True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 545: True Crime Time
Aired: 2026-05-04
Duration: 01:23:10


=== Hunting Another Man's Mind (05:48) ===

[00:00:00]  Because everything with you is seeing, isn't it?
[00:00:06]  Your primary sensory intake that makes your dream live is seeing reflections, mirrors, images.
[00:00:18]  First of all,
[00:01:01]  pause on that You're...
[00:01:02]  You're hunting a man.
[00:01:04]  You're hunting a man.
[00:01:05]  Yeah.
[00:01:06]  Once I find you, I'll stop you from doing gay shit.
[00:01:09]  You're hunting another man's mind.
[00:01:12]  That's crazy to me.
[00:01:13]  Yeah.
[00:01:13]  To get into another man's mind.
[00:01:16]  I don't think you should be doing that.
[00:01:18]  That's the same thing.
[00:01:19]  It's like whenever people are like, oh, why don't you walk 10 miles in his shoes?
[00:01:22]  Pause on that, brother.
[00:01:24]  That's how you get athlete's foot.
[00:01:26]  First of all, why would I be in his shoes?
[00:01:27]  He left them outside our fucking door while we fucked?
[00:01:31]  Not happening because that does happen sometimes.
[00:01:33]  Yeah.
[00:01:33]  You know, ladies and gentlemen, the moccasins are on and the boys are saying hello.
[00:01:42]  My name is Brace.
[00:01:43]  My name is producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:45]  And we used to, it doesn't sound right, right?
[00:01:50]  Because it used to be that there would be a voice.
[00:01:52]  I have a vague recall of that.
[00:01:55]  A memory.
[00:01:56]  You know, and I looked up how long is maternity leave?
[00:01:59]  Mm hmm.
[00:02:00]  A lot of these countries are giving two weeks.
[00:02:03]  Yeah, that seems.
[00:02:04]  Two months, maybe two and a half months.
[00:02:08]  I don't even know what we're at right now.
[00:02:09]  Two years?
[00:02:10]  Who's keeping score?
[00:02:11]  Two years?
[00:02:12]  I guess maybe Liz will.
[00:02:14]  We're excited for Liz to come back so that we can hear how her baby's.
[00:02:19]  going to college.
[00:02:20]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:02:22]  She can talk about.
[00:02:23]  Liz is coming on the show soon to talk about empty nest, the feeling of having an empty nest.
[00:02:29]  Liz is coming on soon to talk about, oh, my kids' hormones are going crazy, puberty.
[00:02:34]  I feel like it's such a drag.
[00:02:35]  This is an empty nest.
[00:02:37]  It is.
[00:02:38]  You know, it's an empty nest, but the bird, it's almost like this.
[00:02:42]  It's not even an empty nest.
[00:02:44]  It's like we saw, we had a bird, and then the bird escaped.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:02:49]  It migrated wherever birds go.
[00:02:51]  And why do they do that?
[00:02:53]  Ask Holden Caulfield.
[00:02:54]  Did he?
[00:02:55]  Oh, it was ducks.
[00:02:56]  His thing was the ducks.
[00:02:57]  It's like where do the ducks go in the winter?
[00:02:59]  You know, that guy, what do you write?
[00:03:02]  Two books.
[00:03:04]  J.D. Salinger?
[00:03:04]  Yeah.
[00:03:05]  Yeah, something like that.
[00:03:06]  And then, like, is that short stories?
[00:03:10]  That's a novel, I think.
[00:03:11]  The nine stories.
[00:03:12]  Nine stories.
[00:03:13]  You had three books?
[00:03:15]  Come on.
[00:03:17]  Three books?
[00:03:19]  Not really prolific.
[00:03:20]  Yeah.
[00:03:20]  You and Holton Caulfield would butt heads.
[00:03:22]  They're kind of in the same genre, no?
[00:03:25]  Yeah.
[00:03:26]  Oh.
[00:03:27]  Yeah, that's kind of the genre.
[00:03:30]  But it made a bunch of people shoot other people.
[00:03:33]  That did.
[00:03:34]  He shot Lennon, right?
[00:03:36]  Mark David Chapman.
[00:03:36]  Yeah.
[00:03:37]  He shot John.
[00:03:38]  Yeah.
[00:03:38]  And Hinckley's thing was Jodie Foster, as we just discussed.
[00:03:42]  But I feel like other assassins.
[00:03:43]  He probably read it in school.
[00:03:44]  I feel like they all talk about it.
[00:03:45]  Now I feel like actually it's probably the most read book by killers because they make you read it in school.
[00:03:52]  Yeah.
[00:03:54]  And they make you read it because they're like, this is what an annoying guy's like.
[00:03:56]  Don't be like this.
[00:03:58]  Killers should start talking about like Great Gatsby or something else.
[00:04:01]  Jane Eyre.
[00:04:02]  Oh, The Green Light or whatever.
[00:04:03]  I had to shoot Trump because of Jane Eyre.
[00:04:08]  Yeah.
[00:04:09]  The Giver.
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:10]  The Giver.
[00:04:11]  He was taking all the color from her.
[00:04:13]  What the fuck was up with The Giver?
[00:04:14]  The Giver hit when you're in like seventh grade, it's like, whoa, 1984.
[00:04:20]  It is kind of 1984 for babies.
[00:04:22]  I was really into 1984.
[00:04:24]  They made us read The Giver and then they made us read Fahrenheit 451.
[00:04:28]  I didn't read that one.
[00:04:29]  Really?
[00:04:29]  I read 1984, though, before it was assigned, and I was like, this is fucking so next level.
[00:04:34]  I'm so into this.
[00:04:35]  Yeah, he goes crazy from getting a little bit of pussy.
[00:04:38]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:39]  Yeah.
[00:04:40]  I think it's kind of a danger.
[00:04:41]  It shows the danger of going crazy.
[00:04:43]  You want to keep on, you want to keep on, keep your mind level.
[00:04:49]  Yeah.
[00:04:49]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:50]  Because he gets a little bit of that shit.
[00:04:51]  Women we can look at.
[00:04:53]  He just goes crazy.
[00:04:54]  He's talking about Leon Trotsky.
[00:04:55]  Yeah, I read, I remember I read Fahrenheit 451, 451, whatever.
[00:05:03]  And I was like, well, this seems a little ridiculous.
[00:05:06]  They burn books.
[00:05:08]  They made us read Anthem.
[00:05:09]  What's Anthem?
[00:05:10]  Ayn Rand.
[00:05:11]  It's like a short sci fi, which in ninth grade, I had no idea who Ayn Rand was.
[00:05:15]  I was also like, this fucking rocks.
[00:05:16]  It's like the same kind of book.
[00:05:18]  They're like, they're burning, they're burning.
[00:05:20]  They're keeping you down.
[00:05:22]  It's like Harrison Bergeron.
[00:05:23]  What's that?
[00:05:24]  That was Vonnegut, where they make everybody, they're trying to make everybody.
[00:05:27]  Equal, so it's like if you have good ideas, they like make a squawk sound in your ear so you can't think right.
[00:05:32]  Yeah, and if you're a great ballerina, they like weigh you down with weights because that's what they're doing to people now.
[00:05:37]  He uh, shout out to my aunt, he kissed my aunt nice right on the lips.
[00:05:43]  Was she into it?
[00:05:45]  I think she was just like, Why is Kurt Vonnegut this guy's married?
[00:05:48]  You know what I mean?

=== The Best Rachel Week Ever (02:56) ===

[00:05:49]  Okay, but as we say in the episode, it's not illegal, whatever other things you might have to say about it, it is perfectly legal to do such activities, yeah.
[00:06:01]  We are talking about bloody murder in today's episode.
[00:06:06]  We have Rachel Week.
[00:06:08]  And let's give a.
[00:06:09]  For some reason, I moved the gong back, but then whatever.
[00:06:12]  Now that Liz isn't here to say that I can't use the gavel, Rachel Week, you don't like the gavel either.
[00:06:19]  Well, it's just.
[00:06:20]  It's harsh.
[00:06:21]  Don't.
[00:06:22]  Sibilant.
[00:06:22]  Ever, by the way, don't ever give me the.
[00:06:27]  You made it seem like I was being abusive to you by your facial expressions.
[00:06:30]  With just now?
[00:06:32]  You're doing it again.
[00:06:33]  I'm flinching.
[00:06:34]  I'm wincing at the gavel.
[00:06:35]  You're flinching.
[00:06:36]  Don't flinch.
[00:06:37]  Well, you don't have, I feel like in the, oh, you do have the thing to hit it on.
[00:06:40]  Yeah.
[00:06:40]  What's that called?
[00:06:42]  We don't talk about that.
[00:06:43]  Okay.
[00:06:43]  It's got a really antiquated name that says it's like the mortar and pestle.
[00:06:48]  Yes.
[00:06:49]  But I don't know what that thing is.
[00:06:50]  Rachel Week in session.
[00:06:52]  This is the big, this is, you heard the alpha of Rachel Week.
[00:06:57]  We are now at the Omega.
[00:06:58]  Yeah.
[00:06:58]  We are at the end of Rachel Week.
[00:07:00]  But what a Rachel Week we had.
[00:07:03]  Every year, everyone's like, I'm so looking forward to Rachel Week.
[00:07:06]  It's my favorite part of the year.
[00:07:07]  And we hate it usually.
[00:07:09]  We're like, fuck the listeners, fuck the fans.
[00:07:11]  Relax.
[00:07:11]  Y'all just want this Rachel slop from us.
[00:07:13]  Rachel Week, Rachel Week.
[00:07:14]  It'll get there when it gets there.
[00:07:16]  We'll get there.
[00:07:17]  We have a busy schedule and stuff.
[00:07:19]  But this year, we are excited to have Rachel Week.
[00:07:22]  And of course, RC Week, as we talk about, I mean, we talk about this really in about two seconds when we do the interstitial music and all that kind of stuff.
[00:07:30]  We once again mention it, but it is worth mentioning.
[00:07:32]  Yeah.
[00:07:32]  Well, everybody's at home sipping their RC Cola, thinking about Rachel Week.
[00:07:35]  Yeah, yeah, of course.
[00:07:36]  Course, you're doing the friends, and it's like, Have I been good this year?
[00:07:40]  Am I gonna get a present?
[00:07:42]  Rachel presents, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:44]  Or obviously, is the Rachel Devil gonna take my kid?
[00:07:47]  Because that's what happens, and you don't know that for Rachel Week every year.
[00:07:52]  If you are a parent, the Rachel Devil may take one, yeah.
[00:07:57]  We it might come back, might not if you've been racially insensitive.
[00:08:04]  And with that being said, my name is Rachel Jake, and we have with us Rachel.
[00:08:09]  Corbett.
[00:08:22]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Rachel Week on TruAnon.
[00:08:26]  And I see your eyebrows raising it in surprise there, Rachel.
[00:08:30]  But in fact, every year, and the audience loves this, every year we have one week of all Rachels.
[00:08:36]  And this year we are thrilled because we had Rachel Koster last episode.
[00:08:41]  Now we have Rachel Corbett.
[00:08:44]  Another RC.

