- 2 days ago
Hustlers Gamblers Crooks S02E01 (2025)
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TVTranscript
00:01Give me the money.
00:02I can remember going, give me the money.
00:04Give me the money.
00:05The gun.
00:06Give me the money.
00:07Broke in half.
00:08No, no, no.
00:09So now it's pointing at my suit, and right when it did,
00:12this guy comes running out of the back with a cleaver.
00:15Ah!
00:16I couldn't believe it.
00:20I have taken millions of dollars out of casinos
00:23around the world as a professional gambler.
00:25By the time I was 16, I had stolen hundreds of thousands
00:30of dollars' worth of cars.
00:32I don't care who you are.
00:34You see some idiot holding a hand grenade,
00:37you're going to pee.
00:39And now I'm in a literal tug-of-war
00:42between two factions of the Chechen mob.
00:46The key to a robbery is letting people absolutely know
00:51that you will kill them without, say,
00:54a word.
01:05My name is Danny Trejo.
01:09And before I became a movie star and machete,
01:15I was an armed robber.
01:17I robbed a few stores with a hand grenade.
01:19I'm from Los Angeles, California, born and raised.
01:31As a kid, I was surrounded by girl cousins.
01:34I had a mom and dad that were really too busy.
01:38The only one that ever had any time for me was my Uncle Gilbert.
01:42My Uncle Gilbert was the last of 11 kids.
01:45By the time Gilbert came along,
01:48my grandma and grandpa were kind of done with kids.
01:52You know what I mean?
01:53And Gilbert was six years older than me.
01:55So, me and Gilbert kind of became outcasts together,
01:59because we always got in trouble.
02:03My uncle would steal my grandfather's car.
02:06And he'd take me, and he would deal weed.
02:14I didn't know he was dealing weed.
02:17And he would pull it to somebody's house.
02:19They'd come out and say,
02:20give me three.
02:21And he'd roll up three joints and sell three joints.
02:23And then that's what we did.
02:24The first time I watched Gilbert do a robbery,
02:29it was him and a friend named Charlie.
02:32I didn't even know that they were going to do anything.
02:35You know what I mean?
02:36But stopped in front of a liquor store.
02:38They both got out of the car.
02:39They both came out.
02:43And it's funny, because they left the car running.
02:45You know?
02:46And they were just laughing and counting money.
02:49It seemed so easy.
02:52And they did it so much.
02:58My uncle Gilbert gave me heroin when I was 12.
03:01I remember him telling me,
03:03hold this, I'm holding this, and bang!
03:14And the next thing I remember was that I was outside,
03:18and I was just sitting there,
03:19and I couldn't keep my head up.
03:21There was a great feeling.
03:23I get...
03:24I remember trying to eat this ice cream,
03:26and I would nod,
03:28and what would wake me up was the dogs.
03:30Hey!
03:32Get over there!
03:33I don't know if I ever got any ice cream or not,
03:37but I'll never forget that day.
03:39And I think from the time I was 12 then to the time I was 25,
03:48I tried to recapture that day.
03:51As soon as I started using drugs, I started committing crimes.
03:56You need the money for drugs, and it's real hard to realize whether you're getting the money to do drugs or doing drugs to get the money.
04:09I committed my first armed robbery at 14.
04:13I remember I stole a gun from my Uncle Art.
04:15It was a revolver, but the gun I got was broken.
04:20You had to hold it like this, or it would fall.
04:24And so, me and a friend of mine robbed a market on Lancashire Boulevard.
04:29I can remember going,
04:31Give me the money!
04:32Give me the money!
04:33Give me the money!
04:34She was an old lady, and I kept saying,
04:35No!
04:36The box!
04:37The box!
04:38Because they kept all the big cash in a cigar box underneath the counter.
04:42When I kept pointing,
04:43No!
04:44Down there!
04:45Down there!
04:46When I went there, the gun broke in half.
04:49No, no, no!
04:51So now it's pointing at my suit, and right when it did,
04:54this guy comes running out of the back with a cleaver.
