Criminal - Cannonball

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

With Covid-19 shutdowns, people have been taking advantage of quiet highways to drive as fast as they can from New York City to Redondo Beach, California. They’re trying to break records set in an unofficial and secretive race called the “Cannonball.” Car and Driver Magazine editor Brock Yates came up with the idea for the race, and described it as a “balls-out, shoot-the-moon, rumble.” He also wrote the screenplay for the 1981 movie based on the race, “Cannonball Run,” which starred Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, and Roger Moore. In today’s episode, the history of the illegal cross country race, how it has evolved since 1971, and why fans say it will never go away. We speak with Brock Yates’ son, Brock Yates Jr., and Ed Bolian tells us about his record-setting cross-country drive in 2013. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. 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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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. The first speed limits in the United States were set in 1652 in what was then New Amsterdam, now New York City. The law stated that wagons, carts, and sleighs could not be run, rode, or driven at a gallop. And the first speed limits for motor vehicles were set in 1901 in Connecticut, 12 miles per hour in cities and 15 miles per hour on country roads. After that, states continued to set their own speed limits, ranging from 40 to 80 miles per hour. But in 1974, President Nixon signed legislation

that established a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour. People called it the double nickel. The new national limit was meant to conserve fuel in response to the 1973 Mideast oil embargo. There were fuel shortages all over the country. Gas stations were so crowded that you could only get gas on certain days, depending on whether your license plate

ended in an odd or even number. The government had mandated a national speed limit once before, during World War II, with the so-called victory speed limit of 35 miles per hour, which was also meant to conserve fuel and rubber. There was a lot of support for that national speed limit during World War II, but that wasn't the case decades later. The New York Times reported in 1982

that most drivers just didn't observe the 55 miles per hour speed limit. Some states started drastically lowering the penalties for speeding. One driver told the New York Times in 1989 that the speed limit is making us all criminals. In 1995, President Clinton signed a bill that ended the federal speed limit, allowing states to once again set their own. Currently, a highway in Texas has the highest posted speed limit, 85 miles per hour. In 2013, a man named Ed Boleyn and two of his friends spent more than 28 hours in continuous violation of the law, breaking the speed limit all the way from New York City to Los Angeles.

We had three radar detectors, two laser jamming systems, an ambulance traffic light changer, four navigation systems, phones, tablets, wiring for everything, high-powered binoculars, a police scanner, a CB radio, stopwatches, obviously. Did you say they're an ambulance traffic light changer? Correct, yeah. So ambulance, in different jurisdictions, they use different things, but they're essentially IR pulsing diodes that will trigger a signal on top of the traffic light and either turn just yours green and everybody else's red or turn them all red so that you can just run the light. Ed Bolin and his friends left from a parking garage in midtown Manhattan, the Red Ball Garage, just before 10 p.m. to maximize nighttime driving. Not see too

many people on the road. We went, you know, back in 2013 in October when gas prices were really high. So recreational travel had dropped, trucks weren't driving as much, and they certainly weren't speeding. So it was one of those things that really created an atmosphere where we didn't have to interact with a whole lot of cars or trucks, and that helped us a lot. The goal was to beat traffic at all costs, plan the route so that if you were going through big cities, you were doing it at night. And figure out a way to arrive in Los Angeles in the middle of the night, so you wouldn't have any slowdowns that close to the finish line. A group of friends drove the route miles ahead of them

to check for police or construction or traffic, anything that would slow them down. When you first, when you pressed the timer start and you took off, what were you feeling? I was mad at all the lights that were stopping me in Manhattan. But, you know, honestly, we were approaching it very much as a first attempt, as a shakedown run, not putting too much pressure on ourselves, both because that would be counterproductive to increase anxiety and stress, but also just because we had no idea what it was going to be like. And, you know, we were expecting to need to average 91, 92 miles an hour. And we just started driving kind of as fast as we could, given the conditions. It was wide open and going through kind of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, just looking at what was possible.

And I was driving the first leg, and our average just climbed and climbed and climbed until it was over 100 miles an hour. Ed says it was shortly after that they saw their first cop. We were coming past this cop at about 135 miles an hour, and David's standing on the brakes. But fortunately, this law enforcement officer was just staring into his laptop in the median and not paying attention to anybody speeding past.

