Behind the Bastards - Part One: Basil Zaharoff: The Man Who Sold World War One

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Robert is joined by Teresa Lee to discuss Basil Zaharoff, The First Great Arms Dealer.FOOTNOTES: Man of Arms: The Life and Legend of Sir Basil Zaharoff Men Of Wealth: The Story Of Twelve Significant Fortunes From The Renaissance To The Present Day  Arms Race prior to 1914, Armament Policy A scandal of international proportions comes out of the vaults The Mysterious Mr. Zedzed: The Wickedest Man in the World The Soviets and Tsarist Debt ZACHARIA BASILIUS ZACHAROFF 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 America and the rest of the world. I'm Robert Evans and this is yet another terrible introduction for the podcast that exists that you're listening to. And it's called Behind the Bastards and About Bad People. And that's the introduction. Sophie, do you think that's a keeper?

I mean, honestly, better than some of the ones you've done in the last couple weeks. Well, I'll have to correct that and make it worse in the future. Last episode he just goes, Hitler! Oh my god. Well, my guest today, who you're hearing from, is Teresa Lee. Teresa. What's up? How's it going? How are you doing, Teresa?

But you're not. I can see you on a screen. I am not. This is cool. I'm in the East Coast, which is terrible. And it knows it. In general, you just hate the East Coast. Yeah, I mean the West Coast. West Coast?

Yeah, exactly. We're all West Coast elites on this podcast. Yes, elite with the three. How do they do the Haxer elite? No, seven, three, three, whatever. Don't at me. Yeah. Teresa, you and I worked together for a number of years at a website called Cracked,

where we were East or West Coast elites together. And now you have a podcast called You Can Tell Me Anything, which I've guested on once. Is there anything else you'd like to announce right now? You also are professionally funny, which I think is pretty cool. There's a really cute dog named Wushu, who's friends with Anderson. She has an adorable dog. I do have a dog.

Sure, besides being professionally funny, I'm not never funny if you not pay me, by the way, but I have a short film, so yeah, if you guys want to check it out, it's called I Think She Likes You. It came out about a month ago, but it's still out there, and it can never spread the word too much, considering we have no marketing money. But it's on YouTube. YouTube.com slash I Think She Likes You. Well, I'm going to ask my listeners right now to do guerrilla marketing for your show. Go spray paint an MTA station, burn down a wealthy person's house,

and please don't do that. Do you have some problem with me urging people to commit crimes on your behalf, Teresa? Is that something you don't like? Please do not commit crimes on my behalf. Please don't commit crimes on anyone's behalf. And, you know, just stay in school. Cool. Teresa's saying that to be polite.

This podcast is very pro-crime. Okay, cool. Get out there. Break some laws. Break some random laws. Go J-Walking. It's a good time. It's safe.

Yeah. Do a blindfold. Definitely do that. Yes. Yeah. That's the competitive version of J-Walking. Competitive J-Walking. Yeah.

Yeah. The judge is the ER doctor who sees you. Teresa, have you ever heard of Basil Zaharoff? I don't think so. Wait. Is it the last name again? Zaharoff. Z-A-H-A-R-O-F-F.

No. That was me buying time to try to think of an answer. But no. I'm going to just go with no. And you know what? If that sounds so, that's okay. It's not. I had never heard of this guy until I started researching.

Until like right before I started researching him. He's a fascinating figure. He has more nicknames than I think almost any historical figure I've ever studied. He was called the merchant of death, the armaments king, the mystery man of Europe. A whole bunch of them. Out of those three, the mystery man of Europe really just doesn't hold up to the others. That sounds like a draft's nickname. Yeah.

It was in somebody's Google like a saved email. Yeah. It sounds like when you text your friends to be like, what do you think? And they're like, no. Yeah. Well, he didn't choose his nicknames, but he did choose his career. And the things he did in his life are why, so this guy was the inspiration behind one of James Bond's early villains, the head of Spectre.

So like one of the first Bond villains, like it was directly inspired by this guy. And he was basically a Bond villain. This is going to be a different episode than a lot because a lot of what I'm going to tell you today are lies because this guy told so many lies about his background that nobody knows for certain a lot of things. The dude we're talking about today is, in short, the guy who invented the international arms industry. Wow.

Yeah. So this is like the guy who figured out like selling guns to multiple, like different countries as like an international business. He's like one of the very first. Like there were a couple of other people at the same time, but like he's the brilliant mind behind the arms industry. You could call him like the father of the military industrial complex. So that's our dude today.

Are you a fan of the international arms trade? No. Are you a fan of the international arms trade, Theresa? You know, I'm usually fan of international things, but in this case, I have to say hard no. So your podcast is not currently sponsored by Raytheon? You know, I haven't checked, but I'm going to guess no. I don't think we're sponsored by a mass weapons distributor, but you know, I guess we can still

surprise, I don't know. Things can surprise you. If you're listening Raytheon, opportunity here, you could get, you could sell a lot of drones. A group of comedy slash therapy fans who might be interested in buying mass weapons of mass destruction. I mean, I, I happen to know, Theresa, that your podcasts have a lot of fans who are the potentates of small Eastern European nations.

So yeah, that's a, there might be some sales in there. Yeah. So, Prince Zacharias Basilius Zacharoff was born in a small town in Anatolia, which is like Turkey, on October 6th, 1849. He's a Libra. There are very few. Yeah, he's a Libra. There you go.

That's two in a row. They love, yeah. So there, there aren't a whole lot of set facts about his early life, but I called him a prince at the start and he absolutely was not a prince. We know for a fact that he was in no way a prince, but he would lie about being a prince his entire life. Not even by marriage? Not, not even by marriage.

Okay. Yeah. His parents were Greeks and they'd spent most of the mid 1840s fleeing political instability as Greece fought for its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Since they were living in the Ottoman Empire for most of their lives, identifying as Greek was not an entirely safe move, so they changed the family last name from Zachariah DCs to Zacharoff, so that they could pretend to be Russians. So from an early age, his parents are like, tell everybody we're fucking Russian.

