Original subtitles

We were going down to Mexico, and we were buying steroids with counterfeit

money.

We were crossing over the border, and we had all this stuff packed in a very

tire.

I was thinking to myself, don't start acting weird.

Be calm.

I was not about to get caught there.

Not in Mexico.

This wasn't part of the plan.

I grew up in Turlock, California.

I was raised by my dad, my stepmom.

We had a pretty good upbringing.

When I was 15, I quit going to high school, and I started working for my dad

full -time.

My dad was a very hard worker, and he rubbed off on me.

When I was 20 years old, my girlfriend

moved in, and we had a child.

Everything was great.

But things got messed up between us, and we went our separate ways.

It crushed me.

I was kind of heartbroken.

I saw my daughter whenever I could.

At the time, I was trying to remove what had happened in my head, and I

really got into lifting weights.

It was pretty much the only thing I could take.

My aggression's out on.

We worked out six days a week.

That took my mind off of a lot of things.

It kept my mind busy.

A friend of mine from high school.

I hadn't seen this guy for a while.

He was kind of big.

And I was wondering what's going on here.

And so I got to talking with him, and he was like, yeah, you know, I do steroids

and stuff like that.

I was actually kind of surprised when I heard all that. I was like, really?

How did that work?

I was kind of interested in wanting to know more about it.

I could hook you up.

I go, well, let me think about it.

The whole point of lifting weights and stuff was to get bigger.

To feel better about ourselves.

To look better for women.

I told them, hey, that would be great.

They came in a bottle.

A 20 milliliter bottle.

Liquid.

Little rubber top.

You just poke the needle through and you pull some out.

into the syringe.

And that's how you use it.

We would inject ourselves in our hip.

Sometimes we would inject in our arms.

It was just a fast way to get really big.

A few weeks after, I had actually bought some steroids.

I had asked them, so where do you get this from?

Well, we get it from Mexico. We get it from the pharmacies there.

Hide them in a spare tire, and we drive back over the border. Take the 22 -hour

round trip.

Yeah, we're going to go down there in a couple weeks. We're going to go get some

stuff, and we're going to bring it back.

If you want, I think we have room for another person.

It sounded fun to me. It sounded like something off to take my mind off of

things.

It was like, yeah, I'll come with you guys.

Sure. Sounds like fun.

Cool.

The only problem was I was a little tight for money.

Hey, Jake.

My work is slowed down a little bit.

Hey, how you doing, man? Hey, dude. Good to see you.

One of the guys came over my house and he was like, you know, I want to show

something. And he pulled out this $5 bill.

I started looking at it, and I'm like, and?

And he's like, I made this last night.

Dude, that's not a real $5 bill. No.

It's a counterfeit.

I almost thought it was brilliant for some reason.

I kind of laughed. I thought it was funny.

Come on in. He showed me a big roll of old cash register paper.

You mark this stuff with a counterfeit pen, and it turns real.

And I'm thinking to myself,

It's amazing.

We set everything up in my kitchen.

It just happened really fast.

You threw in some $100 bills into the scanner.

You run a piece of paper through the printer.

You turn the paper around, print out the back side of it. This is great. I know.

So that way, when we tape the paper over the template,

We knew exactly where it was going to print out at.

What gave it that feeling of an actual bill was the hairspray.

Sprayed over the bill, and we would throw it inside the dryer with some

bundled up and let it run through there, you know, roughing them up a little bit

and make them not so perfect.

They felt and they looked so real.

I kind of felt like a little charge come out of it.

I was thinking to myself, man, this is kind of genius, you know.

The only way of telling the difference between those bills, if you held them up

in the air and you look for a hologram or that bar that runs through that bill,

going down to Mexico, and I'm like, well, how do they know?

I'm not going to have any problem.

And next thing you know, we all jumped in the car, headed down to Mexico.

I had taken about $1 ,500 of the counterfeit money.

I was going with a group of guys, and they had been doing it for years.

I had been to Nevada, and that was about it. So it was my first time actually

going out on a date.

I never thought about getting caught.

I never thought about any of the consequences of what I was doing.

I was going on a ride.

We drove into Tijuana. It was about like 9, 10 o 'clock in the morning.

Down in Mexico, you can buy whatever you want.

