March 12, 2024 • 54 mins
The Owens battled addiction in some of Memphis’ worst dope houses. When they left town to escape this life, Ben felt called to eventually come back to help those whom they left behind. Today, their nonprofit We Fight Monsters owns some of the very houses that they once used in, transforming them into hope houses for 75 people touched by recovery and sex trafficking.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everybody, it's Billed Courtney with an army of normal folks.
And we continue now with part two of our conversation
with Ben and Jess Owen. Right after these brief messages
from our Jenner sponsors.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Like November comes around and you know, we had everything
on auto pay and we're burning through so much money.
You don't always notice what gets paid and what doesn't.
The rent didn't come out, and that took us to
court and I called her. I was like, hey, I
didn't realize any of this is going on. She's like, yeah,
you're fine, to bringing a money order. I was like, okay, cool.
So I took her money order. I don't know what
(00:48):
she did with it, but she did apply it towards
the rent. Because January fifth of twenty nineteen, three linebackers
show up to our house and our gated neighborhoods one
seven and a half feet to not really guy, Yeah,
and look, I'm by Grace Saint Luke's in Midtown. I
was on my way back or on the way to
(01:08):
the dope man, I don't remember, in our only vehicle,
which we hadn't been spending any money fixing, because you
don't do that your money goes to dope, not your vehicle.
And I'm by Grace Saint Luke's right there on Peabody
or Belvede or whatever it is, and I slung a
ride through the block. That's it. The vehicle's done. I'm
(01:28):
standing on the side of the road and my phone
rings and it's Chest telling me that we have linebackers
that are house throwing us out. So in a matter
of ten minutes, I lost my only transportation and I
lost the roof over my head on his mom's birthday,
on my mom's birthday. And look how many times have
I said something where you're thinking, man, that would have
(01:49):
been rock bottom one.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Hundred that this one right here feels like it, But
it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
This This is where things start to get real bad.
They weren't bad already, right, they weren't bad enough. And
this is up that I tell parents all the time
when they reach out and they got a kid struggling
with a didiction, like they're not going to do anything
different until they've suffered enough. Well, this could have been
be suffering enough had somebody been there to tell me
a better way. I scrapped together what money I could
(02:20):
or rented a U haul. We threw all of our
belongings into a ten by twenty storage in it out
there off of sixty four in Arlington, and we took
that U haul straight to the Dope Track and we
moved into the trap pouse that day. For those of
you that don't know, a trap house is a house
where narcotics and women are bought and sold. Crack house
is another way to say it.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And women typically sell themselves for their next exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So the women out there, they're selling their bodies or
their some amusic pump to fund their addiction.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And at fifteen hundreds a day, that's a lot of selling.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, and so most of the ones out there that
are just addicted to crack, they're seventy two to ninety
six grand a year is what they're smoking at. That's insane.
But anyway, we moved into the trap house that day.
You know, I had I'm a white guy in South Memphis,
but I had trust because I had spent such an
ungodly sum of money out there. We didn't have a vehicle.
(03:16):
We moved into the trap house on it where's your kid?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
So we took the his kids went to his ex
wife and mine went to my dad's house.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And the one that you had together is with us.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
In the trap house. My dad would while we were
in the trap house, I would drop James off with
my dad because I didn't want him in that. As
horrible of a person as I was, I did not
want him in a trap house smelling crack smoke, so
I would I did take him to my dad's house,
and I was like, look, can you just watch James
and just let us get our together. And of course
(03:53):
that meant us just going and hanging out at the
trap house for like a week without leaving, without sleeping.
Eventually we would make it to my dad's house. That's
where we ended up going to live. And we got
married in twenty eighteen in Starbucks because we didn't even
have money for a wedding. But I knew that I
(04:13):
loved this man. I wanted to marry him. So we
like got this lady on Google. We're like, hey, come
meet us here. So we actually got married twenty eighteen
in February.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
In a Starbucks in a Starbucks.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
And then you know, so so.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
On Madison on Madison City Union on Union Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
So, so that was February so not even a year.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
In the middle of this chaos, But why not a Starbucks? Exactly?
It actually oddly makes.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
A little sense, Yeah, made a little sense.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Wis Brandon? So Brandon?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
At this point we had moved into a high rise
overlook the Mississippi River down there off a front street.
Brandon was clean when we moved him. This is sixteen seventeen.
Brandon pulled back from us when he saw us headed
in a bad direction. And then Brandon went in a
bad direction while I was doing good. So we had
started trying to help Brandon while I was clean and
(05:16):
she was on pills. Nobody knew she was on pills.
And I'm out there trying to act like this white
knight who has it all together. I'm six months sober
and I'm gonna save you. Trying to help Brandon ends
up losing that apartment because he went back to active
addiction with heroin. So oddly enough, we ended up somehow, Hussa,
I say somehow, if you haven't figured it out, I'm
(05:36):
kind of a serial entrepreneur. I've always got some sort
of hustle. We were able to buy a vehicle. Before
the end of it. We had James the kid you
asked about, and Brandon living in a truck with us
in South Memphis seven hundred truck, seven hundred dollars truck,
lived in a truck. We lived in a truck that winter,
the winter of twenty nineteen, a truck.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah, and I think that that's after we decided to.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
The trap house.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Sometimes we were. Sometimes we would drop James.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
A dropped by this place and know exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
They know exactly where it's going, they know exactly what's going.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
I don't really know why. I've never understood that, like
if you know what's going.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
On, been in that house on what weard when it
was surrounded by OCU wearing vests with our fifteen's out,
and they never read it, Like I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now. Look, I've also been rested in front of the house.
I don't want to say they know what's going on,
they don't do anything about it, because I've gone to
jail in front of that house a few times. So
you know, do you process they're going to build a case.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And all that these houses, empty houses that people were
just squatting in.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
No, Sometimes they're well, the ones that we were in
were actually they're owned by another cracker, another crack.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah. Do they charge daily rent? They get paid and crack.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So you've got women that are are being tried affects,
sex trafficked to feed their addiction. You have other crack
addicts who are essentially being labor trafficked. You can use
an addiction to coerce anybody to do so.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The owner of the house is getting paid for the
use of the house, Yes, and cracks, So they're satisfying
their habit by letting this go on. Exactly how many
of these houses ballpart me are in Memphis, Baltimore, Chicago,
any city?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh wow, Oh man, that's that's going to depend on
the population, but a lot. You know, every block's got
one in the hood, in the hood, right in the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
There's two hundred of these spaces in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, yeah, or more. Yeah, there's probably that many just
in North Memphis, just in South justin which means.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
In a city like Chicago, way more, New York, DC.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Way more. You got to remember, Memphis does not have
that him population density. It's just and what really sucks
is like I don't think the average person understands the
misery that's coming from these houses. You know, just nobody
that's in them wants to be there. We didn't want
to be there. You know, it's fun to be addicted
(08:14):
when you live out in Arlington for a minute, not
for long. It's definitely not fun.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Ultimately you end up there.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
You all roads lead to Rome. In Rome in this
case is the Trap House. And you know, we've seen
we've seen friends die out there. We've seen murder, we've
seen overdose, we've seen a rape ja yes, yeah, over
a drug deal over nothing, over nothing. A buddy of
mine who went by the street name No Talk, he
(08:43):
was a.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Mute street name what no Talk, no talker.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah yeah, he was shot five times in the head
in front of that house for absolutely no reason by
a guy named Mike Wilson. We called him crazy Mike Crazy.
Mike did six years for that six six yeah, and
he's back in custody in South Dakota now for another murder.
And he called his mom, who is a prostitute, and
(09:07):
told her, Mama, I'm probably gonna have another six, which
is crazy to me. That's the value we put on
human life just because they're an addict that something's not right.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Okay, so you're in this truck, Brandon's in the truck,
your son's in the truck. Are we rock bottom yet?
I am?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
I'm rock bottom and I'm done. I'm done. You know.
That lasted for about a month. There were a couple
of deaths leading up to that that really pushed me
over the age.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Now.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I had gone to detox a couple times during twenty ninety.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
As bad as you describe detox as being, and you
keep going through it, you're just putting yourself through constant misery.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, well, yeah you are. And it's not just constant misery.
It takes a toll on your body. I had two
heart attacks between thirty five and thirty seven trying to
put on my own. I told you I was twenty
something years old, and I lost an organ to my alcoholism,
like a whole organ. I drank out of my body.
These are things that to a normal person would be
like signs to stop. But I don't guess up normal.
(10:13):
So twenty nineteen, we a very dear friend I had
a crack related stroke and died in the house, and
I went to detox, and I told Jess it's like,
you can come and get clean with me, or I'm
out of here. Done, And I hung up the phone.
It was about twelve hours later that are wheeling her
(10:33):
into Detox in a wheelchair, and I was like, oh, okay, cool.
So we got this. We held it together for a
little bit, and then we both ended up back out
there because we weren't willing to go to meetings. We
weren't willing to do the things we knew we needed
to do. We just wanted to stop suffering. We weren't
willing to put in the work to make sure it's stuck.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yet We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
So after Brandon and all of us are living in
this deep truck, I'll let you tell the story about
Nick dying. But uh, we're towards the end of May.
And I just woke up in an empty light one day,
covered in blood, without a cut on me. To this day,
I don't know whose blood was on me. But I
was done. I was done. I got a phone, I called.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
My up with blood, all of them, and you don't
even know who's.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
To this day, I have no idea.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And he had been missing for like four days.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, I went missing. I don't remember anything, and it
wasn't your blood, wasn't my blood? You killed somebody?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I have no idea. Probably a fight, yeah, probably probably
a fight. But I called my dad and I got
on a greyhound bus and I went to Georgia and
that was it for me. I was done, and I
told her. I was like, I'm done. We'll figure out
custody at James later.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And we had been clean for a little while. My
daughter's father my first, my first, Oh.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
No, I'm sorry, I'm catching up. You were missing for
four days and woke up without a recollection of how
you got where you were in the sparking lot covered
in somebody else's blood.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I had no recollection. I still don't. We've been able
to piece some of it together because we've gone back
to those places and we have communication with the people
who are there, but a lot of it is just missing.
There were a couple of fun colls my parents. They
could hear gunshots and screaming. I think that second heart
attack was in there. At one point. My mom heard
the MS workers working on me, but couldn't get anybody to.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
You describe your parents as unbelievable parents. They have to
be an absolute terror for their.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
In a lot of ways, I almost have more regret
for what I put my parents through than I do
what our kids went through. Because my kids didn't see
what happened. My parents had to deal with all of it,
and they never turned their backs on me, like they
never enabled. They stopped that decades ago, but they were
there when I needed him. But yeah, I woke up.
