Peter Nygard, a billionaire fashion magnate and prolific con artist, built an empire on fraud and exploitation. From defrauding designer Nancy Ebker in 1978 to allegedly trafficking workers in Jordanian sweatshops for half wages, his business practices were rife with abuse. While advocating for NAFTA, he maintained a "passion pit" office and a Mayan-themed Bahamian compound, yet faced numerous sexual assault allegations spanning decades. Despite threats of defamation suits and dropped charges, Nygard's pattern of exploiting young women and suppressing unions reveals a dark legacy of unchecked power in the fashion industry. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Jeffrey's Early Life Claims00:15:04
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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What's Jeffrey my Epsteins?
Oh boy.
Sophie.
This is the topic.
That was a horrible idea.
This is the topic you chose.
Sweet, Margaret Killjoy.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where Robert gets himself canceled with that introduction.
Margaret, I can't, I can't even.
This is the topic you chose for our dear friend, Margaret Killjoy.
It's kind of nice people, right?
This is a nice one, kind of.
Not really.
Margaret, you know, you're familiar with friend of the pod, Jeffrey Epstein, right?
I am aware of this person.
Yeah, yeah.
Everybody is.
Real bad.
He's doing.
Not great.
Not very well.
Although, by some judgments, better than ever because he's dead.
That might be my attitude towards how Jeffrey Epstein's doing.
But a pretty bad guy.
He's kind of become like shorthand for a specific kind of monster, like a man who traffics women and children and is like a fucking child sex trafficker to the rich and famous and powerful, just like this embodiment of corruption.
And I'm here to tell you today, Margaret, I found a guy I think might be worse.
God damn it.
Yeah.
Wow, this guy.
Real, real piece of shit.
Have you heard of Peter Nygard?
I have not.
Whew.
Okay.
Well, put on your.
I once again am saying, how could you do this to our dear friend?
I'm not sure what you put on.
Strap on your anti-pedophile cream, load up your anti-garment industry, monster, fashion, demon hammer, and get ready for an episode of Behind the Bastards.
Just a nine mil.
I feel like a nine millimeter might work out great.
Okay.
I keep one in my desk in case anyone involved in the fashion industry comes to my house.
I do sincerely look forward to the point where I get to show Margaret a picture.
Yeah, this guy looks incredible.
I almost brought our good friend Tom Ryman onto the podcast, who we had on for our episodes on right-wing media grifters just to react to this man's appearance and then leave, but I decided not.
Pekka Juhani Nygard was born in Helsinki, Finland on July 24th, 1941.
His mother and his father ran a bakery, or maybe it was just his dad.
Sources I found are a little bit unclear.
Now, you might guess by the year that this was not the easiest period in history to be a Finn.
Some real, the late 30s, early 40s, real rough years for the Finnish people.
Rough years for a lot of people in that region, to be fair.
Not just some good decisions and some bad decisions in rapid succession.
It was a complicated time.
No one was going to handle it perfectly.
And after the war, his family were like, maybe this chunk of Europe's not the best place to raise a child.
I don't know if the bad stuff is done happening over here, you know?
So they moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where they lived in.
They get hired by a bakery, and the bakery kind of moves them in to some land that it owns, which means that they take up residence in a 15-foot by 13-foot converted coal bin.
So that's like...
That's also not a great place to raise a family.
Not a great place to raise a family.
Although, if you've just lived through several, both the invasion of Finland by Russia and then World War II, you might be like, a coal bin where nobody's shooting at us sounds dope.
Yeah.
Let's get the fuck out of Finland.
Probably would stop some bullets, depending on how it's going to be.
It probably would.
There's a good chance that was on their mind.
How thick is this coal bin?
Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely.
Yeah.
So they lived there for a little while.
Peter was about, or Pekka at this point, was eight or nine years old, maybe 11 when he moved.
Again, sources are kind of unclear, and it's not entirely clear to me if he was born at a time when everybody who got born in Finland got an accurate birth certificate, right?
Like the 40s, you still are kind of in that period.
Now, since Finnish names are simply unacceptable in English-speaking nations, he began going by Peter instead of Pekka and substituted the Juhani for a J.
Now, we have a lot less detail about his early life than I would prefer.
And because he becomes basically a billionaire, Peter was successful for many years in limiting the scope of inquiry that reporters could delve into his past.
I did find a write-up on celebfamily.com, which is a clearly credible source by someone I think was either Peter Nygard or someone he had paid to write it.
And that source notes, quote, Peter Nygard credits his vast success to three things, genetics, his Finnish roots, and perseverance.
He is immensely grateful to his parents for having immigrated to Canada.
He remembers never having to go without the basic necessities, even though money was often scarce in his household.
And I think actually this is probably more just based on some things he paid other people to write on other websites.
And then it wounds up getting filtered to these kind of clickbait sites after some stories break about him, but whatever.
About how good of a person he is.
About how good of a person he is.
Well, yeah, that's early on, yes.
So his mother and his father opened their own bakery soon after arriving in Canada.
They move out of the coal bin pretty quick.
So they're doing good.
They're doing good.
They wind up in the big city, which is Winnipeg, so not really a big city.
Yeah, a moderately large town.
Birthplace of Winnie the Pooh.
Yeah, Winnipeg.
That's why he's winning.
Yeah.
This is your one lie.
It might be.
Oh, crap.
There's no way to know.
It's impossible to say.
But yes, the city where Winnie the Pooh lived briefly before going to die on the Western Front.
Look it up.
You'd be surprised at how accurate that one is.
So yeah, they open a bakery and things go well.
You know, they wind up kind of, it's kind of hard for me to tell exactly, but I would probably say upper middle class-ish, or maybe at least solidly middle class, right?
They're doing fairly well.
And yeah, they seem to have a lot of gratitude to their adopted new home country.
Once Peter gets rich, his mom's going to use some of his money to create a park in Winnipeg in their father's armor honor, where the Colbin homestead they lived on is featured.
I don't know that they keep that Colben around anymore after the stuff that happens in this story.
But now, again, Peter becomes almost a billionaire, close enough that it doesn't really matter all that much.
