Original subtitles

When people think of Chicago, they think of the skyscrapers, they think of

Michael Jordan, but there's another side to Chicago.

I've been a gangster city since a long time ago.

As a kid, I always wanted to be a gangster.

That decision will haunt me forever.

I look at my Mexican prison story as how I came in as a drug lord and

I left a drug addict.

But the story doesn't end there.

My name is Julio Cesar Almanza, but my friends call me JC.

I was born on the south side of Chicago in 1977.

When I grew up, it was very, very dangerous.

There was a shooting every day.

I saw people's, you know, heads getting blown off and stuff like that.

I thought chaos was normal.

My childhood was stolen from me.

I grew up with very little parental supervision in my life.

I was always running the streets. I didn't really have a curfew.

I was looking to have some kind of father figure in my life.

I would look at all these gang members in my area, the way they dressed, the

they walked, the way that people respected them, that feeling of

feeling of being part of something.

I wanted what they had.

I wanted it all.

These guys are always looking to recruit on the streets. So if they see a kid

that's constantly hanging out, they befriend you.

They made me feel accepted, made me feel part of something.

So that's why I was willing to do whatever I had to do to make it.

I started doing delivery, small little dime bags.

I knew there was drugs in the bag.

I just didn't care.

Any kind of pat in the back felt good, so I would take it even if it came with

price tag on it.

I was heading in the wrong direction and going really fast at full speed.

It's 1993.

I'm nearly 17, and the only thing I have in my life is the gang life.

Not having education, I felt like I just had to do whatever I had to do to

survive.

I'm selling drugs. I'm hanging out on the street.

It was violence, drugs, gangs, murder.

That was my life every day.

I didn't think I was going to live past 21.

If I wanted to survive, I needed to move up the ranks.

I wanted respect, power.

I wanted more.

I wanted more.

One day, a girl came up to me. Her name was Valerie.

Her boyfriend was the boss of my street gang.

What's up, Val?

What's up, yourself?

Got a proposition for you.

She said, I need you to drive down to Mexico.

Pick up some weed and drive it back to Chicago.

So you'd be down?

Hard to say.

I looked at it as an opportunity.

I didn't even ask how much. I just said yes.

Be back here tomorrow morning.

I wasn't thinking about no dangers.

I was young, cocky. I thought that I was going to be the biggest drug lord in

Chicago.

The next day, I was really excited.

And I said, am I just going to put the weed in the trunk of the car?

But she said, no.

We're going to put it in the gas tank.

The tank is humongous in that car, so you're able to fit a big metal box in

gas tank.

I was excited, happy, but also a little bit scared.

Just a little bit.

I jumped on the 55, and all you could see is Chicago getting smaller and

smaller.

I knew this was going to be a stepping stone for me.

I was going to Apatingán, Mexico.

I felt like a man.

I felt like I was taking control of my life.

Finally arrived to my destination.

When I pulled into the town, I was seeing all these guys in trucks with AK

This town was owned by the narcos. There was no question about it.

I knew that I arrived at the right place.

I found a hotel.

My instructions were to just check in and wait.

The next day in the morning, I hear a knock on the door.

I was already up. I was ready to go.

It's a tall Mexican, older guy.

He looked a little scary, I'm not going to lie.

He told me his nickname was Cicero.

I could tell by the way that he looked in his eyes that this guy didn't play

around.

He said to me, we're going to take the car, we're going to modify it, we'll let

you know when it's ready.

You stay put.

Comprende?

In my head, I thought that I was rising to the top, but he thought I was just

some young American punk, just some gang member.

It was a real wake -up call.

I wanted to show them that I was someone that could be trusted, so I just stayed

put.

The next day, I went to his ranch.

The ranch is where they grew the marijuana. They processed it.

I got to see how it was grown, how it was cut, how it was dried.

They compacted it into small blocks to be able to fit 30 to 50 kilos in a gas

tank.

Once the brick is wrapped up, They dip it in oil to avoid the smell, and then

they put it in the metal compartment, and then they weld it shut.

It was amazing to me.

I wanted to learn it all, because one day I was going to do the same thing.

I didn't want to be a gang member no more. I wanted to be a narco.

