Criminal - Under the Wall

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Soon after the Berlin Wall went up, a group of students knocked on Joachim Rudolph’s door. They told him they were trying to get people out of East Germany - and they wanted his help.  Helena Merriman’s book and BBC podcast are called Tunnel 29. You can hear the episode of AirSpace with Günter Wetzel here. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. 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

Do you want to be a more empowered citizen but don't know where to start? It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways to make impact. With so much at stake in our democracy, join us at futurehindsight.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, adipotulinum toxin A, FDA approved for over 20

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You'll get to hear seven brand new stories, most of which will probably make you laugh. I'll even try to come and say hi at the merch table. Get your tickets while they last at thisiscriminal.com slash live. In October of 1961, Joachim Rudolph was a college student going to school in West Berlin. One day, he's in his dorm room, and there's a knock on the door. It was just two months after the Berlin Wall had gone up, overnight. Even the people building the wall hadn't known about it beforehand. So it took everyone by surprise.

Helena Merriman is a journalist and author. The commanders who were in charge of this had no idea that they were about to do this until that evening when they they open these envelopes these secret envelopes and they're given their instructions and in the dead of night at around one in the morning this operation begins so the the street lamps are switched off they don't want anyone to see what what's about to happen and you have soldiers driving across these border points pulling out coils of barbed wire they use the barbed wire to mark the border between East Berlin and West Berlin. Streets cut off, train stations cut off.

It cut through graveyards. It cut churches off from the gardens from the people who would go to those churches. There were some streets like Bernauerstrasse which were cut right down the middle. In a matter of hours, a barrier more than 25 miles long had gone up, cutting the city in two. And when people wake up, they come out onto the streets. And you can see in some of these extraordinary photos from the time, the shock on their faces. You have families suddenly divided. There are photographs, extraordinary pictures of mothers holding up babies

to wave to their husbands on the other side, and people completely baffled as to what's happened. As the weeks went on, the wall became more and more fortified. Concrete slabs went up. Soldiers and police were guarding it. East Germans were trapped. And some West Germans started trying to get them out. When Joachim Rudolph answered the door that day in late 1961, three other students were there.

And they tell him about a group of friends who were trying to help people escape. And they wanted it to be the biggest escape since the wall went up. Joachim was an engineering student. He liked to build and fix things. So here he is, he's 22 years old, his whole life ahead of him. He has so many reasons to say no. But he says yes, and that's how it all begins. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. When the Berlin Wall went up, Germany had already been divided for 16 years, since the end of World War II.

Germany's defeated, and the countries that defeated it were arguing over who should run it. So they divide it very crudely. The Soviet Union gets one half, Britain, the US and France get the other. And then they divide Berlin, the capital. The west side of Berlin was run by the US and its allies, the east side by the Soviets. Russians were really turning Berlin and East Berlin into their city. You know, the minute that the east and west were divided, clocks were changed in East Germany into their city. You know, the minute that the East and West were divided, clocks were changed in East Germany to Soviet time. You had Soviet musicians flown in, teachers, you know,

you had a whole line of teachers who would be sacked and new ones put in place. And the propaganda started very early. So you had two-year-olds who were taught the principles of communism through communal potty breaks. You know, questions were discouraged. Rebellious kids were sent to juvenile correction facilities. olds who were taught the principles of communism through communal potty breaks. Questions were discouraged. Rebellious kids were sent to juvenile correction facilities. So it was a full, a whole scale reimagining of a national political identity. And then on the other side of the street, they're watching movies from Hollywood and listening to the Beatles.