(13:03):
It was May twenty sixth, twenty nineteen. I woke up
in an empty lot next to the Trap House on Loward,
covered in blood, and I realized where I was. I'm
about to go walk to that window. I'm gonna get
some crack right back at it. And for whatever reason,
my feet wouldn't move. It was just like, I'm not
actually going to go to that window today, I'm gonna
do it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
So you go to Georgia. I go, Is that where
your parents are?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah? My dad. I called my dad and he's like,
just come home, just come home. So I let her
pick up back on May nineteenth before I went missing.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, we had we had her a little time clean
and then then we had something very bad happened, which
was my daughter's father, Nick, who I'd been friends with,
since I was twelve years old. Ben had actually started
getting pretty close with him, and we were talking to
him every day. Ben talked to him every day because
he was also an addict, and you know, he would
just call Ben, what do I do? What do I
(13:52):
need to do? And he had just gotten clean. Ben
was like, look, you need to He was asking Ben
if Madison could come over for the summer.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Nick had no idea we were back in active addiction. Yeah,
he looked at me like a mentor, kind of a
big brother. I'm hiding it really well. And Nick had
had just gotten out of prison not too long before that.
We were kind of helping him get back on his feet.
I had convinced him he needed to get away from Memphis,
he had a warrant. I convinced him to move to
Alabama with some family, and he called asking if Madison
(14:24):
could come spend the summer, and I reminded him he
had just told me, like two days prior that his
roommate was a really weird guy. And I was like,
you know, Jess and I aren't terribly comfortable with Madison
spending the summer there with this dude. So next like,
I'm going to take care of that. He called me.
He kicked the roommate out, and we're talking on plans
nixt getting a room ready for Madison. It's like midnight
(14:45):
on the eighteenth, I guess, and Nick goes, hey, man,
I got some at the door on a call right back,
And he never called me back because the dude at
the door was a roommate who came in and stapped
him to death.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So he got murdered. And this was like, you know,
my best friend since.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I was twelve.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
So I lost it, and Ben, you know, feeled he
felt somewhat responsible because he's the one that told Nick, hey,
go back to Alabama. So so we that was a
hard hit for us. So we went back out and
we went and got high again. And then that's when
it got really bad, and we were we were so
bad off that we had no money and we only
(15:21):
had like a phone each and we were like, you
know what, we're always together, let's just sell our phones
and get another hit a crack. So that's how we
ended up losing each other because we had no way
to even communicate with each other. At that point, we'd
gotten high, we had separated. I think we had gotten
a fight because you're always fighting when you're high or
when you're not high.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's that's the part. And her and Brandon had had
I guess come to meet me at some hotel or so,
I don't remember, but he yeah, it was bad.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
So then Brandon was living in my car, just me
and Brandon and James, and we were trying to find
Ben for like three or four days. And then that's
when he woke up covered in blood and he called
and he was like, look I got go.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Nick's death was I definitely carried a lot of guilt
over that, because I mean, I'm the one that convinced
to move do Alabama in the first place. I'm the
one that told me to kick that room rate out.
And you know, when I feel guilty, I drink and
I went into a blackout drunk. But anyway, I ended
up going to Georgia. I told her I'm done. I
was like, I'm not coming back.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
I am not.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
I am done, and she's like, well, I'm done too,
but you do have to come back because you have
the keys to the truck that left locked in the
ground parking lot. So she decided she was done as well.
That was rock bottom for her and I get back
on a Greyhound bus back to Memphis with the keys
all along the way. You know, I don't know how
(16:44):
you are on your faith journey, but there were like
these little guid shots for God's just telling me, you know, yeah,
I'm watching, I'm watching. And one of those is when
I got back to the Greyhound station, TBI boarded our
bus to search everybody Tennessee beer investigations, and for the
first time, I'm getting so and I know they're not
going to find a thing on me.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
For the first time.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
I get off the bus, we get Jess, we go
back to Georgia. I remember on the way we were
heading down Littlemore and this hit me, and your your
a little teaser when you talk about turned the review
mirror fifteen degrees. I got my cell phone. I took
a picture of that RuView mirror with Memphis behind us,
and I said, I'm leaving the city in the rear
view for good. And I posted to social media, thinking
(17:28):
I'm all dramatic or whatever, you know, and I put
the phone down and not even five minutes later, I
told just I was like, God wants me to go
back sick. What are you talking about? Let's not do that.
I know God wants me to go back to Memphis.
My work's not done, Like what work? What work do
I have in Memphis, Tennessee's And so anyway on our
(17:49):
way out of town is our little nuclear family. It's me, Jess, James,
and Madison on the way to my parents where we
started rebuilding our lives. God put it on me that
I was supposed to come back here and do something.
And I had no idea what. I thought for a
long time that it had something to with Brandon Kelly
because he was back out there bad, homeless. Max wife
(18:12):
was helping us take care of him. She would take
him food and cigarettes and you know, money here and
there when we thought he was gonna be okay to
handle it. It's hard to hit every point I wanted
to hit in this period of time. But I want
to rewind twenty eighteen. It was April twenty eighteen. Brandon's
(18:36):
mom had had relapsed, and this is when I was sober.
Brandon's mom was an area too. She lost into foster care.
They had rebuilt that relationship kind of it was. I
think it was April twenty eighteen. Times she had been
silent for three days, and me and Brandon were talking
to her every day. Neither one of us realized it,
so we're like, well, let's let's go check on Virginia.
(18:58):
And I got there right after Brandon. They kicked the
door in and I could smell her before I got
to the house, so she had killed herself. Fast forward
back to December of twenty nineteen. I realized I haven't
heard from Brandon in three days, and I knew, like,
there's there's no doubt. But I sent one of my
(19:19):
employees from that business I had back when I had
it all together I maintained contact with, and he got
in his car and I called MPD, and sure enough,
Brandam was dead from a fentonyl overdose.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Guys, I've known you for an hour and fifteen minutes
since so far I know about Nick being murdered, Brandon
dying of an overdose, Brandon's bomb dying of an overdose,
just as Mom dying I think of an overdose. Yeah, no,
talk being shot five times in the head. I imagine
(19:53):
if we sat here for an hour and listed them.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
All, Oh it's your sheet would be of.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Names of names who were either victims of violent perpetrators
of violence or of overdoses. Your life been filled with
not only personal loss personal guilt, but loss of friends
and people. You know, this thing is literally destroys lives. Yeah,
(20:27):
so you kicked that rearview mirror fifteen degrees of left
and said, I got to come back to Memphis and
you didn't know what. And irony of irony is some
of the very places you stayed in as addicts you
are now rehabbing. Yeah, so here's the redemption, everybody. The
(20:52):
crazy story that you just heard allowed Ben and Jess's
life and marriage at Starbucks and loss of friends and
abuse and loving parents who never enabled but never gave up.
And despite how hard you tried to destroy one another
(21:15):
in your relationship, figured a way out and all of that.
Now you're in Georgia. You are finally really sober and clean,
and you decided to start a nonprofit called Flanders Fields
(21:38):
with an initiative called Operation by Block the Block, And
I watched a video clip of it, and I'm going
to just tell the listeners what I know, and then
I want you to go with it. You're basically buying empty, dilapidated,
blighted properties, many of which were these what do you
(21:59):
call my houses? Trap houses that had prostitution and drugs
and everything going on them, and you were figuring out
ways to refurbish them and make them safe, halfway houses
for people and recovery, I think. But when you left
(22:24):
and you said goodbye, Memphis, I'm never coming back, and
then somehow you felt like God was calling you back
to Memphis for a purpose. Tell me how you found
it in Georgia, how you started this and what you're
doing now.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So we used to say a prayer when we're out
there all the time, when you were out in the
in the streets, the streets, and it was something along
the lines of God, if you'll just get us out
of here together, we'll spend the rest of our lives
coming back for the people we leave bond he called
the debt. Do I guess.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
We do? You know, you may be the fourth guest
that I can think of right now who in the
depths of the stare made to do with God. And
they all warn everybody be careful when you make a
deal with God, because when the deck comes due, that's
one dude you don't want to pay back.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Well, if you know the story of Johnnah and the
whel Memphis was very much our nineveh We didn't want
to come back here. When we started Flanders. That sergeant
that lost a leg came back in the picture. He
ended up in twenty twenty one. He ended up right
where I was, crack heroin gun charges and he called
me for help because I'd helped him before. He had
(23:37):
no idea what we had been through in the tenure gap.
Jess and I, ever committed and always ready for excitement,
were like, well, we're back on our feet. I'm skipping
so much. We moved out of my parents' basement. We
got a town home, we got a big house, we
got all our businesses back.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
We have currently.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, that's awesome in Atlanta, yeah, or north of Atlanta,
north of Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Souse you after all all this, you're back in business.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Absolutely yeah, and that is so oh congratulations quick, but
thank you very much. It was all God and it
was not us.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So you rebuilt.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
We rebuilt the business.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
The business you did everything you could to destroy on
Tuscasions and you're back doing it. In North Georgian.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
One was actually given back to us because they're like,
we don't know what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
But you do, and they gave it back to him.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
They so you moved back in your para space. When
you get a townhouse, you finally buy home, you are sober,
you're building your businesses. But the grip is now not
crack and heroin. It's the people you left base.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
It's the people left ironic that.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
That's the military thing, and that's good starts.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So it's interesting you bring that up, because this is
where everything starts getting really crazy, if it weren't crazy,
if it weren't already March April twenty one, starting to
eat and comes back and we're going to fund a
flight for him to get to rehabit Axis and my
business partner on the black Rifle. So I was like, bro,
you need to just start a nonprofit. Well, we'd already
(25:06):
decided we were going to start a nonprofit. We're going
to call it Flanders Fields because of the poppy flower
and opium and you know vets, and so we're gonna
start a nonprofit helping vets batting addiction. We're like, oh, well,
here it is, let's go and do it. So we
get sergeant moved to where he needs to be. We
file the paperwork at the IRS again had no intentions
coming back to Memphis. This is not We're not there yet.
