Decoder Ring - The Grifter

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Today, I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Mr. President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy.

The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and war. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick.

We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this quarter. Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody showed that Gorsuch would join the majority on this.

He is the justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activism. Slow Burn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come.

Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains explicit language. Brett Johnson, a career criminal, cyber fraudster, and conman, has a lot to regret. That was just this horrible, horrible guy.

Over more than a decade, Brett scammed people in person. On the side of a road with these buckets, you know, give to the needy, abused children. You know, signs like that, collecting money. He scammed people online.

Pick up a black Sharpie. Go home and start signing Sammy Sosa and Marker Wire signatures to these baseballs. So I print certificates of authenticity. List these things on eBay for $60 apiece.

Sell every single one. And he scammed merchants, banks, and the government. Learned how to launder money internationally at that point. I was killing $106,000 a week on income tax fraud.

Credit card fraud, identity theft, passing counterfeit checks, playing a pivotal role in early online criminal marketplaces, grifts, cons. Brett has done all of these things, ripping off hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the process. From a moral perspective, Brett's deeds are terrible. But from a storytelling perspective, they're material.

His criminal exploits make for a rollicking yarn that is the arc of a movie like Catching If You Can, sequences from a heist film, a protagonist straight out of an anti-hero drama, and a happy ending, maybe. And when we first started reporting on Brett, that's what we were intrigued by, how good his story was, as entertainment. But as we dug in, Brett's story became significantly less fun. Not because we discovered Brett was lying to us, but because people are complicated.

And so are stories. Grifters, scammers, con artists, they feel like they're all around us right now. Fire Festival, Theranos, the summer of scams. But the people involved in these types of things don't just have fascinating tales.

They tell fascinating tales. That's what they do. Tell you a story you can believe in, even if you shouldn't. Brett Johnson was one of the first wave of criminals to figure out how the internet could be exploited for financial gain.

But he was also the kind of guy who could talk people into things and out of them. This storytelling ability is one Brett still uses to this day. In fact, it's his job now. Brett is a legal person operating on the right side of the law as a speaker and a consultant advising businesses on how to protect themselves from cybercriminals like him.

In today's episode, we're going to deconstruct Brett's story. First, by letting you enjoy it, and then by taking it apart to see how it works. This is Recodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin.

Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. Today, how do you tell a good griffer story? Brett Johnson was born in 1970. I'm from Hazard, Kentucky, right in the middle of the heart of coal country.

It's one of these areas that unemployment is high. If you're not fortunate enough to have a decent job, you might be involved in some sort of fraud or crime. Growing up, his home life was financially and emotionally volatile and dominated by his mother. My mom was basically the captain of the fraud industry for that city.

At one point, she stole a 108,000-pound Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. At another point, she took a slip and fall in a convenience store and tried to sue the owner. When Brett first starts talking about his mom, she's not like a larger-than-life rascal who wouldn't be out of place on a TV show like Justified, but she was more complicated than that. She calls me and my sister into the bedroom.

She looks at us and she's like, you know, I really love you guys. And we're like, yes, mom. She's like, I'm going to show you how much I love you. So she takes a cigarette that's lit and pretends to burn herself on the arm with it.

She sits there and pretends to burn herself. She's like, this is how much I love you. I still remember that, man. I was like, but you're pretending to burn yourself.

Brett's sister Denise, who's a year younger than him, tells many of the same stories that he does. But what he tells him with a laugh, her versions are darker. She'd put two chairs in the living room in front of the couch. She'd sit on the couch and put us in the chairs in front of her and she'd say, there's a devil inside me.

Look into my eyes and fight the devil because it's saying I should kill you. These things would go on, not for five or 10 minutes. They would go on forever. Like, you'd be sitting there two hours or more crying, begging her not to kill us.

That's what I remember. Those are the things that I remember from her childhood. Their mother frequently left them for long periods of time, periods when they didn't always have enough to eat. It was around this time that Brett began stealing.

So mom had been gone for a few days. No food in the house. Denise walks in one day and she's got a pack of pork chops with her. My brother says that I took a pack of pork chops.

I didn't. I stole a pack of ham. And I'm like, where'd you get that? She looks at it and she's like, I stole them.

I'm like, you know, that's a good idea. Show me how you did that. So she takes me over to the A&P and shows me how she's stealing food and we start stealing food. Well, my mother finally showed back up and it dawned on her, whoa, they got things like, wait a minute, where'd they get that?

So my brother, trying to cover, said, we found them. And so she looks at me and says, where did that come from? Denise stands up and says, no, we stole it. Mom looks at us and she was like, show me how you did that.

Joins us. Not only does she join us, she goes upstairs and gets her mom to join us as well. So it's me and my sister, my mom and my grandmother taking these road trips to shoplift. As I got older, Denise got out.