Exactly. It's these two incredibly different worlds. And I think what made that so extraordinary was just that you could wander from one side to the other and be back again in the same day. And a lot of people in East Berlin, their jobs or their lives were still in West Berlin, but then they would go home at the end of the day. And for all those years, since 1945 right up to 1961, people could cross the border whenever they liked. But the problem soon came when the communist government in the East realized that millions of people were leaving East Germany and just never coming back. They were fed up with life under a communist dictatorship, and they wanted a better life in the West. One reason people were leaving was because of the state-run police force, the Stasi. Its job was very simple. Its job was to keep the party in power. And they had this idea of trying

to find you, trying to find troublemakers before you carried out a crime. It was all about trying to stop things happening. And the only way you could do that was through information. And so their job was to know everything about everyone. Including what you smelled like. The Stassi collected dissenter's scents on pieces of yellow fabric, collected from things they'd touched, and stored them in airtight jars. If the person went missing, a tracker dog could use the scent on the fabric to hunt them down. They wiretapped phones,

opened mail, and planted microphones inside people's homes. They had a division of garbage analysis, looking in people's trash for signs of disloyalty. Eventually, the Stasi also used psychological tactics to intimidate and harass people they deemed a threat. They'd call you over and over and hang up or spread rumors about you or your family. They'd send you pornography in the mail to embarrass you or break into your home and move your socks around, or change your alarm clock so it went off in the middle of the night. And most importantly, they trained up hundreds of thousands of people to become informants. So some people think around one in six people were informing for the Stasi. They were called, rather poetically, the breathing organs of the Stasi.

People in churches or hospitals or schools or knitting clubs, even in the police. There were lots of reasons that people became informants. Some thought they were being patriotic. Some people were offered money. Others were blackmailed into it. More than 10,000 children became informants, sometimes spying on their parents. So they would know about what you were planning because your friend or your neighbor had informed on you, or perhaps even your child. Meanwhile, the cost of food in East Germany kept going up, wages were going down,

and then the government told people they had to work more, without additional pay. In 1953, people began to protest all over the country. The government responded with tanks. And these tanks plow into protesters. People are crushed under the wheels. Dozens of people are killed. Thousands are thrown into secret prisons.

Hundreds of people executed. And so that was the very first anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe. And it ended so horrifically that there wouldn't be another one for another 30 years. So that's really when people learned the limits of what they could do. Did people start trying to escape after they saw what was done to protesters? Did people try to leave East Germany? Yeah. And when you look at the numbers of people who left every year, it was after 1953 that they suddenly skyrocket. That was the moment that for so many people, it becomes too much. You know, everyone has their breaking point.

And for a lot of people, that's theirs. By 1961, 4 million East Germans had left. So Walter Ulbricht, who was the leader of East Germany, makes this extraordinary decision. If he can't persuade people to stay in the East, they'll just shut the border and lock them in. So he comes up with this plan to build a wall. When the wall was first built, did people panic? Yeah. I mean, when you look at the photos and the footage of that first day, you see some people very quickly, desperately just leaping over the barbed wire because back then it was just a sort of crude, crudely built barbed wire stretched between concrete posts. So people could just jump over the barbed wire. And

that's what they did in some of those early days. And you then had East German police trying to pull them back. You also had people in West Berlin, who were suddenly separated from family in East Berlin, driving up to the border on motorbikes, throwing stones and West Berlin pulling them back. And you then have, over the next few days, this wall was gradually fortified. So concrete slabs brought up to the wall. It was made stronger. So you had some people who had smashed through the wall in dump trucks. There was a couple who swam with their three-year-old baby in a bathtub along the river. You even had people who would walk up to the top of their houses, which were on Bernauer Strasse, which was a street which was cut in half by the Berlin Wall,

and they would quite literally throw themselves out of the window because one half of their house looked out onto West Berlin. And you would have them, they would often write down the date and the time when they were planning on jumping. They would throw the piece of paper down to the streets of West Berlin, hoping that people would then turn up with mattresses on the other side. And there's an extraordinary piece of footage where a woman had climbed out of one of these windows and she was dangling out of it. The East German police run up one side and they're pulling on her arms and people in West Berlin are pulling on her legs and she manages to escape. But you also then have the very tragic cases. So there

was a woman called Ida Sieekman who jumped out of her window and there was no mattress and she dies. And you have a man called Gunter Litvin who was a 24-year-old tailor. He tries to swim across the river Spree and he's shot by transport police. So very quickly those first rather chaotic escapes soon stop and people realize they need to come up with better plans. Including digging underneath the wall. We'll be right back.

