[00:00:00] Kristen: Welcome to this edition of Insider Secrets, the weekly podcast that turns real estate investing goals into reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned real estate professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Mike is the founder of My Core Intentions and would like to help you make your real estate investing dreams a reality.

Mike coaches you to buy investment real estate, creating short-term cash flow and long-term wealth. Your host and real estate coach, Mike Morawski, has more than 30 years of real estate investing and property management experience. Here’s your host, Mike.

[00:00:39] Mike Morawski: Hey, what’s up everybody? Good morning. Welcome. Glad that you’re here upright and early. Good to see you this morning. Hey, if you’re new to the show, we are here typically talking about multi-family, talking about real estate investing, passive investing.

Today we have a twist. We’re gonna talk a little bit different. And I’ll get to that in a minute. [00:01:00] But if you’re here for the first time, make sure you smash the subscribe button on YouTube and you’re gonna get notified every time we roll out some new content. Every time we bring a new program, every time there’s another siren that goes by, which is typical for where we record from.

Hey, welcome though. And if you’re on social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, love us, like us. And follow us because like I said, ton of good content continually. So one thing I always talk about is intentionality, right? What’s your intentions? What are you starting your weekend with?

What are your plans for today? Is it family time? Are you doing some work? Are you taking some recreation time? What are you doing for yourself? There’s a lot of talk about life work balance, work life balance. I think when you’re an entrepreneur, what winds up happening is that it all gets convoluted.

It all rolls together. Work, life, it’s all one [00:02:00] thing. So we have to be more intentional about our activities, about what we’re trying to accomplish and get done in any given day or during the week. So I hope that you’ve set some intentions for yourself. And this is more than just goal setting, right?

This is intentionality. What do I wanna accomplish? A typical weekday for me. How many calls do I need to make? How many sales appointments do I need to have? What do I need to get done? If it’s the weekend, what do I need to accomplish? Is it by cutting the lawn? Is it dry cleaning? Is it cleaning the pool?

Whatever it is, make sure that you’re being intentional with your time and your efforts so that you’re always giving back and giving into somebody else. So let me talk a little bit about this morning show. I think we’re gonna hit you with a twist.

Many of you know my story. If you don’t know my story, go to my website. I have plenty of things out there on it. But I think we all in life get faced [00:03:00] with challenges. Things come up and, we either let those dictate our future or we don’t. It’s a choice that we can make. And today my guest Brent Cassity.

Brent Cassity is with Remax Gold in St. Louis, but owns a company called Nightmare Success. Wrote a book called Nightmare Success about loyalty and betrayal, actually about life behind bars. So we’re gonna talk about prison today. We’re gonna talk about some effects on people’s lives, things that happen along the way, and really kind of dig into it a little bit.

Hey, if you’re somebody that likes that kind of stuff, stay tuned. And I always say buckle up. But today, I mean, buckle up. Let me bring Brent in. Good morning.

[00:03:45] Brent Cassity: Good morning, Mike.

[00:03:47] Mike Morawski: How’s it going?

[00:03:49] Brent Cassity: I’m going Good.

[00:03:50] Mike Morawski: Hey, I gotta say, I’ve been looking forward to this. I was on your show a month ago or so.

[00:03:55] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:03:55] Mike Morawski: And we had a good time and really have kind of gotten to know each other here through [00:04:00] a mutual friend Danny Navarro.

[00:04:02] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:04:02] Mike Morawski: Who I’ve really grown to really admire and appreciate from his story and journey and that. And so I’m glad that he connected us. So I think that we can learn a lot from each other and continue to inspire each other along the way.

[00:04:18] Brent Cassity: Agreed.

[00:04:19] Mike Morawski: Hey Brett, one question I always start my show with that I like to ask people is, in one word, what do you think best describes you personally and professionally?

[00:04:28] Brent Cassity: I think the word that comes to mind is tenacious. Never give up. Never give up.

[00:04:35] Mike Morawski: That’s an interesting word because that’s mine. So we have more in common than we thought about. Right? So what’s cool about that though is here’s how I learned that word. So I was selling residential real estate. I was about three years in and I had walk in a client’s house on a listing appointment. He says, man, Morawski, you’re the most tenacious guy I’ve known, and I didn’t know what the word meant.

And so [00:05:00] graciously hoping he means something good, I say, Hey, thank you very much. I run right home. I grab the dictionary, look in the dictionary, and I go, shit, that is me.

[00:05:07] Brent Cassity: That’s me.

[00:05:08] Mike Morawski: It was kind of funny, but hey, I love that. What makes you tenacious?

[00:05:12] Brent Cassity: Well, I think that what, there’s an old Chinese proverb that says you get knock down seven times, get up eight. And I think what makes you tenacious is, you have to have something deep within you that you’re always looking ahead and knowing why you’re getting up. I think the people who get stuck are the people who get knocked down and they don’t know what reason they had to get up. I think you’ve always gotta have a reason to keep you focused, that no matter what happens, I’m gonna keep getting up, I’m gonna keep getting step into where I’m wanting to go.

[00:05:41] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Makes a big difference in people’s lives, doesn’t it?

[00:05:44] Brent Cassity: It does.

[00:05:45] Mike Morawski: Listen, I know a number of guys, and I think you can relate to this, but when I was locked up I know a number of guys that they chose to pull the covers over their heads. And they just laid there. They watched tv, they ate all day. And some of us [00:06:00] make other choices and other decisions.

[00:06:01] Brent Cassity: I think there’s an interesting for those who’ve seen that movie, Shawshank Redemption, there’s a lot of life lessons in that movie, but the one that really stuck out to me is you gotta get busy living and get busy dying.

And that doesn’t matter if you’re in prison or if you’re out in the world, but there are two choices to make. In prison you saw that because it was such a primitive environment. You saw the guys that had quit, given up and you saw the guys that were trying to make it, how do I get through this? How do I survive? How do I better myself to get my feet under me to get outta here and while I’m in here, I’m not gonna waste time.