Her honesty and her anger helped her. She's a teacher who's particularly attentive to kids growing up in difficult circumstances. But Brett never stopped scamming for long, even as he went to college and got married. Here, for example, is what happened after he started a straight job that also involved talking people into things.

So I started raising money for the Shriners Club and for the Kiwanis Club. And about three weeks in, I'm like, you know, I can do this stuff myself. So idiot Brett Johnson goes off and creates his own Kiwanis Club, starts calling people himself collecting money. Of course, I'm not giving any money to charity whatsoever.

Eventually, Brett found his way online into a whole new set of crimes, like eBay fraud. I'm watching Inside Edition one night we've got a show on Beanie Babies. They're profiling this one peanut royal blue elephant that was selling for $1,500 on eBay of all places. I'm sitting there going, you know, I need to find me a peanut.

Can't find him. Mother got these little gray Beanie Baby elephants for $8. So I buy one of those, go home and try to dye the little guy, get through with him. It looks like he's got the mange.

So I find a picture of a real one online, post it on the ad. Lady thinks I've got the real thing and she wins the bid. I send her a note as soon as she wins it. I'm like, hey, we have never done business before.

I don't know if I can trust you. What I need you to do is just send me a U.S. postal money order. Once that clears, I'll send you your elephant.

I cash him out, send her that blue-ish elephant and immediately get a call. She's like, I didn't order this thing. I was like, lady, you ordered a blue elephant. I sent you a blue-ish elephant.

This and various other scams were bringing in so much cash that Brett needed a place to put it all. But in order to open bank accounts online in other people's names, which is what he wanted to do, he needed fake ID. The only site he could find online selling anything illegal at all was called Counterfeit Library, which specialized largely in fake diplomas. After spending a couple of weeks on its sparsely populated forum, another user messaged him to say he could get Brett a fake driver's license.

He said that. If you're going to do this kind of stuff online, you have to get to the point where you trust someone. He said, so I'm going to charge you $200, but I'm going to send you the ID. So I send him $200, send him a picture.

Two weeks later, I get an ID in the name of Steven Schweck. When I get it, I think it's the prettiest thing in the world. I'm like, man, that is going to do some work right there. Brett became the reviewer for Counterfeit Library, the guy who tries out all of the illegal wares, sees if they work or don't, and then reviews them on the site.

This review model helped Counterfeit Library to grow quickly, and it became one of the seeds of the criminal marketplaces that still exists today. How exactly? Here is a pocket history of the very early online criminal forums constructed with the help of Kim Zetter, a longtime national security and cybersecurity journalist. Okay, you take your English language forums like Counterfeit Library, which honestly were mostly for teens.

They really started with false IDs, you know, the usual teenager thing of getting a false ID to get alcohol or getting someplace that you can't go. You add to them Russian language fraudsters who have huge troves of personal information and credit card data, and what you get is English language forums also using the review system devoted to credit card fraud at an unprecedented scale. It's not a word, but the massification of this kind of fraud. One of these early high-profile forums was called Shadow Crew.

And it really became this international forum for people from South America, for people from Europe, for fraudsters from the Middle East. It became this community for them to meet online and devise new ways to commit fraud. Brett was a high-level administrator and manager on Shadow Crew. To this day, his affiliation with Shadow Crew is what he's most known for in the cybercrime world.

Shadow Crew facilitated the scanning of huge amounts of money. At first, those scams involved using stolen credit card numbers online. But the scammers had PIN numbers, too. And that meant that if they could figure out how to properly encode a credit card, they could get money straight from ATMs.

Once we find out that exploit, we were making $30,000 to $40,000 per day per person. So much money was being stolen that law enforcement began paying close attention to Shadow Crew. This spooked Brett so he started looking for another scam. What he settled on was something called tax identity fraud, electronically filing taxes for dead people.

This was not as hard as it should have been. First, Brett got a list of the people on this list were dead. Prior to 1998, it took the family to apply for a Social Security death benefit. But that benefit has to be filed for the United States government to record the person has deceased.

So he started filing electronic returns, 1040 EZs, for those dead people. He didn't need real street numbers or anything else like that. It took 10 to 12 business days for the refund to clear. In short order, he was running something like a business, a very lucrative, but often tedious scam.

I could file a tax return manually, one every six minutes. Did that from Sunday through Wednesday, eight to ten hours a day. I filed 200 returns a week. On Thursday, I'd take a road trip, fought out a course of ATMs.

Friday and Saturday, I would cash out through to $160,000 a week. 150 of it would fit in a backpack like you carry to high school or college classes. I'd come home to Charleston, South Carolina. I had a spare bedroom.

