281: What if you entered the belly of the Narco beast?
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From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 281.

What if you entered the belly of the narco beast? This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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I have super mixed ethnic heritage. My mom is black and my dad, his mom, my grandma was born in Puerto Rico to Italian and Spanish parents. So I'm just a mix of European, Latin and African-American. I really believe that my mom

was sort of stunted after she had kids. You know, she had kids pretty young and I genuinely feel that she is kind of 16 at heart, you know, which growing up was endearing, but as I got older, it became, you know, the source of a lot of conflict. My dad is just a strange guy.

When I was born, he was in the army, and when I was really young, he was dishonorably discharged from the army, and I still don't even know the complete story. There was definitely physical violence at times between my mom and my dad, and from what I can remember, it was more my mom towards my dad.

Around the time I was five years old, they split and I was with my mom. And we moved from where we lived in this little house in the college area of San Diego to East County, me and my mom and my younger sister. East County, San Diego at the time was a notorious hub for crystal meth. And Lakeside, that was the Ku Klux Klan headquarters. It was just a really sketchy place.

My mom was, I think, catching up on some of the years that she had missed out on. And she had two kids at this point. And, you know, she wanted to party a little bit. For work at the time, she was a stripper. And, you know, she let all kinds of weird characters into that place. And it was not the best environment. And I was not very well supervised.

I remember one time all the kids in the neighborhood were lined up in front of my mom's bedroom window, which was facing out towards the parking lot of the apartment complex we lived in. And I was just like, hey, guys, what's going on? You know, and they're kind of trying to keep me from it. You know, I snuck up to the window where everybody was standing and it was like my mom having sex with some guy. I remember that like shocking me at the time.

And the guy was this dude named Charlie. And I remember after that, like I came in crying and like he was like so pissed off. My dad, meanwhile, he was attending college at UC Berkeley. And I didn't know that there was a custody battle going on. And it was a custody battle that my mom had lost.

No one explained what was happening to me. I just remember one day I got into the car with one of my mom's sketchy tweaker friends. And next thing you know, I'm at the airport and being checked in for a flight. And I don't remember consciously ever being on an airplane before that.

They helped me get on a plane and they sat me with the family and I was utterly confused. My mom didn't even say goodbye to me. There was no conversation like, "You're gonna stay with your dad for a little while," or nothing like that. It was just this sudden change and it felt like I was kidnapped or I'd been abandoned in some way. My dad and my uncle showed up at the airport in Oakland and that was it. I was living with my dad from then on. It was a different life.

You know, even though I was with my dad, I felt like I had been like taken. It was a weird experience. I slept on an army cot. My dad worked as a security guard at night and took classes during the day. And I was left with my grandma who, sweet woman and extremely religious, like a monk, basically. You know, we'd pray together and then like I'd always just pray to go back and live with my mom.

I was just ruthlessly separated from my mom and my sister, Jessica. And it's just kind of where the sadness came from. I just remember being sad all the time. I became really introspective. I got into studying and collecting insects, and I wanted to be an entomologist. I got really into drawing, and that period of time really helped me develop an inner world. As a kid, it was hard to know what was normal and what was not normal.

All I knew is that life with my mom, it seemed just more vibrant in some way.

There was all these people, there was all these friends, and everyone was kind of happy and partying. And my mom, you know, she was a loving mother. Her priorities were screwed up, but she was a loving mom and she was warm. And I went from this kind of like fun adventure in the hood to what felt like this monastic and sterile environment surrounded by academia.

And I didn't have the same sense of family, screwed up or not by any other perspective, with my dad. It was jarring. So eventually when my dad graduated, we drove back down to San Diego and he allowed my mom to pick me up for a visit. And I just didn't come back.

I don't know what was happening in terms of litigation at that time, but my mom picked me up and she was like, oh, you're going to stay with me now. And I was like, yes, thank you. And I was just so grateful. My stepdad had applied to get us into military housing with my mom, my stepdad, and my sister Jessica, and my new baby sister Taylor.

Man, it was an idyllic childhood paradise. So for me, that little chapter of my childhood, on one hand, was great. But on the other hand, my stepdad, I think, was getting into something he didn't completely understand. And the way that he chose to discipline me was physically.

Child Protective Services had been to my house a number of times. I was afraid to come home because I was going to be in trouble for something. I was just always, always, always in trouble. So I drew pictures and I wrote stories and I caught bugs and I tried to do anything to create a world outside of what I was experiencing at home. My transition into adulthood for me came when I had, I think I said something backhanded to my mom and me and my mom get into this crazy melee situation.

At the end of it, I have a giant bite mark on my ribs where she had bit me because I had like tried to wrestle her. Black eye, broken nose, and just blood everywhere.

