Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Evilest Football Player of All Time
Episode Date: August 21, 2025Robert explains how Alexandre Villaplane ruined his football career committing crimes, badly, and then started a new career as a mass murderer for the SS.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy inform...ation.
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Oh goodness, it's behind the bastards
the podcast that you've been listening to
because this is part two of our episodes
on Alexander Vilaplan
and if you're listening to Part 2,
you've listened to the show before.
This isn't your first time.
Otherwise, why would you be listening to it this way?
To answer that question, our guest, Dana Schwarz,
Dana.
Someone just listening to Part 2
as like a challenge to be like,
Maybe I'll just figure it out on the way.
Yeah, they're like second acting a podcast.
Yeah.
It's Gen Z.
It's the new trend that Gen Z's love.
They call it second acting.
That's right.
That's right.
And another thing that the Gen Z love is your podcast, Noble Blood, and your podcast,
hoax, you know, with an exclamation point.
You know, you would have to plug them right before we get in?
Yes, please.
Noble Blood is a scripted podcast about,
historical royals and the usually murderous shenanigans again, too.
And hoax is a story about, is a podcast about stories about historical hoaxes.
And they're both really fun.
Listen to hoax because it's brand new.
It could use new listeners to rate, review, subscribe, all the above.
I think you like it.
I have a great time making it.
Yes, definitely check that out.
You will enjoy it.
And you'll also enjoy the continuing shenanigans of Alexander Vlaplan.
This is an I-Heart podcast.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tide, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Milgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet
found. I didn't feel real at all. More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting. Listen to Hands Tide on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.
I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge
your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.
Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Zone 7 ain't a place.
It's a way of life.
Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey.
We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives,
prosecutors and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work
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Stories like Erica Hunt.
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Listen to hunting for answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network,
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So, at this point, you know, we kind of ended last episode when he wins a France cap,
which is some sort of football, and by football, we mean soccer for my mostly American listener
base award in a game against Belgium in 1926.
He becomes the captain of his team in Neme.
And yeah, he's just on top of the world in the late 20s.
In 1929, Vilaplan is recruited by the racing club de Paris, which is striving to become
the premier French football club in an era in which the whole concept of the sport is still
kind of new, right?
football is still getting its legs as a big thing.
So it's kind of an open question.
Who's going to be like the French, you know, A team, right?
And, you know, the racing club of Paris wants to be that A team.
And Villepland is the best ballheader.
He's one of the best passers.
You got to have him, right?
So the new club president makes signing Villepland a priority.
Again, at this point, he's still an amateur and is working for free in the strictest.
legal sense of the word. But he's been handed so many jobs and businesses at this point that he is a
wealthy man. He is very comfortable. And he has no real job outside of soccer. So he gets to spend
all of his free time that he's not playing out at bars and nightclubs doing those, you know,
if you've seen Moulin Rouge, he's doing shit like that. He's going to these fancy live theater
events and burlesque shows. He's gambling uncontrollably at racetracks, right? He has everything he needs
to be set up for life, but he absolutely has no control of himself outside of the field, right?
Like, he is just, he's one of these guys, he's burning money as fast as he can spend it,
just lighting it on fire at the racetrack, right?
And he's also, while he's still in his early 20s, the fact that he spends all of his
free time partying and drinking, you can get away with it because your body is very forgiving.
That's not going to be the case forever, right?
So he makes his first contacts with organized crime during this period of time when he's in his early 20s and his star is ascendant because he's repeatedly getting into debt with different shady underworld characters to continue his gambling habit.
Now, initially, this isn't a problem, right?
Nobody in the underworld is going to like break his leg.
For one thing, they care about how the team performs.
And for another thing, they know he'll keep making money.
The whole country needs his legs.
The whole country needs his legs.
You're not going to break him, right?
And also, you know that as long as he's playing soccer at this level, he'll be good for it eventually, even if it takes him a while, like the money's coming in.
So you want to kind of keep this big, this whale, like on the hook, right?
People don't fish for whales with hooks.
It's a harpoon, but that doesn't sound as good.
So in 1930, just three years after moving to Paris, I think his team wins its way to the very first World Cup, right?
So he's with this club di Paris, and they win admission to the very first football World Cup, right?
This is, again, kind of the birthdays of the sport.
And the first World Cup is going to be held in Montevideo, Uruguay, right?
Now, the Algerian, as he was known sometimes in the sports press, is going to be the team captain leading France before the entire world at this first World Cup, right?
This is, you know, the inaugural FIFA World Cup event.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's FIFA even at this point.
But this is what becomes the FIFA World Cup, right?
So this is held in 1930, and Villapalins is the head of France's team.
He's considered the best midfielder in the country at this point and one of the best passers.
His team wins their first game against Mexico at the World Cup.
And at this point, this is the most significant event in the history of French football.
Because there's not a lot of French football history, right?
But he leads them to a victory at the World Cup.
That's a huge deal.
There's photos of Vilaplan at the time that show this.
He is just exultant, right?
He is the star at the peak of his abilities.
He's gleeful.
You can just see it on his face.
He tells interviewers on the day, this is the most beautiful day of my life, right?
So this is his peak moment, you know, and things are only going to get worse from here.
Unfortunately, for him and for a lot of other people, everything after this first
World Cup game is downhill.
Now, because the World Cup isn't a normal God-fearing sporting event, like the Super Bowl,
or whatever it is we do for hockey, the Cup itself is actually a bunch of different games,
right?
It's not just like one thing, you know?
And so after defeating Mexico, Vilaplan leads his team into two more matches, which they
lose both games, I think, one to zero, which is close in football terms, and they're forced
out of the running.
So, you know, France, they win one game at the first.
World Cup, but it's not, his, his chief moment is still not even like that great, right,
a performance, which is kind of a bummer.
