Behind the Bastards - Children of Dictators

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

What happens when you are raised by an evil tyrant? In Episode 19 Robert is joined by Jack O'Brien (The Daily Zeitgeist) to examine what it is like being the children of monsters. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody, I am Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Today with me is my former boss at Cracked and current boss at Stuff Media, Jack O'Brien. It me, Jack O'Brien. And today, Jack Attack, we are talking about the children of dictators, which I know you just had another kid.

I did. And you're kind of like the podcast equivalent of a dictator. Yeah, so there might be some tips here. I didn't realize that's how we were coming at this. I feel like you can empathize with the fathers of us. Right, the father figures. Well, at least you can give me some, you know, I'm not, I don't have kids, so I may not know if something's actually a good parenting tactic. Right.

Well, my children are two and two weeks old, so I have yet to be able to fuck them up totally. Have you given one of them control of either a soccer team or a military unit? Not yet. Okay, okay. Third birthday. Gonna be a lot of that in this podcast. I've spent most of the last week reading about the various children of dictators. There's a number of sources for this podcast, which I'll go through as we read them, but I do want to upfront plug a book called Children of Monsters by J. Nordlinger.

It's a great book. I'll be referencing it regularly here. There are a lot of players in this podcast, so I kind of figured my best bet would be to start with a dictator who I think was probably the best parent out of all of them, Fidel Castro. I am not saying Fidel was a good parent. He was terrible by every normal measure of being a dad, but none of his kids grew up to be mass raping, mass torturing monsters, and that counts as a win on this list. Oh boy. So Castro's oldest son was Fidelito. Castro divorced Fidelito's mom, Murta, early, and fled to Mexico to wage his revolution from afar.

Fidelito's mom's family was well connected in Cuban politics, so obviously Castro hated them and he hated that his kid lived with them because they were, you know, bougie as fuck. When Fidelito was six, Castro asked nicely if he could have his kid for a two-week visit. Murta said yes and sent him over, and Castro kidnapped him. Big mistake. But not only did he kidnap him, he didn't even kidnap him to raise him himself. He kidnaped him and put him with a foster family that he thought would do a better job than the kid's actual mom. That is some dictatorship. You should be over here.

These are better parents for you than your mom and certainly better than me. That's great. So Murta had to get the Mexican government to help her re-kidnap her son three months later. But in 1959, when Fidelito was nine, Castro took power. His mother sent him over from New York to visit his dad again because she thought he should know his dad even though he'd already kidnaped him once, which is maybe a questionable call from a mom. I mean, so far, this is exactly the story of my two-year-old, so keep going. So yeah, Fidelito went over to Cuba to see his dad, who was the new dictator of Cuba. They posed together on top of tanks, and basically Castro treated him as a prop.

Fun dictator stuff. Yeah, fun dictator stuff. And a few months after those tank photos were taken, there was a horrible car accident Fidelito got into. He was badly injured. He went into surgery to have his spleen removed. On the same night, Fidel Castro was set to address a bunch of reporters on TV. The Children of Monsters book quotes a biography of Castro called Guerrilla Prince, which is both a solid name for a rap album and which I'll also quote because, you know, it's great. So this is the night Castro is talking to a bunch of press people while his son is getting surgery. And he's clearly set all this up, so all these journalists are talking to him, but instead of asking him normal questions, they're all asking him, like, why aren't you leaving to go see your son?

Why aren't you leaving to go see your son? And finally, one of them says, come on, Dante Castro, who is it who rules in Cuba? And Castro shouts back, the people. And then the journalist says, well, then the people want you to go see your son. And so at this, Castro turns around and drives off to see his kid. Like, his son gets in an accident and he's like, how can I spin this for good PR? So Fidelito became a celebrity in Cuba, and he seems to have hated it. Castro eventually pulled him out of the limelight and sent him to study nuclear physics in the Soviet Union, like you do.

He became the head of Cuba's Atomic Energy Commission in 1980. He was not good at the job. No, he wound up getting removed from the position 12 years later in 92. I don't know why exactly, but it probably had something to do with the joint Cuban-Russian nuclear reactor. There's a great article about this reactor on Gizmodo. And the title of the article kind of tells you the story, the abandoned communist reactor that would have killed us all. So this reactor that Castro's son was presiding over, they basically found that upon its operation, it would have been at least 15 times likelier than a U.S. plant to have had a catastrophic meltdown.

Based on the weather patterns, they knew it would only take 24 hours for radioactive materials to reach Florida if it did meltdown. And since Cuba's not very big, Fidelito's plan was to dump all of their nuclear waste into the ocean. So he was not a great Atomic Energy Commissioner. His dad fired him. He was sent to the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and that's not really much else to say about Fidelito. He's kind of boring, which is basically the best case scenario for a kid on this list. Fidel, we don't know how many kids Fidel had. We aren't even sure if he was married for most of his time and power, or how many wives he had.

But we do know that he had another boy, Antonio, who became an orthopedic surgeon. Antonio worked as a physician to the Cuban basketball team, and seems to be better at his job than his older brother was at building nuclear power plants. I'm bringing him up because in 2008 something hilarious happened to him. Luis Dominguez, a pro-democracy activist, baseball fan, and Cuban-American, pretended to be a 27-year-old Colombian sports journalist named Claudia to seduce Antonio. So the internet's not allowed in Cuba, but if you're a Castro family member, you get a smartphone, you get internet access, you get all of that stuff. You're not supposed to, but they have it anyway. So Luis pretends to be this woman, Claudia, and strikes up a romantic relationship with Castro's son via text messages and Google chat. Oh, so he's catfish.

Yeah, he catfishes Castro's son. Catfishing the king fish, the big fish. There's messages like, guess where I am, and I will make love to you without stopping, as one message Antonio sent this fake woman while he was on a diplomatic visit to Russia. I mean, that's just kind of basic love-making, is that you don't stop in the middle of it, make love to you, and I won't just randomly stop. I have a desire to kiss you, I want to kiss you, love you, and make love to you. So that's sweet. But Luis was also able to get Antonio to share his phone number, his address in Havana, and reveal that he had no bodyguards and give him updates on secret trips he was taking to other countries in Central and South America. That's the sort of thing that a secret admirer would ask you.

Yeah, exactly. And my favorite thing about this is that by doing this, Luis is not just throwing shade on Fidel Castro, but he's also kind of sticking it to the CIA, who tried to kill Castro 500 times, always trying to figure out stuff and couldn't. And then this guy's like, I'll just pretend to be a girl, pretend I want to fuck his son. Turns out that was the key all along. Yeah. So that's a fun story. So yeah, Antonio is clearly kind of dumb, but he doesn't seem to be a bad person. So again, Castro's kid is pretty much the best case scenario here.

Right. The worst case scenario. For that, we're going to have to roll over to our old buddy Saddam Hussein. All right. Of all the dictator fathers I've read about, I'm pretty sure he was the worst. Ude Hussein was born in 1964. Ude. And Kuse in 1966.

Kuse, not a whole lot to say about. I mean, he wasn't a great guy, but it's Ude who's the real king shit of garbage mountain. So Ude was originally meant to be the heir to Saddam's power. He was tall, handsome, and athletic, but he was also so crazy that Saddam couldn't stand him and eventually disinherited him. So in the 90s, Ude was made the head of the national soccer team, football team, whatever term you want to use. The head of the team? Yeah.

