The REAL Story Behind War Dogs | David Packouz

The first thing they ask is the triangle of that.

And the crazy thing about that story is that it's actually true.

“But what did you do with all that cash at the end of the movie?”

Man, I wish, I wish that was true. Do you really like the Joan Hill character? And I was like, no, he was like, wait, where? I was like Joan Hill made him seem often confused. Yes. So I talked to you on the phone while I was in prison.

Listen, I got a question from you. Did Ephraim ever tell you why he screwed me over? Right. And I want, yeah. I was like, I'm so good because I asked them. Hey, this is Matt Cox, I'm going to be interviewing David Packhouse.

David is the real guy who was played by Miles Teller in the movie, War Dogs. And I happened to have written a memoir for Ephraim Devoroli, which was played by Jonah Hill in the movie, War Dogs. And so David was gracious enough to drive up here for Miami

“and let me interview him and I think it's going to be a super dynamic interview.”

So check it out. Lived in Israel in Jerusalem until it was eight years old and then we moved to Miami for my dad's work. He went to massage school because I realized massage therapist makes $75 an hour and my friends were making $5 an hour and a minimum wage jobs. And the ladies like a guy who's good with his hands so that helps as an extra bonus.

What would you think? I mean, when you're in high school, what were you thinking you were going to do? Right. I mentioned the massage thing, but what you did? Oh, this is it for me. I'm going to be a massage therapist. No, no, no, no, no, no. So I was in college. I went to the massage school in order to support

myself while I was in university. I was studying chemistry in university. And I also had a few other side businesses that I was doing.

Right. So I first got into...

Yeah, one was over. You were already bidding on government contracts or contracts in general to import stuff? Yeah, I was importing stuff. It wasn't government contracts. It was. So I started, the way it started was, it started when I first, I got my first digital camera. And I realized this decarts were super expensive. And so I kept on looking for a cheaper SD card.

And then I realized I needed to buy them in bulk in order to get it real cheap. And I realized I could sell the rest of a money ban, make some money. And so I started doing that importing SD cards from China, doing larger and larger volume, selling them on eBay, doing pretty well. And then a friend of mine tells me, oh, you know, you've seems like you know how to source things internationally and import them.

So I have a bedsheet business that I sell bedsheets and towels and other items like patient gowns and things like that to nursing homes. So if you could get me a better price than my distributor, I'll buy from you. So I started looking for manufacturers for that and found better prices than he was getting a lot better prices and started importing that. So I had a few of these businesses. I was doing pretty well. By the time I met up with F from, I was around halfway done

my chemistry degree doing pretty well with, yeah, it wasn't like in the movie struggling to, to make ends meet, they just needed a better arc. Right. So they wanted to, it to look like I was

much harder down on my luck. I never took delivery of all these bedsheets I got stuck with.

It was just brokering. I would just make a deal with the buyer, make a deal with the supplier, get a transferable letter of credit and that was it. I didn't even like have to finance the deal. It was great. I would just collect a commission. And I was doing this with containers of towels and bedsheets. So I was telling, yeah, we had mentioned something about the movie.

“I was like, no, it's not true. It's not true. Well, you have to understand that you've got,”

what's probably 10 to 20 hours worth of screen time that you have to consolidate in. That's exactly into an hour and a half. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so you have to make massive funds. You have to move in certain scenes together. There's all kinds of storylines that. Yeah. You have to have a classic arc. Yeah. So you have to have a aesthetic character. Yeah. So the core struggling college student is better than the, hey, I'm actually doing all right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's a better

arc. It's a better dramatic arc. So yeah, I was doing okay. I mean, I wasn't, I think at that point, I had about $100,000 to my name, which is not bad for a college student. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I was in your 20 or early 20s. I was 22. Yeah. I was 22. So I was doing okay, legally. Um, yeah, completely illegal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I could do that. Yeah. 100% legal. And that's when I bumped into F from. And it was at a wrong place that they're wrong time. Well, you know,

different? How it would have been if had gone a different way. Yeah. So we bumped into each other at a mutual friend's house, a guy that was friends with both of us. We, that we had grown up together. I first knew F from when we were teenagers. We both went to the same synagogue and we were both sneak out during prayers. He's four years younger than me. So he was friends with, with guys who were

“two years younger than me that I was friends with and that's so how that's how he got into my”

friend group. But then he got sent away to work for his uncle, uh, B. K. Um, yeah. And uh, I think when he was about 16 or so, and I lost contact with him, then when he was 9 to 18, 19 is when he came back from LA after learning the government contracting business from his uncle. Which was brilliant.

Yeah. Like whenever I, whenever I bash him, I always point out that there are, there are some

amazing things about. Oh, absolutely. You know, I've said, I'll be the first person to say it. Right. Um, yeah. Or more individual. But yeah. Yes. I, I, I, I, I don't know if this is the right term, but I've always thought of him as an idiot, Savant. Right. Um, because he's so good at certain things and he's so bad at certain things. Yeah. And the things he's bad at tends to ruin the things he's good at long term. Like he can't think long term. He, everything's just about

very, everything's transactional. It's always about what's this deal going to do. He never thinks about the long term relationship just burns everybody. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's his

Achilles heel, so to speak. But, um, but yeah, I mean, he's, he's an amazing guy. I'll, I'll be the

first as much as I, uh, dislike him, right, one as much as he screwed me, um, and stole from me. But, uh, he's an amazing person. Not many people can make millions of dollars by the time they're 18 years old on their own. And, uh, and yeah, and so he told me about the business he was doing and he's like, oh, you're doing like a lot of the things. I'm doing searching for sources overseas, rearranging logistics, uh, doing the financing with the bank, et cetera. I could use a guy like

“you. You should come work with me. I could use a guy I could trust. I really want to expand my”

business and I asked him how much money have you made. And he goes to me, he's like, I'm going to show you, but, uh, only to inspire you, not because I'm bragging, okay? And he, uh, shows me his bank

account and he had 1.8 million in cash in the bank. Yeah. And that, like, he was 18 years old and I was

like, holy crap. I mean, I was, I thought I was hot shit with my 100k and, uh, this guy had made in the space of one year almost $2 million and he was 18 years old. I was like, this guy knows something I don't and, um, definitely want to learn what he knows. Yeah. So that's how I got involved with the, uh, the infamous Ephraim de Veroli. Yeah. You know, you guys start, uh, bidding on stuff right away. Like, you drop what you were currently doing or you're just kind of doing it like on the side,

as you drive full time, like, so all in. Right. So the way it happened was at first, the way the way we got involved. I, I told them, well, you know, I don't know about about, you know, your business or something, but, you know, you, I know you've got a lot of money and, uh, you know, because he showed me. And I had been offered, this was, um, this was right after the first Xbox had been released and through my contacts for the SD cards, I had been offered a bunch of Xboxes at, uh, wholesale prices.

And all the stores were out of Xboxes. So I thought, well, that's amazing. I didn't have the money I needed to buy these Xboxes. I said, hey, you want to come in and invest in this and we could buy a bunch of Xboxes and flip them. And so, and then he went to work on this deal and it was amazing to watch and work because he broke through, like, five levels of, uh, intermediaries, right. You kept on going up the chain of command, like just convincing them. And, you know, a middleman,

“the only thing he's got is being a middleman, yeah, it, having a middleman give up his suppliers”

to you, he just got cut out. It's, it's amazing. He was able to do that. Yeah, not just once, but, like, five times in a row. Until we got to, uh, a, um, he was just so convincing over the phone. It was really amazing. Um, and, uh, we got to the final person who was, uh, it was from an email address of, like, a major electronics distributor. And every time we bumped up through the different intermediaries, the amount we had to buy got bigger and bigger and bigger. And by the time we got to the, like, fifth

level, we had to buy, I think it was $20 million worth of Xboxes. I was like, uh, like, I think it was 100,000 or 10,000. My math is terrible in my head. Uh, so, um, uh, he only had $2 million, so we needed another $18 million. So we started looking for investors and we, we, we got, like, a hedge fund on the line. And he was like, gentlemen, we can do this deal. And it's, uh, I need $20 million and I'm 18

going to be a letter of credit. So the bank was going to hold the money and escrow until we ex, until we inspected all the merchandise. So it was not, like, fake, um, at least not that we could figure out. Right. Uh, but the hedge fund backed out and decided that it just didn't pass the smell test. They called it. Right. Um, and I guess they, the, what they were figuring probably was,

“why is there, there's such a large amount of Xboxes, not through the official channels, right?”

Wouldn't it just go through Microsoft to Best Buy or because we had already lined up Best Buy and Walmart. They were willing to buy the Xboxes at, um, at retail price, not like the full retail price. They were going to use it as a loss leader to get people into the door. So we were going to

double our money on this $20 million deal. And so the hedge fund decided didn't pass the smell test

and pulled out. And I think what they thought and was probably true, especially, especially at that time, which is like late 2005, um, the Chinese factories were very infamous. They still do it to this damn sure, but especially back then, um, they're infamous for doing production overruns. And so if a customer comes to them and says, make me, you know, five million Xboxes, they'll make 5.1 million Xboxes. Right. And then they'll sell the extra 100,000 on the, you know, on the

gray market and or really black market. I mean, they're not allowed to do that. So that's probably where they came. And so if Microsoft found out about it, they could have frozen it in customs and there would have gone their 18 million dollars. So, right, that's probably why they turned it down. So that whole thing collapsed. And then after that whole thing collapsed, he says to me, he's like,

you know, we almost got really rich right there. Right. Because almost made $20 million right off the bat.

But, uh, but why don't we do the the business, my bread and butter. You know, I, I know government contracting. I could teach you how to do it. Uh, let's just, let's wind bids and with the government and we'll make money that way. I'll teach you how the system works. And so he taught me how the system worked. And he was like, you know, I, I'm already doing arms. So once you concentrate on something else to expand the business. So I concentrated on fuel. Uh, one my first contract with

then like a month and a half of starting to work made eight grand, you know, not bad for a month and a half of work. Right. Um, and then I was working on bigger fuel contracts. Because you have with

“government contracting, you have to win the smaller contracts in order to win the bigger contracts”

when you're getting into a new field. So you can't just automatically go for the multi-million dollar ones. So if there's something under a hundred thousand dollars, you don't need the past performances. They call it or the proof that you've done this business before. Right. So I was building up, uh, AEY's, uh, the which was his company's name, uh, AEY's reputation and past performance in the fuel industry. He was like, oh, I need your help to work on this gun parts contract because he won

this, uh, this, like, um, specialty gun parts for the special forces. These like rare gun parts, you need like to source like 130 different items. Because the special forces train on these old historical weapons, uh, because you don't know where you're going to be in the field. And you may need to use the weapons that are available there. And sometimes those are old outdated weapons. So the, the special forces has a collection of these old historical weapons that are hard to

source. So he did it at like a very high margin. Because he, he knew the gun industry really well. He's a gun nut. And so he knew that that this was going to be a pain in the ass contract to supply. So he just put a real high number out there, ended up winning. They didn't want to spend the time sourcing on it. So he gave it to me. So I worked that for a while, made some money on that. And then we saw, uh, I worked on a few things that I failed at, um, a few vehicle contracts,

some food contracts, some clothing contracts. In government contracting, you tend to lose like 10 contracts that you've been on before you win, right? Unless you specialize in a specific field. And you know that field really, really well. And then you could win a higher proportion of contracts because you know what your, what the competitive landscape is. Right. So, uh, I was kind of shooting in the dark, saying what, what we could win was one of those contracts, the, the, like the S. U. V.

Thing with like Heinrich or, what was it? Oh, Henry. Henry. Heinrich was his real name. Yeah. Yeah. We call them Henry. They call themselves Henry. That's a introduced himself. But yeah. So no, we didn't use him. So he was, he was the, the guy played by Bradley Cooper in the right. He was, he specialized in military gear. So we were just using him whenever there was like it's, particularly, um, uh, Warsaw Pact military gear. He had really good connections all over Eastern Europe.

“Right. So, um, well, I'm just, I remember there was one time. There was the Indians or something.”

He wanted or Pakistanis, had one or somebody had wanted some special Jeep. Oh, no, then,

I think the Indians could build it for this much. And um, Deborah always said, you guys had won the bid.

Because he couldn't get him for that much. Right. And he was like, the whole thing fell apart. Yes.

“Yeah. So I remember that. That was the, yeah, not at one. You know, now that you mentioned it,”

I do remember that. Yes. Yes. That's right. Good. So yeah. That was a big one. I put a lot of work into. I guess, uh, I repressed all that those painful memories. I mean, I, I think, uh, you, you, you, listen, like, I, whenever I've lost money, yeah, I learned a lot. I don't know. A lot more. One of

that's true. With some goals for crew. Yeah. That was like, you know, then it's like, I'll never do that.

If everyone goes right, then I'll probably learn much. Right. So, uh, but yeah, because I remember sitting with Deborah Rollin, he just, you know, he told me just one after another after there was so many contracts. Yeah. That you, you, both of you were bidding on. Yeah. And he had won the one that was like 50 million to, to Iraq, to Iraq. Yeah. And then they came back and they were like, no, yeah, to complete this many tasks, you know, each individual section. Right. Then you have to compete.

I'm many compete. Right. Like, I won the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, that's, so, um,

“so, I'm sorry, you were, you were saying, I think I kind of interrupted you. Yeah, you guys were.”

Uh, so yeah, I mean, and then in the summer of 2006, is when we saw the, uh, the

half the solicitation for the Afghan contract. Right. Um, and, uh, we, we saw that it was like 30 different items, each enormous amounts. Like, the other thing was at least 20 to 30 times bigger than anything we'd ever seen. And he says to me, he's like, hey, listen, you know, I know that you're, you're working on the fuel stuff and this other stuff, but I really need your help on this. Um, I've got my, my sort, these five sources. And so don't talk to them. I'll get prices from them. But I need you

to go and scour the internet and get as many new sources as you can. And, uh, so we have the best possible price for this contract. And we thought it was a really long shot because this was just a huge contract. It was massive. I mean, um, but we figured this is, we had delivered these items before. So we had the past performance. So we technically qualified for this contract. So we had to bid it on it. And, uh, so I spent like a good like two months or so. It's your, uh, I paid.

No, I was, I was working completely on commission. I was living off my savings. Yeah, that's, so my hundred K was dwindling. Right. And, um, but you're seeing him during this time. You're seeing task orders getting fulfilled. Yeah. And huge checks are coming in. Yes. You're seeing him. Yeah. Yeah. He's doing some like, it's not like at the pipe dream. Like, no, all right. This is happening. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It just hadn't won anything big myself. Right. So he had, most of the

contracts that he had was delivering on at the time. He had already won before I started working with him. So he was, he was like working on, on fulfillment. And he was using me to get new business. Right. Right. Because he was busy managing all the dumpster fires. He started with the other contracts.

“Right. So, um, uh, and that's why he didn't want to work on the Afghan contract on getting new”

sources. And he, he says to me, um, well, you know, you, because we made a deal that we split the profits 50 50 for everything I worked on because I would pretty much do all the work until it, we won the contract. And then he would do like the final negotiations of really hammering people down in price and help and check over my work and submitting it to the government and make sure I wasn't messing up. And he would do the financing. And then we would split a 50 50. That was kind of the deal

that we had. And he says to me, well, you know, for this Afghan contract, it's, this is like my bread and butter, you know, so it's not like, it's not like you're completely bringing in new business because I've got my five guys. So, and we can't do 50 50, but I'll tell you what, we'll do 25 75. And I was like, okay, that's fine. You know, that's fair. You know, I was like, whatever, you know,

I wanted 300 million dollars. Yeah, I was like, I'll take 25 percent. That's fine.

If you end up with a 10 percent, if he even just made 10 percent profit. Yeah, that's a massive amount of money. Exactly. Exactly. So, so yeah, so I said, fine, no problem. And so I worked my ass off. Got all the, contacted everyone in their mother and built a huge spreadsheet of all the prices and all the locations and the estimated shipping costs. The really massive spreadsheet of all the different aspects, the packing configuration. So we would be able to calculate

logistics and all that stuff. And we submitted the bid. Then we didn't hear from them for like four months, like three, four months. I worked on other contracts, lost most of them. And then

an audit where they, I think we had three or four audits. I forgot. Yes. Yes. Where's where this woman came in? Yes, exactly. There's a whole comical kind of thing of how he just was like, yeah, it's like I just didn't ever thought we were going to pass this fucking thing. It's like I had just, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he's like my accountant had been had gone to federal prison or something before. And right, he, yeah, he loved that. He, he, he, he just, he just loved that. I just threw his accountant back and

yeah, I want to jump in. I want to say something real quick that that I don't think anybody, not everybody that is going to watch this knows that let I actually wrote, yeah, I was actually imprisoned with devil roly and I wrote his memoir, right, you know, so it was once a gun runner, right, that's why I like a lot of the stuff like what we're what you and I are talking about. It's really really the story, not the movie, right, I'm saying, because the movie people are,

“well, yeah, I don't remember that. That's what they're probably thinking of the truth,”

but I mean, I sat with devil roly for, you know, 40 to 80, probably 80 hours or well, you know,

yeah, which he was never once on time, by the way. Oh, yeah, he's never been on time in his life.

I remember going, one time he was supposed to meet me, waited there for 30 minutes, and I was like, okay, because he always promised he'd be there, when he found him in the unit, in the housing unit, and he was in the middle of arguing with a Muslim guy, installed apples out of the prison cafeteria, and the Muslim guy, devil, he wanted two stamps for two apples, and devil roly wanted to give him two stamps for three

apples. And I walked up, and I could hear them arguing, walking in the unit, walk over to sell and sat there for five minutes. Yeah, going like, like this, and that after about five minutes, I was like, what the fuck are we doing, bro? And he's like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, yeah, yeah, you're forgetting I don't want to. Yeah, you're right, you're at, I'm like, you're supposed to meet me 45 minutes, you're like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And he got up,

and it was like, yeah, like, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't care that you did, it just stood me up again, right, right, and you're arguing over a stamp. Yeah, with the guy by the way, they've got like 30 years for hijacking a plane. Oh, wow, you know, I'm saying it was really ridiculous, but yeah, yeah, he loves to win. He loves it's all about that. It's all, and my favorite story, very similar to yours, was early on when I first started working with him,

I heard him get on the phone with AT&T and argue with them, like, about like a five dollar overage for like 45 minutes, for 45 minutes. And he already had millions of dollars in the back, and I told him, like, you know, he's like yelling and screaming and demanding to speak to the manager and all this stuff, and I was like, dude, why are you, why do you, it's five bucks? Right,

“why do you care? Is he your tear? Exactly, you make $1,000, $2,000, yeah, that's what I told him.”

And he says, it's the principal of the matter. Oh, buddy, fucks me, yeah, no, buddy, fucks me. You're really only, he only seemed, he really only seemed happy with the deal if he felt he had gotten over, yeah, on the other person. He wasn't even about, like, win, win such a waste. We booked up something out of it, what we wanted. It was no idea to get over on you. Yeah, if you walk away, happy, I fucked up. Exactly. That's how he worked. I mean, yeah, I saw him destroy people. I saw him,

like, like, trick people into things. Yeah. And because he always managed to like maneuver it

in like sneaky ways, like he would promise things over the phone and then go back on his word about like, you know, the amount he was going to buy or the the timeline or whatever, you know, like he managed always managed to maneuver something. And I remember once him once talking to a guy and the guy was like literally crying on the phone, and he was like, dude, if you do this,

“I don't remember the exact details. But like, he's like, if you do this, he loved to talk”

up with his speaker phone on, so if you could hear both ends of the conversation. And he's the guy was like, if you do this, you're going to ruin me. My bank, my business is going to go bankrupt. And, you know, like, my kids in the hospital and all this stuff, like, the guy was really sobbing on the phone. And Ephraim's like, I wish I could help you, man. But that's just how it is. You know, it's not personal. It's business. And he just like hangs up and he's like, well,

I got another 3% on the deal. Nice. Just like that. Yeah. Yeah. For 3% he was willing to just bulldoze this guy. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I kind of believe it. Yeah. So you went in the contract. Yeah. So, yeah, flashbacks. So yeah, we went in the contract. And at first he's like, he says to me, he's like,

David, you know, amazing job doing all this sourcing, you know, we wouldn't have won it without you.

You pulled in. You really pulled in those grenades. It was actually one of the major money makers in the contract was one of my sources for Bulgaria company that made grenades. And, um, and work,

to, um, to run the entire contract. I want you to manage the whole thing. That's what he tells me.

“And I said to him, I'm like, I mean, you're not going to help me manage it. I mean, you're the expert”

here, right? Yeah. Um, and he's like, no, no, no, I'm going after other business because, you know, we're, we're really rocking and rolling now. You know, we're, I'm good. This is just the beginning.