04:57Cleaver eyes!
05:04So me and Mike took off running,
05:06and my gun is going, you know.
05:10We got away with $11, but it was kind of a fiasco.
05:14We ran away laughing.
05:19But then it just escalates.
05:21It's like robberies become a habit.
05:27You can be driving down the street with $400 in your pocket and go,
05:32Hey, right there.
05:33That's a good score.
05:34And go rob something else.
05:36And I think that's one of the things that Gilbert happened to do,
05:39was he hooked me to that easy life, not just drugs.
05:44I spent my teenage years stealing as much as I could and getting away with it.
05:49The key to a robbery is letting people absolutely know that you will kill them without saying a word.
05:57I threatened people just with intimidation.
06:07Sometimes I didn't even have a weapon.
06:10You know, there's people that couldn't look intimidating with a whole fistful of guns.
06:15And there's other people that can look intimidating just looking at somebody.
06:20I could intimidate.
06:21That was one of the keys to whatever success I had.
06:28I started committing crimes with a friend named Dennis.
06:32Dennis and I went on a 45-day crime spree, robbing anything we could.
06:37Robberies, whether it was strong-arm, whether it was robbing somebody, whether it was just part of the day.
06:47You know, you can do a robbery and get $8 or a robbery and get, you know, $17,000.
06:54We used to spend thousands of dollars a day.
07:00I think one of the things that we specialized in was intimidation robberies.
07:06Give you an example.
07:07These guys robbed an armory.
07:09And I remember they had three or four hand grenades.
07:12And they were like real hand grenades.
07:14And I got one.
07:16Just holding it was scary.
07:18And, you know, you can pull the pin on a hand grenade.
07:21And as long as you hold that hammer down, it's not going to go off.
07:28I don't care who you are and how tough you are.
07:31You see some idiot holding a hand grenade and having the pin right here and say,
07:36how about I put this in your pocket?
07:38You know, I don't care.
07:39You're going to pee.
07:43The minute they saw that, it was like they're already opening the register.
07:47You were like, wow, you know, what power.
07:55That's kind of what robbery is all about.
07:57It's not just the money.
07:59It's the power.
08:01Sometimes Dennis and I sold drugs, and sometimes we sold fake drugs, which was just sugar.
08:17Dennis had set up a drug deal.
08:19Yeah, the minute I got a look at this guy, I knew something was up.
08:24The guy buying the drugs, his partner looks a little shady.
08:28I mean, too clean cut.
08:31You know, I knew he was a cop.
08:33I was glad we were selling him sugar.
08:36Dennis had the sugar, gave it to the Fed.
08:40And then the Fed turned around trying to give me the money, and I just looked at him straight.
08:44I looked at Dennis. Dennis grabbed the money.
08:49And then they left, and then I told Dennis that it's no good.
08:53Oh, he's a cop. Nah, man, man.
08:56I knew they were in trouble because the Feds marked money, so to the police.
09:01So what I did, the minute they left, I went and switched out the money at a restaurant where I knew the waitress.
09:08As we pulled into Dennis's, the Feds came from all over.
09:17Boy, all hell broke loose.
09:18There was about 15 different police, and wow, were they mad.
09:23Where's my money?
09:25I gave my money.
09:27That's not my money.
09:29Guy was berserk, because if they don't have the marked money, they ain't got nothing.
09:34And so this guy beat me all the way to the Federal Building downtown.
09:41I was on the floor of a 1965 Butte Riviera.
09:46Beautiful. That tan interior. I'll never forget.
09:49And I'm bleeding all over.
09:51I thought, hey, I'm bleeding all over your car.
09:55Kind of looked like the end for me.
09:57I was sentenced to six to ten years for sale in lewd of narcotics.
10:10That means sale in pretendies dope.
10:14While serving my time, I was transferred to San Quentin.
10:18San Quentin is like the only right now place in the world.
10:26Everything happens right now.
10:28I can die right now.
10:30I can go to the hole right now.
10:33All this bad stuff can happen to me right now.