(25:28):
And in July, a Marine Corps intelligence officer hits me
up and about my data company, my day job, Black Rifle,
which had started with bump stocks, but is now this
massive conglomerate of data that we use for digital intelligence
and digital marketing. And he's like, hey, man, you want
to do something crazy? And I was like sure. He's like, okay, cool,
We're going to get some people out of Afghanistan. I
(25:49):
was like, I'm sorry, what what did you say?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
We will be right back.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
So I know what we care about here is what
the army of regular felks are doing in Memphis. But
I got to tell you how we got there. We
got pulled into the evak out of Afghanistan, and we're
using data to vet Afghans early on, and we saw
some great success. We were able to make contact with
American citizen family members. We were able to determine who's
(26:29):
good who's bad.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
We were talking about like inres.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Interpreters, ye in Afghan interpreters and special forces. We were
able to locate some missing people. We were able to
prevent the trafficking of some children. By the end of it,
we were running sixty eight safe houses in Afghanistan that
we leased, which is insane if you think about it.
I went from.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Sixty eight safe houses we leased sixty eight houses and
or apartments in Afghanistan, contract signed in darry or pashto
two languages I don't speak, right.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We had real estate agents, we had ground teams, we
had drivers, we had food delivery networks, steod up like
all of this insane stuff. And I'm not even two
years clean yet, right, So that was cool. But the
cooler part was this network of other really cool regular
people that were building, and a lot of them came
from the special operations community. And I didn't want anybody
(27:23):
to feel like I had misrepresented my service, so I'm
always careful to say I'm barely even a vet. In fact,
I'm a junkie and an alcoholic. I'm two years clean.
And so I had that conversation with everybody, and instead
of them being like, well, I'm a little afraid to
work with you now, they were like, that's amazing. And
this happened more and more and more, and so we
ended up sorry language, We ended up with this really
(27:48):
great network of special operators, former CIA officers, congressmen, senators,
scary people, very scary, big hearted peaceeople that wanted to
help with our work. And so we ended up doing
some similar stuff in Ukraine. We ended up doing some
anti trafficking work in Mexico. And next thing I know,
(28:12):
the same judge that had kicked me off of drug
court and the man who kicked me out of his
halfway house, asked us if we would be interested in
taking over those halfway houses and the relationship with drug
court back here in Memphis. And that is not what
I wanted. I went into that meeting where that question
was asked to get them to give us a letter
of recommendation to do something similar in Chattanooga or Knoxville.
(28:37):
And God reminded us of that promise we'd made to
come back to the people we left behind. And so
now we've gone from getting the people our government left
behind in Afghanistan to being called in our own promise
to take care of who we left. So we went
back to that house on Wilbird Street in South Memphis,
the one fairy.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
House that you slept out in front of in the
truck with Brandon and your sock.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
The very house, and I went and I knocked on
the door or the window, and I was scared to death,
and I asked about two women in particular that I
knew we had left, and they weren't ready for help.
But we kept coming back. We kept coming back, and
(29:23):
we kept coming back, and while they weren't ready for help,
we started to seeing other people that noticed we were
coming back, and they also noticed we were clean, and
they started asking for help. And so slowly we're able
to get people off of that street, some of them
out of that house into detox and treatment, and before
(29:43):
long we were able to negotiate a deal with the
people that were selling dope out of that house to
buy it and close it with their blessing. And today,
two years later, both of those women are clean. One
of them put down a forty five year heroin and
she's clean today.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Unbelievable. Yeah, So, how many of these houses do you have?
Speaker 2 (30:08):
That was the first one, And then we went to
Melrose Street, which is the street that I some of
the worst days of my life before meeting Jess.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You literally are going back to the very places that
were the worst of the worst for you. You were
literally going back and buying houses where you left people behind.
It's not just a slogan. You're literally doing this.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
We are starting exactly where we left them. I'm going
back to houses where my blood is on the floor. Yep.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, and a lot of the people that saw that
blood leave his body, we're still there in active addiction, and.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
You're buying the houses if we can.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
You know, in one case, we had had the house
donated to us. Oddly enough, the guy that runs the
Delta Fair also invest in real estate and loved what
we did in Afghanistan, and he happened to own a
house that I lived in with the one nine Vietnam
Marine back in twenty fourteen, and he donated that house
to us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
And then we have the halfway houses, and we.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Did we did buy the half of We had a
mortgage in them, and we didn't have wanted to buy
them out right, But we've got the same halfway house
I was kicked out of, so, yeah, the same one
you were kicked out of the house I was kicked out.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We took a mortgage on it to buy it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, and it's full and it's full.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
What is full mean?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
All the beds twelve men no, I mean twelve men
are well. Right now, we're housing about seventy five men,
women and children in Memphis on mostly our dime. Some
of them do pay rent in these halfway houses, but
all spread throughout the city. We've got people who six
months a year, two years ago were high.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
These houses have to be POWs of I got to
be careful too, This house has got to be POWs
of crap. So I gotta believe if it's a trap
house and people been in it for ten years, those
are the electrical the walls, they probably stinks like hell.
The floors, there's no applies any You're buying a piece
of property with a frame and sometimes.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Sometimes not even the frame. Now, the halfway houses were
in good shape, and then when we opened up Sparrow House,
which was a house for trafficking survivors of kids. That's
that one's already renovated. But the trap houses, yeah, we
have to cut them. We have to renovate them. And
what's been really cool is oh roof Yeah, so eighteen roofing.
I don't know if you've heard of them. They're local
veteran on They donated a roof to one of the
(32:34):
trap houses, which is amazing, Like we're seeing all sorts
of people come and swing hammers with us being willing
to bleed with us.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Are you swinging hammers too?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Oh yeah, yeah. This is the part we never planned
and this has been really cool to watch, is that
the guys that live in our halfway houses and the
girls too, they want to help. They see what we're
doing out there on the dope track and they want
to give back because that's where they come from. Maybe
not that track, but a lot of them did. And
so we've seen. I've got one example that comes to
(33:06):
really two that come to mind very quickly that we're
huge problems on their way to getting kicked off of
drug court that asked to come help us, and the
judge will straight up tell you that come in and
helping us save their lives. It changed the trajectory of
their life because it gave them purpose. One of those
guys has graduated drug court now and he's he's he's
our superintendent out there on the block on my construction projects.
(33:28):
We couldn't do any of what we do without him.
So it's not just we're not just rehabbing houses, We're
not just closing dope houses. We're watching lives get rebuilt
in the process, and it's what keeps me sober. You know,
I've had periods of sobriety over the last three decades
that I've been battling addiction and alcoholism, but never stuck
(33:48):
because I never had anything to fill that void. You know.
I drink to fill an emptiness inside me, to fill
a void. And this work that we do that I
don't feel the need to drink anymodre. I still have
to do meetings, that's fell a spot's tryst, the steps.
But this is that defining factor that made this time
different for me. I have a purpose now, and I'm
(34:11):
watching other people come alongside us and find their own
purpose in it. Their purpose doesn't look like mine. It's
not the same as mine, or maybe it is, but regardless,
they're able to find purpose through service. When you do
and I'm sure you know this, Bill, but when you
do something for somebody that can never ever ever pay
you back, it does something to your heart. And when
(34:35):
an addict or an alcoholic, especially in earlier recovery, has
that experience that change that happens in their heart. Being
of service, well this is nothing new. If you're familiar
with twelve step recovery. That's the twelfth step. We're supposed
to carry that message. We're supposed to be of service.
And so we're watching this play out in real time
and at scale, and it's replicable. We're not special, we're
(34:59):
not I know, our story sounds insane, but like really,
we're just lucky we made it, and we're really lucky
we made it together. This is something anybody can do,
you know, blighted houses, tax sales, Like, anybody can do this.
I really do believe that. And even if they can't,
anybody can just go be of service to their neighbor.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Five days or so after he woke his bloody self
up and hauled us to Georgia and you said, hey,
you got to come back. You got the keys. It's
about five days, right, yeah, days whatever, shortly, yeah, and
then you all get on a Greyhound and head back
to north of Atlanta and Georgia. What was the date
(35:43):
do you remember about?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
June first?
Speaker 3 (35:46):
June first, which is my that's my clean date of
twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
It's four and a half years Yeah, it's four and
a half years ago. You were in a trap house
with a two year old.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Addicted with a two year old, and you were waking
up in a parking lot covered in somebody's blood, with
no recollection of anything that happened the four days previous,
four and a half years ago. And now you're telling
me you have halfway houses and stuff all over the
city currently serving seventy formally addicted people trying to get
their lives right, the people that you refused to lyput.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yep, that's correct.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
See if you guys can do that. Plus you've got
a business again and you burned one down twice. If
you can do that, anybody can.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Anybody can, and it doesn't have to be to this extreme.
I overdo everything, as do it. I do, you know
it doesn't have to be this extreme. A week before
Nick died, I was in dts, which are that's alcohol
a drawl and it can kill you. And I had
(37:04):
made the decision I was going to take my life.
And I went into a gas station in South Memphis
at at Bellevue and Elvis Presley right there at South
Parkway with the VP, and I was going to steal
a beer and I was going to go overdose. I
was just done. And I walked in that gas station
and a woman I've never seen in my life smiled
(37:24):
at me.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
She smiled at me, and something happened in my head.
I'll never forget that moment. I'll never forget her face,
because all it took was a stranger smiling at me
to decide I'm going to stay on this earth just
a little bit longer. You just listed a whole bunch
of cool stuff that's happened. If that woman hadn't smiled
at me, none of it would have happened. I tell
(37:48):
you that story to illustrate this point. It does not
have to be anything as extreme as what we're doing.
Sometimes just smiling at somebody can change the world. Seriously,
you have no idea what you could accomplish just by
showing kindness to somebody you don't even know. Forget everything
that we've done here in this city. All right. There
(38:09):
are fifteen thousand Afghans that are alive today because of
the results of not just our efforts, but a lot
of organizations like us, A lot of kids that thousands
of children that are still alive because I chose to
stay on this earth, and a lot of other good
people chose to show up when nobody else would all
because of a smile, All because of a smile.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
You mean, normal folks changing lives.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
That's one hundred percent normal thoughts changing lives.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
We're at a at a crossroads as a civil society
right now. We've been here before, about a century ago.
