Episode Show Notes

							
			
[START OF RECORDING]



JACK:	Man, have I got a story for you. Where did this one even come from? Oh yeah, it was Twitter. I got a Twitter DM, and this guy’s like, hi, I’m Nathan. I’m like, okay. He was like, yeah, I’ve done some stuff, and you might want to interview me. I should note right here that this episode has a lot of swear words, and I would say it’s for mature audiences. So, if you have some sensitive ears around you, I recommend listening to this one with headphones or whatever you need to do. That’s your warning. That’s your graphic warning for this one. So, typically, when someone DMs me and says, hey, you know, you should interview me for your show, my first response without even knowing anything about them is, can I see your police report?

Because a lot of people message me; they want to be on the show for hacking something, but maybe they’ve never been caught. So, I hate to glorify their actions, right? But even more so, it’s probably true that their story isn’t over yet, and it’s just the beginning, and I should probably check in with them in a few years to see how things are going. But I also have CEOs message me and say, hey, I’d like to come on the show and tell you about my product and how great everything is and how great we can defend things and stuff. So, when I just immediately start by asking for a police report, that cuts right through a lot of the small talk and gets right to the heart of what I’m looking for. I want to know about the worst day of your life, the thing that happened that was just catastrophic to you.



You probably don’t even want to talk about that. But with this guy Nathan, I ask him for a police report and he just starts sending me link after link and news reports and files and videos and photos and, yeah, indictments and affidavits and all that stuff. It was piling up. This story just kept growing. I couldn’t even keep up. I was like, okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s definitely talk. Whatever this one is, it looks like it goes deep. So, I’m like, hey, we should probably switch to Signal, which is a more private messaging app, and he gives me his Signal number. I message him there, and we start talking. But then I find out I’m actually talking to his brother, a different guy. I’m like, what the…? Hey man, I thought I was talking to you on Signal, but it ended up being your brother.



He’s like, yeah, I gave you both — me and my brother — my brother’s Signal so you could talk to both of us. I’m like, okay, which one is yours? So, he tells me which one is his, and I’m like, okay, let’s do a call. He’s like, great, give me a date and time, and I’ll be there. I’m like, alright, well, how about this weekend? He’s like, hell yeah. Saturday I’m free all day. I’m like, great, let’s do it. Saturday comes. I wake up and I check the Signal, and I got a message from him in all caps. It’s like, I have to work until midnight, but it’s not that hard, so I can multitask and I can talk to you at the same time. I’m like, no, no, no, don’t call me while you’re at work. Finish your job, and then we’ll talk. How about tomorrow, Sunday, 10:00 a.m.? He’s like, yeah, that sounds great. I got nothing going on all day Sunday.



So, when Sunday, 10:00 a.m. comes around, he messages me saying, man, my baby mama is tripping, so I have to drive my daughter somewhere. I’m gonna be two hours late for the call. I’m like, oh, okay, no problem. It’s Sunday. See you in two hours. So, two hours go by, and I’m like, alright, you ready? He’s like, uh, my phone is about to die, and I’m not near a computer, so let me charge it on a power bank for thirty minutes. I’m like, okay, fine. I think at this time he went to his mom’s house or something and she’s like, seventy years old. I think he was gonna take her to the store or something, but then he texts me a photo of her and she’s all dressed up, ready to go out, jewelry on, purse in hand, but she’s passed out on a couch. He tells me she drank too much and passed out.



Then he tells me it’s not even her house. Someone’s asking me to take my mom somewhere else, so now I’ve gotta drive my passed-out mom somewhere. Then he starts filling my texts with wild chats. Like, I don’t even know some of the shit he was saying to me on Signal. It’s like, he was gonna show me a video of him cussing out some cops, and then he told me his brother is on the run due to some impending felonies. I’m like, is that the same brother I talked to? He’s like, yeah, man. He tells me his uncle killed himself and how he chose his kids instead of his uncle’s life. I can’t even follow what he’s saying.



But then he goes swimming and he sends me a photo of him swimming in a pool with his daughter. Needless to say, we did not get a chance to do a call that weekend even though I was sitting on the line for like, six hours waiting for him to show up. So, we tried to reschedule, but man, we had a lot of conflicts. All I’m trying to say is that this guy, Nathan, is one wiggly guy and is hard to get on the phone. But eventually we got on the phone together. [To Nathan] You made it.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	So, what are you doing right now?



NATHAN:	I’m sitting right here with a bong in front of me in front of five computer screens.



JACK:	Why five?



NATHAN:	I mean, ‘cause my brain’s going so fast.



JACK:	Oh, yeah. You only have two eyes, though.



NATHAN:	I know, but they’re going everywhere.



JACK:	What’s…?



NATHAN:	If you squint you can see them all at the same time, kinda. You know what I mean?



JACK:	Why — what’s going on in your brain? Why is it going so fast? Explain to me your brain here.



NATHAN:	It’s like fireworks constantly exploding in my brain.



JACK:	Yeah, so, give me an example. Are you like, oh, I gotta check an e-mail, I gotta check Twitter? Like, what’s going on?



NATHAN:	Yeah, like a thousand…



NATHAN’S DAUGHTER:	Are you talking to me?



NATHAN:	No, babe, I’m not talking to you. That’s my daughter. No, honey, I’m doing an interview. She said, oh, okay, and left.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	Yeah, so, I prepare for the worst and then hope for the best, if that makes sense. That way you’re never surprised.



JACK:	Yeah, and you’ve gone through some pretty bad stuff, so…



NATHAN:	Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.



JACK:	You’ve got different levels of trauma.



NATHAN:	Right, there are levels to it for sure, for sure. Yeah. Like, they need a scale for that. Maybe all this new AI supercomputer shit — they’ll come up with some new shit. We’re gonna be cyborgs by like — by like, 2030, we’re gonna be getting two years younger every year.



JACK:	Yeah, I hope so. I don’t want to get older.



NATHAN:	Then we’ll live forever. You know what I mean?



JACK:	Yeah, I want that.



NATHAN:	I mean, I don’t know if I want to live forever.



JACK:	Alright, let’s start with what’s your first name?



NATHAN:	Nathan.



JACK:	Okay. I got in my notes that Nathan is the ringleader of this whole enterprise.



NATHAN:	[Laughs] Well, you know — I mean, if they really got the people that they should have got or whoever, then it’s probably my mother-in-law that would have been the ringleader.



JACK:	It’s worse already. We haven’t even started and it already gets worse.



NATHAN:	[Laughs]



(INTRO):	[INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]



JACK:	Nathan grew up in Oak Cliff, an area near Dallas, Texas.



NATHAN:	They put me on Ritalin when I was six years old, bro.



JACK:	Ritalin; wow.



NATHAN:	The first day of kindergarten, I tried to stab a kid at school.



JACK:	‘Cause your head was fireworks. Wait, did you say you tried to stab a kid at school?



NATHAN:	First day of kindergarten.



JACK:	Oh man, you were that kind of kid.



NATHAN:	Yeah, yeah, yeah. MHMR for real.



JACK:	[Music] Yeah.



NATHAN:	Then, of course, the drugs didn’t help. When you’re self-medicating, you’re thinking it’s helping, and it ain’t helping.



JACK:	By the time he was fourteen, him and his brother were really into video games. Diablo II and World of Warcraft were his favorites. At the time there was an underground market where you could buy and sell in-game items for real money. So, they’d play these games and try to sell things within the game.



NATHAN:	Well, I was like fourteen and I was selling Diablo II items. I kept getting scammed on PayPal with chargebacks. So, I just joined that side because they seemed to be making more money, ‘cause I was losing more.



JACK:	There’s his origin story. He got scammed, and the scammer didn’t get in any trouble at all. He got away clean with Nathan’s money. He was like, alright, alright, I see how this world is. Either you’re getting scammed or you’re the scammer. Might as well be the scammer.



NATHAN:	Like, I knew right from wrong from when I was a kid. I chose this path. My parents didn’t raise me like this. My parents raised me to do right. But when I got tired of getting scammed, I just chose the path of the dark side.



JACK:	But his origin story isn’t as simple as that. If you know Oak Cliff, you may also know that that’s a rough area of town to grow up in.



NATHAN:	So, I was raised middle class, but I lived in the hood. Like, my parents made about $100,000 a year.



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	We had the nicest house in the neighborhood and shit like that, but I was raised in the streets, though.



JACK:	Yeah, so, tell me what was shitty about your neighborhood.



NATHAN:	You know, police chasing people around the neighborhood, shooting at people at 3:00 in the morning. You’re looking out your window and there’s three helicopters in the sky looking for somebody, and there’s spotlights shining on your house, shit like that; gunshots, seeing people get shot. Yeah. I picked up on my bad habits at school. That’s where everybody learns all the bad shit, right, is at school. Then I got on the internet and then I started picking up all the bad shit. Once I started getting into wares and programming and AOL back in ‘94, ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, ‘98…



JACK:	Well, I think there’s some sort of reflection here of like — it’s like, hey, look, if I’m gonna be nice, people are still gonna rob me and beat me up and all those sort of things, so I gotta toughen up. I gotta be a jerk to the world because the world’s a jerk to me.



NATHAN:	That’s why I turned into a monster.



JACK:	[Laughs]



NATHAN:	I mean, seriously. I just did thirteen years in prison, and I didn’t even know I could fight that good. I mean, I got into a lot of fights growing up where I grew up at, but I didn’t know I was a beast.



JACK:	People learn a lot about themselves in prison, don’t they?



NATHAN:	You do. I mean, I’m still learning things — I just realized what a couple triggers I had that were pissing me off and how easy they were to change so I didn’t get mad no more.



JACK:	Yeah, yeah.



NATHAN:	It’s like self-discovery. I’m just now getting self-discovery, ‘cause I’ve been clouded by drugs my whole life.



JACK:	So, who were you living with at fourteen?



NATHAN:	I was living with my mom and dad in Oak Cliff, Dallas.



JACK:	Your brother living together as well?



NATHAN:	Yes, yeah, me and my little brother.



JACK:	Alright.



NATHAN:	I had just dropped out of school.



JACK:	Dropped out? Let me guess; you were — I want to say ‘dirtbag’, but you probably don’t call yourself a dirtbag. I’m trying to guess what kind of person you are. But I imagine just — you got into drugs and just screwed around and — like, forget this, I’m done with this, and you didn’t shower and you just played video games. I don’t know what…



NATHAN:	I was out pimping hoes.



JACK:	What?



NATHAN:	Pussy. Yeah, when I was fifteen, I was out chasing pussy.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	It was crazy. Like, so, I dropped out and my mom bought me a computer from the IT guy at work. It was a 486 Pentium, and I want to say it was a 14.4 baud modem. [Music] I’ve been stuck on a computer ever since.



