 You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications button so you're notified for when my next podcast goes live. I had a troubled youth, struggled in school. I was a victim of sexual abuse when I was eight, nine years old. My mum had me at 15, so she got pregnant at 15 and had me at 16. We had a very, you know, it was a poor environment to be around, struggled in school. So my network that I was providing steroids to quickly escalates to export and methadone, export and ecstasy, import and cannabis, export and cannabis. The police had had this allegation that I threatened somebody with a firearm and they come to the house and they raided the house looking for a firearm and they tore the place to pieces. This is where karma really kicked in. The guy who I'd had assaulted and robbed, as soon as he went in for his first interview, he gave them everything they could possibly want and more. For whatever reason, I had more money than a cent at the time. I was probably making about 20 grand a week profit at the time, but for whatever reason being a tight ass, I didn't want to throw these secretaries away, so what can I do with these? So we took this stance, I put this video up, said we're not closing and then within 24 hours, I think that video had like four or five million views. So we had the police there the next day, oh we believe you don't intend to close tomorrow, just need to let you know that we are going to come to find you if you don't, blah, blah, blah. And then for a year and a half, we've locked everybody down permanently, fed them fast food and said you're not allowed out to exercise. So all we've done is cripple the NHS further. I mean don't get me wrong, I was guilty of the crime. I facilitated it, I put down two people together and as you can imagine, I regret it more than anything. But the money laundering comments is what really, really got me. Well, we're on. And today's guest, a good night, Capo. Good to see you, Nick. Good to see you, brother. Long overdue. Yeah, it's coming for a while, but you're just out of prison. Over in Jersey, you get a three year sentence. You made world headlines with not closing your gym, you were very anti-authority. Not anti-authority, but anti-lockdown. You stood up for yourself, you believed in what was right. You made headlines all over the world. People supporting you, people against you. You ended up going to prison for something that happened years ago. Was it through text messages? Yeah, text messages, signal messages it was, yeah. First of all, how are you? Good to be home. Yeah. Again, yeah, did not see that one coming at all. As you know, off the back of the COVID situation, everything else, I was in a really good place. And to have something from three, four years ago come back up to bite me at the, probably the best point in my entire life was, you know, it's been a, it's been a tough journey, but I'm glad to be home. And it's, it's another chapter for the story, isn't it? Yeah, well, I'm glad to have you home. Glad to get you out. You were coming on the podcast before it all went down. But before we get into everything, I'll just go back to the start of my guest to get a better understanding about you. Where you grew up and how it all began. I grew up on a little council of states in Massachusetts. I had a troubled youth, struggled in school. I was a victim of sexual abuse when I was eight, nine years old. And then me and mum, mum had me at 15. So she got pregnant at 15, had me at 16. We had a very, you know, it was a poor environment to be around, struggled in school. And we moved away from that area when I was about 10 years old. I moved into a different area. So the sexual abuse stopped and then I go into high school. Again, struggled in school, didn't really fit in, didn't like the conventional school and system whatsoever. It just didn't, it didn't fit me. I tried to diagnose me with ADHD when I was in school, but my, my mum refused to have the assessment done there exact words to the, to my head teacher at the time, was love, my son isn't disabled. You know, you know, you're not examining him whatsoever. So I went misdiagnosed for the best part of 20 years. I was struggled through school. And I eventually dropped out when I was about 12, about 12 years old. I dropped out of school. And then I got into parkour and free running. Basically the way that started is we were just like most kids on council of states, we just used to go out looking for getting chased by the police. Now we go and cause some trouble, get chased by the police. But then we got, we got really, really good at getting away. And then we found some videos on the internet of something called parkour or free running, which originated in France. And there was a team over there and they were super skilled in efficiency and the art of movement, getting from A to B, running across rooftops really fast. They were very much like a urban assault course, you know, type of environments. So we got really, really talented at that. So I dropped out of school at this point and I was just doing this every day of my friends. They were a bit older than I was. And being one of the first teams in the country doing it, we ended up getting picked up for adverts and music videos very early on. So you're talking, skip forward a few years, 15, 16, coming onto 17. We're getting picked up by Adidas, Red Bull, you know, MTV. We are being flown around the world, business classes as teenagers who just dropped out of school. And it was the experience that we had through that chapter of my life, going from what was a very, very tough, very underprivileged upbringing into, okay, all of a sudden we're travelling, business class were flying around the world, working with some of the biggest brands in the world. And that was a super positive time in my life. We got to travel everywhere. We got to meet people from all over the world like racers, religions. It was eye-opening and it put me in a really good place, really fortunate place both financially and in terms of the wealth of experience and having been everywhere. So that was a really positive turning point for me. And then I get to about 19 and I start suffering with injuries and I had to come away from the sport. And that's when things started to turn. And then for the worst, I dropped out of that industry and said, I'm going to take a year off. Doctor said to me, you can either take a year off and let your knees recover or you can carry on and you'll inevitably need surgery and then you're going to be out for good. So I took the year off and in that year that I had off, I thought, okay, I'll join the local gym, local fitness centre. I'll stay fit whilst I'm taking some time out, keep myself able, keep my mind healthy, my body healthy. So I joined the local gym and I was in good shape at the time, obviously through gymnastics and everything else that we've been doing. I carried a good frame. So I had a really good base to start on and within six months of joining the gym, I'd met the gym crowd and I mingled with the gym crowd and all of a sudden I get introduced to bodybuilding and with bodybuilding I've got my steroids. So now I'm 19 and a half approaching 20. I've started taking steroids, I've fallen in with this whole new crowd and come away from what was a very positive, holistic approach to life with my freerunner friends into this culture of vanity and ego and everybody trying to be better than each other and it's, you know, at 19, 20 years of age when you're sending your hormones through the roof as you're injecting yourself with all sorts, that lifestyle took a grip of me to, you know, to a huge extent and I really started to lose my personality and shortly off the back of that I competed in bodybuilding for the first time. This was as a junior. So I'm about 20 years of age at this time and I competed in the Junior British Open and I won that competition so I won the Junior Mr. Britain title in 2012 and then from the back of that the exposure that I had from that industry because we're talking pre-Instagram era now I mean obviously fitness now as you know is huge. It's everywhere you look it's there, you know, the Instagram boom of say 2014, 15 everybody does fitness or everybody knows somebody that does fitness. We're talking 2012 years or it's before that and I've just won the British title so I'm featuring in magazines I'm getting a lot of attention because it was such a nice industry and I was so young, I was getting a lot of attention and I'd already fallen victim to this culture of, you know, the ego and the vanity and the power and being better than other people so all this just feeds into this this egomaniac, this monster of, you know, wanting, you know, wanting praise left, right and sense and wanting to have power over people and then I suppose the big jump was when I've gone from taking steroids to now I've got this big network and by chance stumbled across a manufacturer of steroids and we got quite close so I've gone from taking steroids now and I thought right I'll sell enough steroids so that I can pay for my own course, okay that goes on a couple of weeks and then it's well maybe I can sell enough steroids to pay for my own course and pay for bills and so on and so on and this escalates over the space of, I don't know, four, five, six, seven months and that quickly jumped to exporting steroids around the world with the contacts that I'd made from my free-running age so everybody that I've met all across your all across America I've reached out to these people looking for looking for customers essentially so I start exporting steroids and then amidst all that I take a job on working club security in Liverpool so I started working the doors now that at this point now I'm making enough money from selling steroids that I don't need the money I take in the job working on the doors purely because I wanted to be in that environment I wanted to feel powerful which I think is something a lot of a lot of men who go into that trade fall victim to they want to have that power so I start working on the doors now I'm in the Liverpool city centre and I start mixing with more people who I've never been around in my entire life, the type of people who you know you're reading about in books when you're younger or you hear legends on these states you start mixing in these circles in the clubs and on the doors and you start meeting old generation gangsters and all of a sudden you have this huge network around you and you have access to anything you want wholesale be it drugs, guns, whatever it is so my network that I was providing steroids to quickly escalate to export and method drone export and ecstasy, import and cannabis export and cannabis all completely tangled in this web of people that I had met and this has only been the space of 12 months so I've gone from this kid at 19 who was had a super positive circle everything was good energy, good vibes to skip forward a year I've taken steroids, I've lost my personality I was ego obsessed, I've become extremely violent my social circle had gone from you know, as I say really really positive implements to people who just thrive off violence, they thrive off you know the power, the crime the drugs, you know the weapons and the contrast between the person that I was at 19 to the person that I became at 20 you wouldn't even recognize that person whatsoever and things from there the three years that followed the two and a half years that followed that were undoubtedly the the worst chapter of my life because I lost myself completely and I was arrested for the first time in I think it was January 2013 for a firearms allegation and I still had I had a sponsorship at the time with a company called Optima Nutrition and at the time they were the biggest supplement protein company in the world and the police had had this allegation that I threatened somebody with a firearm and they come to the house and they raided the house looking for a firearm and they tore the place to pieces tore my ranger over to pieces fingerprint dust or dust over anything they could I had a spare room in the house at the time and it had like 100 tubs of protein in there that had been sent by Optima Nutrition and the police had opened up every single every single tub and poured in solvent to see what it was they found no firearms they found a few bits of drugs a bit of cash and then I was bailed for that offence in 2013 and remained on bail for about another year and so I was arrested again for my first Jersey offence now what had happened in the meantime is as well as I had a strong network within Liverpool City Centre because that's where I was living now I was living right in the middle of the city centre I had 15 bedroom apartments right bang in the middle of the city centre whilst I was working on the doors and we had a couple of particular clubs as our areas that was kind of that's us, you don't go there and there was a new kid on the block trying to make a name for himself he'd been in the clubs giving it the big talk a few years older than me at that time I'd have only been about 22, 23 and he'd been trying to move in on our territory so to speak so we we broke at a deal I asked a mate of mine he's a really soft looking guy I said look do me a favour I want you to text this guy and I want you to order a small amount of drugs off him go and meet him look as geeky as you possibly can go and see him he goes you meet this guy he gets a small amount and comes back I said do me a favour wait four or five days and then I want you to meet him again I want you to ask him for a bit more okay I want you to wait a week now maybe two weeks message him say look you and you you and your you and your roommate in college and university sorry you're about to get your student grants and you want to buy a big amount of drugs come across as naive as you possibly can you know tell him whatever price that he says you know make out like you're really happy with that you know make him feel like he's got the deal of a century so we set this deal up and we meet this guy I sense my mate is the driver and one of our Albanian mates we had met through the doors in the back seats and he picked him up anyway he took him down a back alley in Liverpool beat the life out of him, took everything off him kicked him out of the car and off him put his boxer shorts, took the drugs off him his clothes, his phone and everything and a couple of days later I've got in touch with him and said listen and you want to work in that area in Liverpool you work for us or you don't work at all so me and him got talking and it turned out that he had some friends in Jersey and he thought Jersey might be a good market he said look I can go and work for you in Jersey I can set up over there so we go for him we sent him over to Jersey to set up shop and he'd been there all of about two weeks and we'd sent him a couple of parcels over and we were due to have some money sent back in the post and I just split up with my girlfriend at the time and I said to one of my mates Carl I said look should we go over to Jersey and just pick this money up we don't need to but let's make a weekend of it let's go over to Jersey pick this money up kill a bit of time I'll have a laugh and then we flies to Jersey on the Friday being my pal Carl I remember them as towards the police had us under surveillance from the minute we stepped off the plane so further into this we see pictures of us quite literally stepping off the plane so we already knew we were coming and so we get into Jersey Town Centre and we sat down me, my pal Carl and the other fella on the end and we sat in this pub about to order food and I got the menu and this woman comes and stands next to me and she I thought she clearly a waitress so I start reading my order off and she just looks at me funny and I'm a little bit suspicious at this point and within about 30 seconds the pub was full with police officers in the pub so the arresters they take us to Jersey's Custody suite and they quiz us and they found a quantity of methadrone in this guy's house where