There's a theologists or scientists Robert Puttnam that talks about it. Yeah,
we've been here before. And our faith in institutional leadership
(39:11):
said an all time low, justifiably so watching what happened
in Afghanistan and a million other things that the border
crisis fentanel crisis. I don't trust our government, which is
okay because I don't feel like what we're talking about
right now is our government shop to fix. Government creates
(39:32):
more problems than they're able to solve. At a grassroots level,
these are our communities, these are our streets, and more importantly,
these are our neighbors. These are the people that we
are supposed to show up and love unconditionally until they're
able to love themselves. And we can all make a
difference out there. Memphis does not have to be in
the top five deadliest places in America, and before I'm
(39:55):
willing to slow down what I'm doing. It's going to
get off that list.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Jess. I see you sitting there noding your head, then
y'all are probably seeing me nod my head if you
cann't listen to that and look at where you are now,
what you're doing now, and understand why you no longer
harbor shame now after hearing that, I just don't think
(40:27):
you've been listening, you know. Yeah, sure, Gil, sure some regret, but.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Not shame, No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
What do you feel when you hear your husband say
what he just said.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Just a little gratitude. I'm so grateful because we shouldn't
be here. Y'all heard the story. I mean, we should
not be here, and I'm glad that God gave us
a chance. And honestly, I mean we you know, we
did the work. We did a lot of work. We
didn't sleep.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Sounds like you're still doing work.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
We're absolutely, I mean like eighteen hours a day. My
phone never stops ringing, his phone never stops ringing. We
have kids that are like, hey, we need you and
h and that is a problem sometimes, you know, sometimes
we put our kids, our own kids, on the back burn,
our kids that have already had to go through enough
with our addiction. And I just almost hate to say this,
(41:24):
but they're having to deal with another addiction. Now it's
just helping people instead of it's just a good addiction.
Now instead of a bad addiction, say it's healthy.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Yeah, I agree, it is a healthy addiction.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Are they involved? They are our son. Jacob is different
if they're watching versus if their participants.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Jacob has got he just turned eighteen, but you know
he went out to Valde with us after the masker
at rob Elementary, we get asked to come out there
and I guess initially work with one of the first responders.
We ended up providing security for seventeen to the funerals.
We worked with every one of the families. We fundraised
for one of the girls that survived. Jacob went out
there with us. Was such a godsend to the children
(42:07):
that survived. I mean we still talk to those families
to this day. Jacob went to win Arkansas where the
tornadoes with us the fires in Lahina Task Force Lahina.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I don't know. I mean, you were literally looking for
anything you can we do, but.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
It's only where God really tells us to go, though
I try to remove self will from it as much
as I can, because I do go into some dangerous places.
I do go into places normal people, particularly some of
that's not a special operations veteran should be going. And
I know if I step too much into my own will,
(42:45):
I'm gonna get myself killed in some of these places.
So we try to go where God directs it. Right
now that God has directed us to focus everything we're
doing here in Memphis.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
How many houses total right now?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
We've got nine?
Speaker 1 (43:00):
And let's just be honest, some of these are leveraged. Yes, yeah, absolutely,
I mean this is not like you're independently wealthy cash
and buying these houses.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
We got used to living with nothing. And even though
we're making money now, we don't have excess. Our excess
money goes into our philanthropy. And if that's the price
that it costs to say sober.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
So be it. Why stay in north of Georgia and
do all this back and forth. You must be buying
a new set of tires every month, and I have
because you're literally going back and forth constantly. You're commuting
from Atlanta to Memphis like I compute to my commute
to my house every day.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
That's a good question, and I have tried to convince
her to consider moving back here.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I was wondering if this was going to be the answer.
I think I know it.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
My kids, you know, well, two of them have two
addicts for parents. Of them have one addict for a parent,
and Memphis is not yet the place I want to
raise kids.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I get it, and I gotta believe in the deepest
recesses of your mind, it could be a dangerous proposition
for your family.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
We've already, yeah, crossed one bridge. We're just not willing
to take that risk yet.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Fair enough commute spending wheels off and did I want
to say one more thing. I heard you talk about
Aaron supporting kids, supporting you, just supporting your friends, and
then I heard you talk about Nick supporting you and
you supporting Nick. These are your ex spouses who have
(44:49):
been even through out of it, remain loving and supportive,
which tells me that they were two unique people that
could separate the person from the addiction. Hate the addiction
loved the person. I just want to give you an
opportunity to speak for two or about both of those people,
(45:13):
because they seem pretty phenomenal to me to have had
their lives torn up by your addictions and still stuck
by note only you, but one another as spouses.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
So we had obviously we had a rocky road with
justin Aaron in the very beginning, because there was I mean,
I made a lot of bad decisions. But I have
often said I had the ex wife lottery, and I
mean that every.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Wife lottery.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Well, funny, I really did. Uh. You know, Aaron, I
think I mentioned I've known since I was twelve years old.
She's just one of the kindest hearted people. Her life
was impacted by addiction before me on her family side,
and so while she can't relate, she gets it more
(46:04):
than most would.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
And yeah, Aaron and you share children.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, we share five children. That's the biggest thing. You've
got to always put the kids first, always period. I
think always has.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Yeah, but I'm going to tell you something. Somebody could
be your dad's a loser, your dad's lost business. Your
dad's an addict, he's a he lives in drap houses.
Your dad's a piece of crap. But I sense that
she's the kind of person that's like, we hate the addiction,
but we love your dad.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
To my knowledge, she's never said a bad word about
me to the kids.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Want woman Erin. I hope you're listening to this, but
kudos to you for your heart and your patience, and
I got to believe she's rooting for the two of you. Yeah, Nick,
Nick was.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Of course he's not with us anymore, but he was.
I think he was just so deep in his addiction
that and he was a little crazy out there sometimes.
But I think he just had a lot of respect
for Ben because me and Nick were always down and out.
We were homeless ourselves. We never really had anything, you know,
like Nick never really worked. He had a meth head
(47:10):
for a dad and a crackhead for a mom. So
he's never known normalcy as I really hadn't known it
when I was a kid. So he sees me get
with Ben, and Ben's this, you know, big time businessman,
and he's got his own house and he's you know,
able to pay for his own kids. So I actually
think Nick really looked up to Ben and he very
(47:31):
much valued his opinion.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Nick was a good dude, but he was a very
good good guy even if he had nothing else. Yeah,
and he just had a most respect He is I
have no doubts about that.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
So we'll wrap this up with this. You heard the
story of all that you've been through only four and
a half years ago to pick up in good Lord,
thank Goodness for your parents to have a respite and
(48:09):
to go to and now rebuild your business. Got involved
helping Afghanistan, people that fought for our country that were
left behind, and then turn that into work you're doing
in Memphis now, sheltering and harboring seventy formally addicted folks
(48:31):
getting their life back on track. And I gotta believe
you're looking for the next house. What an amazing story.
So if someone wants to contact you to find out
more about what you did, let's say they want to
do it with you alongside you in addition to you.
How do people find you? Guys?
Speaker 2 (48:52):
So are the nonprofit? There's two of them. We started
flanders Fields, which is Flandersfields dot org to help Hamilson
adicted that. We very quickly realized there's a lot more
people that didn't serve that need the same help, so
we start up We fight Monsters websites. We fight Monsters
dot org. You can contact us through those websites. I'm
on social media LinkedIn, Facebook.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Give me handles.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
LinkedIn is the real ben Owen? Instagram is the real
ben Owen Facebook. I have no idea what it is,
but if you just search bno and you're gonna find me.
I've had a ton of pictures go like crazy viral.
Elon Musk retweeted one of them. I hold signs with
stupid messages on plus.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Tattered up coolok and you got the cool beard, you
got the whole, you got the whole groovy dude going
for sure, So I get why you'd be retweeted and stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:43):
So yeah, we've we've got a big social media presence.
I'm pretty easy to find on there. And then jess
of course Jessica Owen on LinkedIn, and.
Speaker 3 (49:53):
Our halfway houses are at Rebo's Recovery, which is sober
spelled backwards. Do that again, Rebo's Recovery, which is sober
spelled backwards.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
That's interesting, okay. And so email addresses if someone wants
to email you.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Email is just at Flandersfields dot org. Ben at we
Fight Monsters dot org. We're both very responsive at when
we can be, we're not. And then YouTube, we got
a YouTube channel. It's at Monster fighters.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
All right, there you have it. If you can't get
in touch with you or find you through all of that,
you're not trying real hard. And I don't do what
I'm about to do a lot, but I'm going to
say this, y'all. These are folks who were living in
a seven hundred dollars truck four and a half years ago,
blitzed out of their mind on heroin and crack and
(50:45):
really fighting just to live another day, having lost a
couple of businesses, been foreclosed on a home at three linebackers,
so their stuff in a storage unit, sold their phones
for the next tip, and they are now four and
a half years later north of Atlanta, having rebuilt their
businesses and not spending everything they make on themselves, rather
(51:11):
investing in the most desperate among us in our society.
And if you heard their stories, they're not evil. There
were addicts and the vast majority of the people in
these trap houses they're selling themselves for drugs, or selling
their houses for drugs, or doing whatever they have to
(51:31):
get drugs. They're people with souls and hearts and brokenness,
and their brokenness just has to happens to manifest itself
in a way that maybe others doesn't, and it's public,
it's scorned. People don't like it in the neighborhood, and
(51:51):
as a result their particular brokenness we tend to shun
and turn our backs on. But they're people with souls
and lives just like just like Ben adjusts. And so
I'm just going to say this one time. You know,
if you want to donate to something, I can't imagine
(52:15):
a better thing to do than to donate to turning
a dope house into a hope house and intrusting it
to the hands of people who know that life intimately
and personally, who have now dedicated their lives and have
proven after four and a half years, they're never going
back to trying to help those that were in the
(52:36):
same position with them. And they know it all too well.
And so they're not just able to fix houses, they're
able to fix lives because they understand those lives. So
if you feel so compelled, I hope you'll reach out.
I have a particular affinity for what you're doing because
everybody says, what are we going to do to fix it?
And when you just got through saying it's not the
(52:57):
government's problem, this is our community and our city and
our neighbors and our people, and therefore it's our responsibility. Dude,
you just hit me right on the head because that's
what I've been saying ever since this podcast started. And
I can't I can't agree with you more. And I
hope somebody listening here reaches out and helps you get
(53:18):
the next nine houses, because it turns seventy in two
hundred and forty, one hundred and forty and two eighty,
and then all of a sudden things start changing and
that five percent most dangerous city in the world gets better.
And guys, I'm in awe of the lives you've overcome,
and then I'm in awe of the lives you're now building,
(53:40):
and mostly in all of the lives you are now changing.
And I cannot thank you enough for spinning the wheels
off your car and spending the evening telling your story
with me.
Speaker 3 (53:52):
Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
We appreciate you having this big time brother. Nobody's coming,
It's up does.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
And thank you for joining us this week. If Ben
or just Owen or another guest has inspired you in general,
or better yet, inspired you to take action by volunteering
with We Fight monsters by donating to them, or starting
something like it in your own community, or something else entirely.
Please let me know I really want to hear about it.
(54:22):
You can write me anytime at Bill at normalfolks dot
us and you'll hear back from me. If you enjoyed
this episode, please share it with friends and on social
subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it. Help us out,
become a premium member at normalfolks dot us. Any of
these things and all of these things that will help
(54:42):
us grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'll see you next week.
