1048: Shaun Attwood | From Raves to Riches to Ruin Part Two

1048: Shaun Attwood | From Raves to Riches to Ruin Part Two

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Heineken zero zero for sponsoring this episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Before we start this show, I wanna let you know it has some adult themes in it, so no kids in the car for this one. And if you leave the kids in the car and you still play the episode, don't blame me when they have nightmares.

Coming up next on

[00:00:15] Shaun Attwood: the Jordan Harbinger show, May 16th, 2002. I'm on my computer up in the morning, trading options, and there's a knock on the door. Bam, bam, bam, bam. 10 people please. We got a warrant. Open the door. Run to the window. The whole apartment complex is surrounded. Speak to my Mrs. And we're like, what should we do better?

Let 'em in. We get halfway through the living room and then just boom door just flies off the hinges. Hands up. Above yet. Don't move. Get on the effing ground now.

[00:00:51] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of incredible people, from spies to CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional Emmy nominated comedian, extreme athlete, or Russian chess grandmaster.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. Part two, with Sean Atwood. This is a crazy, amazing conversation in so many ways. If you haven't heard part one, definitely go back and check that out.

Otherwise, this part's not gonna, you're gonna jump in the middle and frankly, you're just gonna ruin it for yourself. So go back and listen to part one and for the rest of you, I know you can't wait to hear the rest of this one. It is, it, it gets, it gets worse. Somehow. It gets worse. So here we go, part two with my buddy Sean Atwood.

It seems like there was a moment or a phase of your life where you felt lost and outta control. It seems like you, you plowed through that pretty well though, or not.

[00:02:16] Shaun Attwood: Alright. I quit the importation, right. But hadn't quit going out on the weekend partying with my mates. Mm-Hmm. My inner demons, I didn't address them until years later.

Mm-hmm. Through therapy and philosophy and psychology and yoga and meditation. So I didn't understand the psychodynamics of what was going on. I still had to get high every weekend. The walls were howling for me to come out and party, and I would leave my girlfriend at home, go out with wild man, go out with G dog getting high in Tempe.

Is this, is it with Claudia? I think Claudia, yeah.

[00:02:45] Jordan Harbinger: And you meet her family in this like normal, functional family. Yeah. And I think

[00:02:50] Shaun Attwood: God bless them.

[00:02:51] Jordan Harbinger: In the book you, you have this moment where you're like, who? Who am I? You feel like you're a normal guy who's a stockbroker, but I have a secret life that's really shitty where I'm a drug dealer.

There's a lot of tension having those two, those two people exist in the same brain basically.

[00:03:07] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. When you're living double lives. Yeah. It's very stressful.

[00:03:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Drugs probably alleviate some of that stress temporarily, but they make the overall situation worse.

[00:03:18] Shaun Attwood: Over time. The pleasure of drugs goes down because you're always trying to get back to where you started.

Yeah. But the pain, the side effects is rising in the background. And they cross. But if you're addicted, you can't stop. So you're still taking drugs, even though the side effects is up here, hoping you get back to here, but you're just burning yourself out. This is why most of my

[00:03:38] Jordan Harbinger: mates are dead. Yeah. A lot of the people from the book, I was like writing these names down.

I was like, oh, I gotta ask about this person, this person. But then by the end of book three, it's like dead, dead, dead, dead. This person vanished. We think he's maybe, okay. We're not sure. Dead. Dead, dead. Dead alive. But now you're updating me. Actually, he died a couple years ago after the book was published, right?

Yeah. So this is not a, there's a timer running on your life that just starts going maybe faster and faster. You just can't see the clock. One of

[00:04:04] Shaun Attwood: the most dangerous situations then was with Sammy, the Bull's son.

[00:04:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:04:07] Shaun Attwood: So the ecstasy ring, Mike Papa was running this sy ring, one of these steroid jet guys.

Sammy the bull moves to Tempe with his family on in witness protection after testify against Gotti. Right? Papa brings in. Gerard Gravano and Karen Gravano, the kids of Sammy. Sammy starts acting in an advisory capacity. He doesn't know what's going on the street level. Mm-Hmm. One of the evidences against him is, uh, a call where Gerard asked for money for gas, and Sammy says, yeah, I'll send you money for gas, but that's Sammy putting money into the ecstasy ring.

[00:04:39] Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

[00:04:39] Shaun Attwood: When I got arrested, this was May 16th, 2002, in Towers jail, Maricopa County, I finally met Gerard Gravano in prison in this Maricopa County jail system. Oh, I see. In the beginning, the guards chained him to wild man to see what would happen. They just, they didn't like him either. Apparently they knew from the news there was a beef.

Oh. So they were God like to

[00:05:02] Jordan Harbinger: create situations. They're just stirring the shit.

[00:05:04] Shaun Attwood: Oh, interesting. Wild man's looking at me like, what should it do? Do you want me to do him in? And I'm like, no, let's talk to him and see, you know, how his case is going because his case started a couple years before I was. We're talking to him all night long.

'cause they waited up for court the night before you're in court, the next day you're in transportation all day. He later on tells me that they had a bouncy on me and we were in a strip club who had a

[00:05:25] Jordan Harbinger: bounty on you. The

[00:05:26] Shaun Attwood: Gravano Gravano, the Gravano Enterprise. Yeah. They had a bouncy on me and we were in a gay bar called the Crowbar in Central Phoenix.

Me. Well man G Dog, well woman, and about a dozen more people. And they advised me to leave. They said it's getting a bit moody. And we left in the bar. Yeah. They're like, you should take off. Yeah. But what I didn't know was a strip tease girl. I'd called in for the bounty to the gravano. They got an armed crew that were on the way to come and try and take me out to the desert and hold me for ransom.

Wow. And they said if the ransom wasn't paid, they were just gonna eliminate the competition. Yeah, that's what he told me. We've got a documentary coming out on a huge American network. Oh man. Where they've filmed me and my family that came to the uk, they've gone and filmed Sammy the Bull and his family.

And this is gonna be one of the stories in it. They've also interviewed people who work for me and my detectives.

[00:06:17] Jordan Harbinger: How did you get caught at first? You said you were in the, in the jail system, but how did you, what was you getting caught? What was that like? When did that happen?

[00:06:24] Shaun Attwood: So 10 witness statements were made to the police against me.

One was from a house Wellman destroyed in Mexico after he'd blown up another house in Mexico. Some of them were people who worked for Sammy the Bull, and one of them was Skinner. None of them had a, the inside scoop on the organization except for Skinner, who's my sales guy. So Skinner had got so scared of Wild Man after we realized he'd Firebombed Wild Woman's apartment.

Skinner got so paranoid that he went to the cops and then left the state. And later on in jail there was a guy called Joey Crack, who was one of my co-defendants. And he was telling me stories and he said he showed up at Skinner's apartment and Wildman had found out where it was and he was in there and Wildman just grabbed his neck, thought it was Skinner.

And Joey Crack was like, it's crack. It's crack. Don't kill me. Don't kill me. And crack said, well, man had sweat just running down his face, dripping off his ears. And he had every weapon. No, every known weapon laid out like hammers, golf clubs, knives, baseball bats, everything. So Skinner was the one who gave the inside scoop.

May 16th, 2002, I'm on my computer up in the morning, trading options, and there's a knock on the door. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Jump up. Look through the peephole. It's blacked out. 10 people, please. We got a warrant. Open the door. I'm wondering, is it the cops or is it someone pretending the cops come to rob me, run to the window.