[00:06:38] Mike Morawski: Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. So listen, let’s dive in. Why don’t you talk about your history a little bit, talk about your background and I’ll probably cut you off along the way, but.

[00:06:48] Brent Cassity: Yeah, my background as a kid growing up, I had a great childhood. Lived in southwest Missouri, Springfield that was kind of a smaller town. It was one of those where you ride your bike around [00:07:00] town and pick teams, you play pickup basketball or baseball or whatever the case might have been.

But my big thing when I was growing up was sports. That was my big outlet. I had a dad that was from a small town, won a state championship in his high school, and he went on to play D one basketball. And so I think that kind of ingrained in me that whole sports mentality, which I also think that sports is a great equalizer when you’re a kid. So I think sports growing up for kids who are still doing that in their lives, I think it’s a great thing for kids to understand, what it takes to be out on the field. And you don’t want to be on the sidelines.

[00:07:39] Mike Morawski: Yeah.

[00:07:39] Brent Cassity: Not normally.

[00:07:40] Mike Morawski: What’d you play?

[00:07:42] Brent Cassity: I played basketball and football, but my main passion was basketball. The funny thing was, I was six foot one in seventh grade. So I was like, what felt like a seven footer at that time. Everybody else was about five foot five, so I mean, it was a domination plus.

So I thought, eighth [00:08:00] grade and I thought it’d be six foot five and I stayed six one, so the NBA dreams died in my junior year that there’s not a lot of people really looking for that six one white guy out there.

[00:08:13] Mike Morawski: Yeah.

[00:08:14] Brent Cassity: Plays off guard.

[00:08:15] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Well, I think back in the Bulls though, in their three peaks, twice in a row you had Steve Kirk. That was about it. Steve Kirk.

[00:08:24] Brent Cassity: Oh yeah. Yeah. You just don’t want to peak your freshman, sophomore year. You want to continue to get either bigger or better. But, the other part of my world was, is that, I mentioned my dad had great parents. I had both my grandparents that I was very close to.

But the one strange thing that happened in my life is my dad went to prison. And he was such a big person in my world. He graduated number one in his law school class. He won big cases as soon as he got out. He got into business and real estate. And he was just like, [00:09:00] man, like when I was seventh, eighth grade, I was like, God, I want to be that guy.

And one night he pulled us in, my brother and I and said, boys, I got something I need to talk to you about. And he said, the bank that I own, I’ve gotten into a heap of trouble and I’m being investigated by the federal government and it’s gone from bad to worse. And I think I’m gonna work out a plea bargain to get this behind us as a family.

And Mike, it was like when he was saying that, it was like his mouth was moving, but I was thinking, how in the world this guy that I idolize, the guy that has the golden touch, how is he saying this? And about the time his words came back and to get a clean break, we’re gonna move to St. Louis, Missouri. And I was like, oh man, this is like the worst family meeting you could ever have.

Is what I thought is in that time of my life. And the thing that happened though is, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I [00:10:00] hadn’t have had dad in my life. But, one of the things that I found was, is he ended up going to prison. We moved to St. Louis. Couple of strange things, you know, back then there wasn’t Google, so we moved into the neighborhood.

Dad wasn’t there. And so it was strange because we had this elephant in the room, people coming over, neighbors, nice people trying to introduce themselves to us. And mom’s not a widow and she’s not divorced, so like, where’s the dad? So we decided what we’re going to do is just say, dad’s out of town working, and that’s who we go see him every weekend. And it was somewhat true. I mean, he was out of town. He was at Marion, Illinois in prison, and he was working in the kitchen. But it was strange to have that in a new world. Nobody knows when the world’s going on with you.

But I remember driving down there the first time we were driving down there, I was thinking, wow, what a weird thing this is that we’re that family now, we are driving every weekend to see my dad in prison. [00:11:00] And before that we had been a pretty well-to-do family. And it was such an adjustment, mine adjustment. But I remember going that first visit and thinking, when he rounds that corner, is he gonna be like dad or is he gonna be prison dad?

I mean, how’s he gonna look? And surprisingly I think he put it on a good face too. But he was fine and doing okay. But I remember the thing that I thought when I walked to that parking lot after that visit was, this’ll never happen to me. No matter what I do in my life from here on out, from 15 years old on, this’ll never happen. I’ll never find myself here.

[00:11:37] Mike Morawski: So you were 15 when that was all happening?

[00:11:39] Brent Cassity: I was 15. Yeah. And then 47 years old, I was standing at the Gates of Leavenworth, and how that all transpired? My dad got out, he hit the ground running with the one company that survived that was not a sexy company. It was a company that prearranged people’s funeral services ahead of time, take the [00:12:00] burden off the family so that the family didn’t have to deal with it at the time.

And it solved a real problem. And it was growing and I couldn’t have been more proud of him. He got out of prison. The reason why he had that company is he put it in a family trust. His name wasn’t on it. And that company began to grow. As I was getting outta college, my goal in life was I was gonna be a trial attorney, like those fancy guys you see on tv and I’d taken theater and I was gonna just go out and get it.

My thing was I graduated, I wasn’t great. I graduated with like a 3.4, wasn’t a 4.0 student or anything, but I had a heck of a time with standardized tests. I mean, I would register on the dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb scale when it came to standardized tests. I always blame it on being left-handed, but I’ve come across a lot of really smart left-handed attorneys, so I don’t know what my issue was. But, I had a fork in the room in my life at that point, no NBA [00:13:00] and now maybe I might not get the law school deal, political science degree and a theater degree wasn’t gonna kick it out into another option for me.

So I had done sales over the course of my college career and I liked it. It had a good rhythm and flow to it, it was kind of like playing sports. You close a deal, you kind of had a scoreboard. If you’re good, you get to play. It didn’t matter how old you were. So I went to my dad and I said, dad, I’m thinking about maybe entering this company of ours.

