Nicky Barnes: Mr Untouchable | The Rest of the Story | 5

From Airship, an Evergreen podcast, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal. Now, today, we're doing something a little different. I'm here with Joel Callan, who's Australian, and he writes the show.

Hey, Joel.

Hey, Jeremy, it's great to be here. How you doing, buddy?

I'm all right. Okay, so do you want to tell the listeners why you're joining me today in the studio?

Yeah, well, so first off, I, you know, the idea for this episode came about when you mentioned to me how much you enjoyed recording this specific season of the show about Nicky Barnes.

So I wanted to talk with you about that, but then when I started thinking about having that conversation with you, I realized there's also so much extra story to this tale of Nicky Barnes and the Council that I wanted to talk through some of it with

you because I figured some of the wild twists and turns of the story might have been what fascinated you, and we've got a lot more that we weren't able to fit into the series. So that's what we're going to do today.

Well, then this is going to be a lot of fun. We don't get to be on mic together very often, but I like it.

All right, so like I said, I'm excited to talk about the story with you.

On that note, before we get into the stuff that we kept out of the series because there was just too much of it, I wanted to ask you, as I said, you emailed me a while back to say how much you were enjoying recording this season of the show, and that

it might have been one of your favorites that we've done so far. We've covered a lot of different cases on American Criminal over the years.

We've done a lot of murders, we've done some fraud, we've done a bunch of different gangsters, we've done a jewel thief, we've done the baby thief. But this became a favorite pretty quickly, right? So what was it, do you think?

It captures two of the things that I am interested in when it comes to crime.

One is the psychology behind it, the hubris. We've talked about this before. The hubris that someone has, that it takes to pull these things off and think that they deserve to be able to get away with it.

I don't want to call it sociopath because that's not technically a clinical term anymore. Everything falls under the psychopath umbrella. But I don't really think that this is psychopathy.

I think it's hubris. And again, I mean Mr. Untouchable, that says it all.

That says it all right there. And also because it took place in the 70s and the 70s was a great era for cinema. You got Dog Day Afternoon.

You've got a French Connection. You've got all of the conversation for Grinnell. You have all of these great movies about criminals and the pursuit of them.

And it just amazes me that this guy got away with it for so long. I mean, everything catches up to you, but this guy, he skirted the system for a long friggin time.

Well, you know, I'm so fascinated to hear you mention cinema specifically, because there's a part in this, I think at the end of the fourth episode, where I touch briefly on Nicky's legacy and his frustration that his story was never made into a

movie. And there is a sort of a touch of that narcissistic personality idea of someone who thinks they were so great that their story should be seen on the silver screen, especially when some of his contemporaries were seen on the screen, you know?

Well, as one of his guys in his gang, you know, the American Criminal, American Criminal, God, is that what it's actually called? It's the movie with Denzel Washington and Russell Crum. American Gangster.

That is not technically about Nicky, but it's a story more of one of Nicky's cohorts. But I feel like they pulled from kind of everybody's story and put it into Nicky's story. That's the most modern example I can think of.

I mean, it certainly is right on the nose with what we're talking about. But I'm just fascinated by, and we don't have to go down this rabbit hole, but I'm just fascinated by how different filmmakers perceive different crimes.

And, you know, like there was the great movie with Nero about Bernie Madoff, which wasn't violent at all, but it was a fantastic crime thriller. Because it really all comes down to, are we going to catch this guy or not?

And I thought that in American Gangster, they captured it really well. And having watched it, after we started recording this, I was like, oh, I thought I knew this. And now I know something different about it, that it wasn't really about Nicky.

It was about one of the people in the council.

It was Frank Lucas, who I think was sort of like one of his sort of like rival people.

Yeah, maybe that, or why do I think it was his cousin?

Nicky was apparently portrayed in American Gangster, but it wasn't his story. It was Frank Lucas, and he was someone who Nick mentions in his book, but he was someone he didn't have a particularly high opinion of, apparently.

So, yeah, let me ask you this. We're going to shift direction a little bit. Tell me about Nicky's stand up hoe, Thelma, or T.

She gets pregnant the first time she and Nicky have sex, which is not his intention.

But once she tells him that, he buys her a leather coat from Spain, a two-seater Mercedes, a penthouse in Washington Heights, but he's adamant that he doesn't want to make her his woman. What's going on there?

