Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm at the casino until roughly four am in Louis.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Eyes of the morning.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
After all, I have gone to bed, I leave the casino.
I get home within twenty minutes. I had an apartment
that was close by.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yes, I go on to myself, think of things at juice.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
You a regular night, I go to bed, Yeah, but
I fall asleep. Period one. I get woken up to
a loud pounding on the door. If there is anything,
it's either you're getting robbed, someone trying to knock down
the door, or the cops. So I grabbed my gun
(00:48):
right away to defend the house. I always have a
lot of cash in my safe. You young, then I hear,
I just put my gun down. I go open the door.
But when you looked at me, smile, hands up, that's
(01:10):
when it all begin.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's Ray. He surrendered to the FBI right then and there.
If you asked me when we were kids, where Ray
would end up, honestly, I would say right here, handcuffed
in his Gucci shorts and Gucci slides, flashing his newly
minted veneers as the neighbors stood there gawking. He was
probably more worried about how pale and skinny he looked,
(01:34):
and less worried about the handcuffs on his wrists. For
as long as I could remember, Ray was always good
at making a couple of pennies. The problem was didn't
matter how Rachel Panney was being arrested for fraud, conspiracy
to commit security fraud more specifically, and conspiracy to commit
wire fraud for what you might ask well. Ray's company
(01:56):
was called Centritech and he was one of the founders.
During the summer of twenty seventeen, center Tech became a
massive success, raising millions of dollars from investors. A list
celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled touted the company
as the next big thing, and their success wasn't limited
to the US. Center Tech went global. Two kids from
(02:20):
New York were going to change the world until they didn't.
And I'm here to tell you why.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
You know wonder.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Will I ever be back with you? Ray and his
partners raised millions of dollars on false promises and partnerships
(02:52):
that they claimed would disrupt the financial industry, and they
made these claims across interviews, social media, and email. When
centri Tech launched, not only had they caught the attention
of hundreds of investors, but also the SEC and FBI
law enforcement had rarely come across a crime like this before.
Centri Tech was something new, novel, unregulated, the opportunity to
(03:16):
deceive was high and the stakes were massive. By the
time the FEDS caught up with Ray and his partners,
the initial funds that were raised had turned into a
lot of money. And when I say a lot of money,
according to the pending class action lawsuit, we're talking billions
of dollars. That's a billion with a capital B. I'm
(03:40):
Johnny be Good and this is creating a con The
story of Bigcom Episode one, breaking.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Bed this SEC crack down on initial coin offerings to
arrests of the co founders of an ico that was
backed and promoted by Floyd Mayweather. DJ coll ed.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
The founders of that company.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
They've been indicted.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Now for defrauding investors.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
In the course of operating their company, Centric Tech, they
found rampant plagiarism, identity theft, fake executive teams. The danger
is there's manipulation, there's fraud, and people don't know the difference.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Ray was mixed up in one of the largest financial
crimes of the decade, he found himself far away from
home and in a shit ton of trouble. His company,
centri Tech, found itself directly in the crosshairs of the FEDS.
And as the FBI and SEC turned their eyes on Ray,
well he was fucked. But Ray wasn't the only one
(04:51):
who'd lose everything. I threw my phone on the floor.
I was like, I invested how much money into this shit?
All of centri Tech's investors would see their valuable investment
in the company evaporate instantly.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
When my assets went from three million dollars to zero overnight,
I went on to Centertech's website.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
It just said shut down and you had no answers.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Ray and his partners were lying to stealing from and
cheating on witting investors, and they left a lot of
destruction in their way. It did lead to a lot
of family trauma, and ultimately I haven't spoken to my
father in four years now. All right, you might be thinking,
some shithead ripped off a lot of people, Why the
fuck should I care? Sounds like something I've seen on Netflix.
(05:37):
Guess what you probably have. And that shithead you're talking about, well,
he happens to be my best friend, and before you
start judging me, you have to understand growing up, Ray
was basically a member of my family. Sometimes I'd come
home laid from a cello lesson or some shit, only
(06:00):
to find Ray there playing Nintendo in my room. As
we got a little older, I knew he was getting
into shady shit, but he was like my brother. I
knew the things he did for money weren't exactly legal,
but so what. We've all got that friend or relative.
If you don't, I promise you that you do. The
thing is people don't just turn to a life of
(06:22):
crime overnight. Ray was no different. It wasn't always a criminal,
at least not before the age of ten. It was
an evolution. Didn't matter if he was selling drugs or
one of the most prolific con artists of all time.
To me, Raychelkannie was always just that quirky kid from
Atlantic Beach who always had my back. Growing up in
(06:45):
ab there was a lot of money around us. It's
a white collar town with blue collar running through its veins.