And I said, maybe we should concentrate on the $300 million deal. We just, right? And yeah,

I was going to say, and, and just for the sake of clarity, yeah, that deal, it's not like, hey, we have to get the entire $300 million before we get paid. Yeah. They send task orders with I say, right now we need, you know, whatever, 500,000 AK 47 rounds and, you know, 1,500, whatever, him and four grenades and this, so we have a task order and that task order is worth $6 million. Yeah. And then you fulfill that. And as soon as that's done, they pay you. And then the next one is

this one's for 15.2 million. Yeah. So, so, and sometimes it's two and three task orders. So, it's not like you're waiting three years to fulfill it. Right. To get the money. No, no, millions of dollars is coming in. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. Yeah. So, it's not like, hey, you take this. And if he ends up pulling it off great. If not, that's not him. Right. No. Right. These are deals that are coming in. This isn't going to bankrupt the company. Yeah. Three years worth of fucking deals here.

Yeah. Exactly. And it was 20 times bigger than anything he'd ever won in his entire business history. Right. So, I said, you know, we should concentrate on this enormous cashcat. We just won. And he said, well, I'm just I'm going after more business. You handle this yourself. And I said,

“okay, I mean, look, if you insist, I think it's the wrong move. But if you insist, I'll do it.”

And so, you could, he could use if you didn't fulfill those orders. Right. And you fell short. Then he could lose his standing. Yeah. And not be able to bid on anything. Yeah. Yeah. Or get suspended or, you know, whatever. Yeah. And I mean, and he's financing it. So, his money's on the line. Right. Not just his money on the line, but also his investors money on the line Ralph. Ralph Ralph Ralph Ralph. Yeah. Yeah. When he tried so hard to explain to me how he didn't fuck Ralph. Yeah. He tried desperate.

I'm sure he did. Yeah. It just, you know, and it was just like, like, no matter how many times, you know, and I was loved of when I would be like, yeah, bro, it's you owe the guy this much money. Yeah. You, you know, he was like, yeah, you don't understand. I'm thinking, no, but I think the problem I do understand. So, yeah. Poor Ralph. I felt so bad for Ralph. I really did. I love the, by the way, I love the, um, I love the scene in the mood. It's funny that in the movie, like,

you guys go to like the Pentagon, like, you know, right. No, no, it was Rock Island. It was Rock Island. Did you go with him? I did. He went with Ralph actually. Oh, that's right. Yeah, because he wanted someone older or the right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't, because he would look so young. He didn't want another young guy with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he had, but I can see that. That means sense. Yeah. So he went with Ralph. He convinced them to give them the contract. They sent their

auditorers down to the office after a big scramble to create a whole bunch of fake accounting. You know, they, we passed the audit gave them a, the game. One of the things they had to have certain amount of money. They gave, they gave the auditors and a praisel. Yeah. That had an

apprais value of like, whatever, like $20 million. Ralph had bought it for like $1.5 million. Yeah.

And it would be worth 20. You could get the zoning. Right. It didn't have the zoning. But the auditor just saw the properties worth. Like, didn't really, I guess, go through it well enough to realize like, hey, this is kind of an, a subject to. Right. Uh, rezoning, which Ralph had been turned down twice for. So it wasn't getting the zoning. Yeah. But it, it said it was worth 20 million. Yeah. So they took that. They, or whatever. I don't know if it's 20. It might have been five. No,

“what was about those about that? It was about, I think, 18, 20 million dollars. Yeah. I think so.”

Yeah. I mean, it's amazing what they got by the government auditors. Yeah. Another amazing thing in the, in the, during the financial audit where they wanted to see that, or during the past performance audit, one of the documents that Ephraim submitted was a, um, a permit to import, I think it was 20 million AK47 rounds into the US. Right. He got that, that import license approved, then the deal fell

through. So it never actually happened. But he still had that copy of the documents of that import

permit approved. So if he used that as proof to show that he had imported 20 million rounds into the United States, but it never had never happened. Yeah. So yeah. I'm not going to say here. Yeah. And listen to you say that he did something on your hand. Absolutely. Well, you've experienced it

the Jonah Hill character. And I was like, no, no, he was like, wait, where's I was like, Jonah Hill made him

seem soft and comfortable. Yes. Absolutely. No. Yes. Yeah. 10 times. Yeah. Much worse. Yeah. You know, but he, you know, to us, there were, there were times, and honestly, I just fucking laughed out. Yeah, he's very charming. He could be funny and say stuff. He's very, he's very charming and funny. He is very funny. Yeah. That's, that's one of his talents. He can, you know, write up just like, where you're writing the back. He's slapping you on the back until he knives you on the back. And that's,

“that's how he is. He's very good at it. He's very good at it. So you get a conge. You got the conge.”

Yeah. You're, you're starting to put in the, the, or the task orders are writing in. Yeah. So the task orders. So we first get a $600,000 task order. Right. And we weren't, we still couldn't believe that that they had awarded us this contract. We thought that they were giving this, this like $600,000 task order as a test. But the task order wasn't big enough for us to fill an entire aircraft load. So we couldn't really deliver on that profitably. We would lose money if we tried

to deliver on that. So we were freaking out. We were trying to arrange all this other alternate

transportation. And then like a week and a half later, we got a $50 million task order. And we're like,

okay, they, they are actually serious about this. Right. They're, they're, they're actually going to award this huge contract to us. And so we're scrambling, uh, Ephraim's of course renegotiating

“with everybody as he does. Yeah. And, um, and, uh, and one of his classic, uh, strategies was to take”

competitors quotes and like change the prices on that. And then send it to other people and say, look, I got a better price from this guy. So you got to be, hand right. And he would do that with everyone and see how low he could like knock him down. And, um, uh, I was just saying, yeah, there was another one was he had told me about was that some, he had, I figured what it was. He, he got like, he bit on like to, uh, like 2000, uh, helmets or something. Yeah. And he got the price based on

10,000 helmets. Yeah. And then he, that's an classic. Yeah. Yeah. So he's got the manufacturer thinking, I'm going to order 10,000. And they're like, okay, okay, fine, this is the best we can do. And he was

amazing price. Yeah. And then he comes back and he says, okay, the first order they're asking

first 2000, they're going to be asking for 2000 every month or every two weeks. So give me the first two, he gets the first 2000 pay them. And then when they call them up and say, hey, we're ready to shift the next 2000s. He's like, man, they canceled the contract. They were, they were unhappy with your product or they were unhappy with like he blamed them or he says, you know, it's a government. I don't know what happened or and they're like, we gave you a price based on 10,000. He's like,

what do you want me to do? I didn't cancel it. And then what do you really do? Yeah. You still got the product. Yeah. So so that was a standard procedure for him. He would inflate the prices and inflate the quantities to get lower prices. And then he would structure the deal in a way that he was able to weasel away his way out of further orders that he promised then. Or was that was the other one was at this was really underhanded. What he used to do was a equivalent product. Yes.

Like he did know the contract. Yeah. Yeah. If you could provide a an equivalent product. So he's bidding on, you know, night sniper rifles, which are $4,500 a piece. He then says, I can get him for you for $3500 a piece. And then they're like, oh, like that's cheap for them. Night can get him like we don't know how you're doing this, but we'll take it. He wins the bid. And now he's going to give you 10,000 of them. You know, the government gets 10,000. But then he comes back and he says,

listen, night can't fulfill the order by the time you want either you guys need to give us more time. Or we can give you the contracts as we can give you an equivalent product. We've got like South Korean Panther rifles that are $1,500 and nowhere near as good of a rifle, but they meet all the same specs. And then he argues with Panther to get him down to like $1,100. And then he provides all those. And he makes a massive process of massive amount of money. But it's like at some point,

“you know, and I remember when I said, yeah, but bro, like they they wanted this that they expect”

that the night. And he started laughing and he was, oh, I have no doubt that they want. They were would have been more happy with the night. He started laughing and he started laughing just as that gutterl. It was like, he's like, bro, I fucking made, you know, I made $400,000 on that deal. Yeah. It was like, it was some point. At some point, somebody is going to, you're going to hit somebody twice. Right. But and then he has whole thing was like, the government's so massive

providing so many different places like it's not going to happen. Yeah. It's like, yeah.

brag about that. He did that exact substitution. I remember with the M249 machine gun, he substituted for the K3 Korean machine gun. Okay. Yeah. To the state department, I think it was in Colombia.

He made like a million dollars or something. Yeah. That deal, something insane. Yeah.

It was for a for a million dollars. I'd probably probably. Yeah. Yeah. One time. Well, the thing is that he, he, as far as I can tell what he did was legal. Yeah. No, he was insisting. I was like, that's not it. I said, I mean, it's sneaky. Well, it's a bait. It is a bait. It is like a bait

“and switch. It is no, no, no. And the truth is like a child, you know, right, right, right, right, right.”

Right. I mean, in reality, it's a bait and switch. Yeah. But they're not gunna. But legally, yeah, it's unless they can prove, unless they can prove the fire, the fire intent. Right. And he was pretty sloppy. I wouldn't be surprised if he, if he left a trail of

the fire intent. So yeah. Yeah. One thing he would do, they actually showed this thing in the movie

or this really goes all the way. I believe to the dark side. Maybe he would pretend to be a contracting officer and he would call up his competitors and say, oh, you know, uh, there's a glitch in our system. I need to enter the numbers by hand. Can you just give me that price that you bid on this contract? And he would get his competitors to give him the price that they bid right over the phone and so he could undercut them. And the thing that really blew my mind is that he used

“his cell phone to make these calls. Right. And he wouldn't like, you know, Star 67 or whatever it was. Not using”

a cell server to save the US military or exactly. You can easily see the, what number called from is like associated with him online. He just didn't, he didn't cover his tracks at all.

And so it always shocked me that he got away with it. But yeah, there's so many things, so many

things that they could have gotten them on, that it actually surprised me at how few charges they ended up bringing against them once they went through all these emails and everything. Yeah. So at what point, like once you've, once you guys have one, you know, the contract. Yeah. You're, and, you know, I mean, I know the movie focuses on the AK-47s. Yeah, rounds, the 7.62 rounds that there was an issue getting the rounds. Yes. Like, you know, cheap enough.

I don't, I don't know, he explained to me that fuel he gone up. Yes. That's right. He didn't have a huge margin. Right. And so you guys were sourcing them all over the place. Did, right. And I'm unclear.

“I mean, I'd have to break out the book or not. But did you, did you go to Albania? Did you go?”

No. So I didn't go to Albania. We sent, we sent, so, yeah, we sent Alex Padritsky to Albania. So what happened was we found, so we had, we were sourcing things from all over Eastern Europe. The AK-47 rounds were coming out of Albania. They were, from a deal that Henry had set up for us. Right. And we realized at the time, this was in early 2007, there was a huge spike in oil prices. And because we were air shipping everything to Afghanistan, we, the air freight had gone up,

so much that we were underwater on that aspect of the contract. We were going to lose money on this on these shipments. And so I, I had the idea. I'm told that from them, you know, these, these, these, these, the Samo is, are, these crates are packed, they're packed in like heavy wooden crates, right, the ammo. And they're inside these sardine cans, which are metal sealed canisters. And those are inside these thick wooden crates. And I told them, you know, if we remove the wooden crates,

we can probably save a bunch of weight. And we'll save a bunch of money on air freight. And he was like, oh, that's a great idea. We have to find out how much those crates weigh, but we, and he's like, but we can't really trust the Albanians to give us numbers. We need a guy in the ground. And he says to me, he's like, "I need you here in Miami. You're taking care of the government stuff. You know, I need you in the office managing the contract because I'm still, you know,

gonna go after these other contracts." And so what, you know, we need to get someone to go over there. At the time, Alex is one of my best friends, and we had grown up together. It was actually at his house that that efferment, I bumped into each other and started the whole thing. And so Alex had done a stint in the French military. He's has French citizenship. And he was looking for a job, and he was looking for experience. And so I suggested why don't we send Alex,

he has some military experience. He speaks three languages, not Albanian, but he knows his way around.

he's like, "Bro, you know that all the Ammo here is Chinese, right?" And I said, "What are you talking about here in Albania?" And he's like, "No, no, there's Chinese markings on all the crates, and he sends me pictures, but email, right? It's missable evidence." And I tell that from an evidence like, "Oh, Lee, shit, this is terrible because our contract specifically said no Chinese ammunition could be delivered either directly or indirectly." That was the phrase in our

contract. And that was put in there. We assume, in reference to the embargo, which was placed on China in 1989 to the 10th square. But the Ammo had been given to Albania by the Chinese and the 70s. So we figured, well, it probably doesn't violate the terms of the embargo because you can buy

“Chinese AK-47s in the United States legally as long as it was imported before 1989, right?”

Because it was imported while it was legal, so it remains legal. And he, or hadn't you guys already shipped some of it?

So the, so I think the first aircraft load we shipped was actually Albania. It was Albania,

Namo, and then, but there wasn't apparently according to the Albanians, not that much of it, and most of their Ammo was Chinese. So the next thing that they were going to ship, they were wanted to ship the Chinese Ammo. And Ephraim was like, "Oh, you know, maybe I can get a waiver from the State Department." And he emails the State Department and they say, "No, you can't do anything. You can't ship this stuff." I think the what he actually asked was, "Is there a waiver in the

law?" I forgot to his exact terminology he used is that where if the Ammo has been in a third

“country for more than five years, that would be allowable under the embargo. And they said,”

"There's no such provision in the law," right? He didn't want to ask something too specific because he didn't want to tip them off. Alex told me later that he had met with the State Department official in Albania and the State Department, if the US State Department official told him, "Oh, yeah, that Ammo's all originally from China. It's good thing that you guys are finding the good use for it." Right, right. He was totally unbored. He didn't bat an eyelash.

Yeah, I wrote that saying in the book. Yeah, yeah. You know, I like to listen. I read pretty much every single piece of discovery. Yeah, he had like 12 boxes underneath his bed. Oh, wow. Multiple. Yeah. So I read all of the, you know, all of the, the interviews and they interviewed that guy and yeah, that was kind of new kind of, you know, saying it was very spooky because he was very, you know, he was like, you see, like, you see, I know, State the

Mormon, but he's helped CIA kind of, right, right. Yeah, I ran. He contrasted down. Yeah, yeah,

he never should ask. Like if he's just not asked and kept shipping it. Yeah. And then they said,

hey, he said, oh, no, no, it's okay. This, well, that doesn't work. Oh, my bad. Right. He could have, you know, then they'd be a stop doing it. Right. But yeah. Right. But instead he decided that what we're going to do is we're going to repackage the ammo and hide the fact that it's Chinese. Right. And so he had Alex find a box manufacturer, a cardboard box manufacturer in in Toronto in Albania.

“And, uh, an ascent, uh, to. True, true, true, fish guy. I think that's going to be. Costa,”

for Bishka. I think it's the Albanian pronunciation. Yeah. I was, I was educated in this here. Yeah. I didn't go, right. I mean, it's, it's, uh, I only know because I heard it from people who, you know, from Alex. So who actually talked to him. But, um, so yes, a Costa owned a box factory, a cardboard box factory. And because we're going to need a whole bunch of cardboard boxes and we're going to do this repackaging. And, uh, and so he asked him for a quote on the labor and Costa said,

I could do the whole thing for about $100,000. And we were going to save about $3 million worth

of transportation costs on this, right, by doing this repackaging. So, so we are obviously, right. So no brainers. Just from the weight alone, it was, we were going to repackage it regardless. But, because of the Chinese issue, we had to make sure to remove the metal tins and the documentation that was, that was, um, inside the tins. And the labor Chinese. Yeah. Exactly. And, and there was an email that went that the government, of course, used later, um, where it said, "Make sure that

all the Chinese documentation is removed." Not that we're doing it wrong. Exactly. Yeah. And so, uh, Costa starts to repackage the ammo and, um, and we start shipping into, uh, into

officer in Kabul, uh, asking him if it was okay if we were delivered in this, in this new configuration.

Right. And the reason we gave was, well, we want to make sure to inspect the ammo, to make sure it's all high quality. Right. And we, therefore, we have to take it out of the tins in order to inspect it. And, is it okay? With these are really strong, double-walled, corrugated cardboard, and, you know, et cetera. So, it'll be fine. Um, and, and also wrapped in plastic to prevent against corrosion. And, uh, and the, the receiving officer said, "Yeah, sure. No problem. Great idea." You know,

that's, that, that configuration is fine. So, we got permission from the government in order to deliver in this, uh, in the, in the, in the new cardboard box configuration. We started shipping into Kabul, started shipping, like, like, like, three aircraft loads a week, plus the grenade shipments, which started to go once a week. And so, everything started to go smooth. The, the money is rolling, and, uh, everything started to go well. And then, uh, I, so I stopped coming into the office

as much because I don't have to work 18 hour days anymore. And, I'm just, like, managing the contract as I should be doing. And then, one day, Ephraim comes into my office after everyone I'll set a left. They're around, like, 15 employees at this point. And, uh, he goes to me, he's like, "You know, some guys around the office have been saying that you're not really pulling your weight around you." And I said, "What do you mean? What are you talking about?" And they're the contracts

going well. And he's like, "Yeah, but, you know, you're not helping on the, uh, on the Iraq contracts." And I said, "But, I'm not part of the Iraq contracts, so why should I help on that?" Right. And he's like, "Well, you know, if those, if those contracts fail, the company can go down,

“and that takes your Afghan contract with it." So you have to help make sure the company survives.”

And I said, "Oh, so you want to give me a piece of the company because I'm only getting a piece on what I work on." And he's like, "Oh, don't be ridiculous." But he's like, "Well, you know, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. I'm only going to make you this offer because you're my best friend,

bro. I would never even consider making this to anyone except for you. But I'll tell you what.

I'll give you a hundred-case salary as a vice president of the IAY. And, um, and you get one percent of the company. And I said to him, "Well, you know, the Afghan contract is going to make us at least 90 percent of the money for the next two years." Right. And I'm supposed to get 25 percent of that. So, I think I'll stick with our original agreement instead of going from 25 percent to 1 percent. Yeah. And he's like, "Well, you know, take it or leave it." And I said, "Go fuck yourself. I'll see you

in court." Right. And I left and, uh, and that was the last day I worked at AY. Was he basically

“was saying you take it or get out? Yeah, that's what he was saying. He's taken it or leave it. You know,”

like he wasn't, he was like, take one percent or get the foot or you get zero." That's what he said. So, uh, so I said, "Well, I'll see you in court." Right. And, um, and so I quit. And, uh, that was a really, really hard because I'd been living on my savings. Yeah. And my savings were dwindling very rapidly. And all the money that I had made with contracts prior to this, he insisted on rolling into the next contract because the way he, what he said, he's like, "Hey, listen, you know, it's not fair. I'm

financing our contracts. If you make money, you should at least finance what you're able to finance."

Right? Because no, you know, 25 percent. Yeah. That's where you're 75 percent is because you're

financing the contract. Right. So, you know, he's like, he can't stand it. He doesn't want to give anybody a dollar or not. Anything. Even doesn't matter if you earn five dollars, you don't want to give you one. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. He doesn't want to give you anything. So, so, and he of course, he kept on insisting kept on saying, "I'm like, you know what, fine, fine, fine." Yeah. And he just warm me down. Yeah. And I'm like, "Fine, I'll take it. I'll still make millions of dollars." So, I thought.

And, um, until eventually. So, he kept on rolling all the money that I had won previously into the new contract. So, I was still living off my original savings, which were greatly decreased because I've been working for a year and a half on this primarily. And so, uh, so after I quit,

“I was like, I went from like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be making millions in the next few”

years to Holy Shit. I'm about to go bankrupt. I'm about to go broke." At this time, I had my daughter was six months at this point. Right. And so, it wasn't just me. I had to like support a kid. Right. And I went from like, going, "I'm about to be a multimillionaire to I'm about to go broke." Right. And I just, it was a really, really hard time in my life. I was like, "That's got wrenchy." It was,

My friends told me that they'd never seen me in a worse condition than that.

Um, kept on negotiating with Devoroli. He kept, of course, kept on hammering me down. And eventually, we agreed to a few hundred K, which was a fraction of what he owed me, like, 10 percent at most of what he owed me. But I just wanted enough money to survive. Yeah. So I could get into something else. Right. And I was like, "You know what? I'll put all, yes, I'm not going to make millions. At least I'll be able to go from here. I won't go bankrupt.