Yeah. He was like the head coach. Okay. That's like a dictator kid trope. We'll run into a couple other kids who like, okay, you get to run the soccer team because your dad's, I mean, yeah. That's awesome. The boss.

Right. And so as coach of this team, he was known to show up at halftime and promised to cut off players' legs and feed them to hungry dogs if they didn't improve, which is. That's good motivation. Yeah. Yeah. It's a solid strategy. Yeah.

I'm going to quote here from a wonderful Guardian article titled Ude, career of rape, torture, and murder. Quote, as football overseer, Ude kept a private torture scorecard with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten on the soles of his feet after a particularly poor showing. Well, you got to stay organized. I mean, that's the first thing. Can't forget any beating worthy mistakes. No, no, that's like the first, I'm pretty sure what Joe Namath said that. Yes.

He was hitting people in the foot. Yeah. So in addition to being probably not a very good coach, Ude was famous for raping basically anyone and everyone who caught his eye. There were some occasions where he'd show up at weddings and just take the bride. Really? Yeah. That would happen like there's a lot of those stories.

So he's garbage. He became obsessed with torture. It's said that he had a private torture chamber on the Tigris. I found a quote during my research from a friend of the Hussein family who said, the day Ude discovered the internet was a black day for Iraqis, which, yeah. What did he do with the internet? Well, he found out about things like Iron Maidens, not the band, the sarcophagus filled with spikes.

Got it. We found one of those in one of his palaces. The Americans did when Iraq was conquered or whatever. When they found it, it was dull. Jesus Christ. He didn't just buy it to put it in the corner because he was like, that's sick as shit. You got a sharp in your Iron Maiden. I think it started sharp.

Yeah. You got to keep that thing sharp, man. I think he was doing a lot of maidening with the Iron Maiden. Although maybe more painful if it's not sharp. Yeah. I mean, I assume Ude knew what he was doing when it came to using an Iron Maiden on people. Right. He was probably the world's leading expert on that, actually.

Yeah. I've only used one like once or twice. You shut my big mouth. There is one mark in Ude's favor, which is that he was the leader of the Saddam Fadain, which was a violent paramilitary force dedicated to his dad. The mark in his favor is that he equipped his private army with Darth Vader helmets. Yes. I've got a picture of them here.

This guy fucking rules. That's cool. That's pretty fly. Now, did he know they were Darth Vader helmets? Oh, yeah. No, he knew what he was doing. It was a conscious decision to echo Darth Vader and the helmets of his private army, which is, if you're going to have a private army, not a bad call.

So he was just like, I'm a bad guy from age one. He was just like, I'm going to be evil. He didn't half-ass it. There we go. Yeah. No, he's not like one of those awful people who tries to pretend to be good. He's fully committed. You know what would be cool?

An army of Darth Vaders. If they were mine. So Saddam does not seem to have reigned in his oldest son for decades or disciplined him much at all. But over time, Ude's behavior grew too abhorrent for even history's worst dad. Got to let that horse run, you know? Well, so Ude was a drunk, had a little bit of a drinking problem. And in 1988, he got drunk at a party and bludgeoned his father's bodyguard to death in front of

a bunch of random partiers, which is kind of a party foul. Where I draw the line personally. Yeah, beating your dad's bodyguard to death. That's an important line. This was not unheard of behavior for Ude. He was famous for getting shit-faced and doing things like firing his machine gun above the heads of musicians and dancers at parties. Sometimes he did not shoot above their heads.

Jesus Christ. He would just get drunk and shoot people at parties. That was his thing. He was like Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas if he was never a kidding. Every single time, he was just going to murder the priest. Yeah, there's no kidding with Ude Hussain. Bad sense of humor. Notoriously, bad sense of humor.

Well, all of this came to a head during a drunken brawl with his uncle Watban. See, Watban and Luai, which was a Saddam's brother-in-law, got into an argument over, quote, the most sought-after prostitute at a party. They went to Ude to ask him to basically King Solomon the whole matter and determine who gets the prostitute. Oh, no. Yeah. This was not a good idea.

Ude had shown up at the party after 3 a.m. drunk as fuck with a crazy pump-action rifle that looked like it came from the movie Rambo is the only description. I have no idea what kind of gun it was. Right. It sounds ridiculous. So he was already hammered, probably blacked out, and when they asked him this, for some reason he became convinced that Watban had been making fun of his speech impediment. Right.

So Ude just starts shooting. He fires randomly into the crowd first, killing three people and wounding God knows how many. Then he turned the gun on his uncle and shot him in both legs, and then also accidentally gunned down six female dancers. So like nine people have died total in this rampage. Jesus. And Saddam's brother has had his kneecaps blown off. So this pissed off Saddam Hussein, and he decided he was actually going to discipline his son.

So the story- What? Yeah. So this- It's a real hard ass, that guy. You know? He had to draw the line somewhere. Yeah.

So the story of how I'm quoting from Will Bardenwerper's, the prisoner in his palace. Quote, as punishment, he'd torched Ude's prize collection of Rolls Royces, Bentley's, BMW's, Porsches, and Ferraris, which had been stored under guard in a garage in the Republican palace. Laughing wildly, the former dictator recalled how he gleefully watched the inferno, smoking one of his famous cohebas as the flames engulfed his son's treasured possessions. Saddam's almost-manical laughter was contagious. Rodgerson, who's the guy, the American, he's telling the story to, was unable to resist

joining in, succumbing to belly laughs of his own. The mental image of the dictator dousing hundreds of his son's luxury cars with gasoline and setting them ablaze reminded him of a Jerry Springer episode on steroids. Oh, so just everybody in this story, including the guy he's telling the story to, is just fucking crazy. Just completely out of their mind, like, ah! I mean, that's pretty funny. New murder nine people at a party, I'm gonna light a hundred cars on fire.

Yeah, that'll show him, and Uday was on the straight and narrow from that point forward, right? The end? No, he actually got shot in an assassination attempt and paralyzed from the waist down. So he did calm down after that, but I don't think it was because of the cars. So one of the weird things here is that, like, well, Saddam doesn't seem to have done much at all to his son's one way or the other. He was actually kind of a sweet dad to his daughters, especially his eldest daughter,

Raghad. She told a story to an interviewer who, like, saw this cheap piece of jewelry on her when she was, like, in exile in Jordan, and was like, that doesn't look like the kind of thing you'd have. And she told him a sweet story about when, you know, before Saddam was dictator, they'd been walking in a market and she'd fallen down and scraped her knee and broken down in tears. He was just a power crazed general, like, power crazed vice president.

Yeah, scrappy young power crazed vice president. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he bought her some fancy, like, costume jewelry when she scraped her knee and she kept it her whole life. So Saddam was like a sweet, and this is like another dictator trope is their sons always or often turn out to be, like, mass raping murderers and their daughters are like, he was a sweet dad. Yeah.

