Criminal - Action Park

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

“Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there. It was part of why you wanted to go.” Seth Porges made a documentary about Action Park, along with Chris Charles Scott. It’s called Class Action Park. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Or catch My Mom Jane, Mariska Hargitay's moving documentary feature directorial debut about her mother, Hollywood icon, Jane Mansfield. There's something for everyone. Get your tickets now at trybeckafilm.com. This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there.

Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal. It was part of why you wanted to go. Chris Gethard is an actor, comedian, and writer. But most importantly, I am a real product of Northern New Jersey. I have first heard of Action Park because the church in my neighborhood, Our Lady of Lords, they used to send the altar boys there on an annual summer trip. Every summer invariably the altar boys would come back with burns on their skin. One year a kid came back with a broken bone. Action Park must have had some deal with the Catholic diocese in North Jersey to give cheap tickets out,

because a lot of the legend of it was spread by these altar boys going and coming back real messed up. Chris was in third grade when he was first invited to go to Action Park. And my parents did not want me to go. We had all heard about the place. My parents were dead set against it. But if you grew up in Northern New Jersey in the 80s, if it got brought up, you're too scared to go to Action Park, you're kinda soft. And it could be used against you.

You could be judged for that. Action Park was in Vernon, New Jersey. I think even people who grew up there would not be offended if I said it's kind of the middle of nowhere. Really a gorgeous part of the state. This is when New Jersey really becomes the Garden State. Rolling hills, farms, long stretches of boredom. And then you finally get there and it's on the side of a mountain. It looked like a regular water park, although famously you knew something was really wrong because one of the first things you saw out of the entrance, I believe off to your right, right after you entered, was the infamous slide that had the loop-de-loop.

It was called the Cannonball Loop, a more than 50-foot vertical drop in total darkness, ending with an upside-down twist. I remember seeing it and thinking to myself, oh yeah, no, there's no way that would work. That won't work. You can't do that. There's just no way that would work. I knew at the age of eight or nine, absolutely no way that that was a good idea. And you heard stories around North Jersey,

the big one that we all heard growing up was that they were sending test dummies down it. And the test dummies were coming out with no heads, that it was ripping the heads off the test dummies. You started to hear stories that kids would get flung into the side of it, and their teeth were being knocked out. And not only were their teeth being knocked out, but then the people who would

go after them were sliding over their teeth. So you heard urban legends about this ride. And to enter and see it right away. Did Verify. Oh, everything I've heard is true. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Before Action Park was built, the area around it was home to a pair of ski resorts, Vernon Valley and Great Gorge. They were owned by a man named Gene Mulvihill.

Gene Mulvihill was the creator of Action Park, the founder, the auteur, the madman, genius, visionary criminal overlord of the place. Seth Porges has spent years researching Action Park and Gene Mulvihill. Before he bought the ski resorts in northern New Jersey, Gene had a company on Wall Street called Mayflower Securities, which got involved in penny stock fraud. This was the Wolf of Wall Street era. This is when you'd have these boiler rooms full of shady phone salesmen calling people up at their dinner table and telling them they have the deal of a lifetime.

If you buy now, this stock can only go up. Penny stocks are cheap shares of small companies. Scammers often create a buying frenzy around them to drive up prices and then dump their own shares. That's what Gene did. Gene was a penny stock guy. After an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, Gene's company was suspended in 1974. It was the same year that he bought the ski resorts.

But in Northern New Jersey, it only snows for a couple of months. So the ski slopes went unused for most of the year. And Gene wanted to find another way to make money, especially during the summer. First he built a ride on the side of the mountain, a long curving track made from cement and asbestos, and put little plastic sleds on it. When there wasn't any snow, you could still take the ski lift up

and then ride 2,700 feet down. Jean Mulvihill called it the Alpine Slide. It opened in September of 1976. New Jersey star Ledger reported that employees said it wasn't dangerous, though, quote, there is talk that someone got a broken thumb and someone else received a dislocated shoulder. Jean Mulvihill said it's outrageously fantastic.