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Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Engineering student Joachim Rudolph was six years old at the end of World War II. His family had a farm in the eastern part of the country. But when Russian soldiers invaded their town, they made their way to East Berlin. old at the end of World War II. His family had a farm in the eastern part of the country. But when Russian soldiers invaded their town, they made their way to East Berlin. Helena Merriman interviewed him in 2018. He taught me about growing up playing hide-and-seek in bombed-out buildings and finding bits of unexploded shrapnel and throwing them onto tram tracks. His father had been sent to a Russian gulag and had died there. And Joachim had been a part of the anti-Soviet protests in East Berlin.

But after the Berlin Wall went up, he didn't have any plans to try to get out. All his friends are there. He doesn't want to leave. But then there's this moment where he's at university, and this is about a few weeks after the wall goes up, and he picks up a newspaper. And in that newspaper is a list of everyone who has been turning their radio aerials to the West. Because the only way you could listen to radio from the West was to climb onto your roof and tune the aerial to the West. But of course, Ulbricht didn't want people listening to this. So he made it a criminal offence to consume Western news, which

is why they then made a list of everyone who was doing that in the newspaper. And that was the moment for Joachim where he suddenly saw himself, this 22-year-old, in a country where you can't listen to what you want or watch what you want or say what you want. And that was his breaking point. That's when he decides to escape. He and another friend look for a place along the border where they might be able to sneak across. They found a place outside of the city that looked less guarded and waited for a cloudy night. They crawled through a field for hours, avoiding being spotted by border guards, and crossed a river, reaching West Berlin. Joachim went to a refugee camp, and then a CIA safe house. He eventually enrolled at a technical university in West Berlin, but life there wasn't easy.

He really struggles in West Berlin. You know, he's grown up in this country where you have communal potty breaks, to suddenly living in West Berlin where you can do what you want whenever you want. And like a lot of people who then will move to another country, he was desperate to find other people from East Germany who were living in West Berlin. And he does. He goes to university, he studies, he makes a group of friends. It was some of those friends who knocked on his door one night to ask if he wanted to help other people escape from East Germany. They were planning to dig a tunnel. And essentially they need to find somewhere safe that they can dig from. And two, they need tools because they can't use machines.

They need to avoid the water pipes because there have been a few tunnels dug by this time that have collapsed. There have been diggers who've been this time that have collapsed. There have been diggers who've been drowned in the mud because the Berlin water table is pretty high. So they then also need to decide how far or close to the wall to start digging from, because if they start digging too far away from the wall, it will just be too long. It will take them too long. If they dig too close, then they'll be too close to the border guards. And then they need the soil to be of a certain type of soil. If it's too soft, then it will fall in.

So they start driving around. They get a van. They're driving around. They're looking at all these different sites. They came across a factory building that made cocktail stirrers. It seemed like it could work. But they needed a way to access the cellar. So they told the owner they were a jazz band,

looking for a place to practice. And he doesn't buy it. He guesses what they're up to. But it turns out he is a former East German factory owner. And he says, you can use my cellar. You can use the water and electricity. And that's how their first part of their plan gets going. They, one night, take this group of tools to this cellar.

And it starts up in exactly the way you might imagine. They draw a circle on the floor and they start digging down they have to dig to a certain depth it's about as deep as a mini car and once they get to that depth they know they can start digging along towards east berlin so you have one digger hacking out the clay you have another one shoving pieces of wood into the walls and then you have joach, who's this real whiz kid. He loves inventing things. So he eventually gets a cart and he puts it along rails so they can start putting earth into the cart and whizzing it back to the cellar. And he is constantly problem solving.