So his routine turns back to Paris and, like, they've technically even defeated, but also
this is literally the first ever World Cup.
So people are still really psyched that they won a game, right?
The whole football playing world is there.
And France did okay is kind of the way they're feeling.
And so, like, this is like a big moment for them.
Alexander returns home a national hero.
Unfortunately, he's also coming back to Europe in like 1931.
Things aren't looking great for European politics at that point.
But 1931, everything's going up.
Not a good time, you know?
The stock market, they're not good really for much of anywhere in the world, but the stock
markets crashed in 1929 in New York.
And things moved a little slower back then, right?
So, like, the Europe, France doesn't feel the repercussions as immediately as like they would today.
But by the time the team is on their way back from Uruguay, the global economy is, in what might be politely turned, a state of cascading collapse.
The end of World War I had brought this economic boom, particularly to the victorious Western powers.
But that was now proved to have been a bubble, right?
This, like, period of post-war prosperity comes to an end very rapidly.
in his book
The King of Nazi Paris
Christopher Othin writes
France held out
until 1931
but then started to struggle
on street benches
and at metro entrances
groups of exhausted
and starving young men
would be trying not to die
wrote Breton journalist
Morvonne Lebesque
I don't know how many
never came round
I can only say what I saw
in the room adam one day
I saw a child drop a suite
which someone trod on
and then the man behind
bent down and picked it up
wiped it and ate it
that's a succinct description
of how bad shit is.
Bro, that makes me sad.
Yeah.
And they're not, I don't think they're eating it
just because they're Jonzing for sugar.
They're just like, oh, calories.
Fuck yeah.
This is my only opportunity.
This is my only way to avoid dying.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's great stuff.
So Alexander is at first insulated
from the broader calamity by his wealth.
For the next two years,
he continues to be a star player.
As money kind of trickles in, right?
Like he's, he's, you know, going to be one of the later people to suffer.
But part of the problem is that his salary is not from football, right?
If his salary just been from literally a traditional working salary, he might have done better.
But his salary is like these fake businesses that he's been given, these turnkey businesses and like fake jobs.
And like the nightclub that he owns does a lot worse once the economy collapses, right?
So this hits him more than it might hit like a professional footballer today.
and problems are compounded.
In 1932, things get even more complex because French football turns professional, right?
So France, you know, players are now being paid directly for their work, which like initially helps Vilaplan, right?
Like the fact that they're actually allowed to like take the money.
He quits his position at RC Paris to sign on to a new team, which is fighting to make a place for itself in the sports world, Olympic de Antib.
But the new club doesn't have money to pay.
pay him what he's worth, right? So he gets this new, this is, he should have been doing better
once it transitions to professional, but he takes a lower paid job with this, this club in Antib,
because he's able to have an ownership stake in it, right? And he thinks this club might have the
chance to be the big French club. They might be bigger than R.C. Paris. And if I get it on the
ground floor and I own part of the club, it'll be worth a lot more money in the long run, right? So that's his
attempt, or that's at least on paper what he's trying to do. But what's also going on here is that
he is in the middle of a massive sports betting scheme, right? Like, he and part of why he wants
ownership of this is that he and his friends are going to like basically start rigging matches
and throwing games and whatnot in order to make a lot of money on sports gambling, right?
And he seems to be the, we don't entirely know, but it's most of the historic, of the
historians I've read, suggest that he was the mastermind of this.
Like, he is the guy strong-arming everyone.
He is the guy with the connections to the underworld.
And so he gets-
To be clear, this is allowed, right?
This is just like legal ever told with it.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is totally illegal.
Yes, massively illegal.
So he convinces several of his comrades from R.C. Paris to join as well.
And the thought of this is that, like, yeah, this is a struggling small team.
If we bring some ringers in, we can put money on game.
and make a fortune, right?
And for a while, this seems to be working.
And the club's first season goes surprisingly well,
but Vilaplan isn't just sort of like fixing matches.
He's also using his money and the money of others
to bribe opposing teams to throw matches, right?
So it's not just we've got these ringers
and they don't know how good we are.
It's like, I am, we are paying people
or ordering our own people to throw games in order to,
which is the, that's the really illegal part.
So they get caught during this first season.
They don't even make it a full season.
They get caught fixing games, and it causes a huge scandal.
Per right up in the Guardian, quote,
At that time, the championship was divided into southern and northern sections,
with the winners of each playing off for the title of champions.
And Teab won the Southern section and then beat SC-5's Lille as in the decider,
only for it to emerge that the match had been fixed.
And Teab were stripped of their title, and the team's manager banned,
although it was widely believed he was a scapegoat.
Vilaplan and two teammates with whom he had previously played,
We're suspected of being the real plotters.
All three players were soon let go, right?
So the team manager gets banned forever.
He gets shit-canned with two of his colleagues,
but they're not banned from the sport,
I think because he's, you know,
the kind of shine off of leading the team
and the World Cup is still on him a little bit.
So he's generally agreed to have been the mastermind of this scheme,
but he doesn't pay as much of a price as the team manager does.
he's still a top player after this
and so after Antib collapses
like this club collapses
he gets pulled in by Nice's team
right
and however by this point
in the early 1930s
Vilaplan is no longer in his prime
he's getting older
he's basically taking
his calories are nothing but hard liquor
right with like brothels for dessert
you know like he's not eating food
he's eating liquor and brothel
and he's engaging in yeah
brothels
Like, that's his entire diet.
And he's also gambling uncontrollably and burning all of his money that.
He's not really sleeping.
It has an impact on his ability on the court, you know?
So his next few years as a footballer are notably less impressive than the previous ones had been.
He misses regular training sessions because he's hungover, right?
He'll just be absent when he's supposed to be practicing with the team because he's, you know,
or in a lot of cases, he's still drunk from the next.
night before. Sometimes he's even still drinking. A lot of times it's a combination of all three.