You know, Jean is a fascinating person. He is somebody it's kind of impossible not to feel some form of an attraction towards. You know, this is a guy who in many ways encapsulates a lot of the things that we sometimes wish we could get away with doing. He just went ahead and did it. And I think there's something in our culture that's drawn to these individuals who break rules for the sake of breaking rules. And Gene was somebody who was drawn to the idea that if somebody told him he couldn't

do something, he absolutely wanted to do it just because. He started building more rides, and by 1978, there was an entire water park around the Alpine Slide. It was over 250 acres in the different sections, like Motor World with go-karts and jetboats, and Waterworld with cliff dives, river rafts, and a wave pool. He called it Action Park. It officially opened to the public on July 4, 1978. The day featured a Dolly Parton lookalike competition and a tobacco-spitting contest.

Visitors were asked to fill out a survey about what they liked and what they didn't. One guest said, quote, almost drowned. Someone else said, lost my teeth. A third person said, bees. Action Park was one of the first water parks in the country. Gene Mulvihill was hoping that Vernon, New Jersey could become the next big national resort town. He said that why would people fly all the way to Orlando or to Anaheim to go to a Disney park when hey, I'm an hour and a half from New York City. I'm two hours from Philadelphia. I'm a day trip away.

He wanted to turn Vernon into the next Orlando. And to a lot of people, the people who grew up in this bucolic town, the preservationists, they were really, really scared of that. Then you also had the other side of Vernon, which are the people who wanted the growth, wanted the business, wanted the tourists, wanted the customers. And they were the people who largely for many decades were and still are in charge of Vernon. And so Gene could get away with a lot. But did he have any background in theme parks? I mean, he's a stockbroker. No, no, of course not.

You know, I think he's somebody who looked at Walt Disney and said, that guy's creative. I can do that. And it's like, what if Tony Soprano looked at Walt Disney and said I want to do that It's really what Gene was Gene didn't have a background in a lot of things He did he didn't have a background designing rides, but he was the single most prolific ride designer at Action Park He would personally tinker with the rides. Never mind. This guy has no idea how to Engineer anything he had imagination all these rides just seemed to resemble things You would doodle in the margins of your notebook. And that's what Action Park was. It was somebody taking these ideas from their imagination

and willing them into existence and either not knowing or not caring what would happen when they entered the real world. The cannonball loop, the first slide you saw when you walked into the park, was based on something Gene had originally drawn on a napkin. was based on something Gene had originally drawn on a napkin. Gene's son, Andy Mulvihill, has said, some people think of my father as a berserk Willy Wonka. He earned a reputation for being willing to take risks when it came to whether or not a ride made sense or would possibly even work.

The rides at Action Park were designed by sometimes Gene himself, sometimes his employees, sometimes just these oddball designers who nobody else wanted to touch. And so people who nobody at Disney or Six Flags or Wet n Wild wanted to talk to would track Gene down at amusement industry conventions and be like, hey, I got a ride. You're going to want to build this. And Gene would just go, sure, let's build it. What could go wrong? And then they just build the ride without any modeling

or testing and then see how it worked. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Quince. It's hard to know what you'll actually get when you shop for clothes online. The fabric might look great in photos but feel uncomfortable or cheaply made once it arrives. Quince is a clothing company that works directly with top artisans who use premium fabrics and finishes. They have European-style shorts and dresses made from 100% linen for as low as $30.

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New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Seament Mobile for details. One early ride Gene Mulvihill wanted to build for Action Park was called Man in the Ball in the Ball. You'd step inside this ball and you'd just roll down a track down the side of the mountain. First of all, a great name for a ride and a truly ludicrous idea for a ride.