he just set up shop in Jersey now they kept us, the idea was they kept us ex-communicator for three days we didn't want us to contact the outside world but the officer on the desk wasn't made aware of this until after they gave me a phone call so I managed to get a phone call back home I said look I've been arrested just to let you know I'll keep you updated, that's that so I managed to get that phone call home now they interviewed this guy and this is where I come I really kicked in the guy who I'd had assaulted and robbed as soon as he went in for his first interview he gave them everything they could possibly want some more so they had the quantity of methadrone they found him with but he also made a point of telling them there's another package that's come over that contains cannabis, ecstasy tablets he went above and beyond and gave them a lot more information than they already had and then he also he dramatized it to the point where he's telling these police officers that the guy I had with me was my bodyguard because my pal car was like six foot three he's about 120 odd kilos he's a huge guy but he's a gentle giant but to look at he's fucking terrifying so he's giving them this story trying to paint this picture of me being this this big gangster in Liverpool and as much as I'd like to have thought about it at the time I was just a kid trying to play big gangster and obviously I very quickly become aware of how not gangster I was with some of the people that I met which I'll go into but we're at this point now we're in a jersey to custody sweets and they they contacted Mary Side Police and said look we want you to read his premises you know back in there back in Mary Side so they got this warrant it took them two days and the address that I gave them wasn't my house address I gave them my grandmother's address at the time and they didn't question if they took the address in two days to get this this search warrants and I think they had about 20 officers turn up at my grandmother's house 12 o'clock on the Saturday or Sunday afternoon and this is this is a you know a big street on a council estate and you can neighbors can see up and down the road as you know there's a big front yard so you've got 20 police officers there now and they search the house and they don't find anything besides this one safe so it's a fairly chunky safe and my nan said they thought they'd really hit the jackpot they've got this huge safe they brought it out onto the front yard to smash it in with a red key you know the big buttons he said the front doors in with so they've got this safe on the front yard now and they've made a big spectacle of it as if you know they were about to hit the jackpot this is going to be full of firearms jugs whatever it was because it was a pretty big safe now as I said I just split up with my girlfriend at the time and I just started seeing somebody else and this is where I was living I'd now had this new girlfriend come around and with the previous one I was with we'd spent about two and a half grand on sex toys so we had all kinds of funky shit and we'd just split up and I was seeing this new girl and for whatever reason I had more money than a cent at the time I was probably making about about 20 grand a week profit at the time but for whatever reason being a tight house I didn't want to throw these sex toys away so what can I do with these I know I've got a spare safe I'll put them in the safe I'll put the safe in my grand house and then that's fine she won't be able to get into it she won't know what's there I can just put that there out the way and then it is what it is so skip forward now you've got 20 men you saw police officers outside my grand house with this big safe and the big red key and they are plowing the front of this safe in with this this giant red key making loads of noise and you've got all the neighbors out watching everything else and they finally get the door off it and all they managed to pull out of it is a shit son of a sex dirty sex so we so that's how that went so that I this right up until the baby man died she never mentioned what they found in there never ever discussed it was just yeah they get the safe the other outside and that was it she's never never mentioned to the day she died what it is that they found it say nothing to me whatsoever so they were they were forced to bail us then they found nothing so they bail us and they let us out to police station at like midnight on the Sunday night we've been there like three days at this point and they reminded they reminded the other kids that he was working for us because he you know he give himself up and he give us up at the same time so they reminded him and he bailed us you know let us out it must have been near midnight he took all our money off us and just pointed and said the airport so many miles that way see you later so we flies back home and they bail me I think it was about six weeks bail or eight weeks bail what year so this was this was 2014 so this would have been so I won my I won the junior British bodybuilding competition in 2012 2013 I was arrested for the first time on the firearms allegation and then while still on bail for that this is late spring early summer 2014 they've arrested me for this and they've they bailed us we come back home so come back in six weeks so six weeks goes by and I'm still on bail for this other charge so I email the I emailed you as you please and say look I want to get this UK charge out the way first would you mind waiting before I come back for the second interview so they give me a bit of time bit of time goes and then I got bailed again on the UK charge and then they say look we really need to come back and do the second interview now so speaks to my solicitor and I said look do me a favor tell them tell them I can't afford to fly over so he tells you as you please this and the officer he speaks to just laughs at him down the phone just laughed at my grief he's like right okay I'll get back to you two days later he rinks back he's like okay the attorney general signed it off we're going to pay for his flight to come over no more excuses so he said to me so I said look we're out of options now just tell them I'm not going they'll have to come and get me if they want me so he sends that and we didn't hear nothing for about four weeks and then for some reason we took it four or five weeks on they ring him and they contact him again and say right then the European arrest warrants we're coming for him to this day I don't understand why they give him the heads up but they said look we're coming for him just to let you know at some point we're going to come and get him so I get the call from my solicitor and I still remember the day I sat at the beach with one of my mates Craig and I get the call from Sam and my solicitor and he's like look Nick they're coming I said what do you mean he said we cut the European arrest warrant they're coming for you I can't advise you what else to do here but I just got to let you know they're coming so I put everything in storage put my car in storage, put all my clothes in storage my money, my jewelry and I start living in hotels for six, seven weeks and it was a miserable time I mean being on the land, being on the run it sounds like this romanticized idea of you know it's all fun and exciting but in a hotel and they only have three different meals on the menu and you're watching broadcast TV like it is the most depressing experience I've ever done so I've done that for six, seven weeks no sign of the police no doors have gone in, nothing they must have been bluffing trying to get me to go over there so I thought okay I'm good so this is seven weeks on, six, seven weeks on now and we're in the September of 2014 so I thought okay I'm going to come back out and I said to my, I've given up my apartment block in Simon I said to my mum, look I'm going to come and stay with you for two or three weeks whilst I find somewhere new do me a favor, don't answer the door to anybody whatever you do, don't care who you think it is don't answer the door and I still, in the background I still had everything everything going on, we were still importing, we were still exporting and I was making more money than I knew what to do with at the time we were quite literally doing about 20 grand a week profits for me personally and that's for a kid that grew up on a council estate and I'm making my mum's yearly salary in a week I had more money than I knew what to do with and it was past the point of the money meaning anything because everything had become a little bit tasteless, you know when you can buy anything, nothing nothing gives you that stimulus anymore buy whatever car you want, you can go out you can eat in restaurants three times a day and take everybody with you and you can buy the bar out when you go out clubbing you need more and more stimulus, you know, the more that you get so I've become numb to everything at the time but we were still cracking on, still doing what we were doing so it comes back, it comes out of hiding it comes to my mum's pub my car back out of storage I had a private place on it at the time I had a very atypical one of the gangster Range Rover fully blacked out looking back I cringe on a lot of it now Jeremy, I fitted the stereo and typed down to a T 115 kilo skinhead black on black Range Rover, unemployed everything that you could possibly do wrong I was doing wrong, red flags top to bottom, so I pulled my car out of storage and I've been back out a few days and then we went I was going out for a night out with the lads who I worked off the doors with so I was coming through Liverpool tunnel which separates the world from Liverpool so I was coming through this tunnel with one of my pals in the car this must have been about 10 o'clock at night on a Friday or Saturday and we've come through we've come through the tunnel and just as we've come out Liverpool side to see a police car sweep behind me and I said to the lad in the passing seat I was like I'm getting pulled over here so I think this is it I said I think they're coming for me so look I said whatever happens just don't make any drama out of it I said it is what it is and he pulled me over that's exactly what happened we had one car pulled behind us another car pulled in front and then one at the side so he boxes in completely on this bend coming out of Liverpool tunnel and they come over to the window and she's asking me all the normal questions you know what's your name, date of birth who's the car it's my mum's car what does your mum do, she's a care worker she's obviously looking at me like and this is your mum's car is it, yeah what do you do, I said I'm unemployed again red flag red flag and then she says can you just wait there for a minute in front of the car and someone's been there for five or ten minutes on the radio and I'm just waiting for it to come and get me out of the car and arrest me she comes back to the car and I said look do you mind me asking why you pulled me over and she said oh we've just been asked to verify the vehicle information whatever else it's like oh god you're free to go you can go on your way and at that point I didn't understand what it was that it actually what had just happened but Jersey Police had been on my Facebook and being again you're atypical 21, 22 year old wannabe gangster I've got a picture on my car on Facebook with the registration blades on it and everything else Jersey Police contacted me and said look AMPR this car, pull it over make sure the driver is in fact Nick so that when we fly over with this European arrest warrant all we need to do is AMPR him and we can get him there and then five, six days later I get woken up at ten o'clock in the morning by loads of screaming downstairs against what I'd said, I'd open the door to the police thinking it was the postman and I had 20 police 20 mazes out of police and three of Jersey Police who had flown over come in and arrested me and they come they come up the stairs and I just said look I had no hassle from me no drama look just let me get dressed let me let me get off and I know what's going on I'll come with you, no fuss when we fly over and they were decent with me Jersey Police says, I mean Jersey's only nine by five miles, it's super chill, one horse town the police were really decent with me and they flew me over and the guy that arrested me he really loved his job he was the, Jim McGrann I think his name is and he's the guy that caught Curtis Warren to be bragging to me on the plane about you know I got Curtis I got Curtis I don't know why he thought that was going to impress me I'm not in the kind of place to tell me these stories do you know what I mean so we get there anyway I finally get a copy of the interview from the guy that rolled on us and some of the information he'd given there was you know he blew everything out of proportion and he really did make me seem to be the next big thing and that's what Jersey thought I was now I'd never dealt in I'd never dealt in big weight I'd only ever dealt in small weight at high value so what I was doing was aiming for the smaller populations aiming for the islands to maximize the money I was getting and we were bringing boxes of weed over from Spain and I mean like piss poor quality that you couldn't sell anywhere it was bushery I think we were paying about 2,000 euro a kilo and we were sending that over to the likes of Jersey and the Isle of Man and places like that and because they'd never had never really had blood before the old school type stuff people sending it over in cars it was getting snapped up so we were making ridiculous amounts of money by you know only dealing in very small quantities so we had loads of money but we weren't dealing in big volume and as I say the circles that we then got into because people see that you're doing well especially in that industry and they want a piece of it so I had a lot of people then latch onto me around this time all the original friends that I grew up with slowly started to drop away and now I'm surrounded by gangsters and dormant and fighters and it was completely different and naturally you then become surrounded by false friends people over there for the money and the lifestyle and everything else but you get lost in that quite easily especially when you're 21, 22 years of age and you've got dozens of people putting on this facade of really caring for you and all they really care about is the lifestyle and it wasn't until I got into my sentence that that really hit me and I got, so it was October 2014 when they arrested me and they remanded me immediately and I didn't get sentenced until February of 2015 get sentenced February of 2015, I got six years for importation of XSC cannabis and meth are drawn into JZ and that took me it took me nearly a year to get back to the UK because if I had stayed in JZ I'd have done two days of my sentence there's no catty, there's no open prison there's no progression I'd have done four years behind the door and you know as far as prisons go JZ prison is the Titanic of the prison system we're talking 2014 here and you'd go into your cell and you had a fingerprint scanner above a plasma TV and it would log you into your account and you've got Sky Sports, you've got National Geographic it's like being in a holiday camp but to do an extra couple of years behind the door I had to get out and I transferred eventually in the October of 2015 I managed to transfer home and at this point now I'd been in I don't know, about eight months and I'd lost, I'd started to lose contact with the people that I'd picked up along the journey of getting into crime and violence and they'd start to drop off and there's a story that always sticks to me or one that I always like to share about what happened there and you had a picture board in your cell in JZ and when I first come in, the photos that I requested to get sent in and I filled this board up and it's pictures of luxury cars and nights out and champagne bottles and jewelry and all this so my wall was full of all