And then we averaged 108 through Ohio and 110 through Indiana. And we're averaging 117 through Illinois until the car started begging for oil. It was just consuming a lot more than we had ever seen it in earlier testing. And then they pulled into a gas station in Groom, Texas, and Ed's credit card was declined. American Express froze all my credit cards because as soon as I swiped it, they saw within eight hours of the last charge, I was between two places that couldn't have been reached by airplane. And I guess they have advanced enough algorithms to tell that there were no flight scheduled or flight patterns that could have gotten me there. And so I got all these fraud alerts and I'm yelling to the guys that are in there using the bathroom like, hey, get out here with another credit card or some cash.

We got to get this thing filled up. Ed Bolian was doing this, trying to drive from New York to Los Angeles as quickly as possible to follow in the footsteps of his hero, a man who'd done it more than 40 years earlier, Brock Yates. In 1964, Brock Yates was hired as an editor for Car and Driver magazine. He loved cars, looking at them, driving them, and writing about them, at a time in the United States when, as he wrote,

existential high-speed drives were in style. This was also a time when cars and drivers were becoming more tightly regulated. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was signed in 1966, and each passing year brought new requirements. Brock Yates hated it. He didn't like bureaucracy, and he didn't like the idea of anyone taking the fun out of driving.

And so he came up with an idea. A race, from New York to Los Angeles. Competitors could drive any car they wanted, take any route they wanted, and drive any speed that they wanted. Whoever got to Los Angeles first was the winner. But there was no prize. You just did it to do it.

Brock Yates said it was anarchistic. He called it a, quote, balls-out shoot-the-moon rumble, and said it would be up to future generations to decide what it meant, if anything. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I'm not sure my mother fully approved, but my father asked me if I'd like to go on a little adventure.

And being an awkward 14-year-old kid, of course I left it to chance. Brockgate's son, Brockgate's junior. And we packed, my mother packed the Dodge Moon Trash van with a bunch of apples and stuff. And we set out from our house in south of Rochester to New York City for the start, where we were supposed to meet some other cars to run the race with. But when they got to the starting point, the Red Ball Garage in Midtown, they were the only ones there. The other cars didn't show up. Brock Jr. remembers his father saying, screw it, we're gonna go. So we sat out in this Dodge van and started driving across country. Their destination was the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach,

just south of Los Angeles. Their supplies included four large Hershey bars, 36 Mounds bars, a two-pound round of Jarlsberg cheese, and a 10-ounce bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Passengers in the Dodge van were 14-year-old Brock Jr., his father, and a man named Steve Smith, who'd worked with Brock Yates at Car and Driver, and lastly, an artist named Jim Williams. The three adults took turns at the wheel.

Did you have a job? Oh, theoretically. But what was your job on the run, on the drive? Would have been looking for police. We all were scanning for police. There's also no, you know, GPS and no one telling when there are slowdowns or this or that. So did you just have a lot of maps out and were people saying, no, go this way, go this way? We did have a CB radio, which were popular back then, and a radar detector of no quality whatsoever. It managed to pick up every telephone pole between New York and LA. But no, the maps

were the way everybody did it. Or you memorized the route and you just drove it. And the truck was limited to about 100 miles an hour, so we really didn't run that quickly by any modern standards. But we just didn't stop. But that was just, you know, that's what we did. I mean, we didn't stop, we didn't do anything, we drove. They kept a log of the trip. Highlights included May 3rd, noon, US 40 westbound, average 70 miles per hour.

Ran out of fuel trying to pass a truck on a two-lane section. Barely make it to the roadside. Hairy situation. 2.15, cross the Mississippi. 4 p.m., crossing Oklahoma at steady 90 miles per hour. Brock Jr. sleeping in the back. Yates Sr. and Williams eating constantly. May 4th, 6.30 a.m., wheeze into Flagstaff, Arizona, on an empty tank, cross the border into California. We jettison what's left of our apples, finally, desperately roll into the Portofino Inn. They arrived 40 hours and 51 minutes after they'd left New York. Even though only one car, his own, had participated in the race,

Brock Yates gave it a name. The Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. He named it after the racing pioneer Irwin Baker, who was said to have done the New York to L.A. trip in 1933 in 53 hours and 30 minutes. His nickname was Cannonball. Brock Yates wrote about his drive in Car and Driver in August of 1971 and received hundreds of letters in response.

