A former illegal drug dealer who grew up surrounded by high-powered members of the Mexican and Colombian cartel has revealed how he broke away from the black market after multiple run-ins with the law to move into the legal weed trade – which now sees him creating designer strains for a slew of celebrities.
Felipe Recalde, 40, a South native, has become one of the heaviest hitters in the legal marijuana industry, where he designs strains of rare weed for stars like Wiz Khalifa; 2 Chainz; Quavo; and billion-dollar brands like ‘Cookies’.
He’s been in the cannabis business – both illegally and legally – for more than half his life, but his history with drugs goes back much further. His Argentinian uncle was arrested in the eighties for drug trafficking, and his mother’s childhood neighbor, Carlos Lehder, co-founded the Medellín cartel alongside Pablo Escobar.
Recalde was raised by immigrant parents in a Mexican cartel border town and spent his summers vacationing in the Colombian cartel town where his mother and Lehder grew up.
Recalde started dealing drugs when he was 17 and needed money to pay for college. Despite never having smoked weed before, he thought he’d be good at selling it. And he was.
‘At a certain point, if you smoked high-grade weed in South Texas, it came from me,’ Recalde told DailyMail.com.
He’s only been arrested once during his twenty-plus years in the industry, but he’s experienced countless run-ins with law enforcement, including the DEA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security.
‘I continuously had products seized over the years, and I would take a total loss and have to start all over. I’ve lost everything multiple times in my life’.
Despite weed being legal in California and nearly half the country, it’s still illegal federally which creates massive problems for cannabis companies. Until that changes, Recalde’s not going to stop fighting the persecutory anti-cannabis laws that kept him in hiding for half his life.
Recalde family horseback riding in early 1990s on their family ranch in Colombia, located next door to the childhood home of Carlos Lehder, founder of the Medellin drug cartel
Celebs like 2 Chainz (left) and Kevin Garnett (right) work with Compound Genetics to create custom strains of ‘designer weed’
Recalde pictured smoking weed while wearing a ‘Smoke Better Weed’ sweatshirt by Khalifa Kush, one of the brands that works with Recalde
‘SUPER NERD’ TO SUPER SMUGGLER
Recalde was raised in a cartel border-town in South Texas and spent his summers in a Colombian cartel town where his mother grew up.
He describes his parents as ‘strict’ and ‘conservative’, but their family history was anything but.
On his father’s side, Recalde’s uncle Miguel was arrested in the eighties for drug trafficking. It became a high-profile case that eventually established for search and seizure laws in the US.
As Recalde explains it, ‘My last name vs the United States is the bright-line rule for search and seizure. It’s case law for the 4th Amendment where my dad’s brother got caught with cocaine and overturned the case in the Supreme Court as his rights were violated’.
Meanwhile, Recalde’s mother was next-door neighbors with Carlos Lehder, who went on to become Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man and co-founder of the Medellín cartel.
Lehder also helped bring Recalde’s mom to the US from Colombia in the seventies, around the same time the drug lord was running a cocaine-transport empire out of Norman’s Cay island in the Bahamas, about 200 miles off the coast of Florida.
Recalde pictured in his teenage years horseback riding on his family’s Colombian ranch. Despite his parents’ best efforts to shield their children from anything drug-related, their son (right) ended up creating a career out of cannabis. After more than a decade dealing in the black market, he now runs successful legal-marijuana companies
In the late eighties, Lehder was extradited to the US, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 135 years. Five years later, his sentence was reduced to 55 years in exchange for his testimony against Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega. Lehder’s story was profiled in the 2001 movie ‘Blow’, featuring Jordi Mollà as Lehder and Johnny Depp as ‘Boston George’, Lehder’s former cellmate at Danbury federal prison.
Medellín Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder’s mugshot from February 1987. Lehder ran a cocaine transport empire out of Norman’s Cay island in the Bahamas. He grew up in Colombia with Recalde’s mom, who denounces drugs because she saw firsthand the damage that it caused her community and the reputation of the country
Also in the late eighties, Recalde started spending his summers with his family in Colombia. He would vacation there from age three until his late teens when his mother deemed it too dangerous to keep going.
The would-be drug smuggler didn’t understand or appreciate the significance of that danger because when he was there, it wasn’t like he was doing drugs or learning the ropes of the drug trade from cartel members.
He couldn’t tell who was in the cartel from who wasn’t:
‘I’ve crossed paths with cartel members. They’re educated, they’re well-spoken, they own legitimate businesses in congruence with their [cartel] operations’
‘They’re pretty sophisticated, and you would never actually know meeting and speaking to them that they’re tied to any sort of illegal drug trade’.
Recalde’s day-to-day was about as innocuous as it gets.
He says he mostly remembers, ‘the country clubs and all the beautiful homes’.
‘I took tennis lessons. We swam in the country club pool. We rode horses on our family’s ranches… It was a lot of fun’.
Recalde didn’t learn about his family’s cartel ties until much later in life.
‘I found out, as an adult, that the neighboring house to my aunt’s house had been the home of a very famous drug trafficker called Carlos Lehder. That was his parents’ house. Carlos grew up right next door to my family.’
As for why his parents kept him in the dark, Recalde admits, ‘My family wouldn’t even say that they have ties to the cartel. They’re so embarrassed by anything related to drugs in general. They’ve spent their whole lives really embarrassed about that.’
Unlike some of their friends, relatives, and neighbors, Recalde’s parents vehemently rejected the cartel lifestyle out of fear of being associated with it, and so did he for a period of time.
Family photo of Recalde (center), his sister (left) and his dad (right) while on vacation in Armenia, Colombia. Recalde’s mother grew up in that town and was next-door neighbors with Lehder, who would later become Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man. Recalling his more than ten summers in Colombia, Recalde says, ‘I just remember the country clubs and the beautiful homes’. He went there from age three until his teens when his mother deemed it too dangerous to keep going
Recalde’s family photos from his summers in Armenia, Colombia – where his mom grew up with Carlos Lehder, one of the most notorious drug lords of all time. When Recalde vacationed there, he wasn’t doing anything remotely related to drugs. He would go swimming, take tennis lessons, and horseback ride on his family’s ranch, which was located next door to Lehder’s childhood home
The future black market weed baron describes himself as a ‘super nerd’ who, from a young age, was building computers, websites, and calculator games.
‘You would have never thought I would’ve gotten into the marijuana industry. This is the last career choice you would’ve ever expected’, laughs Recalde.
As for whether he thinks his family’s background played a role in his decision to become a drug dealer, Recalde asserts, ‘Their history had very little influence on my life choices. It was more, growing up on the Mexican border and in a region that was a high drug-trafficking area and my curiosity around the Internet and marijuana in general’.
FROM CARTELS TO COLLEGE: DRUG DEALING 101
Recalde didn’t enter the world of weed until his freshman year of college when he was 17 years old.
The soon-to-be cannabis connoisseur was a computer science major at University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.
Despite never having done drugs before, for some reason, Recalde thought he’d be good at selling them… And he was.
‘It came natural to me. It ran in my blood in a sense.’
Recalde says it all started when he was, ‘randomly assigned to a dorm room with a drug dealer’.
His roommate asked him to front a couple thousand so they could buy weed in bulk and then sell it. In exchange, Recalde would be compensated and then some. Except, he wasn’t. His roommate lost all the money.
Recalde attended University of Texas Pan American as a computer science major. After his freshman year, Recalde’s friends got raided by the FBI. To avoid getting arrested himself, he dropped out and moved back in with his parents
To make matters worse, around that time, Recalde lost his scholarship. So there he was, without money to pay for food, let alone tuition.