Don't let them know we're Greek. Yeah. So that's cool. Hidden as Russians, the Zacharoffs wound up living in a town named Mughla in the Anatolian Peninsula. Today, we would call it Turkey, but they didn't then. Zachariah was named after his grandfather and he lived in Mughla until he was three when his family decided Constantinople was a safe enough city to move to.

All of this part is probably pretty accurate, but Zacharoff would spend the rest of his life trying to obscure even these very basic details of his upbringing. As an old man, he told a teenage girl that he wanted to fuck this. Quote, also he, yeah, he's that guy. Okay. Quote, my father was Russian. It's one of these episodes. Okay, go.

I mean, he's a rich old arms dealer. Of course, he's going to try to have sex with children. Oh, no. Quote, my father was Russian and my mother was Greek of the Byzantine family of Desbracinos. In another interview published during the same time, though, he told a journalist. I was born in Anatolia. My father was a Polish origin. My mother was French with 11 teen strain.

So everyone who talked to him, he would tell a different story about where his parents came from, what his upbringing was. He was just like one of those people who lied habitually about every single aspect of their lives. I feel like with that, a lot of times you think, oh, there must be some massive secret. But in general, it's just because the truth is so boring or so uninteresting that they're just trying to obscure it. Yeah. You know, I think it often starts with people who just like because the truth is so boring

and they don't want to be boring, but some of those people wind up living very interesting lives. And I guess if you have this combination of lying about everything and having an interesting life, that's what it takes to be an international man of mystery. Sure. Sure. Sure. I can see that.

Yeah. And also, yeah. Which is why I lied about my upbringing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I followed this blueprint my entire life. I mean, none of you even know I'm Canadian. Yeah, I kept that. Yeah. I've never even seen your face. I don't know what you look like. No. No, I always wear a mask.

It's one of those president masks. Yeah. So, though Zacharoff would later claim to have grown up poor, he did not. That was another lie. His family was comfortably middle class and he attended very good schools. His mother was blind and after school, she made her son repeat all of his lessons for that day to her, which he claimed is how he sharpened his memory. His dad was in the business of importing something called Atar of Roses, which I think is basically

a fancy rose scented essential oil. He had to boil like 250 pounds of rose petals to get a single ounce of the liquid, so it was very valuable. Wow. He traveled a lot for work and his family traveled with him. One of Zacharoff's sisters was born in England and the time abroad gave him an early experience with foreign languages and cultures. So, he, again, lies about the number of languages he can speak the rest of his life and says

it's like 14 or something ridiculous, but he was a polyglot and he gets experience around the world from a young age. So, there are rumors that when Zacharoff was young, a wealthy family offered to pay his tuition to an English school in the capital. These rumors usually end with allegations of that wealthy family's Masonic connections because this guy shows up in a lot of conspiracy theories. You'll find him in a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, even though he was not Jewish because a lot of people are convinced he was Jewish because he was an arms dealer that spoilers

helped lead the world into World War I. So, yeah. That's a fun one. Oh, no. Sounds like these other people have to work through their issues. Yeah. I mean, if you're any kind of important and any kind of shady, racists will decide that you must secretly be Jewish.

Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. It is cool. That's exactly what it is, Teresa. It's cool. So, yeah, there's rumors that like, yeah, this wealthy Masonic family paid for him to go to a fancy school for shady reasons. The reality is that he probably attended this English school in Constantinople for free

because all of the English schools in the city were run by churches and people didn't like the churches because they were Muslim and not Christian. And so, the churches were always empty and would give free schooling to people just to keep him full. So, that's probably how he was able to go to a good school. So, Zaharoff nursed an early love of England regarding it from the beginning as the one nation that could help him establish the kind of career that he wanted to have. One version of his background suggests that as an adolescent, he made his way over to

England and attended a mid-level British boarding school. He claimed the other boys made fun of him for his foreign-sounding name. And so, he adopted his middle name, Basil, as his new first name. He also says that he learned how to box so he could punch anyone who made fun of him. So, that's, yeah. Sounds like a healthy way to cope with anger. Yeah, I mean, people make fun of you. You learn how to punch.

That's healthy. That's the word for it. Did Todd Phillips write this guy's life note? Yeah. Robert, that was a joker joke. I think it was an inspiration for Todd. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah, this is, actually, this is like the opposite of that story. Okay, so cool. Sorry, I'm totally distracting you. Okay. Yeah. So, there are some reasons to believe this version of the story because he did know a lot about English culture and knew a lot about boarding school culture in England. But people who later looked through the records of all of those schools, there's no evidence

that he actually attended any of them. The other more legendary version of this guy's life story is that when he was an adolescent, his family fell on hard times and he was forced to take the streets of Constantinople to hustle his way to get enough money to pay for an education. These rumors will claim that he worked as a brothel tout. Was the term at the time? What? You know what a brothel tout is?

I can guess. Is it a guy who goes, is it like a person who barks people into a brothel like, hey, we got sex tonight. Come on in. You knew that. I remember sex like that. Yeah. Okay, cool.

That's exactly what it is. Wow. I should do that. You know a lot about brothels. Yeah. They have people. That's so sad. Barking into comedy shows is the worst thing and then to do it for a brothel sounds just

like, do they need that? I feel like people like sex, right? Yeah, but they don't always know where the sex is, right? True, true. And they don't know what time it happens. Maybe there's a lot of competition. Maybe the door's open for the sex. You got to know.

Oh, there's fucking now? Oh, great. You don't want to come early, you know. And for, you know, that was not meant to be pun, but that, now it is. Okay. No, but it was. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, so he was a brothel tout. Yeah, so he's a brothel tout. And like, you'll find a lot of like, kind of poorly written and poorly researched articles about him that will claim he got to start as a pimp. And it's just because people haven't heard of a brothel tout, like it was way lower level than a pimp. Like, he was not getting a cut of these girls' money, he was getting paid to basically stand on the street and shout out the prices of different women in the brothel.