That backpack I'd open up for the bedroom and I'd just chuck the backpack in there. I was making so much money that he started to do the kind of things that you see in mob movies. And it starts by me going in the bathroom one day and I simply put a couple of 20s in the drawer. Well, that turns into having $10,000 in 20s in the spare bathroom in the drawer.

And it was kind of a joke for me. So if I had a friend over anything, they would go use the restroom and I would know if they had been filtering through the drawers by the look on their face when they came out of the bathroom. There's a saying in journalism about a story being too good to check, which is basically when a detail is so perfect, so entertaining, you don't want to know if it's not true. But I need to say here, I do not know if this drawer's full of cash fit is true.

We fact-checked this episode and almost everything we checked, checked out. But there are some things we cannot confirm one way or another, specifically having to do with the more elaborate details of Brett's behavior. This story may be true, but we're including it because even if it's an exaggeration, it gives you a sense of the type of guy Brett wants you to think that he was. Because Brett was making most of his money on fraudulent tax returns and was increasingly nervous about law enforcement sniffing around.

He stepped away from Shadow Crew, which in October of 2004 was busted by the Secret Service. The government agency tasked with protecting financial systems and so the one that deals with credit card fraud, identity theft, counterfeiting, and so on, all the things that Brett was into. 28 people from the U.S. and six other countries were arrested, but Brett was not, despite being mentioned mostly by his username in many of the same documents as those who were.

Around this time, Brett got divorced and subsequently got a new girlfriend who he used as a justification for scamming more money so he could buy her nice things. I'm like a guy that buys love all the time. He doesn't have to tell somebody I love him, I have to show it. But at that moment, his scamming options were limited due to tax season ending and the Shadow Crew lost.

So he started passing counterfeit cashier's checks. I go to pick up the package from the UPS driver, hand him the cashier's check, he hands me the package, I turn around, and there's the FBI, police department, everybody else with guns drawn. We've got you. I was arrested in Charleston on February 8th of 2005 was when I was arrested.

Another story too good to check. Brett says that the car he was driving at the time of his arrest had a wad of $976 $2 bills inside of it. Once he was arrested, it didn't take long for the Secret Service to figure out who he was and take over the case. So then they look at me like, anything you can do for us?

Brett cut a deal. They agreed to let him out on a reduced bond if he went to work for them as a paid confidential informant, helping them infiltrate online criminal marketplaces, which was not an entirely uncommon offer to cyber criminals at this time. In a flash, Brett went from committing cyber crime to secretly helping stop cyber crime. Or that was the idea, anyway.

Finally, after three months, they reduced the bond, walk out. So I didn't have any money. I had $30 left for my name at that point. I take that $30 and I walk over to Walmart and buy a prepaid debit card so I can start back in tax fraud again.

I go work for the Secret Service. For those 10 months I work for them, I break the law every single day, often from inside the Secret Service offices with them sitting next to me. During this period, everything that Brett did on Secret Service computers was recorded. But he says after a few weeks, they stopped paying attention to the recordings.

So I would make the contacts to do the tax return fraud, make the contacts to order prepaid debit cards to cash out the tax return fraud, talk to people about credit card theft, arrange for credit cards to be delivered to my address. The Secret Service eventually grew suspicious and gave him a polygraph, which he failed. They revoked his bond and sent him back to jail while they searched his apartment, where needless to say, they found lots of evidence of fraud. He had also bought a number of computers using stolen credit cards and filed over 100 bogus tax returns.

At this point, Brett was in jail and he should just stay there, but instead, he caught another break. A state judge ruled that his bond had been improperly revoked, which meant he got to leave. Naturally, he made a run for it. I head out going west on Interstate 20, no idea where I'm going to head to.

So I've got $1,000 I am. Spend, I think, $600 or $800 of that to rent a hotel for two weeks. Then I go to Kinko's every day and start filing taxes. The way tax refunds work is they fund usually about 3 o'clock in the morning, so I wait until 3 o'clock This is the Secret Service's most wanted list, by the way, not the more famous FBI's most wanted list.

The Brett is never very careful about this distinction. Oh, shit, I can't go to Brazil now, can't get the passport to do that. So I'm like, what can I do? So what do I do?

I go to Disney World. I go to Orlando. I buy the year pass to go to Disney World and Universal Studios. Some details that stand out to me from the tail end of this escapade, and this information comes from law enforcement records, is that at the time of his arrest, Brett had $230,000 in total assets on him, which included $150,000 in cash and a $22,000 DVD collection.

You would think that having a life story that resembles a heist movie or an anti-hero drama, as this Disney World interlude does, would only work in your favor. Not only are we culturally conditioned to have empathy for the leading men in these kinds of fictions, we're culturally conditioned to lose ourselves in their plot, to be entertained. And Brett has benefited from his life story's crazy twists and turns. It opened up a lot of doors for him.

