My name is Shaun Attwood.
I smuggled over $10 million worth of ecstasy
into America from Holland.
This is how crime works.
At the height of the ecstasy ring,
I had about 200 people working for me.
Largest-ever shipment was 40,000 pills,
and we were competing against an underboss
for the Gambino crime family,
"Sammy the Bull" Gravano.
When I was active,
the capital for ecstasy manufacture was Holland.
Five of the most common ones back then
were white doves, Mitsubishis,
euro dollars, Teletubbies, dollar signs.
A pure ecstasy pill should be 100 to 125 milligrams
of MDMA and clay.
So, they put the powder into the press,
and it comes out with a logo on it.
The recipe for ecstasy has changed
because the government has clamped down
on the original ingredients for ecstasy.
So, you've got these cartels and big criminal enterprises
who don't care about the purity of the product
putting all kinds of mixed chemicals in.
People sometimes put food coloring in them
to make a distinct branding.
Most of the pills that had the food coloring in them
were not the pure presses,
the base presses from Holland.
Every time a new pill came out,
people would say, "This is the bomb,"
"This has got double-stacked MDMA in it."
But generally, if it's 100 to 125 milligrams of MDMA,
you're going to get the same hit.
At the height of the ecstasy operation,
we could commission a pill to be designed in a certain way,
but we opted not to
because we believed it would attract law enforcement.
On the website DanceSafe,
they had all of the pills, photos of them,
and they gave the exact ingredients in the pills.
So we were already in very good standing
for the quality of our product.
I was there when the rave scene began in Arizona.
I knew everybody.
It was all the local little cliques that came to me
to invest in the parties and the E deals.
The first clubs I scored individually from
was a little rave called Chupa
and the Silver Dollar Club.
We were getting them for, like, $25, $30 a pill.
This is 1996, 1997.
So we set up a deal whereby,
I can't remember if it was 500 or 1,000 out of LA
for just over $10 a pill.
So that's when we realized that we needed to
meet demand to get greater quantities
and to get them at reduced prices to go through Holland.
To source pills from Holland,
I had to put people on flights
with the testing kits and say, "Hit the clubs."
They would find the people selling them in the clubs,
and they would come home with the samples.
And if the samples were good,
then the person would go back out
and we would establish a deeper connection.
It's very covert.
It's all done in hotel rooms.
People show up. You got your testing kit.
They hand over the pills;
you hand over the bills.
You don't know a lot of the background information
as to what's going on,
and that's probably to protect the enterprises
that are running it.
Once we started to source pills out of Holland,
we were getting tens of thousands per shipment,
but we didn't have to do it as often then.
It might be every month,
every couple of months, something like that.
Wild Man, my best friend from childhood,
became my main bodyguard in Arizona.
When Wild Man was on his first stay,
he opened the door into a world of gangsters,
contacts I wouldn't have made.
And I got to meet all these characters.
And one of them in particular,
he was in a situation with the cops,
and we protected him, and he said,
"From now on, me and my brothers have got your back."
And that was the New Mexican Mafia.
We were schooled by the New Mexican Mafia.
This is the most powerful,
dangerous mafia in Arizona at the time.
They tried to assassinate the head of the prisons,
the head of the Department of Corrections.
They said to me, "Shaun,
if you get pulled over leaving our house,
the cops don't have a right to get in your vehicle
unless they have probable cause.
They're going to ask you, 'Can I search your vehicle?'
You can say, 'No, I'm in a hurry.'
And if they insist on searching the vehicle
and they find something without probable cause,
that is the fruit of the forbidden tree.
We will post your bail bond right away,
we will have a lawyer come and visit you right away,
and the lawyer will tell you what, realistically,
what kind of trouble you are in."
The reason I wasn't bumping heads with the cartel
and I wasn't bumping heads with the New Mexican Mafia is
they had harder drugs locked down.
I was never in competition with them.
So, in the beginning from Holland,
we were doing it through the mail.
We hollowed out stock market annual reports,
and we used some edible glue stuff to seal them all.
And then they'd be put in a box
and FedExed to an address in Arizona.
And we had various addresses.
I flew people over from the UK,
built up credit in their names,
rented houses in their names,
and bought cars in their names,
all for use within the criminal enterprise.
We would go from Hermosillo Airport.
We would fly over to Mexico City.
Then you could take Air France to Paris,
and then you'd get the train over to Holland.
Back then, this was before 9/11.
This may sound really lackadaisical to some people,
but you could just throw them in your luggage
in, like, pillowcases, thousands and thousands of pills.
Now, it was more strategic
than just them getting off the plane at Hermosillo
and then coming over the Arizona border.
We rented properties in Puerto Peñasco, Rocky Point,
and the smugglers who brought them into Mexico
would take them to those locations.
Then the pills would be divided up into vehicles
and smugglers that had, for example, brand-new SUVs,
University of Arizona stickers on them,
diving tanks, all kinds of tourist bric-a-brac.
And in particular, if it was spring break
or one of the student holidays,
the checkpoints were so backed up.
They were so overwhelmed.