When he makes it to practice, he's often still kind of wasted and just not able to function.
And he makes it, you know, when he is well enough to actually play in games and he's not,
you know, spacing out of that, he's noted by sports writers for seeming to be out of shape
and barely able to focus on the game itself. And after a few seasons, Nice lets him go, right?
They're like, you're not really worth paying.
And now we actually have to pay you, right?
And this marks the first time when he gets shit-canned by niece.
This is the first time that he leaves a team without choosing to do so to get better pay somewhere else, right?
So that's kind of noteworthy.
This is functionally the end of his career in football, although he continues, he goes to another team, a second division team in Bordeaux who are kind of willing to take this.
because they're not as good at team.
So, you know, he's still an upgrade for them.
But they only really, like the Bordeaux only condescends to hire him because they're
being managed by his former mentor, that Scotsman Gibson.
And even in this situation where his mentor is running the team and he's got an end,
he can only last three months before he gets fired for refusing to turn up to training
sessions and games, right?
He just won't do the job.
He sounds like a fun time.
Yeah, he's fucking great.
like you you had it all man like you could have easily kept going for at least a few more years
but yeah he's just not able to sober up to like make the game um you know who else can't sober up
to do their jobs the sponsors of this podcast yeah
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime my husband comes back
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I didn't feel real at all.
For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.
There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me.
And I just, I want answers.
Listen to Hands Tide on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.
Zone 7 ain't a place.
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I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.
We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork and solving these crazy crimes.
Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts,
and most importantly, victims family members.
Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.
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So what happened at Chappaquittic?
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about football, the soccer of sports.
So by the mid-1930s, Vilaplan's career in pro football is over.
And he transitions, I have to say, very seamlessly to what has become his true passion.
You know, he's over football, he's getting into a new line of work, gambling badly.
He is now a professional gambler and he sucks at it, right?
he's horrible at this job and he can't stop getting caught from doing he's doing like really
high stakes bad gambling like it's not enough to like lose at the horse tracks or like you know
lose money playing fucking blackjack or whatever he is constantly getting in trouble for
trying to fix different sporting events which is like the one way as a rich guy to get in
trouble for gambling outside of just losing your money you know um so uh in 1935 he gets caught
fixing horse races, both in Paris and Cote d'Azour.
And before, you know, his charm and his fame as a beloved sports hero had been enough that
when he got caught doing shit like this, like the last time, he avoided the most serious
trouble, right?
Because he's beloved it and he's charming.
He's not that anymore.
He is a washed up alcoholic, degenerate gambler who is no longer good at football.
So he gets sent to prison after this time in 1935.
And he does some time, right?
Not a lot of time, but enough that it's made made made clear, you do not enjoy the same kind of benefit of the doubt that had previously accompanied you in your sporting career and your life.
So this is not the last time he's going to be locked up for gambling-related crimes.
It's going to happen to him periodically over the next few years before World War II.
And he spends the remainder of the pre-war years cheating on his several wives.
He has a couple of divorces, I think three during this period.
time. And it's always because he's cheating constantly. And he becomes a, he does some more time in
jail. He gets caught, you know, doing other gambling crimes. He becomes a figure of minimal note in
the world of Parisian organized crime, right? He's kind of, in part due to his debts. He's like
working. I think he's basically being muscle sometimes for some of these like gangsters and whatnot
because he owes them and he doesn't really have any other skills. But he's fit or, you know,
he's in better shape than most people, right?
So we could beat somewhat up, maybe.
So war clouds start to gather above Western Europe,
and Alexander shows no interest whatsoever,
either in joining the fascist
or in fighting them to protect his home country, right?
Again, because he doesn't consider France's home country.
This is part of why also, because he's Algerian,
he's, I think he does,
I think he has citizenship technically,
but he still doesn't consider himself French
in the way that like people born on the mainland do
and he's also because he's Algerian
he's got this kind of inroads
because a lot of the organized crime world
are people who are on the margins right
they're people who don't benefit from citizenship
they're people who are in a more marginal play
and so they wind up kind of associating
with organized crime because they don't
they're never benefit from like a legal position in society
and you know because of his stardom he had
and he had that opportunity but he's still
identifies more with that side of things, which is part of why this kind of is the direction
he takes. So when it becomes clear when Germany and the USSR invade Poland, it becomes clear
that France and Germany are going to have them a war. And France starts, you know, hoovering up
all of the young men they can because they're like, well, we got to throw some boys at the Germans
again. We might have another couple of years of that. And Alexander wants no part of this. His
biographer, Luke Brien, writes, Alex would have liked to stay away from the march towards war
that was leading Europe to disaster. He was easily satisfied with this life of gambling,
women, and petty trafficking, but it was impossible to escape. From June 1939, France began
recalling its reservists. Villaplan was one of them and joined the 416th Pioneer Regiment,
based in the Jura. Far from any possible front, this unit was primarily intended to accompany
the movement of the combatant regiments by digging trenches for them and setting up cantonments. No
machine guns or tanks. Here, the men's only weapons are shovels, picks, and a few vague
Lebel rifles. Right. So he gets called up. He's not with a combat unit. They're like
combat engineers, basically. And he's not even going to really do that, right? France's war with
the Germans winds up being brief, or at least the kind of, much like, again, this is a mirror
of what happens in Algeria. The war on the ground is very brief. Obviously, France puts up more
of a, you know, more of a military fight than Algeria does, like the casualties that Germany
suffers pretty significant casualties, which we often kind of gloss over. Like, this is not a total
cakewalk for them, but it is over very quickly, right? And it's going to be a situation like in
Algeria where the actual sort of open conflict is over shortly, and then we transition to this
more, this insurgent warfare, which lasts a lot longer, right? And I do think it's really
interesting how these things mirror each other and how, you know, the side that Vilaplan is going
to find himself on in this case. So Paris falls to the Nazis in June of 1940, and Vilaplan
happily ends his service in a defeated military. He might have been happy to return to his life
of debauchery, you know, to return to the women and the gambling and the petty crime if a better
opportunity hadn't presented itself. And it very quickly does. So the Nazis are occupying Paris
self at this point, right? And so you've got all these foreign officers, these Germans and
Austrians who, I mean, they're all technically Germans for our purposes, but they're new to
France and they don't know the lay of the land, but number one, they're corrupt as hell. Like
the Nazi regime is a gangster regime, especially all of these SS guys who are in country, are just
gangsters by mindset and a lot of cases by background. And also, they're just like military officers
who are occupying any country in any point in history,
they want luxuries that they're not supposed to have,
that they're not being provided by their government
and that are hard to come by in wartime, right?
