[DM] An ex-con who is friends with woke DA Alvin Bragg and appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast last month has been charged with murder after a severed head was found at a Bronx apartment.Justice reform advocate Sheldon Johnson, 48, told the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast on February 1 about his journey 'changing his life around' after being jailed for 50 years for two violent robberies.
He regaled Rogan's audience with tales of his rise to the top of one of the prison's most notorious gangs, before insisting it was all behind him.
'I've been doing bad for so long I'm going to try to do something good, if all else fails I can go back to doing something bad,' he said at the time.
Just a month after the episode aired, Johnson was charged in relation to a dismembered body found in a bin and a head stashed in a freezer belonging to victim Colin Small, 44.
Johnson, who works with at-risk youth at the Queens Defenders in New York, joined Rogan to discuss his justice reform advocacy.
During the chat, he admitted to dealing drugs and robbing those who could not settle their debts - acts for which a judge reportedly branded him, 'a menace to society.'
He described robbing a debtor and his girlfriend in the 1990s with the help of a gang of accomplices, one of whom pistol-whipped the victim leaving him with a head wound.
Johnson also admitted he 'roughed up' a second robbery victim, although he insisted the man was not physically harmed. Johnson was given consecutive 25-year sentences for the crimes.
While in prison, the convicted felon said he was smoking weed and drinking 'jailhouse hooch.'
'I was in a gang, I was top of the food chain. I had my own nation under me, I wasn't just like a random gang member,' Johnson told Rogan.
But he claims that stints in solitary confinement, where he was restricted to a diet consisting of bread with cabbage and carrots six days a week, helped him rethink his approach to life.
'I was really looking at myself and reevaluating and thinking, "what the f*** are you doing",' Johnson explained.
'I remember thinking, "what are you going to do? Can you live out the next 48 years like this?" I said I couldn't do it.'