JACK:	This whole time, Nathan and his little brother were watching how people were making money in their area. Living in the hood, you can probably guess what kind of stuff that they were seeing; a lot of hustlers. They were set on trying to find ways to make money themselves, but they were also super into computers. So, that’s where they focused on trying to make money.



NATHAN:	Okay, so like, my whole life, me and my little brother, we always made money on the internet through video games, through selling currency and stuff like that for games and stuff and whatnot.



JACK:	How do you do that?



NATHAN:	For selling in-game currencies for different video games? We used to have a couple of Diablo II dupes, and we’d sell Diablo II items. Then we sold WoW gold. Then we had a virus, a root kit virus that stole all the accounts for every gaming platform that they had. Then we’d sell…



JACK:	How were you getting the gold to sell?



NATHAN:	Oh, we were buying it from them with stolen PayPals and shit.



JACK:	Oh. So, we gotta step back a second now.



NATHAN:	Oh, that’s a whole story.



JACK:	So, you got some stolen…



NATHAN:	Been doing it since ‘94, you know? I was doing it back in the BBS days.



JACK:	Holy cow. So, he’d buy access to someone else’s PayPal account, buy some in-game gold with that, and then he’d have the gold in his video game account, and then he’d sell that gold to some other player for real cash which he could put in his pocket. In this way, he was using World of Warcraft gold as sort of a money-laundering mechanism. This led him to chat rooms where people were selling or trading credit card dumps. This is where they get their hands on some full credit card details so that they could buy whatever they want with it.



NATHAN:	They just weren’t hitting, bro. It’d be like, hit or miss. You know, ‘cause they have all the algorithms and shit running. So, it would be hit or miss, and then — but then when you get a good one, it’d be a banger, you know? So, I was like, man — so then we sat down again and we’re like, well, there’s gotta be a better way ‘cause this just ain’t working.



JACK:	I’ve gotta hand it to these two boys. They were incredibly persistent and diligent at finding ways to make money. Sometimes it was legal. Sometimes it wasn’t. They would study a lot, learn how to do stuff, try it, fail, and then pivot and try something new. They were young teenagers, though, so a lot of the stuff they were doing was really dumb and not working. But they knew there was loads of money to be made online somewhere; scamming, stealing. It was just a matter of trying lots of stuff before finding where the good stuff was. One idea was the one that his mother-in-law came up with. He was married in, I don’t know, 2008-ish, and his wife worked at Walmart. His mother-in-law gave him an idea.



When someone goes to use a credit card to buy stuff at Walmart, the cashier tries to scan the card on the little machine, and if it works, okay, great. The card is charged and the person goes on their way. But sometimes the magnetic stripe gets screwed up. The card is broken or something like that, and it doesn’t swipe right. So, if the cashier can’t swipe the card, then they look at the numbers on the card and punch those numbers into the cash register manually and charge the card that way. Well, his mother-in-law was like, so what you guys should do — Nathan, you should bring a totally broken card when my daughter is on the register and put on the card a bunch of credit card numbers for her to try, and she’ll just keep punching in random credit card numbers until you guys find one that actually works.



NATHAN:	My ex-wife was a manager at Walmart, so when I tell them that my card — I’ve demagnetized the strip on the card so that it would say they gotta punch it in. They could manually enter the number then if it doesn’t swipe. Then she’d come over there and put in her little manager key, and I give her a blank card, a blank PVC card with just a mag strip on the back of it with a Post-It note on the front of it with like, eight card numbers, eight CVVs, and eight expiration dates. We’d just sit there and run that bitch and get whatever we get off of them.



JACK:	Can you guess what he was trying to buy with this? Stacks and stacks of gift cards. [Music] If a random card would work, then he’d buy as many gift cards as he could on that bogus, made-up, stolen credit card number.



NATHAN:	I got $30,000 worth of gift cards in one day from her Walmart.



JACK:	You didn’t actually spend any of the gift cards, right?



NATHAN:	Oh no, we spent them all.



JACK:	Why? You spent — what’d you spend $30,000 in gift cards on?



NATHAN:	Well, you know, it’s half-price when you’re selling it anyways, and when you’re selling quantities like that, you gotta go down about forty percent, anyways. So…



JACK:	Okay, so you were reselling them and then other people were spending it.



NATHAN:	Yeah. But I had sold one to my mom, so — ‘cause you could do bill pay at Walmart. So, I sold one to my mom, and then they jammed my mom up too. My mom was retired, so she got her job at Walmart when she retired.



JACK:	So, what did your mom think of you giving her a stolen gift card? I imagine you’ve been in trouble a thousand times by this point, but I should have been asking this; what do your parents think of you?



NATHAN:	I went to junivile when I was fifteen, which was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.



JACK:	Yeah, kindergarten, you were stabbing someone, and then aggravated assault — I imagine it’s not news for your mom to hear that you’re doing crazy shit.



NATHAN:	Right.



JACK:	But yeah, okay. So, I don’t even know what…



NATHAN:	See, fireworks, bro. Fireworks.



JACK:	[Music] At some point, the people in Walmart caught them, and they put them in a room and interrogated them and told them, don’t ever come back here again. But nothing ever came of that.



NATHAN:	I could talk about it now ‘cause the statute of limitations ran out and they can suck my dick. They already know they could suck my dick, so…



JACK:	Okay. Yeah.



NATHAN:	Fuck the fed.



JACK:	Yeah, don’t say anything that’s gonna get you in trouble here.



NATHAN:	Yeah, I made sure the statute of limitations has ran out.



JACK:	Yeah, and I should say that my journalistic ethics or policy here is that anything you tell me in the past I’m not going to tell anyone except for whatever goes out publicly, right? But if you tell me that you might harm someone in the future or commit some crime in the future, then that puts me in a moral pickle where I’m just like, man, I could have prevented…



NATHAN:	A moral obligation to do right. You have a moral obligation to do what’s right.



JACK:	Yeah. So, don’t get me involved in any of this shit.



NATHAN:	You know, I’m gonna go kill some pedos; you’re not gonna tell on me.



JACK:	Don’t tell me what you’re gonna do in the future. That’s all I’m saying.



NATHAN:	If I was going to and they were pedophiles, you wouldn’t tell on me ‘cause it’s not morally right to go tell on somebody who’s gonna go kill some pedophiles.



JACK:	Well, have you heard — if you tell someone your plan, they’re a part of the conspiracy at that point just because you tell them?



NATHAN:	You know the feds give out one-person conspiracies?



JACK:	What?



NATHAN:	I have a home girl that was locked up in the fed. She was on a one-person conspiracy.



JACK:	Oh my gosh, that’s…



NATHAN:	From phone conversations and shit.



JACK:	Man, fireworks is right. Alright, let’s get back on track. Okay, so that plan didn’t work, and it was time for them to try something new.



NATHAN:	We started OJ’s crew online gangster hackers and shit. We had — so, we had — like, the original 419 scammers from Nigeria and shit, we had some of them in our crew. Like, it’s crazy the people that you meet online, bro, from all different regions of the world and just different cultures. It’s amazing how — but you get on the internet and we’re all alike. Everybody’s everybody. You could be whoever you want to be on the internet. We fucking messaged this one China dude, and they were — back then they did fake iPhones and shit like that. He had MSRs and skimmers, embossers, and chippers and all that shit.



JACK:	This is equipment to steal credit cards and print credit cards. The MSR is a mag stripe reader/writer, so if you get a blank credit card, you could program it with the MSR. They studied up on how all this works, and they thought, yeah, if we get a skimmer, we could collect our own credit cards. No need to buy dumps from others. So, he was like, alright, let’s buy a skimmer.



NATHAN:	[Music] Bro, he had a hell of a deal, bro. It was like, you had to buy ten of them, though, and they were like, $250 apiece back then. We saved up. We got $2,500 and ordered them. We got like, two — a couple MSRs and — but we got mostly skimmers, though. I had gas pump ones and everything. But they…



JACK:	So, did you try putting those skimmers on gas pumps and stuff?



NATHAN:	Oh yeah, we had them on gas pumps.



JACK:	How’d…? Okay, I’ve never talked with anybody who’s ran that. So, tell me some of this process. Was gas pumps your number-one place you put them on or did you put them on other things?



NATHAN:	I mean, we had ones on ATM machines, too, back in the days, too. But the problem was with them is trying to get the PIN recorded, right? They didn’t have the 3D printers now where you could print something that looks just like it that’s paper thin that you could put right over the top of it, you know? They didn’t have shit like that back then.



JACK:	So, it cost $200 for one skimmer?



NATHAN:	And that was cheap. That was cheap.



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	They’re usually like, $600 back then.



JACK:	Wow, okay. So, you — so, yeah, tell me about putting your first skimmer…



NATHAN:	That particular order was the ones that were about the size of a Bic lighter, and they’re wireless and they have Bluetooth on them.



JACK:	Okay, so tell me about putting your first skimmer on a machine.



NATHAN:	Well, there was a gas station right around the corner from my house that I’ve been going to my whole life. So, I mean, I used to clean up the parking lot and shit when I was a kid at this gas station, so it’s like, they would never fuck with me about anything anyways. So, I would just put it in there and let it sit for about a week.



JACK:	Yeah. So, you’re not even nervous driving up to it. Like, okay, here we go; we’re gonna put this in. You’re just like…



NATHAN:	Got — already got the keys for all the gas pumps. I live in the hood, so it’s like, you can get whatever you want to get into anything.



JACK:	Okay, so he leaves this skimmer on the gas pump for a few days. In case you don’t know what a skimmer is, it fits right over the credit card reader on the gas pump, so when you go to swipe your card to buy some gas, his skimmer will also read your card and save the data from it. It’s meant to look just like a regular scanner on the gas pump so that you don’t notice it. This is why every time I go to swipe my card anywhere, I first grab the reader and wiggle it hard to see if it comes off, because then it would be a skimmer. After a few days he comes back and pulls it off the pump, and then he has to learn how to get the data off it.



NATHAN:	Okay, so, you could either unplug it and hook it up to your computer USB and it just downloads — you just opened it up and it’s just like a file — or you could Bluetooth them. The later ones had Bluetooth. You just go Bluetooth to it; boop, download.



JACK:	Okay, so when you grabbed it and you connected to your computer, what’d you find?



NATHAN:	Crack one and crack two information. Bro, I had — the reason they caught me with all the victims, the 6,500 victims from over a hundred different banks, is because I was trying to crack the code, bro.



JACK:	Crack the code?