Respectable French citizens,
number one, often don't have access to this stuff either
because they're respectable French citizens.
So when the nice stuff is harder to come by
because there's a war on, they don't have it.
So the people who have access to the luxuries
and who are willing to sell them to the occupiers
are the criminals, right?
And it's these members of the underworld who, in their attitude, again, a lot of these people
are not French citizens, they're living in France, but they're, you know, in a lot of cases,
Algerians are members of like other, you know, immigrant populations.
They've never had a legal status or their legal status has been questionable, and they're
also working in a criminal enterprise.
So their attitude is like, look, does it matter if we're breaking the law under the French
Republic or the German, right?
Like, whatever.
We're criminals either way.
Who gives a shit?
You know?
So they have this very, and to an extent, especially if you're an Algerian, why would you
immediately assume the Nazis are any worse than the French Republic, given what they've
done to your people, right?
It just doesn't make a lot of sense that you'd be particularly pissed at the Nazis in
1940, right?
So a lot of these black market guys, these smugglers and whatnot, are only too happy to serve
whoever's got cash on hand.
And I want to quote from an article in The Blizzard.
Quote, as soon as the armistice was signed on June 1940,
Vilaplan tried his hand at racketeering and blackmail,
his preferred targets being black marketeers and Jews.
He was immediately arrested for handling hot goods.
However, and it was in jail that he was approached by Henry Lafant,
one of the most reviled figures of the collaboration,
to many a psychopath, a sadist,
but first and foremost, an opportunist who convinced the occupier
that he was someone they could do business with
by leading them to the destruction of a whole Belgian resistance network.
And so, you know, VilaPlan,
Plawn is immediately like, okay, the Nazis are in charge.
Oh, I can really fuck over like Jewish French people, right?
Like nobody's going to come after me, right?
And nobody's going to be paying attention to my petty crimes, but he's really bad at petty
crimes.
And so he's still mad.
He gets in trouble in Nazi Paris for like scamming Jewish people.
Like that's hard.
You have to be bad as a scammer.
Oh, God.
So he gets fucking locked up.
And there's this, this.
This mafia figure, Henry Lafant, right, who had been an organized crime figure who, once the Germans take over, he basically uses his connections to help them destroy this resistance network in Belgium.
And is, the SS is like, hey, you're useful.
Could you put together a team of, like, locals who we can rely on to do stuff like what you just did to this Belgian network, right?
Like, we're having some trouble with the French resistance.
Can you get us some local criminals who know the lay of the land?
and can help us dismantle
these developing resistance networks.
And LaFont is like,
of course I can, baby.
Like, I'm a piece of shit.
I'm so down for this job, right?
Henri LaFont is described by the Guardian
as an illiterate orphan
turned rampant ne'er-do-well,
which is just a charming wit.
Yeah, ne'er-do-well.
Does he do well?
Neer.
No, ne'er, ne'-er.
And it's funny to describe a guy
who winds up working for the SS to dismantle resistant networks as a ne'er do well, we're a little
beyond near doing well, right?
He is as shady a character as they come.
And Lafant rubs a lot of people.
He has a mixed relationship with these different Germans, right?
Because a lot of the German military guys who are responsible for the occupation of Paris
are Prussians, right?
They're these old Prussian military, you know, in a lot of cases, members of the
nobility. They have these very old-fashioned attitudes about the right way and the wrong way to
do things and about honor. And they don't like all of the criminals that they're associating
with to try to win this developing insurgent war. But then you've got the SS, who are basically
gangster. Like the Nazis are a gangster regime. And the SS are basically gangsters themselves.
And the SS is really down to work with these guys, right? Because they're, you know,
we're all the same kind of asshole, more or less. So the SS sees.
potential in a man like Lafant, a man with no loyalties towards anything but himself and the
promise of a payday and a deep well of knowledge about how things are done, you know, in the underground.
And the SS gives Lafant a choice. Work for us and help us round up Jews and crack down on the
growing resistance and you get a place in the new order. And Lafant is like, fucking hell yeah.
I want to quote from Doyle's book, the more Lafant's influence grew, the more he recruited.
he toured the Parisian prisons, arranging the release of old associates and anyone who could help consolidate his powerful place in the perverted new social order.
Pierre Bonny, once the most famous police officer in France before being disgraced and jailed for corruption, became his right-hand man.
At some point, they hooked up with Vilaplan, whose assorted activities now included gold smuggling.
The gang set up their headquarters at 93, Rue L'Arestan, probably the most infamous address in Parisian history,
the home of the gang that became known as the French Gestapo.
Right?
Wow.
So Lafant partners with this corrupt French police officer who got fired by the
Republic and then, you know, the Nazis bring back.
And they start hooking up with Vlaplan, right?
And initially he's their driver.
He's like their chauffeur.
But obviously driver for these guys.
You're doing bodyguard work.
You're acting as muscle, right?
And their goal is to make money.
These guys are with the SS.
They are going to be wearing SS uniforms.
They're not ideologically.
in love with Hitler.
