Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
How Thailand’s Most Wanted Criminal Escaped The Country | Louis Ziskin
24 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
I went from $900,000 in debt to up $2 million. We started moving into private jets and air cargo. We were traffickers. We did credit fraud. We did credit cards and traveler's checks. I'm the number one trending thing in Thailand. Kingpin turned tech mogul arrested for attempted murder, kidnap, extortion. They offered me, as the top dude, the first chance to ride.
At the street level of dope dealing, it's highly competitive. At the high tier, Nothing stops the money train. If one person has a problem, everybody has a problem. I was born in L.A. My mom was an immigrant from Lithuania. Her mother, my grandmother, was a Holocaust survivor. Okay. And they came over.
She got over here in her teenage years through a few different refugee programs with my grandmother. And my dad was from Cleveland, Ohio. His family were immigrants from Russia, though, but they'd been here for a few generations. All right. So my dad, you know, was a few years older than my mom. He'd just gotten out of the military. And he met my mom, who was, you know, finishing up high school.
And I was my mother's 21st birthday present. Nice. So they met. They hit it off. It lasted for about—then I had a little brother about a year and a half later, Brian, the best. And then, you know, about six, seven years in, they went their own way. My mom was much more serious. She had two jobs. She had this and that. My dad's head was more in the sky. He's very smart. He gets great ideas.
But at that point in his life, he wasn't able to push through on them.
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Chapter 2: How does Louis Ziskin describe his family background and early life experiences?
And my mom was very pragmatic in the sense like, hey, there's two kids here. I got my mom here. We need to have something together. You know, stable. And my dad's parents were very supportive of me, though. My grandparents, they loved me to death. And a lot of people, you know, over the years have tried to look back and say that, oh, maybe I had parental trauma that pushed me in this direction.
I don't, you know, I miss my dad. I remember waiting for him to come visit after he left. But, you know, I love my dad. I don't... Well, sure, there might be some... hidden trauma somewhere. I don't remember like huge big fights or anybody doing anything horrible to me. You know, I love my parents there. They did the best they could together.
And, uh, you know, and they both, my mom really did what she thought she needed to do because it was in our best interests. And my dad wasn't around for a little while. And, and then he was, you know, and, and he, he was doing things to his capability to looking back,
on it i really believe that i don't believe there was some nefarious parent out there trying to me up for the rest of my life right but i also think parents don't have all the answers sometimes and when you're a problem child like i was from the very beginning you know problem with authority don't go around the block on your bike just ride up and down the street i didn't even ride up and down the street once i took the first left and went around the blocks
Right. Right. Like my mom even said, you know, she's like, when you were younger, it was easier because I could tell you the opposite. Right. And that worked for them. But when you got older, you figured that out and you would just do the opposite of what I wanted, regardless what I said. Right. And that kind of went on all through. You know, I was at Hillel Hebrew Academy in L.A.
I went to Gardner Street Elementary School in Hollywood first. Then the busing thing started and my family sent me. I didn't really understand what that was at the time. My family sent me to Hebrew Academy. Colby doesn't understand what that is either, by the way. Oh, so bussy is forced integration of schools. So they move kids around into different areas to make sure that they integrate.
That was going to be my guess. Okay. So anyway, they sent me there. I like to poke holes at Colby. Well, he's a youngster. What's he for if not that? So anyway, they sent me there and I was there on scholarship. You know, we there's all kinds of Jews, but we were the broke. Right. And so I'm there on scholarship. I'm there through sixth grade, you know, one problem after another.
And then sixth grade, about a week before the end of the school year, I got into a fight with this kid, David Fish. By the way, I'm going to talk shit right now, but they're a great family and I got nothing but good things to say about them. But this kid was the rich kid. He used to fuck with my little brother. He was, you know, but he was kind of goofy.
And so I beat the shit out of him, flushed his head down the toilet. The glasses go down the toilet. And then I'm so pumped up when I get back to my class. Right. Like there was this teacher, Miss Mazor. Like, and she had these big tits, you know? Right. And so I'm in sixth grade and people have been talking about her tits and I'm up at the board and I'm still like all adrenaline rush.