He bought me jewelry. This is why it's so good that our main enemy North Korea has just a line of succession with just nothing but dictators and sons of dictators all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. And most of them seem to be cut from the old Udae cloth. Yeah. So, again, that's a trend, dictators being really close to their first daughter.

And that kind of brings us to Stalin, because Stalin adored his young daughter's fetlana. And we're going to get into Joseph Stalin as a doting father after this break. But first, we're going to break for something Stalin would have hated, ads, capitalism, songs of products. So by not skipping these ads, you're fighting Stalin, in a sense. Yes. Stick it to Stalin. Be a good American.

And several of the dictators on this list by listening to these ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Welcome to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

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podcasts. And we're back. Last we talked about Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein and their parenting tactics. And right now we are talking about Svetlana Stalin, the daughter to Joseph Stalin. She was born in 1926 after Stalin was already in power and he was kind of a doting father at first. Svetlana thinks it's because he reminded her of his mother. Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda, was a committed Bolshevik.

She was not big on child rearing. She never hugged her daughter. She never said a kind word to her daughter and she constantly gave Stalin shit for coddling their daughter. So in this relationship, Stalin was the cool parent. Right. Which Stalin was the laid back dude. He's the chill dad.

Right. Wow. Yeah. Stalin's wife did not fuck around, huh? No. She did not. Yeah. She wound up killing herself because she wasn't angry at how he wasn't communist enough

for her, basically. Really? That seems like why. We don't, I mean, we're not going to... That's how you want to fucking argument ladies. But anyway. So Stalin and his daughter had a cute little relationship. He would have her issue orders to him in writing and then he would respond, I obey.

He would sign notes as like the poor peasant Joseph Stalin, the secretary to my daughter. So that was cute. That is adorable. Yeah. They had a cute little thing. It didn't last. Stalin was always busy and a lot of what he was busy doing was disappearing people. So regularly her classmates would just not show up at school because their parents had

been exiled or executed. I think many had her classmates killed for like not being nice to his daughter. I suspect some of that might have happened, too. Just a lot of her schoolmates weren't there one day. And that kept on happening. From time to time, other classmates would give her notes to pass on to her father begging him to free their parents. Stalin hated this and told his daughter to not act as a post office box.

So that's a fun thing to put on your daughter's shoulder. Her relatives started to disappear, too. After Stalin's wife committed suicide, Stalin got rid of basically the mom's whole side of the family. So all of Svetlana's aunts and uncles. She didn't understand why this was happening and thought that it was just like a terrible mistake until she went to Stalin about it and he said, no, they knew too much. They babbled and it played into the hands of our enemies.

He knows how to talk to his daughter. Yeah. He's a good father. He's a good dad. He's a good dad. That's how you explain disappearing. Right. Yeah.

So in 1943, at the height of World War II, Svetlana fell in love with a young boy named Kapler. They had a brief romance and then Stalin found out. He became convinced Kapler was a British spy. He also wasn't wild about the fact that Kapler was Jewish. Svetlana said, you know, but I love him, dad. I'm going to quote from Svetlana's autobiography here. Love screamed my father with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey.

And for the first time in his life, he slapped me across the face twice. Take a look at yourself. Who'd want you? You fool. I was all around him. What? That's Stalin. Whoa.

There's a immediate drop off as she like gets to be a teenager in how sweet Stalin is. Yeah. And just the second she shows any interest in another man, that's so she's also a first daughter. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just interesting. We were just talking on the other podcast that I host, the Daily Zeitgeist today about

our president and his strange relationship to his first daughter Ivanka. Just how it doesn't seem like totally normal. Like they seem to have a very special bond. But yeah. That's the nice way to put it. Yeah. So he has sort of the same sort of relationship to his daughter, Stalin does, that like Scarface has to his sister.

It's like, yeah, man, he's really protective of her. Yeah. It's sweet up until another human being enters the picture and then it's like, oh no, this is bad. That's interesting that dictators can like not because they're clearly their love for their daughter is just a function of their narcissism. Right. Yeah.

But it's weird that it doesn't translate to their sons probably because they see their sons as just like a diminished shittier version of them. Yeah. It's me, but you know, you never had to struggle. You didn't grow up robbing banks for a living. Right. Right. And then there is just this, you know, perfect little thing that loved him and then she becomes

a person and he's very angry about it. Right. Yeah. So, you know, Stalin dies, spoiler alert. And after his death, Svetlana flees the Soviet Union. She becomes an American citizen in 67, but then comes back to the USSR in 84. But then she goes back to the US and then France and then finally England in 1992. Just on her, my dad was Stalin tour.

Well, yeah. She wrote two very popular books. I think one of them was a bestseller and they were apparently good books, like well-reviewed. So you might call her the best case scenario for like the kid of a monster from our perspective. Yeah. She wound up being a relatively successful person and, you know, spoke out against her dad the rest of her life. Whatever happened to the guy Kaplar that she fell in love with?

He went off to a gulag. Oh, got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah, specifically as ordered by Stalin or just because he was one of millions and millions of people who got swept up. I mean, he was one of millions and millions of people who got swept up. But Stalin, you know, I don't think it was unrelated to the fact that he was making

eyes at Stalin's daughter. And gulags were nice places, right? Yeah. Yeah, pretty chill. Let's not examine that any further. Right. They seem nice. It's a nice name.

It sounds like a good soup. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gulag. Oh, yeah, I love the gulag. That's eggplant, right? Yeah. My favorite fact about gulags is the Russian word for, Russian still has a word for this. It basically means man cow.

And it's a word that was created in the gulags for when you fatten somebody up who you're in the gulags with in order to, and then you plan an escape with them so that you can eat them as you're crossing the tundra. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. And Russian has a single word for that. Is that why you would cater all those really fat, heavy lunches when they were? No, no, don't worry about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Back to Castro's, oh, yeah, so this kind of brings to mind Castro's daughter, Alina, who had a very similar story to Svetlana. So she never really lived with her dad. Her mom was kind of one of Castro's side flings, but she grew up knowing she was Castro's daughter. Someone else knew she was Castro's daughter.

And like Svetlana, people would beg her to have her dad free their families from, you know, horrible slave camps and stuff. Castro wasn't as much of a dick about it as Stalin. I don't think he did anything when she asked him, but he wasn't like. Makes it kind of hard to be like, guys, I'm not just defined by my father when they're like, but he's killing my family, please. My father. Right.

So they didn't have a super close relationship, but Fidel did show up at her first wedding. And as he left, he told her, don't let me know when you get your divorce. And her response was, don't worry, I don't have your phone number. Nice. Like Svetlana, she fled her home country. She wound up in the United States. She wrote a book about her shitty dad and she started a radio show in Miami called Simply Alina, where she would talk shit about Castro every day.

Not Castro was my dad, it was just simply Alina. No, I think Castro was my dad was similar to her book's title. Right. Yeah. So that's interesting. You've got like two older daughters of dictators who follow basically the same path. Right. Rejecting their father, who clearly was into them for a weird reason, there's still hope

for you, Ivanka. Yeah, you can write up, but you could have a Simply Ivanka. Yeah. You could just get therapy. It would be interesting. I'm really interested to see what, as everybody who was associated with, well, we don't need to talk about politics, let's keep going with these crazy motherfuckers. Yeah.

