Citation Needed - Boss Tweed

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

William Magear Tweed (April 3, 1823 – April 12, 1878), often erroneously referred to as William "Marcy" Tweed (see below),[1] and widely known as "Boss" Tweed, was an American politician most notable for being the political boss of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party's political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th-century New York City and state. At the height of his influence, Tweed was the third-largest landowner in New York City, a director of the Erie Railroad, a director of the Tenth National Bank, a director of the New-York Printing Company, the proprietor of the Metropolitan Hotel,[2] a significant stockholder in iron mines and gas companies, a board member of the Harlem Gas Light Company, a board member of the Third Avenue Railway Company, a board member of the Brooklyn Bridge Company, and the president of the Guardian Savings Bank. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Hey, it just seems like they're hedging their bets, right? If you want to make another Captain Marvel movie, just make it. Thank you. Exactly. It's like they want us to check a box whether we're going to go to the dance with their franchise or something. I'm not checking the box. Please, Mr. Curry. All I need is some elbow patches. And I told you, elbow patches don't come. Hey, guys, I'll be willing to do me a face. Wait, what are you doing now? Yeah. And what did you do to the couches, man?

Oh, hey, Noah. Hey, Cecil. Yeah, we were getting all psyched up for this week's episode about boss tweed. Yeah, I am not going to lie. I am deep into character on this one. I own half the tweed in this. That's true. He does.

No, guys, this episode has nothing to do with the material. It's about boss tweed. The public figure is super corrupt politician. He wasn't a fabric magnet known for his style of warm, but you know, still itchy clothes. Nope. Nope. Damn. Well, I guess we should get these back to peer one. Yeah. And we should untie the men's warehouse guy we have in the back. You guys know you could just Google who we're doing before you set up your shenanigans, right? I mean, it could.

Yeah, honestly, I'm kind of relieved. This stuff is super itchy. Fuck, just, ugh. Okay. Hello and welcome, citation needed, podcaster we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we are experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works. Now, I'm Cecil, and I'll be raging against this machine, but to do a proper job, I'll need my other mechanics.

First up, my special technicians for carburetors in realignment, but only when you're talking about bongs and D&D characters, Noah and Eli. No, yeah,, no. And my niche we have a totally different meaning for spark plug. Yeah. And I'm the podcasting version of a murder hobo. So it's time to acknowledge it. I'm glad. I'm glad it's out there. Also joining us tonight is the guy we don't let touch stuff because he is our break expert. Okay. It's not my fault. Everything is made so flimsy these days, Cecil. I am a robust man living in a delicate world. That's an interesting way to put it.

I will allow it. Patrons, without you, Eli would have to move something heavier than a can of fruit nectar. And one of Tom's 400 children who he doesn't know personally with starve. Oh, and Noah needs weed. Your continued support is a truly humanitarian effort. And if you'd like to learn how, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that all the way, tell us Noah what person place thing, concept, phenomenon,

or event we'll be talking about today. Boss tweed. I know you had this one in your sights for a while, no, also who was boss tweed? Oh, I so have. All right. So he was the very epitome of the corrupt bloated political grifter, like if a smoke-filled back room could get pregnant,

it's baby would be boss fucking. He was the center of a corrupt political ring that ran New York City politics through the middle of the 19th century, and he excelled at it despite never holding a particularly high office himself. Instead, he controlled the people who did a hold high office, and more importantly, he controlled the votes that would keep them in high office. By so doing, he got himself appointed to keep positions that allowed him to enrich himself to a poot-n-esque degree. Quoting directly from the opening paragraph of the Metropolitan Hotel, a significant staholder and iron mines and gas companies, a board member of the Harlem Gaslight Company,

a board member of the third Avenue Railway Company, a board member of the Brooklyn Bridge Company, and the president of the Guardian Savings Bank. End quote. And if you were alive today, you'd have almost as many podcasts. Yeah. The Harlem Gaslight company is now known as the Black Republican Association. Well done, sir. Okay. No, where does the tweed story start? So it starts April 3rd of 1823 on the lower east side of Manhattan, where William

