The Underworld Podcast - The Shady World of Cryonics: Missing Heads, Bank Robbers and an Italian Funeral Mogul

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

We're joined by journalist and writer Peter Ward, whose upcoming book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever is out this week. Since the times of Gilgamesh, humans have dreamed of living forever. Since the 1960s, when the son of a bank-robbing mobster froze a psychologist (then lost him), cryonics has been touted as a way to be reanimated in decades, or centuries, from now. Except that, as you might expect, cryonics is a shady world populated by hucksters, crooks and, in one, crazy case, a warring Russian couple who employed the services of a Calabrian funeral magnate. Sounds fishy? It is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. September 16th, 2021, and the Russian futurologist, transhumanist and all-round wacky scientist, Danila Medvedev, is in his Moscow apartment when there's a knock on the door. Medvedev looks up. Two shifty-looking guys are standing in. on his doorstep. Medvedev is immediately on high alert. It's been over two years since Medvedev ex-partner

Valeria Udalova broke into the premises of Crea Rus, the cryonics company they founded together, and stole a bunch of frozen heads. In April 2021, Medvedev had bitten back, traveling to Creolew's large white concrete facility in the nearby village of Semcoz with three supporters, changing the locks and taking pictures of themselves throwing up these signs with the lab's cryostats, those are thermostats for the ultra-low temperatures you need to freeze a human body. Kind of like Occupy Wall Street, only for the cowboy world of cryonics. And beyond that, cryonics in the cowboy nation of Russia. Mevedev whips out his phone and starts filming.

Take the phone away or I'll break it and break you, one of the men tells him. Who sent you? asked Medvedev, still filming. People sent me, the man replies. People? Mevdiv has a pretty good idea who they are. Eventually, one of the men tells him, return what you owe, what is not yours, and don't go to jail. A couple months later, more intruders will enter the facility at Semkos. Udlilova, dressed in a luxuriant light brown fur jacket,

quarterbacks them as they prepared to take the cryostats. Before long though, Medvedev is on the scene. and so are the cops. They're not sure which crazy, futurist device belongs to which mad scientist, or who's stolen them, or really what's going on. Udalova pulls out a massive binder of documents that she says, prove her claim to the facility, the cryostats, and the dozens of bodies and heads cryoras has frozen,

in the hopes of reviving them decades or even centuries after its foundation in 2005. Medvedev hasn't bought a thing. The cops let Udalaova load up the equipment and leave. Medvedev is dejected, but he won't be defeated. One website called Biohacker News publishes a video of the heist alongside a caption. The Valeria Odolova faction is the winner of the first transhumanist war. In reality, though, this is just one battle.

The war? That will be fought in different countries, bringing in years of pseudoscience, feuds, and an Italian funeral home mogul. arrested as part of the biggest ever raid on the Calabria mafia, the Andrangetta. The Real War, now that is yet to be won. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to the podcast where we teach you not only to how to cover your tracks after committing crimes, but actually how to cheat death itself, which is pretty apt, given we're recording this on the Easter Monday Bank holiday.

I'm your host Sean Williams. I'm a freelance journalist in Berlin. ordinarily I'd be coming to you with Danny Gold but I think as we're recording this he's in a plane somewhere across the Atlantic getting ready to report on the war in Ukraine and we'll have more on that next week when he gets settled over there but my guest on today's show is Peter Ward

a journalist based in the UK friend we've worked on a bunch of stuff together over the years including that Iceland highest story we reworked for the show what feels like a long long time ago now welcome to the show Peter thanks for having me on me it's great to be on yeah it's great to have you

Just before we get into everything, there's always a Patreon to shout out. Danny just put a mini episode about the so-called contract killer gas czar of NYC, which is quite a good title. We've got scripts, notes, reading lists, and interviews, and it's only going to get more now. Danny's back in journalism and tweeting about air raid sirens and getting drunk in Odessa and tweeting about stray dogs or whatever people do out there. And we're doing more shows you guys as suggesting these days,

so keep them coming. The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. So me and Peter have probably witnessed enough organized crimes during our time working on tech stuff to fill up about six or seven episodes at least. But today we're going to talk about robbery, Russian mafia's, frozen heads and weirdly Seth MacFarlane. Because Peter's got a new book out soon called The Price of Immortality, The Race to Live Forever. And it's all about transhumanists, cryonics, biohackers and folks who basically want to live forever. So that's good because I really want a podcast forever. resonated with me. I went over to your Amazon page before this mate and you've got some pretty

muster reviews up there already. So I'm not going to blow too much smoke up your ass. But yeah, I've read the book. It's really good. You didn't get me a shout in this one. But what did you on the show anyway? Because I'm such a nice guy. Yeah, thanks, mate. So I only actually wrote about half of those reviews myself. So some of them are actually genuine. And, oh, nice. That's, yeah. 50% more than the last lot. There is actually also a story about someone. you to blow smoke up your ass. So yeah, that's in there as well. And before you think there's not much of a link

between chronics and crime, well, think about it, right? People are working in cutting edge science, sometimes quackery. It involves cutting people's heads off or putting them in super powerful freezers and all sorts. I mean, there's tons of crime in this world. And as we'll digress into later, there's even a link to one of the most famous robberies in American history.