The internet winds up littered with all these weird little websites that he paid to create and have someone write nice things about him on.
There's like a bunch of websites he makes.
We'll be talking about this more in part two because it's part of a kind of rich guy battle he winds up in.
You don't do this for like $10,000.
I bet we're $10,000.
It doesn't take that much, right?
Get some people in other countries to write some nice stuff about you.
Yeah, use like a Task Rabbit style app to get them to self.
It's not a bad idea, right, Margaret?
We could, we could, we could at least take down one enemy.
I feel like if we if we wrangle together six to eight writers, yeah, that could be the end.
That could be the end of Will Wheaton.
Of Wayne.
Oh.
Oh, sure.
So in one of these, these random little websites about him, which was titled The RealPeterNiger.com, I found this claim.
That's incredibly credible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it wouldn't say real if it wasn't, Margaret.
Yeah.
It's like being a cop.
You're not allowed to lie about that.
No, absolutely not.
So, quote, Peter excelled at school and received recognition and awards for both academics and athletics during his secondary school years.
He constantly contributed money to assist his family through varied and multiple jobs.
And he concluded his high school years as the most accomplished student in the graduating class.
Peter was later asked by the school to return and deliver a speech to the graduating class.
This speech provides a roadmap to his success in business and life and was still being quoted 50 years later.
Now, I haven't found a copy of this speech, Margaret.
I don't know that it's still being quoted 50 years later, unless it's by people Peter Niger paid to write articles about him.
But yeah, there you go.
That's his claims about this period.
We know that he goes to the United States, you know, basically as soon as he graduates high school.
And he graduates from the University of North Dakota a couple of years later with a business degree.
This is in 1964 when he is 23 years old.
We go on to praise one of his professors, Tom Clifford, as a mentor.
Now, Tom Roundup went up running the college, and he seems to, I found like his obituaries and stuff, which obviously aren't unbiased, but the obituaries make him look like a decent guy.
He killed a Japanese soldier during World War II with a shovel, but that's, you know, that happens.
Also, pretty rad.
I gotta get anyone who kills a man with a shovel, that's pretty badass.
Yeah, not boring.
Not boring.
He was also apparently pushed for more recognition of indigenous people on campus, which is nice.
There's only one detail from the obituary that gives us maybe some insight into what Nygard saw in him.
Quote, in the preface to Good Medicine, a 2003 account of intrigue behind the creation of the four-year medical school, he created a medical school at the University of North Dakota.
Clifford told how we cut corners, sometimes at blinding speed, and got around red tape in many cases by simply ignoring it.
Right.
So, Clifford, Clifford is kind of in education.
And again, I haven't really run into terrible criticisms of this guy, but he's Peter's mentor and he's a big, if you got to cut corners, cut them kind of guy, right?
So that might have an impact on the man that Peter becomes a little bit later.
Right.
Corners like getting consent from your workers.
And consent's not something Peter's going to grow up to be great at, Margaret.
In a number of ways.
He's not, that's not a strong suit of his.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His other strengths.
He, he, I mean, he does have other strengths.
Uh, we can debate whether or not they're good ones.
So Peter spends very little time working for anybody else in his life.
He returns to Winnipeg right after graduating.
Uh, he gets hired by the T. Eatons Company, which one of his websites describes as quote, the premier and most sophisticated department store chain in North America.
I have no way to judge those claims.
There's like three of them and they had like a couple of people.
Yeah, yeah, it's some weird little Canadian.
Like, I haven't heard of T. Eatons.
It sounds like it's a, it's like the Tim Hortons of clothing.
Um, anyway, uh, he was part of their young executive program, and Peter is very careful to let us know that, quote, he worked side by side with the Eaton brothers and was identified by the Eaton family and their executive management team as having the potential to eventually run the entire Eatons operation.
But he doesn't do that, Margaret.
He doesn't do that.
And we don't really know why.
Although it's possible he's just lying about this and he wasn't really very good at that job.
We have absolutely no way of, I mean, theoretically, if I was to make an article about him, I could try to track down people on the Eatons management team, but they're all probably dead now because this was 1966.
Yeah.
Anyway, in 1966, he was really the most accomplished student at a school in all fields or whatever.
He was probably the one who made the most money.
I have not, I can't tell you off the top of my head and did not find in limited research a University of North Dakota graduate who I'm certain made more money than Peter Niger.
So he makes a lot of money.
Okay.
In 1967, he gathers up his life savings and receives an $8,000 loan to purchase a 20% stake in a woman's garment manufacturer called Nathan Jacobs.
Now, kind of unclear to me whether the loan came from a bank or his family.
Nyger does not specify on any of the defunct websites I found, and I haven't really found clarity anywhere else.
It's noted in several sources that he quickly came to own the business outright.
On one of his websites, Nygard says, the speed with which Nygard claimed his number one position in the industry is attributed to the uniqueness of his business decisions and his work ethic that includes 14 to 16 hour days, seven days a week.
But then, as Nygard says, the only time you are working is when you wish you were doing something else.
Nygard's Labor Practices Exposed00:11:38
That's going to be good when we have our podcasting seminars.
I feel like that's going to be a nugget of wisdom.
You all got that for free.
Yeah, you got that for free.
But if you, I mean, honestly, I do feel like we should get a collections agency to just go around and crack a couple of kneecaps of some listeners until they pay up because that was worth $350.
You feel like that's a $350, Margaret?
Yeah, I think so.
As long as it's enough people.
Well, 10 people?
Yeah.
At least 10 of you better send us some fucking cash or it'll be bad.
That's a threat.
That's a legally binding threat that I'm party to somehow.
That you, CoolZone Media, Sophie, the iHeartRadio Corporation, we're all making it.
Anyway, on one of his personal websites, Nygard describes this process differently.
Rather than buying in to own part of a company, he was, quote, recruited to become an equity partner, which makes it sound more like the company brought him on to buy them out.
He makes sure to let you know that he was recruited, quote, despite having no direct knowledge or experience in the ladies' apparel manufacturing industry.
Do you think it was just like going out of business?
And they're like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
I kind of think it was.
I kind of think that's what happened.
He was not recruited.
