My name is Jimmy Tsui. I have a nickname as Bighead. I'm a former high-level member of the largest triad, Sun Yee On. I decided to leave my life because I got sick and tired of it, and I almost got killed in 1992. I got shot five times. Do I know the person who shot me? Yes, I know the person who shot me. But I don't know why he
shot me at that time. How many triads in Hong Kong? I can tell you there's a lot of triads. Sun Yee On, 14K, Shing Wo, Shui Fong. My situation is a bit special
because I'm not in Hong Kong. I'm from New York. And in New York, I already have
a lot of soldiers under me. When I joined the Tung On
gang in Chinatown, New York, a couple of former members in Tung On, they are from Hong Kong. When they in Hong Kong, they already are triad.
Sun Yee On members. So after they come to the United States, they still have a connection
with a Hong Kong triad. Because some things happened,
I got arrested on ... 1985. I remember. So, after I got out, the couple of members I mentioned before from
Sung Yee On, they asked me, "Hey, Jimmy, you want to
go to Hong Kong with us? Maybe you can go outside
and have some fun first because you were already
inside for two years." I went back to Hong Kong with them. They took me to a restaurant,
and told me wait over there. And then afterward, a guy come down, but he didn't look like
a triad leader, nothing. He looked like a businessman. They never mentioned this
guy is the leader, OK? So the leader asked me
a couple of questions, like, "What you do in New York? What's your position in New York?" And I tell him the whole thing. So he's saying that, because I already
have a lot of soldiers on my under level, all the kids who follow me, they will become a Sun Yee On too. For the ceremony, there's a
incense altar on the table. We have to swear a lot
to God or something, and we had to drink blood wine. And then the first thing,
they were saying that — I will speak in Cantonese because I don't know how to
translate in English that one. The rule for the triad, the main rule is you obey
your boss, of course. You obey your main boss. There's only one main
boss for the whole group, so you must obey him. And never against each other, and never steal money from each other, and never lie to each other, and never take girl from each other. My boss give me, as I remember, two, two nightclubs to collect
money every month, which they call protection money. The shareholders must be,
like, one or two shareholders for the nightclub is our member. In America, you can say that's extortion, but they'd be willing to give out money for the protection in America. But in Hong Kong, you must be a shareholder
for this nightclub, and then you have your own
people to protect the club. I tell you — honestly, I tell you — we are there every night, at least 20 days a month. We got used to it, just like going to work. Just, like, every day
about time, we were like, OK, let's go to this nightclub tonight, let's go to that nightclub tonight. Every night is like that.
That's the gang life. For me, I got two nightclubs to collect. Every nightclub, they give
me 20 grand each month. So a month, I get, like, 40 grand, without doing something,
for two small nightclubs. But for the big ones, as
I know, they pay, like, 100 grand a month for each general. Back then, the triad business always production company, bowling alley. That's a legal business. And for the underground business, maybe money laundering,
maybe drug money. They have business right
here, in United States. In New York, in LA. They
have business all over. Back then, I can say,
every gang in Chinatown, they have connections in Hong Kong. They all have connections in Hong Kong. The generals from the other group, they start a business of drug trafficking. Back then, it's very
easy to smuggle the drugs into United States. Maybe they have some
girl member in the gang. They tell the girl to
go back to Hong Kong and pick up something
and bring it back in. At that time, it's very easy. It's not like right now. When the time I'm in Hong Kong, the movie business, I can say that is all controlled by triad. If you don't listen to triad,
you cannot get the spot. Not even a spot. You don't listen to them,
you will get punished. There's a movie star come
out saying that, like, "I'm not a triad," whatever. You believe them? You believe them. OK. But for me, I don't believe them. A lot of famous movie
stars which is female, they are triad members. A lot of people don't know. And we know. Every gangster got a nickname because we don't want to use
our real name on the street. Easy to remember. I got big head, and my name's
Jimmy. It's too simple. A lot of people are called Jimmy. So they won't forget, they
always called me Bighead Jimmy. They have a nickname for monkey. They have a nickname for
"tiger boy," "fat boss." They have all kind of nickname. They have all different kind of handshake, like different position. They have different kind of handshake. Sometimes you do this, and then you show with your hand sign, and then they know what's your position. Maybe the guy who you're
talking to is a soldier, and then you show him the
hand sign is, you are a general, and then he don't know
what is general hand sign because he's only a soldier, so he only can show
the soldier hand sign. So if I saw it, you're only a soldier, I don't want to talk to you. Tell your boss to come out, like this. They don't use that no more.
Only the old generation. The generation after the
2000s, they don't care. They don't care about this. They just care how many people you have, what kind of power you
have, how much you got. In Hong Kong, I'll never
go out with myself. If I go to this nightclub,
at least 20, 30 people will follow me, go into nightclub. So they knew. They knew you're triad. We got experience. We can tell who's a triad, who's a cop, and who's a businessman. We can tell. For triads, they have a couple levels. But for Sun Yee On, the
members on the top level, they are all controlled by one family. No other people can take their position. Every generation, they will pass down, like father and son,
son and son, like this. So it's all controlled
by one family until now. After the top level, the
second level is the general. We call it 426. After the 426 is the soldier. For the soldier, they call it 49. And after the soldier, that's the people who hang out
with the soldier every day, but they are not a member yet.
They call it blue lantern. This is the main structure of the triad. Of course, they have a lot
of different positions, like white paper fan. That's the guy who
controls all the money. There's another position that's for passing out the message. A special guy doing that. Now, at this century, a
lot of position is gone. So only got left is
the top level, general, the soldier, and the blue lantern. I only saw my boss in Hong
Kong two or three times. But I know his family members. When I get to the general position, the boss will give you a couple places, like, couple of business places, for you to collect money every month. That's our salary. I just make sure they are
doing the right thing, they don't step out of the line. And that's what I did. If somebody step out of the line, OK, there's so many people in the group. So many people. Always, things happen, because you cannot control everybody. I never did that before, but what I heard, the worst thing, they got killed. That's the worst. If they did something against the company, against the group, they will get killed. After me, I have a couple of soldiers — they are in the group for a long time, they have experience —
who control all the kids. They are doing all the management. So this thing won't happen. But sometimes in the other groups, this thing did happen. That's what I heard. Hong Kong's really small,
and too many triad members. They all have their own district. Like, you control this part, and 14K controls the other part. But you know how the gangster is. They always want to increase their power. So they step in the district
that's controlled by the Sun Yee On, and the war is gonna start. When I was in Hong Kong, I saw another general in Sun Yee On, they have something going
on with a general in 14K. They start a war. They want
to take their territory. Yeah, I saw that before. But this always happened
in Hong Kong back then. Back then, in Hong Kong,
they always start a war, but they don't use guns. They always use knife, because in Hong Kong the
firearm law is really strict. Even though they have a gun, they're hardly going to bring
the gun outside on the street. Almost impossible for people to get a gun license in Hong Kong. When the time I was in Hong
Kong, who used the guns, always the gangsters from
China, from mainland China. They bring the gun from China, then they use it in Hong Kong, and then they ran back to China. But for the original members in Hong Kong, they hardly use the gun. OK, maybe the lower-lower-level guy, but not the general. And if a fight starts,
we don't get involved, only the soldiers who start the fight. If we saw something and we know the war going
to start, we back off, and then the soldier forward. Different triad members, they are together doing
something, yes, always. It's money talks. Easy, it's money talks. If one general, he thinks
he cannot take the whole cake and he want to share
out with another member or share out with different
group, he will do that. Hong Kong is real small, I tell you. So you have to friend
with other groups too. Back then, in Hong Kong
prison or Macau's prison, the whole prison is run by the triad. The triad got more power than
the correctional officer. In the '60s and '70s, all the police was corruption,
and with the triad. They worked together. Until now, no. Impossible. You can't. It is very strict right now. You do something they don't like, you will disappear forever, and people cannot find you. And you are not facing jail
time, you just disappear. I decided to quit my gangster life. I got shot five times, and after that, I said, "No more." I got sick and tired of that, because I'm getting old. The
way I think is different. So I want to return to my
normal life, so I quit. I know the person who shot me, but I don't know why he
shot me at that time. Afterward, I found out. Because my soldier, under me, people under me shot their member two weeks ago. So they know I'm the general of them. So he shot me. At that time, I was at home,
and I ran out of cigarettes. So I have to go down and try to buy a cigarette in the grocery. When I closed my driver's-side door and I check out the side mirror, I saw someone came out from a car behind, and then he started to shoot. And then the ambulance come, like, after at least 15 minutes, as I remember. They brought me to the Elmhurst Hospital, and they do a surgery, and then the doctor come by
and showed me all the bullets and tell me that, "We
took four bullets out, and there's still a
bullet inside your body." So I asked him, "Why don't you
just take the last one out?" And he was telling me that, "Because that bullet is
running into your bone, so that bullet's going
to stay there forever." That's what the doctor says. What do I have to do to leave? Actually, nothing. I just tell my soldiers. Because I have couple of soldiers, who control all the kids already. I just tell them that, starting
now, all the street money, the gambling house money, whatever, I'm going to give up everything. You guys take care of
the under-level people, and anything happens,
you don't have to ask me. Even though after I left, I start working, and the FBI come to me, ask me questions. I say, "I don't know
nothing. I left already." In the '90s, the FBI, all the leaders, all the gangsters got arrested
and thrown in the prison. Without our help, they cannot stand in the United States no more, and then they back off and now disappear. The first beginning of
triad, we call it a tong, Hung Mun. Hung Mun is the first one. After that, they split out from Hung Mun to all separate triads. They call it triad for
the three big rivers in the southeast area. So inside that area, they
call everybody a triad. Government people, they call them triad. And then they start to
call themselves triad too. Sun Yee On in Hong Kong
is the largest triad almost in all the Southeast Asian area. At my time, they have,
like, 200,000 members, and all over the world. They have a pretty long history. For all the high-level
members in Sun Yee On, they become a businessman now. They doing legit business. All undergrounding is only for the lower-level members. I was born in 1965 in Hong Kong. I born in the district called Yau Ma Tei. Inside Yau Ma Tei, there's a
street called Temple Street. At that time, the whole street
is controlled by the triad. So when I was real young, I
already know what is triad. And my father saw, like, I'm getting worse, my behavior's getting worse. So he decide to immigrate the whole family to the United States. At that time, there's a
gang called Ghost Shadows in Chinatown. Always waiting
outside the school every day, like after school. They try to do something to us and try to scare us and
tell us to join the gang. If we don't, we have to
pay them money every day for protection, but we keep refusing them. One of my classmates, he told us that we should go look for
his cousin, Clifford Wong, and he's the leader of the Tung On gang. My classmate got killed
because the Flying Dragons, they thought my friend
belonged to the Tung On gang, but which at that time we are not. So we asked Clifford Wong
for help, and he said, "Why don't guys just join our gang?" So officially we joined the Tung On gang. I start as Tung On
gang member when I'm 14. When I become a member
of Sun Yee On, I'm 22. So I was already in the gang life for, like, eight years already. We have a channel on YouTube,
Chinatown Gang Stories. We started telling the true
story about gangster life. We want to do the best we can to find every former gangster member, no matter what level they
are, to tell their true story, so that the world knows
what the gangster life is. I just want to say that,
for the new generation, don't trust anybody except your parents. Don't trust any movie story. You are not a hero in the gang life. If you're really in the
gang life right now, only two final ways out. First, you gonna end up in
the prison, doing time. Second, you're going to get killed. My name is Robert Mazur. I spent two years undercover laundering tens of millions of dollars for Pablo Escobar's cartel. This is how crime works. Money laundering enables cartels to produce the most lethal thing that they produce around the
world, and that's corruption. It enables them to be
able to control countries, presidents of countries. Operation C-Chase was a
multiagency task force to prosecute the biggest money launderers of the Medellín cartel. Most of the people I dealt with were high-level drug traffickers who had hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm doing this interview in silhouette because two agencies and an
intelligence agency informed me that the Medellín cartel
issued a contract on my life. I spent a year and a half
putting together what I think is one of the more sophisticated
fronts used in undercover. I built the persona of Robert Musella. I dressed the part.