10:37People think that people walk around prison going, hey, I'm tougher than you.
10:41You don't.
10:42Prison is probably one of the politest places you're ever going to be in.
10:46Because if you're a killer, I'm a killer, he's a killer too.
10:50It's like the last thing you want to do is be rude to somebody.
10:56San Quentin is the pincushion of the world.
10:58And here is where everybody gets stabbed.
11:01There's no such thing as a fair fight.
11:03You know, a fair fight is me coming up behind you, stabbing you three times and walking away.
11:09It's not that I did something wrong or that you did something wrong or that we pissed somebody off.
11:15It's like this guy didn't get a letter.
11:17Do you understand?
11:18This guy didn't get a letter from his wife and just felt like stabbing someone.
11:30In San Quentin, you might get stabbed.
11:32You can use a magazine to protect from being attacked.
11:36Let me show you a little quick.
11:38Armored.
11:39A magazine.
11:40Best protection you can have.
11:43I don't think they make...
11:44Do they make look magazine anymore?
11:47Anyway, there's a magazine, a look, and it was a big one.
11:50You put it right here.
11:52Cover your shirt.
11:54Put a belt so it'll stay.
11:56And it's like...
11:58Boom!
11:59Somebody hits you.
12:00You might knock the wind out of you, but you're protected.
12:11I was surviving prison, but what happened on Cinco de Mayo literally changed everything.
12:16Cinco de Mayo, 1968.
12:21Powers that be in prison did probably the stupidest thing in the world.
12:27They invited an outside college baseball team to play a bunch of drunk Mexicans.
12:34They bring in some absolute Caucasian baseball team.
12:39They all look like Ricky Schroeder.
12:49The third baseman, I'll never forget, man.
12:52This big white boy just had gum chewing like double bubble.
12:57You're not allowed gum in prison.
13:00And this guy is just like letting everybody know, I'm chewing gum.
13:10And Ray, Ray had come down from Tascadero, which is the mental hospital for the criminal scene.
13:16I remember Ray saying, damn, I wish I had some gum.
13:20Ray had gone up and asked that guy for some gum.
13:22That guy said, no, I'm not supposed to give you any.
13:25Bam!
13:27Bam!
13:28Ray smacked him.
13:29And in prison, when something goes down, it just all goes down.
13:34It's kind of like if you had a thousand rat traps.
13:44They all go.
13:52In a prison riot, anybody who's got a resentment just goes for it.
13:57And it was alleged that I hit Lieutenant Givens in the head with a rock.
14:08All I remember is seeing him bleeding.
14:10It was just like chaos.
14:11And then they blew that whistle.
14:14When the whistle starts blowing, that means they're going to shoot.
14:17The minute that...
14:19Bam!
14:21Me and Ray both turned up and we fell.
14:23And Ray, kind of like a little kid, are they going to hurt us?
14:26No.
14:27No, we're already hurt.
14:29Don't worry about this.
14:31They marched us to the hole.
14:37There's solitary, which is you're in a cell by yourself.
14:41And then there's a hole, which is completely dark, quiet.
14:46And that...
14:47I think they outlawed that now.
14:49When we were in the hole, I was questioning my whole life.
14:53I was 24 years old.
14:56That's a baby.
14:57Because they said we attacked guards.
14:59Those were gas chamber offenses.
15:04I remember asking God to let me die with dignity.
15:08That's all I remember.
15:10Let me die with dignity.
15:11I will say your name every day, and I will do whatever I can for my fellow inmate.
15:17I said inmate because I never thought I was getting out.
15:27I got out of the hole a month or so later, and I started going to AA.
15:31That changed my life.
15:34And it helped me never to touch drugs or alcohol again.
15:40And I started helping my fellow inmates.
15:43And when I went to parole board in July of 1969, and I started talking about AA and the good guy I turned to.
15:53He says, we're kicking you out of here.
15:59And I was stunned.
16:01They were just tired of seeing me.
16:03After I got out of prison, and I became a drug counselor, my whole life changed.
16:08My whole life came from a taker to a giver and a helper.