So once they start getting quite a way down along into under the ground towards East Berlin, it's very dark at the front. So he rigs up a lighting system. They also then have a problem with fresh air. So he connects 160 different bits of pipe to bring fresh air down to the front. He even, I think one of my favorite things he does is he goes to an old U.S. Army store at one point and he finds this old World War II telephone. So he puts one end right at the front of the tunnel and the other one back in the cellar so that when the digger is at the front and they've got a cart full of earth, they can ring back into the cellar and the digger knows to pull the cart back. Could you stand up in it?

No. So I crawled inside a replica of this tunnel and it sort of felt like being inside a coffin. You know, they're 30 meters under and when you're inside, there was only space for me to crawl. You can't stand up in there. So Joachim would lie on his back, dig out some earth, put it along this cart and the cart would be pulled back into the tunnel. So it was incredibly claustrophobic. And of course, what made it all the more claustrophobic was the tunnel is so close to the surface of the ground that he knows he can't talk, he can't make any noise, because the border guards have listening devices that they put on the ground. And when they hear sounds of digging, they're known to open these holes and throw in dynamite. So he lies there, he can hear the sound of his breathing. He has to switch the air off. There's no talking. He can even hear the sounds of people walking above him. This is audio from inside the tunnel, recorded by NBC in 1962. Joachim and his friends had made a secret agreement with the network.

NBC could film them digging in exchange for money, for tools and wood and wooden supplies and to pay workers to dig 24 hours a day. They agreed to give them $7,500 if the diggers let them film the whole thing in real time. So it's sort of the birth of reality TV. Did the government, U.S. government know about this payment that they were working together? No. So the whole thing was shrouded in secrecy. They had separate accountants outside NBC, and they hire these two West German brothers, Peter and Klaus Demmel, who then go to the tunnel once they start digging it every day with this tiny little camera that's so small it can only hold two minutes of film at a time.

And so it's this incredibly secret process, which the US government knows absolutely nothing about until it's too late. They dug for two months, more than a hundred feet, longer than a basketball court, and had gone under the wall into East Berlin. But one day, they noticed a drip in the tunnel. Eventually, the leak got worse and was flooding the tunnel, and they realized they had to give up. Meanwhile, the East German government kept fortifying the Berlin Wall. They built a second inner wall, about about 100 yards behind the outer wall. The land in between became known as the Death Strip. Getting over the wall became even harder.

And that's when they discover that there's another tunnel that they can use that's been abandoned. And they realize that this could be their next great chance to help people escape. So they set a date to try their first escape attempt. The other tunnel ended beneath a house on the east side of the border. They would have to dig up into it. But they didn't know the people who lived there. They decided to go ahead with the plan anyway. They sent word to the people hoping to escape East Berlin

to come to the house on August 7th, almost one year since the Berlin Wall was built. You have around 80 people in East Berlin who are all walking towards this tunnel. They're walking towards the cottage. Meanwhile, Joachim Rudolph and his friends are crawling down the tunnel. You also have NBC filming from over the wall. And the diggers, they've got pistols and an old World War II machine gun.

So they crawl through the tunnel until they get to this cottage. They hack through the floor with an axe and a saw. And there's this moment where Joachim hears a woman screaming. It was the woman who lived in the house. She'd seen Joachim and the other diggers sawing through the floor and started screaming at them to leave. She ran outside where the Stasi were already waiting. Someone working with the diggers was a Stasi informant.

