The Closers Inner Circle Podcast Episode: Sales Infiltration Behind Bars — From San Quentin to Lompoc

Ben Gay III spent 11 and a half years in and around prisons — five years teaching at California's infamous San Quentin State Prison, and more than six years as an inmate at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. In both environments, he learned how to read the system, identify the people who mattered, establish trust, and ultimately make the system work for him. Last time, Ben told us how he talked his way into San Quentin and built a program that reached thousands of inmates. This week, he and Denise turn the tables: San Quentin was voluntary. Lompoc wasn't.

Show Notes

The Closers Inner Circle Podcast Episode: Sales Infiltration Behind Bars — From San Quentin to Lompoc


Ben Gay III spent 11 and a half years in and around prisons — five years teaching at California's infamous San Quentin State Prison, and more than six years as an inmate at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. In both environments, he learned how to read the system, identify the people who mattered, establish trust, and ultimately make the system work for him.


Last time, Ben told us how he talked his way into San Quentin and built a program that reached thousands of inmates. This week, he and Denise turn the tables: San Quentin was voluntary. Lompoc wasn't.


Ben walked into Lompoc with nothing — and walked out, by his own account, as the most successful inmate there. Along the way he taught basic English and writing to a class full of Hell's Angels, learned the hard way that a well-timed detail about your old Honda 550 can undo weeks of trust-building, and met a 19-year-old drug dealer named Lamont Bournes in a public speaking class — a relationship that would eventually make Lamont part of Ben's family and lead to Lamont's own book, Don't Let Your Past Hold You Back: The Redemption of a Gangster.


It's the same technique Ben calls sales infiltration, tested in a place with far less room for error. Tune in as Ben and Denise dig into how it worked from the inside.


Get Ben's Closers books, Parts 1 and 2, at Ronzone Books on eBay.


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