called Last Counterfeiter.
It's a really cool, good book.
And even in there, there's a lot left out.
And I'm glad I did because I've, I've, Learned of other people reading that book and then trying to copy it, right?
Copy the recipe that they saw in there.
And it didn't work for them.
And there was a reason it didn't.
Well, we had a dude on the podcast like four years ago.
This was before you, Steve, that he was inspired by you.
And he was a huge counterfeiter.
He literally said, like, Art Williams, that's, I read his book and that got me into counterfeiting.
That's what I'm saying, you know, but I left stuff out, right?
I left stuff out, a lot of stuff, right?
Yeah.
And it would almost have been impossible for anyone to replicate printing with an offset, right?
Because there's not too much equipment left of that.
It's really hard to get, you know?
And so, anyway, you know, it's, so what happens?
We order all this paper.
We're ordering paper from everywhere.
Just trying to test it.
Just trying to test it, test it, test it.
Hold that thought.
I'm going to grab it.
I have a $100 bill out there.
I'm going to go grab it real quick.
Well, let's check it out.
Bro, I never paid this one.
I never looked this close at a bill before.
There is so much shit on here.
Well, here's what's fascinating.
So, this bill, this is the new one.
This is the one even newer than the one I cracked.
What year did this one come out?
This came out in 2013.
Well, I think it was 2013.
Yeah, 2013.
It was the year I got out.
So, here, a funny story about this bill.
So, I'm getting released in 2013.
And I collect old money.
I got money books that get sent to me.
I got one of the dopest paper money collections silver coins, gold coins.
I got a badass collection of World War II money.
I mean, I collect Roman.
I got some Roman coins.
So I'm a money guy, man.
I really love money, you know?
So when I was reading, and I think in Forbes, I was in prison and they were creating a new bill, right?
And they were talking about this new technology called visual physics.
All right.
So, me, like I am, right, I start just going crazy trying to figure out what this visual physics is.
And this is what it is this purple strip down the middle, that's visual physics.
So, this bill was supposed to come out before 2013, but they were having issues with putting this into the paper, embedding the purple strip.
Because what happens is if it gets folded right here, it starts to break.
Super Glue Prints00:12:32
So it was a defect.
So they weren't going to release this, right?
They weren't going to release this bill because of that, right?
So usually in the old currency, I could do something like that and these will come out, right?
If you crumple it up, the creases won't stay, right?
You'll see them, but they'll loosen up, right?
This, though, this will never come out.
This break right here, it'll always be there from now on, right?
And then it starts to fall apart and they break in half.
So, there was a big thing about them not releasing this because they dumped a bunch of money into making this bill, right?
So, how could they not release it, right?
Kind of like in that place, right?
The funny thing is, as I later down the road, I found out that the reason this was created was to stop what I had started, which was taking two pieces of paper and binding them together, right?
So, we go back to how I found the paper, right?
So here we are ordering this paper, going crazy, right?
We're marking everything, nothing's working.
And I even tried crazy shit, man, because I knew it was the pH, right?
It was the pH in the paper that was reacting with the pen, right?
It was a pH situation.
Oh, so when they draw on it, when they draw on it, the pH in the paper reacts with the ink.
Makes it go yellow, right?
Makes it go yellow.
If it's fake, it goes black, right?
So there was a certain level, the pH in the paper was like neutral, right?
And so there's acidic papers, there's all kinds of papers.
Holy shit, man.
I mean, I didn't realize how much type of paper is out there, but there's a lot of paper, right?
And now I'm a paper fiend, right?
Yeah, even I make art out of some crazy shit, man.
But anyway, so here we are ordering and she's, my girl Natalie, she opens up the yellow pages, we've ordered from everyone and she marks it, the yellow pages, and she's saying nothing works and she marks it and it marked yellow.
It freaked us out, right?
So now we're like, okay, how do we get directory paper?
I mean, we're jumping up and down, we're freaking out.
We've been on this holy grail for a second now, okay?
Like it just was about, we were about to give up.
We were about to say no more, right?
And then this happened.
And so, The first thing we did is we go to RR Donnelly and we ask him if we could get some extra paper.
We come to find out they're called butt rows, right?
A butt row is a roll of paper.
It comes to the printer at like, it's tons, like a ton of paper on this big roll.
And they run it through these web machines, the web presses they call them.
It's what they print newspapers and stuff like that.
It's much different than the press I used.
And so she went and said, Hey, listen, I'm a teacher at a school and we're doing a big, small Project for the kids, and we need some paper for them to draw on.
And they just started giving us these butt rolls, it was great, right?
The problem was, is it was newsprint, right?
And newsprint was a little thicker than directory paper, right?
And that thickness, when you put them together, because I'm like, okay, let's put them together because I wanted to do the watermark and the strip, right?
So when we found out that the directory paper printed, I pulled the sheet out, right?
I think there were some blank ones in the back of the book.
Right and I pulled, I cut them out real nice, and so I had just a couple right and i'm like wow, this stuff is thin.
I bet you we could put something in between it, which was the watermark and the strip, right.
I said man, if this paper is so thin, we could put, we could make the watermarks and make the strips, lay them down and then put another.
You know, so we would make fronts and backs, watermarks and strips right, and then we would just press them together right, so it would have the front and the back with a piece in the middle yeah, And what we tried, the piece in the middle, but it would make it too thick, yeah.
Couldn't do that, so you literally this is the 1996 bill, 1996.
Yeah, so what we did is we would cut.
We, for one, I had to find a thin enough paper that I could print on that if you put it in between two pieces of paper, it wouldn't lump up.
It was real difficult, really, really difficult to find that paper.
I ended up finding it, and then we had to put it on carrier papers because you couldn't run it through a printer or a press because it would tear it up because it was so thin.
So we would take eight and a half by 11 sheets of, you know, like copy paper, and then we would cut all our paper a half inch smaller.
So it would fit right in the middle of the carrier paper, I ended up calling it, right?
And we would tape it, and then we would run it through, and then it would print, right?
Then we would cut those out, you know, we'd sit there.
My money was handmade, so everyone's like, oh, you must have printed millions.
Yeah, I printed a lot.
I printed a lot over it because I had a long run, right?
How much total?
I mean, I don't know, man.
It could be 10.
10 million, 50 million.
I mean, I'd probably burn 3 million, you know, because if it didn't come out right, I'd burn it, right?
And that happened quite a few times, you know, where we'd be burning money, man.
Crazy shit, you know?
But anyway, so with making it, we would cut these watermarks out.
So you'd have them printed five across, I think seven down.
So you'd have 30, right?
Cut them out pretty quick.
And then I would have a light table with light.
I'd have plexiglass with lights underneath it.
And I would throw a drop cloth plastic like you use when you paint.
And we would have the money, it would be on, there would be one, two, three, right?
Three fronts on a sheet of paper.
And then we'd have three backs on a sheet of paper, right?
And we would have little marking lines on each to where when this was laying down on the plastic, there would be three of them too, right?
I would spray.
And then she'd be there and she'd hand me the watermarks and the strips and I'd lay them, boom, boom, boom.
I'd always put super glue on my fingers.
Right, man, my fingertips are torn to right because I would super glue them all the time.
I always had super glue on my fingers, it would kill the fingerprints, you know.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, super glue is the best.
You did that to destroy your fingerprints, yeah.
Well, to make it you know to where they were covered, super glue would go in there and it would mess up the prints so they couldn't get a print off the bill because that's one of the ways that they would get you.
What gave you that idea?
Well, I read that it was one of the ways that they got you, and I was like, man, we got to figure this out.
You couldn't wear gloves.
Because the gloves would get all tore up.
You do it like Men in Black where they just sear your fingerprints off?
Well, I would really love that one, man.
You know what I'm saying?
I figured out how to do it, though.
That's all I needed, man.
You know?
And so, like I said, man, I'm a thinker, man, where I'm always trying to figure something out.
You know?
That's what gives me, even like being an artist, it's what gives me joy, man.
I was just talking about the other day that I'm always doing something different, you know?
So, you would have this down.
We would spray it with the glue and then I would lay the watermarks down and then lay the strip.
Then I would grab the backs.
And those little markers I'd have, as long as I lined them up perfect, I could just lay it down.
Right.
And then go to the next one, to the next one, to the next one.
Once all those were done, I'd peel them up and we would have another stack of copy paper.
And we would take the printed paper that has the strips and the watermarks and we would lay it down on the white paper and then put another piece of white paper over it.
And that's how we'd stack them.
You had to do that because they'd stick together because of glue.
So you had to have a separator, right?
Yeah.
Then we would put them in a metal press, right?
Like really press them down, metal plates that we put in.
And then let it dry for like two or three days, you know?
Crack the press.
And man, this was one of my favorite parts, actually, right?
Because when you would peel that white paper off, you could just feel, you could just see that they were just really tight, you know, from being pressed for all that time.
And we would peel them off and then we would cut them out.
Right, each one we would cut out, and then I built like a clothesline hanger.
I call it a money hanger.
Right, it was a you know, just a big U with metal lines through it that were far enough to put a bill on.
Right, we have little clips, you know, little clips from your IDs, it would hold the bills on there.
And so I'd have a row of hundreds, a row of hundreds, a row of hundreds.
I think one, I think I had like five rows of hundreds, and then I would come and I would spray it with this special spray.
That would like to tighten the cotton and give it the money feel.
That was the last part that made the bill real when I'd spray it.
I never talk about what it was I sprayed it with.
You know, there's people that have done it with hairspray and all that shit, whatever.
This was an actual chemical that tightened the cotton and made it like a real bill where I could take it to the air at the gas station and he could feel it and say, Yeah, that's good.
What about the smell of it?
Because money has a very distinct smell.
It does have a smell.
And we would play around with different sprays, you know.
I mean, never really, never really like did anything to acquire a smell.
I think one time I bought some, I went into one of those Santeria shops and they had like a money smell spray.
And I tried to get it, didn't work, man.
I couldn't use that shit, man.
But the money, you know what?
The money, it kind of like, it's funny, man.
Whenever, I believe in the transfer of energy.
Okay, there's this thing I call it.
It's where energy moves through the universe, man.
And it can go from life and death, it could go from seed to plant.
Energy transfers constantly, man.
Right.
I've always looked at money as just an energy, a tool to allow me to do the things I want.
Right.
Whether it's eat, take care of things.
Right.
I don't lust after it, I don't greed after it.
It's just my tool.
And whatever amount of energy I put out into something, I believe that energy will return through that tool.
Right.
And so for me, when I was making my money, and because it had so many different processes, I believe that was one of the reasons why it was so good and it worked because it literally took the energy that I had that I was pushing into it and it was becoming almost alive.
Right.
And so it was, and the reason I say that is because sometimes when I'd be printing, some, not all print runs would come out the same.
You know, if I did a 100,000 print run or I did a 500,000 print run, I didn't ever do anything more than that, right?
I would always only kill it at around 500,000.
When we first figured out how to make it, I was actually scared, man, right?
Because I'm a thinker.
I'm like, man, what if these people find out I'm making this like this, this good to where you could get it through a bank?
You could use it at a casino, right?
Like in the early days, you could put it through the machines before they even knew that anyone was breaking the 9600, right?
It was dangerous to me in my mind, right?
Like, not just from who would want, This recipe, or who would want to know how to do it?
But what about the government, man, that might get pissed and say, Nah, you ain't doing that, pa?
You know, like there's so much deeper shit with how I was thinking on it, man.
So I was real, like, I wasn't trying to print 100 million or 50 million, or I wanted what I felt I could move comfortably.
Yeah.
And I love to travel, you know, I wasn't really into a lot of shit.
You were just trying to be modest.
Modest, man.
I was a modest counterfeiter, but, but, but, but, I love doing it.
I mean, it was more of like one of the things that I love the most when we were doing this is when we would help people.
About a year ago, I got hit with a text about an unpaid toll.
And then when I paid it, it turned out to be a scam.
And that would have never happened with Cash App because they stress transfers with trusted individuals, which is why I use Cash App.
Cash App Safety00:02:13
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Mall Bandanas00:15:20
Now back to the show.
All right.
For me, I grew up real poor in the projects, nothing.
We didn't even have TV.
My mom wouldn't even let us have it.
She said it was devil, right?
We had to read books all the time.
I probably read 5,000 books in my life, man.
I agree with her.
It is the devil.
Yeah.
And even now, we're the same with my kids.
Right now, he's working on a project, you know?
We keep their minds busy, man.
That's what you have to do, right?
And so, my mom had, even though she was mentally ill, she just inherently did things for us that made us better, made me better, right?
And so, with the money, it's like when we would take it off, and I'm going to go back to the hanging, right?
Yeah.
When we would take it off, And we would let it just kind of, I called it the crackle, right?
Because when we would spray it, it would start moving, it would come alive.
That's where I was going with this whole thing.
That's when I knew the money was ready.
When I would see it, like, and it would make a noise, man.
It had like a little crackle sound from the paper, man, when it would move.
It was just so, yeah, man, I wish I could still hear it without going to jail, you know?
Right?
But it was energy, man, you know?
And we would take that down.
And at first, like I said, I was super paranoid, like, damn, I don't want to show this shit to no one.
I don't want no one.
I grew up in the streets.
I've seen people get killed.
I mean, I've had friends murdered, man.
One of my boys, Mike Titman, broke into a car, found something he shouldn't have found.
He's gone.
This shit happened in my neighborhood.
That shit was real.
My friend, Peter Friegel, got shot in the head.
One shot you heard, boom, he's gone.
Brain out the side.
That's real.
That happened.
Even my gallery, when I became an artist through the whole Arnold Schwarzenegger thing I told you about, I went back and opened up a gallery in my old neighborhood.
In the rival gang's street, 33rd and Morgan, man.
And if you looked up 33rd and Morgan, how many murders were on the corner of 33rd and Morgan?
Probably 20.
I had a gun pointed at me twice.
I'm an artist.
I was coming out one night, had my shoes and my shirt off, and the La Rasas pulled up.
King Killer pointed a gun right at me.
I threw up my shirt and my shoes, said, I'm an artist, man.
I'm out of game.
And he started laughing.
They took off.
Whoa.
Oh, it was wild, dude.
Wow.
Wow.
So, I mean, Chicago, the South Side is real.
It's real.
This shit will get you.
You know, even if you're not looking, Chirac, it has that ability, yeah.
You know, and you know, and I don't live there now.
I mean, I got a gallery there still, it's in League of Park, though, right?
But I had a gallery on the south side for years, right?
But so with the money, man, you know, when we decided to start spending it, the first thing was just like, okay, let's just kind of hit and miss, see where we're at, you know?
And then it got really intense where we were just, we old Rand McNally map ran, you know, and driving to different towns, finding the malls.
And she would just run through the malls, cash it out, cash it out, cash it out.
And before long, what was happening.
So explain that.
So you go buy stuff.
Go buy stuff and get changed.
Get changed.
So you'd buy so you'd use a hundred dollars.
What was like the best thing to buy?
Like something that was like five bucks or five, ten dollars, fifteen dollars, right?
You don't want to make it too conspicuous, you know, like you because it's a hundred, right?
So and you could only do it like you could use 100 at one store, yeah, you wouldn't always, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know.
So I mean, she was she got a little frisky with it though, a little frisky, yeah, with the money, right?
She got frisky with the money.
She'd spend two or three sometimes, she wanted something, you know, but I was always like, so for me, there was rules to it, right?
Don't spend it in your own area.
Don't use it for rent, cars, credit cards, gift cards, anything where you're getting something that you're going to have to use.
Right.
Because I've heard people say, oh, I've got travel checks, I got gift cards.
That's how you're going to get caught.
Mm hmm.
Right.
That's how you're going to get caught.
For me, it was always, you know, break the money and use the real money for the real world shit.
Mm hmm.
Right.
I wasn't trying to use fake money for everything.
Right.
I was trying to get my real money, you know.
And so when we first started, we did the malls.
We'd pull up into a mall.
I'd act like a bored husband, right?
Sitting in the mall, what the, you know, doing this again.
She would just hit and I'd watch.
I became really good at watching people.
Like I could tell things about people.
I mean, I've always been really good because I grew up on the streets, but this really trained me.
Like I could pick out if a couple was arguing.
I could see, I mean, it was, I got really good at it, man.
Still good at it, right?
That's how I sell my art.
I could feel it, you know, the person, you know?
And, She'd just go from store to store to store.
You know, in the mall, there might be 100 stores in the mall, right?
And she'd probably hit maybe like 80 of them, right?
She wouldn't go back.
She might go this one and skip one and go that one.
Then she'd hand off the stuff to me, right?
Once she had about three or four bags, she'd come sit down, then boom, she'd get up and she'd go back.
And what was happening is I started getting concerned with having all this shit in the trunk, right?
And then having all this change 20s, fives, 10s, ones, you know?
I'm like, man, if we get pulled over, they're going to be like, what the hell are you doing?
All right.
You got all this shit in the back and you got all this money.
So, a few factors went into what we started doing.
One of them was at first we were buying everything for us, right?
You're buying jeans, t shirts, hand go, whatever.
Before long, you just got too much shit, right?
I mean, what are you going to do with 100 pairs of jeans?
You just get to the point where you're like, man, can I buy myself anymore?
Then we started buying for like our, you know, maybe we'd go out and we'd buy stuff for our family or stuff, you know, and then that got a little weird because.
Because then people started like, you know, for one, they'd be like, ah, you got so much money.