=== Narrativizing Murder and Suicide (15:22) ===

[00:08:45]  Exactly.
[00:08:47]  Another RC.
[00:08:48]  We are thrilled.
[00:08:49]  You don't give a fuck, but we are thrilled to have you there, Rachel.
[00:08:54]  A features writer at New York Magazine.
[00:08:58]  We don't really know what features are, do we?
[00:09:01]  Do we really know what the features are?
[00:09:02]  They're long stories.
[00:09:04]  Can't you just?
[00:09:04]  That's features is better, though, sounding right.
[00:09:07]  Yeah.
[00:09:07]  We're not going to read.
[00:09:08]  See, the long story writer sounds like you're making up that you're a journalist.
[00:09:11]  No one wants to read a long story.
[00:09:14]  Well, no, but they were loving to give us long reads for long reads.
[00:09:17]  That's true.
[00:09:18]  What the fuck were long reads?
[00:09:20]  They were the things that used to be in magazines before like magazines all closed down and they just put them online.
[00:09:27]  They were features.
[00:09:28]  They were features.
[00:09:29]  Narrative, long form journalism.
[00:09:32]  Does New York Mag do this bullshit where they put the minutes to read next to the fucking side of the article?
[00:09:39]  I don't know, actually.
[00:09:40]  I don't think that they did.
[00:09:41]  I don't think so.
[00:09:42]  I feel like Medium pioneered that.
[00:09:43]  That is, if you were glancing at those minutes and then calculating your day, just give up.
[00:09:49]  Give up reading that article, give up reading forever, and start writing your obituary because you, well, that's two on the nose.
[00:09:58]  Rachel is the author of You Must Change Your Life.
[00:10:01]  And the monsters we make, and a really crazy feature, I guess you could call it, in New York Magazine, I want to talk about.
[00:10:12]  But first of all, I want to ask you a personal question, which is one you, I believe, were kind of mostly an art journalist.
[00:10:22]  Yeah.
[00:10:23]  And then it seems at some point in the past few years, you got into writing about people killing each other.
[00:10:29]  And I did want to ask why that is the case.
[00:10:33]  Well,.
[00:10:34]  I've always been interested in people killing each other, I think, forever.
[00:10:38]  Yeah.
[00:10:39]  And I like crime movies and crime shows and all that.
[00:10:45]  And I like art.
[00:10:47]  And I think that I never wanted to be exclusively an art journalist.
[00:10:51]  It's just kind of where I landed, and all my friends were artists, and I knew lots of people, and I loved to look at art and write about it.
[00:10:57]  So that was very kind of convenient.
[00:11:00]  But now that I'm, you know, at New York Magazine, I get to do more general interest stories.
[00:11:06]  So.
[00:11:08]  I have lots of other interests.
[00:11:10]  But the crime thing, you know, is personal a little bit.
[00:11:14]  This book, my newest book, The Monsters We Make, starts out with a personal story about my own connection to a murder.
[00:11:23]  Do you want me to tell this story?
[00:11:26]  Yeah, you know, I'm not trying to be like a podcaster about it, but it is a fucking crazy story.
[00:11:31]  Because you're from a relatively small town, like a rural, non town.
[00:11:39]  Yeah, I've only ever lived on the coasts.
[00:11:41]  And so to me, I mean, we don't know what happens there.
[00:11:44]  But I, you know, one, there's this classic thing of like, you know, it's a small town, it's a close knit community.
[00:11:50]  People know each other, whatever.
[00:11:52]  And it seems like there was sort of violence visited upon your town in a kind of crazy way, or it's really not even that crazy, almost a typical way in some ways.
[00:12:04]  But the fact that it entered your life in this sort of really, I don't know, yes, tell us about it.
[00:12:09]  Yeah.
[00:12:10]  I read that part of it and I was like kind of tripping out about it for a while.
[00:12:13]  Yesterday.
[00:12:14]  I guess that's why I'm stumbling over my words.
[00:12:15]  Oh, well.
[00:12:17]  So, the story is when I was a child, like five, six years old, my mother met a man after my parents divorced, and they dated for several years.
[00:12:26]  He lived with us.
[00:12:27]  He was this really nice guy.
[00:12:29]  His name was Scott Johnson.
[00:12:31]  He had a skateboard and a dog, and he was this very cool, kind of like father figure, older brother type.
[00:12:38]  Really nice, very calm, quiet, you know.
[00:12:43]  And, you know, they were together for a few years, and then eventually they broke up for various reasons.
[00:12:50]  Shortly thereafter, he met another woman and then he killed her and then he killed himself.
[00:12:56]  So it was a murder suicide.
[00:12:58]  And it was obviously a complete shock because it was so outside the character.
[00:13:02]  I mean, they always say this, right?
[00:13:03]  Yeah.
[00:13:05]  But there was no history of violence.
[00:13:06]  So that was unusual.
[00:13:08]  Usually a domestic violence situation escalates and there was no domestic violence before this, which I came to learn later is actually murder suicide is a very particular kind of crime.
[00:13:17]  It doesn't fit the same characteristics of typical domestic violence.
[00:13:21]  Although, One can escalate into murder suicide.
[00:13:23]  Many murder suicides are related to like a job loss or some stressor where the man feels he can no longer provide for the family, or it could be jealousy, a loss, you know, losing a partner, some big loss.
[00:13:36]  And in this case, you know, Scott didn't leave a suicide note, so I'll never know exactly why he did it, but his new girlfriend was, they were breaking up and he had just lost his job working at the rail yard.
[00:13:48]  And there was this, You know, when I was a child, my mother just told me he committed suicide.
[00:13:57]  I never knew about the murder.
[00:13:58]  And then years later, when I'm living out here in New York and I'm thinking back on it, and there's like Google now and stuff, I go back to look at the papers and I see the headline is, you know, a boy sitting outside during murder suicide.
[00:14:14]  And it's Scott.
[00:14:16]  And I find out that he killed this woman also, and that she had a six year old son who was in the car outside waiting.
[00:14:23]  And then I became just super obsessed with trying to understand who this man was and who the boy was.
[00:14:28]  I went back and met the boy and went back to the house and tried to like piece together kind of like a profile of this man.
[00:14:35]  And he fit a lot of like the characteristics.
[00:14:39]  He was, you know, murder, suicide.
[00:14:41]  They're usually straight white men in rural areas, all the things I just described about losing a job and all that.
[00:14:48]  And so I was like, okay, he makes, it makes sense, but it makes absolutely no like psychological sense to me.
[00:14:54]  Practical, but what is this?
[00:14:56]  And then I became curious with my own curiosity what was I trying to really do by figuring out this guy?
[00:15:06]  Would I figure him out?
[00:15:07]  Would that make me feel more in control, or what would that do?
[00:15:10]  So the book then kind of becomes about that really fundamental need to know what's inside the minds of the people who scare us the most.
[00:15:20]  Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason it stood out to me is because my mother committed suicide when I was six.
[00:15:26]  And I didn't really know that until later.
[00:15:29]  I mean, no one really, I think a six year old has trouble understanding that kind of stuff in the first place.
[00:15:36]  But I knew that she died, and then later I found out she committed suicide.
[00:15:39]  And I remember trying to piece together like reasonings.
[00:15:46]  And I think that's, I saw a lot of the sort of similar stuff, I guess, in your writing, where it's just like, I kind of came to the conclusion like, I don't think I can ever know this.
[00:15:56]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:57]  She also didn't leave a note.
[00:15:58]  I mean, then there's some.
[00:16:00]  Fit some other typical profiles of somebody who might do that.
[00:16:04]  But it was one of those things that sort of bedeviled me, but also bedeviled me, I think, because I knew that there was no answer, which is sometimes the case.
[00:16:16]  You mentioned, too, that in the book that sometimes suicide is catching.
[00:16:21]  I think it's sort of towards the end of the book, which did not obviously happen with me, but I've seen that happen before in families.
[00:16:31]  And there is this psychological.
[00:16:35]  I don't know what patterns that emerge that, like, are even if you can see that there are patterns, it's hard to make sense of them.
[00:16:44]  And so much of the book is you describing people who are trying to make sense of acts of extreme violence.
[00:16:52]  And, you know, I've known, I knew one guy in my life who was, I've probably known more, but really, really knew one guy who was like a murderer who had, he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
[00:17:05]  With his chihuahua.
[00:17:07]  He lived, the chihuahua died.
[00:17:09]  Oh, God.
[00:17:09]  I know.
[00:17:11]  Which really, there goes your sympathy, right?
[00:17:15]  Well, they often kill the animal because they don't think anyone else can take care of them.
[00:17:19]  Exactly.
[00:17:20]  This guy killed his dog too.
[00:17:21]  Yeah.
[00:17:22]  Why?
[00:17:22]  Well, this guy goes, he moves to Alabama.
[00:17:25]  And then, first of all, I think he kills another dog.
[00:17:29]  But then he, I believe, shoots a woman that he was seeing and maybe her.
[00:17:37]  Guy that he was a sort of sordid kind of, I believe, methamphetamine fueled kind of thing, and then dies for gunfight from the police.
[00:17:45]  And, you know, with him, I'm like, I guess it may, I can make sense of that because it's methamphetamine, right?
[00:17:52]  But it's still like, it's, I don't know.
[00:17:56]  So much of, I haven't really known anyone who's been like a straight up murderer.
[00:18:02]  And so much of the book is you finding these people who are trying to make sense of why people do it and they can't really.
[00:18:08]  Figure it out.
[00:18:09]  Doesn't work so well, it turns out.
[00:18:12]  Kind of can't know certain things, but we keep trying.
[00:18:14]  That's why we watch all these TV shows.
[00:18:16]  Yeah.
[00:18:16]  Everyone, like, thinks that we're just pretending that we can figure it out now, and we're okay with that placebo.
[00:18:22]  And it is, like, it is, I mean, as somebody who likes art a lot, it probably does appeal to you a little bit.
[00:18:26]  I know it appeals to me, like, being able to figure out why someone does something because of the details that you notice about their life.
[00:18:32]  Yeah.
[00:18:33]  Yeah.
[00:18:34]  It's all analysis.
[00:18:36]  You know, I like, I love that.
[00:18:38]  I mean, I'm trying to do it all the time.
[00:18:40]  I still do it, even though the book is largely like a.
[00:18:43]  Refutation of the possibility of ever profiling.
[00:18:46]  And it's also about how people, I think you feel control.
[00:18:51]  I think that's why we do it.
[00:18:52]  Understanding, like knowledge is power, kind of thing.
[00:18:55]  But also, there's real power that people gain from defining who someone else is saying, you did this because of why, or you're a criminal because you act this way or that way, or you look a certain way.
[00:19:08]  And then that's like the real abuse of power that comes in.
[00:19:11]  And you kind of create criminals where there maybe weren't.
[00:19:14]  One wasn't one before, yeah.
[00:19:16]  Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about this in a sec, but there's a point definitely in your book that it reminded me of when I was a kid.
[00:19:21]  I got in trouble when I was a kid, uh, that's maybe unsurprising, and uh, I actually didn't do the crime that I was accused of.
[00:19:29]  But what were you accused of?
[00:19:30]  I was accused of setting fire to this hill, and actually, I was hanging out with these other kids who one of whom was pretty bad, uh, and they were playing, we were just playing with fireworks, they were playing with fireworks, I was just there, and the hill burned down, and because I had written brace rules.
[00:19:47]  On the inside of an abandoned building we used to hang out in, I kind of got all the blame.
[00:19:52]  And I got put on probation, and it just became this cascading effect of like, this narrative really kind of came that I was a bad kid.
[00:19:59]  And I remember being, because I had a lot of contact with mental health professionals at this point, even though my mental health was pretty good.
[00:20:07]  And they would kind of narrativize a lot of stuff.
[00:20:10]  And they'd be like, oh, you do this because, and again, a big thing was my mom's suicide or this and this.
[00:20:15]  And I remember, I think at the time, I was like, so much of this sounds like nonsense, but maybe they're right.
[00:20:20]  And as I've grown older, I realized that no, these people were just kind of like saying shit that sounded right.
[00:20:26]  You know what I mean?
[00:20:28]  And that reminded me so much of this shit, especially when.
[00:20:31]  Because we don't got to go through the whole book.
[00:20:33]  You guys should read the book.
[00:20:35]  But it's funny because so much of the profile that you talk about follows the scientific trends of the day.
[00:20:42]  And so, you know, we see a lot of the phrenology stuff, which could you explain what that is, real quick?
[00:20:48]  Yeah, when you, you know, feel somebody's skull and there's certain notches or bumps or crevices that determine certain criminal traits, like thievery is an indention, you know, in your lobe or something, and murder is, I forget, an extended frontal, I don't know.
[00:21:05]  Some other part.
[00:21:06]  They were just making shit up.
[00:21:09]  They were just coming up with it.
[00:21:10]  But they would also sometimes look at the skulls of people who are already in prison and say, oh, well, all these guys are Southern Italians and they all have certain noses and they're all criminals.
[00:21:21]  So we can presume that all these Southern Italian type of noses is criminal.
[00:21:26]  This is straight how they were doing science in like 1970.
[00:21:29]  See, and I often have a pet peeve because, correct me if I'm wrong, the facial feature analysis is physiognomy.
[00:21:36]  Where the skull shape is phrenology.
[00:21:38]  And I see a lot of these new style racists who they use those terms, and I'm like, you're using that wrong.
[00:21:42]  Thank you.
[00:21:43]  Because I think you corrected me there, too.
[00:21:44]  No, I think you're right.
[00:21:46]  They're related.
[00:21:46]  But if you're going to be racist, get the terminology right, is my thing.
[00:21:50]  But once they discover psychoanalysis, I feel like they've never really moved on from that in a way, like the criminal profiles.
[00:22:00]  And I think that there is something there.
[00:22:02]  But you talk about during World War II, all these people trying to make, in the OSS, trying to make a.
[00:22:09]  A psychological profile of Hitler.
[00:22:11]  And I noticed how quickly they went to it's a sex thing.
[00:22:15]  Yeah.
[00:22:16]  Yeah.
[00:22:17]  I mean, especially for the people, Henry Murray, who wrote one of the profiles, had never met Hitler, had never interviewed him, certainly.
[00:22:25]  We didn't know anything, we didn't know much about his childhood or his sex life.
[00:22:30]  Yeah.
[00:22:30]  But he was immediately like, he likes to be urinated on by women.
[00:22:34]  Yes.
[00:22:34]  Henry Murray wrote this for the US government.
[00:22:36]  Yeah.
[00:22:38]  And it was just like, what?
[00:22:40]  Where do you get that conclusion?
[00:22:41]  You know, it's so specific.
[00:22:44]  You never look at a guy and you're like, I bet he gets pissed on.
[00:22:47]  Yeah.
[00:22:47]  Sometimes I look at a dude and I'm like, someone's peeing on you, man.
[00:22:50]  That was the whole thing with Trump for years.
[00:22:52]  They were like, oh, the P tape.
[00:22:53]  Well, that's exactly what I'm thinking of is there is this great compulsion to ascribe to people we don't like and to people who are evil.
[00:23:02]  Like, you are also, like, you might in public be this sort of powerful, malignant force, but in private, You're sort of curled up on the bathroom floor while some fraulein is tinkling on your belly.
[00:23:19]  And it's crazy because I remember there was also, as Hitler had, I mean, there was sort of a doggerel rhyme that Hitler only has one ball that people would sing back then.
[00:23:28]  But Hitler, they did try to sort of diminish Hitler in this way where I remember there was an OSS campaign to refer to him by his, I believe, his mother's maiden name of Schickelgruber, which actually they were right because his aura would be completely diminished if he was the Fuhrer Schickelgruber.
[00:23:46]  But it is, you know, this becomes almost like an obsession in, it seems like parts of the government, but also in this sort of burgeoning pseudoscientific field after World War II.
[00:24:00]  Yeah, I mean, this was, that was coinciding with the rise of psychoanalysis, which was in the beginning just a lot of people making things up.