16:18That's all I do.
16:20No more life of crime for me.
16:25I'm Richard Munchkin, and I have taken millions of dollars out of casinos around the world as a professional gambler.
16:31I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and I was fascinated with games from the time I was very little.
16:44The winters back there are brutal, so we would stay inside and play games.
16:49In high school, my older brother invited some of his friends over to the house to play poker.
16:56We were literally playing for nickels and dimes.
16:58And at the end of the day, I was ahead, $5.20.
17:03And it was like the heavens opened and the angels began to sing.
17:08And I thought, oh, my God, I can actually make money playing cards.
17:14Like, this is the greatest thing in the world.
17:17So I started playing as much as I could.
17:20Basically, I went through college playing poker.
17:23That was how I earned a living while I was in college.
17:25And then one day, I was playing backgammon with a friend in a bar in Chicago.
17:32And he told me that he had a system for beating blackjack.
17:37There's a way of counting the cards and being able to keep track of them, and you can actually have a mathematical advantage.
17:43And he recommended a book called Playing Blackjack as a Business.
17:48And I got it, and I read it, and I thought, okay, this makes sense. This is math.
17:53For my 21st birthday, I flew out to Las Vegas, and I started practicing to become a professional card count.
18:03Counting cards is a method for keeping track of low cards and high cards and the ratio of those two things.
18:10In blackjack, a shoe, you know, is like six decks of cards.
18:15And when you play, cards are removed from the shoe.
18:20And that does affect what's going to happen the next hand.
18:23And when there are more low cards in the deck, that favors the house.
18:28So you want to bet as little as possible.
18:30When there are more tens and aces in the deck, the count goes higher.
18:34That favors the player, and you want to bet as much as possible.
18:39So smaller cards favor the house, and higher cards favor the player.
18:43That's basically how card counting works.
18:46And the question that I get asked most often is, isn't that illegal?
18:52And the answer is, absolutely not.
18:54It's not illegal anywhere in the United States or any country I've ever been to.
18:59In the nice places, they come up and they say, we don't want your action anymore.
19:04In the not so nice places, they can be pretty nasty.
19:08In the old days, card counters would get roughed up.
19:11In Las Vegas, they have been around the longest and been exposed to card counting the longest.
19:18The further you get away from Las Vegas, the less the casinos understood.
19:24And really, the more money you could make, because they just thought you were getting lucky.
19:29People would call me and say, I found a great game in Korea, or I found a great game in Russia.
19:36Those phone calls are worth literally millions of dollars.
19:41One of my friends calls me once and he says, I found a game that's really good.
19:48That means that I'm going to go strap $50,000 in cash to my body, leave the wife and young kids at home and head to an airport.
19:59And in this case, I was heading for Moscow.
20:01I had never been to Russia before.
20:12I had no idea what I was getting into.
20:15I mean, it's Russia.
20:17They can just say, we think you're a card counter.
20:20We've decided that's illegal.
20:22We're just taking the money back.
20:23My trip was about to go from a dream to a nightmare.
20:38I had never been to Russia before and had no reason to go because prior to this, they had no casinos.
20:44And the casino people really didn't understand the games.
20:47And they were giving away the store.
20:50The rules were so good.
20:52Any blackjack player that heard would have immediately jumped on a plane and flown over there to try to play.
20:59I go into this little casino and it's off the lobby of a hotel.
21:04And there is a nightclub that's closed.
21:08I go look in the nightclub.
21:09It's dark.
21:10There's, you know, chairs and tables and a little stage.
21:12And then way in the back, I see a door with a porthole window with light behind it.
21:18I think it's the kitchen, but I go back there and I push through the door and here's this little casino.
21:25There's six or eight tables.
21:26There's only two customers in the whole place.
21:29But I sit down.
21:31And I start to play.
21:35I bought in for $2,000 and the maximum bet on this table was $500.
21:40And I start to win.
21:43And the count goes higher.
21:45And so I start betting the maximum the table allows.
21:50And I just get lucky.
21:55Sometimes it has nothing to do with my skill.