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Chapter 3: How did Louis manage his drug trafficking operations?
You're paying two bucks to three bucks a pill, depending on how many milligrams of MDMA is in it. and uh you know what i'm getting and i'm getting uh 20 000 pounds per kilo which was about 30 000 and the price on the street was you know 12 13 back then so i'm taking that buying pills take that i buy pills right i got 220 000 pounds english close to 300 grand at the time i buy 150 000 pills
Now they're going for 10 bucks a piece at that time wholesale. I get back, I sell a
million dollar you know two-thirds of them i got a million bucks i can pay the 900 grand i owe right and everything's cool and i got you know we got uh uh half a million left uh or 50 000 pills left sold a hundred thousand got 50 000 pills left and uh so we i go instead of paying the guy i go to his competitor and i buy 30 keys with his money i ship them all I mean, you just want to get killed.
Ship them all in three boxes. Well, I figured it out. It doesn't sound like you figured it out. In my head, I'm going to tell you the justification. Oh, I just got one through. I've got to figure it out. Oh, yeah. And now I'm going to put 10 in three different boxes. So as long as two get through, I double my money.
Chapter 4: What led to the eventual bust of Louis and his associates?
And if all three get through, it's insane. And if one gets through, I'm going to break even. Right. So I'm there. I fly to London. All of them land. I get a better price on the pills this time, right? I end up with, you know, a little bit over 650,000 pills. Right. Right? Put them all in boxes. Drive from Amsterdam to... Dusseldorf, Köln, Bonn, Frankfurt.
Now, I've mapped out all the FedEx and DHL offices on that highway from when you come into Germany all the way down to Frankfurt. So there's two at each one of those cities. Drop all the pills off, ship them. They all make it. So in the end, it took me 20 days. I went from $900,000 in debt to up $2 million.
Anyway, now the funny thing is, is all the dudes who didn't have five or ten grand to loan us. Oh, bro, I got 50 back. Of course. Can you turn this over for me?
When you're drowning, nobody wants to come. It's when you reach the shoreline that suddenly they run out and help you.
Yes. And contemporaneously, while all this is getting started. I have a friend of mine, Simon, great guy, Bulgarian guy, roommate, took me into his house when I was broke at different times, gave me a bedroom, was there for me, got me the first keys that I ended up losing. I had a bunch of ancillary debt besides the big debt, right?
And so there's these other guys, too, who are running around at the same time. Tamer and Al, who end up being my co-defendants later, they're operating totally separate from me. We don't know each other, right? Like, I'm looking for them. They're looking for me because of price control, right? And, bro, you want to hear the funniest thing?
By the time we finally find each other, right, we realize... Tamra and Al were living in my girlfriend's building. We'd been passing each other in the building for like a year while we're looking for each other, right? So that was pretty funny. Anyway, so Simon, just a little side thing because this becomes relevant later. Simon's a dealer. He buys a kilo of coke.
And he grams it out and he puts he puts 10 grams of in. He doesn't sell eight balls. He doesn't sell to one gram. You want three grams. You buy three grams at the price. Right. He sells them for 60 bucks, puts them in little bags. He doesn't cut it. So every little bag has a little like fish scaly, pearly looking rock, you know, 60 bucks a gram. So he's turning 15 grand into 60,000 grams.
Every three weeks. That's his thing. When he takes 10 grams with him, when he's done with those deliveries, he comes back home, gets 10 more, drives around in his Porsche, does his thing. Anyway, we both move into this building, 3rd Street in San Vicente, high rise right across from the Beverly Center. And the police end up coming to raid his house. Right. The police raid his house.
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Chapter 5: Why does Louis Ziskin refuse to go to sentencing?