Finally, the car was ready.

It was clean. They even detailed it, and it didn't smell nothing.

This was 40 kilos.

Look, Cicero explained to me that there's a lot of dangers.

Getting robbed by other cartels, even getting robbed by the cops.

If I could get killed.

He just told me to be careful.

I was on my way.

There was a lot of things that could have went wrong.

So I started getting nervous.

But when I got waved past two checkpoints, my head got a little bit

said to myself, this is going to be a piece of cake, a cakewalk.

You start to see the border come up. You start to see the Mexican flag, the

American flag.

And you come to a complete stop.

You smell the traffic.

You see the guys out there selling stuff.

There was police there. There was military.

And I'm gripping the steering wheel really hard because I had been driving

fast through Mexico.

And it hit me.

I'm doing this. I have 40 kilos.

And your heart starts to race a little bit. You start getting anxious.

I was trying to stay cool, but all of a sudden I see a cop walking towards me

with the dog.

They were coming really close to the car.

This is a crucial moment. There's no way to get out of it.

There's cars behind you, so you can't reverse.

You're a sitting duck.

I started to feel paranoid.

People are staring at you from other cars like, that guy has drugs.

I start gripping the steering wheel a little bit harder.

Almost want to bend it in half.

At this point, I'm praying.

I just want the dog to keep moving.

The next 10 seconds, I'm either going to drive away or I'm going to go to

prison.

I knew what I had inside that gas tank, and I knew that if I got caught, I was

going to go to prison for a long time.

After he stepped away with the dog, a sense of relief came, but I couldn't

no attention to myself, so I couldn't really celebrate.

I still had to make it into the United States.

Once I got to the U .S. crossing point, they asked me if I was an American.

I said, yes, I'm an American.

I show him my ID, and he just waves me in.

All the stress and all the relief just came out of me. This

big smile just came out of my face.

My heart was racing, but it was more for excitement.

Once I started seeing Chicago come back into view, my smiles just started

getting bigger and bigger.

My first question is, how much am I getting paid for this?

I counted the money like 100 times that day.

It was $12 ,000.

I felt like Tony Montana.

I told Valerie I wanted to go again.

I had a feeling you'd say that.

And I was on the road the next day.

It was the beginning of a new chapter in my life.

After the first one, it became a regular thing.

I was gone every month.

It started getting easier because I was doing it more frequently.

Coming up to the border, seeing the agent waving you by, it almost became

second nature.

The more

I saw Cicero, the more I won him over.

For being such a young kid, Cicero made me feel important.

He said, keep doing what you're doing, you're going to make moves.

Every time I would go down, there was always a party to go to.

Cicero asked me, have you ever done coca lavada?

Lavada means pure.

I had never done anything like that.

It was very uplifting.

I feel like Superman.

It started changing my life because I started having too much money.

I mean, what 17 -year -old kid is sitting there putting money in

So I started finding ways to spend it.

I had access to huge amounts of cocaine, and the more money I had, the bigger my

habit got.

I would wake up, do a bump, and I would get my day started.

It was like my cup of coffee.

My head got big. I was going to go places. I was going to move up the

Sister Brooke went from a boss to a friend, to like a father, mentor in my

It was like joining a family.

You are one of us now. La familia.

I felt like I was part of something. I thought I was about to be a millionaire.

This boy is going to make a lot of money.

I was flying high, but my life was taking a deep turn into addiction.

At first you think it's helping you, but then it becomes a

crutch.

It got up to the point where I was running around the whole house with a

kilo in my hand, just sniffing it out.

That's how bad it got.

In my head, I was holding it together, but once I started letting cocaine take

over, I started getting really sloppy.

You're late.

This was my seventh trip too much ago.

When I got to a ranch, I was pushing them to get the car ready faster.

Yo, man, are you done yet?

I felt like a superhero, but I didn't look like one.

Hey, hey, hey, mano.

Huh?

Look at me. Hey.

I had bags under my eyes.

Cicero said to me, why don't you stay here?

I didn't want to stay in Mexico. I wanted to go back and make more money.

I thought that I was going to be the biggest narco that Mexico had seen.