21:59You just get lucky.
22:01I won every hand.
22:03It was ridiculous.
22:04But I'm a little bit worried because when we go into a casino to play, we set a number.
22:15How much is this casino comfortable losing?
22:18If you win over that, bad things start to happen.
22:22So we want to go right up to the ceiling and stop.
22:26So in Russia, I have no idea.
22:29I'm shooting in the dark here.
22:32In 15 minutes, I'd won $26,000.
22:39Now the pit boss is a young guy.
22:42He looks like he's wearing his father's suit.
22:44And every hand I win, he just starts to look sicker and sicker.
22:50And the color starts to drain from his face.
22:53And I keep thinking, this is not going to end well.
22:56So I finish the shoe and I think, I better just cash out.
23:00And now the same guy is the cashier.
23:03And he says, look, I'm sorry, we don't have enough cash to pay you.
23:08I say, how much do you have?
23:11Basically, he gives me back my $2,000.
23:15So I'm left with 22 $1,000 chips.
23:19And then he tells me, the owner will be here tomorrow.
23:22Come back tomorrow, he'll have your money.
23:24And now I'm starting to think, oh boy, this is going to be a problem.
23:29I'm going to get screwed out of $22,000.
23:32I immediately go to the Cosmos poker room and see Jeff.
23:38Now, Jeff is an Australian guy who discovered all these blackjack games in Russia early.
23:45And he has moved here and has been here for years.
23:49Jeff runs the poker room at the Cosmos Hotel.
23:52So he knows every casino and everything that is going on in the gambling scene in Moscow.
24:00And I tell him what happened.
24:01He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, they can't afford that much.
24:05He says, this is the way it works in Russia.
24:08The laws and the police and the courts, worthless.
24:11Every business has what's called a roof.
24:15And your roof is your local mafia boss.
24:21If you have a dispute, you go to your roof.
24:24And that casino's roof is Chechenian mob.
24:27And he says, and you're in luck because my roof here at the poker room is also Chechenian mob.
24:33But my roof is higher than their roof.
24:37And I say, okay.
24:40And he says, would you take $18,000 for the 22 chips?
24:44I was like, done. Let's do it right now.
24:47Jeff says, I have to leave.
24:49But this is Natasha.
24:50And here's this Russian woman.
24:54And she's mysterious, like a femme fatale.
24:58Kind of scary.
24:59Like if you had sex with her, you might not live through it.
25:03And he says, Natasha will take care of you.
25:06She will introduce you to our roof and meet at the other casino.
25:08So I'm just sitting there waiting and waiting.
25:15And about 10 o'clock at night, Natasha comes up to me and she says, we go to get your money.
25:21And we drive back to the other casino.
25:28So we get out of the taxi and we walk into the lobby and there's two huge guys with a little guy in the middle.
25:35And they're all wearing black turtlenecks and black suits.
25:39And I look over at the closed nightclub and they have a metal detector there and two big security guards.
25:48And those security guards are not happy.
25:52It seems pretty clear these two groups of mobsters do not like each other.
25:57Natasha starts talking to the little one.
25:59So it's clear to me that these are my Chechnyan mobsters and the guys over at the metal detector are their Chechnyan mobsters.
26:09She says, OK, we go.
26:11And now we all start heading for the metal detector.
26:15As we're going, the guards start talking to the guys behind me in Russian.
26:22And as we're going, the volume is getting louder and louder and louder and to the point now they're yelling at each other.
26:30And as I'm going through the metal detector, one of the guards grabs me by the wrist and starts pulling me in.
26:36And one of the guys behind me grabs me by the other wrist and starts pulling me out.
26:42And now I'm in a literal tug of war between two factions of the Chechnyan mob.
26:49And I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing?
26:52I just want to play cards.
26:54How did this happen to me?
26:55I didn't think I was going to get out of there alive.
27:02I pull loose and we all back out into the lobby and Natasha says to me, those men do not want these men to go inside.
27:11I said, yeah, I kind of got the message.