To get out of that hole, he dug himself a bit deeper and bought some more marijuana.
But this time, he did his research and found out what was considered good weed from what wasn’t, how to price it, and who to trust. That worked, until it didn’t.
‘I eventually lost everything when everyone else in my circle got arrested and went to prison’.
Recalde had to lay low, so he moved back in with his conservative parents, who didn’t know why their son dropped out of school.
By day, he was building websites. By night, he would go to and from his parents’ house delivering weed to people. That routine continued for about six months until he got caught.
‘My parents really suffered from that… My mother said she spent her whole life trying to get away from drugs and stay away from all that. For her son to have made that as a career choice, it was very painful for her’.
Out of respect for his parents, Recalde gave up dealing drugs and stuck to his straight-and-narrow career working with computers. That went on for another six months until he came across some tourism websites for South Padre Island.
‘I looked at the websites and they were terrible. I saw an opportunity to make websites for this tourist destination. That was pretty much it’.
So, Recalde moved out of his parents’ house and headed to South Padre island in 2000, where he’d go on to become the marijuana magnate of South Texas.
CANNABIS KING OF THE SOUTH: ‘IF YOU SMOKED HIGH-GRADE WEED IN SOUTH TEXAS, IT CAME FROM ME’
The then-18 year old started a small-scale tech company, SPI Connect, when he moved to South Padre Island.
Recalde says he spent ‘a good year’ building websites, but then he saw an even bigger opportunity… weed.
‘After a year watching, I saw the opportunity. That’s why I showed up with hybrid weed’.
He began sourcing California marijuana from friends like, Adolph Thornton Jr., who’d go on to become the famous rapper, Young Dolph.
Recalde later grew weed himself, ironically enough, at a country club. It was there that he built a South Texas cannabis empire.
‘At a certain point, if you smoked high-grade weed in South Texas, it came from me’, Recalde told DailMail.com.
SPI Connect was a South Padre tech company founded by Recalde in his early 20s. He built websites and fixed computers as one of the only IT guys on the island
Recalde pictured in his early 2000s at a South Padre party with cast members from MTV show, The Real World. At the time Recalde was earning a name for himself as the go-to guy for weed on the island
It was only a matter of time before the Gulf Cartel of Mexico came knocking.
‘As soon as I started bringing high-grade flower to South Texas, the cartel started buying weed from me. They wanted it in Mexico for the cartel bosses’.
So there he was, back to leading his double life – computers by day, cannabis by night.
And that’s how he ‘developed a relationship’ with the Feds.
‘Over those years, I got to know DEA agents, Homeland Security, like everybody because I was one of the town’s only I.T. guys… I removed viruses off of their computers’.
Ultimately, Recalde landed on their radar for other reasons.
‘I also sold iPhones. They had photographs of me with some guys that I was selling cell phones to’, he admits.
‘They asked me what my relationship was with them, and I said, I just sold them phones’.
The Federal agents informed Recalde that the cartel members he was working with were kidnapping Cubans, taking them to Mexico, and selling their organs on the black market.
Recalde remembers, ‘They showed me pictures of some of the victims going into Mexico, and they said, will you sign up to work for us?’
He told them no because he wasn’t a rat, but at the same time he said, ‘There’s things I could do that we morally agree on’.
Recalde (center), pictured celebrating his 27th birthday in South Padre. The South Texas cannabis kingpin was running a couple marijuana grow houses at the country club where he worked. Less than a year after he moved to California, the country club got raided. Recalde says, ‘It was a close call!’
The drug smuggler didn’t sign up as an informant, but he did offer them tips about the cartel members with the cell phones and corrupt local government officials.
Recalde avoided getting arrested but knew that was a cue to leave. Plus, the country club where he was growing weed was going under.
So he packed up shop and headed for the weed capital of the world: California.
‘I spoke to my partner and said, “Hey, I think we belong here. Do you want to move to California?” We agreed that was our plan… we were moving to California to figure out how to do it legally’.
UP IN SMOKE: ‘EVERYTHING BURNED, FORCING ME TO START ALL OVER FOR WHAT FELT LIKE THE TENTH TIME’
When Recalde got to California, he was living out of his car and sleeping at hotels and on camping grounds.
‘The KOA campground in Sonoma County – I tried to get there after they would close and leave before they would reopen. I would take a shower every maybe third day in a hotel room as soon as I’d get enough money to put down a deposit on the room’.
He began taking classes at Oaksterdam University, the world’s first cannabis college, because he wanted to, ‘be taught and learn how to do it [weed] legally’.
Cannabis Distribution Association members pose with California Governor Gavin Newsom (center). Recalde co-founded the organization in 2016 to represent California’s cannabis distributors
Despite his best intentions, Recalde couldn’t make a clean break from the black market because he still needed money. In 2012, he went to Grundy County, Illinois to pick up some money that was owed to him. When he arrived, however, he found out that the person who owed him money didn’t have it. Instead, the guy offered Recalde a few pounds of weed and said that he had contacts in Iowa who would buy it.
‘I hadn’t done that in years,’ recalls Recalde, ‘I just wanted the cash, so I accepted the weed as payment. I figured I could sell it when I got to Iowa’.
The pair jumped in rental car and headed for Iowa, except, they didn’t make it very far. While they were still in Illinois, they got pulled over by a high intensity drug task force.
When Recalde asked the cops why they pulled him over, he says one of the officers told him, ‘Well, you’re a Hispanic male in a rental car with a black male from the south south east side of Chicago. We pull over cars every single day from that neighborhood. That’s a bad neighborhood’.
Recalde maintains the incident was a product of racial profiling and, ‘the best lesson I could have ever had’.
He explains, ‘It was a fluke. I calculated how many times I’ve driven a four-hour drive and been pulled over and thought, How low risk is this? My entire life and survival, my entire existence and freedom has depended on risk calculations. And when I ran the math, to me the risk was relatively low. I had never run the math of being racially profiled’.
Three days after the arrest, Recalde bailed himself out of jail and headed back home. Over the next year, he’d travel back and forth between California and Illinois for multiple court dates.
In 2013, he was issued a ‘410 probation’, also known as a first-time drug offender probation. Under those terms, his case would be dismissed if he could stay out of trouble for two years.
Unfortunately for Recalde, his indoor grow operation in Cloverdale, California got busted three weeks later. He managed to avoid arrest because the property wasn’t listed in his name, but the cops confiscated more than 200 pounds of marijuana and arrested his roommate.
At this point, Recalde packed up what was left of his life and bunkered down on a vineyard in Sonoma County where he was building software until he completed probation in 2015.
The ordeal was a wakeup call for him to get out of the illicit drug game once and for all. Plus, the county announced an amnesty program for preexisting cannabis operators willing to transition into the legal market.
So, Recalde started working with legal growers and eventually made enough money to start a farm of his own.
It was his first successful legal cannabis operation, but it went up in smoke in Tubbs Fire of 2017, which destroyed 36,800 acres of land and over 5,200 structures, including Recalde’s home and cannabis farms.
Recalde seen sifting through debris of his burned down house after the Tubbs fire in Northern California. Nine days later, he started Node Laboratories
‘It burned my house and all of the farms that I had fronted, you know, funded their plantings’.
Recalde bought soil nutrients for over 50 farms in Sonoma County. They were supposed to pay him back come harvest season and provide him with additional product to sell, but that time never came because of the fire.
‘All of my investments went to zero and so did every inch of my life savings. Everything burned, forcing me to start all over for what felt like the tenth time’, says Recalde.
He continues, ‘Cannabis has so many ups and downs, right? It’s hard. You fail and you get everything taken away from you over and over. You have to get back up’.
