Felony Fights is badly misremembered. Two decades after the last volume shipped, much of what circulates about it online is wrong: the wrong founder, invented payments, imagined prosecutions, a run time that stretches years past its actual life. The paper trail that does exist is thin but real, and it tells a stranger story than the myth.
What follows is that trail: who built the series, where the fights were actually staged, how discs marketed as "banned from retail" ended up on shelves in Best Buy, which government did ban them, why the operation stopped, and where the footage sits now.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Format | Direct-to-video DVD series |
| Volumes | 6 main volumes, plus a separately branded Ghetto Fights line |
| Developed by | Michael Lynch, an ex-prisoner from Southern California, with four partners |
| Started | First volume in circulation by late 2005 |
| Tagline | "No rules. No judges. Anything goes." |
| Where filmed | Mexico, according to Lynch's account to The New York Times |
| Retail | Best Buy, Sam Goody and mall retailers at $14.99 |
| Label on packaging | Xtreme Entertainment Group |
| Regulatory action | Every volume submitted to New Zealand's censor was ruled objectionable |
| Status | No new volumes; back catalogue still sold via felonyfights.com |
Who Actually Made Felony Fights
The single most repeated error about this series is its founder. A great deal of secondary writing credits Shad Smith, the professional fighter whose story carried Felony Fights into the mainstream press. Smith did not create it. He was recruited into it.
Felony Fights was built by Michael Lynch, an ex-prisoner from Southern California who set out to commercialise unregulated fights between amateur men. Lynch has continued to identify himself publicly as the founder of Felony Fights in the years since, and the series is the subject of the only peer-reviewed study of it (Salter and Tomsen, British Journal of Criminology, 2012).
The New York Times reported that Lynch was convicted of residential armed robbery at sixteen and sent to the California Youth Authority; a 2011 Orange County Register profile by Greg Hardesty described him as an ex-convict who had been in numerous stabbings and brawls inside and outside prison. His own description of what happened after his release, given to the Times, was blunt: "I got out and brought together some friends from the not-so-legal world to fight, and we got it on tape."
He was not working alone. The Times reporter sat down with "Lynch, Garcia and their three other partners", which puts five men at the centre of the operation: Lynch and four partners. One of them, Anthony Garcia, also appeared as a fighter on the first disc. Garcia's complaint to the paper was that coverage misrepresented them: "The media like to portray us the wrong way, like we're savages or something."
How Shad Smith became the face of it
Shad Smith was a professional mixed martial artist who had fought for King of the Cage and other second-tier promotions. Shortly after his release from California's Avenal State Prison in early 2005, he got a call from the people running Felony Fights.
The terms he described to The New York Times are the only concrete figures ever attached to the series by a named participant: "They said they'd give me 800 bucks to show up and double that if I won." That single sentence is the entire documented basis for fighter pay in the Felony Fights catalogue, and it directly contradicts Lynch, who told the same reporter that the fighters were not paid at all. Nothing has ever reconciled the two accounts. For the fuller treatment of that gap, see Felony Fights fighter pay.
Smith's appearance mattered for a reason unrelated to fighting. Paul Wachter's profile of him, headlined "Gladiator" and published in The New York Times Magazine on 23 March 2008, was the piece in which Smith came out publicly — reported at the time as making him the first openly gay fighter in American mixed martial arts. That profile is why Felony Fights exists in the mainstream record at all, and it is quoted on the series' own website to this day.
The Six Volumes
The main series ran to six volumes. The subtitles and content descriptions below come from the publisher's own surviving sales copy, which is the only catalogue-level documentation that exists; they are marketing claims, not verified content lists.
| Vol. | Subtitle | Publisher's own description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sick & Twisted Games | "No rules, No judges, Anything goes!" |
| 2 | Return Of The Games | Ultra-violent competitions, weapon fights, knockouts; packaging carried a "BANNED FROM RETAIL!" flash |
| 3 | The 3rd Strike | Two-on-one fights, drunk fights, women's fights |
| 4 | Down & Dirty | Women's fights, two-on-two fights, mixed-gender matchups |
| 5 | Business As Usual | Multi-person bouts including a four-way last-man-standing |
| 6 | Bloodiest Battles | A compilation: "13 of the sickest and bloodiest Felony Fights all on one DVD, with never before seen footage" |
Two things are worth reading out of that table. The first is the escalation, which is not subtle: by volume three the format had abandoned any pretence of one-on-one matchmaking, and by volume six the series was recycling its own back catalogue, which is what a shock product does when it runs out of places to escalate to.