And so there's tons of going on this episode, plus you lot might actually learn something about science so double win um yeah mate i remember you first telling me about the idea for this book i think it was like before the pandemic in new york at met's game do you remember that i think we're talking about then yeah yeah i'm pretty sure we're extremely high up watching the mats play uh in the stadium and uh yeah obviously naturally talking about living forever yeah what else do you do for three and a half hours of watching very little action um and then you headed down to hollywood Florida just before the lockdowns and chaos and all of that stuff. And you met a bunch of guys

at something called the Church of Perpetual Life. You want to tell us a little more about them? Because they're pretty crazy. Yeah, definitely. They are a weird group. So the Church of Perpetual Life is like an organized religion. And they all believe that they're going to live forever. They believe that somehow technology will make them choose when they want to die. So they hang out in this church in in in Florida. And they have these sort of these get-togethers where a lot of it is just like looking at PowerPoint presentations and looking at tiny advances in science and it's all a bit boring. But there's also a lot of like whipping up the crowd with these sort of rallies against death. So one guy sort of stood up one of the main guys and listed off a bunch of millionaires

who died in the previous month since the last meeting and then sort of mocked them all for dying and not saving themselves with all their millions. So yeah, really odd crowd. There's definitely a little bit of a cultish vibe to it because there's not much. The science will only take them so far and that's not very far at all. So you have to have a lot of belief and that kind of leads you to that sort of cultish, weird religion type vibe. And a lot of PowerPoint presentations, which I'm pretty sure is what Jesus used when he was

first calling out of the tomb. So yeah, before we actually kick off with some, some crimey stuff. Tell me if I'm wrong, but there's actually a difference between cryogenics, right? But that's just generally getting things down to really low temperatures and observing them. And that might be bodies. And then there's cryonics, which is specifically freezing bodies at those temperatures, which is anything from minus 150C to around absolute zero, which I think is minus 273,

where you see, which is theoretically when stuff just stops altogether. Is that right? Yeah, that's about right. So cryogenics, best way to look at it, cryogenic's legitimate science, cryonics, people trying to reanimate dead bodies after they've frozen them. So less reliable science. Okay. Yeah, so cryogenic sciences are using as far as I see in MRI scans, storing food for long periods of time, which is all tied in with the future of space travel and probably Elon Musk's next kid's name or something. I mean, does he actually come up much in the book? He actually doesn't. Elon Musk is like the one that all of them want. Like they want him so desperately to get involved in making people live forever. So far he's resisted. But all their other sort of heroes,

Jeff Bezos and those guys have started throwing money at it. But Musk, unfortunately, Papa Musk, hasn't got involved. It was kind of a relief, to be honest, so I didn't have to put up with the Musk grows. But, um, yeah, I imagine the Venn diagram of transhumanists and people who defend Elon Musk when he calls people paedophiles is like pretty much a circle. Yeah. Um, yeah. Of course, uh, you've got your Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel's and Aubrey the Grey's, uh, those

have been signed up to be cry genetically frozen. Um, according to Ray Kurzweil, he's, like the head of future or something at Google, I think. He said, quote, my primary strategy for living through the 21st century and beyond is not to die. I think that's more likely to work than cryonics, but they're not mutually exclusive. So, cool. So, yeah, anyway, so today there are around 500 people stored in vats around the world, around two thirds of them in the US, and the majority of them are two places,

which is Alcor and the Cryonics Institute. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think we're touching on this a little bit, but is it actually kosher? Does this stuff work? Is there solid science behind it? There is absolutely no scientific evidence that this would work. So, yeah, so I don't want to get anyone's hopes up from the start. I just want to be very clear if people are starting to get ideas already. This probably isn't going to work. And most people involved in it, actually, they sort of acknowledge that.

they know it's only a tiny chance, but their argument is I'd rather take that tiny chance that'll be reanimated in the future rather than be buried or cremated and have zero chance. So yeah, there's no, there's no evidence that when you freeze the bodies, they're preserved properly, and there's definitely no evidence that will ever be able to reanimate anybody in the future. Right. Okay. Well, that's good news that we can all take home after listening to the podcast. So anyway, so let's take this back a few decades, and that's before the Russians and the Italian mobster and the stolen heads and way, way more besides. We're going to go back to 1932 and that's when, I guess, a baby called Robert Nelson is born in Boston, Massachusetts. Now, I don't know if he was called Bob as a baby, but young Robert's life is pretty tragic from the off.