Let's talk about Stalin's sons. So first props to Stalin. He spoiled his kids a lot less than most dictators. This is particularly true of his sons, Vasily and Yakov. So Stalin seems to have been kind of a true believer in some ways to the stuff he was, he was, you know, throwing out there. He didn't want his kids to get special treatment just because their dad was Stalin. When Vasily was 17, he joined a flight school.

His grades were terrible. His dad's employees helped him get into the school without, you know, Stalin's knowledge because they thought it might curry favor. They were probably disappeared for that because Stalin did not like that. He described his son as spoiled and average. When you're helping somebody get into a flight school and they're not good enough to get into a flight school, are you really doing them a favor or are you just sending them off to a fiery death?

Yeah. Or maybe other people. So Vasily tried to use his famous name to get privileges at flight school. Stalin found out and ordered that his kid not get any special treatment. I think he still did get some special treatment, but I think Stalin was pissed about it. Vasily was a rampaging drunk. In spite of that, he did manage to graduate flight school. He had a habit of drunkenly commandeering planes and then flying them while continuing

to drink. You would expect that story to end worse than it did, but apparently he never, like, accidentally 9-11ed anything. I like that 9-11's past tense is 9-11, first of all, but also, yeah. So he was like Denzel Washington's character in flight and he needed a couple pops to get him to be just the world's greatest pilot, and then he was like flying planes upside down. Is he a commercial pilot or what?

No, military. Military. So he is the commander. He is a colonel in charge of an Air Force regiment during World War II. For a little while, Stalin actually fired him very quickly and said this, Colonel Stalin is being removed from his post as regimental commander for drunkenness and debauchery and because he is ruining and perverting the regiment. So I mean, when he's drunkenly commandeering these planes, that's only a thing that is

possible if you're Stalin's kid, because everyone else, they just fucking shoot you between the eyes. Yeah, yeah. Stalin did protect his kids from being shot in the eyes. Yeah. If there's one thing you could say about that guy, yes, millions of lives lost, but actually Vasily got to drunkenly commandeer that plane. I should say he stopped two thirds of his kids from being shot in the eyes.

So Vasily lived to the ripe old age of 41 when he died of rampant alcoholism. He lasted longer than his brother Yakov. Damn. As far as I can tell, Yakov was actually a pretty solid dude. I haven't read about any specific crimes he committed. He did try to kill himself after a failed romance when he failed Stalin's only comment was he can't even shoot straight. Is the name Yakov in Russian spelled Jackoff?

I mean, I wrote it as Y-A-K, like it's written in Cyrillic. Well, it's neither, because you can spell it either way, because they use different letters. Proceed. Yeah. Yakov wound up on the Eastern Front during the Nazi invasion. He was captured by the Nazis. They offered to ransom him back to Stalin in exchange for the captured German Field Marshal

Paulus, but Stalin said it's not worth it to trade a general for a lieutenant. Stalin also had Yakov's family locked up after he was captured, because he'd issued a decree saying that the families of captured soldiers had to be punished, and he did not exempt his son's own family from that. So his son's own family was imprisoned. But that's like his wife or like some just his wife and kids. Some side piece. No.

It's his wife, I think. Let's get a wife and kids. So Yakov's family was also his family. Yeah. Sodom's grandkids and daughter-in-law he throws in prison because their dad gets captured by the Nazis. Oh, okay. Got it.

Yakov's. Yeah. And Yakov gets killed at the Saxon-Hausen concentration camp when he refuses an order from a guard to go do something. He just wasn't willing to take it anymore. The fact that he died this way is actually the only thing he ever did that Stalin approved of. Yeah.

So that's Stalin the dad in a nutshell. Wow. So was he shot by a German officer? Yeah. He was shot by a German while in SS Guard. Right. Basically the guy's like, it's time to go inside and Yakov's like, no fuck it, I'm just ready to die shooting me.

I want to keep playing. Yeah. Okay. And yeah. So that's how you get Stalin's approval if you were his son. Get shot by a Nazi. Way to go Yakov Stalin. Yeah.

And I feel like now is the right time to move on to another communist dictator, Nikolai Chichescu. He was the dictator of Romania from 1965 to 1989. As an authoritarian ruler, he ordered troops to fire on protesters, operated a vast and repressive secret police, and generally ran his country into the ground. He's the whole standard bingo for a European dictator in the 60s, 70s, 80s. And he's kind of middle of the pack as far as dictator dads go. So his wife was named Alina and they had two sons and one daughter.

His first son, Valentin, was initially meant to be the heir apparent, but Valentin didn't want to follow in his dad's footsteps. He declined the privilege of being the heir and instead became a nuclear physicist, which he still does today. Such a disappointment. So yeah, what a bummer. Kid just becomes a nuclear physicist, not a power hungry dictator. Valentin only abused his position a little bit.

He acquired a giant art collection and he had a side job helping to run the nation's best soccer team. But he was apparently pretty nice. Nobody had any complaints with him on the soccer team. Yeah, you know, the silly Stalin also had a soccer team or a hockey team or whatever. All these dictator kids get a sports team if they want them. Apparently, it's a lot of fun because it's what our richest people do. Right?

Yeah. The second they become billionaires, they buy a sports team. Yeah. Zoya Chechevsku was the middle daughter. Apparently Nikolai and Alina did something right because she also got a PhD. Hers was in mathematics. Yeah. Check out the big brain on the Chechevskus.

Now this is actually a problem because Nikolai's wife, Alina, the dictatorist, you could say, was kind of a giant piece of shit too. And her hobby was pretending to be a chemist. She loved to get honors from foreign universities for her pioneering work in chemistry. She had done no work in chemistry, but that was just her thing. It got her off to pretend she was a chemist. And she hated that her daughter was an actual scientist with actual accomplishments. Of course she would.

So when her daughter gets a PhD in mathematics, Alina kicks Zoya out of the presidential palace and makes her live in an apartment. As revenge, Zoya starts a new mathematics department at the institute she worked at and winds up in charge of it. She also starts smoking because her mom hates cigarettes. So this is like a mix of normal teenage rebellion and the kind of thing you can only do as a dictator's kid. Like I'm going to smoke cigarettes and start a new mathematics institute.

Right. Screw you, mom. Very smart. Yeah. She's a sexist, kid. Yeah, yeah. She's brilliant. She starts drinking heavily and having lots of sex with random people, like you do.

Alina didn't care about the sex so much, but she did order the secret police to watch her daughter and report on the boys she dated, which I assumed did not always end well for the boys. Yeah, seriously. And Zoya became a bit of a dissident. She made some friends with normal Romanians who were suffering under her parents' rule, and so she stopped using her family name and spoke out about terrible living conditions. But that really seems to have been more of a way to get back at her mom than out of a

real commitment to justice. When her parents were forced from power, Alina was arrested too. The troops that searched her house found it filled with jewels and art and cash. As they took her away, she asked the police if they had any room in the truck for her poodles. Since many Romanians were starving at this point, this did not play well. But Zoya and Valentin were both functional people who got legitimate jobs and high-level degrees.