They thought they were pulling over one-on-one over on him.
But that's not how things are going to work out because this is the thing he's actually good at.
Anyway, he gets enough money together one way or the other by hook or by crook over the next year or two, couple of years, to buy a majority stake in the business, which he renames from Jacobs to Tanjay Fashions.
Now, he would later market the products under his own name, Nygard, and eventually expand to produce products under tinned brand names.
His clothing was sold in Niger's stores, but also in major department stores like Sears and Dillard's.
Remember Sears and Dillard's?
I remember Sears.
I feel like Dillard's missed me.
I mean, I can picture it, but.
Yeah, if you want, today, if you want to encounter very large rats, find your nearest Dillards and break in.
Don't worry.
There's no security guards there.
There's no people there at all.
It's the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a Dillard's in 2022.
Well, there's a rats.
You'll find the desiccated remains of a security guard with rats kind of filling out the uniform in a sort of body shape.
Yeah, they left him there when they locked the doors from the outside.
Yeah, and they said they'll be right back.
Yeah.
And now the rats inhabit his soul.
But they don't know about cell phones, so they can't reach his family.
He had a six-month-old child.
I don't know why I'm making this so sad.
One early strength that helped Nygert expand beyond the bounds of the business he'd invested in was a focus on the growing field of information technology.
Peter, and again, this is like the fucking 70s that this is all starting to come together, invested in software that linked manufacturing with a network of retail stores to keep them fully stocked.
In 1978, Peter expanded his business from Canada to the United States.
He did this by again investing in an existing company, a sportswear designer run by Nancy Ebker.
She claims Peter came to her and agreed to split profits 50-50 and kick in $700,000 of her own money to finance the production of two new sportswear lines sold out of her showroom.
According to Ebker, Nygard smooth-talked her out of putting any of this agreement down in writing.
He complained that bringing lawyers into the situation would make everything a big mess.
As soon as the deal closed, Nygerd fired Ebker from her own company and took over the offices.
Yeah, he is a cool customer.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in Forbes.
And that's the worst thing he did.
Well, yeah.
Ebker is still fuming.
He literally ruined my life, she says.
Ebker claimed in court testimony that in their heated final conversation, Nyigard told her, I have all your patterns.
I have everything.
I own everything.
I never intended to put anything in writing.
You have nothing, and I am a millionaire.
Damn.
Yeah, that's straight up.
He's the one who locked that guy into Dillard's.
He's dead.
He did.
Oh my God.
Of course he did.
Why wouldn't he?
Let's try to reason, she interjected, to which Nygard responded, if you don't have $1 million by Friday, I'm going to see to it that your name and reputation are totally destroyed in this market.
Just a cool guy.
Now, Nygard tells the court a different story, saying the two had a calm conversation in which he suggested they amicably part ways.
The judge found Ebker to be highly credible and deemed Nygard evasive, insincere, and utterly lacking in credibility.
We deplore the unseemly conduct of Nyig, Judge Irving Cooper wrote, but ultimately ruled that Ebker failed to prove she was damaged by his actions.
Niger's counterclaim was also dismissed.
Ebker, who calls him a true villain of the world, is writing a book about the case.
I don't think she ever did.
If she did, I'll read it.
So his business takes off in the years that follow.
Nygard hires his mom.
He brings his sister on, a spokeswoman for the brand.
And he's building this clothing building he's making is really tailor-made for middle-aged women.
This is not high fashion.
I don't mean that as an insult, but he's not, he's not building this is like this is the Paris runway kind of stuff.
Yeah, this is like clothing for women from like 30 to 50 who have a couple of kids.
It's meant to be like affordable, have like a wide selection, and he's trying to both make it kind of something that's attractive to them, but also something that they feel good about buying from.
So he makes sure that like his sister is the spokeswoman.
He makes sure to bring his mom on so that he can talk about how well he treats his mom.
He emphasizes his annual $2 million donation to breast cancer research.
He claims, makes big claims about having an ethical supply chain.
Nygard's former website bragged as achievements to be the number one, the first manufacturer to have air-conditioned factories.
And in the realpeterniger.com, he also claims, Peter was always committed to the health and comfort of his associates.
He was the first company in Canada to ban smoking by associates or visitors in the buildings or elsewhere on the premises.
He created the first air-conditioned manufacturing plants.
Yeah, well, he banned them from smoking.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And he created the first air-conditioned manufacturing plants, transforming the industry from sweatshops to fashion houses.
Uh-huh.
This guy's fucking clever.
Margaret, you want to guess if they weren't sweatshops anymore?
Was this his one lie?
Yeah, this is the only one.
So we'll get to that in a second.
Obviously, top reviews for Nygard clothing on Amazon include praise that their polyester pants are, quote, very comfortable and wash well.
So that gives you an idea of kind of like what people are looking for in these, right?
Like, I want something comfortable.
I want something that's convenient.
Like, I'm a busy mom, right?
Like, that's like what this is angled at.
And it's a good strategy.
In very short order, his clothing is in more than 30 states.
60% of his corporate revenue is soon coming from outside of Canada.
And it spreads to other countries too.
It's not just the U.S. and Canada.
It's all over the place.
And as you might have guessed by now, the reality of Nygard Inc. labor practices did not quite match the rosy claims made by their old website.
And I'm going to quote from Forbes here.
In late April, the National Labor Committee, NLC, a private group in Pittsburgh, issued a report claiming that Nyigard pants from its Aliyah line were being sewn in a Jordanian sweatshop.
The factory in Al-Zarka, the report says, employed 1,200 guest workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India who had, quote, been trafficked to Jordan, stripped of their passports, and held under conditions of indentured servitude.
According to the investigation, women were forced to work 15-hour shifts seven days a week and were paid half the wages they were owed.
A Niger spokeswoman says that a government inquiry found no truth to the allegations.
But since the report, the NLC says factory conditions have improved significantly.
Passports have been returned, and workers now get Fridays off.
Wow.
And they get their own passports back.
That's they get to keep their passports while they're working 15-hour days, six days a week.
And six days a week.
I mean, yeah.
That's not as many days as there are in the week.
That's not.
