From Bad Things On The Streets: To Healthy Treats: The Owen Hanson Story

From Surfer Kid to Federal Target

Owen Hanson was just a surfer kid from Redondo Beach when he got recruited to USC on a volleyball scholarship. His dad was a construction worker, and Owen had grown up as a junior lifeguard, playing beach volleyball and dreaming of becoming the next volleyball star. But when he arrived on campus, the wealth around him hit like a wave.

“I just couldn’t believe all the wealth that was around me. Something I’ve never seen as a son of a construction worker,” Owen told me when we talked about his early days at USC. He was surrounded by fraternity brothers with their fathers’ American Express black cards, BMWs, and Mercedes. The contrast was stark, and it planted a seed that would eventually grow into something much darker.

After graduation, Owen landed a six-figure job with a USC alumni, but the 2008 recession wiped that out. Facing unemployment and feeling the pressure to match the lifestyle he’d been exposed to, he made a decision that would change everything. He went to his father and begged him to introduce him to his Italian friend who was a bookmaker.

“I became the biggest bookmaker in the United States at one point, taking bets from A-list celebrities, professional athletes,” Owen said. What started as sports betting quickly escalated when one of his high-rolling clients couldn’t believe Owen paid him on a Monday after a big win. That client turned out to be connected to a Mexican cartel.

The Million-Dollar Mistake

The client was so impressed with Owen’s business ethics that he wanted to do more business. Owen, ambitious and eager to please his VIP customers, became what he calls a “concierge” for handling the man’s logistics in the United States. Before long, Owen was trafficking tons of cocaine into Australia.

The money was incredible. “If I’m picking up a million dollars for him and he’s paying me 10%, I’m making 100 grand in the day. Who can say they made 100 grand in the day at 24?” Owen explained. He kept thinking about his father working nine to five, sitting on the 405 every day, barely having enough to pay the mortgage. That wasn’t the life he wanted.

But the dream turned into a nightmare when Owen found himself in Australia with about 10 million in cash that needed to be laundered. He set up operations through casinos, but his money launderer got in over his head and lost 2.5 million of the cartel’s money in a single day. In a panic, the guy called the cops and reported that Owen’s operation had weapons, which wasn’t true. A runner got caught with $700,000 in cash.

In 24 hours, Owen had lost 3.2 million dollars of cartel money.

Facing the Music in Mexico

Most people would have run. Owen drove to the Tijuana border to face the cartel boss directly. “I told myself, you know what, I’m going to face the music. So at least if he’s going to kill me, he’s going to do it right in front of my face, right? And then I don’t have to worry about looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

The boss’s response was simple: Owen didn’t owe 3.2 million anymore. He owed 4 million, and now he worked for the cartel.

Owen was 26 years old and had just become an employee of one of the most infamous cartels in the world. But he also knew something else: he was alive, and he was going to pay back every penny. His father had taught him to always pay his debts.

The next few years were a blur of creative smuggling operations. Owen developed ingenious methods, including breaking cocaine down into liquid form and hiding it in expensive wine bottles, then having a chemist in Australia turn it back into powder. He used a USC fraternity brother’s chocolate delivery trucks in New Jersey, paying him $50,000 cash monthly for access to expired chocolate shipments. He even converted a catamaran into a smuggling vessel, transporting cocaine from Mexico into US waters at Newport Beach.

Living Under Surveillance

But Owen’s world was closing in. The money launderer who had lost the cartel’s cash had made a deal with the feds and was working as an informant. For four years, Owen lived under FBI surveillance, watching federal agents in Verizon vans parked outside his house, seeing them in his rearview mirror.

“A lot of drugs, a lot of drinking, a lot of partying, just to just to get my mind off of it,” Owen said about how he coped with the pressure. “You’re just trying to just the anxieties through the roof. So you’re just doing anything and everything. I’d be golfing with Matt Boyer and I’d be popping Xanax and biking and making margaritas at 6:30 in the morning.”

The weight of having both the cartel and the FBI breathing down his neck was unbearable. But Owen kept grinding, focused on one goal: paying back that debt.

The Takedown and the Unexpected Relief

The end came at a golf course. Owen went to handle what he thought was a routine money-wiring transaction, but it turned out to be a sting operation. Fifteen undercover FBI agents, a helicopter in the sky, and Australian authorities were waiting for him.

“That was the day it was finally over, man. It was the, the best, to be honest, the biggest relief of my life,” Owen said. He was relieved for two reasons: he had paid back the cartel, and he could finally walk away from the game without owing anyone or worrying about having to work for them again.

Facing a potential 30-year sentence, Owen made a strategic decision during his cooperation with federal authorities. He told them straight out that he couldn’t talk about the cartel or the people he worked with in Italy because that would be signing death certificates for his family. But there was one person he could talk about: a crooked Australian lawyer who had given him illegal advice and stolen money from him.

Owen ended up with a 21-year sentence, devastating at first. But his luck changed in 2020 when he got extradited to Australia to testify against that crooked lawyer. His testimony helped prove ineffective counsel, and when he returned to the US, a judge granted him an eight-and-a-half-year sentence reduction under the First Step Act.

Prison Innovation and the Birth of California Ice Protein

While serving his time at a federal prison in Colorado, Owen broke his sentence into quarters like a basketball game, five years at a time. During COVID lockdowns, when inmates were confined to their cells for 23 and a half hours a day, Owen wrote his book “The California Kid” and earned a master’s degree through correspondence with California Coast University.

But his most innovative creation came from simple boredom and prison ingenuity. Owen was making protein shakes in his cell and accidentally discovered that adding rock salt made them freeze into ice cream. He convinced his cellmate to help him film the process, and together they created content that would become the foundation for his post-prison business.

Owen started selling the protein ice cream to fellow inmates for $15 each, making more money than the prison guards during one Super Bowl week. “That was my claim to fame. I said man I’m making more money than the guards this week,” he recalled.

Sixteen months after his release to a halfway house, Owen has turned that prison innovation into California Ice Protein, a legitimate business with real manufacturers and distribution plans. The surfer kid from Redondo Beach who once ran a multi-million-dollar criminal empire is now channeling that same entrepreneurial drive into something legal, something he can be proud of.

The nightmare that began with trying to fit in with rich kids at USC has transformed into a comeback story grounded in hard-earned wisdom and genuine innovation born from the most unlikely place imaginable.