Look through the window. Shit. The whole apartment complex is surrounded. Oh man. Go through to the bedroom, speak to my Mrs. And we're like, what should we do better? Let 'em in. We get halfway through the living room and then just boom door just flies off the hinges. They come in hands above, don't move, get on the effing ground.

Now put, and it's like, have you ever been through a SWAT team, right?

[00:08:16] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, no. No. Not, not from the perspective, actually, I should say yes, but not from the perspective of the person who has the gun pointed at them. Generally, no. So

[00:08:25] Shaun Attwood: you see all these visors and these very intense eyes behind these visors.

There's some lights, some bright lights, you know, you know, if you make a mistake your life's over in seconds. Yeah. Time kind of freezes and then they just jump on you and crush you. One of the detectives just grabs me up, gets in my face English Sean. You are a big name from the rave scene and we've got you.

I have no idea who this guy is at this point, but he knows well full well away. Yeah. You've been his life for three years. Exactly. Yeah. From the police paperwork that I read later on, he is like sat next to me in restaurants and everything. Oh, yeah, yeah,

[00:09:01] Jordan Harbinger: yeah. It he, that was his moment where he was like, oh, this is, that was the payoff.

Yes. He had, he had a few drinks that night for sure. Yes. Finally cracked. They were celebrating. Yeah, man. Okay, so you go to prison, by the way, the prison stuff is so gross. We'll get into some of that, but even in the beginning you're like, there's something called prison itch. Tell me about this. So

[00:09:24] Shaun Attwood: there's Durango foot rot whereby if you go in the shower without your shoes, oh man, your foot just ends up getting fungus on it and turning green and stuff.

There is, it's almost, I. 120, 130 degrees in the summer in Arizona On the American scale. Yeah. So there's a tiny vent called a Swamp Cool Event at the back of the cell. The earth coming in, it was like as one was baby's breath. The only time it worked was when the county health inspector walked through the building and then it went back to the broken setting.

So we're being cooked alive in a concrete oven and it wreaks havoc on your skin. Yeah. You get all these skin infections that itch and bleed. It look like I spillt battery acid on my leg. At one point you get these bedsores on your, on your behind. 'cause you sat around the lot now at night when you're trying to sleep.

You're basically just rotating on your bunk in a pool of sweat. Oof. And the itchiness from these skin infections and bed, so is keeping you awake all night if you scratch yourself. 'cause you're sweating constantly. Day out after day, the outer layers of your skin turn soggy. So you get this itchiness oof.

Scratch yourself and clumps of your own skin. Detach

[00:10:35] Jordan Harbinger: under your nails. Oh my God. That's really awful. Yeah, that's really, and everyone has this pretty much,

[00:10:42] Shaun Attwood: yeah. I mean, people were just getting naked and throwing buckets of water on each other. Try and cool down. Holy smokes. Yeah. That's, uh, truly awful. And then there was the insects.

There was a spider called a brown recluse. Yeah. And it would come out at night looking for food. And you roll around and you sleep, you touch it, it get you, you wouldn't even see it. You'd just wake up the next day, have little pinpricks on your skin, no big deal. In the following days, the puss would start to come out.

And the venom, it eats into your flesh downs of the bone on some occasions and causes what's called a volcano lesion. There were guys in the jail who had been in shootouts, and these spider bites are putting bigger holes in people's bodies than bullets. And we say to the guard, this guy's gotta go to the doctor, take him to medical.

It's the policy of the jail not to treat insect bites. You put yourself in here, you deal with it. So there was a guy called Wow, Alejandro. He'd done a drive by shooting teenager, and every night he'd get up and watch the news because he might be up for the death penalty if one of his victims died. I see one girl got a bullet through her back, came out the front and took her nipple off, and all these people in critical condition.

So every night he'd go up and watched the news. Anyway, he got bit and it looked like a baseball of yellow plasma was trying to come out of his back. Oh man. Guards wouldn't take him to medical. So in the day room, big guys arm locked him on either side to hold him steady. There was a Russian guy in there who'd been in the military and said he knew how to dress wounds.

He. He comes up behind Alejandro and he's massaging this. This guy's back and all his puss is running down the back and I'm mopping up with the toilet paper. This is going on for about 10 minutes. Big guy's, almost fainting sweats, dripping off his ears, off his chin. We need more guys to hold him because it's because it hurts so bad over.

Guys are jumping on to hold this guy. When all the puss was finally out, what the Russian guy said, the best thing you could do for him was put salt on the wound to reduce the bacteria.

[00:12:35] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. This is like stone age. This is how you treat a wound in Afghanistan or something like that. Sheriff, sheriff Joe Apio, America's tough as sheriff, so you were in this notoriously horrible US prison and that he later went to, he later was I think either in prison or convicted of he was convicted

[00:12:55] Shaun Attwood: of racial profiling and contempt of court.

Trump pardoned him. Right. So he was looking at six months in his own jail,

[00:13:00] Jordan Harbinger: but he got, he got away with it. Oh. So it would've been poetic. Six months isn't even that long. You mentioned the food in this prison was like not real food, almost.

[00:13:10] Shaun Attwood: Breakfast was moldy bread and green Bologna. Green, yeah.

[00:13:14] Jordan Harbinger: Not supposed to be green.

Just happens to be green. Raw

[00:13:16] Shaun Attwood: sausage meat that's got this green shine to it. Oh, and then the mole on the bread. Blue. Green. Sometimes it had these fantastic psychedelic colors that look like works of art. We'd scratched the mold off the bread. We were that hungry. Hungry. After bread was stale, put it in water and swell it to get it down.

Evening meal was a mystery meat slot. We called Red Death. Red Death. It looked like Carrot e vomit, blended with blood, all kinds of random meat in it, and it stunk Occasionally there was a dead rat in it. Oh, one time we gave a rat back to the guards and they said they would investigate, and they came back and said it was just a potato, so the jail couldn't get in trouble.

Sheriff Joe, on his favorite quotes, it costs us more to feed our police dogs than our prisoners, 50 cents or less per day to rotten food. I see. And our police dogs are working for a living.

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah. You mentioned the banned toothpaste from China. Oh, what was that? How? How was it banned?

It wasn't banned if you had it. I guess if, if you Google

[00:14:15] Shaun Attwood: a me fresh toothpaste, a MER, fresh. It will come up. I think it was a case in prison, legal news or something that it had antifreeze or something in it. Yeah. Oh man. So there all this toxic stuff, they're just disposing of it onto the prisoners

[00:14:31] Jordan Harbinger: basically.

They're torturing you guys in there. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And a lot of people won't have any sympathy for prisoners. However, there's a level of humanity that you should generally afford. Somebody, especially nonviolent criminals.

[00:14:42] Shaun Attwood: You got the guards murdering the prisoners.

[00:14:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:44] Shaun Attwood: Brian Crenshaw, Scott Norberg, you got a blind guy, failed to produce his ID for the evening meal.

They pulverized him, put him into a coy, died over a month later. Scott Norberg mentally ill man, wandering neighborhood. They started beating him up. His face is turned blue. A female guard says, stop it. His face is turned blue and they just kept beating him. The prisoners were yelling, why are you still beating him?

He's already dead. And they were still beating the corps. That's, and people can Google him and research it and though they were lawsuits that were settled,

[00:15:14] Jordan Harbinger: willing to some of this in the show notes. It's quite horrifying actually. Tell me about introducing yourself to the gangs because I, you, that's one of the first things you told me on the phone is you gotta, you have no choice.

