Behind the Bastards - Part One: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

We begin our 6 part series on the Chairman & CEO of WWE, Vince McMahon. Behind the Bastards is once again funding the Portland Diaper Bank! You can donate here to make sure families suffering financial hardship have one less thing to worry about: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ah24n-btb-fundraiser-for-pdx-diaper-bank?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, DC. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can. Signed Freeway Phantom. Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app,

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They left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do it. The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness, and there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, I clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalochean. Listen to Silenced, the radio murders,

wherever you get your podcasts. If you want early access to new episodes or tier episodes ad-free, be sure to subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Hey, everyone. I'm Robert Evans. I'm the host of a podcast called Behind the Bastards, and like most of you, I was raised during the 1990s and early 2000s on a steady diet of World War II movies and history channel documentaries about Hitler. I decided as an adult to kind of make that into a career

and just read weird books about the Nazis and other dictators and talk about them on podcasts. And for the last five years or so, that's gone pretty well. You know, every week, I find a new terrible person. I read about him. I write a script. And the show comes out that you're all duly familiar with. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I decided after a few years of every now and then getting suggestions from people to do a bastard who is kind of from the...

It's not really a sport, but we'll call it from the sports world, a guy you've probably heard of called Vince McMahon. He is the owner of more or less of the... What was once the WWF is now the WWE. And I kind of expected it to be like every other episode of Behind the Bastards. You know, I spend three or four days, I read a book, maybe two, do some research, put together a script. Well, to my surprise, a couple of things happened.

One of the things that happened is that when I posted that I was doing this guy, it got a response unlike anything I've ever gotten. Thousands and thousands of likes on Twitter and a wrestling Twitter lit up over it. There were news articles about the fact that I was going to cover this guy, which has literally never happened before. Authors of books about Vince McMahon, including the book, author of the book Ringmaster, which we're going to talk about a little bit, by Abraham Josephine Reisman here after referred to as Josie Reisman reached out.

People kind of lost their mind about it. And I found myself putting together a script that is currently set to be about as long as the script on Henry Kissinger. And that may seem insane for a guy whose primary claim to fame is running a wrestling company. But I assure you it's not. He deserves everything we're writing about him and to kind of help me wrestle this monster to the ground. I told you so. First of all, you did. You did.

You tried to warn me, Sophie and like several years. Yeah. So we're doing this. And the only people I thought could possibly help me wrestle this thing into a manageable form are two of the people I respect most when it comes to talking about shit like this. Sean Riley, AKA Sean, baby, who you all will remember from the the legendary episodes that we did on a famous karate monster. Famous Poonani master. Poonani master.

Yeah. Yeah. Sean, hey, how are you doing? Oh, it's good to be back. I've missed you. I have. I have missed you too, Sean. And this is this is going to be a special one. And I also want to introduce Tom Reiman to the program. Tom's been on a number of episodes. Tom, you're also a big wrestling fan. Yeah. Yeah. Very excited to be talking about Vince McMahon. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Vince McMahon,

but the fact that you have such a volume prepared for us is making me think, like, did I not know how much of a ghoul he was? I thought I did. Well, I think it's technically a business goblin. Yeah, he's a business goblin. Yeah, he's a business monster. There's a lot of business ghoul. One of the problems with covering Vince McMahon, weirdly enough, the thing that this episode is most similar to

is writing about European royalty in the 1800s and 1900s. Because all of those like kings like Napoleon III or Leopold or Victoria, there was like somebody writing about every single second of their life and every decision that they made, right? So there's just this there's so much shit to go through. There's so much detail on everything they ever did. And weirdly enough, it's exactly the same with wrestling. Like, wrestling, covering wrestling is a lot like covering England or European royalty.

Oh, that's the king. King Leopold had like a Dave Meltzer and a wrestling observer and stuff just tracking his every move. So that's part of what's going on here. And the other part of what's going on is that, like, as I started learning about Vince, there are all these other wrestlers like wrestling probably has the highest density of like monsters of any like entertainment, industry, sport out there, at least interesting monsters, right?

Like there's just so many fascinating weirdos. Like a casual wrestling story is like, oh, yeah, my friend was cranky. So we tore a guy's eyeball out backstage. It's because they're carnies. It's a carnival thing. And so there's this it's way more hardcore than I think the more casual person realizes. Yeah, the more casual fan. So probably every episode, all of the first couple so far, we're going to be

going on log digressions where we just talk about other crazy ass stories from wrestling because, like, I felt like I was doing a disservice if I didn't. I wanted to get like Friday Andre the Giant poop stories. We are talking a lot about Andre. Yes. I love Andre the Giant. Not a bastard, a hero, by the way, just so we're clear. For sure.

Let it let an indecipherable ultimate warrior monologues. Yeah, oh, God, I have been watching quite a bit of wrestling. I wanted to start by asking, what is y'all's background with with pro wrestling? Oh, OK. Long time fan, since I was a kid, I grew up. I actually trained in pro wrestling for about a half a year and did three three live shows as a character named Captain Party. I was a super powered frat boy.

I did it here in Portland at the Ash Street Saloon. Oh, shit. Yeah. And let's see. I wrote three video games about wrestling, three WWE video games. Gosh, I feel like that's enough. That's yeah. No, that's that's so much expertise. So hell of a credit. Yeah, I can't live up to that.

Yeah. Tom, now you're on now you're on. I mean, like, yeah, I'll fucking I'll try. So I also grew up watching wrestling loved it since I was a kid. I was always more into WWF or WWE than WCW. I was a backyard wrestler for several years. Hell, yeah. And I definitely filmed one of my friends throwing another one of my friends

off the roof of their house and then that friend doing a flying elbow drop off of the house onto that friend. I never went off the house, but I had some some some fun bumps in a backyard done to me as well. I'm my friend back home, books, a local promotion. It's actually how I met my wife. I met my wife at a wrestling show. I didn't know that.

Yeah, I know my friend. I've known you and your wife for so long. OK, so so so my buddy Jerry Stephanie's books, Independent Wrestling Promotion called Vanguard Championship Wrestling, VCW in Virginia. And many years ago, they put on a show where they brought in Rick Flare. He was like a big man. Oh, yeah, stolen as a baby, by the way. I know I remember that episode.

That's nuts. And so she she was Marina was there set up because one of the wrestlers, his mom ran this like new age sort of healing store studio and she had a massage parlor in there. Marina's a massage therapist. So Marina had a massage chair set up at this wrestling show. And that's how I met her. I met my wife at a Rick Flare.

That's how I met her. I met my wife at a Rick Flare appearance that my friend put on. That is that is a happier Rick Flare story than we've gotten lately. I mean, a lot of bad Rick Flare press recently. Rick Flare spent the whole day drinking and then tried to stiff somebody else with the bill. That's that's what I heard from that that specific appearance. But I have so I will I will come in and and say I have far less

experience than all of you. And I think my experience kind of lines up broadly with like most kids in the 90s were like I was never like a huge wrestling guy. I played a bunch of different wrestling video games in the late 90s, early 2000s when like friends over for birthdays. Robert, I also own a WWF superstars standup arcade unit. I should have included that. That is awesome.

Yeah. I definitely played a bunch of that. I was I kind of I had about maybe two years where I watched wrestling semi regularly. This was kind of I think it's you'd call it the attitude era, right? When Stone Cold Steve Austin was one of the big names and the yeah. And I was brought in again. It was one of those things that wasn't I didn't it wasn't kind of like it did.

I like I made friends with a kid and he was like one of the few kids weird enough to want to hang out with me after school when I moved to this new town. And he loved wrestling and old Star Trek, right? And so he introduced me to both of those things. Obviously, the love of Star Trek stuck around longer, but I watched wrestling like off and on for a couple of years. And, you know, for years afterwards, I'd play games when, you know, we were having a birthday party or something with my friends.

From what I have kind of read, you know, I didn't know this at the time, obviously wrestling was just wrestling. But 97 and 98, which was sort of more or less, I think when I was watching wrestling was kind of smack dab in the middle of depending on how you count it, the third or fourth big American surge of interest in wrestling and the second of those to happen under the watchful eye of Vince McMahon. I don't remember a whole lot about that time, except for that.

My favorite wrestler was the Undertaker. I'm not sure what like where that puts me. Although people say he was a great kind of like technical, you know, wrestler, get it back and people up good at the good at the, you know, kind of pinch hitter for storylines and stuff. Terrific zombie. Yeah. Solid zombie.

And Vince McMahon, I think for most of us who are kind of on the periphery of wrestling, who just sort of know it, you know, as in broad terms is one of those figures in American pop culture who's just kind of always been there. Like I couldn't tell you when I first heard his name, right? He's like Michael Jackson or Arnold Schwarzenegger in that he's just someone who's always been kind of part of the foundation of pop culture for basically my whole life. And in the decades since I, you know, was kind of into wrestling, he's become

a major Republican donor. One of the few close friends of former President Trump, people will say that he was one of the only people Trump would take his phone calls and push other people out of the room when he called while he was president. His wife is also a massive influence, Linda, huge influence on the direction of wrestling and also a moderately influential person in American politics. She was kind of the only member of Trump's cabinet who didn't have a huge

scandal during his presidency. Like she was just kind of in there for a while and then bounced. But there was no like, she didn't do a mooch, right? Like there was no big blow up, which I'm not saying is like praise for her. She is a terrible person, but like she's savvier than a lot of the other people he brought in. Do you remember when the mooch went on like a following spree and followed like everyone it cracked?