I doubt they've read Mind Kampf.
They're anti-Semitic,
but like the normal kind of French anti-Semitic
where they're like,
oh, we can fuck with these people now.
I always hate it.
Let's rob them, you know?
I never liked them.
We can take their stuff now.
Yeah.
See what side their bread is buttered on.
Right.
It's more like cynical Nazism.
Yes, yes.
Their pre-existing biases are compatible with Nazism
because they are racist against Jewish people.
But that's not like the primary motivation, right?
The primary motivation is there's money in this shit, right?
And so, you know, they start tracking down, you know, Jewish refugees and people who have, like,
gone into the underground to try to avoid the SS drag net that's growing in this period.
So they're tracking down Jews for the SS.
They're tracking down resistance fighters and helping to bust resistance cells.
They're helping in general for the SS to police the enemies of the Reich.
And from their headquarters in 93 Ruehleristan, they are taking.
torturing hundreds of people, right?
They're not, they are, they're murdering people.
There's a lot of, like, executions and whatnot, but there's also just a lot of, you know,
pulling out of fingernail, just, you know, torture, torture, right?
Like, it's, it's gnarly shit.
So, better known as the Carlinque, the French Gestapo saw the new order as an opportunity
for personal wealth and power.
Villeplan had known Laurent, because for years, they'd both kind of been involved in
similar aspects of the underworld together.
And as I said, he's brought in as a chauffeur for higher-ranking criminals who made a place
for themselves in the Carlinck at first.
But he exhibits the same kind of work ethic and skill at social manipulation that had previously
served him so well in football, right?
This is the kind of thing he'd gotten sort of burnt out on football, but now that he's
got a chance to be in the SS.
It's like his career.
He gets a second lease on life, right?
Like, oh, this is what I wanted to be doing the whole time.
Perfect for me.
So in short order
Dean Cain joining ice
Right, right
He's a D he's Dean Cain joining ice
Where he's like ah
You know my Superman years are behind me
But my Aryan Superman years
May not be behind me
Even though I'm out of year
My ubermensch years
Are still ahead of me right
And again this is a kind of thing
There's a lot of misconceptions people have
About the way Naziisms
white supremacy and like racial supremacy worked, where we say like, well, they're Nazis.
They're obviously white supremacist.
That doesn't mean that they were white supremacist in a way that translates totally directly
to the way a lot of white supremacists are racist today, right?
Nazi racism is a little different from a lot, like, OG Nazi racism is a lot different
from even like the way the KKK was racist.
Because this is not straight up white supremacy in the area, like being white is not what
matters most, right? For one thing, their whole attitude is that being Aryan and kind of
bringing back through breeding, you know, we've got the kind of the Norwegians, the Nordic
peoples, and the Germans are closest to this Aryan race, right? And so we want to, through
eugenics and whatnot and through careful, like, breeding of our population, recreate this
Aryan race, but we're working towards it. So that's a difference from just, well, we're
white and we're superior to everybody, right? There's a difference there.
And there's other differences in that there's this belief in kind of a global hierarchy of
races that is more fluid than you get with a lot of modern white supremacists.
For one thing, the Germans are working with the Japanese, right?
And Hitler's attitude, Hitler's goal is not, I want Germany to rule the entire world.
It's Germany is going to be in control of Europe, you know, stretching basically almost
into China, right, all across the Russian steps.
And there will be spheres of influence, right?
Japan will control this other sphere of influence, right?
And it's not that they don't consider themselves superior to the Japanese, but it's not
quite as simplistic as a lot of racism as today.
And so as a result, there is room within this Nazi movement for people who are not white
and who are not Christian.
And one of the examples of this is as the SS, as LaFontz, you know, starts working for the
SS, in collaboration with the SS, he creates a unit called the BNA, which roughly
translates to the North African Brigade.
And this is made up of, I think, 50 to 100 Algerian French residents that the SS decides
they can trust to crack down on the French resistance.
And a lot of these guys, obviously, Vilaplan is a European-A Algerian or European descent
Algerian, but a lot of these B&A guys are Arab and they're Muslim, right?
And part of why the SS decides they're trustworthy is that because of all of the shit that
France had done to Algeria and the genocide that basically had been carried out in,
you know, over the decades, right, with around two million people killed, including a mass
amount of starvation, because of that, the SS is very astutely like, well, these people
aren't loyal to France.
They're certainly not loyal to the regular French population.
We can use them, right?
And so Hitler had started in the early 40s, right, when Germany takes over France,
funding an Arabic language French newspaper, which was geared towards recruiting and radicalizing
Muslims who had immigrated to France from colonized nations.
And the paper described Hitler as almost a Madi-like figure.
The Madi is this, I mean, it's both this figure in kind of Islamic theology, but also there
had been a guy in North Africa called the Madi, who had led this rebellion against the British,
right?
And Hitler is describing himself in these propaganda papers to the Arab population of
France as this messianic figure who is bent on Hitler's goal is to free colonized people from
the shackles of their Western oppressors and put an end to colonialism and communism, right?
That's how Hitler is portraying himself to this community because he's like, look, I don't
care about India.
Free India, sure, free India, right?
Like, because that'll hurt the British, right?
That's what I care about the war with.
India is so far outside of my, like, area of giving a shit, of course you can be free.
I'm an anti-colonialist hero, me, Adolf Hitler, right?
Yeah, he's fully beneficial.
Yeah, like, he's just, he's fine with this, right?
And it's, he's also, Hitler is insanely jealous of Great Britain and the United States.
And there's a degree to which his, his, the thing he's angry about is like, kind of fair is the wrong word, but like, he's pissed because, like, well, they got to do a genocide, genocides and steal everyone's land and no one's pissed at them.
Why can't Germany?
Why don't I get to do this, right?
Like, and that is like a major thing for Hitler.