That's not.
That's a whole day they don't have to work.
Yeah.
Other cool fact: the factory is in Al-Zarqa, which is also the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is kind of the group that immediately led to ISIS.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Cool guy.
Yeah.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with Peter Nygert.
It's just a neat little coincidence.
It's just a fun.
Well, yeah, or does it?
Did Peter Nygard create ISIS in order to sell more comfortable, easily washed polyester sweatpants?
Did he?
World will never know.
There's no evidence that it didn't happen.
Maybe.
It's possible, but that's not a legally binding allegation.
So, it gets worse.
The one detail I did find on his website that actually surprised me was this tidbit.
Nothing has made a bigger impact on the Canadian fashion industry than the NAFTA agreement.
The seeds of this agreement were sown in 1982 when Peter Nygard wrote a strategic position paper to initiate free trade.
This paper resulted in his appointment to chair in the Advisory Committee on Future Canadian Long-Term Industrial Strategy.
From that committee grew Nygard's recommendation to negotiate a free trade agreement, FTA, first with the United States, which ultimately became the foundation agreement for Mexico's entry in DEC 92, known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
No other person in the apparel industry has played a more significant role with the creation of NAFTA than Peter Nygard.
Holy shit.
Right?
Yeah.
Now.
Okay, well, that means the Zapatista, we get the Zapatistas out of him.
We do kind of get the Zapatistas out of him.
Now, obviously, this is a claim being made on his website.
He thinks, and he is taking personal credit for making it.
I think he is overselling his role here.
But he winds up on a couple joint Canadian-U.S. like government panels, like several, a number over the years, like a number of pretty significant positions that he holds, like helping to carry out aspects of what's going to become NAFTA.
So he's not entirely lying here either.
We're going to get into this in a bit, but he is not an insignificant part of the creation or the establishment of NAFTA, although he is a little bit overselling it here.
He's definitely one of the people in the apparel industry who's most involved in the creation of NAFTA.
That's probably fair to say.
So we're going to talk about that and why that's not entirely a good thing.
But first, Margaret, you know what people don't like about NAFTA?
The fact that it strips resources from developing nations to fuel the lifestyles of the wealthy that are destroying the earth.
Exactly.
You know what doesn't do that?
Potatoes.
Potatoes don't.
But let me paint a picture of you, Margaret.
Okay.
I want you to think about the Great Lakes, Superior, the other ones shining out beautiful, surrounded by basically Canada.
Canada, which is the bad guy of this story.
That's true.
Now imagine.
Now imagine, Margaret, a beautiful sheet of ICBMs coming down over the Great Lakes.
And instead of robbing poorer and low-income nations in order to finance the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, we irradiate fish in the Great Lakes to provide the world with fish that's huge.
The Great Lakes Nightmare00:04:49
Because whatever.
It's already cooked.
Probably.
Who knows what happens?
I just think we should do it.
Sophie, how we doing here?
I'm so tired that I'm like...
Let me show you some pamphlets while the listeners check out these other ads.
Okay.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
And, you know, I think if the U.S. has 6,000 nuclear weapons, we can spare a handful.
I'm convinced the pamphlets had lots of charts.
Workers Fighting for a Living Wage00:09:41
Yep.
And graphs and warning labels that have been scratched out.
So they probably don't matter.
They probably don't matter.
And several times I repeated the lyrics to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to remind you of all the brave men who died in those lakes.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I looked at your many personal websites and I found I have hired to have a lot of websites made.
I cross-referenced from one of your personal websites to the other and they all checked out.
That's right.
That's what we call research.
That's OSINT.
Yeah, I, you know, people, look, Sophie has driven a hard line that we have to stop the blue apron child island bit because it's, it's just, it's just creates so much work on the bleeping end.
And then when we don't bleep it, people are like, is it real?
Which is a question we've had to deal with a lot lately.
So now we're going to talk about nuking the Great Lakes for a couple of months and then I'll figure out something else.
You believe mistakenly that if you go allah the producers and go more and more drastically absurd, that people will stop believing you.
I do hope, because it'll be really funny.
It'll be the end of life on this earth, but it'll be really funny that like this bit ends with me being elected president in a landslide with a mandate to deploy nuclear weapons to the Great Lakes.
Yeah, I mean, we don't have zero Mostel.
So I won't allow it off.
But anyway, back to NAFTA.
Speaking of bad things, not bad things like Zero Mostel.
He was rad.
Didn't name names.
Anyway, sorry.
Jesus, this has gone off the rails a little bit.
Let's talk about NAFTA.
So Peter Nygert, obviously, he's a narcissist.
Take what he says about being like integral to the creation of NAFTA with a grain of salt, but it's not an invented claim.
It's probably fair to say that Nygert's strategic papers were less the inspiration for NAFTA than one of a number of people with influence who were pushing for trade liberalization to allow U.S. and Canadian companies to do their manufacturing overseas, particularly in Mexico.
I found a write-up by the Makila Solidarity Network, which is a Canadian organization promoting solidarity with laborers in places like Mexico and other parts of Central America to improve conditions and win a living wage for workers.
Right at the beginning of NAFTA, they published a position paper analyzing the trade agreement and its likely impact on laborers.
And the manufacturer they chose to highlight in order to analyze this was Nygert.
So whatever he's saying and however much he kind of exaggerates things, this organization, when they were like choosing to like look at a garment manufacturer to see what NAFTA was going to do in Mexico, they picked Nygert because it was a really big deal and he was a big part of it.
Is this like the 80s?
Where are we at?
Timeline.
Yeah, this is like the late 80s, I think, when kind of this gets, I can, I can actually look this up.
I'm just trying to figure out why I've never heard of this brand before.
Is it because I'm not Canadian or is it because I only became a middle-aged lady more recently?
Yeah, I think the second might be a bigger.
And you're not like a suburban like mother of three, which I think is primarily kind of who he was angled at.
But yeah.
So obviously, Makila is also a Canadian organization.
That may also be part of why they picked Nygard.
But Nygard was one of the largest, I think added for a time, the largest garment manufacturer to invest in Mexican factories in kind of the first days of NAFTA.