What could go wrong? Gene Mulvihill said, you're not going to find this at Disney. The track was made of PVC pipe. Well, the day they decided to test this thing out, it was like a sweltering 100 degree day. And the guy who built this ride, the designer, he didn't quite realize that PVC pipe warped under extreme heat. And as this guy is going down the mountain on this ball, the track just breaks apart. And the ball just continues the roll without any track down the hill on this ball, the track just breaks apart. And the ball just continues to roll, without any track, down the hill,

over Route 94, over the highway, into a swamp on the other side. There was one called the aquascoot. You sat on some sort of sled and it went, there was water involved, but it also went over these rollers. Chris Gathered. And I don't want to be too crass, but I do distinctly remember looking at that and going, if you fell off the sled, that thing, your bathing suit could get caught in between those rollers.

Your testicles could get caught in between the rollers. I remember sizing it up immediately and going, the reward is not worth the risk when it comes to the old Aqua Scoot. I will be opting out of the Aqua Scoot experience. What were some of the other rides that you looked at and just thought no? Sadly, I, like many kids of my generation,

looked at the rides and said, yes. I went on the Tarzan Swing and the Alpine slide. The Tarzan swing was a bad idea. I ate it so hard on the Tarzan swing. It was not good. What was the Tarzan swing? There's a wire with a sort of triangle shaped bar at the bottom and you jump off a platform and you just swing out over water. There's a couple very important things about the Tarzan swing, which is one, it was a natural spring. The temperature was unregulated. It was notoriously freezing cold, so you're dropping from 15-20 feet, depending on how much momentum you get, and you are dropping into really slimy looking frigid water. The design of the Tarzan Swing was really genius, especially in a place as rowdy as Northern New Jersey,

because the line looped around in a way where everyone online watched you jump. Now some people would get up there and have the upper body strength to like pull themselves up and do a backflip and fall into the water and would be met with raucous applause from all the people watching. Some people would go one hand at the end and throw up the middle finger and everybody would cheer because it was naughty. I personally witnessed

people pull their pants down and moon the line. It was also met with cheers. But if you weren't met with cheers, you were met with like a Roman Coliseum level of derision. I was an eight-year-old kid and I remember I went to jump off the platform with the Tarzan swing and I am a meek man now in my 40s. I was a little tiny late bloomer kid with glasses. It was not good. I had no upper body strength. As soon as I jumped off, I felt my arms kind of wrench at the shoulders and immediately realized, oh no, I can't do this. I can't hold on. And then I went down, I remember my feet hit the water, which created this drag. And I remember just thinking, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. And then I was pulled up maybe five or six more feet

and then wiped out. And when I came up from again, shockingly cold water, shockingly cold water, I'm confused, I'm overwhelmed. And I see that there are people shouting, booing, mocking me, yelling things. What are they yelling? I mean, yelling things that you'd have to bleep on a podcast.

No, it's okay, we can bleep them. I mean, people would wipe out and you'd have throngs of other people chanting the word pussy at them. Coming out of the ice cold water and hearing someone yell, you ate shit, you little bitch, something like that. And then you look up and realize it's like a dad who's there with his family, like adults, grownups, drunk, late 20 year olds, yelling things at kids.

Like- And who was working there? I mean, did you get a sense that you, the rides were dangerous, but you know, okay, at least when the person gets injured, someone will be there to help. No, there was no help. There was no help at Action Park. The vibe was that you were on your own, do what you want, and if you eat shit at any point today,

maybe you or your friends can get you to safety, but you can't depend on the workers. The workers were teens. -♪ MUSIC PLAYINGan I mean, this was a summer park, so basically half of Vernon High School worked at the park in the summer, is what happened. And, you know, Gene liked having young employees there because they didn't