You know, you got so many guys stopping cars.
We never, ever got caught
bringing them over the Arizona border.
It was flawless.
"Better Call Saul," these people exist.
They may seem like stereotypes,
but they're based on what's really happening in America.
I mean, there's so much money in drugs.
So, I was No. 1.
I was coordinating the operations.
Wild Woman was No. 2.
She's from Liverpool.
Wild Man was No. 3.
Three English people at the top.
The rest were all local people from America.
Mostly, people originated in Arizona.
We had it structured like a corporation.
I divided it into factions.
So then you've got the head of each faction,
they've got middle people,
and they've got runners who are selling them
at the street level.
In my enterprise, the main rules were loyalty,
not snitching, passing information up the chain.
If you found anything out at street level that was a threat,
that information gets fed right back to me.
I chose people primarily who did not have criminal records.
My right-hand man, Cody Bates, he's dead now,
he hired cars and rented houses
just for cash and pills that nobody knew about.
I'm living in a million-dollar house on a mountainside,
the most beautiful place I've ever lived in my life,
in a gated, guarded community.
As more people work for me,
I realized it was in the best interest
to spread the product out amongst various locations,
amongst various factions.
So, as soon as a shipment came in
that was tens of thousands,
we'd want to get that out right away,
spread out to the different locations.
Because if one gets hit,
with 2,000 pills, that's no big deal.
That's the cost of doing business.
But if we've got 40,000 in one house
and that gets hit, that's a serious loss.
At the height of it,
we had people from other states coming to us.
Even people would fly from Chicago
and states on the other side of America to come to us.
We had pagers.
Never spoke about big deals on the phone to anyone.
Cody Bates, he had the house rented where the product was,
where the cash was that nobody knew about,
and he would do the rounds.
So, he would drop off to the head of each faction,
pick up the cash.
If everything was going smoothly, that was fine.
If there were problems,
that's where we'd bring in Wild Man and G-Dog,
and they would handle the enforcement side of it.
With the shipment that was 40,000 pills,
let's say I'm getting $10 at a minimum, on average,
and I'm paying $2 to $3.
I'm making $7 or $8 on 40,000,
which is a couple hundred grand, I think, profit
from one mission.
To launder the money, I flew people from the UK,
opened stock market, bank accounts,
and credit accounts in their names.
Slowly built all this credit up
and kept all this money in a legal kind of way
whereby I hadn't done anything criminal to it yet.
But once the enterprise was massive
and I knew I had to burn through these accounts
and these names, I just started investments
in rave clothing and music stores.
Now, if you're a store that throws raves,
then when you've thrown a rave at the weekend,
you've got tens of thousands in cash
going in the bank on Monday.
You add my ecstasy proceeds to that.
We're getting the money into the banking system.
Before Sammy the Bull Gravano entered the scene,
I had a reputation for getting
the white and beige presses out of Holland.
And that was the primary source of supply to Arizona,
to the raves and to the clubs.
What you've got to bear in mind is people say,
if Sammy the Bull Gravano was in competition with you,
this is the Italian Mafia, the Gambino crime family.
But that's not true.
Sammy the Bull is a formidable character in his own right.
He murdered people, conspired to murder them.
But he was the highest-ranking member of the Mafia
to turn sides and testify and cooperate.
And he went against Gotti.
I did something that was silly.
We found a property that we believe was linked
to Sammy the Bull's people.
And we all got strapped up
and kicked the door in and held the people
and took all their stuff as an act of,
you know, showing that if you do something to us,
something's going to happen to you guys.
But I regretted doing that.
I shouldn't have never put myself in that situation,
because kicking someone's door in and running down the hall
with a gun where they could have all had guns
and just shot us all, the cops could have come,
that was drug-fueled insanity, looking back on it now.
It made things worse. There was a hit put out on me.
They were offering $10,000 for my head on a silver platter.
In prison, Sammy the Bull Gravano's son told me
that someone had called it in
in Phoenix, The Crowbar, it's called.
I was there with G-Dog, Wild Man,
and some of my crew, Wild Woman.
A strip-tease woman had spotted me.
There was a bounty on me. She called it in,
and they were in a car coming to take me out to the desert.
G-Dog, Wild Man advised me to leave
because they'd sensed the atmosphere had changed.
And I got out of there
just before Gravano's son Gerard arrived.
He said that if the ransom hadn't been paid,
they were going to kill me,
and that would've just wiped out their competition.
Sammy the Bull's enterprise came up,
did big numbers, lit the scene up,
had all the runners running around the raves and clubs
saying, "We're the biggest drug barons
in the history of the world,"
these steroid-head jock characters,
which totally brought the heat to the scene.
And that's why he got popped a couple years before me.
So, I mean, I was thanking the cops for his arrest,
basically, in my mind.
But all of those resources were then turned on me.
It was May 16th, 2002, when the SWAT team came.
I thought once I quit the importation,
I got away with it.
I thought they had catch you with the drugs.
All it takes is someone from your past, within seven years,
the statute of limitations, to tell the cops
they've done a deal with you, and they've got you.
