The Meat Mafia Podcast

P2
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Speaker 2: [00:00:00] So they, they followed me from my house out in, in, uh, I lived in Sonoma so I think I flew out of Oakland. They followed me to Milwaukee, the DEA. They were on the planes, they followed us to Bogota. They didn't know what hotel rooms and all that. But they, they knew I was on that airplane. And, uh, they figured we're not going to get him in the States because of the way he operates now.

But we're going to get him here. And how are we going to get him here? They're going to, uh, torture you until you sign a confession. So they started electrocuting me right in the airport. They had a cattle prod that started electrocuting me. Um, uh, they decided to take a piece off my finger. I wouldn't sign the confession.

It was like a five page confession in Spanish. I wouldn't sign. I kept thinking, I don't have any drugs. I didn't know the DEA were watching. The guy said to me, he said, You, you think, you think that we didn't know? Who do you think set this [00:01:00] up? The DEA, they're watching right there. He pointed to the two way glass or whatever.

I never signed the confession. So after about three days of being interrogated in the torture chambers, And the guy that I never saw again, who was the courier, was also interrogated. I figured he was signing the confession, right? I mean, what they did to me for three days, they hooked up an electric box with wires to your testicles.

They came in and poured cold water, like a bunch of water on you. You were naked, underground, in like a dungeon. They poured cold water on you and then they electrocuted you. Uh, and the only reason I didn't sign that confession, really, It wasn't because I was so tough. It was because they said, if you don't sign, if you sign we'll stop this all.

If you don't sign, one of these times you're going to pass out and not wake up. Your heart's going to stop and we're just going to throw your file away and no one's going to know what happened to you. [00:02:00] And I figured, okay, because I was in this terrible room with a little hole in the floor where somebody else's feces was from the last guy, dried blood on the wall.

And I thought, if I sign this thing, I'm going to be here 15 years, I, I'd rather just go and end it here. So I didn't sign it, but they lied to me, and they didn't kill me. And then I was transferred to this place called the Black Palace. It's a Leckumberry prison, if you, uh, there's a lot of documentaries that were made on this prison.

Uh, it was a hell hole, and I was put into this Leckumberry prison. Um, And, they kept me there for a year, the American government. I was supposed to go to court within three days. And if you had no drugs and no accusers, meaning, if, he never signed a confession either. Mm hmm. Can you believe that? That's wild.

This guy [00:03:00] never signed. And so,

Speaker 4: For 10k.

Speaker 2: When we went to the court for our opening, like, appearance, His statement, I read it, was that we went to Columbia for a karate tournament and he was a karate student and he went with me as the karate instructor that I was being one of the, uh, judges of this tournament and he went with me and he did this whole cocaine thing on his own and I didn't know anything about it.

Wow. Loyal. That was his statement. Uh, and we were in there a year before we ever went for our final sentencing. A year. And during that year, I started shooting heroin in prison. There was guys that shot heroin every day. They'd come into my cell because nobody bothered me in my cell. We would, like, all of us, 14, 12 guys, would take the same needle, sharpen it on the concrete floor, heat it up.[00:04:00]

Uh, and shoot intravenously heroin until, it was about eight weeks I did that until I got so tired, uh, of who I had become. And I already injected cocaine, so, uh, addiction wasn't a new thing to me. But if you're in a Mexican prison, uh, and every day there's news that somebody else was found dead, I didn't think there was any hope.

But there was other Americans incarcerated, but they had all signed confessions. Matter of fact, there were 636 Americans in various Mexican prisons in Mexico, and 632 had signed confessions. Four people didn't sign confessions. Me and the guy I was with, and two Puerto Ricans from New York, who were really tough guys, uh, they didn't sign confessions.

And so, uh, at this time, politically, it was very interesting, you know, [00:05:00] um, Nixon was out of office and I think Gerald Ford was in and running for another term. Because, you know, Nixon had had a, he got kicked out and then Ford took over. Anyway, Jimmy Carter was running for president and Jimmy Carter was a human rights activist, this peanut farmer from Georgia.

So, me and a couple of other guys smoking pot. So wait a second, people in America don't realize that these, all these people in, these Americans and Canadians that were young kids, I mean I was really, I deserved to be there, I was a successful narcotics smuggler for years. But a lot of these people were caught because, you know, they were with their girlfriend in a park and they had a gram in their shoe, or they had an ounce of pot in their shoe.