ask questions. If you're 16 years old, you're not second guessing this guy. And it became this rite of passage for so many kids in the Vernon area to work at Action Park. So basically, you needed no skills to get a job at Action Park. No skills. And they didn't really care about labor laws. New Jersey law people to operated rides to be 16 years old action bark didn't care about that You have 14 year olds operating rides and gene was paying off people who would give him heads ups when inspectors would come by whether it's labor inspectors or ride inspectors or Insurance inspectors whatever inspectors like gene knew before these guys were gonna show up So if you have a 14 yearold who shouldn't be operating that ride,

maybe the day the inspector goes by, he's at home, or maybe he's just working like a hot dog stand. In 1982, the state of New Jersey began to look into Gene Mulvihill's businesses in Vernon Valley. Gene's resorts were on land leased from the state, and the state believed Gene was under-reporting his earnings. Eventually they discovered that his organization had failed to report millions of dollars of

revenue. But there is more. Jean didn't have liability insurance, which was required by the state. If anyone asked, Jean would point to a policy with a company called London and World Assurance Limited, a company he'd formed in the Cayman Islands. This fake insurance company wasn't just there to allow them to not actually pay for insurance. It also became a vehicle for a number of other criminal pursuits, including money laundering.

At one point, the state of New Jersey said Jean wrote a check for $175,000 that was supposedly to pay his insurance premium. But then he passed it through 13 different companies and back to Vernon Valley. New Jersey spent two years on their investigation. In the end, Gene and his company pleaded guilty to criminal counts of fraud, theft, and conspiracy. They were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Gene was ordered to give up control of Action Park. They say, you're no longer allowed to operate this facility because you are just willfully

breaking the law left and right. And Gene says no. He basically decides he's just not going to do what they say. He instead basically stops following rules even more than he had before, basically sets out to become the worst tenant he possibly could be with the express goal of pissing off the state of New Jersey so much that they would throw their hands up in the air and say, we are done with this guy. We don't even care anymore. Eventually, Gene struck a deal with the state. They agreed to sell him the land where his ski resorts and Action Park operated.

Gene told the New York Times his businesses were a big bonanza for the area and said, quote, they should pay us for being here. No one could understand how Jean got away with it. In the end, they agreed to sell him the whole mountain for basically $800,000 just to get him off their back. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Bombas. Start your spring cleaning now by finally getting rid of your old, worn out socks and

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That's selectquote.com slash criminal today to get started. That's selectquote.com slash criminal. By 1981, Action Park was getting more than Gene was kind of a genius in one sense. And that's that he knew that the more people learned how dangerous this was, it wouldn't scare them away. It would bring them in. His lieutenants were basically telling him, you got to clean up your act. You got to make this park safe.

And he didn't want to. He knew that every newspaper report, every TV spot that reported on the injuries and the safety record of the action park would just make the place more and more popular. The Alpine Slide, the very first ride Gene Mulvihill built, was one of the most popular in the park. It was also one of the most dangerous. The Alpine Slide alone, I was told on a busy Saturday, was probably going to injure several hundred people in a single day. This isn't a thing where a couple people got a couple scrapes and injuries. It's a thing where a sizable percentage of anybody who stepped

foot in this park was going to get hurt and potentially have scars that they have to this day. Everybody knew that the Alpine Slide was the number one thing that hurt people at Action Park. Everybody in New Jersey knew that thing's messed up. People get messed up on that ride. On the afternoon of July 8, 1980, a 19-year-old named George Larson, Jr. borrowed some money from his mother to visit Action Park with one of his friends. Around 6 p.m., he took the chairlift up to the top of the Alpine slide, got on his cart and started down the mountain, down a newly opened so-called expert track. According to an employee who was working at the time,

the track was wet because it had just rained. Later reporting said that as he turned to look back at a friend, he lost control of his sled, hit a curve, and flew out of the track. George Larson Jr. flipped about 25 feet down the side of the hill and hit his head on some rocks. After more than a week in a coma, he died. The park had messaged the newspapers that it wasn't the ride that killed George, it was the rock that hit his head that killed him. And that was the problem.