=== Sadomasochistic Two-Person Relationships (06:48) ===

[00:24:08]  Yeah.
[00:24:09]  And Henry Murray studied under Jung, kind of, which was just drawing pictures.
[00:24:15]  But it was, you know, then they tried to, Henry Murray also famously never studied psychology at all.
[00:24:21]  He was like a biologist.
[00:24:22]  So you have these people just kind of coming up with like typologies or features of people they think will become good soldiers using certain, you know, psychoanalytic traits, you know.
[00:24:37]  And this just became the way that we recruited people in the army, the way that we trained them, and then all the research that got funded.
[00:24:46]  Suddenly the military.
[00:24:48]  And the CIA were funding all of basically all federally funded research for one point.
[00:24:53]  I think at one time the CIA was the largest employer of college professors in the country.
[00:25:01]  So they just started training people to conduct social science research, psychology research that would help them with their aims.
[00:25:10]  So, you know, whether it was brainwashing the enemy or brainwashing soldiers on our side to get them to fight.
[00:25:18]  It is, it is, because I knew who Murray was.
[00:25:23]  In general, I guess before this, but you describe, I found it fascinating, his personal life that kind of co occurs with his professional life, which also is both quite messy.
[00:25:36]  And I don't really know which I want to ask you about first, but I guess his professional life, you mentioned that he had no actual psychoanalytic training, that he was sort of a, you really, you kind of are cruel to him.
[00:25:49]  You call him a dilettante and all, but the word.
[00:25:52]  He was a cruel guy.
[00:25:53]  I don't care what you're saying.
[00:25:54]  He was a piece of shit.
[00:25:56]  Yeah.
[00:25:56]  But he seems just like a guy who's like, he seems like he had untreated ADHD.
[00:26:00]  Let's be real here.
[00:26:02]  It's not the first diagnosis I would think of, but yes, probably that too.
[00:26:05]  I think maybe there's a couple other ones that he might have had too.
[00:26:08]  But he basically creates this program at Harvard to seemingly torture people.
[00:26:17]  Yeah.
[00:26:17]  I mean, once he had risen to the top of the Harvard psychology clinic, which he was very well educated, he had an MD, he had a PhD.
[00:26:25]  They just weren't in anything.
[00:26:27]  Social scientific.
[00:26:29]  So he just talked his way in there.
[00:26:31]  He didn't take a salary, so that helped.
[00:26:33]  He knew everyone.
[00:26:36]  He wanted, after he'd served in the OSS, he came back and he basically wanted to conduct the studies he'd done there on spies on his own students.
[00:26:47]  And there were all these, you know, interests at the time, like hallucinogens and brainwashing, and humiliation was one of the big, you know, themes, one of the exciting.
[00:26:58]  Points of research at the time.
[00:27:00]  And that's what he decided to do.
[00:27:03]  So he conducted these humiliation experiments on his students.
[00:27:09]  And he claimed it was in order to create, to transform a person from a selfish nationalist identity into a, what he called it, a world man, someone with a more humanitarian, you know, instead of national, you're world, you're, you know, more humanitarian person.
[00:27:31]  But he got as far as like breaking down the personality, but never rebuilt them.
[00:27:37]  So he would try to figure out how you could sort of destroy someone through humiliation.
[00:27:43]  And then in theory, he was going to build them back up.
[00:27:46]  But it turns out he wasn't so interested in that part at the end.
[00:27:49]  And that's sort of because he was doing this also.
[00:27:51]  Like, I mean, his clinic had some dealings with MKUltra.
[00:27:57]  And that seems to be one of the big sort of themes that, I mean, we don't know.
[00:28:02]  A ton about a lot of MKUltra experiments, but breaking people down seems to be a common through line through many of them.
[00:28:08]  Building people up does seem to be much more difficult.
[00:28:10]  It is fucking crazy that this guy could just be like, yeah, so we're just going to humiliate a bunch of our students.
[00:28:19]  And then after like the first year of not being able to build them back up, you'd think he'd be like, well, maybe we should try something else.
[00:28:26]  But then they just seemingly kept doing it.
[00:28:28]  But in his own private life as well, there's, you tell a very arresting story of his sort of decades long.
[00:28:37]  Dyad romance with this woman, Christiana Morgan, I think her name is.
[00:28:43]  Yeah.
[00:28:44]  And I thought that was fascinating because, like, basically they're both cheating on their spouses with each other.
[00:28:51]  And then she also kind of becomes his acolyte, but then they engage in this crazy sexual, yeah, Hitlerian sexual practices with each other.
[00:29:01]  Yeah, I think that was projection, some of his Hitler analysis there.
[00:29:06]  His thing was the dyad.
[00:29:07]  He was fascinated by two person relationships.
[00:29:09]  He thought there could be.
[00:29:11]  Stressful dyad, like he was carrying out with his students.
[00:29:15]  And then there's a loving dyad, theoretically.
[00:29:17]  It turns out they didn't actually look that different in practice.
[00:29:19]  But he wanted to see, with his lover, Christiana Morgan, if they could write a book about what it would be like to build each other up in this loving two person way and how they could transform each other into some sort of higher state of human.
[00:29:39]  But really, it was the same thing.
[00:29:41]  He tortured her, essentially.
[00:29:43]  They worked together.
[00:29:45]  She was very smart and they wrote papers together and she worked for him at Harvard.
[00:29:50]  So it wasn't, you know, she had her own life and interests.
[00:29:54]  But in private, they had this weird I mean, it was like a sadomasochistic relationship.
[00:30:00]  They had names for each other in their like bedroom names where she was Wona and he was Mansell.
[00:30:08]  And they dressed, he dressed in women's clothes sometimes and he whipped her and they drank each other's blood sometimes.
[00:30:16]  It was this.
[00:30:17]  Very, it was a very strange thing, and she became incredibly dependent on him both intellectually, you know, to work, and also she just was madly in love with this guy who, over time, lost interest in her and kind of kept her.
[00:30:32]  She they insanely built this tower that was a replica of Carl Jung's tower in Switzerland, and she just lived there alone, isolated, and she slowly went crazy.
[00:30:45]  He like hooked up with a student and you know married her instead, and it was a whole thing, and then she.
[00:30:52]  Allegedly committed suicide, although there are some other thoughts about how she died.