The writers of that Makila Solidarity Network paper did not consider this to have been a good thing.
And they wrote, quote, from the research that has already been done on the ground, however, working conditions in areas where Nigerd has produced and is currently producing in Mexico are less than ideal.
While management at the Mejelosa factory in Tehuacan, Mexico insisted that they paid premium wages, workers disputed these statements.
Low wages are a common complaint of garment workers in Tehuacan.
Many are forced to work several jobs to meet their families' basic needs.
It is not uncommon for children to work in smaller maquilas and workshops to complement the very low wages their parents are making.
In Cuahuila, where Nyigert is currently contracting work, there are similar reports of low wages, long hours, and forced overtime.
Since the signing of NAFTA, union representation has decreased significantly in this region.
Forced pregnancy testing and sexual harassment have also been reported.
Further research needs to be done to document the working conditions at Nygert-owned factories in Guadalajara and Guernavaca, Mexico.
In Canada, three of Nyigard's Manitoba factories are certified by UNITET, the North American Garment and Textile Workers Union.
During union drives in the 1980s at his plants, Peter Nygard placed full-page ads in Winnipeg newspapers stating his anti-union position.
At that time, the Manitoba Labor Board ruled that the company had committed unfair labor practices, including the refusal to deduct union dues, to allow the union access to the plant and to pay into the union's retirement and health and welfare funds.
Nyigard was ordered to pay the union and illegally laid off employees $150,000 in money owed in fines.
Um, so yeah, he's cool.
Do you ever like is there ever a bastard who's like the shining prince of everything and then secretly has the like murder basement?
Or is it always just these people where you're like, Of course, this person doesn't respect fucking anybody except it's like I mean we didn't portray it this way, but a lot of people Georgia Tan, the woman who invented adoption by kidnapping a lot of babies, a whole bunch of people thought she was wonderful because she's running these adoption centers and stuff, you know.
Um so I should probably say a little bit about NAFTA here as well.
We're not gonna go a lot into NAFTA here because that's a subject that deserves more than just casual coverage on a podcast.
But it's fair to say that rather than inspiring NAFTA, Nygert's primary contribution was to be one of the first guys to use the trade agreement to escape unionized labor and force workers to endure privation for the enhanced profit of his company.
This pattern was repeated on a large scale by other businesses.
I want to quote now from a write-up by sociology professor Robert Ross from Clark University.
It is a long quote, but I think that it's necessary to do that here.
On August 2nd, 1995, labor officials in the state of California raided a garment manufacturing shop 12 miles east of Los Angeles and the town of El Monte.
The shop was located in what had appeared to be a residential condominium complex, but this one was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a six-foot brick wall with metal spikes.
Dangerous and unsanitary, the garment factory was worse than substandard.
Its workers were virtual slaves.
Held in the condominium complex were 72 laborers who were forced to work as much as 17 hours a day, seven days a week, for $160 an hour.
In some cases, the 67 women and five men worked up to 22 hours for as little as 50 cents an hour.
Their wages varied, therefore, between about one-third and one-tenth of the U.S. legal minimum wage.
The condominium was also a major fire hazard.
There was no rear exit and only small windows with thick iron bars.
A gang of eight smugglers had paid the workers' airfare from Thailand, promising them a brighter future in America.
Upon their arrival, however, the new immigrants were forced into slave labor, working day and night to pay off their passage fees.
The fees ranged from $4,800 to $25,000.
They were also threatened with beatings, rape, and even death.
Following the discovery, all 72 workers were arrested as illegal aliens held by federal immigration officers.
But conditions had been so bad, one of the women said, the day I was arrested, I was very happy.
Budpar Rangmak, one of the people forced to stay at the compound, claimed that a year ago, two people who tried to escape were severely beaten and sent back to Thailand.
He also stated that workers were frequently beaten in the compound to prevent escapes.
Another worker from the El Monte sweatshop claimed that she was told it would take three years for her to pay off the $4,800 traveling fee.
She was forced to pay $300 a month.
According to federal officials, threats against the workers' children or family members in Thailand were used to make sure their parents continued sewing.
Immigration officials had been aware of the El Monte operation for three years, but the local authorities acted only when they heard the testimony of a woman who escaped through a ventilation shaft just weeks before the raid.
The eight Thai nationals who ran the ring and its businesses were convicted of harboring and transporting illegal immigrants, kidnapping, peonage, and other serious charges.
A few weeks after the discovery, over a million dollars of their assets, including over $865,000 in cash, were distributed to the 72 workers found in El Monte and to 39 others who had worked in the Los Angeles installations controlled by the ring.
The smuggler owners have been imprisoned.
The illegal immigrants are due approximately $3.5 million in back pay and penalties.
The labor and occupational safety agencies of the state of California asked for $550,000 in penalties from the sweatshop owners.
Compensation has also been collected from the garment manufacturers who commissioned work from the contractor.
Major American retail chains which sold clothing made in the slave sweatshop include Neiman Marcus, Montgomery Ward, and Sears.
Stories such as these about the Thai slaves of El Monte, California symbolically represent one of the main tendencies of contemporary global capitalism.
The tendency to level workers' conditions down to or below a global standard more like that of today's most vulnerable third world workers than that of yesterday's organized workers in the developed industrial social order.
This is the concrete meaning of the race to the bottom.
While the Thai slaves represent the unusual worst case of the problems of labor in the apparel industry and in other low-wage industries in North America, the rise of the new sweatshops is widespread.
One responsible estimate, often used by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, is that up to half the entire apparel workforce of the United States, potentially half a million workers, labor at below the legal minimum wage or without legally entitled premium pay for overtime hours.
These workers also suffer unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
Such conditions include as many as 50,000 workers in New York City and 70 to 90,000 in Los Angeles, the two largest centers of garment production in the country.
Treating People as Profit Barriers00:05:38
The North American Free Trade Agreement, dissolving barriers to the movement of goods and capital between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, is like the European Union and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, part of the project of global capital, and a very successful one.
In 30 years, a new form of capitalism has been born out of the crisis of mid-century capitalism.