this materialistic power-driven ego-driven image with all these people around me who'd only been in my life for about 12 months and then slowly over that journey of whilst I was still in JZ prison, over that eight months maybe week by week the lesses had stopped coming in from them people and people from my previous life had started popping up and they'd send some pictures in and very slowly and progressively over that eight months then pictures started to come down and the pictures started to go up with a life beforehand and that was the I didn't notice what was happening at the time of you know, I've slowly adjust in the board it just, you know, I didn't think any more of it than one picture down, one picture up and then I think I've been in about six months and I look up the board and for whatever reason it hit me then that the board that I put up when I come in versus what I had in front of me now were completely different, none of the faces were the same I'd gone back to the people who were still in touch and the people who were still sending me pictures of the people that I had around me prior to getting into that world and that was kind of the turning point for me of wow, I really really lost myself and I lost so many good people around me and even to this day there's people that I lost around that time and I still haven't managed to get back in my life despite the the journey that I've been on That's the difficult thing though when you do bad you lose the good as well because we always want more and when you want more, trying to search for better it's never there anyway see when you were like eight and you were going through that your sexual abuse like did you deal with that at a young age did you tell anyone or was that later in life No, so that with the sexual abuse so I'd have been and I can't remember the exact age but it had been somewhere around eight to nine I think it went on for about a year the lad lived down the street from us he'd have been about twice my age we'd have been about sixteen, seventeen this went on for about twelve months and then once we moved and I buried that not consciously, almost subconsciously just compartmentalized they put it to the back of my mind and I didn't deal with that again until 2016, 17 when I seen a psychiatrist for the first time in prison we had a conversation and obviously she delved deep and wanted to know more and more and for whatever reason for the first time in fifteen years I talked about it and that was you know I don't know if that was you know self-preservation that I put that to the back of my mind or whether I just moved on from it really quickly but that was the first time that I really really tried to process it was sat down with the psychiatrist because I'd never had therapy before I'd never had counseling before and I didn't realize how empowering it can be talking to somebody who's completely objective you know somebody who doesn't know the people that you know you're not gonna have a conversation with this person and they're gonna go and tell their mate who tells their friend who tells six of your mates and all of a sudden everybody knows your business you know it's a completely private conversation and you can really let go and that was that was the first time I talked about a lot of trauma that I'd had growing up and it was it was really empowering and that was the journey that I went on through that sentence you know I found myself again but I was also able to process a lot of stuff from being a kid because you had the sexual abuses so we grew up in poverty and my mum was only 15 years older than me so her parent and skills were poor and I don't hold that against her that's more of a I wouldn't have done any better at 15 and I couldn't judge her for that and I would not judge her for that but you know I went through a lot of neglect and we had no money we had no food and you know often times where me and my best friend Kylie was in a very similar situation we'd go out and we'd go climb over the back of the fence as a test go and we'd dig through the bins and we'd get all the damaged tin food and that's kind of how we got by for most of our early teenage years and you know I tell that story to people and they're like oh you know I feel so terrible for you and I'm like listen we went through a really we were in a really harsh environment we were happy kids we had nothing but we were happy and that's it's difficult for a lot of people to get to you know to understand unless you've been through a hardship like that yourself that you know it's you can make the most out of nothing and hardship is you know it's character building if you don't go through any hardship chances are you're not going to have much about your personality childhood trauma it's the worst as well especially going through sexual abuse a lot of people have had on suicidal addicted to drugs drink like how much did parkour then save your life like from the kid who's raiding bins to survive not really got any love around being sexually abused to then being fit strong and like you say nature naturally people strong living outside and having fun and living like all the materialistic shit we can wear the nice watches, drive the nice cars and chase the false dreams but it doesn't really mean for a call and it's easy to say once you've had it and you get it you realise once you get it there isn't everything and it takes it's weird because it actually takes you to get something that you've chased your whole life to realise that was a fucking wasted year chasing that shit do you know what I mean that how much did it then because you never went down always hurt people hurt people no matter if it was your fault or not if your abuse mentally physically or emotionally if you're tormented inside if you're hurt you will hurt other people if you're going on in life and try to find therapy and try to do the right things when you heal then you can help like we'll fuck up we'll make mistakes and you'll be loving the trauma and pain for the rest of your life and that's why these podcasts are so good it's to understand the person why they get involved and what they're involved in that we'll fuck up we'll make mistakes but for you to get in through that to basically eating from the streets how much did the parkour stuff serve you life I think I found parkour at the age that I did I very much suspect I'd have been dead at the age of 18 and now so sexual abuse stopped at age 10 when we moved out of the area I started secondary school and I was a trouble kid I was fighting every day I was extremely violent and I got to say 12 and I got arrested for assault I kicked somebody in the face and they'd lost they'd lost their front teeth so I got charged with GBH and this is at 12 years old now school separated me one of the witnesses was in my class in my form in school and they put me segregated in a in a porter cabinet at the side of the school and caged windows on it it was about as dramatic as it gets for school so they isolated me from everybody in school and that just exacerbated the hatred that I already had for the conventional system so I stopped going in the end and police sorry and the school kind of gave me a lot of leeway with that it's not like it is now if you take two days off you know they're on to your parents for truancy and whatever else but it was a bit more relaxed then and my my mum couldn't have cared less anyway she let me do whatever I wanted which was a blessing and a case at the same time I had all the freedom to do whatever I want but also I didn't have any of that nature and any of the loving instinct that you get from your natural mother and coming into the school so I dropped out of school and I found parkour for the first time in my life I was part of a community I had a sense of family for the first time in my entire life and I think I was spiraling out of control up until that point and the group that I got in with one of the more talented guys he was one of the alphas from a very religious family now I'm not religious at all but the morals that he brought into our community you couldn't fault them he was a good person, he was all about treating people decent and I took a lot of lessons from him and I was willing to do that because he was such a talented athlete and we're talking about somebody who's gone on to be in some of the biggest movies that have ever been at least he's a super talented guy so because he was so talented at what we did I was happy to take lessons from him and I was happy to learn from him he was a teacher or a relative or a police officer and you told me I need to do X, Y and Z I had told you to get lost I wouldn't have taken you seriously because I idolized this guy and I took his message on board and I got to like 14, 15 and I was just getting into everything but I still felt quite depressed and I always remember he took me I told him how I was feeling he's a few years older than me he'd been about 18, 19 at the time and he's very mature from his age you know this high point in our area this apex, we'd have been a hundred feet up and we just sat with our legs dangling over the edge straight drop to the floor and we're talking deep and he said I want you to try something I want to suggest something and I don't want you to ask me why I just want you to do it he said I want you to make a point of being kind and decent to everybody even if they're not that way with you and he's seen that a lot puzzled he's seen it in my face he said don't ask me why he said don't dig too deeply into it he said just do this for me just go out of your way to be kind and decent to people and see what difference it makes and I kind of shrugged it off and I thought you know what what have I got to lose and from there onwards I adopted that philosophy and I started being decent with people and instead of trying to take the piss out of people all the time mocking people I really started supporting the people around me and then everybody then started being kinder to me and then all of a sudden I'm being offered opportunities to you know this is where it comes in with the big brands with the D-Diss and Red Bull and everything else that we were doing everybody was then decent to me and wanted me on board and that's just from that small change in my personality of going from a kid who's been through trauma to lashing out to everybody to go and wait hang on a minute if I project myself in a different way people are then going to receive me better and people want to give me more opportunities if you're decent to people and people know you're a good guy you find more success and that's obviously not why you should do it but it's a secondary effect of being decent to people and being kind to people and being a genuine person opportunities come to you and for the five years that followed coming from a kid that's been scrounging out of bins to fly in business class within the space of 12 months that put me in such an incredible incredible place and then when I got injured I'm making that decision to go into bodybuilding and competitive bodybuilding I think that took me way back to where I was 10 years previous and I had to go through that whole cycle again of losing my personality lashing out, thriving off the violence you know because I had a lot of issues inside that I obviously hadn't processed and without having all the positive influences around me that starts to creep up and bubble up back to the top again that starts to take a grip here and as you say that's why it's important to have conversations like these even if it's in a professional context with a counselor or even talking to your friends or on a podcast whatever it is vocalizing it is such a strong way to stop processing things it really can and if I hadn't if you don't find an outlet to channel that energy or at least to process you know you are statistically likely to go through a really difficult life or end up in jail or end up passing on that sexual abuse to the next generation and it's you know but it is difficult backing through internal pain blaming yourself thinking it's sure it's done wrong I've had rape victims on who blame themselves like people who have been sexual abused as kids blame themselves like that poison and hatred and fear and guilt for people do it for 20-30 years people die with it to then be speaking to someone and releasing it no doubt they've been emotional stuff like that but see when you started taking steroids did that give you a false sense of power where it's like a shield where because I always say this as well that gangsters that come on hold the guns hold the knives for me they're fragile because it's not a huge main thing to do is to hold a gun or a knife but they do it because they're broken because they don't want to feel pain anymore they don't want to be hurt so what I'll do is hold a gun or a knife try and stop you from hurting me but not realising they're actually hurting others while hurting themselves so nobody wins but when you started feeling bigger feeling stronger did that give you a false sense of security as well where the violence kicks in and yeah it's all a facade then isn't it you are you know you're projecting your insecurities and then you know steroids in I mean there's there's banks of scientific literature now where you could you could read it and you could you know you would know what you were doing back then it was you go see Big Dave at the gym Big Dave tells you to take X, Y and Z and take as much of it as possible because he's the one selling it to you you know I'm 20 years of age and I'm filling myself with all kinds of hormones aren't just you know designed for human consumption I was taking something called tremolone which is designed for cattle and that absolutely skewed my mind it makes you feel it makes you feel superhuman but it also makes you feel numb to a lot of a lot of the positive stuff so the neurochemical impact that it has is it prohibits your brain's ability to produce or at least tend to say dopamine and the like and serotonin so your ability to feel good is pretty much taken away but you feel superhuman at the same time you feel invincible but you're miserable while you feel invincible and that just feeds into everything that then the back of that feeling you know having this this strong facade in front of you being 115 kilo and feeling like you look mean and wanting to be you know violent all the time and getting involved in guns for the first time and all of that as you say is just a shield to protect what's really going on because you're dealing with these issues because you think they say people get ROID raised but I think we're just angry before and the ROID's just getting hands up because people have been smoking for 12 years so now I was a lazy bastard before I smoked so when I smoked I was even lazier and people can still go to the gym on it but for me if they ever smoked it they still went do you feel ROID raises a thing or is that a mental thing that we're already fucked in the head anyway I think scientifically they say it can increase aggression in about 5% of the population but if you're a dick beforehand you're just going to be a bigger dick and that's the best way to see if you have them tendencies inside you anyway they're just going to be amplified 10 fold if you're an angry kid or you're an insecure kid and all of a sudden you've now got 10 times the amount of testosterone in your system than you're meant to have I mean you see what kids are like, you see what lads are like when they go through puberty and they lash out and that's obviously with a relatively low amount of testosterone that's been introduced into the system you start putting in synthetically 10 times what you're meant to have as a grown adult you are all over the place and you are if you are a little bit, you know if you are inclined to be aggressive anyway you're now going to be 10 times bigger and more capable of doing more damage and with that size and power comes more confidence to be that way and one just feeds the other and it's a very dangerous and very slippery slope