27:15And she says, you and me, we go in and if they have the money, OK, if not, don't say a word, just come back out.
27:23OK.
27:25We go into the casino and it's the same pit boss and he is white and sweating.
27:31And he says, this is very bad.
27:34You should not have brought those men here.
27:37They should not be here.
27:39And I said, do you have my money?
27:41And he says, I have some.
27:44I said, how much?
27:46He says, one thousand.
27:50The guy gives me the one thousand and I give him one chip.
27:55He says, you come back in a week and I give you another thousand and another week, another thousand.
28:01And I say, I'm leaving tomorrow.
28:03I'm going to be back in America.
28:04So I'm going to give the chips to them, the other mobsters out there in the lobby.
28:11They'll collect the money.
28:12And he says, oh, no, only you can collect this money.
28:14I said, you'll have to take that up with them.
28:16So we go back out to the lobby and I still have 21 $1,000 chips.
28:23And I want to leave.
28:24I'm supposed to leave tomorrow.
28:26My only hope is that these guys are going to give me the $18,000.
28:32Natasha talks to the little guy in Russian and he keeps shaking his head.
28:37No problem.
28:38Give me the chips.
28:41I said, well, Jeff said, like, you would give me $18,000 for the chips.
28:46And I don't want to.
28:47He's like, oh, okay, you give them to Jeff.
28:51I called Jeff and Jeff says, leave the chips with Natasha and come down in the morning and pick up your money.
28:57I was like, eh, Jeff, no, I'm not going to give up my chips to anybody without getting the money at the same time.
29:04I'm certainly not going to trust this Chechen mobster.
29:08And I'm not just going to leave the chips with Natasha.
29:11I'm not even going to leave them with Jeff.
29:13No, you get the chips when I get the money.
29:16And he says, all right, well, just come down in the morning.
29:19I'll have the money for you there in the morning and then you can give the chips to Natasha.
29:23So I go up to my room and I try to sleep, but I can't.
29:29And plus, it's a really cheap hotel and there are hookers that walk up and down the hallways knocking on people's doors.
29:37This is definitely not America.
29:40There is nothing here to protect me.
29:42Look, if I lost the $21,000 in the casino, that's fine.
29:47That happens all the time.
29:49It's nothing.
29:50But to lose it in this way, I'm just feeling awful.
29:56The next morning, I go to the poker room.
30:00Natasha is there.
30:02I say, do you have the money?
30:04And she nods her head.
30:06And I say, where is it?
30:08And she goes over to a cabinet.
30:11She comes back with $18,000.
30:15I don't even count it.
30:17I'm like, thank God.
30:19And I give her the chips.
30:21And Jeff's roof will collect the full $21,000 after I'm gone.
30:26It was one of the happiest transactions of my life.
30:31I immediately jump in a cab and I drive directly to the airport.
30:36And I got on the plane.
30:40I had somehow survived a literal tug of war between two factions of the Chechnyan mob.
30:46Counting cards is never worth risking your life.
30:49My name is Sari Lopez and I was America's most prolific child car thief.
30:56I was addicted to the rush of stealing cars.
31:01I was born in Portland, Oregon, and I was adopted at three days old.
31:06I was raised in an amazing home.
31:08My parents were super caring, loving.
31:11They made me feel special at all times.
31:13I just always felt like the black sheep that I never really fit in.
31:18My parents had blonde hair and blue eyes.
31:20And then there's me.
31:22Like, I always felt really different.
31:25I had a completely different personality.
31:27I was always more outspoken.
31:29I always did whatever I wanted.
31:31And then I hit my adolescent years, probably about 14 years old.
31:35And I met a group of kids that were definitely into criminal activity.
31:42I think the main connection with these people was that they were just as lost as I was.
31:46They didn't really have identity.
31:48They all came from broken homes.
31:49A lot of them didn't have parents.
31:51If they did, they were on drugs.
31:52They already had been in juvenile.
31:55So they were just kind of lost too.
31:57And so I quickly got into that crowd.
31:59And that's where I felt mostly at home.