NATHAN:	Yeah, the algorithm. I’m trying to generate dumps.



JACK:	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you just…



NATHAN:	I figured if I got it from each one of them, I’d be able to figure out the sequence. You know what I mean?



JACK:	Yeah, ‘cause it’s just a sixteen-digit number plus the CVV code. If you could figure out a way to find those…



NATHAN:	I mean, they already got generators for the numbers. So, if you could just find how they get out — how they get the CVV code, you’d be good.



JACK:	Yeah, and that’s what you were trying to do.



NATHAN:	I mean, you can do it today, right now, today. Crazy.



JACK:	So, I actually tried that same thing when I was a teenager. Like, hey, this is just a sixteen-digit code. Let me just type in gibberish into this form and see if I could order shit, and of course none of it worked. I was like, okay, this is beyond me.



NATHAN:	No, you needed a good one.



JACK:	Well, I just was doing it random, trying to think, like, how do they know if this is a real card? I’m just gonna type in whatever.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	They somehow knew, but…



NATHAN:	I always just used mom and dad’s credit card to find out, and then I knew that cards worked like that. Then — so, I just started stealing everybody else’s…



JACK:	Yeah. Okay, so…



NATHAN:	I stole cards like that — like that.



JACK:	How many cards did you get from that gas pump?



NATHAN:	Oh, probably like, eighty-three or something like that if I remember correctly.



JACK:	Dang.



NATHAN:	Yeah, that was like, for three days, four days.



JACK:	Then what’d you do with those cards?



NATHAN:	I sat on them. I didn’t do nothing with them.



JACK:	Why?



NATHAN:	I was scared.



JACK:	Yeah. They just weren’t familiar enough with how all this worked. The cards they were punching in at Walmart were just random numbers that they were trying, and the dumps that they were buying, well, they knew that those were already stolen by someone else. But these cards they were skimming themselves, that’s new to them. They never stole credit cards before like this. So, they just had to sit on them and let the heat cool down for a little while. We’re gonna take a quick ad break here, but stay with us because wherever you think this story is going, I promise you it gets way crazier than that. Okay, Chicken Express; that’s what this chapter’s called, Chicken Express.



I’ve never been there, but I’m looking at it on Google Maps, and there’s actually a bunch of them in Texas. It’s a drive-through fast food chicken joint, and during busy times they have two lanes for cars to line up in, but in order to take the order from that second lane, a cashier needs to walk out to the car and take the order and then also take their money so that they can do into the building and charge the credit card or get change for them. Nathan’s brother’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, got a job at Chicken Express taking orders.



NATHAN:	What he would do was — is he had this little girlfriend and, you know, manipulation and all that bullshit. So, you know how that goes.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	Convince anyone to do whatever you want. They’re just like — they can convince every man to do what they want them to do. So, she was working at Chicken Express and we were like, okay.



JACK:	[Music] They had the skimmers from before and they were like, you’ve got this great, big apron on. Put the skimmer in your front apron pocket, and then when you take the person’s credit card into the building to swipe it, also swipe it in the skimmer in your apron.



NATHAN:	The machine to charge the card was inside the restaurant. So, she would take the card, leave, and come back, which would give her ample opportunity to stick it in that pocket and swipe it through that skimmer. ‘Cause it don’t matter which way you go on the skimmer or anything. It’s gonna record it.



JACK:	Alright, I get it. They basically were just grabbing a copy of everyone’s credit card that came through that Chicken Express lane. Her first day doing it, she got eight cards. Not bad. But again, they’re too scared to use them. They’ve just stolen eight cards. Take it easy. Don’t do anything with it. His brother was the one who was grabbing the cards off of Elizabeth’s skimmer and keeping it on his computer. He didn’t want to share them with Nathan.



NATHAN:	Right. Well, we were just gonna save them up for a while. What we really — our plan was is just to start selling dumps, originally. But I had other ideas in my head. My little brother had his ideas; I had mine.



JACK:	Yeah, what was your brother’s ideas?



NATHAN:	Well, he didn’t want to use them. I wanted to use them.



JACK:	Why…? Okay, this is what I don’t understand. Both of you have now spent $2,500 to buy skimmers. You’ve both gotten dozens of cards from it and then you’re like, let’s not use this for anything.



NATHAN:	Well, ‘cause we didn’t know nothing about that side of it. You know what I mean? Like the dump side of it. We knew what Track 1, Track 2 was, and we knew how to put them on cards and we knew all that stuff, but we didn’t know none of the — I guess we were trying to do opsec on it. You know what I’m saying? I gotta figure it out.



JACK:	Okay, okay. So, you’re just being hesitant.



NATHAN:	If we were to use these — we were dissecting it, hacking it, trying to figure out how their system worked. We didn’t know if we used one of these, they were gonna come busting down our door right then or not. But, you know.



JACK:	That’s right, yeah.



NATHAN:	So, we were more cautious about it.



JACK:	Okay, fair enough. But she keeps skimming them.



NATHAN:	Yeah, she kept skimming them for months.



JACK:	[Music] So, they just sat on them, not sure what to do. Just play it cool. Until one day, Nathan decided to use one.



NATHAN:	One day I used two or three. We were stuck somewhere or something, had no gas or something. ‘Cause we had an elaborate setup inside a vehicle to where we could make cards on the go. We’ll get to that sooner or later.



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	But we had no dump, so we couldn’t get none or we couldn’t get no — back then it was Liberty Reserve. We had no Liberty Reserve to buy any — our web money. So, we decided to use a couple of them, and they were bangers. I’m talking about bangers, bangers, bangers.



JACK:	He was storing these cards in a Google doc, and he took a few and got some blank credit cards, and he used his MSR device to write the credit card details to the card. At first he just tried to use it on a gas pump, and it worked. He got gas with this card. Then he went into a store and tried buying stuff. He says with just a few cards, he was able to buy $3,000 worth of stuff.



NATHAN:	Like, every one of them hit, bro. Every one of them hit.



JACK:	Of course they hit, ‘cause they’re cards you stole. They’re fresh.



NATHAN:	Right.



JACK:	‘Cause the ones you were buying online were sold to four other people before they were sold to you, right?



NATHAN:	Yeah, but we didn’t know that.



JACK:	I know you didn’t know that, but that’s why they weren’t working. Yours were fresh.



NATHAN:	[Crosstalk] Yeah, but we probably got scammed eight times before we ever got one that worked.



JACK:	Yeah, that’s right, yeah.



NATHAN:	You know? But yeah, so, we didn’t know that they worked like that. So, once we used them fresh ones, my brother didn’t want to use no more. I’m like, fuck him. I’m going — my wheels are spinning in my head, and once I see — taste the money, it’s like, I’m not worried about pussy. I’m not worried about drugs. You ever been addicted to making money? I’m talking about being addicted to making money. ‘Cause this is an addiction.



JACK:	[Music] He had some of these cards from the skimmers that he was putting around town, but it was his brother who had the most amount of cards from all the cards his girlfriend Elizabeth was skimming at Chicken Express. But his brother wasn’t sharing those cards with Nathan, and his mind was racing with how to get those from his brother.



NATHAN:	I don’t know if — how much of the federal paperwork you read — or if you looked anything up, but there was fifty-eight people they wanted to indict.



JACK:	Fifty-eight…



NATHAN:	And they only got three of us. Well, they got four of us, but only three of us.



JACK:	Yeah, well, you have to tell me when these other fifty-five come into play, ‘cause we’ve only listed three so far.



NATHAN:	They’ve already been involved with all that. We’re already making — well, by that time, we’re already making cards. We’re already deep in the game by then. This is when we get the fresh dumps and we’re using them fresh dumps that were skimmed. That’s what our fed case started because of.



JACK:	Okay, so, the…



NATHAN:	[Crosstalk]



JACK:	…fifty people were involved before this.



NATHAN:	Not necessarily all fifty of them. My brother had his people and I had my people. My brother had like, four or five people, and I had like, thirty people.



JACK:	Okay, and these other people, what were their roles?



NATHAN:	Shoppers.



JACK:	See, Nathan had a Fargo printer, which is a classic printer used to make IDs. Think membership cards or student IDs, employee badges. But he was using it to make credit cards, and he was making them look really good.



NATHAN:	I’d print the cards and then program the mag strip and then — my little key trick was — so they don’t have to ask you for ID — just put your fucking picture in the corner of the fucking card.



JACK:	So, you had a guy that would — that — you took a picture of him and you would print it on the card to make it look like a legitimate card. It wasn’t just a blank card. You were printing on the card to make it look as good as possible.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	And then he was taking it in the store and like — look, my picture’s on the card. How can you say that it’s not me?



NATHAN:	Exactly.



JACK:	Wow. That’s going the length there.



NATHAN:	This is like, in 2008. So — or ‘07 and ‘08. So, nobody was doing it like that back then.



JACK:	So, he would go around his neighborhood and hit up people he thought might want the extra cash and have them come over. Then he’d make a bunch of credit cards with their photo on it and have them go out and shop with stolen credit cards and then bring back any of the stuff you buy with it.



NATHAN:	So, what I would do is just — I’m providing the cards. I figured the cards were — if they’re buying the dump and they’re making the card — so, I’d charge $100 for the card, basically, right?



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	So, say they brought me back $3,000 worth of merchandise. I can only sell it for half price. So, that’s $1,500 out the gate. I’m taking $100 off for each card and then I’m paying you in cash the rest.



JACK:	Hot damn. So, people — yeah, okay. That’s a pretty good incentive. I could see why a bunch of people would want to get in on this in Texas.



NATHAN:	Well, and — plus, you know, I was in the hood, so everybody’s broke. Nobody has nice jobs and shit like that. All their parents are crackheads or whores or prostitutes or pimps or they’re pushers. They’re pimps or they’re pushers.



JACK:	Okay, so, all that was going around for a while with crappy stolen credit cards, a lot that didn’t work. But now Nathan is like, man, I’m sitting on a bunch of banger cards. It’s time to start making some real money with these. But his brother was the one who had the bulk of them, and he wasn’t sharing.



NATHAN:	So, my brother didn’t want to use them. So, I hacked my brother. [Music] Fuck, man, I hacked him and started using them.



JACK:	Wait, you hacked your brother?



NATHAN:	Yeah. Why not, right? You got something I want. I mean…



JACK:	How’d you do that?



NATHAN:	I mean, I just got on his computer and fucking — and stole his file. I knew — you know, it’s my little brother, so obviously he learned from me. So, he’s gonna think how — like I think. So, it wasn’t that hard to find the text document, where it was hidden. I’ve seen him — ‘cause it’s his girlfriend that was doing it, right?



