Owen Hanson’s story of how he went from a college athlete to a convicted cartel kingpin was so wild that Mark Wahlberg had to tell it.

In July 2022, the actor’s production company, Unrealistic Ideas, announced that it had greenlit a three-part docuseries about Hanson, per Deadline. Cocaine Quarterback: Signal-Caller for the Cartel premiered on Prime Video on Sept. 25 and chronicled how the former University of Southern California football player created a global drug empire — and how it all fell apart.

After graduating from college, Hanson made an alliance with a Mexican drug lord, intertwining his ambitions for getting rich quickly with organized crime. However, when his money laundering scheme lost the cartel millions of dollars, he was stuck with a web of debt and in the middle of an FBI investigation, per the official synopsis.

Hanson was arrested at a golf course in 2015 as a result of an undercover FBI sting, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. He later pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute drugs and was sentenced in 2017 to over 21 years in prison plus a lifetime of supervised release.

In addition to serving time, he was also ordered to pay a criminal forfeiture of $5 million, which included $100,000 in gold and silver coins, a Porsche Panamera, two Range Rovers, luxury watches, homes in Costa Rica, Peru and Cabo San Lucas and a sailboat.

So, where is Owen Hanson now? Here’s everything to know about the former cartel kingpin’s life 10 years after the FBI took down his global drug empire.

Who is Owen Hanson?

Hanson is a Redondo Beach, Calif., native who joined USC’s football program as a walk-on in 2004. There, he became the campus drug dealer, telling The Mob Museum in July 2025 that he “was willing to do anything it took to be able to fit in with those USC kids.”

His small side hustle turned into a major illegal enterprise after he started rubbing elbows with an elite crowd of celebrities, athletes and big-money gamblers. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, he trafficked cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy and heroin in the U.S., Mexico, Canada and Australia and ran an offshore sports-betting website.

At one point, Hanson said he was known as “O-Dog” and partied with the elite in Las Vegas, including one memorable Super Bowl party.

“Around me, the fellas were slugging champagne like there was no tomorrow, snorting lines of coke off the table, and downing shots of Clase Azul Ultra Tequila in between slobbery bites of herb-butter snow crab and sixty-day dry-aged Tomahawk steak,” Hanson wrote in his 2025 book, The California Kid: From USC Golden Boy to International Drug Kingpin.

He continued, “Our table was the personification of gluttony, lust, and excess: gorgeous women and coked-up guys, mounds of food, all different variations of drugs and alcohol. The Super Bowl was like Christmas in the betting community.”

The former collegiate athlete claimed he made $1 million a day at one point from his drug and gambling empire, per The Mob Museum.

What did Owen Hanson do?

According to a 2017 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of California, Hanson wasn’t just running an illegal empire. He was the leader of a violent racketeering enterprise called “ODOG,” which relied on intimidation and force to keep customers in line.

That violence was demonstrated when Philly gambler R.J. Cipriani — who also went by Robin Hood 702 — lost $2.5 million of Hanson’s laundered money while playing blackjack. Unbeknownst to him, Cipriani had agreed to work with the FBI and lost the cash on purpose, which led to Hanson’s arrest, per Deadline.

After losing the millions, Hanson sent Cipriani death threats, poured fake blood on his parents’ graves and sent videos of executions to his family members.

Who did Owen Hanson work for?

Though Hanson was linked to a Mexican narcotics cartel, he’s never named names. His silence earned him respect while in prison, and he said that inmates would shake his hand for “not squealing.”

“I can’t say who I was working for,” he told The Mob Museum. “But just put it this way: At the time I was working for the most infamous cartel in the world.”

Where is Owen Hanson now?

In March 2024, Hanson was released from federal prison early, serving less than seven years of his 21-year sentence. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the motion for his sentence reduction was filed under seal and that the request only cited “extraordinary and compelling reasons.”

Deadline reported that he was relocating to transitional housing in Long Beach, Calif.

Cipriani offered an “all expenses paid” one-bedroom apartment for Hanson to stay in for six months as he assimilated back into society.

“This is so that Mr. Hanson is close to his family,” the gambler-turned-FBI-source told Deadline. “From the last person that he’d ever expect to help in life, I wanted to be that person. I wanted to ‘Pray It Up’ as Mark Wahlberg has suggested.”

Since his release, Hanson launched an ice protein bar company using a recipe he developed while incarcerated, which he created using prison mop buckets. He told The Mob Museum that he was released from the halfway house in June 2025 and moved into his company’s Los Angeles warehouse.

“I should have been dead a long time ago,” said the convicted felon. “I should have been killed by the cartel. I should have overdosed on cocaine that was laced with fentanyl. Going to prison saved my life, and I can honestly say that as scary as prison was, it’s the best thing that happened to me because now I feel better than ever.”

Hanson remains on supervised parole.

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