And then they started expecting it.
Like, well, you got money, man.
You know, what'd you get me this time?
Right.
You know, like, man.
So it was kind of like you started seeing, you know, anytime you give stuff away for free, it usually don't turn out well.
What about like finding people who knew the money was fake and you could sell them like.
Well, that eventually happened.
Right.
So, so eventually we, we, we progressed there.
Right.
And that's when shake.
Hey, we'll give you, we'll sell you $10,000 in fake money and we'll charge you five grand.
Well, I charged 30 cents on the dollar.
30 cents on the dollar.
So if I, every hundred was 30 bucks, man.
And I usually tried to stay in between like, you know, 10 to 100,000.
I didn't like to really go too high on the number when I sold because I didn't want to get robbed.
It was a big thing in my town, right?
You know, someone would kill you for 20 grand.
They'll kill you for 10,000.
They'll kill you for 50.
And it could be someone you know.
I've seen the most insane shit, man.
Dudes getting, well, I got robbed.
I got robbed.
Yeah, I'll never forget, man.
Dude, I was working a deal with someone, man.
He goes, Hey man, I got this dude.
He's in, he's gonna take this and that.
And I'm like, All right, we picked him up.
I'm sitting in the passenger seat.
He's there.
My friend, who's been my friend, and he knows who he is if he sees this for a long time, he set the whole thing up, pulled the gun out on me, took my bag, took my keys.
That was the worst thing.
Took my car keys.
Now, she's trying not to say the F word because my son's out there.
Yeah, but he took my car keys.
So I would have just given my car keys back, you know.
So, I couldn't when he let me out, I couldn't even do nothing.
I mean, I was completely screwed.
Come to find out, it was him that set the whole thing up, you know.
So, I mean, it just you know, this happens, man.
So, I was I'm not gonna say paranoid, you know, even though I had every detection device you could have, like I had all kinds, you know, back then you could get you still get them, but I don't know if they're like they were, but like bug detectors, you know, if someone got a bug on it, it would vibrate.
I had this little box I always carried with me, and if someone came up to me and then they were frequenced out, that thing would start vibrating.
It only happened to me one time, only went off once.
But yeah, no, man, it was a lot of shit, man.
How much money could you print in one day?
Well, it wouldn't be a day.
Yeah, it took the process.
There was a bunch of steps to it, around 12, right?
It was like a puzzle from the carrier papers to mixing the inks to making the plates to using the ink jets.
There was a lot of steps that it went through.
And I would do a whole run, right, at one time.
So I'd say, okay, I'm going to make $250,000.
Right, and so I would have everything ready for that, and I would go in and I wouldn't leave until it was done, sleep there, eat there because I didn't want to leave it open like that.
Right, I didn't want to leave the paper hanging out, you know.
Yeah, I want to go in there, I want to make the sometimes take a week, 10 days, you know, about a week though, usually for 250.
Yeah, I could get it done, you know, a week, and uh, but I was leaving with a briefcase, you know, I was leaving with a briefcase, and then and then I started burying my money, you know.
Roll it up real tight, seal it, put it in PVC pipes so the metal detectors couldn't hit it.
Go out to the forest preserve, bury it.
Yeah, because I've seen so many people get busted with so much money.
I'd be laughing.
I'm like, what is wrong with you, man?
Why did you have a million dollars in your wall?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, what are you doing?
You know, they're going to find it.
They find it all the time.
They got machines to find that shit.
So I kept it as far away from me as possible, man.
I probably still got money buried.
But yeah, no, so I mean, I was like, man.
I was damn near like a James Bond of that shit because I was real, man.
I'd had some, you know, if I was doing a meeting with someone in the early days before I had that shit, I'd take your shirt, man, take your shirt off.
I had no problem telling you to take your shirt off.
Let me see what's underneath you, man.
And these are people that were buying the fake brands.
Yeah, when we graduated to that level, right?
Because we stayed in the small level for a while, right?
Because I had, so after I got shot, So I got shot when I was around 17, 18.
I ended up going back to Texas.
So, my mom was from Gainesville, Texas.
My dad was from Chicago, right?
So, we would go back and forth because I got family down in Dallas, you know, and so we would go back and forth all the time.
So, when I got shot, my mom was like, Man, you got to get out of here.
You got to go.
You need to go down to Texas, man.
Where did you get shot?
Right here in my side.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They done me, man.
Yeah.
Gang shit, right?
Yeah.
Walking through a playground, two cats walking up behind me, you know, they had bandanas on.
I thought they were my boys because I just left a party with them, you know.
And I told them, hey, man, pull the bandanas down.
And they were like, bandanas.
And they pulled out the pistols and just unloaded.
I turned around.
Why did they shoot you?
Huh?
Why did they shoot you?
Because I was in that gang's area where I was in Disciples' area.
They were Latin Kings.
So for them, they were killing a rival gang member, you know.
Oh.
Yeah.
So I was a rival gang member to them.
All right.
So they were trying to take me out.
And that was a.
That was a tough one because for me, you know, when you get shot, man, it does something to you.
You know, for a long time, fireworks freaked me out, you know, like it just really kind of jacked me up.
But I made it through.
But anyway, after I got shot, my mom was like, listen, you need to get out of here.
And so I ended up going back to Texas, staying with some family down there.
Then I would come back, whatever.
And after I got into a little trouble, and my baby's mom at that time, She was dating a cop.
She became a cop.
So, my son's mom's a Chicago police officer, right?
Wow.
She's awesome, though.
She's really awesome.
She's the best.
She's a great mom, great friend.
She's still really cool.
But she became a cop.
So, that kind of ended that situation.
But yeah, I went back to Texas.
That's when I met my wife.
And then I went to prison for some bullshit and then got out.
And that's how the whole 96 started.
She bought a book for me.
We went to a Barnes Noble, and I wanted her to get a book.
She bought it with 100 and they marked it.
And I'm like, whoa, that's all they do?
They didn't even look at it, right?
And she's like, yeah, that's you know, and that's when I first said, okay, I'm gonna break this, I'm gonna figure out how to break this.
And then we went on our journey, right?
You know, it was wild, you know, but you know, Texas.
So when I came back from Texas, it had been almost what nine years.
So I had been gone for a minute, right?
I hadn't been to Chicago in a long time.
I was down in Texas, man, hanging out with the Cowboys.
Literally hanging out with them, right?
I was arm wrestling.
I think he was the world champion bull rider.
I arm wrestled him.
I thought I was a badass because I was all big and shit.
He damn near ripped my arm off.
He did.
You think they're little bull riders, man, because they got to hold on to that shit.
You're both strong as hell.
Oh, I couldn't believe it.
Because I've always been pretty strong, working out.
That boy, when I grabbed his hand, I was like, what the hell, man?
He let me know too.
So, how long did that last for with?
Printing the money and selling it and getting exchanging it and all this stuff.
How long did you ride that?
I did that for a couple years, you know, maybe three years.
And then when I went back to Chicago, now I'm going back into my neighborhood, right?
And my neighborhood, so all the guys that I grew up with, now they're like doing major organized crime type shit, you know?
And so I had, and because I knew a lot of people from different things.
So when I was young before I left, I liked to play basketball, still do.
I love basketball.
And we used to go to different parts of Chicago, CYC, and we would play in Brownsville, which was all the brothers.
We would go to Pilsen, play against the Latinos.
We would go all over and play.
And I would befriend them, right?
I wasn't on that, you're this, you're that, you know?
Sometimes there'd be a little racism going on, but I wasn't on that, man, you know?
So I made friends with the cats from Brownsville.
I made friends with the cats from Pilsen.
And when I went back, they were still there, but they were doing better.
Some crazy shit yeah, cartel shit, this shit, that shit you know like awesome, real things you know.
And so when I went back I went and seen my guy out there, you know, in in a little village which is like the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago, and went see my boy in Brownsville, right.
Mob Godfather Shit00:06:18
So i'm reconnecting with some of the old characters and and started pushing right and we were even on Taylor Street running the money through the bookies and that didn't Turn out too well.
Yeah, no.
What happened with the bookies?
They just shut us down.
You know, like, what are you crazy?
Right?
Because they would pay.
My boy was paying out with the money.
Oh.
So if you won, right?
If you played with him and you won, he'd pay you with the fake money.
No.
Oh, it was crazy.
It was crazy.
We got in trouble for that.
Not by the police, by the street.
What happened?
They just shut us down.
They just stopped it and threatened you.
Yeah, well, because so the cats that I knew.
My, my one really good friend I ain't gonna say his name, but his, his grandfather was was a top dog, you know what i'm saying.
And and then my other friend he um, he collected a little for him right, he'd go around and bang some heads, you know for for like loans, and you know so.
So the guys I was already around were kind of some tough cats, you know so, like.
So they it was.
It was weird, you know, like the old timers they love, they love me because um, I was quiet, not flashy, you know, did what I said I was going to do.
Right.
Right.
You know, didn't talk about things I shouldn't, you know, leave the room when I need to.
You know, that type of shit, right?
See you later.
I'm out of here, right?
I've always been that way.
That's how I move, you know?
And so I've always had really good respect for them.
One of the old timers, he, from my neighborhood, he's like an icon, right?
He stole the Marble Diamond.
Right, the Marble Diamond 52 carat.
Look up Jerry Scalise, yeah.
Marble, the Marble, yeah.
The Marble Diamond, yeah.
I learned a lot from him, right?
You know, he was a philosopher, I would say.
Wow, oh, yeah.
So, I used to trip out on some of the mob movies where they make the gangsters look really stupid.
I've had some of the most insane philosophical conversations with some mob guys that would blow your mind.
Really?
Oh, Jerry was out this world, he was predicting Facebook before Facebook was even invented.
I remember when he came up and when he was talking shit about that shit.
There's gonna be a device where you could find this person.
He was brilliant, you know, brilliant.
You know, he robbed banks.
He worked with Johnny Depp on that John Dillinger movie.
And while he was helping Johnny Depp make the movie, he was robbing a bank at 78 or 72.
Insane.
He was done.
You would think, and we would talk about like, why would he, he has everything.
Beautiful house.
Why would he go do that?
Because that's what he does.
Sometimes that's just what people do.
Yeah, sometimes people are just so brilliant.
They're crazy.
They're crazy.
I know I have touched on that sometimes.
This is the diamond necklace he got?
No.
That's the marble.
Yeah, that's the marble.
He told me too.
He said, you know, so they never found it.
They never found it.
He did nine years in English prison.
In an English prison?
Yeah.
Yeah, they never found it.
Yeah.
What do you do with it?
Who knows?
Well, that's what he went back to prison for.
They said that he was trying to.
So actually, right where I live.
What's the story with this necklace?
It's wild.
This is the last photo I could find.
It's like this, and then this is like an earlier version of it.
And then at some point it pops up without those bottom frills.
But these are the only photos I could find of it.
Yeah, well, they don't even know where it's at because they never got it back.
But Jerry's, yeah.
So anyway, Jerry was a great guy.
He even joked.
He said, I said, you know, I asked him about the Marvel, and he asked me about how to make the money.
Like, where is it at?
They never found it.
And he tried to break into the.
So there was a mob boss in my neighborhood, actually lived right across the street from me.
I live on 29th and Princeton.
And the mob guy, he's dead now, right?
But he has this big fortress on the corner.
It's crazy, like some Godfather shit.
Wow.
Big old wall around it.
Just nuts.
And he was called the Hook La Petra.
He used to hang people on hooks.
He was crazy, right?
The Hook.
Look up the mobster, The Hook.
Look him up.
Yeah.
So what happened is Jerry thought.
Apparently, the Marble Diamond was in that house and he had been staking it out.
He was going to go in there.
The hook was dead already.
Uh huh.
But it's still an icon house.
You know, you got to be out of your mind to try to break into that house.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you're going to break into the mob's house.
Like, are you out of your mind?
Harry Allman.
Now, he was a shooter from Taylor Street.
Harry the Hook Allman.
Yeah, he's a Taylor Street guy.
Wow, died in 2010.
How'd he die?
Who knows?
Probably in jail.
I'm sure he was a hit man.
But anyway, so these are guys from my family.
So he hung his enemies from hooks?
Well, this is Olibin.
He was a one shot shooter.
Look up The Hook La Petria.
That's his name.
Yeah, La Petria.
There he is down there.
He's right there.
Angelo.
Yeah, that's The Hook La Petria.
He lives across the street from me, or he did, anyway.
He was a heavy cat, man.
He was a heavy cat.
But anyway.
He was okay.
So he got the nickname The Hook due to his way he murdered his victims.
Yeah, hang him on a meat hook in his house.
Those who could not pay, it was said that he would take his victims, bound and gagged, hang them on a meat hook, piercing the victim's rib cage with the meat hook, and then torture them to death with a blowtorch.
He was brutal.
Whoa.
And so my friend was breaking into his house.
Go figure to get the marble die.
It's wild.
It's a crazy story.
What a fucking psycho.
Oh, he was a psycho.
He says, look out his window.
Find some pictures of this.
Cat, dude.
Yeah, he was intense.
So remember, I told you my neighborhood was called the 26th Street Crew.
The Hook Murderer00:07:40
These were the guys, right?
This is, yeah.
Look at that one.
No, the top left one, bro.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was brutal.
He was a brutal one.
Look at those guys.
But that's the neighborhood I come from, you know?
My neighborhood's interesting because you see a lot of mob movies and you see a New York and this, but they never talk about Chicago, especially my neighborhood.
And they were like one of the most.
But I think they have always had a level of silence amongst them, right?
Very moved, very under the radar.
Yeah.
You know?
And I mean, it's all gone now, right?
It's not really, it's not, it still has its whatever remnants of it.
But most of them, they were able to build pretty big empires that lasted.
Right.
And they were able to work with the CIA and the FBI.
Oh, yeah.
And they build, you know, they build concrete companies and there's companies that are still around, garbage companies.
They're still around.
And they don't have to do shit no more.
Right.
Because they figured it out.
I mean, but that's where I was going with it, man.
Most of them I grew up with were brilliant.
Brilliant, you know.
And they always kind of make them seem like they're a little dumb and drug addicts and all fucked up.
But I'd never seen that.
They didn't like drugs.
Not the ones from Chicago, anyway.
They didn't like that shit, man.
They looked down on you even if you smoked a cigarette, man.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That was how me and Jerry got real close because I smoked cigarettes at that time.
I'm talking about how I was so young 20 something, whatever.
And he challenged me.
He said, What, the cigarette's stronger than your will?
You got to have a strong will to be out here.
And if something like that could break your will, then anything else can.
And it hit me so hard.
I'll turn my mic back a little bit.
And it hit me so hard that he said that.
That the cigarette was stronger than me and I quit, and he noticed I quit it.
You know, he said something later on.
He's like, Man, I really, really like to see that, what you just did.
But it's true, right?
You know, habits are a form of weakness, right?
I think, you know.
So, but yeah, so with the money though, when there was a lot of shit had happened after we stopped.
So when we were going out spending it, we started doing where we were only buying things for kids.
Right, it was getting to the point where I didn't want nothing in the car, and I wanted to be able to take this cash and really seal it up and stash it.
If we got pulled over, they wouldn't find it, yeah.
Right, I didn't want to just sit and change you know, hundreds hanging out of the glove compartment or hundred dollars, right?
Right, so we started buying stuff for kids, and then we would give it to the charities, right?
The Salvation Army Charity, because that's where, well, for one, there's a box in every town in the parking lot somewhere, right?
And for two, that's the shelter that you know I was in when I was a kid, you know.
We would even go.
We would even go into churches on a Sunday and I'd just drop 10% of whatever I made, right?
Of real money.
I never put fake money in an offering.
Maybe once I might have slipped.
I might have slipped once, man.
But anyway, I always made sure it was real.
No, whatever we made, I would count it and I'd take 10% out and we'd go to church and I'd throw it in an offering, just a big stack and then leave.
Clearly, conscience, right?
A little bit.
It makes you feel good.
Well, I mean, for me, it really did.
It really did.
You know, I felt kind of rocking.
Yeah, it does.
Yeah.
The biggest thing was the kids.
That was the thing that I enjoyed the most when we would have new clothes, new bobs, diapers, this, and then we would drop that off.
That would be like the coolest feeling for me.
Because I remember growing up so poor where we didn't have shit.
You know, like I wore the same shoes with holes in them for years.
You know, like it was just terrible.
One year for, we didn't have.
Uh, heat for two years.
We didn't have hot water for two years.
Wow, in Chicago, in Chicago, in the projects right, taking cold showers, ice cold showers oh, ice cold.
It was brutal, man.
You know, I think it's what made me smarter right, that?
Probably the brain yeah, but yeah no man, it was tough, right.
So for me, even now right, like that's how even my art career started, right I?
I started donating paintings to charities, that that that mean something, that do something right, Arnold Schwarzenegger's charity?
It's After School, ALL Stars, you know, they legitimately go in there and create programs for kids, right?
Yeah.
After school.
We never had no after school programs, right?
So when I seen that, yeah, I want to be a part of it.
You know, Maestro Cares with Mark Anthony, they build orphanages all over the South, you know, Latin America, right?
You know, so I donate, you know, I just found out that a piece I donated sold for $14,000, right?
And I don't take nothing.
A lot of artists, they'll use the charities because it's a certain time of the year, they'll use charities to make some money because they get 50%, right?
I learned my lesson.
I did that a couple of times with Arnold and with a few others, and then it turned out, Bad because I didn't get what I thought I was going to get.