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	So — and then, yeah, I didn’t go to prison the first time ‘til I was thirty. So, I made it a pretty good while before I got in trouble. I did good for myself.



JACK:	[Laughs] What age do you think your daughter is gonna be before she goes to prison for the first time?



NATHAN:	My kids are not going to prison.



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	One of them’s graduated college. The other one’s in college. My sixteen-year-old is fixing to graduate high school with her nursing shit done this year.



JACK:	Do you have a better neighborhood that they’re living in compared to where you grew up?



NATHAN:	Yeah. I mean, it’s Dallas, bro. You know, it’s a city. So, I mean, it’s like, bad shit happens everywhere.



JACK:	Well, you put it as a badge of honor. Like, man, I didn’t go to prison ‘til I was over thirty. So, I did pretty good.



NATHAN:	Most people are either dead or in prison by the time they’re thirty in my neighborhood. I grew up in Oak Cliff, though. See, my kids live in Dallas with their mother. I mean, it’s a little better, but it’s still the city, you know? Fast life.



JACK:	What did your dad do? Was he a carpenter or a musician or…?



NATHAN:	My daddy sold fire systems in restaurants and tank boosts.



JACK:	Did he ever break the law? Did — what was his — at what age did he go to prison?



NATHAN:	He went to jail when he was a kid one time for running from the police, ‘cause he had a race car. He had a Dodge Challenger.



JACK:	Yeah. I mean, when you say the fast life, it really does resonate with me because there — everything’s just moving and changing and things are happening and it feels uncomfortable because it’s like, I’m not ready for this. But man, everyone else is doing it, so I better get ready for this ‘cause I got no choice.



NATHAN:	Exactly. It’s like you’re in a tank full of sharks. So, you either become a shark or you get eaten.



JACK:	Okay, we need to get back on track. Alright, with the stolen file that he got from his brother, he had a whole new chest of cards to start cracking into. When I think about the supply chain here, it’s pretty wild. Elizabeth stole these cards from people at Chicken Express, and then she gave them to her boyfriend. Actually, I think they got married sometime in there as well. So, she gave them to her husband, then Nathan steals the cards from him, and then he prints them onto cards and gives them to shoppers and swipers, and then they go out and they buy things from the stores with them, and then they sell those things back to Nathan for thirty percent of its value, and then Nathan tries to sell it for fifty percent of its value on the streets.



So, Nathan was a lot of people’s hook-ups for just half-price stuff. But despite being complex and long, the system was working. With Nathan working with dozens of shoppers that were just going around buying stuff all the time, it was endless work for him. He was making cards all day and reselling things and buying stuff. But he was making good money doing it all. At this point his brother realized that Nathan stole the cards and was unhappy about it, but was joining him on some of this, anyway.



NATHAN:	I mean, he always joined. He said I was doing too much ‘cause I was doing too much.



JACK:	Anyway, he didn’t want to miss out on all the money that he could get from these cards that his wife stole.



NATHAN:	In order to be a good swiper, you gotta believe in your heart and in your mind and in your body that this is your credit card. This is your money. If you don’t, you won’t do good. You’ll be one of them people that pays for the shit and then they ask you for ID and you burn off. You just burned yourself. It’s all about how you talk to people. It’s all about your finesse game, really…



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	…and who you pick to check you out.



JACK:	Did you teach people how to do that game?



NATHAN:	Yeah. You got to.



JACK:	Well, okay, teach me. I want to be a good swiper.



NATHAN:	Okay, so, I’m teaching you to be a swiper. I’m gonna give you probably two or three cards, right? I’m gonna tell you what to go in there and get. Like, I would plan people’s routes out for them and everything. ‘Cause back then, it was MapQuest, right? I’d plan their whole route out for them, tell them what stores to go to, and everything. Bro, I’d have it all wrote down and everything. So, we would go to the store, and you would come with me first and I’d show you how to do it. You never look up at a camera. Never — I always wore a hat, so — and I’m always looking down at my phone. Always look — so, always be on your phone. That was rule number one. Always be on your phone. ‘Cause if you’re looking down at your phone, you’re always gonna look down, right?



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	So, you’re not gonna be looking up to where a camera can get a clear picture of your face. That’s why I get my federal documents — it said, it’s two unidentified white males, two unidentified white males. It was always me and my brother.



JACK:	Yep.



NATHAN:	But it was two unidentified white males is all it was. Always cover up all your tattoos. Wear black. Wear a hat, things that are gonna make it not so obvious of who you are, but without — not making it so obvious that you’re hiding your identity, right?



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	I liked — when I’d go get gift cards, I’d like putting on some coveralls and getting them all dirty and shit; look like I’ve been working on a oil rig all day and I’m coming here to get $2,500 gift cards for my workers ‘cause they passed the safety test.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	So that it doesn’t look so obvious. Then my brother’s got coveralls with him. He’s with me. My card don’t work, right?



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	Bro, your money get on your card yet? Yeah, yeah, my money got on my card. Pay for my shit, bro, and as soon as my shit gets on there, I’ll pay you back. So, we’re — he’s at one register and I’m at the next register and we’re working together at the same time to steal, too. So, we’re banging them double. Bro, we — when I was doing that, bro, I went to — all the way to Missouri and back down and got like, $30,000 worth of gift cards. The dude sold them — they were like — they were for eBay and PayPal. He ended up buying a Corvette with them off of eBay.



JACK:	So, over time, the shoppers and swipers and his network would be bringing him tons of stuff. A lot of was gift cards, but sometimes it was TVs and laptops and video game consoles, anything that would have a high resale value.



NATHAN:	What I’d do is I’d have a storage, and I’d fill it up. There’s pictures of it in my discovery packet. I’d fill it up, and then I had a couple of Mexicans that are cartel; they’d take all that shit back to Mexico, bro. They’ll buy that shit for cash, ‘cause it’s easier to transport that shit across the border than it is cash. You’re not gonna lose anything across the border. They’ll be able to drive it right across.



JACK:	It’s crazy how much logistics went into his operation, but the more cards he would get from skimming, the more cards he could just print and give to shoppers, and they would be constantly bringing him stuff. He had it all dialed in.



NATHAN:	[Music] Bro, at the end of it, I was making like $5,000 cash a day profit.



JACK:	But of course, in the wake of all his activity, it would mean that tons of cards were reported stolen, and purchases were traced to certain locations, and authorities started putting pieces together.



NATHAN:	Half of Texas, bro — so, basically half the United States looking for them.



JACK:	This article says this case is being investigated by the Tyler Police Department, US Secret Service, the Smith County Sheriff’s Office, the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office, the Athens Police Department, the Caney City Police Department, the Longview Police Department, the Mesquite Police Department, the TERO Police Department, the Waco Police Department, the Corsicana Police Department, the Waxahachie Police Department, the Van Zandt County Precinct Four Constable, Walmart Stores Associate Asset Protection, and Southside Bank.



NATHAN:	Yeah. It’s crazy, right?



JACK:	It wasn’t too hard for them to all look at the cards for a common purchase point which would indicate where they were likely stolen. The cops saw that Chicken Express and gas pumps were where these cards were getting stolen from. Eventually this meant the cops had an arrest warrant for Nathan, and it didn’t seem like they knew exactly what he was up to, but they had a strong suspicion that he was doing something wrong. For some reason, right around this time, Nathan broke up with his wife. They got a divorce. She was the mother of his kids. She wasn’t clean from crime herself, though. She got caught punching in those credit cards at Walmart; remember? The police gave her a stern talking-to for that one. But for whatever reason, the two of them broke up and were done with that relationship.



NATHAN:	I had — I met this bad bitch, bro. So, I had a bitch living at the house with me, and I met this bad bitch, bro. So, I brung a bad bitch home with me and kicked my other bitch out the night before, bro, that I got raided. Bro — so, I’m in there making some cards this morning. It’s like, 6:00 in the morning, bro. The dude comes over from across the street to get some cards. I’m making some cards. Five minutes later, bro, I hear this banging on the door and they’re kicking the door. I fucking throw the laptop on the floor and I jump up. Police is in there. I come into the living room; they fucking got a gun to my goddamn daughter’s head, bro. [Music] She’s like, five years old, bro. They’re telling me to get down on the ground, bro. I said, get that fucking gun out of my daughter’s face, you fucking bitch. I’m like, I’m irate, brother. I’m already freaking the fuck out.



JACK:	His girlfriend and dad come home, and they see Nathan in handcuffs in the front yard.



NATHAN:	The Secret Service, they start asking me questions. I’m like, I ain’t got nothing to say. They’re like, well, they found some stolen motorcycles here, drugs, everything, plain credit cards. They raided the neighbor’s house across the street; they snitched on me. They found a fucking — a baby wipe container with a thousand cards in it. They put them all on the news. They had pictures of them all out on a table. They fucking — you know how they do. They parade that shit around like they did something good. I was just a modern-day Robin Hood, bro. That’s all. I was stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.



JACK:	No, you were not the Robin Hood. You weren’t giving anything to the poor. You were the one making all the money. You were like, I want more money. I want more money.



NATHAN:	No. See, it looks like I made all the money because I had so many people working for me, but everybody else made just as much money as I did.



JACK:	So, the cops continued to question him, but he just kept quiet the whole time. They told him, look, if you tell us the names of everyone involved, then we’ll let you go. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t give up anyone’s names. I’m not sure if they even knew he was the ringleader of all this or not.



NATHAN:	They were like, well, we don’t have anything to charge you with today. Alls we have is a search warrant; you’ll be receiving an indictment at a later date, and left.



JACK:	They didn’t take you. They just left you.



NATHAN:	They didn’t take nobody to jail. They were trying to take my Escalade, but they couldn’t take my Escalade because it wasn’t in my name. They were putting nothing on me. Thank god.



JACK:	So — okay, so, what kind of cars did you have at the time?



NATHAN:	I had a Jaguar, a Lexus, and a Cadillac Escalade.



JACK:	Yeah, and they couldn’t take any of the cars?



NATHAN:	Nope. My Lexus was in my best friend’s name, the Escalade was in the cop’s name I bought it from, and my Jaguar was in my other home boy’s name.



JACK:	So, you were buying cars with this? What else were you doing with the money?



NATHAN:	Oh, we’d buy electronics. I had lots of jewelry and lots of guns.



JACK:	Drugs?



NATHAN:	Oh yeah, lots of drugs, yeah. Always had drugs. But…



JACK:	Of course. Sorry. Had to ask.



NATHAN:	When they took me off of Ritalin, what else did I have to do besides self-medicate?



JACK:	Yeah, they gave you…



NATHAN:	When they started giving me prescription methamphetamines when I was six years old, what did they expect me to turn into?