Hey, everybody, it's Billed Courtney with an army of normal folks.
And we continue now with part two of our conversation
with Ben and Jess Owen. Right after these brief messages
from our Jenner sponsors.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Like November comes around and you know, we had everything
on auto pay and we're burning through so much money.
You don't always notice what gets paid and what doesn't.
The rent didn't come out, and that took us to
court and I called her. I was like, hey, I
didn't realize any of this is going on. She's like, yeah,
you're fine, to bringing a money order. I was like, okay, cool.
So I took her money order. I don't know what
(00:48):
she did with it, but she did apply it towards
the rent. Because January fifth of twenty nineteen, three linebackers
show up to our house and our gated neighborhoods one
seven and a half feet to not really guy, Yeah,
and look, I'm by Grace Saint Luke's in Midtown. I
was on my way back or on the way to
(01:08):
the dope man, I don't remember, in our only vehicle,
which we hadn't been spending any money fixing, because you
don't do that your money goes to dope, not your vehicle.
And I'm by Grace Saint Luke's right there on Peabody
or Belvede or whatever it is, and I slung a
ride through the block. That's it. The vehicle's done. I'm
(01:28):
standing on the side of the road and my phone
rings and it's Chest telling me that we have linebackers
that are house throwing us out. So in a matter
of ten minutes, I lost my only transportation and I
lost the roof over my head on his mom's birthday,
on my mom's birthday. And look how many times have
I said something where you're thinking, man, that would have
(01:49):
been rock bottom one.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Hundred that this one right here feels like it, But
it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
This This is where things start to get real bad.
They weren't bad already, right, they weren't bad enough. And
this is up that I tell parents all the time
when they reach out and they got a kid struggling
with a didiction, like they're not going to do anything
different until they've suffered enough. Well, this could have been
be suffering enough had somebody been there to tell me
a better way. I scrapped together what money I could
(02:20):
or rented a U haul. We threw all of our
belongings into a ten by twenty storage in it out
there off of sixty four in Arlington, and we took
that U haul straight to the Dope Track and we
moved into the trap pouse that day. For those of
you that don't know, a trap house is a house
where narcotics and women are bought and sold. Crack house
is another way to say it.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And women typically sell themselves for their next exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So the women out there, they're selling their bodies or
their some amusic pump to fund their addiction.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And at fifteen hundreds a day, that's a lot of selling.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, and so most of the ones out there that
are just addicted to crack, they're seventy two to ninety
six grand a year is what they're smoking at. That's insane.
But anyway, we moved into the trap house that day.
You know, I had I'm a white guy in South Memphis,
but I had trust because I had spent such an
ungodly sum of money out there. We didn't have a vehicle.
(03:16):
We moved into the trap house on it where's your kid?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
So we took the his kids went to his ex
wife and mine went to my dad's house.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And the one that you had together is with us.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
In the trap house. My dad would while we were
in the trap house, I would drop James off with
my dad because I didn't want him in that. As
horrible of a person as I was, I did not
want him in a trap house smelling crack smoke, so
I would I did take him to my dad's house,
and I was like, look, can you just watch James
and just let us get our together. And of course
(03:53):
that meant us just going and hanging out at the
trap house for like a week without leaving, without sleeping.
Eventually we would make it to my dad's house. That's
where we ended up going to live. And we got
married in twenty eighteen in Starbucks because we didn't even
have money for a wedding. But I knew that I
(04:13):
loved this man. I wanted to marry him. So we
like got this lady on Google. We're like, hey, come
meet us here. So we actually got married twenty eighteen
in February.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
In a Starbucks in a Starbucks.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
And then you know, so so.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
On Madison on Madison City Union on Union Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
So, so that was February so not even a year.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
In the middle of this chaos, But why not a Starbucks? Exactly?
It actually oddly makes.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
A little sense, Yeah, made a little sense.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Wis Brandon? So Brandon?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
At this point we had moved into a high rise
overlook the Mississippi River down there off a front street.
Brandon was clean when we moved him. This is sixteen seventeen.
Brandon pulled back from us when he saw us headed
in a bad direction. And then Brandon went in a
bad direction while I was doing good. So we had
started trying to help Brandon while I was clean and
(05:16):
she was on pills. Nobody knew she was on pills.
And I'm out there trying to act like this white
knight who has it all together. I'm six months sober
and I'm gonna save you. Trying to help Brandon ends
up losing that apartment because he went back to active
addiction with heroin. So oddly enough, we ended up somehow, Hussa,
I say somehow, if you haven't figured it out, I'm
(05:36):
kind of a serial entrepreneur. I've always got some sort
of hustle. We were able to buy a vehicle. Before
the end of it. We had James the kid you
asked about, and Brandon living in a truck with us
in South Memphis seven hundred truck, seven hundred dollars truck,
lived in a truck. We lived in a truck that winter,
the winter of twenty nineteen, a truck.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah, and I think that that's after we decided to.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
The trap house.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Sometimes we were. Sometimes we would drop James.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
A dropped by this place and know exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
They know exactly where it's going, they know exactly what's going.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
I don't really know why. I've never understood that, like
if you know what's going.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
On, been in that house on what weard when it
was surrounded by OCU wearing vests with our fifteen's out,
and they never read it, Like I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now. Look, I've also been rested in front of the house.
I don't want to say they know what's going on,
they don't do anything about it, because I've gone to
jail in front of that house a few times. So
you know, do you process they're going to build a case.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And all that these houses, empty houses that people were
just squatting in.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
No, Sometimes they're well, the ones that we were in
were actually they're owned by another cracker, another crack.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah. Do they charge daily rent? They get paid and crack.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So you've got women that are are being tried affects,
sex trafficked to feed their addiction. You have other crack
addicts who are essentially being labor trafficked. You can use
an addiction to coerce anybody to do so.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The owner of the house is getting paid for the
use of the house, Yes, and cracks, So they're satisfying
their habit by letting this go on. Exactly how many
of these houses ballpart me are in Memphis, Baltimore, Chicago,
any city?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh wow, Oh man, that's that's going to depend on
the population, but a lot. You know, every block's got
one in the hood, in the hood, right in the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
There's two hundred of these spaces in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, yeah, or more. Yeah, there's probably that many just
in North Memphis, just in South justin which means.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
In a city like Chicago, way more, New York, DC.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Way more. You got to remember, Memphis does not have
that him population density. It's just and what really sucks
is like I don't think the average person understands the
misery that's coming from these houses. You know, just nobody
that's in them wants to be there. We didn't want
to be there. You know, it's fun to be addicted
(08:14):
when you live out in Arlington for a minute, not
for long. It's definitely not fun.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Ultimately you end up there.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
You all roads lead to Rome. In Rome in this
case is the Trap House. And you know, we've seen
we've seen friends die out there. We've seen murder, we've
seen overdose, we've seen a rape ja yes, yeah, over
a drug deal over nothing, over nothing. A buddy of
mine who went by the street name No Talk, he
(08:43):
was a.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Mute street name what no Talk, no talker.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah yeah, he was shot five times in the head
in front of that house for absolutely no reason by
a guy named Mike Wilson. We called him crazy Mike Crazy.
Mike did six years for that six six yeah, and
he's back in custody in South Dakota now for another murder.
And he called his mom, who is a prostitute, and
(09:07):
told her, Mama, I'm probably gonna have another six, which
is crazy to me. That's the value we put on
human life just because they're an addict that something's not right.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Okay, so you're in this truck, Brandon's in the truck,
your son's in the truck. Are we rock bottom yet?
I am?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
I'm rock bottom and I'm done. I'm done. You know.
That lasted for about a month. There were a couple
of deaths leading up to that that really pushed me
over the age.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Now.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I had gone to detox a couple times during twenty ninety.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
As bad as you describe detox as being, and you
keep going through it, you're just putting yourself through constant misery.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, well, yeah you are. And it's not just constant misery.
It takes a toll on your body. I had two
heart attacks between thirty five and thirty seven trying to
put on my own. I told you I was twenty
something years old, and I lost an organ to my alcoholism,
like a whole organ. I drank out of my body.
These are things that to a normal person would be
like signs to stop. But I don't guess up normal.
(10:13):
So twenty nineteen, we a very dear friend I had
a crack related stroke and died in the house, and
I went to detox, and I told Jess it's like,
you can come and get clean with me, or I'm
out of here. Done, And I hung up the phone.
It was about twelve hours later that are wheeling her
(10:33):
into Detox in a wheelchair, and I was like, oh, okay, cool.
So we got this. We held it together for a
little bit, and then we both ended up back out
there because we weren't willing to go to meetings. We
weren't willing to do the things we knew we needed
to do. We just wanted to stop suffering. We weren't
willing to put in the work to make sure it's stuck.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yet We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
So after Brandon and all of us are living in
this deep truck, I'll let you tell the story about
Nick dying. But uh, we're towards the end of May.
And I just woke up in an empty light one day,
covered in blood, without a cut on me. To this day,
I don't know whose blood was on me. But I
was done. I was done. I got a phone, I called.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
My up with blood, all of them, and you don't
even know who's.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
To this day, I have no idea.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And he had been missing for like four days.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, I went missing. I don't remember anything, and it
wasn't your blood, wasn't my blood? You killed somebody?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I have no idea. Probably a fight, yeah, probably probably
a fight. But I called my dad and I got
on a greyhound bus and I went to Georgia and
that was it for me. I was done, and I
told her. I was like, I'm done. We'll figure out
custody at James later.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And we had been clean for a little while. My
daughter's father my first, my first, Oh.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
No, I'm sorry, I'm catching up. You were missing for
four days and woke up without a recollection of how
you got where you were in the sparking lot covered
in somebody else's blood.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I had no recollection. I still don't. We've been able
to piece some of it together because we've gone back
to those places and we have communication with the people
who are there, but a lot of it is just missing.
There were a couple of fun colls my parents. They
could hear gunshots and screaming. I think that second heart
attack was in there. At one point. My mom heard
the MS workers working on me, but couldn't get anybody to.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
You describe your parents as unbelievable parents. They have to
be an absolute terror for their.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
In a lot of ways, I almost have more regret
for what I put my parents through than I do
what our kids went through. Because my kids didn't see
what happened. My parents had to deal with all of it,
and they never turned their backs on me, like they
never enabled. They stopped that decades ago, but they were
there when I needed him. But yeah, I woke up.