My girlfriend at the time was there and her dad came to pick her up and saw me. And this guy who I was carpooling with at Starbucks came to pick me up. And he's like, wow, okay, you're not going to work today. And he drove me to Children's Hospital. I had a concussion. The detective came, took some pictures. And my girlfriend at the time, since her dad saw what happened, he took me in.

So I stayed with her family for a while. It was the first bit of normalcy that I had. But then the 2008 financial crisis happened. I lost my job at Starbucks and I needed to have something to give me a sense of autonomy. I was a big Nine Inch Nails fan. And when I discovered that Trent Reznor made all the music himself, I was fascinated by that fact. I was like, wow, I could do this.

When I started taking classes in community college, I took an electronic music production class and I started to learn how to make music. I liked all types of music, but electronic music at the time felt free and it felt truly subversive. I dropped out of community college and one of my classmates gave me some pirated software and I just consumed it.

The first music that I started producing, people liked. And the music that I produced was like a kind of a crossover fusion of like rock and electro house. Through the grapevine and through this kind of electronic music community that I was building, I became acquainted with this guy named Parrish. He booked me for his first party, Studio 69, and I had never DJed before. I had just made the music, but I had tons of it.

This party, Studio 69, it exists in this really special moment in the LA underground. And I walked in there into this underground with my name on the flyer and no one knew who the hell I was. And I was like, okay, yeah, I'm home. This is it. I was going to make it as a DJ. I felt seen. I felt at home. I felt like I could express myself and like anything was possible.

And I was getting bookings and I was producing music and I started doing like little licensing things and trying to work on commercial music. But it was still a lot of struggle and a lot of chaos. My roommate at the time, she went on a trip to Mexico. They're posting on Facebook about their awesome time in Mexico.

The next message I get from them, they're like, "Hey, I met this guy. He like basically owns the town I'm in. Like he's got this club and everything and like he's looking for a DJ to book their opening night and I showed him your music and he thinks you're awesome." Look, I had never even left the country. I'm like, "Yeah, sign me up." She passes along my contact info and I get an email from someone named Carlos.

Hey, I met your roommate. She showed me your music. I really love it. I think you'd really dig the scene down here. People are super open. I just opened this club and I'm really looking for someone to headline the New Year's Eve party that we're throwing here. It's kind of a grand opening. I can pay you. Room and board would be covered. We'll feed you. I'm like pumped. You know, it was almost too good to be true.

And by the 22nd of December, I was on a plane to Mexico to meet a nightclub owner named Carlos, who I had never met before. I remember stepping out of the plane and just looking like a complete fish out of water. I had like a black leather jacket and black skinny jeans. And I looked like a creature from a nightclub, you know, and everybody's in their board shorts and tank tops.

I was so used to urban life and I was suddenly surrounded by lush, tropical foliage in the ocean. And it was just so different, but so like refreshing. And it spoke to something in me where I was just, I don't know. I was like, wow, this is great. This is happening, you know. It was like a two-hour cab ride from Vallarta to Sayulita. And I'm looking out for Carlos.

And I see this tall, white, surfer-looking dude waving at me. And he comes up and he's like, "Oh, what's up, man? Carlos." And he gives me a big hug. I'm like, "Oh, this is fucking Carlos? This white dude?" And he's like, "Let me take you to the club. Let me take you to Zen Garden." He's kind of gregariously just showing me the club and introducing me to the staff and things like that. And, you know, I'm the guest of honor, essentially.

And it's a nice place. It's like a half a block away from the water. The building itself is three stories high. The first floor was kind of like a club with a bar. And then there was a set of stairs. And the middle floor is like an administrative office with an attached flat, like an apartment.

And so he leads me up there and he's like, all right, this is where you're going to be staying, you know, help yourself to whatever. And then there was a rooftop bar and kitchen. Carlos was an interesting character. He was charming in this kind of David Koreshi kind of way. When he gave me a hug or we spoke like he really had this like brotherly energy.

He just meets this chef. Her name is Annie. She's from the U.S. There's a guy there that I know from L.A. named Lenny who kind of washed up there. And he recognizes me from my social group. And he's like a really jovial kind of guy. I think at the time he wanted to be kind of like a gonzo journalist. And he's like, there's just fucked up stuff happening all the time here. And you don't want to get caught up in any of the bad juju.

I was like, yeah, noted. And he's like, don't fuck with the locals. And I was like, don't plan on it, you know? He's like, the devil's here in Sayulita, is what he said.

I spent the next few days leading up to the New Year's party that I was going to play either battling food poisoning or a hungover. And every time I talked to Carlos, it was kind of like he was really trying to sell me on being a part of this family of his. And I was kind of being sold on it. And he was telling me like, yeah, you know, we could pay you like a residency rate and, you know, you can eat for free, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

In my head, I'm thinking like, nah, no one ever blows up at a random club in Mexico being a resident. I'm trying to be a big name producer, you know. New Year's comes along. Time comes, play my set, and I play one of the best sets I've ever played in my life. It was six hours. I went through so many different genres. I played so much new music. The crowd was fucking amazing.

