Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
FBI Agent Reveals Bizarre Stories Behind Famous Fraud Cases | Tom Simon
11 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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He just said you weren't going to do it. I'm not doing a Chinese accent.
I refuse to do a Chinese accent. Hello, Matt Cox. Hello, Tom Simon. It is so good to be back with you. It's great to be here. Yes. I don't know if this will be our last episode this year, but it's been a hell of a year for us.
Yeah, that's true.
I think this might be episode 13 that I've been on with you.
Are you serious?
Yeah, I counted them up. And I think each episode is damn near two hours at least. And so we have created over 24 hours of solid gold content together. That's a lot of cocks. How do you feel? I get exhausted with that many cocks. Anyway, so I have 12 stories for you today. Nice. 12 true crime stories ripped from the headlines of the FBI.
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Chapter 2: How do Tom Simon and Matt Cox introduce the fraud cases?
in the city of Chicago building inspector's department. And they began developing some informants within the Romanian building community. Romanians are very good tradesmen. And they found a house that had been just a lot of rumors about builders paying bribes and inspectors taking bribes. And there was a common denominator, what they were finding.
There are people out there, in Chicago at least, who have a job called expediter.
Do you know what an expediter is? Is that someone that you pay to make sure something gets done much quicker than it probably would on its own?
Yeah. In the most pure world, an expediter would be the person who stands in line at the city building department to get you a building permit. Oh, that wasn't what I... But also when it's time, as you're building a house from scratch, let's say, inspections need to happen along the way.
For instance, before you put the drywall up, the electrical inspector needs to come and take a look at the electricity, the wiring behind the walls to give it a thumbs up and say this passes this phase of the electrical inspection. Same thing with plumbing, right? You can't have the plumbing inspector come when the drywall's up and the toilet's sitting there.
You need to be able to take a look at the pipes. make sure they're slanted in the right direction so gravity's working for you to get the waste out and the good water in. It's really very involved. And so there was an expediter named Benny. And so Benny, a Romanian immigrant, very good-looking guy, very nice, evangelical Christian, and
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Chapter 3: What is the structure of the true crime stories shared?
Is all the good-looking and dabber, is all this going to come into play at some point? Or are you just mentioning it? You're just impressed.
I'm painting a picture for you.
Okay. I'm painting a picture for you.
And so the idea was that Benny, we had intel that Benny was soliciting, was the one, if you wanted to make sure you passed your plumbing inspection and had it done fast, because time is money when you have a building loan, You call Benny, and he gets the plumbing inspector there, and you're going to make sure you pass, whether that plumbing's good or not.
Okay, nice.
Benny sounds like the guy to know. Benny is a good guy to know. So when we were thinking about perhaps going up on a wiretap, to try to build cases against crooked building inspectors and crooked builders paying and receiving bribes, it would not make sense for us to go up on a wiretap on a crooked building inspector, right? Because we're just going to catch one guy.
It also, by the same token, didn't make sense for us to go up on a Romanian builder or any builder because, again, we're just going to catch one guy. What if we went on a wiretap on the expediter, the guy who's in the middle of a lot of transactions for a lot of builders and a lot of bribes being paid to building inspectors? That's exactly what we did.
We went on a wiretap on Benny and began listening to his calls. And we had this three-agency team of postal inspectors, FBI agents, and City of Chicago Inspector General.
The Inspector General guys, we put them on the streets with their cameras to take pictures of meetings between the building inspectors and Benny and the builders and Benny when we would hear that a bribe is going to be handed off. And so... We had all of us in the wiretap room, and then we're dispatching, listening to Benny live, and then we're dispatching people. We kept the wire up.
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Chapter 4: How does the first fraud case unfold?
And so by the time we actually were ready to take it down, there was one transaction that stood out to me. It was bad plumbing in a building. It was all backwards. We had an inspector that was helping us out go and take a look at it and say, the plumbing here is all backwards. The plumbing that's underneath the floorboards and behind the walls needs to be slanted in a certain way so you're
When you flush the toilet, it kind of, you know, it goes out to the sewage system. This was all like backward. They were slanted the wrong way. The poor bastard who was going to buy this house was going to have plumbing problems forever. There's no way this would have passed inspection, but the Romanian builder needed it to.
So the Romanian builder contacted Benny, and Benny took $7,000 and handed it off as a bribe to a plumbing inspector named Mario. So of all the transactions we had and all the kind of buzz about, you know, envelopes being handed out in cash, this was a perfect situation for us to make the centerpiece of the criminal charges against Benny and this plumbing inspector whose name was Mario.