But dad was always the biggest cheerleader. Oh my God, you’d be great at that. You got these leadership qualities of these natural sales. And I said, but dad, hold on. The one thing is that you cast such a big shadow. Is there any place I could just go pass, fail, just see if Brent can make it?

And he said, well, yeah, son. He said, we just opened up Texas. He said, we signed a funeral home down there to represent. It’s in Austin. I said, sign me up. I packed up my car, moved down there. And Mike, it was in my wheelhouse. It really [00:14:00] felt natural. And some of those directing classes I had in theater, I would almost say to anybody who’s in business that that’s one of the best things to do if you’re gonna try to build and create a team.

Because it’s all about people. Do they believe it? Do they believe the characters? Do they believe the motions on stage? Do they feel what you’re trying to convey? And I think that has a lot to do with building a company. So I grew a region down there, promoted myself to regional vice president. We won all divisions of the national contest. So dad was more than happy to throw the keys over to this 20 something kid because at that time we had grown into having our own insurance company that actually funded those contracts.

So dad went his way and this 20 something kid went into starting to build. We were in three states at the time, when we were done, we were in 25 states 2,500 funeral homes. When I said that was a non-sexy company, we created somewhat of a sexy company in the funeral [00:15:00] industry because there wasn’t anything going on different in the funeral industry in the last 125 years.

And it came from a family cassette tape. My brother found a cassette tape with my grandmother who died three years prior. He came downstairs, he said, check this out guys. And we sat around the table and said, wow. It was her voice. And we started talking about, isn’t it crazy? You lose the inflection of somebody’s voice the way they talk and laugh just in that short amount of time?

We started talking about isn’t it strange that Presidents, Movie Stars, all the important people, they have the highlight film of their life and like Queen Elizabeth died and just imagine if the only thing that you got was the funeral arrangement or funeral services are Sunday at 11 o’clock. You’d be thinking, well, where’s everything else?

But we don’t do that for our grandparents and our uncles and aunts and our parents. So we started talking about why don’t we become the filmmakers for everybody else? So that led us into a world where we [00:16:00] created a production company. We started buying cemeteries, which is a lot like real estate, Mike, you’re just selling it in very small but water, features, location, everything plays into that, which I loved. I loved the idea of creating something in cemeteries where something has permanence to it.

But we injected technology. So we created touchscreen consoles on our cemeteries that we owned. The production people would go out of the people who owned cemetery property and they would take ’em through their scrapbook. And have ’em start talking about their life from the earliest memories to when they had kids and they got married and their jobs. And it was great. We did over 20,000 of these live stories and it got a lot of attention, got a lot of attention because it was something totally different than anything else that was going on in the world of the funeral industry.

So we got covered in the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine and Fortune and Forbes and then HBO came along and did a documentary called The Young and the Dead that [00:17:00] spawned the HBO TV series six feet under which my brother ended up becoming a writer on. Yeah, it was a great show.

[00:17:07] Mike Morawski: Yeah.

[00:17:07] Brent Cassity: Great show. And it was really good. At that time I had met my wife in the neighborhood when I was 15 and she was 13, and so we had kind of gone through every life stage together and I had three beautiful daughters and they were in private schools and I had a country club membership and we had a vacation home and I couldn’t have felt any more accomplished when I was 40 years old.

I just felt like I was at the top of the world. And I think for those guys out there that entrepreneurs that’s sometimes when a blind spot can hit you right upside the head and knock you sideways because when you get on a roll like that, it gets easy. And I think it’s something you and I talked about, Mike, on my podcast with you is that it gets intoxicated.

You get into the flow of everything seems like it’s come enough [00:18:00] roses. I was at a gas station one day and I was filling up my gas tank and my phone rang, pulled it out, fumbled it out of my pocket, and it was the president of our insurance company. Which I didn’t talk to very often, which was one of my problems with the rest of my story is I always just thought that insurance company, I didn’t like math, but I thought, Hey, I filled that up and they take care of it.

He called me up and he said, Brent, I just had the weirdest phone call stranger’s phone call. He said, there’s a lady that called me from the Department of Insurance Investigative Division in Ohio and she said that she has information on our company that’ll bring our company down. And I’ll tell you, Mike, it was like a cold chill went up my spine and I had felt this before, but it was different this time. When my dad told me that at that little family get together, back when I was 14 years old, I felt bad for him, and I knew my life was gonna change, but this felt [00:19:00] tremendously different because I was in this storm now.

And I knew if this was being said in a regulatory environment and one of the most highly regulated companies, industries, there is insurance, that this was gonna be a problem. And our problem really was, you go back to how these things begin and you can almost put a pinpoint on, we had an insurance company and we had a reinsurance company.

The reinsurance company was much bigger. It was the largest in the world. And for those, I don’t want to get in the weeds on reinsurance. It’s just, you write the business as a small insurance company and you sell that business off to the bigger one and they give you a commission back. They take the liability.

So we had cut a sweet insurance reinsurance agreement with them and they came back to us and wanted to renegotiate. My dad being the guy, he was wickedly smart and an attorney. Looked through the contract and said, [00:20:00] no, hell no. And at that moment, if we probably would’ve renegotiated that contract, things would’ve gone on.

Maybe it would’ve cost us a little bit of money. What happened was an arbitration, and that’s where a panel kind of figures out how do we solve this problem? Problem with that was, is you go up something the size of a country and you’re small. Just discovery alone went from 2 million to 4 million to 8 million to 12 million, and it started hitting our capital and surplus.

Something like that hitting your capital and surplus and having that type of an impact catches the eye of regulators and not just one, but we were 25 and that became a firestorm. Dad came to me and he said, Brent, he said, we’ve got a heck of a problem here. And he said, I can’t go talk to these people cuz I’m an ex-felon.