Yeah, that was a fun day. That was weird. That was a weird day. What a wild presidency. We just all blew right past it. But Vince is not just, and kind of the reason why we're doing so much focus on him, Vince is not just like a guy who is influential in wrestling.

He helped create the foundations in a lot of ways of not just modern right wing media, but like modern American culture. You know, there's a strong argument that we may not get Donald Trump as president without Vince McMahon and specifically without Trump's time in wrestling, where a lot of people will argue he learned quite a bit. The best book about the life of Vince McMahon is the recently published tome Ringmaster by Abraham Josephine Reisman.

Again, here after referred to as Josie Reisman. Early on in the book, she makes the point that wrestling is more or less inextricable from human civilization. I didn't know this when I started researching, but the biblical Jacob got the name Israel after a wrestling match. And the word Israel means wrestling with God, at least in one translation. Sweet. That's kind of sweet.

You're dropping a macho man elbow on God. Hell yes. That's exactly how I think. Take that, God! Palestine does translate to leg drop. Big boot leg drop. Yeah, so virtually every culture has some form of wrestling. And generally, you know, up until the modern era, these were like actual

competitions, right? In which, you know, athletes were, you know, the end was in doubt. Obviously, like all sports, people, you know, falling on matches for betting purposes has happened for forever. But generally speaking, it was supposed to be an actual competition. And while, you know, that was always a part of wrestling, it also relied heavily on spectacle, right? This has always been a part of it.

Now, if we're tracing back the origins of modern pro wrestling, the most direct place to do so is the French Revolution of 1830. Better known as the July Revolution. This is the revolution that led to the overthrow of the bourbon monarchy and its replacement by the House of Orléans. But that's, you know, boring history nerd shit. So I'm just going to quote from wrestling reporter Kyle Dunning here. It is said that during this time, wrestlers were first given nicknames.

Also, the tradition of an open challenge being issued to the general public was born. There was commonly a reward of 500 francs to anyone who could knock a wrestler down to the ground. This is where Circus has got the idea from. I wish we still had that. This happened organically to me once. I was at a Mexican video game convention.

And there was a wrestling ring in this booth that I was near. Just a weird little wrestling ring. Don't know why it was there. And someone asked me to get up and say something. And within two minutes, I just sort of organically offered to body slam the biggest person they could find. And then I just did that for like 10 minutes. And then one kid got in and it was like, OK, cool.

Put your phone down. I'll body slam you. And then he attacked me. And I was like, oh, this, this must be how shoot fighting got it started. Oh, how did that go? He tried to take me down and then we wrestled for a bit. And I kind of gave him like half a body slam, which he did not want. So he didn't take it very well.

And I realized we got to stop doing this. This is escalating too quickly. Yeah. This could go really badly. I always, back in the day, kind of one of the seminal moments in early internet culture was the, there was this director of horrible video game movies named Uva Bowl. I think everyone is familiar with this story.

Who got made fun of by comedy writers on the internet a lot. And so challenged them to a fight, like a televised fight. And he had, he had some sort of semi pro experience, right? He's like an amateur boxer. But he's legitimately like a more built dude than the average internet comedy writer in the late 90s, early 2000s for sure. He did not, if I'm not mistaken, Sean, you put your hat into the ring and he did not want anything to do with that.

I did. It's going to take like three or four minutes to tell this full story. I want to be fair though. But like, I used to host a show called attack the show back in the day on G4. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I recently came back and then left again. But Uva wanted to come on and fight Kevin Pereira. And Kevin Pereira is like, dude, that's crazy.

But wait, wait, wait. I bet Sean, maybe he'd fight you. And so they called me. I'm like, fuck yes. Today. Tomorrow. I don't care when. And then Uva.

Zero training. I don't need to prepare. I've been preparing for this fight my whole life. My whole life. When I got the call, I did jump some rope. I'm like, all right, all right, let's get some. Drink some raw eggs. Yeah.

Had a few eggs. And so it was people like called me to get my stats. And I was like, I gave them my stats. I was six, three, like 210 pounds. This is not good news for Uwe Bowl. They're like, do you know how to fight? I'm like, yeah, I kind of know how to fight. You know what?

You know what? Maybe we're not going to do this. And I found out later that he basic, I don't think he was like scared, but he was like, he's kind of a bully. He just wants to beat up on little nerds. He didn't want to like film Rocky four. So he's like, no, I don't, I want to like just beat up your smallest toast. I don't want to like stand toe to toe with a real man.

I want to beat up Richard Keonka. Yeah. He beat the shit out of that guy. He sure did. He did. And we, it's included as DVD extras on one of his movies. So I've watched all the fights and it's a, you know, we have since learned afterwards that low tax had it coming.

Yes. Yeah. He was, uh, uh, we don't, that's, I will be pure. We don't need to get into that. Yeah. Um, so anyway, he did offer me a spot in that they're like, well, we'll fly to Canada and we'll do it there. And like suspiciously, they never followed up on that.

But, uh, but anyway, that's the story of Uwe Bowl. And then people say like, Oh, he ducked me. And I guess he technically did, but, uh, I did, uh, go to the premiere of postal. And, uh, I was like, I think it's only fair that I give him the chance to kick my ass. So I went up cause I'd already like made fun of him. Yeah. And I went up and he's like, yeah, I know who you are. And I'm like, okay.

So like, so like, are you like pissed? And he's like, no. And then he just very, uh, it carefully explained all of my jokes back to me and how they weren't like real. And I'm like, yeah, they're fucking jokes. Like I don't think he understood even a beginning of what I was trying to do there. I'm like, yeah, it's making fun of you. The movies are bad.

I'm like, what the fuck are we doing here? I think the way they framed it on the DVD extras that I saw was that, oh, he's, he's fighting critics. So maybe he thought it was like all film criticism and not just like jokes. I guess. I mean, I was criticizing his films. He was just like, you know, tech, tech, like, like in blood rain, there's a love scene. I was like, this is obviously directed by a man who's never fucked.

And he's like, you know, I've had sex before. Like he's like a clinically explaining. Like jokes. It does seem like the type of dude that would need to clarify. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have had sex. Right. It doesn't translate into my work, but I have touched it.

Yes. I have, I have seen the boobies. I do like to think about him like getting in a cage with Ebert and then Ebert like pulling out like the Baraka weapons from Mortal Kombat. Just fucking swords erupting from his wrist. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I imagine him fighting.

You never jump in on Ebert. Too much anti air defense. So to send you beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This, uh, this kind of evolution in wrestling where it starts to become something that like, yeah, people like you're doing it out in public. People are like drinking heavily. You've got random folks locally kind of like showing up to fight, try to knock these wrestlers down.

It becomes this circus act. This is what marks kind of the first really clear permanent separation from the various forms of competitive wrestling that had obviously been around for forever to modern wrestling as entertainment. Um, because obviously when you've got like random local drunks like queuing up to be suplexed, the point is very clearly not measuring grappling skill in a traditional way. Right. Um, by 1848 circus troops had adopted a new style of wrestling known as firsthand wrestling,

all better known as Greco-Roman wrestling, which is not the way that the ancient Greeks or Romans wrestled. Right. It's just called that. It pants on for one. Yeah. They had pants on for one, a lot less abusive in a number of ways. Um, it banned a number of holds below the waist.

Uh, it also banned a number of holds that had like kept killing people. Um, so they were trying to like reduce the body count. Good idea. Uh, circus troops in Europe quickly adopted this new style. But not eliminate the body count. No, they never get rid of the body count. Let's be very clear about this. I've been again, I've been watching old wrestling like from the 80s and early 90s with like

my young friend Garrison. And one of the things we'll do in every match is like Google the names and see kind of who made it the longest. Yeah. A lot of 49 year olds, you know, tapping out of life in this sport. Unfortunately. Oh yeah. That's like not a joke.

It's just sad reality. Yeah. Um, football is not wildly different. So one of the things that's kind of going on here is they transitioned to Greco-Roman wrestling is that a lot of things like leg hooks are restricted, which were some of the most effective holds. And so because they can't do a lot of the holds they used to be doing, wrestlers adopted the tactic of throwing each other around the room, uh, or around the, um, the, you know,

the whatever the square, which is obviously like another link, you know, in the chain to modern pro wrestling. The nicknames, fan challenges and increasingly elaborate throws that evolved over this period of time made wrestling more fun to watch than it had been before. By the end of the 1800s, the new sport had its first real champion, a guy named Paul Ponds. Uh, he was a Frenchman. His stage name was Colossus.

And he became by some counts the world champion of Greco-Roman wrestling. That's what Wikipedia calls him at least. The reality is he won a match sponsored by a magazine and then like another match sponsored in Russia, neither of which were really world championships, but he just started calling himself the world champion because like, who's going to argue with you? Right? Right. This is before the internet.