At one point, Carlos comes behind the DJ booth and he hands me a little bag of Molly. And he's like, welcome to the family, man. It's really great to have you here. He's like, you remind me a lot of myself. You got nothing to lose. And he like pats me on the back and walks away. I was like, all right, I guess. Took some Molly, did the countdown. Everybody went crazy. It was like one of the best nights I think I've ever had. I don't remember much of it.

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Hire high-quality certified pros at Angie.com. The next day is kind of a blur, but we decide to open the club up for a rooftop kind of day party thing. And I DJ.

Goes on for a while till past sunset. And then eventually we kick everybody out. And the core group decides to still keep the party going, but a little bit more mellow inside of my flat. And it was me, Carlos, Lenny, Annie, and a handful of other people.

Some dude walks in that no one knows, or at least I didn't know. And he's just like, yo, ready to party, you know? And we're all like, yo, what the fuck? And Annie's like, yo, get the fuck out of here in her surly way. And Carlos steps up. He's like, hey, man, it's private party. You got to go.

And he's like, "No, I want to party!" He's like, "Fucked up." And Carlos is like, "No, man. Sorry. Chor group only. Come back tomorrow." He's like, "Man, fuck you, gringo. I don't gotta listen to you." And he takes this star tetrahedron decoration that's hanging and he rips it down and he starts carrying it outside. And everyone's like, "Whoa!" And we all kind of follow down the stairs onto the street.

And I'm kind of like hanging back a little bit. I can kind of see what's going on. But next thing you know, the dude rushes back inside with Carlos. His nose is bleeding. He's like, why'd you fucking hit me? Like, what the fuck was that for? You know, Carlos was nice enough to let the guy back into the club and he gave him some ice. He was like, I'm sorry I had to do that to you. Like, but you were disrespecting me and I had to do what I had to do, you know? And he gives the guy some ice and it seems like everything's cool.

So he leaves and I'm kind of chilled out laying in bed when I hear like a screech of brakes. And then I can hear someone like yelling in Spanish. And like Carlos is like, go home, dude. So I come out of where I'm at and I join him and Annie who are on the balcony. I look down and there's a brand new 2014 Charger.

And standing on either side of it are the dude who just got checked by Carlos and some other guy who I don't know if I'd seen before. The guy I hadn't seen before is like yelling at Carlos and like reprimanding him, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English. He's like, this is Meiko. Like, oh, fuck you up, blah, blah, blah, blah. We kind of shrug him off. And like, he's like mad that we're not taking him seriously, I guess.

He grabs the ice that we had given his friend to help him and starts throwing it back at us. And one of the ice cubes hits Annie. And then Annie gets mad and she pitches her highball glass at him with accuracy I have never seen before in my life. And manages to hit him right in the forehead above his eyebrow. All of a sudden, the mood changes completely.

I hear a bunch of Spanish. I hear the word pistola. I see him reach into his car seat. We all duck. I can see from where I'm at that this guy and his friend start heading towards the door. The gate is broken downstairs. Carlos closes the door leading to the flat. And he's kind of like stacked on the edge, like on the side of the door. And I'm right next to him. So is another guy who's with us.

Right next to the door, there is a security monitor. One of the cameras is pointed at the office door. And I can see the guy in the security monitor kicking the door and in real time the door buckling, you know, next to where we were standing. Like, this guy's coming in. We're under attack. I have to be in this. We stand a better chance if it's all of us. Carlos hits the door. I hit the door right next to him. Bang. Bang.

Bang, bang, the third kick, the door swings open. Carlos is on the guy before he is even completely through the door and kind of like throws him over and cuts an angle around him and takes his back. I'm like, all right, Carlos has him. I notice that the other guy's behind him. So I go downstairs and I kicked him in the chest and he went downstairs and he went out the gate. And then me and another guy, we close him out of the gate.

and he takes off down the street. I go back up to where Carlos is, and Carlos is like, "Give me a hand, take him, I gotta get something to tie him up with."

This guy's much bigger than me and his back is against the stairs and he's trying to post up on his hand. And I kind of go knee on belly with him. I get my right arm around his neck and I grab my own bicep on the other side and I have my left hand on the back of his head. And I'm just like, dude, just chill out. Chill out. If you don't chill out, I'm going to have to put you to sleep.

He's still struggling. He's like, fuck you, I'll fucking kill all of you. And like, he's like fucking like a demon, you know? And I'm like, all right, I have to put this guy to sleep, you know? So I do. I tighten my grip and I put pressure kind of with my bicep, grabbing my opposite tricep and with my hand on the back of his neck. And I just kind of squeeze there. I can feel him stop struggling and go limp.

