April 3, 2024 • 32 mins
“For as long as I can remember I was always trying to make a couple pennies.” That’s Ray Trapani, one of the co-founders of the crypto-currency company, Centra Tech. In the premiere episode of Creating a Con: The Story of Bitconned, we hear the origin story of Ray, the guy who, in his own words said, “I always wanted to be a criminal since I was a kid”. Was it destined in his nature? Or would this prolific con artist be shaped by his environment and the influences on his life from an early age?
If you would like to reach out to the Creating a Con team, please email us at creatingaconpod@gmail.com
To get an inside look into Ray Trapani, Centra Tech and all the characters in the podcast, check out Bitconned, exclusively on Netflix… available to stream now.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm at the casino until roughly four am in Louie.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Eyes of the morning.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
After all, I have gone to bed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I leave the casino. I get home within twenty minutes.
I had an apartment that was close by.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
Yes, I go on to myself, think of things at Juice.
Speaker 5 (00:27):
You a regular night, I.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Go to bed, Yeah, but I fall asleep.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Period one.
Speaker 5 (00:35):
I get woken up to a loud pounding on the door.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
If there is anything, it's either you're getting robbed, someone
trying to knock down the.
Speaker 5 (00:44):
Door, or the cops.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So I grabbed my gun right away to defend the house.
I always have a lot of cash in my safe.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Ju Young.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Then I hear I just put my gun down. I
go open the door.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
But when you looked at me, smile.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Hands up, that's 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 3 (02:26):
You know wonder will I ever be back with you?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Ray and his partners raised millions of dollars on false
promises and partnerships 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
(03:10):
this before. Centri Tech was something new, novel, unregulated, the
opportunity to 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
(03:34):
capital B. I'm Johnny be Good and this is creating
a con The Story of Bigcom Episode one, breaking.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Bed this SEC crack down on initial coin offerings. They
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 6 (04:10):
They've been indicted now for defrauding investors. In the course
of operating their company, Centric Tech.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
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 8 (05:03):
When my assets went from three million dollars to zero overnight,
I went on to Centertech's website.
Speaker 3 (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 wake.
Speaker 8 (05:23):
It did lead to a lot of family trauma, and
ultimately I haven't spoken to my father in four years now.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
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. 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
(05:53):
basically a member of my family. Sometimes I'd come home
laid from a cello lesson or some shit, only 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
(06:17):
you don't, I promise you that you do. The thing
is people don't just turn to a life of 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
(06:39):
who always had my back. Growing up in 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.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Room. How you cramped back there?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You guys are Yeah, I know you're the one that
got the stupid car.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Good thing on in my old car, Yeah on my car,
probably more room. This is long Beach. Atlantic Beach is
just like the private sector of Long Beach. 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 5 (08:23):
You live in rent?
Speaker 1 (08:24):
No, Putnam is the street away from where I used
to live Plaza you're thinking of, 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.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
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 3 (11:14):
We were the poorest people on the block, let's put
it that way.
Speaker 8 (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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Their mom's not killing theirselves. They're all stay at.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Home moms and you know, like their dad just like
a stockbroker or owns some big business. So 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.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
That made me very me against the world.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
And they're also the.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
More flat people, 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. Ray
was attracted to that power, that influence. He saw a
firsthand how his grandfather operated. He compared that to how
hard his mom worked double ships and overnights just to provide.
That wasn't for Ray. Growing up. When Ray wasn't with
his grandparents, he was out on the streets. It's where
(14:06):
we spent most of our days when we weren't at school.
That's where the AB boys come in.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
That Atlantic Beach Crew had a huge influence on this town.
They were like the surfer you know, they run the streets.
They're doing all like the bad shit in town, all
like blue collar families, and they got like all the girls,
so we looked up to them in a way. They
were like the surf gangs from Point Break, just dowing
more drugs. Ray saw the AB Crew making more money
(14:34):
from drugs than lifeguarding, and he wanted a piece of that.
They say Atlantic Beach dies in the winter and comes
back to life every June. Summers in Atlantic Beach were special.
Even after moving to Florida, I'd go back for the
(14:54):
next five years. The beach was my first job, where
I met my first girlfriend, where I smoke my first blunt.
Most of us were content to just be teenagers and
enjoy making a few bucks on the beach.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
But not Ray.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
He saw a bigger opportunity than parking his ass on
a lifeguard stand. His life of crime, Well, it all
started with weed, and it started on the beach.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
This bowl looks like shit, like Long Beach Bowlok is
brand new. This bowl looks so shitty. One of the
coolest memory like for me is this is actually where
I worked when I first sold wheat.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And Ray had the perfect cover to get started.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
We were chairboys, so like it would be two chairboys
and a security guard. And then like when people would
comment they say that last name, you take their chairs,
you bring them down for you and they give you
a tip.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Look, as a kid from a b your summers were
spent as a chairboy or a lifeguard. These jobs weren't negotiable.