Which is precisely what the penniless and homeless cannabis entrepreneur did. Nine days after the fire, Recalde started a new company, Node Laboratories.
Node Labs is a tissue culture and cannabis biotech company with proprietary technology that allows them to store, or bank, plant genetics in-vitro.
In other words, they’re taking cannabis cells, putting them in gels in a clean certified lab to keep them pathogen free until they use them at a later date to breed new strains.
Node Laboratories is a biotech agribusiness that was co-founded by Recalde nine days after the 2017 Tubbs Fire destroyed everything he owned. The company combined with Compound Genetics in 2019 to create a hybrid cannabis company that uses high-tech science to design high-grade weed
Plus, they’re collecting data every step of the way. Recalde boasts that he has decades worth of cannabis data dating back to his black market days.
Their genetics technology is useful for any type of seed producer, from chili pepper farmers to cannabis breeders.
And that’s how Recalde first came to start working with his future Compound Genetics business partner, Christopher Lynch.
He and Recalde met in 2018 through mutual contacts and hearing about each other through the weed grapevine.
Lynch started Compound Genetics in 2017, but back then, the company didn’t have any certified infrastructure. He had decades-worth of marijuana seeds and plants stored in garages.
And that’s precisely what Recalde needed – a large library of cannabis genetics because all of his burned down.
Knowing that the partnership would be massively and mutually beneficial, the pair teamed up in 2019 to form a new version of Compound Genetics, one that implemented high-tech science to breed high-grade weed.
Lynch started banking his cannabis seeds with Node Labs so he could create new strains with those seeds, preserve those strains, and collect data on them.
Recalde brought to the table his certified labs, patented plant-genetics technology, California cannabis licenses, and relationships with companies like Cookies, the first billion-dollar weed brand in the US.
COMPOUND GENETICS: WHERE THE STARS GO FOR ‘DESIGNER WEED’
Pavé (left) and Sour Guava (right) strains designed by Compound Genetics
Recalde says that weed is both an art and a science. Compound Genetics, as it exists today, covers both those bases with Recalde bringing the science and Lynch bringing the art.
Lynch’s title is ‘Chief Executive Wizard’. In that role he looks at the structure, flavor, taste, smells, and effects of a plant to decide if it’s right for the market and for what type of consumer. He’ll also take that flower and go back to the library of plants to decide which ones should be crossed with which to create something new.
Compound Genetics sells millions of dollars worth of legal cannabis each year and has secured breeding contracts with well-known rappers, athletes, and companies who are drawn to the brand because of its artistry, science, and combined experience between Recalde and Lynch.
Recalde (right) teamed up with his now business partner, Lynch (left), after the Tubbs Fire burned down Recalde’s life’s work and savings. The dynamic duo combined forces in 2019 to form a hybrid version of Compound Genetics. The newfound company leveraged Lynch’s vault of seeds and breeding experience, Recalde’s certified labs, cannabis licenses, and proprietary technology.
They have the world’s largest library of pathogen-free cannabis that they use to create new and improved strains of hybridized weed.
Recalde’s business model is based on that of Driscoll’s Strawberries. He remembers reading a research paper about how Driscoll’s won the ‘berry wars’. The household brand would find the reddest, juiciest, biggest berries, and use those genes to create an archetype berry. Recalde applied those principles to weed.
Compound Genetics cannabis plants shown at week 3 of their genotype, phenotype, chemotype hunt in 2020
Here’s how it works:
Like humans, plants have chromosomes with potentially hundreds of different genes existing in each one.
A marijuana plant receives 20 chromosomes from its mother and father plants. The females produce flower and the males pollinate. The resulting seeds are grown by breeders, like Compound Genetics, to create phenotypes.
The phenotypes, while having the same parent plants, have different expressions like smell, taste, and potency.
Again, think about it like humans. A mother and father can produce multiple children with varying heights and hair colors. Weed’s the same way.
Compound Genetics uses in-vitro germplasms and seed vaults to bank genetics from existing strains of weed (e.g., ‘Sour Diesel’, ‘Gelato’, ‘Girl Scout Cookies’) and uses those genes to create new strains. They also collect data on each strain to track how it performs under various conditions.
As Recalde puts it, ‘Let’s say we like the color in one strain of weed and we like the smell of another, we make the next generation of that’.
Those next-generation strains are considered designer weed. To Recalde, designer weed, ‘…checks all the boxes. It’s beautiful, it tastes great, it has the desirable effects I’m looking for, and it’s got the aroma that every time you open a jar, you just want to try it’.
To this day, Compound Genetics hasn’t spent a dollar on marketing. Recalde boasts, ‘We haven’t bought a single ad in any publication ever… People talk about weed. When there’s a really good strain, you share it. It can go viral in a way’.
That word-of-mouth effect is also why Compound Genetics is so particular about who they partner with.
‘We’re not desperately taking business from everybody that knocks on the door’, Recalde says.
Rapper Wiz Khalifa rolling (left) and smoking (right) his custom cannabis, ‘Khalifa Kush’
‘It’s all about word of mouth in marijuana. Reputation is everything. So we go ahead and vet every partner that we work with and know mutual contacts that have worked with them in the past. And if everybody says they’re good, then that works for us’.
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A former illegal drug dealer who grew up surrounded by high-powered members of the Mexican and Colombian cartel has revealed how he broke away from the black market after multiple run-ins with the law to move into the legal weed trade – which now sees him creating designer strains for a slew of celebrities.
Felipe Recalde, 40, a South native, has become one of the heaviest hitters in the legal marijuana industry, where he designs strains of rare weed for stars like Wiz Khalifa; 2 Chainz; Quavo; and billion-dollar brands like ‘Cookies’.
He’s been in the cannabis business – both illegally and legally – for more than half his life, but his history with drugs goes back much further. His Argentinian uncle was arrested in the eighties for drug trafficking, and his mother’s childhood neighbor, Carlos Lehder, co-founded the Medellín cartel alongside Pablo Escobar.
Recalde was raised by immigrant parents in a Mexican cartel border town and spent his summers vacationing in the Colombian cartel town where his mother and Lehder grew up.
Recalde started dealing drugs when he was 17 and needed money to pay for college. Despite never having smoked weed before, he thought he’d be good at selling it. And he was.
‘At a certain point, if you smoked high-grade weed in South Texas, it came from me,’ Recalde told DailyMail.com.
He’s only been arrested once during his twenty-plus years in the industry, but he’s experienced countless run-ins with law enforcement, including the DEA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security.
‘I continuously had products seized over the years, and I would take a total loss and have to start all over. I’ve lost everything multiple times in my life’.
Despite weed being legal in California and nearly half the country, it’s still illegal federally which creates massive problems for cannabis companies. Until that changes, Recalde’s not going to stop fighting the persecutory anti-cannabis laws that kept him in hiding for half his life.
Recalde family horseback riding in early 1990s on their family ranch in Colombia, located next door to the childhood home of Carlos Lehder, founder of the Medellin drug cartel
Celebs like 2 Chainz (left) and Kevin Garnett (right) work with Compound Genetics to create custom strains of ‘designer weed’
Recalde pictured smoking weed while wearing a ‘Smoke Better Weed’ sweatshirt by Khalifa Kush, one of the brands that works with Recalde
‘SUPER NERD’ TO SUPER SMUGGLER
Recalde was raised in a cartel border-town in South Texas and spent his summers in a Colombian cartel town where his mother grew up.
He describes his parents as ‘strict’ and ‘conservative’, but their family history was anything but.