And in my mind, I'm like, okay, he's chill for a moment. But my adrenaline is like crazy at this time. I was like, what about the other guy? There's another guy out here. He was bleeding from that gash on his head from when Annie had thrown that highball glass. So I'm not wearing a shirt. I am covered in this guy's blood. And I just start taking off down the streets of Sayulita looking like a psycho, looking for this other dude.

At that point in my mind, I'm like, we did it. You know what I mean? Like some people came and we handled our shit. And so I can't find the guy. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. Fucking run. So I walk back to the club. I'm not thinking of what could happen next. I get back in and I walk up the stairs. The man that I just choked out, essentially, he's lying there. He has audio cables tied around his wrists and a pink doggy leash tied

Also tied around his wrist. And I'm looking down at him and I noticed that his eyes are open. And I'm like, oh shit, this guy's dead. And he's the first person I ran into. And I was like, is he dead? And she said he needed to die. And I was like, what?

I look over at Carlos. He's on the phone and eating a granola bar. And he's wearing a blue billabong hoodie that has blood all over it. And I'm like, whoa, okay, all right, okay. So I get in the shower and I rinse off all the blood. And I'm watching it kind of go down the drain, like thinking of what my next move is. Like, okay, we're in the right.

This is fine. We have security footage. This person came and tried to cause us harm in some way. We defended ourselves. He happened to die. We're going to be fine. And so I get out and a local cop is in the doorway talking to Carlos and crew. And I get my laptop and I'm just going to take a video of

So I opened up the Photo Booth app and I started taking a video. I still have this video. And I just kind of do like a little panorama shot and a little walkthrough, show the dead person, the blood and the flat and me and save the video. And then I make a group email. I have one of my sisters in it and some other friends and just various people back home. And I attach the video to that email.

And I'm just like, hey, this is what's going on. This is all my personal information. These are my last whereabouts. I close my laptop just as I hear motors and screeching of brakes and red and blue flashing lights. And I take my laptop and I slide it underneath the mattress of my bed and I go out and I

Next thing you know, there are guys with black balaclavas and military gear coming up the steps. And they came with guns pointed. Their commander comes, picks up my hand, inspects it, marched me forward at the behest of the barrel of a rifle, and marched me and everybody downstairs into the street where there were...

These pickup trucks with sirens and everybody from the town was outside and these like Humvees with like mounted machine guns and shit. It was a scene. Then they zip tied my hands and they marched us all into the back of a pickup truck. It was like such a non sequitur for my life. And it was so out of context that my immediate response was just to start laughing.

I don't think at that point I was intelligent enough to be scared. I didn't know who the deceased was. I didn't know that there was history there between him and Carlos and how deep it ran. And I didn't know that I was now in the Mexican criminal justice system where you are guilty until proven innocent.

They put Carlos in the back with us and he's just like, just relax. It's gonna be fine. Don't worry. We're good. And without any explanation, without any reading of rights, without anything to tell me what the situation was, we're speeding off down this cobblestone road in the back of this pickup truck. It didn't quite seem real. You know, so many times in my life I had been put into shitty situations and just like, well, whatever happens, you have to deal with it.

And Carlos seemed to be sure that we were going to get out of this. I was very detached from the experience. And the attacker's humanity was secondary to the situation that I knew him in as an assailant.

Eventually we get to a police substation of some kind in the jungle, and there's not much in terms of processing. They just take me separate from everybody else, and they put me in what feels like a dog kennel. Not enough room to stand, but enough to lie down. There was some cardboard on the ground to lay on. I took my shoes off and used them as a pillow. And so eventually I pass out.

You ever wake up somewhere where you don't quite remember going to sleep there and it's instantly unfamiliar and you have that little bit of a panic? I had that same sensation but with a lot of reality sinking in. That evening they loaded us back into trucks and drove us to the jungle again. And I remember it was freezing cold and we drove forever. It must have been like three hours.

Until we came upon a giant concrete wall and this big fence. They unloaded us from the trucks. We're all lined up with a bunch of prisoners in this administrative building. There's like a backdrop with all of the logos of these like media outlets and things. And there's like a news camera.

They're taking people in front of that, asking them questions, and they're having the SWAT guys, the cops, pose next to them to take a picture or whatever. It was like some media thing. And then they marched us off into the jail. This place was kind of like a dungeon. Two rows of barred cells with a hallway, and they put us all into kind of separate cells, but each of the cells was absolutely packed with human beings.

The floors and the walls were all kind of a deep crimson-y red. There was a hole where people would defecate. There wasn't any lighting. And the only way that I knew night from day was that it got really cold at night. Somewhere on that first day, Carlos, who was in a cell across and diagonal from me, they grab him from the cell and kind of like drag him away.