=== Luring Boys into Hardcore Diagnosis (15:18) ===

[00:30:56]  All right, well, I know you're a journalist, but one does get the impression that he might have helped that process a lot.
[00:31:05]  Well, he just changed the story so many times.
[00:31:08]  They're on an island together for vacation, and then he said at one point, you know, she drowned.
[00:31:14]  He went out and she was already floating in the water, and her emerald ring was on the, you know, he'd made this kind of poetic image of her.
[00:31:20]  And another time, he said he raced in and she was still breathing and he performed CPR or something like that.
[00:31:25]  So it just is like, why?
[00:31:26]  Classic.
[00:31:27]  It's like a Natalie Woods situation.
[00:31:29]  Yeah.
[00:31:30]  Yeah.
[00:31:30]  So, yeah.
[00:31:31]  So, I mean, I got kind of the impression that it's there might be some gray area which could lead to one to the conclusion that, I mean, maybe she killed herself.
[00:31:39]  Maybe he also might have helped that along.
[00:31:42]  Maybe he saw her drowning, didn't help, something like that.
[00:31:45]  We don't know.
[00:31:45]  But it is crazy that this person was basically involved in pretty, I guess, important, although oftentimes nonsensical, psychological research.
[00:31:58]  You know, have you ever taken any of those kind of tests that they give you in these places?
[00:32:02]  Like these thematic a perception tests.
[00:32:04]  Yeah.
[00:32:04]  I mean, I've never taken that one, but I think I tried to take that personality test that everyone, I N T F, or whatever those things are.
[00:32:12]  It's complete nonsense.
[00:32:14]  And it was too long.
[00:32:14]  I never finished it.
[00:32:16]  I got in one, like a detox or a rehab facility I was in, they had some lady who was doing, I think it was probably a grad student.
[00:32:25]  I have no idea what it was for, to be actually totally honest with you.
[00:32:28]  But there was a lady who would do these tests on you, like the mini mental and all this kind of stuff.
[00:32:33]  And I was kind of not taking it too seriously.
[00:32:38]  And, you know, there was like questions like, is it okay to steal?
[00:32:41]  And I was like, it's just a yes or no question.
[00:32:43]  I'm like, well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, you know?
[00:32:45]  Yes.
[00:32:47]  And they did diagnose you with antisocial personality disorder and then rescinded the diagnosis.
[00:32:53]  That's a really hardcore diagnosis.
[00:32:54]  I know.
[00:32:55]  And I was like, there's no way.
[00:32:57]  And then they, like, because it was also these sort of interviews with me, and they're like, he endorsed selling drugs.
[00:33:03]  I'm like, yeah, I'm a drug addict.
[00:33:05]  I think it's awesome that people sell drugs to me.
[00:33:08]  I think it's probably bad for society.
[00:33:11]  But, But they were like, we cannot diagnose him formally with ASPD because he seems to feel remorse for his actions and empathy for other people.
[00:33:21]  And I'm like, this is complete nonsense.
[00:33:24]  Like, I don't have what I don't, because I'm like, this is like a psychopath.
[00:33:29]  That's the zero killer diagnosis.
[00:33:30]  Exactly.
[00:33:31]  And I'm like, I feel horrible for not calling people back.
[00:33:36]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:37]  Which I still don't do it, but you know, it's that, and that kind of red pilled me on a lot of this stuff where I'm like, oh, people are just a little bit guessing.
[00:33:47]  It's not as exact as I might have thought.
[00:33:51]  And to be clear, they did say in the diagnosis thing that, like, we are not diagnosed with ASPD because he said he answered the question literally.
[00:34:00]  But it is crazy that so much of this shit came from that.
[00:34:06]  But one sort of spectacular, I guess, success in his research came in the form of Ted Kaczynski.
[00:34:14]  Yeah.
[00:34:14]  So Ted Kaczynski was one of those students who he.
[00:34:17]  Experimented on and systematically humiliated over the course of like three years.
[00:34:22]  And you know, you probably remember that Kaczynski was very young when he went to Harvard, he was 16.
[00:34:28]  He was one of the only kids from like a working class background, and he was always a little bit off.
[00:34:34]  He was super smart and he was off a little bit, yeah.
[00:34:38]  But like, you know, he no, there was no suspicion that he was violent, he wasn't known to, he wasn't like killing animals as a kid or anything.
[00:34:45]  He just seems like kind of annoying.
[00:34:47]  Yeah.
[00:34:48]  Just a former gifted.
[00:34:49]  Yeah, she's like a gifted.
[00:34:51]  Maybe he was on the spectrum.
[00:34:51]  I don't know.
[00:34:52]  But, um.
[00:34:53]  No, he was.
[00:34:54]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  Come on.
[00:34:56]  Um.
[00:34:57]  So he, and, you know, like they kind of lured boys into this.
[00:35:03]  They said, like, if you take this experiment, we'll have a party with the girls of Radcliffe at the end.
[00:35:08]  And, and Ted Kaczynski was so desperate to meet a girl.
[00:35:12]  Um, they also paid him like a little stipend.
[00:35:14]  So that could have also been an incentive.
[00:35:16]  And he was a broky.
[00:35:17]  He comes from a, as you mentioned, he comes from a sort of poor family.
[00:35:22]  Yeah.
[00:35:24]  So, anyway, he agrees to do this.
[00:35:27]  They tell them it's only going to be for, I think, a semester, and it ends up being for three years.
[00:35:33]  And I have in the book some of the, there's a book about some of this called Harvard and the Unabomber that came out in the 90s.
[00:35:43]  But what I have in my book is also the transcripts from Kaczynski's session, because Harvard famously closed all the files on Kaczynski when he got caught because they claimed they wanted to.
[00:35:58]  Protect his confidentiality, even though he wanted the files himself and try whatever.
[00:36:04]  So now you can't access anything.
[00:36:07]  You can access all the studies under the other code names, but you can't access his.
[00:36:12]  Oh, his code name was Lawful, and we don't know any of Lawful's papers other than like the few that I got.
[00:36:19]  Yeah, God, the transcripts are really.
[00:36:21]  I'm like, they just have someone being mean to you and calling you stupid.
[00:36:25]  And I did, you know, I guess.
[00:36:29]  I was trying to think, I was trying to be broad minded.
[00:36:31]  I'm one of the most open minded people in the world.
[00:36:33]  And I was looking at them, I was like, this doesn't really seem very scientific.
[00:36:37]  And it also just seems like it would make you feel horrible as a 17 year old.
[00:36:43]  And it kind of made me, I don't know if this was your intention, I was like, I get it.
[00:36:49]  You get why he became a bummer?
[00:36:51]  I'm not saying what I get, you know, but I get it.
[00:36:54]  You know, I'm like, if this had happened to me at 17, you know?
[00:36:57]  Yeah.
[00:36:58]  If you were, and you already had vulnerabilities toward whatever, you know, I mean, You can't experience those.
[00:37:06]  You can't have some law student telling you you're an idiot and you're not manly enough to grow a beard and you're, you know, whatever, all the things he went through for years and not have some rage at the end of it.
[00:37:18]  I mean, and then, you know, he famously hated psychologists, so he targeted some of them in the process.
[00:37:26]  Like, of course, you can't draw a line.
[00:37:27]  This led to that, but it's hard to think there's not some relationship here.
[00:37:31]  I think it's pretty easy to draw that line.
[00:37:35]  You know, and you talk elsewhere.
[00:37:38]  I think you make the good point that, like, the FBI basically, switching tact a little bit, but you talk about this with the Ted Kaczynski part.
[00:37:45]  The FBI basically didn't really catch that many serial killers.
[00:37:48]  No, no.
[00:37:49]  They made it up, kind of.
[00:37:50]  They made up this idea of the mind hunter.
[00:37:53]  Yeah.
[00:37:55]  And they used it.
[00:37:57]  They also made up the serial killer epidemic in large part.
[00:38:00]  There were like five guys, and they were like, there's like 500 killers out there.
[00:38:04]  They're on your doorsteps, you know?
[00:38:06]  And this is also the era where they had like the milk.
[00:38:09]  Cardinals with the missing, you know, there's this huge, you know, kind of Reagan.
[00:38:13]  Well, this is actually before Reagan, but it continues on into that era.
[00:38:16]  But the, so they created this epidemic and they created these guys who were supposedly these kind of geniuses who were in touch with the dark side in the basement of Quantico.
[00:38:27]  And they could, they and they alone could get into the minds of murderers and save us.
[00:38:32]  So they used that.
[00:38:34]  They put them out and did a big PR campaign.
[00:38:38]  They talked about Ted Bundy all the time.
[00:38:43]  Then they used that to get the public riled up and then to pressure Congress for more funding for the FBI, which worked and expand their jurisdiction and all of this.
[00:38:52]  So it was a very useful.
[00:38:54]  And this was the time when they were in disgrace from the J. Edgar Hoover days.
[00:38:58]  So they were really trying to rehab their PR.
[00:39:01]  Well, it's funny because the Mindhunter thing, if you think about it, is ridiculous.
[00:39:08]  Have you seen Manhunter, the Michael Mann movie?
[00:39:11]  Oh, is that related to the series?
[00:39:13]  Silence of the Lambs.
[00:39:14]  Yeah, it's like a prequel to Silence of the Lambs.
[00:39:18]  It came out before Silence of the Lambs.
[00:39:19]  Yeah.
[00:39:20]  It's awesome.
[00:39:21]  It's really, really gruesome.
[00:39:23]  Yes.
[00:39:23]  That I remember.
[00:39:24]  I loved it, but it's got a great soundtrack.
[00:39:29]  But it's so funny because they make it seem like the profiler in that is like a Jedi Knight or something that they have to like, he's like retired because he's hunted too many minds before and it's like made him twisted.
[00:39:41]  They have to like go get him out of retirement in order to like do one last mind hunt.
[00:39:47]  But if you think about it, it's just like, what the fuck?
[00:39:50]  Like, first of all, he actually solves it by good old fashioned detective work, but like, The whole Mindhunter thing is supposed to be it's like, okay, I look at your handwriting and I'm like, you have like some fucked up G, like your loop on your G is fucked up.
[00:40:04]  And I'm like, molested.
[00:40:07]  And then his T's crossed all messed up.
[00:40:09]  And it's like, he did two years in the armed forces or whatever.
[00:40:13]  And it's like shit like that.
[00:40:15]  And it seems like, I mean, to kind of continue, it seems like the pseudoscience sort of, I don't know, quality to all of this, it seems like.
[00:40:26]  You make a pretty good point that, like, a lot of these guys are just like, sometimes they're successful, but then, like, they basically weren't more successful than random people also guessing.
[00:40:35]  Yeah, there was a study that was like homicide detectives and sophomore chemistry students or something, and they did about equally.
[00:40:44]  I think the chemistry students did actually a little bit better in identifying a suspect.
[00:40:49]  Yeah.
[00:40:50]  So it's that.
[00:40:51]  Then there's another statistic in London that I think 88% of the Detectives thought that profiling was helpful, but in reality, only like 2.8% of profiles led to the identification of somebody.
[00:41:06]  So there's this huge mystique.
[00:41:09]  People think it's magic.
[00:41:10]  Even the people doing it seem to think it works, even when they can see that it doesn't.
[00:41:16]  There's, you know, there's like, now it's evolved a little bit.
[00:41:18]  There's things like linguistic profiling or like geo profiling, you know, all the AI driven stuff is different.
[00:41:27]  But The idea of, you know, even the original Mind Hunter is John Douglas.
[00:41:33]  He's the one whose book that show was based on and everything.
[00:41:37]  He's like, it goes back to Sherlock Holmes.
[00:41:39]  Like, we just all love Sherlock Holmes.
[00:41:42]  And that's our antecedent, is really crime fiction, not crime fact.
[00:41:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:47]  But there's some use to thinking psychologically a little bit.
[00:41:51]  Like, there was such animosity at the time between the social scientists and the cops.
[00:41:56]  Like, they were like the street smarts.
[00:41:58]  They didn't have time for like the wimpy psychologists who had like real actual studies about violence.
[00:42:06]  So I think there's some good in them hearing each other a little bit and thinking, like, oh, okay, maybe a sociopath isn't going to be like salivating from the mouth.
[00:42:16]  And, you know, it maybe it could be a guy who could pass a lie detector test, even because they're good with that.
[00:42:23]  So.
[00:42:23]  Yeah.
[00:42:24]  You know, it is, you know, the cops do got to respect the eggheads at some points.
[00:42:30]  But then it seems like, and you talk about Bratton a little bit.
[00:42:33]  It seems like they started respecting the eggheads a little too much.
[00:42:37]  And now, my whole life, we've seen the eggheadification of police just expand and expand and expand.
[00:42:43]  And before we started recording, we were talking about these flock cameras and stuff.
[00:42:46]  And there is a real technology worship thing that happens with a lot of cops now.
[00:42:51]  But one of the, I would say, the most disturbing sort of vignettes in the book is about the predictive policing stuff that happens in Florida and the harassment that you, this family that you're sort of interviewing, experienced is just like, Unbelievable.
[00:43:08]  And that's kind of what, you know, I mentioned earlier when I was a kid, I got in some trouble, and it sort of seemed like I stayed in trouble for a number of years after that.
[00:43:18]  That, regardless of how bad I was actually being.
[00:43:22]  And God, I mean, they basically, I mean, this, this, you can just describe it.
[00:43:26]  This, this kid, they basically make him out to be a criminal and then they turn him into a criminal.
[00:43:32]  Yeah.
[00:43:32]  I, I mean, cause it does, it does, I have the same feeling as you.
[00:43:37]  I remember like getting like the at risk youth designation at some point in my childhood and then really like internalizing that.
[00:43:44]  Yeah.
[00:43:44]  And feeling like, oh, I'm like a, I'm a bad kid.
[00:43:49]  And then, you know, kind of became it a little bit.
[00:43:52]  I mean, I didn't become, I never got caught doing anything.
[00:43:54]  But the kids, I mean, so this, it's a really, really heartbreaking story.
[00:44:01]  It was really painful to write that chapter.
[00:44:03]  I went to Florida, they're in like the Tampa area, and spent some time with this family who, it was like a single dad and his four kids.
[00:44:12]  And the one kid was kind of getting in trouble in school, but like, you know, he was smoking weed and he got into some other trouble with kids.
[00:44:20]  And then they moved.
[00:44:21]  To a different county just so that he could, he wouldn't have to go to the alternative school.
[00:44:25]  He could go to the regular, like, public high school.
[00:44:29]  But in this particular county, this sheriff had this intelligence led policing innovation, this idea to use data to predict among children who is going to become a criminal.
[00:44:42]  Awesome.
[00:44:43]  Yeah.
[00:44:45]  I mean, and he used, like, real research.
[00:44:47]  Like, of course, it is correlated that if you are a victim of, you know, violence or your parents are in prison or whatever, like, Those are more closely correlated to bad outcomes.
[00:44:58]  Yeah.
[00:44:59]  However, they're not predictive, and many people need, like, a counselor or something, you know, or help getting to school.
[00:45:07]  It just doesn't mean that you're going to be a criminal.
[00:45:09]  It just means it's technically more likely that you could be.
[00:45:13]  Right, exactly.
[00:45:14]  But they're so what they were doing was designating these kind of pre criminals and targeting them for enhanced policing.
[00:45:23]  So going, I mean, they were insane about it.
[00:45:27]  They would go and knock on the doors.
[00:45:29]  At all hours of the night, they would like to terrify these little girls.
[00:45:32]  They would knock on the windows and scare the girls.
[00:45:35]  They would demand that, like, Bobby was the boy they were really hunting.
[00:45:39]  And he was 15 when it started.
[00:45:42]  And they would, you know, search him.
[00:45:45]  They would find maybe like a bag of trace marijuana.
[00:45:47]  They would throw him into detention.
[00:45:49]  And it would take 90 days, I think 60 or 90 days, for him to have his court hearing.
[00:45:54]  So he was immediately thrown out of school because of the absences.
[00:45:58]  He was never charged with any crime.
[00:46:01]  And he was put into this detention center like, Like nine or ten times.
[00:46:05]  Jesus.
[00:46:06]  Like he spent like several years of his teenage life in lockup for nothing.
[00:46:11]  But he went to, so he was basically in jail for several years.