It was against the law to buy medication, but they don't ask you for a

prescription.

The pharmacy that we went to had kind of a sterile type of smell to it.

Both of the girls that worked there, they were in their 20s.

They all seemed to be professional.

I was like, hey, you know, we want to get some stuff here.

Can you get us 350 bottles?

So the lady was like, yeah, we can get that for you.

She said, I'll be right back.

And she walked out of the pharmacy.

Five, ten minutes later, she came walking back in there and she had two

two five -gallon buckets.

She was like, oh, you know, here we go.

It's all there.

Well,

how much, you know, per bottle? And she was like, $20 a bottle.

It's going to be $7 ,000.

And so everyone had pulled out money and gave it to her.

I paid for the fake ones.

She was sitting there counting it.

And I was thinking to myself, huh.

I was a little bit nervous.

She goes, okay, well, thank you.

And she put the money in the cash register, and I was like, oh, wow.

I got away with it.

I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe this.

Kind of got a little high off of it.

Everyone was like, wow, you know.

That's a trip.

They spent a bunch of counterfeit money in there.

And we walked out.

Can you believe that?

I did think to myself, you know what?

That was too easy.

We went and got some foil and some masking tape.

We were packing up all of our stuff, wrapping it all up, wrapping masking

around it, and then marking our names on it.

There was a lot of stuff in the car.

I knew it was illegal, so I was a little bit nervous about how much we were

bringing back.

I kind of thought to myself, man, is all this stuff going to fit inside that

spare tire?

And I turned around, and there was a cop there on a motorcycle.

I was in disbelief. I was like, is this really happening?

I was starting to break a sweat.

He was pulling up, and I kind of looked back into the car, and I was like, hey,

guys, there's a cop behind us.

There's a cop pulling up right now.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and put themselves over what they were

wrapping up. He pushed them out of the way a little bit.

Got off his motorcycle.

And he came walking up to the vehicle.

And looked in a little bit.

I was thinking to myself, oh man, don't get nervous here.

Don't start acting weird or shake or anything like that.

Be calm.

I was not going to get caught like this.

I took a deep breath, and I was like, okay, how am I going to get rid of this

guy?

I had a carton of cigarettes laying right there in the front seat.

I grabbed the carton of cigarettes, and I said, hey, do you want a carton of

cigarettes?

He kind of looked at me kind of funny, and I said, here, you know, take it.

The guy that spoke Spanish had walked around the car.

He said to him, you know, in Spanish, he wants to know if you want a carton of

cigarettes.

You tell him I don't smoke.

He just turned around and got back on his bike and he left.

The guys were like, Wow, I can't believe that we actually got away with that.

They were like, well, good job.

I just couldn't believe that everything was working out how it was supposed to

work out.

We headed down to the tire shop.

They unscrewed the tire, put all the air out, and they took the tire off the

rim. We started packing everything inside the tire.

They put the tire back on the rim and they put air in it.

We paid them $50 and we were on our way.

The guy that was driving was like, hey, you know, we need to find like a dirt

field. There's water dripping off the spare tire.

We want to make it look like it hasn't been touched.

So we were spinning out in this dirt doing donuts.

Dust was flying everywhere One

of the guys got out of the car and they

went and checked underneath to make sure everything looked normal Everything was

fine, let's go

There's so many cars that lined up there at the Tijuana border.

We're sitting in our car, and there's some guy selling a blanket, and another

guy is trying to sell you some hat or something.

It was my first time.

So I didn't really know what happens when you cross over.

A couple of the guys in the car, they were like, we're all pretty.

noticeable guys.

So a couple of us are gonna get out of the car and we're gonna walk over the

border.

No one told me that anyone was gonna jump out of the car and walk

across the border.

Why do I have to stay in the car?

I thought maybe they're like, oh, you know, he doesn't get nervous. He's good.

He stays calm.

That's why I was chosen to drive over the border.

That's cool, man. Don't worry.

We finally pulled up to the border.

And you just pull up. Guy comes walking out.

He kind of looked in the back seat through the window and looked to see if

was in the vehicle.

I was a little nervous inside about the whole situation.

I was like, stay calm and don't worry about it.

He was like, are you bringing anything back?

And the guy that was driving, he was like, oh, you know, we're just bringing

back a real bad hangover, you know? That's about it.