It's why he's on this podcast. But the entertainment value of Brett's life also gives everything he says a kind of fictional quality. It makes it feel like what he's saying can't quite be real, can't quite be how things really happened. And to a certain extent, they're not how things happened, not because Brett is a liar, but because his default storytelling mode is one of folksy humor, where everything that's happened to him is presented comedically, even stories about his childhood and his scams and his time in prison, even stories about him being isolated and on the run and hopped up on toxic amounts of ego.

But Brett's story, it's not a comedy. And so we're going to pause the story for a bit, with Brett having just been arrested in Orlando, and go back and look at some of the stuff the fun version of the story skipped over. With Instacart's preference picker, you can tell your shopper how you want your bananas, which matters, because your banana needs change. Monday you want to be ready.

Wednesday you is stress eating them straight from the field between meetings. Raya you makes it into a banana split, because it's been a week and you deserve it. So choose bananas that are ripe, almost ripe, or not ripe at all. And shop for every version of you.

Want bananas just how you like? The preference picker is available at most retailers. Download the Instacart app. Hey, I'm Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex, and Money, an interview show here at Slate.

And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June. I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival, featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Erica Schmidt. Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones, my favorite film station agent, and Erica Schmidt, who's a director, screenwriter, playwright. They are married, and we're going to talk about making art separately, in collaboration, and how they've built their life around that.

Join us. It should be a great event. It's their first joint interview they've done ever together. And we are so glad at Death, Sex, and Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival.

The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theater at 5.30 p.m. Get your tickets at TribecaFilm.com slash audio. See you there. Let's return to the first ID that Brett got on Counterfeit Library.

So I sent him $200 to send him a picture. Two weeks later, I get an ID in the name of Stephen Schweck. My name is Steve Schwecky. I had, at one point in time, my driver's license stolen.

It ended up being a very painful experience for me. After Brett told us Steve's name, we were able to track him down. Until we spoke with him, he had no idea who Brett Johnson was. Back in the day of Blockbuster, one of the things you had to do was turn in your driver's license and scan it, and when I left, I left it there.

And I had no idea where it was forever, and by the time I realized where it was, it was gone. So I got a new driver's license, no big deal. Started with a new company. It was a national company, and someone saw my name in a different state.

And he's like, hey, you know, are you the same Steve Schwecky that I'm working with on eBay? He had an Xbox that he was selling or whatever at the time it was. And he's like, you know, you need to pay me for that. And I'm like, dude, I don't know you, and that's not me.

So he then sent me a picture of my driver's license. He's like, well, you provided this, and it was my driver's license. The rest of Steve's story plays out in a typical way for identity theft, as a huge ruling hassle. It put my name on the watch list.

And so I spent the next seven to ten years not being able to get instant credit, having to be called at home to verify who I am, having to fill out extra paperwork. Oh, it was absolutely a violation, because you have to deal with all the inconveniences that it brings. Identity theft and credit card fraud are occasionally referred to as victimless crimes. The idea is in most instances, the person whose identity has been stolen does not end up voting the bill because credit card companies, merchants, and banks end up paying.

It's often a justification for the people who do this sort of crime. It's not really hurting anyone. But I think this perspective seeped out further than that. It's hard to imagine an armed robber hundreds of times over being given a chance to work for the Secret Service.

It obviously didn't hurt Brett in his interactions with law enforcement, that he's white, and that cybercrime and this sort of fraud has historically been a mostly Caucasian pursuit. But I think this perspective also seeps out to Brett's audience, who are not as horrified by his crimes as they might be by others. And that can feel icky. It does to me.

How easy it can be to forget to be icked out by what he did. I mean, this also is a storytelling problem where it's like, right, there's someone who is doing all the action. That's always the person you want to watch. And then there's the person who has the action done to them.

Because the victim, there would be no book if there were no victim, but the victim's part of the book ends on page one when he or she dies. Like, that's just the way that it is. That's Rebecca Lavoie, a true crime author and podcaster. On her show, Crime Writers On, she talks a lot about why people love stories like this so much.

Here's why you like this story, and here's why you feel good about it. This is what I think, anyway. And I think this is true with a lot of comment stories. We all wish that we had this superpower on some level.

This is a superpower. It is a superpower to be able to fool people. I think there's a lot of truth to this. But I also want to be clear here that Brett was not just fooling people, not just getting one over on the man.

He did very bad things, way worse than inconveniencing and violating the privacy of hundreds, if not thousands of people, and stealing money from banks, businesses, and the government, which are not, in and of themselves, small things. She was a single parent, and she was selling a coin collection to put a roof on her house for her and her kids. And I stole that collection. She had it listed on eBay, and I was going through, I was paying with counterfeit cashier's checks, and I think it was like $7,500 she had them for sale.