=== Years in Detention Without Conviction (02:33) ===

[00:46:14]  Yeah.
[00:46:15]  But never got convicted of a crime.
[00:46:17]  Right.
[00:46:17]  As a child.
[00:46:18]  Right.
[00:46:19]  Jesus.
[00:46:19]  Just in and out, but for these huge, you know, for 60 days or whatever it was at a time.
[00:46:25]  And then like, who was he making friends with in there, of course?
[00:46:28]  Like, then he gets out.
[00:46:29]  He doesn't have a high school diploma.
[00:46:33]  So he's like, how do you make money, you know?
[00:46:36]  And so, You know, in the end, he does get into some criminal activity without giving it away, I guess.
[00:46:44]  I don't know.
[00:46:45]  But yes, I mean, they put him on a path he could hardly go on.
[00:46:50]  You know, you can't get an education and you can't get a job.
[00:46:55]  I mean, they're really forcing you into something.
[00:46:58]  It's really heartbreaking because they have, you can see all the body cam footage and they just, it's like Henry Murray.
[00:47:05]  They just berate this kid over and over.
[00:47:07]  And he's just this, like, He's just like obedient.
[00:47:09]  He just nods and listens to them as they tell him he's this terrible problem.
[00:47:15]  He's causing his dad's life to be ruined.
[00:47:17]  He's, you know, and of course he's internalizing all of that.
[00:47:21]  Yeah.
[00:47:22]  And, you know, there were other kids who were targeted too, which I did.
[00:47:26]  The Tampa Bay paper did a great piece on all of this with some of the other families that were targeted.
[00:47:33]  And they, two of the kids committed suicide.
[00:47:37]  You know, it's just.
[00:47:40]  It's just awful.
[00:47:42]  Yeah.
[00:47:43]  Well, it's, it's, that reminded me because then I got sent away to that thing when I was a kid.
[00:47:49]  We did this series about it, whatever.
[00:47:51]  But I remember what your descriptions of the cops talking to this kid.
[00:47:54]  I'm like, man, that's like, yeah, they would like tell you you're ruining your parents' life, that like you're doing all this stuff.
[00:48:00]  And like, I didn't internalize it because I learned when I was like 14 that I was like, everyone's kind of just making stuff up.
[00:48:07]  But a lot of kids did.
[00:48:09]  And yeah, it was a huge amount of kids that killed themselves after getting out of place like that.
[00:48:14]  And I think it's weird.
[00:48:15]  It's like they never really invented anything besides just yelling at somebody.
[00:48:19]  Like, that's like yelling at somebody and then like coming up with a bunch of like clues that you sort of make up by looking at random things.
[00:48:27]  And like, you sort of trace this line of policing or detective work for like a hundred and something, 50 years essentially.
[00:48:34]  And it doesn't really deviate all that much within that.