Well, dude, I can't go to sentencing. I just absolutely cannot get sentenced for that. So do you know those dudes who are doing like the straw man, the corporate USA? Yeah, the sovereign citizen kind of thing. Yeah, so I'd read that stuff, and it appeals to you on an intellectual level sometimes until you realize you need a judge to agree with you. But what I found fascinating was the UCC...
financing elements of those things. So I did, I wrote the judge a letter, certified mail, and I said, I've copywritten my name and you're using any unauthorized use of my name in commerce is, we'll start the process of a self-executing UCC1 financing statement for $100,000 for every violation.
so i sent him the letter right to his chambers and this comes out you know next time ziskin ziskin like he's trying to rub it in dude but because he never responded He's stuck the same way that Columbia House, when they used to send you, you know, 10 CDs for a penny and then they send you one every month for 14 bucks, twice the price in the store. Right.
And you have to tell them, no, you don't want it or return it. Right. You have to take an action. If you don't take an action, you owe that money.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Louis Ziskin use to challenge the court?
Well, the judge was so arrogant. And this is what I was counting on. I was betting with dudes in MDC. I was like, he's not if he just responds and says, I don't accept this or I can test anything, just scribble on a piece of paper. There's nothing I can do. Right. But I was like, this this dude is so arrogant and hates me so much. He's not going to respond. He didn't respond.
So, bro, I take the transcripts. I take the letter. I take the registered mail. I have my wife go up to Sacramento file. You see what used to see one financing statement on him for millions of dollars. And the reason why I want to do this is this judge had denied every motion I made, granted every motion the government made. He's known as a hangman judge. Like, you know, I got to get rid of him.
Right. So I said, OK. Your Honor, you have a pecuniary interest now that involves me, so you have a conflict. You need to be recused. Oh, my God, that set off a firestorm in the whole system over there. So they take me to this other court, you know, civil judge, federal judge. You're not entitled to a lawyer. And they're trying to bury me.
They're actually validating it for a second by trying to beat me in court on it. Right. And so I did the same thing to that judge. Okay. Right. He also didn't respond. I filed the UCC financing statement. So you got all that going on, right? Now that's going on. That ends up kind of like stalled. They don't know what to do because they don't want to validate it, right?
Because why would you want to? But at the same time, they're stuck. I got these things recorded, right? After we got the UCC1 financing statement in Sacramento, I had my girl go record it at downtown. Now I'm trying to find investigators who will go looking for these judges' assets, and none of them will touch that.
I'm like, listen, man, I ended up getting his gas card and a condominium that he owned in the Valley, and I was going to lean those. So anyway, I'm doing all that, right? And then Tamer gets in. He's extradited from Amsterdam for the second indictment, the other case that hasn't started. Right, right. So that's going on for a while.
You know, I don't get sentenced for like a year, year and a half, right, by the time I finally get sentenced. Right. So Tamer comes in. They put him on a different floor than me at first. And anyway, finally, the day comes, you know, about a week, about a month before my sentencing. I say I want to represent myself. I want to do my own closing argument. I was like, I was so out of my mind.
My closing argument was going to be, hey, yeah, whatever. Two, three tons of you say we ship to the UK or into Europe. Well, I just want you to know that I got more off the streets than any DEA agent ever did in the history of America, because that was drugs that was already here that already beaten customs in the DEA that were already on our streets. And I traded that for something like.
which is like, that's how out of my mind I was, bro. Like- It's a bad argument. But the funny thing is, right? It's true. There's no DEA agent anywhere in history that is responsible for removing more from American streets than me and Tamar Ibrahim.
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Chapter 7: What prison experiences shaped Louis Ziskin's perspective?
So you're like talking to them and this and that once in a while. They try to keep you separated, but every now and then, one of them's still out on the yard when they take you to yard, like for the dog run yard, right? Yeah. Meet them dudes. And anyway, then I go to Victorville. One, the medium there, which was actually the most rocket spot I was ever at out of all the prisons.
The most violent one was that medium one. It was more violent than Victorville USP. It was crazy because that was the step down yard for the West Coast. So if you're coming out of Penn. You go there if you're on your way up to a pen because you're a headache you go there So it was just wild at that time.