They got tortured to say they were taking it back to the States to sell it. They signed the confession. They had 632 confessions to show the United States, because Nixon had given the Mexican government [00:06:00] 25 million for something he called Operation Cooperation, which was to stop all the heroin trafficking, the war on drugs.

Right? So the Mexicans figured out that if they just made everybody sign confessions, here, here's our statistics. We arrested 636. We got 632 convictions. These are all drug smugglers. They were just kids. I had more drugs in my bust than all the rest of them put together. Wow. So we started, and I had money because I was pretty successful for years.

I

Speaker: mean, you were making like a million dollars a

Speaker 2: year, right? So I started writing articles that were put out in full page ads in newspapers, open letter to the American public, open letter to the, to the American president, you know, that there's human rights violations going on, not in the Middle East, 18 miles south of San Diego.

People are being tortured. Now, at [00:07:00] the same time, there was a lot of, every time that anybody was arrested, the American Embassy would come, and then they would get the information, and they would notify these, you know, 21, 22 year old kids, They would notify their parents in the States. You know, your child was busted in Mexico.

Oh, what do we do? Well, we have, we have a Mexican attorneys we recommend, and if you talk with them on the phone, you know, they're legitimate good attorneys. They can help out. And so these people, whether they had money or they didn't have money, if they didn't have money, they might take a second mortgage on their home.

They would fly down there, and they would give the Mexican attorney, say, 20, Mexican attorney would split it with the U. S. embassy official. Nobody got out. So, we were saying, not that up front, but we were saying that there were human rights violations and people were being tortured to sign confessions.

And [00:08:00] extorted in prison. Uh, and so they finally, because these parents that were going down there also had Congressman Peter Stark from Los Angeles was one who said, What? And he came down and looked into it. And there started to become momentum around it. So when we would smuggle out, like, you know, I would ask my wife to take the article and put it inside of her.

And she would smuggle it out. And then it would be printed in the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune. So we were gathering some momentum. And to make a long story short, one day, I get called into the warden's office at one in the morning, and he's telling me in Spanish, Sesenta minutos, sesenta minutos aqui.

What? Sixty minutes? Sixty minutes was there. Coming to do a story on the Mexican and North American prisoners in Mexico. Wow. And so, he, the Attorney General [00:09:00] was, met with me in the morning, previous to having Dan Rather come in, and said to me, listen, uh, we'd like you to be one, there was another guy too that was a representative, James, and me and him were going to go in with the Attorney General and represent all the Americans incarcerated in Mexico.

Uh, and he said, we don't want to talk about the torture. Did you ever have any problems while you were here? No, it just cost me, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars while I've been in prison, but no torture. That was only the first week, right? Yes. Let's not talk about it. Let's talk about how the American government under Nixon paid the Mexican government to do this.

And let's talk about a prisoner exchange where all of you would get sent back and they would send back the same number of Mexicans to our country so people could serve their sentences close to their families. Okay. Okay. Okay. So we went in and did the 60 Minutes segment, and, uh, three days after the 60 Minutes segment, I [00:10:00] was called in for my court case.

And they ruled me to be absuelto. Absuelto is the term for innocent. And the guy I was with got eight years. Wow. And five minutes after I was, the gavel went down that I was released as innocent, three days after 60 Minutes was there, and they did what I did with the Attorney General. They, they released me, and as I was gathering whatever was left of what they arrested me with, which wasn't much, uh, the phone rang in the administration office, and the guy, the secretary picks it up and goes, it's for you, and he hands me the phone, it's the attorney general of Mexico, uh, Garcia Ramirez, and he said to me, oh, Arturo, I heard about your good fortune.

Five minutes after the gavel went down, he heard about my good fortune, and I was released. But they were supposed to extradite me to the United States because there was a [00:11:00] grand jury that had convened, and I was being charged with racketeering, cocaine smuggling, and tax evasion. So I managed to pay the Mexican government 1, 500 to let me go to the airport and take any flight I wanted to.

Twenty four hours ahead. Before they notified the American authorities that I was released. So I flew to Canada and started assuming a different identity and lived in Canada for a year, uh, until my young son broke his leg in the States and I felt terrible that I couldn't be with my kid. And that's when I decided that, you know, I was coming back and facing the music.