They're success stories. The same cannot be said of Nikolai and Alina's youngest child, Niku. Since Valentin had chosen a life of the mind, Niku was seen as the Chichescu's best bet for establishing a communist dynasty. I'm going to quote children of monsters again here. From his mid-teens, Niku was an out-of-control drunk and a rapist. He raped at will, and his will was ferocious and unopposable. He had complete license.

He was the kind who could run red lights and kill people in the process with total impunity. So that's... That's old Niku. Yeah. When the United Nations named 1985 International Youth Year, Niku was picked to be the spokesperson of that whole thing. The United Nations picked him? Yeah.

He's the spokesperson of the International Youth. Yeah. Yeah. You got a medal. What's more youthful than running red lights and indiscriminate rape? He's a fun guy. Back in Romania, now with a medal, Niku drank, raped, and regularly got into car accidents. His best friend was Ude Hussain.

The pair would regularly meet up in Monaco in Switzerland and have that ooo sound in their name. Yeah. They just seemed like a perfect match. I bet they had fun in Monaco in Switzerland. They seemed like a good crew to party with. Yeah. You must be weird to get drunk with Ude when he can't machine-gun people.

Right. I wonder... Yeah. What does he do then? Yeah. He just goes around and pushes people under traffic or something. He just shoves people off of balconies. Right.

At one point, Niku got married. His mom had to force this on him because he was happier raping people indiscriminately. Right. But at his mom's urging, he eventually married a girl named Pollyanna. After the wedding, he told her, now go live with my mother. She should fuck you because she chose you. Wow. So that's some solid...

That was actually in my wedding vows as well. That's a beautiful sentiment. Beautiful sentiment. Yeah. The couple divorced not long after that. Aww. Yeah. So, during the revolution that kicked their parents out of power, Niku ordered troops

to massacre civilians in one Transylvanian town. His brother and sister didn't do much at all. They received eight-month sentences. Niku was given 20 years in prison. He was released after only three because his heavy drinking had killed his liver. He died at age 45, which means he lived a good four years longer than Vasily Stalin. I could probably fill two or three full podcasts with anecdotes of other dictator kids. I assume we'll do a follow-up at some point.

You know, there's the story of a Gaddafi son, Mutasin, who hired Beyoncé and ushered a play at private parties he would throw and spend $2 million a month of the government's money on his own. It's fun. But Mutasin also sounds like some sort of over-the-counter cough medicine. We're going to actually move on to another dictator's kid in a little bit, Nikolai Lukashenko, the small child with a golden gun. But first, we've got some advertisements to come back to, which again, advertisements

that would really piss off Nikolai Chichescu, because he was, you know, communist. So let's keep angering these dead dictators. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, we are back and I'm going to talk about Benito Mussolini, the lean man, and he actually seems to have been a decent parent in that his kids all grew up idolizing him even after his death. But he was a shitty parent in that his kids all became horrible fascists and his family

are still fascists today. He sent his son Vittorio to Hollywood in 1937 and Vittorio formed a company with Hal Roach, creator of the Little Rascals. Their collaboration was short-lived. Adorable. You can find a video online of Mussolini's son meeting all of the Little Rascals. For real? Yeah.

Does he have like a stiff sort of fascist demeanor about it? You know what I think he would have been a great... Does he kill any of them? No, but he would have been a great member of the cast. He's got Rascals charisma. I don't see why they didn't bring him back for the reboot in the 90s of the Little Rascals. That would have been what that was missing. But yeah, if you want to look that up online, you can see Mussolini's son and the Little

Rascals being adorable together. Mussolini's daughter, Etta, loved Hitler in the Nazis. In 1933, she joined Hitler and Goebbels and Goebbels' family at Lake Vance, which is where the Holocaust was planned, not during that meeting, but in that same location a couple of years later. They planned the Holocaust. Holocaust jokes aren't that funny, but the idea of Hitler planning it with a 10-year-old is really weird.

I think she was late teens, like 19 or 20 at this point. Oh, okay. So never mind. Not funny at all. Yeah, no. She called Hitler her uncle, though, and was, quote, always struck by his extraordinary kindness and affection toward me as well as his patience. Anki Hitler.

Anki Hitler. Yeah, in 1940, she said she was ashamed and disgusted that Italy hadn't yet entered World War II on the side of the Nazis. She said that she didn't force her dad to enter World War II, but she also said, quote, given my Germanophile sympathies, I was, without being aware of it, the link between the Führer and my father. I found it normal that two dictators should be allies, and this is all the more so, since as soon as he took power in 1933, I had begun to consider Hitler a veritable hero.

In the 30s, I'm just trying to get a sense of when Mussolini and Hitler were first on the scene. Is there a modern-day corollary for how the world viewed them? Would Putin be the closest thing we have? Putin might be the closest thing we have towards how Mussolini was viewed at the time. A lot of people thought he was a monster, but he was very popular. One of the things that's hard when you think about the 30s is that fascism was a legitimate political ideology at that point.

People thought it was dope. People thought, oh, no, this might be a reasonable way to run a country, so Mussolini was the senior partner between him and Hitler for a while. In the 30s, he was the big man, and Hitler was trying to impress him, and then obviously Mussolini went to shit, and his whole country went to shit. Whereas Hitler thrived. As far as I know, now I haven't read past 36, but I think it went pretty good. That guy's got something on the ball.

I feel like we got a lot—no, I probably shouldn't make those jokes about Hitler, but yeah. Edda had a husband named Siano, who wound up turning against Mussolini and being part of a plot to sort of overthrow him and pull Italy out of the war. Mussolini had him executed. He was forced to sit in a chair with other co-conspirators, tied to the chair, and then shot in the head. His Mussolini's grandchild, Fabrizio Siano, wrote a book in the 1990s titled, When Grandpa Had Dad Shot.

It's taking all I have to not say any of these names and insulting Italian and caricature. Fabrizio! There we go. You feel better? Yeah. Get a little bit of that pressure out. Mussolini's family is still very active in the Italian far right, which you'd think after their dad and his mistress being murdered in public and the country getting bombed.

They would have been like, oh, maybe that was a mistake. His granddaughter, Alessandra, is a member of the Italian Senate since I think 2011 and also a member of the European Parliament. In 2006, when Libya asked for reparations for Italy's colonization and brutal war against it, Alessandra said, quote, if it hadn't been for my grandfather, they would still be writing camels and wearing turbans on their heads. They should be paying us compensation. Being complete shit does not always skip a generation.

The Mussolini family just seems to be garbage. Maybe it did skip a generation and he had that generation shot in the head and this is the shitty generation again. Maybe the next generation will shoot the prior generation. The jury's pretty much in on fascism, isn't it? You would think so, but then everything that's happened in the last two years. Yeah. All right.

Let's talk about Qaddafi. Momar, Kh, freaking, Dafi. Kh, so you're a Q-man. Yeah, I'm a Q-man, I'm a Q-man. He has a weird record as a parent. Most dictators, he gave one of his sons a sport team. Saddi Qaddafi was the head of Libya's National Football Federation, but he was also the captain of his home team and the national team.