He'd tipped them off. There's incredible footage where you see the Stasi taking off their shoes to the diggers. They don't want the diggers to hear them. Joachim decided to keep going and broke through the floor. He and the other diggers pulled themselves up through the hole and found themselves in an empty living room. And that's the point where Joachim suddenly sees someone creeping outside the window. And there's this extraordinary moment I read about in the files

where the Stasi are just about to go in and arrest or shoot, but they suddenly hear Joachim and his friends talking about the machine gun. And now at this point, the Stasi only have Kalashnikovs, which are no match for the machine gun, so they wait for backup. Joachim finally realizes what's going on, and he and his friends crawl back through the tunnel. They escaped. But many of the East Germans who'd come to the house

were arrested by the Stasi waiting there. A month later, Joachim and the others decided to try again. We'll be right back. 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. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach.

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subscription-based charges, invoicing, and all recurring revenue management needs. Learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com. That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress. After their first failed escape attempt, Joachim Rudolph and his friends went back to check on the first tunnel they dug, the one that was flooding underneath the cocktail stirrer factory. It's now dry. And they decide to give it one more shot.

And they set a date for a month from that failed escape attempt, so they set a date the 14th of September. This time, they didn't tell as many people what they were doing. On September 14th, Joachim and two other diggers crawled to the East Berlin end of the tunnel and started to dig up into the basement of an apartment building. There was a new leak, and water was starting to flood the tunnel again. The NBC film crew was set up on a balcony

overlooking the wall in West Berlin. They have managed to find a tower and a building block overlooking the wall, which has an incredible vantage point so they can film everything. It was such a good location that the Diggers asked if they could use it to send their final signal that the tunnel was ready. They'd hang a white sheet out a window. And NBC say yes, so they're now filming and being part of it. Joachim and the Diggers got through the floor of the basement of the apartment building.

It was empty. The film crew hung the white sheet out the window. A woman working with them named Ellen saw it from East Berlin. That was her cue to make three stops at nearby bars, where the people hoping to escape were waiting. They would know it was safe to go when they saw a woman come in and order something specific. And there were three separate signals. She has to order coffee in one, matches in another, water in another. And that's how the group of escapees in each pub will know that the tunnel is ready. Joachim was waiting for them in the basement.

Finally, the escapees started to arrive in small groups. They started making their way through the tunnel. So you have these groups of families, you have kids, toddlers, babies, and the crawl itself is about 120 meters, so it takes about 12 minutes to crawl through. And remember, this tunnel has sprung a leak. So as they're crawling, the water is getting higher and higher. And the footage of this moment is just extraordinary. The first person to go through the tunnel was a woman named Evie. She's terrified as she's crawling. So one of the diggers is carrying her baby behind her.

She's on her hands and her knees. And the camera, the NBC camera crew, is pointing to the mouth of the tunnel. And you suddenly see a hand appear through the tunnel, holding a purse. And then you suddenly see this woman, a very beautiful woman in a black dress, appear through the tunnel.

Her tights are torn. She crawls out and she gets to the ladder and halfway up the ladder, she collapses. And one of the diggers catches her and manages to take her up the rest of the way. And over the next hour, you see person after person come through. And I think one of the most extraordinary moments is the moment when one of the diggers is helping out a woman. And the woman hands him a baby. And as she hands him this baby, this digger looks at the woman and realizes it's his wife. And the baby that she's carrying is his child, who he hasn't seen ever before because the wall

went up as she was pregnant and he escaped, but she didn't make it. So it's the first time he's ever seen his baby. And the camera captures everything. How many people were able to escape? 29. And that's why the tunnel is called Tunnel 29. Did the Stasi have any idea that this had happened? No, and they were livid. So you see this moment sort of about a week later when a border guard discovers a push chair

outside this house, they they investigate and discover this escape tunnel that is still mostly being submerged by water but there's still enough evidence of it there and you can see from the way they talk about in these Darcy files just how embarrassed they are the number of people that managed to crawl through without them knowing anything about it NBC News edited their footage into a documentary film. And then word got out that the network had been filming, and even quietly funding, a tunnel operation. And there is fury amongst other journalists, partly because a lot of them had wanted to do the same thing, but the State Department had said absolutely not.