I'll still be able to support my kid. I'll be able to use a few hundred K dowell and and go into something else." And I figured, I know the government contracting. Why don't I start my own company? I have all these contacts. Right. I know how the whole system works. Isn't the problem you did it? This was because you guys were buddies. It was just a fan agreement. You didn't have exactly the movie. Yeah. Tears up the contract. So,

thing. But there actually was, oh, that's actually more true than you would think.

Because we, at first, everything was verbal. But he kept on trying to renegotiate the contracts.

So when there was finally, I was like, you know what? Okay, fine. We'll accept, yeah, this new arena is like the third time you tried to renegotiate it. Right. I was like, I'll accept this renegotiation. But we're putting this in writing and it's not changing. Right. And no more net renegotiations. So we had a handwritten contract that we both signed of very specific about what he owed me. And I tried to scan it in my scanner at home. My scanner

was broken. I put it on my table and I meant to, I was planning on getting my scanner fixed so I could like email it to myself to be able to keep my copy. And then like two days later, it disappeared shortly before he walked into my office to tell me that he was screwing me. So yeah. And he was the

only guy who was coming over my apartment. Yeah, there was like nobody else you could have taken it.

So we lived in the same building. So yeah, I mean, I can't imagine it. Anything else

“having happened to it? So I think he did actually take the contract. So I think he knew he knew”

that I didn't have a written contract. But verbal contract is still enforceable under law if you could prove it. And I was obviously working on this contract and not getting paid a salary. So I wasn't working for zero. Right. So he's, so you have an argument. I have an argument. He owed me something the question was what? And so we kind of went back and forth and eventually he knocked me all the way down to a few hundred k. I was like, you know what,

fuck it? I want this guy out of my life. I'm moving on. We were about to sign the agreement and and then I get a call. The day we were going to sign the agreement, I get a call from a secretary at the office. He says, hey, I just want you to know, but the Fed's just rated the office. And I was like, the Fed's, oh my God, we're so fucked. And I'm like, which Fed's? And she's like, I don't know. They just told us to step away from our computers and they're boxing up all the

files. And they told us to leave. And so I call it Alex, who's my best friend, I'm like, hey,

“you know, I thought you should know this is what I would. This is like a month and a half after”

I quit. Right. And I tell Alex in Albania because he's kept on working for from on a salary. He wasn't getting like a cutter or anything. He wasn't, he was just getting a salary. I told Alex, I'm like, hey, the Fed's just rated the office and he's like, okay, let me call the office and see what's going on. So he calls up the office and he a Danny Doutnik answers the phone, who he's the guy that FM replaced me with after I quit. Right. And Danny answers the phone and Alex says, hey,

you know, I've got this aircraft coming in later today. I need these documents to be able to get the export permit. And he knew that because I told him, like, they told everyone to leave the office. Yeah. So he wants to see what would happen. So he hears Danny covered the mouthpiece of the phone and he goes, he hears Danny whisper, hey, FM. It's Alex. He needs these documents. What are I tell him? And now he hears FM whisper. Oh, tell him, tell him there was a bomb threat.

Yeah, yeah, there's a bomb threat. So we all had to leave. And we can't get the documents now, but we get that, get it to him later, okay? And so Danny gets back. There was a bomb threat. And we have to get these documents to you later. And Alex is thinking, why is he lying to me? Yeah, right? Why is he trying to throw me under the bus? Is he going to blame me for everything? Like, oh, I had no idea. Alex was the guy on the ground. And he was doing everything.

So, but this point at this point, do you think it's as a result of the Chinese ammunition?

“That's what I thought. Okay, that's what I thought. But it was actually a come-header had put in a”

can we claim? Yeah, we found that later. Yeah, the way later, yeah, that FM was selling. I think it was Chinese AK-47 that had been made in China, but stamped in Hungary and the rest packaged and sold.

you know, I'm sure in Eastern Europe, they're blowing each other off. Oh, yeah. So over there, it's a real cut-through business. Yeah. But so, yeah, one of his competitors

“bad mouths them to the feds and they started an investigation. And I think that he had let one of his”

licensees lapse with, I think it was the State Department, because he didn't think he needed it. And they used that as well as some sort of cause to rate his office. So they had like a more than one reason to rate his office. Right. And but I don't think it was the Chinese ammo,

not at first. Yeah. And so they rate his office and I, you know, I figure out, we're fucked.

Because like I call up a defense attorney and I tell him the whole thing and I say, how what's the situation here? And he's the fur he's like, first thing you got to do is go through your your emails and your text messages and do search for key terms like Chinese ammunition and repack and stuff like that. Whatever you think you did wrong, look to see what evidence there is. And so I looked and there was a lot. Right. I mean, unfortunately, at first we were pretty good at

“keeping it every nothing written and and Ephraim said he's like guys, we got to only talk about this”

over the phone. But then he started writing an emails because we were on all on different time zones and there were like harsh deadlines and and we were working 18 hour days and people were losing sleep and then he started writing about it. So we started writing about it and eventually it was just like fuck it. It's all the cats already out of the bag. So there was all these, there was a lot of written evidence in the emails about what the entire thing. I mean, the whole repackaging operation.

And so my lawyer told me is like, hey, you know, you either can you could fight them or you could cooperate. Those are your two options. Right. If you fight them, you need a lot of money and you better be innocent. Yeah. So if you think you're guilty, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, then you really need to go in for your memory. You really don't have a choice here because they already they're they probably only rated the office because they already have access to all the emails.

They already have all this evidence. So it's not like you're going to be able to, you know, if they don't they're going to figure it out. Exactly. And it's like and don't delete anything. Right. Don't delete anything because if you delete it, they're going to find that you deleted it and then they're going to get you on additional charges on with that. And you're stopping on there stuff. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's too late. Yeah. So so Alex and I have of course agreed a co-operate and we get interviewed

by the agents and of course they don't tell you anything at first. But at the end of the interview,

and they tell, they're like, you know, you tell us everything if we think that you're withholding even one tiny bit of information, you get zero, right? You get zero for a co-operating. So you better tell us everything. You better tell us everything. And they give this whole like psychological game on you. And so I told him everything I knew. Of course, I had no loyalty to Ephraim who just screwed me out of all the money I had been working for for the last two years and

“he wasn't going to pay my legal benefit. And honestly probably just got you attitude and you just”

got you out of to an indictment. Yeah. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's like every the only person getting rich in this situation is Ephraim. Yeah. And he's having up me participant or you guys participate in a fraud. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to commit. Yeah. It's a fraud against United States. Right. And now I'm out of to an indictment. So I don't

even have the benefit of saying listen, at least I was ball and at least I made $3 million. Right.

Of saying no, no, I did make a couple million. But Ephraim kept that kept rolling it into the next exactly. Like he's it's yeah, it's a constant scam. Yeah. Yeah. You had no benefit out of that. Yeah. I got no benefit. And I couldn't I didn't even have enough money to hire a lawyer. Right. So it wasn't like I couldn't I couldn't even afford to defend myself. Yeah. Even if I wanted to. Even if I thought I had a good chance, which I didn't considering all the emails. And so after the

interview that agent goes to me, he's like, you know, um, it's your garden start clear for the fruiting by action, quality and the kleinste price hand in hand. So for example, for mini-capten-seek in just 24-38 or garden touch-gapenshearing, just one, two and 80. And Decke, yet all garden products in our field and in the action app, action, kleine price, grocery. We actually knew about the Chinese ammo because one of the

things we found on his desk when we rated the office was a handwritten to do list. And one of the items was repackaged Chinese ammo. Right. Yeah. So he's like, so yeah, you know, we knew about

Yeah. Yeah. But it's funny because what what they originally rated the office for,

yeah, that wasn't even true. Like the repackaging the AK-47s, that's not even true. So that falls apart, but they're still going to go through the, you know, just from seeing that that note, they're going to then go, you know, what let's go ahead and do some keyword search. Yeah. He word searches and then they find all those emails with all the pictures and everything. And so yeah, um, so after, so they told us they told Alex and I, you know, you guys,

you guys didn't benefit financially at all, right? I mean, Alex got a salary, but that was it. But I didn't get a penny. Yeah. Exactly. It wasn't, wasn't even. I think he was there for like four months, something like that. So I didn't get a penny out of it. Right. Um, and, uh, and it's like the,

we're really, Ephraim is the real target of the investigation. So we're not even, we're not planning

“to charge you guys at all. That's what I told us. We're not going to charge you. Because you guys”

co-operated, we're not going to charge you. And so we're like, great, because we can't afford to defend ourselves, so please don't charge us. And then we hear nothing for six months. Six months later, we get, um, the New York Times publishes a front page article about us. And my mug shot and Ephraim's mug shot are on the front page of the New York Times. And they, New York Times, they were trying to call you, so they did. Oh, so I knew, I, I knew

that they were investigating because a few weeks before the art, uh, like maybe a week and a half, before the article came out, I got a call from, uh, the reporter CJ Shivers. And he was like,

uh, we've been getting reports that, uh, some of the ammunition that he wise delivering is

Chinese manufacturer. Do you have a comment on this? And I just hung up on him. And I call my lawyer. And I'm like, uh, I just got this call from the New York Times. And he's like, don't talk to anybody. Don't talk to any journalist right now. Just ignore their phone calls, uh, because if you anything you say, the government will be pissed, right? You don't want to, you know what, in the New York Times got to twist it. Exactly. You saw how they twisted the article anyway.

Yeah. So, uh, I noticed. Yeah. So they, um, uh, I'll give you the little story about how they got our mug shot. So the, the mug shots they got on the front page of the New York Times, we looked terrible. Um, um, um, uh, it was from Ephraim's 21st birthday, where we got arrested on his 21st birthday by then Miami Beach Police Department. And what happened was, um, we Ephraim had this, like, running feud with the valet guy in his building. I don't know why, right? Do they just hated each

other? Yeah. And some, like, this little Cuban guy. And, uh, we were getting ready to go out for his birthday to, like, a club. And he, he goes to the valet guy. He's like, he sees the guy's not there. And so he's like, oh, great. This asshole isn't here. I'm just going to grab the keys from the valet stand and get my own car, because he would live in one of these fancy buildings. This is before we moved into the same building. Uh, he lived in a fancy building where they require

“you to valet your car. It's like your own car. You live there. You know, but you need to, uh, they,”

you can't park your own car. It's like a stupid rule. So he goes into the valet, like, cabinet with the keys and right then the valet guy comes around the corner and sees him rummaging with the valet keys. The guy starts yelling at him. You can't go in there. And so Ephraim's like, uh, I just want my key or just want my car. Where you got to be such an asshole. And the guy just clocks him right in the face. And, and so Ephraim starts punching back in there,

like, beating each other. The security guard comes running over, pulls the Cuban guy away from Ephraim. I pull Ephraim away, where we separated them. And Ephraim's shirt is all like ripped and and he's like yelling, he's like, you motherfucker. I'm going to get you deported. You piece of shit, you know? And I'm calling the cops. And he's like, come on, I got to change my shirt. You know, and we go up to his apartment building and he's like, and he calls up, he actually calls

up the cops and he's like, he's like, I just got assaulted by the valet guy in my building. I want

“to file a complaint against this guy. I think he also might be legal. And so as we're going, he changes”

his shirt as we're about to go down the elevator. We see down in like, we could see there's like, it's one of these like all glass buildings. Yeah. So you could see the driveway from like his floor. And we see like three cop cars pull into the into the driveway. And he goes to me, he's like, hey, as we're going down the other words, like, you know, I got this bag of gun me. If they're going to arrest anybody, it's going to be me, right? So why don't you just like hold this bag for me while I talk

to the cops? That's a good guy. And I'm like, oh, why don't we just drop it on the elevator floor? Yeah, that would have been a better idea. But we thought, I mean, we figured we were, we didn't do it.

if anything. Yeah, nothing. Why would they arrest us? And so I take the plastic bag,

“I put it inside my sock, just in case. And so we go into the driveway and the cops separate us.”

And they talk to us separately. And I tell the story of what happened. And I see him talking to the other cop. And then they go and talk to the valet guy into the security guard. They come back and they're like, well, security guard said that you were holding the valet guy down and your friend was beating him. And I said, that's, that's not what happened. There's video cameras here. Why don't you go check the video feed? You'll see that's not true. He, the valet guy hit him first. And I just separated

them along with the security guard. And why are you saying that? And they're like, well, we don't need to check the video feed because we got witness testimony. So you're under arrest. And I'm like, just, why are you arresting me? Just don't check the video feed. It's right there. You see that video camera right there. And, and they're like, we don't need to, they put me, they put handcuffs on, they put me in the car. We both get dropped off at the police station. I have the, in my sock.

And I'm like freaking out. I can't believe it. We just didn't do their due diligence. I've never heard

that before. Right. Yeah, shocker. And so, so I have the fucking my sock. And I'm like freaking out. I'm like, what should I do? You know, should I take the gun and just like put it in the back, like, drop it on the floor or the car? Are they going to search the car? You know, I don't know what the procedure is. What's the safest thing to do? And so, I decide, you know what? I'm going to keep it in my sock because just in case the, the couple searched the back when she takes me out.

It arrived female come. And so, get to the station. She takes me out of the, out of the car. She takes her flashlight. She searches underneath the seat and, you know, it does a complete search of the, of the back of the car. It's, I'm like, okay, that was a good decision. Didn't put

it in there. And then she gives me a very thorough search before taking me into the, into the,

into the station. But she didn't check my sock. All right. Go into the, they put me, they take me into the, the holding area. And the cops, like, okay, take your socks and shoes off and put them on the

“table. And I'm thinking, should I take, should I keep my, under my foot? Should I put it in my sock?”

Right. Like, what do I, what should I do it? I decide to, to leave it in the sock. But my feet were sweating because I was super nervous. I had to, use my finger to unstick it from my foot. So it stays in the sock. I put, put my, I'm socks are crumpled in my, in my shoes I put it on the countertop. And the, the cop does does another complete body search. And then he looks at the shoes and he's like, okay, take the socks out of the shoes. I take the socks out of the shoes and the socks in the sock.

And I have flat feet. So they're, I have orthotic devices, which are these inserts inside the shoe. And he, like, takes the orthotic, he's like, what's this? He, like, holds up the orthotic device. I'm like, that's an orthotic device. It's for flat feet. He's like, it's not a weapon. And I'm like, it's just, I didn't know that. And he's like, are you sure about that? He's like, like knocking it on the table trying to, like,

open it up. Maybe it's got a hidden compartment. He looks at the other one. It's just a piece of plastic. Yeah. And I'm like, no, it's just an orthotic device. It's for flat feet. And he's like, okay, and he puts it, but he's like, okay, put your socks and shoes back on. Nice. And he doesn't even check the sock. I guess he was too distracted by the orthotic device. So, so, man, he got put in the holding cell, managed to flush the hook down the toilet immediately.

So managed to avoid that. But because of that. And then, of course, they kept us in this, like, van for like three hours locked with a bunch of drunk, like, drunks and homeless people. I almost died from the fumes. And then they transfer you to another place. So, by the time they took that mug shot, it was like four in the morning. I was, we're both completely miserable, sleep deprived, very upset. And so we looked terrible in the mug shot. And this is, of course,

with the New York Times publishes on the front page of the, on the front page of the newspaper, right next to a picture of Rusty ammunition. And they say, oh, the ammunition they're delivering is defective. And it's all junk and they're putting our allies in danger. And the ammunition they put on the cover of the New York Times wasn't even the Chinese ammo, right? It was Bulgarian ammo that

“after, I think, bought 30,000 rounds as a tiny amount. He bought it sight unseen because it was”

super, super cheap. And we had some extra space on, I was coming out of Bulgaria. And we had it, it's a mixture space on the plane that was transporting the grenades. So, he figured, well, if they accept it, we make a huge margin. If they reject it, I'm paying so little for it. It doesn't really

this is junk. We're not paying for this. And so, of course, they have no, no ammunition recycling facilities in Afghanistan. So, they didn't know what to do with it. So, they just put it to the side of the runway and just left it there. And so, when the New York Times reporter came to Afghanistan to report on the story and asked to see some of the ammo that A.Y. delivered, that was some of the stuff he was pointed at. Right. And the rest of the stuff was already shipped out into the field.

So, he took pictures of that. And the New York Times very strongly implied that everything where we were delivering was that low-quality, defective, rusty junk, which wasn't the case. Of course, this article created a huge political scandal. There was a congressional hearing. There was a congressional hearing. Our pictures were put on the floor of Congress as the poster boys of government mismanagement.

They had Congress mismanaged. How did a 19-year-old get a $300 million contract? That's a pretty good

congressman's voice. How do you know? Oh my god, this is so bad. Yeah, they wanted us to testify. They were going to submit us to testify in front of Congress. And, of course, we were already under investigation. So, our lawyers said, well, you guys could subpoena them, but they're just going to plead the fifth the whole time. Yeah. And so, they decided not to go through that circus.

“So, we didn't end up, I think it would have been kind of cool to plead the fifth, like a mobster.”

Yeah, Congress, I want to go. I want to go. Yeah, I can't plead this. Yeah, yeah, the advice of council. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, they saved us the whole circus. So, we didn't end up a testifying in front of Congress. But, a week after that article gets published, suddenly the army says, oh, we had no idea that any of this was happening. We can't believe that they've been violating their contract with us. So, we're canceling the contract and then the Justice Department decides to charge us and not just

death from, but also Alex, me and Ralph, as co-conspirators in, even though they said you weren't going. Even though they said that we were not, I don't think Ralph was cooperating, but they said that Alex and I would not be charged, because we were cooperating. And so, they have, they have emails from Ralph where he's showing how to, how to, shimmy off the, the Chinese writing on the wood.

Yeah. So, it was on the wood. He was like, look, you can always take a chisel and chisel off,

and he actually has a little, how to video, get rid of. Yeah, but it didn't help him. No. It didn't, but he decided to fight them all the way. What, no, did he win? He didn't win. He lost. He went to four years in prison. No, but I mean, he didn't win at all. Then he had a hard jury once. Oh, yes. Yes. He did. The first trial was a hunger.

“And then they retry them and he would lost the second time. And that's why it took three years”

for our legal issues to get resolved, because they had to wait until his trial. Both his trials went through. And give him mind, Ralph was Ephraim's original investor. Yeah. Like, he gave him, first he gave him, like, whatever, 80 grand or something. 50 grand something. Then he ended up giving him a million dollars or 1.5. 1.5. This is, this is Ralph's, like, net beg. Yeah.

Ephraim took it all. Yeah. Never got it back. Never got a penny back. He ruined him. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So I was going to say, well, so it, after all this. Sorry. I, like, when I was writing Ephraim's book, at some point, we were going back and forth between myself, Giloson and you. Right. And Giloson sent me an email, said, "Aven want you to call him." And I was like, "Absolutely." Because by this point, I realized, Ephraim's going to fuck me. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to, they're going to, you know, he's not answering

phone calls. He's not answering. Anything, emails, nothing. So I talked to you on the phone.

“Wow. I was in prison. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. And he was like, I have a quick question.”

So you answered some questions. Yeah. And then you said, "Would you mind talking to my attorney if he needs to, you know, testify?" Because you were ready to sue him. Right. And I was like, "Absolutely." Yeah. And then you just said, "I have a question. Do you remember you asked me?" I don't remember the question. You said, "You go, listen." I got a question from you. Yeah. I said, "Well, you go, did Ephraim ever tell you why he screwed me over?" Right.

And I went, "Yeah." I was like, "That's a look." Because I asked them. Yeah. At one point when he explained the whole argument that they, which was very different than your argument, right? Right. And I was like, you know, I was like, "If it's you had an agreement with him." Right. Like, by this point, I've signed a contract with Ephraim. I realized I'm screwed.

because you owe $6 million to the government. My fear is, and my lawyer said, "They may come after any proceeds from the book, because you're insisting that your name be on the book." And I'm saying, "I'm not insisting my name be on the book." You can take my name off the book,

“but you have to pay me more. Right. And he's like, "Well, so we're to sign this”

that way we can use this, but you're going to get this much." And I'm good for it, bro. Yeah, of course. But at that point, I only kind of written that I was in the middle of the outline. So when I started writing the book and got it started expanding it, I started realizing, but I don't think you've known me by you haven't fucked over. Like, anybody that makes a mistake you do a business with, you know, you look for a chance. Even, and even his version is,

I'm looking for a chance. Like, he's not even lying about him. He's being pretty open. You know, so it's very easy to be open with me, because I'm very non-judgmental, and I laugh at about things that are inappropriate. That most people would be like, "Wow, that's fucked up." I'm like, "Oh my God, wow, that's a good lick." And so he felt very comfortable with me. He was telling me things that I know, you know, and he would, "Don't put that in the book,

I mean, I'm not going to put it down." It's in my best interest to make you look at it. But when you and I got on the phone, tell us a few of those. So when you and I got on the phone, you said, "Why? Did he ever tell you why?" He did. His thing was once, and I, it's said this, once he hired Alex, put a drink ski, and he paid him like 100 a ran.

