Inside Joey Diaz's Prison Sentence: the Shocking True Story Behind the Stand-up Legend
Joey Diaz’s collision course with the legal system began thousands of miles east of the penitentiary cell he would eventually inhabit. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1963, Diaz arrived in the United States as an infant and grew up in the working-class community of North Bergen, New Jersey. His childhood collapsed early. His father died when he was three, and his mother, who ran a numbers racket and local bar, died suddenly when Diaz was just sixteen. Left parentless, he bounced between foster families, friends' basements, and neighborhood street corners.
By his late teens, petty theft, cocaine abuse, and street brawls had become routine habits. Seeking a clean break from an environment heavy with bad influences and personal grief, Diaz relocated west to Colorado in the mid-1980s. He enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, attempting to reinvent himself as an economics student. The academic reset proved short-lived. The burgeoning cocaine trade in the college town pulled him right back into criminal schemes, this time involving larger stakes, violent acquaintances, and organized scams.