Megartweed was born. He was the son of a third generation Scottish chairmaker. And by the way, his middle name is often listed as Marcy. And the wiki is littered with the detritus of a battle over his middle name that mars the entire article looks a field of fucking for done. So I want to make sure that I'm super clear about that right up front. Anyway, a little Willie Tweed got a bit of schooling early on, but he was done with that by the age of 11

when he left the follow his dad's trait. Then he went on to apprentice for a saddlemaker studied to be a bookkeeper and worked as a brushmaker because apparently everything was a fucking a whole ass occupation back then. At the age of 21, he married one Mary Jane Skaden and her name literally never comes up in the wiki again, nor does any reference to his wife. So that's all I'm going to say about her as a man who flipped through several college majors before deciding to go into that for a philosophy degree. I'm going to be very, very quiet. It's really quiet. Okay. Well, now I'm curious. What didn't rise to the level of philosophy? Did your school offer a degree in home economics?

So, shot fire from the answer. Yeah. Right. Now, apparently tweeds. Take it. Now, apparently tweeds political career started in a volunteer fire department, which wasn't at all unusual back then.

Apparently volunteer fire companies were common wasn't at all unusual back then. Apparently volunteer fire companies were common recruiting grounds for political parties. And if you've seen gangs of New York, you'll know that volunteer fire companies in 19th century New York were also famously adversarial. They were often drawn along ethnic lines from various immigrant communities,

and they were as likely to fight with one another as they were to fight fires. Okay, so there's no record on how good Tweed was at the fire fighting aspect of his job, but he was apparently really good at the fire fighter fighting part of it. And his reputation for in the Wikis word, Axe wielding violence got him elected as the permanent of his fire company and eventually caught the notice of the state's Democratic party. They put him up for Alderman in 1850 when Tweed was 26 years old.

Fight and Democrats. This is definitely the past, definitely the past. I was going to say nowadays Tweed would just email you while your house was on fire. Eli, you have to stop this fire. Can I count on you to donate $15 today. This is a lot of reliance on the acts. I mean, like I have never fought a fire. I'm a giant baby who's afraid of fire. But I feel like in a game of acts, water and fire, acts loses to both water and fire every time. Yeah, but when you're fighting other firefighters, though, okay, super handy. So okay, so tweet loses his first election, but he runs again the following year and wins and takes his first crack at public office. It'd be around that time that he would also get his first experience

illegally enriching himself by exploiting his public office. He quickly falls into a group known as the 40 thieves, which just I feel like the name says it all in the sense that true. Yeah, they were up to that says it all in the sense that they were up to that point. Some of the most corrupt politicians in New York City's history. And by the way, this would start a lifelong trend of tweed raising that particular bar. Okay, but like, did they not read Alibaba in the 40 thieves before taking the name? The story is about the problem of greed, not a celebration of it.

I don't, I don't think they gave themselves that name, actually. The stationery would have been super awkward, right? But they would have owned it. So, yeah, no, that's fair. So, okay, so he was elected to the US House in 1852, sort of a single term without distinction. More significantly though, he was also appointed to the New York County Board of Supervisors, which would become his first vehicle for large scale grift. Now, the scammy used is remarkably simple and everything he did from this point on his career would be basically this same thing, right? So if you owe the city money, you just tack on 15%. He takes that and distributors that those funds among himself and his conspirators.

If the city owes you, they'll just tack on 15% of that and have you give that money back to them for said distribution. And if you don't play along, of course, you don't get city contracts. And it was around that point where Tweed realized two important principles that were going to guide the rest of his life. The first was that the scam didn't have to be complicated to be effective. The second was that very often the most lucrative positions in government weren't the most prestigious. Often they weren't even elected positions. Okay, okay. A scam doesn't have to be complicated to be effective. I get that. But if you can manage

to make it sound complicated, it will be much more effective. Like it's not a pyramid scheme. It's a multi level marketing boss, babe, entrepreneurial opportunity to shift the paradigm of your life by leveraging social synergies within your financial network. No, that's fair. That's fair. What do you sell in time? I might I'm in whatever you want to pay.

I want 16 of them. I'm in. I want 16 of them. I'm in. I want to the ground floor. Now, the most significant vehicle for his rise in influence was a political organization called Tammany Hall or the Society of St. Tammany. And it's honestly hard to draw a parallel between it and any modern institution. So it's like, um, it's like three parts political action committee, one part mousse lodge, one part organized crime. Cable.