Whatever that was, uh, and I came back to the United States, uh, and then I actually began doing work with the government. Kind of teaching them about how I smuggled. [00:12:00] So they would have a better opportunity of, you know, thinking like an entrepreneurial person. Because they, you know, the DEA, believe it or not, were brand new.

And the DEA was formed out of the Tobacco and Alcohol Division. And when they hired DEA agents, uh, the DEA agent I ended up working with, I said, what'd you do before you were a DEA agent? He said, I was a repairman for IBM typewriters. Wow. I said, how'd you become a DEA agent? He said, I answered the classified ad in the Chicago Tribune.

That's when I realized, when you have somebody who has that type of mentality, Trying to catch somebody who has a very, uh, entrepreneurial mind. You know what I mean? It's not really a contest.

Speaker 4: Two totally different games.

Speaker 2: It's a totally different thing. And so, instead of, like, giving up people that they [00:13:00] hoped I would do, I introduced bigger things to them that they never really, you know, like, you can't get back on a boat in Cartagena anymore without being searched.

You know, stuff like that. Uh, set up a jungle in Columbia that they could bust. It was the biggest bust they ever had. That was on in the cover of Time Magazine. That was really set up between me and my contacts in Columbia so that they could do a thing between the American government and the Columbian government and make a big, uh, you know, um.

Combined effort to stop the drug production of cocaine in Columbia. Things like that.

Speaker: So were you able to get those charges thrown out in exchange for your services to the DEA?

Speaker 2: No, but what I didn't know at the time was when I went to court, the prosecuting attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, the prosecuting attorney, uh, had seven more months left as the [00:14:00] prosecuting attorney.

Thank you. And, and, and then he was going to become a junior partner in my attorney's law firm.

Speaker 3: Hmm.

Speaker 2: I didn't know that. But when it was time for the judge, by the way, the judge in this case, played handball with my attorney every week. Wow. What are the odds of that? So my attorney, who visited me in Mexican prison, told the judge when he played handball with him, you know, I got this guy.

You should see what they did to him. He's in this Mexican prison. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't an exciting description. And so really, the reality was that I was looked at as a guy who had paid my dues. Uh, it cost me my marriage. It cost me a lot of money. Uh, I think they felt like I hadn't been through enough.

And when the judge asked the prosecution what their recommendation was, you know, I was never like the guy that [00:15:00] was a badass criminal who had guns and threatened people and all that kind of, you know, so the prosecution just said we remain mute and they gave me two years probation and then I didn't know that but seven months later, I The prosecuting attorney became a partner at my law firm and, uh, if you think that I had learned my lesson by then, uh, I was in Columbia about another year and a half later because some guy in San Francisco that I knew offered me 50, 000 just to introduce him to my connection so he wouldn't get robbed or killed.

So, I was supposed to go to Columbia to introduce him. Except he didn't show up. And he asked me if I would just take care of it. And he had already paid me the 50,

Speaker 3: 000.

Speaker 2: So now, I was down there with my girlfriend. And, uh, my girlfriend, who [00:16:00] was a young, attractive blonde,

I actually never did a cocaine buy. Because I really felt like we were going to rip me off. So it was very spooky. It wasn't my same connections. And, uh, so I didn't want to do the cocaine buy, so we took the 125, 000 that I had to do the transaction, and I taped it on her body, and she flew back from Cartagena to Miami.

Well, when they saw a young good looking blonde landing in Miami from Columbia, they had to take her in the secondary, and she didn't check off on the flight, where it gives you the customs card that says, are you carrying more than 10, 000 in cash? She's checked no. So, they were looking for drugs, but when they found a hundred grand on her, she was in prison, in the jail in Miami.

I was still in Cartagena. Uh, and when she didn't call [00:17:00] me after three or four days, I called my attorney in Milwaukee. He called Miami, found out she was in jail in Miami. They found a hundred thousand. It's a federal crime. So, who came down the representer? None other than the former prosecutor who was prosecuting me in Wisconsin.

Now he's representing, basically, my girlfriend, uh, it was, and then I filed, I filed to get the money back saying, hey, it's not my fault. She checked, no.