JACK:	The cops did take all the blank cards, the gift cards, writers, and stuff that looked illegal. I saw a picture of it. They laid it all out on a table for the media to see. One picture, I counted over two hundred gift cards just spread out all over the table. At the time, he was still living with his parents, his mom and dad, and his kids. His little brother was living there, but his brother got a sense that Nathan was doing just too much, and was gonna move out. His brother was still mad that he stole the file off his computer.



NATHAN:	He was mad as fuck.



JACK:	Even though his brother did some of this activity himself, too, there was just too much going on for him. It was getting too hot, and his little brother moved out just before the cops raided the place.



NATHAN:	He wasn’t here, bro. He already burnt off ‘cause he said I was doing too much. I mean, ultimately we would have got caught anyways. This kinda put us in a HOV lane and got us there quicker.



JACK:	Yeah, with their past of punching in credit cards at stores, buying dumps online, and getting dozens of people to help be shoppers, they were doomed from that alone. The Chicken Express cards that they were using like this, it just sped up the process of them getting caught.



NATHAN:	So, after they raided us, I had $20,000 stashed that they didn’t find. It was in a fucking — one of them big flashlights that has nine — the big-dick square batteries in it. It had five rows, $5,000 apiece wrapped up — rubber band in there in my dad’s room. They didn’t search — they didn’t even search my parents’ room at all.



JACK:	Okay, alright. So, what do you do after that? You stop cold turkey. You be a good boy.



NATHAN:	No, no. I smashed the gas on they bitch ass.



JACK:	[Music] I smash the gas…



NATHAN:	Go hard or go home. Bro, the cops were already after me. They already know what I’m doing. The fuck am I gonna stop for? I’m already in trouble. I’m already caught.



JACK:	Oh my god.



NATHAN:	I’m an Aquarius, for one, so, it’s like, I’m all or nothing. I’m gonna give 110% or I’m gonna give it no percent. Same thing I do with my relationships. But I’ll go back to the childhood, still — like you were talking about earlier, you know? You apply what you’ve learned to everything.



JACK:	So, what he knows is how to make money and be invisible. So, he grabs the $20,000 and goes on the run.



NATHAN:	Three days later I went to Dallas and I got me — I was staying at the hotels at first. Then I got me a spot, a little house that I was out renting in somebody else’s name. Got the electricity and shit got on somebody else’s name, all that, and started making credit cards there. My home boy — my right-hand man that lived with me, he’d sell drugs. I’d sell credit cards. So, I never had to buy drugs anymore, and he never had to buy credit cards no more. It worked out.



JACK:	Now, during that time, the police were also looking for his brother, but he was hiding out, too. But one day, his brother made a mistake with one of the stolen credit cards. Okay, I have it in my notes that he was at an arcade messing around with quarters.



NATHAN:	They got like, $200 worth of quarters out of the fucking automated quarter machine with a credit card.



JACK:	With a stolen credit card.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Why was this suspicious at all? Because people don’t buy $200 worth of quarters?



NATHAN:	I mean, not — and put them in their pocket and leave.



JACK:	Why would you put $200 worth of quarters in your pocket? It is — I guess you’re right.



NATHAN:	 I would have been playing video games.



JACK:	So, he just goes into the arcade, grabs $200 worth of quarters and is like, I’m good. [Laughs] And the mall worker calls the cops…?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	…and says, this guy’s weird. He just bought $200 worth of coins and he’s leaving. Quarters…



NATHAN:	Well, he went shopping, too. He had a whole bunch of shit under the car outside the mall. He had a whole bunch of shit under the car that — he had been shopping in there all day, too.



JACK:	Just follow the trail of quarters through the mall. You’ll catch him.



NATHAN:	But he was like, shit, that’s a easy $200. That’s the max they let you get out per card.



JACK:	So, this is how his brother got caught, and since they caught him in the act, they took him right to jail.



NATHAN:	So, they ended up catching my brother probably around November, and he got arrested in Dallas. I had already — knew a bondsman, so I called the bondsman and had the bondsman go get him right out, and he got out.



JACK:	His brother was out of jail, but not for long. Stealing from the mall is one thing, but running a huge stolen credit card ring is another. So, the feds came and arrested his brother and took him to jail a week later.



NATHAN:	Oh, and I couldn’t have bonded out the feds. When the feds got him and the US marshal detainer was on him, there ain’t no bonding out the feds, bro. I had $100,000 cash; I tried to get him out and they told me I was fucked. So, I ended up paying $20,000 for a federal lawyer. That was the biggest waste of money ever.



JACK:	So, your brother’s stuck in jail.



NATHAN:	I can’t get him out.



JACK:	You can’t get him out.



NATHAN:	I mean, this is my best friend, you know? My first best friend was my sister. She died when I was thirteen. She was killed in a drunk driving accident.



JACK:	Oh no.



NATHAN:	So, then my little brother became my best friend, you know?



JACK:	So, a drunk driver hit her?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Were you in the car, too?



NATHAN:	No. It was her and her boyfriend and then two other people in the other vehicle. All four of them were intoxicated.



JACK:	Your sister was intoxicated, too?



NATHAN:	Yeah, she was underage and she — like, I got — we won a $5 million lawsuit against Dennis Rodman, bro, but it was under LLC, so we’re never getting any of the money.



JACK:	Wait, how does Dennis Rodman come into this story?



NATHAN:	Well, it’s not into the story. It’s into the story of my sister dying. He owned the bar that they were at drinking underage, and we — their investigator that went in there — we got a video of it and shit and we won in court.



JACK:	Okay. So, was it the car that your sister was in that was the drunk driver or was it the other car?



NATHAN:	Both of them.



JACK:	Oh, okay.



NATHAN:	But everybody was drunk in both cars.



JACK:	Holy cow. What a awful situation that is to lose your sister at thirteen.



NATHAN:	Yeah, it was — that was probably my first real traumatic event in my life, and that’s when I started using drugs. That’s when I blamed god for everything. That’s why — you know what I mean? That’s when my life really took a turn for the worst.



JACK:	Really? It hit you hard.



NATHAN:	Yeah. I mean, getting a knock on the door at 4:00 in the morning and two police officers being there and you’re thirteen years old and you’re answering the door — it’s your mom and dad and somebody’s beating on the door at 4:00 in the morning and then you’re hearing this. So, it’s like — yeah. Our parents didn’t know how to deal with losing a kid, so how could they help us cope with losing a sister?



JACK:	Yeah. Right? They’re probably losing their mind. They don’t — their grief, and they can’t help you. Right. You’re — I didn’t think that.



NATHAN:	Right. Like, what are they gonna do to tell — what are they gonna do to help us?



JACK:	So, you had to find your own way, which was drugs.



NATHAN:	Right. That was my escape.



JACK:	Goddamn.



NATHAN:	My escape from reality. Then once I figured out how to escape from reality, you escape from reality forever. Man, this time I’ve been sober like, five months.



JACK:	You’ve been sober right now for the last five months?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Oh, good for you. Wow. That’s hard.



NATHAN:	You know, it took me losing probably the love of my life to figure that out.



JACK:	Wait, hold on. We started this call; you told me you had a bong in front of you.



NATHAN:	I do. I didn’t say I don’t smoke weed.



JACK:	[Laughing] What are you smoking?



NATHAN:	Nothing.



JACK:	I don’t know what to believe with you.



NATHAN:	Believe I just took a bong rip.



JACK:	[Laughs] Sober for five months.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Okay, so, your brother’s in jail, you’re stressed out on this. You were hiding out from the cops.



NATHAN:	Right.



JACK:	Are you missing from the cops or are they asking you to come to court and you’re like, no, I’m not coming?



NATHAN:	I’m wanted. So, my brother’s baby mama, Elizabeth, she’s staying with my cousin in another house in Oak Cliff. I get a call one day that she was talking to the Secret Service trying — they’re trying to get her to turn herself in. I find out about it. I go over there and tell her to get in the car. She gets in the car. I tell her to give me her phone. She gives me her phone. I take the battery out, SIM card out, throw the shit out the window, break that bitch in half and throw it out the window. I tell her, if I ever catch her talking to the cops again, I’m gonna kill her.



JACK:	Damn.



NATHAN:	I kidnapped her.



JACK:	Wait, you kidnapped Elizabeth?



NATHAN:	Yeah. Then she started getting high on methamphetamines, and now she’s in jail still for methamphetamines. I turned her out. Fucked her life up.



JACK:	What — what?



NATHAN:	She never got high before. I got her high for the first time. She’s been doing meth ever since.



JACK:	Oh my god. What?



NATHAN:	My brother got custody of both his sons because — he could tell you all that stuff. But yeah, he ended up getting custody of both of his sons because his baby mama’s a piece of shit. My baby mama’s a piece of shit, too. She got back with the guy that molested my kids.



JACK:	Yeah, but you’re the one who turned her into a piece of shit by getting her hooked on meth.



NATHAN:	It’s not my fault she stayed addicted.



JACK:	What is this? This is the — you need your own TV show. Someone needs to be following you with a camera.



NATHAN:	If someone recorded my life, bro, we’d be — I’ll be rich. We’d all be rich.



JACK:	This is…



NATHAN:	Like, I tell people all the time; bro, you can’t make this shit up.



JACK:	I know. Like, Jersey Shore would have nothing on you. You would just be like…



NATHAN:	No. This is real life reality. All that shit that they do is fake, scripted shit. Yeah.



JACK:	So, the indictment comes out. It lists Nathan, his brother, and his brother’s wife, Elizabeth, saying they were stealing credit cards from Chicken Express and then using those at Walmart. Nathan was still wanted, though, missing, hiding out, and still making stolen credit cards.



NATHAN:	I had a budingera, a witch lady, come from Mexico.



JACK:	A what?



NATHAN:	A budingera or some…



JACK:	What the hell…?



NATHAN:	It’s like a witch person, a witch doctor or something. They worship Santa Muerte.



JACK:	Why would you get this?



NATHAN:	So they can come cleanse my house.



JACK:	[Laughs] How much did you pay them?



NATHAN:	Like, two hundred bucks. So, what happened was — so, I was burning a candle in my house, one of the Mexican candles, and it stopped burning. So, my home boy that was still staying over there — ‘cause the cops came to the house looking for somebody, but it wasn’t for me or for him or anything. It was some — wrong house, basically. But I panicked, and so, I wasn’t never going back there. Somebody called me and told me the candle was going out. I go to get the candle; the candle had gone out. I never got the candle lit again.