Certainly had the lifestyle. Drove a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Jaguar. I was embedded in real businesses. Had an air charter service
with a private jet. We had a jewelry chain with 30
locations on the East Coast. A lot of cash goes through
the Diamond District every single day. So if you've got those
kinds of businesses, you have a very good excuse
for where the cash came from. I was embedded in an investment company, a mortgage-brokerage business,
and even a brokerage firm with a seat on the New
York Stock Exchange. And then I and my partner began a two-year infiltration
of the Medellín cartel and the banks that were supporting them. One of the keys to doing undercover work is to build your undercover persona to have as many traits
as you do in common. Robert Musella was from Staten Island. I'm from Staten Island. Robert Musella was a businessman. I have a business background. I didn't fake accents, fake anything. I was always just me. The first person I met that was working within
the Medellín cartel is a gentleman by the
name of Gonzalo Mora, a small-time money launderer who had an import-export business. But the capacity he had to launder was probably limited to
about $50,000 a week at best. We had my
partner, Emir, deal with him and simply say, "Listen, my
boss handles a lot of this, but he never wants to meet you. He wants to stay in the shadows. But if you could ever convince him to come out of the shadows,
the rivers would open and you'd be able to launder
untold amounts of money." By the end of that six months, Gonzalo Mora was banging
on the door to meet me. You know, it's always
best to play hard to get. I also knew these people
have a sixth sense. If you're afraid of a dog, they know that. You're the first one they bite. I didn't want to get bit, so I knew that I would be working against myself and undermining my cause if I showed any fear whatsoever. And I told him eventually, "Listen, I have to get
these people to understand that they need to let me
invest some of their money. Your only responsibility
is to introduce me to them. If I succeed, we'll even
do business bigger." He felt compelled to
make the introductions, and then I started to climb up the ladder, to meet bigger and bigger people. You know, money launderers,
like I played the role of, are basically operating what's called the black-money market. It's an informal banking
system that's made available to people who operate
through the underground. So, as a black-money-market operator, I have a supply of dollars. My supply comes from drug traffickers. Now I have to find people who
have a demand for dollars. People who want to buy dollars are oftentimes importers around the world who otherwise have to go
through their central bank and spend 25% of their money
to officially get dollars. I could sell it to them for 10%. My traffickers, in many
instances, wanted Colombian pesos. So the best people I could
sell those dollars to were Colombian importers. All I have to do is swap. So, I have supply clients,
traffickers, and demand clients. But most often the money would
wind up into bank accounts controlled by the cartel, in Panama, and from there they
distributed around the world wherever they wanted to hide it. Well, sometimes the money
had to be used to buy planes. Like, there was a guy, his responsibility was acquiring
the aircraft and trucks and things like that
that the cartel needed. So he basically was the buyer
of the cartel's air force. So I dealt with him
because he needed money in order to buy the specific
planes they were looking for which were Rockwell 1000s
and Rockwell 980s Some money is smuggled out of the United States down to Colombia, and it's used to make payoffs
to people in the military or prosecutors or politicians or whoever's help they need to buy. Most of the money's in five, 10s, and 20s. That's because people using illegal drugs buy it with five, 10s, and 20s. That gets collected by people
who have a responsibility here for the cartels to do nothing
other than collect money. They try not to have traffickers and money handlers in the same place. Too much asset to potentially be lost. So, the dollars generally
would come to me in suitcases, duffle bags, boxes. New
York was a key point. Get a million, $2 million per delivery. I generally had runners who
picked it up and brought it. You don't usually get the guy who really controls the safe on the street. The way it works is we get the information from Gonzalo Mora. So he might give us a phone number in the form of an invoice number. He might say that, you know, "You need to get in touch with Guapo, and he's going to have 250 boxes. It's $250,000." They generally like to
meet in a public area, so it might be at a McDonald's. They sit down. Not much gets said. Pushes the keys across the
table. "It's in the trunk." Emir goes and gets the money. It's usually wrapped in rubber bands in blocks of $5,000 and $10,000, dependent upon denominations. A lot of people say,
"Wow, isn't it tempting? You've got all these millions
and millions of dollars, and it's in cash." There's unfortunately been people in just about every agency that has fallen victim into
a slippery slope of greed. My motivation was
information became my heroin. If I couldn't get the next
big piece of information and I couldn't risk more than I did to get the last piece of information, I felt as though I wasn't
accomplishing my mission. Yeah, I was addicted, but I
was addicted to information. Layering is a process by which
a series of corporations, usually offshore entities, are used to continue to receive
what initially started off maybe as a suitcase full of cash. The way we layered, the money would first be put into a certificate of
deposit in Luxembourg in the name of an offshore entity. That money was used by
the bank as collateral for a loan in a different
part of the world. So let's say the loan was in Paris and that was to a Gibraltar corporation. And then that Gibraltar corporation would transfer the funds to
Panama and then from there to accounts controlled
by the drug traffickers. And so the purpose that
you use layering for is to just confuse the route in which the money is being moved. In order for anyone to
trace the money backward, you have to first pierce
the corporate veil in Panama and bank secrecy laws. Then you have to pierce
the same in France. Then you have to pierce
the same in Luxembourg. You know, a lot of times what they do if they don't want to deal
with a person like me, they will use an army of
couriers, call them Smurfs, the little blue guys,
Smurfs running all over. We kind of dubbed them Smurfs because let's say there's 10 of them. Their job every day is to go to meet with their money contact, and that guy may have
$500,000 in the trunk, and each of them gets $50,000 and a map that tells them
where it is locally they can go to use cash to buy MoneyGrams, cashier's checks, money
orders, traveler's checks. They'll buy a money order for $987.25 to try to make it look
like it's for a payment. Leave the payee blank. They generally don't want
to buy anything over $3,000. So at the end of the day,
$500,000 that filled the trunk was now a stack maybe 8 inches high of money orders, traveler's checks. There were times when
those were offered to me to then take it from there and launder it. That was safety for them because we were not having direct contact with their main money people. We were just getting a FedEx box with $500,000 in money orders. I think the biggest deposit was somewhere around $2.1 million. There was a time that I met in Paris with Pablo Escobar's main lawyer, a guy the name of Santiago Uribe, and some other people that
worked directly with Pablo. He'd sent Uribe to assess our money-laundering processes. And at the end of that meeting, we came to an agreement we would receive, in a relatively short period of time, $100 million that they wanted to put into a nest egg in Europe
in case they had to flee. So, when we get back from Europe, we started getting deliveries. A million in the morning, $2 million in the afternoon. I had told the people who
were doing surveillance that they needed to be really careful and we needed to try to
keep it as light as we could because they would have
countersurveillance out there. And one of the people who I dealt with, a person who met with Pablo Escobar often, told me, "Make sure your people look on the street for gringos," white guys, "who are in their late 20s, early 30s, in good shape, wearing jeans, pullover shirts with collars, solid color, jogging shoes, fanny packs. That's where their guns are hidden. Those are los feos." The ugly ones. That's informally what people
in the cartel called the feds. So, I never used to want
to go into an office, but this was getting very important. So I met with the people who were going to do the surveillance, and there was a room full
of gringos with jeans, pullover shirts that
were solid with collars, and they had fanny packs. And I tried to convince them that that was a uniform that
everybody was looking for, but egos are such in law enforcement that sometimes people don't
want to take that advice. So, anyway, the surveillance got burned, and the next thing that
happened is that my partner, Emir Abreu, received a phone
call from Gonzalo Mora. And in the background
was a screaming voice of Gerardo Moncada, Pablo
Escobar's main manager, who was screaming that Musella, I, had to be a DEA undercover agent because they saw all the feds there, and all deals from here on were off. And I had to talk myself out of that. I guess the point is that there are a lot of different moving parts to
these undercover operations, and it's pretty easy for any one of us to do something that
might potentially endanger somebody else on the team. All of the traffickers
said to me, you know, "I love your money-laundering system, but the end payout is US dollar checks from accounts that are
in the United States. We want you to open up US
dollar accounts in Panama." Panama uses the US dollar more than it does its own currency. They know that secrecy is big in Panama by corporations, by
banks. It's harder for DEA to get the information
concerning the accounts. But what they told me also was, "Listen, we want your accounts in Panama because we own Gen. Manuel Noriega, and he will not touch any of your accounts because you're with us." So now I have to open
up an account in Panama. I happened to be driving
past a branch in Tampa of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International, the seventh-largest privately
held bank in the world. There was a big gold sign. Because I would've never walked in there if it wasn't for that. And they said, "Well,
we'll give you a meeting if you can give us a résumé." I had a fully verifiable résumé, and I had bank accounts with
millions of dollars in it, all of which the bank in particular wanted to see before they opened up to me and explained to me how
they laundered money for many people in organized crime. And I said to him, "All of my clients are
from Medellín, Colombia. They operate businesses here in the States that are very sensitive, and it's my job to very
cautiously help them to move capital across borders." He goes, "Well, that's
the black-money market. We have plenty of customers
who deal in that business." He said, "Yeah, Panama's
where you want to be." There's a lot of hands in
which these checks go through, and sometimes mistakes can be made. And in fact, that's the
way I got really inside the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International. That got me into the inner circle of dirty officers in BCCI, and then I went on to meet
more than a dozen of them. The No. 1 person who managed my accounts, a gentleman by the name of Amjad Awan. He managed accounts for people who ran countries, for Manuel Noriega. He helped launder Noriega's drug profits from the protection he sold
to the Medellín cartel. And during that time we recorded
about 1,200 conversations, all of which were used as the cornerstones of the prosecution of
not just drug traffickers and money launderers, but senior officials of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International. I needed to coax the conversations into the areas where I was
exposing their true intent, their involvement in criminality. I couldn't allow them
to dance around issues. You have to try to get a way
to have the conversation. So one of the things that I
used during that time frame, one of the most famous
businessmen at the time in the late '80s was a guy
by the name of Lee Iacocca. He ran Chrysler. Everybody knew who he was. And so when I would talk to
people, especially at the bank, I would say, "If my
clients came in this room, you might mistake them
as being Lee Iacocca. The big difference is they don't
sell cars. They sell coke." I dealt with dirty bankers. I dealt with lawyers in Switzerland who formed corporations to
hide the source of our funds. I dealt with attorneys in Panama, people who ran
financial-service corporations that do nothing other than form tens of thousands of corporations for people all over the world. They provide nominee directors that hide the beneficial
ownership of accounts and the control of corporations. All of these people are intermediaries who the underworld counts on. There were other people, real
money launderers at that time, who were sending what they claimed to be precious metals in and
out of the United States, which actually was lead
that was covered by gold, and that was their cover for
why they were depositing cash and were not bashful about it. Talking to the bank and saying, "This is a cash-generating business." If you have enough that's believable, it's amazing how quickly
they'll convince themself that you are who you say you are. June of 1988. I was told that it would be