They were passed down from generation to generation. We doated
on the rich people of Atlantic Beach as they paid
us peanuts to carry their shit. They made leather out
of their skin as they parked their ass on the
beach all day. Ray realized his time had more value.
(16:09):
He also paid attention to who was coming to the beach.
It wasn't the people like my father busting his ass
working one hundred hour weeks. These people were comfortable. Some
made an honest living. Others, well, Atlantic beaches will want
to be mob town. You literally had the retired mafia
living right there and a lot of people getting rich
(16:29):
off backroom deals, making others do their dirty work while
they got fat. And Tan Ray took note.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
It was just like a good station to set up
and bag up my wheat. As long as people are
getting in chairs, no one's complaining, no one's going to bother.
You made ten grand, like eighth grade going into ninth grade,
which is like a lot of money for someone that
has no money at all.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
A fourteen year old walking down the hallways of Lawrence
High with ten k in cash.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
You know what am I going to do? Go make
seven dollars an hour and just sit at the beach.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Hey, I was that kid. I was happy to collect
my seven dollars an hour. Ray he needed more. Maybe
Johnny worked here more than me. I switched up and
started doing other shit. That other shit. Ray got into
girls and drugs.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I've definitely smoked blunts with girls here and like caught
head sitting here. And we were little kids just enjoying
the day smoking, And.
Speaker 5 (17:26):
There were definitely times where I would go and pick.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Up with girls to do whatever with them.
Speaker 9 (17:32):
Right was got along with women.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
That's Mara. The three of us were inseparable in high school.
She knows Ray as well as I do.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
Everyone would meet up on the beaches at night and
get fucked up.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
A lot of these girls, like their first time doing
anything was with me. That's the most part. They're not
having sex. Some of these girls are just starting to kiss.
I kind of knew everything that was like sexually to do,
and it wasn't just sex.
Speaker 9 (17:57):
Ray was always a little bit ridiculous also in the
sense of like he smoked pot before everyone that I
ever even met. It was like kind of always the
kid that was stoned.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
We're introducing them to like everything. The first time everybody
does mushrooms is with us, or the first time anybody
tried to smoke weed is with us. We were like
the bad influences. I was probably the worst influence there
ever was.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
We had plenty of excitement growing up, smoking weed, breaking
into cabanas, partying. It felt like there were no rules.
We even had some close encounters with the cops, but
we never took it seriously.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
Yeah, it was definitely fun. Running well. That was like
how it was with the cops.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Like it was just like Cat and Mouse came at
all time enjoyable cat and Mouse because the cops weren't
like out to get you. You almost felt like untouchable
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The reality was most of those cops were our friends
and family. The line between criminal and cop was a
thin one. A lot of the guys that ended up
joining the Forest were some of the biggest scumbags at Lawrence,
so there wasn't really any respect for authority, And as
Ray got older, that untouchable mentality persisted.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
When you start coming in real crimes, you're not really
like trying to have any sort of police interaction.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Atlantic Beach had a bad drug problem that was no secret,
and Ray was mixed up in it. We were all
worried about him. Here's Mara again.
Speaker 9 (19:22):
The dynamic definitely changed at one point because Johnny moved
to Florida. And when Johnny moved it was kind of
like the band broke up a lit all and Ray
was doing his own thing.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It was a good time until he started beering off
the wrong way. That's Ray's childhood friend, Bert Feldman.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
Seemed clear that Ray started moving away from me to
harder shit.
Speaker 10 (19:46):
You know, anytime you get a bunch of kids together
and they get nothing to do, I think leads to
drug abuse.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
That's Ray's father filled your panny. They aren't exactly close,
but Phil came back into the picture.
Speaker 10 (19:57):
They would feel their parents' drugs and then they'll put
them in a big bowl and they would just share
the drugs like that prescription medication.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Bert Mara and I were in no position to really
help Ray. We were all dealing with our own substance
abuse issues. If I tried to get him clean, he'd
be the first to point out the hypocrisy, Like I.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Was on a crazy amount of drugs. I was taking
twenties Annex a day, which is you know, like anyway
that ever did ones annex like fucked up? Like I
was taking twenties annex, smoking weheed all day, plusing heroin
with that.
Speaker 9 (20:28):
I was definitely concerned when he started doing harder drugs.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Raise mom Carrie had her own concerns.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
He stopped hanging out with kids in Atlantic Beach, like
with Johnny and stuff like that, and he started to
hang out over the bridge.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
That's when he started to go, you know, because there
were bad people over there.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
In some neighborhoods, you talk about the wrong side of
the tracks. In Atlantic Beach, it's the wrong side of
the bridge. Our parents tried to keep us on our side.
