Michael Emmett has experienced a life of incredible extremes: drug smuggling, extreme wealth, extreme addiction, extreme incarceration, and extreme incarceration before coming to Christ and walking a very different path. In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, he shares his story of how he made 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 humility, undertaking myself. 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 the people who support them. Visit stayfree.co.uk/remindwonder to join our book club where we re reading Mere Christianity. Brought to you by Pfizer. In this video, you re going to see the future. You re gonna see the past. In This Video, You're Going to See the Future. - Russell Brand This episode is exclusively available on Rumble. Remember, you can become an Awakening Wonder if you become an Awakened Wonder, then you can join us for these conversations live and exclusive when they happen, as well as getting access to exclusive videos and meditations every single week and the chance to meditate with us and join our Book Club where we're reading "Mere Christianity" - The Book Club. by P.D. The book club is available on all of our social meditations on the book club websites. To find out more about the book Club, visit merechristianity.org.org/thebookclub.uk. To join the Book Club, go to merecemett.co/theBookClub.uk To learn more about our bookclub? To find a list of our upcoming book club, click here. Our book club discount offer? To buy a copy of Mere Christianity? Click here. To become an AWAKENING WON'T YOU'T TALKING ABOUT MERE CHRISTIAN? to receive a discount of $25 or $50 or $75 or $150 or more than $150,000 in total? We're giving you access to our book Club membership? Get in touch here: bit.ee/bookclub@merecristian. We'll be giving you a discount code
00:00:31.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand, and what a special day it is where we have the opportunity to talk about transition and transformation.
00:00:40.000Many of you will have been following my journey of late, and this will give me the first opportunity to talk about those things in a new context with someone who's a little further down the path than me, who's experienced some very extreme Life experiences.
00:00:55.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be available there for the first 15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
00:01:02.000Remember, you can become an Awakened Wonder, then you can join us for these conversations live and exclusive when they happen, as well as getting access to exclusive videos every single week and the opportunity to meditate with us and join our book club where we're reading Mere Christianity.
00:01:17.000My guest today, Michael Emmett, has experienced a life of incredible extremes.
00:01:22.000Extreme drug smuggling, extreme wealth, extreme addiction, extreme criminality and extreme incarceration before coming to Christ and walking a very different path.
00:01:35.000Today 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.
00:02:02.000Michael, thank you so much for Thank you for joining me.
00:02:08.000It 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.
00:02:34.000You have an extraordinary Story to tell, in particular, I suppose, for those of us that have never been part of that world, the transition from living a life of crime, as they call it, defined by that what from the outside appears like ludicrous grammar, excuse me, ludicrous glamour, possibly ludicrous grammar,
00:02:59.000And I wonder, can you, first of all, for those of us that aren't familiar with you, for the people who haven't yet read your book, Sins of Fathers, can you just tell us what your original condition and family of origin were and how you ended up pursuing what, to most people, is a pretty extraordinary life, in particular the various enterprises around smuggling?
00:03:22.000Yeah, so early days, I mean, I've got, there's two halves of my family, yeah?
00:03:29.000So one's my father's line and one's my mother's line.
00:03:33.000So my mother, 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.
00:03:52.000So my mother's family was like South London people.
00:04:45.000So 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 around the piano on one side, but you described a pretty incredible darkness on the other side.
00:05:02.000Am I right about the general era, post-war London?
00:05:07.000So we come out the flats, my father come from Battersea, Now, my mother's... My grandmother, I think she had nine or eleven brothers and sisters.
00:05:17.000And my grandfather had sort of the same.
00:05:19.000And they was out of Bermondsey, The Elephant and Castle.
00:05:56.000Now, when I look at my cousins, there's been a problem there, emotionally and spiritually.
00:06:03.000But 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.
00:06:12.000But I was impregnated with a madness at a very early age.
00:06:16.000What 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?
00:08:32.000So 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.
00:10:00.000He used to run the course at Epsom Downs, two miles.
00:10:04.000And I used to watch him, and he was such a fit man.
00:10:08.000But he had the thing in here that I know about today.
00:10:11.000He was impregnated with something that weren't right.
00:10:16.000Yeah, a kind of a compelling darkness.
00:10:19.000You've mentioned briefly that ecology, a crime that emerged out of London around that time, and for people that have studied, and that is a sort of word I suppose, that scene.
00:10:31.000It's full, from the outside at least, as a simple observer, with incredibly colourful characters.
00:10:41.000You've mentioned the Kray twins and the little cultures that formed around them, as well as the Great Train Robbers.
00:10:49.000Indeed, I suppose there are Hollywood movies about the Great Train Robbers, about the Krays of course, on numerous renderings of their extraordinary life story, and the Richardsons too.
00:11:01.000What do you, as a person that was growing up around that, think was uniquely interesting about those characters and about that way of life?
00:11:11.000Why does it, whether it's American organized crime through the mafia and the sort of genre of films that has spawned, to London-based gang crime, or even Peaky Blinders and other regional iterations of crime, What, as a person that has been, is part of it, what has been in the past, been part of it, what is it about that world, do you suppose, that captures the attention at a cultural level of so many people?