Volume two is the exact disc the Times found on sale at Best Buy for $14.99.
The second is the "BANNED FROM RETAIL" line on volume two, which was not true in any straightforward sense. Volume two is the exact disc the Times found on sale at Best Buy for $14.99. The paper reported that the fights "have also made their way into Best Buy, Sam Goody and other megastores", and described a distribution path that began with Lynch and his partners hustling discs on the street before they reached shops and, later, pay-per-view television. The ban was a sales pitch, not a status. The genuine ban came from somewhere else entirely.
Retail listings for the series credit Xtreme Entertainment Group as the label, a direct-to-video outfit whose catalogue ran to hidden-camera and prank titles of the same era.
The New Zealand Ban
The one hard piece of regulatory action against Felony Fights sits in a government register on the other side of the world, and it is almost never mentioned in discussions of the series.
New Zealand's Office of Film and Literature Classification — the statutory censor, whose "objectionable" rating is an outright ban on supply and possession, not an age restriction — assessed the series and banned it. The register entries are unambiguous:
| Title as registered | Registered | Running time | Decision | Submitted via |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Felony Fights | 9 December 2005 | 39m 04s | Objectionable | Labelling body |
| Felony Fights Volume One | 8 December 2005 | — | Not approved | Labelling body |
| Felony Fights Volume II | 13 October 2009 | 52m 33s | Objectionable | Comptroller of Customs |
| Felony Fights: The 3rd Strike | 13 October 2009 | 59m 05s | Objectionable | Comptroller of Customs |
| Felony Fights 5: Business As Usual | 15 October 2009 | 69m 51s | Objectionable | Comptroller of Customs |
| Felony Fights 4: Down And Dirty | 27 October 2009 | 51m 00s | Objectionable | Comptroller of Customs |
Every volume submitted was banned, and volume six appears never to have been submitted at all. The 2005 decisions came through the labelling body within months of the first disc reaching circulation; the four later ones arrived via the Comptroller of Customs in a single sweep in October 2009, which is to say they were caught at the border, by which point the series had already stopped producing new material.
Those runtimes are also the only reliable data on how much footage each volume contained: between roughly 39 and 70 minutes, broadly increasing across the run. No equivalent published record has been found from Australia's Classification Board or from any other national censor, and no US body classifies direct-to-video releases in the way New Zealand's does.
The Legal Architecture: Filming in Mexico
Felony Fights was built around a jurisdictional argument, and Lynch said so out loud.
Asked by The New York Times how the operation stayed on the right side of the law, Lynch's answer was that the fights were filmed in Mexico and the fighters were not paid. Both halves of that answer do work. Filming outside the United States put the conduct beyond the reach of American state prizefighting statutes — California Penal Code section 412, for example, makes it an offence to take part in, instigate or encourage an unlicensed fight — while the claim that nobody was paid was aimed at the definition of a prizefight itself, which in most American jurisdictions turns on the presence of a purse.
The reporting undercut the second half. Smith described being offered $800 with the win doubled. One of those two accounts is false, and the paper printed both without resolving it.
What did not happen is equally important, because the internet has largely decided otherwise. There is no public record of any criminal charge, prosecution, conviction or civil settlement involving the producers of Felony Fights. No indictment, no plea, no judgment. Claims that the series was "shut down by law enforcement" or that its organisers "faced criminal charges" do not trace back to any documented case.
The contrast with Bumfights is instructive precisely because Bumfights was prosecuted. Four filmmakers behind that series faced felony charges filed in 2002; the counts were reduced and the four pleaded guilty in 2003 to arranging a fight without a permit; in 2006 they surrendered the rights to produce or distribute further videos and compensated three of the homeless men they had filmed. That is what a legal reckoning looks like in the public record. Felony Fights has no equivalent entry, which is why the censorship ruling in New Zealand remains the only formal sanction anyone can point to.
Ghetto Fights: A Separate Brand on the Same Shelf
The Felony Fights storefront has always sold a second six-volume line called Ghetto Fights, and the two are routinely described as a single operation. The evidence for that is weaker than the assumption.
That line continued under Fall Thru for years afterwards, with a sixth volume still being issued in 2010.
Ghetto Fights was covered by the hip-hop trade press in April 2005 under a different publisher, Fall Thru Entertainment, whose representatives said at the time that their "Fight" brand had sold more than 500,000 copies. That line continued under Fall Thru for years afterwards, with a sixth volume still being issued in 2010. Whether the Felony Fights operation acquired, licensed or simply retailed the titles is not documented anywhere.