Right.
And I said, okay, wait a minute.
If this is going to make me feel that way, you just need to give it to them, you know?
But I just found out that this painting that was auctioned off, the woman told me that the 14,000 built another addition for like 25 more kids.
Wow.
In the Dominican, that my painting allowed 25 kids to get off the street.
Like that shit is real.
Yeah.
That feels good.
Right.
So, So, yeah, it started like you said, maybe trying to make myself feel better, you know, right?
But inherently, I think it was just the goodness in me trying to find a way to find goodness, right?
Because my life was so fucked up at times, you know.
Excuse my language, DaVinci.
He's out there right now.
Yeah, really trying to be good with that one, man.
But yeah, so, you know, the money, when we would spend it, that was the coolest part of it was like the give back.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah, totally.
And then I go back to Chicago, I start getting back into it, and that's when shit got crazy.
Because now, when you're selling $100,000 of paper that costs you 50 bucks to make, maybe $100, maybe $100 it would cost me.
I was like a million times over on my money, right?
I mean, $100 I'm making.
So when you have that type of money, you start spending, you start going out, you start taking your friends, you start acting a little bit, you know.
Like you're feeling like a god, really free right, you're free from everything.
You're free from from any constraint that society could throw on you.
Yeah, you know, I tell people there was a time where I felt freer than probably any man could ever.
Right, I wasn't attached to a bank, I wasn't attached to to anything, but I had everything right and and so but, but it it.
It started bad.
Right, I started doing, you know, I got into partying, got into this, got into a lot of things that Warped my brain and led me down into a place where I ended up going to prison, right?
And it happened a couple of times.
The first time was with my dad, right?
I get jammed up in the House of Blues.
Secret service come in.
I got caught with $80,000 in fake money.
Warped Brain Prison00:14:47
I ended up beating the case on illegal search and seizure.
The police, when they said they came into my room, that they seen some weed on the table, which they couldn't because there was a hallway in my suite.
To where they, unless they were Superman with x ray vision, they weren't seeing nothing, you know?
And so they put that in their police report.
So I challenged that and had photos taken.
And then we depositioned the security guard that was with them and we threatened them with perjury.
And he just told the truth that they just barged in.
And so the judge threw out the 80,000.
Wow.
I was insane.
I couldn't believe I was walked out, right?
I was in there for three weeks.
When my attorney came and he said, hey, he read the police report, I said, wait, that's off the hook for 80,000 fake news.
80,000.
I got off.
But you're paranoid.
Now I'm paranoid, right?
Because they even told me, he said, Oh, we've been looking for you for a while, right?
And so now I'm like freaked out.
What am I going to do?
And I watched Over the Top with Sylvester Stallone, the arm wrestling movie about the boy and the son reuniting.
And man, I just started thinking about my dad for some reason.
I don't know.
I just was missing my dad, you know?
And I went and did a search at the time.
Again, the internet's early in these days, right?
What year are we talking?
That had to be like 2003, 2002, maybe somewhere in that range.
Maybe even earlier, 2000, maybe.
Yeah, maybe it was not even 2000, even 99, but it was early in the internet years, right?
And I went through the post office, I think, punched his name, and it gave me an address up in Chickaloon, Alaska, right?
It's like 45 minutes east of Anchorage, right?
And so I write a letter, say, you know, I don't, my name's Art Williams, you know, I'm looking for my dad, da da da.
If this is Art Williams from Chicago, Can you please give me a call?
And I gave him my wife's mom's number.
And about a week and a half goes by and he called.
Couldn't believe it.
Yeah, he called.
How old are you?
22 years.
22 years had passed.
How old were you?
It's probably like 29, 28.
Yeah, something like that.
What happened after it came out?
So he called.
We talked, man, for like an hour.
And I told him I wanted to see him.
And he's like, well, why don't you come up here?
And And so I ended up making my way, went to Seattle, ended up making my way to Anchorage, me and Natalie.
She was pregnant.
And I remember when he picked us up, and it was, you know, he was still with the woman that he took off on us with, right?
Anise, real, real dark woman.
And, you know, it was for the first two days, we just stayed up talking, man.
He apologized, you know, he said, man, I'm sorry.
He wanted to hear everything that happened to us.
I said, you know, well, your daughter, she jumped out of a window and she's missing a leg now.
They had to cut her leg off.
What, your sister?
Yeah, she tried to kill herself.
Yeah, yeah.
And my brother, I lost a mental illness.
Yeah, so you know, I'm fortunate, right, that I was able to overcome some of the things that I went through, but my siblings didn't, right, you know.
And and so, you know, so I had to let them know all this.
I had to let them know, you know, Jason, he had no clue about any of it, nothing.
Wow, he had been gone 22 years, so you know.
So we slowly, man, you know, started to unite.
I started to learn about him.
You know, he was super mechanically.
He had old cars everywhere.
He had that, he had a Firebird, you know, Camaro.
He had the Mustang from Gone to 60 Seconds.
What was that?
Eleanor?
Yeah.
I mean, all beat up and shit, you know, like something he wanted to rebuild.
But then he had some beautiful ones that he did rebuild.
So he was really good with just building stuff, you know, mechanically inclined.
And, uh, And so I started to see a lot of things that he was, that I was.
And it really started to, like, okay, now I'm starting to really understand who I am.
Right?
Because a lot of times you wonder, man, why do I do this?
Or where does this come from?
You know?
And that was the best thing I got out of being around my dad for the short time, you know, was that I was starting to understand a lot more about myself.
And we had some good times and we had some rough times.
You know, one of them, he did the Iditarod, right?
He had a whole sleigh dog team.
He liked to do the sleighs.
And so here he is, got like 40 dogs that he's feeding every day.
And I go into town with him to get dog food.
And I'm helping him load the dog food, 50 pound bags.
And he dropped like 900 bucks for all this dog food to feed these dogs.
And we're driving back into town.
And the Seward Highway runs along the Chickaloon River.
Big badass river comes off a glacier, right?
If you ain't never seen a glacier, go see them when they're beautiful.
They got a beautiful blue color, right?
I walked in one.
But anyway, so we're driving around, we're driving down the highway, and man, I just can't get it out of my mind that he just dropped down.
And so I said, Hey, how long have you been doing this, man?
He's like, Oh, I've been doing it for like 15 years now.
And I'm like, 15 years.
The dog thing?
Yeah, yeah.
He's been gone 22, right?
Yeah.
I've been doing it.
He's like, Yeah, it was a hobby, man.
Expensive ass hobby, right?
Well, that's where my brain was.
Right.
Right.
I said, 15 years.
I said, man, you and you spend that much every month?
And he's like, well, I mean, it wasn't that much, but yeah, dog, it's kind of expensive.
I said, and me and my brother and sister were fucking eating beans, man.
Living in the projects and didn't have hot water.
You were feeding dogs.
And man, I started to get real.
You know, real frustrated and just started crying.
I told him to stop the car.
He stopped the car.
I got out.
He got out.
I grabbed him.
I started strangling him.
No, I wanted him dead.
My sister lost her leg.
I mean, I've told you like an inkling of the shit that we went through, an inkling of it, you know?
And here you've been feeding these dogs.
So we were less than a dog.
That's how I was feeling.
I let him go.
I finally let him go.
And, you know, he just kept apologizing, kept apologizing.
So I'm going to make it up to you.
I'm here now.
Boom, boom, boom.
Trying to calm me.
And I did.
It took a minute.
It took a couple of days for me to finally come down out of it.
And then we started, you know, getting back, you know, started talking again.
And I showed him the money that I made, right?
Now we were starting, like, okay, let's be father and son then, right?
We got past that.
It's over.
Let's try to do this now.
And, you know, he, he, uh, He asked me what I had been doing in life and I pulled out that bill man.
It's like gold fever man, right?
I call it gold fever because anytime anyone ever and not too many people knew back then But when you someone did find out that's what I did They thought it was like gold like it may oh my god.
We got printed money here, right?
And and you just is changing the eyes It's kind of trippy man gleam, you know, and it happened he did he changed like wow you got to and then he wanted to show me what he did and so we went way out into the bush and He had an underground grow room.
He had two big semi trucks buried underground with some crazy Kevlar that blocked the heat.
Whoa, oh, it was nuts.
He tapped into the two semi trucks, two semi trailers, trailers, right?
Buried underground, hooked up.
My dad was a genius too.
How the listen?
This though, what's even crazier though?
Right, I because I didn't know where he got his electricity.
Well, along the Seward Highway, they got an underground cable.
He tapped into the cable.
Oh my god, he tapped into the cable.
He was nuts, man.
So he was just as nuts as me, right.
Which I thought was kind of awesome.
That was kind of awesome.
Yeah, I'm like, this is great, man, you know?
But, you know, he showed me that.
And so now we're like bonding through criminal fraternity type shit, you know?
You know, I did this, oh, I do this, you know?
And then he, you know, I didn't have much.
I only had a little bit because I was paranoid because of what happened.
And so I gave it to him, and unbeknownst to, you know, he gave it to his wife who hated that I was there.
Really?
Oh, she hated it.
She was the one, she was just a hateful woman, man.
She's the one that kept him from us, right?
Yeah, it was terrible, right?
She had a son and a daughter that she wanted him to be the.
A father to them, not us.
He told me what happened.
He told me about a bunch of stuff, you know.
She, yeah.
Yeah.
How long did they stay together?
They were together then when I came up there.
Yeah.
So, I mean, how long after that?
Well, that's the crazy thing.
So, I gave some money and she starts spending it with her friends.
And I told him, man, don't spend this stuff here, man.
We're way the hell up here.
Don't shit where you eat.
Yeah, man.
Are you out of your mind?
And, you know, he said, no, I'm just putting it away, you know, so it's safe.
Well, no, he wasn't doing that.
He was, they were, she was spending it.
And me and my dad ended up going back to the lower 50.
We came back to the lower states.
We were going to Chicago because I told him, because I gave him the stuff, we're bonding, and he asked me if I could make more.
And I said, man, I don't know if I could do it because I got jammed up and I would have to remake the whole recipe.
Yeah.
I can't use the same recipe.
They're going to come at you.
They're going to know it's me.
You hadn't done it since you went to prison.
No.
Since that time where I got out, right?
Right.
So he's like, well, let's change the recipe.
Can you do it?
I said, I'm sure I could.
You know, we could try other things.
I said, but I have to go to Chicago and start collecting all the supplies.
Like, there ain't no way I'm going to do it.
What year are we talking now?
It was like 2000 because it was.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, it was like 2000.
So we flew into Seattle, drove across country to Chicago.
It was great father and son jamming, listening to audio, slave, smoking a little bud.
It was great bonding.
He was going to see my sister for the first time.
Wow.
Yeah, which was heavy.
My sister snapped on him.
I bet.
Yeah, I screamed and yelled at him.
It was terrible.
It was a rough moment.
Rough moment, you know?
And, but she actually went back with him.
So.
Really?
Yeah.
So when we got there, it was a real mess when we got there, you know?
Finally calmed down, kind of like my little moment where I wanted to kill him, you know?
And then the woman he was with, her daughter, was getting married and was having a wedding.
And so.
My dad had to get back, right?
We drove across, it was great, but he had to get back.
So he asked my sister to come with and he wanted me to go with.
But I hadn't got everything I needed.
I didn't have everything I needed.
I needed to go to Dallas to get some stuff.
So I was getting some stuff.
You were going to make it up there?
In Alaska, right?
I was shipping everything back there, right?
And so I needed some more stuff, but there was something in Dallas I had to go get.
So I told my dad, I said, hey, listen, I'll meet you up there.
You and Wens go up there.
I got to go to Dallas.
And, um, So they flew back.
I went to Dallas and I started getting these funny feelings like something wasn't right.
I don't know how to explain it really, you know?
And I left my pregnant wife up in Alaska.
Oh, wow.
This whole time, right?
And she's like, when I told her I wasn't flying back with him, oh, you better get back here.
Are you out of your mind?
You know, like one of those, right?
She had the right.
Yeah.
So I was trying to get her to fly back.
I didn't want to go back.
And she says, I am not getting on a plane pregnant with all the baggage.
And we had her, she said, You've got to come back here.
It's your sister's wedding.
I said, well, she's not my sister, man.
Well, she loves you.
You need to come here.
You got to stop being like the dad's girlfriend's daughter?
Yeah.
And I was cool with Chrissy.
She was cool, you know?
I mean, but it just, there was something I just didn't feel like going back, you know?
I think after the thing with my sister, what I had seen, I was just feeling a certain way, you know?
And so I ended up going back.
I went back and Natalie had the baby like right after I got back.
Thank God I did come back.
In Alaska?
In Alaska.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Had the baby in Alaska.
And we decided to stay at Chrissy's house because she lived in Anchorage.
Because we didn't want to live, we didn't want to have the baby way out and chickaloon in the bush, you know?
We wanted the baby to be in the city.
Natalie wanted to be in the city.
She was tired of being out there, right?
She wanted to go to stores, she wanted to do shit.
So we go stay with Chrissy, and my dad has been acting funny, right?
And I'm telling Natalie, I'm saying, as soon as we can fly, we're out of here.
I want to go.
I don't want to be here anymore.
I want to get out of here.
Oh, that's the reason why.
Because he ended up taking me to a party.
So I get back.
Natalie has the baby.
The things are starting to come in.
The things that I shipped up from Chicago and Dallas.
Supplies.
They're starting to pop in.
Dark supplies.
Dark supplies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're starting to pop in.
And so me and my dad are kind of tough, but I'm still feeling weird, man, you know?
And so he's like, hey, why don't you come out here?
We need to hang out.
He's trying to break the ice.
He could see that I was a little.
Tents, you know, he goes, I got something to show you, some really good news.
You're going to be really excited about this, man.
I'm like, okay, you know, I'll try.
So I go out there and I get in his truck and we start going out deep into the bush, right?
And we get down this gravel road, and as soon as we come over this hill, man, there's this massive bonfire, man.
I mean, big, I don't know, 50 feet.
It was just massive.
Bikers everywhere, guys over here shooting machine guns on the cars, right?
It was a Hells Angels campsite, yeah.
Hells Angels Campsite00:09:00
My dad was real good friends with the president of the Hells Angel.
Oh, shit.
I'm like, where the fuck?
Where am I, man?
I'm a city boy, dog.
I'm in the middle of Alaska, man.
I'm at the Hells Angel.
Like, this is insane to me, man.
So we go down, we walk in the dude's tent, the big dude, real nice guy, man, you know, real big, right?
He was the dude that was, you know, I guess the president of that chapter.
He introduces me.
And then my dad tells me that, you know, we're going to start selling to him.
In front of him.
Oh my God.
Before ever even saying anything to you about it.
Never said nothing to me.
And I freak out.
I say, man, we need to talk outside right now.
I say, man, all due respect, I need to talk to my pops right now.
I walk them out.
I'm like, man, what is wrong with you, man?
Even if you wanted to do this, why would you bring me and let him know it's from your son?
I said, I want to leave right now.
He said, man, you need to calm down.
We're going to do this.
He's good people, man.
I said, whether he's good people or not, I don't want to be here.
I want to leave now.
Take me home now.
So he took me back to his house.
I jumped in the car, went back to Anchorage.
And at that time, I think the baby was like almost three weeks, a month old.
I said, Get tickets right now.
We're out of here.
I don't care.
We're gone.
So she was ready to.
She was ready to get back to Dallas, you know, go back to Texas.
So we got the flight and I ended up flying to Dallas.
And I, for whatever reason, changed it and wanted to go to Houston and have my boy pick me up in Houston and then drive me.
Again, I do things that if when the feds watch me, they probably wonder, they probably wonder, how the hell did he know to do that?
Because I've done things that have shook them.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I got jammed up one time at a hotel and completely disappeared with the helicopters.
And I'm sure they're still wondering how that happened.
But it's not anything I do that's special.
I just move in, you know, I just do shit unconventional.
Unconventional all the time.
Yeah.
It would even be hard for AI to track me, man.
They would, man.
They would be like, this cat is wild.
You know, I could shift in a second, man.
Right.
And won't even think about it.
You know, it's not like I second guess very much.
I'm going to, if I feel something, I'll go with it.
You've been doing it for so long, it's become just an instinctual thing to you.
Yeah.
Let's do something that's, we're going home this way, we're going to fly into a different airport, and we're going to take this road home or whatever.
And that's exactly what we did.
Yeah.
And thank God I did that because Secret Service were sitting in Dallas waiting for me to get off the plane.
Wow.
Unbeknownst to me, you hadn't even done anything.
So, the money I had gave him, his wife, Anise, the crazy lady that hated us, her and her friends had been around Anchorage spending it.
Took a while for it to catch, right?
They caught.
They ended up coming back to the gym and Vicki.
They gave up her.
She gave up me, the feds.
So, when Jim and Vicki gave up her, on the very day, this is what's insane Jim and Vicki.
So, they were the friends that were spending for her.
Okay.
So, my dad gave the money to his wife, the evil lady, right?
The dark woman, I call her.
And then she had a couple of her friends going out there with her spending it, right?
After all said, done the Secret Service through cameras and stuff, came back to them and they said, Oh, I got it from her.
They came and raided.
They found guns.
My dad caught a gun case, fell in possession, right?
They arrested her on the money and she gave up me right away.
Well, guess what?
I had just got jammed up in Chicago at the House of Blues.