00:11:41.000What is it about those characters, having known them and been around them, that do you think renders them so magnetic?
00:13:13.000I started nicking in Woolworths when I was a kid of 11.
00:13:16.000And 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.
00:13:30.000We used to have a speaker there, down in Wimbledon it was, and it was Lord Longford.
00:13:37.000I don't know if you know about Lord Longford.
00:13:40.000It was bonfire night and all I wanted to do was mess about.
00:13:43.000Because Lord Longford is known for reform and visiting prisoners in extremely notorious, famous criminal cases in the UK.
00:13:51.000I 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.
00:14:00.000during 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, even in the most egregious forms of criminality.
00:17:15.000My dad didn't teach me to be a criminal, but I became one.
00:17:20.000It sounds like already sort of quite inevitable.
00:17:22.000And 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.
00:17:32.000Notably, the Blind Beggar has already been name checked, notorious mostly as the place where Jack the Hat McV... No, George Cornell.
00:17:41.000We'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, Permitted for global institutions.
00:18:04.000Permitted for the dominant elite class.
00:18:09.000So perhaps in all crime there is an inherent Robin Hood element because we recognise how the game is rigged and how the game has set up.
00:18:17.000Nevertheless, for none of us, there is no solution to be found in the material world.
00:18:21.000So ultimately, we'll be talking about the conversion and transition that Michael has experienced while talking also about his prison conversion experience.
00:18:30.000One of the biggest drug smuggling busts in the history of these islands and how that went down.
00:18:35.000But we won't be talking about any of that on YouTube.
00:18:38.000If you're watching us there, click the link in the description.
00:19:17.000Michael, 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?
00:19:30.000To the kind of crime that has come to define your life and indeed your biography, Sins of Fathers.
00:19:37.000How is it you go from peripheral criminality to career criminality?
00:19:43.000I 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
00:20:02.000love to hear about how your enterprise reached those proportions and the
00:23:02.000So, when, yeah, so Marlborough, so I'm in 1984.
00:23:06.000I've just had a big car chase, I've been in a wheelchair, get a little bit better, slip down to Marlborough, arrive there, I'm about, in 1985, 84, I was, er, so 58, 68, I was about 33.
00:23:46.000My mate was wanting for something else.
00:23:49.000It was guns and all sorts of crazy things involved.
00:23:52.000At 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.
00:24:08.000New markets created people wanting cannabis and ultimately and eventually other substances, I suppose.
00:24:13.000At that point, That's a sort of a nascent new market and a new sort of realm.
00:24:18.000So 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.
00:24:28.000Can you tell us why and what that period is defined by?
00:24:54.000But the education that I had, once the old man knew that I was sort of up for it, The education that he gave me to be, shtomali, shut your mouth, don't talk on the phone, you know, be... All sorts of things that he taught me.
00:25:13.000On 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.
00:25:24.000And when I arrived there, obviously, people knew my dad.
00:26:29.000Was it an enjoyable time, all of that?
00:26:30.000place called Pinky's up in Portobadoo with all the chaps, one up on the trumpet on the cocaine.
00:26:38.000Was it an enjoyable time all of that because I know that you're in recovery from substances
00:26:42.000so I wonder what it was like actually, were there high times that were joyful, that it was
00:26:49.000hedonistic and pleasurable, that it was working for you?
00:26:52.000You keep making reference to the darkness a kind of which I suppose in one way you could look at
00:26:56.000addiction, in another way you could look at something sort of deeper than that I suppose but like in
00:27:03.000This story is there like are we talking about in Marbella and leading up to this enterprise becoming criminally and financially significant talking about a part of your life that for the obvious transformation you've made and therefore obviously I guess look back at it with I don't know some regret or Was there, was it sort of, because for us outside of it, British people like me, that's a kind of a legendary scene with legendary characters.
00:27:30.000In the same way people ask me, like with all of the drug taking and the womanising and all that kind of stuff, people, I have to sort of go, I suppose there were minutes where it was sort of like I felt very sort of beautiful or powerful or impressive or something.
00:27:44.000I have a different kind of take on it now, but what was it like, sort of, for you in that?
00:27:47.000Like, I think of crime as its own show business.
00:27:50.000Like, they say politics is show business for ugly people, and I feel like, I don't know, crime is show business for odd people.
00:27:57.000I don't know what I don't know what a perfect analogy is but as you remember at that time there was a lot of crossover wasn't it?
00:28:03.000Like 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 that are 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.
00:29:38.000But that sort of thing for me, I think I was shown early days that drugs, a level of, thank you Russell, the level of cocaine was a massive distortion.
00:29:50.000It was distorted to the head, to the spirit.
00:29:54.000And that night we used cocaine when we was out with Charlie Wilson and my brother.
00:29:59.000And we went back to the apartment up near Lower Golf Course up behind the ball ring in Marbella.
00:30:05.000And me and my brother had words and it was hard to argue with my brother.