He started laughing. He was like, yeah, that's...

That's what happens when you come down here to New Mexico.

He just said, okay, guys, go on over.

See you later.

As soon as we crossed that line, everything felt normal.

We were all excited.

We were all ecstatic. We were high -fiving each other.

I just thought to myself, we got away with it. We did what we had to do. We're

here in the United States, and we're free.

Working out and seeing yourself get bigger and bigger and bigger, it was a

It made me feel good.

be addictive.

I wanted to do more.

The second time that I went down there, I printed about $3 ,000.

And everything just happened the same. We drove down there.

I walked in the pharmacy.

We spent the money.

Got everything we needed.

We came back.

It was pretty simple.

Some other medications that we were buying down there was synthetic

Hey, how you doing?

People were using it to relieve the pain from tearing muscles when you were

working out.

They would pay a lot of money for it.

And, well, if you have the money, then...

Sure, I'll sell it to you.

I was just trying to make myself happy.

Dude.

I met this girl, Stephanie.

Thank you.

She was a nice girl.

She was real fun to be around.

We had a good time.

I was trying to make the best out of my life.

I thought I was doing a good job.

Everything that I had...

All the morphine and stuff was all gone.

So I needed to go get more.

The guys that I normally went with, no one really needed to go down there.

So I was trying to figure out who was going to translate for me because I

know how to speak Spanish.

Jose, wait a minute.

Hey, man, what's up? My neighbor, he was a Mexican.

How are you doing, man? Doing fine, and you? Good to see you, man.

So what's up?

He came over to my house one day and I was like, would you like to go down to

Mexico with me?

Uh -huh.

Maybe you could translate for me.

Is this the owner of this money?

Yeah. And he goes, well, have you done this before?

And I go, yeah, I've been down there a few times.

Oh, yeah.

Fine.

He goes, are you sure it's going to work? And I go, yeah, it's fine.

I promise.

He goes, all right.

He goes, let's go then.

I told Stephanie, I go, hey, do you want to go?

Why not?

It looks good when you cross over the border.

It makes it look not so conspicuous.

Okay.

Because I got away with it two times before this, I got a little greedy.

Let's just say I...

were to buy $4 ,000 or $5 ,000 worth of this synthetic morphine, I would make

$25 ,000 off of it.

And I decided that I was going to buy as much stuff as I could.

Getting out all the money took me about a day and a half.

I ended up printing out about $11 ,000.

At about 6 o 'clock in the morning, we all jumped in the truck.

On

the

way down to Mexico, I pulled out all that money, and I was going through

single one of the bills.

Whatever bill did not look perfect, I put them behind the passenger seat of

car.

And I totally forgot about it.

About eight hours later, we got into Mexico.

Are we there yet?

We pulled into Tijuana.

And we found a pharmacy.

And we parked.

Our vehicle was not right out in front of the pharmacy.

She asked us, you know, how we were all doing.

Jose was like, oh, you know, we're doing good.

And she was like, is there anything I can get you?

He was like, yeah, we need to get some of this synthetic morphine and some of

these pills.

All good?

She went and she got all the stuff.

That's the stuff.

She said it was going to be $360 American dollars.

So I pulled out a whole wad of money, and I had handed

her four $100 bills.

She put the money in the cash register, and then she didn't have any change.

So she pulled out $100, and she walked to the back of the store and told one of

the other girls that worked there, hey.

I need to go to the bank and change one of these hunters for some change.

I felt like my whole stomach just got twisted, like someone grabbed it and

like, squeezing on it.

What happens if she were to come back here with the cops?

I was like, oh, man, this does not look good.

We need to leave.

We got to get out of here.

I was not about to get caught there.

Not in Mexico.

Started running.

Going the opposite way of our car.

We ended up walking around the whole entire building.

We looked down, and there was a bunch of cops out in front of the pharmacy.

I just felt like, oh, my God, thank God we weren't there.

I don't want them to start looking around for us.

I need to get out of here fast.

I have to get out of here.

I knew that I had a problem.

You got cop cars out in front of a pharmacy, and we're going to have to go

and get the car.

This wasn't part of the plan.

We didn't want to take any chances, so we ran a taxi down.

All three of us got in the back of the taxi, and we told them, hey, just drive.