Right. So, and to be clear, the term stand-up hoe is definitely something that Nicky uses a few times in his book. That is not our preferred term.

That's just what he, I guess, would call some of the women in his life.

What it means is that a woman who can, if Nick or someone else in the council is pulled over by the police and Thelma is in the car with him, if she is a quote unquote stand-up hoe, she can put his gun between her thighs, conceal it there, and then

stand up for the police, submit to a pat-down without letting on that there is a gun hidden somewhere between her legs, and then, so she can literally stand up and then go for a little strut for the police to demonstrate that she is not concealing

anything without letting it slip. When he first introduces this idea in his book, Nick says, like, it's none of my business what happens to the gun as long as she makes it stay out of sight. He's like, I don't care what piece of it goes where,

whether it's just between her thighs or whether it's somewhere else. We can assume that it's maybe sort of somewhere inside the underwear region, if you know what I mean, but...

I do. I do.

But we really, really don't know, and that's sort of as much as Nick gives us on the subject. It really indicates the culture of the time and sort of the way Nick thought about the women in his life.

And not just the women in Nick's life, but the women of the other men in the council, the other brothers, as Nicky calls them. Because Nick also writes that Ishmael's wife, Helen, has Thelma over practice sessions.

So, you know, Thelma will go over there and Helen will sort of, you know, they'll cook together and then they'll sort of practice their strut.

And it was just a fascinating little tidbit that, you know, there wasn't any pivotal moment where Thelma does this for Nicky, so I could sort of include it in the story.

But it was such an interesting aspect of his life and just the way he viewed the world that I really wanted to chat about it with you, because it's just a little bonkers to me.

Yeah, when she goes to Helen's house, I can only imagine what it would be like to, let's find new and interesting places to hide a gun. We'll have some lunch first.

It seems incredibly dangerous to me. There are so many ways that could go very badly wrong.

You know, mulling heroin is one thing, but mulling a pistol, that could be terrible.

Yeah. So, but you know, there was so much focus on Nicky that he was like an intensely paranoid guy, especially the more popular he got.

So like by 1973, which is around the time when the council is taking shape, like people are coming to New York City from, like, all around the country.

Baltimore, Philly, DC, Oakland, yeah.

Yes. Just to buy the powder to, like, bring it back and sell it to their own customers. And they're paying, like, street value for this stuff.

Which is like 15 or 20 grands worth of powder to take home to their own cities, right?

Yes.

That's the reputation of Nicky.

Yes.

Yes. And his product, you know, it was very popular on the streets of New York, but it was also sort of getting this big reputation around the country. You know, that's just sort of where his level of popularity comes from.

And I guess where a lot of his, um, his, I'm trying to think of the word now.

Hubris. Dandruff.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, yeah, it's just his paranoia about, you know, the police always following him because, you know, I think after a certain amount of time, they did sort of have an eye on him, you know, most of the time.

And it's so ironic because in 73, New York Magazine runs this piece called The Untouchables, and it showcases some of the giant names in the city's drug trade, and it includes Nick. So this is a while before he becomes the Mr.

Untouchable, and about four years before the New York Times Magazine runs their Mr. Untouchable cover story, right?

Yeah. So this was interesting because as I was researching, there was the Mr. Untouchable piece that comes up later in the series after Nick's facing all these charges right before he goes to prison.

This, I was trying to look up that story, and I kept seeing this one from 1973, and I had to sort of sit down for 20 minutes one day and be like, wait, when did this story come out?

And I realized that there were two different stories about Nick with the word untouchable as the headline. So this one was by New York Magazine, and it was in 1973, as you said.

And yeah, it was just sort of like a general overview of the state of the cities, like drug dealers and drug kingpins, and sort of the emerging faces and names, I guess, to watch as these rising criminals in the city.

But yeah, like you said, it was years before he became sort of like the Mr. Untouchable, which was the name he earned, not specifically for this reason, but because he kept getting away with crimes.

He kept being charged with crimes and being acquitted.

Yeah, it just feels like he could do everything that he wanted to do. And again, the hubris of being involved with that original article, you know, because he just seems like he doesn't care.

But we know that the council, right, his organization, has a built-in surveillance system. It's made up of dealers and customers, anyone who knows what kinds of vans to be wary of, when to take supply off the streets.

So when the authorities pick up the trail of any of their dealers, Nicky and his brothers only need to move their dealers a few blocks away, yeah?