He said, we’ve gotta have a voice to talk. And he said, I really think that [00:21:00] you would be a good voice for us to go to these people. And I was like, man, Mike, I was thinking this is the one company that I really didn’t pay attention to. The one that I arrogantly thought doesn’t matter, we’ll just take it, put it over there. Pays for everything with the time it needs to be paid. And this was time that I had to really dig in and figure out what in the world was I talking about and how was I gonna defend what we were doing?

So I set off into a path to go to talk to these regulators with attorneys and so on. Really basically running into a burning house and I wanted to do it. At that age, I was arrogant enough and cocky enough to think that we had four or 500 people working with us.

And I wanted to show everybody that I could save the day and put the cape on and be the hero. And there were days that I thought that we were gonna be able to do that. There were days that [00:22:00] I thought I had it worked out and that we were gonna be able to avoid the crisis. And in the end, I didn’t.

We ended up going into receivership. That led to a criminal investigation that led to six years of going through being investigated and three years of being indicted and all being a public spectacle. It was a nightmare beyond nightmares that I could ever imagine. I can’t imagine wishing that on anyone.

And anybody who’s gone through that, it’s one of those things if you feel like you’re a person who likes to be in control, your world spins out of control and it’s almost like you’ve fall into a hole and you think you can grab the sides, and the sides keep grabbing and getting wider and wider, and you just keep falling deeper and deeper.

You go to bed with it, you wake up with it, and you just fight. It got to a point where my daughters who were teenagers and my wife, we had kind of gotten into a bubble where we had really good support with [00:23:00] friends and teachers and coaches, and we’d stayed in that bubble. But when we got down to the end of this, my daughter said, dad, there’s just no way we’ve had a tsunami of bad here.

You can’t go any further with this. And at that time when it gets close to a trial, the federal people always come to you with a plea. And I knew at that time, even though I was so used to fighting that I was worn out, I was broke and I knew it was time to give in. And I remember the night that it kind of was all coming down.

I was gonna go plead the next day. And my kids were up at our vacation home with my wife and I was on the phone with my mom, my dad, my brother, and my wife. And we were just kind of talking about how are we going to navigate this going forward? Dad’s gonna go to prison. I’m gonna go to prison. There’s four other [00:24:00] people that are gonna go to prison.

And when I got off the phone that night, it was the first time, Mike, that it hit me that, wow, I hadn’t contemplated this next step. I’m gonna be a felon. I’m gonna go to prison. When I get outta prison, I’m gonna be an ex-felon. How do I live as an ex-felon? Do I wanna live as an ex-felon? What does that mean for the people around me?

My wife, does she need this stain or does she need a fresh start? My kids, can they live with a dad and their life that’s always gonna be branded as an ex-felon. I was drinking alone in our house, which is never a good formula.

[00:24:43] Mike Morawski: Been there, done that.

[00:24:45] Brent Cassity: And it just was one of those things where it caught up to me where I felt like blaming and sorry for myself and how did I get here and why did this happen? And I had another drink and [00:25:00] got worse and it brings the hairs up on my arm when I talk about this cuz I’m not this person. But I grabbed a piece of paper and I started writing, all the people have been such the support to me. My wife, who had just been a warrior, a perfect wife, my kids, all the fatherly advice I could give them.

And got another drink, grabbed the keys to the car and went to the garage, turned it on. And I didn’t know if I was gonna go run into a tree or just let the car run. And Mike, it was like something hit me and feel like it happened like yesterday, something hit me in like a bolt. It was like, my God bro, what are you doing?

What are you thinking? This could be the worst legacy that you could ever conceive for your wife and kids of how you handled this situation. And it was at that moment, cuz I was thinking to myself, you’re the guy half full guy. You’re, you’re the solution guy. And at that moment it became crystal [00:26:00] clear to me the difference between a victim and a survivor.

A victim balls up in a fetal position, points fingers at everybody, and it takes all your strength away. But a survivor, just gives you a different feeling. Even saying the word that you stand up a little differently, you think differently, you react differently. And at that moment, I thought, no matter what happens to me, and everything in front of me looked very scary.

I didn’t know how long I was going to prison. I didn’t know where I was going to prison. But I thought, no matter what happens from this point forward at my rock bottom moment, I’m gonna stand tall. My people that are around me are at least gonna be proud of how I’m handling this situation. So for me, when I went to voluntarily surrender at the gates of Leavenworth, I’d really already hit my rock bottom moment a few weeks before.

And so I kind of gathered myself on how I would handle this, because it’s a strange thing when you stand at the gates. [00:27:00] Everything you know and love is behind you, and all the unknown that you’re stepping into is in front of you. And it’s a really strong, deep moment for you personally because, you don’t have a choice. You’ve gotta step forward regardless.

[00:27:20] Mike Morawski: Brent, let’s back up for one quick second if we can. What was the exact charges or allegations against you that caused you go to go to prison? What’d they say you did?

[00:27:30] Brent Cassity: So, the big thing that I had as a personal thing was, is that, there’s a lot of laws on the books and one that had happened. 1994 Congress passed a law that an ex-felon cannot work in the business of insurance. And the way that our company was structured, my dad was an ex-felon, and we being the trust owned the company. So me being the CEO was aligned my dad to work in the business of insurance. That carried a five year sentence.

[00:27:57] Mike Morawski: And let’s be clear on this. You guys owned this [00:28:00] company before your dad went to prison the first time?

[00:28:02] Brent Cassity: Right. Yeah. So yes, we could have and should have been able to understand and unwrap that from all the attorneys that we had, but we did not. And so that law stood out there. That was one that I couldn’t get away from because if I went to trial whether it was intentional or unintentional I was in a position that I was responsible to know that law.