Planned Parenthood. No, it seems like the chief qualification though for rising up in Tammany Hall's ranks was being okay with corruption. So needless to say, tweets rise was fucking meteoric by 1863. He'd risen to the position of Grand Sage. Him, which is the top position. And that's when he started being referred to as boss on a law that have an L. Ked with Mason compasses for horns. Yeah. Pretty much. I'm using. Yeah. Now, this whole time, of course, boss tweeted slowly, a mask of fortune.

Despite dropping out of school at the equivalent of sixth grade, he gets a certified as a lawyer by a judge friend of his and uses the law firm to extort money even more than the name lawyer normally implies. Uh, he also, hi, Andrew. He also had himself appointed deputy street commissioner, which is not a particularly sexy job title, but he gave him considerable access to the city's contractors and funding. He also bought the New York printing company, which then suddenly became the city's official printer. He also bought the manufacturing stationers company, which suddenly became the city's official stationery supplier. Both companies overcharged the shit out of the city, of course, and but since nobody was scrutinizing those contracts, except the people in tweed's

pockets, nobody said a word. More like stamps.com. Am I right? Right. Right. I feel like owning all the stationary contracts was like a way richer plum in the 19th century and it sounds like today.

No shit. Put it in the file drawer next to all your buggy with contacts, you know? No, of course, all the politicians in the tweed ring were getting a little something for their complicity. First of all, tweed was known for his large ass. He reached a lot of publicity and did so generously, but more importantly, he delivered votes.

So Tammany Hall wasn't many ways a lobbying group for the city's Irish immigrants. As it's had, tweed made sure that the basic social services were available to that group and kept the fuck ton of them employed with his insatiable love of public spending. But in addition to money and votes, he also offered protection to the people that worked with it. For example, when one of his accomplices got caught stealing 150 grand in city funds, the guy put in charge of arresting him was a Tamini operative who went to arrest him with the very specific instructions to break into the guy's house super loud and super slow.

Well, make it your ass. Needless to say, the thief in question mentioned to escape pretty easily through a back window and then lived out the remaining years of his life in Mexico. He's chasing him down the hall like you're playing with a toddler. I'm going to get you for stealing. Here I go. No, I found out. Like the slow motion rate is nice and all, but like they could just send him a message ahead of time that they were coming. They have plenty of stationary for the notes. All right. So of course, with great power comes powerful enemies. And this is the point in the story where we have to meet tweed's arched emphasis, a guy by the name of Thomas Nast. Nast was not a plucky police sergeant or a hard-nosed private dick or a crusading pro-ohibition agent.

Arjun or a hard-nosed private dick or a crusading prohibition agent. He was a cartoonist for Harper's and from his desk at Harper's Weekly, he did more to bring that motherfucker down than pretty much any other single person. See, Tweet's corruption wasn't particularly well hidden. He was stupid, rich, and pretty much every source of income was fraudulent, but he was able to get away with it because he had his people appointed or elected to every position of oversight. That left this loophole though, right? Because like cartoonists could make jokes about what a racketeer the motherfucker was, and that's exactly what NAS did.

Okay. Okay. So for people who don't remember this, imagine if every day someone printed out several pages of the internet, and on page six was a daily XKCD. That's a newspaper. That's a newspaper. someone printed out several pages of the internet. And on page six was a daily X K CD. That's a newspaper. You guys not print out your internet every morning to catch up. I've been printing on my internet. We're, we're gen X. Of course we do. And some of us read our phones while we shit. Thank you.

It might be tempting to think a cartoonist in a fight with the most notorious city boss in American history would be an unfair fight. but Nasts cartoons were effective as all hell at painting boss tweed as the grifter that he was. What's more, tweed knew they were effective. He reportedly said of Nasts cartoons quote, stop them damn pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help but see in them damn pictures. I love you. I'm educated. Crazy. It's almost like short, punchy visceral political statements might have a future somewhere with a character count.

Well, we consider that. Let's take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. Tally, Tally, get in here, big guy. Yes, Mr. Tweed. That's boss Tweed, they're calling me boss now. Right. Yes, boss Tweed, you wanted to see me? Yeah, yeah. Can you do something about this nasty guy?