=== Kids Killed After Getting Out of Place (15:22) ===

[00:48:48]  You know, I want to switch tack a little bit to talk about this article that you wrote.
[00:48:54]  Jesus Christ.
[00:48:56]  That this guy, Andrew Crispo, I got to tell you, this guy, they should have predicted police to this fellow immediately.
[00:49:06]  They should have looked at all the clues in his life and locked him up immediately.
[00:49:10]  But what we see is like basically the opposite of any of this detective work, where this guy has obviously probably committed like three or four murders and then is.
[00:49:19]  Is not imprisoned for any of them.
[00:49:22]  Yeah.
[00:49:23]  Tell me, who is this guy?
[00:49:26]  What happened here?
[00:49:29]  Andrew Crispo was a very, very well known art dealer in the 80s in New York.
[00:49:35]  He came from nowhere.
[00:49:36]  He came specifically from an orphanage.
[00:49:38]  He was deposited there as an infant.
[00:49:41]  He had no family ever at all.
[00:49:43]  And he left the orphanage.
[00:49:44]  I think he even got kicked out around 16 and he started just turning tricks for men.
[00:49:50]  In Philadelphia.
[00:49:51]  And one of those men happened to be a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this guy in his 50s.
[00:49:58]  And Andrew Crispo kind of got that was an introduction to the art world.
[00:50:02]  He stole some art from the guy at one point and managed to sell it later.
[00:50:06]  And that is a very natural prelude to working in the art world sometimes for some people.
[00:50:13]  So he's a natural salesman.
[00:50:17]  He's, I think, probably a sociopath and he's very charming.
[00:50:22]  And he's very comfortable lying and stealing.
[00:50:24]  So he does well for himself with the gallery.
[00:50:29]  He shows a lot of like early American modernism.
[00:50:34]  He has one of those huge spaces in the 57th Street Fuller building where it was like Pierre Matisse was at the time.
[00:50:40]  And he becomes this very preppy, gay art dealer who has a home in the Hamptons and he's like living, you know, the good life.
[00:50:51]  But he has this other side.
[00:50:54]  This very dark.
[00:50:55]  He gets addicted to cocaine, massive, like huge quantities of cocaine in the 80s.
[00:51:00]  And it was, let's just put whatever the incidents that happened aside here.
[00:51:05]  It was probably awesome.
[00:51:08]  Right?
[00:51:09]  Probably made you feel great.
[00:51:11]  It was like seven grams a day.
[00:51:12]  I mean, he was.
[00:51:13]  Of 80s Coke in New York.
[00:51:15]  Yeah.
[00:51:16]  I'm saying this guy was probably, he felt quite good.
[00:51:19]  Yeah, except for you never, I mean, couldn't have slept.
[00:51:22]  But he probably, yeah, he probably felt pretty good for a while there.
[00:51:24]  I know you take a couple leudes or whatever.
[00:51:26]  They did that too, yeah.
[00:51:27]  Yeah.
[00:51:27]  He was into those.
[00:51:28]  Well, the one thing that I feel like happened in this period too, where he, you mentioned this in the article, he gets, because he kind of gets a benefactor of this billionaire, a baron.
[00:51:44]  A baron?
[00:51:45]  Nice.
[00:51:46]  Get real.
[00:51:47]  A baron?
[00:51:49]  But the billionaire already has an art dealer, but that art dealer falls out of a window in his underwear.
[00:51:56]  Mysteriously.
[00:51:58]  And then.
[00:51:59]  Crispo becomes the billionaire's art dealer.
[00:52:01]  Yep.
[00:52:02]  And that's kind of on his ascent.
[00:52:03]  Yeah.
[00:52:04]  That was how getting this Baron as his client is really what makes him.
[00:52:08]  Because this Baron allegedly spent like $90 million on paintings, like in the 80s, $90 million just on paintings from Crispo.
[00:52:18]  He was extraordinarily wealthy even then.
[00:52:22]  And I mean, you know, there's always been rumors that Crispo was potentially involved in this man.
[00:52:31]  Falling out the window.
[00:52:31]  And I talked to one of his friends.
[00:52:33]  This wasn't in the article, but one of his friends was like, No, he definitely did it.
[00:52:38]  Because one time I was talking to him and I might, someone had just jacked my car.
[00:52:45]  And I went up and I was meeting Chris when I said, somebody just stole my car.
[00:52:49]  And he's like, oh, we got to go get him.
[00:52:51]  And he's like, well, what do you mean get him?
[00:52:53]  We don't know where he is.
[00:52:54]  And he goes, no, no, no, I've done it before.
[00:52:56]  What you do is you lure him to the window and you pretend you're going to give him a blowjob and then you whoosh.
[00:53:03]  It's like he throws his hands up like he's knocking somebody out the window.
[00:53:06]  And the friend is like, oh my God, he did that to the Baron.
[00:53:10]  I mean, wait.
[00:53:13]  What?
[00:53:13]  Also, how would you.
[00:53:15]  Why would the guy who stole your car want his dick sucked by you?
[00:53:19]  Well, they didn't even know who the guy was.
[00:53:20]  I mean, it made no sense.
[00:53:21]  Yeah.
[00:53:22]  He just wanted to shoehorn.
[00:53:23]  All right, you push one guy out a window, and then you try to shoehorn pushing a guy out the window as a solution to everything.
[00:53:30]  And so he becomes.
[00:53:32]  So, I mean, again, you're a journalist.
[00:53:36]  You can't.
[00:53:37]  I don't know if legally you can say, I think that he might have pushed this guy out the window while pretending to suck his dick.
[00:53:42]  But I will say, as somebody who read this article, is very open minded.
[00:53:47]  I did get the impression that maybe he might have had something to do with this guy falling out the window.
[00:53:51]  It's hard to fall out a window, right?
[00:53:53]  I know a couple people have fallen out windows.
[00:53:55]  But.
[00:53:56]  What was ruled a suicide, technically?
[00:53:58]  I mean.
[00:53:59]  In your undies?
[00:54:01]  We're jumping in the three piece.
[00:54:02]  Yeah, well, that was the thing.
[00:54:03]  People were like, this art dealer who fell out the window was very vain.
[00:54:07]  They're like, he would have never exposed himself so indecently.
[00:54:10]  Like, he would have.
[00:54:11]  He dressed well.
[00:54:12]  Yeah.
[00:54:13]  And also, like, it just is one of those things.
[00:54:15]  It's a cui bono situation, right?
[00:54:17]  Where it's like, all right, well, this guy falls out the window and then you get his job.
[00:54:21]  Yeah, that's pretty convenient.
[00:54:22]  Yeah, and you also killed people later.
[00:54:26]  So it's, you know, not to be mind hunter about it, but I think you might have something to do with it.
[00:54:30]  But he's like living the high life, right?
[00:54:33]  Like you mentioned eight grams of coke a day.
[00:54:36]  Seven.
[00:54:37]  That's fucking crazy.
[00:54:40]  Just seven.
[00:54:40]  Yeah, yeah, I know.
[00:54:41]  Well, okay, that's nothing.
[00:54:43]  But that's fucking nuts.
[00:54:47]  And he seems to be, and being an art dealer in the 80s, I mean, what was it like back then?
[00:54:51]  I mean, that's like.
[00:54:54]  I mean, well, for him, yeah, I mean, it was a party.
[00:54:58]  I mean, he was having, Debbie Harry was over at his house having parties.
[00:55:01]  He was, you know, he wasn't really in like the Warhol scene, but like he didn't, or Maplethorpe, he wasn't really in the gay male art scene.
[00:55:10]  He was a very like preppy type.
[00:55:13]  He was an uptown and Hamptons guy.
[00:55:16]  But, you know, he was selling, he was really, once he got the Baron as his dealer, he was on top of the world.
[00:55:23]  I mean, you couldn't, there was no one.
[00:55:25]  Potentially, I don't think anyone was doing business like he was, or at least not far off.
[00:55:30]  So, art dealers, from my understanding, you find a rich guy, and then you find sometimes poor guys, sometimes not as poor guys, sometimes a wealthy artist, and then you basically broker that art and you take a cut.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:49]  And in this case, he managed to sequester the baron.
[00:55:55]  He's He attacked any other dealer who tried to work with the Baron.
[00:56:01]  I have these audio recordings of him calling people up and being like, How dare you speak to him?
[00:56:05]  He's mine.
[00:56:06]  He's my Baron.
[00:56:09]  So he was really good.
[00:56:10]  He would lie about where he got things and all kinds of.
[00:56:14]  But so yeah, you could really just live on one client if you have a Baron.
[00:56:19]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  And if you have.
[00:56:22]  So he was working, so he would get other galleries to give him art that he would then sell to the Baron.
[00:56:27]  So he would take a cut on everything that went through.
[00:56:30]  Wow.
[00:56:31]  He's so, unfortunately, I do get the impression from your article, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but he was engaged in what I've come to know as evil gay guy activities.
[00:56:44]  You said it, not me.
[00:56:46]  You know, I'm not saying that you are.
[00:56:47]  And I'm not saying, well, listeners know what I'm saying.
[00:56:50]  You know, this has been, this has come up on the show before.
[00:56:53]  But he is, I mean, this seems, some of it is typical like guy who has a bunch of money in like a very sycophantic world or a world with a lot of sycophants in it, kind of throwing his, swinging his dick around, you might say, throwing his weight around, throwing his money around, throwing his coke around.
[00:57:12]  And he kind of gets these people in his thrall.
[00:57:14]  And one thing that is kind of funny about this is that throughout, he kind of has like gunmen.
[00:57:19]  Like he sort of acts in this sort of like mafia dawn kind of way.
[00:57:25]  Yeah.
[00:57:26]  And, but he also is really seems to be a huge enthusiast of sadistic sexual torture on young men that he meets.
[00:57:36]  Yeah.
[00:57:37]  That was his favorite pastime, I think.
[00:57:40]  He wouldn't go down to like the mineshaft or the hellfire, the vault, those kinds of clubs in the 80s and, you know, Bring someone home, and he would admit that he wanted, you know, he was into SM or whatever.
[00:57:53]  They knew there'd be something like that.
[00:57:55]  But then they'd go home, and there'd be like four straight guys there with guns and bats, you know, who he had hired usually for the night, gave him some drugs or a hundred bucks or something, and then they would beat him, beat this victim.
[00:58:12]  There were very different variants on that theme.
[00:58:15]  Sometimes it was consensual, sometimes.
[00:58:18]  I think definitely not.
[00:58:19]  Yeah.
[00:58:21]  So, what was weird is that he wanted to orchestrate the scene.
[00:58:26]  He was like a film director and he had his actors and he would dictate when action started and where they should be and what.
[00:58:34]  Sometimes they wore costumes, even like Nazi uniforms and police uniforms and all that.
[00:58:40]  And he would rile them up.
[00:58:43]  He would get the straight guys and he'd say, Oh, he called you.
[00:58:47]  Can I say that word?
[00:58:50]  We can bleep it.
[00:58:51]  He called you a f.
[00:58:52]  So, You know, what are you going to do?
[00:58:54]  Let him do that?
[00:58:54]  And they'd be like, no.
[00:58:56]  So they go and like beat the shit out of his friends.
[00:58:59]  He would orchestrate homophobic violence.
[00:59:01]  Yeah, that was his.
[00:59:02]  He was very homophobic himself, I think, in a way.
[00:59:05]  That's one of the most evil gay guy traits of them all.
[00:59:07]  Well, his friend was Roy Cohn.
[00:59:09]  That's something that comes up a couple of times.
[00:59:11]  Yeah.
[00:59:12]  His friend is Roy Cohn.
[00:59:13]  And at one point in the article, there's like a reveal of a portrait of Roy Cohn that a guy sees in like where he's like piecing it all together.
[00:59:22]  He's like, oh my God, this guy's friend is a portrait of Roy Cohn.
[00:59:26]  You must be.
[00:59:27]  I mean, if we're talking about evil gay guy accoutrements, having the portrait of Roy Cohn up in the crib or in your gallery in the 80s has got to be top of the list.
[00:59:38]  It's fucking crazy.
[00:59:39]  I mean, it's, you know, you sort of write about a number of incidents where this occurs, but then there's a murder.
[00:59:50]  And the murder is straight up most foul, but it occurs in a way that is just like, I think, very cinematic, where it's like this guy.
[01:00:02]  I don't want to mispronounce his name, but Legros.
[01:00:05]  Legros.
[01:00:05]  Legros is kind of in his thrall.
[01:00:10]  And he essentially makes him kill an FIT student that they meet.
[01:00:15]  Yeah.
[01:00:16]  What happens?
[01:00:17]  So Bernard Legros is his.
[01:00:20]  It's a really sad story, in my opinion.
[01:00:21]  It's fucking sad.
[01:00:23]  He was like 15 or 14 when he met Crispo.
[01:00:26]  He was a messenger delivering some airline tickets to the gallery.
[01:00:30]  And they strike up a conversation, and like.
[01:00:34]  And Bernard goes on.
[01:00:36]  He goes to college.
[01:00:36]  He wants to be a filmmaker, maybe.
[01:00:39]  He's going to NYU.
[01:00:40]  And he finds Crispo to be this really smart, clearly impressive guy who is somehow always emotionally attuned to him.
[01:00:49]  Like he could really care for him.
[01:00:51]  And Bernard, you know, family of abandonment also in his own way.
[01:00:57]  So he really goes under his wing.
[01:01:00]  And eventually Crispo's like, You don't need to be in college.
[01:01:02]  Just come work for me.
[01:01:03]  You'll make way more than your professors.
[01:01:06]  And so.
[01:01:06]  He's like, yeah, you're right.
[01:01:08]  I should.
[01:01:09]  So then he works for him, but instead of being like, you know, at the front desk greeting guests or something, he's his bodyguard, which why Crispo needs a bodyguard is unclear, why any art dealer needs a bodyguard.
[01:01:20]  But, and he just starts to, Crispo kind of riles him up as this tough guy, and he kind of gets him into this character.
[01:01:28]  Yeah, it seems like he grooms him to become like a, I don't know, like his like thug that he keeps around.
[01:01:36]  Yeah, his body, his executionary calls him.
[01:01:39]  Jesus.
[01:01:41]  I mean, yeah, foretelling something.
[01:01:43]  And then, so then he becomes one of these guys who participates in these, you know, brutal attacks on young men.
[01:01:53]  And he says to me, you know, in this kind of poignant, horrible moment, he says, I don't know what they're consensual or not.
[01:02:01]  Like that, I didn't even know what that was at the time.
[01:02:03]  Like, who really thought about that?
[01:02:06]  Just kind of amazing, you know.
[01:02:07]  So you don't even know what was real, what was not real in this world.
[01:02:12]  I mean, Crispo was making things up.
[01:02:14]  Bringing people in, they thought they were having SM, but then actually it was just total violence.
[01:02:22]  So, anyway, on one of these nights, Crispo picks up this really beautiful young Norwegian fashion student and a model.
[01:02:33]  His name's Eigel Vesti, and brings him home, and things sort of start out like they're doing their sex things.
[01:02:41]  And then Bernard and his buddy come in, and he Crispo is like, you know, this guy said some shit about you, or he's, you know, whatever.
[01:02:52]  He gives them some excuse, and they start, you know, brutally whipping him, brutally assaulting him, knee dropping him.
[01:03:00]  It was the term that I heard a lot.
[01:03:02]  I don't even totally know what that means, but it sounds bad.
[01:03:04]  I'm assuming that's like he needs someone in the stomach or something.
[01:03:07]  Something horrible like that, yeah.
[01:03:10]  And then they put him in this black leather bondage hood, like with the zipper over the mouth.
[01:03:16]  You don't want to be in that.
[01:03:18]  No, no.
[01:03:19]  It's terrifying even to, to, To look at.
[01:03:22]  But it was probably one of these Nancy Grossman masks.
[01:03:26]  Crispo had it like on a, in his house in the Hamptons, he had it like on a mannequin's head.
[01:03:32]  He displayed it all the time.
[01:03:34]  But they put him in this mask and they take him, they drive him out to Rockland County where Bernard's family has like a summer home in the woods.
[01:03:45]  And they do, you know, loads more Coke, they're drinking, and then Crispo and the guy are having sexual relations.
[01:03:54]  Bernard's sort of like, I don't know, like storming around the house, like agitated.
[01:03:59]  Sneezed up, yeah.
[01:04:00]  Yeah.
[01:04:00]  And then, anyway, eventually they bring the guy out to this kind of like little structure, a little smokehouse on the property.
[01:04:09]  Crispo's like, okay, it's time.

