In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with Michael Emmett to talk about his life of drugs, crime and incarceration before turning his life around and becoming a Christian. In this episode, Michael shares his story of coming to Christ and the lessons he has learned from his experience of living a life defined by material want, scarcity, longing and fear. He also shares some of the most important life lessons he s learned and what we can all take from the transcendence that is available to all of us on the journey of faith that Michael has undertaken and that he is currently undertaking. Stay Free with Russell Brand is a podcast hosted by Russell Brand and features interviews with people in recovery from drug and alcohol addictions, and other addictions. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "WAKEUP" to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the invite code: AWAKENINGWON'T YOURSELF at checkout. We do brilliant conversations with people like Jordan Peterson, RFK, R.R.K. Tucker, Tucker Tucker, Carlson, Tucker Carlson, Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate, Veena Shiva and more. These things are already up and you can listen to them now! - The Awakening Wonder Podcast. You can become an Awakened Wonder, then you can join us for these conversations, live and exclusive, when they happen, as well as get access to exclusive videos and the chance to meditate and meditate with us every single week. - join our book club where we're reading "Mere Christianity" - The Book Club where we re reading Mere Christianity. We love you're already up to date, right? - And you can be part of the Awakening Wondering Community. . So that you can become a Wonder! - R.Waking Wonders, then join us, become an Awakening Wonder? R.B. - The Conversation, then get access, when you can meditate, meditate on the book Club where you re-up to the next episode of the book club. , and you re getting access to all that R. R.E.W. by becoming a Wondering Wonder, and learn more about what it means to become an awakened wonder? RATE 5 days a week!
00:00:00.000Hello you Awakening Wonders there on Spotify, Apple, Stink Whistle, Gurgle Dot, or wherever you download your podcasts these days to remain at least peripherally connected to some tendril of truth in a bewildering miasma of lies and propaganda.
00:00:28.000We decipher the latest news stories, we break down current topics that the mainstream media should be covering and if they aren't, Then we critique why they're not and what they are covering.
00:02:10.000Extreme wealth, extreme addiction, extreme criminality and extreme incarceration before coming to Christ and walking a very different path.
00:02:21.000Today we'll be having a conversation about the entirety of that journey, the important life lessons that have been learned and what we can all take from the transition from a life defined by material want Scarcity, longing and fear to the transcendence that is available to all of us on a journey of faith that Michael has undertaken and that I am with trepidation, vulnerability and I pray humility undertaking myself.
00:02:47.000Michael, thank you so much for joining me.
00:02:53.000It was lovely to meet you the other day, participating in your podcast that you've currently suspended, which focuses, as I understand the podcast being Gritty Nitty, the journey of life in recovery, where you and a couple of other friends of ours in recovery from multiple addictions, our mate Tosca, our mate Mark Dempster, talk about various aspects of life in recovery, the challenges that people face.
00:03:19.000You have an extraordinary story to tell.
00:03:22.000to tell, in particular, I suppose, for those of us that have never been part of that world,
00:03:28.000the transition from living a life of crime, as they call it, defined by what, from the outside,
00:04:08.000So early days, I mean, I've got, there's two halves of my family, yeah?
00:04:15.000So one's my father's line and one's my mother's line.
00:04:19.000So my mother, and there was a judgment from me that one was really lovely and it was wrong because I've learned a lot about Um, spiritual stuff that makes me understand that we should not judge, because we don't know what lies beneath.
00:04:38.000So my mother's family was like South London people, they were flower people, they were in the flower industry, Borough Market, Covent Garden, and my father came from a very dysfunctional family, not out of choice, he was extremely bright, extremely bright.
00:04:59.000They say my grandfather was shot in the Second World War.
00:05:03.000He was slightly disabled and they called him Sticks and he killed himself by drinking acetone and they found him with The lying in of his stomach coming out of his mouth.
00:05:16.000And that was how my dad got brought up.
00:05:18.000My mother got brought up in a family that were flower sellers.
00:05:30.000So we're talking about London in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, like, you know, so it's flowers and glamour and joy and tickling the ivories, playing the old Joanna, gathering round the piano on one side, but you described a pretty incredible darkness on the other side.
00:05:47.000Am I right about the general era, post-war London?
00:06:41.000Now, when I look at my cousins, there's been a problem there, emotionally and spiritually.
00:06:49.000But I grew up in the flats in South London, in Stockwell, And then I got taken down to Morden in Surrey when I was about six.
00:06:57.000But I was impregnated with a madness at a very early age.
00:07:01.000What were your dad doing for a living in that early part of your life to have the money to put you in what I understand was an alright school down there in Morden in Surrey?
00:09:16.000So it's like legitimate businesses selling used cars, legitimate businesses doing transportation and one can see how that might align quite nicely with other aspects.