So, she could channel her spell and keep her spell of protection over me. Well, it didn’t work. I was on fucking Channel 4, 5, 8, 11 News, most wanted — top ten DFW most wanted by the US marshals, and they’re looking for me and my Escalade. So, I dropped my Escalade off, got my Lexus, and we went and got our OCS for Oak Cliff Swipers. We had a little swiping clique called Oak Cliff Swipers. We went and got our OSC tattoos, me and my cousin and one of my shoppers.



JACK:	Tattoos. You’re on the run from the feds and you’re like, guys, we need to stop and get tattoos on the way out of town.



NATHAN:	Yeah, yeah.



JACK:	Oak Hill Swipers.



NATHAN:	Oak Cliff.



JACK:	Oak Cliff Swipers.



NATHAN:	Yeah, I got a song about — called Oak Cliff. That’s my hood. [Music] That needs to be the opening intro music. Oak Cliff; that’s my hood. [Laughs] My main girlfriend shows up at the tattoo parlor. So, I got both my bitches there. Me and my cousin…



JACK:	They didn’t knew about each other.



NATHAN:	Yeah, they knew about — the side bitch knew, but they didn’t — the main bitch didn’t like the side bitch. The side bitch didn’t give a fuck.



JACK:	Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, that’s how it usually works.



NATHAN:	My cousin’s like, I got you, cuz. My cousin’s telling me, I got you, cuz. So, I make both my bitches sit in the back seat. My cousin rides in the front seat with me. We go to my cousin’s house. My side bitch goes in the house with me ‘cause my cousin and my main bitch don’t get along. They hate each other.



JACK:	[Laughs] Yeah.



NATHAN:	So, she’s like, you can’t come in my house. So, this bitch is sitting inside my Lexus. I’m in the bed with my side bitch at my cousin’s house. I wake up the next morning, make some cards, roll a blunt, and go start looking for — my cousin rolls a blunt. [Music] She goes, Nathan, the cops are here. My cousin, she had the doors open in the front of the house that was clean and shit, and she’s seen the Secret Service car pull up. There was just two Secret Service agents originally with one Dallas patrol car when they came to arrest me. I don’t know how they got the anonymous tip there.



I’m pretty sure it was my main bitch’s fucking mama. I’m about 99.9% sure. It’s all good. You know, I was gonna be caught eventually anyway, so I’m glad it went down like it did and I didn’t get hurt, because I ran everybody out the house. My cousin’s Mexican; she got like, three kids at the house with her. Both my bitches are out of the house. I ran everybody out the house, put on my body armor, got my AR-15, loaded that bitch. I had ten thirty-round clips. I was ready for war. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was going to prison for the rest of my life, bro.



JACK:	Wow.



NATHAN:	So, I was ready to die.



JACK:	So, you cleared everyone else out of the house and then you loaded up body armor and armed yourself with all the weapons you had…



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	…and you flashed it out the windows and the door, saying, hey, stay the — stay out.



NATHAN:	And screen front porch, bro, on the — underneath the car port. But it had the screen on it, though, that you could see out but people couldn’t see in, right?



JACK:	Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.



NATHAN:	So, I was sitting there watching them for six hours, bro, while they were surrounding my house, a tank pulling up in the front yard. They’re putting a robot on the porch, throwing a phone in through the door, shooting flash bangs and tear gas. I’m sitting there watching these fucking idiots thinking they’re tear-gassing and flash-banging me, and I’m sitting out here on the front porch watching these fucking idiots the whole time, bro.



JACK:	Oh, dang. Yeah, they didn’t know you were on the porch.



NATHAN:	If I wanted I could have picked them off. I mean, I wanted to get all of them, but I could have picked them off, bro, if I really wanted to. They wouldn’t even know. I mean, after the first couple of shots — I mean, I would have gotten a couple of them before they got me.



JACK:	Oh, yeah.



NATHAN:	But I wasn’t trying to go out like that, not at that point in my life.



JACK:	I mean, this sounds really intense. Were you scared? Were you tensed up?



NATHAN:	Yeah. I was hyperventilating, I was — cold sweats. It was an adrenaline rush, sadness, and — it’s over with. All at the same time, you know? So, I just said, fuck this. I took some hydrocodone, I took some Xanax, went in the house. As soon as I went in the house, my eyes started burning like a motherfucker, crying like a baby. So, I fucking put on some big-ass glasses, wrapped a towel around my head, got it wet, and went to the door. Then I find this phone that they threw in through the window, and I pick up the phone. This hostage negotiator gets on the phone. I tell him, fuck you, bitch. I don’t want to talk to you. Put Secret Service Agent Reeves on the phone. He said, yes, sir. He got on the phone. Said, Mr. Reeves, these guys — police are gonna kill me, bro. They’re treating — look, they got this tank out here in the front yard. They got the goddamn SWAT — they got the command center band down at the end of the block.



JACK:	There was a actual tank in your yard?



NATHAN:	Bro, they had snipers on the hospital across the street.



JACK:	How did they know that you were armed and dangerous in there? You must have showed them like, hey, I’ve got these weapons through the window or something, and — stay the fuck back.



NATHAN:	I shot like, three rounds into the ceiling. I mean, I came to the door…



JACK:	You shot the ceiling?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	And they — and at the door they saw — so, they came all the way to the door and they saw you shooting the ceiling?



NATHAN:	No, they were in the yard. They were in the yard in the tank. They had like, turned on the tank that — they shoot tear gas. They’re like…



JACK:	This is crazier than Waco.



NATHAN:	Secret Service — they’re very professional, bro, and they’re very chill and laid back, bro. But he said, I got — since this — since we don’t know if there’s anybody else in the house, you have to come out and surrender to them. But as soon as you surrender to them, I’m gonna come and get you. I said, that’s your word? He said, what are your demands? I said, bro, I want to talk to my kid and I want to smoke some cigarettes and I just want to call my parents and my kids, tell them I love them, tell everybody I love them. He’s like, well, if you come out peacefully, you got my word. You got that. I was like, that’s your word as a man? He’s like, that’s my word as a man. So, I surrendered peacefully after eight hours.



JACK:	Holy mackerel. Okay…



NATHAN:	And I didn’t know how close I was for them — they were fixing to come in. In the next five minutes, they were fixing to come in and get me. So, I probably would have been dead.



JACK:	Yeah. Did they honor their word?



NATHAN:	The Secret Service agent did. As soon as — I didn’t even get put in handcuffs by the Dallas police. When he arrested me, he put zip ties on me and put them in the front and let me sit in the front seat with him when we left. When we drove off, I was in the front seat with him and another agent was behind me. He gave me his cell phone. He said, call your kids. We got down to the grassy knoll where Kennedy got shot. He said, you’re not gonna try to run, are you? I said, nope. He said, if you do, I’m gonna shoot you in the back. He let me sit down on the grassy knoll and smoke three cigarettes before he took me to Lew Sterrett.



JACK:	Lew Sterrett Justice Center is the main Dallas county jail. As you could guess, he was facing tons and tons of charges at this point. They were slapping him with charges of things he didn’t even do. Like, any time that there was a stolen credit card incident in Texas, he was getting charged with that.



NATHAN:	There was — actually, one of the computers that had been purchased from us they ended up finding somewhere or something, and they found out it had some child pornography on it. But my lawyer had a special investigator, and somebody had bought the laptop before us and taken it back to Walmart, and then my shopper purchased it.



JACK:	Okay, so at this point your brother’s in jail, his ex-wife Elizabeth’s in jail, you’re in jail.



NATHAN:	Yep. And Corey Davis, the snitch, is in jail, too.



JACK:	Corey Davis; let me see what I have on him. So, this guy was an accomplice.



NATHAN:	He was the one that was getting credit cards that morning from me when we got raided originally.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	He lived across the street from me. Dude couldn’t feed him kids. Him and his wife lost their job and couldn’t feed their kids, pay their bills, or nothing. So, I put them on and then they tell on me.



JACK:	Oh, he was your neighbor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, he was cashing for you, and when the police got to him, he got scared. He just got scared for his own sake, man. He was like, I don’t want to go to prison forever. What do you want to know? That’s the thing about snitching, is everyone says don’t snitch, don’t snitch. But then when it’s like, well, you got forty years in prison or you can snitch, then suddenly the reality hits people.



NATHAN:	I gotta look — I call him my little brother ‘cause me and my ex-wife raised him. It’s her little brother. He just got five years for murder, but…



JACK:	What?



NATHAN:	The dude that was with him did the murder, and my little brother didn’t know he was doing the murder.



JACK:	I see.



NATHAN:	The dude got out and blew somebody’s head off on a motorcycle, and my little brother only got five years. But he got like fifteen years because he had a whole bunch of other shit, too. But they knew he wasn’t part of the murder, so they only gave him five years for it.



JACK:	Have you ever diagnosed yourself for any mental situations like ADHD or anything?



NATHAN:	Diagnosed myself, or what…?



JACK:	Well, not diagnosed yourself, but have you been — are you officially anything, like ADHD, or…?



NATHAN:	Yeah, I have ADHD, dyslexia, intermittent explosive anger disorder, PTSD, extreme PTSD, extreme anxiety. Did I say bipolar 1 and 2 yet?



JACK:	No.



NATHAN:	Yeah, I got them. That’s what they — that’s what I’ve been diagnosed with by the doctor.



JACK:	What’s some of your favorite music, musicians?



NATHAN:	Tupac.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	I listen to rock music, like death metal, like heavy, heavy, heavy death metal. You know, like — you know, Rammstein, Slipknot…



JACK:	Yeah, okay. I was gonna say Slipknot.



NATHAN:	Break-shit music.



JACK:	ICP?



NATHAN:	Yeah, yeah. I went to an ICP concert. They were fucking hilarious, bro.



JACK:	Oh my gosh, I bet they are. A bunch of clowns.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Okay, where were we? Oh yeah, December 2010, Nathan, his brother, and his brother’s wife Elizabeth were all in jail, and Nathan’s brother and Elizabeth had kids.



NATHAN:	His son with Elizabeth is with his grandparents, and then his other son with his other wife is with his first baby mama. My three kids are with my baby mama. But when I got arrested, my kids were with my parents. When my wife left me, she left me with no car, no nothing, and three kids. Like, she paints this whole story. She got — everybody pictured this whole story that I’m the evil person. You abandoned me and the kid.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	I feel like I abandoned them eventually anyway because I went to prison for so long, so I feel like I abandoned them too, though, and I did. But at the time, when you have no means of making money — bro, when I was seventeen, I got my first computer job working for Southwestern Bell doing tech support for Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell, and Pacific — and Southwestern Bell. I used to work for Microsoft, bro. I used to work for Verio web hosting. I worked in a network operations center. I could have had a good, promising computer career, but I fucked it all off because of drugs. I was doing cocaine, lines of cocaine, when I worked for EarthLink internet. You know EarthLink?