And I sent her a message, I was like, hey, I'll buy those from you. And we talked for three or four days, and she's telling me what she's using the money for and everything else. I'm like, oh yeah, I've got you covered. And she sends them out.

So I pick them up, and I pay for it with a counterfeit cashier's check. There was another point where we had fished out probably 60,000 different e-trade accounts. We'd find someone with a fat portfolio. We'd sell everything they had.

We were destroying retirement accounts, everything else. And that's just the stuff that he knows about, or just the stuff he told us about. We don't know what happened to that woman after he robbed her. And we don't know what happened to all of the people he ripped off after he ripped them off.

How it affected their lives. There's one more crime recommended that you should know about. I'm 15, and I beat a woman up in an elevator, is what happens. To this day, I guess I do understand why I did it.

I mean, I look back, and she was almost a carbon copy of the books-wise of my mom. And I guess that I didn't have any tools to cope with what was going on, and I attacked this woman. So I spent six months in juvenile detention at that point. And I still don't understand why I did that.

That's not for me all my life. I really don't understand why I did that. When Brett told this to us, it was about 20 minutes into our first conversation, and it was unexpected. In retrospect, while he was talking, two things were going on in my mind at once.

One, my perception of him was changing into someone worse, someone capable of this kind of violence, but also someone who was way more fucked up. But the second thing that was going on while he was talking was that I was surprised, in a good way, that he was being so open, that he wasn't just telling us the same stories he tells at conferences and on his blog. I was glad, for the purposes of our story, that he was being so vulnerable. Because when you're telling this kind of story, whether like Brett you're telling it about yourself, or you're us telling an audience about him, you want people to hear this kind of remorse.

It's part of what makes this larger story, and every story about a reformed criminal, work. The evidence of change. I'm not saying that I think Brett was being coldly calculating when he told us this, but I do think he wants to be open about his guilt and his shame, because if he's not, how else will we know that his guilt and his shame are there? I thought about this story, and his decision to share it with us a lot.

It's not something we would have come across in our research, so I asked him about it the next time that we spoke. You know, the elevator story, which you told us, I cannot figure out why you told us that story. You know, I told you that story, and it's been this process of me wanting to just, I just wanted to get out. So the first person I told you this last, I don't know, it was like four or five months ago, I was sitting there, and I was like, you know, if they're going to do something, if they're going to know who Brett Johnson is, then by God, they're going to know everything.

And so that's why I told her, why I told you guys this is your slate magazine. And I'm like, by God, if you're going to know Brett Johnson, you're going to know everything. So I just don't think that it's worth hiding anymore. You know, just get out and let the chips fall where they may.

What I've noticed as we play these clips for people is that not everybody reacts to how Brett sounds here in the same way. Some people find this mode when he seems extremely distraught to be persuasive, but other people really do not. Everyone seems to have their own line when he slips over from sounding appropriately emotional into narcissism, which is maybe why, despite the two most recent clips, Brett tends to tell his stories with humor. He doesn't have to.

His sister, for example, tells a lot of the same stories in a different, darker tone. But comedy is a way to shield everyone, himself, but also his audience, from the unvarnished awfulness of what he's done. Engaging with all that darkness, it's no fun for anyone. If I didn't laugh about it, if I couldn't find some sort of weird, odd, just black humor about it, I really don't think that I could cope with it at all.

You know, I think back at the people that I didn't even know that I hurt without coming at it from an angle of trying to find some humor with Instacart Shopper Notes, you can be specific about what kind of steak you want, like asking your shopper to get you thick cups of steak. Bright red, marbling you can see from across the room, a fat cat that knows exactly what it's doing. Proclaim your need for a cup that can single-handedly carry the evening on its back. Something so tantalizing you don't even have to call the kids down for dinner.

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99% Invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday. If you like decodering, I know you will like 99% Invisible, a show that I love and that feels like kin to us. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity, so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 99% Invisible has already done it. Because if they have, we know they have done such a good job, we just have to back off.

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Mr. President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The U.S.

Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment.

He is the most unpredictable vote on this court. Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody thought Gorsuch would join the majority on this. He is the justice most likely to be a true wild card.

This is judicial hack. Slow Burn, Becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so we're going to press play on Brett's story now. Just to recap, despite having been arrested multiple times for massive amounts of fraud, Brett had been given a chance by the Secret Service to turn his life around without going to jail. He had furthered that chance away and then got on the run, all while stealing additional hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the time of his rearrest then, in 2006 in Orlando, he seems pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility or making any kind of real change, and he can't or won't stop stealing.

He was indicted on 37 counts and he pled guilty to four of them, having to do with identity theft, tax return fraud, and paying for a Rolex with a counterfeit check. He was sentenced to 75 months in jail, a little over six years, in order to pay $332,080.13 in restitution. But Brett was not finished just yet. 75 months.