(13:03):
It was May twenty sixth, twenty nineteen. I woke up
in an empty lot next to the Trap House on Loward,
covered in blood, and I realized where I was. I'm
about to go walk to that window. I'm gonna get
some crack right back at it. And for whatever reason,
my feet wouldn't move. It was just like, I'm not
actually going to go to that window today, I'm gonna
do it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
So you go to Georgia. I go, Is that where
your parents are?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah? My dad. I called my dad and he's like,
just come home, just come home. So I let her
pick up back on May nineteenth before I went missing.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, we had we had her a little time clean
and then then we had something very bad happened, which
was my daughter's father, Nick, who I'd been friends with,
since I was twelve years old. Ben had actually started
getting pretty close with him, and we were talking to
him every day. Ben talked to him every day because
he was also an addict, and you know, he would
just call Ben, what do I do? What do I
(13:52):
need to do? And he had just gotten clean. Ben
was like, look, you need to He was asking Ben
if Madison could come over for the summer.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Nick had no idea we were back in active addiction. Yeah,
he looked at me like a mentor, kind of a
big brother. I'm hiding it really well. And Nick had
had just gotten out of prison not too long before that.
We were kind of helping him get back on his feet.
I had convinced him he needed to get away from Memphis,
he had a warrant. I convinced him to move to
Alabama with some family, and he called asking if Madison
(14:24):
could come spend the summer, and I reminded him he
had just told me, like two days prior that his
roommate was a really weird guy. And I was like,
you know, Jess and I aren't terribly comfortable with Madison
spending the summer there with this dude. So next like,
I'm going to take care of that. He called me.
He kicked the roommate out, and we're talking on plans
nixt getting a room ready for Madison. It's like midnight
(14:45):
on the eighteenth, I guess, and Nick goes, hey, man,
I got some at the door on a call right back,
And he never called me back because the dude at
the door was a roommate who came in and stapped
him to death.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So he got murdered. And this was like, you know,
my best friend since.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I was twelve.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
So I lost it, and Ben, you know, feeled he
felt somewhat responsible because he's the one that told Nick, hey,
go back to Alabama. So so we that was a
hard hit for us. So we went back out and
we went and got high again. And then that's when
it got really bad, and we were we were so
bad off that we had no money and we only
(15:21):
had like a phone each and we were like, you
know what, we're always together, let's just sell our phones
and get another hit a crack. So that's how we
ended up losing each other because we had no way
to even communicate with each other. At that point, we'd
gotten high, we had separated. I think we had gotten
a fight because you're always fighting when you're high or
when you're not high.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's that's the part. And her and Brandon had had
I guess come to meet me at some hotel or so,
I don't remember, but he yeah, it was bad.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
So then Brandon was living in my car, just me
and Brandon and James, and we were trying to find
Ben for like three or four days. And then that's
when he woke up covered in blood and he called
and he was like, look I got go.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Nick's death was I definitely carried a lot of guilt
over that, because I mean, I'm the one that convinced
to move do Alabama in the first place. I'm the
one that told me to kick that room rate out.
And you know, when I feel guilty, I drink and
I went into a blackout drunk. But anyway, I ended
up going to Georgia. I told her I'm done. I
was like, I'm not coming back.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
I am not.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
I am done, and she's like, well, I'm done too,
but you do have to come back because you have
the keys to the truck that left locked in the
ground parking lot. So she decided she was done as well.
That was rock bottom for her and I get back
on a Greyhound bus back to Memphis with the keys
all along the way. You know, I don't know how
(16:44):
you are on your faith journey, but there were like
these little guid shots for God's just telling me, you know, yeah,
I'm watching, I'm watching. And one of those is when
I got back to the Greyhound station, TBI boarded our
bus to search everybody Tennessee beer investigations, and for the
first time, I'm getting so and I know they're not
going to find a thing on me.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
For the first time.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
I get off the bus, we get Jess, we go
back to Georgia. I remember on the way we were
heading down Littlemore and this hit me, and your your
a little teaser when you talk about turned the review
mirror fifteen degrees. I got my cell phone. I took
a picture of that RuView mirror with Memphis behind us,
and I said, I'm leaving the city in the rear
view for good. And I posted to social media, thinking
(17:28):
I'm all dramatic or whatever, you know, and I put
the phone down and not even five minutes later, I
told just I was like, God wants me to go
back sick. What are you talking about? Let's not do that.
I know God wants me to go back to Memphis.
My work's not done, Like what work? What work do
I have in Memphis, Tennessee's And so anyway on our
(17:49):
way out of town is our little nuclear family. It's me, Jess, James,
and Madison on the way to my parents where we
started rebuilding our lives. God put it on me that
I was supposed to come back here and do something.
And I had no idea what. I thought for a
long time that it had something to with Brandon Kelly
because he was back out there bad, homeless. Max wife
(18:12):
was helping us take care of him. She would take
him food and cigarettes and you know, money here and
there when we thought he was gonna be okay to
handle it. It's hard to hit every point I wanted
to hit in this period of time. But I want
to rewind twenty eighteen. It was April twenty eighteen. Brandon's
(18:36):
mom had had relapsed, and this is when I was sober.
Brandon's mom was an area too. She lost into foster care.
They had rebuilt that relationship kind of it was. I
think it was April twenty eighteen. Times she had been
silent for three days, and me and Brandon were talking
to her every day. Neither one of us realized it,
so we're like, well, let's let's go check on Virginia.
(18:58):
And I got there right after Brandon. They kicked the
door in and I could smell her before I got
to the house, so she had killed herself. Fast forward
back to December of twenty nineteen. I realized I haven't
heard from Brandon in three days, and I knew, like,
there's there's no doubt. But I sent one of my
(19:19):
employees from that business I had back when I had
it all together I maintained contact with, and he got
in his car and I called MPD, and sure enough,
Brandam was dead from a fentonyl overdose.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Guys, I've known you for an hour and fifteen minutes
since so far I know about Nick being murdered, Brandon
dying of an overdose, Brandon's bomb dying of an overdose,
just as Mom dying I think of an overdose. Yeah, no,
talk being shot five times in the head. I imagine
(19:53):
if we sat here for an hour and listed them.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
All, Oh it's your sheet would be of.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Names of names who were either victims of violent perpetrators
of violence or of overdoses. Your life been filled with
not only personal loss personal guilt, but loss of friends
and people. You know, this thing is literally destroys lives. Yeah,
(20:27):
so you kicked that rearview mirror fifteen degrees of left
and said, I got to come back to Memphis and
you didn't know what. And irony of irony is some
of the very places you stayed in as addicts you
are now rehabbing. Yeah, so here's the redemption, everybody. The
(20:52):
crazy story that you just heard allowed Ben and Jess's
life and marriage at Starbucks and loss of friends and
abuse and loving parents who never enabled but never gave up.
And despite how hard you tried to destroy one another
(21:15):
in your relationship, figured a way out and all of that.
Now you're in Georgia. You are finally really sober and clean,
and you decided to start a nonprofit called Flanders Fields
(21:38):
with an initiative called Operation by Block the Block, And
I watched a video clip of it, and I'm going
to just tell the listeners what I know, and then
I want you to go with it. You're basically buying empty, dilapidated,
blighted properties, many of which were these what do you
(21:59):
call my houses? Trap houses that had prostitution and drugs
and everything going on them, and you were figuring out
ways to refurbish them and make them safe, halfway houses
for people and recovery, I think. But when you left
(22:24):
and you said goodbye, Memphis, I'm never coming back, and
then somehow you felt like God was calling you back
to Memphis for a purpose. Tell me how you found
it in Georgia, how you started this and what you're
doing now.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So we used to say a prayer when we're out
there all the time, when you were out in the
in the streets, the streets, and it was something along
the lines of God, if you'll just get us out
of here together, we'll spend the rest of our lives
coming back for the people we leave bond he called
the debt. Do I guess.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
We do? You know, you may be the fourth guest
that I can think of right now who in the
depths of the stare made to do with God. And
they all warn everybody be careful when you make a
deal with God, because when the deck comes due, that's
one dude you don't want to pay back.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Well, if you know the story of Johnnah and the
whel Memphis was very much our nineveh We didn't want
to come back here. When we started Flanders. That sergeant
that lost a leg came back in the picture. He
ended up in twenty twenty one. He ended up right
where I was, crack heroin gun charges and he called
me for help because I'd helped him before. He had
(23:37):
no idea what we had been through in the tenure gap.
Jess and I, ever committed and always ready for excitement,
were like, well, we're back on our feet. I'm skipping
so much. We moved out of my parents' basement. We
got a town home, we got a big house, we
got all our businesses back.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
We have currently.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, that's awesome in Atlanta, yeah, or north of Atlanta,
north of Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Souse you after all all this, you're back in business.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Absolutely yeah, and that is so oh congratulations quick, but
thank you very much. It was all God and it
was not us.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So you rebuilt.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
We rebuilt the business.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
The business you did everything you could to destroy on
Tuscasions and you're back doing it. In North Georgian.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
One was actually given back to us because they're like,
we don't know what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
But you do, and they gave it back to him.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
They so you moved back in your para space. When
you get a townhouse, you finally buy home, you are sober,
you're building your businesses. But the grip is now not
crack and heroin. It's the people you left base.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
It's the people left ironic that.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
That's the military thing, and that's good starts.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So it's interesting you bring that up, because this is
where everything starts getting really crazy, if it weren't crazy,
if it weren't already March April twenty one, starting to
eat and comes back and we're going to fund a
flight for him to get to rehabit Axis and my
business partner on the black Rifle. So I was like, bro,
you need to just start a nonprofit. Well, we'd already
(25:06):
decided we were going to start a nonprofit. We're going
to call it Flanders Fields because of the poppy flower
and opium and you know vets, and so we're gonna
start a nonprofit helping vets batting addiction. We're like, oh, well,
here it is, let's go and do it. So we
get sergeant moved to where he needs to be. We
file the paperwork at the IRS again had no intentions
coming back to Memphis. This is not We're not there yet.
(25:28):
And in July, a Marine Corps intelligence officer hits me
up and about my data company, my day job, Black Rifle,
which had started with bump stocks, but is now this
massive conglomerate of data that we use for digital intelligence
and digital marketing. And he's like, hey, man, you want
to do something crazy? And I was like sure. He's like, okay, cool,
We're going to get some people out of Afghanistan. I
(25:49):
was like, I'm sorry, what what did you say?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
We will be right back.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
So I know what we care about here is what
the army of regular felks are doing in Memphis. But
I got to tell you how we got there. We
got pulled into the evak out of Afghanistan, and we're
using data to vet Afghans early on, and we saw
some great success. We were able to make contact with
American citizen family members. We were able to determine who's
(26:29):
good who's bad.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
We were talking about like inres.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Interpreters, ye in Afghan interpreters and special forces. We were
able to locate some missing people. We were able to
prevent the trafficking of some children. By the end of it,
we were running sixty eight safe houses in Afghanistan that
we leased, which is insane if you think about it.