The US government was worried about starting a nuclear war with Russia. And the New York Times run an article saying that NBC had helped build the tunnel. The East German government says the film is an attack on them. The West Berlin Senate even says the film has to be dropped. And the State Department then call NBC in for a meeting and say they have to drop the film. But four months later, the controversy dies down and the State Department agrees to show it. And so at 8.30 in the evening, people get their TV dinners ready,

they're sitting on their sofas, and people in 18 million homes watch it. The film was called The Tunnel. These are ordinary people, not trained or accustomed to risk. What must they be leaving to risk this? In the US, it had a huge impact in that it suddenly shone a spotlight onto a story that so many people had found it hard to connect with. Because so much of the Cold War was actually about inaction, you know, inaction against the

constant threat of nuclear annihilation. And so whenever they would see footage of it, it was often tanks sitting there. But here, suddenly, you had this human story, something that humanized it and made this issue that seemed so very far away feel personal and relevant. And of course, then, only five months later, President Kennedy goes to Berlin and makes his very, very famous speech. We don't know if the film itself helped to engineer that trip, but I think it definitely changed the way in which people in the US thought about Berlin and the Cold War. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner. Did people continue to escape?

Yes, but in much smaller numbers, because too many other tunnels were intercepted. There were some truly horrific incidents of people trying to dig similar tunnels and coming face to face with border guards in the tunnel and being killed underground. And people tried other things. One person was smuggled out of East Germany in a specially modified tiny BMW. Others snuck out under pig carcasses in a refrigerated truck. One man swam four hours across a canal to escape. Another man invented a small submarine scooter that would pull him across the Baltic Sea. An acrobat named Horst Klein crawled on a tightrope across the border,

but months later went back to East Berlin after his wife sent him letters saying she couldn't live without him. It was a trap, and he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. In 1979, two families attempted an escape over the wall in a homemade hot air balloon. They made the balloon in secret out of small pieces of taffeta sewn together. One night in September,

the two families took off. They spread out in the balloon's basket. One of the men who helped build the balloon, Gunter Wetzel, spoke with the Smithsonian podcast, Airspace, in 2022. As they started lifting off the ground, the balloon caught on fire, but they quickly put it out. Then they got turned around and weren't sure which way to fly, so they just hoped for the best.

They went up more than 6,000 feet in the air. It was less than 20 degrees. And then their gas went out. They started to go down, brushed over some trees, and were on the ground. They'd made it to West Germany. Between 1961 and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, at least 600 people were killed trying to cross from East Germany to the West. 140 of them were killed at the Berlin Wall. 91 of them were shot. Until 1989, every year the Berlin Wall would

get stronger and stronger, until the point where very few people would even attempt to escape. What happened to Joachim after the escape? So this is a very beautiful part of the story, which is that the escape tunnel that he digs eventually brings him a family. Not long after the escape, the very first woman through the tunnel, Evie, whose baby daughter was carried behind her, got divorced. She and Joachim started dating, and in 1971, they got married. You might expect that the minute someone escaped into West Berlin, they would be so relieved to escape this authoritarian country that they would create their own life and not

look back. But the irony is that a lot of people did then want to help other people. And when I asked Joachim why he wanted to help other people escape, people that he didn't even know, he said, well, what you have to understand was that we had been brought up in East Germany to think of everyone as brothers, as part of our family. So when he escaped into West Berlin, the idea that you would just forget people you'd left behind,

even people that weren't your friends, he said that was completely out of the question. And so there was a real irony, I think, that the very values that East Germany had encouraged in its citizens helped to then undermine the country when those people, having escaped, helped other people to escape too. In 2012, Joachim and the other diggers were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, one of Germany's most prestigious awards. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Helena Merriman is the author of the book Tunnel 29, and she made a podcast with the BBC with the same name. You can listen at the link in our show notes. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com

and you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator

Lauren Sporer, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Dratch. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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