We kind of told the driver to drive back by the pharmacy.

We got onto the road where the pharmacy was, and sure enough, there was cops

standing out in front of the pharmacy.

I told Jose, I was like, what we're going to do is, one of us are going to

out of the taxi.

and jump into the car that we drove in. Okay.

We pulled up by the pharmacy, a little bit past it where our car was.

Jose jumped out of the taxi, ran and jumped into the car, and he

yelled at the taxicab driver, follow me.

He pulls over.

We get out of the taxi.

And we jump inside the rental car.

We drive.

That was a close call.

How much more closer do you want to get?

You know what I mean?

I didn't want to go back home empty -handed.

I didn't want to feel defeated.

And I'm like, come on, you guys.

I didn't come all the way down here for nothing.

Both of them kind of thought it was a bad idea.

I continued to press the issue of, let's go give it another shot.

And so we did.

I wish I would have went with my gut feeling.

I knew it was a bad idea.

I'm like, we need to go to a different town.

We needed to get a boy from Tijuana, so we drove down to Ensenada.

We walked down the boulevard, and we went into a pharmacy, and we bought like

$200, $300 worth of stuff.

No problem.

The guy didn't even ask a question. He took the money, counted it, gave us back

change. We walked out there.

We walked down a little bit further, and we walked into another pharmacy, and we

went and did the same thing.

It didn't be really easy. It was like there was no heat on us anymore.

We spent about $8 ,000.

We got everything that we needed.

It felt good.

Wow.

Stayed at a hotel.

Went out to dinner, went and danced and partied.

You know, we were just having a good time.

It made me feel a lot better because everything kind of worked out how I said

was going to work out.

But still, we had yet to actually drive across the border.

We didn't.

We weren't done yet.

That next day, we got up.

It was pretty late.

I go, hey, guys, it's like 3 o 'clock in the afternoon. You got to go.

Everyone was like, oh, man, you know. We needed to get a little bit of money,

just enough to.

Eat and put some gas in the car, enough to get home.

I'm going to put some of that. We'll go to a couple stores and I'll get change

for a hundred.

Okay, let's do it.

We drove a little bit out of town.

There wasn't a whole lot of people out there or anything.

There's just some small little shacks that people lived in.

What about there?

Everything seems closed.

I didn't really think it was a big deal.

I thought this would be a really quick, simple thing. Walk into a store, get a

couple things, get some change, and walk out of it.

We had a good time, right? All I had been thinking about at the time was

out of Mexico. I wanted to go home.

We had pulled up to this little mini -mart.

I told Jose to stay here in the car, and I'll be right back.

So I remember I walked into the store.

It was a real small store.

There was a little boy standing behind the counter.

Hey. He was probably about 13 years old or so, and he just kind of said hi.

I grabbed a couple of quarts of oil, and I walked up to the counter, and I asked

him, can I have a couple of cartons of cigarettes?

Yes.

Okay. And the little boy was like, sure.

And so he put them on the counter, and he rang it up.

I just handed him a $100 bill.

And he walked kind of through the back of the store.

And I was like, huh.

He wasn't looking at it weird or anything.

This guy kind of walked out.

Kind of looked like he had just woken up.

He looked at the $100 bill.

He pulled out some money, and he gave me like 700 pesos.

Okay.

Okay. Great, thanks. I grabbed everything, and I was like, cool, you

out of here.

I went walking over to the car, and I got in.

Everything cool? Oh, yeah.

Everything's fine.

Jose's looking at me like, hey, you need to look behind you.

I turned around in the car, and...

That guy from the store is standing outside with a $100 bill, holding it up

the air, and he's like turning it around and stuff.

And I'm like, okay, we've got to get out of here. I go, let's go.

So Jose took off.

And the next thing you know, right out of a side road, this truck, this white

old truck comes pulling out.

The guy from the store, and he had a couple of friends with him, and they had

big 12 -gauge gun on them.

They were yelling at us, and they were screaming, hey, pull over.

I was looking back.

Close? Yeah.

Jose was looking in his rearview mirror.

We were like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? I can't believe this is

happening. Go, go, go, go.

Just go.

All of a sudden, I just turned around and I'm like looking behind us and I

see those guys anymore.

I'm like, you know what? I think we got away with it.