JACK:	Yeah, I remember EarthLink. Dial-up.



NATHAN:	Yeah. I was doing lines of cocaine on the desk with the trainer. The trainer…



JACK:	The trainer; what?



NATHAN:	The trainer from Seattle would come down, come get me; we’d go to Oak Cliff, get him some cocaine. He’d smoke the cocaine on top of weed in his tobacco pipe, and I’d do lines of cocaine on the table. He was like, I’m gonna go get Michael. We’re gonna go work on some training material. We’d do all this on the clock.



JACK:	Crazy motherfucker. Okay…[laughs]. I think…



NATHAN:	I hacked EarthLink, bro. They tried to fuck us, bro. I was — I crashed their stock, bro. This is like…



JACK:	What?



NATHAN:	Yeah. I crashed their stock, bro. So, it was the EarthLink, MindSpring merger, right? Sprint took over, basically, ‘cause they own eighty percent of EarthLink. Back when they had that short — URL shortener called cjb.net — you remember CJB?



JACK:	No.



NATHAN:	It was a URL shortener. So, I made elssucks.cjb.net. I worked at a network operations center, bro. So, I had access to the server room and everything, you know? So, I got into the company — the president of the company’s e-mails, and him and the vice president and people on the board and shit, they were talking about how they fuck over their customers, how fucking — ‘cause their service was shit, bro. It was trash. It was just — anyway, so, I posted these documents, all this confidential information about how they got hacked one time and they didn’t report it to nobody. But back then you didn’t have to. So, I released all this. I put it on the cjb.net website, just a little HTML thing with some snippets from the e-mails, and fucking — I started spamming fucking MSN and Yahoo stock message boards. Their fucking stock went from like, $32 down to $18.



JACK:	Damn.



NATHAN:	‘Cause this company comes in here and they’re now — got all these new employees, and now they’re trying to renege on what they said they were gonna do. You know what I’m saying? I’m always for the little man. You know what I’m saying? I always stand up for the little man. But I never went back.



JACK:	I bet you didn’t, yeah. Man, we get off track fast at this one. Alright, yeah, still, Nathan, his brother, and Elizabeth are all in jail. Elizabeth pleads guilty and his brother pleads guilty, and the two boys actually said that they coerced Elizabeth into doing it, so this meant she got less time in jail. So, she ended up serving two years in jail. His little brother got four years in prison, and the last one to face trial was Nathan.



NATHAN:	[Music] I pled guilty. Conspiracy to commit access device fraud, and then went to prison.



JACK:	He was sentenced to four years and three months in prison, three months more than his brother.



NATHAN:	Yeah, I ended up doing all of it. My brother ended up doing all of it, too. You know, I mean, I went to prison, bro; I lived like a rock star the whole time I was in prison. I stayed high on K2 and drinking moonshine.



JACK:	What the hell is a K2? That’s a vitamin.



NATHAN:	No, K2 is like synthetic marijuana.



JACK:	Oh my god. Okay, so you do your four years, three months in prison. You get out, and then you’re a good boy after that and you’ve reformed — self-rehabilitation in prison.



NATHAN:	Yeah, right. Got out — I got out of the halfway house. When I got out of the halfway house, I got seven violations the first week I was out.



JACK:	For drugs.



NATHAN:	Driving while intoxicated, getting caught in a stolen car, fucking — but it wasn’t a stolen car; it was a rental. It just didn’t get taken back when it was supposed to. But being out of district, not reporting in to my probation officer — she told me, Mr. Michael, do you want to go to jail? Do you want to go back to jail or do you want to go to…? Then they put me on code shit, the color-code shit, and I had to go to an intensive drug treatment program. Got one-on-one counseling for six months straight.



JACK:	Now, I think a lot of people might have gotten out early because of good behavior. It’s surprising to me that you had to serve the entire sentence. There was no good behavior for you.



NATHAN:	Oh, I discharged. I discharged my federal sentence and my state sentence. I stayed in medium close custody. I’m a knucklehead. I got — but I didn’t listen to the police in the world. Why am I gonna go to prison and start listening to them?



JACK:	To get out early and see your kids.



NATHAN:	Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about that. The way they treat people in prison, bro, is inhumane. So, if they treat me like an animal, why ain’t you gonna act like an animal?



JACK:	Okay.



NATHAN:	So, if they leave me in a cage twenty-three hours a day and they let me out an hour a day, what am I gonna do when I get out for that hour? It’s like locking a dog in a cage for twenty-three hours a day and letting him out.



JACK:	Alright, so, you get out of prison and how does it go wrong after that?



NATHAN:	Well, I got a girl pregnant and I had like — I was at the hotel and, bro, I was sitting there one day. I was like, man, I got three different bitches in three different rooms, not knowing what to do.



JACK:	In one hotel?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Man, you — what’s the secret to your rizz? How are you attracting so many of these girls?



NATHAN:	What’s crazy, bro, is my brother always asks me the same thing. He’s like, how do you get so much pussy? How do you get so…? I don’t know, bro. I don’t go chasing pussy. Bro, it’s just like, I always — that’s what I always tell people. I pose and get chose. I just chill and be still, bro. It comes to me. It’s crazy.



JACK:	You pose and get chose. I’m gonna try that. I’m gonna see if it works.



NATHAN:	I mean, it works. Me and my girlfriend broke up four months ago, and she’s been dragging me for four months. I finally cut her completely off about a week ago, and I got two chicks already. I’m forty-five and I’m still upgrading.



JACK:	[Laughs] You — okay, so you’re in a hotel with three different ladies in the hotel and you’re looking at it like, man, how am I supposed to juggle this? Keep going.



NATHAN:	Yeah. [Music] So, it’s like — and then the guy that was down here at the lake with us, he was originally involved in our fucking fed case, but he didn’t — he was one of the ones that didn’t tell, stayed stiff, and — starts fucking with him again. Then me and him are out in fucking Fort Worth and we’re going to Chili’s ‘cause they had them kiosks where you just swipe right at the fucking table.



JACK:	Yeah, so, despite serving four years in prison, Nathan went right back to carding, getting stolen credit cards, printing them on blank cards, and using them to buy stuff in the stores himself. He was doing all his old tricks, wearing disguises and buying gift cards from Home Depot and Walmart. Oh yeah, and using them to get free food at Chili’s. Since the ordering system is right there at the table, you could just keep trying different cards until you find one that actually works and pays for your food without the server getting suspicious, right? So, he’s riding in the car with this guy and they’re on their way to get food at Chili’s.



NATHAN:	Like, we’re turning on to get on to the highway, and he runs a red light with three cops parked at the red light right across the street. The dude ended up being a snitch, right? My brother’s got a couple pending felonies ‘cause of him right now, and my brother kept fucking with this dude. I told my brother the whole time that he snitched, he snitched. ‘Cause everybody — you know, people talk.



JACK:	You said he was a stiff guy, though, and he didn’t, though.



NATHAN:	But he ended up — he’s not stiff now.



JACK:	Oh.



NATHAN:	No, he was just in another state in Virginia or somewhere, and he was in there for like, three felonies like larceny and a whole bunch of other shit. He said they gave him time served in county for felonies. Where the fuck do they do that at?



JACK:	Oh, yeah. County is not a felony place.



NATHAN:	You can’t serve your time — you can’t serve felony time in county.



JACK:	No.



NATHAN:	I don’t think anywhere. I mean, I studied federal…



JACK:	I can imagine maybe a few weeks before they transfer you to the right place, but not your whole duration.



NATHAN:	Yeah, but you might get time credited towards your felony, but you’re not gonna do your felony time there.



JACK:	I agree with you.



NATHAN:	Then he went to Alabama and then he…



JACK:	So, was this guy…?



NATHAN:	… and then he moved back here.



JACK:	Okay, so was this guy high or stoned when he was driving around like that?



NATHAN:	Yeah, of course we were. I was high on GHB and he was high on fucking meth and GHB, probably.



JACK:	[Music] Alright, so, you’re leaving Chili’s, you’re speeding through…



NATHAN:	No, we’re going to Chili’s.



JACK:	Oh, going to chillis, going through red lights, right passed cop cars. Keep going.



NATHAN:	Cops pull us right — pulled in right behind us, turned the lights on. He pulls right over. Doesn’t even fucking drive feet. He slams on the brake, pulls over. I got rid of all my cards, bro. The cops didn’t catch me with no cards. They didn’t catch me with no plastic.



JACK:	You threw it out the window?



NATHAN:	Nah, I put them down the side of the window down into the door.



JACK:	Oh, smart. Yeah, right in the glass. Okay.



NATHAN:	Yeah, yeah. They didn’t catch me with no cards. They didn’t even catch me with no gift cards. I got rid of everything. They caught them — they caught my co-dependence with everything. I got eight years. They got ten years deferred probation. Probation has never been a option for me. They’ve never given me probation or offered me probation.



JACK:	Wait, so when the car got pulled over, is that when you went to jail, or you got off?



NATHAN:	Yeah, I went to jail that night, all three…



JACK:	Well, how? Because you didn’t have the cards. How did they know it was you?



NATHAN:	The cops got the receipts. They were just — the car is packed full of shit.



JACK:	Oh, yeah.



NATHAN:	That was just the last place we went, was Home Depot. So, we just got all this shit. They ended up opening up a box, a security camera box. We got the MSR in it and shit. They just — they run my name and they see what I was in federal prison for, and they’re like, what’s access device fraud? That’s what they always ask me every time I get pulled over. What’s access device fraud? You ever lose your credit card or it gets stolen? [Laughs]



JACK:	It’s interesting how vivid Nathan’s memories are in those moments right before being arrested. That must be like a flash bulb moment for a lot of people, you know? Like, you remember it so perfectly clear. It’s almost like those are the last moments of freedom that his brain holds onto, or maybe he replays those moments again and again in his head to try to think what he could have done differently. Anyway, the cops found swiping equipment in the car and quickly put the pieces together that he was still doing swiping. So, they arrested him and took him to jail again. This time he pled guilty, and they sentenced him to eight years in prison. The main crime they were saying he did is that he swiped a stolen card at Home Depot and bought $2,200 worth of gift cards. [To Nathan] Okay, so this is the second time you’re going to prison?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	Eight years they put you in for for $2,200? That’s a lot for just such a small amount.



NATHAN:	I mean, but they know that I was doing more than that, though.



JACK:	So, what’d they…? I mean…



NATHAN:	It’s not — Texas — you know how fucked up the legal system is. It’s fucked up in every state, I’m sure.



