Original subtitles

What you're about to see may be dangerous, illegal, unethical,

petty, misguided, immoral, and most definitely stupid.

But it's also all true.

Sort of.

My name is Charles McDowell, a.k.a. Damn Wide Neck.

So how did I get famous?

- Just got famous. Damn Wide Neck. - Charles McDowell...

...250,000 comments.

Well, that's a crazy-ass story.

I was out one late night,

and there was a warrant out for my arrest.

Police seen me.

I ended up taking them on a chase, and I never stopped.

My car ended up running hot.

So I had to, like, pull over into this yard.

- And I ran to the woods. - Slow down, pal!

This when them little man purses was just coming out.

- I had a little fanny pack. - Come back here!

I had it loaded. I got a whole bunch of dope on me.

I'm telling you to stop!

In Florida, like, that's the worst case you can catch.

A heroin trafficking and Ice trafficking case,

so I ate all that.

Son, slow down! Hey!

Howdy.

I got you on gunpoint. Do not move!

Don't move, but I'm wigging.

- Why you moving? - I'm out my mind.

Why you moving?

Hey, buddy, don't move.

This is a lot of touching, man, which qualifies as moving.

Why we spinning? Why we spinning?

You need a doctor or something?

Hey!

That's how it all started, but shit got way crazier.

How many high-speed chases do you think you've been in total?

I have been in a lot of them. Over fourteen, fifteen.

A Florida man arrested for taking police on,

you won't believe this, his twentieth high-speed chase.

That's how the whole thing started.

One, two...

That's when they took my mugshot and my whole life changed.

I mean, I'm from Florida, like, I don't know, like, Florida Man, like,

is it, like, dude that breaks laws all the time

or just constantly getting in trouble?

That's what they call Florida Man?

Crazy headlines, that's what it is. Florida Man can be me.

A twenty-four-year-old man, this man right here,

accused of throwing an alligator through a drive-thru window.

I think for those of us who have spent our lives here,

there was always a sense that this was a different place.

And, at times, a very peculiar place.

I'm Carl Hiaasen, and I'm an author,

a longtime journalist with Miami Herald,

and born and raised in Florida.

I've been writing about Florida Men for, you know, my whole career.

This one was banned in a Texas prison system.

I was incredibly proud of that.

I've written between twenty and thirty novels,

including the novels for kids.

Most of the sickest stuff in my books is based on something real

that happened in Florida.

It's the right mix for this incredible vortex of weirdness

that the whole country seems interested in now.

I mean, it's almost a brand.

I don't think we're ever going to escape this.

There's absolutely no chance of Florida becoming a normal place to live.

People from fucking New York, California, wherever in the US,

they think that it's this crazy, gator-riding place,

but, like, if you look outside, it's pretty fucking chill, you know?

I like Florida because we're free.

She's out there showing her tits.

It's like the Wild West, right? We don't gotta wear helmets.

If you wanna catch an alligator and drag it across the road

and show it to your friends, that's cool.

That's Florida for you.

I mean, when I hear "Florida Man," I think I'm a Florida Man.

Florida Man!

The sunshine law in the state of Florida has basically made it such that

if you come into contact with the justice system,

within 24 to 48 hours,

anyone from the public from anywhere in the world

can basically pull up a mugshot of you

and see any and every allegation against you.

The sunshine law made public records available to the actual public.

From all of that was something that I had the benefit of

as a journalist for all those years.

And certainly a strong argument, constitutional argument, can be made

that we have every right to see everything.

These public records, arrest records,

really perpetuate that "Florida Man" stereotype.

That is the danger, is you could take a very small news story

and put somebody's mugshot on the internet.

I mean, that was a whole way to gain readers.

Every single day you go in that gas station to get gas

and get a little drink or something to go to work,

and you see the actual mugshots

of every single person that got arrested the night before.

So everyone knows, you get arrested,

you're on that cover of that newspaper the next day,

right in the gas station.

Guilty or innocent, you know, you're right on there, so.

It's entertaining at some level,

but it also can be very, very destructive to somebody's life.

Wheel... of... Fugitive!

Hello, everyone. I'm Sheriff Wayne Ivey of the Brevard County Sheriff's Office.

I'm excited. You know why I'm excited?

Because it's Tuesday night, eight o'clock. It's time for Wheel of Fugitive.

You know how it works. Ten fugitives. I'm gonna spin this wheel.

One of them's gonna be our fugitive of the week. Let's see who it is.

Wheel of Fugitive, like, they just went too far with that.

Wheel of Fugitive is Sheriff Wayne Ivey making a joke or a mockery

out of public safety and justice.

We got a bunch of fugitives out there. I want to get 'em all off the streets.

Let's go fishing for fugitives.

Just stick to regular public service announcements.

You know, don't try to be a comedian.

Adam, you can do the right thing and turn yourself in, son.