00:09:33.000I'm thinking like, so is this in the 19, in the 1960s and 70s involved in importing drugs into the United Kingdom?
00:09:43.000So even while you're a little kid, this way of life, this business is established for you.
00:13:58.000I started nicking in Woolworths when I was a kid of 11.
00:14:01.000And then when I sort of gravitated to the scene myself, against my old man's wishes, really against my old man's wishes, I got nicked when I was 13.
00:14:15.000We used to have a speaker there, down in Wimbledon it was, and it was Lord Longford.
00:14:22.000I don't know if you know about Lord Longford.
00:14:25.000It was bonfire night, and all I wanted to do was mess about.
00:14:29.000Because Lord Longford he's known for reform and visiting prisoners and extremely notorious famous criminal cases in the UK.
00:14:36.000I think probably most notably people have heard of him because of his relationship with Myra Hindley who along with Ian Brady murdered a bunch of children tragically during the 1960s and Lord Longford was known for bringing compassion I suppose under a kind of Christian edict to people and believing in reform and transformation.
00:14:56.000Even in the most egregious forms of criminality.
00:15:46.000And this geezer come up to me, I'd never met him before, and he went, do you know a fella called, I won't say who it was, he went, do you know a fella called Neil So-and-so?
00:16:05.000and he said look I've got something for you and he gave me two videos of me and my younger brother when I was 11 and my brother was six on our chopper bikes going down the road I thought my god down the road with the turning we lived in and I said to this guy who I was talking to I said did they miss us when we left he went Not really.
00:17:52.000And so, the school became a bit of a blur to me.
00:17:56.000I couldn't I couldn't get it and my criminal activities My dad didn't teach me to be a criminal, but I became one.
00:18:05.000It sounds like already sort of quite inevitable, and even in the first part of this conversation, we've talked about famous places and monuments to this extraordinary and glamorous, peculiar period in British history, notably the Blind Beggar has already been name-checked, notorious mostly as the place where Jack the Hat McV... No!
00:18:26.000We'll be talking about not only the extraordinary glamour that that culture appears to emanate, but also, in my opinion, the fact that somehow ordinary people sense that criminality is institutional, endemic, and everywhere, permitted for a particular class of people,
00:18:46.000permitted for global institutions, permitted for the dominant elite class,
00:19:33.000And the extraordinary mysteries around it.
00:19:35.000We've also had amazing conversations with Bobby Kennedy this week, Dave Martin, extraordinary educations on the kind of institutional crime that I'm alluding to here while we talk about the types of crimes that tend to... I suppose...
00:19:49.000Put hairs on end in Hollywood and excite people across these islands, perhaps because we know that the real criminality is taking place elsewhere.
00:20:02.000Michael, so how do you transition from the kind of what I identify with of feeling like you don't fit in at school and minor misdemeanors, although I've never set fire myself, to a public railway station?
00:20:15.000To the kind of crime that has come to define your life and indeed your biography, Sins of Fathers.
00:20:23.000How is it you go from peripheral criminality to career criminality?
00:20:28.000I suppose in particular I'm very interested in the smuggling enterprise that led to the biggest cannabis bust in the history of these islands and a pretty considerable sentence for both yourself and your father and that extraordinary detail that both you and your father Served the time together I think in the same prison I'd love to hear about the what how your enterprise reached those proportions and the consequences of it
00:22:11.000And they became, they were drug smuggling into the UK late 70s early 80s.
00:22:17.000Yeah, when it was really weren't really well known then and it was coming across Europe and we got involved as kids like we set up some potato pitches, we used to sell potatoes on the side of the street and the cannabis used to be delivered there and picked up.
00:22:35.000It was a little bit rough and ready but I don't think The police and all that were ready for it because it wasn't a crime that they focused on.
00:24:31.000My mate was wanting for something else, there was guns and all sorts of crazy things involved.
00:24:37.000At that time the police's focus, as you say, was more like armed robbery and like, I suppose, the kind of coercion-oriented crime of racketeering and such, rather than what you've described as the relatively new markets around drugs that you say come out of the counter-cultural movement.
00:24:53.000New markets created, people wanting cannabis and ultimately and eventually Other substances, I suppose.
00:24:58.000At that point, that's a sort of a nascent new market and a new sort of realm.
00:25:04.000So is it, I suppose, after you've, it sounds like, served a little sentence for whatever was related to that police chase, you've moved to Marbella.
00:25:14.000Can you tell us why and what that period is defined by?
00:25:39.000But the education that I had, once the old man knew that I was sort of Up for it.
00:25:47.000The education that he gave me to be shtumarly, shut your mouth, don't talk on the phone, you know, all sorts of things that he taught me.
00:25:58.000On this time, when I got a bowel, because I was in a wheelchair, and they knew it weren't really a lot to do with me, I got a bit of bowel, and I absconded to Marbella in 1984-85.