“And he's like, "That's a gun." And an annual basis, he didn't pay him 100, right?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a salary. He was like, "This is a guy that speaks three-fuckin' languages." It has like, I don't know, like a master's, or whatever. He's got a college degree, three languages. He's like, "He's got military experience. I can get him for 100,000." And he goes, "Pakas was going to make millions." Yeah. And he was like, "So, initially, I thought, "Give people a percentage." Because then I don't really owe him anything. He's like,

but then when the money came in, I realized, like, "I'm so much better off. Just paying somebody 100 grand." Because he was, instead of having to give them a couple million, he's like, "Right." But at that point, I had an agreement. He was like, "Started kind of looking for a way to get out of the agreement." Of course he did. And one of the things he had said was, and about the time he realized that, he was about the time when he said, "You." So, Alex had gone,

he had higher Alex. And you had started not coming in as much. He was like, "You were always there."

He was like, "But once things start going smoothly, you weren't there. There was no reason to be there." Right. And he's like, "And I know he was managing things through his cell phone." Right. He's like, "But it gave me an opportunity to start saying, "Where you been, Bro, was like, every time something went wrong, I told him, "What the fuck are you? Where the fuck are you, man?" This is happening. And so he said, I was able to start picking at him so that when it came,

he would think he had fucked up. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was his plan. You might actually

“blame yourself. Right. Right. So, remember when I told him that, I was like, "Yeah, he said that”

he could just hire something for 100 grand." So, if he had thought of it, and he was starting

to get out of the contract, he, you went, "I fucking knew it, bro." If you were like, "I fuck it. I always knew

that was the reason." Of course it was. Right. Yeah. But you said, "But I never heard it." Right. New. Right. Because he would never admit it. Right. Right. To me. Right. But you know, he told one time, I love that he told you that. It's amazing that I get the truth. Well, I'll give it. Here's one little opportunity to you told me. And then we'll jump right back into it. It's just kind of a, just while it's on my mind. Sure. Because you'll appreciate this. Is it one time he

had done a deal where, I want to say, I'm going to say it's AK-47s, but it may have been something vastly different. Right. And by the way, you know, I love to get in the numbers, hearing the numbers. Like they're buying AK-47s for like $49. Right. Like it's $49 bucks to buy it. It's $450 bucks to ship it. Like for $99. And they're selling them for, well, you still weren't selling for that much about Mark up. Right. It was like $2,300. Right. Like that AK-47s go for $1,500.

Right. They're getting them for, for fucking $0.50 bucks. Yeah. You know. So, but something happened. I don't know what the weapons were, or, but Ephraim had bought something from some broker. And he ended up getting around him and went to the source, cut the broker out. Right. But the broker comes to him and he's like, look, we've got a contract. I'm going to sue you. And so he's like, yeah, so he starts threatening me. So he's like, I got process,

server, trying to fucking serve you know, he's just whatever it was. He's like, but he didn't know what my address. Like, he's got a face. He's going on to avoid getting sued. Right. And I'm like, okay. Okay. And I went, you, I said, I mean, I get it. I understand. He's like, you know,

fuck, it was always fuck that guy. Right. And you know, it would he always tried to have some

racist rant that he'd go on or something. You fuck. He was in a fucking semi or whatever. It was like, okay. There. I noticed whenever you owe them money, they'd become anti-correct. I wonder, why did he come anti-Semi? It's when you, you refuse to pay that. Right. So he goes kind of feeds into the caricature. Oh, there, for a little bit. And I went. But, you know, I said,

you did owe him a hundred grand. Like, you would have never got the, you do understand,

you would have never got the guy, the other guy. Yeah. If he hadn't, he's like, yeah, but I was dealing directly with him. I understand that, but you agreed to pay him a hundred grand. Right. And he was like, you don't understand. I said, well, because you used to say that all the time. You don't understand. Let's just keep going. You get fucked right like you're a dick. Right. Like, I'm not a dick. We're just trying to understand. Right. So this is one of the times,

I was like, no, I, I said, well, then explain it to me. Because I'm, because this is happening all the time now. Right. And, and you're noticing it, right. Right. And usually I was like, no, I get it. I get it. Keep going. Because I, look, I don't want to, I don't want to alienate myself from this guy.

“Because I think I'm in a writing a book that's going to be huge. Right. I'm thrilled. Sure.”

You know, and I'm thinking these guys are going to be able to get a series made or something, right on its story. Yeah. It's a phenomenal story. It is. Yeah. And, um, so I say to, so I, I was like, we'll explain it to me. It is, and I'm thinking of this because you can't. I know you can't. Right. Right. But he did. Yeah. What do you say? He said, so, no, I'm sorry, and I'm wrong about that. He, I remember he owed the guy like 300 grand. Okay. So he owed him 300 grand. And he goes, you know, he is, let's say the guy

sues me and I go, okay, he said, and it cost me a hundred grand to fight him in court. His, but I'll win. He was because, and he had some reason why he was going to, like, either he did or didn't have it in contra in writing or he, whatever the reason was, he had a way to get out of it. Sure. He's like, you know, that contract was originally for this, but we ended up going here, so that does it, that it validates the contract. He was, so he, so he's got to fight and pay this. And so let's

say, I, I pay a hundred thousand dollars to my lawyer. He is, and in court, I win. He said, I owe them 300 grand. He was, I get to keep 200 grand. He was, so it's worth a hundred grand

“to fuck him out of that money because I make 200,000. Right. He was, that's why. He's, if I”

lose, he was, I don't really lose much more anyway, but I'm not going to lose because I already, in the contract said, and he's got blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, and in his mind, that was completely justified and that made right. Right. 100% 100% logical with logical and made sense. And, and I just remember, I, bro, I was just like, I'm so fucked. Yeah. That's so screw. You knew. Right. Oh, yeah. You knew. But I wanted to finish it, and I, I wanted to finish the book,

and I wanted my name on it. Right. And I kept thinking of myself. He didn't put your name on it. He did put my name on it. Oh, it's on the cover. No, it's on the cover. No, it's on the cover. No. It's on the cover. There were other things like my bio, my picture of my bio was supposed to be in the back. It was, but you know, the little things, not a big deal. But no, my name's on the whole thing. Initially, he actually did that. Well, initially he files a copyright and doesn't put himself as the writer.

Doesn't put me. Right. But at that point,

“reback the, the literary age it was there, and he came in and said, listen, you have to put his”

name on. Like, I, he's like, oh, my lawyer made a mistake. But it's not a big deal. We'll put his name on the jacket. He goes, no, no. He's in the contract or whatever it was. He's supposed to be on the tie on the on the on the copy or you have to put it on them. He has the writer. You have to. He's like, and on the book. Uh-huh. He's because Ross was like, because he wasn't going to put you on the book.

Why did he go to bat for you? Because I think never really got this for sure, but I think Ross,

it would have been so egregious. Like, you, it would, in my opinion, probably, it would invalidate the entire contract. Like, you did nothing. I didn't pay me. You didn't put me on the book. You did like nothing is correct. Like at the very least, you have to abide by some part of the contract. Uh-huh. You know, even though those, those stipulations, they say, if any one part of the contract isn't, right, followed through, it doesn't invalidate the entire contract. Yeah, but at that point,

it would have been every single thing on the contract. You didn't do. You didn't pay me. You didn't put my file on the back. You didn't put my name on it. You didn't put me on the copy right? Like nothing is correct. Is there? So I think that that would have been so egregious. And I think Ross said, hey, you're a little very least have to put his name on it. You know, it will. You know, we have to put him on the back cover like his spot. No, we don't have to put his picture. We don't

have to. But, um, yeah, but I didn't even note like literally they broke contact with me. I didn't even know they had published the book until I was sitting at this area where we called Stonehenge, um, we're sitting there and I had a guy walk by and say, yo, Cox, what's up? What's up? What's up?

Here's you making any money on that? I never always book on that. The what's a gun around a book?

I went, no, I said they haven't published it yet. He goes, yeah, he goes, yeah, they have. And I went,

because the guy's kind of a cook. Um, and they can't four minutes later, he comes back and goes, boom, he goes, that's him right there. Picture a him and the, um, the book fair Miami. Yeah, the my book fair. Yeah. Was the Miami book fair, but it was on like a ocean dry magas, you know, the big glossy is picture and I'm like, yeah, like I couldn't believe it. Yeah. But, um, didn't even tell you about it. The book was being published. No. Yeah. Um,

that was a very painful read. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a very painful read. Well, yeah. So I understand it was, it was in, it was written in Ephraim's best interest. It's a lot of the

style aware of that. Yeah, yeah. A lot of stories are always across their skewed, you know,

they're, they're all slightly skewed, but slightly. Yeah. And then it was almost impossible to get them likeable. Right. I like, you just, there's only so much you can do. Yeah. Um, but, uh, so I have a question for you. So yeah. So because this doesn't make the movie, there. I didn't mention this to, um, I mentioned this to Colby, um, because he was like, oh, yeah, yeah. So they, how they mentioned how you guys got arrested, but, but in truth,

you came in, you played guilty. Yeah. Uh, I mean, Ralph didn't, but uh, you and Alex did, uh, Devoroli played guilty. Eventually. Yes. And, you know, you were getting, you got house arrest. You hit a guy's at a grid on house arrest. Right. And Devoroli's supposed to get house arrest. Yeah. He was supposed to. Right. Right. But, so do you, I mean, you want to say how that play. Yeah. That is,

“because I honestly, uh, look, as much as Devoroli's probably got whatever comes his way coming. Yeah.”

Like that was super underhanded. Sure. I read the transcripts. I read all of the emails going back and forth between him and the, um, was it ATF agent? It was an ATF agent. Yeah. I read all the all the emails. I wrapped them. Yeah. Yeah. It was such an entrapment. Yeah. They entrap them. Uh, well, I mean, so they, they told him not to be in that business. And just like they told me, they told me, you can't, you can't stay in, while you're awaiting sentencing, you cannot continue

to do business in this industry. That's right. They were very specific about that. Um, and so I, I actually was about, so right before the, uh, uh, they only said that after the New York Times article came out. All right. And, uh, before the New York Times article is just one thing after another, every time it's like the date of that something, that some major, turning point is going to have something completely derailed. I was about to win my first independent contract that was going

to make me like a million dollars, a million and a half dollars. Right. It was for this like anti-aircraft

demo. I, I started a new company. It was, it was under my name. I had an amazing contact that did Veroli didn't have. Right. Uh, because I had met this contact in one of the trade shows that, that I had attended. And, um, I was going to make like a million and a half dollars on this thing. I was, and they, in the government informed me that they were preparing to do the audit process, which means I was in the final running. They just needed to do the audits just like we, yeah,

yeah, they're not going to get that point lesser. Exactly. To give you the contact. Exactly. They, so they give me all the things I need to provide for the audit. And then the next day, the New York Times article gets published. And the, uh, so one of the, one of the, one of the,

“uh, I had to pass a financial audit. The only way I was going to pass a financial audit was with a”

factoring deal with Wells Fargo with the bank. And a factoring deal is where you, uh, because the government usually pays you 30 days later. So with, when you have a factoring deal with the bank, you could submit the invoice to the bank, uh, that after you deliver the stuff to the government and get paid immediately by the bank. And then, uh, the bank gets waits 30 days to get paid by the government. So that way you could roll the money and, hey, keep going. Exactly. You could make,

you could continue, do continuous deliveries. So you don't have to have 30 days between each

delivery, which is your capital is always accessible. Exactly. So I, that was the only way I was

going to be able to finance this particular deal. And as soon as the New York Times article comes out, the bank calls me up as like, I just saw this article about you. Unfortunately, due to the, uh, the intense scrutiny we're going to have to withdraw, offer our factoring offer. And so that completely tanked my deal. And, um, and so they, they told me, as soon as this came out, the government was like, listen, we, we're so sorry, but we have to charge you. We weren't planning on it,

but we have to. We can't go after him. You were too involved, uh, even, we know we told you we weren't going to charge you, but you were just too heavily involved. So we can't charge differently without

“charging you. And because we're going to charge you, you have to stop doing this business. You”

have to leave the industry until this whole thing shakes out. And so they told him the same thing. And, but of course, he, he doesn't listen to anybody and he keeps undoing the business from,

a company under his name, right, not, not, never release name under his minions name. And, uh, but

definitely such a, a control freak that whenever the deal got to the points of negotiation, he couldn't let his minion do the negotiation. He's got to get the phone right. He's got to get, he's got to get on the phone and start blathering. And so he does this with, uh, this, um, gun dealer in, uh,

“in central Florida. I think he wanted to sound like like Korean magazines or something.”

Yeah, I was, yeah, um, uh, beta, uh, it was, uh, where that they were beta mags. They were the ones where it pumps the, you take a regular nine millimeter right at, it's a magazine that actually pumps the bullets in super fast. So you pull the trigger. And everyone's one, you'll see one of these in a movie, right? It's like, right. I get this fucking machine gun to become a machine gun,

right. It's a, uh, and beta had just lost their, um, copyright on it. So he was legally able

to, and by the way, someone bought him that deal. Right. He took the information and yeah, told that guy to fuck off. Right. And then I'm with the, uh, right. Right. Right. I didn't even know that. Yeah. That's, that's a good, right. It was super lucrative. Yeah. By the way, he just wanted someone to stamp it, right, because people don't like made in, you know, made in in South Korea, like they don't want to see that. Right. He was saying, they'll accept it. Like if it's made in South Korea,

but it's also stamped Smith and West, and then you think, oh, it's a quality product. Right.

“So that's why he went to night. So go ahead and see. So yeah. So he, he tells him about this. I,”

I assume this guy, uh, eventually he discovers who Diveroli is. Right. Google some realizes he's already put guilty to the, to the, to the gun charge at this point. Read the article. Yeah, read the article right the New York Times. And, um, probably figures that Diveroli is trying to entrap him into, to try to get, uh, reduction on his own sentence. And, um, calls up the ATF. And the ATF says, oh, that's very interesting. Why don't you introduce one of our former, uh,

one of our undercover agents to, uh, to Diveroli as your business partner. Yeah. And so he introduces him to the, to, to Diveroli to the undercover agent. Under cover agent insists Diveroli come to central Florida to look him in the eye and shake his hand in order to complete this deal. Yeah. At the time, Diveroli is out on bond and he's not allowed to leave the southern district. So he,

“he wants him to be at the meeting with night industries. Right. That's how he gets in there.”

Ah, so night, the, the owner of night industries, which makes the night sniper rifle. Right. And they make those things on the, on like the, the, they go on the end of the, the machine guns stuff. You know, they're little handles. All right. The little devices that will like hold your your map or to hold a flashlight, like a little arms that right maneuverable. Right. They make that and sell it, by the way. It's a, it's a hunk of plastic that they sell for like $250 to the, to the army.

Right. When it's probably six bucks at most. But they make all that. And so this, the ATF guy was, had, had told Diveroli. He, that night was going to night was willing to stamp the magazine. That's how he got him there. That's how it, yes. So now it's a night product at a nightbox with night stamped, even though it still says maiden, you know, all legal. Right. But Diveroli is not allowed to leave the district. Exactly. So I'm sorry. So yes. So he convinces him to come up to Orlando. I think

was Orlando, right? Where somewhere in central Florida. Yeah. Yeah. It was, yeah. There was no, it wasn't even that far. It wasn't even that far. It was just out. It was maybe 20 miles over the line. Of course. It just had to get him over that line. And he meets with the undercover agent.

And the undercover agent, he, he was at an HK handgun that he had. Yeah. Yeah. Here's what's

funny about that too. Yeah. Because it's, yeah. In Diveroli is defense. Like, I mean, I don't care who you are. You don't deserve to be set up. Yeah. And I mean, yeah. Literally, there were, I read the transcripts of the phone calls. And by the way, Diveroli was like super on drugs and it was all, yeah. It was fucked up. Like, even list, you could hardly read what he was saying. Wow. You know, how it's so, she's so choppy and right. But the guy was telling him, they want to sign. They

just want to come and meet you, sign the contract. Then we're all going to go to the gun range, bring some weapons. And Diveroli very clearly said, bro, I told you, I'm on supervised. No, I'm on pretrial, whatever. Right. You know, I cannot have a weapon. I cannot even be around weapons. Right. And the guy, the guy is like, okay, we'll bro whatever. And at one point, Diveroli says, uh, he's like, come on, man, what, what are you doing? You're going to blow the deal. You're going to blow the

doctor. We can't tell this guy that. Oh, yeah. And so Diveroli goes, okay, it's cool. Bro, I'll bring something. Uh, when he shows up to the meeting, he doesn't bring anything. Huh. But the guy brings the guy

latest model and Diveroli is a gun nut. So, so he's like, yeah, let me see that thing. He's like,

“yeah, we should go to the range. We should pop off a few rounds. And he's like, what can I say?”

What's a gun runner? Oh, he's a gun runner. Am I right? He's bad. Agent slaps the cuff on him. He's like, you're a felon and possession of a fire. All right. I'll decide the jurisdiction. Yeah. And so that they didn't give him a bond because he

already violated his first bonds that you had to stay was in like County jail or something

for like a year, just terrible situation. Um, I'll tell you something really funny. You know, and I don't know if you know this. Well, I think you do know that. Okay, tell me. Thank you mention this. Okay. You mentioned this. Okay. So, Diveroli, when he's giving me all the stuff, right? At one point, he's he's locked up. He's dead. So, they've they've dropped his deal. His deal's gone. We just got arrested with that with a gun outside the jurisdiction. Right.

So his plea deal is. Your plea deal's done. Right. And they're like, you know, you can take whatever, five or six years or you can go to trial. He can't go to trial. So, um, so what they say it, so he's the whole time he's locked up. And this comes out of just sentencing. And when he gives me his sentencing paperwork, he gave me the first one. And I got it. Okay. I was like, where's the

second one? And he's like, he's listening. I'm going to give this to you. And I'll never just

just so funny. He goes, um, and I remember I went to grab it and he had it. He talked, we tugged it away. What's your fucking deal? And he's I'm going to, there's stuff in here, bro, that I'm not proud of. Okay. And I looked at him and I went, I promise you, nothing I'm going to read. It's going to lower my opinion. And he goes, you're a fucking asshole. And he started laughing. And he goes, here. And he said, and he said, bro, don't show that to nobody. I'm like, I should, you know,

he gets to do it. You know, who? And I was like, I'm not going to show it to anybody. Yeah, sorry. So I go and I read it. Yeah. Oh my god. So while he's locked up, okay. At some point,

“there was a, I'm going to say Korean. I want to say he was a Korean guy. So, I, I remember that it was”

this, the phone call with his desk. Oh, that, that, that got out there. I heard that. Yeah, I heard that. I read it. Oh God. I heard it. It was horrible. Listen. Yeah. I was like a cello. Yeah. Tell us, tell us, these guys and call me. Yes. Oh, whatever. Yeah. So, let me take it back story. Back story is that Devory only had actually, yeah, there was a Korean. I'm going to say Korean. There was a Korean guy he was. He was a Korean or an arm's dealer. Yeah. Name like, it was like Kim. What, Mr. Kim?

Yeah, Mr. Kim. So I remember him. So Mr. Kim had come Devory all and said, look, you can get AK-47 for like, you know, $99. He's like, right. He's like, I can sell them for $2 for $1.99. And he goes, devil is like, okay. He's like, how many do you need? He's like, yeah, he's like, can you do it? He's like, absolutely. How many do you need? He's like, oh, I need, you know, I need 10,000 of them. He's like, devil, like, nice. Like, I got a Mark, Mark got right. So, Mr. Kim,

“so they're going back and forth. And then Mr. Kim tells him, because I guess you have to get, what is it?”