Well, I promised myself, I told everybody, if I get any more than 60 months, I am not saving. I looked at the guard and I'm like, hey man, are there any jobs outside of the fence? Brett joins the landscaping crew. Then he gets an accomplice to drop off a package for him.

And I get my package, dress out, drop the prison clothes in the woods, and leave. There was a cell phone in the package. I act like I've got a car waiting to be serviced and call a taxi. He wanted to go far.

I'm wanting to catch a greyhound as far off as I can. But he only had his own ID, which he didn't want to use, so he ended up in a motel 200 miles from prison. Meanwhile, I go back to the California Death Index. That lasted about three weeks.

I'm at the hotel room one day and I've got the curtains open and I see this guy walk by the room. He walks by, stops, turns around, looks at me, and he points at the door like, now. So I open the door and he's like, Brett Johnson. I'm like, yeah.

He's like, U.S. Marshals, you're under arrest. I'm like, I figured. Brett was taken back to jail.

While he was awaiting re-sentencing, his sister came to visit him. She had this on me. After I escape and get caught, Lisa gets in the car and drives that seven hours to come see her dumbass brother for a ten-minute visit to tell me she loves me. I didn't really have anybody at that point.

So when she came back, I've got to do something. I've got to change what's going on. The judge gave Brett an additional 15 months in prison, but he did something else too. You see, at the time of his re-arrest in Orlando, Brett learned that the one way to get time off his sentence was to have a drug problem.

So he had faked a drug problem, going so far as to write a long, handwritten sob story, blaming his problems on this phony addiction. Yes, I went right back to my cocaine addiction. Why? Many reasons.

All my own fault. It boiled down to it was easier to do that than face the tragedy my life had quickly become. So I found escape, the only place I knew, at the bottom of the bottle and the end of a line. And the judge, looking over Brett's records, saw all this evidence and ordered him into a drug treatment program.

That's the best lie that I ever told my life right there, to get in that program. Turns out it wasn't about drug abuse whatsoever. You're in the... special unit for nine months, and 24-7, it's nothing but getting you to understand that your thoughts determine your feelings, your feelings determine your actions, and take responsibility for who you are and what you've done.

And over time, it got to the point where Brett Johnson had to face his demons and mistakes and everything else, and they really helped me with that. Brett's time in jail, more generally, seemed to finally change something for him, to work not just as punishment, but as rehabilitation. It took about two and a half years out there at Big Spring for me to get to the point of realizing that I didn't break the law because of family or life. I broke it because I chose to break it.

Brett got out in 2011. The conditions of his parole meant that he was not allowed to touch a computer for three years, which made it hard for him to find work. I got to the point I was trying to apply for fast food. Well, no, that's a computer.

You can't do that. Okay, well, what about a waiter's position? No, that's a computer and credit cards. Idiot.

Can't do that either. So I couldn't get a job. Brett says he bummed money from his dad and sister for a while. He had a roommate who covered most of the rent.

Everyone in prison had kept telling him, once he got out, he got something that he really cared about. So he got a cat, and despite being truly, at this point, the opposite of a catch, he had a friend set up an online dating profile for him. A woman responded, and they made a plan to meet him. Ten minutes in the conversation, literally ten minutes in, she looks over at me and she was like, what's the worst you've ever done?

He said, I really spent five and a half years in federal prison. I'm like, no, I'm serious. I'm not kidding. Really?

He said, I really did. At that point, I just sat there and said, oh, okay. That's her. Her name is Michelle Johnson.

It was the most unusual first date I've ever had. We sat there and talked for several hours. He told me everything that had happened, and he sat there and he said, I really like you. I'd like to see you again.

He said, I generally tell everybody that I first meet about myself, so that way you can make a decision for yourself as to whether or not you want to continue knowing me or not. He said, I would like to see you. He said, I'm going to leave it up to you. I was so impressed by his honesty and just being buried, just laying it out there.

No, no, no pity. No self, you know, um, no soft story. No, you know, poor, you know, woes me. It was just very, just very matter of fact.

This is what I did. This is the price I paid for it. This is what I'm doing now. And I felt that if somebody could be that open and honest on a first date, then I was definitely intrigued to get to know him better.

I just want to point out here that Michelle is saying the thing that drew her to Brett was the way he told her his story. Matter of factly, with no self-pity, presumably with some humor. And telling her that story, it was a risk. I mean, that's a lot for a first date, but it's a risk with a lot of upside, potentially because confessing to how shifty you are, it makes you seem less shifty.

Telling people the awful truth about yourself, it makes you seem less awful. And all of that isn't just true on a first date. So Michelle and Brett got together and eventually they told her kids and her parents about that history and they accepted it. Brett moved in.