So then they wait until the police figure out where they are, and they start going through the process of moving into place to surveil them and move back to their usual stomping ground.

Yeah, and so this is such an interesting part of the story.

It's such a simple tactic, you know, and it sort of takes advantage of the nimbleness of the street dealers, because they can just sort of know when there are police moving about on their streets, and they can sort of pull the product off the street

Yeah, a couple of hours is probably closer to a couple of minutes.

Well, you know, there's a part of the series where we hear that Nicky knows to, that like weekends are a better time for selling because narcotics cops work less on the weekends, don't work on the weekends.

So it could be a matter of like, okay, well, let's pull it off for Friday night, we'll be back here Saturday morning.

But yeah, they know that the police have so much red tape so that sort of holding them back that they can just figure out where the police are actually looking and then send their dealers a few blocks down the road.

And by the time the police work out where these dealers have gone and sort of followed them and apply for new permits and get people into place to sort of try and surveil them, the dealers can just move back to where they were.

It's sort of this game almost of whack-a-mole, except you never get to whack them all.

Yeah, and it's strange too. Well, not strange. I guess it is kind of strange.

But people like Nicky Barnes, who run a criminal enterprise, right? Lot of moving parts, lot of people, lot of all of that. These guys could easily be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

They're wired the exact same way. People talk about it all the time. Psychologists talk about it all the time.

How a CEO is wired essentially just like a serial killer or just like any other sociopath that you might run across, except they're wearing a suit. And this other guy is just talking to himself underneath the train tracks.

So I'm always curious about, gosh, why didn't you go left instead of right? Why did you make this choice instead of? Because obviously you have the wherewithal to learn business, to do all of this stuff, to become, you know, a success at it.

It's just so weird. And it sort of shines a light on the fact that, again, there's no black and white. It's all gray.

Everything is gray. You can use your powers for good. You can use them for heroin.

Okay, so here's a big shift. I'm always curious about Sista. That's Nick's second wife.

So did she really disappear?

Okay. I'm very glad you asked this question because this is something that was going through my head a lot while I was writing the series.

And full disclosure, I'm going to take you into the way I was thinking about this as I was writing, because Sista is this figure who was Nick's second wife, I believe, and I was never able to find any records of her real name.

So all we know her as is Sista. So she left Nick after he was arrested when they raided her penthouse apartment one day and they found a joint in the bathroom. And she was really angry at him.

She wanted him to leave the world of drugs behind. And there's a scene in one of the episodes where she's moving around the apartment and filling her Louis Vuitton luggage and grabbing all her cosmetics.

And then she leaves her wedding ring on the kitchen counter.

Yeah.

And Nick says that that's the last time he saw of her. And the only other time he really hears from her is after she has allegedly cleared out one of his safety deposit boxes. And inside, she left a note saying she was giving the money to a church.

And she was very specific not to say she wasn't giving it to the church that Nick used to launder his money through.

Yeah.

And so Nick in his book writes that he has no idea where she went after that, and that he was still angry about losing the money that she stole, but that he was glad she got away clean. And that's really the last we hear about it.

That's a weird statement to make. Like, which part of it do you believe?

Yes, and we know that Nick loved having money. He specifically wrote that he loved having money, and not even just to spend. He loved the idea of having money, that he kept stacks of hundreds in safe deposit boxes all over the city.

And so I couldn't help wondering if Sister really left of her own accord, or if maybe she disappeared under different circumstances. Again, this is all just complete speculation, because I don't know the full name of this woman.

So, you know, I was thinking, like, did he have her removed from the city in some way, or moved from his life in some way, because she was sort of opposed to him dealing?

But, you know, later in this year, in his life, he goes on to sort of stop the council who want to kill someone because he thinks they're not a direct threat.

He's very careful to say to the council members that they should only kill people who were direct threats to them business.

Right. Like Lucky and Judy and Clifford Haynes.

Yes. And so I'm thinking like, okay, am I overthinking this? But then at the start of his book, Nick also sort of has a disclaimer saying, you know, like, oh, if there's a murder in this story, I'm only going to talk about it if it's being solved.

If it's not being solved, I'm not going to snitch, which again, just confuses me.

So that ain't you snitching already.

So yeah, that's the mystery of where sister went. Hopefully she went on to live a long and fruitful life, but I really don't know.