On his father’s side, Recalde’s uncle Miguel was arrested in the eighties for drug trafficking. It became a high-profile case that eventually established for search and seizure laws in the US.
As Recalde explains it, ‘My last name vs the United States is the bright-line rule for search and seizure. It’s case law for the 4th Amendment where my dad’s brother got caught with cocaine and overturned the case in the Supreme Court as his rights were violated’.
Meanwhile, Recalde’s mother was next-door neighbors with Carlos Lehder, who went on to become Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man and co-founder of the Medellín cartel.
Lehder also helped bring Recalde’s mom to the US from Colombia in the seventies, around the same time the drug lord was running a cocaine-transport empire out of Norman’s Cay island in the Bahamas, about 200 miles off the coast of Florida.
Recalde pictured in his teenage years horseback riding on his family’s Colombian ranch. Despite his parents’ best efforts to shield their children from anything drug-related, their son (right) ended up creating a career out of cannabis. After more than a decade dealing in the black market, he now runs successful legal-marijuana companies
In the late eighties, Lehder was extradited to the US, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 135 years. Five years later, his sentence was reduced to 55 years in exchange for his testimony against Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega. Lehder’s story was profiled in the 2001 movie ‘Blow’, featuring Jordi Mollà as Lehder and Johnny Depp as ‘Boston George’, Lehder’s former cellmate at Danbury federal prison.
Medellín Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder’s mugshot from February 1987. Lehder ran a cocaine transport empire out of Norman’s Cay island in the Bahamas. He grew up in Colombia with Recalde’s mom, who denounces drugs because she saw firsthand the damage that it caused her community and the reputation of the country
Also in the late eighties, Recalde started spending his summers with his family in Colombia. He would vacation there from age three until his late teens when his mother deemed it too dangerous to keep going.
The would-be drug smuggler didn’t understand or appreciate the significance of that danger because when he was there, it wasn’t like he was doing drugs or learning the ropes of the drug trade from cartel members.
He couldn’t tell who was in the cartel from who wasn’t:
‘I’ve crossed paths with cartel members. They’re educated, they’re well-spoken, they own legitimate businesses in congruence with their [cartel] operations’
‘They’re pretty sophisticated, and you would never actually know meeting and speaking to them that they’re tied to any sort of illegal drug trade’.
Recalde’s day-to-day was about as innocuous as it gets.
He says he mostly remembers, ‘the country clubs and all the beautiful homes’.
‘I took tennis lessons. We swam in the country club pool. We rode horses on our family’s ranches… It was a lot of fun’.
Recalde didn’t learn about his family’s cartel ties until much later in life.
‘I found out, as an adult, that the neighboring house to my aunt’s house had been the home of a very famous drug trafficker called Carlos Lehder. That was his parents’ house. Carlos grew up right next door to my family.’
As for why his parents kept him in the dark, Recalde admits, ‘My family wouldn’t even say that they have ties to the cartel. They’re so embarrassed by anything related to drugs in general. They’ve spent their whole lives really embarrassed about that.’
Unlike some of their friends, relatives, and neighbors, Recalde’s parents vehemently rejected the cartel lifestyle out of fear of being associated with it, and so did he for a period of time.
Family photo of Recalde (center), his sister (left) and his dad (right) while on vacation in Armenia, Colombia. Recalde’s mother grew up in that town and was next-door neighbors with Lehder, who would later become Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man. Recalling his more than ten summers in Colombia, Recalde says, ‘I just remember the country clubs and the beautiful homes’. He went there from age three until his teens when his mother deemed it too dangerous to keep going
Recalde’s family photos from his summers in Armenia, Colombia – where his mom grew up with Carlos Lehder, one of the most notorious drug lords of all time. When Recalde vacationed there, he wasn’t doing anything remotely related to drugs. He would go swimming, take tennis lessons, and horseback ride on his family’s ranch, which was located next door to Lehder’s childhood home
The future black market weed baron describes himself as a ‘super nerd’ who, from a young age, was building computers, websites, and calculator games.
‘You would have never thought I would’ve gotten into the marijuana industry. This is the last career choice you would’ve ever expected’, laughs Recalde.
As for whether he thinks his family’s background played a role in his decision to become a drug dealer, Recalde asserts, ‘Their history had very little influence on my life choices. It was more, growing up on the Mexican border and in a region that was a high drug-trafficking area and my curiosity around the Internet and marijuana in general’.
FROM CARTELS TO COLLEGE: conferencing DRUG DEALING 101
Recalde didn’t enter the world of weed until his freshman year of college when he was 17 years old.
The soon-to-be cannabis connoisseur was a computer science major at University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.
Despite never having done drugs before, for some reason, Recalde thought he’d be good at selling them… And he was.
‘It came natural to me. It ran in my blood in a sense.’
Recalde says it all started when he was, ‘randomly assigned to a dorm room with a drug dealer’.
His roommate asked him to front a couple thousand so they could buy weed in bulk and then sell it. In exchange, Recalde would be compensated and then some. Except, he wasn’t. His roommate lost all the money.
Recalde attended University of Texas Pan American as a computer science major. After his freshman year, Recalde’s friends got raided by the FBI. To avoid getting arrested himself, he dropped out and moved back in with his parents
To make matters worse, around that time, Recalde lost his scholarship. So there he was, without money to pay for food, let alone tuition.
To get out of that hole, he dug himself a bit deeper and bought some more marijuana.
But this time, he did his research and found out what was considered good weed from what wasn’t, how to price it, and who to trust. That worked, until it didn’t.
‘I eventually lost everything when everyone else in my circle got arrested and went to prison’.
Recalde had to lay low, so he moved back in with his conservative parents, who didn’t know why their son dropped out of school.
By day, he was building websites. By night, he would go to and from his parents’ house delivering weed to people. That routine continued for about six months until he got caught.
‘My parents really suffered from that… My mother said she spent her whole life trying to get away from drugs and stay away from all that. For her son to have made that as a career choice, it was very painful for her’.
Out of respect for his parents, Recalde gave up dealing drugs and stuck to his straight-and-narrow career working with computers. That went on for another six months until he came across some tourism websites for South Padre Island.
‘I looked at the websites and they were terrible. I saw an opportunity to make websites for this tourist destination. That was pretty much it’.
So, Recalde moved out of his parents’ house and headed to South Padre island in 2000, where he’d go on to become the marijuana magnate of South Texas.
CANNABIS KING OF THE SOUTH: ‘IF YOU SMOKED HIGH-GRADE WEED IN SOUTH TEXAS, IT CAME FROM ME’
The then-18 year old started a small-scale tech company, SPI Connect, when he moved to South Padre Island.
Recalde says he spent ‘a good year’ building websites, but then he saw an even bigger opportunity… weed.
‘After a year watching, I saw the opportunity. That’s why I showed up with hybrid weed’.
He began sourcing California marijuana from friends like, Adolph Thornton Jr., who’d go on to become the famous rapper, Young Dolph.
Recalde later grew weed himself, ironically enough, at a country club. It was there that he built a South Texas cannabis empire.
‘At a certain point, if you smoked high-grade weed in South Texas, it came from me’, Recalde told DailMail.com.
SPI Connect was a South Padre tech company founded by Recalde in his early 20s. He built websites and fixed computers as one of the only IT guys on the island
Recalde pictured in his early 2000s at a South Padre party with cast members from MTV show, The Real World. At the time Recalde was earning a name for himself as the go-to guy for weed on the island
It was only a matter of time before the Gulf Cartel of Mexico came knocking.
‘As soon as I started bringing high-grade flower to South Texas, the cartel started buying weed from me. They wanted it in Mexico for the cartel bosses’.