00:30:10.000He was a bit like yourself Russell, he had a right nice way about him without talking.
00:30:15.000There was a niceness, there was a kindness there and I could see it in your eyes.
00:30:19.000And I'm not massaging your ego, I'm telling you the truth.
00:30:24.000That's one thing I've learned to do, is tell the truth.
00:30:47.000And we was arguing, we had an argument.
00:30:49.000He 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.
00:30:57.000He 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.
00:31:09.000And that was the news I was woken up to.
00:31:12.000His girlfriend, who's a lovely lady, she's a famous artist actually today.
00:32:00.000Got a... I went to prison this time, but instead of getting the eight or nine years what the other kid got, cos I was innocent, I really was, I got 18 months for being in the car.
00:32:27.000Drugs appeared again when I came out of full prison.
00:32:30.000And I went back down to Spain, sort of the late 80s, and got at it again.
00:32:36.000When you're working out of Spain, and you've mentioned this, the connection between Morocco and Marbella, how does this lead to this sort of incredible industrialized smuggling that ultimately leads to your arrest and significant And a significant prison sentence.
00:32:55.000And what role do you imagine that the death of your brother plays in that?
00:32:59.000Do you feel that the sort of sadness of that loss somehow, I suppose any one of them, any time 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.
00:33:17.000So could you tell us a 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?
00:33:25.000Well, 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.
00:35:01.000So when I went back down to Spain, I was a broken vessel.
00:35:06.000That 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 The broken spirit, the broken soul, which was dirty.
00:35:22.000I went down to Spain again in the late 80s.
00:35:25.000One reason was to recover, because I'd caused absolute murders with my behaviour towards women.
00:35:31.000And as much as Michael was likeable, the darkness was making him sort of an unsavoury character.
00:35:38.000But where I was lively, I was very theatrical.
00:35:41.000And people used to like... And I was a good money owner, right?
00:35:47.000Al, what is this ingenuity that's required?
00:35:49.000What's the difference between a successful drug smuggler and unsuccessful ones?
00:35:52.000What's the difference between people that can participate in organisations that generate great revenue and those that fall at the first pitfalls?
00:35:59.000What kind of relationships do you have to form?
00:36:01.000What kind of decisions do you have to make?
00:36:02.000What is the kind of opposition that you're facing?
00:36:05.000And how did your skill set enable you to manoeuvre your way through what sounds like a lot of strategic difficulties?
00:36:41.000Seriously, how I'm here to even speak properly, I had levels of mental illness that I think would have blown schizophrenia out of the water.
00:36:52.000That's when I realised it wasn't the common illness of a cold, schizophrenia, which we call it.
00:38:14.000What kind of relationships you've got to have?
00:38:16.000Right, so the relationship, I suppose my dad went before me.
00:38:20.000So my apprenticeship was made a little bit easy.
00:38:23.000So the environment... My dad was old school.
00:38:27.000So 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 ago and he got a telegraph from the King.
00:41:46.000and 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 on it.
00:46:39.000Samantha Fox was a friend of... Samantha Fox in the UK was like a glamour girl, she was a thing called page three girls.
00:46:46.000In 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, front page, but there's a war in the Falklands, page three, look at this woman with no clothes on!
00:50:57.000It was my... Everyone knew I used to say it.
00:51:00.000So God was not unfamiliar to me, because my grandmother, staunch Catholic, she had so many pictures of Jesus in her bedroom, I thought he was a relative.
00:51:38.000Let me change the only way out so spirituality Was a was a thing.
00:51:43.000I think I was searching for this dirty soul.
00:51:46.000These guys rock up to exit a prison It was 26 of us in their prison officers my dad and it might sound bizarre this but People falling off the bottom of the earth in Australia don't sound bizarre.
00:52:01.000We accept it, all the stars in the sky, but the spirit of God was in that room.
00:57:28.000In our conversation with Bobby Kennedy this is a person that's now running for president who has some interesting ideas about why his uncle and father are no longer with us and how those murders were brought about.
00:57:40.000So when we're talking about criminality we're talking about sort of sets of regulation and legislation And as Foucault would have it, who has the right to kill and who doesn't have the right to kill?
00:57:49.000The state has the right to kill, other people don't.
00:57:53.000I also like the theme that keeps emerging of there being a sort of a second ulterior presence, a different force that is available to us when we choose to access it or when we are brought towards it.
00:58:05.000And with that, Michael, to bring us to conclusion, I'd love for you to read whatever verse you fancy reading.
00:58:12.000I'll take the opportunity to let our audience know that you can become an Awakened one day.
00:58:20.000We do exclusive content every single week.
00:58:22.000You can join us and pose questions to our guests.
00:58:26.000Also join us for our book club and our meditation club.
00:58:30.000You 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.
01:00:36.000Thank you very much for joining us for this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
01:00:40.000Remember, tomorrow we'll be talking to Bobby Kennedy and the day after that, Dave Martin.
01:00:45.000Fantastic 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.
01:00:58.000We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.