His mother is an alcoholic and his father, Elvin, leaves before he's even born. Robert's stepfather is actually a guy named John Fats Buccelli and as you might guess from the name he is no strange as a crime. In fact, in 1950 Fats takes part in probably the most infamous robbery in American history. That's the so-called Great Brinks robbery at the Brinks private security building on the north side of Boston. God, I hate the word Brinks. The newspapers are the field day, some call it the perfect crime, others the crime of the century or the fabulous Brinks robbery.

which I suppose it was all of those things, right? But it was pretty nuts. And it goes a little something like this. Just before 7.30pm on January 17, 1950, a group of armed masked men burst out of the Brinks building, dragging sacks containing almost $3 million in cash, checks, money orders, and other notes. And that's about 32-milled-day,

or like one-city apartment or 10 avocado toasts. When the cops arrived soon after, there are almost no clues. According to witnesses, between five and seven men at the end of the building, I'm guessing that's six then, all wearing navy peacoats, gloves and chauffe's caps. Their faces have been covered with Halloween masks, although in truth, they actually look a bit more like sex dolls,

which is even more disturbing. Anyway, these dolls have opened three or four locked doors to reach the building's second floor, and when they have, they force five employees onto their bellies at gunpoint, tie their hands and put duct tape over their mouth. This could have all gone wrong when a garage attendant buzzes into the building and the gang is ready to mess him up. But when they see him walk away, apparently unaware anything is going on, they just let him leave. So this is the biggest armed robbery ever at that time, and the gang members are kind of ingenious.

They agree not to spend a dime of the cash for the next six years to avoid detection and then split it up, leaving at a depot in town. And they even hire mobsters to watch that depot for 18 full months. but these are career criminals and one man's stupidity brings the whole thing crashing down Joseph Spex O'Keefe leaves his loop with another one of the group while he goes behind bars for a separate

crime altogether and then he writes a bunch of letters behind bars threatening other gang members if they run off with the cash then demanding money in the letters and then and this is music to the cop's ears suggesting he might even talk

when Spex gets out of prison the gang ring leader Fats Pino sends a hitman to whack him. But when the assassin fires a machine gun at Spex in the Dorchester suburb of Boston, he only causes the guy minor wounds, and that is a big, big mistake. Specks then runs straight to the feds and testifies against his Brinks co-conspirators. All ate a court and two die before they even tried, although only 58 grand of the 2.7 million they took is ever recovered. And that 58 grand, it came from a false wall

and the office of a contracting business run by Edward Wimpy Bennett and yes, Fats Buccelli. Actually, though, because the authorities never find the mother low from the heist, both men caught pretty short sentences only that's not quite it for facts. Months after his release, he shot in the back of the head and killed. Do we actually know who killed him at all?

I don't think we do. No. I don't think that was ever discovered, but yeah you might like one thing worth knowing about this case is that I think partially inspired some of the scenes from Goodfathers I think with that whole heist when they start whacking everyone afterwards. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Well, Bob Nelson, I'm going to call him Bob. I don't know if he's going by Bob by the time he's 18. When do you start going by Bob? It feels like that's like a 40 or not. I feel like it's a right of passage, right? I think in Boston. You have to pick when you're 18.

Yeah. Well, who gets wimpy? Shit. So Bob Nelson is 18 at the time that they all get caught for this. And he says that his stepfather's death

leaves him, quote, devastated but not surprised, but also that he felt strangely freed from his path, which is ever so slightly messianic. Anyway, the path he takes is pretty odd by all accounts. He gets deep into the work of a guy

named Robert Ettinger, who writes a 1962 book called The Prospect of Immortality, which says that a person could be frozen now and thawed out centuries ahead. Yeah, interestingly, that book actually, if you read it and you can still find it, that gets really dark really quickly. So Ettinger discussed freezing everyone prior to birth and then essentially removing the need for childbirth. And then he said that we should only heat up the ones who didn't have certain diseases. So it's kind of got echoes of Silicon Valley today. You have this kind of utopian future, which quickly turns into like a eugenics-inspired dystopia.

You're only like a sort of, it's sort of like a Kevin Bacon rule, right? You're only ever six steps away from phrenology in Silicon Valley. Yeah. So this book, so yeah, it's like literally God-level shit. I mean, whether you believe that that God is particularly good or not. living forever and so on. And the young Bob, he is well into it. In 1967, he freezes the body of 73-year-old James Bedford, a psychologist, who is the first person on earth to be cryogenically frozen. Is he still around? Is he still? Well, he's not with us. Is he with us? I don't know.