So we take it down. We arrest a ton of people, all these building inspectors. We arrest Benny. Well, we arrested Benny the day before. I was there when we arrested Benny. Benny was a muscle man, worked out every day. We showed up to the gym when he was getting out of it. And Benny, you're under arrest. He puts his hands up. He comes in. And the idea was this.
I was going to be handling the interrogation of Benny, me and a partner. We arrested Benny before we arrested anyone else because we wanted to flip him and begin cooperating and start paying bribes to city building inspectors that we could do a better job of capturing on tape. Benny had a wife and kids. He had everything to lose. A very successful business.
And so, and the way we did it was this. We bring Benny into a room. I sit him down. I said, Benny, I want to talk to you before I, and I want you to say a word. I have not Mirandized him yet. I want you to listen to some things. I hit play on the tape recorder that I had set up. And I basically played him 30 minutes of Benny's greatest hits from our wiretap.
Taking a bribe, paying a bribe, agreeing to take a bribe. Some of the conversations are in Romanian. I have no idea what they're saying. We had Romanian translators here. It was bad. It was all bad. And Benny's sitting there just looking very deflated. And I said, Benny, listen, now at this point, I want to talk to you about what's going on here. And we want to solicit your help.
My hope is that you can go home tonight and spend the night with your family. And we would love for you to work with us, not against us. We want you on the government bus, not under the government bus. I said, you have the right to remain silent. Go through it all. He looks at me and goes, I'd like my attorney. Benny was not interested in cooperating. He was not going to testify against anyone.
He wasn't going to set anyone up. And so we take Benny to jail that night. And then the next morning at like four in the morning, we go out and we just arrest everybody, everyone else, all the building. Because we were hoping we could kick that down the road and have Benny make some better cases for us. But we had good cases.
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Chapter 5: What bizarre connections do Kid Rock and The Walking Dead have?
Yeah, Casey Goonan failed miserably to seize the means of production.
Oh, God. What a jerk off. You ever watch the show The Walking Dead? Oh, I love The Walking Dead. You remember the Asian guy in that, Steve? I loved him. I was so disappointed when he got killed.
Yeah.
He got killed. He was my favorite character. Yeah.
My favorite character. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How did Mayor Rick become involved in real estate fraud?
Were you ever into the early music of Kid Rock? I love Kid Rock. Do you remember his little hype man?
Oh, yeah. The little guy. The little... Oh, I forget his name. He would sing. Joe C. Yeah.
Yeah.
Remember Joe C? What do Joe C and Walking Dead actor Steve Ewan have in common?
I don't know. Steve Ewan's way taller than him. It's not height. Joe C also. Joe C died. Whatever.
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Chapter 7: What consequences did Mayor Rick face for accepting bribes?
Oh, yeah. No, he had like a terminal disease. Part of the reason he was such a short film.
Yeah, I thought he actually was a great hype man and added a lot to kid rock shows. Joe C. and Walking Dead actor Steve Ewan are both from the town of Taylor, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit with a population of 63,000. Can you imagine that one town produced two luminaries like that? It's amazing.
The town had a mayor named Rick Solars, and it didn't take long before Mayor Rick was accepting bribes. We just did an episode.
Chapter 8: How does Ping Li's espionage story unfold?
For what? We're getting there. We're getting there. We just did an episode before, sponsored by our friends at Home Title Lock, discussing different kind of real estate fraud scams involving fraudulent titles. This one could have actually probably been in that. The city had title to 95 plots of land that had been foreclosed upon because they didn't pay property taxes, right?
Most of them were probably vacant plots of land. Mayor Rick had the authority to turn those properties over to a real estate developer of his choice in order to do whatever he could. It was his job to kind of maximize the value of those foreclosed properties. Mayor Rick had control of that. And so what he does is he gives all those plots of land to a real estate developer named Shadi Awad.
I think it's spelled like shady. We'll call him Shady Awad. Shady Awad, perfectly legal under city rules to give this stuff, give it to him. The problem is that Shady was also providing Mayor Rick with bribes at the same time in the form of home renovations, cash, money for gambling, and appliances. He had a smart refrigerator. Mayor Rick did.
Probably the only one in the town, huh?
Yeah, yeah. And he also was given a gift of a stove, I guess that's an appliance, and a cigar humidor. What's a cigar humidor? It's like a box that you keep cigars in to keep them fresh? Keeps them nice. You a cigar guy? No. Yeah, me neither.
I have smoked a cigar before. Yeah. Once. Puked my guts out. Just puked like you can't believe.
It's one way to get that monkey off your back.
I'll never. Listen, for years, if I even smelled cigar smoke, I'd feel sick to my stomach.
Yeah.
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