They tied him up upside down and put a fuel-soaked rag in his mouth. And they beat him in the abdomen with axe handles and essentially interrogated him until his lawyer showed up. He comes back a few hours later and he's like visibly fucked up. He's kind of stumbling as they're carrying him into the cell.

And they come for me and I'm like, okay, shit. And they sat me in front of a window and they had someone take my statement, essentially. And his English wasn't very good. So they get Carlos and Carlos starts interpreting for me. And he honestly could have said fucking anything to these people. But I just trusted that, you know, he told them it was up. Yeah, like somebody broke in. We defended ourselves.

The guy leaves, Carlos leaves, and the guy comes back. He sits down with some papers and he has me sign them. And I don't even know what the fuck I'm signing. And he's like, okay. He's like, your friends, not so much trouble. You, Carlos, lot of trouble. I was like, okay. All right. This is definitely different. Something's fucked up here.

you know, were observed in the surveillance footage in the melee. What they were saying is that we intentionally lured the deceased, whose name I learned was Yvonne, into the club, tied him up, and then beat him to death.

At that moment, when I learned that I was in a much deeper situation than I thought I was, the light bulbs going off like, you're in Mexico. You have no idea how this system works whatsoever. But also knowing the futility of freaking out. There's a certain surrender. There's like a brief like, okay, what the fuck? And then there's just like, fucking nothing I can do about it. And just knowing that Carlos had some semblance of control.

Yes, we're in a fucked up situation, but this guy seems to think that we're not gonna be so bad off. I just have to have faith in that. There's got to be a consulate. There's got to be something going on. There's got to be something to bring attention to my situation, but right now I'm helpless and freaking out about it isn't gonna do anything to make the situation any better. We're told that our case is gonna take a lot more work and we're gonna need to go to a more permanent facility.

So, again, put us in the back of trucks. They drive us for a while. We're in the capital city of Topek. Pull up to a prison. And they open up the gates and haul us all out. And it's already completely crowded with people. And we kind of find little places to sleep. I think there's like 3,000 people here. So it's massively overcrowded. The next day, they take us to like a more permanent housing kind of situation.

That's kind of when my nerves kick in a little bit, and I'm talking to Carlos, and I'm like, so, hey, really, what's going on? I said, just don't worry about it, okay? I got this under control. I got a great lawyer. Like, they don't know who they're fucking with. Trust me, we're going to be okay. It's just going to be some bullshit. Yeah, okay, but you said we're going to be okay before. He was, like, frustrated, and he was like, look, you can either think of this as you have to go to Mexican prison or you get to go to Mexican prison. I was like, what? What?

Fine. I obviously can't talk to this guy. I think it was that first day they call for me and they take me to the admin building and some guys like, you have people from the consulate who want to talk to you. I was like, okay, fuck, finally. Great. This is awesome. I can speak for myself.

They introduced themselves and it was a lady and a man. And they were like, this particular prison, there's not a lot we can do. The conditions aren't great. We can't do anything for you for your legal case because that's up to the courts here. We just want to make sure that you're not being singled out because you're an American citizen and treated differently. That's all we can really do for you.

I can reach out to family if you want, but this place is kind of notorious for some of its civil rights violations. And keep your chin up. You're in the hands of the system. Here's a John Grisham novel. Here's a bar of soap. That was it. They're on their way.

There are lots of like pretty brutal moments that I've omitted simply because I don't know the best way to talk about them. Like one of them was going through their medical system, for example, and those horrors. But it was just that constant sort of awareness that I had to put my faith in a stranger who I couldn't fully trust. And at any moment during the night, people could just show up and then, you know, put a blanket over my head and take me.

And like, it wasn't necessarily getting killed I was afraid of. It was like, am I going to be tortured? Do they think that I have more value and I'm going to be like, they're going to send a ransom note to somebody? There's all these thoughts, you know? I could end up hanging upside down with a gas-soaked rag in my mouth, or I could wake up and have chili quiles for breakfast. And so it's just this constant, constantly having to push certain thoughts away.

and not knowing who to trust, and feeling helpless in a lot of ways. It's just having to eventually make peace with surrender in this really extreme way. I was really afraid, and this is a fear that I think persists in me, and it's maybe scarier than anything else. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to control myself. I was afraid I would do something that would make things worse.

That wouldn't just harm me, but could harm Carlos or Annie or Lenny or any of the people that I interacted with. And it's sometimes manifested in a freeze response. Because like, I don't know. I don't know if I would be in a state and do something or say something or whatever, you know, because there's all these variables. There's all these, I'm locked up with murderers and crime lords and things like that. And the weight of every decision and every action that I have is like magnified.

So I was very afraid of my ability to control myself.

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My journey through the Mexican criminal justice system was disorienting. There was no clearly defined stages of their legal process, and everything was a mystery to me, and I didn't speak any Spanish. So everything was sort of disseminated to me through Carlos.