Speaker 4: Was there anything, were there moments where you saw yourself shifting, changing? how you wanted to be as a person. Like you mentioned your son's leg injury.

Like, what ultimately ended up being the, the catalyst for you changing and kind of, uh, cleaning stuff up?

Speaker 2: You know, I just, um, [00:18:00] I had been through so, so much of those types of stressful life activities. And, uh, I was just tired. I was tired of it. Tired of The life I had led and I really wanted to do something.

I remember thinking in prison in Mexico, I had become so successful with so many adversaries, you know, people trying to rip you off, kidnap your wife arm, rob you. Then you got the I-R-S-D-E-A, FBI, Interpol. Everybody's trying to, it's, it'd be like if you were playing football on the field and you were all alone with the ball.

And you had this whole group of people trying to stop you from getting to the goalposts. I remember having this vision, thinking, what if I was doing something that nobody was trying to stop me? If I was this successful at this age, doing something where so many [00:19:00] people were trying to stop me, if I was doing something that was good for humanity, which actually I thought cocaine was, in the early years, but now I realized it was narcotic smuggling.

wasn't viewed that way. And after I had been through everything I'd been through and lost my marriage through it and uh, I wanted to do something different and I didn't know what that was. But coming back to face the music because my son had a broken leg and I wanted to be his dad. I didn't want to be living under an assumed name in a foreign country.

You know, I loved my son and I wanted to be a dad. So I figured if I have to do a few years in prison here, , I'll do a few years in prison. I didn't know that there would be the result of being on probation for two years. I didn't know any of that. I came back ready to face whatever happened so that I could get it under done.[00:20:00]

Hmm. And, uh, that was the beginning, I think, of the shift. Well, first of all, you know when you're picking up all the restaurant tabs for your friends Mm-Hmm. and acting like a rock star. Uh, it's pretty good to be a criminal. Crime pays. When you're in a Mexican prison, uh, being tortured and being considered to be the low life narcotic smuggler that you are, then, you know, I saw that being a criminal really wasn't something that You know, other guys that were in prison there, this wasn't their first time in prison.

I talked to a guy, Richie Messina from New York, shot five times trying to rob the Bronx Zoo. Heh. on a Friday night, and, uh, he had been in prison out of his adult life, he was like 35 years old. He was in prison more years than he was out. And I said to him, Richie, Richie, he had a great sense of humor too, Richie.

I said, Richie, did it ever occur to you that you're not too good at this [00:21:00] crime thing? He said, what do you want me to do, open a flower store? I said, Richie, there's a lot in between a flower store And the kind of crime, you know, armed robbery, Bronx Zoo. He was smuggling cocaine with a Colombian woman named Tatiana who had breasts that were 44D.

Like, didn't you think they were going to look? Yeah. So, when you're in jail with guys like that who, I was in jail with guys that were cartel, you know, the cartels were just forming, and I was in with, with big cartel leaders, uh, these guys. You know, they would do a year, two years, they'd get out. And when you were in Mexican prison, if you had money, it could be a pretty good life.

It wasn't, you know, after the, after the interrogations and the extortion and all that went down, uh, with money, it wasn't that [00:22:00] bad, unless you got killed, but other than that. But, you know, I wanted to do something different. And eventually Because I was a martial artist, I knew about acupuncture. I knew about acupuncture because when I studied, even as a teenager, martial arts, if somebody got hurt, like in training, my sensei would come out, uh, Grandmaster Ji, and he'd come out with these acupuncture needles and he'd acupuncture you, like, if you got thrown too hard, because there wasn't always mats.

Sometimes it was just a concrete floor or wood. And if you hurt yourself, you come out and do acupuncture. And so I saw it from 16, 17 years old. And when I read some article in, like, a magazine, a health and wellness magazine, about acupuncture schools, there was a few acupuncture schools in the United States.

And there was one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I thought, I gotta go check it out. So, I actually flew to Santa Fe. Uh, and [00:23:00] shadowed the Chinese master, the Chinese, uh, acupuncturist. He was a medical doctor from China, didn't speak much English. Uh, and I, he gave me a chance to enroll in the school even though I didn't have the degree.

You were supposed to have the four years of college, but I didn't have that. But because I knew a little bit of how to act and a little bit of Chinese from my martial arts, He accepted me, and I also was able to write the full tuition check. So I got in, and I told my friends, we were buying real estate, because I still had a lot of money.