the first week of October that the operation would be taken down. I've got two years' worth of work to do, and I gotta get it done
in about three months. So many times these undercover operations result in indictments, but the bad guys, they're in countries that
do not offer extradition. Colombia was one. Someone suggested,
"Well, why don't we have some kind of a personal event?" One of the agents said, "Well, they obviously appear to like Bob. How about a wedding?" So we put this together for a supposed wedding in Innisbrook, which is a country club. This got personal. In some instances, children
of future defendants were part of the wedding. Wives. And the night before, one of my informants went
around to the defendants and said, "Hey, Bob doesn't know this. We're going to have a bachelor party. The cars will be here soon." The arrest team's there. They arrest them. Everybody was in disbelief. And the case concluded with the arrest of about 85 individuals, the collection of fines and forfeitures of about $600 million, and the seizure of about
3,000 pounds of cocaine. Ultimately, the bank imploded
on the night of the arrests. You know, it was all high fives. They wanted to go out and
have a celebratory gathering. I wanted nothing to do
with that whatsoever. I was emotionally exhausted. I first learned about
the contract on my life about 30 days after the
undercover operation. Operation C-Chase was over. The longest trial lasted six months. I was on the witness stand. I could see the hatred in their eyes, even more so in the eyes of their family
members who were there. No doubt, they didn't see me as a person who was just doing their job. They saw me as a person who tricked them. But I never tricked
anybody into doing anything other than trusting me. Nobody in there did anything
that they hadn't done before. After I testified, my family
and I rented a motor home. We went into the mountains, got away from everybody,
and tried to heal. There was a pager number, an 800 number, that they could call. The office could call
and leave me a message, and occasionally I would check, and I got word that the jury had convicted every single person of
virtually all accounts. I went back to the campsite by a river and just sat there thinking about it. And it occurred to me
that it was so surreal that I had done the same things
that the bankers had done, and I was getting awards, and they were about to go
to jail for a long time. And I don't take what I did lightly. Some people think it's a sign of weakness. I did drop a tear or two that day. I kind of think that was good, because I want a
government with conscience. I don't want people high-fiving. It's unfortunate, but the
law-enforcement community and the private sector responsible for trying to
attack money laundering have been highly unsuccessful. The United Nations on
Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $400 billion
is generated each year from the sale of illegal drugs. What I really do believe needs to be done, you have to understand, there are two different sides of banking. There's the sales side
and the compliance side. Sales side brings in the accounts. Compliance, in an unhealthy
bank, does the background to make sure they're not
dealing with a bad guy. That needs to be brought together. I'm suggesting it only on accounts that have $5 million or more that have been received in a year. I think that the account
relationship manager that brought the account in should have to file with
the bank a sworn statement affirming that they've
asked certain questions. Questions that if you ask them would expose whether
or not it is an account that's being run by front people. Those questions don't get asked, and they don't get asked now because the sales side always
tells the compliance side, "If I ask those questions,
we won't get this business because they don't want to
answer those questions." You know, we have a joint
terrorism task force run by the FBI, but it's
also participated in by I don't know how many hundred agencies. There should be a joint
money-laundering task force that does the exact same thing. There has been an evolution
of cryptocurrency. There are people who've been
involved in the drug world who have used cryptocurrency. Unlike cash, you can follow crypto. The other problem you have with crypto is you only need to look at Bitcoin and see that unlike the US
dollar, its value is not stable. I don't think it's really ready for the big time in the drug world. What is big? Gold refining in the Middle
East, Dubai. That's big. I retired from undercover work after the second operation
when I almost got killed, and that was in the late '90s. I'm extraordinarily grateful
to have the platform from which I get the opportunity to speak, and that platform is first a
book called "The Infiltrator" that became a New York Times bestseller and the basis for a film by the same name starring Bryan Cranston. And then subsequently, a
book I wrote this past year came out called "The
Betrayal," a nonfiction book about the second undercover
operation that I did. But as long as I've got that platform, I'm going to do everything I
can to try to share information that can in some way try to
help us with the problem we face with this massive illegal drug problem in our country
and around the world. My name's John Mendoza. I'm a former member of the
Nuestra Familia prison gang. I was a category III, and I was a regimental commander in different parts of Northern California. And this is how crime works. I've been to San Quentin, Pelican Bay. In the early '90s, they put us out there with Southern Mexicans and the Aryan Brotherhood,
the Nazi Lowriders. Those were our enemies. They were putting us out
there on the yard together, and we were going out there fighting. If you were crafty enough
to bring a weapon out, we'll try to kill each other. I went to prison in 1988
when I was 18 years old. Some of my older homeboys that were there in the county jail with me basically told me that
when I get to San Quentin, that the NR is going to approach me about making a commitment.
I knew who to look for. The first time I went out
to the recreation yard, there was a group of individuals
that were in the corner that were covered with tattoos. Those were the NR members.
From that point on, they put me on a 90-day
probationary period. It's like you're functioning
within that movement, but you're not an actual member. You can do anything
that they ask you to do. Stabbing somebody, keeping
security on somebody, holding paperwork, holding a weapon. A lot of guys that make a commitment because they want the
status, they want the title. Those guys are going to
end up getting weeded out because they're not making the commitment for the right reasons.
They're not true believers. I was an NR member for
about five years, six years. People take notice when
you're functioning that long and you're not questioning authority, you're developing into a leader. Eventually the NF is going to approach you because the NR, in essence, is like the NF's training grounds. I think it was 1994, I was approached by two
high-ranking NF members, Smiley from Salinas and
Mikio from Salinas. Induction process is similar to the NR. You go through an indoctrination process where you learn some of
their concepts, their bylaws. You have a sponsor, and you have the guy
that actually pulls you. They're responsible for you. When you make a commitment to the NF, it's a lifetime commitment. I was asked things like, "Are you willing to kill
your own flesh and blood? Are you willing to put
the organization first before everything else in your life?" Everything else that you were
loyal to becomes secondary. They write everything down. There's 14 bonds, which is, I used to call it my little toolbox. Everything that I needed
to know how to function within that movement —
conduct, discipline. You're encouraged to study things like Middle Eastern philosophy, Socrates, revolutionary literature like
George Jackson, Che Guevara. And then there's everything
that you need to know about how to make weapons. I can make a stabbing instrument
out of 15 pieces of paper. It's all about how you roll it and then how you put the point on. When your membership is sanctioned,
there's no big ceremony. They'll get together with you maybe in a group setting
out there on the yard. They'll say something like, "Today, we're welcoming
the brother Boxer in." Me, I was right there in
San Quentin on the yard, and it was done similar. "Hey, this brother's a carnal now. He's a Familiano from this point on. He's a member of the mob." It's like, I felt like
I reached a pinnacle, a point in my career where I had really accomplished something. Everything that I've
done, it was all worth it. When a new arrival will come in, we'll get his information,
we'll get all his vitals, we'll get his name, his CDC number, we'll get a little bit about his history. We'll get things like his aka, his age, his neighborhood, what they called him. We'll look on the BNL to make
sure he's not on the BNL. So, the BNL, the Bad News
List, is, we keep a roster of everybody that's coming
in and out of that household. I'll send a filter out to all the members that are in that household,
and I'll ask everybody, "Have you done time with this individual? This guy just drove up. Do you know him?" Any good or bad information,
that'll get filtered out. If nothing comes back, he'll
be welcome into the household. Then at that point, he'll
be given a care package, soap, shampoo, coffee,
toothpaste, things like that. When you first come in to an
ad seg or even a mainline, they give you what's
called a 114 lockup order. That's like your passport. The gangs, they're going
to ask you for that, but the only way you're
going to get a lockup order is if they freely give it up. That's the only way we're going to get it. It's going to say on that lockup order whatever gang that you're affiliated with. It's going to say things like, if you got an S on your jacket, like a sex offense or something, it's going to say it right there. So somebody like that, you know, you got an S, they probably wouldn't even give up their 114 lockup order because they already know what time it is. If you decline to give up
that information, you're done. That's somebody that refused
to comply with the program. Somebody like that's
not going to be welcome out to the yard. If he tries to come out to the yard, he'll get hit at the gate. I mean, obviously there's a lot of perks with becoming a member like that. You're going to get that
rockstar-status kind of treatment from a lot of the youngsters out there on the streets and in
prison. They look up to you. They call NF members, just like they call Mexican
Mafia members, big homies. You're going to have a
lot of access at money. I've learned a lot of things
that I still hold to this day, even though I'm not a part of it no more. Things like conducting
myself a certain way. The NF is built, it's constructed or built
under a paramilitary structure. A lot of the old NF members
came from the Marines. They're ex-Marines, so
they actually took a lot of the structure of the
leadership in the military and brought it to the NF. You have captains, lieutenants, commanders, a category I-er. Or for members that are just
coming into the organization, they have no status over anybody else. Then you have a cat II. They've shown that they
have leadership potential and they can give a correct interpretation of the constitution. They'll become teachers for the cat Is. Now, in order to become a cat III, it's the cream of the crop.
You need to be voted in. Then you have the inner
council and the general council that basically make the decisions for the entire organization. You have a general for the prisons, you have a general for the streets, and then you have a general that's — it's basically like internal affairs. He handles investigations,
internal disputes, things like that. When you're in the SHU, you might be in charge of, like, 200 guys. You're not really
running the whole prison. There's guys out there on the mainline, regimental commanders out
there that are doing that. But on the streets, if you're a regimental
commander out there, it might be 20 or 30 guys. I was a regimental commander
all over Northern California. Different parts. Each time, there was probably
around 10 to 20 members that were under me at that time. A day for me, well, it
depends. Like, San Quentin, you're running H-Unit in
North Block, West Block. I would have to sit there and
answer some investigations. So you're getting daily
filters or weekly filters from all these different blocks. All day long, I would just be
getting inundated with kites. San Quentin is the worst place to be as far as being a leader. The main rivals for the
NF are the Mexican Mafia, they're following the Sureños, and then you have the Aryan Brotherhood, and they're following the whites. But on the mainline, it's mixed. Everybody's mixed out there. The Norteños, the Sureños,
the Blacks, everybody's mixed. If you're talking about in an
ad-seg type of environment, a SHU program, everybody's
kind of segregated. I spent all the '90s in the SHU program. When you see us out there
on the yards and we're doing burpees and we're doing
exercises out there, we're not out there doing
that because we're just trying to get karate bodies and just
trying to look nice. Right? We're training for a
war. That's what it is. They're getting ready to
go to the SHU programs. They're going to be engaged in a conflict. So, the SHU program is like
a prison inside of a prison. They put you in a cell, and you stay in the cell
about 23 hours a day. You'll come out of the cell for a half hour to take a shower, and then you might come out for yard, and you come out to a yard that's, you got four concrete walls and a camera. That's all that's out there.
You got plexiglass on the top. If you see a bird fly over, you're like, "Damn, I seen a bird today, man." You go back in there and
tell people in the pod. In the SHU program, they got
what's called a nerve system. Everything is electric
up there in Pelican Bay. They sit up there and
they push buttons all day. You know, you got one cop up there that's in charge of six different pods. So he might forget
somebody's in the shower or he might forget that a door is open and he'll press another button and somebody else will come out. You could be in there watching
TV or working out one minute, and you'll be out on the tier in a fight for your life the next minute. It'll happen just that fast. So, us as Norteños, you know, all day our
mattresses would be rolled up and we'd be sitting by the door. I mean, I get up and I work out, I watch my TV, but for the most part, whenever there was movement
or activity on the tier, I would be posted up on my door, ready, just in case my door would open. Because a lot of times the COs
would say it was a mistake, but it wasn't a mistake. You know, they pop certain doors
open for different reasons. I used to see them. I used
to watch from my cell. There's a lot of different places out there on the yards to bury weapons. Inside the buildings, up on the, like, in the little rafters. We obviously know where they're at. Under sinks or in the walls, buried. They keister it. You know, to move a weapon
from one place to another, they'll put it in their anal cavity, is how it's moved around. I don't know how you want
to put that out there, but. So, I went through Corcoran SHU
wars back in the early '90s. We were going at it with the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood. You know, they knew we
were mortal enemies, that we would kill each
other if we had a chance, but they would put us out on the yard. And they knew. The
administration knew over there. You'd have to have your light on, and that meant that you
wanted to go to yard. Guys used to turn their lights off because they didn't want no part of it. But those of us that remained active, we'd turn our lights on and we'd go out. It's like a little enclosure
before you get out to the yard, and the yard's like a little, it's kind of shaped like a piece of pie. When you get in that little enclosure, you can see through the yard door who you're going to go out
there and get off with. So we'd go out, we'd fight. Always try to get yourself situated so that they have their back to the gunner so that you can see
what the gunner's doing. Because we were the ones
that were getting targeted. It was the Northeners and the Blacks that were getting shot
and killed over there. There's no warning shots, per se, but what they have is they have, like, a — it's called a bertha or a knee-knocker. It's, like, a gas gun that
fires little wooden blocks. Sometimes they'll fire once, twice, and then they'll grab the real gun. But yeah, they don't give warning shots. Now, the other thing though, too, is the COs are making bets. They would be like, "Hey, we
got money on you guys, man. You guys better go out there
and do your thing, man." You know, sometimes they
would take their best fighters from one building and they
would take the best fighter from another building
and get them out there. When I first came in
the system, I was young. I used to mean-mug them. I used to have a bad taste
for certain individuals. And I didn't even know why I hated them. It was because I was supposed to. That's the mindset that
was instilled within me. But being around them, a lot
of them were just like us. They were solid dudes. If there's a Sureño and
he needs some toothpaste, or I got a book and he
wants to read it, you know, we'll pass literature back
and forth to each other. We can play chess on the tier. It doesn't do us any good
to make that environment any more stressful than what it is. Now, like I said, if the gate's open, we were directed to basically torpedo out and engage with whoever was on the tier. If we were going to take
off on staff, the guards, our politics might get set
aside for a bigger purpose to where, yeah, we might come together to go against administration. You might see something
like a small uprising within an ad-seg unit or something where we're not getting fed right, they're tearing up our cells and disrespecting personal possessions like pictures and things like
that, where everybody says, "You know what? We had enough.
Let's just all board up." Blocking your window so that
they can't see in there, which basically forces them
to have to come in there and cell-extract you. It's something that I was
personally involved in before, in Susanville. You know, when we were going
through the Corcoran SHU wars, people might debate this, but
a lot of the COs were split as far as who they favored in that war. Even some of the female officers. It's just, you could tell that they were either
sympathizing for the north or they were sympathizing for the south. A lot of it is just geography. Where that prison's at,
whether or not they got family that might be hooked
up. So it just depends. Corruption, it's rampant
in the county jails. I mean, you see a lot of
relationships that happen where female officers are getting
into relationships with inmates. The next thing you know,
they're bringing in drugs. They're not getting that kind of stuff in through the visiting room. They're getting it through corrupt COs. In prison, one of the things
that is a huge problem are the cellphones that are coming in. But it's a huge business for COs. They can make anywhere
from $1,000 to $4,000 bringing in a phone, a cellphone. Having the phones is, it's a
lot different because, again, when I was in the SHU
program back in the '90s, when we'd be back there
plotting somebody's murder, there was a lot of lag
time that was involved. Either it had to go out through
a letter, a coded letter, a phone call, or a visit,
and you'd have to wait maybe a week or two for somebody to drive 300, 400 miles to come
see you up in Pelican Bay. But now you put these cellphones in the hands of these leaders, if somebody's got a green light on them, they'll make a phone call. You'll get a leader that
will call a figurehead on the streets, and it
will happen in real time. "Hey, this dude's got a green
light on him. He's gotta go." It might happen that same night. Let's say somebody came on the tier, I was on the tier in
the ad seg or something, and he was, like, six cells down. I'd make verbal contact with him. I'd yell down there, "Hey,
homie that just came in. Heyo, once you get situated, go ahead and make a line
so that I can get at you." Making a line is where you take
the elastic from your boxers or from the strands from your sheet. You'll make a line, and
you'll tie them together so that you can put a
weight at the end of it, and then you'll throw it down the tier. It's just a way to get back
and forth to the cells. So he'll tie the kite on
there, and I'll pull it in, and I'll read it, and
then I'll respond to it, and he'll pull it back. Ingenuity. There's a lot of different ways to do things like that.
Covert communications, there's a language that we use
in there. It's called Nahua. It's an Aztec language, and
there's different dialects, but we use it so that if we're on a tier and we need to communicate and
there's officers on the tier, we can talk on the tier in front of them and they're not going to know what we say. There's very few people that
know the whole language. They'll just know certain
words, like weapon, drugs, CO, hit, green light, things like that. Norteños, our color is red. Sureños, they wear blue. So, the NF insignia, the sombrero, obviously it signifies
the Mexican heritage. You got the dagger that signifies that this is a violent organization. And then each drop of blood characterizes its own individual meaning. So one drop of blood is for blood in, guys that have spilled blood
coming into the organization. Blood out, meaning anybody
that tries to walk away from the organization, it's
an automatic death sentence. And then the third drop
of blood is for members that have honorably spilled blood, that have died in the
course of their career. I had "Nuestra Familia"
tattooed on the back of my head, and I got that covered up. I had a star on my hairline, when I had hair, that signified the NR. I had "Familiano" over my left eyebrow, being a family member in Spanish. And then I had a tattoo
on the back of my forearm, I had a "NF" back there. The whole purpose of generating money is supposed to be for the
less fortunate members that are doing life in prison that don't have a means to
take care of theirselves. That's what it's supposed to be. It's a smoke screen, though.
There's no trickle-down effect. There's a trickle-up effect. The money that comes in,
it goes to the leadership, the select few at the
top of the hierarchy, and they're the ones that use that money for their own expenses. Some of it's used to invest in drugs and to invest in new
regiments or new territory, you know, breaking NF ground
out there on the streets. If I got a visitor that's
willing to bring in drugs, off the top, my gang is
going to require whatever, 25% of it, 50% of it, or I might even have to
turn it all over to them and they'll give me back what they feel that they want to give me. You know, you're part of that gang, you're going to take care of that gang or that criminal organization. The biggest thing in prison,
county jails, the biggest, the currency in there is soups. Everybody loves soups, Top Ramens. That's like prison or
jail currency right there. But, you know, obviously
then you got weed, tobacco, then the hardcore drugs
and things like that. White lightning, a cup of
that, it can go for, like, $50. But you're talking
about a cup of something that's like vodka. I learned early on from
a young gang member that the more violent I was,
the more blood that I spilled out there on the streets,
the more respect I got. The fastest way to elevate
yourself within the organization is by hurting people. So, out on the streets, the structure, you have your regimental
commander, a second in command, your squad leaders,
and then your manpower. I would have a second in command, and he would be my buffer. He would collect the money. He would make sure that
everybody's following policy, issuing out the drugs, the guns that were coming
in off the streets. That was to kind of keep me insulated. In the '90s, when it was a lot different, the regiments were called
colonias back in those days. Everything was compartmentalized. You had a robbery crew, another
crew that would sell dope. You had a wrecking crew. I think the influence has waned
over the years, like, a lot. In the '80s and the '90s, you couldn't testify against the NF and live in the same county. You wouldn't even want
to be in California. The threat was, it was very
real back in those days. But once the three-strike
law came into effect, we kind of stepped away
from the violent crimes and started doing almost
exclusively selling drugs. The influence is there. People know that they're out there, they're in the cuts, they're functioning. It's just not as — it's not like it was. I want to say since, like, '68 is when the NF first came into inception. From that time on, that's
when they took a stand against the Mexican Mafia in
South Block San Quentin. This is basically when
the NF banded together, decided that they weren't going to be abused by the Mexican Mafia anymore. And from that point on,
that's when the war started. So for almost the next five decades, that war was in effect. The truce actually started
back in the SHU program at Pelican Bay, the end of
hostilities, their agreement. Again, the whole purpose of it
was, for a lot of these guys that had been in the SHU program for, some of them three decades, it was to get back out to the mainlines and to basically show CDC that they could live on the same yard
without killing each other. So I thought it was a temporary thing. They were going to get out there, somebody was going to
push a line somewhere, and it was going to kick off, and then it was just going
to be a domino effect. But it's lasted. I mean, honestly, I never
thought in my lifetime that I would ever see the
day when Norteños and Sureños would be out there on the
same yards playing basketball with each other, walking
laps with each other. But at the same time, there
was a lot of housecleaning. Guys that had issues,
internal issues within their respective gang,
were getting dealt with. Whether it was over misconduct, something came up in their
past or something like that, there was a lot of housecleaning. And then there was a lot of guys that didn't agree with the peace treaty. They felt like, "You know what? I didn't sign up for this, man. What are we doing? What
about all the brothers that have spilled blood in the past?" I think the violence is worse. When they let these guys
out of the SHU program, all these leaders, guys
that are from the '70s, from the '80s, when I came to prison, they're starting to bring
the old school back, where they're not just poking people and slicing people up no more. You see all the murders that
are happening out there. The Mexican Mafia, the
NF, they're behind it. They would rather eat their own right now, stab some of their own
people. I mean, it's crazy. The politics that are going on right now, everything's going backwards. In 2004, I was arrested in
a multiagency investigation where I was the leader of a street crew, an NF regiment. So I was the main target
in that investigation. On the first day, on June 11th, 2004, they raided around eight houses that were all in relation
to this investigation. On the first wave, they hit my house where I had all my guns. They hit another house
where I had all my money. By 2005, that case continued to snowball. They put me in a observation
cell because they said I had too much influence
with the Norteños. So they wanted to keep me isolated. And during that time,
my whole concern was, my girl, she had lupus. I was trying to do everything I could to make it easy on her. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn't want to tell
her because she had lupus, and for somebody like that,
stress is a killer, so, during the first couple weeks talking to her, my mom on the phone, I had some difficult
conversations with them. You know, "What are you going to do? Are you going to sacrifice yourself? Think about your family for once." My mom kept pushing me to cooperate. She kept pushing me to cooperate. "You need to cooperate. Do what you do. Your wife's out here dying.
What are you going to do?" And I basically started pacifying her, telling her whatever I needed to tell her. "Let the case play out. I haven't even been to court yet." So, what they do is, and understandably, they release my phone calls of how I've been talking to my girl, and all my codefendants hear these conversations about cooperating. Trying to explain that to the NF, it was going to fall on deaf
ears because of who I was. I was a leader. I get held
to different standards because I know better, and I got no business talking like that. This is five years later now. People are still speculating
that I'm cooperating. Come on, man. It's five years, and there's no police
reports. There's nothing. So, somebody that had an agenda pushed the issue with
leadership up in the Bay. They put a green light
on me. Nothing happened. It was literally - the dude,
honoring the green light, tried to push a phone over
in front of me on the tier. I still held my mud. I still wanted to be a
part of the organization. 17 months later, they put
me back on a active tier. I functioned for another two years. Put another green light on me, and the second time, it was
just as bad as the first time. Somebody wanted to act like they were trying to spear
me through the bars. The spear was, like, 2 feet too short. Didn't have a tip on it. You know, my wife, she
died. She ended up dying. My mom ended up dying. She passed away. So they did this at a
time when I was already in a dark place, you know what I mean? I'm looking at life. I was getting ready to plead
out, but then they pulled that. So I was like, "You know
what? I'm done, man." The district attorney wants to wash me up. I'm in bad standings now
with the NF. What do I do? Law enforcement again
came up, and they're like, "You know what? Loyalty only
goes so far. Come on, man." I agreed that I was done and that I would talk to them. So that's what I did from that point on. I denounced my membership, and I agreed to cooperate. However, the cooperation
that I gave was just, I didn't go in as a percipient witness. Everybody that I got
arrested with was gone. So I went in there basically talking about what I'm talking about
now, how gangs work. The judge struck two of my strike priors, which took me out of the three strikes and gave me 16 years, eight months. I've been in the county
jail almost 10 years. None of that had to happen. If the NF would've let me fight my case, I would've been a big dummy
sitting in Pelican Bay right now with a life sentence. Yeah, I
was one of the true believers. But, you know, by them
pulling the trigger twice, I felt betrayed. For somebody that just
doesn't want to be part of the organization no more,
for them to walk away, to just ride off into the sunset and go on about their
life and not hurt nobody, it's still not considered honorable, but it's something that people will say, "You know what? At least he
didn't tell on everybody. At least he didn't hurt nobody." But, you know, there's never retirement. You'll never be able to
walk away in good standings. I've had a couple
situations where I ran into some individuals. When
there are 15 of them, that's when everybody wants to get active. But, you know, when I
catch cats by theirselves, they're not trying to do all that. And I'm not trying to
look for trouble either. I'm trying to just live. Live out the rest of my
days without all the drama. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. I grew up in San Francisco, California. My mom was a young heroin addict. She got involved with
drugs at a young age. At the age of 11, I found my way back to my
mom's from foster care. I found out she was using. And she didn't just give it to me. You know, people are going to be like, "What kind of mother gives
their 12-year-old child heroin?" I understand that, but I don't blame her. I look at it as, she was
stuck in her addiction at a young age. She got
stuck in that cycle, and I kind of manipulated the situation. I told her I knew what she was doing, and if she didn't give it to me, I was going to go get it in the streets. And from that point on,
for the next 40 years, that s--- tore my life
up in every way possible, from relationships to
the choices I would make, me becoming involved in
the criminal element. From then, I stopped going to school. I started drinking. That's when I started
getting involved with gangs. It started with burglarizing cars, ripping out the radios, the speakers, selling them for drugs. Robberies, home invasions. And then we started using weapons, and it just continued to escalate. From that time, it didn't take me long before I got caught up in
the juvenile justice system. I caught four robberies,
one out of San Francisco and two out of San Mateo. I took seven years, ran consecutive, and they sent me to prison. My book is — through talking to at-risk youth, I've talked to kids that
have gotten in trouble. Probation officers come up
and tell me that, you know, "These youngsters, they read your book, and we actually use your book as a workshop type of thing. The name of the book is called "Nuestra Familia: A Broken Paradigm." And so I started doing a YouTube channel, Paradigm Media News. I got a series on my channel,
one's called "Inner Demons" and the other one's called "War Stories." It's also therapeutical to talk about it, you know, to try to help
some of these youngsters that might be headed for
that type of lifestyle. I give them the fine print that they don't hear
about until it's too late, until they make a commitment and they find theirselves
in that situation. I've seen a lot of my homeboys
die throughout the years. Most of them are gone. There's only three roads
you're going to travel in this lifestyle. You're either going to spend the rest of your life in prison, you're going to die trying
to push the organization's advancement forward, or you're
going to turn your back. There's no pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow. My name is Mike Moy. I was a former member of a Chinatown gang. I later became an NYPD cop. And this is how crime works. You had so many guns that's
hidden all over the place, secret tunnels, and you have
snipers up in the safe houses. A crazy person wouldn't even
dare to go to Chinatown, because even a crazy person, they feel pain, they fear death. So, as far as being in a Chinatown gang, you're either going to wind up in jail or it's going to be some outcome that's not going to be good. So, I was only 16 when I joined the gang, and it was one of the
notorious Chinatown gangs during that time. There
were a lot of rivals. In the 1970s, the Ghost
Shadows and the Flying Dragons, those were the two main gangs. Eventually, you had the White
Tigers, the Tung On gang, the Fuk Ching, the Green
Dragons, and the BTK. The violence between the gangs, I wouldn't say it's because of territory. I would say it's because of respect. Any form of disrespect warrants
a killing or a shooting. Remember, these kids are young. 13-, 15-, 16-year-old kids. All they want is for people
to show them a little respect. Maybe it's because they're
insecure about themselves or they have low self-esteem. It's all about respect. And a lot of people died
because of disrespect. When we were in a gang, most of us at one time or another had some sort of interaction
with the Italian Mafia. Even I, myself, in my early 20s, was dealing with guys
in their 40s and 50s. But these Italian, young
Italian teenage kids, they're the ones who were a problem to us. And there were some shootings where some of our guys
would kill some of them. They'd walk around with
their bats and canes and want to be tough, and they didn't know who they were messing with
because we were never afraid. You know, we felt like we were invincible. During my teen years,
we would do extortion, street robberies, petty
stuff, petty crime. But then as I got older, got into my 20s, started selling marijuana,
dealing with counterfeit money, credit-card fraud, stolen credit cards from a source that we
had in the post office. I opened gambling houses. A gambling house that we
hung out in on Canal Street right next to the Rosemary
Theater, in the basement. We would have poker
machines from the Italians. They would put the
poker machines in there. Sometimes we'd have poker tables, pai gow tables where we
collect the percentage. So that was one of the most profitable business I had. And also bootleg videotapes. Back in those days, the VCR tapes, those Shaw Brother kung fu movies, they made me a lot of money too. All we had to do was get a bunch of VCRs and copy those tapes. So we're talking about the,
probably around that time, probably the '80s and '90s. After the Italians lost
the heroin business in the "Pizza Connection" trial, yeah, there was a vacuum
and the Chinese took over. The Chinese were able to import high-quality heroin into Chinatown. They dominated that
business for a short while. Just imagine how much money
was circulating in Chinatown during those days in
just a few block radius. I mean, you had cab drivers, waiters, waitresses benefiting from all that money. Even factory workers. Because the gangsters
would spend that money into Chinatown. Yeah, they extorted from the stores, but they weren't out
there to put the stores out of business, how
the media portrayed us. All the business in Chinatown was flourishing during that time. Look at Chinatown back
then. It never sleep. It's open 24 hours. You get the gang members
go into a restaurant during the Chinese New Year's,
during whatever holidays, and the owner's going to give
them a little red envelope. It's just a little piece
of what they're getting. Less than what they probably pay for the garbage disposal, right? To the Italians. You know, we did protect the neighborhood. And I even have personal experiences protecting the businesses, you know, doing what I needed to
do back in those days to protect the business
owners from getting bullied by people who didn't even know better. Some of those people remember
me for the rest of their life. The person that you least
expect to be a gang member, that's the person that's carrying the gun. So, when we travel in a group, for example, we go into a pool
hall and we're shooting pool, there'll be a kid in the
corner of the pool hall watching over us, and that's
the kid that has the gun. There could be a targeted hit where, OK, you're going to go get this
person and kill this person, yes, but a lot of times
when they're in the streets, you can't control what they do. And it was very easy to get
a gun back in those days. I know in the '70s they had
a source with the Italians, getting guns from the Italians. In the '80s and '90s,
it wasn't that difficult to go out of state and buy a gun. Just show your ID in a flea market, and you just buy a bunch of antique guns. Safe houses are located all over. We had safe houses in Brooklyn, by Williamsburg, one by Midwood; Queens, by Woodhaven. So we had several places
where we hold our meetings. At any given time, there
could be as much as 10, 15 people in that apartment, sleeping there, living there. We kept it very low-key. A side entrance, so it doesn't appear to be a
lot of people going in and out. So the runners will go out there and buy whatever's necessary, whether it's food or drinks, whatever they need. Generally, the police wouldn't
even care about these things. What they care about are guns. But luckily we hid our guns in a way where the
police couldn't find it. One of the ways what we did was, we were on the second floor, so we would tie it in a string and lower it down to the first floor. So all you see was a string on the floor. But who would expect when
you pull up that string there's a gun there? And so many secret tunnels and
places for them to hide guns. As far as the tunnels, you
had them on Mott Street, Bayard Street, Canal Street, Pell Street, Doyers Street. These places. Those tunnels was used
as a form of escape. After you do a shooting,
you just run into a tunnel and just come out from the
other side of the street. That's why there's so many
cold cases in Chinatown. I was 16 years old when I joined a gang. I saw it as a way to
protect me from the bullies. During my years in school,
I was the only Asian kid. So I was a victim of bullying. How did I become a member of the gang? Initially, I started
hanging out with them, and when they started to trust me, they know I was able
to do things for them, that's when I got accepted. And they would give you a
nickname, such as Bighead, and say, "Hey, you have a big head, so we're going to call you Bighead." Onionhead nickname came
from his hairstyle. The newspaper and journals claimed that Onionhead's nickname came from, "If you betray him, he'll give you tears. That's why they call him Onionhead." But that is not true. He
looked like an onion head with his haircut back in those days. They tried to give me a nickname. I put a stop to it. I'm
that type of person. I like to stay under the
radar, keep a low profile. And I was firm about it,
and they respected that. But what they call me behind
my back, that's another story. And we did a initiation ritual together with two other members. We kneeled down and we lit up the incense. We poured wine in front
of the General Guan to give him an offering. In the wine was our blood. We pricked our fingers. After the initiation, we felt a certain bond, like a brotherhood. What the Italians would
call probably associate, we would call liang chai. What the Italians would
call a street soldier, we would call them ma chai. Like, a captain, a dai ma. Underboss, that would be a dai lo, which is big brother. The leader, dai lo dai. And that would be the guy at the top. So, how does one become a dai lo? Start out as a soldier, and if you have the qualities of a dai lo, such as the gift of gab,
you have the charisma, then you'll have these kids following you. You spend money on them,
and once you have a crew, you become a dai lo. The dai lo would give
the money to the dai ma. That goes to pay for everything
as far as entertainment, food, expenses, the safe
house, paying the rent. The money trickles down to us, unlike the Italians, where
the money trickles up. They have to pay for our loyalty. What we do in the streets, we basically enhance their reputation. A lot of people have
the misconception that tongs, triads, and gangs
are the same thing. It's not. The tongs were former
gang members in Chinatown who later tried to become a legitimate enterprise
association trying to help the new immigrants
coming into this country. But you have a handful of bad apples that associated themselves with the gangs, and they used the gangs
to do the dirty work. The Flying Dragons was under
the Hip Sing Tong Association, the Ghost Shadows was under
the On Leong Association, and the Tung On gang was
under the Tung On Association. The Flying Dragons had
control of Pell Street, Doyers Street, and later on they moved on to Canal Street and Grand Street. The Ghost Shadows had control
of Mott Street, Bayard Street. The White Tigers went to Queens, Elmhurst. Later on, the Tung On gang was created, and they took control of East Broadway. Do the Chinatown gangs still exist today? Yes, they do, but they
operate differently. A lot different than what I grew up with. There isn't a dai lo, so to speak. There isn't a big leader, like how we had. They keep it totally underground. Back in those days, we dealt
with a lot of federal crimes, crimes that warrant the
attention of the FBI. The NYPD didn't have the resources to take on the Asian gangs. They didn't even have the translators available to translate. They were just there to help the FBI. But it was the FBI that
cracked these cases. It was around 1993. The FBI started rounding
up a lot of people, and that's when it started falling apart. The people at the top
was getting locked up. So the people at the bottom
didn't know what to do. Most of the gang members
were arrested by the feds or they were killed or in prison. That's when I made the transition. And in order to make that
transition to go into NYPD, it had to be like a light switch. It was like a on-and-off switch. It was either all or nothing. You know, I grew up
watching "Baretta," "Kojak." What happened to Steven
McDonald, you follow his story, he forgave the kid who shot him. And when Steven McDonald mentioned that this kid was a product of his environment, did a lot of self-reflection, and I see that how I grew up, it made me who I am, and maybe I need to change. So I joined the NYPD in 1995. But the gang was always there
for me, up until that day. When I took the oath, I
left everything behind. I was assigned to work in Chinatown. So. I didn't expect to be
working in Chinatown, my old stomping grounds as a gang member, and that was a little bit nerve-racking, because what would happen if I bumped into my rivals or my fellow gang mates? And it did happen. I bumped
into my rivals in uniform. I bumped into my former
gang mates in uniform. Even when I was assigned
to the detective squad and I got promoted many years later, some of these guys came out from prison, and I was assigned to arrest them. Some of them couldn't make a living, so they started doing home
invasions and robberies, robbing stores and taxi cabs and whatnot. They started getting involved with different type of rackets now. They didn't get involved
with the heroin trade anymore because the feds were watching that. So they got involved with other things, like the transportation
business, the dollar vans, the bus going out of state. They still did their gambling houses, and the prostitution houses
were run differently. As opposed to back in those days, where you would go into
a prostitution house and you would see 10, 15, even 20 girls. So what they did was they broke it up into, like, an apartment, and they would only have
maybe one or two girls. The gangs were operating
a lot differently. Nobody wanted to call
themselves a dai lo anymore. I love the NYPD. NYPD gave me everything I
have, for all those years. It's just that I had a bad experience while working with some
bullies in the NYPD. That left a bad taste in my mouth. So it was time for me to leave. I left July of 2021. After over 26 years,
I started this channel called Chinatown Gang
Stories to get these stories from former gang members who lived a life. Because there's a lot of
misinformation out there. A lot of the information
came from non-Asians. Movies, authors, and documentaries. My channel will give you
an accurate description of what really happened in
Chinatown back in those days. What did I learn from being
in a gang? Just don't do it. Between social media,
like, the technology, cellphones, and plate readers, DNA, facial recognition, Big Brother's watching everything you do. So there's no place in today's society for gangs anymore. My name is Bryan Sobolewski. I'm a former diamond thief, and I stole $2.3 million
worth of gold and jewelry throughout New England. And this is how crime works. I would compare the jewelry
business to the drug business in terms of how shady it is. You're never getting the
diamond they tell you is there. You're probably buying
junk most of the time. The markup is somewhere
between 500% to 800% when you walk into a store
to try to buy a diamond. I was 20 when this started,
25 when I was arrested. So it was a five-year span. So, you had my dad,
who was the mastermind. My brother, he was the muscle. I was usually the driver. I was usually the lookout. We had an inside guy. Bill
was a friend of my dad's. So he'd basically feed us who
was a good person to go after. If we were going into a store, he would tell us where the safe is, what time the safe opened up, what time the guy would be there. He himself was a traveling salesman. That's how he knew everybody. We used Bill to place an
order if it was a store just so we knew that that
product would be in the store and we'd have a certain amount that we'd be able to get from the store. The landscape at the time was, you had a lot of
mom-and-pop jewelry stores. You didn't have a whole lot of chains. There was Kay Jewelers, there
were a couple of major chains, but most of them were independent. And they had traveling salesmen with their product lying in their car, and they would travel to these stores and try to sell to them. We tried to hit anybody that
had claimed false insurance or false robberies prior. We never went after anybody clean. And that's very hard to find
in the jewelry business. You'd be surprised how many of these guys are reporting fake robberies and taking the insurance money. Casing a job is, it's maddening, but it's super, super, super important. It's about recognizing traffic. What time a patrol car might go by. All of this stuff fed into what time of day we would do a job. Usually during the day. We didn't mind crowds. Crowds
could sometimes help you. People being interested
in what's going on there. So, for Seabrook, for the Woody job, it was basically, what
time does he come to work? Where does he pull his car up? The Raynham robbery, my
brother and I went into a Papa Gino's right next
door, grabbed a slice, and then went back in the car and ate it. Everyone from Papa Gino's remembered us. Every single person. So that's one of the things about casing. You've got to notice, but you
can't be noticed noticing. So, the cars that we used were never ours. We would go back at night, take the car. We'd go into a mall parking lot. I would unscrew somebody's license plate. We would put that on the
car. We would use the car. My dad would bring it back the next night. He'd just leave it back on the lot. You could never prepare
for every eventuality. There would be no scenario
that we could practice and go through that
wouldn't eventually present some issue that we would have to overcome. I would go in as a customer based on being as average as possible,
but I didn't like it either. It was nerve-racking, having
a duffel bag with rope, bolt cutters just in
case we had to cut a lock that we didn't have a key for. My dad would go in with his girlfriend. It sounds so sexist, but
we needed to have a female. Most of the traveling salesmen that we were going after were males. So it wasn't necessarily about
how many bodies we needed. It was more about what gender it was. One of the things that we
had to do was make sure that we could get into the safe. We knew that the
insurance-company protocol for you having loose diamonds and being able to sell them
and have them insure them is that every single
time you go to that safe to bring a diamond out,
that safe gets relocked. But my dad did it in a way that he kept sending the guy back
and forth from the safe that eventually the guy would
just leave the safe open. And most people didn't follow
the protocol to the letter. So once we knew the safe was open, that's when we would take down the store. It was 90 seconds at the
beginning of the robbery. So when my dad and his
girlfriend go in there and start talking, that's
not the 90 seconds. It's 90 seconds from when Kev comes in and the guy's subdued. That's when we hit the clock.
When that 90 seconds is done, I don't know what you have in
your pockets, but we gotta go. So there were times we left a case behind. We didn't take everything. The 90-second rule came from bank robbers. They tell you that you cannot
spend 90 seconds in a bank. Because if you go for the vault, it's going to be more than
90 seconds, and you're dead. Everything was based on Kev.
He could subdue a victim. It was either cuffs or duct tape or sometimes just standing
over them with a gun. So my brother would jump over the case, grab them, and put them down. Say, "Just keep your mouth shut. We'll be out of here in a couple seconds. Nobody's going to get hurt." My dad went after the safe.
I went after the cases. One time we encountered a
safe that, when we opened, it didn't have what we thought was in it, and my dad just wasn't convinced. And he started fooling around
with the bottom of the safe, and he pressed it, and it popped up, and everything was inside. The bottom was hollowed out. So, I'd always have a ball-peen hammer. And those cases are not easy to break because they all have a layer
of plastic in the middle. So when you hit it, just a hole. You have to keep smashing
and eventually push down this whole piece of cracked glass into — and then it makes the items
very difficult to get to. So that's why some of these cases, even the jewelry-store windows, there were people in the '80s that would smash and
grab through the window. My dad had rules. We
tried not to hurt anybody. In the scenario that we
were going into a store that wasn't ours and we were looking to
rob a traveling salesman, we would stage it so that
when the guns were pulled out, they were only pointed at the victim. So we purposely didn't point
them at the store owner so that the victim would
say, "Hey, is he in on it?" And that's exactly what happened. There was a plan that my
dad had and wanted to hatch that we would go in and actually
take down as many stores as we could in the Jewelers
Building in Boston. There is an actual building with five or six floors full of jewelers. And it was something that we squashed because the front-desk
guy was a police officer. We never had to deal
with any security guards because at the time there
weren't many jewelry stores that required an armed guard be there. The only one was the double
doors. And we didn't even go in. And you'll notice that
about most street-level jewelry stores, is there's
a foyer and you cannot hold both doors open
together at the same time. You'd have to go through one, take a number of steps before
you get to the next one. And that's because they
can lock that foyer. And at that point, we're like, nope. Most of these stores buzz you in. I can't get into a jewelry store now without being buzzed in. They don't use a high-tech
security system during the day because you have foot traffic. And that stuff, you know, are
you talking about laser beams that are tripped once you go past them? Well, you can't use that during the day. There are alarmed cases now, but again, you have to consider who's
responding to the alarm. When's the last time you did
anything about a car alarm? If during the day, during business hours an alarm is going off, I think
for a good couple of minutes, most people are going
to think it's a fluke and wait for it to shut off. Most people's first instinct isn't to call the police
when they hear that. So now you have a live
armed guard in a store now. I think the "Pink Panther"
breaking-and-entering-style jewelry-store robbery went
away when security systems didn't have to be connected to your phone. So once a silent alarm, once it's tripped, it can contact a satellite. The satellite calls the cops. You can't stop that unless you find a way to cut the electricity
to that entire structure. And even then they have backup systems. So, yes, if the power does go out, that security system's
still going to work. If we left in the stolen car,
we would meet the Bronco, we'd throw everything in the
back, and I would go home. That's when I had the opportunity to start going through the stuff. We had to keep the stuff in the house. So we would have $500,000
to a million dollars' worth of jewelry, retail. Wholesale, that's probably about a hundred grand worth of stuff. My dad would separate it
into, here are the necklaces, here are the bracelets,
here are the rings, here are the uncut gems,
here are the cut gems, here are the set gems. From there it's just
putting them into packages that we could sell to jewelry stores. High-end stuff is super,
super, super hard to sell. You know, little trinkets, little chains. My dad made more money off
these little glass jars with little beads inside. If it sparkles, people will buy it. So for us, no, there wasn't
a level of preference in terms of what you were grabbing. But if I got five cases in front of me and one's full of diamonds
and one's full of gold chain, I'm going for that. The gold chain is way
easier to sell quicker than a diamond ring is. You don't want to deal with uncut, because then you gotta go
find a place to cut them. And that's not easy to do. I would rather sell you a
set stone than a loose stone because more of it's done and
you can charge more for it. You're charging for the gold. So when you go in and you buy a diamond, now you're paying for the diamond, you're paying for whatever
the gold is in weight. Bill was our main dump site
for a lot of the stuff. [Censored] was the other person.
He was a jeweler in Nashua. And this was a guy that understood that the markup is where you make your money, and if you buy stolen stuff, you can mark the hell out of it. So if you buy it at $0.50 on the dollar, you can already just charge
what you normally would, charge a little bit more,
and really, really clean up. [Censored] bought a lot of
our stolen stuff in bulk. So, getting rid of jewelry in
bulk, very difficult to do. Because as soon as you
have your hands on it, you're an accomplice.
So there's a lot to it. So you gotta understand, after a robbery, every single pawnshop is, you know, the cops say, "If you see any
of this stuff, you call us." So we couldn't just go
to a pawnshop and say, here, buy all this stuff. We put it through piecemeal. So it's great to have a
pocketful of diamonds, but if you don't have anywhere
to dump it or fence it — and fencing is what we call
the selling of stolen goods. Get caught buying fenced
stuff, and you're screwed. And that's how most people get
caught in these situations. Jewelry party is where
you just invite a bunch — it's like a Tupperware party with jewelry. So, come and look at our product. We would lay everything out on the table, display it, and people
would just look at it. And it's cash. It's cash business. A lot of diamonds are
laser-inscribed with serial numbers. You can buy fake paperwork for this stuff. So, at the time, it was rare
that anything was engraved. The technology wasn't there, and the technology was expensive. So you have now certifying
bodies out there that will give you a certificate that says this is the diamond you're buying, and this is how it's graded, and this is blah, blah, blah. But you can pay for those. One of the ways we used to
tell was scraping glass. You might go into a
jewelry store or a pawnshop and they'll take a little pen and they'll hit it with a
little electrical current to tell if it's a real diamond. You're pretty much OK buying any gold, but you gotta make sure it's stamped. So if you have a piece of gold that's, you know, they say is 18-karat gold but there's no stamp that
says "18K," it probably isn't. Gold will not magnetize. That might be a way. I used to try to, I'd take some of the stolen jewelry and try to sell it for drugs, and they used to dip it
in bleach because they say bleach reacts to the other
metal that's in the gold. That's not true. It doesn't work. I'm not going to a store and
buying jewelry right now. Because you're paying
an exorbitant markup, and you don't know. You
don't know if it's real. Some people are probably
looking at their hand right now wondering whether or not what they have on their
hand is worth anything, but. Diamonds are not rare. A flawless diamond is rare, but sapphires and emeralds are way rarer, if that's even a word, because you just don't find
them flawless very often, and you don't find them treated or enhanced in some way artificially. Most of the insurance
scams that I observed were hearing secondhand what the person reported was stolen from their store. Every job that we did
that Bill was able to go and talk to that person afterwards without knowing that Bill was
the one that helped rob him, we heard what he said was stolen, and it was always double. At least double. These guys are taking this problem and turning it into an opportunity. And that's why you're paying
so much for insurance, is because these guys, insurance companies are
getting screwed pretty bad. If you're really, really good at it, you will have knowledge of how
many police are in that city, which is why we never pulled a
job in Nashua, New Hampshire. Nashua, New Hampshire, had
one of the best police forces at the time. I grew up in Boston with organized crime. I wasn't in it, but we all knew
the Angiulos ran the state, ran all of the waste management,
all the construction. An entire section of Boston was devoted to strip clubs, drug dealing. And the second you stepped
out of the combat zone and did any of that
stuff, either an Angiulo or somebody from that crew or
a cop would thump you for it. That was the place you did it. And it ran really well. Bulger comes in, and it just
became completely disorganized. No way we would've robbed 22 stores while the Angiulos were in power. They would've either come to
us and asked for a piece of it or they would've said
these stores are protected and you can't hit them. When you think to
yourself, how does a father get his sons involved
in something like this? My dad lived a very different
childhood than we did. He grew up in Chelsea,
right next to Heller's Bar. Heller's Bar was a mob bar. Right behind Heller's was a
huge dirt parking lot where, frequently, my dad would leave his house and see a tractor trailer
pulled from East Boston docks, where the mob picked
up most of their stuff. They would park it in
the back of Heller's, and that's where they
would sell everything. And my dad saw this. So my dad followed every
rule. He went to college. He was an upstanding member of society, unless there was something on the ground that wasn't tied down that he could take. And that was the mentality, I think, of most people in
Massachusetts at the time. Pay your taxes, keep
the man off your back, but if you see an opportunity to take a little something, grab it. My father initially gave
this guy his life savings to invest in importing
diamonds into the country. This guy decided to take
that money from my dad and then tell him that he
never got the delivery. And my dad was in a bad place.
He was in a very bad place. He finally asked if we would help him. He finally just sat down
and said, "Here's the deal. You guys are going to have
to come out of college. You're going to have to work full time. I don't have any money to
pay for any of that stuff. Or we could go get the money back from this guy and set him up." And that's exactly what we did. And it started the beginning
of 22 other robberies. It started as, we gotta save Dad. And then my dad started
presenting all the robberies to us as, we're helping people. We're going after this guy, he's dirty, and this guy ripped people off, and if we stop him, he won't rip anybody. It was like a Robin Hood kind of thing. After five, you start
saying, hey, you know, we're not superheroes, and we're
not here to save the world. What are we doing? And that's when things
started to get very — my brother and I were very worried at how much further this was going to go. The real victims are anybody
that we stole their dignity, their right to freedom, their
right to move about the world without somebody tying them
to a chair and their families. It doesn't stop with them. It stops with anybody
that loved that person that had to hear about
what happened to them. I was arrested on December 26 of 1996. There was enough distinctiveness about us to separate us from anybody else doing it. There weren't a whole lot of crews. There weren't a lot of
multiple people doing jobs. I went to rehab and I
stopped doing robberies, and my brother and father continued. They did two more, and then
they did one after prison. But I stopped because I had sobered up, and I went back to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor. My brother was already arrested. My father was already arrested. They were both sitting awaiting trial, and I knew they were coming for me. To me, prison was a lot like criminal university. So many inmates would
go in there and be like, "OK, what did you do? How
did you get caught? OK." And they leave with knowledge
of how to get away with it. So prison is a, it can be an education in terms of if you want to
keep doing what you're doing, that's the place to go
and talk to the people that got caught and figure
out how to do it right. I think the hardest part
of my prison sentence wasn't the jail time. It's the stigma. I couldn't get hired. Regret sucks, man. It really does. It's not easy to live with. It was ultimately my decision. And I, you know, I could
say that I was 13 years old and wasn't capable of
making those decisions, but I was 20. My father and brother passed
away February 11th last year, My brother and I had a very difficult and complicated relationship. We very rarely got along. And when we bonded, it was
in situations like this. So through our drug abuse, we bonded. Through the robberies, we bonded. In prison, we bonded. But whenever we were
outside and needed something substantial to solidify that
bond, it was never there. The book I wrote is
called "Family Jewels," and it was my attempt to
use the book as a tool to talk to kids, to talk to people, to maybe use the how crazy this story is to kind of scare you straight. I work as a personal trainer now. I created my own certification. I wrote my own book that
lists the programming for this type of exercise. And it is now approved by three, four certifying bodies
for personal training. I do the podcast, I do
"Family Jewels Podcast." Podcast allowed me to
go into greater detail. It allowed me to break down
each robbery individually. My name's Jeff Turner, I've printed over a million
dollars in US banknotes, and this is how crime works. I've been called "the
Picasso of counterfeiting." From my perspective, it
wasn't that hard to do it, if that makes sense. It just took a lot of
trial and error, basically. The bills just progressively
got better and better until eventually got caught. And the Secret Service
said the bills I was making were the best they've seen in 25 years. I started counterfeiting
when I kind of found myself in a desperate financial situation. I wrecked a work truck, so I lost my job, and I had a newborn baby at home, the lease was up in our house, so I was just kind of in a desperate spot. I was just trying to think of some way to get my family back
on their feet, you know? And counterfeiting just ended up being the safest, easiest way. The majority of the money I printed was the '96-series $100 bill. I also counterfeited some of
the 2013, the new "blue notes," but really that was
more of a hobby for me, just kind of a challenge. The longest process to
start counterfeiting was making the digital files. I would say I spent two months of just editing these images. Really, Wikipedia has pretty high-resolution
photos in their stock, and I broke the image
down to multiple layers. So I would have one image of
just the background color. I'd jumble up the serial numbers. I knew I needed to find a real thin paper that was opaque enough
to where you couldn't see the strip and watermark
through the face of the bill. I went through rice paper, vellum paper, tracing paper, toilet paper,
wrappers on toilet paper. I ended up finding that
Bible paper was perfect. Bible paper glows a dull
purple, just like money does. I would acquire the Bible
paper by going into bookstores and just kind of taking
out the blank pages. Inevitably, I ran out of
bookstores in Knoxville. I would coat the bills with
a matte lacquer spray can, which basically enabled the
counterfeit-detection pens to mark yellow. I would also use a invisible-ink UV pen to draw an invisible line over the strip. I also found a certain type
of iridescent green eye shadow that I would basically
paint onto the "100" in the bottom corner to kind of replicate the color-shifting ink. One cashier would run her fingernail along Benjamin Franklin's shirt to kind of feel the rigid texture. I ended up going to, like, a Hobby Lobby, and I found a fine-tip glue pen. It would dry and give a
little texture to his shirt. The 3D security ribbon
on the modern $100 bill was hard to crack. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing kind of outsources a
company to produce the paper and some of the security features, and I was able to find the patent rights, so it was like, it basically
explained how to do it. The trial and error was
definitely frustrating. When I first started counterfeiting, I would just experiment, and I'd mess up five for
every one that I made well. Towards the end I could make a perfect counterfeit $100 bill in probably five or 10 minutes. I've had a few printers
kind of break on me. Sometimes the paper would
just get so jammed up. It's not so much noisy, because
I'm using digital printers, but the matte lacquer spray smells really bad. So a lot of times maids at hotels would come into my room thinking we're, like,
huffing paint or something. I'd have to say, "Oh, my
wife spilled nail polish," or, you know, just make
up these little lies. But eventually, I rented a
house and I had ventilation fans that would suck the matte
lacquer out the window, so I could kind of spray the bills in front of this exhaust fan that, it kind of sucked it out the window. There weren't really big
stockpiles of counterfeit money. I would try to essentially
launder the money every day. So I'd print maybe $2,000, $5,000 in the morning and early afternoon, and then I'd try to break all those bills before the end of the night. There was probably 10 or
20 of the big corporations, retail, grocery stores,
Walmart-type stores. And those were the best
to break the bills at. I also sold bills to people. 25 cents on the dollar was
kind of the going rate. If I was breaking a bill in a store, I would try to go to female cashiers, and if I sent women in with the bills, I would tell them to go to male cashiers. When I would break a bill, I'd
give them the exact coinage to kind of distract them a little bit. The majority of your
amateur-type counterfeiters get kind of called out at the register, and they'll get a license-plate
number or something. And I would always park my car far away, so they could never get my license plate. I steered away from self-checkout machines because they were just too hard to beat. And some of them even
have photographic software where it just analyzes the micro-printing and all that stuff. In the beginning, I was definitely nervous because I spent so much
time perfecting these bills that I would notice any little error or anything like that. I think I've got an attention to detail that most people probably don't have. And the knowledge I have
for the security features, I study extensively. There was a few times that I would go to the same grocery store and it turns out that the
bills I'd spent last week, they found out about them. But really, most of the
time when a cashier, even if the cashier
kind of knows it's fake, they usually give it back to you. Over the two years that
I was counterfeiting, I probably only had maybe three or four cashiers turn me down, and I was spending thousands
of dollars every day. Luckily for me, they only had, I think, like, 12
surveillance videos of me. So I was pretty good about
kind of staying anonymous. There was a be-on-the-lookout
for me and my wife breaking a bill at a specific store. They didn't know my name,
though. It was just a picture. The Secret Service has the capability of kind of building cases on people, but as far as local police, I mean, they can't really do
much about it, you know? Knoxville has a lot of
dealers from out of town. Basically, drugs are more
expensive in Knoxville than they are in Detroit or
Chicago or Cleveland or Atlanta, so a lot of people kind of
go to these mid-level cities to sell their drugs
because they're, you know, you can get a brick in
Detroit for, like, $25,000 and then cut it and go sell it for $100,000 in Knoxville. I was addicted to drugs at the time, so a lot of it was buying
drugs with the bills. A few dealers I was honest
with and I would say, "This is what I do." And I ended up selling some bills to a drug dealer from Cleveland, but there was a couple
cases of, I would buy drugs from these people with
the counterfeit money. And the guy that actually
ended up setting me up, I probably got him for close to $10,000 over about a month's period. And he said that it was raining one day and one of my bills got wet and the color-shifting makeup smeared off. So he found out that they were fake. He was just kind of impressed and wanted to start buying them from me. These people would drive
from Knoxville up to Detroit to buy a brick of heroin, and they would mix in $5,000
or $10,000 of my bills when they went to their city to re-up. All different stores have
their specific method of detecting counterfeit bills, and a lot of the big retailers just use the counterfeit pens. So they typically just mark the bill, and then if it marks
properly, they cash it. If someone's buying a real
cheap item with a $100 bill, that's probably more reason
to take a closer look at it. Like, looking for the
strip and the watermark, holding the bill up to the light helps. Really, the best way to
tell if a bill's real is putting it in a bill validator. This is the more modern
blue-note $100 bill. If you hold the bill at a
certain angle and shift it, the ink turns from a
metallic green to a copper. It's used with magnetic ink, so if you fold the bill in
half and set it on the table, you can actually lift it
up with a neodymium magnet. There's enough magnetism to actually lift the bill up off the table. So, some cashiers will scratch the shirt to feel a kind of rigid
texture in the bill. The bills are printed on an intaglio press that kind of raises the
ink above the paper, which gives it a certain type of texture. Bills are really hard. There's kind of a real
crisp feeling to it. Well, yeah, there is a smell to money, and my bills, I've had a couple people, if I sprayed the matte lacquer too soon to spending it,
you know what I mean, a couple people would complain of a smell. I mean, they always accepted the bills because really, every security feature that a cashier would
look for, my bills had. So even if they were kind of suspicious or even brought up
something like the smell, they still accepted it because
there was really no reason to believe it was counterfeit. It was 2019. The dealer from Cleveland,
he got arrested up there. He either got caught with my
counterfeit money or heroin, and it didn't take him
long to inform on me. And then from there, the Secret Service raided my hotel room. I was in the process of printing when they kicked the door in, so they found computers and printers, and I think I had, like,
$6,400 in counterfeit bills that I tried to flush down the toilet. They pretty much caught me
red-handed at that point. I was basically looking
at about three years, but the Secret Service came to me and basically said that if I pleaded guilty and showed them how I did everything, then they wouldn't charge
my wife with anything and they would give me cooperation credit and they'd keep my restitution
amount under $100,000. So, with the cooperation, that got reduced to 10 to 16 months. The maximum sentence is 20 years. I think white-collar criminals
should still go to prison. I mean, I deserved to go to prison. I was lucky with the amount
of time that I served. It got me sober. Really, it was for the
best in my particular case. There are organizations in other countries that have taken a liking
to counterfeiting. It's obviously extremely profitable, and I've heard that a lot of counterfeits come out of Lima and Medellín. I've seen some bills
that I was told came from South America, but the
quality wasn't very good, I didn't think. It's criminal organizations
in the drug trade. And just from my experience, people who are in the drug trade, obviously, they're opportunists. If there's a way to make
money any other way, from my experience, they'll do it. There's a "supernote," they say, most likely coming out of North Korea produced by the North Korean government, that is indistinguishable
from legitimate currency. It supposedly has not only
all the security features, but all of them done pretty flawlessly. I started counterfeiting
when I was 19 years old. I read "The Art of Making Money," a book about Art Williams, who was a counterfeiter up in Chicago. And that kind of gave
me the original idea, but everything else was
kind of my own methods. The bills weren't super sophisticated, but they were good enough to sell. A friend of mine's dad was kind of a connected guy in Tampa, but then my friend overdosed and died. I basically just stopped doing it. You know, at that point I
didn't want to get caught. And of course, when I
started up again later on, it's all because of just a
desperate financial situation that kind of, you know,
I was racking my brain for any ways to make quick money. I don't think there will ever be a way to prevent counterfeiting. Even if it goes digital, there's still ways of
counterfeiting cashless — like, a person I know was
counterfeiting credit cards. The million or so dollars that I had made over my career hasn't impacted the
economy much, I would say. But maybe on the local level, it might make people lose trust in cash. In fact, a lot of stores in Knoxville don't accept $100 bills anymore. They've got little signs
at, like, Dollar Generals and certain stores that I frequented. Obviously, this whole situation kind of flipped my life upside down. I'm sure it wasn't easy on my kids. I had to go to prison. My wife and I are now separated. So, I mean, it's been rough on all of us. Now I am the production manager at a printing and graphics
company in Knoxville. So, yeah, still printing, just not, nothing illegal. My name is Stephen Gillen. It was estimated that I stole over $5 million worth of high-value goods as the leader of an
organized burglary gang. This is how crime works. Our burglary gang would always
carry some kind of weapons, but that is to control the situation. The emphasis is not to hurt people but to command dominance without any fuss or unnecessary violence. I was operating in the
late '80s, early '90s, all around the greater London
area and the home counties. My first introduction to the gang was just people that we hung out with and grew up with, pretty much. Burglary gangs pretty much
always know each other already. They may have gone to school together, or they know each other's brothers, or they would've worked with each other in another form of organized crime. This is the way our gang was formed. I was a leader of a gang of
four, sometimes five people. You would have the lookout
guy, who was the eyes, who would drop us off. You'd have the muscle. He
would be the brute force. And then you'd have
the jack-of-all-trades. He would also bring a lot of information. And then you'd have someone there who was always really savvy
with alarms, with sensors. There were a couple of times
where people would be arrested. It's the nature of this game. Many times we would not want
to bring anyone else in, because we would be able to replay that and execute what had to be done anyway. But on rare occasions, if we needed another body, as it were, there were always a selection
of people within our groups. Scouting for properties
is a role all by itself. The properties the gang would target, one would be ones that we were sent to with specific information, usually knowing there was
high-value items in there. Others, there would be
surveillance on them. They would be watched. Information could be from
a disgruntled employee and just other people
even close to the family. I think all this posting and showing of wealth on social media, where people live, what
they're doing all the time, is very, very dangerous. It was different back
then when we was active, but I know now a lot of really high-end burglary gangs that specifically go onto the internet, and that's where they get their targeting. Kim Kardashian is a name.
Pprofessional footballers. They're very susceptible
to that happening to them, and it was very easy even to pick the time when to go to the properties because they'd be posting and
saying, "I'm at the Oscars," or, "I'm away at Switzerland
for the weekend filming." A burglar decodes a target
in a certain specific way. First thing he's looking at is going to be the weakest part of the building. Houses which are semidetached, houses that are on the corner of the road or have a lot of shrubbery
would be a target. People going there in
a uniform as a postman or a worker or whatever. This is so if anyone's
looking out the window or watching or passing in the car, they look like they have every
reason to be where they are. A great deterrent -- it's
not a full deterrent -- is that places would have a new alarm. Dogs is another one. When they see obstacles like this, they're more likely to move
on to an easier target. Or again, you'd come aware
of a dog in the barking. But no, there have been times -- it's very easy to get a nice bit of meat, put loads of Valium or whatever in it, and sling it over the fence or
put it into the dog's kennel. The best time for the
gang to approach a target really varies, which
is why the surveillance and the location are very, very important. Commercials were generally more at night, just because of during the day there'd be a lot of people in these units. Smashing glass is not just
noisy, it's very messy. And if you're climbing through glass, then you have a big percentage
of leaving DNA, blood, and all these kind of samples. It wouldn't be our preferred entry point. Overpowering or circumventing
private security is something a burglary
gang would not want to do. They'd look at ways to get around that. In them days for us, security codes in residential properties would usually have four or five numbers. So there were technologies that we had that could plug into that
to release the number, and then you had safes, and there was different
ways to drill safes, or in some cases, like the old days, people would even blow
them, but not so much. We would be looking to do
as least work as possible. So it was basically about
dismantling the alarm systems and getting through that
first level of protection. We had other techniques
that we used to use, which was a building foam which we could put into an alarm system that would harden so the bell
wouldn't be able to ring, but then we'd have to do the same on the internal alarm system. Other ways into a building, it's the understanding of
alarms and how they work. It's usually, if it's not sensor-led, you would know it would be
metal on metal for doors. So sometimes we would just chop the whole bottom of the door off and pull that in the bottom out. The alarms wouldn't trigger, and that would give us the
valuable time that we would need to get to the internal
alarm system and disable it. Our gang wouldn't necessarily target homes or commercial properties
with people in them, but sometimes we did. Our burglary gang would always
carry some kind of weapons. Not having weapons like guns, but that is to control the situation. The emphasis is not to hurt people, but to command dominance
to get the work done without any fuss or unnecessary violence. People would always comply because we was very
professional in our approach. The places people would hide items, usually they're just out
there in a master bedroom or in a cupboard or in a jewelry box. A lot of other times
they'll be in the safe. Sometimes the safe is open. We have found some of this stuff in the most unbelievable places. In the back of cupboards,
rolled up in socks, in the back of drawers, even
under the bed and the mattress. One of the most successful
burglary jobs we'd done, me and the gang, was a commercial that had a lot of really
high-end designer goods. It had alarms. It was in Central London. It was a very, very busy location. We had been given
information about this place. On this job, we left two people outside on the road as lookout. So only two of us went
in as the main lead. I was one of them. Once we got through the outer doors and into the courtyard, there was only a really,
really flimsy alarm. But we put the foam into the alarm. We started wrapping up the stuff. We had someone out there,
they reversed the van in, and we loaded that van very, very quickly. That was taken then to what
we used to call a slaughter, and the slaughter was where
the goods would be unloaded and then moved on to the buyer. Getting rid of the proceeds of a burglary is one of the most risky times, but sometimes we would be
stuck with certain items. I remember once we had a stamp collection which had come out safe. Because of the rarity and the misprints on some of these stamps, which was what made them
valuable in the first place, it was very hard to
find a buyer for these. Their great value translated
to a much lower price, which we had to take. We had very key influential
jewelers in London who would break up the stones, who would weigh the gold, who would be able to move any amount of jewelry on very quickly. We had other people who
was in the antiques market. They would act as middlemen. The paintings guys, they
was a different market. And I had a couple of people
who worked in that area, and it was very specialized, and they would usually always
go to private collectors. The retail price of
diamonds or jewels or gold or antiques is greatly diminished by the time it goes to the black market. If you had a 50-grand diamond, you'd more than likely
go and get 12, 13 for it. With gold, you would get a
quarter of the price. Scrap. There were many times I had paintings worth hundreds of thousands. You'd be lucky to get a few thousand for some of these paintings. I think the market in stolen
goods for burglary gangs is pretty much the same. There is a tendency now to go for a lot of high-performance cars because they can be
shipped abroad, replated, and there's a lot of
money in this to order. The gang always broke down
profit, four ways, five ways. Whoever was involved and depending on how
much of a leading role they had in any given job. Some would fund the lifestyle of drugs and parties and going out. Others, it would be cars
and watches or women, even. Sometimes the money was definitely used to invest in the next
job, needed equipment, or even to pay off someone who was giving us new quality information. Our burglary gang was independent. We didn't have to kick
money up to anyone else. Everyone was part of a wider
high-level criminal network. In my time, London's underworld, its organized-crime circles
were very tight-knit circles, but loosely affiliated. There were some corrupt officials and corrupt police officers
who sometimes would want to get damaging paperwork
or would target rivals. Due to the crimes I was
committing, I ended up in prison. My further sentences relate to organized crime. I was
given 17 years, which I served at a Category A prison. Many people talk about
crimes they've done, crimes they missed, other
crimes that are out there and can be revisited or done again. It was an education,
a university of crime. Sometimes you come across
some really, you know, clever guys who would tell
you about alarms and safes and locks, which could be applied. I first met Charles Bronson because of our level of security category within the prison system. Charles Bronson was a
larger-than-life character. He was an amazing
storyteller and an artist. He was a very, very funny man, and he could switch at any time. He had to be managed very, very carefully. I never had a problem with him. I think sometimes long sentences are a deterrent. It's more about the
lifestyle, the upbringing, and the conditioning. These people need more opportunity, and they need to be
helped and given education and the right role models. In the UK, sadly, home invasion burglaries have been on a steady
increase year by year. I don't think police
in the UK are doing enough to respond to nonviolent crimes. In many ways, these
are put on a lower tier of urgency, and of course, alarm systems are so much more sophisticated now. Everywhere is covered by cameras, drones, directional mics, all
kinds of different ways of tracking criminals. This has led many criminals
to go into cyber crime and more faceless areas of crime. I was released from prison
from my final sentence, which was possession
of a firearm in 2006. So many years had passed,
12 years, so the members of the burglary gang from
the old days had dispersed. It's not conducive to
having a family life. Everyone around you suffers, and I knew I needed to change my life, but everyone around me was
either dead or in prison and I went on to, to work
real, honest manual labor. Within 18 months, I went from laborer to supervisor to running my own contracts to starting my own business. I am CEO, cofounder of Raw
Media Creative Studios, which is a brand development TV and film digital agency. I was born in England, but as a six-month, 3-year-old
child, was taken to Belfast and left there in the middle
of the war over there. It was a normal occurrence to hear the bombs and guns. I was brought up in an environment of fear, constant violence. My surrogate mother died of cancer when I was 9
years old, so I was going back to England and London,
which was alien to me. I had a succession of children's homes and foster homes where the basic
road for me was to survive. Some of them was quite brutal. But there was a lot of
learning from the older ones above me about what to do, and that was the start
of the grooming of crime. I'd have guns and the
really serious violence around me from the ages of 15, 16. I was exposed to that very quickly. From that point on, it was very much a grooming
thing from the older ones. They saw, here's one we
can manipulate, here's one who can be sent out there. Here's one who I see myself in that's going to be useful to us. And so it translates up the ladder.