[00:29:00]

[00:29:11] Brent Cassity: The rest of our charges really were about how we funded and what the value of our insurance policies were when they went into trust. Whether they were valued at the face amount or the cash amount, and that’s a really 12 million document discovery on talking about that. But really what it came down to was our business sustainable going forward.

We’ve been in business for 30 years, but they believed that the way that we ran the business, that it wasn’t sustainable as a company with our business plan. That led to anything that we had bought over those 30 years was money laundering. Anything that we mailed was mail fraud. Anything we wired was wire fraud.

As you know how those things go, Mike, those are four charges, but they can stack on all of those, [00:30:00] on each silo. So with those four charges and stacking them, I was looking at about 900 years and it was more than you can think in your mind when you’re thinking about what do I do next? Am I going to trial?

Am I not going to trial? But the biggest one that I had was and it was a conspiracy too. So when you have a conspiracy, you have to defend all people in the conspiracy to prove the overall to be proven innocent in the overall charging. So it was a big company that, I say it’s a big company, it was a medium sized company that we’ve became a target in the world of the regulatory world.

And so it was something that was hard to put your arms around of what are your next steps if you were gonna go and fight something. 97% of the people who are indicted, plea. And I think most of that comes [00:31:00] down to how can you go into the courtroom and be successful.

I think in our justice system, it is innocent until proven guilty. I’ve dealt with the fact that there were multitude of things that I should have done much differently as a CEO of a company that had an insurance company. My oversight was not what it should have been, and there were things that I should have done that would’ve protected us.

And that didn’t happen. And there’s things too when you think about the family businesses, a lot of people say that’d be great to go into family business. It is. But there’s a couple other things about family businesses too.

You can’t get away from it. You go on vacations and trips and whatever, and eventually it gets around the table and everybody’s talking business. It’s kind of like, having the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. Everybody’s wanting to be the lead singer. So you have that dynamic.

We fortunately didn’t have a whole lot of that cuz all of us kind of had our different ways that we were getting and growing the business. But it’s [00:32:00] something to think about too when you’re thinking about family businesses, cuz there’s a lot of benefits to it, but there are drawbacks of how the family survives as a corporation going forward.

But I think you asked what the charges were. There were big charges that when you’re dealing with money laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud those are charges that are complicated and not easy to get away from.

[00:32:23] Mike Morawski: Let’s fast forward a little bit. Obviously you go to prison, your dad goes to prison, four other people are affected and go to prison. But the effect is deeper than that. It’s not just you facing those gates and saying, What the hell did I do to my life? Or what’s my life gonna look like tomorrow? But there’s wives, there’s children, there’s other people that are affected by this.

We’re the most incarcerated country in the world. And the number is somewhere between 25 and 30% of the US population [00:33:00] has been touched in some way by somebody being incarcerated. Whether it was a business partner, whether it was a sibling, whether it was a spouse or a child. And those effects run deep on people. And I think that you’re somebody, obviously, you stayed married?

[00:33:18] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:33:19] Mike Morawski: And your kids are still solid in your life?

[00:33:22] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:33:23] Mike Morawski: Where it went opposite for me. And which is a shame, but it’s not easy to keep that together. Can can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:33:32] Brent Cassity: Yeah. Because it wasn’t normal. I say and realize that I’m one of the lucky ones and it sounds somewhat strange to say I went to prison and got sentenced to five years. And I say I’m one of the lucky ones, but I saw so many guys that I was close to that lost everything.

I lost everything material. I didn’t lose my family. I think when someone goes to prison, the whole family goes to prison and everybody has to deal with it on their own terms and they have to lean on each other to deal with [00:34:00] that. I give so much credit to my wife. She is really the hero in this story because how she handled the situation and I think the time period of this going on in the ages of my kids, they saw her as a role model of how do you handle something that so unforeseen, so unexpected, the worst nightmare and still thrive, and still become the mother and the person who’s pushing things forward. She was so good about all of that and kept the girls going.

And we joked about it. We had the Leavenworth Express, cuz my kids were at Mizzou, so it went through there at Leavenworth and she’d pick up one or two or three of them every once in a while and on those weekends. And she came every weekend. And I’ll tell you what I think really was the glue to it was, is her doing that because by her being there and me being able to go to a visit, straddle the fence, understand what’s going [00:35:00] on on the other side of our world with the kids and friends and everything else that was going on, us as a marriage was able to stay together and plug into each other’s lives.

And I think one of the things that happens when somebody goes to prison is that gets frayed and frazzled to where they lose contact because that person’s going and fighting the fight out in the real world and you’re encapsulated and segregated off to this world where it’s not.

So I think that was the magic formula for us is that we stayed connected weekly and my kids did too. And we were able to lean on each other through the hard times and share the good times because there were good times also. I mean, my youngest daughter won a state championship. And I remember playing tennis, state tennis, and I remember I was trying to make those phone calls and you get on the phone and then you can’t talk for 30 minutes.

I was trying to follow [00:36:00] that set, but those moments that I had, I still had them in prison because of how we decided to handle the new weird normal. And for so many people, they didn’t get that opportunity because life happened and it frayed off to the side. So, Mike, I was just so incredibly lucky at 15 years old to understand that this 13 year old girl at that time was gonna be such an incredible mother, wife to go through because we were living a very good life. And she was living that life and the kids were living that life and she just buckled in and said, okay, we’re gonna get through this. My kids work through college, my kids do very well now, all accomplished. I couldn’t be prouder of them. So it’s just a testament, I give most of the credit to Julie.

[00:36:53] Mike Morawski: Hey, I just wanna circle back real quick and I want people to grab hold of this, what you kind of alluded to about the telephone [00:37:00] situation. Kind of the same situation with email when you’re in federal prison, you get 15 minute time blocks, so you can talk to somebody on the phone, you can email for 15 minutes, and then the system shuts you out and you gotta wait 30 minutes to get back on, and you’re trying to do that in between count times and work time and travel time and movement time. And I just want people to get, cause a lot of times people say, Hey, what was it like for you in there? And I tell people, I say, Hey, ask me anything except what I ate. Cause you and I could talk about Tuesday cheeseburgers and Thursday fried chicken.