I told him, let me get this car back to Chicago.

I'll come back down and take a break.

I promise.

He just trusted me. He gave me the keys.

Late at night, I'm driving like bad out of hell.

I was constantly doing cocaine and drinking as I was driving.

As I started getting closer to the checkpoint, I started seeing the lights.

at first, I'm like, oh, you got this. You've done this 100 times.

But something seemed different this time.

I started to notice the difference in uniform.

They all had high -caliber weapons.

This was the military.

I started getting more anxious.

And then they told me to come in.

So that's when it got real.

I've done so much coke that my nose is constantly running.

I was trying to keep it together, but I just couldn't stay still. And he asked

me, I started to sweat right there and then.

I just told him that I'm scared of law enforcement.

That's why I get like that.

The soldier told me to put the car on the ramp.

I felt like driving with the car, not stopping.

But if I would have drove away, they would have probably shot the car up with

the high caliber weapons that they have.

And they would have been no me.

They started taking the screws off the gas tank.

The more I hear the wrench turning, the more my stomach's turning.

The tank was completely down.

They had found the drugs.

They turned to me and shouted, who did I work for?

Who are you driving this car for?

I knew that I was caught, but I didn't want to throw in the towel just yet. So

told him that it was for personal use.

He got very upset about that joke.

From that moment on, my life completely changed.

This is when the nightmare starts.

I knew I had messed up.

I thought that I was going to be big time.

But now I was going to have to fake the music.

They drove me to a small police station.

In my head, I'm still thinking that the cartel could pull their strings and get

me out of there.

So I called Cicero.

It was a very difficult phone call to make.

Yeah.

Hola. It's me.

Listen, something's happened.

He didn't need to express his disappointment. I could feel it.

Because you didn't get picked up by the local cops.

Whole different ballgame, amigo.

Cicero said to me, we can't pay them off.

What do you say? What are you talking about, Cicero? Don't you...

I feel betrayed.

They made it seem like they were going to always be there for me, no matter

what.

But it's all lies.

It's all lies.

In the morning, I'm on my way to the prison.

That's when the whole other nightmare started.

My whole world was about to be turned around.

I had heard that Mexican prisons were really bad.

But in reality, it's even worse.

I had never seen torture.

I had never seen people getting lynched.

I mean, it was a whole different world compared to the United States.

These guys were pretending to be my friend, but at the same time, they were

trying to see what I had in my bags.

I knew I was going to have to fight. I knew I was going to have to pretty much

make my stand.

Their leader asked me what size of shoe I wore.

I told him, not your size.

Big mistake.

He stabbed me in the back with an ice pick.

They took the bags, they took my shoes.

Everything started turning to a blur.

And that's it, I passed out.

Next thing you know, I wake up in the infirmary.

My lung was filling up with blood.

I'm going to die.

The doctor came running in.

They didn't put me to sleep or nothing. They just put the, stabbed me through

the lung.

So I pretty much got stabbed twice that day.

I had just been in that prison for 10 minutes before all this happened.

That was my welcome party.

The next day, I'm in the infirmary trying to recover.

I see this man walk in.

He has jewelry on, he has boots.

He has the whole look of a narco.

He's like, I heard you had a little incident.

And I was like... You

know, he keeps smiling, and I really didn't have nothing to smile about.

Oh, Gordo was

the boss of the prison.

Cicero? He's one of my wife's cousins.

So, we got your back.

He let me know that nobody else was going to mess with me.

I was going to go live with him.

Even though I was in prison, I was going to be taken care of.

A sense of relief came for the first time.

So this is where you're going to be.

El Gordo moved me right next to him where all the guys that had money lived

The money side had showers, hot water, single cells, very clean.

But when protection is given to you, you obviously know if you're from the

streets that there's no such thing as a free ride.

You have to bring something to the table or you can't be part of the team.

El Gordo said, The cartel didn't ask me to babysit you.

I was going to be one of his workers, selling cocaine.

At the time, I was just glad that I was surviving.

I didn't have to fight for my life.

But now I was working for some pretty evil, bad people.

One day, there was a guy coming into the prison. He was a pedophile.

Everybody was waiting at the front door with pipes, brooms.