I don't see anyone behind us.

Do you? And he's like, no, no, I don't see anything.

I'm like, well, maybe we're okay. I go, let's just hurry and get back to the

hotel room.

As we were driving down the road, all of a sudden, we were coming up to a road

that was all blocked off.

And there was a couple of small cop cars that were parked out in front of the

road.

We were both looking. We were like, oh, my God, is that a roadblock there?

Is it an accident or what?

I see cops and everything else.

Jose is like, just be cool. Let me talk.

It just felt like, oh my God, is this really happening?

And these cops run over and they open up the car and they tell us to get out.

So we get out of the car.

They're asking us what we're doing, and someone called and said that we had

passed some kind of fake money or something.

I'm like, hey, tell us not us. We didn't do anything.

Jose was pretty calm.

Anytime they asked him something in Spanish, he answered them.

He was actually a really good accomplice.

The next thing you know, the owner from the store is pointing his finger at me,

saying, that was him.

That's the guy.

That's him.

Here's the money that he gave me.

Everything in my body kind of went numb, and I felt as if I didn't know how to

move.

The whole attitude of the police changed. It was kind of a night and day

The cops just... threw me up against the car, handcuffed us.

I'm sitting there thinking to myself, oh, this is not happening.

It seemed so surreal.

They took us both back to the police station.

I knew that we were in trouble.

I remember Jose telling me, just don't say anything.

Don't say yes or no. Don't tell them anything.

They opened up all the doors and they started tearing through our car.

They were tearing up the carpet.

They were looking underneath the feet, pulling out the panels of the car.

It was crazy.

I kept on thinking to myself, there's nothing in there. What are they going to

find?

What are they going to find in there?

And the next thing you know, I see one of the cops come out of the back of the

car saying, look what I found.

He had a stack of $100 bills in his hand.

It was the bills that were messed up.

They started questioning us saying, where are you guys staying at? Thank God

they don't know where we're staying at because then they're going to find

everything that we have.

Because I told them we just got here. We just drove down here today.

The next thing you know, they pulled out the little parking pass that was

sitting on the front of the car in between the dash and the windshield.

Oh, look what we found. We know where you guys are staying.

You're staying at the Hotel Corona.

I didn't know what to tell him.

He goes,

you, white boy, you're coming with us.

And they threw me in a pickup.

It started to settle in a little bit about what was going on.

I should have never came down here.

I was thinking, I got to get out of this mess.

Little did I know there wasn't going to be a way out.

They pushed me into the room.

They told me to get down on my knees.

They started going through the hotel room.

They were lifting up the bed.

They kept on saying, where's your drugs at, gringo? Where are they at?

And I was like, I don't have any drugs.

And they weren't finding anything.

The last place that they looked was the bags that we had on the ground.

They grabbed the bags, opened it up, and they saw all this foil and everything.

Right then, I knew that it was over.

They started dumping out our backpacks all over the bed.

And they were, like, all happy and going, yeah, look, we found the drugs.

them.

I just felt bad.

Both Jose and Stephanie, they were just there to have a good time. It was kind

of like a road trip.

They told Stephanie, come on, you're coming with us.

I did my best to tell them that she had nothing to do with it.

They threw the stuff in the back of the pickup.

They threw me back inside of the truck.

And... They drove me and Stephanie to court.

A few days later, I found out that they let her go.

But me and Jose were in trouble.

Jose and I were sitting there waiting for the judge.

I got to talk to my dad.

I was so happy to see him.

We just sat there and talked and cried.

It was pretty sad.

It was a horrible feeling.

I just said, I'm sorry that I've caused this problem, and I'm really sorry to

put you guys through this.

I know I should have listened to you. I hope you can forgive me.

He just said, don't worry.

We're going to get you out of here no matter what.

They threw us in a car, and they took us to the prison.

There was two guards standing out there.

We pulled up, and they walked up to the car, and they pulled us.

Go ahead and go through.

They opened the door, and they let us in.

All I remember was looking up at 35 feet of brick, and I was looking

around thinking to myself, wow.

This is bad.

They don't give you any kind of uniform there. Whatever clothes are on your

back, that's what you wear.

You're not given any paperwork.

You're just thrown out into a backyard full of people that have done something

wrong.