You can just say things. This is before the internet and you're giant. You know? Right. Yeah. So this made... Big Lies gave us Bloodsport. Yeah.

I'm in favor of them. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Uh, this made him famous and he opened a gym for wrestlers and for strongmen, right? And this is again all kind of very highly tied to the circus still. The reality of the situation is that a couple of different countries had wrestling tournaments and winning basically any one of them would qualify you to call yourself world champion if you wanted because like there was no body that was sort of determining who was, what

was the real world championship? In the early 1900s, this is kind of the first time that we start to have what you could call a credible world championship. And the guy who wins it for the first time is a dude named George Hackenschmitt, who was legitimately one of the hardest motherfuckers to ever walk the face of the earth. Basically unbeatable from 1901 to 1908. How lucky is that name then? Hackenschmitt.

Hackenschmitt. It is. I don't know if he'll show you a picture of this dude in a second here. Pons is interesting. I'm expecting a real granite faced son of a bitch. He is actually kind of in a pre-steroid era. He looks like he's on steroids. He's got a nice carpet of fur.

That's right. No, no, no. He is smooth as a fucking waxed dolphin. Oh, no. That's terrifying. He's interesting because he's kind of an old guy when he becomes, he's 34, which is like today even that's kind of like pushing it. You know, by the standards of athletes in the late 1800s, that's like 103.

Back then he might as well have been 97. Yeah. Hackenschmitt is one of the first really shredded guys, as I said, in the modern sense to ever be photographed. And again, it kind of says a lot that he still looks jacked by today's standards, even though there's, there's no steroids in this period. There's not even like a great understanding of muscle building. Why do you think they took his picture?

Yeah. They were like, holy shit, look at this guy. It's also, he's credited as the inventor of the bench press and the hack squat, at least according to a website called Barbend that repeatedly tried to sell me creatine. I feel like somebody figured out the bench press before that. It's not exactly super. I found another website that says he definitely didn't create the bench press, although I will say that website also tried to sell me creatine, Tom.

So how much creatine do you have? So how much creatine do you get? Clearly not enough according to these two websites. Could you buy enough creatine to invent the bench bench press? Not yet. But I'm hoping I bought enough creatine to determine which website is more credible. Like whatever, whichever creatine pushes my bench up more in like a three week period, that's the website I'll choose to believe.

This is how we will measure all things from now on. Sophie, I want you to show them like Hackenschmitt looks like a crude discount, discount action figure from a grocery store toy aisle. Oh hell yeah. Look at that dude. He looks awesome. Yeah. Absolutely natty.

You have to assume because it's 1908. Yeah. No neck. Yeah. Absolutely no neck. He's necklace. He cannot put his arms down at his side. He can't put his arms down to his side.

He looks cannot put his arms down. He looks like a he-man. Yeah. And like, look at those thighs. This motherfucker never skipped a leg day. We can say that with a degree of certainty. It's interesting looking at. Low versus black socks.

Yeah. Incredible. Oh hell yeah. He's got the socks pulled up. He looks like like a professor. He does look amazing. Yeah. It's interesting.

This dude is like, it's like reminding me of like the difference between like when like Christopher Reeve or like Michael Keaton played superheroes and then like what Peter who plays superheroes look like nowadays. Like this guy's definitely jacked. Yeah. But like he's not Hugh Jackman and the Wolverine Jacked. No. No, no, no.

No. It's Hugh Jackman and X-Men Jacked. Yeah. Yeah. Although he is a wide-shouldered man. He's so wide. Yeah. He's a fascinating looking fellow.

So again, basically none of the creatine websites disagree that he invented the hack squat. So I guess we have to give him that a different website that tried to sell me workout powders did argue that he didn't invent the bench press. And that article was written by a guy named Roger Rock Lockridge. So I do think we have to trust it because that's quite a name. Sweet name. Yeah.

So Hackenschmidt racked up. He invented something. Yeah. Yeah. Is the rock in quotes? Yeah. The rock is in quotes. Absolutely.

I hope you do could hear them. So Hackenschmidt racked up more than 3000 victories during his career. A lot of them were during he has a, there's a 40 day wrestling tournament that he wins in 1900. Yeah. So this guy, you have to assume pretty good endurance. But he doesn't really earn a place of promise in the history books until 1905 when he travels to the United States.

Now in the US and the UK, obviously like in Europe, as we've been talking about, Greco-Roman wrestling is the big thing. In the US and the UK, it's still a thing, but it's kind of less favored than something called catches catch can wrestling, which is a combination of several smaller variants of wrestling rules that allows leg hooks, but also emphasizes submissions and mat wrestling. This goes viral in the US because it made it particularly easy to allow challenges for members of the public at big outdoor events. Wrestlers are drunk and love to fight, so you can't not have that.

But also you don't want either to kill these guys or for them to seriously hurt your wrestlers. And so submission holds are something that wrestlers can train on and can kind of guarantee that they can win without like murdering a suburban dad by shattering his spine. I'm just trying to picture the first poor son of a bitch that got put into like a figure four. Yeah. You have no context for that. What is that?

Is this a spell? No. It's like a medieval peasant eating Cheetos. It just blows your mind. Yeah. You would just have a stroke and die. Like you wouldn't be able to wrap your mind around whatever devilry was being done to your legs.

Absolutely not. Yeah. No. No. This was still a point. The number of times I've gone back to my date after losing to a figure four leg lock, like, uh, sorry, honey. I just, I thought I had him that time.

That would have been my whole life back then. Just going out on dates, like, oh, sorry, I'm going to go get my ass kicked, honey. Like stop it. I'm going back to our date. You promised me you wouldn't do this anymore for my whole life. The evolution. You know, he's just going to wrap your legs up again. I got this time.

I'll turn them over. I'll turn them over. If I can flip them over so we're on our bellies, I'll first go pick your four. You never listen to me. You think my ideas are stupid. I'm imagining like early OSS men watching like a wrestling match and going, we have to, we have to figure this out. We have to put money into this.

This is how we beat the crowds. We're going to crack this nut. Yeah, they've got like a stone cold stunner locked up underneath the Pentagon. Like, we can't let this out. It's like the plague in the stand. This gets out. Anything could happen. I've always thought you could measure how good a lover a man is by how well he takes

a stunner, like how giving he is as a lover by how much he gets obliterated by the stone cold stunner, which means that the rock does like a full backflip. I'm saying on record, I think the rock is a very giving love. Yeah, I mean, honestly, Sean, it's the rock or Vince. Yeah, this is sort of does like a weird like Paralympic quiver. He used to do it better. He used to do it better before he blew his knees up. So Hackenschmidt's style and size made him pretty unstoppable in the U.S. for a time.

He very quickly defeated the American champion of the day, a guy named Tom Jenkins, in what was not a particularly hard match. Hackenschmidt was so dominant that a wrestling promoter named Charles Cochran took him aside and was like, hey, man, you can make a lot more money if you like fuck around with your opponents a little like taunt him, toy with him, give people a show instead of just like beating the absolute piss out of them. In an article for e-wrestling news, Kyle Dunning writes, in other words, he wanted to fake the contests to make them more competitive because the marks would keep coming back if

they thought he was beatable. With this business philosophy, catch wrestling soon transitioned to become professional wrestling. And many other countries adopted the same, knowing there was more money to be made predetermining bouts for entertainment value. It all relied on keeping decay-faved that wrestling remained a sport in the eyes of the public. Now again, it's not as, this is kind of like flattening it a little bit. Obviously, other people, other promoters had been doing wrestling matches where the ending was sort of settled ahead of time, but that was not always the case.

It was also a thing where like a lot of time in this day, even if you were supposed to be setting up who's going to win ahead of time, it would still like either egos would get her in the way or something and like people would actually just wind up fighting, right? Like this was a lot more common back then. I should also note that the idea in this period that a major sporting event might be determined by something other than legitimate contest was not unique to wrestling. In early 1919, the Chicago White Sox conspired to lose that year's fall classic to the Cincinnati Reds.

The members of the White Sox approached a group of gamblers and presented them with an opportunity to make a shitload of money. This did not go well. There's a huge grand jury investigation. There's a trial and Major League Sports Gambling is banned until we realized that it was stopping a lot of terrible people from making money. This took about a hundred years, so the fallout from this is significant. Anyway, Hack and Schmidt basically unstoppable in the U.S. until he winds up wrestling the

guy named Frank Gotch. Gotch is an American who just was famous for having pretty incredible endurance. It's unclear to me if their big match is fixed in one way, but from what I've read, neither man is able to force the other into a clear submission for more than two hours. For some perspective, in modern wrestling, one of the most famous matches of all time is an hour-long match between Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart. These are two of the best technical wrestlers of their day. Obviously, they're not competing in the traditional sense, but if you watch what they're doing,

it's amazing that they kept up that level of energy for now. It's an incredible match. They are going, it is insane shit. It wasn't an MMA match that went 90 minutes in the year 2000. That was Kazushi Sakuraba versus Hoist Gracie. I love Sakuraba. He's the best. The freaking Gracie Hunter.