So the fact that it's often gets left out of our discussions of Nazism, but part of Hitler's
propaganda is to portray himself as, you know, this kind of anti-colonial figure to
certain groups of people.
And in fact, the BNA, this North African SS group that's going to be trying to cut down
the resistance in France, is not the only instance in which not.
non-white soldiers were admitted to the SS, which this is a little bit of a side story,
but it's one of my favorite weird side stories from the Second World War.
There was a unit in the SS called the Indish or Indian Legion that was made up entirely of
Muslim and Hindu Indian soldiers in the SS.
Hey, everyone, Robert here.
Just wanted to clarify the Indish Legion was initially started as part of the Vermacht,
and then it was absorbed by the Vophan SS later in the war.
so it was ultimately part of the SS,
but it started as a project with the Vermacht.
That explains the discrepancy and the quote I read.
Anyway, just wanted to make a note of that.
For a study by Bajalanti Roy, published by Oxford Academic,
quote, set up jointly by Subhas Chandra Bose,
who is an Indian independence leader,
and the Vermacht in 1941,
the Legion composed about 3,500 volunteers from the Indian POWs
who belonged to the British Imperial Army
that had fought the Germans in Africa.
In order to integrate the newly formed legion, the Indian soldiers needed to be provided
proper training by the German military personnel.
An important element of this training was ideological indoctrination into the Nazi worldview.
Several India experts who were not all academic specialists on India were called on to mediate
between the German army and the Indian soldiers, not only as interpreters, but also as
propagandists of Nazi ideology.
Right.
And so to propagandize this very peculiar unit in the Nazi military, Urdu and Hindu
speaking authors are brought in to write a magazine edited by Germans called Bybond.
And the overall project is a failure, right?
These guys do briefly see combat in France, actually, after the Normandy landings,
but they don't, they like basically roll over immediately.
They see which way the war is going.
They're like, we're not going to die for the, the third Reich.
Are you kidding me?
So this doesn't have much of an impact on the war, and this has very little.
The hope had been that if Indians over-Indians, over-indigenous,
India see, you know, liberated, you know, Muslim and Hindu soldiers fighting together against
the British, that it'll spark a rebellion in India, basically.
That doesn't work at all, right?
Jesus Christ.
It is not, this is not one of the more successful Nazi plans.
But speaking of successful Nazi, nope, here's your luck.
Yeah, probably shouldn't do that.
Listen to some ads.
Forget what I just said.
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So what happened at Chappaquittic?
Well, it really depends on who you talk to.
There are many versions of what happened in 1969
when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond.
And left a woman behind to drown.
There's a famous headline.
I think in the New York Daily News,
it's Teddy escapes, blonde,
And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's
political future. Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president?
Chapiquitic is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.
And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.
The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse?
Every week, we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.
Listen to United States of Kennedy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth?
Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.
He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you.
Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training.
These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs.
Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months.
The first night was so overwhelming.
and you don't know who's next to you
and we didn't know what to expect in the morning
nobody tells you anything
listen to shock incarceration on the iHeart
radio app apple podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts
we're back
you've all forgotten that I just compared our sponsors
to the Third Reich
you know nobody needs to think about that anymore
we're done we're good
we're back to Alexander
Vilaplan so
Vilaplan is that the BNA is created, this North African unit that's going to be helping to
destroy the resistance, and Vilaplan is made Oberstermfuerr, or lieutenant of a unit of a man
around a hundred men. And it's possible, if not likely, that his status as a white Frenchman
essentially close enough helped him secure this place, but it's likelier that he'd simply
done a good job of making himself useful already. The guardian rights of the BNA's crimes.
In Philippe Aziz's authoritative 1970 book on the Lafont and Bonnie gang, the following story
is told. Following a tip-off from a source and the Paris Gestapo, Alex and three of his men
burst into the home of Jean-Vieve-Lenard, accused of harboring a Jew. They ransacked the house.
Alex seizes the 59-year-old mother of six by the hair. Where is your Jew? He shouts.
The lady refuses to answer. Alex picks her up brutally, pushes her into a neighboring farm,
hitting her with his rifle butt on the way, and there he forces her to watch an appalling scene.
Men from the BNA torture two peasants in front of her.
After being beaten and set ablaze,
the two peasants were machine-gunned from close range.
Alex laughs.
During his time, some other men from the B&A had located the Jew.
Antoine Bachman.
They bring him to the farm.
Alex hits him and then arrests him.
He then orders Jean-Ville-Lenard to give him 200,000 francs.
So we've broken bad.
That's pretty hideous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's real, just evil.
Yeah, he is effectively, he's that character from Inglorious Bastards.
He's the real version, right, where there's no charm, there's no point at which he's like, oh, he's evil, but he's like, this, like, evil genius who's, like, cruel, but there's this degree of, like, you just want to keep watching him, right?
No, this is the real version of that guy, right?
Where he is just beating a 59-year-old woman with a fucking pistol bud.
He's having people lit on fire and then X.
He's just random peasants, machine gunned after being lit on a fire.
Like, this is the real version of that character, you know?
So over the last year or so of the war, or at least the last year that France spends under German dominance during the war,
Vlaplan and his men are responsible for dozens of executions and turning over countless Jews to the Gestapo.
And he makes a fortune during this period of time.
By some accounts, he becomes as wealthy or wealthier than he'd ever been during the height of his football career because he's taking shitloads of bribes, right?
And a lot of times he's taking bribes and he's turning these people, these Jews, these resistance figures in any way.
We'll talk about the other things that he's getting bribed for in a sec, but he and the BNA become notorious.
And they earn a nickname among the resistance.
And this nickname is, of course, based in the racism that was quite common, even among the Frenchmen fighting the Nazis.
They called them the SS Mohamed, right?
Again, there's no non-racist side in this conflict.
Yeah, no, this is just flat bad.
Yeah, this is just all pretty ugly, right?
