Criminal - Don't Let Me See You In The Whirl

Episode Date: December 2, 2016

Since 1938, a weekly African-American owned newspaper called The Evening Whirl has covered crime in St. Louis with a style all its own, using alliteration and rhyme, and often omitting the usual crime-reporting words like "accused" or "alleged." The paper has been widely criticized for its casual approach to fact-checking and sensational writing style. But the paper's owner, Anthony Sanders, who has been helping out with it since he was 18 years old, doesn't have any plans to change it. As the pages of The Whirl have said: “If that’s too much for you, pick up the Times and read the theatre reviews.”  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. I have always taken it as the ultimate compliment when you get someone from a daily or big weekly to tell you that they wish that they could write the style that the world does by eliminating words like accused, alleged, and just go to supposition. Maybe he was supposed to have done it anyway, but I take that as a real compliment.

The Evening Whirl is an African-American-owned crime newspaper in St. Louis. It's come out every week for 78 years. This is Anthony Sanders, the owner. I flew to St. Louis to meet Anthony. He suggested we meet at his favorite lunch place, Culpeper's. We talked about the city and how newspapers are changing, but mostly we talked about how he thinks and writes about crime. And as he said, crime stories in the world don't often include words like accused or alleged. And we call it world-esque type of writing, where we go right to the nature of whatever the story is.

It's almost like a conviction before a conviction. We say right away that you're the killer. You know, let you prove that you're not. And to be honest with you, if it's going to bring some real respected persons into the story, then we will use the word accused or alleged. But most of the time it's just? It's just straight. Wanted killer.

Not alleged or accused killer. Just wanted killer ABC. Right at the top of every edition of The Whirl, it reads, There is power in naming and power in shaming. Not only does The Whirl want to embarrass people who break the law, they do it in a rather playful way, with lots of alliteration and puns and exclamation points, lunchroom lady bopped in face, bungling bandit bagged and booked,

and don't call me a slobber, I'm a real bank robber. For Anthony, this wordplay is one of the greatest parts of working on a story. As it starts to come together, it's like, I guess, a chef, or say a cook, maybe more than a chef. A good old-fashioned pot of greens, if you will. You know you got the greens and the fat back or whatever, but it's the other little spices that you add that's going to make those greens either memorable one way or the other. Homicide detectives are called H-men and even get nicknames. Charles Knuckles Johnson, Detective Jeff Stone is Stone Hard, and Detective Tom Carroll is Pac-Man because he, quote, gobbles up bad guys.

And here's the thing. In the world, the police are always the good guys. Each week, the paper gets information from the police department, and sometimes the department gets information from the paper. And I'll put this out there. the police department, and sometimes the department gets information from the paper. And I'll put this out there. I think St. Louis Police Department as well as St. Louis County Police Department does themselves a lot of harm when they have suspect information, they crack crime, homicide, and they don't share it, especially a photograph. People just do not read words. They look at the words and read the pictures. So you think that they need to be putting out more information? Yes. These guys

monitor this newspaper. They read it. Their friends read it. And anybody that may be associated with it reads it. Now, if you're going to solve a crime, you need to put that on blast, as we would say, to let people know. Criminals are seeing other criminals they know that have committed homicides on the street. It just emboldens them to do it themselves. According to FBI data from September, St. Louis now has the highest murder rate per capita in the country. The murder rate has increased more than 60 percent since 2000. And Anthony says the world reports on every single one. There is no homicide that we do not report on. No homicide doesn't make it into the world. That's right. And I'll say that emphatically because we have been accused of not printing certain murders, especially those involving Caucasians.

I think it's ludicrous, but people think that that happens. It doesn't. In an era of real-time fact-checking, when journalists are terrified of wrongly assigning blame, not to mention being sued, Anthony Sanders just doesn't care. This is how the world has always done it. As they say, if that's too much for you, pick up the Times and read the theater reviews. But the evening moral has always been criticized, sometimes extremely, all the way back to its very first editions in 1938. Anthony's predecessor, the paper's founder, was a man named Ben Thomas, and when he was criticized, he famously replied, The very first editions of The Whirl covered nightlife and celebrity gossip in St. Louis' black community.

This was during the Jim Crow era, when the daily newspapers wouldn't hire black reporters and rarely covered black neighborhoods. Most mainstream papers in America wouldn't even run African Americans' obituaries. And one day, Ben Thomas came across a scoop he couldn't turn down. There was a rumor that a couple of high school teachers had been molesting their students. Nobody was reporting on it. Ben got a hold of the police records and ran the story. He had to reprint that edition three times, and The Whirl has been a crime newspaper ever since. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In the Ben Thomas era, the writing was even more playful. A lot of crimes were written up as jokey little poems.

For example, about a man on his way to prison for selling heroin. I will sit and lick my toes and blow snot from my nose. Where I'll end up in life, only God knows. I asked Anthony where the name Evening Whirl comes from. He said he didn't know. He thinks of whirl as in kicking up dust, which is certainly appropriate. But then, when we were researching the story, we came across the phrase in a Mark Twain novel.