I went from.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Sixty eight safe houses we leased sixty eight houses and
or apartments in Afghanistan, contract signed in darry or pashto
two languages I don't speak, right.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We had real estate agents, we had ground teams, we
had drivers, we had food delivery networks, steod up like
all of this insane stuff. And I'm not even two
years clean yet, right, So that was cool. But the
cooler part was this network of other really cool regular
people that were building, and a lot of them came
from the special operations community. And I didn't want anybody
(27:23):
to feel like I had misrepresented my service, so I'm
always careful to say I'm barely even a vet. In fact,
I'm a junkie and an alcoholic. I'm two years clean.
And so I had that conversation with everybody, and instead
of them being like, well, I'm a little afraid to
work with you now, they were like, that's amazing. And
this happened more and more and more, and so we
ended up sorry language, We ended up with this really
(27:48):
great network of special operators, former CIA officers, congressmen, senators,
scary people, very scary, big hearted peaceeople that wanted to
help with our work. And so we ended up doing
some similar stuff in Ukraine. We ended up doing some
anti trafficking work in Mexico. And next thing I know,
(28:12):
the same judge that had kicked me off of drug
court and the man who kicked me out of his
halfway house, asked us if we would be interested in
taking over those halfway houses and the relationship with drug
court back here in Memphis. And that is not what
I wanted. I went into that meeting where that question
was asked to get them to give us a letter
of recommendation to do something similar in Chattanooga or Knoxville.
(28:37):
And God reminded us of that promise we'd made to
come back to the people we left behind. And so
now we've gone from getting the people our government left
behind in Afghanistan to being called in our own promise
to take care of who we left. So we went
back to that house on Wilbird Street in South Memphis,
the one fairy.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
House that you slept out in front of in the
truck with Brandon and your sock.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
The very house, and I went and I knocked on
the door or the window, and I was scared to death,
and I asked about two women in particular that I
knew we had left, and they weren't ready for help.
But we kept coming back. We kept coming back, and
(29:23):
we kept coming back, and while they weren't ready for help,
we started to seeing other people that noticed we were
coming back, and they also noticed we were clean, and
they started asking for help. And so slowly we're able
to get people off of that street, some of them
out of that house into detox and treatment, and before
(29:43):
long we were able to negotiate a deal with the
people that were selling dope out of that house to
buy it and close it with their blessing. And today,
two years later, both of those women are clean. One
of them put down a forty five year heroin and
she's clean today.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Unbelievable. Yeah, So, how many of these houses do you have?
Speaker 2 (30:08):
That was the first one, And then we went to
Melrose Street, which is the street that I some of
the worst days of my life before meeting Jess.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You literally are going back to the very places that
were the worst of the worst for you. You were
literally going back and buying houses where you left people behind.
It's not just a slogan. You're literally doing this.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
We are starting exactly where we left them. I'm going
back to houses where my blood is on the floor. Yep.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, and a lot of the people that saw that
blood leave his body, we're still there in active addiction, and.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
You're buying the houses if we can.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
You know, in one case, we had had the house
donated to us. Oddly enough, the guy that runs the
Delta Fair also invest in real estate and loved what
we did in Afghanistan, and he happened to own a
house that I lived in with the one nine Vietnam
Marine back in twenty fourteen, and he donated that house
to us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
And then we have the halfway houses, and we.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Did we did buy the half of We had a
mortgage in them, and we didn't have wanted to buy
them out right, But we've got the same halfway house
I was kicked out of, so, yeah, the same one
you were kicked out of the house I was kicked out.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We took a mortgage on it to buy it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, and it's full and it's full.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
What is full mean?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
All the beds twelve men no, I mean twelve men
are well. Right now, we're housing about seventy five men,
women and children in Memphis on mostly our dime. Some
of them do pay rent in these halfway houses, but
all spread throughout the city. We've got people who six
months a year, two years ago were high.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
These houses have to be POWs of I got to
be careful too, This house has got to be POWs
of crap. So I gotta believe if it's a trap
house and people been in it for ten years, those
are the electrical the walls, they probably stinks like hell.
The floors, there's no applies any You're buying a piece
of property with a frame and sometimes.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Sometimes not even the frame. Now, the halfway houses were
in good shape, and then when we opened up Sparrow House,
which was a house for trafficking survivors of kids. That's
that one's already renovated. But the trap houses, yeah, we
have to cut them. We have to renovate them. And
what's been really cool is oh roof Yeah, so eighteen roofing.
I don't know if you've heard of them. They're local
veteran on They donated a roof to one of the
(32:34):
trap houses, which is amazing, Like we're seeing all sorts
of people come and swing hammers with us being willing
to bleed with us.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Are you swinging hammers too?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Oh yeah, yeah. This is the part we never planned
and this has been really cool to watch, is that
the guys that live in our halfway houses and the
girls too, they want to help. They see what we're
doing out there on the dope track and they want
to give back because that's where they come from. Maybe
not that track, but a lot of them did. And
so we've seen. I've got one example that comes to
(33:06):
really two that come to mind very quickly that we're
huge problems on their way to getting kicked off of
drug court that asked to come help us, and the
judge will straight up tell you that come in and
helping us save their lives. It changed the trajectory of
their life because it gave them purpose. One of those
guys has graduated drug court now and he's he's he's
our superintendent out there on the block on my construction projects.
(33:28):
We couldn't do any of what we do without him.
So it's not just we're not just rehabbing houses, We're
not just closing dope houses. We're watching lives get rebuilt
in the process, and it's what keeps me sober. You know,
I've had periods of sobriety over the last three decades
that I've been battling addiction and alcoholism, but never stuck
(33:48):
because I never had anything to fill that void. You know.
I drink to fill an emptiness inside me, to fill
a void. And this work that we do that I
don't feel the need to drink anymodre. I still have
to do meetings, that's fell a spot's tryst, the steps.
But this is that defining factor that made this time
different for me. I have a purpose now, and I'm
(34:11):
watching other people come alongside us and find their own
purpose in it. Their purpose doesn't look like mine. It's
not the same as mine, or maybe it is, but regardless,
they're able to find purpose through service. When you do
and I'm sure you know this, Bill, but when you
do something for somebody that can never ever ever pay
you back, it does something to your heart. And when
(34:35):
an addict or an alcoholic, especially in earlier recovery, has
that experience that change that happens in their heart. Being
of service, well this is nothing new. If you're familiar
with twelve step recovery. That's the twelfth step. We're supposed
to carry that message. We're supposed to be of service.
And so we're watching this play out in real time
and at scale, and it's replicable. We're not special, we're
(34:59):
not I know, our story sounds insane, but like really,
we're just lucky we made it, and we're really lucky
we made it together. This is something anybody can do,
you know, blighted houses, tax sales, Like, anybody can do this.
I really do believe that. And even if they can't,
anybody can just go be of service to their neighbor.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Five days or so after he woke his bloody self
up and hauled us to Georgia and you said, hey,
you got to come back. You got the keys. It's
about five days, right, yeah, days whatever, shortly, yeah, and
then you all get on a Greyhound and head back
to north of Atlanta and Georgia. What was the date
(35:43):
do you remember about?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
June first?
Speaker 3 (35:46):
June first, which is my that's my clean date of
twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
It's four and a half years Yeah, it's four and
a half years ago. You were in a trap house
with a two year old.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Addicted with a two year old, and you were waking
up in a parking lot covered in somebody's blood, with
no recollection of anything that happened the four days previous,
four and a half years ago. And now you're telling
me you have halfway houses and stuff all over the
city currently serving seventy formally addicted people trying to get
their lives right, the people that you refused to lyput.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yep, that's correct.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
See if you guys can do that. Plus you've got
a business again and you burned one down twice. If
you can do that, anybody can.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Anybody can, and it doesn't have to be to this extreme.
I overdo everything, as do it. I do, you know
it doesn't have to be this extreme. A week before
Nick died, I was in dts, which are that's alcohol
a drawl and it can kill you. And I had
(37:04):
made the decision I was going to take my life.
And I went into a gas station in South Memphis
at at Bellevue and Elvis Presley right there at South
Parkway with the VP, and I was going to steal
a beer and I was going to go overdose. I
was just done. And I walked in that gas station
and a woman I've never seen in my life smiled
(37:24):
at me.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
She smiled at me, and something happened in my head.
I'll never forget that moment. I'll never forget her face,
because all it took was a stranger smiling at me
to decide I'm going to stay on this earth just
a little bit longer. You just listed a whole bunch
of cool stuff that's happened. If that woman hadn't smiled
at me, none of it would have happened. I tell
(37:48):
you that story to illustrate this point. It does not
have to be anything as extreme as what we're doing.
Sometimes just smiling at somebody can change the world. Seriously,
you have no idea what you could accomplish just by
showing kindness to somebody you don't even know. Forget everything
that we've done here in this city. All right. There
(38:09):
are fifteen thousand Afghans that are alive today because of
the results of not just our efforts, but a lot
of organizations like us, A lot of kids that thousands
of children that are still alive because I chose to
stay on this earth, and a lot of other good
people chose to show up when nobody else would all
because of a smile, All because of a smile.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
You mean, normal folks changing lives.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
That's one hundred percent normal thoughts changing lives.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
We're at a at a crossroads as a civil society
right now. We've been here before, about a century ago.
There's a theologists or scientists Robert Puttnam that talks about it. Yeah,
we've been here before. And our faith in institutional leadership
(39:11):
said an all time low, justifiably so watching what happened
in Afghanistan and a million other things that the border
crisis fentanel crisis. I don't trust our government, which is
okay because I don't feel like what we're talking about
right now is our government shop to fix. Government creates
(39:32):
more problems than they're able to solve. At a grassroots level,
these are our communities, these are our streets, and more importantly,
these are our neighbors. These are the people that we
are supposed to show up and love unconditionally until they're
able to love themselves. And we can all make a
difference out there. Memphis does not have to be in
the top five deadliest places in America, and before I'm
(39:55):
willing to slow down what I'm doing. It's going to
get off that list.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Jess. I see you sitting there noding your head, then
y'all are probably seeing me nod my head if you
cann't listen to that and look at where you are now,
what you're doing now, and understand why you no longer
harbor shame now after hearing that, I just don't think
(40:27):
you've been listening, you know. Yeah, sure, Gil, sure some regret, but.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Not shame, No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
What do you feel when you hear your husband say
what he just said.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Just a little gratitude. I'm so grateful because we shouldn't
be here. Y'all heard the story. I mean, we should
not be here, and I'm glad that God gave us
a chance. And honestly, I mean we you know, we
did the work. We did a lot of work. We
didn't sleep.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Sounds like you're still doing work.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
We're absolutely, I mean like eighteen hours a day. My
phone never stops ringing, his phone never stops ringing. We
have kids that are like, hey, we need you and
h and that is a problem sometimes, you know, sometimes
we put our kids, our own kids, on the back burn,
our kids that have already had to go through enough
with our addiction. And I just almost hate to say this,
(41:24):
but they're having to deal with another addiction. Now it's
just helping people instead of it's just a good addiction.
