 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention, Patriot tradition in Orlando, Florida 2019. And our next guest speaker, a very special individual. I've had the honor to be a good friend with for about six months now. We spent some time together. He's a donation background. Very powerful lesson for us. He's been through some crucibles that most of us can only imagine. And he's come through on the other side as an example to everyone else. Today he's going to talk a bit about fatherhood. Going to show some wisdom with us about what he's seen in some of those dark places. Very proud to present my friend, my brother, Bobby Dino. Gentlemen, good afternoon. Thank you for having me. My name is Bobby Dino. I'm honored to be here. I've had a chance to talk with some of you and see what's happening here. And I'm honored to be a part of it. I'm going to share a little bit of my story and what I went through and talk a little bit about an epidemic that we're having right now in the United States. It's fatherless children. Statistics are not in their favor. Whether it be education, whether it be criminalization, whether it be a mentalization to where there have some psychological disorders, bad things happen when kids grow up with only one parent. How do I know? Let me tell you a little bit about my backstory. My father died before I was born. Never had a chance to meet him. It affected others, my family, people that knew him a lot more than it ever did me when I was a kid. I heard stories about what a great guy he was. He was out of all the four brothers. He was the best one. He was the smartest. This and that. It was all stories. I was hearing stories about some guy that might as well have been made up to me because I had no idea. What I did know is I didn't have a father. So as I was growing up, I was what they make call nowadays a kid that had kind of these ADD tendencies. It was bouncing off everything. Wild. I had no direction. There was nobody to tell me, hey, knock it off, kid. So I kept bouncing my head off of stuff, growing up, and then I got a little older and didn't learn. And then finally, in August of 2000, I got in a physical altercation with someone. We got in a fight and an innocent bystander who had nothing to do with the situation was seriously hurt. It weighs on me to this day. It weighed on me then. I caused drama and heartache in someone's life that had absolutely nothing to do with my drama. As a result of this, I was arrested, convicted, and ended up going to prison for initially only five years. So I got a five-year prison sentence, California State Prison. I was around people that I had no idea even existed in real life. Psychopaths, murderers, guys that would look right through you because they'd rather just kill you than have to deal with you. I'm not speaking in hyperbole right now either, understand. When I say they would kill you, they would kill you. I saw it many times, participated in many riots. Because of this, I had this belief when I first came in as this kid that I had to do what the OGs told me, the prison daddies. The guys that when you're this young impressionable man coming into the system go, Hey youngster, come over here. I'll teach you how to do this and that. You start going through this gladiator school. They teach you how to be a better criminal, how to hide stuff from the police, how to really kick the shit out of someone. How to put a lock in the sock and smack somebody in the head with it. How to pick up a mop ringer and use it like a mace and knock somebody across the room. Crazy stuff that you would not even think about in the real world I was seeing on a daily basis. Because of this belief that I had to fit in, that I had to go along with this intensely racial system that exists in the California prison system. Everything is race. Everything is race. And so much race that if a black man were to drink from this water and I was dying of thirst, I could not drink from that. Or I would be severely messed up and possibly killed. That racial. So I'm in this place and I think, uh oh, I'm scared. I'm not going to lie about it. I was completely freaked out when I got there. I was seeing all these incredibly brutal scenes constantly to where I felt it was only a matter of time before maybe somebody got me. So I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be one of the fellas. Well unfortunately what happens is when these prison daddies scoop you up, they're doing so for a reason. It's not out of the kindness of their hearts. It's because you'll do the work that they won't. So now it's, hey, hold this shank. Hey, so and so didn't pay his dope debt. You've got to go deal with him. And you being this soldier, they also use the term torpedo because you go and get what you need to get. It brought me into a world which I was not familiar with but which I believed I had to live in in order to survive. I didn't grow up that way. I didn't grow up racial. I grew up in Orange County. I was born in Anaheim. Anaheim, California, Orange County. My first job was at Disneyland. I was not that scene. But I ended up in that scene. So we go forward a few years and I'm still running and drinking pruno, which is homemade wine and smoking the joints we get sometimes and tobacco, hanging out with the fellas, playing P-knuckle and spades and hearts and working out, working out. Oh, let me tell you about working out. That's something that's mandatory. You've got to work out. So I'm doing all these things. And then one day I'm told, hey, Bob, there might be a sweep, which is what they call when the correctional officers come through and look for contraband. Bob, there might be a sweep and we got a little bit of dope. It was actually marijuana but they just called it dope. You need to hold on to it for us. Hide it. Okay. Didn't think anything of it. Unfortunately, the cops thought a lot more of it than I did because when they found it on my person, I was arrested. And yeah, you can get arrested in prison. It happens. I was arrested. I was tried because I took that one to trial hoping maybe God had smile on me. But I was convicted. And on top of that, five years was added another six years. So now I'm doing an 11-year prison sentence. And I'm still not convinced that this is the wrong way to be because I need to survive. However, there was a worm, a worm of a thought, if you will, that had begin entering my mind. I was going and getting in these riots. I was going and beating people into the ground over dope that I didn't do. We're getting in full-blown riots because some guy that didn't even share his stuff with me didn't pay his bill. So now I'm literally going and risking my life behind somebody else's drama. As I got a little bit older and as I saw more, that thought grew and it became bigger and bigger until one day I couldn't take it anymore. I call the meeting with the woods. The woods is what they refer to, that's what they call the whites in prison. It's a short form of peckerwood. So they call them the woods. These are the whites that are different from the Aryan Brotherhood, from P9 and from the skinheads. They're just regular white guys, but you still got to be a group because you don't want to be by yourself. Well, I realized that being by myself was the only way that I was going to live. Because if I didn't get out of that lifestyle I was in, I was going to die in prison. Whether I was going to pick up another charge, whether I was going to be killed, if I didn't stop the lifestyle I was living, it would cost me my life. So one day I woke up and I said, enough's enough, I'm done. So I went to the shot caller, the guy who's in charge. And this guy knew me from another prison that I was at. We'd been in riots together. He knew I wasn't afraid. And I said, hey, we need to call a meeting. What happened? What do we need to call a meeting for? I got something I want to tell everyone. What do you want to tell everybody? I'm out. You sure you want to do that? Yeah, I want to do that. Okay. So later on that afternoon a meeting was called. There was probably about 80 white guys in the building at that time, but only about 30 or 40 showed up. And the guy that was the shot caller at the time, his name was Keith, said, hey, Bobby's got something he wants to tell you guys. So now I've got all eyeballs on me. I say, fellas, I'm not trying to disrespect any of you right now, but I need to tell you something. From now on, you don't have anything coming from me and I won't have anything coming from you. You don't expect anything from me and I won't expect anything from you. I'm out of this lifestyle. At that point there was a youngster, probably a guy in his early 20s that immediately kind of got upset. Even though I said no disrespect, I was full-on disrespecting everybody. And that's pretty much how they all took it. What the fuck? You can't do that. If anybody's got a problem with how I'm going to live my life, let's take it over to the blind spot and handle it right now. Because none of you guys are going to tell me how to live. Any takers? No? We're good? And that was that. I was on my own. Now, me doing what I did at that point was something that, if you want to talk about anxiety, about hypervigilance, about watching your back, now because I didn't have the protection of my race, I was an open target. Somebody came at me, there was no one coming to save me. And especially not the cops. As a matter of fact, dealing with a California CEO, you don't want to talk to them because it'll only get worse. They'll throw you to the wolves and then videotape it with their cell phones. So I was on my own, but a funny thing happened. Funny thing happened. The other races that I thought, uh-oh, now I'm a target, they saw what I did. Even though there's a lot of people in prison, it's a small community and the guys in their gossip just as bad as any woman you'll ever meet in your life. Everybody's talking, so everybody knows. They had a respect for me. I said, look, he ain't with that racist bullshit. He ain't with that stuff about we got to ride our race and I can't drink after a black guy and I can't hang out with Mexican dudes. He's not with any of that. And there was a respect there. So instead of becoming a target, I became someone that nobody really had a problem with. Now, that being said, there were a few instances while I was in there about every six months or so, I'd have to make an example out of someone. The reason for this is because everything in prison is solved with violence. Everything. There is nothing in prison that is not solved with violence. Nothing. If you and I can't agree on something, we're going to violence. And that's that. This can be hard for people that haven't been in that environment to wrap your head around because in society, you say, oh, well, we talk it out. Talk it out. And if there's a problem, you know, maybe I got to sue somebody. Maybe I got to call the cops. You know, we talk it out. You don't get that luxury. If we can't come to an agreement, you will be on the receiving end. I myself was lucky in the sense that I had the wherewithal to think about changing my life. There were others that weren't lucky like that. There was this kid everybody called Red. He was an 18-year-old kid. They called him Red because he was a total ginger, just a big, shocking head full of red hair. And he came in about three months after he graduated high school. So when you're talking about a kid in that kind of sense, he was a kid in there. He was about as fresh as you can get in an adult prison. He was immediately scooped up by the woods. Immediately. Oh, come here, kid. Oh, yeah. Come on. We'll show you what to do. And I saw that, and I went, uh-oh. Because I knew what was going to happen. And I knew a little bit about the kid's story, too, and it was similar to mine, so it kind of affected me. He didn't have his parents. He was living with his grandparents. I also, at a young age, had to go live with my grandparents. And he kind of had that aw-shucks attitude about him, you know? Always smiling. He didn't have that prison mask, that look that you get when you're about to fuck somebody up. He didn't have that. It was just kind of like a, you know... So with those kind of people, they're easy to scoop up because these prison daddies are giving them attention that they never had. So now, instead of somebody that may have been steered in a good direction by a male figure, by someone, this kid's about to go down the darkest road, okay? So at first, you know, it's playing cards, it's doing this. Then it's, hey, hey, Red, you know, you gotta hold this shank for us. Hey, Red, they're gonna do a sweep, so you gotta take this dope to the hoop. You know what taking the dope to the hoop means? It means sticking it up your ass. So here, you gotta take these drugs, put them up your ass, kid. Then when we need them later, you can get them back from ya. So now this kid is sticking baggies of heroin up his ass. He's slamming heroin in speed with these people, drugs that he had never done before. And he's got this whole new darker side to him. He's got a habit now, right? Well, he was only there for 16 months. With California prison terms, 16 months is the shortest you get. And he did 12 out of those 16. But the problem was, Red was in the most sick, twisted boot camp that you could put anybody in. And he lived it 24-7. He didn't get to go home at the end of a shift. It was his life. And he lived it for a year. I heard from the prison counselor after he was released about two weeks later. He overdosed on heroin and died. See, what happens is when you're in prison, all the drugs that you're doing, it's a very small quantity, very small amount. So Red's logic was, well now that I'm free and I can get a big amount, I can do a bigger shot. And he did. And he's gone. Even talking about it, I have to catch myself not to let my eyes tear up because that was something that stuck with me for the longest. That guy wasn't my homeboy. He wasn't where I was from. But I'd played cards with him a couple of times. I knew he was kind of this goofy kid, but I didn't ever try and be an influence in this kid's life or anything. I never tried talking to him. But when that happened, the personality of this goofy kid that had come in, I thought, what if I did talk to him? What if I would have said, hey, Red, come play cards over here, man. Hey, let's go out on the yard and work out and meet him, my friend. Now, I'm not saying I'm not trying to put him and his death on me. But the thought was there that if somebody would have just told this kid, don't go that way. Go this way. He could still be alive. He could still have been a productive member of society. He might have gotten out and maybe that was the shock to him, like, oh, prison's bad. He was young enough. I'm never going back there. No. So the problem with this is when I had that same experience of growing up the way that this kid did but saw where he went and where a lot of others went like him and then started noticing, wait, he's not the only one. He's not the only one that comes from a single parent home. So does this guy. So does that guy. So does that guy. That guy lives with his grandparents. That guy grew up in a foster house. That guy bit in YA since he was fucking 14 years old. And those are the ones you've got to watch out for. The youngsters that come up in the system, they're the ones that'll slit your throat before they talk to you. Because they know what time it is and they've known for a while. So you have these kids and they grow up like this and they don't have these father figures in their lives. They don't have somebody that would steer them in a direction. What they get when they got in there was someone that steered them in the wrong direction, obviously. So what would have happened if before they went there somebody would have gotten at them? Prison's a band-aid. Prison doesn't fix anything. It just removes the offender from society. California, when I went in, it was called CDC, California Department of Corrections. When Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California while I was in there, he added an R on the end to make it look good. Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. There was no rehabilitation. There was none. What happened with these kids is they would come in, they'd learn how to be really good criminals, and then when their time was up, they'd get a little white envelope that has 200 bucks cash in it. Here you go. What do you think's going to happen with somebody that's been taught how to be a criminal and then you just kick them to the street and say, go for it? Our recidivism rate right now sits at about 67%. What that means is three people get out, two go back in. I don't know about you all, but I think that that's ridiculous. Ridiculous. So you're telling me that all those people that are in there are so messed up that that's the only place they can be? No. Now, don't get me wrong. Prison has this unique way of funneling down and concentrating the worst of the worst. So yeah, there's a lot of bad guys there. That's part of the game to get there. That being said, there's still a lot of people in there that made a mistake. It wasn't a lifestyle. They messed up. They drove drunk. I'll tell you what, I knew a few guys in there that were doing, what, seven, ten to life because they drove drunk and they hit somebody and killed them. They weren't a criminal. They were just some dude party in one night. And instead of calling someone to get them or having a designated driver, they said, I got it. And now they're in prison, going through the same crazy stuff. Another thing I saw a lot of, kids getting in fights. You think, oh, I get mad at somebody, I punch them in the face. Let me tell you something about punching somebody in the face. You can kill somebody that way. It may not seem likely, but it happens. Because I knew people that were sitting there because they got that lucky or unlucky hit, whichever side of the coin you fall on on that. And that person fell down dead. And now they had gotten in this stupid little fight out in a parking lot or behind the school. And now they're in prison. So it's not as if there's... It's not as if it's completely hopeless. But the thing is, whatever is going on with prison, it's still just a band-aid. The real issue is how do we get to these kids before they go to prison? How do you get to a kid that doesn't have any direction before he makes the worst mistake of his life and not only hurts him, but everyone who loves him, the victim of his crime, everyone who loves the victim of his crime, the taxpayers, and then whatever drama, whatever else trouble he's going to get into once he's inside. This is not a single... It's not a singularity. It's a ripple in a pond that goes out. So what do we do about these kids? Well, the truth of the matter is is that these kids are everywhere. We know it. We know there's an epidemic going on right now. We've been talking about it. Now, the cause of this epidemic is something that people still debate about. Mr. Tamasi spoke about it. But the cause isn't necessarily going to help what's already happened. So what about these kids? Well, let me tell you something about these kids. I was one of them. And every time there was a man that came around, my eyes were immediately on that guy. Immediately. Why? Because I didn't have that. I didn't have that. When I would watch my friends play with their dads, or like they'd call me, hey, you want to come with us? And we'd go to whatever goofy place we were going to, whether it be Knott's Berry Farm or whatever. I would see how their dad would love on them and appreciate their son. And oh my God, man, if I could just rip my heart out of my chest right then, I would have done it just to end it. Because it was something that was missing. And I knew it even from a kid. I'm not alone in that. When there are children around, especially the fatherless ones, I promise you men, they are watching you. They're watching to see how you act. They're watching to see what you're saying, how you say it, how can I be cool? Most importantly, they're watching what you do. So what can we do about this? Well, I'm sure that there's many of you that maybe know someone. Maybe it's your sister. Maybe it's a friend. Maybe it's a friend of your wife. Maybe it's your whoever. To where you know that that kid doesn't have a dad in their life. If you are able to safely, and let me pause on this for a second. I got to really drive this point home. We've spoke at the beginning and throughout this convention that there are women that do not, to put it nicely, do not have men's best intentions at heart. If you can safely, without incurring some type of danger from a crazy woman, you can safely reach out to one of these kids, kind of do that big brother thing. I swear to God, something as little as that, you do not know the ripple that you are creating in that pond. You do not know the butterfly effect to where that butterfly is flapping its wings here and there's a tornado in Japan because of it. You've given that kid something like a seed that can grow inside of him. The more that we become involved with these kids, the less that this epidemic is going to continue. There's all types of ways that you can get involved. Not just one-on-one, coaching little league teams, coaching Pop Warner teams. Big brother. Even if you can't be there personally, maybe you know someone or an organization that is and you can somehow help them. We can't sit here and complain as men that there's an epidemic, that, oh my God, all these fatherless kids and we're going to grow up and be a nation that's going to have the softest men on earth, but yet you're not going to do anything about it? We're just going to talk about it? Like, oh, we're fucked. Okay. It doesn't work like that. If there's a problem, you've got to fix it. Problems do not fix themselves. And if we're going to have the mentality of, well, somebody will handle it, that's not going to fly either. If we want to make this world a better place, if we want to really lower the recidivism rate, if we want to keep these kids out of the system, we have to be proactive. You can't just complain about something and not do anything about it. That's the weakest shit in the world. You know what you are if you complain about something and don't do anything by default? You're a bitch. Because you're bitching. That's all you're doing. What are you doing about it? Bitch. So, the way that we fix this is we make a concentrated effort to be a mentor in some capacity in these kids' lives that we know don't have a father in them. And I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room knows somebody like that. Everyone. Once again, I stress it, you don't want to get involved with a crazy woman. If you know that that gatekeeper to that kid is nuts, you come first. You can't help anybody if you're sitting in a cell. And women can be pretty gnarly like that. However, if you can reach out to these kids, if you could be that driving force in their lives, even if it's not something big, but it's something small, even if it's something like, hey, kid, oh, listen, what do you got to say? And you just let this kid jabber at you and you don't even have to say anything. Just be there to listen to the kid. Hey, you got something tough going on in your lives? Oh, you got a girl you like? Any of this advice that they may have gotten from a father is that you can still give them. It can still work. But what won't work is if we acknowledge there's an epidemic of fatherless children and we don't do a goddamn thing about it. That's what doesn't work. So when you leave here today and you know of somebody that's in this situation, you don't have to go back and jump in feet first, but I would really implore everybody in here to just consider it. Consider it. Just think about it. What if I did go talk to so-and-so's kid or what if I talked to so-and-so and said, hey, I'll throw the ball around with the kid? What if you did something like that? What if something as small as that was the ripple that maybe kept a loved one of yours safe? Something to think about, gentlemen. Thank you for your time. I'm Bobby Dino.