So we were investing in real estate, me and a couple of guys. And I said, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to Santa Fe to study acupuncture. And he looked at me like, something was wrong with me. Uh, and I did. I went there in three years.

Two kids, two more children, two more boys, [00:24:00] and became an acupuncturist, started treating people out of my house, uh, for 30, 35 a treatment, and never, you know, just stuck with it for 37 years. Treated thousands and probably at least a couple hundred thousand treatments, uh, that I conducted, and ended up to have a very successful Practice.

It helped a lot of people. Coached a lot of people.

Speaker: Coached a lot of people. What do you think it was about acupuncture that drew you to do it? Because like you said, you still had a lot of money. You could have just gone with your buddies and invested in real estate and done really well. You clearly already had this business mindset.

Um, yeah, what was it about acupuncture that just kind of drew you in to really pursue that?

Speaker 2: That's a great question. You know, there used to be a TV show on. in the 60s maybe, early 70s, called Gung Fu. You could probably find it if you Google. It was with David [00:25:00] Carradine. And it was about a guy who was this shaolin priest who, you know, was a deadly guy, but also it was all about a guy who was a healer.

And he, and he had a little satchel of like herbs in his phong necklace or whatever. And it was this cool guy who just went from town to town, kind of like a nomad. Um, he was wanted in China for killing somebody who killed his teacher. Uh, so they were looking for him, and that was kind of the baseline of the story.

But anyway, I, you know, the thing about being a healer and wanting to, um, serve, for some reason, which I can't explain intellectually, just resonated with me. I wanted to, to be able to, uh, to help people. And, you know, I had a 10th grade education, so I wasn't going to medical school. Uh, and because I was accepted by this Chinese doctor, I [00:26:00] guess I felt like, wow, this is a real opportunity coming my way.

And I, you know, an opportunity is only an opportunity if you can see it. If you, if you don't get it, it's not much of an opportunity. And, uh, I just left the properties that I owned with my two other partners. Uh, one was a real estate broker and one was an attorney. And I moved to Santa Fe, uh, and enrolled in this school.

And it was a completely different scene. You know, all these really, really nice people. Really nice. There was nobody who was a cartel guy. There was, you know, nobody who killed other people. There was These were just all these really nice people, and they all just wanted to serve and help other people. And, uh, it resonated with me.

I don't know if you ever travel out into another country or been into another culture. Like, I've spent time in Thailand. I've spent [00:27:00] time in Southeast Asia. And, uh, there's a, there's a thread of respect. There's a thread of gratitude between human beings that somehow You know felt good to me, and I always thought to myself I'd like to try to retain this feeling like in Thailand or Bali, Indonesia where people were just so kind and so wonderful so respectful I, you know, that's not the way I grew up.

I grew up that if we were friends, we usually were friends because we saw things the same way. We agreed on stuff, and everybody else was just a mark. Everybody else was an idiot. We know what's going on, but those people, pfft. Uh, and here, it was something else that resonated with me about humanity and people, and I just thought, you know, this acupuncture has been around 5, 000 years.

The [00:28:00] Asian cultures aren't stupid.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: They wouldn't be doing it continuously now, intermingled with other Western methods, if it wasn't effective. And so I just thought, I want to learn this. You know, I thought I could do it. And I made that commitment. And once I had the intention and made the commitment and made the move, it also got me away from all the old relationships.

All the old temptations, like the DEA kept trying to get me involved in more stuff. I was done with all that, and uh, I just submerged myself into a completely different culture of people. That brought out the more, I guess, caring, empathetic, compassionate things in me. Mm

Speaker 3: hmm.

Speaker 2: And when I worked with people in my practice, all my background [00:29:00] was, was powerful.

Because, uh, for example, I had a woman that came in, couldn't sleep, gained a lot of weight, was on Colazapam, which is like a Valium, a tranquilizer, sleeping pills. And, like, 60 year old woman, she's like, My son, you know, he's been stealing from me for a long time, and buying cocaine, and he finally got busted, and he's gonna be going to court, and he's gonna go to jail.

And I, I said to her, Great. How old's your son? 22. Great. She's looking at me like, The fuck you talking about, great? I said, I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't been busted for cocaine and gone to jail. That's the opportunity. Because if he didn't go to jail and he's using cocaine and he's stealing cocaine, there's no shot.

