Shaun Attwood is a former drug smuggler who ran a successful ring trafficking MDMA pills in the US in the '90s. He's been dubbed "the Walter White of the ecstasy market in Arizona," and he was arrested in 2002 and served six years in US jail.
Attwood speaks to Insider about how ecstasy is processed, smuggled, and sold. He recounts his work with the New Mexican Mafia and rivalries with "Sammy the Bull" Gravano and the Gambino crime family. He also speaks about sentencing, life in US jails, and extradition.
He has been featured on "Locked Up Abroad," and he has his own YouTube series interviewing former offenders. Attwood published his life story as the "English Shaun Trilogy" and speaks to audiences around the UK and Europe about prison reform.
Attwood speaks to Insider about how ecstasy is processed, smuggled, and sold. He recounts his work with the New Mexican Mafia and rivalries with "Sammy the Bull" Gravano and the Gambino crime family. He also speaks about sentencing, life in US jails, and extradition.
He has been featured on "Locked Up Abroad," and he has his own YouTube series interviewing former offenders. Attwood published his life story as the "English Shaun Trilogy" and speaks to audiences around the UK and Europe about prison reform.
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00:00 My name is Sean Atwood.
00:01 I smuggled over $10 million worth of Ecstasy
00:04 into America from Holland.
00:06 This is how crime works.
00:08 At the height of the Ecstasy ring,
00:13 I had about 200 people working for me.
00:16 Largest ever shipment was 40,000 pills,
00:19 and we were competing against an underboss
00:22 for the Gambino crime family, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.
00:26 (machine whirring)
00:28 When I was active,
00:33 the capital for Ecstasy manufacture was Holland.
00:37 Five of the most common ones back then were
00:39 White Doves, Mitsubishis, Eurodollars,
00:43 Teletubbies, Dollar Signs.
00:46 A pure Ecstasy pill should be 100 to 125 milligrams
00:51 of MDMA and clay.
00:53 So they put the powder into the press,
00:55 and it comes out with a logo on it.
00:57 The recipe for Ecstasy has changed
00:59 because the government has clamped down
01:01 on the original ingredients for Ecstasy.
01:04 So you've got these cartels and big criminal enterprises
01:08 who don't care about the purity of the product
01:11 putting all kinds of mixed chemicals in.
01:14 People sometimes put food coloring in them
01:18 to make a distinct branding.
01:19 Most of the pills that had the food coloring in them
01:22 were not the pure presses, the beige presses from Holland.
01:26 Every time a new pill came out,
01:29 people would say, "This is the bomb.
01:30 "This has got double-stacked MDMA in it."
01:34 But generally, if it's 100 to 125 milligrams of MDMA,
01:37 you're gonna get the same hit.
01:39 At the height of the Ecstasy operation,
01:41 we could commission a pill to be designed in a certain way,
01:44 but we opted not to because we believed
01:46 it would attract law enforcement.
01:48 On the website, Dance Safe, they had all of the pills,
01:51 photos of them, and they gave the exact ingredients
01:55 in the pills.
01:56 So we were already in very good standing
01:58 for the quality of our product.
01:59 I was there when the rave scene began in Arizona.
02:08 I knew everybody.
02:10 It was all the local little cliques that came to me
02:13 to invest in their parties and their e-deals.
02:16 The first clubs I scored individually from
02:20 was a little rave called Chupa and the Silver Dollar Club.
02:25 We were getting them for like $25, $30 a pill.
02:29 This is 1996, 1997.
02:31 So we set up a deal whereby,
02:34 I can't remember if it was 500, 1,000 out of LA
02:37 for just over $10 a pill.
02:39 So that's when we realized that we needed to meet demand
02:44 to get greater quantities and to get them at reduced prices
02:48 to go through Holland.
02:50 To source pills from Holland,
02:51 I had to put people on flights with the testing kits
02:54 and say, "Hit the clubs."
02:56 They would find the people selling them in the clubs
02:59 and they would come home with the samples.
03:02 And if the samples were good,
03:04 then the person would go back out
03:06 and we would establish a deeper connection.
03:09 It's very covert.
03:11 It's all done in hotel rooms.