The mid-century type of capitalism, known variously as monopoly capitalism, or later Fordism, was characteristically associated with the Keynesian welfare state.
But many of the characteristic forms and achievements of that variant of capitalism have been superseded by a new one, global capitalism.
This then is the context of NAFTA, a world project of capitalism to dissolve barriers to investment and to lower cost of production entailing, ipso facto, a systemic attack upon and loss of working class power and social protections in the older industrial nations.
Yet, paradoxically, the same world context makes more concrete than ever the rewards of solidarity and the necessity of internationalism.
Anyway, I mean, it was a long one.
It talks about the necessity of something.
Like, probably a couple of things.
When I think about the compensation those people are deserved, I mostly think about like, I don't know, ears and pieces, pieces of bodies.
Yes.
But it is like this is the thing that Nygard was a huge part of.
And we can tell from the way he treated his workers in Canada and the way he treated his workers in Mexico, this was exactly what he wanted to happen.
Like he saw he was one of a number of people.
Not to put too much credit on this guy, but he saw the people who made his products as a barrier to his profits.
And before NAFTA happened, he was working to do what he could to ensure that they could not cut into his profits.
And he backed NAFTA and took advantage of it as soon as it happened in order to cut the ability of other people to make money off of the company that he owned, right?
Like that was the thing.
The people who made the products.
He was willing to, you know, force them to take pregnancy tests, beat them, lock them up for days on and take their fucking passports, whatever it takes to make sure that like he gets every dime he possibly can out of that.
Anyway, I'm sure he used for good and noble purpose.
Like, I just, I can't even.
Yeah, that's what we're about to talk about.
Okay, good.
Yeah, what he does with all the money he makes doing this.
So in 1987, Peter purchased land in the Bahamas, where he soon began construction on a sprawling estate.
We will discuss this later, but in 2003, an American couple sued him in Florida for allegedly tricking them into accepting jobs managing this estate.
They further claimed that Niger ignored Bahamanian immigration laws and failed to obtain work permits for employees, which you may notice is something of a pattern for him.
And he just borrowed some passports as soon as they're there.
Yeah.
You're going to need to give me those.
I'll make sure you don't lose them.
Yeah.
Now, they also allege that he fined workers for petty infractions, which Niger conceded to doing during a court case.
He claimed this was done in cases of, quote, lateness and poor quality work.
Such penalties under law are only allowed to be deducted from quarterly bonuses, but Niger illegally deducted them from weekly pay.
Forbes writes: $25 fines were common for such offenses as leaving a dirty glass on a beach cabana, not having Niger's room cool enough when he arrived, and for the presence of house flies in the Grand Hall.
Executives at Niger corporate offices lived under a similar threat of penalties.
For example, the employment contract of Normand Neal, a former vice president, advised that after receiving full indoctrination, including so-called basic policy framework training, he would be subject to a fine equal to 5% of his bonus for violations of company policies.
Neal was fired and he later sued for breach of employment contract.
Nyigard countersued and the case was settled.
So this is just kind of the way this guy rolls.
And it is, I guess, interesting that he treats his VPs kind of the same way.
That's honestly the most surprising thing so far.
Yeah.
Like you'd think, I mean, maybe it's just like all of the Hollywood indoctrination about like even the evil capitalist rich people with their house on the beach are like really into like seeming really cool to the people who are around them, including like the higher up people who work for them or whatever.
Like, no, this guy is amazing.
It's, it's yeah, he's comprehensively a piece of shit.
Yeah.
Now, there's more things we could say about Peter's treatment of his employees, but I think we have now covered the most consequential cruelties.
So it's probably time to discuss the primary group of people outside of laborers that he targeted for horrific cruelty, which was any young woman who happened to be anywhere near his orbit.
Yeah.
Often the employees he abused were women, obviously, as this excerpt from the New York Times makes clear.
A 1980 news article described an area of his office in Winnipeg, the city in Manitoba where he built his company as a passion pit with a mirrored ceiling and a couch that transformed into a bed at the push of a button.
This is his office in Winnipeg.
If anyone calls your boss's office a passion pit, it's time that's not a place.
That's not a good place.
No, don't go to that place.
That's not a good place.
Don't go to the pat.
Don't go to anything called the passion pit unless it's like a juice restaurant that focuses on passion fruit and like peaches a lot.
Yeah.
Then I guess it might be okay.
Or like a kind of, if you're into the kind of sleazy swinger club that we call itself the passion pit.
Obviously.
No judgment.
Look, if there's like a dirty bar in an industrial part of Philly that promises key parties and like 65 cent rum and cokes and it's called the passion pit, of course I'm going to go there.
Assault and the Free Press00:16:25
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, that's just a good time.
Yeah.
That's just a good time.
And then a number of doctor visits afterwards.
Yeah, but most of that stuff's anyway.
Whatever.
Yeah, they got fucking things now.
So, boy, I shouldn't lead directly from that to this next paragraph.
So you know what we're going to do, Margaret?
Is we're going to roll to ads and just try to let a little bit of capitalism cleanse our palates.
This is our palate cleanser.
Little, little, little bit of an ad break.
Little dabble off down to the old shopping villa.
Pause.
Woo.
It's all bad, except for these ads.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice and sells, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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Oh, we're back.
So bad.
Over the years, Peter Nygard was repeatedly accused of demanding that female employees satisfy him sexually.
There were at least nine women in Winnipeg and Los Angeles who accused him of sexual harassment or assault.
The New York Times spoke to 10 other women who said that he had proposed sex, touched them inappropriately, or raped them.
Since he sold fashion for women, Peter worked hard for decades to maintain the image of an eccentric playboy, but one who was basically good at heart, right?
He would dress ostentatiously.
He would have this, like, he was always photographed with models and stuff.
And there's even photos of like his passion pit and his like living room and stuff and all of his fancy things.
But his whole attitude was that like, well, yeah, I'm a little bit of a playway, but look, you know, my mom and my sister helped me run the company.
Like, I'm a good guy at heart.
I just like to, um, anyway, uh, when he wrote about his one brief marriage to a model in the 1970s, he refused to name her and claimed that she had left him after three years because, quote, I worked too hard.
