Infamous America - Introducing "My Fugitive" from Pineapple Street Studios

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Nina Gilden Seavey was twelve on May 5, 1970, the day an Air Force building in St. Louis burned to the ground. Her dad represented a young man accused of the crime: Howard Mechanic. Facing serious federal time, Howard went on the run and became one of the longest-running fugitives in U.S. history. As an adult, Nina picked up the trail. What ever happened to Howard Mechanic?This eight-part series is the tangled story of her search for answers. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. FBI surveillance and confidential informants. Cold War spies, conspiracy theories and the murder of a civil rights icon. And the sacrifices America makes in the name of national security. https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/my-fugitive-49438 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody has secrets. You have secrets, and I have secrets. And families have secrets. For most of his life, my father was haunted by a family secret, but not our families. My dad was a civil rights lawyer in St. Louis. And he had a client, a young man, who disappeared for almost 30 years. By the way, his head is Howard Bricanagan, in the North. He laughed and hasn't been hurt.

He was sentenced to five years of penitentiary, and I haven't seen him. I spent 10 years trying to unravel what happened to Howard Mechanic, and my journey took me to places I never could have imagined, like a Cold War spy ring. Within the bureau itself, oh gosh, you probably had less than a dozen and a half people at any one time who knew about the thing. A suspected conspiracy to murder a civil rights leader. I could hear people say get down, get down, and I took off and went up the stairwell. I kneeled down and I try to read its pulse.

And it's not working. Nothing seems to be working. And the U.S. government's attempts to cover it all up. If you're planning to get rid of Martin Luther King, would you want anybody to know about that? so it had to be secret. It's a story fueled by paranoia, about communists in our midst and about students trying to end a war

and about the threat of black power. All of it forged in the peculiar crucible of my hometown, St. Louis. And I said to him, you are paranoid. You have gone off the deep end. The FBI doesn't care one bit about me It sounds like the stuff of crazy tin-hat conspiracy theories, except it's not.

It's all verified. All it took was someone to tie these secrets together. Well, and 350 Freedom of Information Act requests. One lawsuit, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and 10 years of my life. I mean, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but like there is a sort of like obsessive dimension to the journey that you've been on. Yes.

One of the things that I did was that I took tens of thousands of pages of documents and I put them on shelves so that I could actually be witness to this insane level of what is almost madness. And that seems nutty. But it's not. Or is it? Right, but it's not because we got to the truth. New episodes of My Fugitive are available every week wherever you get your podcasts. But why wait?

Binge every episode now exclusively on the new Odyssey app. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y. I hope you enjoyed this preview of My Fugitive. New episodes are available every week wherever you get your podcasts. But why wait? Binge all episodes now exclusively on the news. new Odyssey app. Odyssey is your audio home for all the podcasts, music, news, and sports that matter to you. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y-A-C-Y.