03:12 People show up, you got your testing kit.
03:14 They hand over the pills, you hand over the bills.
03:17 You don't know a lot of the background information
03:19 as to what's going on.
03:20 And that's probably to protect the enterprises
03:23 that are running it.
03:24 Once we started to source pills out of Holland,
03:27 we were getting tens of thousands per shipment,
03:30 but we didn't have to do it as often then.
03:32 It might be every month, every couple of months,
03:34 something like that.
03:36 Wildman, my best friend from childhood,
03:39 became my main bodyguard in Arizona.
03:42 When Wildman was on his first stay,
03:45 he opened the door into a world of gangsters,
03:49 contacts I wouldn't have made.
03:51 I got to meet all these characters
03:52 and one of them in particular,
03:55 he was in a situation with the cops and we protected him.
03:58 And he said, "From now on,
03:59 "me and my brothers have got your back."
04:01 And that was the New Mexican Mafia.
04:02 We were schooled by the New Mexican Mafia.
04:11 This is the most powerful, dangerous mafia
04:13 in Arizona at the time.
04:14 They tried to assassinate the head of the prisons,
04:17 head of the Department of Corrections.
04:19 They said to me, "Sean, if you get pulled over,
04:22 "leaving our house, the cops don't have a right
04:24 "to get in your vehicle unless they have probable cause.
04:27 "They're gonna ask you, can I search your vehicle?
04:28 "You can say no, I'm in a hurry."
04:30 And if they insist on searching the vehicle
04:32 and they find something without probable cause,
04:34 that is the fruit of the forbidden tree.
04:36 We will post your bail bond right away.
04:39 We will have a lawyer come and visit you right away.
04:41 And the lawyer will tell you what realistically,
04:44 what kind of trouble you are in.
04:45 The reason I wasn't bumping heads with the cartel
04:49 and I wasn't bumping heads with the New Mexican Mafia
04:51 is they had harder drugs, lockdown.
04:55 I was never in competition with them.
04:57 So in the beginning from Holland,
05:05 we were doing it through the mail.
05:07 We hollowed out stock market annual reports
05:10 and we used some like edible glue stuff
05:14 to seal them all.
05:15 And then they'd be put in a box
05:17 and FedExed to an address in Arizona.
05:21 And we had various addresses.
05:22 I flew people over from the UK,
05:25 built up credit in their names,
05:27 rented houses in their names
05:29 and bought cars in their names,
05:31 all for use within the criminal enterprise.
05:33 We would go from Hermosillo Airport,
05:35 we would fly over to Mexico City.
05:39 Then you could take Air France to Paris
05:41 and then you get the train over to Holland.
05:44 Back then, this was before 9/11.
05:46 This may sound really lapsidazical to some people,
05:49 but you could just throw them in your luggage
05:51 in like pillowcases, thousands and thousands of pills.
05:55 Now it was more strategic than just them
05:58 getting off the plane at Hermosillo
05:59 and then coming over the Arizona border.
06:01 We rented properties in Puerto Penasco, Rocky Point.
06:05 And the smugglers who brought them into Mexico
06:07 would take them to those locations.
06:10 Then the pills would be divided up
06:12 into vehicles and smugglers that had,
06:15 for example, brand new SUVs,
06:17 University of Arizona stickers on them,
06:20 diving tanks, all kinds of tourist bric-a-brac.
06:24 And in particular, if it was spring break
06:28 or one of the student holidays,
06:30 the checkpoints were so backed up.
06:33 They were so overwhelmed.
06:34 You know, you've got so many guys stopping cars.
06:37 We never, ever got caught bringing them
06:40 over the Arizona border.
06:41 It was flawless.
06:42 Better call Saul.
06:49 These people exist.
06:51 They may seem like stereotypes,
06:52 but they're based on what's really happening in America.
06:55 I mean, there's so much money in drugs.
06:57 So I was number one.
06:59 I was coordinating the operations.
07:01 Wild Woman was number two.
07:03 She's from Liverpool.
07:05 Wild Man was number three.
07:07 Three English people at the top.
07:09 The rest were all local people from America.
07:12 Mostly people that originated in Arizona.