Obviously, the resistance is the right side, but that doesn't mean these guys, that, number one,
a lot of people who fought in the resistance, had been unapologetic colonialist bigots
prior to the German occupation and continued being after.
And just also, war doesn't make anyone a better point.
person, right? So they had other nicknames. The non-racist members of the resistance would call them
the phalanche, which is a term that gets used around a lot of different fascist groups. So, like,
that's just kind of calling them what you would call, like, the Spanish, you know, the phalanches is like a
term, it's a, it's a, a term that a lot of different European fascist groups used. So that that one's
fine. Some locals also called them Lebeco, which is a colonial slur for non-white denizens of
French possessions. Author Robert.
Robert Pike describes, they were a strange-looking bunch at best, dressed in a combination of sheepskin
jackets with baggy blue boiler suits and berets.
They wore thick leather belts with a waffin SS buckle and were armed with machine guns and grenades.
So weird-looking uniforms on these guys, one of the stranger units in World War II, the BNA.
They receive combat training from the SS, but these guys are thugs and gangsters first, right?
So they don't, they avoid direct combat with the resistance whenever possible.
because they're not good at that, right?
And the resistance is getting,
as the war comes to a close in France,
increasingly competent and well-armed
because more stuff's getting through the out,
from the allies.
And as a result, the B&A,
they want to avoid fighting directly
with the resistance,
which means when the resistance carries out
a successful attack,
they're not going in and attacking the resistance.
They're just massacring civilians
with the goal of forcing the resistance
to make difficult choices, right?
Basically, we're going to,
to try and stop them from carrying out attacks because they know that we'll massacre villagers
when they do.
We're not even trying to fight them, right?
Because, like, we'll be bad at that.
Right.
Yes, this is all awful.
I mean, it's the calculus of war for the resistance.
And this is how a lot of counterinsurgency actually winds up in practice, whether it's
the Nazis or the Americans doing it, where, you know, even if you're not supposed to, it's
a lot easier to do reprisals against unarmed civilians.
So that's what you do.
Much of this, much of these reprisal attacks
against civilian populations are being done on the orders
of Michael Hambrecht, who is the Gestapo head of Dordone.
And he used the B&A as his dedicated war crimes unit
in support of the 11th Panzer Division of the Vermacht.
One of the things this does is it lets,
there's this myth that comes up post-war that like,
well, the SS was bad, but the Vermacht was mostly clean, right?
There was like a clean branch of the German army,
and there wasn't.
The Vermacht are involved in a lot of war crimes,
And part of how some of these units avoid more direct things is like, well, the Vermacht, when they need to move in to fight a resistance cell, we'll send the Vermacht in.
But we have the Algerians massacring civilians on our behalf, right?
Because they're doing these war crimes to try to roll up these networks or get, you know, torture citizens to get them to like give up the locations of different resistance cells, right?
So we're outsourcing our war crimes, right, to these, to these, this Algerian unit.
the B&A was so successful at this, at least in the eyes of the occupiers, that they soon get seconded in addition to this Vermacht unit to the second SS Panzer Division as well.
Robert Pike writes, official records are scarce but those available, as well as the many eyewitness accounts and reports by the judicial police tell of pillage, rape, plundering, and burning of property, extortion, and profiteering.
However, this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Arrests, deportations, or summary murders of civilians and executions of suspects took place,
on an almost daily basis.
As an auxiliary police force to the Gestapo,
its members held carte blanche to do as they pleased.
They were hardly accountable to anyone,
but the massacres were on a different scale.
These were ordered by the Germans
and executed by the Falange.
In March, the town of Brantom
was the first to feel the full force,
with 25 hostages bust in to be executed
in a show of force
designed to persuade the local population
to inform on resistance activity.
The following day,
in Saint-Marie de Cheneck,
a further 25 hostages,
mainly Jews were executed. Both were in retaliation for resistance ambushes. Many other towns and
villages suffered losses of innocent inhabitants as well as resistance sympathizers, Jews or refugees.
The events of 11th of June 1944, by which time it is likely that Alexander Velaplan was replaced
by the even more brutal Raymond Manang are perhaps most striking of all. On that day in the town of
Musadon, 20 kilometers west of Paris had its name etched into the history of Nazi barbarity.
An armored train heading from Paris to Montpon was attacked by the resistance.
Thirteen Germans were killed in the firefight, and a further ten were taken prisoner.
Consequently, the entire male population of the town and surrounding hamlets were rounded up and questioned.
Many tortured.
Michael Hamburg arrived in the town late in the afternoon, along with 30 members of the Falange.
Already visibly drunk, he had been told to personally select 50 men for execution.
Of those under 60 years of age that had been retained, he chose 48, who were then led to a nearby alleyway overlooking farmland.
Along the way, they passed the line of men that had just been released.
There they stood in two rows for more than two hours until they were moaned down by machine guns,
operated by flange members who then finished off survivors with handguns.
Later, the mayor and his adjutant were tortured and killed while two other men were killed in the street,
taking the death toll that day to 52.
All the bodies were left where they fell.
Miraculously, two men survived the massacre.
The town was then pillaged.
And there's debate, was Vila plan there?
Was he not?
Was he just there in the massacres heading up to this?
I've heard sources that say he was there at Musadon, some that say he actually pulled the trigger
and shot people directly during that day, which was not, he liked to, he didn't like to get his
hands dirty, but some of the stories at least say that he did that day, it's a little long, I don't
have perfect evidence on it, but if he wasn't there in Musadon, he was there other days where
similar massacres were carried out, we just talked about him having people lit on fire in machine
gunned.