You can fuck this, but yeah, a dollar to, I don't know, I don't know what brothel prices were like in Constance. I hope it's more than that. I don't know. I mean, that was a lot of money back then. Sure. Hard-working person ought to be able to afford a brothel. So, yeah, it was the kind of job that probably would have made a lot of sense for someone like Basil,

because he was very cultured, he spoke a lot of languages, he was very charming, tall and handsome. He's the kind of person you would want to be doing that job. He was good at talking people into things. He worked as a money changer too, and as a tourist guide. But he didn't find his first true calling until he got involved in the noble profession, a firefighting. Oh. Now, that sounds like, normally a great thing to do, right, working as a firefighter, one of the most noble professions you can embark upon.

That was not his job in the fire department. His job was starting fires. What? So, in this period of time, the Constantinople Fire Brigade was basically a mafia, and in order to make money, they would burn down the houses of rich people, and then basically solicit bribes to go get their valuables out. So, they'd be like, oh, your house is on fire. That's a shame.

Be good if somebody went in there and rescued your nice shit, and gets paid. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's dark. Were firefighters not provided, were these bribes the way you bribe police, but it's still shady, or were firefighters the private industry where you have to pay them to come? No, no, no, these were public employees. Wow, could you imagine that they privatized the fire industry? Yeah, this would happen again, that's why you don't do that.

Yeah, that's the thing with all the fires that were going on in California, like rich people hired firefighters. So, this is like, there's a long history of this. Marcus Licenius Crassus, who is a Roman and considered to be one of the wealthiest men in the ancient world, made a lot of his fortune by operating the fire department in ancient Rome, which was a private enterprise, and charging people while their houses were on fire to put the fires out. Yeah, so, running firefighting companies was like a thing that you would do

if you were a real piece of shit for a very long time, because the governments didn't do fuck all. Yeah, it's awesome. But his job, so Basil was not putting out fires, he would start them. Okay. Which is like the easiest part of that gig, really. Like, I think I would have been very good at this job. Yeah.

In 1865, a major fire tore through Constantinople, destroying 8,000 homes, 20 mosques, five churches, and numerous businesses. Roughly a quarter of the city was burned down. 20,000 people were rendered homeless and an unknown number were killed. The Ottoman government responded with a vicious crackdown, arresting and trying and hanging numerous perpetrators. It is impossible to know if Zaharov had anything to do with this, but his friends on the fire brigade later noted that he fled the city

immediately afterwards and stayed away for five full years. Seems guilty. Maybe. So here's the thing. There's, again, as I said, there's different versions of all of this, and it's entirely possible that he fled the city because he committed a totally different series of crimes. True.

Because he was, yeah, always climbing. And I'm going to read you to you about what those crimes were in this quote from the book Man of Arms, which is a biography of Zaharov. In his late teens, it is generally accepted, a maternal uncle, Sebastopoulos, offered him a job in his cloth business in the busy Galata district by the port. The merchant was delighted with his astute and aspiring relation, and for two or three years, everything went well.

Then suddenly and mysteriously, the young man vanished, and for several years, all trace of his career vanished with him, conveniently creating one of those vacuums in his life, which legend so avidly filled. One tale had it that he absconded with his uncle's cash, was caught and sent to a prison from which he made his escape. It was even hinted that he had taken the life of a warder of a guard in this bid. The least sensational view was that he had committed some misdemeanor,

but had managed to flee abroad with the proceeds to embark on a new career under another name. So either he got in trouble for burning down a quarter of the city, had to flee, or he stole all of his uncle's money, and had to flee, and it's also possible that he went to jail for stealing his uncle's money and then murdered a cop and had to flee.

All of those things are possible. We don't know which is true. Or any of them. It might have been something totally different. That's the frustrating thing about writing about this guy. Yeah, it's like really impossible to know what actually happened, and Basil himself only deepened the mystery by saying shit like this to interviewers later in life. Quote, I have been lucky all my life. If I hadn't been, I should have been murdered long ago,

or I'll serving a life sentence in some prison. So he would drop little lines like that just to keep the mystery alive. So there's some buried bodies in his past that have not been found? There are a lot of buried bodies in his past that everybody saw, because that's kind of the benefit of being an arms dealer, is you can get a lot of people buried and you're just doing your job. True. It boosts in those Q4 numbers, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I feel like his Q4 numbers... His hair just for me, because all her jokes are killing me. Robert, why aren't you his funniest dreams? I think it's because he's on a screen, so then I feel more compulsion to say things, but then they feel more, what's it called, non-sequitur. So I will, and then Sophie's across from me, so she's laughing at me.

But I am paying wrapped attention, Robert. You're paying very close attention, that's good. So he lied, okay. He lied all, everything he ever said is a lie, and we don't know what he did. These are the different stories. He may have been a prostitute, Barker, and then an arsonist who fled the country. He may have stolen all of his uncle's money, might have murdered a cop, who knows. By the early 1870s, though, we know that Zaharoff had made it to Great Britain,

and we know this to a point of certainty because he almost immediately got arrested in a massive legal trouble over there, and there are thankfully court records. So this is the shit we absolutely know happened. During his travels to England, he met a young woman named Emily Burroughs, who was the daughter of a Bristol-based businessman. And depending on which version of history you believe, Basil was either living off money stolen from his uncle, or living there off money given to him for commodity speculation

by a number of businesses back in Constantinople. Either way, when he meets this woman, Emily, he succeeds in passing himself off as a very wealthy foreign man, which he was not. But he was charming, and he had a nice suit, and no one had the internet, so he was able to get away with these lies. Emily falls in love with Basil, he proposed to her, and in short order, the couple were married in Paris. They quickly returned back to England to repeat the marriage ceremony in front of her family.

Years later, Emily's niece, Henriette, recalled that this second ceremony was, quote, planned in a great rush, my aunt seemed agitated about something. She wanted to wait a little longer, but Basilius was pressing her to marry him. So, Anthony Allfrey, one of Basil's biographers, suspects that she might have been nervous because she hadn't told her parents about the first marriage that they'd had in Paris, but it's also possible that she'd started to suspect that her new beau might be a con artist, because he absolutely was. On the marriage register, he listed his name as Zacharias Gortzikov,

which was a reference to Prince Michael Gortzikov of Russia. So, he was claiming to be a Russian prince to this woman, that's why he's, yeah. He claimed that his dad, a rose oil salesman, was a high-ranking Russian general, and Basil himself claimed to be a general. And it's entirely possible that Emily didn't even know that her new husband had grown up in Constantinople and believed him to be a full-blooded member of the Russian nobility. For his part, Basil's interest in Emily probably had less to do with love than real estate. She was four years older than him, and her wealthy father was somewhat desperate to marry her off.