Here's my sister, Alyssa. She's three years older and was
a part of that ab crew. She knew all this
shit Ray was up to.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
When you go over the bridge, it's really only for
one thing, and that's to sell drugs.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
My other best friend lived over the bridge, got at
his house regularly smoking the pod and all that type shit,
and his brother was like the main weed dealer for
all of Nassau County, like.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
A big part of New York.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
His brother has millions of dollars in cash and hundreds
of pounds of weed.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Where Ray was in Inwood, which is a hood part.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
Of Queen's.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I think I was in like eleventh grade. I got
my first apartment over the bridge. I've always had like
a million apartments, but like Atlantic Beach is my home base.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Lies he had one, but a sixteen year old having
an apartment still kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I'd kind of sell drugs out of and that's kind
of where I'd bag up coke and just kind of parties.
If I wanted to do like some ecstasy, you know,
we're all just going to go to that apartment.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
At this point, not only was Ray an addict, he
became a full blown drug dealer, his main product oxy.
He was fifteen.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
When you find out how much you pay for one
of these pills, that's when Ray's eyes lit up in
both ways. Hey I can sell these drugs and do
them for free and make a good profit. Ray was
always about the quick come up since an early age.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
If someone was like, oh, what's your best way of
making money, I don't think start a business. I'm like, oh,
we should start some sort of scheme, and I can't
help it.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
Ray is very much a shady person. He would pick
money over everything.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Dealing wasn't enough. Eventually, the future billion dollar con artist
decided to influence the supply.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
My first fraud was I basically had someone steal a
pad from a doctor, and then I just had someone
else go to the doctor get like this script for
like tailan oil. I copied his exact handwriting. So I
just wrote out the whole pad of oxy conton thirties
to all different people in my town, made them all
go to the pharmacies, cash them in, get the pills,
and then I would give him thirty pills each most
(23:14):
of the scripture for one hundred and twenty to give
him thirty pills, which you know that makes them like
six hundred bucks. To just basically go into a pharmacy
per phil you'd give the person thirty pills, you'd get
ninety ninety times twenty. You'd make like eighteen hundred bucks
off each one. You'd multiply that by one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
It's a couple of pennies, one hundred and eighty grand
worth of pennies.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
It was crazy how many they allowed us to fill.
One pharmacy alone allowed us to fill about one hundred
prescriptions from the same doctor without every questioning anything.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Ray practically had the entire town filling fake scripts. He
was hustling selling pills fast then he can swallow them,
making bank. But New York's opioid crisis was at a
critical mass. The authorities were finally cracking down.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
My girlfriend goes into a pharmacy to fill another prescription
that's a fake prescription, and she's in there and she
just comes like running out and she says, you know,
they were onto the whole scam, and we left. They
didn't arrest her there. About a week later, detectives showed
up to my house. They said that I had to
warrn off my rest for prescription for it for her.
I think I had like two counts because I filled
(24:30):
two prescriptions.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
Personally.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
They ended up arresting everybody that filled the prescription, Like
the whole town basically got arrested. They never pinpointed me
as like a mastermind of the operation or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Most people I know got off with basically nothing, including Ray.
You had to do a couple of weeks at drug court,
that's it, and without any real consequences. Ray was back
at it in no time, using more than ever. Here's maa.
Speaker 9 (24:55):
He was heavy back on drugs and whatever. The only
time we would leave as if like he needed to
get drugs, which at first I didn't even realize, and
then afterwards I was like, Okay, you're really like fully
back in it.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I used to shoot two bundles of heroin or you know,
three bundles of heroin in a day, plus taking siboxin.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
If you don't have a recovering opiate addict in your family,
you may not know what suboxine is. It's a drug
that doctors prescribed to treat opiate dependency. Ray used to
pop them like candy.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
I'm like, I've had people who die right in front
of me on heroin or I've like resuscitated the two
people actually in my life, I somehow saved their life,
like gave them mouth to mouth after they overdose on
heroin right in front of me.
Speaker 9 (25:40):
His mom definitely was not like helpful in all of
that too. Like her and I've actually had like our
own kind of beef at one point. Everything was everyone
else's fault, never raised fault, and she was very vocal
about that. She had no problems reaching out to kids
and like making them feel like there was something wrong
with them. But you know, it's his own issues that
(26:02):
he was going through. But she did not help.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I don't think Rai's mom, Carrie.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
I think he probably had multiple rock bottoms.
Speaker 8 (26:10):
But like they say, you should, you know, let them
hit rock bottom. I don't agree with that philosophy. They say,
you know you got to cut them off, you got
I could never do that. I wouldn't be able to sleep,
I couldn't I couldn't live with myself.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
You know, I couldn't have him in the street.
Speaker 8 (26:27):
You know, that's why I always gave him a house,
a place to live, whatever, you know, food, even if
I knew he was using, because I just something that
I just could not do.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
I wasn't going to give up on him. People, Oh
you're not giving up on him. You're teaching him a lesson.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
A kid like Ray would have been dead.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Despite their disagreements, Maren knew when it was time to
get Carry involved. She was never one to mince words.