32:01So my friend Wonton was one of my closest friends growing up.
32:06One night, Wonton and I were drinking and he wanted to go steal a car.
32:09Basically, he just said, let's go.
32:11Let's go.
32:12And I was like, okay, let's do it.
32:15So we're walking in a parking lot in the middle of the night.
32:18So, of course, we had to be quiet and it was super dark.
32:20I was the lookout.
32:21I had to make sure that no one saw us.
32:23So he's going car to car, trying to open the handles.
32:26And boom, there's a car door that opens.
32:28My heart is pounding.
32:30I'm super nervous.
32:31I'm shaking.
32:33I'm thinking in my mind, let's go.
32:35Let's hurry up.
32:36Let's go before the cops show up, before someone hears us.
32:39So Wonton has his backpack and he pulls out this screwdriver
32:42and then this hammer and then he puts it into the ignition.
32:45He twists it and the car starts.
32:49And then the engine goes on and I'm thinking in my head,
32:51I can't believe you just did this.
32:53And, of course, we're going to celebrate.
32:55We get some 40s.
32:56We party.
33:00So after I stole the car with Wonton,
33:02I decided that I was definitely capable of stealing cars
33:05whenever I wanted on my own.
33:10I was 14 years old when I stole my first car.
33:13Between the ages of 14 and 16, I had stolen about 15 cars.
33:19So each car I stole was upwards of $30,000 to $50,000.
33:23By the time I was 16, I had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of cars.
33:31Sometimes I would use the screwdriver trick
33:33and then sometimes I'd have to hotwire a car.
33:35You have to actually take a little plastic cover off the steering wheel and then there's going to be wires inside.
33:43Once you have the starter wire exposed, you're going to tap it to the two power wires that are connected.
33:49And the ignition should start.
33:50In my mind, I didn't really think about the consequences of the things I was doing.
33:58It's like almost like no remorse.
34:01Not so much no conscious, but I felt like just really no remorse to what I was doing.
34:06And the more things I did and the more crimes that I committed, the colder I became.
34:12And it was easier to do something bigger and more each time and not feel bad about it.
34:17I'm thinking in my head that I'm never going to get caught.
34:20When I was in the county jail, this white boy came in there and I found out he could hypnotize you.
34:33He hypnotized me and two other guys to be loaded on weed.
34:37And weed actually got loaded.
34:40I mean, we were like laughing and joking and, yeah, the munchies and he was really good at hypnotizing.
34:47But then they pulled him out, you know.
34:50He turned out to be Charles Manson.
34:53It was before all the stuff at Chaney Ranch and all that stuff.
34:57When I seen him on TV, I said, Paul, are you kidding?
35:01We saved that kid in the county jail.
35:03I couldn't believe it.
35:06One night, Wonton and I were partying and we decided to steal a car so we could go to his dad's house in Tacoma.
35:11So we find the car in a parking lot and he does his thing.
35:16I hop in and we take off.
35:19So we pick up our friend Jeremy and he's like this 15-year-old kid and we head to Tacoma.
35:24And we were up there for a couple nights and we were partying and we decided to come back to where I live
35:29because I needed to pick something up for my mom.
35:31I just had this intuition that morning when I woke up that something was off.
35:36Something was different and something was about to go down.
35:38So that day, I decided not to drive the car and I asked Jeremy to drive.
35:42So I head to the post office and we pull in and as we pull in, there's a police officer sitting there.
35:48So I'm in a stolen car and I have a 15-year-old driver driving us that doesn't really even know how to drive.
35:55I'm super freaked out.
35:57I'm having an anxiety attack.
35:59Wanda has a gun in the car so of course we're like, no, you cannot stop.
36:03We gotta go.
36:04But we didn't know that this police officer has been looking for us.
36:08So he had been watching my house because he knows we have a stolen car.
36:17And we see him pull out after us and we're like, go, Jeremy, go, hurry up.
36:21I mean, at this point, Jeremy's freaking out.
36:24He's like, oh, what am I going to do?
36:25What do I do?