The import export like the life, the import and the export life. Right. So he's,

Devory always trying to get them, getting them information. And he says, well, and Mr. Kim,

just for why he said this, he said, well, we've got a general that will accept it on the, in like a Columbia, in Columbia, a general that will accept it on the import. And he goes, he'll get you that. And he said, but it's not really going to the Columbians. It's actually going to FARC. And Devory only, he's, Devory only said, I was just like, fuck. FARC is, it's, it's a gorilla organization and Columbia that is listed as a terrorist organization. Right. I think now they already, they

made peace with the Columbian government in the years since. Yeah. But at that time, that time, yeah. Let me put it this way. Victor bought the, the merchant of death who actually got 25 years that they traded Brittany Griner for. He was caught. The reason he got in trouble was he was selling anti aircraft missiles. And they were going to end up going to FARC. And they told him, this is going to go to FARC. They're going to be shooting. He is, you know, you understand that these

weapons are going to be used to shoot down American helicopters and stuff. He is, I don't care. So I was like, I got the same enemy. Like, that was his response. So you're selling stuff that you know is going to end up in the hands of a terrorist organization. And so Devory, in fact, he bought it already been arrested. So he as soon as I heard that, I only know the story because he told me. And he's like, as soon as I heard that, I thought this is the exact conversation

I can't, can't send him to you. He's like, what do you mean he said, no, it's a terrorist organization. And he said, and I was like, what, what you concern? He's like, I wasn't concerned. But he said, I was concerned that I'm having this conversation on the phone. And I don't know who's looking into him. Right. And so what became a reasonable transaction just became extremely illegal. He said, well, then, you know, so he's upset. He's, you know, clearly disappointed.

Get, we get off the phone. He comes back. He's like a week later. He comes back

to 50. So like, I'm sorry. I can't do it or 240 nine. You know, it's always 49. Right. Right.

So he's like, no, I can't do it. He said, he goes, at some point, he got up to like, like 299 or 399, like he was, it was outrageous. He's like, I'm telling right now. He said, I would have made, I forget how many millions of dollars on that transaction. And the guy's telling, I'm like, he's, he's, the problem was the more he was willing to do it, the more I felt like I was being set up. Right. Like, he's now being unreasonable. Right. And he's then saying, can you give me your

contact then? And I'll just cut your checks. I can't give you my contact. Like, I'm still in the middle. No, no, no, no, you don't understand. I'll do this. I'll do it. No, I know they're going to go here. I'm done. I can't be involved. I can't help you in any way. So definitely do the right thing.

Maybe not for the right reasons, but whatever. Right. So definitely now walked up in prison,

waiting, waiting, sensing. He's fucked. He's not getting out. Two things happen. One, he's talking to a black guy, a gang member, right? And by the way, I want to say, what was the name? Trishka. Trishka by this point, Trishka, the guy who was making the cardboard, who was giving, who was willing to testify, who was, had started this huge investigation, which was also had poured over into, and of government investigation into the Albanians. Right.

Has ended up, because they've probably cut him out of the deal. Yeah, definitely. He'd cut him out of the deal. So he's pissed. He's gone when it started the whole New York Times. New York Times. New York Times investigation. Yeah. But at this point, he's now gotten people within the government being investigated. Right. And as a result of that, he ends up dead.

“Now, whether he ended up dead, because of that, maybe maybe not, but the fact is, is he's found dead”

with his pants down, he's been run over by his own car on a completely flat, straight road in the middle of nowhere where nobody is. And there's no other cars. There's no other cars. There's no other cars. So somehow or another, and they deemed it a car accident. So somehow or another, he's driving his car, fell out in front of the car, got himself run over by the car, and the car pulled off to the side of the road by itself. Yeah. It's just, like, none of it makes

it car accident. Right. So, but that shows up in the New York Times article. So, as a result, Devoroli is now telling people, he's talking to this, this gang member. It's why he's like a gang member. And he's telling him basically, like, look, when people testify against me, they end up dead. Wow. Take a look at that, this article. It shows him. They're like, wow, and it does make it sound kind of suspicious. Right. Like, could have been. Right. So, so that

of he's, and he Devoroli tells the guy, this is the guy's version, because Devoroli says,

that's not what happened. That the guy had come, he never always says the guy came to him and said,

look, if you have somebody that you want eliminated, I got people on the outside that can do it.

“And I then encoded him a price. Right. Now, Devoroli says, that's what happened. Right. Devoroli,”

then went immediately and contacted the ATF agent, or FBI agent, one of the agents, maybe the guy that the guy investigating him might mint him in teveless? I don't know if he, if you contacted, he contacted someone. Okay. Whatever. One of the investigators. Okay. So, he contacts his lawyer, gets the phone number calls, calls them. The problem was that gang member, immediately called his FBI handler and said, this guy Devoroli just offered me money to kill somebody.

So, he's saying Devoroli came to me, showed me this article and said people end up dead, and if I know you got people on the street that can kill somebody, I'll give you money to kill somebody, which would have been you. Right. And Alex. Right. And so that's what he says happened. When the agent gets on the stand and explains the whole thing, they're like, do you think it was credible? He's like, now I think that both of them called, and that maybe Devoroli mentioned it,

“maybe I don't know who mentioned it. I think he was, I think that maybe one guy was just trying to”

set up the other guy they both called. He's, I don't think it was credible. So, they quash it. That's not the funny one. Right. The funny one is, is Mr. Kim. So, Mr. Kim. So, while this is going on, Devoroli calls his dad. So, when that falls apart, Devoroli, because they end up transferring the guy,

that. But we got to call for this guy. They moved the black guy. So, then Devoroli's

he, he ends up calling his dad. He said, Dad, I need you to call Mr. Kim. And tell Mr. Kim, I can get him the 10,000 AK-47s. I'll do it for $199,000. 10,000. And his dad is like, well, why would you do that? Like, I don't understand, you're not supposed to be doing this.

“Right. He said, I know, but here's the thing, this guy, you know, if he, he's going to send it”

to FARC. So, if you call him and he agrees, then I'm going to have you, either I'll get the agents to get me out of jail, and I'll be able to call him. Right. And work with them to get him on tape, you know, on a recording of him agreeing to send this to FARC. I'm going to help you get it imported. We know it's going to FARC. He's just got to get him to say that. He's like, then I don't

have to go to, go to prison. Right. And his father, Ephraim's father is, you know,

not cut from the same cloth as Ephraim. Very straight, least good. Yeah. And he's like, oh, Ephraim, I don't know, I don't know. This man, he, he, he, he doesn't, he hasn't done anything. You're setting him up. You're, you're, you're, he, you know, he's like, no, but he would have done it. Right. And he's trying to explain to us that, you know, he would have done it. And he was going to do it. And he's a bad guy. And I'm going to help the government. And he's like, oh, but this man,

that's a huge, that's a big, big deal. He's like, this guy could end up getting a lot of time. He could get 20, 30 years. That's a huge crime. And Ephraim says, if Mr. Kim has to spend the rest of his

“fucking life in prison for me to get one month off of my sentence, then that's what's got to happen.”

Do you fucking understand me? Now, make the fucking call. My, my, my favorite line. He's like, he's like, if for one chicken to get out, another's got to go in. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean. He was his poor dad. Yeah, his dad. His dad is super nice,

actually. That's what I'm always like his dad. He told me one time. His dad was, uh, I was like,

man, you're, you're dad, like, your dad opened the company. He let you have the shelf company. A, E, Y, he let you have this company and open all, and he knew you were younger. It's like, yeah, he, he knew he's like, he didn't want to do it. You know, he, he, he, he put up a fight. He's like, you know, you know, my dad's the kind of guy you got a bully. You know, so, you know, I kind of bullied him into it. Yeah. I thought he bully his dad constantly. It was very embarrassing for everybody else.

Yeah. He would always make fun of his dad, like in front of his friends. He'd be like, oh, dad, what kind of shitty car are you driving? What'd you make last year? But it didn't even break 110, you loser. You know, like he would, like in front of all his friends. I were like, uh, the effort, why he was being such a dick to your own dad. You know, like, why there's no reason to do that. And, you know, he's just, he's a really nasty, really nasty to his dad. Yeah. Well, when I,

when I, by the way, the next day, when I came back after reading those, I walked up and did you, did you read those? I said, what, it's your something else. And he was like, come on, man, you know, how it is, I was in a fucked up spot. And I was like, I said, but they even talk,

“because they played the tapes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's that recording, I think,”

is on YouTube, or at least it was on YouTube. I, I know someone uploaded it. You might be able to find it. Yeah. And they even mentioned like the, like, the US attorney is like, this is a guy who speaks to his father like, yeah, like they had multiple, you know, tapes where he's just belittling his dad. They're like, this is somebody who talks to his father like not just some, not just some random douche bag that maybe some guy that's, you know, you don't like or

something like this is your father and his father so nice on the moon. Like it, it really, it's out horrible. Yeah. But it was, it was really heart-wrenching just to hear that. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I get the heart-wrenching part, but it just kills me. Yeah. I mean, it's hilarious. It's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. I mean, I know his family since I was like a kid. Right. It's like, uh, but you know, I met his mom. Oh, yeah. His mom, his sister. Oh,

and, and, uh, visitation. Yeah. I met his mom, his sister, his brother. They're all like nice people. Yeah. I'm, his sister. I met a few times. Yeah. Um, yeah. But, uh, yeah, she did a ton of research for me. Like I was emailing her all the time out. Hey, when did this contract come out? Boom. She's spam. Here's when it was, it was 2006 or whatever. Yeah. Um, it's strange. Like the rest of his family is not like him at all. Yeah. It's very, very strange. Like the all his siblings

are very, like they seem to, they surround that they's trying to stay in his orbit. I think that they like, you know, he's going to be successful. I mean, I'm sure he is still very rich. I have a lot of doubts. I have no doubt that he has a lot of money. Most of it's stolen from somebody. Yeah. I mean, sure, like it only match getting into some kind of deal with him. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he's been sued so many times. Well, he's an expert at it. He's got a full

time. He's got a full time. You know, when I, when he got out of prison, he had a full time lawyer. Yeah. Yeah. Like he hired this guy. You guy that, you know, my brother gets his beard. He has a beard. And he gets, he goes to the barber to, uh, to get his beard trim. He was, I swear this is a true story. This is like a few, a few years ago, like maybe like four or five years ago. He's a little bit of time ago. He's getting his beard trimmed and he's listening to the guy next

“him talk to the barber and the, the, the, the, the, the barber's like, hey, man, how's it been, you know?”

And the guy's like, oh, man, if I am just dealing with this client, he's just such a pain in the ass. He's such an asshole. And he's like, yeah, I know what I know what you mean. You know, there's, well, sometimes you get those clients, you know what I mean? And the lawyer's like, oh, man, but this guy's something else. They're like, have you ever heard of the movie word dogs? And the guy's like, yeah, yeah, it's not him. He's like, you know the Jonah Hill guy? That's my client.

He is the biggest piece of shit. I can't fucking stand him. I swear to God, I'm going to quit. I can't take this guy. And you're just like, my brother's sitting right next to this guy in the garage. Yeah, he's just like trying not to react. I was like, yeah, Ephraim's still being out from still, he hasn't changed a bit. Oh my God. He just goes through lawyers. He just like, cheers him up. Well, he's got the one lawyer. He was like, he hired a full time,

straight on a college, he hired him. Yeah, yeah. So he's got a full time lawyer. And then he's got another lawyer on the side. And, you know, he's brilliant. He's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, he'll cut you throw it in a heartbeat. But he's brilliant. Yeah. He's brilliant at cutting through. Yeah. Which is yeah, I just don't, you know, I'm not sure that's the way you want to end up. I mean, live in your entire life. Yeah. I know I don't. Right. You would think you, you know, like some people go to prison. Yeah.

You know, they have this, this, you know, this thing that happens and you have an opportunity to look at it as, I put myself here. I cannot, you know, my buddy Pete has said this and I'm sure he,

“I think he got it from Einstein actually. But he's obviously tweaked it a little bit. And it,”

what he said was, you know, you cannot go to prison and continue to behave in the same manner that led you to prison and then get out of prison and not expect to come back. Right. And, and that's the problem is that I got to prison and I was like, if I can get out, you know, because I was supposed to be 60. Right. If I can get out, I can't come back. So I can't keep behaving this way. Right. I don't want to. And I'd rather live in someone's spare room than be back in this place.

Right. Absolutely. So heaven compared prison. Listen. And when I got out,

yeah. It was even better. Like I'd never been on YouTube. Like I didn't realize how much

free shit there was out here. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I got out. I was like, oh, it's even better. Yeah. The spare room was, what was your first reaction when you saw a smartphone? Wow. You serious? Yeah. Well, it was fucking magic. Yeah. I was, the first point I

“year did you get up? Um, 2019. Wow. The see you, and when did you go in?”

You used 13 years, right? Yeah. Yeah. I got went in in 2000 and late 2006. So right before the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. About about two years, about everyone was going from flip phones, the Motorola Razer. I had the right. No, I had the Razer too. Yeah. So cool. Yeah. It was cool. Um, that that was a cool phone. My favorite example of this is that I had started working while I was in the halfway house. Yeah. And my probation officer had sent me

my financial report. Did you ever, you didn't get restitution? No, I did. Uh, well, they, they didn't an analysis to see if I could afford it. Oh, okay. Yeah. The, the restitution. Uh, so, so, when you, when you, when you commit fraud, usually the restitution is based on the loss of the victim. Yes. But in our case, they didn't really lose anything. Now, they, in fact, would have saved

like $50 million if they had just kept the contract going. So the only loss that they could claim

was the cost of taking the contract away and putting it out for bid again, which they estimated to be, I think it was like 350 grand or something. They estimated what it cost them. And so that was the restitution that needed to be paid. But that was on the entire group of defendants, which there was four of us in the F from Ralph and Alex. And the way they worked it is whoever could afford to pay it was the one responsible to pay it. And I was practically broke. Right. I couldn't afford to pay it.

So I've fermented up paying it. Nice. Yeah. So at least I didn't have to do that. So he's good for that. Yeah. Um, but 350,000, and he got to keep the rest of the money. Yeah. So, you know, what, well, so, so like, I owe a restitution. So I have to fill out an annual report. Okay. And every month, I fill out a report. Right. Not just the standard report, but a much more thorough report on my finances. And then every month, they based my restitution payment on that.

What do you afford? Right. This month. Sometimes it's $300. Sometimes it's $900. You know, whatever it is.

You got to fill this out. I was like, okay. So I go to my boss. I said, hey, man, I said,

they sent me this thing, my probation officer. I have to print this report, this thing. It's like 12 pages. How do I print it? It's on my email. And he was, okay, he said, just here, forward it to me. I don't know. Okay. So I forward it to the email. He goes, okay. He said, I got it. I got it. He said, it's on the printer. And I went, no, bro, I said, I need to print that. I have to print that. Yeah. He said, it's on the printer.

Now, I look over the printer is 60 feet away in the office. Way is a big gem. Right. Way over there. I said, no, man, I said, I need to print it. I need a physical copy. So I can fill it out. Yeah. So I don't know what Wi-Fi is. So I don't understand that that phone is connected to the Wi-Fi.

“Right. I'm like, you have to, he's like, it's printed on the printer. Right. Oh, I said, how?”

I said, he just checked it on your email. Right. I was like, you've got to go to the computer.

It's got to be connected to the, where's the wire? So you have to have the Wi-Fi. I've got to even be connected. And I'm looking at him. Why, what are you, are you fucking right? And he looks at me. He's like, oh, wow, bro. No, he's, it's on the Wi-Fi. His, my, my phone is connected to a Wi-Fi. It's like wires. He's, it's connected to the system, which is a router, which is also connected. I guess that's connected with some wires. He has, but there's no wires, bro. It's the Wi-Fi. Right. And I'm like, he has

gold. It's just go over there. I have walk over. There's my financial report. I feel like a caveman. I'm like, you know, I, I was like the, I was the guy with the monolith that 2001 Space Odyssey thrown in the, I didn't, I couldn't believe it. Yeah. But that's how bad it was. And everything,

you know, everything was amazing. It's just, you know, and everything was free. This is free.

“You guys are complaining, you know, about all kinds of stuff. And I'm like, how can anybody complain?”

Like, this is amazing. Yeah. Do you understand that, like, look, it took me six months to a year before I started feeling, because you have, what, stand up count? It's a four block, they count you before I started feeling okay. I would feel uncomfortable about 30 minutes before stand up count because I felt like I have to be in my, in myself. I have to be waiting to count. Uh-huh. You know, like, it's programmed in. Yeah. Yeah. Taking a shower without shower shoes.

Like, just across the board, it was just, you know, it took a long time. But, um, you know, and I kind of had a plan, a semi plan when I got out of what I wanted to do, um, you know, and, but I had no, just like the difference between, you know, F from and, you know, and what we were talking about, like, like, I had a long-term goal. And I was going to slowly work towards it. And it didn't really care if I made a bunch of money. If I could pay my bills,

I'll stay in the spare room. And I can watch YouTube and I can work on my stuff and I can be happy. And that's, you know, wasn't really expecting to get a girlfriend or a wife or wasn't really expecting to ever have a decent car or wasn't expecting to ever let, like, I'm okay here. This is good. This is good life. This is better than prison. Yeah. And so I had this long-term plan. And I think having changed that mindset. Yeah. Everything came fairly easy. Even the times that we talked

before the podcast that I feel like I really screwed up. There are things I major mistakes I've made many, many times. Everything's still working. Right. You know, because I think I have a good work ethic. And I have a good outlook. I mean, it's the same thing with you. Like you said, you started like, you're, you got nothing. Right. House arrest. Right. But you could sit there and you could go, you could do it after I'm dead. Go to prison for four years. Right.

And bitch in my own the entire time. Like it was at, you're bitch into me. I had 20, six, 26 years sentence and he's bitching to me. Like, focal places to hell. They're keeping me here. I can't believe I'm here. And I can't believe I'm spinning this much time here. I've already done two years. And he's looking at me. And I've already done, you know, like, like, like, seven or eight years. And he's looking at me and he goes, oh, fuck. And then you're kind of real. Yeah. Where am I talking

about? And so, but, you know, it's like, like you, you know, you could do house arrest and bitching me on the whole time. Or you figure. But when am I going to have this much time? Right. Like this, I get, how can I look at this as a gift? Exactly. I got time. I've got, you know, I, I, I don't have to sit home and make a bunch of money and do this and do this. And, you know, I can, this is an opportunity where I'm not going to go out with my friends. I'm not going to do, I'm forced to, to do this.

And I can utilize this. I can watch a bunch of series on Netflix, or I can use this time to come up

“with do the things that I typically am never going to get to. Exactly. And that's what prison was for me.”

Yeah. Let's start. Well, I'm going to try and come up with a plan and do something I like and make money doing what I like. And if it makes me a bunch of money, that's great. And if it doesn't, well, that's fine, too. Because anything's better than making money, the way I was making it before.

Geostins got that wrote the article. Arms and the dudes. Yes. And Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. So what, one day, you got a phone call for him to hang up on him like all the other reporters. So actually, what happened was this was right after the New York Times article came out. Right. And my phone was ringing in off the hook because it wasn't just the New York Times that published the article. It was the New York Times published it. But then it got into the Associated Press Network

and it got republished in like 300, 400 newspapers all over the world. I had my, yeah, I had my, my name on a Google alert. And I started getting flooded with Google alerts from like every major city around the world that their newspaper reprinted this article. So it was worldwide news. And I started getting my phone ringing off the hook and like all these reporters wanted to talk to me. I had lawyers who wanted to represent me. I had, you know, everyone was just like nonstop

ringing off the hook. Then I get this call in my, my, my, my, my color ID says Rolling Stone. And I'm a musician, right. Right. So I'm like, oh, Rolling Stone. Let me answer the phone. Right. I'll answer Rolling Stone. The answer, I'll answer the phone and it's ghee loss. And he's like,

hey, I'm a writer, staff writer at Rolling Stone. My editors think your story is amazing and

perfectly on brand for Rolling Stone, which our brand is a young people doing fucked up things.