You have to introduce yourself to the gangs. You can't just be like, ah, I'm not playing that game. You play their game.

[00:15:29] Shaun Attwood: Well, they introduce themselves to you depending on I see what color your skin is. Okay. So as soon as I go in, you've got these neo-Nazis from the Ian Brotherhood who are low level guys at this stage.

They've got Hitler on them, they've got swastikas, they've got lightning bolts. SS one guy even had Hitler, Zeke Hying over a gas chamber with Jewish people dying inside the gas chamber.

[00:15:56] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow. That's a class act.

[00:15:59] Shaun Attwood: These are some of the, uh, early tattoos that I saw. Yeah. On these guys. And I'm like, holy shit.

So they're like, Hey, get in that cell over there, kind of thing. Go in the cell, close the door behind me so I can't get out free of them. I'm trapped. They're like, what are your charges? So my charges on a printout from the jail, it's all legal terminology. I don't even understand what it means. So I say to them, I dunno what my charges mean.

[00:16:24] Jordan Harbinger: This is not a good answer. Right. 'cause they think you're hiding something. Right. So I assume it's like they're making sure you're not like a pedophile kind of guy that they have to murder at that point or Yeah. Does that happen? Do they kill peta? Yes, because you hear like, oh, they just go into segregated protective custody.

[00:16:39] Shaun Attwood: Nothing ever happens. But some of them try and go undercover. In general pop. And it is KOS if they get outed. And I've got a couple of stories of that. Kill k os kill on site. Yeah. I've got a couple of stories of that happening if you want those. And they're really brutal. Yeah. So I say I don't want my charges mean now they've got against the wall.

Like what the after You mean you don't know what your charges mean? Are you Were chomo, you were, I don't even know what Chomo was. Pull out my charge sheet. They make me show it to 'em. Oh, chomo child molester. Yeah. I see Crime, continuous criminal enterprise Conspiracy. Conspiracy, bail bond, seven $50,000.

Like, damn, you guys, the mafia, what? $750,000 bond. And they loved that. The atmosphere changed right away. And I'm like, no, we're not the mafia. We're doing raves efficacy. Yeah. One of was like, yeah, I killed someone at a rave who was on GHB. And so they then explained the rules. If anyone calls you a punk, a bitch or hits you, you must fight 'em on the spot as the whole gang will attack you

[00:17:38] Jordan Harbinger: because you're a bad representation or, or something like you're given.

That's the rule.

[00:17:42] Shaun Attwood: Your whole race will attack you if you don't defend yourself. If someone hits you or calls you a punk or bitch, because it's, it's automatic. You're gonna get battered

[00:17:51] Jordan Harbinger: by everyone. Well, people are gonna go, why is that? But it seems functional, right? Because if you can get away with it, then it's gonna happen more.

So your job is to make sure nobody gets away with it.

[00:18:00] Shaun Attwood: Someone calls you a punk or a bitch, you have to go in the cylinder stairs and fight 'em right away. Otherwise every one of your race is gonna batter you.

[00:18:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. Yeah,

[00:18:09] Shaun Attwood: that's the first rule they told me. Then you can't go and sit with the other races on the tables in the day room.

So it's 45 men in an area designed for 15. They've got these hexagonal octagonal seats and tables bolted to the floor. There's crappy old TV on the wall. You got the blacks, the Mexicans, the Mexican Americans, and the whites. The whites, the woods. Yeah. Yeah. They're the four gangs. You can't go and sit at the table of the races.

You can't go make your friends with the guards. They'll smash you for snitching. So there was an early occasion where I was working out with a guy called Sniper. He was La Victoria gang member out of Tempe, working out with Sniper, and he's a Chicano Mexican American. The Neo say to me while I'm working up with this guy, Hey, we want a word with you.

I look at Sniper, go talk to your people, go in the cell with them again. They're like, what? What do you think you're doing right now? I don't know. I'm working out. You know, take a look around the day room. Do you see any of the white boys working out with the other races? Nope. You got a lot to learn wood now finish your workout.

At least they were being polite with me. Yeah, and that was because Wild Man was in there as well. I wasn't allowed in the same tower as him, but they knew he was with me. And he'd already established himself. I see. Yeah. So he

[00:19:31] Jordan Harbinger: gave you a little bit of clout, like, this is my guy. He was a good man to get arrested with.

I bet. Holy smokes. Yeah. Such your lucky charm I guess. Yeah. So what does happen to the petto of files in prison? I thought they just went into segregate or what do you call it? Protective custody. They hang out with each other. The end. You said someone, they try to get outta there. Yeah.

[00:19:48] Shaun Attwood: Alright. So the prison system is, there's all these complexes and they do have their own prisons now, but when they go court or they're in transportation or when, if they're trying to go undercover in general population, it enables people to get access to them and do things, which does happen quite a lot.

So, for example, then a guy who come in with me was suspected of something. They had him in the shower beating the crap out of him. They left him whimpering in a pool of blood. Then this guy goes up to the main gang guy and says, look, why can we still hear him? You didn't smash him good enough? And the gang guy goes, yeah, we did him good enough.

And he's like, nah. And he goes in trying to crack this guy's head open like it's a coconut, just crack, crack, crack. You can hear it until he looks dead on the floor. I go back to my cell and then there's a announcement locked down. Everybody locked down 'cause the guards on a security walk has seen it.

This guy's getting carried out on a stretch and there's not just blood coming out his head. There's yellow stuff coming out of his head. Brain fluid. I guess there was another one where the head of the Mexican gang lived next door to me and he had two cell mates and one of 'em was a Jehovah Witness and he was going around preaching all day to people That's and pissing people off.

He, he did it to me as well. And then that was it called the Watchtower, that thing. And one day he goes to court and he's on the news. I. His case from molesting his own knees. Oh man. The head of the gang was so embarrassed that this guy lived with him for months. They waited until the guard did the security walk so they could torture him until the next security walk, which is about 30 minutes.

And I'm sat in that cell next door and I've never heard noises like it coming from a human being. It sounded like a cat was on fire or something. It started out with the fir, the normal sounds of head getting bashed against toilet body getting thrown its wall, body getting thrown around. Ah, ah, ah, you know, normal don't hate me.

Ah, ah, ah. And then it just went into the animal kingdom of sins. Wow. Yeah. By the time he got out that cell before the security walk, he was covered in blood from head to toe and he banged on the plexiglass door and it just slid open and he just collapsed on the floor and we never saw him again. You think he died?

You just don't know. Yeah. Wow. National Geographic researched my locked up abroad episode that they made called Raven, Arizona. They said that 57 people died in that jail around the time I was there, over a five year period. Wow. Is that higher than normal? Sounds higher than normal. Highest, highest rate of death.

Out of all the jails and prisons in America.

[00:22:16] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Geez. That's crazy. Yeah. And you're coming from the UK where, I don't know what prison's like here, but I assume you don't grow up watching prison stories that are that traumatizing. No prison

[00:22:28] Shaun Attwood: here. A lot of bad things can happen and it has got more outta control.

But American, Arizona jail Yeah. Is

[00:22:36] Jordan Harbinger: off the scale. Yeah. You know what sounds a lot more fun than prison itch, the fine products and services that support this show, we'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and a MD. You ever wonder how a hacker can breach even the most secure systems for many of us who aren't tech savvy?

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Many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong, and you can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Sean Atwood. You mentioned the gangs intimidate people into making their significant others do favors for the gang.