Don't need the drugs.
We used the lawyer from the New Mexican Mafia.
He was a loophole lawyer. Paid him $100,000.
And that's how we got it down from 200 years
to 9 ½ years without snitching.
My first jail was Towers Jail,
where the neo-Nazis come up to me.
To join the gang, to be a member,
you have to murder someone for them.
There are very few members.
There are a lot of probates, associates,
people putting work in for them
that are running the system for them.
Arizona, the four major prison gangs,
it's all racially divided.
The whites is the Aryan Brotherhood.
The Blacks is the Mau Mau.
The Mexican nationals have their own gang.
And then you've got the Chicanos,
which are the Mexican Americans.
You've got the Native Americans as well.
And then anyone who doesn't fit in, heaven help them,
because it's just raw survival of the fittest.
Being deep in the Arizona jail system,
the absolute priority of all of the gangs
is to keep the drugs business running smoothly.
You've got the staff bringing the drugs in.
You've got the visitors bringing the drugs in.
They do not want anything to disrupt that.
I've done some PSA videos, prison survival advice.
Be careful what you say.
Don't brag. Don't let them know you've got money.
Don't let them know you've got resources.
Two months after my arrest,
there was a story in the Phoenix New Times.
"English Shaun's Evil Empire," 10 pages long.
The neo-Nazis caught wind of this,
and then they were pressuring me to ask my girlfriend
to smuggle drugs in through visitation
because I must have all of these drug connections.
Fortunately, there was a race riot,
and those guys who were trying to pressure me got moved,
and I cliqued up with the Italians after that,
and that pressure on me ended.
I end up in a jail
run by a famous sheriff called Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Over time, you just saw them. Revolving door.
Young people coming in with lesser offenses
becoming harder criminals.
It is a college of crime.
The conditions in that jail,
the cockroaches, the dead rats in the food,
the guards murdering the prisoners.
For the vast majority of the people I was housed with,
there was no hope.
But that's what keeps the prisons in business.
The illegal black market in drugs
created by drug laws is so vast.
And now we've got hundreds of thousands of dead in Mexico
and all this knife crime in London.
This is what the cops are telling us
revolves around young people competing
for the black-market profits and drugs created by drug laws.
I was operating during a relatively innocent phase
of the introduction of ecstasy to America.
Now everything is monopolized by organized crime,
and it doesn't matter who gets arrested in organized crime.
They always have the resources to pay the officials off,
to keep the drugs flowing.
I lost absolutely everything.
Spent six years incarcerated.
There's a clip where I'm at an airport in London,
I think it's Gatwick or Heathrow,
and I'm all shell-shocked looking, hugging mom, dad, sister.
Mom's crying in the car out of the airport.
Stayed at my parents' house for a year.
The dole was sending me on, like,
telesales interviews and stuff like that.
I'd tell them, you know, criminal record, yes.
Couldn't get a job.
Dole's telling me you've gotta start lying,
telling them you've not got a criminal record,
or you're never going to get a job.
But a year later, I moved down to Guildford.
Lived with DJ Mike Hot Wheels, one of my best friends.
Lived in his bedroom for 10 years
just doing my blog, building my socials.
We started the blog in 2004,
started the YouTube channel in 2007.
It was the first prison YouTube channel.
I'd go up and down the country interviewing
the most interesting people. I'm blessed, you know.
So many wonderful people came into my life
to give me a leg up and help me get my message out.
And I feel it's my karmic destiny
now that we've got this platform
to help other guys share their story.
It was the late 1980s,
and all of a sudden, on the weekends, on the news,
there was these stories of cops chasing around
young people who were wide-eyed,
wearing baggy jeans with, like,
acid, LSD logos on them and stuff.
In my economics class, I had a mate.
He's like, "You need to come and check this out."
And then we went to the Thunderdome,
Oldham Road, Manchester.
So he was like, "Bear with me.
I'll go and get you the stuff."
So, I took the pill,
and then once I started dancing, I never wanted to stop.
I never wanted the party to end.
And I was like, "Whew, I finally found myself."
And that's how raving became my religion.
So, going back generations of my family,
some settled in Chicago,
some retired in Arizona.
I had two aunts.
Two of my dad's sisters ended up in Arizona,
and one of them I would visit as a kid.
When the airplane comes in to land, you look out,
and you see all the swimming pools in the backyards.
So I was already thinking,
"Hm, I might want some of this when I finish university."
That's what I did.
If I could go back and tell myself one piece of advice,
it would be stay on the path
of slow and steady progress in life.
I started following the stock market when I was 16.
I was worth a couple of million
in the stock market in my late 20s.
That was before all this drug activity.
I didn't need the money. It was ego.
My ego was as big as the Grand Canyon at the top of this.
Pablo Escobar was worth billions.
His brother said, "Let's buy our own island
and kick back and not get arrested and not get killed
and not spend the rest of our lives in prison."
Pablo said, "I put the president in power.
I've got 10,000 people working for me.
You want me to kick back on some boring old island?"
It's not money.
It's ego and being a character in the scene.