“And you're fit the bill, my friend. So I think this is an amazing story. We'd love to write”

the article about you. And, and you know, and if this goes really well, maybe we could even option it into a book and a movie because I've had some of my other articles option. And so I said, well, I mean, I'm a musician. It's been my lifelong dream to be written about in Rolling Stone. Just not for this. And he says, well, you know, it's Rolling Stone who knows me. I'll, I promise you, I'll mention your music in, in the article. Yeah. So I said, okay,

but my lawyer says I can't talk to anybody. And so ghee says, you know, I used to be a lawyer too before he became a journalist. So let me talk to your lawyer. Maybe we can work something out. So I put him through to my lawyer and and ghee tells my lawyer that he guarantees that he won't publish anything until all my legal jeopardy has passed. So and my lawyer says, you know, he's a journalist for a reputable major news source. They take their journalistic

“guarantees seriously supposedly. So I think you're, it's safe for you to talk to him. And so I agree”

to talk to ghee and to ghee's credit and Rolling Stone's credit. They didn't publish anything until I got out of a probation. It was actually, um, no, no, it wasn't, it wasn't not out of probation or fellowships until after I was sentenced. Yeah, I was under probation when they published that article. And I walk into my probation officer's office and he has the the Rolling Stone cover and he's like, it's like, Pat gas. You're going to be talking to, uh, I see your famous here

and I'm like, oh, yeah, that article came out. He's like, you're not going to be talking to Rolling Stone about like how we do things here at the probation office, aren't you? And I said, no, you're not that interesting. Yeah, you actually signed a paper saying you won't divulge. Oh, really? I didn't I wasn't even aware of all the papers that you signed. One of there's like, all the things as you will not, you know, not that I see that how they could stop you. Right. Right. I didn't, I wasn't even

aware of that, but I signed lots of papers during that time. Uh, so, um, so anyway, uh, the article came

“comes out and I think it's like, yeah, he had to wait three years to publish that article. Are you”

serious? Yeah. Because it because Ralph Merrill went to trial and he had his first trial was a

Hungarian. They couldn't sentence us until his trial was over because they wanted to use the sentencing as a, as a, you know, way, a leverage on us to get to testify at his trial and call the pun. So they refused to sentence us until his trial was over. So he had to go through through two trials and, and all the preparation that that entails. So it was three years until we finally got sentenced. So, um, Rolling Stone held back, but during that entire time, he was kept on

investigating, he interviewed people who worked in the government side. He interviewed, uh, uh, lots of different people. It dug through a lot of the court records of a lot of the discovery that was coming out from Ralph's trial. And, uh, when it finally came out, it was one of the longest articles Rolling Stone had ever had ever published at that time. And, um, uh, he's agents started shopping it around and Todd Phillips, the director of the hangover movies, and I thought

it was an amazing story and said, man, I can make an amazing movie at it. This is decided to

option the rights to the article. And he, um, also optioned my life rights. Right. So he didn't

States anyway, um, you're now at public figure and people can write anything they want about you and say anything and make a complete work of fiction with your name in it and say you did anything and you have zero right to sue them because it's freedom of speech. Right. So, um, so he didn't, uh, Warner Bros. and Todd Phillips didn't have to option my life rights, but they wanted my involvement to make it a bit more realistic. Right. Uh, you know, to get the inside scoop and all the details,

when they're spending a $50 million on a movie, you know, it's not that much extra to, uh,

it also keeps you, it limits your ability to say, well, it eliminates your ability to sue them. Like if you were like, hey, that's not right. Like you could just try to sue them. But yeah,

“you lose most of that. But yeah, though I don't think that that's why they did it. I don't”

think they were thinking I was going to sue because they didn't option different Oli's life rights, they didn't even offer it to him. He was in prison at the time. And they also told me that they had no interest in working with them, but because he was a known pathological liar, and they didn't think they were going to get anything close to the, to the real story from them. And, um, they just didn't want to work with him. And so they figured that from geese reporting

and from my inside story, that's all they needed. So, uh, at the time, they optioned the story. That's, this was, the wrong stone article came out in, in 2011. Todd was in the middle of filming, hangover two. And then he was going to do war dogs right after hangover two. But then decided that he wanted to do hangover three first because that was a sherbet. And, you know, that he's going to make a lot of money. But he did. He made a lot of money from hangover three. And, uh, once he finished

hangover three, that's when they started, uh, working on war dogs. Um, they sent a screenwriter, Stephen Chin, uh, the original screenwriter, uh, flew to Miami to meet me, stayed in Miami for about 10 days. Every day we met and, like, I told him all the stories. I remember he recorded it. And then he wouldn't, uh, work and take that material into the screenplay. So, he based the screenplay mostly on his interviews with me. And then Todd and, uh, another writer Jason Smilovich rewrote

the screenplay, like, over, like, 10 times over the course of a year. I saw a bunch of different drafts of it as it was being written. And so it's interesting to see what gets left on the cutting room floor and what parts they add in. Um, uh, so yeah, I've seen the evolve from, from the original screenplay all the way until the final movie. So it's an interesting thing to see the evolution of that and the reason that they change certain things. Um, because they, they have a, they have a formula.

Yeah. You know, it's, when they spending $50 million on a movie, they need it to appeal to the general market and the general market. It's the, it's the, it's the high point in the bell curve, right? See,

“you need to appeal to most people, which means you need to be somewhat formulaic. That's what”

formula is, right? So we know this works. Exactly. We know most people will like something in this structure. And that's what they need to fit. So, which means it needed to be about an hour and a half long. It needed to have a certain amount of action, a certain amount of comedy, and a certain amount of drama, a relationship drama that to throw it in there, right? Because this is going to be mostly a guy centered in movie because it's about like weapons and stuff. Right. But some

guys will drag the girlfriends along to the theater and they got to give the ladies the relationship drama because that, you know, their focus testing shows that they need that. So, for example, in the movie, you, uh, there's this whole like relationship drama between me and my girlfriend,

and Anna Darmas, right? Yeah. Who's played by Anna Darmas? Um, and that never happened. I mean,

like, yeah, my girlfriend knew the entire time that I was dealing in weapons and ammunition, and she had zero problem with it. As long as I was bringing in the money, that's all she cared about. And, but in the movie, they make this whole thing that I was hiding it from her and lying to her and it becomes this big relationship, uh, focal point because they needed relationship drama for the women. They need to add that in there. Right. Um, they needed some action. So,

because they, because if without action, it can get a little too boring, so they had to add in a few scenes of action. Like, for example, a famous triangle of death. The triangle of death is the most famous, uh, part of that. So, that story actually. So, people always, uh, when they

“are saying, when people ask me, what's real and what was fake in the movie and what did they change?”

They, the first thing they ask is the triangle of death, right? Because it's just so ridiculous. And the crazy thing about that story is that it's actually true. But it did not happen to us. Right. So, it actually happened to Steve and Shin, the screenwriter. That actually happened to him. Because the reason he got the job to write word dogs was because he had written another screenplay

called Iraq. Iraq. And Iraq, Iraq was, um, it was a very well-regarded screenplay, but it never

got made into a movie. That's most screenplays never get turned into finished films.

Baghdad during, like, 2003, 2004 time. And Stephen had read some article about them and wanted

“to write a screenplay about them. And so, he decided to go and meet them in Iraq. But he couldn't”

find a commercial flight flying into Baghdad. So, he flew into Jordan and hired a Jordanian driver to drive him to Baghdad. He didn't know what he was getting into. And this Jordanian driver actually stopped in Fallujah because no one was manning the gas station so he can get free gas. All right. And then he got chased by these insurgents shooting. I mean, he got saved by the US Army, just like in the movie. So, that actual scene happened. He's actually quite accurate,

but it just happened to Stephen Shin and not to us. So, yeah, and there was also the scene where Jonah Hill fires the, yeah, the machine gun in the air. Well, when he's getting doing the drug

deal, the, the weed deal that never happened. I mean, you don't fire an automatic weapon.

City limits and not get arrested immediately. So, what was there on my favorites? Is the very beginning? Yeah. Well, they put the gun to it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right, right. So, yeah, my old tell us ahead. Right. And I love that he's sitting there like, you know, that's a, yeah, that's an HR five such as that you're starting to, yeah, that's a great scene. It's a very reliable weapon. Yeah, it's a great scene. Yeah, it's a great scene. Yeah, it's a great scene.

Yeah, it's a great scene. I'm watching the movie going that didn't happen. Yeah, that didn't happen. Yeah, that didn't happen. Yeah, that didn't happen. Yeah. And I always realized too that, you know, I mean, I asked, like, I asked you earlier because I was like, I know this, like, I know you did not go to Albany and everything. Yeah. So, and I know they blend it. So, and I remember watching the

“movie, I was like, that I think that I feel like they blended his character together with Alex. Yeah,”

exactly. They did because they wanted to simplify the story. Right. So, they didn't want to add a new character to the story. Instead of introducing a brand new character, Alex, they just had me go to Albany instead. Well, like, like we talked about, like, if you told the real story, like, yeah, it's like 20 hours of things. Exactly. Like, you can't, they have to condense it, condense characters, condense scenes, condense, you know, it's a simplified. Right. Right. Right. In order to, and they,

they left out a lot of stuff that, I mean, I went to many other places that they didn't put in the movie, and to India and South Africa, and you guys went, I listened to the scene. I, I was like, what was you, you guys go into the, uh, the gun shell, right? Yeah. International. Yeah. So that part, we actually did, so the, the Vegas X movie. Yeah. So Vegas, so that scene is based on another gun show, another exhibition, I should say another gun show. Uh, they actually based that on Euro-Satori,

which is based in Paris. Right. Now, they wanted it to be a little sleazeier, so they changed the location to Vegas, because Vegas is more sleazy than Paris. Yeah. Uh, so they call it Vegas X. There is a gun show in Vegas, but that's a commercial gun show. It's called the shot show. Okay. And it's more of the shooting sports show. We still, we went to that show quite a few times. In fact, we did meet Henry at that show, just like, I mean, not in the same way they show in the

movie. We, we, we hadn't already been doing business with Henry for a while. Uh, we were actually introduced to Henry by Ralph, right? Um, he had been doing business with Henry since the '90s, like it like, uh, parts, right, for guns or something, right? The what? He was getting parts for,

he got, yes, from South Africa. That was their first deal. He got, he managed to circumvent

some, like, I think, either the South Africans or the U.S. is like rules against, like, the weapons transferred by cutting up the guns and, uh, and shipping all the parts except for the receivers, which was the legal part, the part that was legally a gun. Right. And so he, and he, uh, Ralph had a machine gun factory. He didn't, he didn't have a laundromat service that Ralph was also Mormon, not Jewish. Right. Uh, but they kept his name, Ralph. So that, but I think that's as far as

his character is accurate, as far as the movie goes. Um, but yeah, Ralph got started with Henry, uh, by importing these gun parts from, for South Africa and putting them back together in his

“machine gun factory in Utah. And that's how he knew Henry and he introduced Henry to Ephraim”

when they started doing business. So you're telling me that you and I didn't have matching portions. So we did have outies. We both did. Yeah, we, he had an A6, I had an A6, and I had an A4, so it wasn't matching. Uh, I had the lower model. He had the higher model. Um, that's, but, uh, yeah, and we did live in the same building. It wasn't as nice as in the movie, but it was, it was actually the flamingo complex in South Beach, the people who live in Miami Beach, nowhere that is, back in the

day. It was a major party scene. And, uh, nowadays I hear all those party people have grown up and started family, so it's more of a team scene now. But, uh, yeah, we did live in the same building. That's actually true, too. Um, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, uh, yeah, they, they cut obviously, they cut out the, the, how I from gets arrested. Yeah, that, that whole thing. Yeah. Um, but it was a, a much simpler. Yeah, I thought it was such a great story, though. I was

so funny. Like, the line. Yeah, yeah. Oh, what can I say, boys, once a gun runner, who is a gun runner? Am I right? So perfect. Oh, my God. Just walk right into it. Oh, man. Yeah, well, it's a much, so much, so much, so much, so much, great time. Yeah, exactly. They have, they got to make it,

yeah, and I never punched him in the face as much as I loved. I would have, I came so close to punching

him in the face like for real. Uh, but I knew in the back of my head that if I did that, he would just use that again. Yeah. Yeah. And that he would like sue me for assault and that would be, I'm like, you know what, I'm not, I'm going to, oh, listen, he's, he's, he, he'd be begging to stay the night in the, uh, in the, in the, in the hospital. Yes, so much, you know, pictures, like, get, yeah, he's saying he has permanent pain and his work in the, yeah, and it's going to sue me for, you know,

for permanent pain, yeah, I mean, like, chronic pain is going to, he's going to claim in all that stuff. Yeah, I didn't want to give him any any ammunition against me, so I restrained myself and just walked

“out. Uh, so how close, so to me, because I've never, like, I think I saw one picture of Henry,”

oh, yeah, like how close was the character of, um, that Bradley Cooper plays to the real. So Bradley, I mean, he, he's a great actor. Right. And he, I thought he did a good job on the character, right, but very different from the real guy. Oh, okay. So, uh, the real guy is a Swiss guy, right? So in Bradley as an American accent in the movie is not, um, uh, and in Bradley, as he's like thick glasses and like a very unshaven face and he looks like kind of like a tough guy gangster, right? The real guy looked

more like a Swiss banker. It was a very clean cut, very calm. You would pass him by the street just

looks like a regular old business man wearing a nice suit. He never raised his voice, never got mad.

It was always very, very calm. It was like he was selling, you know, like groceries. Like he was just talking about, yeah, he was the most boring thing. Like, you know, trying to get you into a home mortgage or something. Like, it was just like, he's trying to get you to buy just 10,000 AK things. Yeah, he was just doing his job, just just doing the job, no big deal. Um, but we did hear lots of rumors about him. Obviously, he, he avoids the limelight, like, like, like, I mean, he doesn't, uh, he tries

to avoid getting pictures taken of him or there is a video of him on YouTube, actually, where he

“gives a little speech, um, that I've seen. I think it's still up there. But, uh, so yeah, so, so there”

are, there is something out there. He's not completely anonymous. This is pretty old, though, and this is from, like, back then. Um, but I haven't seen anything more recent than that. Yeah, he was like, he was like, he was like a real, like, you know, um, merchant of death, like he was like, he really got the content. And if everywhere, everywhere, yeah, he really did.

Yeah. And we always heard, like, I think he got put on, uh, on, uh, watchless by Amnesty International,

and this was suspected of doing things, but they could never prove it. Right. So, yeah, I mean, so, what did you do with all that cash at the end of the movie where I see you? Man, I wish, I wish that was true. I, if only that was, it only Henry had a hard ago. It's great. It's a great scene, though. It's a great scene. So many great scenes that I wish were true. No, I had never got a suitcase full of cash by Henry. Um, yeah, it really was for me. It really was.

I sure wish that was true, but yeah, no, he never, uh, he never stuck his neck out for me to, to give me cash. It just didn't happen unfortunately. When you, when you walk around, do you like, people recognize you or, uh, almost never, which I like at that way. It happens very rarely, right? Very rarely. And almost always it's a positive thing. Someone's a big fan of the movie, and, you know, it's, I've never, like, had any problems with it. Um, I love the movie.

“Yeah, everyone loves the movie. The only, the only thing that has, uh, that has ever negatively”

affected me was that, uh, I was going to do a deal with, with a artist that really loved my products from Singular Sound, the music company. And, um, he really, really loved the products thought they were brilliant. He was a pretty big artist, uh, uh, not big in the, in the general market sense, but big in the musician community. He's like a musician's musician, like he's every musician knows who he is, but almost nobody who's not a musician knows who he is, but that's exactly who we want

because we're selling to musicians. Um, and he was totally ready to get on board and do a promotion for us. And then, I guess he had never heard of War Dogs, like, he discovered at the

you've built a new life for yourself and all that, and that's very admirable. But, you know, my,

“my fan base, they're like, real hippie types. So they wouldn't want it. They want to be comfortable”

with me associating my brand with someone who has this in their past. And so that destroyed the deal. And so yeah, what can you do? Yeah, I was just saying, and you, you're, you're, you're, you know, your character in the movie comes off great. So yeah, I thought they did a pretty good job on me. Um, you know, and look, if you had to pick somebody to play, yeah, yeah, like, yeah, I mean,

great here. I mean, what else can I ask for you? Yeah. Listen, I always say, like, they would make a

movie about me. Like, you, I will not accept an actor that's taller than five foot six. Absolutely not. There you go. You got to, you got to represent a short. If only they, you know, if they give you nothing. No, no, they give you zero creative control. Actually, I came in from the left. Listen, sit down. Yeah, I didn't even know about this again. Yeah, you're leaving. It's exactly, I mean, just like with my cameo, they were, they were like, they were like,

“they went pictures of you with the pictures of you with all the guys and the real guy. And he was here.”

He was helping advise us. He was stop, bro. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, really, I was here sitting down being quiet. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like, they want to tell the story. They want to tell. Yeah. And, and that's, they're going to tell it. And I am actually to be completely honest. I'm very happy with how the movie came out. Yeah. I thought it, they came out really great. I thought it was going to be a way worse to be completely honest. When I first heard that,

just like your reaction to with that from, I thought he was going to make another version of the hangover. Yeah. It's going to cause I was mock you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought they were just going to make us a bunch of clowns. And luckily, this Todd Phillips, the director, he, I think he saw war dogs as his transition movie. He was coming from the comedy world, making the hangover movie. Right. The movie he made after war dogs was Joker.

So yeah. Which he want to hold a bunch of catamil wards. He made a billion dollars. I wish that was war dogs, but it's Joker. And, and, and, and, word, a Joker is obviously a very dramatic sad movie. Yeah. Not a shred of comedy in there, ironically. War dogs was what they call a dromedy, right? It's a had equal parts drama comedy. So it was his way from moving from hangover to Joker. Right. War dogs. It was his transition movie. So I, I think he wanted it to be taken a

“little bit more seriously. So that's why he didn't turn it into a clown show and make us, you”

know, objects of mockery. I was very relieved when I saw the movie. I thought it was, it came out really, really good. And, and I thought that my character in the movie was portrayed sympathetically. Yeah. I thought they made me look a bit more like a loser in the movie than I really wasn't real life, but that's okay. But it made it a better. That's the art. Yeah. Exactly. I understand why they did. Yeah. They want you. Yeah. They want to, uh, uh, anti-hero, that they can group for an

of four kids struggling. You want, you want to try to do the right thing. I want him to succeed. Right. So they root for you. Right. Even though they may not be happy with how you're doing it. Right. Exactly. You know, you need to have sympathetic characters, which is also why they

changed Diveroli dramatically from his real life persona. Uh, yeah. People are always asking me,

you know, just like they ask you, it was Diveroli. He was, he was, he has crazy as Jonah Hill, was he has crazy in the movie. I'm like, dude, he was way more psycho than that way more. I mean, he didn't do that some of the stupid thing. He didn't pull the gun, but he'd done a lot of nasty shit that would make him a lot less endearing than the movie character. Like, I'll tell you, I've seen that I felt watching the movie. I was like, oh, no, that's spot on. Being going up to the

chick in the bar and being like, how much? I've seen him do way worse than that. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen him do where it's perfectly accurate. Like, you think, yeah, everybody's thinking, nobody would ever do that. Oh, no, absolutely. No, he would just say, let's negotiate right now. How much honor box? Do you want it? I've seen him do worse. So I, so I was there when he, he would do this. This was in a one time occurrence. He did this on a somewhat regular basis.

He would go up to a couple, right? Like, on man and woman holding hands, go up to the chick and take her other hand in his hand and say to her, come on, baby, hang out with me. You're too good enough for this loser. And the guy's like, what the fuck? You're talking to my girlfriend. You know, and I had to like pull him out of so many fights. So many fights I had to pull him. It would

got so annoying going out with him because he'd always get wasted and then start fights over stupid

things. It was just, yeah. Well, I like him. Yeah. Keeps people around him that will enable him and we'll get him out of that spot. Like, if you weren't there to save him, he'd probably be much way. He knows this guy will step in and be like, hey, okay, you know, if you're not there, he's probably

in his memoir, yeah, his, his longtime girlfriend that he did was dating at this time. Yeah. I was there when they met. Yeah. She was sitting. It was in a club called Pretty Lounge in Miami

“Beach. She's sitting by herself because I think her friend went to the bathroom or something.”

He sits down next to her and he goes to her, hey, you like doing Coke? Yeah, it is. And she's like, I haven't done it in a really long time. He's like, you want to do some Coke? And she's like, okay, and they go to the bathroom. And that was the beginning of like, I think it was two or three year relationship that was the most dysfunctional thing I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, it was like literally, in this would be in public. They'd be screaming at it like we're at a restaurant

and with a bunch of like people and they'd get in some fight and they'd start screaming at each other. The top of their lungs, everyone in the restaurant is looking going, what the fuck is going on there? She would go running off to the bathroom crying. He would go chasing after, baby, baby, you know what it means to say to, baby, come on, come on, come on, come on, I love you, I love you, I love you, by your diamonds, we're going to go on a cruise next week.

I'm going to take you to the restaurant, you want to go, I sweat, baby, I'll never say that again.

You know, I just like, just like, like, never ending, just like that. And then finally,

he would convince her to come out of the bathroom and they would have like, you know, like, like, they'd make out in public, you know, like, to make up for it. And then like 15 minutes later, they're screaming at each other again. And it was just like so exhausting to be around them. It was just

“so horrible and dysfunctional, very unpleasant. And that's how he explained it, by the way.”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's accurate. I can confirm. I remember the blood thing he said, he said, he asked her, hey, you want to do a bump. And she goes, she's like, um, um, yeah, okay. And he goes, so we go in the bathroom and we, you know, he said, so we, we do a couple of lines. He said, no, I ended up taking her home that night. And I went, no, no, that's a lot. Well, okay, yeah, I put in the book that he told me. I don't know if that's what he told me.