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Mara calls me, She's like, he's going to be mad,
but I don't give a shit.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
He's selling pills, he's selling weed, he's doing this, he's
back on the show. So I got my asses right
in the car.
Speaker 8 (27:03):
I drove right up and just basically shocked him in
the middle of the night, banged.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
On his bedroom door. You know, I'm here, But are
you doing an idiot? You know it's not happening.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
I was never able to go against Ray like Marahad,
I didn't have the balls to call Carry. But the
truth was we all knew Ray needed rehab.
Speaker 8 (27:23):
Yeah, you read a lot of stories about parents that
deal with kids that are having a bad addiction and
the kids are telling them off and cursing them. Never
did that. It's like he knew we had a problem.
He kind of wanted to continue to do his bad stuff.
But if I pulled them in and I said no, hey, we're.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Going, he would come with me.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
You know.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
He was in thirteen different impatient rehabs over the course
of the ten years, and then he would come right
out and use again.
Speaker 6 (27:47):
It's very hard to help Ray. Ray is going to
do what he's going to do, through and through.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
As soon as he completed rehab, Carrie needed to get
him out of Atlantic Beach as fast as possible, so
she called her dad for a solution.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
My grandfather, who was like the connected mafia type of guy,
gets me into construction and I do that for a
few years, trying to like remain sober.
Speaker 8 (28:13):
I wanted to get him out of the area, so
I got him an apartment in bay Own, New Jersey,
and then he was working in the city as a
construction worker.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
My grandfather got me into the union. I was able
to skip their apprenticeship. Then I do construction for about
three years, and I hate construction.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
It's not for me.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
My whole skill set is all brained and I'm so
skinny and not strong.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
He was a recovering drug addict. The kid was like
ninety pounds.
Speaker 8 (28:37):
He's like, my, I'm not happy, and I knew he wasn't.
He hated construction. He's not his personality. He just hated
the guys. He hated the work.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I got disgusted with construction and I go down to
visit Bird in Florida.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Bert Raised, childhood friend we met before, was living down
in Florida at the time.
Speaker 8 (28:54):
He calls me and that he's like, you know, Ma,
it's so nice down here. Burke can hook me up
with the job.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
You know, what do you think.
Speaker 8 (29:00):
If I moved down and at this point he is
relatively sober. He's on some boxing, but he's clean off
of everything else. I'm like, you know, right, twenty four
if I had the opportunity to just pick up and
go and had no kids, I would do it, could
do it.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm like, fuck it, I quit, I pack up, I
put my TV, all my shit in my car. I
drive down to Florida and I ended up moving in
with Bert.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Raised. Choice to go to Florida was just the beginning.
This decision would fundamentally change the course of his life.
He needed a fresh start, and Bert offered that. Growing up,
my friend did a lot of shitty things. He was
no saying. By the time he left New York he
was a career criminal. Little did I realize he was
(29:44):
just warming up. And that's where our story really begins.
On this season of Creating a Con, I went from
working construction, hating my life, to making nine grand, ten grand,
twelve grand in a day, just living like a maniac.
You'll hear the hies. We had an amazing life. We
would all go to courtside, Miami, e games, dinners, wherever
(30:07):
we wanted, spending any amount we wanted.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That first feeling of seeing a million dollars in your
bank account. You see that extra comment. I was like,
oh my god, this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And the Loews my whole life.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
It was always living up to my grandfather. I would
never be able to face them if I lost that money.
I realized this was not going to end well for them,
and they didn't seem to understand that.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
A story that, by the end blurs the line between
fact and fiction.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Because once somebody tells a lie enough, they believe that lie.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
So tune in each week to learn the truth behind
raich or Pany and Centri Tech. To get an inside
look into Centri Tech, raich or Pany, and all the
characters you've been listening to, check out Bitcoon exclusively on Netflix,
available to stream now. If you would like to reach
out to the Creating a Con team, email us at
(31:07):
Creating a Con at gmail dot com. That's Creating a
CEO n at gmail dot com. We appreciate your support.
One way to support our show is by subscribing to
our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate
and review Creating a Con. Five star reviews go a
long way. A big thank you to those who are listening. Also,
(31:28):
be sure to check us out and follow us on
Instagram at Glass Podcasts. Creating a Con is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted and produced
by me Johnny B. Good, with executive producers and Nancy Glass,
Ben Fetterman and Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Ben
(31:51):
Fetterman and Todd Gans, additional writing by Matt Delvecchio. Operations
and production support by Christin Melchiori. Additional production support Trey Morgan.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crimecheck. Sound
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio, Consulting producer Nathaniel Popper.