He played, too, and he was not good, but he benefited and his team benefited from the fact that referees weren't allowed to rule against him and also broadcasters weren't allowed to mention the names of any other players and games he played in. They would call out Saddi by name, but the other players they just give jersey numbers for the other players. If you were playing in a game and he was anywhere on the field, no one else's name could be mentioned. They'd be like, and the guy who Saddi passed two, three passes ago, passes to the guys.

They'd call their numbers out. Okay. But him on the field was just a number. Right. Yeah. Jesus. He did not have a lot of a sense of humor about his playing. There was a game in Tripoli where Tripoli was playing against their rivals, Benghazi,

and the Benghazi team dressed a donkey up in Saddi's jersey. Saddi, I mean, you want to guess how cool his reaction was? Pretty chill. He had the Benghazi stadium demolished and banned their team from playing. That's a lot. Yeah. He was kind of a dick. Kedafi's son, Mutasim, was allowed to hire famous international pop stars for his parties.

He hired Beyoncé and Usher and Mariah Carey, all of whom were apparently fine with taking a dictator's money to play at his birthday parties. When did the, because for some reason my brain was still in black and white from the Mussolini stories, when did he have that stadium demolished? Was that modern days? I think that was in the early 2000s. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

I've done all that. Oh boy. Yeah. It was pretty recent. It wasn't back in black and white days for sure. Yeah. Mutasim had Beyoncé play for him and stuff. He once counted that his lifestyle cost the Libyan government two million a month just

for him. He counted that? Yeah. Yeah. That was something he admitted freely to a friend. Proud of. Yeah. So you can imagine how expensive the whole family was.

Mutasim attempted a coup probably once in the 1990s. We don't know for sure, but he tried to overthrow his dad, we think. His dad exiled him for a little while and then welcomed him back as the national security advisor. Okay. So a little, yeah, you got to forgive your kids. You got to let them get that stuff out of their system. Yeah.

You know that. The military coup overthrowing him. Exactly. Your kids are going to, they're going to crash a car or something. You know, they're going to, going to smoke a little weed. You can't be too hard on them. You know, you kick them out to Europe for a while and then you make them your national security advisor.

No, I see they'll never get there because I already know my kids are plotting my overthrow and I just have it in the back of my mind at all times. Yeah. That's smart. You got to, you got to, it's like that old parenting saying you always, you know, for every kid you need a dozen secret police. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Most of our conversations begin with you think you're stronger than me. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's good. That's setting yourself up for success. That's right. You know, Hannibal was a sailor and so wound up in control of Libya's ports.

Hannibal Gaddafi. Come on. Well, Hannibal's a big name in that part of the world. Yeah. He's still a hero. Fucking baller. Yeah. Bad guy name.

Anytime your name's Hannibal. That's frightening. Um, uh, one of the things that's a general rule with dictator kids is that if you have like an interest like sailing, you'll wind up in charge of that for the whole country. So it's, he was like, oh, you like being on ships. Well, you're in charge of all the ports. In our port nation. Right.

You own the ocean now. Yeah. Uh, the upside of it is Hannibal was well educated and took his education seriously. At one point he was tutored by a European professor from Copenhagen. The book Children of Dictators quotes writer John Byrne as saying he was, this tutor who visited him was met by chauffeured cars, put up in a five star hotel and summoned for private sessions to Hannibal's home where gazelles and antelopes strolled around a garden. Pretty sweet gig if you're a tutor.

Uh, I can see like, I think that's more forgivable than like Beyonce because she doesn't need the money, but a college professor, you're going to take what you can get. Yeah. I guess like be creative with who you make rich. Yeah. Yeah. At least a college professor I feel better about than Beyonce getting more money to play for a dictator.

We're just one of the other destinies child. Yeah. Yeah. I would have been creative. Yeah. We, we've got a whole podcast on Children of Destiny coming up after this one. I guess it is children. I'm sorry.

Yeah. I feel stupid. Hannibal regularly found himself in conflict with the police, not Libyan police obviously because they would never get him in trouble for anything, but with European police. In 2001, he assaulted officers at the Hilton in Rome at 3 a.m. I'm going to quote from Children of Dictators here, quote, the officers had been guarding Hannibal's own room. He struck them with bottles and emptied a fire extinguisher on them for good measure.

He then pleaded diplomatic immunity as he would habitually do. In 2004, Hannibal led French police on a high speed chase through the center of Paris. He was drunk in his black Porsche doing 90 miles an hour on the Champs Elysees. He ran red lights. At one point, he went the wrong way. When the police finally stopped him, six of his bodyguards arrived in other cars and attacked the police, end quote. Attacked them like physically.

Yes. So, this is like that Afluenza case, but just on a global scale. Yeah. It's Afluenza when you actually are immune to prosecution because you have diplomatic credentials. So, you really can just plea diplomatic immunity. They're like guilty? Yeah.

Well, plea diplomatic immunity unlike diplomatic immunity. We control one of the biggest ports in the world, so what are you going to do? Our trade is a not insignificant part of your GDP. It's amazing that nobody just kills one of these guys, just like, it's just like, come on, you guys aren't going to care, right? I mean, some of them did get killed. Right. Yeah, but just like.

Butossum wound up getting killed right with alongside his dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Hannibal was a nightmare person. He beat his wife and his servants, but also his wife poured boiling water on her servants, so nobody's the good, nobody's good in this story. Yeah. And maybe the servants are okay. Yeah, the servants are probably decent people who are just trying not to get boiled.

After Gaddafi was deposed, information came out that Hannibal had ordered the building of a private cruise liner called the Phoenicia. It would have been big enough for 3,500 passengers. Hannibal had specified that he wanted it to include a 120 ton shark tank that could hold two sand tiger sharks, two white sharks, and two black tiff tip reef sharks. White sharks or great white sharks? Just white. Just white.

Just white. Not the great ones. He wasn't going to splurge. It's the companies, country's money, right? You don't want to go crazy. Right. Gaddafi did have one good kid. His name was Saif al-Islam, which literally means sort of Islam.

Saif refused to post in government and would regularly give interviews to the national press where he was critical of the Libyan government and his father. He was kind of very popular in the world media because he was calling out the Libyan regime. He would call for democratic elections. But when the civil war happened, he returned home to fight on behalf of his father. It's a real Godfather II situation. Yeah. I guess Godfather I.

Yeah, Godfather I. He was a good enough guy that he recognized shit was fucked up and he was willing to call it out, but when the chips were down, he defended his monster dad. In fact, he was the last Gaddafi standing in Libya as children of dictators puts it after everyone else was murdered or had fled the country to avoid getting murdered. Murdered in the street publicly. Yeah. Yeah.

And he was left over. Did he ever get murdered? As far as I know, I think he's still alive. I think he might be in custody right now. Two days after his dad was killed, he said that he was willing to fight to the end, but I think he's in custody right now. It makes you wonder knowing what we know about all these other children of dictators, it makes you wonder if this guy was the best human like ever because he managed to just be an

all right person. Yeah. It's rare, right? Like you've got some of the Castro's who were not terrible people. Right. Yeah, that's true. As far as we know, but like Castro didn't give them, I don't know, you know, he gave them like it's it's feel like he was kind of absentee or like a disinterested dad, maybe

like. Yeah, yeah. They were just fucked up by or like poorly parented into not being terrible, I guess. Yeah, like the best thing you can hope for is enough neglect and also that your dad doesn't give you too much responsibility. Yeah. And if that happens, then you won't like wind up in the worst case scenario you could wind up in.