So, he'd set her up in a fashionable apartment right off of Belgrave Square in Bristol. Now, Basil was very much taken with her high-class home, and he wanted to live there himself. Unfortunately, once the two were wed, Emily's father started pushing for them to move back to the family home in the country. Basil resisted this because he was marrying this woman for her nice apartment. Yeah. So, yeah, for a little while, they lived very well together in that nice apartment. But that was not to last very long. And in a little bit, Teresa, I'm going to tell you what happened next. How Zaharov got arrested and how his first time in court went.

But first, you know who won't lie to women and claim to be a Russian prince? Who? Raytheon. No. They will make a missile that's nothing but knives to assassinate people in Afghanistan and Yemen, but they will not pretend to be a Russian prince to romance a wealthy British woman. I mean, they would if they could, but Raytheon is notoriously bad at faking a Russian accent. That's one thing everyone knows.

So, we're off to ads. Uh, here we go. 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. 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. 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 in nasty sharks. 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. We're back. The podcast returns. The ads are done. So I'm going to read another quote from the book Man at Arms about the early days of Basil's ill-fated marriage to Miss Emily.

In Hill Street they remained, the bogus boy or Miss Greenslade recalled who is this woman's like niece years later, accompanying himself on the piano and entertaining his wife and her niece with talk of life on the steps and the gay goings on in the court of St. Petersburg. The idol lasted little more than a month, then, sent in trouble, perhaps alerted by news from Constantinople. Zaharov persuaded his wife that it was imperative they leave the country. He gave the impression that he was engaged in important diplomatic missions for the Russian government and had acquired enemies who, abetted by the police, were on his tail. Accompanied always by the woman relating the story of this woman's niece, they moved to Brussels where they were royally treated. But unfortunately for Zaharov and his new bride, the news of a wedding between this Russian prince and the high society English woman had made international news. And businessmen in Constantinople, who'd sent him over to England to make investments, were really pissed to see this guy that they knew was a Greek businessman,

living the high life in England pretending to be a Russian prince. So these people he stole from basically see him in the paper and are like, that's not a fucking Russian prince. Yeah, so these businessmen had sent Zaharov over to England with about 7,000 pounds in merchandise and securities, which was somewhere in the ballpark of one and a half million US dollars. Yeah, so he stole, steals a lot from these people. They immediately sent a representative over to London to file charges, which is why Zaharov had felt the need to flee Britain in the first place. Unfortunately for him, England and Belgium had just signed one of the world's first extradition treaties, and Prince Zaharov quickly became the very first person arrested and extradited under it.

So that's cool. Yeah, breaking new ground. Now, the new princess, his new wife, was not happy with this, but Zaharov assured her it was all a terrible misunderstanding, just a case of mistaken identity, and promised he would take care of it very quickly, if only her wealthy father would help him with some of the legal bills in the short term while he put matters to write and got in touch with his royal family members back in Russia. In December, he went to court, charged with stealing 28 cases of gum and 109 bags of gall, along with a theft of seven, yeah.

Yeah, he stole, these were like products they sent over as like samples that he took with him and just sold in England, along with 7,000 pounds worth of securities. Upon arrest, he had been found with the securities in the form of 24 Turkish bonds and a loaded revolver. The court asked Basil if he was often in the habit of traveling with thousands of dollars of other people's money and a loaded gun. He assured them that he had been traveling with a revolver regularly since the age of seven, which is a weird thing to brag to a court about. Do you always have stolen money and guns? Yeah, don't worry, I've had a gun since I was a child, so you don't have to worry.

No, no, I got a gun when I was a baby, it's fine, yeah, don't freak out. And there's a court artist's depiction of him giving his deposition, and it's pretty fucking great. I'm gonna have Sophie show it to you now so you can get a look at how the court artist thought of this guy. Okay, let's see it. It looks like he was like in a therapist's office. Yeah, I mean he's... It's weird. Yeah, that must have been...

His waist is very thin, his mustache and like beard are like pointed and like very... He's got a Captain Hook vibe. Yeah, kind of like a cross between Captain Hook and a New Yorker caricature of a fancy British person. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, there are again two stories as to how this whole court case was resolved. Zaharoff would go to his grave claiming that he settled the matter in court when he found a lost letter from his uncle, the head of the firm that had hired him, stating that he should take the bond money as payment for his travel expenses and services rendered.

And it does seem to be true that the aggrieved party who sued him was his uncle, but the rest of the story is probably a lie. Court records note that Prince Zaharoff was declared guilty of embezzlement, but only sentenced to pay about 100 pounds in fines. This is likely because he agreed to pay restitution to the people he'd robbed, or rather he got his new wife to pay back the people he'd stolen from. His biographer notes, quote, all that is clear is that Zaharoff had made a promise of at least partial restitution, and there is little doubt parental indulgence

so recently overtaxed of its probable source, Miss Zaharoff. The late Princess Gortzikov Niberos, like his wife who was pretending like using the name Gortzikov, which was the fake name that this guy used. This and her husband's legal expenses according to her niece swallowed up her aunt's money. So basically he has her pay back the people he stole from, so he gets to keep the money. And then as soon as he's released from jail, he flees England and abandons his wife. And yeah, also abandons the continents. Well, yeah, I mean, you're not really a grifter if you don't abandon at least one wife.

Yeah. It's crazy that she, I feel like she almost got out of it before they, or you said she had doubts before the second marriage. Yeah, it seems like that, that she was starting to realize this guy was shady. And then it's almost you had to just keep going because it's like, well, at this point, I'm better to see it through. The sunk cost fallacy is applied to romance. Yeah, it makes fools of us all.

So now, obviously today, if you've got a grifter who gets in trouble in one country and caught in a grift and tried in court, you're going to flee to Mexico. That's just where you're going to go if you're a grifter in the modern era. But Mexico was not the place for grifters in the late 1800s. And so instead, Prince Zaharoff left for the United States, which was the Mexico of the 1800s, in terms of being a place for grifters to go and absolutely be able to get away with anything. So yeah, he gets on a boat, fucks off to North America. He never divorced Emily.