If she's out there or if someone who is related to her is out there, please, please send us an email and let us know what happened to sister, because I'd love to find out.

So explain this thing to me where the judge sets him up with a hundred thousand dollars bail and Nicky funnels it through his usual guy, which is the Reverend Samuel Windham.

Yes.

But the DA asked for a discovery hearing on where the money comes from.

Yes. Okay. So we mentioned this briefly in this series and it was more complicated than we really had room for, but it was just a bit interesting to me.

So I wanted to go into a bit more detail here and indulge us a little bit. So as you mentioned, like this is after the murder of Clifford Haynes, which, you know, this is Lucky's brother.

Lucky goes on the run with her girlfriend, Judy, with some of the council's money. And they send a couple of basically goons to go and threaten Lucky's brother to try and find out where his sister has gone.

It goes wrong or they never intended to just threaten him, and he ends up stabbed with a kitchen knife with a plastic bag over his head. Nick ends up being arrested for this, and his bail is set for $100,000, and he kind of thinks like, no problem.

He calls the reverend who is someone he funnels money through, and the DA says, I don't know why, but I'm going to challenge where this money came from. And this is something I was trying to do a bit of research on.

I couldn't work out exactly why Nicky needed to funnel the money through someone, because you are allowed, I believe, to pay your own bail.

But it could be because Nicky wasn't declaring income, because if he declared income, he'd have to be telling people where he got it.

Yeah, I kind of think that money laundering thing had been in place for so long that that's really his default, like, okay, this is how I'll get this done.

Yes, and so the reverend is hauled into court, and he sort of testifies that Nicky's been a member of his church in good standing since 1966, and that the church has this money in a safety deposit box, which he has to say it was in a safety deposit

box, because the state pulls up bank records and says that the bank only had $350 in their account on the day that Nick was arrested. So where did this $50,000 come from? And the reverend says, oh, that's just been sitting there waiting.

It was sort of stashed away for a rainy day when one of our members would need to be bailed out of jail, basically.

But the judge rejects the reverend's bail money, right?

Yes. Yeah. So he's not buying it.

He doesn't think this money is okay to use. And so Nicky's sort of back to square one. He tries, I think, three more times to get bail through different people.

I'm not sure if he was funneling the money through those people at all times, or whether other people were legit coming forward with money for him. But all three of these next ones are rejected as well.

And so Nicky sends out a call to a friend or an acquaintance, a guy by the name of Chuck Goldfarb.

Oh, Goldfarb.

Goldfarb. So Chuck is a lawyer, and he just shows up at Rikers one day, and he's got $100,000 in cash in $10 and $20 bills just in a briefcase.

There's nothing suspicious about that.

Exactly. Just nothing to see here. Just some casual $10 and $20 bills in stacks.

And so the DA once again files a motion and tries to stop this bail going through, saying once again, Nick's just like, come on, judge. Nick's just using his own money once again. But Chuck Goldfarb is like, no, no, no, no, no, this is my own money.

And he tells the court the story of how he became a millionaire by selling the Las Vegas nightclub, the Silver Slipper, to the famous industrialist Howard Hughes.

And so once the Howard Hughes has been name dropped, the press is suddenly paying a lot more attention to this little sort of scuffle over bail money.

And so on the day that the judge is due to make his announcement about whether he'll accept the bail, the gallery is just packed with journalists and photographers to find out more about this story that suddenly involves industrialist Howard Hughes.

And so the reason I thought this story was so fascinating is because this sort of sudden influx of media attention is really what helps elevate Nick's growing public status and sort of what changes his story a little bit moving forward.

It makes him a lot more popular. It sort of contributes to him becoming more of a household name in New York City.

So can you go into more detail about how exactly this contributes to his blowing up in the industry?

Yeah. So around 1974, Frank Sinatra records a version of the song Bad Bad Leroy Brown.

Ah, yeah.

And Nicky believes that this is a tribute to him specifically. And he says that all around Harlem, people will put that song on the jukebox anytime he walks into a bar. And I think that's a fascinating story.

I think it's a fun little anecdote to tell. I don't personally buy it and I'm going to tell you why.

So the sort of popular version of this story that you'll see floating around the internet is that this song was written about Nicky in the first place. But Frank Sinatra was covering a song by Jim Croce.

Yeah.