So there he was, back to leading his double life – computers by day, cannabis by night.
And that’s how he ‘developed a relationship’ with the Feds.
‘Over those years, I got to know DEA agents, Homeland Security, like everybody because I was one of the town’s only I.T. guys… I removed viruses off of their computers’.
Ultimately, Recalde landed on their radar for other reasons.
‘I also sold iPhones. They had photographs of me with some guys that I was selling cell phones to’, he admits.
‘They asked me what my relationship was with them, and I said, I just sold them phones’.
The Federal agents informed Recalde that the cartel members he was working with were kidnapping Cubans, taking them to Mexico, and selling their organs on the black market.
Recalde remembers, ‘They showed me pictures of some of the victims going into Mexico, and they said, will you sign up to work for us?’
He told them no because he wasn’t a rat, but at the same time he said, ‘There’s things I could do that we morally agree on’.
Recalde (center), pictured celebrating his 27th birthday in South Padre. The South Texas cannabis kingpin was running a couple marijuana grow houses at the country club where he worked. Less than a year after he moved to California, the country club got raided. Recalde says, ‘It was a close call!’
The drug smuggler didn’t sign up as an informant, but he did offer them tips about the cartel members with the cell phones and corrupt local government officials.
Recalde avoided getting arrested but knew that was a cue to leave. Plus, the country club where he was growing weed was going under.
So he packed up shop and headed for the weed capital of the world: California.
‘I spoke to my partner and said, “Hey, I think we belong here. Do you want to move to California?” We agreed that was our plan… we were moving to California to figure out how to do it legally’.
UP IN SMOKE: ‘EVERYTHING BURNED, FORCING ME TO START ALL OVER FOR WHAT FELT LIKE THE TENTH TIME’
When Recalde got to California, he was living out of his car and sleeping at hotels and on camping grounds.
‘The KOA campground in Sonoma County – I tried to get there after they would close and leave before they would reopen. I would take a shower every maybe third day in a hotel room as soon as I’d get enough money to put down a deposit on the room’.
He began taking classes at Oaksterdam University, the world’s first cannabis college, because he wanted to, ‘be taught and learn how to do it [weed] legally’.
Cannabis Distribution Association members pose with California Governor Gavin Newsom (center). Recalde co-founded the organization in 2016 to represent California’s cannabis distributors
Despite his best intentions, Recalde couldn’t make a clean break from the black market because he still needed money. In 2012, he went to Grundy County, Illinois to pick up some money that was owed to him. When he arrived, however, he found out that the person who owed him money didn’t have it. Instead, the guy offered Recalde a few pounds of weed and said that he had contacts in Iowa who would buy it.
‘I hadn’t done that in years,’ recalls Recalde, ‘I just wanted the cash, so I accepted the weed as payment. I figured I could sell it when I got to Iowa’.
The pair jumped in rental car and headed for Iowa, except, they didn’t make it very far. While they were still in Illinois, they got pulled over by a high intensity drug task force.
When Recalde asked the cops why they pulled him over, he says one of the officers told him, ‘Well, you’re a Hispanic male in a rental car with a black male from the south south east side of Chicago. We pull over cars every single day from that neighborhood. That’s a bad neighborhood’.
Recalde maintains the incident was a product of racial profiling and, ‘the best lesson I could have ever had’.
He explains, ‘It was a fluke. I calculated how many times I’ve driven a four-hour drive and been pulled over and thought, How low risk is this? My entire life and survival, my entire existence and freedom has depended on risk calculations. And when I ran the math, to me the risk was relatively low. I had never run the math of being racially profiled’.
Three days after the arrest, Recalde bailed himself out of jail and headed back home. Over the next year, he’d travel back and forth between California and Illinois for multiple court dates.
In 2013, he was issued a ‘410 probation’, also known as a first-time drug offender probation. Under those terms, his case would be dismissed if he could stay out of trouble for two years.
Unfortunately for Recalde, his indoor grow operation in Cloverdale, California got busted three weeks later. He managed to avoid arrest because the property wasn’t listed in his name, but the cops confiscated more than 200 pounds of marijuana and arrested his roommate.
At this point, Recalde packed up what was left of his life and bunkered down on a vineyard in Sonoma County where he was building software until he completed probation in 2015.
The ordeal was a wakeup call for him to get out of the illicit drug game once and for all. Plus, the county announced an amnesty program for preexisting cannabis operators willing to transition into the legal market.
So, Recalde started working with legal growers and eventually made enough money to start a farm of his own.
It was his first successful legal cannabis operation, but it went up in smoke in Tubbs Fire of 2017, which destroyed 36,800 acres of land and over 5,200 structures, including Recalde’s home and cannabis farms.
Recalde seen sifting through debris of his burned down house after the Tubbs fire in Northern California. Nine days later, he started Node Laboratories
‘It burned my house and all of the farms that I had fronted, you know, funded their plantings’.
Recalde bought soil nutrients for over 50 farms in Sonoma County. They were supposed to pay him back come harvest season and provide him with additional product to sell, but that time never came because of the fire.
‘All of my investments went to zero and so did every inch of my life savings. Everything burned, forcing me to start all over for what felt like the tenth time’, says Recalde.
He continues, ‘Cannabis has so many ups and downs, right? It’s hard. You fail and you get everything taken away from you over and over. You have to get back up’.
Which is precisely what the penniless and homeless cannabis entrepreneur did. Nine days after the fire, Recalde started a new company, Node Laboratories.
Node Labs is a tissue culture and cannabis biotech company with proprietary technology that allows them to store, or bank, plant genetics in-vitro.
In other words, they’re taking cannabis cells, putting them in gels in a clean certified lab to keep them pathogen free until they use them at a later date to breed new strains.
Node Laboratories is a biotech agribusiness that was co-founded by Recalde nine days after the 2017 Tubbs Fire destroyed everything he owned. The company combined with Compound Genetics in 2019 to create a hybrid cannabis company that uses high-tech science to design high-grade weed
Plus, they’re collecting data every step of the way. Recalde boasts that he has decades worth of cannabis data dating back to his black market days.
Their genetics technology is useful for any type of seed producer, from chili pepper farmers to cannabis breeders.
And that’s how Recalde first came to start working with his future Compound Genetics business partner, Christopher Lynch.
He and Recalde met in 2018 through mutual contacts and hearing about each other through the weed grapevine.
Lynch started Compound Genetics in 2017, but back then, the company didn’t have any certified infrastructure. He had decades-worth of marijuana seeds and plants stored in garages.
And that’s precisely what Recalde needed – a large library of cannabis genetics because all of his burned down.
Knowing that the partnership would be massively and mutually beneficial, the pair teamed up in 2019 to form a new version of Compound Genetics, one that implemented high-tech science to breed high-grade weed.
Lynch started banking his cannabis seeds with Node Labs so he could create new strains with those seeds, preserve those strains, and collect data on them.
Recalde brought to the table his certified labs, patented plant-genetics technology, California cannabis licenses, and relationships with companies like Cookies, the first billion-dollar weed brand in the US.
COMPOUND GENETICS: WHERE THE STARS GO FOR ‘DESIGNER WEED’
Pavé (left) and Sour Guava (right) strains designed by Compound Genetics
Recalde says that weed is both an art and a science. Compound Genetics, as it exists today, covers both those bases with Recalde bringing the science and Lynch bringing the art.
Lynch’s title is ‘Chief Executive Wizard’. In that role he looks at the structure, flavor, taste, smells, and effects of a plant to decide if it’s right for the market and for what type of consumer. He’ll also take that flower and go back to the library of plants to decide which ones should be crossed with which to create something new.