So tell me about, is that how things get smuggled in usually? There

[00:26:04] Shaun Attwood: was an article in the Phoenix New Times about my case, English, Sean's Evil Empire, 12 pages long. Mm-Hmm. Evan had done in 10 times more when the Nazis found this out. Yeah. It was good 'cause I was getting a few extra milks and slices of cheese for breakfast, but they started pressuring me to have my girlfriend bring stuff in because I obviously had huge drug connections.

Right, okay. But what happened was a race riot erupted and those guys who were pressuring me got moved. Oh, I

[00:26:31] Jordan Harbinger: see. So you ended up kind of lucky. 'cause they, they were like, oh well yeah, and then they just got replaced. Whew. Man. Your family surely was worried about you, right? That you were the smart kid stockbroker and then dot, dot dot.

You're in the worst prison in America.

[00:26:44] Shaun Attwood: My mom was flying over and to see her all crumpled up in the visitation room and breaks my heart. Yeah. She'd been outside sniffer dogs on them waiting for hours, hearing the stories of all the, the Mexican people trying to get in, how sad their stories were. I just feel blessed that my parents had my back.

[00:27:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:27:02] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. That must have been so

[00:27:03] Jordan Harbinger: stressful for

[00:27:04] Shaun Attwood: them. It was really stressful. My, uh, sister had to have counseling. My mom had a nervous breakdown 'cause of that Phoenix New Times article. I asked my aunt not to show up my mom, she said it was on the internet and my mom read it. Oh man. And she was a college teacher and she ran up to some of the students after reading it saying, I know you've read the article.

I know you know what's going on. Didn't have a clue what she was on about. My dad had to get it from the school and she'd brought off medication to this day.

[00:27:30] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, really? So she just had a, like a anxiety attack type of thing? She had a meltdown. Yeah. Meltdown. Yeah. Geez, man. It must have been tough to face them when they visited you.

[00:27:41] Shaun Attwood: You know what visits are like gold. Yeah. Visits in your mail are like gold. Just any communication with the outside world. Mm-Hmm. This situation was so intense just to get out of your cell and sit with a family member, even though it is in a bizarre environment. You're breathing easy for like an hour or two and communicating with your loved ones and finding out what's going on in the outside world because you've completely lost track of what's going on in the world.

[00:28:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I would imagine it's just like a, it's like the only breath of fresh air, so to speak. Yeah,

[00:28:13] Shaun Attwood: totally. That you have, wow. Some prisoners even managed to make babies in visitation. Is that a conjugal visit or they just happened to be real slick? This was before there was so much, um, camera technology and stuff.

Gotcha. You have some guys stand in a row and get it on behind the,

[00:28:29] Jordan Harbinger: can you imagine being the woman in that situation? It's like, all right, we're gonna do it behind this row of strangers.

[00:28:35] Shaun Attwood: One of my mates is a guy called T-Bone, who met later on big US ex Marine. I believe he fathered more than one child in visitation.

Wow. Yeah. Wow.

[00:28:45] Jordan Harbinger: I don't, and it'd be hard to get it up in those circumstances. Maybe not. If you haven't had it for six months, you never know. I feel like mine, I would just shrivel up, literally, metaphorically. I

[00:28:54] Shaun Attwood: would just be like, Nope, I'm done. One of the hardest parts is going without relations. Yeah. And if you've gone without it, you're like in heat kind of basically.

Sure.

[00:29:05] Jordan Harbinger: Geez. You hear about all like the prison rape and stuff. Is that, I mean, that's a bad prison, so I assume if it happens at all, it's happening there. Can

[00:29:13] Shaun Attwood: I be extreme in my stories then? For sure.

[00:29:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Way more

[00:29:16] Shaun Attwood: extreme than I've been so

[00:29:16] Jordan Harbinger: far. Yeah, because this might get demonetized, but it's like whatever, you know, it's worth So on YouTube trans

[00:29:22] Shaun Attwood: a six and a half foot charismatic trans prisoner.

And she had a tough boyfriend at the time, but she told me her history from decades earlier and she said when she first came in, she clicked up with the The gang Blood dimple doubt. ab the only brotherhood

[00:29:35] Jordan Harbinger: they had a transsexual

[00:29:37] Shaun Attwood: in?

[00:29:37] Jordan Harbinger: No, when she first

[00:29:38] Shaun Attwood: came in, she wasn't there. Oh, oh, I see. She was a big six and a half foot guy.

Gotcha. When she first came in six foot, this was decades before I met her. She was collecting debts, I think for the ab and it's blood in, blood out. And they used people up and brutalize 'em and she got gang rape multiple times. And I said, what happened? She said the first time was a gang rape. They beat me up, knocked me unconscious, raped me while I was unconscious and shove things inside my body.

I said, what did they shove inside your body? A broom stick. Hey? I said, well, how did you know if you were unconscious that they'd put a broom stick inside you? And she said, when she went in the toilet afterwards, she could tell by what came out. Wow. She said, I sat in my cell for weeks, for months waiting for the scars to go away.

There's nothing you can do. If you report it, you're a snitch. They'll put you in a dungeon for years for your own protection. You can do absolutely nothing over the kill the perpetrators. The victim is labeled a rat, a punk, and considered less than human. I said, well then how did you stop it? And she said, I started standing up for himself.

I started fighting back. I was ruthless. You've gotta be ruthless. Now, she hadn't told me the truth is what she's done at the time. I had to get that off some of her prisoners. So what Zena had done, she was studying anatomy, and she came with an idea, and the next two times, the gang came to rape Zena, the first member of the gang, to put his hand on her.

She plucked his eyeball out. So it was dangling from the optic nerve. Oh man. When I first heard that, I didn't even think it was possible. I didn't even, yeah, it sounds fake. It does sound fake. Mm-hmm. So I clicked up with a guy, a martial arts guy in prison, and he told me to join a dojo when I got out, which I did.

I continued, I did karate, and as you go up in karate, they teach you what's called bird beak strike. Mm-Hmm. When you just go in, take the eye out, comes out. Now when the eye comes out like that, there's fluid that can come out through the skull into the socket and the eye might not, that coats the brain and the eye might not necessarily go back in and oh man.

But it is a lethal thing that people who are at the top levels of martial arts and close protection know these kind of moves. But that's what she was doing. So after doing that twice, they left her alone, but they moved onto some of her friends. One friend, they gang raped him, shoved a light bulb in his backside and made bets on who would smash it first.

Oh wow. And that prisoner committed suicide afterwards. Another one was gang raped, held down. They got a shovel from the work crew, cut his head off. And when the head was finally off, they positioned it in an area of the prison where the rival gangs would see it, to make the point that they were the most violent and ruthless out of all the gangs.

And again, that was the area in brotherhood. This was years before I was in prison. Mind you, before the, all the cameras and everything. I think 60 Minutes did a program about Arizona Prison and said it was the most dangerous part of real estate in the whole country.

[00:32:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, yeah. Oh my gosh.

That's, these stories and the book make you, if you are thinking of doing something that would land you in jail, not that I was keen on gonna prison beforehand, but you read this book and you were like, no, never. We'll do nothing to ever possibly risk going in there. Just the cockroaches story alone. You wanna talk about the cockroaches a little bit?

You must even have nightmares about these

[00:32:47] Shaun Attwood: cockroaches. I could do half an hour on cockroach stories, but let's just say that one year in, I asked for a bail reduction. My bail was seven $50,000. Yeah. The judge doubled it to 1.5 million, so it got moved over to maximum security. Okay. Just as a big screw you.

