The Grifter

This podcast contains explicit language.

Brett Johnson, a career criminal, cyber fraudster, and con man, has a lot to regret.

I 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 Mark McGuire's signatures to these baseballs.

So I print certificates of authenticity, list these things on eBay for $60 a piece, sell every single one.

And he scammed merchants, banks, and the government.

Learned how to launder money internationally at that point.

I was stealing $160,000 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 has the arc of a movie like Catch Me 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, Theranos, the Summer of Scam.

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 cyber criminals 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 Decoderang, 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 grifter story?

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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 D-dyne 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 sounds 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.

And 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.

And I still remember that, man.

I was like, but you're pretending to burn yourself.

Brett's sister Denise, who is a year younger than him, tells many of the same stories that he does.

But when he tells them 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 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 ten 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 our 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?

And she looks at him 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 ANP 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've 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.

So then not only does she join us, she goes upstairs and gets her mom to join us as well.

So we, you know, 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 is 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 Kiwanas 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 Kiwanas Club, starts calling people himself, collecting money.

Of course, I'm not giving any money to charity whatsoever.

Eventually, Brett found his way online and to a whole new set of crimes.

like eBay fraud.

I'm watching Inside Edition One Night.

They've got a show on beanie babies.

They're profiling this one peanut, the royal blue elephant that was selling for $1,500 on eBay of all places.

And I'm sitting there going, you know, I need to find me a peanut.

Can't find him.

But they've 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.

He 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 to send me a U.S.

postal money order.

Once that clears, I'll send you your elephant.

I cash them out, send her that blue-ish elephant, and immediately get a call.

She was like, I didn't order this thing.

And 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,

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 sent him $200, sent him my picture.

Two weeks later, I get an ID in the name of Steven Schweck.

When I get it out, 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 exist 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 to get into 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 is most known for in the cybercrime world.

Shadow Crew facilitated the scamming 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 dead people with identifying information like their social security number.

Paid $1,100 for the C Ds that have the entire California death registry on it.

Then he figured out that the federal government did not know that most 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 as deceased.

So he started filing electronic returns, 1040 EZs, for those dead people.

I 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, if 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'd file 200 returns a week.

On Thursday, I would take a road trip, plot out a course of ATMs.

Friday and Saturday, I would cash out to the tune of $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 the door to that bedroom and I'd just chuck the backpack in there.

Brett was making so much money that he started to do the kind of things with it 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 spare bathroom in the drawer.

And it was kind of a joke for me.

So if I had a friend over or anything, they would go use the restroom and I would know if they had been pilfering 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 drawers full of cash bit is true.

We fact-checked this episode and almost everything we checked checked out.

But there are are some things we could not 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 of 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 that guy that buys love all the time.

You know, it's not enough for me to tell somebody I love them.

I have to show it.

But at that moment, his scamming options were limited due to tax season ending and the shadow crew bust.

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 two agents from New Jersey fly down, pull me out of the cell, and they're like, hey, we got your laptop.

And I'm like, yeah.

They're like, well, we know who you are.

You got anything on your laptop?

And I'm like, oh, yeah.

And they're like, well, you're going to be charged for everything there.

And I'm like, I figured I would be.

So then they look at me and they're 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 cybercrime to secretly helping stop cybercrime.

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 in my name at that point.

I take that $30 and I walk over to Walmart and buy a prepaid debit card so I could start back in tax fraud again.

I go to work for the Secret Service.

For those 10 months I work for them, I break the law every single day, often from inside of the Secret Service offices with him 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 have stayed 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 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 in the morning praying that it's going to fund because if they don't, I have no idea what the hell I'm going to do.

I have no money, nothing else.

So the cards fund to the tune of $67,000.

I go back around to the ATMs and start stuffing all these 20s in this black garbage bag.

And

it took about six, eight hours to withdraw all the money.

Went back to the hotel and I'm like Santa Claus carrying this bag of cash back to the hotel room.

This was over a four-month span.

Sign on to Cartersmarket.com and there's my name, United States Most Wanted.

This is the Secret Service's most wanted list, by the way, not the more famous FBI's most wanted list.

Though Brett is never very careful about this distinction.

Well shit, I can't go to Brazil now.

I can't get the passport to do that.

So I'm like, well, 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.

And I'm there every single day.

You know, riding the rides, touring the place, just taking it easy, not worrying about stealing money, just laying low.

It was a Saturday, September 16th, 06.

So I get this knock at the door like at 10.30 in the morning on that Saturday.

Look out the peephole and no no one's there so i'm like what the hell man open the door step out into the hallway and there goes two south carolina agents and a sheriff's deputy from from orange county in florida there they're walking down the hall they turn around i'm like hey guys they're like hey brett and i'm like uh you guys want to come in and they're like sure but let's put you in cuffs first i'm like yeah i figured

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's 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 his story skipped over.

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Let's return to the first ID that Brett got on Counterfeit Library.

So I sent him $200, sent him my picture.

Two weeks later, I get an ID in the name of Steven 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 like turn in your driver's license and they scanned 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 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 was 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 the typical way for identity theft as a huge, grueling 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 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 that in most instances, the person whose identity has been stolen does not end up footing 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 seeps 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 just is a storytelling problem where it's like, right, there's someone who has, who's 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 in the book ends on page one when he or she dies.