Which is again, you see what he's doing here is he's like, look, yeah, I had a marriage breakup.
It's because I worked too hard.
But like, that's not doesn't mean I'm a bad guy.
You know, I just am what I do.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it worked for a while.
In other interviews, Nygard would bemoan that he had given up on the concept of marriage.
He claimed that in his youth, it had been about finding a partner you wanted to stay with for life.
Quote, it doesn't mean that anymore, he said, claiming he was disillusioned about what marriage has turned out to be.
People aren't necessarily happier when they get married.
I think you can be a very good partner to someone if you have to earn that partnership every day rather than be legally bound to do it.
So another good quote from him.
Yeah, that's like fine.
Like, but that's not what he does.
That is very much not what he does.
It certainly does not gel with the picture of the man's relationship styles painted by this Forbes profile.
Quote, Nyigard went on to have seven children with four different women.
Karina Paca, and eventually it gets up to 10 kids.
Karina Paca, a former stewardess, fought him for years in Ontario courts for child support for their then teenage son.
Nygard argued the amount she sought was excessive and would destroy the child's work ethic.
I think give him a case of affluenza.
I know, right?
What a cool guy.
Yeah.
He's just such a sleazeball.
Yeah.
But it works really well.
He's making fucking bank.
He's like one of the biggest names in fashion.
Allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace have flittered out around Peter for most of his career.
We know that in 1980, the Winnipeg Free Press reported that he'd been charged with the rape of an 18-year-old girl by local authorities.
Those charges were dropped when the complainant refused to testify.
I'll give you some guesses as to why.
Nyigard claimed the police had used poor judgment in investigating the case.
He told the free press that he planned to finance the creation of a foundation to improve the Canadian judicial system.
Never happened.
Look, I want to fix this.
We all want to get to the bottom of this problem, right?
Investigating us poor, innocent men.
Yeah, those poor, innocent multi-millionaires with, at this point, 20 or 30 sexual assault and rape allegations against them.
A CBC investigation in the late 2000s found, Forbes says, dredged up claims by former employees that he'd abused.
In the 1990s, it's alleged, Nygard paid to have three sexual harassment complaints settled through the Manitoba Human Rights Commission.
Since the cases did not go to court, no records exist about what these cases were about.
But the Winnipeg Free Press published articles about the complaints.
One was from a 27-year-old travel coordinator who claims she repeatedly brushed off Nygard's touches and sexual advances.
Another claims Nygard added skinny dipping to the agenda of a business meeting.
Business events were often held on his Bahamanian compound.
Well, Nygard would, according to one employee, frequently grab himself while wearing a small bathing suit.
She complained, I would find him in a state of undress, pants open, no shirt, or with his hand down the front of his pants, fondling himself.
This guy's real subtle.
That's a yeah, he's what you will see a picture.
You know what, Sophie?
It's time to show Margaret a picture of Peter Niger.
Does this count?
It's time for Margaret to see this man.
Yes, this violates actually, all of us have grounds to sue now.
Sue him for his photo.
Yeah.
I'm trying to decide which.
I'm just gonna go to Google Images.
He's he looks incredible.
Just share my screen because I can't pick one.
Look, like ethically, I can't suggest that like people get charged with sexual harassment just based on their physical appearance.
But if you were going to do it, Peter Niger would be the guy.
He looks like how Trump thinks he looks.
Yes, yes, that's exactly how he looks.
And he has the hair is fucking amazing.
Yeah, no, like he's got the like silver fox thing down, but in a like creep-ass way.
Yeah.
Like you could, you yeah.
He wears, we'll talk about the V-nex in a little bit.
He wears like really deep.
He was jacked at one point.
Oh, this picture becomes kind of amazing.
Yeah.
He's photoshopped.
But he was muscular at one point.
He does look like he looks like the bad guy from a Paul Verhoven movie.
Like he looks like someone Robocop would shoot at like the hour and 25 minute.
Or the androids will hold over and be like, I want more life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The androids will accuse him of sexual assault credibly.
He's he's.
He does also look, and this is very inside baseball for people who live in Los Angeles.
I'm sorry, is that the man's name?
Very Dallas.
Similar to the weatherman, Dallas Reigns.
I want that guy to be good in every way because if so, he rules for having that name.
And he's a big nominative determinalist, so I can't imagine he's bad.
But no, see, he looks nice.
Peter Niger, Peter Nygard.
He looks rich in all of his photos, but also like he would leave a film if he sat in your car.
The good version.
Like you would have to scrub it and not just with like a spray bottle and a little bit of like a paper towel.
Like you'd need to actually get like one of those green, scrubby things to really get in there because it's going to get in the crevices, the Niger goo.
So when the free press reached out for comment on the case of him pulling down the pants, fondling himself in front of an employee, Nygard threatened a defamation suit against the paper, the reporter, and another employee.
In 1996, he was accused of rape again by a Los Angeles employee who he later fired.
The case was eventually dismissed.
Now, none of these allegations, again, this is the 80s through the 90s.
None of these allegations do more than cause mild talk, right?
Like, this does not harm him in any way.
There's not a lot of way to search things on the internet.
So, unless you're really paying attention to his life, it's not something you're going to just like drum up the fact that there's these stories in fucking Canada about him.
So, Nygard got to live a life of opulence and semi-glamour.
He co-hosted an annual Oscar party in Los Angeles, which he billed as the Night of a Thousand Stars.
Actual Hollywood in-crowd people knew it as the Night of a Thousand Has-Bins because no one but B-listers tended to show up.
It was at one of these parties that he met.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a real Hollywood burn.
And again, the people burning in here are probably the people using Epstein as like pimp.
So let's not.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's at one of these parties that he met Anna Nicole Smith, who he dated from 1998 to 2001.
After she died of an overdose in 2007, he went on Montel Williams to claim that he'd tried to get her off drugs, which, uh-huh, based on some things we'll talk about in a bit, I don't think is likely.
Come on.
It's very sad.
It's a real bummer, real bummer.
Now, he had a private plane where he did the normal rich guy stuff.
He put a bar in there.
He put stripper poles and a bed in there.