Yeah. Yeah, no, he was a Seif was captured trying to flee Libya. He was in jail for five or six years. He was released in June of 2017 and a militia that had arrested him, chose not to transfer him to the International Criminal Court. And it looks like he's going to yeah, he says he's running for president. The UN backed Libyan government says he's running for president. He says he's going to but the UN backed government in Libya right now says that's not going to

happen. The ICC has a warrant out for his arrest. So I guess we'll see what happens. If he needs somebody to run his campaign, I mean, I think we just gave them the strategy. Just be like, did you see how shitty my siblings were? Like, come on. I feel like Bannon could make it. I mean, that makes you wonder, though, if like the whole speaking out against his father

thing was all it was an act from the beginning. Right. He is the great like the long con. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what do they call like the shit? The second coming of Satan is that Satan to electric. Satan to electric.

Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. I forget. Yeah. I feel like that's great deceiver or whatever. I feel like that's what's happening here. Yeah.

For sure. Like if I make myself seem like a good guy to the international press, then they won't have a big issue when I wind up taking over for my dad and his dad was like, well, he's the only kid I have who's not a complete fuck up. Right. So he'll definitely take over and it's fine that he's going to critique me a little bit. Right. Antichrist.

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm about to talk about my boy, Nikolai Lukashenko. So Nikolai is the son of Alexander Lukashenko, who is known as the last dictator in Europe. He's the president of Belarus. I should probably add that people called him the last dictator in Europe before Putin was

as clearly a dictator as he is now, but yeah, we'll stray away from politics here. Coming back, baby. Yeah. So Nikolai Lukashenko started being groomed to Ruel Belarus when he was six years old, which is I guess the age when you start that training. I assume some of this involved a thorough education and military training and all that stuff, but a lot of the time his dad just seems to use him as a prop to embarrass world leaders.

At the age of seven, he'd posed Nikolai with the Pope, Hugo Chavez, and the president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, gave him an actual golden handgun. He apparently still wears it because when he met Chavez again in 2012, he reached his hands up to high five him and his suit coat slid back to reveal a giant, stupid golden handgun. And I got to drop you some pictures here. So these are all going to be up on the website, all the pictures at BehindTheBastards.com. Here's Nikolai Lukashenko receiving his giant golden handgun, and there it is in his little

suit, just always clearly packing heat. He's still a child. He's 13 now. Wow. And he still has a golden handgun that he carries everywhere. There's the picture of him with Chavez. And this is a working handgun. Yeah, it's a functional gold-plated handgun.

Jesus Christ. He's like, my man. Yeah. What else do you give a kid? What do you give the kid who has everything? A golden gun. I like that he's slapping Hugo Chavez up five instead of like shaking his hand or cowering in fear.

He's a hip dictator in training. And apparently gets to carry a gun everywhere. Yeah. Which? Golden gun. I mean, what 12-year-old wouldn't do that if they had the chance? Nothing says mad with power, like golden handguns. Yeah, he's joffering pretty hard in all those pictures.

Yeah, you don't find a whole lot about Nikolai's personality because, you know, Belarus is a pretty closed country. But I'm sure he's going to turn out just great. He's been chosen to represent Belarus at the United Nations General Assembly. He's taken pictures with the Obamas and basically every other world leader who winds up near him. As of right now, he's aged 13. And yeah, we don't know much about him, but I'm optimistic that he will not be a drunken

mass rapist. Yeah. So am I. If I've learned anything today, it's that I want that guy to marry my daughter if I ever have one. So yeah, he seems like he's going to be well balanced. Yeah, he seems like that. It seems like that's going to go well.

So why does his dad bring him everywhere? Because he thinks it's funny to make heads of state pose with him? It's kind of impossible to tell. I feel like some of it's that because Belarus has been condemned by a bunch of different countries, including us through, you know, nightmarish human rights violations, jailing political opponents. So I think it kind of tickles him to make someone like Barack Obama pose with him and his little kid who's the dictator and waiting.

But I think some of it's training like he wants to establish like a Kim style dynasty. Got it. Got it. In Belarus. And so he's sort of positioning his kid. And so there's there's like two messages in making a six year old, your era parent. One of them is, you know, obviously getting people ready for this guy to be in charge, but the other is like, well, he's six.

So I'm going to be around for a long time. Right. I'm going to be free of Alexander Lukashenko anytime soon. Right. And my kids packing a golden gun if anybody has a problem with it. Yeah. Of course. So yeah, I want to end this podcast by talking about Hitler's son.

Now, I didn't know Hitler had a son. He almost certainly did not. But there is one man who spent most of his life believing he was Hitler's son, even though he never met the man. So his story is worth telling. This guy, Jean-Marie Loré, was born right at the end of World War One. He grew up without a dad, just knowing that his father was a random German soldier because the Germans had occupied his village for most of, you know, that war.

He lived a pretty normal life during World War Two. He fought against the Nazis as a member of the French resistance. But then in 1950, when his mom was on her deathbed, she told him that when she was 16, she'd had an affair with Hitler. Jean-Marie had been conceived during a, quote, tipsy night with the future Fuhrer in June of 1917. This is a quote from Jean-Marie, quoting his mother, saying, I was cutting hay with the other women when we saw a German soldier on the other side of the street.

He had a sketch pad and seemed to be drawing, so checks out so far. All the women found this soldier interesting and wanted to know what he was drawing. They picked me to try to approach him. They wound up starting a relationship, and Jean-Marie was born the next year. Is cutting hay a euphemism for something, or they were just legitimately cutting hay? I mean, this is some, like, peasant shit going on there. Right. That is adorably peasant.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. According to Jean-Marie's mom, she and Hitler would often go on walks while she was pregnant. The walks usually ended badly, quote, in fact, your father, inspired by nature, launched into speeches which I did not really understand. He did not speak French, but ranted in German, talking to an imaginary audience, so... Sounds like Hitler.

Yeah. I mean, sounds like the one thing you would know about Hitler if you... So, when was this? This was during World War II? During World War I. During World War I. Yeah. World War I is when this kid's conceived.

Got it. Because he fights the Nazis as a young man. Got it. Because he's just like a French kid. So, most reputable historians say Philip probably wasn't Hitler's kid. A blood test didn't rule it out, though, because they have the same blood group. And his mom had a Hitler painting. And there's another painting of Hitler's that looks like it's a painting of her that

someone else had. An original Hitler? An original Hitler. Yeah. So, maybe... There's... Yeah. It's not impossible.

So, did we have this guy's bloodline snuffed out or what we did? What's going on? We're getting to that. Okay. So, Jean-Marie Groot, believing he was Hitler, or from the age 30, believed he was Hitler's kid. Yeah. And he claimed that at first he was horribly depressed and he would just work all day every

day in order to not be overwhelmed with sadness. He says for 20 years he couldn't even go to the movies because any time spent not productively it would just like grip him and consume him. He didn't tell anyone for almost 30 years until in 1979 he walked into a lawyer's office and said, quote, I am the son of Hitler, tell me what I should do. Which great day to be that lawyer. Why did he think that was a legal matter? Well, he never makes much of a point of it in the interviews of him I read, but there's

always talk about like, well he might be entitled to the royalties for mine camp. Right. Yeah. That's fair. He did wind up writing a book about his experience as maybe Hitler's kid and as the years went on and the scientific battle to prove his claims was waged, Jean-Marie sort of leaned into being Hitler. He changed his look to match the fewer and he definitely looks hitlery.