00:26:09.000And when I arrived there, obviously, people knew my dad.
00:27:14.000up in the sort of a place called Pinkies up in Portobadoo with all the chaps,
00:27:20.000wound up on the trumpet on the cocaine. Was it an enjoyable time all of that because I know that
00:27:25.000you're in recovery from substances so I wonder what it was like actually were there high times
00:27:31.000that were joyful that it was hedonistic and pleasurable that it was working for you?
00:27:37.000You keep making reference to the darkness, a kind of which, I suppose in one way you could look at addiction, in another way you could look at something sort of deeper than that, I suppose.
00:27:46.000But like, in this story, is there, like, are we talking about in Marbella and leading up to this enterprise becoming criminally and financially significant?
00:27:57.000talking about a part of your life that for the obvious transformation you've made
00:28:03.000and therefore obviously I guess look back at it with I don't know, some regret,
00:28:06.000was there, was it sort of, 'cause for us outside of it, British people like me,
00:28:10.000that's a kind of a legendary scene with legendary characters.
00:28:29.000I have a different kind of take on it now, but what was it like sort of for you in that?
00:28:33.000Like I think of crime as its own show business.
00:28:35.000Like they say politics is show business for ugly people and I feel like, I don't know,
00:28:39.000crime is show business for odd people.
00:28:42.000I don't know what a perfect analogy is but you remember at that time there was a lot of crossover wasn't it?
00:28:48.000Like you mentioned like how the Krays were mixing with aristocrats and like famous people and Ronnie Knight there was a sort of a co-mingling of celebrity and crime and like when you talk about pinkies and like people going out and getting on it and smashing it up and everything with the edge of it being not people that have gone to stage school wearing like little tights and tippy-tapping about in ballet shoes but people They're carrying shooters and tooled up the whole thing to me in spite of, I know it's part of the conversion experience of like, oh then we done this, then we done that and we was all on it.
00:29:22.000That was wrong though, that was wrong.
00:29:24.000Oh I look back on that with great regret.
00:29:25.000It's sort of an interesting part of any story I think.
00:29:28.000So like, was it sort of joyful or did it somehow, what did it feel like to be on the inside of that little bit mate?
00:31:14.000My dad said, don't even tell no one your name!
00:31:20.000So that night we had words, we were talking about my father, because my father had met another lady, my mother was distorted, my dad was dying, and this other lady was pregnant, and it was difficult times, you know.
00:31:32.000And we was arguing, we had an argument, he left the flat, I went and got him by the ballroom, give him the motor of one of them old silly Pandas, like they was hired vehicles.
00:31:42.000He went off to, it was a lot of different circumstances here, but he went off to Malaga Airport, couldn't get on the aeroplane, come back, went underneath a lorry and it killed him stone dead.
00:31:55.000And that was the news I was woken up to.
00:31:58.000His girlfriend, who's a lovely lady, she's a famous artist actually today, can I plug her?
00:32:03.000The Unskilled Worker, she's great, her work's great.
00:32:46.000I went to prison this time, but instead of getting the eight or nine years what the other kid got, because I was innocent, I really was, I got 18 months for being in the car.
00:33:12.000Drugs appeared again when I come out of full prison and I went back down to Spain sort of the late 80s and got at it again.
00:33:21.000When you're working out of Spain and you've mentioned the connection between Morocco and Marbella, how does this lead to this sort of incredible industrialised smuggling that ultimately leads to your arrest and significant And a significant prison sentence and what role do you imagine that the death of your brother plays in that?
00:33:45.000Do you feel that the sort of sadness of that loss somehow I suppose any one of them anytime anything like that happens it's a potential opportunity for review and for reckoning or sometimes we go sort of it seems at least in your case sort of deeper into the way of life that would ultimately have to end one way or another so could you tell us a bit bit about the impact of your brother's death but how you end up in, you know, the stories that lead to your arrest, mate.
00:34:10.000Well, what I believe, yeah, I believe that we have parts of our, say, let's call it our soul, yeah, that As a heartbeat, it has a language.
00:34:58.000So, the consequences of my brother dying really, really messed me up.
00:35:04.000And it enlargened the gaping wound that previous life circumstances had been inflicted on me, plus the sins of the fathers I believe I was born with.
00:35:17.000So it was the impregnation of my grandfather's sin.
00:35:46.000So when I went back down to Spain, I was a broken vessel.
00:35:51.000That was when I had the first dishonest relationship, which hurt my mother of my children, with a girlfriend that we knew, the mental illness, the broken Broken spirit broken soul, which was dirty.
00:36:07.000I went down to Spain again in the late 80s One reason was to recover because I'd caused absolute murders with my behavior towards women and as much as Michael was likable the darkness was making him sort of an unsavory character and But where I was lively, I was very theatrical.