He basically just abandoned her to her family after taking all of their money. So yeah, that's cool. Well, sorry, I should say he went to Cyprus. Yeah, it's cool stuff. So yeah, it's very complicated. This guy's like the movements this guy goes through. But after some time in North America, he goes to Cyprus, this tiny Grecian island, and he founds a business and he starts a series of small enterprises

operating a gradually expanding number of shops and importing exotic food stuffs. And as his finances gradually improved, he started going back and forth to England again. And he never met with his wife. He would hide from her every time he was back in England on business. By the early 1800s, he took on a few small jobs selling rifles to the Greek government. And at this point, he didn't really take up arms dealing as a major trade, but it was certainly something he was willing to do a little bit of. He sold linens too.

He catered barracks for the British army. His company laid down telegraph poles and train tracks. He got involved with shipping and was constantly investing in different markets during his trips to London. He lived pretty well off of this, but his businesses were constantly in one sort of debt or another, and his profits were always in the process of being reinvested into a new enterprise. He hatched a scheme to get the British government to let him run the development of Cyprus, which they controlled thanks to a shaky treaty deal with Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Wait, he had the government let him develop this island?

He was trying to. He was trying to. So England was kind of in control of Cyprus due to these weird series of political events. And he was trying to get them to develop the island and let him run it, but that didn't end up working. Neither did a series of business ventures in Alexandria and then France and then back to the Mediterranean coast. And trying to keep track of all his businesses and plots in this period is impossible. There's just so much shit going on and so much doubt about it. What matters is that he was a serial entrepreneur.

He's one of these guys that always has an angle, always has a business he's trying, always has an investment going on. And he was successful enough at this that he was able to dress well and live comfortably and put on the image of being wealthy. But he was also always on the edge of disaster and always had most of his assets invested into the next big thing. Have you seen Uncut Gems? No. This reminds me of that movie. Yeah? How so?

He's just constantly, Adam Sandler's character is constantly just getting in higher stakes, gambling debt, and he'll finally get it back to pay someone, but instead of paying it back, he's like, I'm going to gamble this on this new game and then I'll make even more and we'll both get paid. And he's just doing it more and more and then at the end. Well, I won't give it away, but gambling, you can assume that it's how gambling happens. What happens when you get it? Yeah, this is kind of that story. But for him, when he gambles too much, it helps start World War I.

So a little bit more high stakes. Wow. Okay, so we're going there. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's where this shit goes. So Basil built a reputation as a man of scandal and he left behind a constant stream of sobbing women and outraged families. I'm going to read you now a letter that he sent while he was in a hotel in Paris to one of his business partners. And this letter kind of gives you some insight into the way he conducted his relationships.

And he's talking in this about like two women he met at the hotel and slept with. Quote, Miss Jeharron, whom I was fool enough to poke a few times immediately after my arrival at the hotel, had her knife in me and Miss McCrath from my giving her up with the ladder. You appear to be under the impression that Miss McCrath was divorced and I might marry her. You were wrong. I would not do so if she had millions. I poked her because it was my caprice. I poke her still and when I want to change, I shall give her up. I am under no obligations to her family as she cost me what an average whore would do.

And I pay her in one way or another and I have no doubt that if another man chose to court her and pay for it, he could have her if he paid more than me and she would turn me up. So this is the way this guy talks about women. This guy started the red pill. Oh my God. Yeah. He's pretty gross. So shortly after, yeah, poke.

That's the original Facebook poke. I didn't even realize that was... I didn't know people were... It just seems very current to be like, I poked her. Yeah, it's weird to hear in like an eight, you expect people to be like, I don't know, what's a fancy way to say fuck? I lay with, you know, stooped. It's not fancy at all. So shortly after writing this, Zaharoff fell ill.

He was diagnosed with anemia and it's impossible to know what ailment he actually had because 1870s medicine was basically drunk guessing. His description of his doctor's orders for how to treat this ailment is entertaining though. Quote, I am to avoid the least excitement to take gentle exercise and avoid all stares. And if I want to kill myself, I am to have a woman. This last is strictly enforced. I am to give up women altogether and in fact, avoid them so as to not get excited. His doctor says he's got to stop fucking after he gets sick.

Oh, it's a dick disease. He probably got an STD because they were like, if they said he can't get excited, not because of the heart, but because of his dick, because it has to do with women, right? So maybe it has dick burns and when it gets hard, it hurts. Might have gotten some of that chlamydia's, I don't know. He got poke disease. Yeah, he was poking too much and his doctor said he had to stop it with the poking. So whatever illness actually affected him, Basil Zaharoff eventually recovered

and continued his unsuccessful bouncing around the Mediterranean in search of a big score. By 1884, he'd given up on this quest and decided to take leave of the continent for good and try his luck in the United States of America. And I'm not going to kill myself by giving you an itemized list of every con and legitimate business that he dipped his fingers into. The Smithsonian magazine gives a pretty good overview of Basil's time in the United States. Quote, It appears that he was the Count Zaharoff who in Utah in 1884 claimed to be in possession of four black diamonds that played a celebrated part in the Turkish-Russian war, and who a year later caused a small scandal in Missouri by associating it with the notorious Madame Pearl Clifford,

one of the most beautiful soiled doves ever known in St. Louis, working as a superintendent of a local railway sleeping car company. He was certainly the Count Zaharoff who, hastily promoting himself to the eminence of Prince Zacharias Basilius Zaharoff, married the New York heiress Jeanne Billings for her $150,000 and her expectations later in 1885. So, he bounces around, like, sells, like gets involved in some sort of scheme pretending that he has like these historic diamonds, like, runs a railway sleeping car company at some point. Like, he's just constantly involved in these like weird little get rich quick schemes. And then he marries this New York heiress and steals her money.