I mean, all you need is a mustache. This is him posing next to a picture of Hitler that he keeps in his house. That will do it. He's got the stash and that's all you need. Yeah, he grew the mustache and he kept Hitler pictures around on his walls so that when journalists came over they could catch a picture of him looking just like Hitler. It's also important that you not be smiling in your picture. You can't look like Hitler while smiling.

No, you don't see a lot of smiling Hitler pictures. So yeah, he seems to have gone from ashamed and horrified of his lineage to weirdly proud. Here's a quote from him, Hitler is my family. It's not my fault that I ended up as his grandson or that all those things happened during the war, those things I think being the holocaust. What he did has nothing to do with me, which that's fair. He will always be family for me. That's weird.

Yeah. I don't think evil passes on. Of course, qualities from your parents pass on to you, but you build your own life and you make it what it is. Up until the end of his days, Jean-Marie Loré continued to insist that he was proud of being Hitler's son. So that's weird. He is wearing a smart little sweater tie number there.

Yeah, it kind of gives you an idea of what Hitler retired might have looked like. That's exactly right. So this is not the end of the story because Jean-Marie had a son, Philippe, who worked as a plumber for the French Air Force. Really? That's apparently a job the Air Force needed. As Hitler would have wanted it. Just like Hitler would have loved.

He says, I want you to deal with French soldier shit. So in recent years, Philippe has opened up about his belief that he is the grandson of Adolf Hitler. From him, we get quotes such as, my father said Hitler was a good lover and was gentle to my grandmother, but apparently he was a jealous person and did not like other men giving her the eye. As far as I know, he never had any sexual perversions. I don't want to make him out to be more of a monster than he is, which is weird of all

of the things, rather than just being like, yeah, I think I'm Hitler's grandson, but it doesn't mean I'm a bad guy. You're like, I think I'm Hitler's grandson and my grandpa was good at sex. What a strange, weird hill to die on. It's not like Hitler is known for not being good at sex or being good at sex. Either way, it's a very strange, I hear he was a gentle lover. All right, see you guys later. It's a weird thing to just drop on a journalist.

My favorite thing about this story is the way Jean-Marie apparently informed his kids, including Philippe, that they might be Hitler kin. One evening, they're all seated around the dining room table when, quote, suddenly my father said, kids, I've got something to tell you. Your grandfather is Adolf Hitler. Wow, you really built up to that. He had a lifetime to write that speech and was just like, oh, shit, I almost forgot. Yeah, Hitler's your granddad.

Yeah. So, Philippe also expressed a weird sort of pride in his possible ancestry, and he, too, keeps pictures of Hitler on his wall, seemingly so photographers can take photographs that show off the clear resemblance. It's the same picture as his dad took. I mean, his mustache is a little less hitlery. His mustache is just a mustache. He does have two framed photographs on his wall, both of Hitler.

One of them is a drawing, but this is very strange. They look like they are in frames where you would have family pictures. Yeah, just Hitler right on his back wall. Like his dad, seems to be making some effort to look hitlery. And with that casual laid-back Hitler vibe, he has his one hand on his wrist, just kind of doing a, hey, just chilling at Hitler the third's dining room. Yeah, I can see the resemblance. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's not impossible that they're actually Hitler's kids. It's just weird to me the impact that just thinking you've got this guy as your relative has on you. Yeah. It's also interesting to me that so many of those other kids, the ones who weren't garbage, like as soon as they were old enough to realize what their dad was doing, like fled the country and got out. But these guys, once they think like, oh, my dead granddad might have been Hitler, they

just go whole hog into looking like Hitler. Being like, hey, Hitler wasn't that bad. He was a good lover at the very least. He was a gentle lover. Yeah. Say what you will about all that stuff that happened during the war, Hitler could fuck. And he was my grandpa, the end. I think that's the name of his book, Hitler Could Fuck, and he was my grandpa.

Man, but what a romantic that Hitler was. Yeah. Well, this has been a whirlwind. Yeah. I've learned a lot about what to do as a parent from these stories. Yeah. Any lessons you want to take back home with you? Just, yeah, burn their belongings while laughing maniacally is kind of one of the first things.

Solid parenting. That puts them in their place. Uday really kind of found his place after that, it sounds like. Jesus, man, what a nightmare. Yeah. Oh, boy, that's a fun tale. Yeah. Yeah, I still feel like having gone over all of this, like my initial conclusion was right

that Fidel was probably the least garbage of all these parents, but they were all pretty terrible. Right. Yeah. Like not a lot of good cases here. Yeah. So. Yeah.

Being a strong leader, maybe that's a lesson for all of us parents to learn. Like the tendencies that lead to dictatorship don't lead to good parenting. Yeah. Authoritarianism isn't a good thing to bring out in a parent. Generally not. Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know, maybe the Obama kids will wind up carrying out a brutal purge campaign

against the Trump family and murder their political enemies. So. We're not going to talk about how we would feel about that, but yeah. I bet the Obama girls are going to end up just fine. Yeah. I suspect they'll wind up better than we already know the Trump kids have held out. I'm really curious about Barron. Yeah.

Barron could be very interesting. Ivanka, I mean, come on. She's an all star. She's a star, you guys. How long do you think it isn't before Putin gives Barron a golden gun? It's coming, man. All right. Well, Jack, you got anything to plug?

I hear you have a podcast these days. I do have a podcast these days, almost definitely on the day you're listening to this unless it's weekend. We just released an episode. It's called The Daily Zeitgeist. We talk about whatever's happening right now on a daily basis. I host it with my co-host, Miles Gray, and we have a third comedian on and it's a lot of fun.

You can find it wherever fine podcasts are given away for free. And you should try and get Hitler's grandson to come on. Yeah. That would actually be awesome. Yeah, I'm sure you'd have a fun pronunciation of the word Zeitgeist. Yes. Oh, yeah. And you can follow me at Jack underscore O'Brien on Twitter.

Well, this has been Behind the Bastards and I am and have been Robert Evans. If we haven't in this episode gotten to a dictator that you particularly wanted to hear about in their parenting strategies, that's okay. There's a lot of dictators who had kids. They were all terrible. They didn't even get into pop a doc and baby doc. So this is going to be a reoccurring feature throughout the podcast. We'll be checking back in with other dictator parents and their kids, talking about how

that's going. And you know, so if you've got a dictator parent you want to hear about, maybe drop us an email and we'll, what is our email? So if you've got a dictator kid or a dictator parent you want to hear about, maybe tweet it at us and we'll make sure that one gets into the next episode we do on this topic. Until then, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and social media at at bastards pod. You can find us on the internet.com at behind the bastards.com. And you can find us next Tuesday with another episode of behind the bastards.

Until then, I'm Robert Evans. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. And our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.