Compound Genetics sells millions of dollars worth of legal cannabis each year and has secured breeding contracts with well-known rappers, athletes, and companies who are drawn to the brand because of its artistry, science, and combined experience between Recalde and Lynch.
Recalde (right) teamed up with his now business partner, Lynch (left), after the Tubbs Fire burned down Recalde’s life’s work and savings. The dynamic duo combined forces in 2019 to form a hybrid version of Compound Genetics. The newfound company leveraged Lynch’s vault of seeds and breeding experience, Recalde’s certified labs, cannabis licenses, and proprietary technology.
They have the world’s largest library of pathogen-free cannabis that they use to create new and improved strains of hybridized weed.
Recalde’s business model is based on that of Driscoll’s Strawberries. He remembers reading a research paper about how Driscoll’s won the ‘berry wars’. The household brand would find the reddest, juiciest, biggest berries, and use those genes to create an archetype berry. Recalde applied those principles to weed.
Compound Genetics cannabis plants shown at week 3 of their genotype, phenotype, chemotype hunt in 2020
Here’s how it works:
Like humans, plants have chromosomes with potentially hundreds of different genes existing in each one.
A marijuana plant receives 20 chromosomes from its mother and father plants. The females produce flower and the males pollinate. The resulting seeds are grown by breeders, like Compound Genetics, to create phenotypes.
The phenotypes, while having the same parent plants, have different expressions like smell, taste, and potency.
Again, think about it like humans. A mother and father can produce multiple children with varying heights and hair colors. Weed’s the same way.
Compound Genetics uses in-vitro germplasms and seed vaults to bank genetics from existing strains of weed (e.g., ‘Sour Diesel’, ‘Gelato’, ‘Girl Scout Cookies’) and uses those genes to create new strains. They also collect data on each strain to track how it performs under various conditions.
As Recalde puts it, ‘Let’s say we like the color in one strain of weed and we like the smell of another, we make the next generation of that’.
Those next-generation strains are considered designer weed. To Recalde, designer weed, ‘…checks all the boxes. It’s beautiful, it tastes great, it has the desirable effects I’m looking for, and it’s got the aroma that every time you open a jar, you just want to try it’.
To this day, Compound Genetics hasn’t spent a dollar on marketing. Recalde boasts, ‘We haven’t bought a single ad in any publication ever… People talk about weed. When there’s a really good strain, you share it. It can go viral in a way’.
That word-of-mouth effect is also why Compound Genetics is so particular about who they partner with.
‘We’re not desperately taking business from everybody that knocks on the door’, Recalde says.
Rapper Wiz Khalifa rolling (left) and smoking (right) his custom cannabis, ‘Khalifa Kush’
‘It’s all about word of mouth in marijuana. Reputation is everything. So we go ahead and vet every partner that we work with and know mutual contacts that have worked with them in the past. And if everybody says they’re good, then that works for us’.
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By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) – Roomster was sued on Tuesday by the U.S.Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and six states, which accused the roommate matching service of using fake listings and reviews to take more than $27 million from people often struggling to find affordable places to live.
According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Roomster and its co-founders have since 2016 “inundated the internet with tens of thousands of fake positive reviews to bolster their false claims that properties listed on their Roomster platform are real, available, and verified.”
The complaint said those harmed were typically lower-income renters and students, with many lured into paying even more money to fraudsters who flooded New York-based Roomster’s platform with their own fake listings.
Roomster, in a statement, said the accusations have no merit and “represent another example of the FTC’s overreach.”
Tuesday’s lawsuit is part of an FTC crackdown on fake reviews and deceptive endorsements.
New York, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Massachusetts joined the agency’s case against Roomster and co-founders John Shriber and Roman Zaks, respectively its chief executive officer and chief technology officer.
A fourth defendant, Jonathan Martinez, was accused of selling more than 20,000 fake reviews to Roomster, with Shriber instructing him to produce “lots of 5 star IOS app reviews” and saying he “would like to be #1” for people seeking roommates.
“There is a term for lying and deceiving your customers to grow your business: fraud,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.
The lawsuit seeks civil penalties and an injunction against violations of federal and state unfair trade laws.
In its statement, Roomster said it has always operated with honesty and integrity, and the FTC was “not sincerely interested” in understanding its marketing and advertising practices.
Martinez, who ran the business AppWinn, reached a $100,000 settlement and agreed to cooperate with regulators.His lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last October, the FTC warned website more than 700 companies they could face significant civil fines by using fake reviews and deceptive endorsements to cheat consumers.
The case is FTC et al v Roomster Corp et al, U.S.District Court, Southern District of New York, nj No. 22-07389. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Josie Kao)
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Ray J is exploring the idea of filing , Ray J claimed the infamous sex tape was ‘released like an album’ by Kim herself – who also kept the only copy of it stashed in a Nike shobox under her bed along with other steamy tapes she made with him.
The latest: Ray J, 41, eco is exploring the idea of filing a defamation lawsuit against Kim Kardashian, 41, after she implied he could have sexually assaulted her while she was sleeping
TMZ has previously reported that the McComb, Mississippi-born star claims a second sex tape – separate from the 2007 Kim Kardashian, Superstar – exists, and was filmed in Santa Barbara, California.
Ray J said that Kim’s mother and manager Kris Jenner watched both of the sex tapes and decided to release the former one, which was shot at a resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Jenner has denied any involvement in the release of the tape, which boosted the family’s high-profile, eventually leading to unprecedented success in reality TV, and paving the path toward its marketing empire.
Jenner recently passed a test on The Late Late Show, as a polygrapher said she was truthful in saying she did not arrange for the release of the sex tape.
Doubling down: Ray J uploaded a series of videos on his Instagram earlier on Saturday doubling down on claims that Kris Jenner was involved in releasing his and Kim Kardashian’s sex tape in 2007
Ray J previously doubled down on his claims that it was Kris Jenner’s ‘idea’ to release his 2007 sex tape with her daughter Kim Kardashian, as he shared a lengthy rant aimed at the family.
The singer shared several Instagram posts on Saturday where he threatened to sue both of the stars for defamation, and uploaded a shorter clip where he stated: ‘You have f***ed with the wrong person.’
Ray’s (born William Ray Norwood Jr.) fiery rants came after 66-year-old reality star Kris took a lie detector test on on Thursday, and denied that she ‘helped’ her daughter release the sex tape.
On Saturday night, the younger brother of Brandy Norwood released a sharing numerous Instagram DMs he exchanged with Kim, 41, in April.
‘You know what we did! Your mom controlled this whole sex tape deal with Joe Francis and [Vivid CEO] Steve Hirsch – it was her idea to put out the tape with Vivid. All I did was agree,’ Ray wrote on April 14.
‘Now you want to make it seem like I’m doing it again without your control. All those fake tears. Your fans trusting you to be honest and sincere but it’s all fake for the cameras. I was playing my part until you started doing all of this!
‘What are you trying to ruin me when you know I was just a player in this! You have to stop believing you own lies! I have to let the world know the real [because] you’ve taken it too far now. Somebody needs to explain the play you are doing to me ASAP or I will have no choice but to protect my brand and family and expose real.’
Kim replied that she didn’t say a single bad thing about him in the episode, which depicted the “new footage” that was allegedly going to be leaked by Ray’s manager Wack 100.