=== Cocaine, Masks, and Sexual Relations (15:13) ===

[01:04:11]  He's ready.
[01:04:12]  He has him kneel down.
[01:04:14]  He's naked.
[01:04:15]  He's handcuffed behind his back and he's wearing that hood.
[01:04:18]  And he says to Bernard, it's time.
[01:04:24]  He's ready now.
[01:04:26]  And then Bernard shoots.
[01:04:27]  And it's like this.
[01:04:29]  And the way that Bernard tells it is just like, I don't know.
[01:04:32]  It just kind of happened.
[01:04:35]  It just, he was following orders.
[01:04:37]  They'd got, things had gotten so crazy in the night.
[01:04:39]  He's kind of like, it's, he doesn't totally remember it.
[01:04:42]  It's like flashing memories now.
[01:04:46]  And so it, you know, so they leave and like a few weeks later, some hikers find the body out there.
[01:04:54]  And I mean, then there's the trial.
[01:04:57]  I can go into that, I'm going to keep going into the trial.
[01:05:00]  Well, the trial things, I mean, we, you know, people should read the articles.
[01:05:03]  I don't want to spoil the whole thing for them, but like, It basically is just a.
[01:05:07]  Crispo does not.
[01:05:10]  He is able to keep his involvement to a minimum.
[01:05:12]  He's not even charged.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  Even though he was there, he admits to being there.
[01:05:17]  He disposed of all the guys' clothes and stuff on the highway.
[01:05:22]  He helped burn the body.
[01:05:24]  Isn't that called accessory?
[01:05:26]  Yeah.
[01:05:26]  I mean, the very minimum evidence tampering, you know, all kinds of things.
[01:05:32]  But he doesn't even get charged.
[01:05:34]  And it's.
[01:05:35]  And Bernard goes down with the maximum.
[01:05:39]  25 years to life for murder.
[01:05:43]  And, you know, there's a theory that it comes out like 10 years later that the DA in the case, the Rockland DA, turns out to have had a mistress and they also like to go to those same clubs, the Hellfire.
[01:05:57]  And he was like into some other sexual stuff and that he thought Crispo might recognize him and expose him.
[01:06:06]  So that he maybe he let Crispo off because he didn't want to risk.
[01:06:11]  Being caught in the smacks of Roy Cohn himself a little bit, you know what I mean?
[01:06:14]  That kind of mentality there, yeah.
[01:06:17]  Well, something that you know, because I know that you you you you talked to Bernie for this article a bunch.
[01:06:27]  I mean, how is how is because, yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm not trying to let him off the hook here or something, but like when a guy like that says, yeah, it sort of just happened, I mean, I believe that that's true, you know what I mean?
[01:06:40]  I very much doubt that he set out from.
[01:06:42]  His apartment that day, thinking that I'm going to execute a nude Norwegian guy in a fucking SM mask, handcuffed behind his back, outside of my parents' summer home in Rockland County.
[01:06:55]  But, like, yeah, I mean, is he, what the fuck?
[01:07:00]  I mean, he's out of prison now?
[01:07:02]  Yeah, he got, he got paroled in 2019 and now he's off parole.
[01:07:06]  Is he just like, cause that's basically his whole life, you know what I mean?
[01:07:10]  You know, that was kind of just like, he was in this guy's straw since he was like 15 and then he goes to prison for, for, Decades.
[01:07:17]  Yeah.
[01:07:18]  And Crispo never goes, well, he does go for tax evasion like they all do.
[01:07:21]  But yeah.
[01:07:24]  And I think, you know, like obviously there was something in Bernard, there was a violent side or something very exploitable that Crispo saw.
[01:07:33]  And so he definitely groomed and cultivated that part of him.
[01:07:39]  But you, I think like if he hadn't met Crispo, his life would have been extremely different.
[01:07:45]  There's no doubt.
[01:07:47]  He was, He said that he was sexually assaulted by another man at one point.
[01:07:52]  And when Crispo, he told, he kind of confided in Crispo about this.
[01:07:56]  And Crispo said, like, the way you get over this is you get revenge, kind of like on gay men in general, maybe.
[01:08:04]  He didn't make sense what he said, but you become tough.
[01:08:07]  You're not a victim, you're the victimizer now, and kind of pumped up that attitude in him.
[01:08:14]  And that, you know, and he even admits he was kind of weird, like he got really into Scarface and he started kind of, you know, just really.
[01:08:20]  Performing.
[01:08:21]  I don't know.
[01:08:22]  Also, like, but when you're somebody who maybe, I mean, to sort of to Kaczynski comparison here, but like you're somebody who is kind of out of fish out of water a little bit, you're a younger person in this world of very rich people, yada, yada, yada.
[01:08:36]  You kind of want to conform to maybe their expectations of you, or some certain people will.
[01:08:40]  Yeah.
[01:08:40]  And you think that's normal.
[01:08:41]  Look at Crispo is really successful while doing this insane shit on the side, you know?
[01:08:46]  So, yeah.
[01:08:50]  So, and then I, It completely defined his entire life.
[01:08:55]  He's out now, but he's in his 60s and careers are a little bit, prospects are complicated.
[01:09:04]  He really was a nice guy when I met him.
[01:09:07]  I thought, interestingly, so under the spell that even when he got out, he spoke to Crispo.
[01:09:19]  Crispo called him right away and is trying to suss out whether he was going to.
[01:09:23]  Come after him or something and get revenge.
[01:09:25]  He's just 25 years in prison.
[01:09:26]  33.
[01:09:27]  33 years in prison.
[01:09:29]  Yeah.
[01:09:30]  As soon as he gets out, Crispo calls and he says, Does Mr. B have any ill feelings toward Mr. C?
[01:09:36]  Just like a creepy voice on the line.
[01:09:38]  And Bernard's like, Come on.
[01:09:40]  You think I'm going to waste the rest of my life coming after you?
[01:09:45]  But they kind of still have this hold on each other because Crispo's like, Well, why don't you come work for me?
[01:09:51]  Jesus Christ.
[01:09:54]  Yeah.
[01:09:54]  He still thinks, Oh, you can work in my warehouse, sell some.
[01:09:56]  Sell some watches for me or something.
[01:10:01]  And actually, Bernard kind of toys with the idea for a moment, you know?
[01:10:05]  He's still somehow a little bit captivated by it.
[01:10:07]  He at least wants to see him.
[01:10:10]  I'll be honest with you, I would probably consider killing him.
[01:10:13]  Would you?
[01:10:14]  Yeah.
[01:10:14]  Yeah.
[01:10:15]  I mean, what if he went back to prison?
[01:10:17]  You wouldn't be worried about that.
[01:10:18]  I mean, I don't know, because, yeah, but like, also, 33 years in prison, you might be like one of those guys who are like, that's all I know, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:10:27]  That's true.
[01:10:28]  And, You know, I don't know because I've had, I've taken revenge on people in my life, but not people like who deserved it.
[01:10:37]  And like, not, but not like at this point in my dotage, I'm like, not really.
[01:10:42]  I'm a very much like a live and let live, let things go kind of person.
[01:10:46]  Although some people push it, but, but it is like, I, you know, it is, it's crazy.
[01:10:52]  I mean, it's just to have his life just defined by this guy.
[01:10:55]  And Crispo seems, I mean, does his stock go down in art world after he's like linked to this like slain?
[01:11:02]  Well, he, You know, it's interesting because you would think so, but he goes at the same time.
[01:11:10]  First of all, there's another man that he's tortured who comes forward at the exact same time, which he does go on trial for and gets away with.
[01:11:17]  He's acquitted.
[01:11:18]  And then also, there's this huge FBI investigation into his taxes.
[01:11:23]  So he does go to prison for tax evasion, basically the same time that Bernard goes to prison for the murder.
[01:11:28]  They got him in the Capone wrap.
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:31]  So, like, that may have hurt his prospects with the art world.
[01:11:36]  I mean, he's like all his clients were getting subpoenas and like everyone was pissed off.
[01:11:40]  He owed everyone money.
[01:11:40]  So he, I don't know, it's hard to say whether the murder crime or the financial crime might have irritated them more.
[01:11:47]  I don't, you know, people are willing to overlook a lot in that world.
[01:11:52]  But when he got out, he was, he tried briefly to reopen a gallery, it didn't pan out.
[01:11:58]  And then he, but in his old age, he got super addicted to like meth and crack and he, Was getting sick.
[01:12:08]  He had a brain tumor.
[01:12:09]  He was just completely nuts over the last few years and always broke.
[01:12:14]  He never had money.
[01:12:14]  He was always moving money around.
[01:12:15]  He always had tons of art, but he was like moving things around.
[01:12:20]  And he was trading art still, but like privately.
[01:12:25]  He was doing deals with people and taking out loans with Christie's and Sotheby's and all of that.
[01:12:32]  He had like this Duchamp drawing of the new descending a staircase, worth a lot of money.
[01:12:39]  He had the new descending a staircase?
[01:12:40]  Not the actual one.
[01:12:41]  It was like a drawing of.
[01:12:42]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:42]  But still worth like millions of dollars.
[01:12:44]  Yeah.
[01:12:46]  So people were working with him.
[01:12:50]  But also, he had like he was surrounding himself with these same type of guys, these young, like 22 year old drug addicts with guns, like hanging out in his apartment, like taking things off of his walls.
[01:13:01]  Now, I mean, there's there's crazy subplots in this too, with him befriending this jailhouse lawyer who befriends this police detective who's looking into this case, and the police detective goes down for child molestation.
[01:13:15]  And like, it's just it's so, but but you make a pretty good, although not explicit.
[01:13:20]  But I, as a reader, took from this that he seemingly was involved in maybe like four murders, three or four murders.
[01:13:31]  And I mean, I think that there's a decent case to be made that one could probably assemble in evidence to make that he's something like resembling kind of a serial killer in the most general, literal sense of the term, in that he killed multiple people over multiple incidents.
[01:13:50]  And oftentimes, I mean, if we're speaking in sort of the very cliched sense of it, With sort of sexual sadism as kind of an undercurrent to it.
[01:14:00]  Yeah, I mean, it does fit that profile when you look at this.
[01:14:02]  If you take out like the art dealer part of it, kind of, it looks sort of classic.
[01:14:07]  Yeah, I mean, there's no clear evidence, but there's one case in particular that someone told me about a guy named Daniel Berry who was murdered in a similar way, gunshot wound to the head in the woods.
[01:14:24]  And Crispo was seen with him that weekend and.
[01:14:29]  Was maybe investigated, you know.
[01:14:33]  It's never been solved.
[01:14:34]  Then there's other, then there's like, you know, crimes that Bernard said Andrew told him about over the years that he wasn't privy to, but like he would brag about killing someone in his bathtub or he talked about like killing this guy.
[01:14:47]  And you never really knew what was real or not with him because he did kill at least someone.
[01:14:52]  So it was possible, but he also bragged.
[01:14:54]  So it's hard to say, but it's with all the men that he.
[01:15:00]  Continued to torture.
[01:15:01]  The man didn't reform ever.
[01:15:02]  He continued to do this stuff.
[01:15:04]  He continued.
[01:15:05]  And the Mark Leslie, the one who brought him to trial for the torture, the guy who lived, he said that he was trying to kill him that night too.
[01:15:13]  He was trying to convince Bernard to take him somewhere and kill him.
[01:15:16]  But didn't because there were too many witnesses.
[01:15:18]  So, like.
[01:15:20]  Jesus.
[01:15:22]  It seems.
[01:15:22]  I don't know.
[01:15:23]  Also, this guy would just call pay phones outside of gay bars.
[01:15:27]  Is that normal?
[01:15:28]  It was a thing at the time.
[01:15:29]  Oh.
[01:15:30]  It was a thing.
[01:15:31]  Wow.
[01:15:32]  There's grinders everywhere for those with eyes to see.
[01:15:34]  Yeah.
[01:15:35]  Yeah.
[01:15:36]  Because he also liked the gallery overlooked a payphone.
[01:15:39]  It was like a cruising thing.
[01:15:40]  Gay men.
[01:15:41]  He could actually see, like, guys cute.
[01:15:43]  Because I wouldn't take some dude's word for it.
[01:15:45]  Yeah, I'm really handsome.
[01:15:46]  Yeah.
[01:15:46]  How do I know that?
[01:15:47]  Well, he'd, you know, he could say, I have a penthouse and a ton of blow.
[01:15:50]  And he's calling, like, the mineshaft at 4 a.m.
[01:15:52]  I'm there.
[01:15:55]  I'm there.
[01:15:56]  You're getting crisp-bowed.
[01:15:57]  Yeah, whatever.
[01:15:58]  You know, he wouldn't do it to me, you know?
[01:16:01]  Yeah.
[01:16:02]  It's a fucking crazy story.
[01:16:05]  And yeah, he dies basically a crackhead, tweaking out, shitty in the fucking.
[01:16:10]  You said it in the article.
[01:16:12]  No, you can't laugh like I'm saying it.
[01:16:13]  You said it.
[01:16:14]  He's like shitting in the hallway of some fucking dump ass apartment he has here, even though he's got the crib in the Hamptons still.
[01:16:21]  And you look and you.
[01:16:22]  No, the place in the Hamptons blew up actually mysteriously.
[01:16:26]  The place in the Hamptons did explode.
[01:16:29]  But you take pictures of just like his shits just strewn over various, like you say that he bought a motel and just filled it with garbage, like his, not garbage, but like his crap.
[01:16:38]  He was a hoarder.
[01:16:39]  So he had storage units everywhere, all over the city and upstate and probably in New Jersey and like Jamaica, Queens.
[01:16:47]  And, And they're just kind of coming to light now.
[01:16:50]  Like, some of them have been picked up by like antiques traders who just buy the whole lot.
[01:16:55]  And then his family's got some of them, his like extended family.
[01:16:59]  And so, like, I found like a couple huge lots of stuff.
[01:17:04]  And it was just like box after box of his, like, you know, like his file on Degas where like a bag of cocaine would fall out of it, you know, or his, you know.
[01:17:15]  You got Crispo Blow?
[01:17:16]  Yeah, there's a lot of Blow in those files.
[01:17:18]  Who found cocaine?
[01:17:20]  Yeah, lots of it.
[01:17:22]  In Proust.
[01:17:22]  I opened up a Proust and the bag fell out.
[01:17:25]  Like old, really crystally gray.
[01:17:28]  I think it was cocaine.
[01:17:29]  Although I know, actually.
[01:17:30]  Oh, we can cut this, absolutely.
[01:17:32]  Did you do any?
[01:17:34]  No, it looked horrifying.
[01:17:36]  I should have saved it for you.
[01:17:37]  Would you have done that?
[01:17:38]  No, I'm sober, but.
[01:17:41]  I wouldn't.
[01:17:42]  No, it was like.
[01:17:44]  No, because also, you don't know what's in there.
[01:17:46]  You could have been drugging people.
[01:17:48]  I wouldn't do it anyway.
[01:17:49]  Yeah, but he's going to go gonzo.
[01:17:51]  That's pretty fast.
[01:17:52]  That's true.
[01:17:52]  I could have really.
[01:17:54]  I'll say this.
[01:17:54]  I have a certain notorious pedophile financier's medications.
[01:18:03]  And you've been taking them?
[01:18:04]  No, I did take antacid.
[01:18:07]  Wait, what?
[01:18:07]  You have what?
[01:18:09]  I have a certain financier's medications, including over the counter stuff, which is awesome.
[01:18:14]  You do?
[01:18:15]  Yeah.
[01:18:16]  And I did take his antacid.
[01:18:19]  I took one.
[01:18:20]  And you're taking his antidepressants.
[01:18:21]  No, no, I'm not taking his antidepressants.
[01:18:23]  I don't have his antidepressants.
[01:18:24]  What was he on?
[01:18:25]  Oh.
[01:18:25]  It's like heart meds and then like a bunch of antacids and stuff like that.
[01:18:29]  I took antacid.
[01:18:30]  Did it help?
[01:18:32]  Yeah, it did.
[01:18:33]  I was out of Tums because I get acid reflux some more.
[01:18:36]  Interesting.
[01:18:39]  But it's also, that's not from the 80s.
[01:18:41]  It was from like 2020 or no, 2019.
[01:18:46]  Yeah, that's still good.
[01:18:47]  No, it's still good.
[01:18:48]  I'm like, antacid is still good.
[01:18:49]  I took fucking, I took Benzedrine from the 30s once while on the phone with Poison Control.
[01:18:56]  What's Benzedrine?
[01:18:56]  It's like an amphetamine kind of thing.
[01:18:59]  Oh.
[01:18:59]  That they had back then.
[01:19:00]  It did, it got me, I couldn't tell if it actually got me zooted.
[01:19:03]  I was also doing a lot of cocaine, not Crispo cocaine, regular cocaine.
[01:19:07]  But, but.
[01:19:08]  Probably, he did good cocaine.
[01:19:09]  He probably had a lot of cocaine.
[01:19:11]  But it probably does lose a little bit.
[01:19:12]  But the pictures you put in the article, I'm like, this guy's, it must have stunk in there.
[01:19:18]  Well, the one was infested with raccoons and there was like nests of litter that they made out of his paper.