Some were critical, but he said most of them were curious, people who wanted to know if he was planning to do it again, and if they could join. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

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People wondered about a northern route, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah. Was it better to carry more fuel so you stopped less? At what point are you carrying so much fuel that it slows you down? Brock Yates decided to hold the race a second time that same year, this time with other people. Eight cars, 21 men, and two women. a second time that same year, this time with other people. Eight cars, 21 men, and two women.

Then he did it again the next year, and again in 1975. That year, it was the cover story of Car and Driver. The word CANNONBALL was printed in all caps. And then underneath it, it said, These men are wanted for breaking the dumbest law since Prohibition, referring to the government-imposed nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour that had been signed into law the year before. The New York Times reported that the cannonball was America's most unofficial road race. By 1979, there were dozens of teams competing.

Why do you think, or what do you think is so special about the cannonball run? Or kind of any race across, around the country? Why are we drawn to these things? I can't speak to why everybody else does it, but, I mean, you look at a road and you say, you know, can I do this? Brock Yates wrote extensively about each trip. He described the cars,

but he also described the people, where they came from, their jobs, things they said, what they packed, and how they looked as they crossed the finish line at the Portofino Hotel. He debated tactics with himself on the page. He wrote, to run flat out or to cool it, that's the question, and the cool it school seems to be the way in any long-distance journey. The film director and stuntman Hal Needham wanted Brock Yates to write a movie, and so for the 1979 race, Brock Yates invited Hal Needham to come along and see what it was like.

That was the year that a rich man took his Rolls Royce. He sat in the back and his chauffeur did the driving. Another crew dressed like priests. Brock Yates converted a Dodge van to look like an ambulance and wore clothes from a medical supply store. A real doctor, a radiologist named Lyle Royer, helped drive, along with Brock Yates' wife. All of this was an attempt to avoid speeding tickets, which did not work. More than 50 tickets were issued in that 1979 race.

And then Brock Yates wrote a screenplay. The movie came out in 1981. It was called Cannonball Run and starred Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, and Roger Moore. They used the same Dodge van that looked like an ambulance they'd driven in the actual race. The movie made a lot of money at the box office and was very unpopular with reviewers.

Reckless driving. Disorderly conduct. Give me somebody! And destruction of public property. These are the tricks of the trade in the Cannonball Run. You'll root for them all, but you'll never guess who wins. The Cannonball Run. I just thought that both as a challenge, as a car enthusiast,

and as a chapter of American automotive history, I thought it was just wildly compelling. Even though the movie Cannonball Run came out before he was born, Ed Bolian, who we heard from at the beginning of the story, remembers seeing it and thinking, I can do that. You can imagine as an adolescent kind of trying to figure out who you are, what you want to do with your life, and all these things. And again, just that being the ultimate expression of the fantasy of driving fast. It was this fantasy that we wanted to see what it would feel like,

to be able to just put your foot down and have very few reasons to lift it off. He became obsessed with the idea of running this race. And in the early 2000s, as he was just about to graduate from high school, he got a chance to speak to his hero, Brock Yates. Just prior to that, I'd actually done a project researching the career of automotive journalism, and I had convinced the front desk lady at Car and Driver magazine to give me Brock Yates' home phone number. And so I'd called him and asked him questions, and among the things that we talked about was obviously Cannonball. And I told him that one day, even though no one had advanced the record since 1983, I wanted to see what it would look like with modern

cars in a modern context, and I wanted to try to set the record. Brock Yates said, Good luck, kid. Are you looking to eat healthier but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh.

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And Ed, who was just a few years out of high school, working as a salesperson at a Lamborghini dealership, was determined to beat their time. He started planning his own cannonball run. His car was a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG with 115,000 miles on it. He put two extra 22-gallon fuel tanks in the trunk, which meant that it could carry 400 pounds of gasoline and give him a range of 850 miles before needing to stop at a gas station.