07:15 You had it structured like a corporation.
07:17 I divided it into factions.
07:20 So then you've got the head of each faction.
07:22 They've got middle people and they've got runners
07:25 who are selling them at the street level.
07:27 In my enterprise, the main rules were loyalty,
07:32 not snitching, passing information up the chain.
07:35 If you found anything out at street level
07:37 that was a threat,
07:39 that information gets fed right back to me.
07:41 I chose people primarily who did not have criminal records.
07:45 My right-hand man, Cody Bates, he's dead now.
07:49 He hired cars and rented houses
07:53 just for cash and pills that nobody knew about.
07:56 I'm living in a million dollar house on a mountainside,
08:00 most beautiful place I've ever lived in my life,
08:02 in a gated, guarded community.
08:04 As more people worked for me,
08:06 I realized it was in the best interest
08:09 to spread the product out amongst various locations
08:13 and amongst various factions.
08:15 So as soon as a shipment came in that was tens of thousands,
08:18 we want to get that out right away,
08:19 spread out to the different locations.
08:21 Because if one gets hit with 2,000 pills,
08:24 that's no big deal.
08:25 That's the cost of doing business.
08:26 But if we've got 40,000 in one house and that gets hit,
08:30 that's a serious loss.
08:32 (machine whirring)
08:35 At the height of it,
08:39 we had people from other states coming to us.
08:43 Even people would fly from Chicago
08:47 and states on the other side of America to come to us.
08:49 We had pages.
08:51 Never spoke about big deals on the phone to anyone.
08:53 Cody Bates, he had the house rented where the product was,
08:57 where the cash was that nobody knew about,
08:59 and he would do the rounds.
09:00 So he would drop off to the head of each faction,
09:03 pick up the cash.
09:05 If everything was going smoothly, that was fine.
09:07 If there were problems,
09:09 that's where we'd bring in Wildman and G-Dog,
09:12 and they would handle the enforcement side of it.
09:15 With the shipment that was 40,000 pills,
09:17 let's say I'm getting 10 at a minimum on average,
09:20 and I'm paying two to three,
09:23 I'm making seven or eight on 40,000,
09:27 which is a couple hundred grand, I think,
09:29 profit from one mission.
09:31 To launder the money, I flew people from the UK,
09:36 opened stock market, bank accounts,
09:38 and credit accounts in their names,
09:40 slowly built all this credit up
09:43 and kept all this money in a legal kind of way
09:48 whereby I hadn't done anything criminal to it yet.
09:51 But once the enterprise was massive
09:54 and I knew I had to burn through these accounts
09:57 and these names,
09:59 I just started investments in rave clothing and music stores.
10:03 Now, if you're a store that throws raves,
10:06 then when you've thrown a rave at the weekend,
10:08 you've got tens of thousands of cash
10:09 going in the bank on Monday.
10:11 You add my ecstasy proceeds to that,
10:13 we're getting the money into the banking system.
10:16 (machine whirring)
10:19 Before Sammy DeBord-Gravano entered the scene,
10:26 I had a reputation for getting the white
10:28 and beige presses out of Holland.
10:30 And that was the primary source of supply to Arizona,
10:34 to the raves and to the clubs.
10:35 What you've got to bear in mind is people say,
10:37 if Sammy DeBord-Gravano was in competition with you,
10:40 this is the Italian mafia, the Gambino crime family.
10:43 Well, that's not true.
10:44 Sammy DeBord is a formidable character in his own right.
10:48 He'd murdered people, conspired to murder them,
10:50 but he was the highest ranking member of the mafia
10:55 to turn sides and testify and cooperate.
10:59 And he went against Gotti.
11:01 I did something that was silly.
11:03 We found a property that we believe was linked
11:07 to Sammy DeBord's people,
11:08 and we all got strapped up and kicked the door in
11:11 and held the people and took all this stuff
11:14 as an act of showing that if you do something to us,
11:18 something's going to happen to you guys.
11:20 But I regretted doing that.
11:22 I shouldn't have never put myself in that situation
11:25 'cause kicking someone's door in
11:26 and running down a hall with a gun
11:28 where they could have all had guns and just shot us
11:30 or the cops could have come.