Don't make us come chase you.

It's like this weird, "Yeah, we want to see people get in trouble," type of thing.

Talking about people that genuinely live in your community.

They work here. They pay their taxes here.

Well, maybe they don't all pay their taxes, but...

Let's see who this week's Fugitive of the Week is.

Many employers in this conservative county

watch the sheriff's shows for entertainment.

And if they see an employee on that show,

many of the employers in Brevard County, and business owners, will fire a person

who has not been convicted of a crime just because they appeared on that show.

When we talk about people being basically denied their constitutional rights

to be treated as innocent until proven guilty,

and you're taking that to the next level

by then making a public mockery of those people,

it's a dangerous thing.

When they spin that wheel and your face on there or whatever,

they're going to come get you.

Right here from your Escambia County Sheriff's Office,

we present you with...

Wheel of Fugitives!

Well, you heard him.

It's Wanted Wednesday here at the Escambia County Sheriff's Office.

That means one thing.

- Let's spin the wheel! - Yes!

Looks like this week's winner is... Charles McDowell.

They spin that wheel, and so what happened? It stopped on me.

Ooh, Charles, fleeing and eluding?

You can run, but you can't hide, Charles.

People was calling there, trying to get a reward or whatever,

putting the police on me.

So they had the whole Escambia County looking for me.

That's when I fled to another county or whatever.

Stop!

So after eating a whole bunch of drugs or whatever...

Howdy!

...my body just went to, like, wigging on me.

Touch me.

I ain't know what was going on. I had passed out.

I was on life support for, like, three days.

I had died that night for three days. True story.

I woke up, like, on my third day, and I'm shackled to the bed.

Like, my arms and stuff, like, stuck to the bed.

I got this big-ass pipe in my throat.

Got all these IVs. I don't know what's going on.

First thing I said, I gotta go. I gotta get up outta here.

No police was around.

I took off again.

I have four boys.

Charles was... He's my special one.

The doctor was amazed to see him. It was different. He was surprised too.

'Cause he'd never seen nothing like it.

A little boy with a wide neck.

Charles was amazing.

Charles, like, gets up in the little--

if it's a hole that he can put his body in,

he's gonna get in it.

Any way Charles can get away, Charles gonna get away.

I was on my way to Atlanta.

About like, fifteen, twenty minutes into the drive, I see Christmas lights.

I'm on another high-speed chase. I can't make this up.

I'm on another high-speed chase.

Throwing money, drugs, all out the car.

I look at the dashboard, you know,

the little light come on, when it's like, your tire pressure's going out.

That was happening. I'm like, "What the fuck going on?"

Damn, how the tires blow?

Feeling better?

They spiked the car.

I spiked your car.

And when you threw the drugs out of the window,

it hit my windshield.

Get your ass out of the car.

They pulled me out,

put me in handcuffs, threw me inside the back seat of the car,

and took me straight to the nearest county.

The next day, the whole staff at that jailhouse,

they was coming to see me.

- That's him! - And they was like, "Yeah, that's him!"

That's you, man!

The officer turned the computer to me. He was like, "I'mma show you something."

And he Googled me. He turned it around. He was like, "Look at this."

Charles Dion McDowell was featured

on the Wheel of Fugitives from Escambia County.

He has a giant's neck. I mean, seriously, look at this guy's neck.

My nephews called me and said, "He's on TV."

We turned the TV on. He's not on one channel.

The whole TV, they talking about him.

So far, his mugshot has gotten about 250,000 comments.

My mugshot went viral. Wasn't nothing about my charges, the cases,

or what I was going through, like, physically.

It was like, "Oh, he got a big-ass neck."

"Oh, look at Neck Man." "Oh, it's like he swallowed a plate."

Just crazy comments, and it just kept going and going

and going and going.

I bet when you was little you liked to run around neckked,

eating neck bones, watching Neck-elodeon

until it got dark and then you watched Neck at Nite.

Roasting the fuck out of me. Like, they cooked me.

So after he showed me that, I go back into the pod.

And then this Black lady come to the door, and she was like...

Your bail has been posted.

The whole time, I ain't never used the phone.

So I'm like, "Who made my bond?"

Your lawyer.

All right, a lawyer?

Now I come out.

I don't see nobody, just two white men and all their kids.

There he is.

Me, I'm like, "What's going on?"

- That's your bail bondsman. - I'm Tim, your bail bondsman.

- And your lawyer. - You're going to be a star.

That neck's gonna make you famous.

You're going right to the tip top.

He was like, "You don't owe me nothin'."

Would it be too much trouble if we got a couple of photos with you?

"I just want you to take pictures with my family."

Would you like some pulled pork?

The bondsman, he offered me pulled pork sandwiches.

You're missing out. So moist. So stringy.

Pork!

If it ain't messy, it ain't good.