I think the point I'm making is that Hack and Schmidt and Gotch must have been something to see. Two hours is still a significant fucking match. Yeah. If Gotch's finishing move wasn't called the Gotcha, I don't know what he's doing in the Carney business. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like I don't know what we're doing as a culture if that wasn't the case, but I haven't found evidence of it, Tom, so I apologize on behalf of America. Gotcha nuts. Yeah. So, wrestling's charming right along early 1900s, but then you get that whole World War thing. It disrupts the industry. Obviously, the kind of wrestling age men eventually do come back afterwards.

But the age that follows World War I is a little more jaded. And one of the things this means is that a larger and larger number of wrestling fans start to doubt whether or not wrestling is real. The sport languished and a shady as a kind of shady sideshow entertainment for drunks and people from New Jersey until the 1920s. In the early 20s, a wrestler named Ed Lewis is hooked up by his trainer who'd also trained Frank Gotch with a fella named Tuts Monde. Now, Tuts Monde comes from his fucking names, man.

Tuts Monde. These all sound like old timey baseball players. Sophie, will you look up a picture of Tuts Monde? They need to see him. But second, I need to describe this man to you. Tuts Monde is in the early 1920s considered one of the most out of control gamblers in the entire country in the 20s. Hell yeah.

Tuts Monde is a mobbed up dude who other mobbed up dudes are like, this motherfucker gambles too much. And number two, Tuts Monde is a dude who other men in the 20s are like, this guy drinks quite a lot. It is, it's probable no one on earth could drink with this guy today. I'm really excited to share my screen. You gotta show these fuckers Tuts Monde. I can't wait to see this.

I can't wait to see this hero. You ready? Ready. This guy who other mobsters were like, God damn, this man, holy shit, he looks like a giant baby. Yeah. This is an unfinished clone. Yeah.

He's definitely not done. Yeah. They paint those nipples on him every morning so people don't get suspicious. He looks, he looks, wow. Yeah. 260. Yeah. Six feet tall.

260. I would just put him at three feet tall from these pictures. Yeah. He is a slab of meat. He's dude. A profoundly unsettling man, and I'm only saying that because he's been dead for decades because I would be frightened to make these comments if he were alive. He looks like in the face, not so much as Bill, but in the face he looks like Brian

Erlacher. Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say he looks like a cabbage patch kid, but yeah, Brian Erlacher looks like a cabbage patch. He does have, yeah, resting cabbage patch energy. So Tuts is in addition to being, they call him Tuts because of his train conductor hat. Yeah. Tuts is also a wrestler, and so he acted as Ed Lewis' sparring partner, trainer and security

man. Together, the two worked out a series of new holds and innovative wrestling tactics. They also would wrestle each other in the ring sometime during matches. These were, you know, obviously they had set these matches ahead of time. Both of these guys are pretty technically skilled, so Tuts is the kind of guy that like Ed can trust, and they can trust each other to do a lot of these kind of like throws and tosses and not murder each other, and put together a choreographed spectacle, right? If you can't trust Tuts, who wants to stay in this world if you can't trust the hard

drinking gambling out of control mobster wrestler? So Tuts and Lewis, over time, develop a new style of wrestling, and it's a hybrid of Greco-Roman, catch-us-catch-can, and kind of circus shit, which they call slam bang Western style wrestling. And this is kind of the most direct precursor to modern pro-wrestling. In a different article for eWrestling News, Kyle Dunning writes, The newly formed trio used their connections to persuade wrestlers from around the country to join their new promotions, so they no longer had to be controlled by others. Tuts began forming what we would later know as sports entertainment, but the wrestlers

had to be in on keeping it secret from the public. This new style of wrestling would incorporate elements from boxing, Greco-Roman, freestyle, lumber camp fighting, and theater. As traditional wrestling could go on for several hours, they implemented time limits to ensure matches would not bore the audience. They also introduced the concept of tag team wrestling, which had seldom been used before. Within six months, they had taken over the wrestling scene, and were taking bookings and major sports venues instead of back alley halls and other small places.

This just sounds like making lumber camp brawls. I was about to say, excuse me, lumber camp brawls, specifically up in the Pacific Northwest, a major form of entertainment, where you just go out and watch lumber camp guys beat the piss out of each other. They are very jacked, and they have no money. They are all alcoholics, they will fight for hard liquor. Maybe they'll fight a bear, maybe a tree, I don't know. They don't care.

They don't even know the difference. And you know who else will fight for your amusement. To the death, if you want, you slip them a 20, the products and services that support this contest, huge fans of blood sports. They don't give a shit. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, DC. They took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible.

I will admit the others when you catch me, if you can, sign freeway fan. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time.

Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, picture Miami, picture it's beaches, picture the palm trees swaying in the wind, picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced. The radio murders. They left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card.

It's like the mafia used to do. And yet, the mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And then, there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, I clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalosian. Listen to Silenced, the Radio Murders, wherever you get your podcasts. If you want early access to new episodes or tier episodes ad free, be sure to subscribe

to the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Even the occasional awesome dog. Or maybe Gal Varino, the indigenous Mapuche warrior who replaced his severed hands with swords to fight the Conquistadors. Yeah, this is the show. Listen to Badass of the Week on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

So, you know, lumber camp fighting, all this kind of stuff fuses together to make slam bang Western style wrestling with Tootson Ed create. I love that somebody saw a lumber camp fighting and was like, this is close. American needs this. But it's not quite there. Not quite there. It just needs to be on a national stake. If this had shiny panties, a couple of cakes.

And really throw in each other weird, wild distances, surprising air. That's what we need here. And I got a fancy guy with a monocle. Yeah. More guys in suits. Yeah. There's not nearly enough racist caricatures. No one's dressed as a shake.

So for one thing, we're going to have to fix that. We got to fix that closure right now. It is worth noting that around the same time, the late 1920s and early 30s, other people were innovating wrestling too, obviously, like this is not a two person thing. Among other innovations in this time, the flying tackle and the drop kick are invented, which I love to think of the first man like the Wright brothers of drop kicks. They keep failing at it. They're about to like leave for the day and then one more time.

Just let me try one more time. I know I could do it with both feet and give both legs. Can you imagine seeing that for the first? It's like seeing the first drop kick for the first time. Oh my God. Oh, shit. Yeah. Is he Icarus?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the next thing that will be like that is when they finally clone a mammoth like my God. Look at it. Right. Yeah. The timeline of human history is split.

The drop kick. I'm going to drop kick that mammoth right now. Fucking snail. Oppenheimer watching the first drop kick. Now I have become death destroyer of worlds. That's all that's all that's all the bomb is it's all vision is it's it's Adams drop kicking each other. Yeah.

It's it's it's an evolution of the drop kick. So Billy Sandow would test new recruits for kind of this wrestling business that they're building in his own private ring. Well, toots would work with them on their finishing sequences. This kind of period is when they invent the concept of wrestling having a go home sequence, which is a commonplace today, but back then it was new and exciting to fans. Toots also introduced the concept of the no contest and double count out, which moves wrestling away from kind of the old school competitive roots and creates a lot of possibilities

for like storytelling right for ways that you can kind of end matches and stuff without people getting beat up too bad and that you know opens up possibilities for all sorts of storylines, a whole bunch of stuff. And it's it's kind of worth noting just in terms of how innovative these guys are. Modern wrestling is still very similar to what toots and his his buddies create. And these three guys become known as the gold dust trio, I think because of how much fucking money they make. And they basically are kind of the most direct progenitors of the modern pro wrestling industry.

They do a lot of fights in burlesque theaters, side shows, and they kind of move on and really a fairly short span of time because of how much interest there is to stadiums and other massive like respectable venues. And wrestling for the first time spreads across the United States, not as just like a thing people did, but as a semi organized business in which there's quite a lot of money. Now Toots is the enforcer in addition to training people and stuff. He and another guy, John Pasek, would beat the shit out of any wrestlers who tried to go into business for themselves.

This earned them the nickname hookers. That's what they're called for doing this. I'm not really certain why. But but yeah, that's that's this the old that old hooker toots. I love that toots just applied his mob training to this. It's like somebody else trying to muscle in your territory fucking break his legs. There's not a problem that toots cannot solve with a fucking drop kick. Yes.

So that's a number brawl double threat when you get a guy in the ring and beat a guy out of the ring. That's that's the total package. Toots walking into work. He's got like a briefcase and inside of it is just like a stump. So the trio eventually broke apart due to a power struggle. But wrestling was here to stay. And for a time, its shady reputation kept it down.

Madison Square Garden initially refused to host wrestling events through the 1940s. What finally changes this is that Toots teams up with Bastards Pod alumni Bernard McFadden, who kind of invented physical culture in the United States. He was a big magazine baron, one of the guys who sort of started the modern like health and supplement industry. And he provides Toots with the financial backing to expand this business and because he's got connections, he convinces Madison Square Garden to start hosting wrestling events. In 1948, the first Garden Wrestling exhibition was held.