And he wrote it about a guy he met in the US Army years ago. Just like a guy who he spent a couple of days with and inspired him because he was like kind of a badass and looked like he'd beat people up.

So very clearly, this song is not written about Nicky Barnes. And I found nothing to suggest that Frank Sinatra recorded his cover of the song Leroy Brown as a tribute to anyone.

Apart from anything else, it's on an album of other covers that Sinatra recorded that were songs that were released during his brief time in the 1970s. I think the album is called Great Songs That I Missed or something.

And Bad Bad Leroy Brown had gone to number one on the US charts when Jim Croce sang it. And so Frank Sinatra, when he came out of his brief for time, it was like, oh, that's a great song. I'm going to record that.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he did specifically record it to be a tribute to Nicky Barnes.

I don't think, I mean, not to, but I don't think that's true. I just don't see it happening. And also, I would kill to hear the Frank Sinatra version of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.

I can't imagine what that possibly sounds like.

You know what? I'm going to find it, and I'll send you a link to listen to it.

Okay. I think it's probably just ridiculous. Okay, so we talked about this a lot in the series that Nicky has aspirations of actually going legit, getting legit legal business ventures off the ground.

And he wants to do it before the feds catch him, so they can take the money they made selling drugs and they can become a business empire instead, right?

Yeah, and you were talking about this a little while ago about these people who are very successful criminals. They could be very successful men of industry or women of industry, you know? And Nick always sort of felt that about himself.

That's the impression I got, at least.

And so he is always sort of looking out for these businesses that he can get into, you know, not necessarily as ways to launder money, but just as ways to sort of build actual, you know, some lasting legacy and a legitimate business that can sort of

thrive in the light of day. And so he sort of flirts with a couple of ideas. You know, one is like a flake burger business, which is when you take discarded beef from the butchering process and make them into hamburgers.

Oh, how do you make that tempting?

I know, right?

Let's put that on the sign.

Yes, flake burgers and then some nice pictures to go with it.

Detritus of cow.

He takes that idea to the other council members, and they don't go for it. I don't think because of the maybe the gross factor, but just it sounds a little like too much work.

But then on a trip to the Caymans one weekend, Nicky gets the idea to get into casinos because he believes, you know, that the Italian mobsters have been very successful running casinos and have a strong presence in Las Vegas.

But Nick sort of thinks like, oh, we can get a single casino and grow it from there, and we can sort of run the Italians out of Las Vegas. But to buy a business of that size, he knows he's going to need money from some kind of legit source.

And he sort of brings this idea to the guys, the brothers. And one of them, Guy, suggests that they buy the Apollo, which is the legendary music venue.

Yeah.

And he says that he's, you know, looked into it. It's on sale for 500 grand. It would be a great tax incentive because it's a historical landmark.

It would be a good tax haven. And what happens with the Apollo is a little murky. Nick wrote that they purchased it for $500,000, but nothing really ever happens there.

Nick said he had plans to fix it up. But then once he went to prison, the other guys kind of let it languish. I sort of looked into this a little bit.

I couldn't find anything definitive, but in 2021, the sort of investigative podcast, Shoe Leather, which sort of looks at New York history, they looked into Guy Fisher's role specifically in the Apollo.

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And so he was the guy who brought the idea to Nicky and said, let's buy this. And they found some documents that suggested Guy bought the place in 1978 for $200,000, or that his brother-in-law purchased it with money that was probably from Guy.

But that's really about it, you know? Guy and none of the other council members are mentioned anywhere in the Apollo's official website.

So as far as I know, they might have bought it, they might have had a hand in owning it for a while, but nothing really happened there. They weren't able to make it into legitimate business.

As far as I can tell, that was the end of Nicky's business ambitions, because soon after that whole episode is when they were gathered by the police and sent to jail.

So, okay, I want to talk a little bit about Coco Morris, because we didn't talk so much about him, gosh, if at all. Did we mention him at all in this one?

No, I think I had him in an early draft of one of the scripts, but it was too much of a narrative cul-de-sac.

Well, I just love the fact that Coco worked for the Tuckahoe police, which seems a little on the nose for the story that we're talking about. You got Stand-Up Ho, you got Tuckahoe, you know.

Yes, not to be confused with one another.

Right. And for like five grand a pop, right? He'll look into potential government informants, which, you know, we all know that's snitches.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Government informants get Christmas ornaments, and snitches get stitches.