Do you want some of this?

And I'm like, "No, sir, I'm good. I just need some cigarettes."

You go get yourself a pack of cigarettes.

I ate it all.

It's on me.

He gave me twenty dollars to go to the store.

I don't know what's going on.

I'm looking out the window,

I just see like three, four people like running into the store.

They're like, "Oh, my God, it's him, it's him."

The parking lot crowded, so now we gotta have like...

The county police is, like, right there, like, they gotta move me from the store.

And the police actually trailed us as far as they can

to keep people from, like, following me.

It just blowed up everywhere.

All over the TV. It was all over there. To me, it was just crazy.

I gotta say a huge congrats to you, man.

I've never seen someone pulling that many Google hits.

Thank you, man.

I ain't even understand social media.

Like, I wasn't with the Internet, period. No Facebook, no none of that.

I wasn't even, like, Googling stuff.

You feel me? YouTube and all. I wasn't doing none of that.

Back in my hood, I wasn't never called "Wide Neck" or none of that.

When that mugshot came out, it's like, damn, nigga, you Wide Neck now.

Like, "Wide Neck, Wide Neck!"

They was, like, roasting the fuck out of me, like, damn.

And I called my bondsman, and he was like,

"There's nothing too much you can do about what they're saying on the Internet,

'cause it's public records, whatever."

He was like, "But, however, I think you should call this guy."

Daddy Long Neck here,

and it's about to get litty like a fucking titty.

And I'm looking at the picture, it's Long Neck.

Long Neck is David. I forget his last name,

but his name Damn Long Neck or whatever.

The white kid with the long neck, the world know about him or whatever.

They was like, "You need to try to get in touch with his managers."

I made that phone call and they was like, "Look, we're in Miami."

"We're going to fly you out. We're going to cash out."

"We just want you to do two or three skits with Long Neck,"

da-da, "And we'll see you back home, da-da-da.

I went to Miami.

And my first time meeting Daddy Long Neck, it was like, "Damn."

"What the fuck I'm gonna do with this kid?"

Isn't that fucking Wide Neck?

But, frankly, I'm gonna do it. First time recording or whatever.

- Do it for the money. - I'm doing it for the money this time.

When they put it together

and released it, it was crazy. It just went crazy.

Wide Neck would amass over one million Instagram followers

and achieve worldwide notoriety.

- All necks matter. All necks matter.-

I think there's people with abnormally large necks all over the country,

but I think Florida is a place where you can exploit it

and turn it into a little career.

And I say, "Go Wide Neck!"

It was definitely a blessing. It was nothing but a blessing.

I never dreamed of being in Hollywood.

I'd never been on a plane at the time, you feel me? Never been to Miami.

It was, like, a lot of stuff that I never did.

I was like, in and out of prison, in and out of jail,

like, most of my adult lifetime, you feel me?

And I just made a transition, like, a second chance at life.

I'm real proud of him. I am really happy for him.

He making better choices. He doing better things.

He got a positive attitude now.

It's just gonna be a little tight, but we could work with it.

Over here to the mirror.

I consider myself a street dude or whatever,

but at the end of the day, I'm softer than a bear, you feel me?

Like, I want to have a good life. I want to be there with my kids.

I haven't sold no drugs since that day.

I'm not who the mugshot is,

or I'm not what they trying to make me out to be, you feel me?

Wayne Ivey has actually been sued for his use of Wheel of Fugitive.

The Florida Today investigation has found

that a large number of people featured on the segment

weren't fugitives.

And he really doesn't seem to care.

He's still pushing the shows, and it still continues to move on.

You can almost be certain

that if you have a sheriff named Wayne Ivey

spinning a wheel for it,

you can almost be certain that there's going to be a screw-up.

It's an interesting business how YouTube works.

You know, anybody can make a channel.

This cop started it with the Wheel of Fugitive.

Wide Neck wound up showing up on there.

Wide Neck got a successful YouTube channel.

You know, it's a great economy that we got.

What you think, boss man? Look.

That's hot, bro. They go anywhere.

They're going to be behind me like ducklings.

Go anywhere with that, brother.

I'm gonna be the papa duck. They gonna behind me like ducklings. Yeah.

Escambia County? I already know they're trying to get me,

but I gave them their shout-out.

They got me out the hood, like, they got me away from all that.

It's cool with me, like, I'm good with it.

That's heartwarming. He's no longer dealing drugs,

and that he's found fame and fortune from a mugshot.

That's pretty cool.

This is just the way that the world works now.

"A Florida Man," the words by which

many strange stories begin in the world, arrested and...

Storytelling tradition in America, going back in folklore

and the days of Mark Twain, Will Rogers.

Passing along stories that get bigger and bigger

and wilder and wilder and funnier and funnier.

More often than not, they weren't true.

But in Florida, they're all true.