You know, the one who keeps drawing mean cartoons about me? I can try, sir, I guess what did you have in mind? Ooh, how about a bribe? Did you tell him about my large nest? Largest, sir. And no, he won't take a bribe. I've tried. What about a threat? Have we tried threatening him? He won't budge. He says he's speaking truth to power using comedy. All right. Then he leaves us no choice. We're going to have to kill comedy in the only sure fire way that I know how. How's that? Have someone write in and ask him to explain every

joke he makes until he's literally lost the will to make anything humorous ever again. Oh, that's cruel boss. I'm on it. Okay, sorry, guys, I don't really understand the sketch. Can one of you guys explain it? Did it? Tom will lost. We're back. And before the break, a rich grifter was in charge and no one could do anything about it. And Noah said that this sort of thing happened a long time ago too. before the break, a rich grifter was in charge and no one could do anything about it. Noah said that this sort of thing happened a long time ago too. So let us know how we won. Noah, how did he stop the steve? Yeah. Let us.

All right. So until this point, the story, boss, we just bit a power player and do your politics. But by 1869, he was the power player. Thanks in part to $600,000 that he paid out and bribes to Republicans. That's like $13 million in today's money. He got a new charter passed that put more and more of the power in the hands of the city's alderman, all 15 of which he controlled. Jesus. Yeah. By then he controlled the states governor, the city's mayor, the district attorney, and the city's controller, Tammy associate named Richard Slippery Dick Connolly. I love that nickname. Tweedware, a lot of hats back then, including that of the state senator, but the highest off-seigh held in the city of New York was Commissioner of Public Works, which again put

him in control of the city's purse strings. And he's worried about a bunch of mean Marmaduke comics. I mean, like, what's the worst thing that could happen? Someone's going to read family circus and then write a sternly worded letter on the stationery they bought from Boss Tweet. Joe just you wait, sir. Now, of course, then as now, New York was the nation's financial capital. And that's a lot of the reason that Tweed's Griff was able to reach such a phenomenal scale. The city had no end of banks to borrow from, and all the bankers were desperate to stay on the good side of Tammany Hall.

So Tweed's corruption was able to drive the cities into astronomical debt without the coffers ever running draw. All the banks setting up credit cards, sign up tables with free koozies outside. Tammany halls water buffalo races or whatever it's called. Yeah, right, right. Now, one of the most famous examples of tweedscript comes from the notorious construction of what's now known as the tweed courthouse. It ended up costing about twice as much as Alaska. Oh my god. About $13 million dollars in all. Again, 1870s, right? So we're talking about $290 million dollars today.

The receipts on this thing are insane too. One carpenter was paid the equivalent of $5 million dollars for a month's work. A plaster got the equivalent of $1.8 million for two days work at one point. Unions, am I right? You are not right. If you ask a Fox News viewer, they'd say that like, this is how much a fast food employee would make if they weren't living off that fat stimulus check they got 14 months ago. Absolutely.

Driving up the inflation. No, I don't know the going rate for a month's worth of like carpenter ring, but I feel like tweed's tacking on a touch more than the usual 15%. Yeah. I think in this instance, also by the way, tweet bought a quarry and then granted that quarry exclusive right to provide the millions of dollars worth of marble that the project was going to use. And then he overcharged himself.

And then he skimmed off the top of himself as well. I don't even know what I'm robbing anymore. It's a fearously handing himself money in a circle. Just passing a briefcase from one hand to the other. He also made a ton of money by directing public works projects to places where he owned property, right? So basically he and his cronies would go buy up a bunch of land in a neighborhood and then build that area up in terms of parks and infrastructure and then sell that now much more valuable land. Nowadays they call that an air tweed and tweed. I don't think that's what they call it. Thank you. So VRB. Oh, now it's a lot more expensive.

No, that's. All right. But what goes up with insufficient force to escape earth gravitational pull must come now. I know it's true. No, but it's not as catchy. You got to let it go. I feel like it's just catching.

If we all tried to gather, it would catch on. And of course, that was as true for Bush. We doesn't want for anybody else. His fall from grace began in 1871 and like so many downfalls of powerful men, it started with someone under his slippery deck. Specifically, a county auditor in the Comptroller's office names James Watson, who was in charge of keeping the tweed rings books. In 1871, he had the temerity to get his head smushed in a carriage accident and

he died. And before Tweed could orchestrate a workable replacement, the duty felt to one Matthew or Rorck, who was not in the Tweed circle. And I, it didn't take a hell of a lot of digging to start uncovering the many hundred grand an hour contractors, the city apparently had working for them. Now, of course, Tweet's corruption had always been an inch and a half away from public knowledge. So just his books coming to light might not actually have been enough to bring him down. If it hadn't come right on the heels of a fight about a parade that left 60 people dead in another 150 injured, that fight is called the orange riot of 1871. Not to be confused with the orange riot of January 6th. No.