I'll tell you afterwards. But what happened? Oh, no, you're right. It was a few days later. He called her and then they, he called somebody. He called, she gave him her number because I assume she was cooked up. And I think it was the next day or a couple days later, he called her, and she didn't pick up his call. So he called her again, something like 34 times in a row. Until she finally answered the phone to scream at him, stop fucking calling me. You fucking

psycho. And he's like, baby, baby, baby, baby. Just listen to me. Just give me to hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Okay, okay, I understand. I understand his maybe excessive, but it's only because I, I felt just a connection for you. You know, I thought we were really vibe. And I think that's something special. Let me just take you on any restaurant, you know, just take any restaurant, just pick it. Well, just going to go, I owe you nothing. You could

do lose my number afterwards. But just let me take you out to dinner once. You know, I just

“he wouldn't leave her alone until she was like, okay, fine. One dinner. And then you have to leave me alone.”

And that was like the beginning of it. And then like, just like he just would never let up.

I remember the with the coke. He said, I was like, why? He goes, he said, you give him coke. He's got a 50% chance that the chick wants to do it. Okay. He said, you get him in the bathroom. You do a couple lines. He goes, at that point, you got a 50% chance to go home with you. Because he has four chicks. He has four different women at a bar. You're going home with one of them. I didn't know he was back. Yeah, I was like, unfortunately, that sounds very reasonable. That's

a very reasonable approach to how you date women. I guess it works for him. He's like, I only got to go approach for them. Somebody's coming home. All right. Right. But yeah, he said, yeah, I remember yeah, she had a boyfriend. And then they first seeing each other. Then he was like, you can see he's

this guy's got to go. And she broke up with him. Yeah, wasn't the first night. But yeah, that was what he

had said. Was the 2050 50. It was, it was the, yeah, the worst relationship I've ever seen in my life. He said he would run up thousands of dollars in bills because back then the cell phone, you know, if it's long distance, he'd be like, my fucking cell phone's $1,500. Isn't she like that? She, if, if I had a blow of money on her, she knew how much she bothered me. He goes, so she would be like, yeah, she would, you know, you like that. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

I did like that. They had their own dynamic going. It wasn't pleasant for anyone around them. Or I think for them. But, but I guess they, it did something for them that they, it lasted like two or three years. It lasted like after I, like, left the company, they were still going at it and still hating each other. They were living together, but like hating each other. It was just like, it was a really, really terrible, terrible situation. Yeah. And that's, and you, you, you had started,

you started, what did you start? Because we talked about this before. Yes. So only, but by the way, only it's not that this is like a pitch. Uh-huh. It's only because I'm interested. Yeah. And

naturally to me. But I'm, I'm interested in entrepreneurs that like, you come up with like a

“device where you come up with like, um, because that's what Danny had told me. Right. I thought”

you, when you went on Danny's, I thought it was because of the, um, the oscillating or the, the

pedal, right, for the guitar pedal. Right. That was my first creation. It was the beat buddy. The beat buddy.

That's what I thought it was for. Yeah. But you, you, you, you'd already had that out, you said. Yeah. So my first, so just to give people context, um, Wala was under house arrest, um, I, uh, it was house arrest and compared to prison, obviously, is heaven. And you know, people, people say this all time. Like, it wouldn't matter if it was the rits. Right. I can't leave. I can't see my friends. Right. I can't, like, it's not nearly as restrictive as prison is. Right. But it's still sucks.

It's still sucks. You have a government appointed babysitter who tends to be an asshole. Right. It kind of comes with the job. And, uh, if you're outside, yeah, you have the, the ankle tracking device that you can't remove. Um, if you, I remember the first time I, it got triggered. I was

“taken the trash out in my apartment building. I just went to the trash shoot. Right. Right. It was inside”

the building. But it was able to sense that I had left the boundaries of my apartment. Right. And I get a phone call from my, uh, appreciation. Where are you with a fucker? You, you, you're outside of like your schedule, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh, I'm just taking the trash out. Wow. You don't have fucking permission to take the garbage out. I was like, okay. Now I know. So, um, so yeah, I mean, it sucks. But obviously, I was very, very thankful that I avoided prison. Right. Uh, I mean, I was looking at,

I mean, of course, they scare you to, in order to get you to, uh, plead guilty. But at first,

they were, they were, they said, oh, you delivered 71 aircraft floats with each with, with this Chinese ammo on it. And we can charge you for every, for every one. Right. Well, uh, there is, they say each aircraft load is a separate crime, because you provided a document, the certificate of conformance for each aircraft load. And on the certificate of conformance, it said that the

“place of origin of the ammo was Albanian. You knew it was Chinese. And you went, uh, had a whole”

operation to hide that it was Chinese. So, each one is an individual crime. And we can give you up to five years in prison for each one. And there's 71 aircraft loads. So, we can get up to 355 years if you go to trial. Or you could plead guilty and we'll combine it into one. So, Max, you get

five years. And because you plead guilty, you know, you're going to, we're going to tell the judge

to give you on the low end of the guidelines. So, who knows, maybe you'll get nothing, maybe you'll just get probation. Right. And, um, so that was the choice. It was like the rest of your life in prison, or maybe nothing. Right. And so, of course, I plead guilty. And, um, my lawyer said, oh, you know, we could just ask for probation, but maybe that's asking for too much. So, maybe we should just suggest, because they, you know, asked for our opening offer. Right. So, my lawyer said, well,

maybe we should just ask for like seven months of house arrest. So, he said, and they're like, yeah, sure, no problem. We probably could have just gotten probation without any house arrest, but that was the offer he gave. So, that was what they took. Um, and, uh, so I was under house arrest. And, uh, the thing, I was playing a lot, I've been a musician ever since I was like 15. I've been playing guitar. I'm a singer. And, um, you playing the movie? I do. That's right. I have my cameo. I'm playing

guitar and singing in the movie. I'm singing, uh, don't fear the reaper to a room full of 90 worlds. That was, yeah, that was the joke. I wanted to play one of my original songs, which I thought with, I was thinking, man, this is my big moment. I'm going to get my original music and a major Hollywood film. That's about me. You know, this is going to be the launch of a music career. They told me, you're going to sing this song or we're going to get someone else to do the same. Right.

Because they wanted the joke. They wanted, they wanted, they wanted, don't fear the reaper. So, yeah, so I'm playing a lot of guitar while I am under house arrest, and I really missed playing with a drummer in particular, because it wasn't like a COVID style lock down. You can have people visit you. Right. You just can't go anywhere. So I had my musician friends come over and we jam, but, um, none of my drummer friends were going to bring their whole drum set, because it's a pain in

the ass to move, and I live in a small apartment. It would wake up the neighborhood. And so I bought a drum machine, which is an electronic device that you can make beats on. And so I'd make beats on it, and so I could play along with the beats. But every time I wanted to change the beat, like to go from verse to chorus, I'd have to stop playing my guitar and press a button on the machine to change the beat, and it interrupted the flow of the music. So I thought, I need a drum machine and the form of a pedal

that I could just operate with my foot while I play guitar. So I went online to look for it.

and they were like, I haven't seen anything like that. But if you find it, let me know,

“because that sounds super cool. I would get one too. So I thought if nobody's making it,”

everybody wants it. This is a huge opportunity. So I started researching it. It took me about three years, but eventually came out with it. It's called the beat buddy. You can, like, your buddy that plays the beat. Right. It became a huge hit. I crowdfunded it because I didn't have any money. So, but people bought it, it paid in advance to get it. That's, I raised $350,000 like that in a nice, in one month, which paid for the manufacturing

and the engineering and that was able to launch my company, Singular Sound. And since we delivered the first beat buddy units actually 10 years ago, little less than 10 years ago, in September of 2014, we want a whole bunch of awards for it in the music industry. And since then, have come out with several other musician-focused products, like for the musicians in the audience, they'll know, like the world's most advanced looping pedal, the world's most versatile MIDI controller

and cable management system. Anyway, SingularSound.com, you could check out all those products,

but there was always an issue. So, I built the business, Singular Sound, and it's doing very

well. I'm very happy with it. But there was always a limitation with this business because it's in the music industry. That is the musician-focused industry, not the music industry in the general sense. Right. And musicians only comprise of, like, maybe 10% of the population, people who actually buy this kind of gear. So, it's a very niche kind of product, even though I'm not

“complaining, I've done very well with it. But I've always been thinking of ideas after, I think,”

because, like, our six or seventh music product I was thinking, "Man, I got to come up with something that's for the general market." And one night, I was hanging out with my brother, and we were we were smoking weed, and so we got them on cheese, and we ate some mango, because mangoes super sweet and juicy and delicious, but mango gets stuck in your teeth. Right. So, my brother asked me for some dental floss. We go to my bathroom, we're floss on our teeth, and I'm complaining,

I'm like, "This is such a pain in the ass. I wish I had a machine that could do this for me." And he looks at me, he's like, "Oh, if we come up with a machine that can do that, then everyone's going to buy that, because everyone hates to floss." And everyone needs to floss. That says, as general market as it gets. Right. And so, we're like, "Okay, we have to design something." And so, we start coming up with all these different hair-brained ideas,

like artificial intelligence, vision systems, and robotic hands holding dental flaws and

things that would have never worked. And eventually, we realized that we could just make an improvement

“on the water pick. The water pick is a water flaster. It shoots a single jet of water that you have to”

aim like a toothpick at your gum line, and to use it properly, you have to aim it at 90% to 90 degrees to the gum line, because if you aim it up into the gum line, it irritates the gums. And if you aim downward away from the gum line, then it doesn't get the full clean. Right. It's not as effective. So you have to hold it at 90 degree angle, trace your gum line, both top bottom teeth, and even more difficult on the inside facing outwards. In order to

close the water all there if you're mirroring it. Exactly. Exactly. If you don't use it properly, it makes a very big mess. You can hurt yourself. And there's a significant learning curve to this. Most people buy them because they hate flossing, and then they realize that their initial

experience is very unpleasant, and they just quit and put it under the sink. And they never

floss again. So we realized we could improve on the water. Instead of using a single jet of water, we could create an aged-shaped manifold using 12 jets, so that the angle is always at 90 degrees, and you just bite into it. And this thing rotates. Right. So you could just bite into it like this. And you're done. Right. And so the angle is always held at the right place. There's each side has three jets, so it has full coverage of the entire gum line. And that allows

you to have a full effective floss in just 10 seconds. Right. Which it would usually take you like two minutes if you were doing it manually. Right. I was going to say, too, by the way, then that I made him go out to his car and get there. So it's not like you brought this. Hey, I want to pitch this product. I was like, bro, you got to go get there. So he had to go get it and bring it in. Yeah, because I'm interested because I'm also interested in like, like, you sit down and draw

this up, or do you draw like a sketch and then go to somebody and say, hey, so my process is the way I actually start of all things. I'm actually not an artist at all. Like, I'm very bad at drawing.

the basic line sketch of what I'm thinking about. Right. And then I have like little arrows pointing at various features and a text description. And then what I'll usually do is if it's a physical hardware product like this, I'll go to a industrial designer who will make a 3D model. And then, you know, it's just the looks of it. It's not nothing, nothing functional. And just so I have like a computer rendering of what I want the final product to look like.

Right. And then I take that rendering to engineers, depending on the type of product, it's different types of engineers. I learned this all the hard way through a lot of trial and error. But for a product like this is really just mechanical, mostly. So you need a mechanical engineer. But there are some electronic elements. You do need a PCB designer and an electrical engineer

“to do the circuitry. And so you need to find the right engineers to do this. Ideally,”

engineering teams who specialize in the similar kinds of things. So I hired, I found the company, an engineering company that specializes in dental devices. They designed a bunch of toothbrushes in the past electric toothbrushes. So I figured they already in the oral device industry. They would know how to do this. So that's, you know, kind of how I pick my engineering teams. Once you have the engineering done, then you could take that design from the engineers

and you can get a prototype made and test it in the real world. Make sure it's functioning correctly. And usually you go through several revisions of prototypes until it actually works. That took us three years to go through the prototyping stage. And then once you have that done, you go to manufacturing. And then usually there are other series of engineers to figure out. What machines are going to make this piece exactly? Usually you have to redesign the whole thing

because your prototyping engineers didn't keep all the manufacturing issues in mind.

“Right. Because when you're doing mass manufacturing, you need to do things like injection molding”

where the parts need to be specific shapes so that they could be stamped out by these big plates that do the injection molding. And if they aren't, they can't be then you have to redesign the part and split some parts into multiple parts. And so that entire process took us another two years. So that's what we've been working on into floss for about five years. And we just delivered the first few thousand units to people who pre-ordered it. So very excited about that.

How did you fund this? So we started out with the initial prototyping stage was funded by just friends and family and from some money from my music business. And then once we had the functional

prototypes that we knew it would work, we did a Kickstarter campaign and we raised a million

dollars. Yeah. The fuck am I doing it? Yeah. We didn't go on Shard Tank. You didn't know. So we applied for Shard Tank and we got into the final round. Okay. And then they turned us down. They're like, try again next year. We think you have a great product. But it's like like 30,000. You didn't get on TV. No, we didn't get on TV. We didn't get on TV. We applied to Shard Tank and we, you go through several rounds to get on to the show. And they told us that

we got into the final round. Yeah. So we were very close to getting on to Shard Tank. But then they turned us down. I don't know. I guess we, you know, whatever reason. I personally, I watched that that season of Shard Tank. Yeah. And I thought we were much more interesting than a lot of the

“products that were on there. But I think what they try to do is they try to have a certain mix of”

different types of businesses. Right. Like they'll have some businesses that they know the sharks are going to hate for the drama. You know. So we've done a lot of research on Shard Tank because we've been trying to get on the show. And what you see in ten minutes on the show is an edited version of about one and a half to two hours of them really growing. They're grilling you relentlessly.

Yeah. It always feels funny. Like, you're going to talk to me. I come out. I pitch my product. I'm

on here for four minutes. And you guys are saying, I'll give you $500,000. I'll give you a man. That's not put. They cut out like 90 percent. They have to be asking you, you know. Well, what's your, what's this value? What's that? How are you this? How many employees? What's your overhead? Are you having a, you know, they got to be asking a lot more questions. Yeah. Yeah. They, and they do. I mean, each pitch is like an hour and a half to hours, in which they edited down to 10 minutes.

So, but yeah, we did not, unfortunately, not yet. Not gunwood. We didn't get on Shard Tank yet. Still hoping. Do you want to go on just to go? What on Shark Tank? Yeah. I mean, you know, you're not really thinking, no, I want to go on because I want them to get to raise the money.

Yeah. I mean, look, I would never this point. You're, at this point, you're doing it by yourself.

Yeah. That's true. We are completely self-funded. We still could make use of additional funding.

against the idea. If the offer that we got on Shark Tank was actually good, I would say. So, not be cool just to go on. Yeah. But, but I would be thrilled just to go on. Sure. Absolutely. You know what I'm saying? At sea on Shark Tank. Exactly. They love that.

“Though Mark Cuban, I think he's not, I think this is going to be his last season or something. So, yeah,”

it's too bad. Yeah. Well, so what are you working on now? So, yeah. So, so, so, InstaFloss, I just completed five years to get it to markets that that's been a long road. Much longer than I thought it would be, of course. But, I'm really excited about a brand new venture that I'm working on called War Dogs Academy. Okay. And the way this happened was, ever since the movie, I've had literally hundreds of people, maybe even more than a thousand people,

contact me on social media various ways, begging me to like become my apprentice. Right. And usually the way it goes is, "No, please teach me everything. I'll work for free. I'll give you 90% of the money. Just I'm desperate in a bad situation. I know you can teach. I'll do whatever you want. I'll work 20 hours a day, etc. Right. And I mean, I'm running these other businesses. It's not,

“even if you work for free. I mean, that's time out of my day. I'm not, and I don't know these people.”

Right. They're level of commitment and whether they're willing to stick it out to the end

and all that stuff. Anybody says I'm going to work for free is, and he's almost always not up.

Yeah. That's not the case. Right. Three weeks later, they're like, "Bro, I got to get a job. I'm all about that." Yeah. But you didn't think that's through? Right. So a little while ago, I got a very different message than the usual. And this was from a guy named Logan and he told me he's like, "You know, I'm just reaching out to let you know that around six years ago, my partner and I watched War Dogs. We were 21 years old at the time. And we thought,

"Man, these guys are our age. And if they could do it, why can't we do it?" And so we, set up, we learned everything. Learned how to do the government contracting register and business. We've been on a whole bunch of contracts. We lost them a lot. We were going crazy. But finally, we struck it big. And today, we have a multimillion dollar government contracting business. And I just wanted to say thank you for the inspiration. Nice. And I was like, "That's a great, that's a great

fucking call." Amazing. Exactly. And I said, "That's amazing." I mean, the fact that I was any,

that my story was any inspiration. And you know, took these guys, turned their lives around, and set them up for life was just a huge inspiration for me. And I said, "I had the thought." I'm like, "You know, I have so many people who want to learn how to do this." And these guys taught themselves how to do it. And they went through and made a million mistakes as everyone does when you're first learning something new and complex like government contracting. But they learn

their lessons and now they're running a multimillion dollar successful business. And so I said, "You know, I have all these people wanting to learn this. Why don't we start something to teach people how to do government contracting? You guys built a legitimate legal successful multimillion dollar business." And the vast majority of government contracting is completely legitimate and above board and legal. You don't have to do all these sneaky crazy things that Ephraim was doing. And still

become very successful at it. So it's also not just arms. Like you could say, they fit on everything.

“The government spends, I think it was, I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think it's something”

like $6.7 trillion every year. The defense budget alone is around 800 billion, which is greater than

the national GDP of the vast majority of the world's countries. So they buy everything. I mean, they buy the federal government is the biggest single buyer of anything of the single, the single biggest buyer on the planet, right? Well, they're there. They're the largest employer in the world. Exactly. They spend the most money more than anyone. So if you learn how to sell to the government, you are entering a gigantic market. And because they buy everything, you can sell anything. So

they, I bid on contract. My first contract, as I mentioned, was for fuel. I worked on contracts for clothing and for food and for vehicles, and as well as arms. These guys who, who I started word dogs academy with, they found their niche in laundry services. Book of all things. They have multi-million dollar laundry service contracts. They're actually currently in Germany right now on army base in Germany overseeing their laundry contracts. So you can go into any field, right? If you

already have a specialty in a field, like let's say you know a particular industry, you have a huge leg up, right? You already know all the players, you know, the details of the industry. You can learn how to get registered with the government, learn how the system works, which we are going to

shortly after this podcast, but before we launch, we have a pre-sale deal. So people can save a little bit of money if they're really, so these are this is a video course. So yeah, it's a video course, but we're going to, we have written, we have all the notes and written format as well and all the links to all the websites and all the documents and example documents of things that

“you need to fill out. So we pretty much are making this as easy, turnkey as possible, so that people”

don't make all the mistakes that cost you, you know, will cost you in the future when you're first

learning. What about what if they want, what if they do that and then they want like, you know, hands on or the ability to actually talk to somebody, right? So we're going to have additional options for that. So we're going to have, we have the basic course and we have additional opportunities to have one-on-one coaching. We have offers for us to review their first contracts to make sure they're submitting it to the government. We also have a B2B option because not everyone is someone who's

starting from scratch. Some people want more than happy to pay a little bit extra to get the individualized attention and to make sure that they're not messing up. For larger businesses, it's worth it because the little bit of extra they're going to have for our experts to come in and look at what they're doing and make sure they're not messing up. They save them time off. It's going to save them a lot of time and money if they were going to make them mistakes. Yeah. Okay. So wardogsacademy.com. Check it out.

Wardogsacademy.com. Yes. That was available. That's pretty good. I know, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, Bob F. Sh. I'll let you know. There's a ton of stuff that wardogs is isn't available. But academy, I guess. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You would probably change the court. Wardogs course. Right. Right. There's school or whatever. Yeah. We went through a bunch of dreams. You could have come. Yeah. Yeah. Academy works. Yeah. We landed on Academy. We thought it was

the best. We were thinking at first doing university, but there's been so many scandals with online

universities being like scams. Like what does it annotates? Think all. I didn't want to mention his name. Hustle University. Exactly. That's exactly why we didn't go with wardog diversity because of Andrew Tates. Maybe I made a bunch of enemies with the team fans out there right now. But we didn't want to be associated with someone who has a questionable reputation. We want this course to be a legitimate useful value that people will get. They'll be able to launch a new

career based on this and we're going to make it as easy as possible for you to do that. Okay. So yeah, so the last thing we want is to be associated with a lot of scams. I was going to say it's pretty easy. But I mean, we'll put the beat buddy and or the the name. It's just it's the website for because you have a multitude of different. My musical business is singular sound. Yeah. Singular sound.com. Yeah. The InstaFloss is InstaFloss.com. Like Instagram. Right.