It basically always sells out. It is huge business for them. In that first match, a guy named Gorgeous George defeats a guy named Ernie Ducec. That same year sees another seminal moment in pro wrestling history. By that point, wrestling has grown from being the business of a number of shady Carney promoters and disgraced boxers to a network of promoters and what you might call like cartel leaders who ran wrestling in different cities and regions and generally hated each other. But in July 14th, 1948, several of these dudes gathered together at a hotel in Waterloo,

Iowa to talk. And I'm going to quote now from a book called Sex Lies and Headlocks, right around the room where P.L. Pinky, you're going to love these nicknames, Tom, P.L. Pinky George, a former Bantam weight fighter who ran all the shows out of Des Moines, Al Haft, who liked to book big games, names in Columbus, but couldn't keep them for long because he was notoriously cheap, Orville Brown, a 250 pound brawler from Kansas City, Max Clayton, a genial Omaha businessman who played only $25 for a main event, but made up for it by buying his favorite wrestlers

straight whiskey and steaks, and Tony Stetcher, who ran the Minneapolis Territory while managing his brother Joe, a three-time world champion who could dint a sack of grain with his thighs. Hell yeah. At least what an amazing thing on a CME. Who could not? What's it? Yeah. Dint a sack of grain with your thighs?

And we must be missing something. What does that mean? What a weird metric. I feel like most people could, but maybe grain was different then. Right. What am I, a chopper? A chopper bag, just sitting on the grain. 60% of those guys have killed somebody with a wrench.

Oh yeah, absolutely. But only 30% of them remember it. Right. I love how like some of them are like, oh, this guy's the toughest guy in the world. And then one guy's like, I guess you can tell he's been sitting on grain. Yeah, he does a lot of grains and real grain steaks. So real dubious honors in the crew is what I'm saying. So the dude who calls all these guys together in 1948 to talk is a man, a 42-year-old guy.

He's a former sports writer named Sam Muchnick. Sam had lost his job as a sports writer covering baseball because his newspaper collapsed. A thing none of us can identify with. What is that like? Can't picture that. He decided to deal with this trauma by starting to work for a wrestling baron and then becoming one himself. He rises to prominence fairly quickly and, you know, he takes a little break to do some

World War II stuff. But when he gets back, he finds himself frustrated by the fact that wrestling is kind of being held back by this vicious pack of promoters who are, they're always fighting and bribing each other to like steal each other's wrestlers. And this is getting in the way of both their profits and expanding the business. So he gets all these guys together, these real shady motherfuckers and he's like, what if we set up rules together as the bosses of these different kind of syndicates to set up prices, to like fix wages, to blacklist wrestlers who go into business for themselves.

Now, this is very illegal. They are violating the shit out of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But these guys are all criminals, right? This is not the first law these people have broken. This is mob shit. This is classic mob shit. Yeah. This is very classic mob shit.

And these guys all have a shitload of money. So they figure they can bribe whoever they need to bribe. He gets all these guys at the president hotel to agree to his idea, which amounts to something like the only union pro wrestling, whatever, see, and of course it is a union of owners. This goes on to become the national wrestling alliance. Interesting fact, there's another NWA that's like a wrestling kind of alliance that predates this NWA. But yeah, it's not a, it's not a kind of big deal in the history.

So anyway, interesting stuff. So they all agree on this. They formed the NWA, this big cartel. The last holdout to it is Mucnik's former friend and bitter rival, a guy named Lou Thes. Thes eventually agreed to merge outfits with Mucnik and join the cartel. And Mucnik is like, okay, but if we do that, you've got to agree to lose a title match to this wrestler the NWA likes called Orville Brown, right?

So this match never happens. Brown and his business partner, another wrestler that he'd fought that night were like driving home from the match. They're like friends, but they're supposed to be enemies. And they happened to hit an 18 wheeler. They may have been hammered and very nearly die. This is a problem for several reasons because Brown and his partner are supposed to be hated enemies.

And the fact that they're riding together in the same car creates a scandal. I think they get fired for this. It threatens to undo the fragile bonds of belief that made wrestling what it was. So yeah, I think later on, a similar thing happens to Rick Flair. He's in a plane crash with the guys feuding with and they had to pretend like they weren't traveling together. Yeah. I want to actually talk about this a little bit because like it's now fairly well known

that within the wrestling world, this kind of mix of lies and theater to create this illusion of a contest is known as kayfabe, right? There's debate over where the term comes from sex lies and headlocks kind of credits it to turn of the century carnivals where these, you know, these wrestlers who would take on random challengers, which they called marks from the crowd and like would wrestle them and stuff, you know, they can't, you know, in that case, they generally know what they're doing because they have a lot more experience. But when they're wrestling each other, they can't go as hard as they otherwise might because

one of them will get hurt if they do. So they rigged the matches in order to avoid getting seriously injured. And they have to be in order to like kind of set this stuff up. They have to develop a secret language that lets them kind of plan stuff out in public without making it clear to others what they're doing, which is this kind of pig Latin dialect called Carney. So one theory about where kayfabe comes from is that it's just a term from this little language that they made up initially to initially, it's kind of a term for like, shut the fuck

up. There's like marks watching, right? Like that's the initial meaning of kayfabe. But over time, it just becomes a metaphor for like, don't let anyone on on what's really happening. Now, we don't actually know that that's the origin of kayfabe. Nobody is certain where it comes from. But throughout the middle of the 20th century, this kind of whole language grows up around

pro wrestling, as Josie Reisman describes. For nearly a century, this illusion was maintained at all costs in a kind of industry omerta, a heel and a face who were sworn kayfabe enemies couldn't be seen drinking together in their off hours. A wrestler, billed as Iranian, couldn't be known to be Italian, even wrestlers themselves sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was kayfabe and what was not. So they developed two more terms. A work was anything that was kayfabe and anything that was real was a shoot.

Now a couple of other notes here, a heel is a bad guy, right? Like in wrestling, they're generally the guy is especially in this period, they're nearly always supposed to lose, right? Meanwhile, a face which stands for baby face is like a good guy, right? There's generally the people who are supposed to win in this period. That's going to change a lot over time. Eventually you get to the point where like the heels and faces kind of move up and down and there's also becomes this kind of third category and a lot of times the heels win

because of the people that like the fans like the most. But in this period of time, it's a lot simpler, right? Well, there's a Hulk Hogan is kind of a notorious liar, but like in his book, he had a story about like he had a gun that belonged to one of the savage Samoans and then they all had to go to jail because the savage Samoans wouldn't talk in front of the police because the wrestlers were supposed to be like these caveman monsters that didn't speak English. So they could have like cleared up the misunderstanding about the gun, but they all went to jail instead. And I'm like, there's no way anyone's true, but like this is what Hulk Hogan said.

I don't know. I've heard that story from other sources than Hulk Hogan. I don't know that like you are, Sean, you are very correct, Hulk Hogan is a famous liar. There are stories that crazy that we're about to talk about stuff on that level and even wilder does occur. I remember reading about how Rick Flair's wife didn't know it was fake until like deep into the nineties. No, no, there's a lot of that going on.

I do want to note before we get into some of these stories, not all wrestling fans are marks. Overtime professionals split them up into smarts and marks. Smart is somebody who gets that like this is not real, right? These giant men throwing each other across the room are engaged in a performance. This is not really fighting. Riceman and other historians of wrestling, like kind of traditionally the assumption was there's only a few smarts.

Most people are marks. Rice men increasingly and other historians of wrestling tend to suspect that actually like most fans, particularly most adult fans over time are smarts. They're all kind of sort of like Santa Claus, right? And you know, there's a period of time where you kind of believe that it's it's a real sport and then you get older. You see something that breaks the illusion kind of famously Hulk Hogan, who again take with a grain of salt.

He claims to have been a believer as a young adult, like to have been totally bought into it until one day as he's sort of like watching a match, he sees two wrestlers strategizing beforehand and has this like horrifying realization that the game is rigged. I'd be so embarrassed to tell that story. Yeah, I might believe it because he's not a smart man. Let's be very clear about the whole story. I don't know what you mean, dude. Riceman also notes that while most fans were probably savvy enough to parse out the truth

eventually wrestlers for decades lived in mortal fear of breaking kayfabe because managers and promoters drilled into their crews that this lie is the only thing keeping the interest in wrestling and thus their jobs alive, right? This is deadly serious to the industry, right? Wrestlers are kind of divided into again, you know, you've got your heels and your baby faces and stuff. One of the most interesting realities of early wrestling is again kind of how seriously this is taken.

So even though maybe most fans eventually figure it out, a lot of fans never do. Some of this is because guys like Mucnick would demand that their heel and face wrestlers never travel together, never act friendly together in any way. You know, if wrestlers suffered injuries in their regular life or got arrested and charged with crimes, which happened constantly, this would get worked into storylines on the fly. My favorite example of this stemmed from the 1983 arrest of Kerry Von Erich and we will be talking about the Von Erich family in a little bit, but I want to read a quote from the book.

Dark story. That's what we're ending on. But I want to read a quote from the book, Wrestling Babylon by Irv Mucnick right now. Kerry and his wife were returning from their honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico when US customs agents during a routine inspection caught him with 18 unmarked tablets in his right front pocket. Inside the crotch of his pants was a plastic bag containing an assortment of nearly 300 other pills, including codeine, diazepam, libraium and possibly percadan, 10 grams of marijuana

and six and a half grams of blue and white powder. The Von Erichs wove the ensuing publicity into the world-class TV storyline, vaguely suggesting that Kerry had been framed by the free birds, their arched rivals. 18 months later, after behind the scenes maneuvering, the charges were dropped by the Tarrant County District Attorney. Very fun story. So the wrestlers hit these drugs in my butthole. What's his name?