=== Benzedrine, Hitmen, and Writing Accessories (02:29) ===

[01:19:24]  There was like Crispo gallery papers and like, you know, beautiful photographs of paintings that had just been shredded and just covered the floor of this place.
[01:19:32]  It was like a six.
[01:19:34]  Eight room motel or something.
[01:19:36]  And like people had come and taken out all the good, the valuable stuff.
[01:19:40]  But like the stuff I wanted, like all the papers and the files and the letters were there.
[01:19:45]  He saved everything.
[01:19:46]  He saved like incriminating evidence, you know, like he saved all these prison letters with that guy and, you know, everything.
[01:19:54]  Letters with Roy Cohn and letters with some hitman that he was friends with.
[01:19:59]  It was all letters with some hitman?
[01:20:01]  Yeah.
[01:20:01]  This hitman, Blake Tech Yoon, was.
[01:20:04]  Was working with the Genovese family apparently at one point, and they were writing letters to each other in prison.
[01:20:09]  Oh, Jesus Christ.
[01:20:12]  Well, it's a fantastic story.
[01:20:14]  And thank you.
[01:20:15]  Thank you so much for coming on.
[01:20:17]  This has been a thank you.
[01:20:18]  I got to tell you, have hardly you ever want to be a detective?
[01:20:25]  Yeah.
[01:20:26]  Yeah.
[01:20:26]  Yeah, definitely.
[01:20:28]  I think I thought about that at one point.
[01:20:30]  But I don't want to be a cop.
[01:20:31]  Yeah.
[01:20:32]  Exactly.
[01:20:33]  I know, but I would.
[01:20:36]  And being a private detective, it's mostly cheating.
[01:20:38]  It's just, yeah, photographing, that feels slimy.
[01:20:41]  Exactly.
[01:20:42]  It's not illegal.
[01:20:45]  But, yeah, exactly.
[01:20:46]  I'm like, but if there was, yeah, I know.
[01:20:49]  Journalist is the next best thing, I guess.
[01:20:51]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:53]  But this is like gold.
[01:20:54]  It doesn't happen that often that, like, my journalist friend was like, this is like porn for reporters because you go into a room, there's documents.
[01:21:04]  Yeah.
[01:21:05]  And then there's murder in the documents.
[01:21:06]  What are the chances of that?
[01:21:07]  It's like everyone's dream.
[01:21:10]  Yeah, it is.
[01:21:10]  It's all the crime.
[01:21:12]  It does seem, yeah, it does seem.
[01:21:15]  Did you keep the documents?
[01:21:17]  I have some things.
[01:21:20]  Well, a guy who had a storage unit actually mailed me one of Crispo's writing crops that he used.
[01:21:29]  I did not ask for it.
[01:21:31]  And I'm weird for the antacid.
[01:21:35]  Now I have it.
[01:21:35]  I don't know.
[01:21:36]  Where do you put that?
[01:21:37]  I don't know.
[01:21:37]  You keep it in the crib.
[01:21:39]  It's in the crib.
[01:21:40]  I put it in the basement.
[01:21:41]  With your other writing accessories.
[01:21:43]  Yeah.
[01:21:44]  It's for horses.
[01:21:45]  Yeah.
[01:21:45]  You take it to the stable.
[01:21:47]  Right.
[01:21:47]  Damn.
[01:21:47]  That's fucking crazy.
[01:21:49]  Um, yeah, well, are you gonna do well?
[01:21:52]  I'll ask you that off air.

=== The Book Coming Out in October (01:15) ===

[01:21:54]  Um, thank you so much.
[01:21:56]  Is there anything you want to promote?
[01:21:57]  I guess we're the book is we've said that the book's coming out in paperback, it's coming out in paperback in October, but it took them that long.
[01:22:05]  It takes a year, it came out in like October.
[01:22:08]  Uh huh.
[01:22:08]  Did we say the name of the book?
[01:22:10]  Yeah, The Monsters We Make.
[01:22:12]  We're saying it again.
[01:22:14]  The Monsters We Make coming out in October again.
[01:22:17]  Yeah, it's out now.
[01:22:18]  You can buy it in hardcover anytime you like, but you can buy it in paper cover.
[01:22:22]  In October.
[01:22:23]  But we want them to buy the hardcover.
[01:22:25]  Well, I think buying it now is a nice idea.
[01:22:28]  Yeah, but you can.
[01:22:29]  While it's in your mind, you're not.
[01:22:30]  Correct, correct.
[01:22:32]  So thank you so much for joining us.
[01:22:34]  It is a pleasure.
[01:22:34]  And there goes.
[01:22:36]  Wait.
[01:22:37]  Ladies and gentlemen, what a fitting end to Rachel Week.
[01:22:40]  That was Rachel Corbett.
[01:22:42]  I, of course, am Brace Belden.
[01:22:46]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[01:22:48]  I'm Liz.
[01:22:48]  And this has been Drew Non.
[01:22:50]  We will see you next time.
[01:22:51]  Bye-bye.
[01:22:52]  Even if you guys got your own, you're Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:22:57]  Even if you guys got your own, you're Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:23:09]  Jump, jump, jump for the next step.