So, yeah, yeah. He definitely has a pattern. And I found like a quote from the Omaha Daily Bee, like an article at the time, like written about him at the time, that describes his modus operandi during this period, quote, he maintained a high social position by means of letters from prominent society people which purported to be genuine and had a library full of documents which he claimed were written to him by European dignitaries. He claimed to be a nephew of Prince Gorchakov and told a remarkable story of his banishment by the Zahar. At one point he created a considerable commotion among the set here in which he moved by threatening to go abroad

and fight a duel with a Prussian prince who dared to insult his mother. So, it's the same kind of lie, like, I mean, there's no internet, so you just go over to America and just try a new set of lies on a new set of people. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's almost like the bigger the lie, the less like he thinks like the less likely, it's like you think like, oh, someone wouldn't lie about something that big. Like, you could easily find out if he was a prince. So, kept your lie, so let's not look into it at all. Yeah, exactly.

Like, well, if he was a prince, we would know that if he wasn't really a prince, it would be obvious that he was lying. Yeah, someone would say he's not a prince. I do feel like in that period of time in America, if you had an accent that was vaguely European, most people would believe that you were royalty. As long as you wore a suit. I think even like when I studied abroad in college, it was like the girls weren't crazy for accents. It's like, you know, just have an accent, you could still be a bad person, they could still be mean to you. But they're like, no, the European accent, they're perfect and, you know, can do no wrong better than American men.

Oh, yeah, I mean, you can get away with anything if you have the right kind of British accent. If you have the wrong kind of British accent, you can't get away with anything. Real crapshoot being English. So, yeah, Basil's scamming in America worked out well for a while, but as always, he was eventually found out. This time, it was by a Philadelphia businessman who happened across another newspaper article announcing his marriage in New York. Like that this woman in New York was getting married to this Russian prince. So this wedding between the Russian prince and a wealthy socialite was once again big news. And unfortunately for Basil, the businessman who came across this was originally from Bristol and was like,

didn't I read a news article about a Russian prince marrying a rich woman and then that guy got arrested for like stealing a shitload of money. So this guy reaches out to Basil's first wife over in England and her family starts an international manhunt to arrest this bigamist. And yeah, so Basil has to flee the United States for again. So he's now fled two countries for marrying rich women and stealing their money while pretending to be a Russian prince. But he got out just ahead of the authorities. He managed to make it back to Europe as the law was closing and on him, he left behind his wife and a pile of debts once again. And by 1885, he was back in the Balkans working for an old employer of his named Thorsten Nordenfeldt. Now, Nordenfeldt ran a sizable arms company.

He was a weapons manufacturer and he was one of a number of up and coming businesses that were selling ever deadlier guns to the armies of Europe. Nordenfeldt had employed Basil as a salesman briefly back in 1877, but the two had fallen out of touch over the years as Basil had fucked and scammed his way across multiple continents. But now that Zaharoff was back and looking for work, Nordenfeldt arms seemed as good a place to make money as any. And it's here we should talk a little bit about the global armaments industry. It didn't really exist for most of history. Early firearms were like artisanal tools. Each one was made by hand by like an artisan. And so like you couldn't really have gigantic gun companies in the same way you do now because you needed like some some dude who's like mass manufacturing.

Yeah, it wasn't really possible with like early arms. You know, some firearms makers were like larger and more successful and like hired a lot of these artisans. But like international arms conglomerates the way we know them did not exist at the time. Which is a shame because it means that the good people of the late 1800s couldn't enjoy the fine products that the Raytheon Corporation makes like that knife missile I told you about. I bet there's a thousand things you could use a knife missile for Theresa. I'm more of an artisanal weapons person, you know, I like to get my weapons at the farmer's market. I just think I like to look someone in the eyes when I'm buying a killing machine, you know, I want to be like I want to know that hands, you know, I want to touch the hands that that made it. I like twine guns, you know.

Oh yeah. That makes sense. Guns made of. Farm to table drones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Farm to table drones. Yeah, excuse me, where these drones free range. I want my drones to be played classical music while they're being made.

Yeah. I only local bullets. I am not going to like, yeah, I'm not. I don't want to murder the environment. Just these random people I've decided on my enemies. Yeah. Well, if you enjoy artisanal killing machines, then you'll enjoy the fine products and services that support this podcast. 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. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. He's not in the good and bad ass way. He's in nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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. 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. We're back. So, talking about the arms industry in the late 1800s. I'm going to read a quote from Smithsonian Magazine kind of laying out the state of the industry at the time.

It was not then a huge industry. Best known was perhaps Alfred Krupp, the Canon maker of Essen. At 10 he inherited a modest iron foundry from the old Frederick Krupp who had started it in 1823. At 14 Alfred went into the business and slowly took over its direction. Canon were made of copper. Alfred perfected a solid crucible steel block from which he made Canon, but he had not yet perfected any projectile capable of penetrating the intransigent mentality of military bureaucrats. Canon were made of copper. Had always been. It must always be. Her Krupp learned from the start that the way to sell Canon to the Prussian king was to sell them also to Prussia's neighbors and enemies. He made his first sales to Egypt then to Austria. When the Austrian war began, both armies fired Krupp's Canon balls at each other. And his guns would have been working in both armies in the Franco-Prussian war, but for Napoleon III's refusal to buy them. Krupp's Canon made Bismarck's swift victory possible.

So this is like the first big-armed manufacturer is Krupp. And by the mid-1800s, like the industry was starting to grow in part because of Krupp. Modern firearms made by companies like Winchester and Martini had also started to sweep into the world's wars. Winchester. Barrier. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Barrier company. See, shoot local. That house is right by Winchester Mystery House. Shout out to San Jose. It's right by where my friends live. Shout out to San Jose. And if you're in California and you're going to kill people, make sure it's with a Winchester rifle. Yeah, that's important.

No, no. Don't listen to that. Robert, for some reason. Just don't kill people, cool. But if you do kill local. Robert, Robert. As a Texan, I use Raytheon because it's made outside of Plano, Texas. So I know that if I'm going to drone strike somebody, I'm going to drone strike them with a drone made right down the road by the same artisans that I meet in line at the Trader Joe's before they go build missile guidance systems.