There was nothing wrong with the ride, they said. It was the rock. Seth Poor just talked to George's family. They'd never given interviews about it before. His mother, Esther Larson, said on the night George died, she was in so much pain that she walked into traffic. She told Seth Porges that the park was, quote, porges that the park was, quote, a place where death was tolerated. Esther Larsen says the family sued and settled for $100,000. ACKERMAN And you can imagine just how much pain and grief they were feeling.

You can understand the willingness to just have this end as quickly as you can. And the lawyer who's representing the family told them that they weren't going to get much more because George was a teenager and teenagers are liabilities and this is to be expected from teenagers. In 1982, two years after George Larson's death, a 15-year-old boy from New York named George Lopez drowned in the wave pool. Action Park's wave pool was one of the first in the country. Gas-powered motors could make waves three or four feet higher than the surface of the water. A week after George Lopez died,

a 27-year-old named Jeffrey Nathan stepped out of a kayak mid-ride and was allegedly electrocuted by some wiring exposed in the water. He died of cardiac failure shortly after. In 1984, another visitor suffered a fatal heart attack. It was thought the frigid water under the Tarzan's swing was responsible.

That same year, a 20-year-old drowned at the base of the cliff dive. In 1987, another teenager drowned in the wave pool, which locals and lifeguards had started calling the grave pool. The thing that really baffles me and still messes me up to this day is I swam in a wave pool where people died. And I was a little kid assuming and hoping that to some degree that was an urban legend, but there were adults who knew that it wasn't. There were adults who read that in the star ledger. There were adults who worked at that place. There were people who were probably there when I was eight or nine years old swimming in that wave pool

who had been working there a couple years prior when a body had been removed from that wave pool. And I do get very disturbed by that. There were so many injuries at Action Park that by some estimates, there were more than a hundred lawsuits filed against it. In some cases, federal marshals had to seize cash from Gene Mulvihill's businesses to collect judgments. Gene told the star ledger, quote, So what?

They always got paid. Gene's son later said, quote, I can tell you he did not stay awake at night worrying about lawsuits. My dad was not a warrior. He was a doer. But in 1996, the park filed for bankruptcy. It closed soon after. The park was bought and redone. A lot of the rides were torn down, but the alpine slide stayed open for one more year. You had to wear a helmet and knee pads. Then they tore that down too.

Gene Mulvihill died in 2012. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, "...his unique vision and entrepreneurial spirit will be greatly missed." The state labor commissioner at the time said Jean was one of the most brilliant visionaries and entrepreneurs I ever knew. And the mayor of Vernon said, "...I've lost a good friend. A few years ago, Gene's son, Andy, who worked at Action Park and helped

render different versions of the park later on, wrote a book about his time working for his father. In it, he tells a story about something he calls Gene Logic. He was telling his father why they needed to paint the bottom of the pool white so lifeguards could tell if anyone was sinking. Gene said, Andy, you can't see the bottom of the ocean either. That doesn't mean you stop people from swimming in it if they want. To this day in North Jersey, people will start, here's my scar that I got at

Action Park. Oh, I got really messed up on the Tarzan swing. Listen to what happened to me on the Alpine slide. I do think that there is some level of we all sit and tell stories about it because we all are now raising our own kids and realizing how beyond the pale it was. And I think a lot of the people going, man, I wish it was still like that. No, you don't. I don't really think you wish it was like that. I don't want my kid going to a place like Action Park.

No way. I'm not sure why I ever went or why any of us did. So you wouldn't send your kids there? You wouldn't let them have the experience? I have a son who's about to turn six. And if Action Park was still around, there's not a world in which I send my son there. There's just not. The Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sejico, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, Megan Kinnane, and Dan O'Donnell. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Southpaw just made a documentary about Action Park along with Chris Charles Scott. It's called Class Action Park. We'll have a link in the show notes. You can learn more about the show on our website, thisiscriminal.com, and you can sign up for a newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.