There's no shot. This is his shot. This is a blessing. And I just remember that, [00:30:00] that time and what that woman's face changed dramatically. Uh, And she didn't know anything about me. And then I started sharing, you know, with people, if they were going through difficult transitions in their life, whether it be divorce, people who were going to lose their jobs because of a merger, people, you know, and Because I had experienced both the emotional, mental emotional pain, the desperation, the anxiety, physical pain of being tortured, people came to me and You know, had had a laminectomy and a fusion, and were on prednisone for eight years, had no more bone left in their body.

Now they wanted to build a cage around their spine, and now they were coming for acupuncture. And I would think, I don't know what I can do to help, but I did my best. And then they, after two or three treatments, they'd say, you know, it's amazing. I'm 75 percent different.[00:31:00]

It was, It was really powerful. Acupuncture is very powerful. And, you know, they call it a practice because you're learning. And as the years go on, you continually get better. If you're fortunate enough to have a larger practice, where you see a lot of people, then you'll see a lot of ulcerative colitis.

You'll see a lot of back pain. You'll see a lot of something. And I was fortunate. You know, I've always been fortunate. I've always had a fortunate life. For And not that it happened overnight. I mean, it took 10 years, 15 years before really having that big of a practice. But when you're seeing 40 people a day, you're helping a lot of people.

Speaker 4: How much of your healing was being able to speak into certain instances where people were dealing with life things or physical things and just give them hope and that belief that [00:32:00] they can really stand up. change through this modality?

Speaker 2: That's the purpose of the book. You know, the book, Poison for Rats, the intention I had when I wrote that book wasn't, I understood that there was a lot of people who could not relate to somebody who'd smuggled drugs.

They could not relate to someone who was in prison in Mexico or tortured or whatever, but the transitions that I went through in my life, everybody goes through transitions. Everybody goes through difficult times. You don't have to be those exact experiences. And the point of writing the book was that life can change on a dime.

No matter what's going, when they were torturing me, electrocuting me, and beating me, do you think someone coming up to me and saying to me, you know, someday this is all going to be a benefit to you, this is a real blessing, Art. Right? No. There's no way, because I thought I was [00:33:00] going to die. But, when people would say to me, you know, I've had acupuncture treatments for a year, and I didn't get the results I got from you in this one treatment, or these two treatments, or this, I would say to myself, they must have been seeing an idiot.

I don't know, I mean, I didn't really take, I didn't acknowledge myself and, and, really give myself. Uh, the kind of respect, I just didn't, because I've been a hustler my whole life, and uh, the experience I had treating people over and over again after many years, it was really not even that. I got to become more, more comfortable in my skin as a healer, but it was through writing the book.

Writing the book was the therapy. Writing the book got me to really understand who I am, and who I was, [00:34:00] and who I became, uh, and take some credit for it. But I think that, um, my hopes were that people reading the book would be able to come to the conclusion that no matter how you feel right now, uh, there's always, there's always something better.

Change is always provides something better, for the most part. And that, that was my hopes and intention of writing the book. I didn't know it was going to be that long of a process or, or that big of a story. But, um, really that's what I think my life turned into was, I became someone who could help other people, which is really, what I was hoping for when I brought back cocaine.

You know, in the early stages, people would feel better as individuals, then they'd get a better car, I'd front them some cocaine, then they'd get a better apartment, then they'd have, you know, a better lifestyle, before [00:35:00] it all kind of turned to the dark side. And I really think that I've always wanted to help people, and I've always wanted to be acknowledged by people, and feel that.

that threat of humanity I spoke about. Uh, so, I still like to help people, and I still do help people. I do, uh, acupuncture on people, but now it's not as many people. I don't have a large clinic anymore. Um, I see people out of my home. I do coaching work with people on Zoom, from all over, that are going through difficult things, whether it be, whatever it is.

Hmm. And so, I kind of I still enjoy being able to help people and being thanked for it. I do a lot of mentoring. That's what it all comes to. And dog walking.

