Owen Hanson goes from cartel kingpin to selling frozen protein bars

At one time Owen Hanson, a former University of Southern California national championship football player, was making millions as a global drug trafficker who also ran an illegal sports betting operation. His clients included professional athletes and Hollywood stars.

Now the 43-year-old paroled felon earns $500 every two weeks selling the iced protein bars he first learned to make in prison mop buckets.

The lifestyle change has been dramatic. During earlier years, known in some circles as O-Dog, Hanson participated in epic debauchery, including wild parties on the Las Vegas Strip. During one Super Bowl bash at the Aria hotel-casino, a call came in from Paris Hilton’s boyfriend wanting to place a $10,000 bet for her, according to Hanson’s book The California Kid: From USC Golden Boy to International Drug Kingpin, written with Alex Cody Foster.

That Super Bowl party in Las Vegas was memorable.

“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. “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.”

Previously, he had been a campus drug dealer who first played competitive volleyball and then football for USC, a Redondo Beach surfer kid from a broken home without much money who landed at a major private university as a 6-foot-3 athlete with a 37-inch vertical jump. He also joined a fraternity.

“I was willing to do anything it took to be able to fit in with those USC kids,” Hanson said during a telephone interview.

Later, at the table in Las Vegas, the call from Paris Hilton’s boyfriend elevated Hanson’s status even more. “Here I was a twentysomething kid fresh out of college (and) I was bringing in celebrity clientele and famous sports players,” he wrote in The California Kid.

Ultimately, those days of “gluttony, lust, and excess” led to an arrest that kept Hanson behind bars for nine years. He had been running an illegal sports book and was linked to a Mexican narcotics cartel that, to this day, he won’t name publicly.

“I can’t say who I was working for,” Hanson said, “but just put it this way: At the time I was working for the most infamous cartel in the world.”

In prison, cartel members showed Hanson respect for “not squealing,” he said.

“I would have guys coming up to me once a week when the new buses of inmates came in and guys shaking my hand, tipping their hat,” Hanson said.

That recognition extended to a ballad about him, performed by Tribi Carrillo, available on Spotify and YouTube. Titled “Don Corleone,” the name refers to an encrypted email identification Hanson once used and is a nod to the leader of the fictional crime family in The Godfather.

In late June 2025, Hanson was released from a Southern California halfway house but is still on supervised parole. He only recently was allowed to leave the state with permission.

As founder of California Ice Protein, Hanson is building the startup from its base in Los Angeles, with plans to expand nationally. For now, he lives at the ice protein warehouse in a small studio space furnished with a Murphy bed.

Rather than viewing this transition as a low-paying setback, he regards it as the first step in a turnaround.

“I should have been dead a long time ago,” he said. “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 said prison was like military boot camp for him. “I said, ‘OK I’m going to get in shape. I’m going to get my master’s degree. I’m going to write my book. I’m going to get a documentary told about me. I’m going to create a business while I’m incarcerated and better myself and better the world.’”

One way of bettering himself, beginning with creating a cold protein snack first perfected in prison mop buckets, is through his company. California Ice Protein’s frozen bars-on-a-stick include flavors such as Strawberry Swole Cake and Coliseum Cookies & Cream. The term swole refers to the buff body-building effect on someone who works out and becomes “swole,” Hanson said.  The cookies-and-cream bar is a reference to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where Hanson, a walk-on from the volleyball team who didn’t even know how to put on football shoulder pads, played tight end for the Trojans under head coach Pete Carroll, now in his first season at the helm of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders. Two of those USC teams won national collegiate championships.

Soon, Hanson’s story will become known to a wider audience. An Amazon video production headed by Mark Wahlberg will air this year, Hanson said, though he doesn’t yet know the run date.

Hanson said the production will focus on “the overall story of my life,” including the “rise and fall.”

A news release in December 2017 from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of California, details the government’s case that led to the collapse of Hanson’s narcotics trafficking and sports-betting empire. Hanson told The Mob Museum his illegal endeavors at one point were pulling in $1 million a day.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Hanson was the leader of the “violent ‘ODOG’ racketeering enterprise” operating in the United States, Central and South America and Australia from 2012 to 2016.

The news release states that court records indicate “ODOG trafficked thousands of kilograms of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, MDMA (also known as ‘ecstasy’), marijuana, anabolic steroids and Human Growth Hormone (‘HGH’).”

The government says Hanson admitted that his “drug operation routinely distributed controlled substances at wholesale and retail levels, including selling performance-enhancing drugs to numerous professional athletes.”

“The organization also operated a vast illegal gambling operation focused on high-stakes wagers placed on sporting events,” the news release states. “The enterprise used threats and violence against its gambling and drug customers to force compliance.”

In addition to a prison sentence, Hanson was ordered to pay “a criminal forfeiture in the amount of $5 million, including $100,000 in gold and silver coins, a Porsche Panamera, two Range Rovers, luxury watches, homes in Costa Rica, Peru and Cabo San Lucas, a sailboat, and interests in several businesses.” 
 
Among the 22 defendants charged in connection with the case was former NFL running back Derek Loville, who, according to the news release, “pleaded guilty to distributing retail quantities of drugs for the ODOG Enterprise in Arizona.”

During the telephone interview, Hanson confirmed he took sports bets from athletes, including a World Series closer for a Major League Baseball team. He declined to name the athletes who placed sports bets with him but said he didn’t accept wagers from players on games involving their own teams.

Currently, sports betting is legal in 38 states and Washington, D.C., and is set to go live December 1 in a 39th legal state, Missouri. However, sports betting is illegal today in California, as it was when Hanson was operating an underground sports book.

The explosion in legal sports betting occurred nationally after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 opened the door for all states to regulate and tax sports betting.

As legal sports wagering spread across the county, Hanson said he remembers watching televised games in prison and seeing a point spread displayed on the screen during live action.

“All of a sudden you’re watching the game on ESPN, and there’s a spread of minus three and over-under of 44 1/2, and you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. I got charged for that?’”

Back on the outside, Hanson no longer runs a sports book and said he doesn’t have anything to do with alcohol or drugs. Hanson also said he has no desire to place sports bets himself because “you can’t beat the house.”

“I don’t like to lose my money,” he said. His focus now is on spearheading the growth of California Ice Protein. One of his goals is to provide work for other convicted felons.

“I want to help people that have been incarcerated that are having trouble finding a job, because you’d be surprised how many smart people there are in prison,” he said.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.