Like always when I have written a few chapters of my life story I like to put them together into a consolidated post for people to be able to catch up with, also it makes things easier for someone who is not yet familiar with my story to be able to follow. As always I hope you enjoy and find some help and hope in my story. It really does have a good ending....At least today is good and that is really all anyone can ask for right?

When my future wife told me she was pregnant, of course I knew that it was going to solve all our problems. We wouldn't ever fight again and would live happily ever after...

I was a fool

Living in chaos...again

Once again, I found myself without any direction in life and going nowhere. I had no job, and now I had another child on the way. I needed to figure something out fast.
I know, I will sell drugs! That will solve things!

Hey man I have a connect...

So, one of the people I knew was the neighborhood weed dealer, and I could get a good deal. I decided to start selling.
Only problem with this idea was that I smoked weed. Kind of hard to make any money selling weed when your smoking it too.

Who would have thought right?

Just like everything else I was doing during this period of my life, I was not making sound decisions that made any sense at all. I was not happy with who I was, and I had a violent temper that everyone around me was afraid to trigger off.
I was a real piece of work. My future wife was pregnant, and she was working to support three of us as she had one daughter, soon to be all four of us when my daughter came.

Work...here and there

Like most of my adult life, I was going from job to job with no prospect of the future currently. I had a pattern that I fell into. I would work somewhere for a while until I figured that they weren't going to make me a manager (After 3 or 4 months...) then I would quit and go find another job.

I was never out of work long, but I never kept a job long either.

Be a real man, live with your girlfriend’s mother...

The apartment that my future wife was staying in with her friend was beyond the means that we had to afford. Not really, but when one out of four people is working then it is a little more difficult.

It was not long before my future wife was so pregnant she couldn't work anymore, and we had to find a place to live. My mom didn't really know her, and I don't think she was really believing that she was pregnant with my kid. Moving in with my mom was not really an option.

So, we moved in with her mom for a while. At least until the baby was born, and her taxes came back...

I was a real piece of work.

We were living with my future wife's mother when my first daughter was born. I remember driving her to the hospital and running red lights with her hitting me and yelling at me to at least follow the law once. Never-mind the fact that I was driving with no license in the first place.

Now I have a daughter, and a son I wasn't taking care of...

When my future wife's income tax return came, we moved out of her mother’s house and into our own apartment. I was not working, and my future wife was collecting FIA welfare. Of course, I was not listed as living with her because she wouldn't have gotten as much from the state. When she began collecting welfare for my daughter, they started the process of collecting child support from me.

Instead of just going to work and supporting my small family, I decided it was a better idea to let the state get me for child support, so we could get free money from welfare.

Smart...

Might as well start smoking crack...

For some unknown to me reason, one day I got it in my head that I wanted to smoke some crack again. I had not done it for years, but for whatever reason it called my name.

Drug addicts are funny about some things. Once you know the little tricks about finding dope, you can always find it. I am telling you, I could be on Mars and within a day I would have some Mars dope I swear (Are Xanax on Mars called Mars bars?)

Anyway, I went to the north end of town and drove around with my no license having butt until I found an obvious prostitute. That's one trick for free, prostitutes always know where to find dope, and this one was no exception. We went to find a rock and I gave her some then left.

I know it sounds amazing that I didn't want to have sex with the prostitute, but I will tell you a little known open secret among crack users. Smoking crack makes most men impotent. There is a lot of talk about the sex trade and crack users, and some of it is true, but mostly, men just pay to have a woman to hang out with them. Even then, most people will smoke crack and spend their time either looking out of the window, or looking on the floor for an imaginary piece they think they dropped.

Anyway, I went home and hid in the bathroom to smoke my rock. This was the beginning of my once again downfall into hardcore crime and drugs...

Why work when I can commit crime?

Now that we had our own place, there was really no reason to even try to pretend I was going to do the right thing. I started going out at night and breaking into cars on a regular basis.

It was not long before my criminal activity escalated...

After moving into our own apartment, there really was nothing that kept my drug and criminal activity in check. My future wife was afraid of my temper, so she didn't ever say anything to me about my behavior. I think she was just happiest when I left her alone. She had issues of her own. She liked to gamble with scratch off tickets and enjoyed eating out a lot. My committing crimes every night meant that she had cash every day, and besides, it wasn't her facing jail so why should she care?

Crime spree 101

I started breaking into cars and stealing change and whatever I could get my hands on. Sometimes I would find a purse or a stereo I could grab, and on a few occasions, I found handguns, which brought the big money.

One night I was over at a friend’s house when I met a guy that was doing the same type of things I was, but he was also breaking into garages and houses. We ended up talking and he moved in with me and my small family. We started committing crimes together that same night.

How to form a crime ring...

I knew a few different weed dealers that would buy stolen property when it was something they wanted. I would take whatever I found at night over to them and either sell it or trade it for weed. It didn't take long before weed was not enough, and I was starting to meet crack dealers too. They were all too happy to buy stolen stuff, especially guns when I had them.

My new crime buddy taught me the in's and outs of breaking into buildings and houses. You learn all kinds of little tricks. If there is a dog house or fenced in yard, you don't want to go there. If there is an attached garage, try the side door to the garage. If it is unlocked, then odds are the door to the house from the garage is unlocked too. If you go in the door from the garage into the kitchen, more often than not, the wife's purse will be sitting right on the counter right inside the door. Grab it and go.