to go down and I did a lot of damage to myself with my steroid use because at the time and because I was competing and a lot of people think oh well you're competing, how could you take steroids and they don't realise that the entire industry is untested it's not like the Olympics every competitive bodybuilder you see whether they admit it or not because of their sponsorships is taking steroids to one extent or the other and because there was no guidance at the time and I think that's why it's important for people to talk about it is I was just taking as much as I could of everything I had to code and I damaged my pituitary gland and I ended up seeing an endocrinologist for the three years I was in prison trying to get myself back healthy again and I'd done damage to my brain and he said look it's going to take you three, four years to get back to a normal level if you ever do fully recover and it's you know it was the unhealthiest that I'd ever been and that's the risk that you run chasing that image because big's never big enough the same with the material side of things like the new fancy car if that's not going to be enough if you're not enough before you get it you're never going to be enough when you get it because next year the new car comes out if you get yourself the £600 pair of shoes well that brand brings out the next one and you're constantly chasing this stimulus in the sense of achievements and you just become numb to it and you chase it and chase it and you spend all your life chasing these goals and if the material goes once you get them the anti-climax of getting there you know it's soul destroying and then you're like well what do I do now I just keep chasing and then you spend your whole life in the rat race of just chasing this this one next level and I think a lot of people fall victim to that especially especially those of us who've had hard upbringings it's very easy to get lost in I never had this when I was a kid now I do this defines me and I've got to keep chasing this and it's very very dangerous and that's why I think social media is very dangerous because people the generation after me is now so consumed by how everything needs to look and then highlight rules yeah exactly and it's really guinea pigs for it even me I'm addicted to my phone I've got a great life but why do I waste 70 hours a day it used to be 12 I've came down a lot because I used to say I work so hard to provide for my kids and give them the things that I never have but that thing was just spending time with them and loving them as much as I could but that there is a gold if you can nurture a kid and love a kid and protect a kid your kid can be anything at once you feed that kid materialistic shit you feed them the new iPhone the new Playstation, new set of trainers that kid's going to set himself up for failure because that anti-climax that you talk about having that good thing it ends up in the biggest depression I remember when I got a Range Rover Sport I remember driving down the motorway and I thought I was sad I was fucking sad and I was thinking to myself be grateful and I was trying to speak five things to be grateful for to try and make myself happy I got it and I was fucking sad I remember fucking hell that I used to have up my vision board get this and I got it and then it was the watch and I got it and I was sad because I realised the journey is the most important thing to be happy listen it's good to have good things and set yourself up for it and achieve them but trust me when you get them you realise that it ain't all that because we always chase that finishing line and as soon as we get to the finishing line there's always going to be another one coming there's always more at the height of your steroid abuse what was your intake like on a daily basis and food steroid intake so I'd have been taking about was insulin involved in that as well so I'd have been taking maybe a gram and a half of testosterone a week so it's about 1500 milligrams and then about half a gram of trombolone about 500 milligrams every day I'd be taking about 200 milligram of oxymethylone which enacts their tablets so I'd have been injecting about two grams of steroids a week and then orally taking about another gram and a half and that is knowing what I know now because the industry's adopted the kind of or at least a niche section of the industry have adopted the right we need to talk about this because if people are going to do it they need to do it safely you're never going to stop people doing it at all I think the last statistics that I've seen was crazy it's like an estimated if it's two and a half or three million steroid users in the UK it's huge so there is a need for people to talk about it honestly not to encourage it but to say look this is what you shouldn't be doing don't read what big Dave says on the internet because you're going to do yourself serious harm and what I was taking then based on what I know now and you know the scientific literature that I've read over the last few years and understanding hormones better and endocrinology in general that is fucking terrifying amounts of drugs do you think people need to be more educated in that is there any benefits from doing steroids? there's benefits from doing testosterone you can't argue with that it is a medical treatment testosterone replacement therapy is a very common thing and especially in the United States you can go into your age in clinic and pay $30 and get your script straight away like low testosterone is as much of an indicator of heart disease as high testosterone so if you are on the lower end of the spectrum say you're stressed you've got a heavy weight load you don't sleep a lot you probably have low T and if you've got low T your health risks increase dramatically so you would then be somebody who's suitable for testosterone replacement therapy and then you're talking about 150 milligrams a week is the medical dose maybe a little bit lower I was taking about 3,000 the week yeah so there are positives and it's a danger with the industry and this is why this is why it's really worrying so I lost my sponsorship with optimum nutrition in 2013 because of my steroid use I was quite vocal at the time about using steroids not to encourage it by any stretch of the imagination but to be transparent and optimum nutrition caught wind of this and they called me down to London to this big conference room and I met there with one of their directors and she said oh you know we've just got some questions we want to ask you I sit down with this woman Jessie name us and I travel down from London we've not long done body power for abdomen and we sit in this boardroom I've just got some questions and she looks at me and she's like we believe that you're taking steroids and she's like I just want to know if you've got anything to say to that is it true and I looked at her and I thought and I just asked her straight she was like do you want me to be honest with you here or do you want me to tell you what it is that you want to hear and she looked at me she was quite flirtatious and she giggled and she was actually honest I'd rather you just be honest with me I said of course I am I said you go on your website right now and there's 30 athletes and I said then I know about 20 of them personally and every single one of them is taking steroids because she looked at me in absolute shock I think she was expecting me to say no and I said yeah I am of course I am a capacity bodybuilder and I didn't know you many a lot but I said look two thirds of the sponsored athletes you can't think somebody can have a a grown man can have a waist like a 12 year old girl and shoulders that don't fit through the door naturally do you know what I mean it just doesn't happen and she and this is a director of the biggest supplement company in the world at the time and she was completely naive to the fact that the whole industry are taking anabolic steroids and that's the problem that you come across because you have now all these top athletes in the industry that are taking steroids and they can't talk about it because part of their contracts with these big brands is you cannot take steroids so which is ironic because I know of people in the industry who have big brand sponsors and the big brands are completely aware that they take it but they have it in the contract to cover themselves but then that disables their ability to talk about it which is dangerous for two reasons it's dangerous because okay you're taking that you should be honest about it but more importantly it's dangerous because you have all these people watching on these millions of followers who are looking at these physiques and thinking that's attainable this person quite literally has natural bodybuilder in their Instagram bio when they're not natural at all so you get somebody that comes along okay I'm going to buy your three month training plan and I'm going to spend £400 on it and I'm going to be like you and they go three months in six months in, nine months in and not much is happening am I the problem am I not working hard enough, what is it and then you end up giving people these complexes and these body image issues of why can't I attain that if everything you're telling me is right why aren't I worthy, why can't I get there and all we've done by hiding the topic is generated an entire generation of people who are being misled and now we have more body image issues in this country than we've ever had in the history of statistics and kids are absolutely destroyed by it not only have you got people who are taking all kinds of steroids and amphetamines to lose weight the clenbuterol, subbutramines all of these compounds that they use and to look the way that they do you then add on top of that filters, photoshop, everything else and you just left with 99.9% of the population thinking I'm not good enough, why can't I look like that and it's it really is a trapeze wire for the brands because I understand why they won't allow people to talk about it but at the same time all you're doing is feeding into this this insecurity complex what's the negatives of steroid abuse? of abuse for kids who don't know back in the day talking to it years ago where I was from it was little times a debil kids were just taking 2, 3, 4 and going and doing bench pressing seriously I've had that fucking clue what's the other thing that's changed now you've got sauce, you've got clen, what you've got is it snaker the most common injectables that you get are variations of testosterone which come in different half-life so how quickly it enters your system and how quickly it needs it growth hormone doesn't really have there's not a high risk of negatives with growth hormone it's super expensive it is almost always fake and how do you know the difference? you wouldn't so from somebody who spends a lot of time exporting steroids and important steroids and growth hormone I can tell you that even the stuff that looks medical grade is copied I had a friend of mine who I won't name had he was getting kits, the medical kits the proper ones that the fires of the geno-pens and sending them out to China and having them replicated perfectly to the point where you literally couldn't tell the difference and that's what the bulk of the industry is because growth hormone is so expensive so for a single growth hormone you pay in any way between 80 and 180 pound so it's worth copying and they put literally nothing in it so the risks with growth hormone aren't really that high chances are you're going to be paying a lot of money for something you put in your body and it's fake so you're not doing anything the risk to reward on growth hormone is not what everyone thinks it's not this big one the drug it will help with replenishing your injuries and recovering and stuff like that but testosterone abuse is a whole different kettle of fish and you have... does it make you feel good? growth hormone testosterone makes you feel on top of the world is that a clash with it? if you come off it there is a huge crash the problem with testosterone is if you start your testosterone therapy and you stop suddenly now your body stopped producing its own testosterone because you're replacing it with synthetic so your body stopped producing testosterone and now you stop feeding its synthetic testosterone so for that window which is usually three to six months depending on how much you've abused your flat line so all you have is this concoction of female hormones going all around and you suffer depression you'll get suicidal tendencies you'll get muscle wastage, you'll feel lethargic sex drive will go to shit you'll be absolutely broken as a man for all intents and purposes you are a menstruating woman who's going through hell and that is that really brings a high risk of suicide when people go through that process and that again is something not a lot of people are aware of and there is testosterone it's not so much a case of more is more or more is better your body can only utilise so much of it so once you go over a certain point your body then starts converting it into estrogen which can cause you all kinds of issues that's when you get your your bitch tits and your big bloated face and your acne and everything else that's usually a telltale sound someone that starts abusing steroids but people don't want to hear that as I say we speak to big Dave in the gym take ten of these or you'll take your D ball and then you get your misconceptions of tablets must be safer than needles because needles are clearly a dirty thing to do straight away you think needles you associate it with heroin and crack whatever else but injectable testosterone is the cleanest way to do it if you start taking tablets and damaging your liver and your kidneys it's trying to break it down so you get people who will stay away from the injectable side of things taking loads of tablets thinking that's the safest way so they take excessive amounts of tablets so you end up with serious kidney damage liver damage plus all the hormonal implications that come with it there is a a very fine line between medical applications of using testosterone which in all honesty most men would benefit from taking testosterone can we raise that naturally I read something years ago training your legs yes training your legs will stimulate your natural testosterone production and your natural growth hormone production there are ways to do it naturally of course there are is it better to do it naturally than to take it synthetically of course it is a lot of people get stuck in the rut though of not getting enough sleep to even allow their bodies to produce it I'm 5 hours, 6 hours sleeping I'm getting old nearly 40 I know the energy levels have dropped I understand that I'm trying to push myself to do more but just at that age mate I feel lethargic that I don't get great sleeps 5, 6 hours later I say I'm a bit fucking 6, 5 no matter if I've got my bed at 1 or 10 I'm up that 5, 6 hour mark and it's hard medically medically you would be prime candidates for testosterone therapy if you were in the States they'd be thrown at you and what happens is we've got a professor in the UK I think he's out of Oxford Dr Matthew Walker his name is he's a neuroscientist but he's one of the world's leading voices on sleep science and he talks about testosterone and the link between sleep and testosterone production and he says that for anybody that says that they can function 100% on I think it's less than 6 and a half hours sleep he said they're lying not only are they lying to you they're lying to themselves he said statistically there is a gene alteration that only a certain percentage of the population have who can function on that level not asleep and statistically you've got more chance of being hit by a lightning twice than you have of having this gene have been able to function at 100% on sub 6 hours sleep and he says I forget the exact number the difference between a 6 hour sleep and a 5 and a half hour sleep means you will end up having the testosterone levels of a man 