11:32 That was drug-fuelled insanity.
11:34 We're looking back on it now.
11:36 It made things worse.
11:37 There was a hit put out on me.
11:38 They were offering 10,000 for my head on a silver platter.
11:41 In prison, Sammy DeBord-Gravano's son told me
11:46 that someone had called it in in Phoenix,
11:49 the Crow Barracks call.
11:50 I was there with G-Dog, Wildman,
11:52 and some of my crew, Wildwoman.
11:53 A striptease woman had spotted me.
11:57 There was a bounty on me.
11:58 She called it in, and they were in a car
12:00 coming to take me out to the desert.
12:02 G-Dog, Wildman advised me to leave
12:05 'cause they'd sensed the atmosphere had changed,
12:08 and I got out of there just before
12:11 Gravano's son, Gerard, arrived.
12:14 He said that if the ransom hadn't been paid,
12:17 they were going to kill me,
12:18 and that would have just wiped out their competition.
12:20 Sammy, the Bulls enterprise, came up,
12:22 did big numbers, lit the scene up,
12:25 had all the runners running around the raves
12:28 and clubs saying we're the biggest drug barons
12:30 in the history of the world,
12:32 these steroid head jock characters,
12:34 which totally brought the heat to the scene,
12:36 and that's why he got popped a couple years before me.
12:38 I mean, I was thanking the cops for his arrest,
12:41 basically, in my mind,
12:42 but all of those resources were then turned on me.
12:45 (whirring)
12:47 It was May 16th, 2002, when the SWAT team came.
12:54 I thought, once I quit the importation,
12:56 I got away with it.
12:58 I thought they had to catch me with the drugs.
12:59 All it takes is someone from your past,
13:01 within seven years, statute of limitations,
13:04 to tell the cops they'd done a deal with you
13:05 and they got you.
13:06 Don't need the drugs.
13:07 We used the lawyer from the New Mexican Mafia.
13:10 He was a loophole lawyer.
13:12 Paid him 100,000,
13:13 and that's how we got it down from 200 years
13:16 to nine and a half years without snitching.
13:18 My first jail was Towers Jail,
13:21 where the neo-Nazis come up to me.
13:23 To join the gang, to be a member,
13:25 you have to murder someone for them.
13:26 There are very few members.
13:27 There are a lot of probates, associates,
13:29 people putting work in for them,
13:31 that are running the system for them.
13:32 Arizona, the four major prison gangs,
13:37 it's all racially divided.
13:39 The whites is the Aryan Brotherhood.
13:41 The blacks is the Mau Mau.
13:43 The Mexican Nationals have their own gang.
13:46 And then you've got the Chicanos,
13:48 which are the Mexican Americans.
13:50 You've got the Native Americans as well.
13:53 And then anyone who doesn't fit in,
13:55 haven't helped them,
13:56 'cause it's just raw survival of the fittest.
13:58 Being deep in the Arizona jail system,
14:01 the absolute priority of all of the gangs
14:03 is to keep the drugs business running smoothly.
14:06 You got the staff bringing the drugs in.
14:08 You got the physicists bringing the drugs in.
14:10 They do not want anything to disrupt that.
14:13 I've done some PSA videos, prison survival advice.
14:17 Be careful what you say.
14:18 Don't brag.
14:20 Don't let them know you've got money.
14:21 Don't let them know you've got resources.
14:24 Two months after my arrest,
14:25 there was a story in the Phoenix New Times,
14:27 English Sean's evil empire, 10 pages long.
14:30 The neo-Nazis caught wind of this,
14:32 and then they were pressuring me to ask my girlfriend
14:36 to smuggle drugs in through visitation,
14:38 'cause I must have all of these drug connections.
14:40 Fortunately, there was a race riot,
14:42 and those guys who were trying to pressure me got moved.
14:46 And I clicked up with the Italians after that,
14:48 and that pressure on me ended.
14:50 I end up in a jail run by a famous sheriff
14:53 called Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
14:55 Over time, you just saw them revolving door,
14:59 young people coming in,
15:00 lesser offenses, becoming harder criminals.