JACK:	 It is, but what were they saying your charges were? It wasn’t just the $2,200.



NATHAN:	For swiping for $2,200 — they charged me with engaging in [inaudible] criminal activity.



JACK:	Mm-hm. But…



NATHAN:	So, it was a first-degree felony.



JACK:	The first one was they were saying you did a million dollars in damage. What were they saying here?



NATHAN:	They didn’t say nothing. They just said $2,200 worth of shit from fucking…



JACK:	It’s just so hard that there’s eight years in prison for $2,200 stolen.



NATHAN:	Tell me about it. But it’s ‘cause they didn’t charge me — see, like, if I would have got caught in Dallas, bro, they would have charged me with credit card fraud and abuse. It would have been a state jail felony, a maximum of two years.



JACK:	Mm-hm.



NATHAN:	But since I was out there and I got caught with two other people, they’re doing this shit in Texas now and they’re charging people with basically conspiracy in the state. It’s crazy. At that time it’s not a dollar amount anymore. See, so, it goes up and higher towards how much the dollar amount it is. But once you’re charged — once you get that enhancement of engaging in [inaudible] criminal activity, it’s enhanced from a second-degree felony to a first-degree felony, and then therefore, more time.



JACK:	Geez, man. Okay…



NATHAN:	They were trying to give me fifteen, bro.



JACK:	Fifteen…



NATHAN:	My home boy paid $10,000 for a lawyer for me in the state, and they came down to eight. So, I took the eight.



JACK:	And you went to prison for eight years.



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	And self-reformed while there, and got out. Now you’re a good boy.



NATHAN:	Now I’m a good boy.



JACK:	Okay. We made it.



NATHAN:	We made it.



JACK:	Is it true? Are you doing good now?



NATHAN:	Everything I do now is ethical.



JACK:	Okay. So, that’s…



NATHAN:	But, you know, it took all that and all the trauma that I went through; what happened to my kids while I was in prison, my dad dying while I was in prison, and everything for me to finally wake up.



JACK:	What happens to your dad?



NATHAN:	My dad died when I was in prison, bro. It was horrible. Like, two worst fears — something happened to my kids and I’m not being there when I was in prison, and then something happened to one of my parents when I was in prison. Something happened to my kids while I was in prison and my dad died when I was in prison. My two worst fears came to fruition while I was in prison the second time.



JACK:	How did your dad die?



NATHAN:	He had a heart attack, I think. He was in the hospital. His blood was septic and shit. He had a bad heart. He had health conditions for like, fifteen years, pretty much his heart. He wouldn’t quit eating salt, bro.



JACK:	That’s awful, man. I’m sorry you went through that.



NATHAN:	Yeah. That — you know, he always promised he’d be there and shit. At the end of that, I took peace in it because I knew my dad loved me and I know he knows I loved him. So, I find peace in it in that. But I never asked the questions that you always want to ask your dad when you get older, you know?



JACK:	Yeah, yeah.



NATHAN:	Never got to ask him the questions.



JACK:	Okay. Goddamn.



NATHAN:	It’s crazy. That’s just a snippet. That’s just one moment. That’s just a blip on the radar. Guys mature at a lot older ages than women. I don’t think it finally clicked for me until I was about thirty-eight.



JACK:	So, did you serve all eight years?



NATHAN:	Yeah.



JACK:	So, that’s…



NATHAN:	And I went back for a violation after that, and they fucking held me for another fucking four months. Cocksuckers.



JACK:	For a violation, yeah. So, that’s four years plus eight years. That’s twelve years.



NATHAN:	With the extra time that I had to do for the violation, all the extra days and shit, it’s closer — it was pretty much about thirteen years total.



JACK:	Yeah, thirteen years. I was thinking, you have three kids now, and two of those were there for the first one and one was there for the second, right? So, that’s…



NATHAN:	Well, no. All three of them were there. My sixteen-year-old that’s here with me today, she was there. She was like, one year and two months when I got arrested and went to the feds.



JACK:	For the first time.



NATHAN:	So, I missed her a whole life. I missed her whole life.



JACK:	Yeah, yeah.



NATHAN:	The middle one was three when I first got locked up, and the oldest one was six when I first got locked up. All my kids are three years apart.



JACK:	Yeah, that’s a huge gap to not see — that must be really hard.



NATHAN:	That’s the hardest part right there. That’s the hardest part, ‘cause you can’t ever get the time back. Now they’re grown and doing their own thing, so you don’t get the time that you want. You know what I mean?



JACK:	Yeah, they’re on their own schedule now.



NATHAN:	Yeah. But, you know, I’m in their life and we have good relationships. At least, I do — I have good relationships with the youngest and the oldest, for sure. The middle one, she still has a lot of resentment. But she’ll get there. Their mother painted a bad picture of me. She made me look like the monster, and what it was is we were both young and stupid at the end of the day, you know, and we both made bad decisions. Neither one of us was perfect. That’s the reality of it. But I take responsibility for all of it because I’m the man. You know what I mean?



JACK:	Okay. Yeah, I mean, the mom was part of that Walmart scam, anyway. So, I know that she’s not…



NATHAN:	Yeah, and we both cheated on each other and all that shit. You know.



JACK:	What a crazy story.



NATHAN:	 I know, man. Like, fucking — and alls I want to do now is like — when we were kids, bro, growing up, we didn’t have nobody to look up to. We didn’t have hackers that fucking been doing this shit their whole lives to look up to, ‘cause it started with us.



JACK:	Wait, are you telling me you’re gonna be the — you want to be someone that people look up to?



NATHAN:	I want to be the one that helps save the world, and I want to help kids. I want to help children, bro. I want to help kids.



JACK:	You…



NATHAN:	I want to make the world a better place. I’m gonna come out with the first jailbreak for the fucking robots, bro. You better buy my shit.



JACK:	[Laughs]



NATHAN:	I’ll start pre-selling the jailbreak for robots right now. [Laughs]



JACK:	Okay, you’re gonna save us from the robots.



NATHAN:	I mean, who else is gonna save us from the digital world?



JACK:	That could be a fair redemption arc.



NATHAN:	When the robots turn on us and the computers turn on us, who’s gonna save us? It’s not gonna be fucking Joe down the street that’s working on your car.



JACK:	[Laughs]



NATHAN:	It’s not gonna be the cook at McDonald’s that’s making your burger.



JACK:	It’s gonna be you.



NATHAN:	You know what I mean? But not just me; it’s gonna be all of us.



JACK:	Okay. I will buy your shit when it comes out.



NATHAN:	Or the robots could just take over and just kill us all.



JACK:	No, you’ve gotta save us now. I’m hoping you’re gonna do it.



NATHAN:	According to AI, we have a fifty percent chance to survive AI and we have a fifty percent chance to survive robots.



JACK:	Okay. I think if you’ve survived all this, then you’ve got a fair chance of surviving the rest of whatever’s coming. I don’t know how you made it this far.



NATHAN:	I mean, ‘cause I wake up every day with a smile on my face, and no matter what happened to me before…



JACK:	How many times did you come close to dying in your life?



NATHAN:	 I was in a coma when I first got out. I had overdosed, and by the time I got to the hospital, I was breathing at thirty percent. So, they put me in a induced coma. When I tried waking up, I went crazy on them and tried fighting them all. I couldn’t feel my legs, so I sat up in my bed and — I thought I was having flashbacks when I was in prison. I ripped my restraints off and everything. They had to have like, eight people hold me down and hit me with like, three things to put me to sleep. Then, fucking, they got off of me and they started tying me back up, and I woke back up on their bitch ass.



JACK:	Jesus. Okay, so that was one time being close to death. Any other times?



NATHAN:	When I was probably about fifteen. I was huffing some air from — you know, I had a little Airsoft gun that — to paint model cars with.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	I was huffing the air and my dad woke me up, and I was choking on my throw up. My bed was covered in throw up and I was laying on my back. I would have died if my dad didn’t wake up and come get me.



JACK:	Yeah, see, this is what I mean. You’ve survived all these things. Not only that, but all the shootings in your neighborhood and probably the stabbing in prison.



NATHAN:	I’ve been fucking stabbed. I’ve been shot and stabbed. Prison was worse. Like, when we first got to Leavenworth, there was fixing to be a riot between the Serranos and the whites and — over at TB.



JACK:	Yeah.



NATHAN:	I mean, they’re probably about at least — we made probably about two hundred shanks that night, like vampire stakes but knives.



JACK:	Geez. That was your arrival, and they’re like, you gotta join a side. Come on, we’re fixing for war. Jesus Christ, what a way…



NATHAN:	Exactly. Either that or you’re gonna get — it’s just like in the war. You’re in a shark full of tanks. You’re either gonna be a guppy or you’re gonna become a shark.



JACK:	Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m saying, is if you’ve survived all that, then I think that you’re good for the rest of your life. You’ve cashed in all your lucky chips.



NATHAN:	[Inaudible] for years now, so my recidivism rate of going back to prison is pretty fucking low.



JACK:	Yeah, yeah, and your survival rate is pretty high. You’ve gone through the worst things of your life and you’re still doing good. I mean, you’re still alive.



NATHAN:	I mean, I’m not gonna — I’m still struggling. You know what I’m saying? But I’m free. I got my freedom, I got my health, and I got the people that love me around me. You know what I’m saying? So, that’s my [inaudible]. That’s my Zen.



JACK:	I say we leave it as that, walking off into the sunset with your loved ones near you.



NATHAN:	It was good talking to you.



JACK:	Alright, man. Thanks for sharing your story.



NATHAN:	You have a good one.



JACK:	Bye.



NATHAN:	Bye.



(Outro):	[Outro music] Thank you so much to Nathan Michael for sharing this story with us. What a wild life he’s lived, and he’s only forty-five now. So, he’s got a great, big life ahead of him, and I’m certain it’ll be drama-free from here on out. I’ve got your next favorite shirt all ready. It’s at shop.darknetdiaries.com. Have you looked at the shirts there? If not, why not? I mean, I’m telling you right now, I made a special shirt just for you, and I want you to go there and see if you can find it. It will be the one that you absolutely love as soon as you see it.



This show is also brought to you by our premium supporters who donate each month to show their support for this show. Premium supporters get an ad-free version of the show, and they get eleven bonus episodes that they can listen to right now. If you think this show brings you value, please consider supporting it. Just go to plus.darknetdiaries.com. This show is made by me, little byte, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the key-stroker, Tristan Ledger, mixing done by Proximity Sound, and our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Knock knock. Who’s there? Dishes. Dishes who?
Dish is Darknet Diaries.



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Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes