WHEN I PLACED MY GARY SULLIVAN ID on the counter of the pristine Columbia, South Carolina branch of Wachovia Bank in March 2005, I appeared to be just another clean-cut businessman sporting a Rolex in Dolce & Gabbana; conducting a routine bank transaction, removing some cash from one of my many accounts scattered throughout the city’s banks. In fact, I was the U.S. Secret Service’s most wanted fugitive, Matthew B. Cox, one of the most notorious, mortgage fraud con artists of

A CHUNKY EFRAIM DIVEROLI—the real life gunrunner played by Jonah Hill in the movie War Dogs—sat opposite myself, Matthew Cox, and my literary agent, Ross Reback. To be perfectly transparent, I should mention, although I’m a true crime writer, at the time I was also a federal inmate. Like Diveroli, I was sheathed in a hunter green prison issue uniform. There were approximately one hundred inmates and their guests squeezed into the rectangular room; their chattering voices echo

AT NEARLY 24,000 FEET over Alabama, Schrenker shouted "Four-two-eight-delta-charlie!" into his headset. He was cutting through the freezing January air at 300 mph in a single engine turbo-prop Piper Meridian. "Atlanta Center! This is an emergency! I'm experiencing severe turbulence and my windshield is spider cracking ... Windshield has failed!" At just shy of five miles above the Earth it was a devastating admission. Over 200 Miles away in Peachtree City, Georgia, half a d

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE ROUND UP, a pop-country dance club located just outside Tampa's city limits. The place was packed with drunken southern belles line dancing to Blake Shelton's Redneck Girl underneath the disco balls and duhalf naked strippers in Stetsons, seductively slow riding the mechanical bull. My high school buddies and I had been drinking rum and Coke and snorting oxys most of the night. I was 17-years-old and more than buzzed, dancing with a twentysomething, rave

SLIGHTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, Robert "Snoop" George III and his brother Devell Hawkins, pulled to the curb and shifted the metallic blue Mercury into park. Lush palm trees and palmetto bushes peppered the upscale subdivision in Cypress Gardens, Florida. Mediterranean-inspired McMansions with pools and freshly cut lawns lined the streets. A concerto of crickets were chirping in the sticky summer humidity. Despite the frigid air conditioning, the siblings were sweating into the blac

EX-DEA TASK FORCE AGENT Donald Nides, placed his Taurus .357 revolver to the right-side of his head. He pushed the steel cylindrical barrel against the soft tissue of his grey temple; then pulled the hammer back until it clicked into the locked position and wrapped a finger around the trigger. It was November 5, 2014, a sticky, grey, Wednesday morning in the Big Easy. The humidity was so thick, it was as if the levees had never been repaired. Inside the single-story brick hou

STANDING OUTSIDE THE SUITE, she checked the chambers of the snub-nosed, Smith & Wesson .38 Special, one last time, before slipping it into her Louis Vuitton purse. Her eyes nervously darted up and down the hotel's empty hallway. She took two deep, cleansing breaths and softly rapped on the door of room 921. A Holiday Inn sitting on the hot white sandy beach of Miami Beach, Florida, is as good of a place as any to exchange $1.2 million in cash for 4,000 pounds of high-grade Co

By Matthew B. Cox THE BULKY, SQUARE, armored-truck jolted to a stop feet from the Bank of America branch, located in the center of the plaza—Garda’s iconic red and white logo displayed on its side. Within its bowels was $1.5 million in cash. Hjalmar Towns' US Marshals' booking photo Fifty yards across the parking lot, behind the dumpsters, a twenty-eight-year-old black male watched from the driver’s seat of a navy blue Chevy Monte Carlo with black rims and black tinted window

By Matthew B. Cox ''DEA!" GROWLED THE TALL, lean black woman as she approached the crowd of patients meandering outside the pain clinic's entrance. A mixture of nearly a dozen federal agents, state health department investigators, county sheriff deputies and detectives marched in unison behind her. It was 8:00 a.m., mid-November 2008, in South Florida. The agent held up her Drug Enforcement Administration credentials high enough for all to inspect, but she gave no indication

THE MEXICAN, Juan Medina Gonzales, was on time, as usual. He pulled the mid-sized RV to a stop just shy of the house. Karey hadn't expected the RV. Typically, Juan dropped off around thirty to forty pounds of marijuana a week–-once he'd fronted him two hundred pounds—always arriving in an aging Toyota Corolla. But Karey wasn't concerned. The twenty-four-year-old had only been selling weed for a few months. He mostly sold to friends, and friends of friends. Karey didn't consid

IT’S UNCLEAR IF Sebastian Black[1] was wearing one of his signature Brioni suits and suspenders during the long flight to Australia. Nor do we know if the seasoned confidence man drank Sambuca on the rocks–his favorite liqueur–or flat soda. He may or may not have flirted with the attractive flight attendants in first-class. Regardless, when Sebastian stepped out of the Boeing Triple-Seven at Perth International Airport, it appeared he’d pulled off the perfect scam. It wasn’t

THE U.S. MARINES STOOD TAUT at the edge of the gatehouse, the black Suburbans and Lincoln Towncar entered the White House grounds. Inside the Lincoln sat Frank L. Amodeo, the founder of Mirabilis Ventures Inc, a conglomerate of over seventy companies in various industries—including consulting, corporate security, manufacturing, employee leasing and hotel ownership—with 40,000 employees and nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue. At the corporate mogul's mental core he was