OZY's New Podcast: Perils of Pericles, an International Drug Trafficker

Welcome to OZY Confidential, OZY’s new weekly podcast — you know, the one your mother warned you about — for people who think pushing the envelope is the only way to deal with both envelopes and pushing. Subscribe now to follow OZY Confidential on Apple, Spotify, Himalaya or wherever you get your podcast/audio.

It’s hard to walk away from millions of dollars a year. Probably even harder if it’s tax-free. And if all of your product is coming in from the Dark Web and leaving via the U.S. postal system, effectively eliminating the intensive hand-to-hand drug sales bit? Well, what’s not to like? Greek immigrant Pericles Mosdromos, aka the Mad Greek, went this route after a succession of family-owned and -operated restaurants, the death of his father and the slow decline of a mother with dementia. He decided he needed to do something to be able to keep his mom in the kind of elder care where they really seemed to care — at a price tag of more than $80,000.

Which is what the newspaper headlines said after the FBI, the DEA and assorted cops kicked in the doors and arrested him at his quiet Palo Alto apartment: “Man Deals Drugs for Mother.” Right over a photo of the aggrieved Mad Greek, looking a little confused that he received that kind of press treatment when “there were real criminals all over the place.”

“Yeah, I thought their response was a little disproportionate to the crime,” he says with a laugh and what sounds like chagrin. But the press claims seem a little more than credible since while the Mad Greek started out with steroids and then branched out to a whole panoply of pharmaceuticals, he also had a legit business and used the drug-business bucks to care for his now deceased mother. 

A distinction without a difference when you’re looking at 20 years in federal prison for drug dealing. That’s a long enough time to get anyone’s attention. And yet the Mad Greek emerged whole from this hell of his own making, even if totally bereft of anything he had previously thought of as valuable. 

But we’ll let him tell it.

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