10 years you're a senior so if you're only getting 5 hours of sleep a night statistically you're producing as much testosterone as somebody 10 years older than you and that's the dangers of people not resting enough and that's the way stuff comes in so you can train your legs you can eat well you can run you can keep your fluids up and everything else and what's it all for and that's where the generally becomes a need for the medical application of testosterone I always use the excuse I was working too hard and I'm over thinking I need to work more I just know now that my test is done and we're all guilty of it especially those of us who were a workaholic somewhere around the go all the time and it's easy to fall into that trap and you don't want to give up another 2 hours of your day to sleep because you love the hustle and bustle of it and it's become easier to test for things like this you can go with companies like Medi-checks and Newman where you can pay £30 and they will post you a test and you prick your finger and you put your blood in the thing and they'll come back and tell you what your levels are and that's I think for the sake of £30 getting yourself an MOT like that it's well worth them I'm going to do that after this because obviously you can get stem cells other stuff now to I'm at that age I want to look after myself more in my 20s I was just a fucking raging junkie do you know what I mean? I would just walk booze, get out of there the external stuff to but then when you get older I don't I see people running in marathons in their 50s and 60s like you can clearly still have a great life and positive life wherean't you can hit your peak in your 50s, your 60s, your 70s there's still people learning new things every day like at old ages I don't want to be one of those guys who quit and just accept and just be in that little life of existing we've got a chap in our gym and I won't name him but those in the gym will know what I'm talking about and he's 82 or 83 years of age and he's two years older than my grandfather and my grandfather doesn't have the strength to hold the full bottle of milk he can't close the car door he's frail, he spends most of his time sat in the chair watching television he's still super switched on up there he's fast hyper intelligent but physically he's he's finished whereas this chap that we've got in the gym was 82 years old 82 years of age he's in the gym every day he takes testosterone he looks 20 years younger than my grandfather and he gets about the gym using all the machines he's dead happy, he's dead energetic this guy is 82 years of age and he did some of the TV stuff with us through COVID and he is just the personification of what a difference it can make if you actually look after yourself and the quality of life that you can have extended if you take care of yourself you could very easily get to 55, 60 retire, spend 10 hours, 12 hours a day sat in the sofa watching daytime television, you become frail and old and by the time you're 70, you're completely finished whereas if you look after yourself you can have a good quality of life well into your 80s maybe even up to your 90s I'm the same as you when I was younger, I didn't care taking loads of steroids, McDonald's every day, everything in moderation is fine I'm not thinking about when I'm 40 or when I'm 50 or when I'm 60 but when you start getting into your 30s and approaching 40 and early 40s fuck I wish I'd have done that differently so the earlier you have that realisation the better it is going to be and the longer you can live for and as I say I think it's important people do have these checks and I think it's important that people focus on getting this so you've kind of went through that life you've had the positives been in nature, parkour, travelling around the world you seem to have figured it all out as if I've not got any pain anymore you've got your family slipped again, steroids, prisons bouncer, certain gear so when you're in prison you had that realisation when your photos and stuff started changing was that the moment you decided right was that the... you'd all get that little light bulb and say right something comes into your mind whether we act on it's a different fucking ballgame when I was doing my shit I couldn't do the change I just couldn't because I was so used to that life the subconscious mind would remain who I was because I'd done it for so long so when you're in prison when you're changing your photos was that the moment, the size of the moment in your life? that was the moment there was no point in the 12, 18 months leading up to me getting caught that I think I'm doing the wrong thing here and when my good people started to drop off around me as far as I was concerned they were the issue, it wasn't me I come away and I had that realisation and what really mattered to me started to change and I started to remember how good I felt prior to getting into all that and you know I was like I completely I completely changed both inside and outside in terms of my appearance and everything else just from that moment of realisation with the pictures that was it for me then this life isn't for me and you look around you meet people in prison who are on their fifth, sixth, seventh sentence and they're in their forties or their fifties and you think I don't want to be this guy there's no amount of money in the world is worth being in this place at all, never mind your 50 years of age and you know I look back to when I was younger before we found the fame through Parkour and Freeway digging food out in bins at the back of Tesco I was happier digging through the bins at Tesco than I was just before I came to jail the level of satisfaction I was getting out of life at 13 scrounging for food was better than what I had at 21 buying brand new Range Rovers and Fancy Watches and everything else because it just felt numb so when I've gone through that realisation I thought I'm completely done with this life I'm not interested and I had that realisation quite early on I was in my first year and I still had two years to go so the two years that followed you know I took some time I educated myself I reconnected with a lot of my old friends you know and I really got myself back into a strong positive mindset and then you know pushing towards the end of my sentence I was ready to come home I was I felt really good about myself coming home I was energised I'd spent three years in a concrete box you know I'd gone through the jersey prison system I got to HMP Liverpool which was a an eye opener in itself I've come from eight months in jersey and this prison is ahead of its time you know the technology everything you're on first name change with the staff you know it's Sarah Dave I've had that for eight months and then I transferred to Liverpool and I'm in the GOA means Swapbox you know with the little window at the side and we pull up at HMP Liverpool and you can only see out the corner of the window and you just see this five story high Victorian looking Shawshank type building and that's when it hits you know wow this is actually prison and I get into HMP Liverpool and that place is absolutely terrifying and I thought I was I was big man at the time do you know what I mean as I say 150 in kilo I'm on the doors I love fighting all the time and you know I'm mixing with guns guns all of it you get to HMP Liverpool and you feel about an inch big because it doesn't matter who you are or what you think you are or who you know or what you've done everyone is the same you know it's a hide you have drama with somebody you are in that hostile environment day in day out so it doesn't matter you can't handle yourself for anything you've just become completely insignificant and life is cheap and that having that realisation I'd already come to the point where I was like I never want to be here again and that was when I was in the holiday camp that was Jersey and I get to HMP Liverpool and it was fuck wow I ain't ever doing this again so progress you the system I got to the open prisons you know I was doing the home leaves and the you know the going home and doing the workouts and just before about two or three months before I was due to get released the guy that owns our local gym Paul he was a friend of mine from obviously before going away from my you know from my bodybuilding career and I get talking to him and he says looking like I'm selling the gym I'm going back up to Glasgow with me and him and his partner I remember were from Glasgow and they'd open this gym in our area in 2013 or whatever and they said look here parents they're starting to get older they're unwell I'm looking to sell the gym he just dropped in conversation I was like well what do you want for him and he tells me to figure out I was like why didn't you ask me I didn't think you were in that kind of position I said well let me see what I can do and I had a bit of money left over and I just reconnected with my mum for the first time in a lot of years why'd you just fall out we just we drifted apart pretty much a brother and sister relationship more than a mother and son so because she was so young because she was so young and I've spoken about this in stuff I've done in the press and she's took offence to it and we've fallen out again since because she remembers my childhood very differently to what I do and I think she's done that to protect herself from the truth of you know what the experience was really like and I understand that I never I never mean to demonise her in the slightest because after she was a bad mum those parents in those days can only teach you what they know exactly she was 15 I couldn't have been a parent of 15 I'm 38 mate and I still struggle yeah exactly I couldn't hold anything against her and the flexibility that she gave me enabled me to go on the journey that I did and looking back everything into where I am now I wouldn't change a single thing so I really appreciate the hardship that we went through and the approach that she had for me even though that's not why she did you know the way that she did when I was like 14 I met some American guys on the internet some guys from France and I ended up deciding right okay I want to go over to France and meet these guys so I just I just disappeared I got one of my mates to take me down to London one of my older mates bunked me on the Euro star and met up with all these random strangers I met on the internet they were like 5, 6 years older than me and we went and toured around the found in town of Parkour and I met all the original athletes like the founders of the sport this was at 14 I get back she didn't even know I had gone I had been gone for about a week she didn't even realise I had gone and that flexibility enabled me it could have gone worse on the internet in different countries at 14 like that could have gone horrifically but it didn't yeah how was your trust with men especially what you went through as a kid just the case of you blocked everything out completely yeah and I really didn't process that at all up until I seen this psychiatrist when I was in the open prison Thorn Cross like that I hadn't even thought about it for 15 years and then I spoke about that psychiatrist and it wasn't until 2018 how did they react? they were really upset because they they they knew we struggled they knew I struggled for food because often there was a local Italian restaurant me and Kyle used to go and rob these big 25 kilo sacks of potatoes from there and then we'd go and knock on me in the door and ask for a tin of beans we lived rough and the bedroom that me and Kyle share because his mum had disowned him as well we shared two single mattresses on the floor they were battered in this bedroom and we fended for ourselves when I was like 12 the way I used to make money is we used to play this game online, Legend of Meribus something like World of Warcraft or something like that and I was impersonating a woman at 12 years old and I'm chatting to these guys from Saudi Arabia like relatives of the royal family and I'm spending all nights hunting with these guys and chatting and pretending to be this woman absolutely catfishing and then I build this trust and this would be going on like two months and then I come up with the story of I've got to stop playing the game I've got to take up a part-time job to pay for my university fees and they'd be like don't go, don't go I'll send you some money and whatever else and I've done this with a few different fellas on there and they'd be sending me like this is via Western Union or Moneygram I can't remember where it was, I was about 12 at the time and they're sending me these £2,000, £3,000 over in the post so I'm 12 years old and I've got money now so we had a couple of years which was really rough then we'd make a couple of grand and as you do at that age I just get spent on night track suits and a load of McDonald's and then you're back at square one again but I loved every minute of it every minute of the journey that's something that I'll always be grateful for will be more than that neglect is also what's enabled me to be so different from everybody else because there are a lot of people who I grew up with and some of them are happy, some of them aren't and none of them really went on to achieve what I thought they would and the people who are like the the promising people in school I haven't really gone on to do much with their life which isn't the biggest measure of life I'll say to anyone it doesn't matter what you've got or what you've done if you're happy, you've won at life for a lot of the people that I went to school with who look like they were going to do big things they're going to have mundane lives with mundane jobs and they're miserable and to know that I've come from where I've come from and I'm in a place now where yes, I'm wealthy now yes, I'm successful now but that's secondary I'm happy and I've gone through a lot of hardships and I'm really happy and I'm in a really good place and I can pass that on I'm in a position where I can pass that on to my friends and my family and that's you couldn't buy that private school and with all the you know with all the legs up in life that you could get from affluent parents or caring parents you could never have purchased that so when you've got he's sailing the gym then so I reconnected with my mum at this point and I'm talking to my grandmother I had a bit of money myself and long story short I ended up taking a loan from my mum on my grand, put my own money in and still couldn't come up with the amount that he wanted for the gym, I had about half and I said to him look, I said any chance you could let me buy half of it and I will slowly buy you out as we go and he was in a rush to get back up north at this point he only needs to get back to Glasgow, he's like Nick, okay let's do it so I took half the business off him I took 50% of the business and from there I've just lived off tuna and noodles for three years so minimalistic is my thing at this point I don't need to buy anything, don't need to spend anything I can live minimal so every penny that I made from wages and every penny that I got as a split to the profits went straight to buying more shares more shares, more shares and I brought in when I bought the gym it was it had that bodybuilding mentality as I was talking about through my own experience of vanity and everybody was against each other and I completely got rid of that culture and pushed in my old free running parkour community, if everyone needs to push everyone to do better everyone needs to network more everyone needs to give each other help tips starts to encourage people to network on social media and it completely transformed the environment in the gym, it's come from being this hostile CD bodybuilding gym we've got a really good community here so business goes up and I had Paul bought out within it must have been about eight or nine months and the gym was completely mine then and I was in a really good place and this takes us up to maybe the end of 2018, early 2019 and I'd gone, I