Michael. Oh, shit. I forgot his name. The guy from Nevermind. It doesn't matter. So Michael Bolton, you're thinking of Michael Bolton. Yes, I'm thinking of Michael Bolton. Aren't we all always?

I am. So wrestlers didn't just kind of keep the fans, you know, try to keep this shit up for the fans. They kept their own family in the dark, maintaining the lie that the matches they were in were real competitions and that their fights with other wrestlers were real. This sometimes caused dangerous situations. An early heel named Mario Galinto was so hated that his wife feared for his life and so she started showing up at matches with a loaded handgun to protect him from his rivals

and she would pull it on them and stuff. Like she would threaten them with it during matches and eventually promoters had to sit down with Mario and were like, you have to tell your wife the truth. She is going to murder someone on television. Like this is a serious problem for us. You need to stop marrying six year olds. She was blasts, Paul Bearer or some shit. Right.

She was the MPs of 38 and two of them on fucking God. She had a 30-8. She didn't, when he tells her the truth, allegedly she doesn't speak to him for three days. Oh my God. He just destroys her. I can see that. That's kind of humiliating, but also infuriating.

You lied to me. You lied to me. Also, I'm so stupid. About wrestling. Yeah. Well, I mean, she was in such fear for him that she was carrying a loaded gun to his matches and he was letting her continue to do this. He was like, yeah, honey.

I get it. You're doing a reasonable thing. They both missed a lot of red flags. Yeah. Maybe communication wasn't their strong suit as a couple, you know? That's possible. It is. To be fair to her, it was super common for wrestlers to get assaulted and injured by fans.

Women in particular had a habit of jabbing heels with hatpins, unlike their way up to the ring and stuff. Men, meanwhile, tended to throw rocks and bottles at them. In one South Carolina match, a 78-year-old man with a knife stabbed Al Rogowski so bad that he needed more than 100 stitches. Oh my God. Al is a hard son of a bitch. So he refuses to go to a hospital.

He drives himself back to his house. He finds someone there to sew him up and then he wrestles the very next day. Because I tell you why wrestlers don't have any health insurance. They sure don't, Tom. They are better paid back then. He doesn't get any sick time either, so if he doesn't wrestle the next day, he doesn't make money. So it's like fucking glue me up.

I'm going out there. I should note it is generally agreed upon by the historians I'm reading. The money's better back then than it is now by comparison. These guys are making better livings than modern wrestlers often tend to, which is interesting to me. Obviously, it's different around the country. That's not everywhere. But broadly speaking, it's easier to make an OK living than as a wrestler than it is

today. A lot of people argue. You got stabbed more often. You did get stabbed more often. For an example of that, Sean, Rowdy Roddy Piper claims to have been stabbed three times by fans who thought he was an actual bad guy. I don't doubt it, man. He used to drive people crazy.

No, they were. He was because he's a genius. He's incredible actors. He's very, very, very talented at what he did. But also like just looking at Rowdy Roddy Piper, you have to be either ready to die or the drunkest I anyone has ever been to be willing to attempt to stab that man because he was a monster. Also, his whole gimmick was that he was insane.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. God, I love Roddy Piper. You know, enough to stab him. Yeah, I would. I would. I would stab him if it meant he was back again.

If we got one more episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia with him playing the maniac. What an absolute hero. You know what? This next ad break, go watch the movie They Live starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, just a champion. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, DC. It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others when you catch me, if you can, sign freeway fan.

This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive?

Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Picture Miami. Picture its beaches. Picture the palm trees swaying in the wind. Picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced, the radio murders. They left the body there for a reason.

It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do. And yet, the mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalotian, listen to Silenced, the Radio Murders, wherever you get your podcasts. If you want early access to new episodes or to hear episodes ad-free, be sure to subscribe

to the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. We're talking about ninjas, vikings, pirates, explorers and scientists, and even the occasional awesome dog. You mean like Goofy? Is Goofy a dog, or is Pluto the dog? Anyway, no. I'm not talking about Goofy. I'm talking about Sergeant Stubby.

I'm talking about war hero dogs. I'm talking about a bear named Voitek that carried artillery shells for the Polish artillery during World War II. I might bring up Laskarina Bubelina. She's an 18th century Greek naval commander and freedom fighter. Or maybe Galvarina. The indigenous Mapuche warrior who replaced his severed hands with swords to fight the conquistadors.

Yeah, this is the show. Listen to Badass of the Week on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I watched the entire They Live. We did. And that always sunny episode. And that always sunny episode.

Both works of incredible art. So given all of this, it probably won't surprise you to hear that even in the pre-steroid days, wrestlers often lived difficult lives. One of the first great modern wrestlers was a guy named Gorgeous George. He was the son of a house painter. He played a narcissistic heel who was one of the first big popular TV wrestlers. He would prance around the ring in a fur robe. He was kind of a little like queer coded kind of bad guy thing, right?

This is, you know, the 60s. He gouged eyes. He flirted with audience members. And he just like chewed the fuck out of the scenery. George is a huge hit in like the 50s and kind of early 60s. But by the time he retires in 1962, the heavy drinking that came with his career field, because I mean, it's part of just what these guys do to deal with the pain, because they're, you know, it's not easy on your body, had destroyed his health.

When he retires, he like uses the money he has to start a bar and van knives. But his medical bills quickly forced him to sell it. In 1963, after a night of bumming drinks from the bartender in the bar he used to own, he dropped dead from a heart attack. He was 48 years old. Insects, Lies and Headlocks, the author's note, the wrestlers he'd once worked with pass around a hat to help bury him in an orchid colored casket, beside which his last girlfriend, a stripper, collapsed crying.

It is a very wrestling funeral. He is not the only guy with a story like this. I know. Yeah. Dark. I mean, not that his girlfriend is a stripper. That's whatever. But just like this is like his story is not uncommon.

No, I mean, it's dark that they had to pass around a hat to pay for his casket and he collapsed, begging for drinks in the bar he used to own. That's dark. It is dark. It is. And again, a lot of these promoters are just straight up monsters. There are more of them who are kind of decent guys in this period. There are a number of like regional promoters who will do shit like when their wrestlers

have health problems after retirement, divert funds from their business to like pay for their health care. I'm not saying that's the norm, but it does happen. And it's also, there is strong solidarity with kind of wrestlers where stuff like this is not the taking up collections to help old and injured wrestlers pay for medical treatment or pay for funerals. That stuff happens with a significant degree of frequency in this period of time. There is kind of this understanding that like, you know, this is a tough job.

We're all kind of going to destroy ourselves doing it and we have to have each other's back, you know? So given the cultural values of the time, good guys and bad guys in wrestling had to be very easy to separate on black and white TVs. In the 1950s and 60s, this often meant that your bad guys are going to be either communists or Nazis, right? Very easy way to make it clear. Yeah, exactly.

An early Russian wrestler, Boris Malenko, was actually a Jew from Jersey named Larry. But you know, he could do an accent, right? That's also an extremely common wrestling story. Yes. Yes. For example, the shake of Arabi, who prayed to Allah before each fight, was a Detroit native named Ed. And one of the first great Nazi wrestlers was Jack Adkison, better known as Fritz von

Erich. Now, but he wasn't real Nazi, right? Well, the focus of this series is Vince McMahon, obviously, you know? But wrestling is always traded on brutality and mortgaging human bodies for entertainment. And I don't want to just focus on the ways Vince did that, because that's going to give people this attitude, which is sometimes gets put across by like wrestling fans that like before Vince, things were a lot better. You know, some stuff was, but this has always been a pretty brutal business.

So we're going to talk for the rest of this episode about Fritz and the von Erich family. You guys both had a reaction when I brought them up. So I think you might know this story. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of sadness in the von Erich story. It's a really, really tragic. It is a nightmare, yeah. So Fritz slash Jack, and we're just going to call him Fritz from now on, had been trained

by the founder of one of the first great wrestling dynasties, Stu Hart, a Canadian from Edmonton, whose dungeon, that's what it's called, the dungeon, was the most celebrated training center for wrestlers of its day and for like generations to come. This is like, they remain very big. Bret Hart, we talked about a little bit earlier, is like one of his kids and, you know, trains there. Hart trained Fritz and gave him his stage name. And you might think that having your like mentor be like, Hey, you've got serious Nazi

vibes to me. Why don't you wear a fucking swastika into the ring would make you reconsider aspects of your life. But Fritz is like, yeah, man, for sure. That sounds great. He would wrestle. Yeah. Yeah.

$50 a night for sure, bro. Fritz would wrestle wearing Nazi regalia. His trademark move was the iron claw, and he has the distinction of having been wrestling Lou Thes, who we've talked about before. He's kind of one of the great, great, big early champions. He and Thes are wrestling the day that JFK gets assassinated. There's not as much great footage of him in the ring as I like. Related?