The novel is called The Gilded Age, and the line reads, Both chatted away in high spirits and made the evening whirl along in the most mirthful manner. Missouri was Mark Twain's boyhood home, and given what we know about Ben Thomas's literary interest, maybe this is how the paper got its name. Ben Thomas retired in 1995, and Anthony Sanders, who'd been helping out since he was 18 years old, took it over. Anthony says he can't write poems like Ben,

but he still brings plenty of his own personality to the reporting, once writing that a murder victim was, quote, in a flying casket to hell. And since Anthony took over, he's increased the paper's readership from 4,000 to almost 55,000. The paper has done so well that he's even hired a reporter. Well, it had to take its lumps, but perseverance overruled. And what happened is that we had to do some of the things that we knew that would help strengthen the paper.

We started picking up some of the Internet lingo and incorporating that into it. That helped a little bit because we were told that we were going to go the way of the dodo. But nevertheless, I mean, here we are. Do you have a favorite issue? No, I haven't done it yet. It just hasn't happened? I am never, ever satisfied with what happens after it's printed. Sundays, I could be on cloud nine.

But by Monday morning, I'm getting ready for the next one. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part 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. Hey, it's Scott Galloway. The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Anthony lays out each edition of the paper in his house, working through the night on Sundays

to get it to the printer on time. Then on Monday mornings, he picks them up and personally delivers the papers to stores. He took me along on the route. His first stop is always a BP station at the corner of Jefferson and Clark Avenues. The woman behind the counter said she remembers reading The Whirl when she was a kid, back when it was 50 cents. Now it's $1.50. Well, it's a popular paper. We have, what should I say, residential criminals. I don't know. Do you have people who come in and ask for it? Yeah, all the time. I mean, it sells just as much as the Post.

Yeah. It gives us, like, the daily news constant, what's going on in the neighborhood, the area, who did the most stupidest stuff for the week. Do you ever have anyone who's kind of comes in and says to you, wait, do you have the evening whirl yet? Is it here yet? Yeah, I might be in the paper. Yeah, I've had people sign the paper, you know, their signatures, because there are pictures on there. So they come in here to say, oh boy, did I make it? Yeah, they do. I mean, we get quite a few people that come in and want to know if they made the weak news. This is one of the many contradictions about the paper.

It's openly pro-police, a self-described crime-fighting newspaper. And yet, the men and women written up in the pages of The Whirl often see it as a badge of honor. And what we have found is that the perpetrators will have these papers. I mean, I've had that told to me so many times in criminal cases where a lot of times there's been someone police have been actively looking at for years, and they have been committing crimes continuously. And they know who they are, but they're just trying to get enough information to get more assistance. You know what I mean?

When they do, they go in the house and there's worlds all over the place. Well, they've been kind of chronological of chronologizing their escapades. One of the most persistent criticisms of the Evening Whirl is that it's a black-owned newspaper that exploits African Americans in order to sell copies. The St. Louis chapter of the NAACP attempted a boycott of the paper in the mid-80s. James DeClew, the president of the chapter, called the world the dirtiest, lousiest evidence of lies about a people I've ever seen. I asked Anthony what he thinks about this criticism. I've had a lot of, I guess you say, talks with myself about this.

And it's a question that I always ask myself, would I be a reader of the world? I've been on the paper, but I've been a part of it for so long, I guess it's kind of like, duh. You've been with the paper almost 60 years, or 50 years, and you're only 68 years old. So how much of a choice did you have? But once again I stand on it that and I've said that several times to several of our people that always question that but I'm very very loyal to it and I'm very passionate about it. Whether or not you agree with Anthony, the evening whirl is a piece of history. It's being

preserved at Washington University's library in St. Louis. That was our last stop for the day. The librarian who greeted us says students come in every week to study the paper and its representations of race, drugs, and guns. And right now, there's a campus project called Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis. In spite of the salacious and often offensive writing, some of the only surviving historical documentation of gay African Americans in St. Louis is in the whorl. This is Lesbian Mob Queen Faces the Music. Where do you see that?

Up here? Can you use Lesbian Mob Queen Faces the Music? It says the entire city wanted to look at the woman who smashed last week's rural headline story. She so magnificently conducted her stable of women in the stroll. And the successful robber of a couple who was passing through the stroll area and thought the girls were in trouble and stopped. But to their sorrow,

Diane, 26, taught her protégés to hold on to their money when investigated by police by inserting it in their vaginas. And that is what they did. Oh, my God. The world has never pretended to be something that it's not. In an edition from 1978, Ben Thomas wrote, the city wonders who it will be. Just take it easy. You will see. Guns will roar and rip like hell and how the evening whirl will sell.

Anthony says that somewhere over the past 78 years, the whirl has become shorthand, a way of saying, be good. So when friends say goodbye, they'll joke, don't let me see you in the whirl. © transcript Emily Beynon Alice Wilder is our intern. Special thanks to Russ Henry, Miranda Rechtenwald, and to the archives at Washington University in St. Louis. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we've also got new T-shirt designs,

including one with the diver from the La Brea Tar Pits episode, and one that glows in the dark. We've also got magnets and stickers and brand new criminal tote bags. Maybe these things would make nice holiday gifts. Order now, and we'll ship them right away. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows around. Shows like The Heart, which just won first prize

at the Third Coast International Audio Festival for their story about one woman's experience with female genital mutilation. We'll put a link to their story in our show notes. And Radiotopia's flagship show, 99% Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars. 99% Invisible is ostensibly a show about design and architecture, but really, it's a show about who we are through the lens of the things we build.

It'll make you look at everything around you in a new way. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to Adzerk for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge.

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