I mean it was but whatever, you know, you get used to it you deal with it and But when I got there it was like I was coming there with all these top dudes or like hey our boys coming, you know So then those dudes, you know There's another couple Mexican dudes and a B dudes in the shoe in Victorville made sure they were taking care of smokes and and and whatever right and
That kind of greased my way through the whole prison. Like, I never had a problem again with anybody. Like, you know, me and Tamer were kind of untouchable in that way. Actually, I give the example. Nobody can swim upstream. But every now and then, a few people can swim across stream. And we were able to swim across stream.
And a lot of it was because, you know, to them, and they say this all the time, guys like you rap. They were amazed. And for drug dealers, when you're really doing million-dollar dope deals, all the drug dealers in prison, that's what they wanted to be. Most of them lie and said they were. But in our case, everybody knew it was there. I mean, it's all documented and everything.
We really were million-dollar dope dealers. And that is just not that common in federal prison, no matter what movies say. So we had our little 15 minutes from that. But the thing that really... I think endeared us to them was the fact that we didn't rat and that I'd represented myself on the biggest case. That was something that was impressive even to these hardened, you know, type of dudes.
And it gave us just the ability to do our time in a very easy manner compared to most people. And ultimately then, you know, and they used to tell me all the time, they used to say, hey, Louis, there's nothing wrong with going home. Don't get caught up in this shit. Like where I see that gangs and they're always trying to entangle each other.
Like there was really guys in prison who are very high ranking that were very interested in making sure that
me and tamer did our part we didn't rat we fought ourselves like they they they want us to know that this wasn't our life even that we were here like we we could do more than that they didn't want us to stay in prison right and i really felt that from a lot of them it was very much like they kept us out of a couple jams they made you know there was just a couple things and you know in prison
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Chapter 8: How did Louis Ziskin navigate legal challenges in Thailand?
And then, you know, and then we realized, hey, there's a cell phone application here as well. It doesn't just have to be from drones. It's the same tech. We can let people open their cell phones and live stream to anybody like on demand. I thought, oh, here you have 24 hour on demand news. Why are we watching a talking head?
Tell us what happened three hours ago when there's somebody there with a phone that could show us live. Right. Right. You want to see if your boyfriend's car is parked at home at 11 o'clock at night? You can use drop-in. You can order a drone or a Lyft driver with a cell phone and see if they're there. Anything. Anything. For real estate. Appraisals. Yeah. But we zeroed in on the insurance space.
Yeah.
in the insurance space and uh you know i was slug slug fest and uh my background really didn't help people were very adverse to that risk obviously insurance companies are adverse to risk and uh anyway we just kept our head down and uh you know i got kind of a little bit sick of the morality argument so i looked at the tier two insurers that we were after at that time because we weren't trying to get the state farms or anything like that at that point you know
I looked at the tier two insurers and I sent investigators on five of the seven of them. And I found that a couple of them had their own morality issues. And I brought it up to them and I said, I don't think it's fair that you're making a morality play on me when you're compromised morally as well.
And, you know, they thought about it and decided the best thing to do would be to give us a contract. And that's how we got our first contract. And, you know, it took off from there. And then we got Lyft as a partner. Then we got into Lloyd's of London.
And then Forbes took notice, digital, because this Mexican convict is in Lloyd's of London, the stuffiest institution ever, and dealing with companies like Hiscox and Beasley. Okay, it's Lloyd's Lab. We got accepted to it, right? And then we got into their network. We were approved as a utility for their whole network of insurance companies, right? And so that was that went really good.
And then COVID, you know, so prison of Forbes in five years, got the company going, you know, fits and starts because I wasn't the right CEO. I'm trying to find CEOs. Right. And they're coming in with their performance pay packages. And I'm not even pushing back. I'm like, did you hit those hurdles? You can have everything you ask for. Right. Right. None of them made it.
Because they don't have skin in the game, do they? Yeah. They don't fucking care. Anyway, I ultimately find this guy, Joseph Shemesh, through a good friend, Zohar Loschitzer. He hooks me up with Joseph Shemesh, and he says, and Joseph comes in. He's a CTO, CEO. He's like one of these magic guys with code.
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