It was a blessing in the sense that, okay, Carlos knows all of these people, but it was a curse because it made me less scared of the legal process and more scared of Carlos. I found out, and it was pretty obvious, that Carlos wasn't Carlos' name and that Carlos had some trouble in the States.

Because of that fact, I was limited in the amount of visibility that I could give to myself and my situation. Too much visibility to me, it would bring unwanted attention to him, and he had reason to believe that things wouldn't be good for him if someone discovered he was there, and perhaps that he wasn't who he said he was.

So very quickly, attention, which was my greatest tool, was useless to me. When we walked in there, everybody already knew who we were because of the propaganda photo op interview that we did was playing on the news that they played there. So everybody knew that we weren't there for something petty. We were there for murder. And we weren't there just for murder. We were there for killing someone with our bare hands.

So, of course, the question came from other inmates like, so how'd you do it? Like, how did you know how to do this? How do you know how to take this guy down? Whatever, whatever. Carlos was an interesting character in that there's part of him that was half gangster and half guru. I don't know exactly what he did that made him involved with all of these different players in the underworld. You know, he had gangster contacts, but he also had a wisdom and awareness about Eastern philosophy and meditation and various spiritual practices.

He explained that he trained in a form of martial arts called Kung Fu San Su, which I had never heard of up to that point. And one of the younger guys there, his name was Alex, he was like, "Could you teach me?" So Carlos asked for permission to use the hallway space to do some training. And he also practiced Qigong as well, which is like a Chinese form of movement-based kind of like meditation.

So every morning we kind of had this routine for a while where we'd wake up, we'd have our coffee, and we'd go out and we would sweep up all of the dead bodies of the moths. And then Carlos would lead us through these various situational martial arts drills. And then we'd do qigong and meditation.

Wrestling with the uncertainty and pushing back that thought process of you're in Mexico, people around you are being tortured, you don't know the person that you're locked up with, you can be taken at any time and tortured or disappear or whatever.

That constant awareness that I had to put my faith in a stranger who I couldn't fully trust in this really extreme way. It was constantly having to push certain thoughts away that I think was pretty difficult. And meditation became foundational. I think it kept us both sane to an extent. Carlos began to explain who Yvonne was in relations to him.

Up until that point, he was just the assailant. I hadn't humanized this person. Yvonne was like the baby daddy of one of his business partners and didn't like the fact that Carlos, this seemingly white guy, had managed to make all of these inroads in Mexico where he had failed. And so there was like a pre-existing dynamic there.

I started to think, like, did I go overboard? Did I maybe go too far, thinking in those moments that I was justified in my use of violence? I put myself where I was mentally during the altercation.

And I couldn't help but think like there was a satisfaction. There was a release. It wasn't all of it. I mean, certainly not. There was adrenaline flowing. There was a million thoughts, but there was some element to it that felt maybe like a release.

But I had to question, was that emotion unique to that moment in that scenario? Because it was familiar to me. It was familiar to feel that feeling of just rage and like, yes, I have an excuse to be violent right now. Rage to me is when anger and bliss sort of combine into this nitrogen-fueled, self-feeding fire of,

And I thought about the times in my life where I had felt that before. And I felt it a lot growing up. And I think that sometimes even with my sister or getting into fights, you know, I would feel that release of anger. This person, in a moment of bravado, he had charged that space, made a stupid decision, and he paid for that decision mortally. And I sat and I thought to myself, like, what if I paid mortally for every mistake that I had made?

I would be dead a thousand times over. And I felt like a sense of shame. But I also kind of felt my own innocence because it's like this was the way that I acted out because of the way I was treated. It just made me realize that violence is how the victim virus replicates.

It lays its eggs in you with a strike, and then it kind of has this larval phase in you of fear and that matures into anger. And then the anger finishes its life cycle by you or by me committing another act of violence. And the cycle repeats.

I thought really hard about just where the cycle begins. And I had all of this empathy for some of the people around me who were in these horrible situations in this prison, because the stories that I heard, I mean, a lot of them were it's like, fuck, you didn't have a choice. If you look up the Vienestano Carranza, the prison I was in, it's called La Inferno, hell, basically.

I was witnessing so much of the underbelly, so much of the Mexican underworld, basically, that I had only heard about on news broadcasts. And I was in the belly of this narco beast.

And it seeped into every facet of life in the prison because the people there, by and large, were victims of the drug war in one way or another. Either they were recruited into it or they happened to just be casualties that were there because of horrible police work. I mean, one of the more common stories that you'd hear is,

Those troopers, their black masks would roll up on some pedestrian and tell them that they fit a description and bag them up and basically torture them and get them to confess to some crime.