He finally managed to get a job mowing lawns. But you know, I was happy, man. I mean, Michelle was there. I was, uh, I was doing something.

And what happened is, is, you know, when it gets cold, you can't mow the grass. So the job ends. And, uh, so I'm sitting there going, you know, Michelle's on one work. I got to, I got to do something, man.

I got to, I got to, I got to show her that I'm, uh, I got to show her that I'm worth it. So I'm like, you know, at least I can, uh, at least I can bring food to the damn house. So I got credit cards and, uh, stolen credit cards and started ordering food. And then the boys needed clothes.

I started, I can save the money on clothes. So I started ordering clothes for the boys. I did become suspicious, but he did say, no, this is the answer for my dad. This is my dad helping us out.

And in my heart, I really wanted to believe him. It wasn't until we were getting ready to go up to Birmingham for my mom's birthday. And I get a phone call on my way home from work and it's a police officer. And he said that they had arrested Brett and I asked what for, and he had said for, you know, party.

And I was just absolutely stunned. I said, no, no, not Brett. No, he wouldn't do that. It was a very, very dark time.

And I had a lot of people, uh, telling me that I should cut him loose and turn around and walk away. But I couldn't do that because I knew, I knew Brett. I knew the person that he is. I mean, I'm a Christian and I believe that you're supposed to forgive people for their mistakes.

I felt that he could still be a productive, good member of society and be, I know in his heart, he's a good man. I find Michelle's faith in Brett moving. She trusts herself and she trusts him and she trusts in second chances. She makes it all seem simple, hard, but simple.

Her belief in him feels like it's his credit. And that means that as heartfelt as she is, she's also doing something so many women have done in stories of criminal rehabilitation before her. She's providing the protagonist with a love of a good woman, her decency acting as a kind of proof of his own. When Brett went back to jail, Michelle stood by him the entire time.

When he was released, they got married. Speaking with Michelle underscored to me that Brett is not the only person in the story whose life really depends on whether or not he can stay clean. And my sense is that going clean is not as simple as just changing your job. In some regards, stopping grifting is similar to recovering from drug abuse or gambling addiction.

Because it's not about money, it's about the high, the ego boost of getting over on someone, on something. This is why Brett getting addiction treatment seems so important to me. But even with it, going clean is not easy and maybe not even possible, depending on who you ask. Of the people that I encountered in multiple years of work on con artists, I've never met one who's actually gone clean, including ones who've had multiple opportunities to do so.

That's Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and staff writer at The New Yorker, who has written two books about con men, including The Confidence Game, Why We Fall For It Every Time. She has never met Brett, and at a certain point in reporting the story, that's exactly who I wanted to talk to. Someone who has never heard Brett. I can't even count on, you know, hands, feet.

I don't know how many times I've had con artists tear up when telling me these horrible moments from their past and the things that make them who they are. And all I can say these days is just bullshit. This may be wishful thinking on my part, but I'm not sure Brett can be described entirely as a con man. Someone who, in Konnikova's definition, takes advantage of other people's confidence in them for their own personal gain.

He certainly has con people, including the entire secret service, but especially later in his criminal career, he was largely committing crimes, ripping people off electronically without ever interacting with them at all. My hope is only that he's actually much more like a fraudster than a con man. Like, I'm just like, oh, maybe I'm a little bit misidentified. I mean, he has both tendencies.

I do think the most of what he did was frauding at this point. But he was fraud over a very long period of time, over lots of people. He seems like he's probably not one of the best con artists. He's been in jail so many times.

The best con artists are hardly ever caught, and I think a lot of them so I'm just like, it's a bummer. I don't even know this person. I have no students. I'm just like...

Yeah, we want to believe in the best in people. So as you can tell from this exchange, at some point in reporting the story, I really began to want to believe Brett, to believe that he's changed, that he's reformed. His story worked on me, even though I am aware of all the ways that it works as a story. And that's a very strange kind of headspace to be in.

It's like a rabbit hole, where I can't figure out if my emotions have been manipulated, or if it matters that they've been manipulated. If I react to Brett's story in a way that is sympathetic to him, that is useful to him, that makes me feel used, like his stories are just tactics to elicit a certain response. But something can be tactical and truthful at the same time. Right?

I do think that Brett must have known that he had a pretty good chance of persuading me that his transformation is for real. After all, that's the typical reaction to his story, which has compelled so many people to help him. There's the FBI agent who reached out to all people on LinkedIn when his probation was over. Brett describes this man as the most well-versed good guy on cybercrime on the planet, and he encountered Brett back when he was affiliated with Shadow Crew.

So I sent my message, and I have no idea if he's going to respond. I sent my message, you know, hey, I respect every single thing you did. You did a great job. Just wanted you to know that.