00:36:27.000And people used to like, and I was a good money owner.
00:36:32.000Al, what is this ingenuity that's required?
00:36:34.000What's the difference between a successful drug smuggler and unsuccessful ones?
00:36:37.000What's the difference between people that can participate in organisations that generate great revenue and those that fall at the first pitfalls?
00:36:44.000What kind of relationships do you have to form?
00:36:46.000What kind of decisions do you have to make?
00:36:48.000What is the kind of opposition that you're facing?
00:36:50.000And how did your skill set enable you to manoeuvre your way through what sounds like a lot of strategic difficulties?
00:37:16.000I was frightened of little mice and things like that.
00:37:20.000But I wasn't frightened of the big giants.
00:37:23.000It was a very confused dilemma though.
00:37:26.000I seriously, how I'm here to even speak properly, I had levels of mental illness that I think would have blown schizophrenia out the water.
00:37:37.000That's when I realised it wasn't the common illness of a cold, schizophrenia, which we call it.
00:38:30.000And I just got activated down in Spain again, met the right people and smuggled a copious amount of cannabis into the English quarters in all they say it was
00:38:43.000about it was more than five tonne. More than five tonne. How do you organize
00:38:48.000that? Do you have to go to Morocco and talk to the people that are producing it? How
00:38:52.000do you strategize the means for transportation? How do you ensure that it's
00:38:56.000undertaken safely and it was sorting out the roots. What kind of relationships
00:39:00.000you go have? Right so the relationship yeah I suppose my dad went before me so my
00:39:06.000apprenticeship was made a little bit easy.
00:39:08.000So the environment, my dad was old school.
00:39:12.000So there's people like, and he won't mind me mentioning it, he won't like me telling you this, he was 100 three days
00:39:19.000ago and he got a telegraph from the King.
00:42:32.000and it was a lot of it right and it's called the mothership and then it feeds itself to other ships smaller ships we were one of those smaller ships where we took advantage of a situation because we had a way into England if you ain't got a way into England you can't go out of the dinghy and get it so we had a way into England But it was, it was on it.
00:47:21.000And that's when the conversion took place.
00:47:24.000Samantha Fox was a friend of... Samantha Fox in the UK was like a glamour girl, she was a thing called page three girl.
00:47:31.000In the 1980s, newspapers used to have, for no reason at all really, when you think about it she was mad now, a naked woman on the second page of the newspaper.
00:47:38.000Front page, there's a war in the Falklands!
00:47:41.000Page three, look at this woman with no clothes on!
00:48:29.000And the darkness was covered by the brightness of the light of Marbella Marbella had a sort of a name to you know women and fun and Arabs and money and it was and it was lovely but it was a crime element there which was pretty big so Samantha Fox was Daniela's friend, and she became a Christian at Holy Trinity Brompton, the home of Alpha.
00:48:59.000And God works in mysterious ways, and I was very open to the supernatural.
00:49:06.000The Supernatural didn't phase me because I felt I was supernatural.
00:50:03.000The Bible is a book of violence, wars, but they look at Jesus as if he's got white sandals, a tambourine, ain't that?
00:50:13.000Look at Jesus on the cross, powerful thing.
00:50:15.000But my conversion in prison was when Sam introduced me to a guy called Nicky Gumbel, who's a wonderful church leader.
00:50:26.000Alfred started there was many little sort of little bits and pieces that sort of created this but everything was Coincidental as they say and I gave him a ring You can't get hold of him normally.
00:50:42.000And he sent a team down to the prison.
00:51:06.000So what happened was, the preparation Of a marriage, the preparation of a party, there's always a preparation to drug smuggling, to a night out on the tiles, you prepare.
00:51:20.000So there was a preparation with Daniela and Sam.
00:51:23.000Daniela wanted me, she thought it was a miracle I was going to get out of prison somehow.
00:51:28.000So she'd done everything she possibly could.
00:51:31.000And I weren't really looking for Christ, to be honest.
00:54:43.000It's been great because they love the story of the drug smuggling and the father and the people I knew but the truth of the matter is this God It's changed me.
00:59:05.000We do exclusive content every single week.
00:59:08.000You can join us and pose questions to our guests.
00:59:11.000Also join us for our book club and our meditation club.
00:59:15.000You can support Michael's podcast, Gritty Nitty, which is taking a hiatus at the moment, but I believe there's some other stuff up, and his book, which he's mentioned several times, in which he details his story beautifully, Sins of the Fathers, is available now.
01:01:21.000Thank you very much for joining us for this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
01:01:25.000Remember, tomorrow we'll be talking to Bobby Kennedy and the day after that, Dave Martin.
01:01:30.000Fantastic conversations that in various ways help you understand the significance of the awakening spirit within you and within all of us and the possibility for change and the ability that we all share to unify and oppose global corruption together.
01:01:44.000We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.