(32:13):
Creating a CON's theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library
provided by myb Music. Thank you for subscribing to iHeart
True Crime Plus exclusively on Apple. We hope you enjoyed
this ad free presentation of Creating a Con the story
of bitcom. Continue binging the rest of the series one
hundred percent ad free, and stay tuned for early access
(32:34):
to bonus episodes and additional content exclusively for subscribers. And
for more podcasts from iHeart and Glass Podcasts, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm at the casino until roughly four am in Louie.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Eyes of the morning.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
After all, I have gone to bed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I leave the casino. I get home within twenty minutes.
I had an apartment that was close by.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
Yes, I go on to myself, think of things at Juice.
Speaker 5 (00:27):
You a regular night, I.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Go to bed, Yeah, but I fall asleep.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Period one.
Speaker 5 (00:35):
I get woken up to a loud pounding on the door.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
If there is anything, it's either you're getting robbed, someone
trying to knock down the.
Speaker 5 (00:44):
Door, or the cops.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So I grabbed my gun right away to defend the house.
I always have a lot of cash in my safe.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Ju Young.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Then I hear I just put my gun down. I
go open the door.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
But when you looked at me, smile.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Hands up, that's 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 3 (02:26):
You know wonder will I ever be back with you?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Ray and his partners raised millions of dollars on false
promises and partnerships 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
(03:10):
this before. Centri Tech was something new, novel, unregulated, the
opportunity to 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
(03:34):
capital B. I'm Johnny be Good and this is creating
a con The Story of Bigcom Episode one, breaking.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Bed this SEC crack down on initial coin offerings. They
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 6 (04:10):
They've been indicted now for defrauding investors. In the course
of operating their company, Centric Tech.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
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 8 (05:03):
When my assets went from three million dollars to zero overnight,
I went on to Centertech's website.
Speaker 3 (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 wake.
Speaker 8 (05:23):
It did lead to a lot of family trauma, and
ultimately I haven't spoken to my father in four years now.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
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. 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
(05:53):
basically a member of my family. Sometimes I'd come home
laid from a cello lesson or some shit, only 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
(06:17):
you don't, I promise you that you do. The thing
is people don't just turn to a life of 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
(06:39):
who always had my back. Growing up in 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.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Room. How you cramped back there?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You guys are Yeah, I know you're the one that
got the stupid car.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Good thing on in my old car, Yeah on my car,
probably more room. This is long Beach. Atlantic Beach is
just like the private sector of Long Beach. 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 5 (08:23):
You live in rent?
Speaker 1 (08:24):
No, Putnam is the street away from where I used
to live Plaza you're thinking of, 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.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
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 3 (11:14):
We were the poorest people on the block, let's put
it that way.
Speaker 8 (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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Their mom's not killing theirselves. They're all stay at.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Home moms and you know, like their dad just like
a stockbroker or owns some big business. So 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.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
That made me very me against the world.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
And they're also the.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
More flat people, 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. Ray
was attracted to that power, that influence. He saw a
firsthand how his grandfather operated. He compared that to how
hard his mom worked double ships and overnights just to provide.
That wasn't for Ray. Growing up. When Ray wasn't with
his grandparents, he was out on the streets. It's where
(14:06):
we spent most of our days when we weren't at school.
That's where the AB boys come in.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
That Atlantic Beach Crew had a huge influence on this town.
They were like the surfer you know, they run the streets.
They're doing all like the bad shit in town, all
like blue collar families, and they got like all the girls,
so we looked up to them in a way. They
were like the surf gangs from Point Break, just dowing
more drugs. Ray saw the AB Crew making more money
(14:34):
from drugs than lifeguarding, and he wanted a piece of that.
They say Atlantic Beach dies in the winter and comes
back to life every June. Summers in Atlantic Beach were special.
Even after moving to Florida, I'd go back for the
(14:54):
next five years. The beach was my first job, where
I met my first girlfriend, where I smoke my first blunt.
Most of us were content to just be teenagers and
enjoy making a few bucks on the beach.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
But not Ray.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
He saw a bigger opportunity than parking his ass on
a lifeguard stand. His life of crime, Well, it all
started with weed, and it started on the beach.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
This bowl looks like shit, like Long Beach Bowlok is
brand new. This bowl looks so shitty. One of the
coolest memory like for me is this is actually where
I worked when I first sold wheat.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And Ray had the perfect cover to get started.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
We were chairboys, so like it would be two chairboys
and a security guard. And then like when people would
comment they say that last name, you take their chairs,
you bring them down for you and they give you
a tip.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Look, as a kid from a b your summers were
spent as a chairboy or a lifeguard. These jobs weren't negotiable.
They were passed down from generation to generation. We doated
on the rich people of Atlantic Beach as they paid
us peanuts to carry their shit. They made leather out
of their skin as they parked their ass on the
beach all day. Ray realized his time had more value.
(16:09):
He also paid attention to who was coming to the beach.