15:03 It is a college of crime, the conditions in that jail,
15:05 the cockroaches, the dead rats in the foods,
15:07 the guards murdering the prisoners.
15:09 For the vast majority of the people I was housed with,
15:12 there was no hope,
15:14 but that's what keeps the prisons in business.
15:16 The illegal black market in drugs created by drug laws
15:26 is so vast, and now we've got hundreds of thousands
15:28 of dead in Mexico, and all this knife crime in London,
15:31 this is what the cops are telling us,
15:33 revolves around young people competing
15:35 for the black market profits in drugs created by drug laws.
15:39 I was operating during a relatively innocent phase
15:44 of the introduction of ecstasy to America.
15:48 Now everything is monopolized by organized crime,
15:51 and it doesn't matter who gets arrested in organized crime,
15:53 they always have the resources to pay the officials off
15:56 to keep the drugs flowing.
15:57 I lost absolutely everything, spent six years incarcerated.
16:01 There's a clip where I'm at an airport in London,
16:04 I think it's Gatwick or Heathrow,
16:06 and I'm all shell-shocked looking,
16:08 hugging mom, dad, sister, mom's crying,
16:10 in the car, out of the airport.
16:13 Stayed at my parents' house for a year.
16:15 The Dole was sending me on like telesales interviews
16:20 and stuff like that, I'd tell them, you know,
16:21 criminal record, yes, couldn't get a job.
16:24 Dole's telling me you've got to start lying,
16:25 telling them you've not got a criminal record
16:27 or you're never gonna get a job.
16:28 But a year later I moved down to Guildford,
16:32 lived with DJ Mike Hot Wheels, one of my best friends.
16:36 I lived in his bedroom for 10 years,
16:39 just doing my blog, building my socials.
16:41 We started the blog in 2004,
16:43 started the YouTube channel in 2007,
16:45 it was the first prison YouTube channel.
16:46 I go up and down the country
16:47 interviewing the most interesting people.
16:50 I'm blessed, you know, so many wonderful people
16:52 came into my life to give me a leg up
16:54 and help me get my message out,
16:56 and I feel it's my karmic destiny now
16:58 that we've got this platform
17:00 to help other guys share their story.
17:02 It was the late 1980s,
17:10 and all of a sudden on the weekends on the news,
17:13 there was these stories of cops chasing around
17:16 young people who were wide-eyed,
17:19 wearing baggy jeans with like acid,
17:22 LSD logos on them and stuff.
17:25 In my economics class I had a mate,
17:27 he's like, "You need to come and check this out."
17:29 And then we went to the Thunderdome,
17:30 Oldham Road, Manchester.
17:32 So he's like, "Bear with me,
17:34 I'll go and get you the stuff."
17:36 So I took the pill,
17:39 and then once I started dancing,
17:41 I never wanted to stop,
17:43 I never wanted the party to end.
17:45 And I was like, "I've finally found myself."
17:48 And that's how raving became my religion.
17:51 So going back generations of my family,
17:53 some settled in Chicago,
17:57 and some retired in Arizona.
18:00 I had two aunts,
18:02 two of my dad's sisters ended up in Arizona.
18:05 And one of them I would visit as a kid.
18:08 When the airplane comes into land,
18:11 you look out and you see all the swimming pools
18:12 in the backyards.
18:14 So I was already thinking,
18:16 "Hmm, might want some of this when I finish university."
18:19 That's what I did.
18:21 If I could go back and tell myself one piece of advice,
18:23 it would be stay on the path
18:25 of slow and steady progress in life.
18:28 I started following the stock market when I was 16.
18:30 I was worth a couple of million
18:32 in the stock market in my late 20s.
18:34 That was before all this drug activity.
18:38 I didn't need the money, it was ego.
18:40 My ego was as big as the Grand Canyon at the top of this.
18:43 Pablo Escobar was worth billions.
18:46 His brother said, "Let's buy our own island
18:48 and kick back and not get arrested and not get killed
18:50 and not spend the rest of our lives in prison."
18:52 Pablo said, "I put the president in power.
18:55 I've got 10,000 people working for me.
18:57 You want me to kick back on some boring old island?"
19:00 It's not money, it's ego and being a character in the scene.
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