At the time, that region was run by the H3 cartel, who was in league with Los Zetas, which were this paramilitary trained organization that was the enforcement ring of the Gulf cartel, synonymous with just some of the most brutal enforcement tactics, like the beheadings and the flayings and all of those things. And that's where we were.

Some of the people around me who are in these horrible situations in this prison, the stories that I heard, I mean, a lot of them were it's like, fuck, you didn't have a choice. You didn't have a choice. You were born into a world that was already so violent. And like, it's either adapt or die. So there's this guy they called Monstro.

I remember Carlos one day asked him, he's like, why do they call you El Monstro? His name was Raul, little dude. He used to weave baskets. And he, I guess, explained to Carlos that his girlfriend had come home while he was dismembering people in his bathtub.

And he explained that he was working for these people and his boss told me he had to do it. And it was just part of the job. And there was nothing he could do once his girlfriend found out, except for just, you know, turn himself in. And Carlos was like, how did you feel? He was like,

I mean, it was just a job. I did what they told me to do. And he said how, you know, his uncle used to raise pigs and he used to slaughter pigs. And like, it's not that big of a internal leap from pig to person.

There's another guy. He called himself crazy. He was like a Chicano guy. His name was crazy. He lived in the cell blocks. And sometimes we'd go to other cell blocks to like engage in whatever commerce. I think at the time we wanted to start weaving baskets because we're going crazy. And this guy had like all the plastic twine, you know, he was like a twine monger, I guess.

He was just like, yeah, you know, I'm from L.A. too. You know, they got me back in 2001. And, you know, apparently they have all these bodies on me. But, you know, there's no bodies. And he's like, I was a cook. I thought we said I'm a cook. He meant like he cooked meth or something. He's like, yeah, I cook people. So like all these bodies, they're saying they couldn't find any of them because when I get done with them, he blew into his hand. He's like, they're like dust.

And he explained his method of massaging sugar and diesel fuel into a corpse and it like caramelizes them and horrid stuff. Point is, every single person that was there was there because of this monster of drug trafficking.

And Carlos called it the dragon. That's what he called cocaine specifically in the cocaine trade. It became impossible not to see the connection between my life as a DJ and the party culture and how the party culture, it's a venue for people to get fucked up and to do drugs. And I engaged in that. And I was one of the people that was helping create spaces for that.

I felt a lot of guilt. I felt bad. I felt bad that my life, to some degree, had been defined by party culture, and the party culture was defined by drugs. Just knowing that for every key bump that someone decides to take in a bathroom stall, there is a human soul south of the border suffering for that moment.

I definitely love making music and performing music and celebration, but it's kind of like, at what cost? The sentence that they handed down to me, or the potential sentence that I was facing, was 45 years. I don't know if I necessarily felt the gravity of things for the first while. My ability to communicate was severely limited. I really became sort of withdrawn and...

quiet and introspective just by the factors of the situation and what I could do with my time. But then one day it was just over. There was no hearing. There was nothing signaling that we were going to get let out. It just happened one day. It was like jarring almost, you know? It was like, what, huh? It's like someone woke you up from this long nap. We were called to the gate from our dorm

They gave us some documents to sign that are essentially saying that, you know, we were exonerated of all charges. We gave away the rest of our stuff and we waited outside the gate for a while. And I remember that I wanted to stay. Like, it was weird. I was like, wait a minute. I didn't get my Mexico vacation. I didn't get anything. And I think it was also just the fact that I just didn't know what the fuck I would do just going back to normal life.

One of Carlos's contacts picked me up from the immigration office and we went to some dive bar in Topek and we all drank a lot and kind of had this like debriefing with our lawyer and one of our liaisons.

Spend a night in a hotel in Vallarta and we just like shut ourselves in the hotel room. It was too strange. You know, it was only six months, but it felt like we put ourselves back in jail in a sense in this hotel room for a few days. Some friends, my sister were like, you need to come home. You've been in Mexico for too long.

They booked me a plane ticket and I didn't even say bye to Carlos. He disappeared to settle up some debts. But yeah, I hopped on a plane to San Diego. I went back and saw my family for the first time in years because I had kind of like essentially been a runaway for all that time and hadn't really interacted with them much. And I stayed there for a day or two. I wanted to get to wherever life was and I didn't know where it was anymore.

And the only place I could think to go was just back to LA. And I didn't have a plan for what that meant. I didn't even have a place to stay. I just got on the Amtrak train and I don't know, I was back, but I had no sense of equilibrium. There aren't any support groups for people who have gone through what I've been through. Like, who do I talk to about this? Like, how do I reintegrate

With this kind of new sense of self and new sense of understanding and this experience and these new traumas and go back to my old life. And suddenly I was just back there, back to having to pay rent and figure things out.

There were aspects to that whole thing that were medicinal, that were healing, that were maybe even good for me in a sense. And there was also this awakening to what I had been a part of in the party scene because that's all I knew in LA. And it was a tough journey.