[00:37:38] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:37:38] Mike Morawski: The terrible scrambled eggs on Sunday morning. I always say prison was like, you died and you were watching your life go on without you.

[00:37:48] Brent Cassity: Yes.

[00:37:48] Mike Morawski: Cuz people moved forward and they said when you went to prison that it preserved you. And I came home, I was in the best shape of my life physically. And it’s cuz I worked out, I took care of myself. I can’t say I [00:38:00] ate right. But, I did take care of myself and worked out and exercised and meditated and prayed and did all that kind of stuff. But here’s what I want you to talk about. Talk about your redemption piece. That tenacity that kept you going to the redemption piece to where you’re at today and what you’re doing today?

[00:38:19] Brent Cassity: Yeah. Cuz that’s a good question, Mike, cuz you can only go one or two ways in prison and you see people come out in the best shape of their life or they come out the heaviest they’ve ever been and the worst shape of their life. There’s like no in between. I remember so vividly of walking the fence at Leavenworth, next to the Bob Wire fence and on the sidewalk. And I was thinking, my god, Brent, this is the worst. I mean, you are walking the fence of Leavenworth. What do you do now? Where do you go now?

And kept thinking and thinking why don’t I use, this has been an incredible ride, [00:39:00] an incredible journey, and I want to use this journey to help others. Show them that you can hit rock bottom, but it can be a new beginning. And I started toying around with the words, cuz people always say, Brent, do you know, nightmare and success really don’t go together. Like, where did you come up with that? And I really thought about it when I was walking the fence and I thought about two words that are always together, but we don’t put ’em together. It is nightmare, success because anything that you’re gonna go do in life that’s outta your comfort zone, you’re gonna have to walk through your fears.

You’re gonna have to walk through the things that make you nervous, the things that are scary to get to that thing that sets you free to your own success. And so whether we think they’re together or not, they’re always together. Nightmare success.

[00:39:53] Mike Morawski: Yeah.

[00:39:53] Brent Cassity: And so I started thinking about what can I do when I get home [00:40:00] to continue to stay in my passion? And I think one of the things that I’ve found is the only thing that walks you through your scary points or your nervous, or your fear, your nightmare, is having a passion. Because that’s the thing that wills you to walk over, under, around that fear. And that passion thing is something as they want to nail that they talk about in Shawshank.

Andy Dufresne he talks about the widest, the white sands, the bluest and the blue waters. He’s gonna fix up that old fishing boat, take his friends that on. He’s got the little shack on the beach that he’s gonna fix up so his friends can watch the sun go down and have a drink. You can see it in his eyes when he talks about that.

You can feel it. And that’s what keeps him chipping through 19 years to his freedom. [00:41:00] And every day he rewards himself with the pockets, the holes in his pockets to let that wall out into the yard. That’s what you have to find. And anything that you’re doing, and a lot of people just don’t take the time to figure out what it is that really gets you going, that you feel down to your soul. Because if you get there, you’re willing then to walk through whatever that is, because you know why you’re going to the other side.

[00:41:31] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Did you write your book in prison or out?

[00:41:35] Brent Cassity: Well, I wrote it out. I thought about writing it in prison and I didn’t know if I was in the right mindset to really be a reflective enough. And, writing the book was also cathartic for me because I went through my life and as I thought back, I probably was more reflective of how I handled prison. [00:42:00] Because I really started thinking about, okay, what did I do? How did I do it to survive the way I wanted to survive? And I think while I was doing it, I don’t think I was as aware of the tools I was using until once I got out.

[00:42:14] Mike Morawski: Yeah, that’s crazy. So while you were in, did you do any service work? Did you help other guys? What was that like?

[00:42:25] Brent Cassity: I did, I found we had this I went through RDP which was the only way that you could get a year off prison, which was rational thinking, behavioral thinking. And one of the classes we had was about goal setting and business planning.

And they would give one or two inmates the subject topic. And I was like, okay, I got this one. I know this one. This is the one I don’t have to do any research on. So I got up there and I started talking about it. And it was really something that I had guys come up to me, they said, man, Brent, you got like a minute.

Like we could talk about, I got this idea. You know, like, what do I do with? [00:43:00] And so I started helping guys just get out of their heads what they were thinking. And a lot of these guys, interestingly enough, I see this, one of the biggest things that came to me in prison was, is that there were a lot of good guys in there.

Smart guys made mistakes, but never judging a book by its cover. I always want to hear the story of how did you get here? Why did you get here? You hear about where they are now. So when I started talking to these guys, some of them were drug dealers and I realized that a lot of these guys, if they just set up their business, as they set up the structure that they had, they had distribution, they had incentives, they had hierarchy, promotions, all those things within their structure.

We just need to take it and make it what it would be for a lawn care business or whatever else that they were looking at to be able to make that work on the right side.

[00:43:59] Mike Morawski: Yeah. [00:44:00]

[00:44:00] Brent Cassity: And so I really got a lot out of that. There were other things that helped me feel like me. Cuz I always say, one of my tools was is don’t give in, don’t give up. Keep being yourself regardless of the circumstances, otherwise you’ll lose what makes you, you. And I was the clerk of the food warehouse and so I was very involved in all that food that came in and where it came from and filing all that away and getting forklifts certified, which I would’ve never have gotten for forklifts certified in my life. But I can drive a pretty good forklift, Mike.

[00:44:29] Mike Morawski: Let’s be clear on this. You went from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to making 17 a month.

[00:44:37] Brent Cassity: Yeah. Right. Exactly.

[00:44:38] Mike Morawski: I had that job for a while too.