‘My soul hurts’: On Saturday night, the younger brother of Brandy Norwood released a 44-minute video sharing numerous Instagram DMs he exchanged with the 41-year-old SKIMS CEO in April
‘Your manager threatened to release another tape that doesn’t exist’: Kim first wrote that she didn’t say a single bad thing about him in the episode, which depicted the “new footage” that was allegedly going to be leaked by Ray’s manager Wack 100
Kardashian wrote: ‘It was upsetting to have to deal with and I am sure can understand how that feels. My “burn them to the ground” comment was a generalization to anyone threatening to hold this over my head 20 years later. We are both parents now with young kids and careers and I’m sure you want to move on from this just like I do. But your manager is the person who brought this all up out of nowhere and I have a right to share how it affected me. ‘Next week’s episode airs where Kanye brings me the computer and he says he got back from you, which shows you in a positive light for giving that to him. Thank you for doing that. Just spoke with my team. We will get something out tomorrow morning to clarify that this was a joke and that you would never gave done something like this. Hope this helps and I’m sorry [too]’
‘The show filmed in real time the day in hell that I had with my lawyers when your manager threatened to release another tape that doesn’t exist – and my son who was five years old at the time seeing an ad with my cry face emoji that said “Kim’s new sex tape” as click bate in Roblox,’ Kardashian wrote.
‘It was upsetting to have to deal with and I am sure can understand how that feels. My “burn them to the ground” comment was a generalization to anyone threatening to hold this over my head 20 years later. We are both parents now with young kids and careers and I’m sure you want to move on from this just like I do. But your manager is the person who brought this all up out of nowhere and I have a right to share how it affected me.
‘Next week’s episode airs where Kanye brings me the computer and he says he got back from you, which shows you in a positive light for giving that to him. Thank you for doing that. Just spoke with my team. We will get something out tomorrow morning to clarify that this was a joke and that you would never gave done something like this. Hope this helps and I’m sorry [too].’
The College Hill: Celebrity Edition star replied that he felt like ‘everyone wins but me’ because he’s the ‘bad guy every time.’
The College Hill: Celebrity Edition star explained that the narrative Kim was pushing was ‘extremely confusing’ for the public and she replied: ‘Because you grew up and have a family and people change their minds’
‘That was, like, some gothic dark s***, dawg’: Ray then watched the episode where her estranged third husband Kanye West retrieved the sex tape laptop and told Kim he’d ‘never let them extort us again’
‘I’m tired of playing that role as the villain. I did it for us in the beginning but now without your support it f***s me over bad,’ he wrote.
The Kardashians star replied: ‘Wow I had no idea that that was supposed to be private. I was filming my normal days and that just happened and I had no clue and I actually thought you and Wack were working together [because] on his [Instagram] it says he’s your manager in his bio.
‘So this entire time I thought [you were] working together and I was so confused at the statement you put out saying [you had] nothing to do with it. I just think that story above is powerful and [shows] that we are working together for the future of our children and families to get this out of the Internet.’
Ray responded: ‘But are we really trying to do it? Steve won’t allow it – so we can pretend to do that but it still probably won’t happen. Plus, won’t people say, “Why is Ray J trying to get it off the Internet when I’m the one who put it out in their minds? Doesn’t it get extremely confusing?’
Ray replied that he never leaked anything, she and her momager Kris Jenner did: ‘I’m watching you cry about something you put out – and it’s not even real tears. How can you cry about something you put out?’
Kim continued: ‘Because you grew up and have a family and people change their minds. Let my call the team one sec. I just wanted to be clear with you if you wanted it out there that we spoke. I don’t want to create any drama at home. But the story that we will work together to speak to Vivid to get it pulled off the air is a bigger story and [shows] unity and that there’s no more bad blood or drama.’
Ray emphasized that he hadn’t spoken to Kardashian on the phone or seen her in 12-15 years and wished they could be speaking in person.
‘I appreciate you for at least trying to make it better after it got way worse. Can we speak again tomorrow after the episode comes out? And figure out the right plan for both of us moving forward?’ he asked.
The aspiring lawyer replied: ‘Absolutely! If it’s better that it just goes away that’s fine too. Trust me it will all go away. Please understand I didn’t want this to come back up and thought you did since Wack said he got it from you. Let’s discuss tomorrow for sure. Either way it will be positive.’
‘I got 12.5%. Kim got 12.5%’: At this point, Ray showed his original sex tape contract, which stipulated that they both received $400K
Cabo intro, Cabo sex, Santa Barbara: On the page listing the deliverables [what they were selling] of the contract, Ray claims it was Kim who personally handwrote the list of the three tapes because she wanted to speed along the process for him
Ray then watched the episode where her estranged third husband Kanye West retrieved the sex tape laptop and told Kim he’d ‘never let them extort us again.’
‘And I’m like, “Thank you. That’s the thanks I get?”…All of a sudden they, like, play a n****. That was, like, some gothic dark s***, dawg,’ the Celebrity Big Brother alum said in the video.
‘I’m just showing you all this because I’m putting this all out for my kids. I’m tired of playing games. I don’t give a f***. I’m not that n**** that they say I am. I’ve never been, dawg. I’m tired of motherf***ers thinking that “It’s just this bad little thing in the past you did, but it’s okay and we’ll look the other way.”
‘Nah, we ain’t looking the other way. F*** that. As long as my name cleared, everybody getting sued because they all motherf***ing putting out fake stories. Look, so I see this s*** and I’m like, “Y’all wanna play games with me? Ok let’s play.”‘
Receipts: Ray shared a handwritten note he received from ‘Kimmie’ to compare with the list of deliverables he claimed she wrote out herself, and alleged that he had the note scanned for fingerprints that matched the contract
Compare it for yourself: Here is another sample of Kim Kardashian’s handwriting from one of her 2019 papers for her law studies
Christmas family portrait: Ray – who owns a wireless audio brand called Raycon – said he’s telling all for the sake of his four-year-old daughter Melody and two-year-old son Epik from his four-year marriage to Princess Love, which ended in 2020
After Ray wrote that DM on April 28, Kim’s texts went from cordial to combative.
‘What are you talking about? I’m not gonna take this s*** from you threatening me. Do whatever the f*** you wanna do,’ Kardashian wrote.
‘You told me don’t do anything and wait for the episode to come out. So I did just that and haven’t seen on story about it! I could have tried to control the narrative but you said wait and so [I] followed your lead. So don’t come at me when your manager put this footage out and was leaking clips to geet press. I didn’t start this! Do whatever [you] want to me. I don’t care anymore.’
Ray replied that he never leaked anything, she and her momager Kris Jenner did.
Sex Tape: In 2007, a sex tape from 2002 of Ray J and Kim was released by Vivid Entertainment on a DVD called Kim Kardashian, Superstar; the two seen together in 2006
‘Imma let them see’: The TV personality stated in his clip on Instagram that he will be ‘going through receipts tonight’
Detailed caption: Ray J wrote out a long rant attached to his clip, stating that it is the ‘biggest rant of my life to clear my name…’
‘And now you wanna try and tear black men down and kill careers with all your lies you and your mom are doing! [Shaking my head] – do whatever I want to you? No look at what you’ve done to me!’ Ray wrote.
‘Why are you such a liar? I would think you would slow it down after you lied your way to fame. I’m watching you cry about something you put out – and it’s not even real tears. How can you cry about something you put out? Joe Francis and [your] mo are the real players in this! You’ve defamed my name and tried to kill my career but God didn’t allow you to. Now you trying to do it again. I’m ashamed of myself for letting you do this to me for so long. You can never deny what you did.’
At this point, Ray showed his original sex tape contract, which stipulated that they both received $400K.
‘There’s no way I could use Kim Kardashian’s name in this contract if she wasn’t a part of it, right?’ he said.
‘Expose’: The singer shared another post on his Instagram, calling the man behind the lie detector test a ‘fraud’ and wrote, ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!’