was still on licence at this time and I'd gone the gym's doing really well my clothing brand's doing really well gets to the summer of 2019 and I'd been I'd been travelling in and out of the country my licence condition said you can't leave the country full stop that's a standard condition you can't leave the country now I'd left the country about 30 times at this point and I'd just been travelling not doing anything shady just going backpacking around Asia rock climbing, whatever else gets to July 2019 and I'd I'd agreed to take in a young lad into the gym doing about 15, my best mate Kylo mentioned earlier, he was his little brother he'd been having trouble on your stage only 15, that lad's come through the front window with a machete he's trying to attack him because he's selling a bit of weed or whatever else and he said look can you take him he needs to be away from the house, look he's not living with me on my licence to tell you what, I'll put him in the office upstairs in the gym, I'll turn that into a bedroom he can stay there, he'd be locked after moves him in the gym and social services vet me, the police vet me he said right we think you're a great role model okay you can stay with you every three weeks his mum has a meeting with social services police and a few other entities to check he's okay now this is July 2019 now I'd gone back over to Asia they have this meeting with the police and his mum says look just to let you know, Nick's not here at the minute but the staff are looking after he's in everything's fine and the police officers sat in the room he said what do you mean Nick's not here she said oh he's in Japan how's Nick in Japan if he's not allowed to leave the country so I get to call when I'm in Tokyo off from Basin he's like look you're going back to jail so he comes back from Manchester airport and I had a full squad of police waiting for me so he goes back to Liverpool for a recall for a month and it was like water off the booked back I was like you know what I've had two years of travelling not bothered, dealt with it, it was in a good place got back out and then we slowly get towards pandemic times now and we're approaching March 2020 was it the pandemic hit and we had to close in the national lockdown which we did in the first national lockdown we closed our doors, nobody knew what it was nobody knew how serious it was going to be and it would have been it would have been reckless to do anything other than close, so we closed our doors and we gave we gave all of our equipment away to all our members, basically said look, come and take whatever you want I trust you, we've got this community we've got this report, you take everything that you want bring it back when this ends and that's exactly what happened and all our members suck and the gym got stripped bare you're talking like 60, 70, 80 grand where the kid anything that could come off the floor went to people's houses and as a an unintended consequence of that everyone kept paying their memberships so we had everybody's memberships coming in we had the Bayer series off the government and everything else so we did better through the first lockdown than we did done if we were open which, you know, it's hard not to feel guilty for that when so many businesses did it so poorly because we had that report with our members and we could say look, we trust you take what you want and we did really well through that and then we come out of lockdown and then they bring in the tier system at the end of 2020, so this takes us to probably the first or second week of October 2020 and there's an announcement made on the news that Liverpool's due to be the first city in the country to be put into tier 3 tier 3 restrictions now nobody really knew what that meant at the time because everything was so fresh and they published the legislation online Boris goes on TV and he gives this speech of gives the list of the sectors that need to close immediately and there's nail salons, etc, etc gymnasiums are all set to close in two days time, that's it, that's that now I read through the legislation that they published online and there was no mention of gyms so I thought this has got to be an oversight he's put that in there not knowing that it wasn't included in there so I had a conversation with one of our other local gym owners two of them in fact Chris and Thea and I said look we said this is the situation this is what we know there's nothing in there to say that we need to close legally, what do we do and this went back and forth for a few hours and we're like you know what, let's do it let's take a stance, let's stay open so two days before we were due to be forced to close we both put videos up on social media saying it's wrong legislation doesn't say this is what's meant to happen we're not going to close and I'm still on licence at this point so I thought I get arrested, I'm going back to jail I didn't have long left on my life, I had about a month left but I thought I'm probably going to end up going back to jail I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it for the right reasons it is what it is so we took this stance, I put this video up said we're not closing and then within 24 hours I think that video had like 4-5 million views so we had the police there the next day oh we believe you don't intend to close tomorrow we just need to let you know that we are going to come to find you if you don't blah blah blah I had a really good relationship with the police like I had done from my free running days we used to deal with them every day because we were on rooftops at your job I appreciate that you're not going to get any argument from me you do what you need to do I'll be decent with you, you'll be decent with me and they leave and the following morning was the first day that we would use the closing tier 3 this would have been October 15th 2020 police attend the JMA's o'clock in the morning and there was maybe 10 officers from the armed division of Liverpool's police so the whole idea from what I could perceive at least was intimidation we're going to send the full squad down make them feel intimidated make sure they close and that will be the end of it so they turn up and there's 10 police officers and they've all got the big fancy yellow tasers on and they said you need to close immediately you know are you going to get a thousand pound fine you know so I phoned Chris and said look are we doing this are we in because they're in front of me right now I'm about to be fined are we in don't let me do this on my own like if we're in we're in if we're not we're not tell me now and they said let's do it we're in we're behind you all the way let's do it so I said to the police officers look traps no disrespect I'm going to film this interaction right now when we go pro I said to do yourselves a favour stand whatever distance apart you need to I don't want to get you in trouble this is just for me to document it so it films them the gym panned around the mall panned up to our people's gym sign at the back went home took the thousand pound fine went home made a video about it and that again we go viral again and from there everything just rocketed to the point where within the first 24 hours of having the gym open I've been contacted by CNN ITV Channel 4 New York Times like it was absolute chaos and we'd gotten in touch with some of our local MPs our local mayor and said look we've read to this legislation this is wrong because Boris Boris was then blaming it on he said the decision to close gyms was left to the local MPs and the local mayor so I contacted them on Twitter and was like what are you doing and they've said oh this has nothing to do with us they've done it I was like well he's pointing at you your point at them who is it and basically called them out and said look we've got one side telling us it's them the other saying it's them what do we do now and that's when we launched the petition and off the back of the petition we had a ton of celebrities get on board because everybody was sympathetic to the situation because nobody wanted to be in lockdown you know there's fair arguments on both sides as to you know what extent we should or should not lockdown but everybody was sympathetic to the cause and got behind us launched the petition we ended up with 650,000 signatures on this petition all of a sudden they couldn't ignore us now we're on headline news multiple times a day I had interviews live interviews with TV one straight into another this goes on for like three days and at this point we've now closed the front entrance to the gym because the police were attending 10-15 times a day now and they said we can give you this £1,000 fine but when we come back and it doubles every time until it gets to 10,000 and we can do it every three hours so it was a case of every three hours they could give us a £10,000 fine they were okay but we can't keep the front door open so we kept the back door open so every time the police had turned up we hired extra staff to monitor the cameras and any time the police had turned up we'd see them on the cameras, we'd turn the music right down and they'd come and they'd check the doors and they'd leave and it got to the point where they were coming out that much and they knew exactly what was going on and they'd push on the door and they'd look up at the camera and go and we developed a really good relationship with the police and they were hyper aware of the fact that any video I was taking at the time was getting millions of views so they were very cautious in how they approached it but they were sympathetic any time I'd speak to them they were like look we don't want to be doing this we know you're in the right we've heard everything that you've said on TV and in the newspapers and you write the legislation we had the support of the police and we had the local mayor in my DMs on Twitter saying look I'm behind you what can we do so we banged on we hit the petition over and over again and then we eventually went up to meet Sir Lindsay Hoyle Speaker of the House of Commons went up to Charlie to meet him personally to get this petition fast tracked and that was a surreal experience off the back of having only been out of prison a couple of years and I sat in front of one of the most influential politicians in some back office in Charlie and he's like listen I completely get where you're coming from he said I've listened to all the statistics that you put forward on mental health and physical health and the damage that this is going to do he said I lost my daughter to suicide last year and she was a keen gym goer and that was her only outlet for her stress and depression he said this is what I'm going to do he said when you leave here I'm going to call the Prime Minister personally and I'm going to tell him that this petition needs to be heard immediately and we left and within an hour we've been contacted to say the debate is going to be heard on Monday so we got that and then over the weekend over the weekend I got news that it was being overturned this is before it even happened I got news over the weekend to say look I'm going to post on early next week that you're going to be allowed to open you've beaten them basically so this happens and I put a video up I seen the message in the morning and I got the call and I put this video up on social media and I was hyper emotional and I'm sobbing my eyes out in my dressing gown taking this video in hindsight I should have put something else on because they ended up using this video on national news I'm looking I'm sobbing my eyes out like a 10 year old girl but we did it, we beat them and they were going to reverse it and the date that they were due to reverse it was the 23rd of October which just happened to be my 30th birthday so the day that we got the victory was on my 30th birthday and that same day I got published in the New York Times made front page in the New York Times on my 30th birthday and to round the journey off up to that point of everything that I'd been through to then now I've been on national news in nearly every country from Russia to Singapore everywhere in the UK, front page in the New York Times like it felt so surreal and my Instagram DMs were crazy, I had celebrities that I've idolized for years popping up offering help and it was so it was so difficult to manage and it was difficult to manage emotionally I was hell bent on the fact that we needed to respond to every single message, every single DM and at the time we were getting somewhere in the region of 5 and 10,000 DMs on my personal Instagram a day so we had, there was four of us working round the clock just responding to my DMs I had me and three of my pals literally working round the clock shifts responding to every single DM and it it took a massive toll on me psychologically it took a massive toll on the team but inevitably we did the right thing and gym access was then given back to if it was about 6 or 7 million people who were put into tier 3 at one point who would have had their access restricted had it not been for everything that we did why do you think the gym is one of the last to open? when you get McDonald's open you get all the shit takeaways open that why do you think the gym was one of the last to open? money talks unfortunately and when you have commercial entities like McDonald's that have a lot of political influence I mean look at the look at the ETAB to help out scheme now my statistics are a bit rusty now it's been a long time since I've thought or spoke about them but the link between obesity and just generally being overweight and critical illness with Covid is as black and white as it gets if you are overweight you're like 119% more likely to become critically ill from Covid you're 200% more likely to be hospitalised so we've got all these statistics linking obesity to critical illness with not just with Covid but with most illnesses most influencers when you're overweight or obese your immune system is compromised if your immune system is compromised you're going to suffer more severely from any illness so our response to that is to endorse and eat out to help out scheme where you can go and get your McDonald's 50% off and then you're told to go home and isolate in your house so we're feeding into this feeding into this circle of self inflicted punishments and we've seen more damage from Covid between the United Kingdom and the United States it hurts us more than it hurts any other country in the world because we are side by side with the United States of having the most overweight population in the world because we abuse ourselves so much and to think that our response to that was right we need to give everyone 50% off fast food is absolutely bonkers I think it's a big plan not to go down the conspiracy route but just to kind of actually look at it all because I think I'm the same I'm rusted with all the figures and stats but the survival rate was basically 99 points something I think under the ages of 75 it was statistically there was unless you are unless your immune system is compromised for whatever pre-existing illness you are critically ill from Covid it's an almost non-existent chance whereas you have I forget the name of the professor now he works out of Oxford University Neil I can't remember his surname so he compiles the cost-benefit analysis of nuclear fallouts when we should use a nuclear weapon what the fallout would be that specifically deals in cost-benefit equations and he measured the impact of going into long-term lockdowns bearing in mind very early on the World Health Organization said no state should ever use long-term lockdowns as a solution to a pandemic ever just shouldn't happen maybe two weeks, okay fine six months, you're asking for disaster and he talks about the I don't know if it's called the R-value or something I'm really rusty on it but basically what he's suggesting is what we save in the short term by locking down yes, we will extend the lives of the 78, 79, 80-year-olds by about 12 months but you then take into consideration the