Like, that's just the way that it is.

That's Rebecca Lavoy, 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 con men stories.

We all wish that we had this superpower on some level.

Like 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.

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, you know, we talked for three or four days, and she's telling me what she's using the money for and everything 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 had found someone with a fat portfolio.

We had 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 Brett committed that you should know about.

I'm 15.

And

I for

I beat a woman up in an elevator, is what happens.

To this day, I don't I guess I do understand why I did it.

I mean, I looked back and she was

she was almost a carbon copy, looks-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.

Geez, I still don't understand

why I did that.

That's bothered me all my life.

Really don't understand why I did that thing.

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 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've just wanted to get it out.

So,

first person I told it to 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 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 it out

and let the chips fall where they may.

What I've noticed as we've played 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 of coming at it that way.

I don't know if I could do that.

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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 frittered that chance away and then gone 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, and ordered to pay $332,080.13 in restitution.

But Brett was not finished just yet.

75 months.

Well, I promised myself, I had told everybody, if I get any more than 60 months, I am not staying.

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.

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 at 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 then he points at the door like now.

So I opened the door and he was like, Brett Johnson.

And I'm like, yeah.

He was 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 disowned me.

After I escape and get caught, Lise gets in the car and drives that, you know, seven hours to come see her dumbass brother for a 10-minute visit to tell me she loves me.

I didn't really have anybody at that point.

So

when she came back, you know, it was,

you know, I've got to make the, 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 rearrest 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 a 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've ever told in my life right there to get in that program.

Turns out it wasn't about drug abuse whatsoever.

You're in this 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 why.

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.

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, to get something that he really 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.

10 minutes into the conversation, literally 10 minutes in, she looks over at me and she was like, what's the worst thing you've ever done?

And I'm like,

well,

I'm like, well, I just got out of federal prison.

And I'm like, no, really?

You know,

really, what's the worst thing 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?

And he said, I really did.

And 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 just his honesty and just being very just laying it out there.

No pity, no self, you know, no sob story, no, you know, poor, you know, woe is 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, you know, 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 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 Brett's history.

And they accepted it.

Brett moved in.

He had finally managed to get a job mowing lawns.

But I was happy, man.

I mean, Michelle was there.

I was doing something.

And what happened is when it gets cold, you can't mow the grass.

So the job ends.

And

so I'm sitting there going, Michelle's all in one working.

I got to do something, man.

I got to show her that I'm

worth it.

So I'm like, you know,

at least I can bring food in the damn house.

So I got credit cards and stolen credit cards and start ordering food.

And then the, well, the boys needed clothes.

So I start, well, I can save her the money on clothes.

So I start ordering clothes for the boys.

I did

become suspicious, but he did say, well, no, this is, you know, this is from 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, carding.

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

telling me that I should cut him loose and turn around and walk away.

But I couldn't do that because

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 it in his heart, he is a good man.

I find Michelle's faith in Brett moving.

She trusts herself 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 to 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 the 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 this 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.

Out 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 Konikova, a psychologist and staff writer at The New Yorker, who has written two books about conmen, 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 Kanakova's definition, definition, takes advantage of other people's confidence in them for their own personal gain.

He certainly has conned 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, you know, like, I'm just like, oh, maybe I've like a little bit misidentified him.

I mean, he has both tendencies, but I do think the most of what he did was frauding at this point.

But he, but it was fraud over a very long period of time, over long, over lots of people.

He seems like he's probably not one of the best con artists.

Also, he's been in jail so many times.

The best con artists are hardly ever caught.

And I think a lot of them just are never caught, period.

It's so interesting, Rhea, because it's like, I'm like, I just want to believe him.

So I'm just like, he's a bummer.

It bummers me.

You know, like, I mean, I don't even know what this person, like, I have no skin.

I 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 this 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 he reached out to of 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 had encountered Brett back when he was affiliated with Shadow Crew.

So I sent him a message, and I have no idea if he's going to respond.

I sent him a 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 to help Brett make more connections.

In 2016, he sent a LinkedIn message to Carice Hendrix, who is 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 said,

can you tell me a little bit about your story?

Carice was most intrigued because she also hires keynote speakers for anti-fraud conferences.

And she thought Brett might make a good speaker if 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 bombed as a public speaker, this is still a really cool thing to have somebody with this 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 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.

Beanie 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 preventing 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.

The weird thing today

with me

is I look back

at all the stuff that I've went through, you know, from the abuse as a child, the people that I've victimized,

friends and family that I've hurt, everything else,

the network that we ran.

I would 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 led then.

And

I really don't know what to think about that.

I have a good life.

I have a good family.

I have

friends, real friends, for the first time in

30-some years.

So I've came a long way, but

I still don't really know what

it's hard for me to reconcile the

damage done with the lifestyle that I have now.

I don't really feel right about that.

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 con men, of bad ben gone good.

And there are so many answers to that, including that these sorts of people are, as Rebecca Lavoy mentioned, unseemly superheroes of a sort.

But there's more.

That it's easy and sometimes satisfying to feel superior to their victims.

That they 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.

Curry 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 stave 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, but it'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 Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed and 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 Shaddell, Tom Zeller, Neil O'Farrell, Thea Levine, and Megan Calstrom.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next month.

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