[00:44:40] Brent Cassity: The other thing that you come to is that when you have all this on the outside and then you realize that your world has come down to a bunk bed, a plastic chair, and a locker, and you can still adapt through that. I always say to people when I’m talking to other people is that nothing is as bad as your mind makes it [00:45:00] out to be. Not even prison. What we build up on our minds, when I was standing at the Gates of Leavenworth, I thought I was here to die. That was my first thought. Second thought, I’m gonna get raped.

Third thought, I’m gonna get beat up. And your mind has such a way of playing things out that doesn’t allow you to step forward. Well, in this situation, you had no choice. You had to step forward. You had to get into this environment. But interestingly enough, even in a primitive environment, you can find things that help you continue to be you.

And you don’t have to become institutionalized in an environment unless you want to be. Like you said, Mike, you can work out, you can read books, you can get a good prison job. You can stay connected to people that you have something in common with. One of the things that I noticed when I first went in was, and this is good for anybody going into anything, don’t [00:46:00] say a whole lot when you get there.

Look around, see what’s going on. See who’s getting it right. See if it’s something that you could implement into your routine to help you get through your stint. And then I would go up and talk to him like, Hey, you know, Mike, you’re reading a lot of books, man. Where are you getting your books from? Or man, what a routine you’ve got working out. You think I could jump in here with you? If not, can I just get your routine so I can start working out.

Those things helped me study myself to feeling like I was still being myself. I think when you start falling into an environment that’s not what you’re used to, and then you start acting like that environment, that’s when you lose yourself.

[00:46:45] Mike Morawski: Yeah, a hundred percent. So, couple things interesting, right? I think when I went away for the first 18 months, I cried every day in prison. And I did it publicly and as a result of that I wound up making friends with [00:47:00] some guys that you wouldn’t normally be friends with.

But here’s what’s interesting and you kind of alluded to this a couple minutes ago. There was a guy and I taught classes. So I taught real estate investing, property management ethics for six years. And there was a guy the night before he went home and this was a guy he was second in charge of pretty big name gang actually from St. Louis. We were sharing a bowl of food the night before he went home. And he looked at me across that bowl of food and he said, if I’d have known I could have made this much money selling real estate, I’d have never sold drugs. And that still makes the hair on the back of my neck standup.

Because you know what? When you can make a difference in somebody’s life, behind bars, outside of prison, you’re making a difference in somebody’s life.

[00:47:52] Brent Cassity: And I think that fills you up. When I wrote the book, I was going on another podcast and being a guest and I told Julie one night we were walking the [00:48:00] dogs. I said, I think I’m gonna do a podcast. And she said, well really? What’s your podcast gonna be? And I said, well, I said, I’ve got 50 guys on my Facebook that went to Leavenworth. I said, I really want a podcast. It’s not gonna be, even though it’s all prisoners, ex-felons that I’m interviewing, it’s gonna be about hope and inspiration.

It’s gonna be about dealing when your worst fear becomes your reality, how do you adapt, survive, and overcome it? And so my podcast became a real passion of mine because I want everybody who listens to that. Yes, it’s interesting because they went to prison. I get that, I want them to know the stories that some of these people make it and they become second chance at life.

There’s a guy that he spent three years at Leavenworth as an inmate, and he is now the current mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas. There’s just some really incredible stories that usually don’t get uncovered because we’re always pushing the bat. [00:49:00] Everything’s horrible. This is a terrible system, which everybody would agree, but there’s no success stories. My podcast is about people who haven’t given up, who believe in themselves enough to ask for help and get to the next stage of their life. And what I think happens with that is that people come in thinking, well, it’s kind of interesting because these people went to prison, but they come out with, wow, there’s some commonality there.

I could have gotten into that mess right there. In the end, I think what happens is that they see strategies that they could possibly use in their life to get themselves unstuck and the end result, hopefully if they come across a Brent or a Mike or someone else’s, maybe I should give these guys a second chance. Maybe they’re not just prison creatures, maybe they’re really trying to get by.

[00:49:45] Mike Morawski: Yeah. And I think people need to realize that you can’t judge a book by its cover. You said that. There’s hope and inspiration in what we both talk about, and I really believe so many people are locked in other prisons, right?

Drug [00:50:00] abuse, gambling, sex abuse, verbal abuse, past history. You know what, you can’t be locked in. You’re trapped in a prison that’s worse than you and I being behind the fence. Right? So people need to realize you can’t let your past define your future, that you can move forward. Cuz now, today you’re licensed as a real estate agent, right?

[00:50:21] Brent Cassity: I’m not licensed, actually. I teach people how to sell and do business plans.

[00:50:26] Mike Morawski: Got it, got it. But I got approved by the SEC to go back and do.

[00:50:29] Brent Cassity: I know, and I think that’s incredible.

[00:50:31] Mike Morawski: Hey, listen, we can all walk through those tough times, those fiery times, and obviously you’ve done that. And congratulations to you and Julie and your daughters. And how long you been home now?

[00:50:43] Brent Cassity: It’s been six years. Yeah.

[00:50:45] Mike Morawski: Did you know a guy named Paul Hartfield?

[00:50:48] Brent Cassity: Yes. He’s been on the podcast.

[00:50:50] Mike Morawski: Opera singer?

[00:50:51] Brent Cassity: Yeah. Yes. I forget what episode he is, but he was in the first year on the podcast.

[00:50:56] Mike Morawski: He’s a great friend of mine. And we met in Duluth.

[00:50:59] Brent Cassity: Super nice guy. [00:51:00]

[00:51:00] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Yeah. Did you know Tommy Doyle?

[00:51:02] Brent Cassity: Yeah, I believe I did know Tommy Doyle.

[00:51:05] Mike Morawski: Art guy from New York?

[00:51:07] Brent Cassity: Yeah.

[00:51:08] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Cuz they both went to Leavenworth about the same time, so I figured they were there when you were there.