They doubled it basically. Yeah. The prosecutor filed, uh, 12 more charges against me with additional bond and all this stuff. Anyway, it's about two in the morning when I get to my selling max security two mansel. That's an improvement. I'm wondering why my soulmate is asleep on the top bunk. I'll never forget it.

I can just see it right now. It's ingrained. I walk in, he's got a sheet wrapped around him and stuff, and it's dark, just like this weird movement on the walls and the ceiling. I'm thinking, what, what's, what's going on? So he drops off the ceiling and bounces off my shoulder, like, what the hell was that?

Mm-Hmm. Look at the walls and see anything. Something's not right here. Perhaps I've, 'cause I've been awake so long, my eyes are playing tricks. So I put my face right up to the wall and it's covered in cockroaches, like the classic American cockroach. Size are like an almond nut and they're just swirling around everywhere.

Now I go to look at where I, my, the brackets are for my bunk where they're screwed into the wall and there's a big old hole and they're just pouring onto the bunk where I'm supposed to go to sleep. And then I look at my soulmate and I realize now, 'cause it's the desert, why is you got your sheet wrapped all the way around him.

Yeah. So in the end, that's what you gotta do. You gotta wrap the sheet around. You should look like the mummy and leave a breathing hole. It does keep them off you, but it traps the heat to your body. Yeah. You got all these bleeding skin infections and bedsores and itching. When you've got that sheet around you, it's torture.

So you end up just throwing the sheet off and letting them crawl on you. They don't bite. Right. They tickle your feet, your legs. To this day, you know my girlfriend tries tickling my hands. I flinch. Because I woke up so many nights of them tickling. My hands are just casting them off like that. Oof. They get on your face, mouth, nose, but the favorite place of all is going in your ears to eat your earwax.

It's like funny to them. And I know that because if I got like a bit of cloth to try and clean my ears out and the lasers are filthy and then hung it under the sink, they get on it and they pulse where the ax was. So the neighbor who was asthmatic, he wakes up one morning out of breath, grabs his inhaler, shoots the cockroach into his mouth.

Yeah, into his mouth. His throat starts freaking out saying he can feel it, move around inside him. Oh my God. He's trying to throw it up and it's stuck inside and it won't even come out even in the daytime. There was so many of them. The fellas were doing cockroach races, gambling on the winner, and at nighttime they'd try and trap them with like peanut butter and stuff, and they'd come down the stairs with a all, all the dead ones and them empty them into the trash can under the stairs.

It didn't matter how many we killed, they owned the building. Yeah, it's very tricky. You know, I've got my Amer Freshs toothpaste that I'm cementing the cracks with, and there was a moment in time where I got moved to this cell and it was quite bad and I, I used all my Amer freshs to cement and two days later they moved me again.

Oh, and you're like to one that was even worse. And I had, I had no Amer freshs. Oh no. It s smelled nice and, and minty, and it was keeping them out. So I had this new one, they're just coming in full force and if you try and kill 'em, they release like a chemical scent. And these warrior ones run under your door, like they're f you know, backing up the other one.

Oh really? The pregnant ones have got this, it looks like a little piece of a worm with all the babies in. If they detach that or attach it under your bunk, I would find 'em attached to books and stuff like that and I'd put 'em in the toilet. But if you don't spot them, all the little babies come out and they're just running everywhere.

And there was like all vinyl ones, like white ones. You have to live in harmony with your soulmates over time, and you learn all of the characteristics and mannerisms and you just get on with it. You're just reading books and they're just going by you. You've got your commissary tied up so they can't eat through the paper to try and get your peanut butter and you're just taking countermeasures so that once they come out at night, they'll eat anything in their path.

Nail filings, her ear wax paper. Oh, man. Yeah,

[00:37:01] Jordan Harbinger: that's really gross. I'm surprised they don't eat things like attached to your skin or hair.

[00:37:06] Shaun Attwood: They do. Oh, they do. They get on you to do all that. They pretend to be dead as well, so I've seen them just slammed flat and I'll be reading the book and an hour later I'm looking over and the things reform in itself and then walking away like the terminator.

In the toilet. They pretend to be dead in the water, and what they're doing is they're holding oxygen to themselves in this position that they look like they're dead. And then once they get access to go again, they go again.

[00:37:33] Jordan Harbinger: Good god, man. They're really

[00:37:34] Shaun Attwood: clever.

[00:37:35] Jordan Harbinger: This is like being in a medieval torture dungeon or something like that.

Like this is what you would expect prison in 1520 dancing to be like, yes. Yeah. Yes. You actually seem to have a really good memory of specific days, conversations and stuff like that. Did you take notes on what was happening in prison?

[00:37:51] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. I was so lucky, Jordan. Okay. That Claudia, who stayed with me for the duration of the Maricopa County jail period, which was 26 months six, I wrote to her up to two to three times a day and she kept all those letters under her bed, and when I got released at the end of the sentence, she FedExed them over to all the details of the cockroaches that day.

See what I'd been doing with her conversations, the noise of the shower, dripping at night. The man snoring. I would never have had that treasure trove of detail if it wasn't for Claudia. Keeping all those letters and then I put those in my books. Yeah. Hard time is the jail one if people are interested.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. You wanted to read a thousand books in prison. Right. So early on then I said to myself, I think this was around the time I got sentenced, pat, which was was 26 months in, and I knew I was gonna do another six years total. So I said to myself, oh, that's six years total. Maybe I'll be asleep. Or a third of it that gets it down to four, three or four years is like a university degree.

I could turn this into the educational opportunity of a lifetime. Yeah. And I planned to read over a thousand books throughout my incarceration. 'cause before prison, all I ever read was stock market books. I thought fiction was frivolous. I thought I knew everything. What else is there to learn? And once I did start to read, I realized how little I knew and how much there was to learn.

I want this fantastic journey through literature.

[00:39:18] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Wow. Did you make it through a thousand books?

[00:39:21] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. In 2006 I read 268 and I wrote them all down and rated them and I was keeping account. I did over a thousand. I learned a lot of philosophy and psychology. Yeah. And those changed my worldview and helped me go inside myself and address the reason that I got involved in drugs and crime.

Wow. Inter, how were your eyes? When I got out of prison, I was shortsighted 'cause of all of the reading. Yeah. And I thought I was gonna need glasses, but to get to my gym and karate and stuff, I had to do quite a long walk. 'cause I didn't have a car at that point from where I lived through this park every single day, two or three times a day.

And I believe looking at those long distances got my muscle back in gear without me having to fall back on having glasses. Interesting.

[00:40:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You repaired your vision, your boy, your body repaired itself. Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Did the gangs ever come for you? You know, like were they ever like, all right, you're a liability or, we don't like, I mean, it seems like you can't avoid danger for the whole time.

So

[00:40:23] Shaun Attwood: when I started blogging from the jail and then blogging throughout the prison part of it as well, I turned it away from not so much being about the conditions, but it's been about the stories of the prisoners. So you're writing a blog in prison? Yeah. In the beginning it was smuggled out of the maximum security Madison Street Jail, and it's all time stamp.

People can go back online, John's Jail Journal, JONS, and read the original entries and it was all the conditions. And then I started writing about the characters. And what happened was some of the prisoners were getting letters and books sent in, but other prisoners were getting a bit jealous. Telling people, yeah.

Atwood's writing about you. And he's putting it online. And guys would run into my cell, say, you effing writing about me. I'm gonna effing smash you. I ain't giving you no permission to put anything out there about me. There was another occasion where I wrote about how the prisoners were making homemade syringes from items you could buy from the inmate store, the commissary.