But as the war comes to an end, he's not stupid.
he's aware that the Nazis aren't winning
and that Vichy France's days are numbered
and Alexander, he's never been a true believer
so he starts to hedge his bets
as soon as he realizes which way the wind is blowing
so during this later period of time
while he's carrying out these massacres
he starts pretending to be a resistance
double agent and so he'll let
captives go if they can pay
he'll be like you know
hey I'm with the resistance
but like also I need some cash
right
Oh, God, he's like the worst sort of person.
He's the worst sort of person.
He can't even commit to pretending to be a double agent.
One eyewitness describes him arriving in a village one day and saying to a group of prisoners.
Oh, in what times we live.
Ours is a terrible era to what harsh extremes I am reduced.
Me, a Frenchman, compelled to wear a German uniform.
Have you seen my brave people?
What terrible atrocities these savages have committed?
I cannot be held responsible for them.
I am not their master.
They are going to kill you.
But I will try to save you at the risk of my own life.
I've already saved many people, 54, to be precise.
You will be the 55th if you give me 400,000 francs.
He's such bullshit.
He's such a piece of shit.
He sucks so bad.
He sucks so bad.
He's so awful.
Yeah, that's just, yeah, that's a special kind of evil.
I'm excited, I'm excited to hear about how he dies.
Yeah.
I know.
I was like, I didn't know this guy existed, and now I hate him so much.
He sucks so bad.
Yeah.
That's what we do here.
So by the end of summer of 1944, the jig was well and truly up.
Paris was liberated with French colonial troops, including a lot of Africans, being some of the first soldiers to enter the city.
This was a bloody period of time for those who had suffered under years of Nazi occupation, beat, tortured, and sometimes murdered their fellow citizens who had acted as collaborators, right?
There's a lot of ugliness, some of it understandable, where there's some people who had done horrible things under the Nazis, and they get their just desserts.
And there's also uglier things where, like, women who had, you know, been dating, quote, unquote, members of the German military, who knows how often they had a choice in the matter, right?
They get, like, their hair shaved and they get beaten in public.
Like, there's a lot of ugly stuff that happens during this period of time, too, because not everyone who had been a quote-unquote collaborator really had a full choice in the matter, right?
But some of the people who are going to get their just desserts are the French Gestapo.
And the, you know, from the time that it's, you know, they're planning, retaking Paris, the French government in exile, all these people know, we're not going to leave these folks up to the populace to take their vengeance on.
These people we need to make a public example on.
And, you know, Alexander, he tries to hold on to his uniform as much as possible.
He attempts to, as Paris falls, he attempts to use his position with the SS to commit one last robbery to fund his escape into Germany.
He tries to scam a man out of $900, an Armenian man out of $900 in a gold ring in return for giving him back valuables that he'd stolen from this Armenian man.
But he gets overtaken by events.
And on August of 24, 1944, he gets caught by a resistance agent with a gun and a fake police identity card.
Vilaplan is put on trial and declared to be a con man and a murderer by a French judge.
He pleased desperately that I'd been working for the resistance all along.
No, I was really on your side.
I was a good guy the whole time.
Does not work.
It avails him nothing.
This judge is like, no, you're a con man and a monster.
And on the day after Christmas, 1944, he is executed by firing squad, along with seven of his colleagues.
Yeah.
So we have a happy ending.
Yeah, it seems like the thing to do to that sort of person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's the story.
Oh, bad.
We're done.
We're good.
I'm just like, oh, what a bad person.
What a bad person.
What an interesting boomerang around from, you're kind of born in this mix between colonizer and colonized, at least as you see it, right?
We're like, you know, we might see it more accurately as a colonized, but his attitude on it is a little more mixed than that as a young man, certainly his dad's attitude.
And certainly influenced in his willingness, this, the, the colonial brutality of the French in Algeria, I think definitely does impact.
how willing to like what happens especially with these like North African units in France
and why they're willing to do some of the things that they're willing to do right um because like
you know they've they've seen it before they've endured it before right um so yeah bad bad times
all around bad times all around I guess he uh justice justice won out in the end sort of
he gets killed you know that's good this is one of our for behind the bastards the
is like as happy a story as we get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, you want to plug your plugables?
Yeah.
Please listen to Noble Blood as a podcast about historical royals and hoax, a podcast about
hoaxes throughout history that I host with my friend Lizzie Logan.
Fewer Nazis, I can promise that.
Fewer Nazis.
You know, that's always a good thing to promise.
Not zero.
Yeah, because, you know, especially.
the British royal family.
There's a few.
Oh, they're not-y.
And also just like Nazis are popping up in history.
They tend to do that.
That's like the number one thing Nazis do is pop up.
Yeah, they're like a bad taco restaurant.
I want to say this was a delight.
This was an education.
Yeah, there we go.
But talking with you is delight.
Yeah, talking with you has been a delight too.
Listen to Noble Blood.
Listen to hoax, exclamation point.
And yeah, you know, keep listening to Behind the Bastards.
We'll be back next week with a guy who may or may not be a Nazi, but definitely sucked.
Or maybe a lady.
Sometimes it's a lady.
Not often, but sometimes.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.
Or check us out on the iHeartRewart.
radio app, appa podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on
YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash
at Behind the Bastards. Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed. This is Hands Tide, a true crime podcast exploring the
murder of Jim Melgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.
I didn't feel real at all.
More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tide on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney.
where silence is broken and stories are set free.
I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions
and give you new insight on the people around you.
Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.
zone seven ain't a place it's a way of life now this ain't just any old podcast honey we're going to be talking to family members of victims detectives prosecutors and some nationally recognized experts that i have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases i've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't we started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork
and solving these crazy crimes.
Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors,
authors, canine handlers, forensic experts,
and most importantly, victims' family members.
Come be a part of my Zone 7 while building yours.
Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum
on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network,
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
Stories like Erica Hunt.
A young mother vanished without a trace after a family gathering on 4th of July weekend, 2016.
No goodbyes, no clues, just gone.
Listen to hunting for answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network,
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.