That's good, you know? Yeah, keep killing local. That's what we want in our community. Yeah, kill... No. This is too dark a line of things. No, don't do that. So yeah, the American Civil War had a big impact on the growth of the arms industry at this time because we start to see mass produced weapons that are way deadlier than guns had ever been before and suddenly all these nations in Europe start wanting to buy them. There's fighting between Greece and Russia and Serbia and Turkey and the Balkans

and this spreads the development of new cannons and new firearms and spreads their adoption by the armies of Europe. So yeah, this is kind of the state of the industry in 1885 when Basel gets involved in it. So it is starting to explode but you're still at this point where the idea of massive international arms companies is kind of weird and new. And Zaharoff was initially commissioned to act as the Nordenfelt Arms corporate representative for the Balkans. He received five pounds a week in salary plus commissions. Basel, being an entrepreneur, instantly realized that selling a handful of guns at a time to a single country was not going to earn him the kind of money he desired to make.

So taking a leaf out of Krupp's book, he decides that he should start selling guns by triggering arms races. That this is the way to make fucking money. If you want to sell a lot of guns, you make an arms race. Nordenfelt was not a large manufacturer but they traded in some very novel weapons systems including a brand new submarine that had just been invented. Now submarines were really new at the time and they weren't very well understood and they usually killed the people inside of them. You wouldn't want to be a submarine person in this time. But they were also like the new sexy weapon system.

So they represented a huge opportunity because no one really had them yet. And here's how the biography Man of Arms describes what Basel did next. Many years later, Zaharoff recounted his part in opening up this market. I sold a submarine to the Greeks and then he added with a conventional chuckle and went to the Turks and sold them a couple. Russia presented the next obvious target. From a less reliable source, we learned that Zaharoff with bland impudence expounded the situation as he saw it to the navy minister in St. Petersburg. My firm is the agent of no one power. The Turks have brought two submarines from my firm.

In the event of war, the Turkish navy can, thanks to these submarines, diminish your ships in the Black Sea and strike you where you least expect them, what the Turks possess you too can have in greater numbers if you wish. I propose that while two submarines are sufficient for the local needs of a small power like Turkey, four should be necessary for your own security is a great power. Legend relates that Russia fell for this logic. This would have made a total of seven submarines, which is a lot of money for him. So he sparks like a minor submarine arms race between three countries. He's like a high school girl that's like trying to start drama where you go up to like one, two best friends.

You're like, oh, I heard so and so. I heard Becky's, you know, say that she didn't like you. And then they're like, Becky's a bitch. And then you go to Becky and you're like, I heard Kelsey blah, and now they're like fighting, but they weren't. Yeah. If it wasn't for him. I mean, that makes me think that teenage girls would actually be incredible arms dealers. I think teenage girls would make excellent intelligence officers because all of the CIA and intelligence companies,

companies, you know, organizations do, is they're just gossiping. That's all they're doing. They're meeting up, just exchange secrets and make little alliances. And we should use teenage, well, no, let's never mind. I take that back. Let's not use teenage girls for anything, but let's harness their power. The CIA does listen to this podcast a lot, so maybe they'll take you up on that. Yeah, harnessing teenage girls.

Harnessing teenage girls. Not literally. So the submarines that Zaharov sold were notoriously shitty and basically death traps. And they were renowned as being death traps by the standards of late 1800s submarines. So like in the era where all submarines are death traps, everyone's like, but don't get in those fucking submarines because they're terrible. But he makes a lot of money selling them. So this fact that he sold seven submarines and got a cut of the commissions, obviously, generated him a tidy profit and turned him instantly into one of the most influential minds within the Nordenfeld Arms Company.

Zaharov basically coined this codified his strategy of selling arms to one country to panic another to then panic another so he could sell arms to them all. He came to basically turn this into, he called it the Sistine Zaharov, so he names this thing he did to spark arms race. Like the Sistine Chapel? Is that what? No, like system with an E at the end. Oh, oh, oh. Like the Zaharov system. I thought he was naming it like a masterpiece.

No, he is kind of naming it like a masterpiece. He's like, when he goes into corporate meetings, he's like, the thing you gotta do is spark an arms race. That's how you fucking make bank with this shit. And like, I'm the guy who invented it, even though he's kind of stealing that from Krupp, because he's, you know, a scammer. So having cornered the Mediterranean submarine market, Zaharov next set his sights on a more ambitious goal, the European machine gun industry. Hiram Maxim, the American arms maker who invented the Babe Ruth of weaponry meant to kill large numbers of European teenagers, had just arrived on the continent. Maxim was demonstrating his new quick-firing Maxim gun, which worried Nordenfelt since their own quick-firing gun was really shitty. Zaharov knew at once that Maxim's single-barreled machine gun was way better than the one that Nordenfelt made.

And in the tradition of all great businessmen, he decided that if you can't beat him, join him. No one is 100% certain how Basil convinced Hiram Maxim to merge his company with Nordenfelt. But H.G. Wells wrote out one of the explanations of this, so this is H.G. Wells talking about how Zaharov achieved this coup. Maxim exhibited his gun in Vienna. When he fired his gun at a target and demonstrated its power, Zaharov was busy explaining to expert observers that the whole thing was an exhibition of skill, that only Maxim could fire the gun. It would take years to train men to use it, that these new machines were delicate and difficult to make and could not be produced in quantities and so forth. Maxim, after tracing the initials of the Emperor upon a target, prepared to receive orders. They were not forthcoming. He learned that Nordenfelt was simple and strong. This gun of his was a scientific instrument, unfit for soldierly hands. His demonstration went for nothing. What had happened? He realized he was vis-a-vis with a salesman, a very formidable salesman.

In the end, he amalgamated with the salesman. So Zaharov is like, I can't beat this guy's gun, so I'll lie to everyone about him until he realizes he's basically just got to work with me, otherwise he's not going to succeed in selling any guns. That's such a classic manipulation move, because he's like, that gun sucks, don't buy that gun, and then once they join, he's like, now I have your gun, and now he's like, it's good again, now we're selling it. Yeah, no, this is the best gun, super easy to use. You can kill so many teenagers with this gun. You want to kill teenage British people, this is the gun. Robert. So, what? Stop. It killed so many teenage British people, this is World War I, Sophie.