Slightly more deadly even. And so this started when Protestants wanted to have a parade to celebrate a historic victory against Catholics and Catholics wanted them to not. After some wrangling at City Hall, Tweet agreed to let the parade take place, but its constituency wasn't on board and they sparked a riot in protest. A lot of the power brokers in the city took this is a sign that Tweet was losing control over his constituency. And without the backing of the city's Irish immigrant population, Tweet had no real power base at all. Okay. This is the part about rich grifters. I will never understand when you lose control of your mob of sick of fans, but you are still fantastically

wealthy and not in jail. That is the time to relocate to Belize. Yeah. Oh, right. Just look at the running time here. It's almost two hours. You know you've got a complete now. So in light of all of this, the mayor, a tweet associate named A Oakley Hall and panels of commission to look into the city's finances, but all the commissioners were people in tweed's pockets, so they do tofully found that the books were faithfully kept. But at the same time, somebody started feeding inside information about the contents of those

books to the New York Times. Tweet offered the paper a staggering five million dollars, not to print it. That's over a hundred million in today's. But to the paper's credit, they told them the fuck dust and they ran with the headline, gigantic frauds of the ring exposed. Pretty on the nose. In response, tweets started desperately transferring ownership of his real estate and investments to family members. I'm not a fraud. I'm a nepotist, I say. A nepotist. Now, the most consequential thing to come from the Times exposé was that international crisis of confidence in New York City's finances. European investors owned a lot of New York's bonds.

And as the reputation of the city's government flagged, so did their faith in its ability to repay those debts. So with his voting base in soft rebel. So after a billion is the name of my new online boner pill store. But yeah. So, but yeah, but with his voters in soft rebellion, his corruption on the front page and the bankers losing trust in him, the whole city turned against tweet. A group called the executive committee of citizens and taxpayers for financial reform of the

city. Jesus, that's a mouthful. When after Tammany Hall is financing by encouraging property owners to refuse to pay municipal taxes, that quickly leads to city workers not getting paid, and that quickly leads to city workers marching on city hall with demanding tweets resignation. We said in bother, I'm going to be eating his medium-well steak and louries. Well, you know, that's true. Right, right, have some respect. But it turns out that the protesters got more than tweed's resignation. They got his arrest on charges of embezzlement. Now, he was released pretty much immediately on a million dollars bail and tried to stage

a comeback. But despite some electoral success, he was arrested again later that year. And this time, bail cost him eight million dollars. He just stands him to Carppenters and ask for change. There's a guy with one of those things on his belt just like pressing the buttons and drywallers come out of it. So okay. So in his first trial, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, but the city tried him

again, and he was running low on bribe money by then. So the jury in the retrial found him guilty on 204 of 220 counts. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail, but a higher court reduced the sentence to one year. He served that. But then when he got out, the state filed a civil suit to recover six million and embezzled funds. And this time, he couldn't afford to post bail. So they locked him up in jail.

But and your guess is as good as mine on this one the jail allowed him periodic home business See an Epstein it wasn't full-time jazzy who is part time in jail So during one of those visits he just He's fucking left any fled the country guy who lived let him go is like oh, so I guess pinky swears me nothing now I'm fired. Yeah, I'm fired. Okay. Yeah. All right.

So now he did successfully manage to escape the US and made it all the way to Europe, working as a common seaman on a Spanish ship. Fledged in a plane. Hey. But the, but the minute he arrived in board, his arch nemesis, the cartoonist Thomas now struck one last time. Someone at the talks literally recognized boss tweed from the Harper's cartoons and contacted the authorities.

No shit really happened. Spain immediately arrested him and turned him over to a US warship, which returned him to the prison that he would ultimately die in. And see, this is why canonically I'm the least handsome one on the podcast. It's about discretion. There you go. Just discretion. No, of course, there's no record of every dollar tweet embezzled from the city and state of New York and the convoluted web of ownership and shit made as personal fortune impossible

to precisely measure as well. Still, there have been a number of attempts to quantify it for posterity. Now, the wiki wants to make it super-care that some historians think boss Tweet was just an innocent victim of psychostance, but they're in an extreme minority. He was ultimately convicted of stealing an amount estimated by the Aldermen's Committee at the time

as being between 25 and 45 million dollars. Jesus. Though, and, but later estimates actually put that number as high as 200 million. And I cannot emphasize this enough in 1870s dollars. Yeah, that would be like stealing $4 billion today. That's without a fake cherry and a build a wall go fund me guys. Think about that. Yeah. Do it an old school.