Ray saw early on money was within his grasp.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I've been saying since a very young age that I
was going to be a million right. I believed I
could speak it into existence.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Ray never lacked confidence, that's for sure, But it was
more than that. Certain things are placed on a pedestal
in Atlantic Beach. If you walk into the town hall,
you'll see a sign poster of the Sopranos. I should
tell you everything you need to know about the town's values.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
I always wanted to be a criminal when I was
a kid. I was fascinated with you Catch me if
you Ken, Wolf of Wall Street, these type of movies.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
And guess what, That's exactly what Ray did. He became
a career criminal while friends were at grad school, working
on Wall Street or busting their ass trying to break
through as a writer. Like me, My best friend was
plodding and scheming toward his next big payday. But to
understand how Rachel Panney ended up surrendering to the FBI
(07:48):
and facing over a hundred years in prison, we need
to go back to where his story begins in Atlantic Beach,
New York. How you cramped back there, you guys? Yeah,
I know you're the one that got the stupid car.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
Good thing on in my old car, Yeah on my car,
probably more room.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
This is long Beach. Atlantic Beach is just like the
private sector of Long Beach.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
This is a beautiful neighborhood. Like this is like where
we used to skateboard all the time. This is Putnam.
I'm where are you?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
You live in rent?
Speaker 5 (08:24):
No, Putnam is the street away from where I used
to live Plaza you're thinking of.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
I'm terrible with like geography, geography, geography, geograph. He has
a way with words, doesn't it. Long Beach is really
like what people know. It's what people come to serve
and party. And Landing Beach is just like all the
rich people that don't want to live in the craziness
of Long Beach. They just live in a landing beach.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Atlantic Beach, or ab as we call it, carried a reputation,
and the kids that lived there did too. We weren't
so much degenerates, but we weren't not you know what
I mean. At the end of the day, we always
had each other's backs. The town it thrived off hedonism.
We went to high school in Lawrence. If you've ever
(09:09):
seen Goodfellas, you've probably heard of it. By sophomore year,
my parents were done with Atlantic Beach, so we relocated
to Florida. It was not my choice, my parents were
afraid of Ray's influence on me. They wanted to separate us,
and my dad knew relocating was the only way. Can
you imagine my parents decided to move our entire family
(09:31):
to another state because of bad influences. But here we are.
Ray was always a little different. His outlook on life,
it wasn't the same as mine. Everything he learned he
learned on the streets of Atlantic Beach and from his family,
especially his grandfather.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
For as long as I can remember, I was always
trying to make a couple of pennies. A couple of
pennies is actually my grandfather saying, no matter what it was,
no matter how much, it's always a couple pennies. It
didn't matter how or why. I was always going to
find a way to make money. I saw other people
doing it, and I knew I could do it better.
Everything around me was illegal, but my brothers were all
(10:13):
selling weed. My grandfather is kind of like a mafia criminal.
He's like the one that's carrying the family financially, and
my mom's busting or asking. I'm like, one day I'll
be able to help my mom and pay all her bills.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I always saw a raised pop was in the mafia,
just never heard him say it before. Rai's desire for
wealth was born out of his surroundings.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
This is my house growing up, was over here with
the trampoline and all this crazy shit. I don't know
what crack had moved in here, but it looks worse
than it did.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It looks exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
My mom bought that house on foreclosure to put us
in a good neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Ray's dad was out of the picture by the time
Ray was born.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
My mom worked all week in the hospital, like I
see you, just to like kind of sure. We were
able to pay the mortgage, living like above our means
in a nice town.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
That nice town, the nice neighborhood raised mom carry Trapani
wanted for her son. Well, it came at a cost.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
We were the poorest people on the block, let's put
it that way.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
But they knew that they were loved, you know, and
they knew that they were safe, and that was the
most important thing to me. My family's broke, and my
mom's busting her ass eighty hours a week, killing herself,
and then like all my friends around me, they don't
have to hustle. Their mom's not killing theirselves. They're all
stay at home moms and you know, like their dad
just like a stockbroker or owns some big business. So
(11:38):
like you're always chasing basic life and then everybody around
you is like well off. It's very hard not to
be like, oh, I got to get to where they're at.
That made me very me against the world. I think
a lot of people that grow up around more wealthy
people and are struggling as a kid tend to do
a legal activity. And they're also the more flat people,
(12:00):
which I always was. It's like a poor man's quality
is like that flashiness.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Ray was always flashy, and come to think of it,
so is his grandfather. William Hagner Bill, or as Ray
called him, Pop, was the family patriarch, the protector. In
many ways, he would shape who Rachel Panney would become.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
So back in the day, my grandfather. He's a bigger guy,
very tan, super german, fucking always a lot of gold on,
like your prototypical not Italian mobster, but he looked like
a mobster. He was the head elevator inspector for New
York City and the correlation between that and organized crime.
(12:42):
The elevator unions are always the most shady unions because
they control all the flow in any construction job, because
you need an elevator to bring windows or anything to
the next floor. Right, So every job that went on
in New York City, you know, he obviously got a
piece of that. But he was just super connect the guy.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
If there was one thing that Ray got from his grandfather,
it was loyalty. Pop always supported him. Ray was his blood.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
My grandfather was always on my side no matter what.
He didn't know what the fuck I was doing. Oh,
Ray has a business idea, Let's give it a try.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Pop was the one male influence in his life that
would encourage him support him. Pop instilled loyalty in Ray.
He always had Ray's back and that stuck with him. Hell,
Ray even has a tattoo it's his loyalty running up
the side of his torso. But that's the thing about Ray.
If you're in his inner circle, he's loyal to you
to the day he dies. But if he doesn't know you,
(13:42):
he'll be the first to fuck you over and leave
you with nothing on the side of the road. To
learn the truth behind raych or Panney and his company, Centritech,
subscribe and listen to Creating a Con The Story of Bitcom.
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(14:02):
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