Release: Ray J recently claimed that Kris, ‘masterminded’ the release of his and Kim’s 2002 sex tape
‘I got 12.5%. Kim got 12.5%. She’s got the same exact contract as I got so when we go to court, guess what? They gotta pull that up because we gotta see that.’
On the page listing the deliverables [what they were selling] of the contract, Ray claims it was Kim who personally handwrote the list of the three tapes because she wanted to speed along the process for him.
Ray also alleged that he had the note scanned for fingerprints that supposedly matched the fingerprints on the contract.
The handwriting does, in fact, look similar to past samples of her handwriting on papers from her law studies.
Alleged messages: In another 30 minute video he shared on Instagram on Saturday, Ray J claimed Kanye West, Kim’s ex-husband, asked for the tapes via direct messages
Ready to sue: In his longer video, the star was heard saying he ‘wants to sue’ not only Kris Jenner, but also ‘every network’
Ray – who owns a wireless audio brand called Raycon – said he’s telling all for the sake of his four-year-old daughter Melody and two-year-old son Epik from his four-year marriage to Princess Love, which ended in 2020.
The TV personality previously a short, black and white clip, where he was heatedly heard saying, ‘You have f***ed with the wrong person.’
He then went on to say, ‘I was just gonna handle this s**t legally and just hit you in court and get what I deserve from all of y’all being foul and trying to defame me, trying to make me look bad.’
The star concluded his short reel by calling out to Kris and Kim that, ‘We are going through receipts tonight,’ adding, ‘Everything that I got, Imma let them see.’
Other claims: In a caption to his post from Saturday, Ray J alleged that both Kim and Kris ‘stole’ money from his ‘mom and sister’
Denial: While taking a lie detector test on The Late Late how With James Cordon on Thursday, Kris denied that she ‘helped’ release Ray J and Kim’s infamous sex tape; the two seen at the 2022 Met Gala together
Ray J added an extensive rant in the caption of the clip in order to ‘clear my name’ and emphasized that ‘this is for my kids.’
Ray J began his statement by clearly expressing that both Kris and Kim have messed with the wrong person, and stated that the two allegedly ‘stole’ money from his family.
‘AND NOW ITS ABOUT TO BE A EASY WIN ON YOU DEVILS AND CON-ARTIST — YOU STOLE ALL THAT MONEY FROM MY MOM AND SISTER — OVER 800k and YOU HAD TO PAY IT BACK BECAUSE YOU WERE GUILTY AND THE JUDGE ORDERED IT!! —- YOU TRIED TO TO BURY THAT JUST LIKE YOUR TRYING TO BURY ME!!’
He then referenced to John Grogan, who was the individual working behind the lie detector machine, on James Cordon’s late night talk show. After Kris said she did not assist in the release of the sex tape, John concluded that she was telling the truth.
His claims: It comes after Ray J claimed Kris ‘masterminded’ the release of his and Kim’s sex tape, told ‘false stories’ about him, and tried to ‘ruin’ his family
For his kids: At the end of his fiery rant on his Instagram video on Saturday, he concluded by saying, ‘This is for my kids’
‘John Grogan is a fake. He is not a polygraph examiner. He is quite accurately known as the polygraph parasite. He’s been convicted of twenty-six counts of fraud and had his P.I. license pulled from him, and he simply became a world-known polygraph examiner,’ Ray J typed.
The singer added in all caps, ‘THIS IS THE DUDE KRIS JENNER HAD TAKEN HER LIE DETECTOR TEST TO MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A LIAR! AND WHATS MORE SAD IS THE NETWORK ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN!!’
After sharing the clip, he uploaded a separate post, where he specifically focused on John and claimed he was a ‘fraud,’ while adding, ‘Nothing can stop the RAIN KIM!! NO NO NO KIM!! NO NO NO KIM!! — ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!— WAIT TILL THEY SEE YOUR HANDWRITING AND FINGERPRINTS ON MY CANTRACT!! and WAIT UNTIL THEY SEE YOUR CONTRACT YOU SIGNED THE SAME DAY AS ME!’
He concluded his rant by writing, ‘YOU THOUGHT KIM AND KRIS STORIES WAS TRUE SO YOU RAN THE STORY!! FACTS ARE ITS COMPLETELY FALSE – I CANT WAIT TO SHOW YOU THE TRUTH!!’
Other drama: In a ShadeRoom post, Ray J commented, ‘You telling people false stories about me, making the black man look horrible, for your gain’; Kris and Kim seen in 2015
Relationship: The reality star and singer began dating in 2002, until they went their separate ways in 2006; the exes pictured with Paris Hilton and Serena Williams
‘IM GOING ON THE BIGGEST RANT OF MY LIFE TONIGHT TO CLEAR MY NAME OF THIS NEGATIVITY AND SHOW YOU HOW THESE PEOPLE ARE F***ING DEVILS — AFTER THIS FINALE!!! THEN WE CAN BE DONE WITH THIS- IM FIRED UP TONIGHT!! THIS is FOR MY KIDS!!’
Shortly after the reel was uploaded, Ray J shared a much longer video that lasted for 30 minutes, detailing similar claims in his previous rant, alleging Kim and Kris are spreading ‘false narratives’ and that he can’t ‘even defend himself.’
When discussing the sex tape, he doubled down on his claims that Kris was indeed involved in its release, stating, ‘You watched it. And made a decision and then you get on whatever show you was on and take a lie detector test with a fraud.’
As he looked directly into his phone’s camera, the star stated, ‘I want to sue you. I want to sue every network. I want to sue the dude that did the lie detector test…’
Towards the end of the video, the singer showed alleged text messages between himself and Kim’s ex-husband, Kanye West. One of the messages claimed that Kanye, also known as Ye, was asking for the sex tapes and contracts.
On his Instagram profile description, Ray J wrote out, ‘John Grogan is a fraud and so is KRIS AND KIm!! Sombody is going to jail!’
The tape from Kim’s 22nd birthday in Cabo San Lucas with her ex were famously released by Vivid Entertainment in a 41-minute DVD titled Kim Kardashian, Superstar in 2007.
However, in recent weeks, Ray J has alleged that Kris was the ‘mastermind’ behind the sex tape’s release, but the media personality has now hit back at the allegations.
During the lie detector challenge, James, 44, asked Kris: ‘Did you help Kim release her sex tape?’ His question was met by gasps and sounds of shock by the crowd, but Kris did not shy away from answering the question.
She said: ‘It’s OK. No, no.’
After James’ colleague John, who was working the lie detector machine, confirmed that she was in fact telling the truth, Kris said: ‘We cleared that up!’
It comes after Ray J claimed Kris ‘masterminded’ the release of his and Kim’s sex tape, told ‘false stories’ about him, and tried to ‘ruin’ his family.
The singer, 41, inserted himself into the latest round of drama between Kanye West, 45, and Kim, 41, after the rapper published text messages between him and his ex-wife with a plea from her mom, 66, who asked for Kanye to stop bringing her up.
Ray J left a comment underneath a ShadeRoom post that showed the message, writing, ‘What about my mom Kris? You telling people false stories about me, making the black man look horrible, for your gain.’
The musician then claimed Kris was the one who introduced him to Vivid CEO Steven Hirsch. Vivid was the company that released the infamous sex tape between Kim and Ray J in 2007.
‘You introduced me to Steve HIRSH, you masterminded everything 4 your family, and tried to ruin mine at the same time smh,’ he stated.
‘You don’t think all mothers get stressed ? Or you special huh? – I know it’s old and I don’t care — this makes me sick – but God had my back and still does,’ he said, wrapping up his grievances.