Again, this is the real problem. All these fucking guys, they robbed the house and then they try to live in the house. Yes. Look, if I am bezel fuck off money, the first thing I'm going to do is to fuck off. The fucking off is the point of the money. So I'm not a little debit card for the account. Also, he gets caught in bessiling $4 billion and spends a year in jail. Then okay, but after that, fuck off. Yeah. Now, to be clear, I should also probably mention that Tweet did make a few historical

contributions that didn't involve his greed, or at least didn't directly involve his greed, I guess. Uh, for example, at one point, he got involved with an early professional baseball team called the New York Mutuals. In typical tweed fashion, he jacked up ticket prices and then used insider knowledge to gain a betting advantage, but every story of our best time, at least a little of that. Uh, but he's also credited with starting the tradition of spring training when he sent his club to New Orleans to prepare for the 1869 season. He also is cited as the guy who shorted the name from Liberty and Lightning, the world to Statue of Liberty, purportedly so it looked better in headlines.

French chick with lamb too far. Okay, Statue of Liberty. That's what rules off the tongue. Now, somehow, despite all the taint that he brought to the name, Tammany Hall managed to remain a power player in New York state politics for several more decades. They too though would ultimately fall as so many fell after picking a fight with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That fight started when he was New York's governor and got way worse form a couple years later when he was elected president for life in 1932. He was stripped of group of federal patronage that same year. And two years later, Fierrola LaGuardia would be elected mayor, making, marking the first time in over a hundred

years that somebody rose to that position without Tammany Hall's permission. Huh. And if he had to summarize, we learned one sentence. What would it be? Heaths guy was climbing around Venetian mansions for nothing, honestly. Are you ready for the quiz, Noah? Oh, yeah. All right. No, you made the terrible mistake of mentioning FDR and you know what that means? Why was FDR the perfect person to take on boss Tweet?

Oh, no. Hey, he stood on principle. Oh, damn it. He talked to Doc and walked to the walk. See, he was willing to stand up to anyone or D legs. Yikes. Okay. I refuse to answer on principle Eli, this kind of ableism will not stay up to yikes.

You two both of you. You are politically correct. All right. Noah, with the recent Supreme court decree, is we should perhaps start a new comic to highlight their corruption. What would that comic strip be called? The first one's a broom hilda reference. If you don't remember that one, is a broom hilda, is it which?

Don't apologize for the joke. I'm a don't apologize. I got a pre-apologize for this one. They got a pre-apologize. A, keep that womb filled. A, be fantastic. And to cap and trade. C, a orphan claim or D, focus on the family circus. All right, I think you're trying to throw me with the apology because keep that

womb filled is fucking brilliant. I think it's a keep that wound filter. You're correct. Fuck you. Yeah. Actually, no, I'm not it. I'm looking ahead. It looks like I'm not. No, no, you're correct. I am. I'm correct. Yeah. I'm going to win in a second with this great question. I hope you're ready for it.

Stealing money through grift is an American tradition, but forgetting to run away is also weirdly an American tradition, but forgetting to run away is also weirdly an American tradition. Who are two of the answers to this, not quite a question that I wrote below. Hey, Bernie should have made off with the cash. Be Frank Abig nailed everything but to get away. That's, I think it's, it's C you should have, you should have wrote the whole question you were so close That's not even a question all I had in my head was Bernie made off with the cash I didn't know what to do with it and that's the answer

All right, well see so since I win you can write my good man. Right, well I got something already done. All right, well for Tom, Noah, Eli and the Ghost of Heath, I'm Cecil. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then I will be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can listen to all our other shows and you can find those links at our website. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation to patreon.com slash citation pod. Or you can leave us a five star review every weekend.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes connected to this on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod dot com 50 50. She has someone to ask us to ask if he's dead now. She said the ghost. And I don't know whether I should be terrified or excited that people would think that that would be how we would announce it.