Now instead of a bad addiction, say it's healthy.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Yeah, I agree, it is a healthy addiction.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Are they involved? They are our son. Jacob is different
if they're watching versus if their participants.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Jacob has got he just turned eighteen, but you know
he went out to Valde with us after the masker
at rob Elementary, we get asked to come out there
and I guess initially work with one of the first responders.
We ended up providing security for seventeen to the funerals.
We worked with every one of the families. We fundraised
for one of the girls that survived. Jacob went out
there with us. Was such a godsend to the children
(42:07):
that survived. I mean we still talk to those families
to this day. Jacob went to win Arkansas where the
tornadoes with us the fires in Lahina Task Force Lahina.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I don't know. I mean, you were literally looking for
anything you can we do, but.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
It's only where God really tells us to go, though
I try to remove self will from it as much
as I can, because I do go into some dangerous places.
I do go into places normal people, particularly some of
that's not a special operations veteran should be going. And
I know if I step too much into my own will,
(42:45):
I'm gonna get myself killed in some of these places.
So we try to go where God directs it. Right
now that God has directed us to focus everything we're
doing here in Memphis.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
How many houses total right now?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
We've got nine?
Speaker 1 (43:00):
And let's just be honest, some of these are leveraged. Yes, yeah, absolutely,
I mean this is not like you're independently wealthy cash
and buying these houses.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
We got used to living with nothing. And even though
we're making money now, we don't have excess. Our excess
money goes into our philanthropy. And if that's the price
that it costs to say sober.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
So be it. Why stay in north of Georgia and
do all this back and forth. You must be buying
a new set of tires every month, and I have
because you're literally going back and forth constantly. You're commuting
from Atlanta to Memphis like I compute to my commute
to my house every day.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
That's a good question, and I have tried to convince
her to consider moving back here.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I was wondering if this was going to be the answer.
I think I know it.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
My kids, you know, well, two of them have two
addicts for parents. Of them have one addict for a parent,
and Memphis is not yet the place I want to
raise kids.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I get it, and I gotta believe in the deepest
recesses of your mind, it could be a dangerous proposition
for your family.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
We've already, yeah, crossed one bridge. We're just not willing
to take that risk yet.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Fair enough commute spending wheels off and did I want
to say one more thing. I heard you talk about
Aaron supporting kids, supporting you, just supporting your friends, and
then I heard you talk about Nick supporting you and
you supporting Nick. These are your ex spouses who have
(44:49):
been even through out of it, remain loving and supportive,
which tells me that they were two unique people that
could separate the person from the addiction. Hate the addiction
loved the person. I just want to give you an
opportunity to speak for two or about both of those people,
(45:13):
because they seem pretty phenomenal to me to have had
their lives torn up by your addictions and still stuck
by note only you, but one another as spouses.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
So we had obviously we had a rocky road with
justin Aaron in the very beginning, because there was I mean,
I made a lot of bad decisions. But I have
often said I had the ex wife lottery, and I
mean that every.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Wife lottery.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Well, funny, I really did. Uh. You know, Aaron, I
think I mentioned I've known since I was twelve years old.
She's just one of the kindest hearted people. Her life
was impacted by addiction before me on her family side,
and so while she can't relate, she gets it more
(46:04):
than most would.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
And yeah, Aaron and you share children.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, we share five children. That's the biggest thing. You've
got to always put the kids first, always period. I
think always has.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Yeah, but I'm going to tell you something. Somebody could
be your dad's a loser, your dad's lost business. Your
dad's an addict, he's a he lives in drap houses.
Your dad's a piece of crap. But I sense that
she's the kind of person that's like, we hate the addiction,
but we love your dad.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
To my knowledge, she's never said a bad word about
me to the kids.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Want woman Erin. I hope you're listening to this, but
kudos to you for your heart and your patience, and
I got to believe she's rooting for the two of you. Yeah, Nick,
Nick was.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Of course he's not with us anymore, but he was.
I think he was just so deep in his addiction
that and he was a little crazy out there sometimes.
But I think he just had a lot of respect
for Ben because me and Nick were always down and out.
We were homeless ourselves. We never really had anything, you know,
like Nick never really worked. He had a meth head
(47:10):
for a dad and a crackhead for a mom. So
he's never known normalcy as I really hadn't known it
when I was a kid. So he sees me get
with Ben, and Ben's this, you know, big time businessman,
and he's got his own house and he's you know,
able to pay for his own kids. So I actually
think Nick really looked up to Ben and he very
(47:31):
much valued his opinion.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Nick was a good dude, but he was a very
good good guy even if he had nothing else. Yeah,
and he just had a most respect He is I
have no doubts about that.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
So we'll wrap this up with this. You heard the
story of all that you've been through only four and
a half years ago to pick up in good Lord,
thank Goodness for your parents to have a respite and
(48:09):
to go to and now rebuild your business. Got involved
helping Afghanistan, people that fought for our country that were
left behind, and then turn that into work you're doing
in Memphis now, sheltering and harboring seventy formally addicted folks
(48:31):
getting their life back on track. And I gotta believe
you're looking for the next house. What an amazing story.
So if someone wants to contact you to find out
more about what you did, let's say they want to
do it with you alongside you in addition to you.
How do people find you? Guys?
Speaker 2 (48:52):
So are the nonprofit? There's two of them. We started
flanders Fields, which is Flandersfields dot org to help Hamilson
adicted that. We very quickly realized there's a lot more
people that didn't serve that need the same help, so
we start up We fight Monsters websites. We fight Monsters
dot org. You can contact us through those websites. I'm
on social media LinkedIn, Facebook.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Give me handles.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
LinkedIn is the real ben Owen? Instagram is the real
ben Owen Facebook. I have no idea what it is,
but if you just search bno and you're gonna find me.
I've had a ton of pictures go like crazy viral.
Elon Musk retweeted one of them. I hold signs with
stupid messages on plus.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Tattered up coolok and you got the cool beard, you
got the whole, you got the whole groovy dude going
for sure, So I get why you'd be retweeted and stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:43):
So yeah, we've we've got a big social media presence.
I'm pretty easy to find on there. And then jess
of course Jessica Owen on LinkedIn, and.
Speaker 3 (49:53):
Our halfway houses are at Rebo's Recovery, which is sober
spelled backwards. Do that again, Rebo's Recovery, which is sober
spelled backwards.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
That's interesting, okay. And so email addresses if someone wants
to email you.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Email is just at Flandersfields dot org. Ben at we
Fight Monsters dot org. We're both very responsive at when
we can be, we're not. And then YouTube, we got
a YouTube channel. It's at Monster fighters.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
All right, there you have it. If you can't get
in touch with you or find you through all of that,
you're not trying real hard. And I don't do what
I'm about to do a lot, but I'm going to
say this, y'all. These are folks who were living in
a seven hundred dollars truck four and a half years ago,
blitzed out of their mind on heroin and crack and
(50:45):
really fighting just to live another day, having lost a
couple of businesses, been foreclosed on a home at three linebackers,
so their stuff in a storage unit, sold their phones
for the next tip, and they are now four and
a half years later north of Atlanta, having rebuilt their
businesses and not spending everything they make on themselves, rather
(51:11):
investing in the most desperate among us in our society.
And if you heard their stories, they're not evil. There
were addicts and the vast majority of the people in
these trap houses they're selling themselves for drugs, or selling
their houses for drugs, or doing whatever they have to
(51:31):
get drugs. They're people with souls and hearts and brokenness,
and their brokenness just has to happens to manifest itself
in a way that maybe others doesn't, and it's public,
it's scorned. People don't like it in the neighborhood, and
(51:51):
as a result their particular brokenness we tend to shun
and turn our backs on. But they're people with souls
and lives just like just like Ben adjusts. And so
I'm just going to say this one time. You know,
if you want to donate to something, I can't imagine
(52:15):
a better thing to do than to donate to turning
a dope house into a hope house and intrusting it
to the hands of people who know that life intimately
and personally, who have now dedicated their lives and have
proven after four and a half years, they're never going
back to trying to help those that were in the
(52:36):
same position with them. And they know it all too well.
And so they're not just able to fix houses, they're
able to fix lives because they understand those lives. So
if you feel so compelled, I hope you'll reach out.
I have a particular affinity for what you're doing because
everybody says, what are we going to do to fix it?
And when you just got through saying it's not the
(52:57):
government's problem, this is our community and our city and
our neighbors and our people, and therefore it's our responsibility. Dude,
you just hit me right on the head because that's
what I've been saying ever since this podcast started. And
I can't I can't agree with you more. And I
hope somebody listening here reaches out and helps you get
(53:18):
the next nine houses, because it turns seventy in two
hundred and forty, one hundred and forty and two eighty,
and then all of a sudden things start changing and
that five percent most dangerous city in the world gets better.
And guys, I'm in awe of the lives you've overcome,
and then I'm in awe of the lives you're now building,
(53:40):
and mostly in all of the lives you are now changing.
And I cannot thank you enough for spinning the wheels
off your car and spending the evening telling your story
with me.
Speaker 3 (53:52):
Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
We appreciate you having this big time brother. Nobody's coming,
It's up does.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
And thank you for joining us this week. If Ben
or just Owen or another guest has inspired you in general,
or better yet, inspired you to take action by volunteering
with We Fight monsters by donating to them, or starting
something like it in your own community, or something else entirely.
Please let me know I really want to hear about it.
(54:22):
You can write me anytime at Bill at normalfolks dot
us and you'll hear back from me. If you enjoyed
this episode, please share it with friends and on social
subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it. Help us out,
become a premium member at normalfolks dot us. Any of
these things and all of these things that will help
(54:42):
us grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'll see you next week.
Host
Bill Courtney
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