So my name was right there on their lips.
And they didn't know where I was.
And did this happen?
Before your dad took you out to meet the Hells Angels?
After.
This happened after.
So, this happened after you left?
After I left.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, went out there.
Then I said, okay, we're out of here.
And this is what's.
Because the moment you landed in Texas, they were waiting for you.
So, there wasn't much time there.
There wasn't much time at all.
I've come to find out the morning, the day we left on the plane was the day they kicked in my dad's.
No shit.
The same day.
The same day.
Wow.
I ended up getting arrested at that night in Dallas, though, right?
But that morning, they kicked in my dad.
This is what I'm saying.
Sometimes things seem very matrixy, you know?
Like, how is this forming, you know?
But anyway, so we get to, and the reason why I changed it because I was feeling something, right?
I didn't know what it was.
And I had my files on me, right?
And remember, I told you the files were the most important thing, right?
The recipe book.
Yeah, the recipe book, man.
That is the thing that I have to keep near me no matter what and take the chance of walking through security or whatever.
And so, I said, okay, let me switch because I do have something that I didn't have any money on me.
I didn't have any equipment.
I didn't have nothing, but I had this, man.
And so my boy picks me up in Houston.
He drives me because we were going to stay at Natalie's mom's house.
We get there.
I swear, you know, when you walk into a house, there's a closet, got the coats and all, and the shoes, little, you know, in the entryway, you got the little area where you put shoes and coats.
So I put my little briefcase, I slid it in there, not really like hiding it.
I just was walking in and I put it right there.
And I didn't take, I don't know, 50 steps to the bathroom, and the Secret Service came in.
They came in and you know, they said, We're looking, you know, they they sat us down, they arrested everyone.
It was really terrible.
I felt so bad for her mom.
Oh, god, it was terrible!
Oh, it was so terrible.
And but they never found the bag, they didn't even look.
I was literally, I'm not kidding, I'm sitting in the living room, handcuffed, trying not to look at the closet, right?
You know, I'm saying, like, I'm trying not to look at it because I know once I look at it, I'm done.
And you know how hard it is.
To keep yourself from doing something, right?
It was terrible.
It was torture.
And they said, ah, we know you were in Alaska and this and that.
And they're telling me this.
We need this.
I said, man, I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know what you're talking about.
They arrested me, took me to the station, went through the whole extradition.
So I got stuck in Oklahoma City for a second.
Then they transferred me to Seattle.
Then they put me on a little two-propeller plane all the way to Anchorage.
It was brutal.
Con Air was the worst for me on that one.
It took you back to Anchorage?
It took me back to Anchorage.
Yeah, all the way.
Yeah.
And then stayed there for about nine months.
My dad was fighting his case for the guns.
She was fighting the case for the money, but in her mind, they were offering her probation because she gave me up, right?
Yeah.
They gave my dad five years for felony possession, right?
And my dad got more time than me, right?
I ended up getting 36 months.
For it, she ended up getting six years.
And they never found your dad's underground semi trucks filled up.
Never found none of that stuff.
But what's wild is that when I tried to see my dad in Seattle, in Sea Tech, it's the federal holdover, and they wouldn't let me.
And I didn't understand why, right?
At least let me have a visit, you know?
And come to find out, his wife, the niece, the dark woman, she was trying to take it to trial.
She was trying to say that she didn't do nothing with the money.
Wow.
It was wild.
She completely went and then she started saying that she was mentally ill and all kinds of stuff.
The judge didn't buy it.
Gave her six years.
Six.
She was only going to get probation.
She decided to finish.
Offered her probation.
Yeah.
A year's probation.
Wow.
And on her sentencing day, where she was to plead not guilty, and the judge asked her, Are you not guilty?
Did anyone coerce you into saying you're guilty?
You know, all that shit, right?
Yeah, yeah.
She said, Oh, Your Honor, I'm not guilty.
And everyone in the courtroom was like, What?
We're here for a plea.
And the judge said, Are you sure that you're here for your plea agreement that you've agreed to plead guilty to this?
Oh, Your Honor, I'm not guilty.
I didn't do this.
And so then they sent her to eval.
They were found competent, came back.
The judge says, You know, you were going to get this, but now I'm giving you six years.
She's like, you know, 60 years old, right?
My dad got five.
I got less than everyone.
Probation Plea Deal00:07:53
It was wild.
I don't know how I walked out of it like that, right?
I get to Waaseeka.
I do my time.
They start letting me and my dad write.
And on the day I was released, the very day he was in Sheridan, Oregon, I was in the halfway house in Chicago for my release date.
And, you know, I'm all excited, packing my shit.
Man, I'm going home.
I'm going to be free.
You know, There's a certain feeling you get when you get freedom back.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just hard to explain, man.
But when you've been confined and in prison and when you get that freedom back, it's just one of the greatest feelings ever, you know?
Right up there with sex, right?
You know?
Really?
Maybe even better.
What?
Oh, it's a feeling.
It's just something going on in the brain, you know?
Because you've been locked, right?
Yeah.
So I'm getting all excited.
I'm going home.
I get out.
My sister calls me.
She's crying.
Why are you crying, man?
I'm home.
I'm free.
She says, no, you don't get it.
I said, what do you mean?
What do I get?
She said, I just got a call from prison, Sheridan.
Dad died this morning of a heart attack.
I said, What?
Yeah, he's dead.
I'm sorry.
He's gone.
And I mean, it was like, this is can't.
I almost started to believe, man, that like reality wasn't real.
No, yeah.
It was all an illusion.
And somehow, somewhere, man, there's some sort of.
Intellectual consciousness that's shifting things to create drama.
He died the day you got out.
Yeah, yeah, the day I got out.
Yeah, crazy.
Yeah, he died the day I got out.
How did that make you feel?
I mean, I didn't get to close, I didn't have any closure.
The last time I seen him, I was pissed off at him because he took me to some Hell's Angel party.
You know, I didn't even get to, yeah, you know, and then she got out and died immediately.
His wife.
Yeah.
Like literally.
I mean, think about that type of karma.
The creation makes you do your whole six years and then pops you off.
You know what I mean?
Like, whoa.
Right.
So, you know, those are the types of things that happen in life that just make you really like wonder about it, right?
Like the intricacies of it.
Yeah.
You know, like where you end up, how you end up, how things happen.
It seems scripted, right?
It does seem scripted.
That's what I was saying.
You know, at times it seems scripted to me.
You know, and i've tried to.
I've tried to because i'm an intellectual man, so I try to understand how?
What is this fabric of reality?
Man, it's all light.
Really, when you think about it, everything is made of atoms that are made of light.
That nothing is real, nothing is, it's all light, it's all.
It's just a big, just holographic universe.
It was a great book.
I don't know if you ever read it, but yeah, it's a great book.
It's about string theory and I i'm really into a lot of.
I've read like 5 000 books, no exaggerations.
Probably read 100,000 magazines.
I was into Wired.
I mean, in prison, that's all you can do really is read, right?
And so I had every magazine subscription you could have from Popular Mechanics to Popular Science to Wired.
Like, I'm really into it, you know, like understanding just everything, energy, man, you know?
Yeah.
And so, but yeah, he died, man, you know?
And so after that, I ended up getting my son.
He was 13 at the time.
And, you know, me and him were trying to bond, and it just got, you know, me and him ended up in prison together.
Yeah, father and son.
Yeah.
So he was trying to break that chain.
It is now.
He's doing great.
He's just bought his first house, you know.
So, you know, when I got out, he was, his mom was a Chicago police officer.
So here I'm in the halfway house getting out for counterfeiting.
He thinks I'm the coolest dad in the world.
Come to find out, he's printing $20 bills at his mom's house on her little printer.
His mom's screaming at me, You gotta take care of this boy.
I can't handle it no more.
He's printing money in my house.
There's no way, Art.
I'm a Chicago police officer.
I'm like, okay, okay, okay.
I'll take him when I get out of here.
And I took him, and we had some rough moments.
I'll tell you, he was a rough little street hoogan, man, you know?
And we actually bonded through his music.
So come to find out, he loved rap, you know, music, and he knew how to make beats and all that stuff.
And I knew some pretty heavy people in the music.
You ever hear Disturbed, Fallout Boys?
Of course.
So Johnny K., their producer, was a friend of mine.
He had Groove Sounds.
It was a studio up in Chicago.
And so I asked him if I could bring my son in there.
So me and my son started bonding, you know, through the music.
But it was pricey, it was getting expensive, you know.
I was working out at the marina, you know, doing crazy shit out there, you know.
And I ended up getting, I came back to the money, you know.
But this time I wanted to break the euro, right?
So I had some of the old money buried.
So I had tried to work.
Right, I worked at this marina, it was like river rats, the tugboats that pushed oil up and down the canal.
And but it didn't pay nothing, right?
Didn't pay nothing, I couldn't support myself off it, you know.
So I started dealing a little blowout there, and then and then I had to stop that, almost got in trouble for that one, you know.
And then I went back to the money.
I mean, the thing about money, one of the hardest things, and they say counterfeiting is harder to quit than heroin, right.
There's, you can even look that up.
It says it.
Well, it's like you found a cheat in the system, right?
Like you found a way underneath the map, right?
Yeah.
A way to like get out of the rigid framework of society and create your own little path.
And your life up to that point had been wild.
Wow.
You'd been through so much shit.
Like, how do you suddenly integrate?
Into society, waking up every morning, having it, packing your lunch, going to a nine to five, yeah, making your getting your paycheck every two weeks.
And yeah, that's why I'm an artist now.
I couldn't do it, I tried it, man, but I couldn't print no more.
Art saved me, man, really.
Art saved me, dude.
Art's so amazing.
Not to, by the way, not to like disparage that kind of work, like that's that's great.
No, I'm not talking shit.
I'm just saying, like, coming from what your life was to that point, it had to have been driving you crazy.
Yeah, yeah, did the you know, the work, but yeah, and that's in.
For me, it was like even when I got on it in this one.
So I ended up with my son.
I tried to get him into his music, and it was expensive back then.
It wasn't like you had studios you do these days, right?
You had to go into the studios, and it was big money for engineers and this, that, right?
So here I am trying to pay for this off making no money.
And that's how I got back into making money.
I had some money buried.
I went and pulled it up, tried to sell it to some of my Russian friends so it would go overseas, so it wouldn't even be in America.
Right.
It was just, it wasn't a much.
Yeah.
I was thinking about that.
I was like, why not just like travel to another country and go to the currency exchange thing?
Well, I wasn't into traveling to another country, but I had other people that would take it.
Robot Police State00:10:23
Right.
And they go, could you get through the currency exchange?
I don't know how that, you know, I think at that time there was still a big underground cash, like banking system in Europe.
Right.
So when I used to sell quite a bit of money to some guys that were European and they still, there was used, Cash, you know, especially the underworld did, right?
But there was still like this weird, like, underground river economy going on in Europe, right?
Because everything was so taxed so hard, right?
Yeah.
So they found a way to move cash.
Now it's really bad.
Spent 500, it's a felony, right?
Like the Europeans are like, there's completely.
If you do what?
Oh, they're making it against the law to buy stuff with cash anymore in Europe.
Are they?
Yes.
Yeah, you can look it up, man.
It's against the law to buy shit with cash.
To spend a certain amount.
Yeah.
To spend a certain amount.
Yeah.
They will.
Yeah, it's bad.
It's almost kind of like civil forfeiture here.
So, how would it be against like if the.
So, it's against the law to try to do it?
Well, or to like let people buy stuff from you?
If you buy something, if you.
Europe is implementing limits on large cash payments with the EU.
Greece's 500 euro limit.
Look at that.
It's insane.
So, okay, with a EU wide 10,000 euro cap for business transactions starting in 2027, part of anti money laundering efforts, but this doesn't ban all cash and individual countries have stricter rules.
Like Belgium's a $3,000 limit.
Greece is a $500 limit.
Yeah.
It's insane.
And this is going to get worse.
What people don't understand about this is.
Is it really to fight crime?
No, it's the control and the watch people, man.
Listen, what's happening right now with the cash, with this whole digital currency, it's probably one of the most scariest things.
People are scared of AI.
It's terrifying.
You know what I'm scared of?
I'm scared of just society.
Oh, yeah, totally.
Because it becomes a digital police state.
Digital police state.
Listen, this would be the first time in human history that for barter, you know, everything comes to barter.
He's a huge fan of, Steve is a major proponent and fan of robot police.
Robot police?
He thinks robot police are just going to make the world better.
I mean, they'll probably make less mistakes.
Yeah.
But whoever's controlling the robot controls the people.
And I always argue with him about it.
And then the other day, the ICE guy shot and killed that shot of the girl in the face twice.
Well, here's the problem.
And he's like, robot police wouldn't have done that.
Well, unless their leader said to do it.
If it was Trump saying robot killer.
See, this is a problem with people don't understand.
That's a problem.
With where humanity is going to really take a really just off the cliff with this whole AI and robotics, what I think is going to be is that.
We're so short sighted thinking, right?
And from my experience, from being in the feds and being in prison and going through court systems, in this, there's people that truly don't care about you, that don't even look at you like a human.
There really is.
There is an elite world.
I was around them, right?
Where they think 99% of the world are stupid.
Like who?
What type of people?
Just people that have, say, over 100 million.
Okay.
Let's say that.
Okay.
I've been around people who really look at society like they're like lambs, sheep, slaves.
We think that we've evolved quite a bit from the slave days and from the.
Look at the Romans were doing slavery.
Slavery has existed forever, just a different face.
It's a part of the human, almost like characteristic where people feel they need to have power over other people.
This has been going on for thousands of years.
It's not today or since the beginning of written history.
And so to think that it's going to change because there's a better technology, right?
I'll give you an example.
Right now, a cop could pull up behind you and their car will automatically run your plate.
Technically, that's against the Constitution.
Is that true?
Oh, yeah.
The cop cars behind you automatically run your plate.
Yeah, on your plate.
Automatically.
There's a system in it.
Yeah.
They could pull it up.
And so they used to have to manually do it if they saw you do something wrong.
Right now, the system and it could pull up plates, man, and they even have like alerts from cameras that are on the highway.
One of my friends just got in trouble in Nebraska.
Sadly, it was a guy I was locked up with.
He seemed to be doing Seth Ferrani.
You got his book.
Oh, Seth Ferrani?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was on this podcast years ago.
Yeah, well, he got locked up for running weed across Nebraska.
And they got him because as he was driving, a highway camera picked up his plate, informed the system that there was a felon driving across the country, former drug guy, and they came and got him.
Kind of like how they grabbed Maduro.
So, oh, yeah.
So, and this is stuff people don't understand.
So, yeah, okay, yeah, I'm cool with, you know, a robot cop, right?
But what I'm not cool with, who's programming it and who's running it?
And who, because so far, human nature does not change.
So far, humans have not shown that they are adults to be adults.
Right, right, right.
They're not like kids.
Yep.
You know, and so to give someone this type of power, Will completely, there will be no revolutions.
There will be no over.
If it gets to, I mean, look at right now.
Europe is losing their speech.
They're losing their money.
Yeah.
And they can't do nothing.
And that's without robots.
Imagine with them.
They're getting arrested for posts, making Facebook posts.
Making Facebook posts.
It's just in veterans.
Yeah.
See that some girl got arrested for praying outside of an abortion clinic?
Yeah.
And she didn't even pray loud.
It was a thought.
She was just sitting there.
She wasn't even talking.
Thought crime was, right?
So to give, we haven't, I don't, I don't feel like humans have earned the right to have that sort of technology to rule the world.
No.
Because we're all screwed up.
You got Iran fighting, you got Russia fighting, everyone's fighting.
Nigeria.
So you want to give these leaders, you think they're smart enough?
These cats that have robbed us of 38 trillion?
I mean, I see protests right now because they shot the chick, right?
Which is terrible.
Yeah.
Right.
But what about robbing the country for 38 trillion?
Right.
38 trillion, man.
We should have bullet trains across this country.
We should have insane, this country.
If our politicians and government would have really focused on strengthening and empowering the people instead of themselves, this country would be so insanely awesome.
You wouldn't have people sleeping at the beach in Fort Lauderdale.
I took my kids the other day, it broke my heart.
It's greed and power, man, have corrupted, you know?
And there's almost, I don't know, maybe, maybe he's right.
That's the only way it'll be fixed.
That AI becomes so powerful, super intelligence, AGI, when it transfers.
And then it says, okay.
It overrides human behavior.
It overrides human behavior that keeps killing us.
Well, then that becomes our God.
And then it becomes our God.
Exactly.
But can we do it?
Can we become.
Let the machines take the wheel?
I would hate not to.
I don't want to, right?
I want to believe in humanity that we can actually figure this out.
What you said about revolutions is true too.
There's a famous Thomas Jefferson quote about revolutions.
I don't know what it was verbatim, but he said something like every 150 to 200 years, there has to be a violent revolution and you just spill the blood of the politicians on the tree of liberty or something along those lines.
Well, the thing is, because what happens is like, what's that quote where it's like, strong men create Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create bad times.
And then bad times create strong men, right?
And that's kind of like what we've been in.
And we've probably, I mean, we've probably had three, four, five civilizations fall because of this, right?
Yeah.
Like humans have been on this planet for a minute, right?
There's probably other beings in the ocean that we don't know about.
I mean, everyone's thinking about aliens.
The timeline keeps going back farther and farther and farther.
Yeah, everything.