Speaker: And dog walking. You do it all. I

Speaker 2: do mentoring and dog walking. [00:36:00]

Speaker 4: When you think about time, looking back on your experience, how quickly, or, or, Does it surprise you that you got wrapped up in stuff like that and like how quickly some of that stuff happened When you look back on it Like as in like the drug smuggling like did you even Really, I guess realize at the time like how much of that of your life would be taken up by No,

Speaker 2: I I really know I just Wasn't that insightful I just wanted to, it sounded like, you know, like the Soldiers of Fortune show I used to watch or Flash Gordon as a kid that was eight years old.

It was just something I felt like I, I don't want to be a furniture salesman like my dad. I don't want to be like some of the kids in school that were sitting next to me. What do you want to be, Ted? I want to be a fireman. What do you want to be, Ralph? I want to be a police [00:37:00] officer. Then they'd ask me, what do you want to be, Art?

And I'd say, I want to be Emperor of Mong. Why? Because on Mong Go, he could do anything he wanted to. He was Emperor Ming. I wanted to be Emperor of Earth. And then they'd put me in the principal's office. Say, look, you know, this kid's a problem kid. So, no, I didn't really realize that. I just, I had no idea.

But I've done a lot of other things, too. I mean, besides what we've talked about, I've done organizational leadership development in corporations, which was a strange fluke because I had met Stephen Covey. You know Stephen Covey? Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Yes. When his book was first published, he gave me the state of Wisconsin.

I had met him. He liked me, and he said, I want you to represent my work here. So now I was in front of corporate leaders Presenting his work through a video course that he had done. But then I had one of the people in the audience ask me to come in and do some other work that I had to develop the coursework [00:38:00] myself.

And that just came out of the blue. And when they hired me as an organizational development consultant, they thought Dr. Arthur Rapkin, because I have a doctorate in Chinese medicine. So they thought I had a doctorate in organizational development. They didn't know I was an acupuncturist. So here I am standing up there presenting work that I developed in the communications field.

Uh, I called one of my courses the Spirit of Dialogue Uh, and sold it for 386, 000. And then another company bought it, and another company bought it, and it was like a million dollars in the first year. It was crazy. I had no training in it whatsoever. But I had some, you know, it was like an allure to me.

And again, I think I wanted to just help people. And the, you know, like Stephen Covey's work, The Seven Habits, kind of like the Ten Commandments.

Speaker 3: Yeah. [00:39:00]

Speaker 2: You know, that was one of the leadership exercises I used to do in the corporate world. I'd have a room full of people. I'd say, how many people here have ever heard of the Ten Commandments?

Every hand went up. I'd say, okay, uh, get into groups of three. The first group that can list them in order, raise your hand. Nobody listed them in order. The ten commandments. Something that everybody knew. Everybody probably thought, acknowledged and thought, these are good commandments. But nobody really could name them all, let alone put them in order.

Except one guy who was the head of the nuclear power plant in Wisconsin. Thanks who, uh, went to a Catholic school and was beaten with rulers until they mentioned the Ten Commandments in order every morning. He was the only guy that, that knew the Ten Commandments. Here I was as a consultant in the nuclear power plant.

Me. Where you have to have top security clearance. They [00:40:00] investigate your background. So I did some other things. Yeah. Besides, I was a hairdresser.

Speaker: Women's hair or men's hair? Did you cut men's hair or women's hair?

Speaker 2: No. You know, I went to hairdressing school because I wanted to meet women.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, I figured, how do you meet women?

I went to hairdressing school.

Speaker: You're a smart man.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and then when you go out at night, you don't go out at night looking to meet women. You go out at night with six other girls that you work with. And you don't have to go home wondering who you're going home with. Because you go home with two or three of the girls and in the morning they're making omelets.

Uh, yeah, so I did that. Uh, and I was, I was never a good hairdresser because I didn't know how to dress hair. You know, like if a woman came in with really long hair and they were going to a wedding and they wanted it to be done in a special, no. But with the scissors I was pretty good. You were [00:41:00] good.

Everybody got short hair.

Speaker: Yeah. I liked what you were saying about, um, How writing the book itself was like cathartic and your ability to really reflect on all these different things that have happened that maybe you'd bottled up over the years. But there's something about writing that just really crystallizes your thoughts in a way that nothing else does.

And um, you know, I think that as humans, we're so attracted and drawn to these people with amazing transformational stories similar to yourself, like, I think that's partially why, um, Apostle Paul is such a huge figure in Christianity because, you know, he was the worst of the worst persecuting and killing Christians.