He said the smell was terrible. He needed to find people willing to come with him. He convinced Dave Black, a co-worker from the Lamborghini dealership, and Dan Wong, who he knew from college at Georgia Tech. Then he hired a tracking company to document the car's every move so there would be proof if they broke the record. He packed cliff bars, beef jerky, and protein shakes. Did you remember that story a few years ago about the astronaut woman who put the diaper on so she wouldn't have to stop driving?

I had heard about different things like that. I've known people to install funnels and tubes that pipe through the floor of their cars and things of that nature. You know, what we decided as we kind of evaluated the strategies that had been deployed before us were that shorter driving stints were very, very valuable. When I see myself, sometimes I catch myself going over, one time I saw that I was going 81, and I thought that I had broken every law in the book. I was so terrified. I thought, you know, Phoebe, you've lost, you're out of control. Going 81, I mean, to me, when the speedometer passes 80, things have gotten really wild. Were you one of these fast driver guys just in your daily life? I mean, I certainly enjoyed driving fast. My first summer job in high school was working

in a racing school and kind of a defensive driving school and things like that. I loved that. However, what you'll find about most people who pursue anything like this is that they really don't drive fast most of the time because they've established the parameters of what it takes for them to drive fast comfortably. And that means multiple people wholly invested in getting wherever you are safely, paying attention to the road with every device possible, and not taking something like that lightly. And so it's not, I certainly don't just go around driving 100 miles an hour all the time. There are times on a wide open road in a really powerful, well-prepared car that, yeah, I'll go a little bit fast. But again, it's not a habit of mine to do that,

and it wasn't beforehand either. Before Ed Bolian and his friends could attempt their own cannonball, they first had to get from where they lived in Georgia up to New York so they could start at the starting place, the Red Ball Garage, just like Brock Yates had. Dan Wong later said that after they arrived, he seriously considered taking his backpack and getting a taxi to the airport. On Saturday, October 19, 2013, the three men left the Red Ball garage at 9.56 p.m. It took 15 minutes to get out of Manhattan

and a total of 28 hours and 50 minutes to get to the Portofino Hotel in California, breaking the previous record by more than two hours. It was pretty surreal because you come into this, you know, parking lot with a valet and you're like, you know, nobody's there. Nobody that works at the hotel even knew anything about Cannonball at that point. So it was a little bit anticlimactic, except for the fact that you'd just done something that you felt like you'd spent your whole life wanting. Ed Bolian held the record for six years. And then, a team driving a 2015 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG

broke Ed Bolian's record, crossing the country in 27 hours and 25 minutes. They only stopped for a total of 22 minutes. This was in November of 2019. And then the whole world shut down for a viral pandemic and nobody was on the road. And in the span of eight weeks, it was broken six times. Just about every weekend, somebody was trying it and they were doing it in cars with very little preparation relative to my pursuit and the record that had beaten mine. But they were just finding that there were almost no cars on the road. There were a few more trucks,

but again, just far fewer than you'd ever imagine. Very few police, very few construction situations. And so they were doing it fairly easily. It looked like it was about a three-hour advantage over what we had seen just a few months prior. The current record holders are a team of two men who, May of 2020 took an Audi A6 and made it look like a Ford Taurus police cruiser. They averaged 110 miles per hour the whole way and got to the Portofino Hotel in 25 hours and 39 minutes. Beating Ed Bolian's time by more than two hours and Brock Yates' original 1971 time by more than 15 hours. A year after Ed Bolian set his record, he released data from the GPS tracking service he'd hired.