Yes, but don't say if you want to. I mean, historically. I'm saying out of this domestic dispute. If you want to kill the most European conscript soldiers possible, you want a Maxim machine gun, and they do sponsor this podcast. Jesus. Robert. So, this happened in 1886, and over the next couple of years, Nordenfeldt himself increasingly bowed out of the company he'd founded, while Basil Zaharoff took control of much of the enterprise. And it's hard to overstate what a big deal this is.

So, Maxim Nordenfeldt arms quickly becomes Maxim, like it's just known by the name Maxim, because their gun is like the defining weapon of the age. And Maxim under Zaharoff becomes one of the very, very first massive international gun companies, international arms companies. And they sold a huge variety of weapons to parties in multiple hemispheres. The additional reach the merger gave Zaharoff meant it was even easier for him to spark arms races all over the world. And I'm going to quote from the Smithsonian again here. The next step was a combination with Vickers, Thomas Vickers, the second largest English manufacturer of arms. Maxim became a member of the Vickers board of directors. Zaharoff's name did not figure into the organization at all. But he and Maxim, in some proportion unknown to history, got for their company from Vickers 1.3 million pounds, or over six and a half million dollars, partly in cash and partly in stock for the Vickers company.

Zaharoff thus became a substantial stockholder in Vickers, and would one day be the largest of all. He also became the chief salesman of Vickers, which unlike Krupp and Schneider, had remained up to this point out of the international market. But Zaharoff showed the way in this bountiful field, and therefore he got moving about Europe with the card announcing himself as the delegate of Thomas Vickers and Sons. So the period from 1877 to 1914, when he's the chief representative of probably the biggest arms company in the world, was also the period where the world went through the most significant arms buildup that has ever happened. New technologies were being constantly invented and refined, and every nation in Europe was like worried about fighting every other nation in Europe. So they all were buying up piles of Maxim guns and Krupp cannons and like all of the weaponry they could possibly get. And Zaharoff himself drove this trend. In 1890, his Vickers guns became the sole supplier of naval weaponry for the British Empire. They bought a controlling interest in Beardmore's shipbuilding firm in Glasgow, which gave the gigantic arms concern.

Zaharoff managed a cut of the fortune that Britain spent building up her navy. Now, Britain's naval buildup was driven largely by Kaiser Wilhelm's obsessive need to grow the German navy, which was steadily encouraged by Krupp. So like the German arms company Krupp is telling the leader of Germany, like you got to build more ships. And Basil's being like, hey, the Germans are building more ships. We got to build more ships. And it just so happens that I get a cut of every ship built. So both corporations profited massively from this naval buildup, which also ratcheted up tensions between Imperial Germany and Great Britain all over the world. Before, were planes invented here or is this all via boat? Yeah.

Okay. So he, because I'm just imagining like, because when you say like he went to this country and said this, I went to this country. I'm imagining like him getting on a boat, taking a long time to get there and then being like, here's some gossip by this and then like getting back on, like it's very slow. It's very slow. It's very slow. He's not taking plane. There are planes in this period and he and a little later we'll talk about how he started convincing countries to buy air forces. How does one transport a submarine? Like once it's bought, like, does someone drive it over to Germany?

I think they were probably built in the Mediterranean and then just like sailed over to where they were going. So then it's like delivery day, Amazon delivery. Your U-boats are here. Yeah. I mean, Amazon will get a U-boat to you way faster. No. I mean, they've gotten so much better at delivering submarines. So, yeah, both Krupp and Maxim, or yeah, profited massively from the naval buildup that just, you know, also ratcheted up tensions in Europe and got both countries closer to fighting each other.

And Zaharov continued to sell arms to both sides of conflicts and wars all over the world using the cynical tactics of the system he had designed to ensure ever-growing profits while the world lurched closer and closer to cataclysm. I found a really interesting book called Men of Wealth by a guy named John Flynn that is a good job of illustrating how this web came together. Quote, So like, he's the official arms manufacturer of the British army and he's selling guns to the Bowers who are murdering British soldiers. And then he sells a bunch of weapons to the Japanese who then beat the Russians in a very surprising war. And the fact that Japan, this like third-rate power in the eyes of Europeans, beats Russia in this war, leads to all these nations buying even more guns, because they're like, oh shit, Japan can do that stuff to Russia. They might be able to do it to us. We got to buy more weapons. And the Russians are like, we need to buy way more fucking weapons.

So like, he's very successful in getting everybody to continue buying way the fuck more guns. And what Basil Zaharoff did in St. Petersburg would establish him as the greatest arms dealer of his era. And perhaps of all time, it would also help make the horrible bloodletting of the First World War completely inevitable. But that story, Teresa, we're going to have to talk about in part two. Oh no. How are you feeling so far? Well, I mean like, you know, I know how, I know part of how it ends because I know we're getting up to the war. So I'm just like, I want to put those dots together. Can't wait. Yeah, it's a good time. We're at the part right now where, I don't know, he's helped spark a couple of wars, but not nearly as much as he's going to do. But for now, it's time for all of you to go off and try to provoke your own wars in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.

He means it's time to plug your plugables, Teresa. Yeah, it is time to plug your plugables. Oh, my plugables. I was like, wait, sorry, I thought this was like, I thought you were doing a sponsored ad for Glade plugables. No, no, no, no. My plugables. Oh, well, you know, you can listen to my podcast, you can tell me anything where comedians like Robert, who's been on before, confess something they've never told anyone before. I guess if this guy Basil was on, it'd be all lies. But generally speaking, people tell truths and then we talk. It's fun. You know what else is fun, Teresa? What?

The fine products produced by great companies like Raytheon. What Robert means to say? Farm to table missiles full of knives. What? Okay, what Robert means to say is that he's doing a live show with Billy Wayne Davis in Los Angeles on March 3rd at Dany C Typewriter. You should get tickets. And we will be selling our tees and alarms there. Well, we will not be doing anything of that nature. You can follow Robert on Twitter.

All I'm saying is, you can follow our podcast at atbasterdodd on Twitter and Instagram. And if you're Greece or Turkey and you want to buy some submarines, we'll have a couple of submarines. Thanks for listening. Chris, end it. 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.