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a causal relation. There's not as much great footage of him as I'd like, but I found a clip of his brother, Waldo Von Erich. Waldo is not his real brother. This is a kayfabe thing, right? Waldo was another guy who trains at the dungeon and they're like, you know, match brothers.

And Waldo was also a Nazi. This clip is from a match in 1975, and it is remarkable. I should note before we start that his opponent here is Jay Strongbow, who is a Native American wrestler who wrestles in a full headdress. He's actually an Italian. Yeah, not an uncommon story. So here's Waldo Von Erich being a Nazi. And as he comes in the ring, he is wearing a stall helm.

I should note. Boy, he sure is. Yeah. He is wearing a Nazi helmet and a sleepless shirt. He's got a writing crop in his hand, and he's got in the front of his shirt is there's a Nazi logo. Okay. Here comes the Italian man in the native headdress.

And then there's the Italian man in the headdress. Chief Jay Strongbow. Mm-hmm. From Tuscany. Hi. Old-timey wrestlers, I do love the gay-coded fancy man and the Indian chief are like my two favorite, like, problematic characters. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You get some. I love that Waldo's swastika. You can tell they weren't into drawing it. I also love, you know, steroids are starting to be a thing in the 70s, but they haven't figured them out great. So these guys are just huge dudes with beer bellies. Oh, he's doing a Nazi salute.

Yes, the Nazi salute. There it was. There it was. Yeah. Now, the iron claw, if the audience doesn't know, is kind of like a Nazi salute on the human face. You just grab the front of their head and you just squeeze it. Mm-hmm.

It's impossible to escape. I mean. Yeah. You're palming someone on that face. Yeah. Just how do you get out of that? Just rough. You can walk backwards to the side.

No one thinks of that. No, no. No. Trapped forever. When you get sig-hyled right in the forehead, you sort of like it knocks all thoughts out of your brain. So you're like, what do I do? That's why Hitler adopted it, famously great technical wrestler, Adolf Hitler.

So. I will know. It's actually how he took himself out. He just did the iron claw to himself at the bunker. This match between Jay Strongbow and Waldo, problematic, not even close to the most racist wrestling match that you can find. Like. Oh, it's not even the most racist mid.

It's not even the most racist wrestling match I've seen recently. No. That bounced right off my brain. Yeah. If you hadn't told me, hey, we're looking at this for racism, I would have been like, this is totally normal old-timey wrestling. Yeah, at least the Nazis are supposed to be the bad guy. The Nazis are not seeing an Indian sheet.

Hopefully they're doing pretty good. So Fritz himself has a, as we've discussed, just a nightmare of a life, but because he's a terrible person. So his, you know, his first son, this is not his fault probably, Jack Jr. dies in 1959 from accidental electrocution that leads to drowning. Obviously, this has an impact on Fritz and he decides to stop wrestling on the East Coast. As kind of a result of this, he becomes the godfather of Texas wrestling, overseeing a company that runs wrestling in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio called World Class Wrestling.

Fritz continued to reinvested the money that he made from wrestling into real estate. He's one of the guys in this who's actually like good with his money. And while he's making it as a wrestler puts it into something that's going to make him more money. Unfortunately, he's also a giant piece of shit and kind of a real fascist because one of his best friends is Pat Robertson. He is a born again Christian who becomes a major right wing donor in Texas and a moral crusader.

So that's great. Sweet. Yeah. Good guy. So he has four sons, three of whom are for more sons, three of whom at least are groomed to follow in his footsteps, even though several of them lack the talent or the physique to do so. Spoilers.

When you said three of whom, I thought you were going to say something else. Yeah. That's where we're going. We're going to say then electrocuted and drowned. We're starting with electrocuted and drowned at the same time. He's down one boy so far, right? He's got one out of five already out of the match. Did you do a show on Pat Robertson?

We've covered him before. We've covered a lot of aspects of him. Yeah. His dream was to create a wrestling dynasty in imitation of Stu Hart, right? And as well as Pat Robertson's. No, no, no. No, maybe. But definitely, definitely Fritz.

And as wrestling nerd Nicholas Allhelm writes, by the time Kevin, David and Kerry, his three large adult sons, entered their teens, they were put into grueling workout sessions by their father. Despite time playing a variety of junior high and high school sports, he would work them out for another three hours after school every day. Well, the boys grew up in wrestling and knew wrestling. It was clear that their father wanted to make it clear they didn't have a choice. Their future was wrestling, whether they wanted it to be or not.

Cool. Yeah. So, you know, he's kind of like the Michael Jackson of wrestling or Michael Jackson's dad of wrestling. Yeah. I should say. I always forget that guys. Joe Jackson.

Right. Joe Jackson. But maybe like honestly, Joe Jackson's a better dad, which is like that. That's a heads up as to where this is going. Only one of his kids are dead. Yeah. It's like a really dark like 2000s era joke punchline. Yeah.

Joe Jackson's a better dad. I mean, he's got a better fucking record. So, for a time, the Von Erichs are very successful. In the early 1980s, his boys are all actively in the ring. They are hugely popular in Texas. By this point in kayfabe, Fritz has been revealed by his nemesis, Gary Hart, to have been a normal Texas boy, not a Nazi, allowing him to turn babyface. This made kayfabe a little easier for his boys because they didn't have to wear swastikas.

But since their dad is the booker and they're the stars, he gets to run them mercilessly, right? And his entire company is, because these guys are big stars, their entire companies rely on their performing basically every night during parts of the year in order to keep attendance high at the venues that he booked. Because they're such a necessary part of the business when they get hurt, which happens a lot, they can't take the next night off. So dad just starts handing them fucking painkillers like they're skittles in order to keep them

performing. Yeah. Another thing that's become necessary. It's like a bandit. It's like a bandit. And we'll go back when we talk more about Vince. We'll go back to how steroids become a part of the industry, but steroids are a big part of the industry by the 1980s.

And so in order to compete and again, to keep crowds, butts and seats, they have to bulk up to Hulk Hogan like levels. And the drugs that they're taking take a toll on these boys' bodies. And after a 1984 match in Japan, David von Erich is found dead in his hotel room at age 25. We don't entirely know what happened. His friend Bruiser Brody claimed once that they flushed a bunch of drugs down the toilet after finding his body and basically that he owed deed.

I think the family denies this. It's not really clear what happened because after he makes this claim, Bruiser Brody gets stabbed to death in Puerto Rico. He sure does. We don't get a lot of detailed confirmation either way. Is there a reasonable counter explanation? It's like, oh, he's got a bunch of drugs down his throat. Not really.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of thing where like, today, like any leading man and stuff who's doing big action roles is on something that we can call steroids pretty much. But also we've gotten a lot better at doing it without killing people, which is not, I'm not saying people should do steroids, but if you have millions of dollars and doctors who are constantly monitoring your blood levels and doing tests on you and stuff, it's not as dangerous.

Like these guys are just kind of shot shooting shit up their asses and seeing what happens, you know? It's a combination of things too. You know, it's all the hard drinking and popping painkillers because you can't go to the doctor. You just have to keep going. Yeah. I think they tour something like, I don't know, 300 days a year. It's a combination of all that shit.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's a different time and it's even, again, don't do steroids, folks, but it's even much worse for you at this point in time even. And yeah, they're also Coke is as common as Roids are because I mean, part of what a lot of wrestlers just say is that like, yeah, you know, in order to get into the ring and get amped up, you got to get fucking coked up and then to calm down and to deal with the pain, you take painkillers and then often to get to bed, you add alcohol to that.

A lot of guys OD is a result of that shit. I mean, it's never, I mentioned Ultimate Warrior earlier, but never has you need cocaine to get hyped up for the match been more obvious than an Ultimate Warrior entrance. No. There are, there are like cartel warehouses in fucking Sinaloa that have less cocaine than was in his bloodstream and he given night like he was gliding out there on a, on a board of cocaine, like an ice man. Just an incredible man.

So very tragic death, obviously fucking 25, he'd barely, you know, had a life. Very sad. The Yellow Rose of Texas, as David was known, was mourned by a crowd of 3000 people at his memorial service. Fritz though made sure to profit from this selling color photos of his dead son that had once gone for $3 for $10 at the memorial service, right after he set his one of his surviving sons, Carrie Vaughn Eric, to wrestle Ric Flair for the world title. Because kind of everybody's sorry, you know, because David died.

They set it up so that Carrie, you know, wins this match, right, which is again, not uncommon in a case like this. You've got someone whose brother just died. You give them a belt, you know, I'm surprised like Fritz didn't open up the casket and let people take pictures with David for like 20 bucks or something. Yeah, let me see your money, let me see your money. It's barely better than that. Right.

Get up there. It's 40 for a thumb. That guy took a thumb. Get that extra 10 bucks. Yeah. Don't let that dude leave. The next year in 1985, Mike Vaughn Eric was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault against an ER doctor.