InstaFloss. InstaFlossing. And worddocsacademy.com. Yeah, we'll put all those in the description. Perfect. Got to get my pitch in sometimes. Well, like you're like you're you're kicking a half, right? Thank you, man. You know, I appreciate that. You are. I mean, you're definitely turned the ice out amazed by the crowdfunding thing. Yeah, you're definitely having a lot of experience and crowdfunding. If you ever are thinking about doing that, I've got lots of tips for that.

Yeah, I've got. Well, I'm still, you know, I'm still on probation. Like I'm limited completely.

“And I've had guys come to me and say, hey, if you want to flip properties, we can do it in your”

name. Hey, if it's like, I'm mom, they don't seem to understand. I'm I'm probation. Yeah, but we can do it in my name. I'm like, yeah, no, no, I know there's lots of loop holes. Right. I could get around it without your help. Right. I'm thinking maybe just yeah, I'm supposed to be the right director. I don't end up back. Right. I can wait six months. You know, I can wait, you know, and I'm doing, you know, doing great. So, that's great. When's your probation over? It's, I got like five, five months. But wow. Yeah. So,

early congrats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got, you know, I have one. Yeah, I got five months. I got five months.

Amazing. So that's great around the corner. My, you know, my probation officer comes here and

she walks in and she's like, who, she's like, you know, who, who have you interviewed lately? You know, she, like, asked me questions and stuff. And I'm like, and you know, she's like,

“so what, what do you have to, my, go, I went to crime conscious. I was going to go to crime”

conscious. Are you serious? Yeah. I didn't know what to, you know, what was it exactly? Like, I thought it would be interesting. And I was like, like, how, she's vastly different than my first probation officer. Who I don't think meant me any harm, but she made it as hard as possible.

send me that? You know, like, because, you know, when I first got out of the really strict probation,

because the first time I was on probation, I, I stole the lemon and half million. Right. So they were holding

resentment. Yeah. Yeah. Um, good reason. And so they, she was like, this guy going to happen this time, is it? I was like, so, um, so she was, they were much more strict. But then you know, as you get further away, because most people recidivate in, like, the first two years. After two years, they're like, okay, drop him down. Then I got another probation officer. And then after, like, a year, so with that one, they're like, drop him down. And then I got this one, which is, she's just, like,

you know, I sent it to me when you get it. Oh, okay. She's way cool. Oh, that's nice. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Which is nice. Yeah. Um, not that I do anything. Right. But does it matter? You're scared all the time. Yeah. Because you're so getting out. I'm scared. I'm waiting for him to come show him waiting for them to knock on the door and say they made a mistake. You got to correct.

Right. Turn around. You know, you did something. Yeah. Yeah. Or we let you out by accident. I mean,

“literally that's what I felt like they're going to realize they fucked up. Oh, wow. Um, but, uh,”

yeah. I ran. That's, that's true. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. Um, what are you going to do once you get out? What can't you do now that you, you want your wedding together? You know, what I can't do is like, I really can't like travel. Not that I want a travel. Right. You know, but it's like, you know, it's the same when people someone tells you now. Mm-hmm. One of them says, no, like, soon as you turn it right. I like I got married. Like I'd like to go on

on vacation. She's like, okay. Um, because I told her, you know, oh, I got married and she was like, oh, that's great. She's like, are you going to go on a honeymoon? I was like, you know, which I thought was like a nice thing for her to say. And I was like, yeah, we're playing on going on a honeymoon. She's like, okay. Well, I need to know where and like, they can't be too extravagant. You really, you're not going to be able to don't plan anything outside the U.S.

You know, and it can't be too crazy. And it's like suddenly I'm realizing like, I really can't go on. Like, not that I'm going to do anything crazy, but I actually was thinking about going to the Virgin Islands, which is in the U.S. It's still part of the U.S. But she may have a problem. Right. And then it's like, okay, well, like, there's all these issues. You know,

“I'm saying there's issues with this. There's issues with that. And it's like, what am I going to do?”

You know, it's like, okay, you know what? So I, you know, talked to my wife and she's like, look, I don't like care anyway. I like you. We'll go whenever we go. You know, but let's face it if I say, hey, I want to put $3,000 on our credit card. I can't put $3,000 on our credit card. They see my credit cards. They're going to say, the hell do you have $3,000 on a credit card for? Oh, I went on this vacation. And then I got to say where I'm going. If I say, oh, I'm going to say here, this hotel,

they're going to be like, you're staying there for a week. That's got to be expensive. What does that call? Because keep mine all that goes into what do you pay? So you're going on a really nice little vacation for a week. Well, you owe this money. It's like, fuck. But it means is that end wouldn't with your probation or it ends with my probation as far as them having so much say so. Gosh, you know, I still owe the money. Right. But that goes to like a collection company.

I see. And they'll call you and say, look, and you can negotiate with them. The fact is, if I tell them, look, go fuck yourself. I'm not paying you. You know, which I'm not going to do.

“Right. But I'm in a better position to say, look, I'm not, I can't do this at,”

here's what my understanding is. They basically say, look, pay $300 a month. You know,

they're not, they don't want to, they don't want to sit there and go, okay, this is what you got to pay every month. Or this would, you know, okay, well, well, wait, send us your dot. They're going to do that every month. They're going to say, keep paid this every month and you can at least negotiate your probation also. There's no negotiation. It's like, you're like, well, I'm not paying that much. Well, no, she's like, okay, well, then I'm going to have the Marshalls come and ratchet you.

Perfect. You'll sit in the county for, for you're sitting in the county jail for six months. And then we'll bring you in front of the judge and we'll talk about it. You're like, yeah, can't go to the county for six months. So yeah, yeah, you're in a better position, which, you know, and I'd like to be able to do, you know, every time I go somewhere to travel to do something, you know, I have to go to, like, there's this guy, I don't know if you, you know, Michael Francis is,

he's got a huge podcast, right? And so, the same thing with Ian Beck, I just want to go see Ian Beck. He's got a big podcast too. He's doing great. He started like a year ago and he's already got like 250,000 subscribers. So he's got more subscribers than I did. I started three years ago. So I'm a little jealous about that. But I'm not going to, it's fine. Good for him. Right. So for me to go up there, I have to, I have to submit it. I have to explain why I have to explain this is for business. I'm not

not going for pleasure. I'm not going to party. I'm going, she's like, okay, well, when is it this day this day? And they're like, okay, so you're flying in this day, you're going there, you're going, make sure that you're not sticking around for three days on a little vacation. No. So that's all thing. Like, I want to go to Michael Francis, I have to go, say look, there's this guy, I have to plead my case, fill out a form. Now, she's super cool, because she knows I'm not doing anything crazy.

Right. And it's like you flew in on, I flew in on Monday, I flew out on Tuesday. And then, you know, right, you can check the podcast in a week. I'll show it right. Right. And then, of course,

international. Right. So I had, I did once, I went to, um, uh, Amsterdam. Okay. Two of my charges are passport fraud. Oh. So, you know, when I told them that, they will, she was like, well, you can't go. She's like, you can't even get a passport. I'm like, why? And this one, not this probation officer of my husband, she goes, she goes, she goes, aren't you some of your charges passport fraud? And I was like, yeah, but I mean, this is going to be in my name. Right. And she's

like, she's like, well, I can't okay. That I can't okay. You won the leave the United States and two, I can't let you get a passport. You're on probation. And I was like, what can I go to the judge? She says, yeah, you can, you can ask the judge. She said, I don't have a problem. I just can't okay. And so I had to go in front of the judge and he had issued two orders. One, yes, he's allowed to get his passport. And two, he's allowed to travel for business for this during this

“period of time. And so then I, you know, I went for like seven days. No, six, six, I think it was like six”

days. I went to Amsterdam. There was a TV show called Inside the Mind of a, of a con artist. They did like an hour episode on me. Not super flattering, but it was funny because when I came back in, you know, when you go through, when you go through passport control, like, I'm staying in a line with like six people in front of me. The person comes through and the guy goes, okay. Good. Welcome back, you know what I say? Okay. Welcome back.

Mine he goes. Takes the passport, puts it way over here. Like, I've got a lunge, but that was way over here. And he's sitting there he goes, starts. He's, he's like going through and going through and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting. And at some point I go, how bad is it? It's where you're definitely going to have

to talk to somebody. And I thought, she's as I thought it would be for a split second where I thought,

“are they going to let me in? And I was like, no, of course, they're going to let you in. Of course.”

And then I thought, I got a connecting flight, like, I'm going to get on a plane. But anyway, then he took it and put it in a pad or put it in a clear plastic thing and put it down. And he kept going and I didn't realize it, but I'm still waiting for him. Like, well, what are we going to do? And he's like, oh, he's just given me it. He's still looking and there's a door way. I mean, we're talking about 200 feet away. So some guy walked out of a door. So I see him coming, but I don't

realize it's for me. He comes walking right up, grabs the plastic thing goes, Mr. Fox following me, and I'm like, oh, where are your bags? And I'm like, my, like, I start the, I'm at this point, I'm thinking, I've done something wrong. I may be going to jail. Anyway, I end up getting back to his desk and he sits down and he's looking over the whole thing and he goes, what did you do?

Is this like a Ponzi scheme? I go, no, it's bank fraud. Is it a soul of a few million dollars?

It's not a big deal. He's like, well, you know, there's a, he was, there's a, a whole notice, sort of, basically, he was said, like a red notice or something to say that, but he calls it something else. He's like, there's such and such notice on you. He said, um, and I go, there shouldn't be at all. I said, I've been to prison. I got out on my probation. I said, I have permission and he goes, well, I mean, it's expired. I go, it's expired and he goes, still. And I went, I said, what?

What's happening? He goes, and he said, do you have anything to give me? And I thought, luckily, in my bag, I had the order from the judge. And I pulled it. I said, oh, I got

“thing from the judge. He's like, well, you should have started with this. I got a travel permit to”

pull out the, even though my probation officer, which he gave, she's, I'm going to give you this. You're not going to need it. I'm going to give it to you just so you have it. Thank God, she gave it to me. Right. So he did let, he, he let me go. But yeah, I mean, I could problem. Yeah, I could problem. Yeah, you think this is going to happen every time you go internationally? I don't know. I, I wonder, because like, there's a guy named Sean outwood that I'd love to go on his,

you know, like, it's kind of like shark tank. You know, it's like, I don't think it's going to, if I go on Sean outwood, it's not going to do anything for me. My, my, I'm not going to get any

million views. My, my subscribers aren't going to spike. But it's Sean outwood. Like he, like,

in this little genre, like he's a staple, you have to go on Sean outwood. It's like getting invited on, you know, like Lex Freedman, right? But it's in the genre, right? Like, oh, he only does criminal. I see. So I'd love to go. My fear is it's in, it's in the UK. Ah, the UK doesn't, what? Doesn't allow criminals to come in. But Michael Francis just went. So now I feel better. And Sean said I've had many people come from the United States. He said the only time I've ever

had anybody stopped was when they notified them ahead of time. I have a felony. I would like to come, and they said no. Oh, I see. And it was like, he's like, so don't say anything. I'm like,

plane going back. That's it. You're it. Right. So I would like to go. They didn't stop me going into Amsterdam. They have a policy, not to a lot of islands. UK has a policy. They don't want felons. Like any felon. I mean, that's, yeah, supposedly. I'm a felon. So I was going to say,

but, you know, I think, but like I said, he said, it's never once. Right. So maybe it's more

rich. And even Sean said, they're, they don't, they're not. So they say they don't allow felons into the country. I see. He's like, but I've never had anybody stopped. The only number had a person. You know, I don't know how they would know. Right. Yeah. Like if the FBI providing you with felons from the United States, like that seems odd. I think maybe anyway, I mean, they could Google

“people who are Google. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Maybe. But Michael Franzis just can't.”

Right. Right. So not Google. Right. But it's same thing going on Michael Franzis. Like I want to be able to go. Yeah. I don't think it's going to blow my channel out. Right. It's like Michael Franzis. He's like this huge mobster. He's the, he is the number one biggest earner in the mob. He ran a gas tax scam that netted like $100 million or something outrageous. You know. So yeah, I think that's cool. I want to go. He's got a piece of, you've got to like a million subscribers.

You just started it as channel like a couple years ago. Like he's blowing up. No, it's cool. Well, in five months. Yeah. Five months. Yeah. I can go out. I'm an actual, I can go now. But I'm saying, yeah, I have the right right. You have this just a pain in the book. Yeah. So it's like going on Shark Tank. It's like, right. You're going, you're probably, you go and you think, I don't really, you know, I don't really think that it's going to work out. Right. But I want to go. I do think that

if I went on Shark Tank, it would definitely help the product. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's like seven million viewers who find out about InstaFloss. That's huge. That's, that's big. Because the each of those viewers, everybody needs to floss. So everyone is a potential customer. And it's that kind of, it's that kind of product that would really benefit from that kind of exposure. Right. I do think that Shark Tank would move the needle for us quite a bit, which is why we're going to,

we're not going to give up on it. It's also pretty cool though. Yeah. But it is also very cool. Yeah. I'm not going to deny that that's part of it. Yeah. Absolutely. It would be very cool to be on Shark Tank. So I do, I have like one, I will more question. Yes. Like, so you're on house arrest, and then I'll let you go. Yeah. So I'm on your on house arrest. Like, why didn't you think to yourself, just go get a job? Oh, I mean, this is over just go get a job and just that's it. I'm, uh, I mean,

I did have a job. Yeah. But I mean, you clearly didn't stick with it. Right. Right. Right. Right.

I mean, I've always been very entrepreneurial, and, um, I like working for myself. Right.

I like building new things. Um, and actually the first thing, the first career I ever wanted to have as a kid was an inventor. Okay. Yeah. Which later, when I got a little loader, I changed it

“to astronaut, but my original one was inventor. And I remember thinking this, I think I was eight”

years old at the time. I was looking through one of these, like, kids books of that explain, like, how electricity is generated. Right. And, uh, they explain that, you know, it's these big turbines that turn the magnets and that, that, that, that, that rotate and create a electrical field in the, in the, in the wires, which generates the current. And I thought, man, all I have to do is take the output of a electric generator, connect it to an electric motor, and have the motor power

the generator, and it just goes forever. And, you know, infinite, infinite energy. I just solved the world's energy problems. I'm a genius. I'm a genius. I can't believe nobody has ever thought of this before. And, um, and, and, and so, like, right then, I was like, I want to invent something. And so, my dad was very encouraging. And, uh, he gave me, like, this little notebook that he wrote on it, uh, David's invention book. I still have it. And I put, like, my eight-year-old

sketches, I had other ideas, like, a flying shoe, because you put little fans in the shoes, and it lets you fly, like, Superman. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, I had all these, uh, eight-year-olds,

kind of inventions. Um, so, that was always, that, that was a big goal of mine early early on.

So, when I had the idea for the beat buddy, while I was under house arrest, I was like, "Oh, my God, I actually think that this is going to, this product, I knew it was going to be

“successful. I knew the second, I thought of it. I, I remember going to the internet to search if”

someone else made it first in my hands were shaking, because I was like, if nobody's made this, I'm going to make millions." And I was right, uh, because I knew immediately that I wanted, that I wanted this product. It was a simple product that could be built, right? It was, I didn't need to invent a new technology. It was just a re-application of another technology in the new ways. Yeah. It wasn't like an unknown thing whether it will work or not. I knew it could be built,

and I knew that people wanted it. The only question was whether someone else made it,

That was the major question I had. And when I realized that nobody else was making it,

“and then I got a quote, a bunch of quotes from various engineering companies that it could be built”

at a price range that would be reasonable for someone to buy, I knew that this was going to be a successful product, and this could be a launching pad to achieve my childhood ambition of being a successful inventor. So, yeah, the flying shoes. That's my next one, man. I can't, I can't, I can't divulge any, you know, any of our trade secrets just yet, but flying shoes. It's going to

watch out for it. So, yeah, it was, I could never get a nine to five job after that. I just

had to go for this, for this dream. And I'm really glad I did because it's, it's been an amazing, amazing journey. I'm extremely grateful for where I am today, and I can make a really decent living without having to worry. Look over my shoulder, wonder whether the feds are going to come busting in, you know, whether I'm going to get caught or something, I can sleep easy at night, knowing I have no enemies out there that wish me ill. I didn't fuck over anybody. I'm not in a fight

with anybody. You know, it's just like, it's amazing. It's really, I'm extremely, extremely grateful for where I am today. And, yeah, and I hope that, and I'm really excited about word dogs academy because I feel like, in a way, I mean, don't get me wrong. I want this to be successful for my own selfish reasons, but in a way that's, it's a way to give back to other people as well. Because I really do feel really bad for all the people who message me, and I hear some real

sob stories to be honest. People really give me some real sob stories, and I feel really bad. I'm like, this guy's having a real hard time, but like, I literally have hundreds and hundreds of people who are saying the same thing. I can't. I don't have enough time in the day. So, it's, it's, it's really rewarding in that sense to be able to, to set people up, to, to, to build their own businesses and, and give them a platform, to be successful on their own. Yeah, it's kind of

full circle too. Exactly. Exactly. How you started out? Yeah, you had to rely on it, that from exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's, I learned so many things of like, so many things of what to do with effort, and how to run a business, and how to, and work ethic, and it learned so many more things about what not to do, right, about how to treat people, and how to build for the long

“term instead of just the short term. And so I think that both of those positive and negative lessons,”

I will always give effort and credit. He's a, he's a brilliant guy. Yeah, brilliant guy.

Very special in all ways you take that word to be. I wouldn't want to be him. I wouldn't want anyone else to be. I, I wish he would change. I wouldn't want him to be like him. I think that, that if he managed to focus his efforts into a more constructive way, he could achieve just as much if not more success, then through all his underhanded tactics because he would be building something for the long term. I think he's very unhappy and he doesn't even know it. Yeah, well, I'm not a psychologist.

That wouldn't surprise me in the least, but I'm not going to speculate on his personal internal I think he was happy or he wasn't, you know, that didn't behave the way he'd behave. I'd like to think so. I mean, I don't, you know, where does happiness come from, right? Right. You know, some, you could argue that he's only happy when he's screwing someone over. If you like that, sure, he sure acts that way. So maybe, maybe he would be miserable if he wasn't

“screwing people over. Maybe that's what he needs to be happy and that's why he does what he does.”

I wish that wasn't the case. I think the people around him would be a lot better off. I think society as a whole would be a lot better off if he wasn't screwing people left and right, creating a huge backlog in the justice system and in the court systems and suing people and getting sued and it's just a massive waste of time and money that could be put to more productive uses elsewhere. I'm sure he's very rich. I'm sure he's got lots of money squirled away in various overseas

bank accounts away from the IRS. That's what he was doing back when we were together. He mentioned the Sacell Islands. He had, I'm sure it's not there anymore because that was 15 years ago, but he had

bank accounts in the Sacell Islands. He's hiding money all over the place. He was always terrified

of the IRS doing an accounting examination of him. I didn't even know why, but I just knew that he was. So like when we were negotiating, he was like, you know, I said, oh, if you don't, if you fuck me over, you don't want the IRS looking and he was like, well, don't mention three letter words, like the IRS. So I didn't even know what he was doing wrong, but I knew he was nervous about it.

talents into a legitimate business that actually added value to the world rather than take value

“from everyone he comes into contact with, I think he and society would be immeasurably”

better off. I wish that was the case. I hope it becomes the case in the future. I never lose hope.

If I get a phone call from Mephram and he says, David, you know, I've been doing a lot of thinking, I'm getting older. I think he got married and has a kid now or something. I heard that. And I wish

“them the best. He's like, if he says to me, oh, you know, I've been really thinking about my life”

and I'm going to be a different person from now on. I want to apply. I admit that what I did to

you was wrong. And here's a check for five million dollars. And you know, I hope that we can put

all this behind us. I will give him a big fucking bear hug and I'll be like, Ephraim, you approved me wrong.

“Yeah. I never thought you would do this. I thought it would be not in a million years.”

But you know what? You give me hope for humanity that people can really change and we can be friends again. We can like, you know, hang out and I'll go and publicly sing your praises that you were a formed human being. But I put that chance at very close to zero. So, which is a shame. It's a shame for everybody. It's a shame for him. It's a shame for everybody. It comes into contact with it. It's a shame for his family. It's a shame for everybody. Shame for me too. I'd love to have my five million.

But yeah. I mean, I never lose hope. But it's a pretty small hope. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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