We often would find the keys to a vehicle then we would steal the vehicle and use it to rob other places before we would unload and park it. Sometimes we would play demolition derby with stolen cars and trucks.
We were not good people...

The night it all changed...

One night, we were out in the country doing our regular rounds, looking for easy marks to break into, when I found the back door to a house open...

We went into the kitchen and on the table, was a tell-tale "Smokey Bear" hat of the Michigan State Police. My friend wanted to leave right away, but in my mind "Police" meant "Guns."

Sure enough there were a lot of them. We ended up getting 4 pistols and 2 rifles from his house as well as 2 laptop computers.

With the loot from the other houses we had robbed that night, including a couple of expensive compound bows, we had made a decent haul. It was time to leave and go home.

Need some money...

The next day I needed some money for drugs, so I went and sold the laptop computers that had come from the state police officers house. I was such as sophisticated criminal, I took them right to the used computer store without even trying to clean off the hard drives.

I was brilliant...

Beginning of the end...

I had a closet full of stolen guns and was a big man waiving them around, pointing them at the little neighbor girl. I had a pocket full of money from selling stolen stuff, and I was a big man paying for everyone to party...
Until the day the detectives knocked on the door...

So here I am, closet full of stolen police guns and other property, committing numerous felonies every day, and all this while acting like I wanted to have a family. Telling my future wife that I was just trying to get on my feet, when in reality I just wanted to continue to get drunk and high and not have to work.

But I had to try to pawn that bow...

Pawn shop fun

The day after I robbed the State Police officers (Later to find out - State Police Detective) house, I was in need of some cash. I had also stolen some other items the same night and I decided that I was going to go to a pawn shop and sell a compound bow.

I knew nothing about compound bows...

I went into the Pawn shop and put the bow on the counter. The clerk came up to me and started asking me questions. I told him it was my brothers bow, that he was at work and had asked me to pawn it for him so he could pay a bill. When the clerk asked me how much I wanted I told him $100, seemed reasonable to me. The clerk looked the bow over and asked me some more questions...

He asked me if my brother had had any luck hunting this year and I told him that he hadn't had time because of work, that was why he was selling the bow. The clerk kind of nodded his head and said "Huh, you want to know why I asked?" I said sure and he looks me in the eye and says to me...

"Well, you see this sticker right here?" as he points to a sticker on the bow. I said yes, and he says, " That's a sticker we put on property that has been pawned here before..."

"Do you know how I knew this sticker was here?" I was starting to feel the drop in the pit of my stomach and I said no...

"We got a call this morning to look for this bow.... See this blood right here?" as he put his finger in the fresh blood in the quiver..."The guy that owns this bow...which by the way is worth about $1000, called this morning and asked us to look for it coming through...you stole this last night and I'm calling the cops!"

Being the quick-witted person I was, I told the clerk he was just trying to steal my bow because he wanted it for himself (Huh??) and I grabbed the bow and ran out the door.

The pawn shop sat on the corner of Cedar street in Lansing, which is a very busy street. I ran away from cedar into the local neighborhood, but I saw that the clerk was chasing me! I ran around the block and was going to run right into the traffic on Cedar when I saw my girlfriend pull up next to me. She had saw me run out of the door and had drove to pick me up. I jumped into the car right as the clerk was grabbing at my arm and we sped away.

Fun times...

Detective fun...

About a week after the incident at the pawn shop we were leaving our apartment to go to my girl’s moms house when the detectives drove up on us getting into our car. They separated my girl and I and began to ask questions.

I was avoiding saying anything incriminating while at the same time trying to listen to what my girl was telling the cop talking to her. They were both plain clothes detectives and on my side of the car they had parked their car, so I was not able to leave from behind my door. An older white guy was asking me questions while a middle aged white lady was talking to my girl.

I had been giving some vague story about a crack dealer that had asked me to pawn some stuff for him and I had agreed in order to get some crack. Of course, this was all made up on the spot and not very well thought out. I realized that my girl was telling the female detective more information than she should be, and I immediately stopped talking to the cop that had me and put my nose in with her.

I told her "Hey you know you don't have to answer her questions, right? You can tell her to talk to your lawyer..." The female detective asked me if I was a lawyer and I told her I didn't need to be to know that. Her whole demeanor changed when she realized that I was not going to just cow down to her.

She came around the car and asked me if they could search my apartment for the rest of the stolen property. I told her no because I didn't have it, the "Phantom" crack dealer had it. She kept pressing me to search my house, until I finally pointed out all the people looking out of their windows at us and explained that I had roommates that I was not going to subject to that. I told her if they wanted to get a warrant then fine, but I was not going to give them permission.

Little did they know that my "Roommates" were my accomplices in crime, and at that time my closet was full of guns and other stolen property.

For whatever reason the cops believed the "Phantom" crack dealer story and decided not to get a search warrant. They gave me their card and told me that they wanted me to wear a wire to buy crack from this dealer that didn't exist, they said they needed an answer within the hour.

I went into my apartment and told my roommates what had happened, told them to get rid of the property and that they should probably disappear too, then began contemplating which one of my dealers I could buy dope from as a sacrifice for my freedom...

Things were not to work out that way...

Please Read...

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Thank you and God Bless!

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Consolidated Life Story 7