He got into a fistfight with during a trip to the hospital. Shortly thereafter, he goes to Tel Aviv to wrestle and he takes a bad bump to his shoulder that dislocates it badly enough that it requires surgery due to either poor hygiene or bad luck. After surgery, he contracts toxic shock syndrome, which is very serious and very uncommon. Just like in general, it's not something men get off and it's certainly not a common side effect of shoulder surgery. He gets transferred to a hospital with 105 degree fever and his kidneys shutting down. The upside of this is that he is too weak to punch another doctor, so that might have

helped. So the doctor lives through that. So the doctor survives and he does and while his son is fighting to survive, Fritz starts like making, he goes to the press basically, you know, never waste an opportunity. He tells the media that the number of calls from fans to the hospital outnumbers the calls that a neighboring hospital had received when JFK was sent there in 1963, which is an insane flex. Anybody wants a bag of bloody stools, 70 bucks.

I'm sure you're right. It's real Trump saying now I have the tallest building in New York City. It's wild stuff. Mike does pull through. He survives this and his brother Kevin gives a press conference calling his survival a miracle. Alas, he takes, he's permanently injured from this, right? His weight drops down to just 145 pounds. He is now no longer able to speak without slurring his voice.

He just, like he doesn't recover from this. Muchnick writes, quote, Fritz lost no time in repackaging him for the wrestling marks. Mike was nicknamed the living miracle. Fans were promised that he would defeat the odds, wrestle again and claim a championship for God and family. To give the gimmick momentum, Mike was wheeled out in a car to wave to the 25,000 fans at the big October show at the show at the Cotton Bowl. He made his official return to the ring on July 4th, 1986.

By then he was also battling. You want to kiss him? You want to kiss him? 60 bucks. So when he comes back to the ring, he's also contracted hepatitis and his dad's just like, get him out there. Get him out there. Yeah.

It's so bad. Go share some blood with that fella. Yeah. So the next year, 1986, another prominent wrestler, Gino Hernandez, dies of a cocaine overdose. Now this happens right after a TV spot where Hernandez, a heel, had blinded baby face wrestler Adams. And it says a lot about wrestling in this period that the announcer, Bill Mercer, Fritz's employee, announced Gino's real life death on television by saying, we have suffered

two terrible tragedies in the last week, the blinding of Chris Adams and the death of Gino Hernandez. Equally. The fake blinding and a real death. These are equivalent tragedies. Yeah. Thanks to Kay Fabe. They're the same thing.

So the next year, Carri Vaughan Eric wasted his hell, rams into the back of a police car on his motorcycle. His foot is like, part of his foot, it winds up eventually getting amputated. It is a nasty wreck. Doctors spend 13 hours putting his limb back together and then he is immediately whisked away to perform in the fucking ring. My god. Yeah, it's a nightmare.

He wrestles with a fake foot for a while, doesn't he? Yeah, he sure does, Tom. He sure fucking does. I'm going to quote again from Mochnik here. Sorry, Fritz is just smashing these kids to pieces. He's just a nightmare. Like again, Joe Jackson might be the better dad. His opponent this evening was carefully instructed to sell for Carri, for it was clear in advance

that the man who was once among the most agile, 250-pounders in wrestling would be virtually immobile. Still, they had to make a good show of it. So while Carri changed into his trunks, a doctor filled a syringe with enough Novocaine to numb Secretariat's hoof. Thus fortified, Carri discarded his crutches, gritted his teeth, and hobbled into the ring. The match lasted five minutes and as planned, Carri won. Afterwards, when the Novocaine wore off, an examination revealed that the ankle had

rebroken. Four months later, in another operation, the foot was permanently fused into a walking position. Like, bad dad. Think of the chronic pain that he must have had. Like his calf must just cramp up 20 times a day. Now look, I'm not a big giving people parenting advice, but free parenting advice from Robert here.

Don't do this to your kid. Don't do this. Not good. Not good. Not good being a dad. Yeah. When my daughter got her foot, her first foot torn off, I was like, we're going to wait two weeks before you get back in that ring, honey.

Yeah, two solid weeks because you're a good father. Absolutely. Yeah. I do my best. So despite Fritz's cocaine. The cocaine helped. Yeah, well, yeah, of course. Kids love cocaine.

You know, you just tell them it's one of those fun, fun bad. What are they? What do they call that shit? Fun dip, you know? They love that shit. God, that'd be good. A fun dip bag of cocaine. That's what I'm going to have after we get finished.

Fun dip has my mouth numb. I can't taste it anymore. That means it's working. Keep taking it. Good. Fun dip. Getting that ring. That's probably how it got the name.

That probably was originally a cocaine product. So despite Fritz's pushing, Mike never recovers his ability to perform, obviously. Interviews with him were deeply uncomfortable affairs. Again, he is probably take some damage to his brain from all this too. He rants a lot on air about obscure biblical figures. He also like there's one point where he's there's this documentary or something being made about him and he and one of his brothers are like talking in the background and it's like recorded and you can hear them talking about a gang bang that they had together.

He just kind of loses his ability to sort of, you know, filter stuff. He also has in several minor violent outbursts. He's arrested a handful of times, mostly for drugs. This kind of all escalates to Mike going back home after an arrest. He hikes out into the woods with a bottle of sleeping pills and he takes enough to kill himself. He is 23 years old when he dies. Now, according to some versions of the story, Mike leaves a bottle of the sleeping pills

he'd used to kill himself for his youngest brother, Chris, with a note that basically says when you're ready to go, you can use these. Now, Chris has not performed yet in the ring, but he takes to the ring in 1990 kind of near the end of his father's time as a wrestling baron. Nicholas Allhelm writes, Chris grew up with severe asthma. He took prednisone for the condition from a young age and this resulted in a smaller stature than even his brother, Mike. His bones were brittle and he broke them doing simple wrestling moves.

He wasn't built to be a wrestler, but David and Mike were dead and Kerry had taken a job in WWF. His family needed him, already addicted to painkillers and recreational narcotics. He entered the family business. He is not in there long. He shoots himself in the head one year later. Oh, my God, yeah. In 1993, the last surviving wrestling Von Erich, Kerry, is arrested for cocaine possession

in Dallas. The horrific pain from his foot, which had required partial amputation, pushed him into a semi-permanent state of drug abuse. After being indicted, he drove home to Denton County and his father's ranch where he shot himself in the chest with a.44 caliber revolver. He made it the longest of any of his brothers. He was 33. Fritzwood, in the end, outlived five of his, sorry, he has six sons.

One of them does survive him. He dies of lung cancer in 1997 and good fucking riddance. Damn. Shit. Yeah. That man carved just a path of ruin through his sons. And if I'm understanding right, this is all just to frame Vince McMahon. Just to be like, okay, here's the guy who's much worse than this.

Yeah. Vince is overall worse than this, but you do need to know. It's not like he's not rising out of a crowd of angels. Good God. Yeah. That's a series of tragedies. Yeah. That's a nightmare.

When you are responsible for four of your son's deaths, all before the age of 40, yeah, not a great dad. And three of them killed themselves. Yeah. Yeah. That's dark. Yeah. Yeah.

That's pretty bleak. You guys got anything to plug? Tom, you go first. Oh, well. For $75, you can take some of this here. For 80 bucks, I'll let you hold the gun. Oh, my God. I like how you pause.

You're like, am I really going to say this? Yeah. Absolutely. You know what? Fritz would have done it. Yeah. Fritz would have done it. Yeah.

You can catch me. We're at Gamefully Unemployed. It's a podcast and streaming network I do with our former crack co-worker and great buddy, David Bell. So check that out. Patreon.com slash Gamefully Unemployed. You can find us also on anywhere you look for podcasts and on the social medias. That's pretty much it.

Hell yeah, it is. Absolutely. Beautiful stuff. And I'm at 1900hotdog.com featuring monthly columnist Tom Reiman, who's great. Yeah. And an all-star cast of comedy writers. We do daily jokes, text and pictures like the old days. And it's fantastic.

I work with Robert Brockway, who's also our dear friend from Cracked. And patreon.com slash 1900hotdog. That's my plug. Excellent. Definitely check out Gamefully Unemployed and 1900hotdog. I have one other thing to plug. This is not a project of mine, but we will be talking. You know, Sean, in our episode on Steven Segal, we chat a little bit about Judo Jean Lebel,

who, according to some versions of the story, choked Steven out so badly he pooped his pants. Now, this is debated, but there is a fellow on YouTube named Bobby Fingers. Bobby is an Irish man who works, does something in the entertainment industry like making practical effects and models. I can't describe his videos better than he makes models of moments from pop culture history and one of the things he does. You should just watch them. I can't describe them better, but one of the ones he builds is a diorama of Judo Jean

and Steven Segal locked in combat. Go find Bobby Fingers on YouTube and watch this shit. It's genius. I love it. Yeah. I'm writing this down. Yeah. That's the fucking episode, everybody.

I didn't even get to bits. I mean, a little bit. It's already such a long road strewn with bodies before we even get to this. Somebody men have died and we've only just begun. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can. Signed Freeway Phantom. Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Taking Cover on NPR's embedded on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Picture Miami. Picture its beaches. Picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood. This is Silenced, the radio murders. They left the body there for a reason.

It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do it. The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalosian. Listen to Silenced, the radio murders, wherever you get your podcasts.

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