The Felony Fights site's own copy claims that Lil' Wayne, Lil Jon, 50 Cent, Method Man and Xzibit have all used Ghetto Fights footage in music videos and live performances. The only one of those uses corroborated by contemporaneous third-party reporting is Lil Jon's, who put footage from the series into remix videos for "Real N****z Roll Call" and "What U Gon' Do". The rest sits on a seller's own page and should be read as marketing rather than established fact.
Why It Stopped
There is no dramatic ending, which is probably why so many invented ones circulate.
The series produced its six volumes and then stopped. No new Felony Fights title has been documented after the mid-2000s run, and by the end of the decade Lynch had moved on from the business. He became a born-again Christian, got sober, and by 2011 was describing his purpose in terms of steering at-risk young people away from the life the DVDs had sold.
Three ordinary forces finished the job. The DVD itself was dying as a format for this kind of material, and free video platforms were about to make paying $14.99 for a disc of street fights look absurd. A shock product that has already run a greatest-hits compilation by volume six has exhausted its own premise. And the founder walked away.
That is a duller explanation than a police raid, and it happens to be the one the evidence supports.
What Happened to the People Who Made It
Michael Lynch re-entered combat sports in 2011 with Cage vs Cons, a sanctioned promotion built on the opposite premise to Felony Fights: ex-convicts matched against police officers, prison guards, firefighters and military personnel in licensed professional MMA bouts. The first card ran on 21 May 2011 at the LA Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena with ten professional fights and tickets from $30, the main event going to "Officer" Ismael Gonzales by first-round knockout over "Notorious" Rick Slaton. Lynch's stated aim was to give young people from gang-affected parts of Los Angeles County a route out through the discipline of training, a straightforward inversion of the product that made his name.
He later moved out of fighting altogether. Lynch went on to found Stairway Resource Center, a Southern California substance-use treatment operation, and now works publicly as an addiction and mental-health advocate, still introduced in interviews as the founder of Felony Fights.
Shad Smith returned to sanctioned mixed martial arts and, after the 2008 profile, became a reference point in coverage of LGBT athletes in combat sports rather than in coverage of the DVD series. He has never disputed the account of his recruitment or his fee.
Anthony Garcia, the partner who also fought on the first volume, is documented only through that single Times interview.
Everyone else is unaccounted for. The series did not use consistent real names, did not track its participants, and had no reason to. That absence is the subject of Where Are They Now: Felony Fights Participants, and it is the honest answer rather than an evasion: the roster is not obscure, it was never recorded.
Where the Footage Lives Now
The distribution picture in 2026 is split three ways.
The original storefront still operates. felonyfights.com continues to list all six Felony Fights volumes and the six Ghetto Fights volumes, with the same 2005-era sales copy and a 2008 New York Times quotation on the front page. It is the closest thing the series has to an official archive.
The discs are collectors' stock. Original sealed and used copies trade on eBay and other secondary markets, generally listed as out-of-print. Best Buy's product pages for the series survive as dead listings, a fossil record of the mainstream retail run.
The Internet Archive holds ripped copies. Several volumes were uploaded to its community video collection from late 2020 onwards, including Sick and Twisted Games, Return of the Games, Down and Dirty and Business as Usual, alongside the New Zealand censor's own register records for the series. That is the practical reason the series never disappeared: the DVD-era assumption that a product dies when its retail channel dies stopped being true.
For the current viewing position, see what happened to Felony Fights.
What has largely gone is the clip layer. Mainstream video platforms remove this material under violent-content policies, and links to a dedicated Felony Fights channel no longer resolve. For the current viewing position, see what happened to Felony Fights.
The Academic Afterlife
Felony Fights has an unusual second life for a defunct shock-video brand: it is a cited object of criminological study.
Michael Salter and Stephen Tomsen published "Violence and Carceral Masculinities in Felony Fights" in the British Journal of Criminology in March 2012 (volume 52, issue 2, pages 309–323). The paper treats the series as evidence about its audience rather than about its fighters, analysing viewer responses to the clips and arguing that the appeal depended on profoundly unequal relations of power between the men on camera and the people watching. Its central claim is that the marginality and poverty of the participants were themselves presented as proof of their brutality — that the poverty was the product.