Hey Brent. So tell people how they can get your book? How they can connect with you? Why they should connect with you?

[00:51:21] Brent Cassity: Yes. So one of the easier ways to get ahold of me is brentcassity.com and I spell it wrong. I spell it CASSITY. I grew up wanting to be Shawn and David Cassidy, but they were DY. I’m easy to get to on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It’s at Brent Cassity. And you can get my book Nightmare Success. You can get my book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart even has that. So check that out. I’m pretty easy to get and run down. I’d love to go back and forth too with people on leaving messages on my website. I’ll get right back to you if you leave one.

[00:51:58] Mike Morawski: How’d you get your book into [00:52:00] Walmart? We should probably have a conversation about that.

[00:52:02] Brent Cassity: Yeah. It all happened through the distribution. I didn’t even realize it was in Walmart. And you kind of watch what your books doing, and I all of a sudden saw that it was being distributed in Walmart. So I wish I could tell you how that happened, Mike.

[00:52:15] Mike Morawski: Oh, nice. Good for you. I always ask those fun bonus questions at the end, but I’m not gonna ask you my typical ones. So I want to know how many books you read while you were in prison?

[00:52:25] Brent Cassity: Yeah. Okay. So I really actually read a book a week and it was crazy because my wife would send me the Amazon deal cuz they’d show up there.

And I was one of the guys that had books and we filled up a lot of that library because I would pass those out and they’d pass it and we’d go through and it was fun to see these guys, a lot of the guys usually didn’t read and they got into some of these books and it was fun to kind of share back and forth what they were thinking about these different books they were reading. So yeah, a book a week for three years. [00:53:00]

[00:53:00] Mike Morawski: Wow. Good for you. And what was the best book you read?

[00:53:03] Brent Cassity: Hmm, I read a lot of fiction when I was in prison, because it was like an escape for me. And my favorite guy, and you don’t hear him very often, his name is Greg Isles. He writes big books. He’s fascinating because he truly is an attorney. He is from Nacodoches, Mississippi. And everything he writes about is in that town and it’s got series of books that you can read through. But of fiction, Greg Isles is an incredible incredible author.

[00:53:36] Mike Morawski: Awesome. Hey, so have you ever been to Zihuatanejo?

[00:53:41] Brent Cassity: No, but I’d like to go.

[00:53:42] Mike Morawski: It’s beautiful.

[00:53:44] Brent Cassity: It sounds beautiful.

[00:53:46] Mike Morawski: It is beautiful. I went a number of years ago after watching Shawshank. Yeah.

Hey, this has been a blast. Appreciate you, appreciate getting to know you a little bit more and having you on sharing some [00:54:00] information and your vulnerability. Thank you. It’s not easy for any of us, for you or I to go out there. But I think the best way to handle what happened is to handle what happened and talk about it.

And I think that in the business world, we get a lot of respect for that. My good friend tells me all the time, he says, you’re gonna be the Michael Milken and multi-family. And I believe that.

[00:54:25] Brent Cassity: He’s a hero of mine. Michael Milken is definitely. I want to leave one little analogy story for all those who, whether you’re in real estate or are trying to start a business, there was a guy, Damon West, who was a football player. Down in Texas, got into drugs, having a really tough time in prison. He was going in and out of the hole. He’s getting beaten up. He was just doing hard time.

An old inmate came up to him. He said, you know, Damon, you’re not gonna make it in here if you keep doing in time like this. You gotta understand this prison yard’s like a bowling pot of water. He said, are you [00:55:00] following me? And he said, yes, I’m listening. So he said, if I put a carrot in that water, what’s the water do to the carrot? He said, well makes the carrot soft. He said, that’s right. He said, you can’t get soft in here.

He said, get soft in here, you can get hurt and people take advantage of you. He said, if I put an egg in that water, what’s the water do to the egg? He said, well the egg gets hard. He said, you can’t get too hard in here because you gotta have empathy. You can’t lose your heart.

He said, if I put a coffee bean in that water, what’s the coffee bean doing to the water? He said, I don’t know if I’m following. I don’t know. He said, the coffee bean changes the water to coffee. He said, you’ve gotta be the change, be the coffee bean and change the water. Not let the water change you.

[00:55:47] Mike Morawski: What a great story. Love that. Hey, I’m gonna move you out to the back room. I’m gonna say goodbye. Appreciate you, love you man. Hang with me for a few minutes, okay?

[00:55:56] Brent Cassity: Thanks Mike. I appreciate it.

[00:55:57] Mike Morawski: Hey everybody. Little bit longer [00:56:00] episode today. That’s okay. I think the message is a message that everybody needs to hear. Success, loss, failure. Call it whatever you want. It’s not failure. I always say it’s not what happened to us, but what happened for us, right? And Brent is a great example of that.

And it’s the redemption you know, his word was tenacity, right? Tenacity to move forward, to do the next right thing. To keep plugging away no matter what your circumstance is, no matter what your situation is. I hope you go back and listen to this again, or pass this on to somebody else that you think might need to hear it because there’s more to life than getting hung up on our past or on a failure.

Just want that for you. Here’s a suggestion for you. Go grab a copy of Brent’s book and go to Zihuatanejo. And spend a couple days, take some time. Think about your life, think about your situation. Hope I didn’t rock your world too much, but maybe I do hope I rocked your world. Hope you got a [00:57:00] lot out of this. Be blessed. Have a great week everybody.

[00:57:03] Kristen: Thank you Mike, and thank you for joining us for another great episode of Insider Secrets. As always, Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Wherever you hang out on social media, you will find Mike and My Core Intentions. Please like and follow us to get the most up to date real estate investing trends.

Visit mycoreintentions.com where you can get expert coaching on all things real estate investing and property management. If you are looking to become an expert, Mike’s coaching will help you scale your real estate investment business. We’re looking forward to having you back again next week for more Insider Secrets.