hundreds of thousands and I mean midway through the pandemic cancer referrals missed this is just cancer referrals so when you take into consideration the amount of cancer diagnosis that we've missed and how many years of someone's life that will take we have absolutely messed this up because if you're going to say what's more important and people will say a life is a life but what's more important to save a five-year-old's life or an 83-year-old's life unfortunately you've got if there's a train coming and you have an old woman and a five-year-old girl in front of it and you only save one I'm sorry but the moral stance of one life's worth as much as the other it's not if you're 83 years of age you've lived a great life and I had this conversation with my grandparents because we both lived our lives so we don't want you giving this up for this for us to live an extra 12 months and the comprehensive study did was absolutely fascinating it was like we have caused 20 years worth of serious damage now with what we've got with the NHS backlog you know we've exacerbated the obesity situation because we were already obesity was already costing us, costing the NHS the NHS alone in excess of nine billion a year 30 billion to wider society and they are terrifying stats and then for a year and a half we've locked everybody down permanently fast food and said you're not allowed to exercise so all we've done is cripple the NHS further whether that's deliberate or not is an entirely different conversation you saw people are still struggling but when you actually think what went down like when I'm asked to walk into a restaurant but take it off and you sit down like that's fucking common sense what's going on, I ain't a scientist or a doctor same as yourself but it's just about a common sense that I was still climbing mountains I was still doing things and the shit that I used to get but I knew my mental health was slipping, I can't sit in the house and it's not to be selfish, I was away from everybody I had to be out in nature, I had to keep myself busy like that and the amount of businesses that are still closed down now like the suicide route through the roof, alcohol abuse from through the roof, domestic abuse from through the roof like everything else went through the roof and for a a virus that the percentage of deaths wasn't that high people go off the nut there and I think a lot of people have walking up to it now but they have now and it's a little bit, it's a little too late unfortunately and as you say we had child mental health cases at record highs, record highs suicides at record highs, the statistics were terrifying and I I did I did a documentary with The Guardian through Covid and I referenced my time in prison and I was like look the biggest punishment that we can do to somebody in this country, by law is put them in prison and the biggest punishment you can get in prison is to be put in isolation and you're telling me the healthiest thing for this country to do right now is isolate, that's the most severe punishments we've got in this country, shy of having capital punishment, so you're basically inflicting the most serious punishments upon every single person in this country and asking them to go home stay at home, stay on their own and just sit and watch BBC news all day long about people dying and you know it's more fine and they went so far with it and the government even got penalised by off-common and I bet they did they had these huge billboards in London saying the runner next to you most likely has Covid and it was literally a billboard, a 30 foot billboard maybe even bigger, of an image of somebody running and this caption next to it, the runner next to you most likely has Covid, off-common made them take that down and that's the extremes they went to and you even had the BBC putting pitches up on how to have safe sex through Covid and a picture of a couple wearing masks, completely naked face to face wearing masks, having sex, exchanging all manner of bodily fluids and I'm like what is going on? But fear is a mad thing, that's why the world does control by fear and I see people still wearing masks I see people sitting on their car wearing a mask wearing the same mask for months what do you think the germs have in that? It's used to open your own eyes like I get, like you want to protect elderly and protect us but now they're starting to give vaccines and even we don't want to dive too deep in it but the vaccines themselves and how they were created and how fast they were created and the money behind it and who's behind it like you can go on all day and go right down the rabbit hole but all that stuff we used to have to play getting worldwide attention because you have passed as well and then obviously back in prison do you think there was a connection of you stepping up to the government or was it just a case of like you were a bad boy back in your day or coming back to get you or do you think there is a connection? I think there's definitely a connection and we're into we're into July 2021 and between all of that happening in October 2020 to July 21 I've gone on to do weekly appearances on TV, campaigning for mental health physical health I've got on board as Ryan Rose's health and well-being advisor in his campaign to be London Mayor I've done so much I push the work out to help out scheme I've got that to the floors of parliament I was doing everything I possibly could to promote physical and mental health I'd done so much charity work and I was so proud of everything that I'd done and we get to July 2021 and we hear big bang on the door first thing in the morning and I you know I push in my partner Jade at the time and I'm nudging her and I'm like it's just going to be another racehorse delivery for you get out of bed and answer the bloody door sends her downstairs to get this what I assumed was a partial anyway and the next thing I hear is Massey side police and I thought it's just COVID related again over that 12 months I had about a hundred interactions with the police and they were all decent I thought what is it this time anyway they comes up the stairs we've got an arrest warrant I said what for what's going on now oh it's from Jay-Z police so okay so I haven't spoken to anybody from Jay-Z in years and I said what's this about and they wouldn't tell me anything they didn't want to tell me or they genuinely didn't know anything but they they took the stance of we know nothing and you know they they searched the house they searched the gym and they found absolutely nothing because it's been years since I've done anything it takes me to the police station and it was only Massey side police this time that had got me and Jay-Z customs were flying over the following day apparently so they still couldn't tell me nothing customs come over get me and they tells me on the plane I had a long conversation with them I said what is this about you'll find out when you get there find out when you get there lands meets the lead customs agents and he's like it's for an import of cannabis 2018 with an Anthony Dryden and the penny drops straight away then I knew exactly what it was and to to skip forward a little bit I get gets the prison gets the Jay-Z prison charged in fact tell a lie no I was bailed I was bailed on the Friday I seized the magistrate prosecution stand up give the give their spiel we're not concerned that Nick's going to interfere with the ongoing investigation it's three years old we're not no objection to bail my solicitor stands up duty advocates says look Nick's done all this with his life look at all these articles everything he's doing with mental health give him the bail so he agreed to my bail on the Friday and he bailed me for the weekend on the condition that I come back on the Monday and I have a tag fitted and I stay on tag whilst I'm on bail so he comes back to court Monday morning solicitor says look we're going to be in and out in 60 seconds it's a formality don't worry about it and he goes into the courtroom and it's a different magistrate for whatever reason he comes over to me he said look just just be aware it's a different magistrate and she's known to be quite difficult I said okay so does that change anything he said nah you'll be fine everything's fine so the same the same situation goes again my solicitor stands up says look we're here for a continuation of Friday we're only here to get the tag fitted police area today I couldn't get done on the Friday because the officer wasn't there who fits tags he was on holiday he said he's here today we can fit the tag no problem and she hears the case and she disappears into the back room for 15 minutes and I started to get nervous at this point and she comes back into the room and this is where I got the first idea that's something you know this seemed like there was motivation behind this and she says I'm going to ignore the fact that you were given bail on Friday as she said I'm treating this not as a continuation but as a fresh application and as such I'm denying you bail and you've received six years for this last time and I believe you can expect to receive the same or more this time bearing in mind I've been invited on 21 kilos of cannabis which to your average user you may buy two grams a week to smoke at home may sound like a lot but to anybody that's trafficked in drugs before you could lose three kilos down the side of your sofa do you know what I mean it buttons the maximum sentence that should have produced would have been about 14 months so she's in my administrative court now saying I can expect six years or more my partner Jade is in the dark crying her eyes out I'm like what the fuck has just happened so he takes me to prison I get my depths through quite quickly and I'm reading through all this paperwork and what what had happened was in 2018 somebody that I'd met whilst I was in prison and Jade reached out to me he dropped me a message said look I've been buying cannabis pollen from the dark web my guy is stocked and his counts disappeared whatever it was any chance you can you can sort me out and bearing in mind they've got all these messages in black and white and I said to him listen mate I'm out of the game completely I said I can I can put you in touch with my guy you can do whatever between years he's like right okay so I spoke to one of my mates and said look will you help him out he's like don't really trust him do as a favor you sit in the middle for the first one right okay does him a favor sits in the middle of these three exchanges and this only goes on for a couple of weeks and then they ask me again and I might listen enough's enough I said do use a favor I'm not in this game anymore he's gonna have to speak to each other directly because I don't want anything to do with this I've got too much to lose I'm miles away from this game and I put them two in touch and that's the last I ever spoke to him never spoke to him again three years go by and that's when they come and arrest me and from what I can see in the paperwork they'd had this evidence for very near three years because he got arrested my co-accused on something unrelated to me and they went through his phone and the signal the app that we were using had backed up to his iCloud and they pulled these messages out of his iCloud so three years have gone by now and I'm looking through this paperwork and you obviously get a breakdown a step by step of the investigation and what happens and who submits the statements on what dates have happened and there had been three years and they'd had all of this evidence for three years they had me bound to write they had my phone number they had pictures of my passports on my Instagram more than enough evidence to act on it and they'd done nothing for three years and then in the February of 2021 the local press in Jersey a newspaper called the Jersey Evening Post they ran a big four spread article on me across two days on the one day it was a big two page spread it was from free runner to drug runner and then on the Tuesday another two big spread from prisoner mate to community hero and this huge write up of me and everything that I've done and then from the timeline that you can see in my depths it looks like just weeks after that article had come out they then decided right okay we're going to bother with this because ordinarily that quantity of cannabis at least cannabis pollen which is is cheaper than normal cannabis it would not be worth them coming over to the mainland to arrest someone to spend all the money in dating somebody it's just not worth doing and they've seen how well I was doing and seeing the potential to take assets off me and everything else and thought now's the time to get this guy we're going to get some we'll get a load of press we'll be able to see some assets whatever else so they waited three years and he arrested me in July of 2021 I got bail for three days I go into prison and it wasn't until the October that I went for bail again and I got knocked back and that was the first time I got put in the press properly and ITV news ran with a run with an article saying that I'd been invited on importation of cannabis and money laundering offences no context as to when it was from or anything else so at that time I had a good few big business deals going on including a contract that we were about to sign with JD Sports from my clothing brand which was going to be possibly the biggest you know the biggest deal business success that I ever would have had they got cold feet they backed away from that now the article not only did it not mention the date of the importation or the context of what had happened I mean don't get me wrong I was guilty of the crime I facilitated it I put them two people together and as you can imagine I regret it more than anything but the money laundering comments is what really really got me now what they charged me with is importation of cannabis and removal of criminal property and what that means is if I give you a quantity of cannabis in one hand and you give me a quantity of cash in the other hand that's two offences I've sold you the cannabis and I've also received criminal property which is the cash for the cannabis now in the entire history of Jersey law that's always been seen as one transaction so the even though they are separate charges by side they run concurrence in the entire history of Jersey law nobody has been giving consecutive sentences for that because it is one transaction and we were the first case in all of Jersey history to be given back to back sentences for that same transaction and removal of criminal property is a subsection of the money laundering act but to your layman who's reading the term money laundering first thing you think or at least the first thing I would think is he's been washing money through his businesses and that's not what it means but you've got no opportunity to give context to it all you've got is ITV news saying importation of cannabis, money laundering so as far as the outside world is concerned at this point I can't get out and talk okay whilst he's been doing all this positive stuff on TV and everything else he's secretly been selling cannabis in the background and he's been washing money through his business and it's zip closed and I can't say anything at this point so my life starts aspects of my life at least start crumbling around me and it's you know it becomes very apparent very quickly that there was a motivation there to make an example out of me and the solicitor that I used is from a firm called Baker & Partners and they represented Curtis when he got his 20 years over there and he said I'll pay the money because it will pay off and I spent the best part of a 60 grand on legal fees with this firm thinking they would want to get me this fantastic result and it comes to sentencing and for the quantity that they they'd arrested me for and indicted me for the sentence that should have come out of that was about 14 months and the prosecution had put this number forward on a mathematical basis the sentencing for for this