36:26What do I do?
36:27You know, he doesn't really know how to drive that well.
36:29So we tell him to go straight and then he takes a right.
36:35Straight ahead is a bridge.
36:36And Jeremy's doing about 65, 70.
36:39One wrong move.
36:40We're all going to die.
36:44So he splits the bridge and we keep going and we keep going straight.
36:47And we head down this street called Ocean Beach Highway.
36:50And it has like, it's a four lane road, but there's like a median in the middle where people turn.
36:55And we're driving straight down this median.
36:58At this point, there's like eight or nine police officers behind us chasing us.
37:02So Jeremy doesn't know what he's doing.
37:04He's like, okay, what do I do?
37:05What do I do?
37:06What do I do?
37:07What do I do?
37:08Do I go straight?
37:09And he's like, and all of a sudden, Wonton said, no, go left.
37:10Bust the left.
37:11So he takes the left doing like 90.
37:13The car starts screeching.
37:14We start drifting.
37:15And I just know in my mind that he's not going to make it because it's going too fast.
37:19I feel this smash.
37:24I hear this huge loud noise.
37:26The car had crashed into a telephone pole.
37:29There's literally a telephone pole in the middle of the car.
37:32Right where the console is between the seats, there's a pole sitting there.
37:36So at this moment, the police surround the car with guns and they're ordering me to get out of the car.
37:41Well, I told them I can't.
37:42The door is, you know, because there's literally the pole in between the car.
37:45I couldn't get out of the car.
37:47I'm stuck in this car for 30 minutes with my hands up.
37:51And they have their guns drawn and they're telling me, you know, you're under arrest and not to move.
37:57I felt so, so guilty, so helpless.
38:02The fire engine comes up and cuts me out of the car.
38:05After I get out of the car, they just arrest me.
38:08They didn't check anything to see if I was okay.
38:17I was sentenced to nine months in county jail for evading the police and grand theft auto.
38:24Honestly, I was scared.
38:25I was scared walking into jail for the first time.
38:28I had a lot of time to think about my life.
38:33So right when I got out, I quickly meet a guy that I started a relationship with.
38:37We fell in love and I find out that I'm pregnant.
38:40In that moment, I completely changed the way I thought about this criminal lifestyle.
38:48I needed to be responsible and definitely not be in the streets.
38:53I knew that I definitely had to grow up.
38:58The greatest ride of my life has been being a mom.
39:05Sorry.
39:10I had been a drug counselor for quite a while before I started acting.
39:14I was helping this kid stay clean.
39:17He thought he was going to use.
39:18I went down to help him.
39:20And I walked onto the movie set of a movie called Runaway Train with John Voight and Eric Roberts.
39:29And the director came up to me and said,
39:32You be in movie.
39:34That changed my life.
39:36I became a movie star.
39:40My life is a dream.
39:41You understand?
39:42It's ridiculous.
39:45If I wouldn't have gone down to help that kid,
39:48everything good that's happened to me,
39:50has happened as a direct result of helping someone else.
39:55You know, so I'm still a drug counselor.
39:58That's where I really needed to be.
40:01Not just to help people, but to help me.
40:04I mean, and every once in a while, I ask God,
40:07How am I doing?
40:08He goes, You're almost out of hell, Daddy.
40:10Keep it up.
40:11I talked to my Russian contact, Jeff, some months later, and he did tell me that they were able to cash in all 21,000 of those chips, but it took them six months to get the money.
40:33I never found out exactly how they collected all that money, and really, I don't want to know.
40:42And I knew I could not tell my wife that story.
40:46I'm currently officially retired, although, as my friends say, that is until I get the right phone call.
40:53Retiring is easy. I've done it six or seven times over the course of my career.
40:56It's crazy to look back and really, really think about all the moments that I had, the crazy moments that I put my parents through, and all the high speed chases I was in, and to say that, thank God, I'm still here.
41:15I mean, I don't regret anything that I've done in my past.
41:17I don't ever think that I wish it didn't happen because it all played out for a reason, and it made me who I am today.
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