From USC Football to Cartel Cocaine w/ "Cocaine Quarterback" Owen Hanson | The Hopeaholics Podcast #347

From USC Football to Cartel Cocaine w/ "Cocaine Quarterback" Owen Hanson | The Hopeaholics Podcast #347

The "Cocaine Quarterback" Owen Hanson was a volleyball player at USC who wanted to get stronger and start again. That led him to smuggling steroids in from a vet in Tijuana. He walked onto the football team and began selling Adderall, Xanax, and cocaine to teammates. After the 2008 recession killed his real estate job, he became a bookie, landed a cartel lieutenant as a client, and lost $2.5 million of the cartel's money in an Australian casino. His plan to pay it back involved dissolving cocaine in Everclear and shipping it to Australia in Napa Valley wine bottles. In 2015, 15 FBI agents arrested him at a golf course in Carlsbad and he did nearly a decade on a RICO charge. Thats where he invented protein ice cream in a mop bucket, and had an Emmy-winning Amazon Prime documentary built around his life while he was still locked up.

Chad and Natalie talk to him about how each thing escalated, what the meeting in Tijuana with the cartel actually looked like, what a decade in federal prison was really like, and what he's building now.

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Timestamps:
0:00:00 - Cold open
0:00:49 - Podcast intro
0:01:19 - Owen Hanson, one year out of federal prison
0:05:05 - Buying steroids from a vet in Tijuana 
0:08:45 - The transformation: 185 to 240 pounds in six weeks
0:10:27 - Making the USC football team / Pete Carroll era
0:13:32 - Black market concierge
0:15:30 - Grew up broke at a school full of money
0:17:03 - Reggie Bush, and Matt Leinart
0:19:33 - California Ice Protein taste test
0:29:36 - Getting high on his own supply in college
0:38:38 - 2008 recession kills the real estate job; becoming a bookie
0:40:08 - Uncle Tony and the Italian bookmaker introduction
0:44:27 - Going to Costa Rica, starting his own sports book
0:45:11 - The cartel whale: $750K lost in three weeks, paid on Monday
0:47:00 - The offer: $1 million a day to go to Australia
0:47:51 - The laundering scheme collapses
0:52:24 - The call from the New South Wales Police Department
0:53:33 - Back in America, the cartel wants $3 million immediately
0:57:11 - Figuring out how to move cocaine into Australia
0:57:47 - The wine bottle method
0:59:11 - Five years of FBI building the case
1:00:02 - The arrest at Aviator Country Club in Carlsbad
1:01:38 - RICO charges: distribution, money laundering, bookmaking
1:02:28 - Sentencing day
1:04:10 - Mark Wahlberg's team takes the story
1:05:23 - The halfway house: Bureau of Prisons curfew and 20 months to build the brand
1:05:42 - Coming out with nothing, the warehouse, the Murphy bed
1:06:32 - Protein ice cream from mop buckets, sold for $15 a jar
1:09:38 - "It's a second chance ice cream"
1:11:46 - Federal vs. state prison: 85% time served, no early release
1:13:49 - Getting sober in prison and eating clean
1:15:26 - Coming out to Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Apple Pay
1:23:18 - Living in the warehouse, the grind, proving people wrong
1:24:55 - Why he never cooperated with the cartel
1:27:25 - Little things you don't realize until they're taken from you