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This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a special simulcast of Criminally Good with Sherrie and Jen, the Storehouse Media Group podcast, welcoming Matthew Cox, the former licensed mortgage broker turned nationally recognized expert on white collar crime. Cox built his criminal career around synthetic identities and the fraudulent acquisition of credit cards, personal loans and mortgages, landed on the Secret Service Most Wanted list, and served 13 years in federal prison. Today he hosts Inside True Crime, interviewing law enforcement, journalists and former criminals. Cox opened up about the writing career he started behind bars, the life rights he has optioned, and the persistent confusion around War Dogs, the film based on Guy Lawson's Rolling Stone article. Cox was incarcerated with Efraim Diveroli, the figure played by Jonah Hill, and ghostwrote and sold Diveroli's memoir, but had no hand in the movie. His own memoir, Shark in the Housing Pool, has been optioned several times across seven years without reaching production, and Cox explained why he refuses to build a life around waiting on Hollywood.
The conversation turned into a candid masterclass on podcast growth. Cox has built Inside True Crime to 1.1 million YouTube subscribers in roughly six years, tracing the arc from filming himself on an iPhone, to one video a week, to a full in-studio operation producing three long-form episodes a week plus daily shorts. He explained why AdSense outperforms outside sponsors for a true crime show, and how shorts and reels drove his biggest surge. Neil pushed him on volume, recommending a more aggressive shorts schedule, and shared how NHL Wraparound is capturing summer hockey attention with former New York Rangers general manager Neil Smith. Cox also detailed going from begging guests to appear to fielding more submissions than he can book, and why storytelling ability matters more to him than the size of the crime.
Cox was equally direct about the harder material, describing how he bristled at the first articles written about him before accepting that the con man label fit, and came to terms with how Dateline and American Greed portrayed him. Rewriting his memoir forced an honest accounting, and by his release he had decided to tell his story exactly as it happened regardless of how it made him look. Sherrie, drawing on 32 years in law enforcement, credited him for paying court-ordered restitution when most people in the federal system never bother, and for avoiding recidivism. Cox also discussed launching additional channels, including The Murder Man, which monetized in about nine days, and the painting career that kept him afloat after the halfway house. He still paints today.
Neil then welcomed poet, recording artist and author MJ Bop, whose work blends storytelling, music and spoken word. Bop won a poetry award in second grade, earned an XXL Magazine Hip-Hop Quotable in 1999, released the single You Don't Hear Me, and performed throughout New York City before touring Switzerland and Japan. He cited Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Kool G Rap, Slick Rick and Cam'ron as influences, and spoke movingly about the stroke and heart attack he suffered in 2023, which erased his memory of rhyming and forced him to relearn himself, deepening his faith and resetting his priorities. Bop discussed his book Bop Poetry, Writer of the Black Experience, drawn from the struggles, dreams and shackled hopes he sees in his own neighborhood, his clothing brand Writers Wear, created to make writing cool for young people, and his upcoming book Losing Myself to Find Myself.
The program closes with The Mike Vilardi Show, where Neil and Mike Vilardi discussed the reported bounty on President Trump, the Ayatollah's funeral, the assumptions that shaped the recent conflict with Iran, and Vilardi's view that ideological fractures will split the Democratic Party. Find Cox at Inside True Crime on Instagram,