That framing is the most rigorous published assessment of Felony Fights, and it explains why the series still gets cited in a field that has otherwise moved on. It remains the only peer-reviewed treatment of the series located for this page.
Where Felony Fights Sits in the Underground
It helps to be precise about what Felony Fights was not. It was not a promotion. There was no roster, no rankings, no titles, no returning champions, no venue, no community, and no continuity between volumes beyond the brand on the sleeve. It ran for a few years and stopped.
Set against the organisations it is habitually grouped with, the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree:
| Felony Fights | StreetBeefs | King of the Streets | Underground Combat League | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A video product | A community organisation | An unsanctioned promotion | An invite-only Vale Tudo circuit |
| Rules | None advertised | Rules, gloves, referees | No-rules, fixed format | Vale Tudo rule set |
| Recurring fighters | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Stated purpose | Sales | Conflict resolution | Competition | Competition |
The East Bay Rats sit outside that table again — a motorcycle club that runs fights for its own members and says openly that nobody gets paid. What every one of those groups has that Felony Fights did not is a reason to exist when the cameras are off.
That is the whole of the distinction, and it is why the series functions in the history of American backyard fighting as the boundary marker rather than an ancestor. For the narrative version of the series' rise and collapse, see The Felony Fights Story.
What Cannot Be Verified
Because this subject attracts invention, it is worth stating plainly which widely repeated claims have no source behind them:
- That Shad Smith founded the series. He was a paid participant recruited in 2005. The founder was Michael Lynch.
- That the producers were charged, arrested or prosecuted. No case appears in any public record.
- That the series ran until 2013. No volume after the sixth has ever been documented.
- That fighters were paid $40, or paid in drugs. The only figure attributed to a named participant is Smith's $800, and Lynch's competing claim is that nobody was paid.
- That a producer known as "Johnny Flex" ran the operation. The named partners on record are Lynch and Anthony Garcia.
- Total sales figures. None have ever been published for Felony Fights. The 500,000-copy figure that circulates belongs to Ghetto Fights and came from that line's publisher.
Where a claim about this series cannot be traced to the Times profile, the New Zealand register, the criminological literature or the publisher's own surviving pages, the correct position is that it is unverified.
FAQ
Who founded Felony Fights?
Michael Lynch, an ex-prisoner from Southern California, developed the series after his release, working with four partners, one of whom was Anthony Garcia. Shad Smith, frequently miscredited as the founder, was a professional fighter recruited to appear on one of the volumes.
How many volumes of Felony Fights exist?
Six. A separately branded Ghetto Fights line, also sold through the Felony Fights storefront, ran to a further six volumes.
Where were the fights filmed?
Lynch told The New York Times in 2008 that the fights were filmed in Mexico, which he presented as the reason the operation stayed within the law. No independent verification of the filming locations exists.
Was Felony Fights ever banned?
Yes, in New Zealand. The Office of Film and Literature Classification classified volume one as objectionable in December 2005 and volumes two through five as objectionable in October 2009. An objectionable rating is a full prohibition, not an age restriction. The "banned from retail" slogan on the volume two packaging was marketing; the discs were sold in Best Buy and other US chains.
Is Felony Fights the same as Bumfights?
No. They were separate series with different producers, and their legal histories diverge sharply. The Bumfights filmmakers were charged in 2002, pleaded guilty in 2003 to arranging a fight without a permit, and settled with participants in 2006. Nothing comparable is on record for Felony Fights.
Were the fights real?
The fights were presented as real, unscripted confrontations, and no participant or producer has ever claimed otherwise. What the series never provided was any of the apparatus that makes a fight verifiable — no commission, no officials, no medical staff, no records.
How is Felony Fights different from StreetBeefs?
Structurally, in every respect. StreetBeefs is a standing organisation with rules, gloves, referees and a stated purpose of settling disputes without weapons. Felony Fights was a video product with no rules, no officials, no recurring participants and no purpose beyond selling discs. They are not two points on the same spectrum so much as two different kinds of thing.
Sources for this page include Paul Wachter's "Gladiator" (The New York Times Magazine, 23 March 2008), Greg Hardesty's Orange County Register profile of Michael Lynch (March 2011), the New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification register of classification decisions, Salter and Tomsen's "Violence and Carceral Masculinities in Felony Fights" (British Journal of Criminology 52:2, 2012, pp. 309-323), AllHipHop's coverage of Fall Thru Entertainment (26 April 2005), and the publisher's own surviving catalogue pages.