charge should be however many once it was and I did the math and I contacted my lawyer I was like that's wrong he's added on like six months there and he's quite literally used the terms mathematically on a purely mathematical basis I said and then he's got his maths wrong I said he's a prosecutor at 20 years old how is he getting this wrong and he's like oh don't worry about that and the judge the judge is reading the charges and he reads this bit from the prosecution and even he goes that doesn't look right and he's called him out and called and he said the math doesn't work there he said you've given him more than you should have and at this point I'm thinking okay he sees the error and then they talk about the consecutive sentencing and whatever else and how it should always be counted as concurrent so I thought I'm sat in the dock we've got a good shot at the community service here my sentence should be about 14 months I've already served six, seven months they spoke to probation in Merseyside they said they were happy to take on my community service I was given community service so I thought look everything's looking fantastic here and they recessed and they come back in you get jurats in JD it doesn't work like it does in the UK you don't just get one judge you get a panel of what they call jurats not jury jurats which are basically a load of senior figures on the island that's it so you have the equivalents of five judges sat there in their fancy wigs and it's really intimidating and they come back out and for the first sort of minutes or so they're talking about everything that I've done positive and I thought this is fantastic and then you hear the however and then they get into you're a man of 30 years of age you've done this before you are in our eyes a professional drug dealer a professional money launderer and they dished this sentence out to me and completely ignored the fact that even the lead Bailiff himself had pointed out the inaccuracy in the math they went with it anyway so they give me six months extra for the cannabis than I should have ever got and then they give me another year on top for receiving the money for the cannabis that never happened in the history of Jersey law so I ended up with a three year sentence on what should have been a maximum 14 months and then when I spoke to my lawyer afterwards I was like what the fuck just happened he said Nick I've been in this game 30 years bearing in mind this fella is one of the most prestigious lawyers on the entire island he said I've never seen anything like it at all he said you've really pissed somebody off high up I said what do you mean by that he said well trust me you've irritated somebody who's in a position of of some influence he said look we can appeal he said then I'm confident that we'll get them we'll get the year taken off for things to run concurrent and we'll get your sentence brought down I said how long is that gonna take he said about six months I said six months I said if I transfer to the UK now I can be out in five months on tag I could stay here for another six months get a year and a half taken off my sentence and still end up doing more jail time than if I just accept what I've got now and I think the prosecution were aware of that I think they hit me with more than they more than they knew I should have gotten knowing that the time it would take me to appeal it would keep me in jail longer so no matter no matter what way I approached it that was fucked yeah completely mad that it was against the system especially the headlines that you made look what happens even though you can have a tinfoil hat on but there's got to be some sort of connection there you made that much noise you created change but when you go against the grain and try and get that noise if you become so popular and people start believing what you're saying and you start growing a following they just shut you down man they just shut you up listening about another sex waiting for you it's fucking scary the cancel culture now when you start making noise because everybody sees the world differently but if you're not going what is an agenda then you're fucked if you're not conforming you're a target and it's unfortunate and that's the result of me putting my head above the parapet and as I was saying before we started this talk today was it worth me doing definitely if I could go back now and not taking that stance in Covid and potentially save myself this prison sentence would I go back and change it no it wouldn't we impacted millions of people's lives positively we made a historic significant impact on the physical and mental health of the country we set precedent for people asking questions and for people to stand up for themselves I wouldn't change it at all and you know if that was the catalyst of me having this sentence which it looks from the investigation that that's exactly what happened because of the three years of them doing nothing so be it if that's a sacrifice that I have to make for I'm not trying to sound like a martyr here you know I did this and that's what I got for it I feel better in myself from having done that forget the praise and the press and anything else I feel better for now in that I had sucked that position and stood up and gone through everything to follow because that was a gamble because sometimes you doubt yourself but then it comes out to fucking Boris Johnson's having Christmas parties they're all having tear ups and everybody's in the house wearing masks losing businesses putting on weight suicide though and they're all fucking partying do you know what I mean that what you were thinking then when you got a freak is when you got that then you lost your partner your gran passed away who's always been there for you like how does that then fuck everything that you've tried to the year that I spent in prison especially the last 6 months that I spent in Liverpool felt like 10 times longer than the 3 years I did previously like that 12 months that I've just done felt like 10 years in comparison to the 3 that I did previously like that's the hardest thing I've gone through my entire life I got stitched up with the sentence I got stitched up with everything that went along the way and then I lost my nan and she's the closest thing that I had to a maternal mother the closest kind of physical connection I had to a mother was my nan I lost my nan and me and my partner split up around the same time everything that we lost business wise everything that we lost business wise everything that we lost business wise and then coming home I was excited for it but I was also quite apprehensive and I was very disappointed that I got done dirty by my local newspaper like that really bothered me so when the press ran with it the editor and chief come to court specifically out of respect for me to report on it accurately not do me any favours to report on it accurately and they ran with the headline reformed trafficker jailed for years old offence bang on the money am I reformed trafficker yes 100% was it back in jail for something that had happened years before yes the article goes on to explain the situation how old it was how it was suspicious that the customs had left it for 3 years without acting on it I had references from barristers and CEOs doctors you know politicians I had probably the best mitigation the court had ever seen and that was all covered accurately and that was the JSA evening post the Liverpool Echo however run with anti lockdown Jim Boss exposed as professional drug dealer now seeing that absolutely broke my heart to use this picture of me from 2014 where when I was abusing steroids and my face is like a beach ball and I've got this skin head and I look like a look like a meat bastard so it's not a flattering photo at all so they run with that headline and that picture absolutely slander me give no context to the time give no context to what I've done with my life since or anything you know completely misreported but to the point where I'm lying I mean they can use the term anti lockdown Jim Boss like that's their opinion despite the World Health Organization taking the same position in me as lockdown but I'm the anti lockdown Jim Boss you know as far as they want to word it but that okay that's their opinion but exposed as professional drug dealer gives the impression that it's present time and I've been exposed for doing this simultaneously to everything else I'm doing and then the week later they run with another article basically so I Jim owner journey from prison to national fame and prison again and then a third article another week later slander in me again and because they're owned by mirror group or Trinity group the rest jump on it then so the mirror the sun the star all mimic the Liverpool Echo article so I get I've got all this slander now and again using the term money launderer stuff like that and that's the damage that does for me is a as a business and as a commercial entity to have my name plastered around everywhere as a money launderer with no context to what had actually happened you know that that potentially blacklists me forever from you know a lot of avenues but I've come out and the reception that I've had is more positive than I ever could have hoped for you know I took my time to go back on social media you know I took a week or so to adjust myself goes back on social media and I have been inundated with thousands of messages everyone's super positive and everyone's got their tinfoil hats on you know you've been absolutely stitched up here but you know all the backing that I had in terms of brands and politicians and friends like the entire network no one's pulled away from me at all because everybody knows how old it was everybody knows the journey that I've come on so I've come back home now and arguably just as strong as a position is where I went away so it's trying to process that you know that time and that journey as you know just chalk that off to you know all that online calls on that yeah it's just all madness of the game that we're in we just don't know what the fuck's going on a necessary evil yeah and it's the time I just spent in HMP Liverpool there was hell that's the hardest six months I've ever done in my life prison is tough bastards in there so all scousers are tough bastards man like you never pull your will over the eyes like that the toughest of the tough all in one place everyone's trying to make a name out for themselves it's like a planet you find a planet and they're just fucking mad bastards I love the scousers but I just know how mad the fuckers are and it's terrifying and then wings and then wings in Liverpool five stories high you got your suicide net and there's always something going off so someone getting caught up and it's just chaos constantly and I landed on the induction wing and I thought I was in a very good position and quite a few of the female staff knew me and followed me on social media so I was getting good treatment I was there five or six days and then one of the male SOs I just started a shift and become aware that I was followed by these officers on social media seen as ass put a conflict of interest in against me moved me off the wing and put me on the worst wing in Liverpool which I think is from what I'm told is the largest prison wing in all of your energy wing of Liverpool and it's huge and it is intimidating ass anything and the six months I was on there was just a reminder of why I got out the game in the first place I mean that is no place doesn't matter how hard and you are that's not somewhere you want to be and I say this to people all the time it's not a prison and tells you that it ain't intimidating or it ain't scary the full of shit it's a scary place and it's a lonely place and even if you're not even if you're not impacted too much by the environment and everything that goes on in there just being pulled away from everything positive in your life is enough to destroy your soul where do you go for the future like you've had your rollercoaster of a life like you've had your sad moments you've had your good moments you've had world press it's amazing that you've got fucking GID coming in to take your clothing brand you lose it all you're in the papers again people who've backed you then puts elements of doubt into their mind that fuck me I've backed somebody here that's pulled the wheel over their eyes to basically getting your story out again trying to get things back on track where do you go forward now from here forward from here I promise myself I wouldn't go back into a thousand mile per hour lifestyle but as I'm sure I'm exactly the same trying to stop yourself doing that as near impossible so I've embraced the fact that I'm backing at full speed and you know my priority was having opportunities like this and getting opportunities from people like yourself to get the accurate story out first that was what was most important to me because I'm really proud of what I've done the last few years I'm really really proud and I know that my nan and granddad were really proud of me that was more important to me than anything and you know nothing can take away from that so it was just important for me to set the record straight and then once I've done that and this is the one of the first big steps in doing that I've got some press lined up from there and I want to take some time out I think at least that's what I'm telling myself I'm in early talks at the minute with regards to having a book published we'll see where that goes I'm trying to slow myself down a little bit now because there's been that much that has happened through straight from all our trauma as a kid straight into this big international free running career to being all in the papers, to being in prison to being out, to being all in the papers again to being back in prison, to being all in the papers again here we are again it's been non-stop for 20 years and I think I owe it to myself to force myself away from all the hype from all the madness, from all the work and just take a bit of time out and I thought I'd just live again just be around people I care about again and just take that time and it's difficult to do that and you get lost in the moment and I know if I'm not hyper conscious of it it's only going to be a matter of time before I get pulled up in another moment it's just going back to the basics again what's your social media platforms on that night for anybody that's maybe getting in contact or just trying to basically get the spoke to you for fucking with a lockdown shift for anybody that's maybe want to get involved or help you with businesses, help you with your book what's your social media platforms my Instagram is nikkapo underscore underscore my website is nikkapo.co.uk and that's pretty much it I've come off Twitter, Facebook and a few of the others so it's just there, just Instagram and my website for that I know we're talking about mental health and that but for anybody that's maybe watching and struggling with mental health what advice would you have for them talk, talk talk, vocalise don't suffer in silence in isolation there is always somebody that you can talk to and often times it's the people that you expect at least the people that you think would be people that you think would be there for you aren't always the ones that are but you will find someone and if you do start talking and you do find that confidence to talk about your issues you will find the right person and you know as is evident from what we've talked about today regardless of what you've been through you will find a way through it to talk about it do you like to finish up on anything else brother? No, just a huge thank you for you for having me here today and this is the the first of me being able to get my voice back on record and find some clarity and find a bit of peace with them myself so, just gratitude to yourself being brave enough to talk about the pain of the past as well thanks a lot of courage mate, I wish you all the best for the future stay out of trouble and I'll see you soon