But eventually, I got this gig, creative directing for an emerging brand of flash tattoos, which was a big trend 2014, 2015. And so I did that, and they wanted to have their launch party in Tulum, Mexico. And of course, I had some reservations about going back to Mexico, but I didn't want my life to be defined by fear.

So I went on the trip for this launch party. And who do I run into but Carlos, which was bonkers. We had some drinks. We caught up. It hadn't been great for him since he'd gotten out just in terms of his reintegration process and trying to figure things out. We go on a walk along the beach together. And he's like, look, I just want to let you know, you weren't the one that ended Yvonne.

Yvonne was going to be a problem and things were taken care of when you left. That was the quickest way to end that problem. I wasn't the one to end this person's life. This was obviously information that Carlos had the entire time, the entire time that we're in that place. He knew what had really happened. And I went through that process as a murderer myself.

Whether or not it was justified to use the force that we used, that I had used. The fact was, I held this man in my arms in a chokehold and I felt his body go limp.

The corporeal sensation that I have with that moment is the tensing of my own muscles and the loosening of someone else's and the gravity of it. And I had carried that weight and wrestled with what that meant. And suddenly that wasn't as grave as I had believed. I felt confused at first, betrayed in some ways,

But now, looking back on it, there's a certain amount of gratitude that I have for that experience because it pushed me along this journey of understanding my relationship to my own trauma and my relationship to violence and my relationship to anger. The anger that I felt was just an emotion to heat that cold sadness.

I had so few opportunities to feel sad, like ever, or scared, or any of those things. Sadness is, it's frigid and it's slow getting through sadness, but it's necessary. Like, you have to feel it. And to this day, I struggle with connecting to my own sadness.

But anger gets shit done, you know? It's like you don't feel helpless. You just get that electricity and that fire and you act. And anger has always felt productive, even though it never has been for me because anger has led me to a lot of terrible places.

Underneath that anger is a pain and it is a sadness and feeling that pain and that sadness is it's a necessary process Anger is this actionable form of grief and it caused me to explore different ways to channel those emotions

I think to try to mitigate the harm or the damage that I could potentially do with the choices that I make, it was impossible to superimpose this new sense of self over an old identity. And so, you know, I took different life paths.

The thing that has been the most defining for me is I went heavy into martial arts. I took a couple of years of being stone cold sober and just focusing on the art of Muay Thai, which is...

is painful and is brutal, but it's also beautiful and meditative. And it's a dance and it's violence without anger. There's aggression without ill intent. And it has allowed me to channel a lot of that internal fury that I have in this really beautiful way. I had the opportunity to fight in Thailand. I trained there for a little bit.

Thailand has some of the greatest wealth disparity on the planet, and a lot of the competitors are children fighting to feed their families. Seeing how they find the joy in that, and they're doing these brutal things, and there's no malice in it. Integrating that into my life has been profound.

I teach people on the side, people at my gym, they come to me for knowledge on the art. And it has been this foundation for everything else that I do, even as an artist. Because the great thing about an art like Muay Thai is it's not subjective. There's no opinions. It's governed by physics and anatomy. And when you're in a fight or when you're sparring, you have to be present. So in that sense, it's meditative. The moment you're thinking about something else is the moment you get hit.

And maybe I'm just the kind of crazy person that needs that intense of a meditation. But it has brought this presence and this awareness into my being that is so incredibly vital to who I am. It led to some other decisions that I think are really healthy and have given my life a certain amount of purpose. It started me on this journey as a writer.

Not too long after I got out, I wrote this treatment for a concept that I had, a docu-reality series about musicians in conflict regions, finding musicians in conflict regions, telling their stories, and then pairing them with established mainstream artists for collaborations called Chords. And it was an idea that I came up with. Being in that prison and seeing all of these people who were

victims of the system and who were condemned and still singing songs, still celebrating, still embracing the light. And that was what I felt my way being an LA kid of turning that experience into something potentially positive and maybe putting myself in circumstances that are perhaps a bit dangerous to make this, but I feel like I've been baptized in that kind of that flame

And I'm just trying to transmute it into something as positive as possible. I do feel a little sometimes wrong for saying that a lot of positives for me came from that experience. And I do carry some guilt because I've seen a lot of just the human souls that are consumed in that thresher that don't get to walk out of there. I do feel like a weight and a guilt and a pressure

And it's hard to change and to completely fight against certain things that have become nature. But it is possible to transmute certain energies and behaviors to do good.

Today's episode featured Gladden Rangel. You can find out more about him on Instagram at gladden underscore sane. That's G-L-A-D-D-E-N underscore S-A-N-E. Or on Facebook at eddieizm. That's E-D-D-I-E-I-Z-M. You can also contact him over email at gladdenrangel at gmail.com.

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