Had his transformation and now he's written two, you know, I think it's two thirds of the New Testament. That's a powerful story through that transformation. So, I think your ability to be vulnerable and share those experiences and those learnings and teach people that they too can transform like you did for that woman with her son that was facing those drug charges.

Like, we're just kind of drawn to the, to the ability to be vulnerable and show other people that [00:42:00] you can transform too.

Speaker 2: Took me a long time to really realize how connected we all are. Uh. Because there was a large portion of time in my life that I was pursuing, you know, more. More and more. I wanted more and it was not enough.

Uh, and now as I look back, I realize none of that really mattered. You know, what matters are the things that we're probably taught if we're lucky as kids, about caring for other people and kindness, relationships. Um, not how much money your business made and how successful you are by what kind of vehicle you had.

Uh, and I had, you know, I had three houses, four houses at a time. Different parts of the country, a Rolls Royce, a driver, you know. That is not, as I look back, [00:43:00] what made any difference. My practice, which became huge, wouldn't have made any difference if it would have been A small practice. I still raised my two kids and, uh, you know, didn't have the kind of big money that I had in the old days.

And as long as you have a good relationship with people you care about, and the more people that you make connections with, the richer your life is. Not that people don't count if they don't think like you. Or that, you know, uh, becoming so self important. That other people are less important. I don't know how that all I think when I hung out with those mentors in the big boy restaurant, and, you know, the siding agents, and the con artists, that Like, one of my friends was Ronald McDonald, who was a carny.

Uh, and he was raised on the carnival, and then he got the job as Ronald McDonald when they first hired a clown, uh, make corporate McDonald's. And he used to talk [00:44:00] about, you know, In the carnival world, there's the carnies and then there's the marks. And the marks were the people that came to watch the, the fat lady or, you know, the sword swallower or whatever.

And the guy who was selling the tickets was standing on a higher stoop. And so he would be able to look down and then they'd have people in the crowd who would see when someone went into their wallet or pulled out their money to buy the ticket and they would come by and touch them on the back like, yeah, you know, eh.

You know. And they didn't know, but they had a chalk mark. They did a chalk mark so that the pickpockets would be able to know who to pickpocket during the show. And that's how the term marks came to be. They were marks. So, you know, I was raised in a group like that, where people, the scammers, the hustlers, and then everybody else was a mark.

If you go through life like that, you're missing out.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I really didn't get it until [00:45:00] Much later in my life, but thank God I got it.

Speaker 3: Mm.

Speaker 2: Uh, because I still have, you know, the opportunity to be able to do things that are, I consider to be good things, valuable things, helping other people, you know, whatever I can do.

Speaker: Yeah. What's the best way for people to, um. Get a copy of your book or connect with you further if they want to learn more about your story.

Speaker 2: Well, the book is available on the publisher's website, which is called Beyond the Streets. Beyond the Streets is, uh, primarily, uh, produces art books, table books. But the publisher really thought highly of my story and wanted to do the first memoir.

Uh, it's also being, uh, it's going to be a TV series.

Speaker 3: Mm.

Speaker 2: Uh, a television producer named Kelly Saunders, who's a very successful TV producer, got a copy of the book and, uh, decided she wanted to make it into a [00:46:00] series. Uh, which I think would be a wonderful thing because I think the story has a lot of legs.

And who knows what they're going to do with it. But, um, the way to get the book would be to go to Beyond the Streets and order it. Uh, and, uh, there's a lot of, there's about 150 pages of photographs and documentation. Uh, there's a lot of musicians in there, me with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Stevie Winwood, when I was in my music days.

Um, there's all kinds of documentation. Posters of the Bob Dylan concert, uh, when I was supposed to fight the bull, uh, newspaper articles. So you can actually pick the book up and just look through it and be like, I can't believe this, even though it's all there. It's still unbelievable. When I think back at it, it seems kind of unbelievable even to me.

Speaker 3: Mm.

Speaker 2: I don't get out much anymore. Yeah. [00:47:00]

Speaker: You've done enough.

Speaker 4: So cool. Well, thanks so much for joining us. This is awesome. Really appreciate you sharing, sharing with our audience and I know they're going to love it. So thank you.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.