It wasn't the people like my father busting his ass
working one hundred hour weeks. These people were comfortable. Some
made an honest living. Others, well, Atlantic beaches will want
to be mob town. You literally had the retired mafia
living right there and a lot of people getting rich
(16:29):
off backroom deals, making others do their dirty work while
they got fat. And Tan Ray took note.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
It was just like a good station to set up
and bag up my wheat. As long as people are
getting in chairs, no one's complaining, no one's going to bother.
You made ten grand, like eighth grade going into ninth grade,
which is like a lot of money for someone that
has no money at all.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
A fourteen year old walking down the hallways of Lawrence
High with ten k in cash.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
You know what am I going to do? Go make
seven dollars an hour and just sit at the beach.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Hey, I was that kid. I was happy to collect
my seven dollars an hour. Ray he needed more. Maybe
Johnny worked here more than me. I switched up and
started doing other shit. That other shit. Ray got into
girls and drugs.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I've definitely smoked blunts with girls here and like caught
head sitting here. And we were little kids just enjoying
the day smoking, And.
Speaker 5 (17:26):
There were definitely times where I would go and pick.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Up with girls to do whatever with them.
Speaker 9 (17:32):
Right was got along with women.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
That's Mara. The three of us were inseparable in high school.
She knows Ray as well as I do.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
Everyone would meet up on the beaches at night and
get fucked up.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
A lot of these girls, like their first time doing
anything was with me. That's the most part. They're not
having sex. Some of these girls are just starting to kiss.
I kind of knew everything that was like sexually to do,
and it wasn't just sex.
Speaker 9 (17:57):
Ray was always a little bit ridiculous also in the
sense of like he smoked pot before everyone that I
ever even met. It was like kind of always the
kid that was stoned.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
We're introducing them to like everything. The first time everybody
does mushrooms is with us, or the first time anybody
tried to smoke weed is with us. We were like
the bad influences. I was probably the worst influence there
ever was.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
We had plenty of excitement growing up, smoking weed, breaking
into cabanas, partying. It felt like there were no rules.
We even had some close encounters with the cops, but
we never took it seriously.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
Yeah, it was definitely fun. Running well. That was like
how it was with the cops.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Like it was just like Cat and Mouse came at
all time enjoyable cat and Mouse because the cops weren't
like out to get you. You almost felt like untouchable
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The reality was most of those cops were our friends
and family. The line between criminal and cop was a
thin one. A lot of the guys that ended up
joining the Forest were some of the biggest scumbags at Lawrence,
so there wasn't really any respect for authority, And as
Ray got older, that untouchable mentality persisted.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
When you start coming in real crimes, you're not really
like trying to have any sort of police interaction.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Atlantic Beach had a bad drug problem that was no secret,
and Ray was mixed up in it. We were all
worried about him. Here's Mara again.
Speaker 9 (19:22):
The dynamic definitely changed at one point because Johnny moved
to Florida. And when Johnny moved it was kind of
like the band broke up a lit all and Ray
was doing his own thing.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It was a good time until he started beering off
the wrong way. That's Ray's childhood friend, Bert Feldman.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
Seemed clear that Ray started moving away from me to
harder shit.
Speaker 10 (19:46):
You know, anytime you get a bunch of kids together
and they get nothing to do, I think leads to
drug abuse.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
That's Ray's father filled your panny. They aren't exactly close,
but Phil came back into the picture.
Speaker 10 (19:57):
They would feel their parents' drugs and then they'll put
them in a big bowl and they would just share
the drugs like that prescription medication.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Bert Mara and I were in no position to really
help Ray. We were all dealing with our own substance
abuse issues. If I tried to get him clean, he'd
be the first to point out the hypocrisy, Like I.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Was on a crazy amount of drugs. I was taking
twenties Annex a day, which is you know, like anyway
that ever did ones annex like fucked up? Like I
was taking twenties annex, smoking weheed all day, plusing heroin
with that.
Speaker 9 (20:28):
I was definitely concerned when he started doing harder drugs.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Raise mom Carrie had her own concerns.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
He stopped hanging out with kids in Atlantic Beach, like
with Johnny and stuff like that, and he started to
hang out over the bridge.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
That's when he started to go, you know, because there
were bad people over there.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
In some neighborhoods, you talk about the wrong side of
the tracks. In Atlantic Beach, it's the wrong side of
the bridge. Our parents tried to keep us on our side.
Here's my sister, Alyssa. She's three years older and was
a part of that ab crew. She knew all this
shit Ray was up to.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
When you go over the bridge, it's really only for
one thing, and that's to sell drugs.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
My other best friend lived over the bridge, got at
his house regularly smoking the pod and all that type shit,
and his brother was like the main weed dealer for
all of Nassau County, like.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
A big part of New York.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
His brother has millions of dollars in cash and hundreds
of pounds of weed.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Where Ray was in Inwood, which is a hood part.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
Of Queen's.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I think I was in like eleventh grade. I got
my first apartment over the bridge. I've always had like
a million apartments, but like Atlantic Beach is my home base.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Lies he had one, but a sixteen year old having
an apartment still kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I'd kind of sell drugs out of and that's kind
of where I'd bag up coke and just kind of parties.
If I wanted to do like some ecstasy, you know,
we're all just going to go to that apartment.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
At this point, not only was Ray an addict, he
became a full blown drug dealer, his main product oxy.
He was fifteen.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
When you find out how much you pay for one
of these pills, that's when Ray's eyes lit up in
both ways. Hey I can sell these drugs and do
them for free and make a good profit. Ray was
always about the quick come up since an early age.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
If someone was like, oh, what's your best way of
making money, I don't think start a business. I'm like, oh,
we should start some sort of scheme, and I can't
help it.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
Ray is very much a shady person. He would pick
money over everything.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Dealing wasn't enough. Eventually, the future billion dollar con artist
decided to influence the supply.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
My first fraud was I basically had someone steal a
pad from a doctor, and then I just had someone
else go to the doctor get like this script for
like tailan oil. I copied his exact handwriting. So I
just wrote out the whole pad of oxy conton thirties
to all different people in my town, made them all
go to the pharmacies, cash them in, get the pills,
and then I would give him thirty pills each most
(23:14):
of the scripture for one hundred and twenty to give
him thirty pills, which you know that makes them like
six hundred bucks. To just basically go into a pharmacy
per phil you'd give the person thirty pills, you'd get
ninety ninety times twenty. You'd make like eighteen hundred bucks
off each one. You'd multiply that by one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
It's a couple of pennies, one hundred and eighty grand
worth of pennies.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
It was crazy how many they allowed us to fill.
One pharmacy alone allowed us to fill about one hundred
prescriptions from the same doctor without every questioning anything.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Ray practically had the entire town filling fake scripts. He
was hustling selling pills fast then he can swallow them,
making bank. But New York's opioid crisis was at a
critical mass. The authorities were finally cracking down.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
My girlfriend goes into a pharmacy to fill another prescription
that's a fake prescription, and she's in there and she
just comes like running out and she says, you know,
they were onto the whole scam, and we left. They
didn't arrest her there. About a week later, detectives showed
up to my house. They said that I had to
warrn off my rest for prescription for it for her.
I think I had like two counts because I filled
(24:30):
two prescriptions.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
Personally.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
They ended up arresting everybody that filled the prescription, Like
the whole town basically got arrested. They never pinpointed me
as like a mastermind of the operation or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Most people I know got off with basically nothing, including Ray.
You had to do a couple of weeks at drug court,
that's it, and without any real consequences. Ray was back
at it in no time, using more than ever. Here's maa.
Speaker 9 (24:55):
He was heavy back on drugs and whatever. The only
time we would leave as if like he needed to
get drugs, which at first I didn't even realize, and
then afterwards I was like, Okay, you're really like fully
back in it.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I used to shoot two bundles of heroin or you know,
three bundles of heroin in a day, plus taking siboxin.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
If you don't have a recovering opiate addict in your family,
you may not know what suboxine is. It's a drug
that doctors prescribed to treat opiate dependency. Ray used to
pop them like candy.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
I'm like, I've had people who die right in front
of me on heroin or I've like resuscitated the two
people actually in my life, I somehow saved their life,
like gave them mouth to mouth after they overdose on
heroin right in front of me.
Speaker 9 (25:40):
His mom definitely was not like helpful in all of
that too. Like her and I've actually had like our
own kind of beef at one point. Everything was everyone
else's fault, never raised fault, and she was very vocal
about that. She had no problems reaching out to kids
and like making them feel like there was something wrong
with them. But you know, it's his own issues that
(26:02):
he was going through. But she did not help.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I don't think Rai's mom, Carrie.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
I think he probably had multiple rock bottoms.
Speaker 8 (26:10):
But like they say, you should, you know, let them
hit rock bottom. I don't agree with that philosophy. They say,
you know you got to cut them off, you got
I could never do that. I wouldn't be able to sleep,
I couldn't I couldn't live with myself.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
You know, I couldn't have him in the street.
Speaker 8 (26:27):
You know, that's why I always gave him a house,
a place to live, whatever, you know, food, even if
I knew he was using, because I just something that
I just could not do.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
I wasn't going to give up on him. People, Oh
you're not giving up on him. You're teaching him a lesson.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
A kid like Ray would have been dead.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Despite their disagreements, Maren knew when it was time to
get Carry involved. She was never one to mince words.
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Mara calls me, She's like, he's going to be mad,
but I don't give a shit.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
He's selling pills, he's selling weed, he's doing this, he's
back on the show. So I got my asses right
in the car.
Speaker 8 (27:03):
I drove right up and just basically shocked him in
the middle of the night, banged.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
On his bedroom door. You know, I'm here, But are
you doing an idiot? You know it's not happening.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
I was never able to go against Ray like Marahad,
I didn't have the balls to call Carry. But the
truth was we all knew Ray needed rehab.
Speaker 8 (27:23):
Yeah, you read a lot of stories about parents that
deal with kids that are having a bad addiction and
the kids are telling them off and cursing them. Never
did that. It's like he knew we had a problem.
He kind of wanted to continue to do his bad stuff.
But if I pulled them in and I said no, hey, we're.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Going, he would come with me.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
You know.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
He was in thirteen different impatient rehabs over the course
of the ten years, and then he would come right
out and use again.
Speaker 6 (27:47):
It's very hard to help Ray. Ray is going to
do what he's going to do, through and through.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
As soon as he completed rehab, Carrie needed to get
him out of Atlantic Beach as fast as possible, so
she called her dad for a solution.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
My grandfather, who was like the connected mafia type of guy,
gets me into construction and I do that for a
few years, trying to like remain sober.
Speaker 8 (28:13):
I wanted to get him out of the area, so
I got him an apartment in bay Own, New Jersey,
and then he was working in the city as a
construction worker.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
My grandfather got me into the union. I was able
to skip their apprenticeship. Then I do construction for about
three years, and I hate construction.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
It's not for me.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
My whole skill set is all brained and I'm so
skinny and not strong.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
He was a recovering drug addict. The kid was like
ninety pounds.
Speaker 8 (28:37):
He's like, my, I'm not happy, and I knew he wasn't.
He hated construction. He's not his personality. He just hated
the guys. He hated the work.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I got disgusted with construction and I go down to
visit Bird in Florida.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Bert Raised, childhood friend we met before, was living down
in Florida at the time.
Speaker 8 (28:54):
He calls me and that he's like, you know, Ma,
it's so nice down here. Burke can hook me up
with the job.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
You know, what do you think.
Speaker 8 (29:00):
If I moved down and at this point he is
relatively sober. He's on some boxing, but he's clean off
of everything else. I'm like, you know, right, twenty four
if I had the opportunity to just pick up and
go and had no kids, I would do it, could
do it.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm like, fuck it, I quit, I pack up, I
put my TV, all my shit in my car. I
drive down to Florida and I ended up moving in
with Bert.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Raised. Choice to go to Florida was just the beginning.
This decision would fundamentally change the course of his life.
He needed a fresh start, and Bert offered that. Growing up,
my friend did a lot of shitty things. He was
no saying. By the time he left New York he
was a career criminal. Little did I realize he was
(29:44):
just warming up. And that's where our story really begins.
On this season of Creating a Con, I went from
working construction, hating my life, to making nine grand, ten grand,
twelve grand in a day, just living like a maniac.
You'll hear the hies. We had an amazing life. We
would all go to courtside, Miami, e games, dinners, wherever
(30:07):
we wanted, spending any amount we wanted.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That first feeling of seeing a million dollars in your
bank account. You see that extra comment. I was like,
oh my god, this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And the Loews my whole life.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
It was always living up to my grandfather. I would
never be able to face them if I lost that money.
I realized this was not going to end well for them,
and they didn't seem to understand that.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
A story that, by the end blurs the line between
fact and fiction.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Because once somebody tells a lie enough, they believe that lie.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
So tune in each week to learn the truth behind
raich or Pany and Centri Tech. To get an inside
look into Centri Tech, raich or Pany, and all the
characters you've been listening to, check out Bitcoon exclusively on Netflix,
available to stream now. If you would like to reach
out to the Creating a Con team, email us at
(31:07):
Creating a Con at gmail dot com. That's Creating a
CEO n at gmail dot com. We appreciate your support.
One way to support our show is by subscribing to
our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate
and review Creating a Con. Five star reviews go a
long way. A big thank you to those who are listening. Also,
(31:28):
be sure to check us out and follow us on
Instagram at Glass Podcasts. Creating a Con is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted and produced
by me Johnny B. Good, with executive producers and Nancy Glass,
Ben Fetterman and Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Ben
(31:51):
Fetterman and Todd Gans, additional writing by Matt Delvecchio. Operations
and production support by Christin Melchiori. Additional production support Trey Morgan.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crimecheck. Sound
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio, Consulting producer Nathaniel Popper.
(32:13):
Creating a CON's theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library
provided by myb Music. Thank you for subscribing to iHeart
True Crime Plus exclusively on Apple. We hope you enjoyed
this ad free presentation of Creating a Con the story
of bitcom. Continue binging the rest of the series one
hundred percent ad free, and stay tuned for early access
(32:34):
to bonus episodes and additional content exclusively for subscribers. And
for more podcasts from iHeart and Glass Podcasts, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Jonny B. Good
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