And by the way, I'd like to be a legal person. And he responded within just a few hours. This guy sends me a message back, and I mean, he never hesitated at all. He's like, I got you.

He ends up giving me advice, references. This reference helped Brett make more connections. In 2016, he sent a LinkedIn message to Carice Hendricks, who was an anti-fraud expert. I checked him out, and what I thought was most interesting about his LinkedIn profile was his former work history actually listed Shadow Crew on there with the dates and everything.

And I thought, wow, this guy either has huge balls or he's lying. I was intrigued. So I responded back to him and, you know, said, you know, can you tell me a little bit about your story? Carice was most intrigued because she also hired keynote speakers for anti-fraud conferences, and she thought Brett might make a good speaker, and she could trust him.

I really trust a lot in my gut. Those of us who are in fraud prevention have had to really learn how to hone our gut and just know, is this a good guy, is this a bad guy? So we had several phone conversations as well. I took a pretty big risk.

I figured, okay, even if he bombs as a public speaker, this is still a really cool thing to have somebody with his experience come in and talk about it. And he didn't bomb it at all. It was one of the best presentations I've ever seen. And that was the beginning of Brett's career as a speaker and cybersecurity consultant, the career he's still working in today.

He regularly appears at conferences where he gives presentations designed to help companies and individuals protect themselves that are full of many of the stories you've just heard. Here he is at a TEDx conference in Paris. In 1996, I committed my first cybercrime. Oh, beady babies.

Yeah, in the 1990s, these things were the high-priced collectible. This one, peanut the royal blue elephant, sold for $1,500. $1,500? I'd buy a cheap gray elephant for $8.

Carice and Brett are good friends now. They even co-host a podcast aimed at presenting cybercrime. What's the pattern so that we can try to stop it? Are they all being routed to one zip code?

I cannot stress enough that that's one of the telltale signs of fraud. Brett insists that he's never going to break the law again. Do you think you will never do it again? No, I'm not going to do it again.

But I find Brett's certainty a lot less convincing than I do his remorse, not just about what he's done, but about where he's ended up. But the weird thing today with me is I look back at all the stuff that I went through, you know, from the abuse as a child, the people that I've been demised, friends, family, that I've heard everything else, the network that we ran. I look at all that stuff. And I sit there and I'm like, okay, a good part of the reason that I'm here is because of that life that I lived then.

And I really don't know what to think about that. I have a good life. I have a good family. I have real friends for the first time in 30-some years.

So I came a long way, but I still don't really know what to think about. It's hard for me to reconcile the damage done with the lifestyle that I have. Now, I don't really feel right about it. Do you think that you deserve forgiveness?

No. No. I don't think I did anything to deserve this type of life. But I'm damn grateful for it.

One of the questions lurking inside of this episode is the one about why we are so compelled by stories like this. Stories of grifters, of conmen, of bad men gone good. And there are so many answers to that, including that these sorts of people are, as Rebecca Lavoie mentioned, unseemly superheroes of a sort. But there's more.

That it's easy and sometimes satisfying to feel superior to their victims. That it can seem like dark mirrors to so much legitimate hustling. A kind of logical conclusion to a twisted capitalism. A dangerous, but not too dangerous, point of identification.

But I think this skips right over something so obvious it can sound stupid or tautological. Which is that everything else aside, looking only at plot and movement and arc. They're good, shiny stories. And it's this, before all of the other stuff, that pulls us in.

There's a funny thing about stories. About how if you tell them in the right way, they can do all of this work for you. They can make all of this change. Even though they can't change what already happened.

If a person convincingly talks about taking responsibility for their actions, for not blaming others, we in turn blame them less. Just by saying he doesn't deserve forgiveness, Brett seems so much more deserving of forgiveness. And this is the core conundrum of Brett Johnson. How much can you trust his talk?

Does it reflect his silver tongue or his soul? Is it telling a great story or the truth? Can it be both? One of the other questions lurking inside all of this is one about reform.

How do we know or how do we judge if someone is? And mostly what we have to rely on is their words and their deeds. Brett is still paying off his restitution. Carice seems to think that Brett's current work is a kind of restitution in and of itself.

That it's done a lot of good, helping companies save off cyber fraud. But it's hard not to notice that though he may not be profiting from his crimes anymore, he is still profiting from the story of his crimes. And I'm not sure how different those two things really are. We'll only know in time.

Brett's only been in his line of work for two years. It's still very new. Lots of things could happen. I expect that lots of things will happen.

But I will say, I'm rooting for him. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decoderring at slate.com. If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. This podcast was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Thanks to June Thomas, Gabriel Roth, Doug Schadell, Tom Zeller, Neil O'Farrell, Cleo Levine, and Megan Kallstrom. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next month.