He said he wanted to wait until the statutes of limitations had passed. The tracking service claimed they didn't know what they were tracking. Ed released more than 200 pages of data about his exact route and his speed throughout the trip. It showed that they had spent more than an hour and a half driving above 130 miles an hour. You know, there will be people who hear this story and think to themselves, these guys are a bunch of dangerous idiots. This is, this is, they could have heard a lot of people doing what they did. You're never going to win that, obviously. When you have someone who says what you're doing is unsafe and you did it, then they're entitled to that opinion. I will always call back to, and in any time that

I'm speaking to somebody who has the aspiration of doing a drive like this, I'll say, above all else, you have a 50-year record of safety that is immaculate. In the entire history of the pursuit of Cannonball, there have been three accidents, all single car and all participants. This claim that Cannonball has an excellent safety record is widely reported. But because not everyone who tries to break the record reports that that's what they're doing, no one can actually know for sure. And the low number of reported accidents doesn't reassure critics. Brock Yates Jr., whose father started the whole thing, says there's always been criticism of Cannonball,

even back in the early 70s, when the drivers went a lot slower than they drive today. My father would monthly get a ream of angry letters that were mailed to the magazine, Car Driver. I mean, it disturbed the sensibilities of many, many people, which was fine because it was relatively, in the whole scheme of things, relatively harmless in his activity. But yes, there was, I mean, oh, you can't do this. But that would be expected of virtually any activity for anybody these days.

So there were people enraged? Oh, of course, yeah. People writing saying you're going to kill someone with this? I'm sure that was mentioned. I mean, that was my biggest fear with the cannonball in subsequent runs now. Brock Gates Jr. says the way people do it today, although people call it cannonball, has really little to do with what his father started all those decades ago. His father ended his event in 1979.

Why did your father end the Cannon Boys? He was down in, I believe, Florida, and a guy showed him a Lamborghini, and he pointed out that all the things that he had done to this

car to make it go faster or be more hidden, or all the things for running the cannonball. And Brock thought about it for a while. I said, this is getting beyond the scope of what I think is prudent. I'm going to kill somebody. And he just put a bullet in him. His word. Just, you know, this is it. I'm not going to do this anymore. Brock Yates Jr. says that what his father created was about celebrating driving,

celebrating cars, not going as fast as possible by any means necessary. In an interview, Brock Yates Sr. said, quote, It was starting to get a hard edge on it and was starting to lose its sense of humor. In an interview, Brock Yates Sr. said, What is run today, Brock Yates Jr. says, is all done in secret. There's no party at the Portofino Hotel. The cars don't take off from New York in five-minute intervals. The modern cross-country attempts are many and secret. And there is no, and if you don't like it, you just start over or you go back and do it again another day. So you wait for the absolute perfect time

and you release the fact that you had a perfect run. And it covers up the fact that you had 85 other runs before you were able to do that. I mean, as much as I like all the people that are running post-cannonball, they're not cannonballs. Brock Yates died of complications from Alzheimer's in 2016. He was 82. Our lives did revolve around driving and cars and the skill of driving, the art of driving. And we spent a lot of time in the car together. And I watched his feet. I watched his eyes. I watched his hands.

It was good time. And it's time you'll always have. As for Ed Bolian, today he lives with his wife and young son in Duluth, Georgia. He says people call him all the time for advice or to say they're going to beat the record. The same way he called Brock Yates Sr. back when he was in high school. Why do you think people keep doing this? I mean, it seems grueling, dangerous, kind of pointless. I mean, except for the pride of being able to say, I did it and I won.

But why do you think there's still this, such a group of people that are so interested in this? Well, I think there's two ways to approach that. The first is that cars are still absolutely cool, not just for using this, but they get a whole lot cooler as everybody tells us that we aren't allowed to have them in the same ways that we've always loved them. So for car enthusiasts, as we look at the extinction of

the manual transmission, as we look at cars that are designed in wind tunnels rather than by people who thought that this shape looked pretty, there's a lot of things that we can continue to love about cars. But from a cannonball perspective, you'd argue it the same way as you would a marathon or a century bike ride or climbing a mountain. People do things that there's better ways to accomplish because it's a challenge. And it may not be a challenge of physical fitness, but it might be a challenge of problem solving. It might be a challenge of endurance. And so there's plenty of things that we do as humans that are by no means efficient, but are a tremendous amount of fun both to do and to chase. Thank you. to Matt Spohr. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.

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a collection of the best podcasts around. Shows like 99% Invisible. Our friends at 99% Invisible have released a new documentary series called According to Need. Producer Katie Mingle spent two years trying to understand the system we have to address homelessness in this country. She follows people trying to get help from it and people working inside of it. What she finds is a system that isn't designed to help everyone. And digging into it opens up

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