Gordo just wanted to set an example.

I felt like I wanted to throw up.

El Gordo and his entourage were all laughing and, you know, taking part in

beating.

I've never heard somebody scream like that before.

Finally, someone came up from behind and put the broom through his body,

you know, through his anal cavity.

To this day, I can't get that vision out of my head.

Just seeing their faces and how they were enjoying the pain and the carnage,

blood.

This was my new family.

Months went by.

I started to see violence every day.

It was constantly happening.

And if anybody owed El Gordo money, it got sorted out pretty quick.

There's no guards inside that prison.

All the guards are on the wall.

So I sold coke all day.

I'm sick to sick.

El Gordo would give me an ounce, and I would, you know, sell it and just pay

back.

If you don't have money to do time in Mexico, you're going to do some really

hard time.

Unit 2 was for all the poor people.

There was always people in there begging for drugs or money.

I just thought they were garbage.

I started to think that because I had money, I thought that I was better than

them.

I'm very ashamed of how I acted in those days.

I was this lost kid thinking that it was okay to do bad things to other people

to survive, and I was wrong.

It all started affecting my soul because in the mornings when I would wake up

and look at myself in the mirror, I wouldn't recognize myself no more.

People getting beat up.

People getting killed.

It starts to wear you out.

The only thing I still held on to, I thought that I was only going to be in

Mexico for six months.

All the stories that I heard of all the Americans, they would transfer them out

pretty fast because of all the violence and everything that was happening.

But I was in my cell.

They called my name, Julio Almanza.

They walked me up towards the office.

There was somebody sitting at a desk.

I got my sentence.

There was no, do I plead guilty or none of that stuff.

I got 15 years.

I was screwed.

I started going through a deep depression.

I knew that if I stayed in Mexico to do the rest of those 15 years, I probably

wasn't going to stay alive much longer.

One day, there was a guy that came into the prison.

This was a big -time guy, and he started cooking crack.

All the big drug lords were smoking crack.

That was, like, the high -end drug to do.

And he's like, have you ever done a bazooka hit?

And I was like, no.

Oh, man, you've got to try this.

When I took the hit, my head just exploded.

It was a feeling that I had never experienced before.

When you do coke, it's just kind of like one cup of coffee.

Crack, it's 100 cups of coffee.

But it went away really fast, really fast, in seconds.

So then I wanted it again.

Give me another.

There was just no filling that void with that drug. The more you have, the more

you want to use.

Before I knew it, I was an addict.

I was getting up in the morning, and the first thing that came to my mind was

how I was going to get high.

I wasn't taking care of myself.

I wasn't sleeping well. I was not eating.

My 18th birthday came and went.

I didn't even notice.

It got to the point where I was using all the drugs and not paying back the

money that I owed.

Respected me now.

That was a total amount of $7 ,000. It was a lot of money in a Mexican prison.

You ain't over the line.

You listening?

One way or another, I was going to pay for it.

He told me that I was going to be moving to Unit 2.

I knew that this was it.

I started to get scared because that's where a lot of the murders happen, the

hangings, rapes.

Gordo just said, he's not going to survive in there.

Just let the prison kill him.

I pretty much felt like a dead man walking.

Inside the poor unit, the first thing that I noticed was that there was

of boogers on the floor, like spit.

It was dirty. It was nasty. It smelled in there. It was disgusting.

I was afraid that I was going to catch, like, some kind of disease because it

was a lot of sick people.

I put my stuff down.

And I asked one of the guys there whose mattress that was in the corner, and he

was like, anybody could use it.

I sat down.

I was itching.

Everybody started laughing.

And it was like thousands and thousands of bed bugs in a pile.

It was bad.

I couldn't sleep at night.

I was very scared.

There was roaches, there was rats.

The toilets were just holes in the floor.

Anybody left the hole uncovered at night, the rats would come up.

You could hear them at night.

I thought I had hit rock bottom.

It was long nights, long days.

My craving for drugs was really, really out of control.

I would see all the poor guys in that unit always with a sock that was wet

paint thinner, and they would inhale it through their mouth.

I asked the guy to let me borrow the sock so I could see what it was.