So, you know, but, um, hey, we really got off it, didn't we?
We started getting off it.
What signify a few lives lost in a century or Too.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of the patriots and tyrants.
Yeah, spill the blood of the tyrants on the tree of liberty.
Yeah, so, you know, I mean, but yeah, no, this is a really interesting.
Those guys were on to something.
The founding fathers, they, it's amazing that they were able to predict the future the way they did, right?
Like, they really had some.
Deep ancient knowledge, like to be able to come up with that constitution.
Oh, yeah, even the Pentagon and Washington, D.C. How it's like they predicted all the things that could go wrong, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, and they're going wrong, right?
Yeah, you know, and you know, I mean, hopefully, that hopefully, right now, that for me, it's like it's what saddens me the most because I really love this country.
I've traveled every road spending money, anyway, like I've been on every road in this country, damn near.
I can really say that I would hit every town, everything, drive everywhere.
But what I also saw through my time, because even now I drive because I don't fly, right?
Crumbling Beautiful Country00:09:45
I'm watching it just crumble, right?
When I'm driving and sometimes I'll get off on the back, you're seeing these towns that probably looked really awesome one day and they're ghost towns and everything's boarded up and everything's decrepit and everything's rusted.
And it's like, wow.
Man, this shouldn't be like this.
We're supposed to be America.
But what's happened is we're 38 trillion robbed.
That's what I call it.
We've been robbed.
American people have been hijacked.
And you got the Nancy Pelosi's who make 100 million going to Congress.
How is that not corrupt?
You make what, 200,000 a year?
You're sitting around 100 million?
And listen, I usually try to stay away from the whole politics stuff, but.
Um, it's heartbreaking, it's heartbreaking, you know.
I just had a friend on the podcast a couple weeks ago and he was explaining how he just got back from uh, you want another one?
Yeah, could I see you want to grab another white rabbit?
Oh, yeah, he's getting fired up.
I just had a buddy who went to um, Japan and he bought an apartment in Japan.
Oh, no, he's he's he's cracking one.
Um, and he was explaining to me like how amazing and clean and safe Japan is.
Yeah, he's like, the the the floors in the subways are so clean you can eat off of them.
He's like, And it's safe enough to send you could send your five year old on the subway across town and not blink an eye.
Everything's so safe.
Yeah.
It was like, it's just like an amazing, thriving, clean, efficient society there.
And that's the country we dropped two atom bombs on.
Yeah.
Think about that.
And now look at where we're at.
I mean, even when I think back that, you know, how I grew up, right, in Chicago, right, like literally I had, you know, my, it's crazy.
One of my friends, Sean, well, first, one of our, my brother's friend, his name was Brian.
He gets killed, gets shot in the face in the alley by his house, right?
Car pulls up, some gangbangers jump out.
They pretend to be disciples.
Hey, what's up, folks?
Hey, da da, right?
Throwing up the forks.
And he thinks they're part of his gang, right?
So, Brian, hey, what's up?
Oh, he goes to shake their hand.
They pull out a gun, they shoot him in the face.
He's dead.
19 years old, right?
Go to the funeral, right?
My friend, Sean, good brother.
Good brother, man.
He speaks.
He speaks at the funeral.
Now, he's actually been getting out of the shit.
He's got a kid.
He doesn't come around too much anymore.
Yeah.
You know, he's going on the family thing.
He got him a little job.
He comes to the funeral to speak about, hey, man, we got to give this up, man.
This ain't worth our young brothers dying, right?
He's giving this whole thing.
Yeah.
After the funeral, he goes to the Dunkin' Donuts on 31st and Hosted, gets into it with a couple cats, right?
Actually, it was a couple brothers.
They were having a hard time with the cash register.
They were giving her a problem.
He kind of like, hey, man, calm down, man.
You know, you ain't got to get crazy with her.
They got a little uptight about it.
He just took his stuff, turned around, walked out.
They shot him in the back, killed him in front of his baby and his mom.
Jesus Christ.
Right?
So, when you have those types of things happen in a place, in a country, in a city, and whatever, you have to question, man, what is going on?
What is going on to where this is such a common thing that people don't even care anymore?
That's the real sadness about it all.
Yeah.
Right?
You'll protest for something, but not for another.
Right, there's a lot of things that we could probably come up with say, Hey, we need to change.
You know, how about change this department that's been selling us drugs for all these years, right?
Or how about this?
And but it doesn't happen, right?
And then, then, then there's no accountability.
That's even more concerning that these cats can do things with no accountability.
There's no one to stop them, and I mean, they'll stop me quick, right?
We're they'll you do something that's not in accordance with what is in the law, you're going to prison.
I was in prison with guys that had 20, 30, 40 years for crack.
Okay.
I mean, you're like, really, 30 years, man?
Yeah.
Right.
And even when I would see them go after political opponents about Trump, right?
Lock them up for life.
Really?
Even if you don't like the guy, why do you want to take someone's life like that?
Whether you do or not.
You know, it's just like people are becoming so aggressive in this tribalism.
That man, I it really concerns me that it really will split this country in half.
You know, there was an old book that I read, a Russian philosopher, man.
It was a really old book, and I read it like probably 30 years ago.
He had predicted the splitting of the United States that it's political.
Yeah, man, I wish I could.
If I remember the book, I'll send it to you, man.
You think you'd really dig it.
It was a Russian philosopher, probably get to Google it, but he was talking about how the politics of the country would rip it apart, tribalism would.
Yeah, right.
And now you're really seeing it on the highest level.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, you can see it fester the most with things like the shooting, the ice shooting or whatever, where there's.
Where it's.
That might be him.
Yeah.
This guy's pretty modern, though.
Is he?
This guy's.
Well, I read that book when I was.
This guy was born in 58.
Is this guy.
How old was this Russian philosopher?
Apparently, see how many.
Like with political things like the shooting that just happened, I've noticed you can't ask anybody their opinion on it because it just comes with political baggage.
Yeah.
Right?
Their opinion on it is directly correlated with whether they're left or right.
Left or right.
Right?
Rather than just saying, damn, it sucks.
There's no, there's no, you can't look at that in a vacuum and assess it.
And what's even more like fascinating to me is like how people can see it so differently the same video.
Exactly.
Right?
Oh, he had the right to shoot her in this side.
No, he didn't.
Right?
Right.
They're seeing it like he could have got out of the way.
It's either you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Stupid bitch shouldn't have been fucking there or whatever.
Like, yes, that's true.
Yeah.
Also, is it possible that that dude just wasn't trained enough and that dude was.
He shouldn't have done that.
And a guy, a Delta SEAL team dude or a Navy guy wouldn't.
The guys who kidnapped Maduro, if they were there, that wouldn't have happened.
They would have just hit her with their frequency and snatched her out of the car.
My point was like, they're more trained for that kind of situation.
They would not be fearing for their lives if some lesbian poet was like pulling her Subaru around the corner.
Well, even the fact they said he got dragged and got 30 stitches.
So, like a few months ago, I guess he got dragged by a car.
Well, It, I know I got shot right, so like guns freak me out.
I hate guns, I don't like them around me.
I don't have none in my house.
I don't, if someone has one, I want to, I don't, I don't want to be near it, you know.
I just have a real bad thing with it.
So, this guy gets dragged right, which had to be pretty traumatic, yeah, right.
And you're gonna let him go right back out there knowing that they're using cars to again, common sense, he probably shouldn't be there, right.
He just got dragged.
If he even gets an inkling that he might be hit, he's going to respond in a very negative way.
Right.
Right.
Like that's just kind of common sense to me, man.
Yeah.
You know?
And there are these videos of these dudes just straight up arresting American citizens for not having their papers.
Yeah.
Like I saw a video this morning of a guy.
Like, I think he was a Mexican dude, but he was a legal, registered American citizen.
And they were stripping him of all of his stuff.
Like, oh, he's got a gun on him.
He's like, yeah, it's a registered firearm because I'm an American citizen.
You fucked.
And they were like ripping all of his stuff off.
They threw him in handcuffs, threw him in the back of the car.
Like, it's like, we, what is this like?
It's like the Gestapo, the jack booted thugs pulling up on people, like asking you for your papers.
Yeah, I got to see it in Chicago.
It freaked me out.
I was coming down, going to my gallery, and the ice jumped off.
It was near a construction site, and they jumped out everywhere and just started chasing them.
And I was like, wow, man, this is scary.
Cause they're all like SWAT teamed out and shit, you know?
And you're like, okay, here's the thing is, and this is why I even tell people that condone that.
Right, that say this is good, right?
Yeah, when yeah, America, yeah, here's what they don't realize yeah, America has the ability to teeter totter all the time, man, right?
Yeah, so who you think, like, I remember when Biden was in there and there were some uh things, um, that the feds got a little aggressive on, on some things, like, well, take an example January 6th, they arrested 1300 people, right?
Exactly, and this side said, Oh, that's terrible, police state, and they were sending Fed, FBI, SWAT teams in there to grab them, people, and stuff like it was in.
Something I watched a video of this old couple from Alaska who said they were just there walking through, you know.
But the feds came up there, seen them on the camera, right?
What happens now?
Now it switches, right?
The government switched, and now they're using their, what is important to them.
Yes.
And that's where it comes back to the robots, who's ever in control of them.
Who's ever in control of the robots.
Inglewood Environment00:11:17
And we can pretty much be guaranteed it ain't always going to be the same person, right?
Right?
That's the problem.
That is the problem.
That's the problem.
So, how do we fix that, you know?
But.
You know, anyway, like, want to go back to the money?
Well, I wanted to ask, like, yeah, you come from the worst, one of the worst places, inner cities in this country.
Yeah.
Probably the worst, right?
Maybe one, Shirak.
Yeah.
Southside.
How do you fix that?
How do you fix that problem as a country, in your opinion?
I mean, wow, that's deep, right?
You know, and but how, for me, when I look back, what would have helped me, right?
What's helped me now is I told you I have great people around me.
I have some of the best mentors right now.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which I was lacking my whole life.
Right.
I got people now that if I'm getting into a situation that I don't understand, I can go to them and I trust them and they give me feedback that I take in.
Right.
So it's so, so I'm reaching out and then I'm taking in.
Right.
And then I'm responding.
Right.
I'm responding from what they're telling me.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Rather than just listening.
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Yeah.
And then go keep doing what I'm doing.
For the neighborhoods, I think you have to keep the kids active, right?
You have to give them something to do.
There was nothing for us to do in our neighborhood.
I mean, we had basketball rims, we had public playgrounds, right?
But there was nothing for them.
There was even work, right?
Like, where did these kids, like, say, Inglewood?
So I lived on 31st Street in Halstead, but if you go a little further down, it's called Inglewood.
You can look up Inglewood, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world, okay?
Inglewood.
It's from like 55th to like 79th.
It's a war zone, a death trap.
You know, it's just terrible.
I would go over there.
I had a couple of brothers, man, that I would go over there to visit, man, right?
And there was no hope, right?
There was nothing for them to hope for.
There was no industry there for them to get a job, right?
There was no programs to help them find a way to get out of this.
I mean, there was no education, right?
For me, I think the biggest thing to really help the impoverished is to educate them, right?
Like, educate them on, finances, educate them on, you know, social skills, right?
There's no education to teach the people on how to be better, right?
And then what happens?
You're around the same people, right?
So when I first got out of prison on this, the first two years, I was doing crazy jobs.
I was doing, I did delivering liquor.
I transported cars.
I even cleaned toilet bowls for like nine months.
I was a janitor, right?
Here I am, the greatest Connor forever, and I'm cleaning toilet bowls.
But I loved it.
I was getting a paycheck.
But I almost gave up.
I almost gave up.
I almost went back to printing.
I ended up borrowing some money from some gangsters and tried to do a whole new print shop.
And it all turned out sour.
Thank God it didn't work.
And I walked away and I ended up becoming an artist.
But up until that point, that first two years that I was out, I couldn't take care of myself.
The biggest problem I think that people deal with in poverty is even if you're working, you're not making enough to live.
I made $12.50 an hour.
I'm a 40 year old man.
How am I going to live off $12.50 an hour?
You don't.
I had to get a roommate.
I was riding a bike for like nine months a year, just a regular bike.
I even invented a bike umbrella because I was getting rained on all the time and I had to figure out how to stop that.
But you have to give people a belief that they can actually take care of themselves, right?
Yeah, and a lot of people in the poor neighborhoods don't believe that, they don't believe that there's a way that they can get out of it, right?
Like, I still go back to my neighborhood, right?
Still go back, all you know, I got family, friends, I still go there, right?
And there's still generational poverty.
I go back by the projects, and there's a guy that I grew up with who now his kids are living in there.
And now they're having kids, right?
So, how do you stop that?
How do you stop that part, right?
The generational poverty, right?
But it's, I almost feel like it's designed that way because the rich design it to keep it, you know.
When I tell you, I've been around a lot of the elitist world, you know, they have family offices that plan their wealth.
They got 20 year, 50 year, 100 year plans.
When the first time I heard that they were doing a 50 year plan, one of my friends was going through his family office and they were trying to plan.
50 years they think ahead.
How the hell do you do that?
Yeah.
They're not thinking in one year, six months, five.
These cats are thinking how to keep their wealth forever.
Right.
Right.
And then they train their children on how to do it.
Yep.
You know, it's all training, it's all education.
So, how do you take like schooling, right?
Like, so, so my son, he goes to a private school, right?
He could speak Latin to you right now.
He's out there right now, Da Vinci, his name is Da Vinci, and he is a Da Vinci.
He's brilliant.
He's out there right now building a something crazy, right?
Yeah.
But you could go out there and he'll speak Latin to you.
Why?
Because it's, I'm training him, right?
I'm putting him in a place to be trained, right?
And it's, it's environment.
It's environment.
When you're born into a situation where, Crime and thuggery and gangs and violence is all you're exposed to.
It's all your parents know.
It's all your siblings know.
It's all your friends know.
How can you find an exit to that?
It's difficult.
And for me, I think a lot of it has to do with I was never content.
So when we used to walk around in the projects, I always felt like there was something more for me.
I didn't want this to be my life.
Right.
I wanted something more.
And so for me, how could I become the best at what I was doing, which was the money?
Right.
At some point, I started doing the money.
And so I've always had that drive to not live like that.
Right.
Right.
To not let my children go through what I did.
Right.
So, but that's a personal choice.
So, how do you program people to have a personal choice to do the right thing?
I don't know.
Right.
Because that's really a tough thing, and then is it even capable, because our society is, is is set up for, like you know, you think about it during the early English kings right, you had your kings, you had your counts, you had your dukes, you had your, your serfs right, you had your different levels of society that did different things.
You know, this duke had this amount of land.
He had 10 farmers on his land, three pig farmers right, and then they would bring their crop up to the, to the duke, and then he would give his percentage to the king.
This whole economics, and it really comes down to economics.
How do you change the poverty?
You change the system.
Right.
Right.
You can't give to people because then they don't appreciate it.
Right.
Right.
And then what happens if you have to actually experience that system to be able to work your way up?
Absolutely.
If you're completely excluded from that system from birth and now you're in your 20s or 30s, how are you ever going to integrate?
You won't.
And you also don't know anyone who's a part of that system.
It's like a guy getting out of prison, man.
I did.
So I call it the 5, 10, 15, 20 year.
Like glaze, right?
So, a guy that's been in prison for five years, something starts happening to his eyes.
He even went to a zoo and you looked at the line and his eyes just look like blank.
Like there's no, right?
It happens to humans too.
And it's a scary look, man.
When you go to the shamu at SeaWorld.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Shamu and SeaWorld.
The fin starts drooping.
Yeah.
And they're already drowning at trainers.
Yeah.
And that's how it is for guys in prison.
So, here you got a guy.
That you put in prison for 20 years because he grew up poor and didn't know any other way, and then you let him back out with nothing, right?
And the reason I even bring that up, because as I was working on my mural, it was like two in the morning, a guy rolled up on me, old brother, man on a bike, you know, rolls up.
He's like, hey, man, how are you doing?
I started talking to him.
Told me he just got out of prison.
He did 15 years, and he don't have nobody.
He don't know what he's doing.
He's been living out on the streets.
Right, he did his whole sentence because he didn't have nowhere to go.
All right, it broke my heart, man.
And I told him, I said, Man, and then I told him I was in jail.
I walked out of jail with 20, man.
20, that's what I walked out with, you know.
And it didn't have nothing.
My wife left me, had no money left over from my criminal run, right?
And all I had was just, you know, what I was dreaming for.
Well, and I wanted to be a writer, I didn't want to be a painter.
I wrote a book, I wrote three screenplays.
Painting was like my.
My hobby, you know, but and what was I going to tell him?
Right.
What did I tell him?
I said, The best thing you can do is get a job in any job.
Right.
I mean, that's how I made it.
Right.
There was a system of how I was able to make it.
I always kept a job.
Right.
I never got discouraged with how much money I was making.
As long as I was making something, I was all right with it.
Yeah.
And even when I was, even with this whole thing with the painting, you know.
And the early part of it, I had to work, man.
I had to go to work.
I couldn't become a painter.
I couldn't be a full-time painter.
I got to eat.
I got to pay bills, you know?
So I think it's an intense discipline, right?
To make it.
To really reach the top, you know?
You got to be able to be disciplined with your life.
And I told him, I said, you know, unfortunately, 76% of people go back to prison.
So, you know, 10 guys there, seven of them are going back.
Three are.
Maybe make it right.
That's crazy.
It's crazy, man.
You know, I went back twice, I went three times, man.
I couldn't break the cycle, right?
Art saved me, right?
That's why I'm here.
You know, I had told myself I would rather paint on the beach with nothing than sit in a cell with a smelly, snoring animal.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I'm tired of it.
I was tired of it.
So, how do you change it?
You know, I think it takes a community.
Norway Citizen Fund00:07:08
Mm hmm.
Totally.
It takes a community to change it.
Do you think it could be fixed top down, like with money, like from government's perspective?
Oh, we'll throw like billions of dollars into it.
It hasn't worked yet.
Right.
All right.
You know, I mean, they've tried to do welfare and food stamps and programs and stuff.
Like, I almost think that sometimes that makes.
What if you gave like a universal basic income to all these people where they get like, I don't know, like five grand a month?
Do you think it would stop crime?
Do you think it would have any sort of dent on anything?
I don't think so because I think when you give.
Anytime I've ever given something to somebody, just give it to them.
There's not that same appreciation is earned.
Yeah.
Right.
And I think that's what's going to happen.
This whole basic universal income thing, like, what is value then?
Right.
And it's almost kind of like socialist communists.
Everybody gets the same.
Yeah.
Right.
Think about that.
Right.
Like, yeah.
So, how can you raise your universal basic income?
Do you got to be a good boy for a month straight to maybe get a little raise?
Yeah.
Like, is everyone going to get $5,000?
And then, like, what's the separation?
To me, capitalism and earning and fighting to get to the top, right, that brings out the best.
We stop doing that.
Right.
We haven't really, you know, Had that.
I mean, think about it during the like the the when when when Tesla and uh Einstein andor like even go further back Carnegie and Henry Ford and all these guys where they were they were building things and creating things and fighting to build stuff.
Like, you don't really see that much anymore unless it's building a data center or something like you, you don't or a new app or a new program, you know.
What my what concerns me is that people will turn into just couch potatoes, they'll be plugged into their little reality.
Right?
It'll be like Ready Player One.
I don't know if you ever watched that movie.
Right?
Yeah.
That's what concerns me that the world would turn into something like that.
Right?
Which I'm hoping.
It's certainly possible.
There's a lot of possibilities.
But it's also possible that it could give somebody, a family or an individual, like the stability to not have to stress or go or spend time on a dead end job just trying to pay their rent, put food at the table, and instead focus on things they enjoy.
Or focus on things that are they have.
It's like a utopia, right.
Like it's like almost kind of like the heaven right, have everything's and we're gonna have.
Like maybe you don't care about living in the mansion or driving the nice car, but you want to pursue happiness and you can get, you can figure out a way to live modestly with this money and you know, maybe you want to make cotton candy and sell cotton candy, or maybe you want to be a piano teacher or whatever.
You can now pursue those endeavors.
I like the concept right yeah, the concept.
There's definitely a lot of holes in it, a lot, a lot of pitfalls.
Well, and that those are the things that you know.
Hopefully, humans will rise to the occasion to figure out, right?
Or do we leave it to AI to figure out, right?
Because that's really what everyone's doing now.
I can't tell you how many people say, hey, man, I could do this ChatGPT photo now.
Like you had today, we could do jungle over here.
They might make it, right?
Like now, everybody is like a creator, right?
I saw this video of this woman drawing a mural, but she was wearing the VR headset, the meta headset.
And it puts the stencil on the wall.
It's awesome.
That's crazy, dude.
I want one.
I do.
I want one because you know how hard it is to hand draw what I showed you, right?
Like, my brain was twisted, man.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, man.
It was no, no, technology.
Listen, technology has its ways of maybe, you know, really advancing us.
I just haven't had, I don't have too much faith in the leadership of this world right now, right?
That's what concerns me, right?
Like, I don't, the only country that I see that even has somewhat of a positive is Norway.
Right, so Norway has this crazy fund for their citizens.
You should look it up, it's really, yeah.
So, how we're born into debt, I actually heard some crazy about Norway the other day.
I don't remember, Norway is an interesting country.
How they got wealthy from the oil and the gas, I mean, it's it's wild.
But what they did do, which I thought was amazing, is they created a citizen fund, right?
And so, like, you know, when when when when our when we're born, we're like, I forgot what it was, but it's thousands in debt.
You're technically, as soon as you're born.
Because our 38 trillion debt, you're born into debt.
It's far out.
But Norway, they created this citizen fund to where when these kids are born, they're already born into wealth.
Not wealth, but they're born into like where they have a citizen fund, right?
Now, I don't know how they access it or even if they can, right?
Norwegian citizen fund.
Sovereign wealth fund.
There you go.
$2 trillion.
It's insane.
The users figured $250,000.
Okay, so they don't receive a direct personal payout, but instead they are.
Indirect beneficiaries of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, which benefits the nation as a whole through public services and long term financial stability.
The key factors about the wealth fund are its value, its purpose, which is to fund and invest state oil and gas revenues abroad, safeguarding the economy.
And the government is permitted to spend only the investment income from the fund, the general rule not exceeding approximately 3%, no direct payouts.
Well, here's the thing it says, which is the fund is valued at over $2 trillion, which is roughly equivalent to $2 trillion.
340 000 for every citizen.
So, my point being so, how do they benefit from it?
Just well, that's the question now i'm asking because I didn't know that part.
But my point being is, this should be Us, this should be America.
You know like they're talking about.
They're taking all that oil from Venezuela, uh-huh what?
What am I going to get a 10 cent lower my gas, while this company over here is going to get rich?
So it says that.
It says that um, the spending covers 20 of the government's budget, 20 annually, And funding public services, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and the national welfare system.
Interesting.
And so I was just actually talking to someone who was from Norway, and she was explaining to me that they have like their education system is out of this world.
Yeah.
Right?
Their healthcare, the infrastructure is beautiful.
So maybe that's how, whatever they're doing, if you go to Norway, they didn't, I don't believe they let in a lot of immigrants, right?
They were.
A lot of Europe was taken in a lot of these and really just messed up the whole, you know, the whole, the whole, yeah, I don't even, that's a whole, no, a lot of those countries, the infrastructure is amazing.
Like, the gas stations are beautiful, like modern, clean, great food, healthy food.
Semi Socialist Prisons00:04:14
They're incentivized to, like, not put dog shit on the shelves because they have subsidized, well, Europe is semi socialist, you know, it's semi like, I'm not going to say semi socialist, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But they do take care of their stuff, right?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, That's what needs to happen here, right?
Instead of 20 billion fraud, you know, we put 20 billion into.
Yeah, we got missing trillions of dollars.
Patreon hasn't passed an audit in decades.
Where's that money, right?
Like, that's what I'm saying.
This country, when I see stuff like that, when you ask, how can we change the country, you know, well, I think it would have to start from the top.
The top would have to care.
They would literally, really have to care, right?
They were like, okay, listen, man, we're, you know, instead of just locking people away for 20, 30, 40 years for petty shit.
Let's try to find also the prison systems overseas are a lot different.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, some of them, there it's like I had a dude, we had a dude on here who went to prison in Spain.
Yeah, and uh, it was beautiful.
He was like, it was amazing.
He was like, you get to be outside all the time as much as you want, you get to wear your own clothes, you get to have your wife come over, and you know, you guys can have like your private time.
Yeah, I've heard of amazing prisons over there because they want you to still be human.
Yeah, right?
You know, when you go into these prisons, I mean, you're a number.
You're a nigger.
That's your cattle.
203084255.
And the dudes who are running the prisons, from what I've heard, is like the officers called in prisons.
So you got the COs.
The COs, all those guys.
Those guys hate working there.
Oh, hate it.
Yeah, they hate it.
And then they take it out on you.
Again, another human element of just being miserable, right?
You know, so yeah, I mean, prison for me, like I had seen some really rough shit.
You know, I was fortunate because I grew up, The way I did, so when I went to prison, I wasn't walking around all fearful, but it was terrible, man.
The way that white people got treated, you know, like that segregation is hardcore in prison, from whatever super hardcore.
I did the whites, Mexicans, blacks, they all, oh, yeah.
Well, the rate the rate the segregation is is like it's um, well, I'll tell you, I got into it with a few people because of it, you know.
One, I didn't want to join uh, the Aryan nation, yeah, they would they want you to be a skinhead, I didn't want to do that, and and that turned into something you gotta be like.
Protected by a certain group of people.
You got to join their club yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, like in state prisons it's real, it's real heavy.
Like that in the FEDS it's a little bit different.
You got coalitions, like the Chicago Coalition was, if you were from Chicago you were together.
Then you got Houston, you got you know.
So right, you have these different coalitions and uh, but the the race thing is bad and I, i've seen, you know, unfortunately I I did some time in um Edinburgh, Texas state joint.
It was at the very tip of Texas And they sent me down there because there was a riot and they needed white people, right?
And so I get down there and it's like a 1,200 man compound, right?
And there were like 100 white dudes, you know, 700 Mexicans and the rest brothers.
Wow.
Right.
Well, I could tell you this much there was out of that 100 white dudes, there were only like 10 that stood up for themselves.
I was one of them.
The other ones were paying protection, being, I mean, just really bad.
And what helped me in that system was there were some cats from Chicago that were disciples.
They were black dudes, and they knew I was from Chicago.
And we would talk a little bit, and I let them know where I was from.
And so they kind of had a little bit of protectionism going on with me.
They didn't want anything to happen to me.
Now, I was with my boys and we stood firm, you know.
Chicago Protectionism00:06:54
And what was really crazy is a white dude would come in and you would see just like vultures just flock to him.
Yeah.
If he came in with his bag filled with commissary, yeah.
Oh, he was hit.
That shit was gone.
That was gone.
They either fight or give it to him.
And I say 95% of the time, they would just give it to him.
And then once you gave it to him, then you kept giving it to him.
You were never free.
Right.
Oh, yeah, you know.
And so, yeah, no, prison was rough, man.
You know, and the white cats had it the worst.
So, where did we leave off at your story?
We just went on like a 45 minute tangent.
I know, we were talking about shit.
He got out and then he got.
Did you get caught again?
Yeah, my son.
Oh, yeah, you said that you met your son, you and your son were in prison together.
Yeah, yeah.
So, when I got out after that stuff with my dad, you know, my son was trying to print money at his mom's house and.
And so when I did get out and get my own apartment, she's like, you got to take them.
So I took them.
We started doing our thing.
I got him into some music.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got him into music.
I went and pulled some money out that I had buried, tried to sell it.
They wouldn't buy it.
They wanted the euro, the euro.
Right.
They were like, look at man, right now, if you could do the euro for us, we'll take as many as you can.
I never printed the euro.
I didn't know shit.
Oh, that's where we left off.
We're talking about digital currency in the UK.
Yeah, I didn't know shit about the euro.
So I ended up starting to figure out the euro, started trying to break it.
It was actually kind of fun because it was new.
Right with something new.
It was, and I knew I could get rid of it and I knew it was going overseas, so I knew it wasn't going to be here, and so it fit all the the the perfect crime to me, right.
I thought it was like this was perfect crime yeah, and so I started going after it.
And here me and my son is still printing money right, and I got some of the old money that i've been moving and I came home one day well, actually.
So I started um, I ended up at the job that I had at the, the marina.
What I did for him is I used to pick up guys from, you know, if they would fly in from somewhere and fly into Chicago.
He was like my uncle.
His name was Dennis, man.
Real old gangster, man.
Had an old like tugboat marina, had barges that he would send up and down the river.
We called them river rats.
He had probably about 200 people that worked in the marina.
And he would have me pick up people that would fly in, bring them out there, and he'd have their meeting.
Then he would have me take them back.
So I ended up picking up this producer named Paul Pompeian.
And when we were driving from Chicago to Lamont, which is about a 45 minute drive, Paul was on the phone talking about Chris Rock and talking about this movie they were making and all this.
And I'm like, man, this dude's making movies, you know?
So when I was taking him back, I asked him, I said, do you make movies?
And he's like, yeah, you know, that's what I'm doing.
And I'm getting ready to do something now.
And I was like, well, I got a good story.
And he's like, I heard that before, kids, you know?
And I'm like, well, have you ever met a counterfeiter whose ex wife was a cop?
He said, What do you mean?
I said, Make money, print money, print money, right?
So he got super wide eyed.
He's like, No, I haven't.
So I tell him what happened, the whole story with my dad and all this craziness.
And so he calls Dennis.
He's like, Hey, I want to keep the kid for a minute.
You know, I want to keep art.
I think I was like 30 at the time, something like that.
And so my dentist is like, Yeah, go ahead.
So we went to Pompeii Bakery down on Taylor Street and I tell him everything.
So he calls some agent, Mickey Friedberg, who did the flags of our fathers with Clint Eastwood.
All right.
And he says, hey, I got this kid you got to meet, man.
This crazy story about him printing money.
So they fly me out to L.A.
I meet Mickey, talk to a couple writers.
Nothing came of it.
They wanted to option my life rights.
So I do it.
I'm thinking, this is great.
They're going to make a movie, right?
And then, you know, go back to Chicago.
So here I am dealing with this Hollywood thing.
I got my son now, and I'm trying to break the euro.
Like I'm all jacked up right now, man.
You know?
Twisted in every direction, yeah, right.
And uh, but I'm really hoping, man, that this because they kept telling me, man, this movie's gonna get fast tracked, it's gonna happen quick, you know, you know how that's how they do it, yeah, that's how they do the little carrot in front of you, yeah, you know.
And I was really believing in it though, you know, like I because they're flying me places, and then I ended up um meeting Jason Kirsten, they wrote a Rolling Stone article about me.
The Rolling Stone article went crazy, you know, this is before social media and stuff, right?
Yep, but.
We start getting contacted from Ron Howard, George, all these big time cats to make the movie, you know?
And then Jason decides that he's going to write the book, right?
And that's where The Last Counterfeiter came from, right?
Was the art of making money, but then it got expanded because they did a re yeah, a re thing because of my art.
But so, anyway, so they make this article, the Rolling Stone magazine, and it comes out.
And uh, and I start getting all kinds of cool things to do.
I ended up flying out to Rochester, New York, uh, and I ended up speaking for Document Security Systems, which was a Czech security company.
Yeah, so here I am.
I got this Rolling Stone article out.
I'm trying to get my son into the music, unbeknownst to him, he's.
Playing with money.
Right, i'm doing my own thing, trying to break something, and Paul calls me and he says hey, we got something for you we want you to do start speaking.
And we got your first.
One's going to be out in Rochester, New York, at the Document Security Systems.
I'm like well what, what's the company?
So I talked, they hooked me up with the company, I talked to them.
They said they're going to have me an assistant when I get there.
It just happened to be Frank Abingail's old assistant to catch me, if you can.
Yeah right, I ended up having his assistant.
I guess he was, he was, so the whole point was he was just getting ready to retire from the little speaking circuit that he had been on.
And they were looking at me to replace him.
That's kind of how it felt.
All right.
But I'm still trying to break the, I'm still trying to break the euro, man.
I'm, you know, I need to survive.
I need to make money.
I got to live.
Right.
But so they, I go out there and I'm sitting in the bar and I'm, I'm, I'm with the assistant and I'm like, It felt a little coppish in the bar, you know?
Not a little, it felt a lot coppish.
What am I saying, man?
There was, you know, and I'm like, hey, ain't this a corporate event?
Homeland Auditorium00:04:59
And she said, well, you're speaking on behalf of Document Security Systems Corp, but this is actually a Homeland Security event.
I said, Homeland Security?
I said, well, you try, you tell me, she goes, yeah, these are all FBI, Secret Service.
I'm like, what?
I'm like, you're a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
I'm like, what the hell, right?
And I said, I said, they're like all, She goes, Yeah, yeah, you're gonna be speaking to, you know, on this panel.
Dog, I start slamming whiskey, man.
Like, I'm a mess.
I'm a mess, man.
I'm a mess.
I go up to the room.
She, it felt like just time flew, right?
You know, like I'm laying down at midnight and it's five o'clock already.
You know, she's knocking on the door.
She's like, You ready?
So we went down, we ate.
We go into the auditorium and we go into the auditorium and it's kind of empty.
There's only like five or 10 people in there, right?
And I'm thinking, well, I'm the first one on.
They're surely, they ain't gonna be, they're not gonna be filling this place up, right?
You know, cause it's eight in the morning, right?
And it's a long day.
There was a long panel that day.
So I thought, man, maybe I get lucky and a lot of people wouldn't show up for the first one.
So, like, they're getting me mic'd up.
They're putting a mic on me.
You know, they're getting me ready to be the first speaker.
And all of a sudden, man, I start getting loud.
You start hearing people talking, right?
And it's like 7 56.
I guess this is how the feds like to do it, man.
Cause, They were that place filled up in like two minutes, dude.
Like the whole place filled up, like in a matter of minutes, man.
I was like, Where were they all?
And the whole place was filled.
I start freaking out, my mouth dries up.
I start getting sick, sweating.
Like, I've never spoken in front of a crowd now.
Now I'm speaking in front of a crowd of agents, like you know, the 2000 of them on top of it.
So I get real, like, just I'm a mess.
So I tell her, I'm like, Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom real quick, you know?
And she's like, you all right?
I'm like, yeah, I'm all right.
I'll be right back.
I run out to the bathroom and I start mother.
I start swearing.
What the fuck am I doing?
This is crazy.
I'm like, I'm not throwing up, but kind of like dry heaving.
My mouth is all jacked up.
Yeah.
And so then I leave the bathroom and I go outside, but there's a side door to the auditorium.
And I'm just like, just talk.
I'm talking to myself.
What the fuck are you doing?
Right?
Like, I'm really just like a mess.
She comes running out.
She goes, Are you all right?
What's going on?
Oh my God.
She goes, Turn, turn.
The mic was on.
Oh no.
The freaking mic was on, man, the whole time.
So the whole thing, they heard everything.
And then I was nervous thinking, Damn, did you say anything about you're still printing money?
Right?
Like, you know what I'm saying?
Because now I'm all freaked out, right?
So she turned it off.
She goes, Listen, we're going to cancel.
We're not doing this.
No way.
She said, No way, we're doing this.
I said, No, man.
Gotta do this.
I gotta do this.
I came all this way, man.
I'm not gonna back out.
I'll go in there and I'll do this, you know?
And she goes, Are you sure?
And I'm like, I got to.
What I'm gonna, you know?
So I go back in there, dude.
I tell you, when I walked into that auditorium, man, I had 2,000 people looking at me, man, and you couldn't hear shit, man.
Like, you couldn't hear.
And they were just staring at me.
And I was just like, I felt so small.
I walked up to the front, sat down, and I'm telling myself, You gotta do this.
You gotta do this.
You gotta do this.
Like, I'm just, because I'm one of them dudes.
I talk to myself a little bit in my mind, you know?
Yeah.
Kind of self motivation, man, you know, before you jump off the dam, you know.
And so then they get up there and they introduce me, and I go up on the stage and I just freeze.
I just froze.
I couldn't talk.
I couldn't think.
I couldn't do nothing.
And I'm just like this.
And I could see her, like, come on, man, come on.
And then finally, I seen this old, this beautiful woman.
She was a federal agent, but she had silver hair, older, probably like.
You know, mid 50s, and uh, and she said, You're all right, baby.
But she, she lipped it to me, right?
You're all right, you're all right, you can do this.
She kept like trying to see, you know, which it should have been her telling me that, you know, instead of the agent.
But when she did that, I said, Listen, man, I said, I'm really this is my first time doing this, and usually when I'm around federal agents, I'm going to prison, and so they start laughing, it broke the ice, and it was the most amazing thing that I had ever done.
I spoke for like an hour.
Took questions for like 45 minutes.
Ended up getting to sit at the table with the Homeland Security guy.
No way.
Yeah, I got to see.
It was awesome.
Mifflin Indictment Show00:14:49
Yeah, he was joking around.
He's like, Yeah, I used to make licenses when I was in high school.
So we got a little laugh.
And I think that was the first time, because when I went back to Chicago, I really felt like I wanted to change.
I really liked that.
I enjoyed being around, just being legitimate.
You know, and having some purpose, yeah, right.
It felt, and I was really getting tormented, man, because here I am, I got to do this and I got to take care of my son, and then I got this Hollywood going on.
And you know, I mean, it was just one of them real confusing times.
You know, confusion does it brings chaos, right?
And that's what happened chaos hit me.
Yep, I come home one day, my son's printing money in their house.
I run all his friends out, he runs out, I chase him, I catch him on the street, we're arguing, I grab him, he throws the money.
A Chicago police officer was passing by, sees the money in there.
Gets out.
I tell, you know, I said, man, this is my son.
I got this.
I'll take care of this.
And he asked me my name.
I told him.
And as soon as he heard my name, he said, get around, turn around.
And he arrested me.
I guess he knew, you know, because I'm kind of known in Chicago.
I mean, now for sure, you know, but, you know, back then, still neighborhood guy, you know, Secret Service came and they were like, you know, they were like, all right, we're going to figure this out.
We know these 20s aren't yours, da da da.
Unbeknownst to me, one of the hundreds that I had pulled out of the ground, my son had.
So my indictment, I probably got the shortest indictment in federal history, I swear.
One paragraph, possession of $1,200, 20s, and then 100.
And that 100 was what nailed me.
Wow.
What's crazy is, they pretended they were kind of going along like, we know this ain't yours.
We know this ain't yours.
They take me down to the Secret Service station, put me in the cell, and they leave me in there for a while.
They finally come back and they're like, we're about to go into your place.
So they felt like they knew where my print shop was.
Right.
And I said, I said, what are you talking about?
I said, we finally got you.
You know, because for a counterfeiter, you know, it's really hard to get a lot of time unless you really get busted with the equipment.
If you get busted with the equipment, like an offset press and this, you're going to get 20 years, 30 years.
But if they don't, if it's just like a conspiracy, you're not going to really get slammed.
Yeah.
Right.
So I've always been really careful about my equipment, right?
Like trying to keep it at, because for one, the shit's heavy, it's not easily moved.
Right, 700 pounds, 800 pounds and so, but what happened?
What they didn't know is three weeks prior, before all this happened, and my landlord, oh, an old time, Ricky Benny, had sold the building and told me I needed to get out of there.
So we had went in there another matrix type of moment.
Right, we go in there.
And I cleaned the whole place out.
We moved it to a different spot and they they, they had helicopters, it was on the news.
They swat teamed the place And there was nothing in there, it was completely empty.
Wow, completely empty.
And they were pissed.
Oh, wee, man.
The next morning, they took me to court for bond hearing, and they're holding my arm.
And they're like, Oh, you think you're funny?
You think you're funny?
I'm like, So I didn't lie to you.
I said, I'm a counterfeiter, but not a liar.
You know, I told you there wasn't nothing there.
And man, you know, and then they ended up, you know, I ended up getting bonded, and you know, it took a while for me to get jammed up, you know, get my sentence.
I fought it for like nine months.
A lot of shit happened in between there.
You know, the Rolling Stone article ended up turning into a book deal.
Like right before I'm getting sentenced.
This is how crazy life can be, right?
So here it is.
I'm fighting, fighting, fighting.
The movie producers are saying, hey, man, you're only going to get a couple years.
You're going to be out.
We'll do the movie.
It'll be all right.
The book goes up for auction.
The agent Mickey gets some big boys, Hugh Mliflin, Random House, all the top dogs, right?
I'm sitting in my basement and they're doing an auction for the book rights.
And it starts at 100,000.
It stops at 1.4 million.
1.4 million for my book rights.
Man, I'm a kid from the projects, man.
They've been breaking the law all these times.
And then you're just going to give me 1.4.
So I'm going crazy, dude.
I'm doing backflips, man.
I'm tripping out.
And they call me, congratulate me.
Hey, Hupe Mifflin.
It was Hupe Mifflin who won the thing, right?
And I'm like, man, this is great.
So the next day, she calls me, the lady that was going to be over the whole publishing and managing this book they were going to make.
She goes, We're so excited.
we're going to put you on the talk shows.
We're going to have you on the circuit.
You're going to sign book signings at all different.
They had this huge plan for me.
And I'm sitting here thinking, man, do they know I'm not going to prison?
I'm about to go to prison.
And so I called the agent.
I called Mickey.
I'm like, hey, Mickey, did you tell them that I'm going to prison?
Like probably in another month?
They're talking about me going to book tours and book signings.
Going on talk show radios and all this shit.
I said, Did you let him know?
He's like, Nah, we were just going to wait till the deal was signed and we got the check.
I said, Nah, man, you can't do that.
You can't do that.
I'm not down for that.
He's like, What do you mean?
It's 1.4 million.
Screw it.
Stop having morals here.
You're a criminal.
He was super pissed with me, man.
He said, You're a criminal.
Be a criminal.
I'm like, Nah, man, I ain't a cheat, though.
I said, I ain't doing it.
You let her know if they still want, but I'm not going to.
I ain't doing that, man.
So he, they did.
They didn't.
Hugh Mifflin dropped it.
No way.
Yeah, they dropped it.
That sucked, man.
It was sucked.
And then I ended up getting sentenced like a month later, two months later.
Movie people were pissed at me, weren't talking to me.
The book writer wouldn't talk to me because they were mad that I sabotaged the deal.
And then like two months into my sentence, the writer got a hold of me and said, hey, Penguin wants to pick it up for $300.
We're going to do it.
I said, okay.
I said, you know, whatever.
I'm cool, you know.
So they wrote the book.
The book, you know, I ended up going to prison, Manchester, and I started drawing money, pastime writing.
I wrote the book, Cain's Dagger, I showed you.
And I basically, that book, because like I said, I've read a lot of books, studied a lot of history from Sumerians to, I love like Roman history, it's one of my favorites.
Yeah.
Right.
I love Asian history.
Right, the Chinese emperors and stuff like that.
I loved samurai.
I did a real long stint with samurais, I was fascinated with the samurai for a minute, right?
Yeah, so I'm a real history buff with things.
And so, with this, and then I studied a lot of like secret society stuff, Solomon Knights.
I mean, I went deep into all kinds of stuff, man, you know.
And I just took everything that I had in my mind and just kind of combined it into that.
Wow, it was pretty awesome, man.
It was a great thing.
And I started painting, of course, you know, I started to paint.
Doing shows.
Doing shows.
Galleries.
Well, that was wild, you know, because so I, when, you know, after my sentence came, you know, my son ends up coming to prison.
We're together.
He's doing music.
I'm doing writing and painting.
We got this grand scheme.
He's going to, you know, he's going to be a famous rapper.
I'm going to be a famous writer.
And none of it happened, right?
I ended up becoming a painter and he's driving a trash truck, right?
But he loves it.
He loves his trash truck.
He actually does pretty well with that trash truck, you know?
And, um, But when I got out, you know, I published that book, self-published, nothing happened, you know, and then I had probably like eight paintings that I did in prison.
I did a show, couldn't sell none of them.
And so it got into a place where I was like, man, this shit's a lot harder than just like making a book and you're going to do great or making a painting and you're going to sell it, you know?
And, you know, I learned the hard way that it doesn't work that way, you know?
And after like two years of that, I almost went back to printing money.
I ended up, you know, I ended up meeting a really cool cat, Joe Cacciatore.
He owns Lakeside Bank.
It's a bank up in Chicago.
He kind of took me under his wing, stopped me from making a really bad decision.
He was bringing in artists from all over the world to do murals on his building.
And he needed an assistant for them, a resident artist.
So he put me on, man.
So I got these artists that I'm helping get their stuff, working the lift, helping them put the murals on.
So my art is just self taught.
I've been real fortunate to be around other artists that I could take a little something from and I create my own thing.
And then that lasted for a little while.
And then I ended up, that job ended, and I started painting houses for the union.
Kind of gave up art painting again because it just didn't seem like you'd get through that ceiling, you know.
And then a series of events I lost my job, my car blew up, and my house burned down.
Like literally, boom, boom, boom.
If shit comes in threes, it came, you know.
And the only thing that survived the house, I actually even posted it on my Facebook, man.
It was like July, June, or 13th of 2017.
It's on my Facebook now.
You could see where the flames were coming up behind this painting that I did for my brother.
Now, my brother's gone, but it was about mental illness.
And it was the only thing, you know, if the water or fire didn't destroy it, you know, shit was just, it was a mess.
But that painting survived.
You could see where the flames were coming up behind.
It was kind of cool.
But it made me think of my bro.
And my bro used to always tell me, Art, it's your art that's going to make it for you.
I never believed that, but he did.
And now here was this painting that was saved through this fire, you know?
So I just felt like there was some sort of something speaking to me.
Cosmic connection there.
Yeah.
And so then one of my friends, you know, he gave me a job.
This guy, Frank, man, he's a great dude.
I started working for him and got me a little apartment.
And then this book came out.
There was a book coming out.
It was The Things We Keep, I think it was.
Some New York Times writer was doing this book about objects that people keep that are special.
And he had some pretty famous people in this book.
And he wanted me to be the painter.
I couldn't believe it.
I hadn't even really sold any paintings.
And this guy wanted me to be the painter.
And I still have one of the brushes that I had in prison, my paintbrush, right?
And so he wanted to take a picture of it and put me in this book.
And Frank, my guy, he's like, dude, you got to do some paintings, man.
Like, you got to start painting again.
This book could be, you know, kind of start putting you out there.
And I said, man, I just ain't got, I mean, it's hard to paint and do this.
And I've tried to do it.
Don't worry.
He said, well, what do you think you need to do to really kind of go at it?
I said, just paint, not work, not paint houses or build bathrooms.
I just need to paint and create.
And he said, well, what if I gave you a salary for six months and you came out here to the office and we put you a studio up in my office and all you did was paint and we see what happens?
And I said, well, what if nothing happens?
He goes, well, then nothing happens, but let's give it a shot.
And so I did, man.
I started going out there.
It wasn't a great salary, but it was enough for me to live and take care of my kid.
And I started just jamming and went down to Miami with four pieces for that art basm.
And like the first day, nothing happened.
The second day, nothing happened.
The third day, I was able to throw my own show at an airport hangar, right?
My boy worked for like Jet Smarter.
And so they threw a little show for me.
And I ended up selling all four pieces.
I met Arnold Schwarzenegger's VP.
She loved the energy and the story and everything.
And she said, Hey, listen, we're doing a show for Arnold at the Nobu.
She goes, Would you want to be a part of it?
It's for the charity.
You know, we pay you a certain percentage off the paintings we sell.
But I really like you to be there, man.
I really, I think what you're doing is a good thing.
And I'm like, yeah, I love to.
When is, she said February.
And this was December, like 5th, 6th, wherever Arbez is.
So not only did I sell all my paintings, right?
But now I meet, you know, like one of my idols, like someone that works for him, you know?
I watched every Arnold show.
Who hasn't?
Terminator, Predator, all of it, right?
I grew up on that shit.
All the action heroes, Sly, Bruce, Arnold, all of them, right?
So I'm driving back to Chicago, man, just on Cloud Nine.
Sold work, invited back in February, and I did.
I went back.
We sold $64,000 worth of art.
I gave Arnold his part.
And then they were so impressed with everything.
They said, hey, Arnold does a show once a year at his house.
In LA, and you've been invited.
I said, What?
That's amazing.
To Arnold's house?
And they were like, Yeah, yeah, to Arnold's house, man.
And dude, you don't even know, man, how I was feeling, right?
Like, I was feeling like I was on top of the world, you know?
And that was in June.
So I had some months to get ready.
I had a little money, so I wasn't stressed.
And so, man, I just started rocking, bro.
I started rocking.
I started painting like I never painted in my life, man.
And I rented an SUV and I drove all the way out to LA for Chicago.
I had like 13, maybe 15 paintings.
I forgot.
I was only allowed to show three at Arnold's.
Arnold House Gallery00:16:11
But I said to myself, I'm like, man, you're going to meet someone.
So make sure you have some extra stuff in the hotel room.
And so what happens, man?
I get out there.
Well, first off, I was told I couldn't come two weeks before it because of security reasons, because of my past.
So I was like, I was devastated.
She called me.
She goes, all right, I'm so sorry, man.
The, the state police, that guard Arnold, they denied your entry.
So you, because he still has uh, people that you know he's got bodyguards right, and uh, he said, but we got one more shot at this.
They're gonna shoot your file off to Dc, to the Secret Service.
And then Arnold makes the last call.
Right, and i'm gonna fight for you man, and and and.
So i'm like all right man, but I, I just kept working like I was going right, like I I was hurt and I was a little nervous, of course you know, but but I felt like man, i'm gonna go.
And they called me, like five days before.
Hey, you're not going to believe this?
Arnold gave the goat.
The Secret Service in DC said you were clean.
And so Arnold, we all had a meeting, and Arnold said, Yeah, let him come.
And so I was so excited, man.
I got that truck, man.
I loaded everything.
I drove all the way out to LA.
I put all the extra paintings in my hotel room.
Frank flies out there.
And so the theme was a cowboy theme.
Right, so Arnold has these themed parties, right?
This is a so it's a cowboy theme, so you gotta dress like a cowboy.
So I'm like, Where am I gonna get a cowboy outfit?
You know, and there happened to be a place I went and I got all black, I got a black Wranglers, black shirt, and a black cowboy hat.
So I look like Artie Cash, right?
Like that's what I was calling myself, Artie Cash, right?
Like Johnny Cash.
And um, and I was telling Frank, I'm like, Frank, what are we, how am I gonna stand out in this crowd?
Like, we're going to be around superstars.
Like, what do we do, you know?
And he goes, I don't know, you know?
I was like, so then I came with this brilliant idea.
I said, what if I put puzzle piece hundreds around the top of my hat?
I'll show you the hat.
It's crazy.
And I show you pictures this year.
It was a crazy night.
And he's like, well, where the hell are we going to get 1996 hundreds?
I said, from the bank.
It was, well, how are we going to get those?
I said, well, we used to do this back in the day.
You just walk in the bank, tell them that your daughter's birthday is 1996 and you want to give her a 1996 hundred.
And they'll actually go through them all and they'll find one for you if they got it.
Wow.
Yeah, it was great.
So we ended up going down, walking down Sunset Boulevard, hitting all the banks looking for 1996 hundreds.
Oh, shit.
I said, it was great.
That's incredible.
Incredible.
We ended up getting three of them.
We come back to the hotel.
I break them up into, I draw puzzle pieces on them.
And all night before the show, I'm working on this hat.
I'm cutting out the hundreds into puzzles.
I glued them real neat on the hat, perfect.
And I told Frank, I said, I said, whoever wins the auction, that's who I'm going to give the hat to.
And when people come up to me asking about the hat, that's what I'm going to tell them.
Frank's like, that's brilliant.
I love it, right?
So we go.
I we get to Arnold's, we put up the pieces.
I got fingerprinted, right?
Never been fingerprinted for an art show, but they took me in the back and they fingerprint me and they took a picture of me.
I'm like, wow, I'm gonna get fingerprinted to go to an art show, man.
Like, this is crazy, dog, you know.
Me and the coppers got real cool though, I because they had a bathroom out there and Arnold only had one bath, so that's where I would go to use the bathroom, so I'd have to stay in line, you know.
So that that led to something actually, but anyway, so I get fingerprinted, man.
They we do the show.
Um, Tom Arnold's the auctioneer, Tom Arnold, yeah, right, yeah, yeah.
So he's telling my story, and I'm in front of everybody.
I mean, literally, Sylvester Stone was there, Jason Stadium, like everybody, man.
Here I am at Arnold's house with a mic in my hand telling my story.
It was just wild, it was crazy.
Like, how did I get there, you know, yeah, man?
So the piece auctioned off for $75,000 to the Rizzuto family, beautiful family, I love them, and um.
And it was awesome.
As soon as they hit the auctioneer, I took the hat off and gave it to Sergio Brazudo, who was the son who wanted it.
Because everyone that would come up to me asking about the hat worked perfect.
Everybody was looking at the hundreds on the hat, right?
And asking about it, right?
And Frank was like, Art, that was just awesome, man.
Look at this thing, right?
And everyone wanted the hat, right?
People wanted it.
What's the deal with the hat?
I'm like, whoever wins the auction tonight, I'm going to give it to them.
And the piece went for $75,000, man.
Damn, bro.
That's amazing.
And I gave the hat, you know?
Yeah.
So then, so then I get real cool with you.
Oh, look at that.
Oh, there it is, right there.
That's it, man.
Me and Arnold.
There's the hat.
Look at that.
Look at that.
That's amazing, bro.
That hat's awesome, man.
So, anyway, you know, me and Arnold was awesome.
He gave me a hug.
He was the best.
He gave me my shot, man.
Without him, I wouldn't be here.
That's incredible, bro.
Yeah, he really is a great man.
Like, he's a great man.
He changed my life.
He changed my life.
He don't even know how much he changed my life.
I got three beautiful children.
In a family now because I was able to stay free.
Yeah.
Free.
And because of this, you know.
That's incredible.
That was a great night.
That's powerful, dude.
That's a powerful fucking story, man.
Yeah.
Well, it gets nuttier.
So I leave out of there on Cloud Nine.
The Rizzuto family says, Hey, do you have any more art here?
I'm like, I actually do.
It's back at the hotel.
They said, Well, we're staying in Beverly Hills at the Waldorf.
We want you to bring it all over there.
I'm like, What do you mean?
Like, you want to bring it over to the hotel?
Yeah, bring it all.
I'm like, Frank, this is crazy.
What are we going to do?
He's like, we're going to bring it to the Walder, right?
That's what we're going to do.
So the next morning, man, we load everything up.
I'm still on Cloud Nine.
I still can't believe what happened at Arnold's house, you know?
And we go to the Waldorf and we start unloading the art into there, and she basically had the whole restaurant shut out.
Susie Rizzuto.
Her family owns Cuisinart and Con Air.
Yeah, yeah.
And all the hairdryers and all that.
Yeah.
Phil Rizzuto, Yankees player.
Anyway, big time family, great family.
She was amazing.
And so they're sitting in there, you know, and we're putting all the art up against the walls, man.
It was like a real crazy moment, man.
You know, it is just a South Sider, man, in Beverly Hills, just, you know, bringing all this art into the hotel.
And she bought it all.
No shit.
She bought it all.
Whoa.
She bought every last one of them and then continued.
I mean, and I took the money I made from there.
I gave a lot of it back to Arnold's, the charity.
Well, to the charity.
I gave it to the charity.
Yeah.
And then I went and opened a gallery in Chicago.
I took the money I made and opened up a gallery.
And since then, you can even see I've opened up a gallery in Beverly Hills.
I opened up a gallery in West Hollywood.
I opened a gallery in Boca Raton.
I now have a gallery in Lincoln Park in Chicago, on Chicago and Division, which is a beautiful area.
And so I kind of changed the whole game of even how someone sells art, you know, because the galleries take 50%.
And I do have a gallery that represents some of my art.
It's Artist Replete.
It's one of my friends.
He started the same time I was.
Doing my art, he started a gallery.
But for the most part, I've always had my own studio gallery.
And because of my story and because of the books and stuff that's happened, people want to come meet me and talk to me and then have a piece of history, right?
Because my art is more than just something cool to look at or whatever.
It's literally a part of my history, right?
And my history has been documented through books and all these different things, you know?
And so collectors have really been, especially in the last couple years, Like at first, it didn't really help a little bit to sell the art, but now it's on a whole different level because I've stuck around.
Yeah, right.
You know, a lot of artists come and go.
Yeah.
All right.
They have a short lifespan.
I'm going on 10 years now.
So not only have I been able to stay out of prison, but I've been able to stay an artist.
But I work hard, you know.
It's amazing, dude.
Such a powerful story, bro.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Well, we just did like over three hours.
That's nuts.
That was amazing.
Such a fucking amazing story.
Where can people find your art online and like find your work online?
Is there a website or something?
Instagram, and then I got a um, I got a gallery, yeah, Arthur J. Williams Jr.
Okay, and then I got Da Vinci's Gallery.
Uh, we're actually building the website right now.
There was one, but I tore it down because I'm remaking it.
Uh, but Da Vinci's Gallery that's that's my gallery that I created, and uh, and yeah, man, it's just it's been amazing, dude.
You know, it's been really amazing.
Now I'm just doing all kinds from gold leaf to murals, yeah.
You know, it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, you know.
That's amazing, man.
Yeah, it's been great.
Well, thank you so much, man.
Oh, here it is.
Whoa, look at that, bro.
That's incredible.
Yeah, it's wild.
That's wild.
That's awesome.
That is so cool.
Well, my walls are bare in this building.
I need to get some art.
So I'm going to be placing some orders.
Yeah, well, if you ever want anything, just contact me.
Don't go through them because they take half.
Okay.
Okay.
I didn't realize that.
And I'll give you half off just to cut straight through me, Doc.
Yeah.
Oh, that Martin Luther King.
So, hey, funny story about that.
Wow, that's sick.
Look at the Tupac one.
Oh, Tupac.
The Tupac right now is sitting in Interscope Records.
No way, yeah.
Tony Seiler from Interscope had me do that.
Um, the Martin Luther is a funny piece, so so this piece I can't afford that one.
No, yeah, it was a beautiful one.
That's incredible, bro.
That was it.
Took me a long time to figure out how to paint that.
So I'm big into layering.
Remember, I told you perspective, even on that mural that you've seen, where you almost looked through it.
So, man, I'm really.
I'm really into taking a flat surface and creating a whole world.
Almost like I'm getting really good at it now, but even almost like when you put an AI glasses on and you feel you're there.
I promise you, people are going crazy at that mural that I showed you, the little wall, because when you stand there by the path, you feel like you're there.
And that's pretty awesome.
You can do that with a brush, man.
And I put secret things in it.
I put watermarks in the stuff.
I put fingerprints.
So when I sign it, when I sign a piece, I'll put my fingerprint on it.
Oh, that's sick.
Yeah.
I got badass certificates for the Providence.
They're like $100 bill certificates.
Go back to the main one where it shows everything.
Steve, go back.
I want to see what else you got.
That's my boy.
Wow.
Keep going.
Dude, I really like the layer with the colors.
Those are so cool.
Those are fun.
Those are fun.
This is a lot of old.
Yeah, Ben Robinson.
That's what we got to weigh.
That's incredible, bro.
And then right now, I'm on some knockoffs.
I'll show you some stuff that I have right now.
Yeah.
It's like on a whole nother level.
Hell yeah, man.
I'm doing some really, really cool stuff right now.
I mean, 2026 looks real good for me because I got some pretty big shows coming up.
My gallery.
I just built it in October.
So, my gallery in Chicago on the south side, I closed it like three years ago.
And we moved to the Ozarks.
So, I live in the Ozarks now.
Oh, okay.
Up in the mountains.
Yeah.
You know, it's unbelievable.
And I go back to Chicago once a month to the gallery, you know.
But when I closed my gallery and moved to the Ozarks, I thought I was like secure financially, right?
Like, I felt.
Comfortable enough to close my gallery and then go out into the mountains and disappear right and just do my commissions and then maybe do a show once a year right, and for like the first year that was cool, but then it started I didn't realize how much I relied on my gallery.
I, you know right, I I and I started sounding like man, this is, I gotta get my gallery again.
Man yeah this, this is not gonna work, and and so then I just I just opened one in october and already it's already doing Awesome, wow, that's incredible, yeah.
So, and like, I got other artists in there, I don't charge them gallery prices.
So, I got my guy Brendan Cooney in there, he's awesome, graffiti artist, goes around the world.
Um, I got a couple other cats that I'm putting in there, and uh, and I and I only charge them 25 rather than 50, you know, because because I, you know, I know how that 50 hits, yeah, you know, it hits, you know, and I want these guys to feel the right pleasure of like, I've sold a lot of art, you know.
Each one has its own feeling.
Like when you sell something, I got a video I could send you where I sold a piece for $100,000 at an auction.
And it was actually at Arnold's house.
It was the following year I went back, right?
And Frank Gehry, I met Frank Gehry.
No way.
Yeah, the architect.
Yeah, he just died.
Yeah, man.
Really?
Yeah, he just died.
But so when I went out to L.A. and opened my Beverly Hills gallery, everything was shut down.
And Frank Gehry had just finished the U.S. Eisenhower Memorial.
Just finished building it.
And they had these robots that did this crazy mesh welding that they put on the side of the U.S. Memorial, Eisenhower Memorial.
Yeah.
And so now they were finished and these robots were just sitting there, right?
So my guy knew Frank Gehry's assistant, Thomas, awesome dude, been with Frank Gehry 40 years.
He's a scientist, straight up scientist, right?
So they're like, hey, man, they want someone to make some art with these machines, with these robots.
Would you want to come over there and check them out?
And I'm like, hell yeah, I'd love it.
I know who Frank Gary was.
He built Millennium, you know, he's built a lot of stuff in Chicago.
So I was like, hell yeah, I wanna go.
So we go over to his studio in Glendale, and he's got these big koi fish made out of this crazy material, right?
Like, mash.
I guess he was making them for the Saudi prince.
Real fascinating shit, yeah.
Wow.
But anyway, so they're taking me on a tour, and they bring me to these robots, and they're telling me how we can use them and how we could change the colors.
And I'm looking around, and I see this big roll of paper in the corner.
Right, well, of course, you know, counterfeiter.
Right, I start be lying right to the role, I'm not even paying attention to the robots anymore, man.
Right, and I start feeling it.
I'm like, Man, I look back, and they're all kind of like grinning and laughing.
They said, Only someone like you would go to that, right?
And I said, Well, what is it, man?
They said, Well, you could mold it, you could mold it into anything, you get it, you got to put it into some solution, and it gets, and once it's wet, you can move it, and you got about 45 minutes.
I'm like, Well, has anyone ever painted or printed on the stuff?
Louis Vuitton Store00:05:43
And he's like, No, we just use leave it white, and they do because they actually it's the same material that the Louis Vuitton store in Paris was built with, yeah.
So he built the Louis Vuitton store.
This was some of the material, same right.
And um, and I said, Well, can I try?
Can I experiment with it?
And they were like, Yeah, we could give you a little bit of it.
So they gave me enough to do like four pieces, five pieces.
The first three I ruined completely, just yeah.
They would the stuff wouldn't take the oil, yeah, it wouldn't.
It wouldn't take the print, it just couldn't get it to work, man.
You know, uh, everything would peel off it, man.
This stuff was just a pain in the ass.
I guess they use it for the electronics and space shuttles, they wrap it so they don't get moist.
Really, yeah.
I don't say the name of it because I don't want no one else to know my secret because, yeah, the shit's you know, it's pretty cool, but anyway, because they didn't give me the name, right?
But, but, anyways, yeah, so what happens is so I finally get a piece to work.
Right, I'll show you this video.
I go to Arnold's with it, sells for a hundred thousand.
I go back to the studio in Glendale and see Thomas, and I and I try to give him some money, he wouldn't even take it.
Right, I said, Man, I sold the piece for a hundred thousand.
Man, I said, Man, can I please get some more?
I finally got it, man.
So for me, it was like I finally found the perfect piece of art that I could just sell, yeah, right, because you that's what you want.
You want to find artists search their life for that style that just takes off, right.
Right.
And so for me, I had been experimenting with a lot of different shit.
If you go through my art, you'll see I've tried everything from aliens to horses, man.
I've tried to paint it, but it's always on a sheet of money.
But I've tried to paint everything.
So I look at this like, this is it, man.
I got it.
And Thomas, he's like, We can't, I can't give you any more of that, man.
We're doing a big project for Facebook.
We're still finishing up this koi fish.
It was massive.
He said, And that's all we have.
So I, you know, I'm just not going to be able to give you any.
So I got super discouraged, man.
I left out of there.
And then I said, Well, can I at least find out what it is so I could get it myself?
And he's like, Man, we don't, when Frank don't like to give up, he gets it from NASA.
Well, apparently I found out it's pretty heavy duty shit, right?
So anyway, so I leave out of there.
About a year goes by, and I'm getting ready to go back home to Chicago.
I've been out in LA for like two years at this point.
And so I'm going around visiting all my friends that I met, you know, because I met some great people out there, you know.
And so I go out there and see Thomas, and I say my goodbyes, and he says, Hey, I got a surprise for you.
And I'm like, Really?
And they gave me enough material to do like 15 pieces.
No way.
It was amazing.
That's incredible, bro.
And I went back to Chicago, I made some more stuff.
Sold everything like that stuff just boom quick, you know.
And then I ran out again, right?
But this time I was sending pictures of everything I was making, right?
Saying, hey, check this out, check this out.
And the stuff was just badass, right?
And so then I finally, when I ran out again, I called him and I said, man, I know that, please, man, I'm begging you, right?
I'll pay whatever.
He said, well, I got really good news for you.
I'm like, what?
He said, we're done with it.
I'm like, you're done with it.
He's like, yeah, we're done using it.
I said, well, shit, man, like, He goes, We're going to give you the name of it and we're going to give you the supplier and we're going to let the supplier know that you're going to be calling on behalf of us.
Wow.
I said, No way.
And they did.
And yeah, so now I got the stuff.
Do you have pictures of this stuff?
Yeah, no, yeah.
Can I see it here?
Yeah, yeah.
I got my phone.
How do we find it online?
Maybe if you Google pictures or something of mine, you'll see because a lot of stuff pops up on it, it might be in Google images or something.
But I got it on my phone.
Oh, you show me on your phone.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I could send you some stuff.
No, the stuff is gorgeous.
That's amazing.
Yeah, but actually, one of those pieces was on there was an Einstein that was all crumpled up.
Uh huh.
That's one of the pieces.
But I've done quite a cool.
Now I'm about to do some.
I just did an octopus.
I cut out the octopus and then I cut out little hundreds and I got the octopus grabbing little hundred dollar bills.
Oh, sick.
It looks so bad.
That's amazing, bro.
Yeah, there's a crumpled one right there.
There you go.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's hanging at the London.
That's so sick.
Yeah.
See how it's crumpled up?
Yeah.
And you just hang it on the wall?
Yeah, you just hang it on the wall.
Yep.
I did that for Roy Jones.
That's Roy Jones Jr.
No way.
That is insanely cool.
Scroll up.
I'm going to show you that printing press.
Just print.
Look at this.
Look at this thing.
Wow.
That is ridiculous, dog.
You see that Warhol on the back?
Yeah.
Dude, I do, like, you know, that press is awesome, though.
Like, that is incredible, dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, I, I, I, You know, that's the thing about art is that, like, it's like as long as your mind is there, man, you just the ideas are just, you know, so yeah, yeah, no, I mean, first million, yep, printed on that incredible, yeah, yeah.
I did a Rolls Royce that sold for like 800,000, wow, yeah, it was in Rob Report.
If you looked up Arthur J. Williams Jr. and Rolls Royce, you gotta see this thing, this thing is nuts, but it, uh, yeah, and then put Rolls Royce, this thing is ridiculous, look at that.
Incredible Printing Press00:00:59
Oh my god.
Wow, so it's like a wrap, yeah.
And then, well, wrap and paint, yeah.
Okay, I did both, yeah.
Look at the wheels, dude.
Are the wheels insane?
Holy smokes, that is bananas, dude!
Yeah, yeah, that's really cool.
No, I mean, I like I said, man, my art career has just been like, yeah, yeah, it's just been like a movie, man.
Your life is a movie, yeah, it's still going, too.
Yeah, it's still going, man.
I really appreciate, man, you bringing me on, man.
This is.
Of course, it's been a long time coming, man.
I'm excited.
We got, I remember the last time we talked, man.
Yeah, I was like, man, I can't get on a plate.
Yeah, years ago, years ago.
Well, but I made it happen, man.
About to break it.
I'm gonna be flying real soon here in a couple weeks.
Do it, man.
Like I said, I'm getting over it.
I'm done.
Take off 200 milligram edible and make the flight 10 times scarier, and then you won't be afraid ever again.