That prison seemed like the worst place I'd ever been.

It was hell. It was actually... All the stories about

the Mexican prisons, they're very true.

I was afraid for my life.

They told us to go in this room.

There was a group of, like, four guys sitting on the ground,

and they were all shooting up.

They didn't have any shirts on.

They looked like they hadn't showered for a week.

I was freaked out.

This guy kind of poked his head out around the corner and he said, Hey, you

Come here.

There was a few people in a room all by themselves.

One of the guys pulled out like a little mirror, and he had a couple lines on

him, snorted a couple lines.

He asked, do you guys want a line?

I was too scared to go to sleep, thinking that maybe they would come over

just dab me in the middle of the night where I was sleeping.

So I did a line.

And that was the first time in my life that I had ever done any hardcore type

a drug.

It was methamphetamine.

I liked it.

And I ended up staying up all night.

It went by really fast.

Doing the drug made everything worse than what it had to be.

It was the worst decision I could have made.

The first six days, I did not sleep at all.

Jose was really mad.

Obviously, he was pretty angry at me for putting him in this position.

It was like I kind of told him, I almost promised him that nothing bad was going

to happen and here's something bad happens. So I was a bad guy and I don't

him.

Four months of using meth.

Three, four days, five days at a time staying awake.

It was getting really old.

One of the guys in the cell that I was staying in was a doctor.

He told me, you know, you need to sleep.

You just can't do this anymore.

I'll give you a little bit of my heroin that I have.

It'll help you sleep.

No one cared about me, it seemed like, in there.

I just had enough.

I just wanted you to lay down, and I'll put some in a spoon for you, and I'll

put it down your nose.

It burned so bad, it felt like someone lit a fire in my nose.

I remember he grabbed my head because I wanted to pull up.

He's like, just stay right there for a second. Don't swallow.

So I just laid back there, and my eyes started dripping water.

About 30 seconds later, he goes, okay, you're done.

The next thing you know, I passed out. I was asleep.

And that was the whole beginning of my heroin use in there.

As time went on, I didn't actually really need the meth.

I needed the heroin, though.

I was an addict just like everyone else there.

I usually had some drugs with me.

This guy came running up to me, and he started pointing my face. He goes, I'm

sick, and I want some drugs.

You're going to give them to me. I started walking away from him.

The next thing you know, I see him out of the corner of my eye come running up

to me with the knife.

I was like, did I just get stabbed here?

I have to fight this guy.

Yeah, it's nice.

I sort of punched him in the face.

As I was punching him in the face, He was trying to stab me.

It felt like I had no more power in me.

I had to get it back together and hit him again.

I was just giving everything I had.

I was hitting him as hard as I could in order to get that knife that he had away

from me.

I was fighting for my life.

He was trying to kill me.

The very last punch, I hit him as hard as I could, and he fell on the ground.

Knife went flying out of his hand.

I kind of knocked him out.

A couple of guys came out and grabbed me, and they're like, hey, you're

all over the place.

Come in here and lay down.

These guys wrapped me up with some rags and T -shirts and stuff.

A couple of the guys were looking at me, and they were like, you're going to be

okay.

All the inmates were like, don't go down there to the clinic, and don't go

telling on anyone.

I needed some stitches, but, you know, if I would have gone down there, then...

I would have been a snitch.

I was so tired.

Eventually a bleeding slowed down.

I felt like it was the lowest point of my whole time being in there.

I didn't know what to do.

It was a big mess.

I'm a white guy in a Mexican prison.

The whole time it was a fight just to stay alive.

I saw so many people die in there.

I've witnessed three, four separate occasions of people being stabbed to

People actually dying in there.

And it's not something that you ever really want to see.

told me I was leaving and to grab anything that I had or I wanted to take

me. And I said, I don't have anything I want to take.

Just get me out of here.

And they handcuffed me.

They threw me in the back of a pickup.

You know, I never thought that I would actually end up back, you know, in the

United States again. It had been so long.

I was so happy to be back.

What I did was my fault.

There's no one else to blame for it.

It was pure stupidity.

If I could do it all over again, none of it would have happened.

Being an addict is being in a prison of your own.

Because of my poor decisions, I went through what I went through.

But I came out a better person.

I've learned a lot.

And it's made me who I am.