When writer / director Seth Ferranti received a twenty-five year LSD kingpin conviction, after faking his suicide and landing on the US Marshals Top-15 Most Wanted list, he thought his life was over. As a first time, non-violent offender, the lengthy sentence attracted media attention from The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Washington Times, and others.
As a drug dealing teen Ferranti sold LSD and marijuana at 15 East Coast colleges, crisscrossing across five states- Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland- a wanna-be rock star and Hunter S. Thompson-style outlaw whose hero’s were Henry Rollins, Axl Rose, and Jim Morrison. He followed the Grateful Dead and considered himself a counter culture rebel, not a criminal, as he was breaking laws which he thought were wrong.
He stands by those convictions today and see’s himself more as an activist who was a little ahead of the times. A trailblazer of the legal cannabis and psychedelic movements. As a twenty-two year old from the suburbs, who basically grew up as a military brat in California and overseas, the prison sentence Ferranti received due to the War on Drugs was longer than he’d lived to that point.
But despite the unjust sentence, Seth decided to rise above his past and focus on his future. He began building a writing and journalism career from inside the belly of the beast. With unlimited access to criminals and their stories Ferranti started crafting raw portrayals of prison life and crack era gangsters. Discovering a passion and talent for writing Ferranti also studied the trade earning an associates, bachelors, and masters degree while in prison.
With hope for his future renewed Ferranti started penning prison and gangster stories for Vice, Don Diva, FEDS, Hoopshype and others. He took it one step further and established his brand, Gorilla Convict, from prison. Ferranti became a true-crime publisher and built a website documenting stories that the mainstream media was not willing to share.
These stories reside in his books- Prison Stories, Supreme Team, and Street Legends, among others, and his 500 blog entries written by him and other prisoners. Along with the hundreds, if not thousands of pieces Ferranti wrote for other publications and websites, he became the most prolific prison writer of the War on Drugs era. In February 2015, after serving 21 years, he was released from the Bureau of Prison, to seek his fortune.
Back in the world Ferranti continued his writing career as a journalist penning pieces for Vice, Ozy, The Daily Beast, Dazed, Merry Jane, and features for Penthouse and Real Crime Magazines, among others. He also started writing and publishing comic books under his imprint GR1ND Studios and embarked on his true passion, filmmaking.
Fresh out of prison Ferranti wrote and directed a web-series, Easter Bunny Assassin, played the antagonist in an indie feature, Dog Days, wrote and played the lead in The Precious and the Damned, and joined forces with Shawn Rech and Transitions Studios to make White Boy, a feature documentary on Richard Wershe Jr. that aired on STARZ and became a Top Ten hit on NETFLIX.
Ferranti starred in the Season One Finale of Vice TV’s I was a Teenage Felon. Has appeared on Fox News, Inside Edition, and News Nation as a subject matter expert, and is currently directing several documentary projects- Nightlife, Dope Men, Tangled Roots, The Secret History of The LSD Trade, and Generation ECSTASY- which are in various stages of production. He also has numerous scripted and television projects in development.