Right.

Well, and so Coco was Guy Fish's half-brother. So that was sort of, he was this guy who they were sort of able to rely on to sort of turn to and say like, hey, we're suspicious about this guy, you know, what can you tell us about him?

And he would, you know, as you said, five grand a pop, he would look into people's records and sort of find out if they were talking to the police. So yeah, that was sort of interesting.

But, you know, like I said, like Nick was a paranoid guy, so it was useful to have that kind of resource for him.

And in like June of 75, right? Nick, Ishmael and Frank, they're all booked on a plane to Japan to watch a fight between Muhammad Ali and the wrestler Antonio Inoki. But he doesn't make it because of this paranoia that he has.

What happened there?

Yeah, so this is interesting because, as I said, like he's a very paranoid guy by 1975. The council's been up and running for about two and a half, close to three years now. And so yeah, they're on their way to watch this fight in Japan.

And Nick packs a book in his bag to read on the long flight. They're in LA at the time, sort of meeting with some people for business reasons apparently.

And he's in the terminal and he goes to grab the bag from his carry-on luggage, I guess, and he realizes that it's not there.

So he calls one of the airline employees over and asks them to pull his luggage for him, which it's 1975, so the rules are very different. So they grab him the suitcase and he opens it there in the terminal.

And he starts freaking out because his clothes look slightly messy, which I would maybe argue is because his luggage has been put onto a plane and then pulled off a plane.

But he freaks out thinking maybe something's been planted on him, he doesn't want to go through any customs all of a sudden.

Does he travel under his own name?

As far as I know, yeah.

Okay.

There was nothing ever written about him that I could find that said he was trying to travel under a different name.

So he's suddenly afraid of going through customs either here or in Japan, he thinks, you know, even if they didn't plant something on me here, what if they plant something on me in Japan? And so he decides not to risk it.

So he's in LA and he just walks away from the gate and books a flight straight back to New York instead.

And he never sees the fight.

No, he misses it.

I've seen the fight. I've watched that fight. And it's great fun.

And it's the precursor to MMA, really. So, and they became really good friends, Ali and Enoki. They became really good friends after the fight, which ended as a draw.

And I don't know how many of Ali's fights ended in draws, but it wasn't a lot of them.

No, well, and Nicky Barnes could have been there for this sort of historic event, but yeah, he missed it.

That's crazy because again, I've watched it several times and never had any idea that maybe Nicky Barnes was gonna be in that audience. You never know who's sitting in the audience. Well, I bought tickets, but you didn't show up.

Well, the cops are after me. I killed the guy. So Nicky's all freaked out.

He's paranoid. He doesn't go to this fight. And then he has to go to trial.

I cannot imagine that this was good for his psyche, though he may have put on a strong front. What can you tell us about the verdict and how he reacted?

Yeah. So this is information that I have, you know, Nicky writing this down years later. So I can't sort of speak to his reaction in the moment.

But what he said in his book was when he's at trial, he's so confident that he's going to be found not guilty, that he's making plans for where he's going to take Shemekka for dinner that night.

So the level of shock he must have felt when the guilty verdict came in would have been huge. I mean, apart from anything else, he thought they'd bribed a juror to declare them all not guilty, so.

It almost sounds like Louis XIV when he got taken to the guillotine. You know, he never thought he'd get caught.

Well, and he's, I recommend his book to everyone.

It's an interesting read, but he has so much anger for the people who he felt betrayed him, which is what led to his eventual sort of scorched earth that he went on everyone in his life who he considered family.

So yeah, it sort of speaks to where he, where his mind was at that point in his life. You know, he really did feel like Mr. Untouchable, and he didn't realize just how close he was to the edge.

How fragile he was, how breakable he was.

Yeah.

Well, we need to do this again with some of the other stories when we get to different stories, because I love your writing, and you are a lovely guest to have on the show.

So on that note, I'm going to tell you that American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen podcasts. It's hosted, edited, executive produced by me. I'm Jeremy Schwartz, in case you forgot.

Audio editing and sound design is by Sean Ruhl-Hoffman. Music is by Thrum. This episode, guess what, is written and researched by Joel Callan.

The managing producers for this show are Emily Burke and Sarah Wilgrub, and the executive producers are Joel Callan and Lindsey Graham. So thanks everybody for sticking around for this episode. It was a lot of fun.