And like, look, you've got a private jet, which you shouldn't, but of course you're going to do some like wacky ass 70 shit like that.
Although it is worth noting, he's doing this in like the 80s and 90s.
This is all, anyway, whatever.
Like wood panels, like plush and a fan.
It's like Led Zeppelin shit.
In at least one instance, Niger's 17-year-old girlfriend was filmed dancing on one of the poles.
So again, Epstein-y.
We're not yet getting into the stuff that's, yeah, but we're starting to get into the Epstein stuff, right?
Flying around children on your sex plane.
That's, that's, that's Epstein territory.
We're in there.
You know, we're, we're running deep.
We've made a first down.
That's a basketball term, right, Sophie?
Moving right along.
Um, I'm going to quote from Forbes here.
A former stewardess on his private plane told of one incident in which Niger was accompanied by a bevy of topless women.
At one point in mid-flight, she recalls, Nigerd, wild-haired and with his bathrobe open, began berating her co-worker, yelling, you are nothing.
You are garbage.
When the stewardess tried to calm him down, he screamed, I am God.
Do you not understand?
Even after the security director intervened, she claims Nygard continued to rage, shouting, This is my plane.
I can do whatever the hell I want.
That's the way the rules work.
Cool guy.
Cool guy.
I mean, they do for him for like decades.
So that's why he feels that way.
He's not like making, he hasn't like invented this out of pure like that would normally be evidence of delusion, but for decades, that's the way the world works for Peter.
Yeah.
Like, not that that's good, but that is the way the world works for him because he gets away with all this for an extremely long time.
Also, I should note for legal purposes, he denies that story above.
Although I don't think he'll be suing us anytime soon because of where he's located.
By far, Peter's most beloved possession.
Yes, yeah.
By far, Peter's most beloved possession and the center of his image as a carefree playboy fuck monster was Niger K, a chunk of the coastline of New Providence, which is in the Bahamas, that he renamed after himself.
The compound was Mayan-themed and it had the look of a tropical temple city.
I describe the building.
No, just that.
I have nothing to add to that, but that stands for its own.
It does say a lot, right?
When you have built your own Mayan temple city to yourself in the Bahamas.
Like sovereign country that you've just bought and ignored all the rules.
Yeah.
I would describe the build quality based on what I can see as like Disney World quality.
Like it looks like it was, it looked pretty cool.
I'm not going to lie.
The Mayan temples didn't look bad.
The Grand Hall was 32,000 square feet with a 100,000 pound glass ceiling.
Niger K was featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous.
It hosted celebrities, like Oprah, who claimed, I'm not living large enough after seeing it.
For years, Oprah, constantly like a little D-level villain in like seven or eight of our episodes.
Building a Mayan Temple City00:02:56
Yeah.
Just a little thread, just like, what's going on with her?
She kind of seems like she might be up to some evil stuff, but also everyone loves her.
Fun stuff.
Anyway, for years, the compound was one of the most infamous examples of wealthy excess on the planet.
I want to play a clip for you, Margaret, from a 2004 show called Life of Luxury.
Now, the woman you're going to hear talking first is Bianca Nygert, who's his daughter and at this point is the chief of operations for his compound.
Hi, welcome to Nygar Key.
We have anything you could possibly imagine.
Trampoline out on the water, tennis courts, basketball court, beach volleyball, pool volleyballs.
Every Sunday we have a pamper party with nanicures and pedicures and massages for our guests.
This hideaway of hedonism boasts a 150,000 square foot wonderland of excess, the ocean, the water slides.
There's even a human aquarium.
That's not crazy.
You need to pack your bags.
Sorry.
This slice of heaven ain't for rent.
It's the private utopian bachelor pad of this man, Canada's clothing magnet, Peter Nygaard, and entry is by invitation only.
Personally, I enjoy the luxury best when I have friends here with which a share.
It certainly is big enough with its 22 bedrooms built without walls.
So that last bit's a little creepy, right?
22 beds.
Built without walls?
Built without walls, huh?
And the human aquarium.
There's a shot.
The human aquarium.
It's a gross tank in a dark.
It is a gross tank.
With a person in a bikini in it.
It is pretty fucking fucking gnarly.
And we have not really started into the gross stuff.
We've started into the gross, but it gets a lot worse from here on out.
Now, you're not going to be surprised to learn that a lot of those so-called friends that he likes to share his compound with, the ones who are not celebrities, were extremely young women.
Some of them were children.
A lot of them were children who were trafficked, sometimes allegedly against their will and systemically abused, systematically abused by Peter Nygert.
We're going to tell that story, and we're going to tell you a lot more in part two.
But Margaret, if you had a tens of millions of dollars compound based off of the stolen artistic style of a Central American civilization on a Bahamanian island where you committed a raft of felonies, what would it be and what would the felonies be?
Well, the felonies is that people like that would be in the aquarium and they would be in there for just long enough to before we lift them out again.
It's just kind of a perpetual dunking tank.
And anyone who comes can dunk them in.
Cahokia Mounds Mass Grave00:04:11
That is what I would build.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I would do like a Cahokia mound, but the mound is just a mass grave of guys like that.
My throne of bastard skulls.
Yeah, I think the people of the Cahokia Mounds would be okay with that.
Anyway, Margaret, you got that's that's all for part one.
You got anything to plug?
Well, after that, enjoyable.
Yeah, I have a book that is probably out by the time you hear this called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow, which includes such stories as people programming drones to murder people like we're discussing on the show in a fictional setting.
Yay.
Yeah.
Because it's fiction.
And that book is out.
And I also am a host of a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, where you can hear things that are sort of like this.
Margaret, banger.
We won't be here tomorrow, but we will be back on Thursday with part two.
Well done.
I just thought of that one.
Also, I have a book called After the Revolution.
You can find it at Google at AK Press or AK Press.
Has a bunch of indie bookstores you can order from.
You can also get it from all of the regular bookstores.
It's all over the place.
Just type the words in and you'll find it.
All right, everybody.
All right, Margaret.
All right.
All right, Sophie.
Off we go to Niagara Key.
But like in an IRA or kind of way.
Yeah, there we go.
No.
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