And when I inhaled it, it's a very different high.

You feel like you're in slow motion.

You're pretty much like a zombie.

It was numbing a lot of voices in my head.

It was just to numb and forget, just to keep living my days out pretty much.

Most of my life, I was the dealer. I was never the other guy on the other end.

And I realized that I was that person now.

I had nothing.

By now, I was losing hope.

I was starting to really think that I wasn't going to make it back to the

States.

I was so depressed, so done with life.

that I really didn't care no more.

I just wanted to find a quick solution to end this because I couldn't see

suffering for 15 years.

I just didn't have nothing to live for no more.

I thought it would be easier just to end it now.

I had seen people do it in there, so...

I figured, hey, you know, it can't be that hard.

But I just, I couldn't do it.

After that, I gave up on any kind of hope

that I had.

The guys in my unit started noticing that I wasn't eating.

They started taking care of me.

They started giving me food, making sure that I was okay.

Gracias.

Gracias.

I did a lot of bad stuff to a lot of people.

It made me feel really, really guilty on how I treated these

people when I became one of them.

Yeah.

To this day, I still feel it.

I still feel the guilt to this day.

I was in a very dark place, and it made me feel like I wasn't human.

But one day, one of the guards took me towards the office.

When I walked in, it was a young woman.

She gave me their business card.

I'm from the U .S. Consul.

My hands were shaking when I grabbed the paper.

They had a date for my transfer.

I was nervous. I was excited. I was

happy.

It gave me hope that I was going to make it out of here alive.

I think that paper saved my life.

The last six months, they went really fast.

I started to see light at the end of the tunnel, and I was very, very excited

about coming back to the States.

I remember the day that they called my name, and they told me the American

consul was there to pick me up.

I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

They told me, you better not try and run when we get to the airport.

And I was like, dude, I've been waiting for you guys to come and get me for four

years.

I want to go home.

It was one of my happiest moments of my life.

I just knew that I was safe.

So now I'm back in Chicago, and I was ready.

To make some changes in my life.

I wanted to find a job, but nobody was willing to give me a chance or hire me

because of my background.

We got to the point where I was struggling so much to find work that I

went back. I went back to doing what I knew how to do.

I started selling drugs again.

Why fight it?

Obviously, I didn't know how to do anything else, so.

I lost hope.

I just became the old JC again.

Before I knew it, I was back in prison again.

For many, many years, it was just a revolving door, in and out, in and out

prison.

Every time I came home, obviously I needed money, so I had to hustle again.

My 20s went really fast.

My 30s, gone.

I didn't think I was ever going to break the cycle.

I just thought that that was going to be the rest of my life.

I was just going to be some gang guy in a prison.

I seen so many old guys in there that were never going to come home.

It's when reality really hit me.

I didn't want to die in there.

And that's where I said, that's it, I'm done.

No more. Like, I'm going to change from this point on.

A real spark lit up in me.

I started working out, and it became one of my biggest addictions.

500 push -ups every day, 500 pull -ups, and that's just to warm up for my

breakfast.

I started thinking back with all the people that helped me when I was in the

prison in Mexico, in that unit.

They taught me one of the biggest lessons.

Treat others the way that you want to be treated.

A lot of the other prisoners started to see what I was doing, and I started

taking them under my wing.

I was mentoring a lot of the guys in there.

I started thinking about my future for the first time.

I just told myself that I wasn't going to waste the little that I had left.

And it was time to live.

I started on the wrong end of life.

I wish I would have had somebody around that could have put me on the right path

when I was a kid.

Rolling Strong is an organization that offers discipleship, mentoring, online

fitness training, gang intervention, and we put God first in everything that we

do.

Its aim is to educate guys like me to live a better life.

Most of these kids, what they're looking for, honestly, is love, to feel

connected and feel part of something.

Gangs. Give it to them, but it's...

It's not real.

It's so easy to do what's wrong, but it's very, very hard to be strong

sometimes. And my biggest message is just it's never too late.

We can create a change.

My dream and my goal is I want to build a center on 26th Street in my

neighborhood where I grew up.

I want to give those kids a fighting chance.

It's something deep that I have that I want to do.