Now, bear in mind, some of the places I was housed, 90% of the prisoners were injecting heroin. Wow. Two thirds had Hepatitis C from sharing dirty needle, which were slowly killing them. Oh yeah. Really sad. And it was called rig build. As this blog entry, it got put online and a shot call on a neighboring yard, put a green light on me, attacked or killed for putting this out there.

It's like snitching. That was his viewpoint of it. Now, concurrently, I was writing the life story for a guy called two Tony's All school, Italian Mafia. He was part of the banana crime family. Mm. Under Bill, Sr. And he ended up opening the first disco tech in Alaska and he, it ends up in this like story of, it's like Sons of Anarchy versus the Sopranos.

Okay. Yeah. So I wrote his life story, it's called the Matthew Philosopher two Tonys, if people wanna get it every day. I was sneaking into his cell to get his life story written down in my little chicken scratch. And then I was smuggling it out through the British Embassy so that they couldn't open it.

And because he was confessed to murders and stuff. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Now, when this guy put out this green light to have me attacked two Tony's, there was two or three days people were trying to get a Marc cell attack me, all this stuff, but I managed to keep them at bay while two Tony's was calling a favor to get it squashed.

It was quite hurrying. My parents were visiting me. It was very stressful. I thought I, I was gonna get done in. But in the end, two Tony's called in a favor and got it squashed. Wow. And two Tony's, when I said goodbye to on the fence, he had tears in his eyes. And he told me I'd been like the son he'd never had.

[00:42:54] Jordan Harbinger: That's something, eh? Yeah. That's really something. Yeah. No

[00:42:57] Shaun Attwood: one's ever shown these guys any sort of real goodwill. He was doing 144 years for leaving the dead bodies of rival gangsters from Arizona to Alaska. I. He described himself as a wacker of men. Mm-Hmm. Wow. Yeah. Geez.

[00:43:13] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of getting kidnapped and murdered by mobsters, I have been instructed to read the following by the fine products and services that support this show.

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[00:45:34] Jordan Harbinger: If you like this episode of the show, and you probably do 'cause you've been hanging out for a long time, this is a long episode. I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support this show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

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It's sometimes Jordan, but not always. So go to the deals page over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. It's a win-win because you get a discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Sean Atwood, what are the politics of a hit in prison like I, I know that's a complicated question, but it seems like I.

Well, we're gonna kill you. Well, actually, this other guy kind of likes him, and so he's gonna call in a favor. What does that mean? Who do you talk to? Why do they owe you that? Do they have to respect it? I mean, there's a lot going on here, a lot of moving parts. It's politics

[00:46:37] Shaun Attwood: all day long. Yeah. So in general, if you wanted to hit someone in prison, it depends on the status of that person.

In the prison hierarchy, you could just give someone a $50 bag of heroin and they kill someone for you. But if you kill someone who is higher up in the hierarchy, that's gonna come back on you.

[00:46:56] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:57] Shaun Attwood: Everyone's connected to everyone else. So you gotta ascertain who someone is before you do a hit on them, because if you hit an important person.

You know you are gonna get hit. So you don't wanna be a nobody in prison though, because then you can get killed for 50 bucks. Happens all the time. Whew. There was one guy towards the end of my sentence, that they tried to kill him. They tried poison him, they tried to hang him and I think they killed him in the end.

And some of the guys I was sat with in the chow hall ended up, they all ended up with a death penalty.

[00:47:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Whew, man. I'm guessing I know the answer to this question, but do you think prison rehabilitates people at all? I'm guessing you, you didn't see a whole lot of that in there. I mean, it sounds like you had a life-changing experience, but it wasn't, it was because of what you did.

It wasn't because of the them torturing everybody in prison. Because I'm

[00:47:41] Shaun Attwood: a self-starter. Yeah. With good family support and an education. I maximized the situation in terms of education. Mm-hmm. And writing all these stories down for these books. But in general, what I saw is it's someone comes in who's young, perhaps misguided for a lower level offense.

Even if it was like weed back then was almost a million rest a year. They click up with the gang 'cause they're gonna think their booty's gonna get taken. They're terrified. The gang puts all these neo-Nazi tattoos on them, gets them on heroin. If you put a swastika on someone's forehead and they go for a job interview, they're coming right back to the gang.

Yeah. The jail knows. If they allow it to be gang and drug infested maym, they're coming back to the jail. As soon as they come back to the jail, it's, it was $60,000 a year per person of taxpayers money to house that person. So by allowing it to be drug and gang infested mayhem, giving them $50 on the gate when they get released saying, have a nice day, they know they're coming right back.

It keeps the ganging business and it keeps the jailing business. That's

[00:48:45] Jordan Harbinger: horrifying. I mean, you mentioned everybody you blogged about went back to prison. Everybody, they all do. Yeah. All they die or they die. Yeah. And we have barely scratched the surface of how horrible this place was. You mentioned there's disease guys with Hepatitis C and open source doing food prep.

There's one scene where, eh, it's already gonna get demonetized. There's one scene that I physically had to fast forward because I couldn't listen. This has never happened to me in the history of listening to anything. The transgender woman in prison who decided to cut out her own testicles, I actually felt sick, and I thought I was gonna throw I'm, and again, I am not that guy who's like, oh, I can't listen to this.

I could not listen to that. I had to skip through it, but I got enough of the gist of it. That was the only book in my entire life where I was like, I can't listen to this. I can't listen to this account of cutting off your own

[00:49:33] Shaun Attwood: balls. In the book prison time. We put the entire letter from that trans prison in the, and it's excruciating detail.

Yeah. What she did, I mean, I can give her a summary if you want, for the listeners prison.

[00:49:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. A little sneak preview of what it's like to cut your own testicles out.

[00:49:50] Shaun Attwood: So this prisoner wakes up one morning, drinks a cup of coffee, no painkillers whatsoever. She's got a Mosby's medical dictionary. Felt tip pan draws lines on a scrotum where she's gonna get the razor blade on.

I'm already feeling it. The scrotum open, the testes are on branches called va deferens and the spermatic cord. So she goes to one side and starts to sever through this branch in this spermatic

[00:50:25] Jordan Harbinger: cord. I probably should say, don't listen to this. If you have kids in the car, you're about to eat. But I think I'm already too late.

One testicle

[00:50:33] Shaun Attwood: comes off the other testicle, must know what's about to happen, and retracts inside this person's body. Oh my God. So now she's had to put her hand into her guts to try and find this other testicle. Mm-Hmm. And she's like feeling mushy things and organs and stuff. And this testicles. It's frightened.

It doesn't know it's nowhere. Nowhere to be found. Yeah. Yeah. So where she's got it tied after to stop the blood comes undone, blood starts spraying multiple feet across this cell. She realizes this is a one shot deal now, and the the pain's starting to kick in. Yeah. She's still scrambling around with the mushy inside, trying to find the testicle and having no, and more and more blood's coming out and she's losing consciousness.

And in the end, another prisoner spots her and she gets, uh, Helly Evaced to a hospital where they save her life. She was on suicide watch for a year, and then she cut the other one off. And what she said to me was, she feels as if she's a woman trapped in a man's body. Sure. And by stopping the testosterone and getting the estrogen smuggled in, she feels more at peace of herself.

That prisoner was released after 30 plus years, just over a year ago, I think. And she contacted me and I, I sent her some money to try and help her, but she was institutionalized, didn't understand technology, didn't understand the internet. Yeah. Depressed and decided to commit suicide by a cop. And she went out and robbed the store and just stayed there and threw the money on the floor.

And when the cops gone, she just pulled a gun on him and they shot her dead.

[00:52:00] Jordan Harbinger: That's truly awful. Truly awful. Yeah. Really sad. I've really sympathize with somebody like that who, yeah. I mean that's, imagine being at that point in your life, that's really, really, really terrible, man. I mean, I assume you have changed your mind about the effects of drugs and they're not so fun anymore.

Right. I scare the living

[00:52:21] Shaun Attwood: daylights out of school kids now with talks.

[00:52:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Go in, you scared living daylights out of adults, just letting you know that is the effect of this podcast. Especially that last story.

[00:52:31] Shaun Attwood: Some of the stories you've heard today, the kids here, like the gangs, the cockroaches, the food, the bedsores, the heat, the itchiness.

Mm-Hmm. And even the cocky ones, by the time I get into all this stuff, they're on the edge of the seats. Yeah. And the teachers tell me, the kids who stay behind and ask the most questions are the hardest to reach students. Yeah. And I get emails from kids years later saying, you know, I was, um, backpacking Indonesia, and I saw your locked up a broad episode.

I thought I would email you and tell you that when you came to my school, I was on a bit of a bad path.

[00:53:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:53:05] Shaun Attwood: And I decided not to go down that road. And thanks to your talk, you know, my life has probably turned out in a different way. And that's what it's about, isn't it?

[00:53:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's so great. Yeah. They, they're backpacking in Indonesia.

They're not in their third prison stint or their third jail stint. Yeah.

[00:53:18] Shaun Attwood: Yeah.

[00:53:18] Jordan Harbinger: One

[00:53:19] Shaun Attwood: kid. Was so inspired. She went on to do a criminology degree at Winchester University and the parents invited me to the graduation.

[00:53:25] Jordan Harbinger: That's

[00:53:25] Shaun Attwood: amazing.

[00:53:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I, I assume Winchester, is that in the United States? No, here, here. Oh, 'cause I was gonna say you couldn't go if you was in the United States.

Yeah,

[00:53:31] Shaun Attwood: I, I was deported and banned for Life from America in 2007.

[00:53:35] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah. So you can only attend, I assume the talks you give in the United States are on Zoom.

[00:53:40] Shaun Attwood: No, I don't do any talks. Oh, you don't In the United States. I'm banned.

[00:53:43] Jordan Harbinger: I just

[00:53:43] Shaun Attwood: figured they

[00:53:43] Jordan Harbinger: could, they could have you zoom in. Well, no one's invited me yet.

Oh, okay. Not yet. I mean, it's only a matter of time now. Geez. Wow. Do you think you traded one addiction for another? 'cause you do mention you go to the gym multiple times per day, you do yoga and all that stuff. Alright. One's healthier than the other.

[00:53:59] Shaun Attwood: When I was in the last two or three years of the incarceration, I had this brilliant therapist called Dr.

Oh in prison time and he was into Eastern philosophy. And his thing was, you know, you're reading all these books, Epictetus, or really all this stuff, you come in. We have your best quotes and we'll discuss them in the context of how you can use them in your life. Mm-Hmm. Ryan

[00:54:23] Jordan Harbinger: Holiday, you know Ryan Holiday?

No.

[00:54:25] Shaun Attwood: He's, he

[00:54:25] Jordan Harbinger: writes about

[00:54:26] Shaun Attwood: all those sto so I'm surprised you I probably don't have all those books. I'd like him. Yeah. So I was reading all the originals and he said to me, Sean, if you've got an addictive personality adrenaline junkie like you, you've got to view it as energy. You were choosing to put your energy into these negative addictions, you know, racing around in my car, high on crystal meth, hanging out, all these gangsters, all this stuff that could have got me killed.

What he said, because if that rave music kicks in, you get that. But what he said, when those moments happen, he's put a circuit breaker in my head. I realize now it's just energy and I can choose to take that energy and put it into positive activity. So I've got my yoga and my, you know, my gym, jogging, swimming, all, all the other stuff.

And that's what I do and that's what keeps me sane. I think a lot of people fall back on pills from doctors. Yeah. We are hunter gatherers. Two thirds of the human body is designed for movement. Yeah. If you're not moving, you're destabilizing the physical, which destabilizes the mental. I've done four or five Ted talks now and one of them is how, what Facing 200 years taught me about happiness and the other one is on overcoming fear and anxiety.

Oh, we'll link those in the show notes. Yeah. And it's all about doing physical stuff to get those endorphins cascading instead of being wrapped up depressed and releasing the cortisol.

[00:55:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. You talk about your release and it's like you were like an alien when you got out of there. Oh my goodness.

Can't, couldn't eat regular foot. Tell me about when you get out, like how do you sort of go, I'm back in society now. You said you were asking permission to use the bathroom on the airplane. They're just laughing at you.

[00:55:58] Shaun Attwood: If you want to use the clip from my channel of me getting picked up from the airport by my parents where I'm all stumbled out and bug-eyed.

And I'm hugging my mom and sister. They're crying and then we're in the car afterwards and my sister's explaining what texting is, and you can see looking at my face, this guy looks like he's come outta some Siberian castaway. Like

[00:56:19] Jordan Harbinger: it's like Tom Hanks and Castaway Zen Eaton. Yeah, bitch. Geez. Yeah. Text. So you type the message into the phone and it flies through the air and lands in someone else's phone.

[00:56:31] Shaun Attwood: How does that work? I'm seeing all these like kids on the streets with phones and stuff, like what's going on? Yeah. They took me for Indian food and I tried chicken Tika masala in my former favorite book 'cause of the Red Death Mystery Meat Slop. I had flashbacks and I couldn't eat it. Couldn't eat it.

And I stayed vegetarian ever since.

[00:56:48] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, interesting.

[00:56:48] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. I went back to my hometown, went to the fish and chip shop to try and order a Korean and chips. I couldn't understand the abroad accent in my hometown. They had to bring someone out from the back who talked to me very slowly, like I was a nut job to get my audit in you,

[00:57:02] Jordan Harbinger: your own hometown accent.

I can't

[00:57:04] Shaun Attwood: understand my own hometown accent. I've been gone for 17 years, so you could only understand American accent. So when I I to America, I talk like this. I gum love fish, chips and peas and salt and vinegar, but I had to change how I speak. I'm not sure what you just said. I heard salt and vinegar Americans are coming up to me asking me.

Hey, are you Australian man? Yeah. Things like that. Yeah. So I, I speak the way I do now because when I went to America, especially working on the phones, I had to be clear, fast.

[00:57:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:57:33] Shaun Attwood: To make money and to chat

[00:57:35] Jordan Harbinger: up chicks. So yeah, there's a thing with the English accents that goes, it's starts off and it hits peak charming.

And after that you just don't understand what the person is saying. Exactly. Yeah. And the further north you go, the harder it is for us to understand what you're talking about. Oh, just

[00:57:49] Shaun Attwood: try, try Glasgow. We've just been into, into Glasgow,

[00:57:51] Jordan Harbinger: but, but by the time you get to Sheffield, I'm going, wait, say that again.

Say that again.

[00:57:56] Shaun Attwood: It was surreal going from a hometown and in my parents' house, some of you blood fins are thickens when you're in the desert. But back in cold old England, I had two, like 20 tog duvets wrapped around me, a beanie in all my clothes. And I was still shivering at night trying to

[00:58:12] Jordan Harbinger: sleep. Yeah.

Yeah. And your friends are all out in shorts and T-shirts. That's what it's like moving to California. My dad's like, what happened to you, man? I'm like, I don't know. I don't, I, it's never below 65 degrees during the daytime. I

[00:58:25] Shaun Attwood: need jackets, but just being able to walk down a high street and buy a banana was the heights of ecstasy for me.

I bet you're just going around blist out for days. Yeah, it doesn't last, but some of it has still lasted. I appreciate sleep, I appreciate food. I appreciate giving my mom a hug. I appreciate having a good relationship with my partner. I've had a baby now. Nine month old baby. Just for you, man. Just for, and one of the things that two Tony's taught me actually because one of his favorite books was A Day in the Life I svi, where they're fighting over fish eyeballs in the soup to try and stay alive in the gulag.

Where if you refuse to work, you're hung, uh, from a tree or dragged to death by a horse or thrown off a cliff where their noses and ears are falling off 'cause of frost fright. When anyone complained about anything where I was housed, two Tonys would laugh. You're complaining 'cause your breakfast cold.

Ivan was fighting over fish eyeballs in the soup. Mm. There's always someone worse off. So now I've got that yard stick for the rest of my life. Yeah. Whereby no matter what happens, I'm not in a cell facing 200 years with cockroaches trying to crawl over me at nighttime. Yeah. Nothing can ever get as bad as that.

[00:59:29] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. Yeah. Yeah man. Do you ever miss anything about prison? Like maybe even just the people? Yeah, totally.

[00:59:36] Shaun Attwood: Yeah. I totally miss of the people, the comradery. When you are going through something as intense as that with people, as much as I can describe it to you, they're the only people who can truly understand it.

You could kinda like sense some of it, but they understand it 'cause they were with me. It's slightly bonded for life with those people and that's why I pledged through my activism and my blog to keep campaigning for human rights. I'm not saying prisons should be holiday camps, but give them rehabilitation, give them job skills, give them education like the Scandinavians do, who've got the lowest crime and re-offending in the world.

Hey, when the private prison contracts are in the tens of billions a year. Yeah. When Corrections Corporation of America was boasting its annual report to their shareholders, our profit growth is guaranteed. 'cause they keep coming back. There's no interest in rehabilitating 'em in America. Mm-Hmm. And it is an evil system to have companies profiting and lobbying for laws that house kids who are out taking drugs, who need some guidance, who need some mentorship, and those kids getting thrown into an environment where the skirt are getting butt raped.

So they join a neo Nazi gang and they become a heroin addict and they're a client for the state for the rest of their lives. It's absolutely evil and disgusting.

[01:00:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's really horrifying. I mean, I knew prison was bad. I never heard of pri anything that's as bad as what you wrote about in your books.

To the point where I was questioning I was, this can't be real. This can't be real. But then I, you know, when I tried to verify stuff about the prison, it all came up again in court. Cases came up again in people who had gotten outta there, came up in testimony. So if you'd fabricated it, you backed it up better than anybody I've ever seen.

Lemme say one more thing of that. Sure.

[01:01:26] Shaun Attwood: The most, some of the most extreme stories I've told you today pertains to prison rape. Yeah. And there was an act introduced called the Prison Rape Elimination Act, prea. And under prea, they had to start teaching the prisoners how not to get raped. So you go to a class, you get a little piece of paper under your door rape class today, and you go to class Jesus, and you watch a video and there are predators and basically the young people come in, they're hungry.

The new arrivals, if they take fruit from the predators, like the Snickers burned or a pillow, whatever it is. Then the predator comes and says later on, you gotta pay for that now. Well, how am I gonna pay for it? Got no money. Well then you're gonna get stabbed up unless you go in that cell and do it where that guy says, oh man.

And once they do that, they turned out, they rented out as prison prostitutes. They're punks. There's no coming back from it. The conclusion of the rape class was to stop rape. You have to report it. If you report anything, you're a snitch. Right. KOSA young prisoner was raped right after the rape class. No report a single thing.

[01:02:31] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. So don't eat the Snickers bar. At least to your concerns though, at that point, I guess. Geez, don't eat the Snickers bar kids. Yeah. Better yet, stay outta prison.

[01:02:42] Shaun Attwood: Keep your day jobs folks. Don't get gangster writers. That's whereby you've watched too many movies like Scarface. It ends in the prison.

Police death, the nuthouse. My mother will never break down. My sister had to have counseling. Most of my mates are dead.

[01:02:58] Jordan Harbinger: I'm glad to meet you in person. Alive and well, man. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming out to London to do this and I really appreciate your openness and of course your time. Really appreciate you having me on, brother.

Cheers. Take care. Cheers, care. Cheers. Thank you. Here's a preview of my conversation with Danny Trejo, an excon turned icon featured in over 350 films and TV shows. You've seen him everywhere in machete, breaking bad desperado, and much, much more. He's never been through acting school, which doesn't matter when you're a legend slash icon.

Before becoming such a prolific star, Danny Trejo was a drug addicted criminal hooked on heroin at age 12, who spent more than a decade in and out of prisons.

[01:03:40] Clip: Once you start doing robberies and you're using heroin, the robberies become addicted. You don't know whether you're doing robberies to support your drug habit.

They're doing drugs to support your robbery habit.

[01:03:54] Jordan Harbinger: I read You robbed a store with a hand grenade.

[01:03:56] Clip: This was later on. This was like, we did a robbery. We ended up with this hand grenade. So I tried it and it was very simple. You know when you hold a hand grenade and you got your hand on the pin and you asked somebody for some money, they think twice prison.

There's only two kinds of people in prison. There's predators and they're prey. That's it. And you gotta decide every damn morning, what are you gonna be? And I know a lot of people that decide I'm prey, fuck. I don't care because I'm tired. I know a lot of people that took a elevator off the fifth year.

There's no. I know a lot of people that cut their wrists. I've seen guys with all the muscles in the world get stabbed by a short Mexican in tennis shoes with a big knife, you know, fighting. I don't fight you. That's prison. Prison has a taste. Put one of those fake pennies, the lead one in your mouth and keep it there.

That's the taste of posture. That's the taste of anxiety. That's the taste of fear. That's the taste of everything. You feel it. You know what I mean? That's what you walk around with, and when you finally lose that taste, you've decided whether you're going to be predator or prey. That's the only way you can lose

[01:05:08] Jordan Harbinger: for more, including how Danny Trejo walked onto a Hollywood movie set as a drug counselor and left as a bonafide actor, and how Danny Trejo has managed sobriety for over 50 years and continues to help others maintain theirs.

Check out episode 3 98 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Whew. Folks, I told you this one was a ride. Sean is a great dude. I don't want people to think. That he's like still some sort of menace to society or like a bad person. This man is living a great life in the uk. He's a generous soul. He came a long way just to sit in studio with me and tell his story to us.

He's just a good dude. I know that a lot of you might not believe that based on his story, but I. I really didn't get any sort of vibes from him. This is not a violent criminal. This is a guy. Yeah, well, you know, you, you judge for yourself. But I, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think Sean is just a, a, a mensch, so I'm glad that we were able to have this conversation and get his absolutely bonkers story out to you all as well, all things.

Sean will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. You, you're gonna wanna check out his YouTube channel and stuff like that if you're into what he's created. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this podcast.

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I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. Well, let's created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others fee for this show.

It's that you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, you can share it with enemies too. I really don't care. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about or strongly dislike. Once again, and if you know somebody who would just really enjoy a story like this or maybe they think that they're gonna get away with some sort of minor crime and prison's not that bad, you might want to.

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