I mean, he's still around. His body is with alcohol, which is the biggest cryinix company in the world. So basically after he was frozen by Bob, he ended up going on this sort of tour of places that would let you store a frozen body. And every now and then, a sort of insurance company would call up and ask why the company had a frozen body on the premises and he'd get turfed out.

And then he was lost, actually, for quite a while. So the client industry, despite him being the first person ever frozen, and despite obviously him being dead, and frozen, managed to lose him. And he eventually turned up, his family had been looking after him for a long time. And so a couple of people went on this sort of mission to find James Bedford, and he was brought back to alcohol, which is where he is now. They did actually open him up, and he didn't look like he was in a very good state,

to be honest. Someone had squashed his nose as they put him in or something, and he hadn't been preserved very well. I mean, this is objectively funny, but yeah I guess it's I guess it's sad that he's had his body smashed the pieces but I mean like so so Bob like the basically the criminal or the kind of escapade side of his life doesn't end with his stepfather right I mean he's got a pretty torn rep in the in the cryonics community like um it's got a bit from your book which says the opinion on Nelson varied within the

community some felt he did the best he could with the resource he had while others labelled him a con artist and a fraudster. Where do you come down on on that side of things? Oh, absolutely a fraudster. So he obviously, he didn't like his stepdad, but I think he probably learned a few lessons from him. So for example, he sort of walked into his first meeting about chronics with like-minded people. And he came out as they'd elected him a leader, despite having no, he was a TV repairman at the time. So he obviously like, had the ability to sort of influence people. So after he froze James Bedford,

he ended up sort of freezing a bunch of other people, some he knew and some he didn't. They all sort of paid him. They gave him money for him for him to basically take care of their bodies forever. And so that money sort of went missing, presumably he spent it on himself. He apparently went on a lot of holidays, and he eventually couldn't afford to keep him frozen.

So to cut a long story short, he basically took all these bodies. started cramming them into cylinders so they were all squished together so we could fit more people in and then he rented out an underground crypt in California, put them in there and then occasionally top them up with everything they need to stay frozen. And then he spent the money. When the money ran out, he just left them to decompose. So he actually wrote a book about this. He sounded very sorry in the book. But I think that was a loss of self-emotion. more than anything else.

So when the families of the dead came and found out what had happened to their relatives who were now just, you know, in these sort of metal, these sort of cylinders crammed together and very warm and rotted. They sued him and obviously they won. So that was called the Chatsworth disaster.

It's named after the cemetery where the crypt was. And yeah, it was the first sort of infamous incident in Chironix history. And yeah, it kind of just moved on from there, really. It was a... Did he kind of face any criminal charges at that point then? No, he was just sued.

He didn't have any criminal charges because he'd managed to get around sort of storing bodies in a weird way by renting them out of the crypt, essentially. So technically they were underground and buried. But no, yeah, he didn't have any criminal charges. And he carried on... So he didn't actually freeze any more people, but he did sort of keep in touch with Cryinx industry

and when he did die eventually he was actually frozen so they still let him be frozen and the... Did they smash his nose in as well then? Yeah, hopefully. So we just punched him on the way in. So some people within Crownix thought he said he's a massive fraud, he's dangerous and others just said he was a pioneer and he did what he could

with whatever he had. But he definitely tried to take down a few people with him. like people like his secretary who he made um head of the cryonics chapter just before all the shit hit the fan basically so he tried to pin it all on her a little bit yeah just all around not a nice person and and not exactly the person you want to sort of put as your poster boy for cryonics definitely yeah i mean you've got um a gentleman called mike darwin uh who we'll go into in a minute but he says uh well you say in the book that he has nothing but scorn for for nelson and that Mike Darwin told you that Nelson was a sociopath and claimed that he was involved

with the Boston Mafia and had no remorse for those he hurt. So I think that's pretty unequivocal. But Mike Darwin, I guess, takes us to another chapter of your book. So tell me how we get from Bob Bobby Robert Nelson to the curious case of the missing frozen head. Own it all. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot Slot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.

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Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus Let's go Get ready for a new case We're going to crack this case And prove for the greatest partners of all time New friends You are

Gary Desnake And your last name The Snake Dream team In new habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon

At home You're clearly Working at Zootopia 2 Now available on Disney Plus Rated PG Yeah So this is one of my favorite chapters

To work on because it was just so weird So Mike Dorin Was a slightly strange kid He walked in on his cousin Who had died from I think it was a complication of diabetes And she'd basically been decomposed For like a week

And his mom told him Why don't you go and look for your cousin And he walked in And she was like dead and seriously decomposed. And it messed him up quite a bit. So he decided he would just, you know, wage war against death, essentially. So he got into cryonics really early when he was like 12, 13.

And when he was about 16, he went to California and met Bob Nelson, who at that point was like the, you know, the darling of cryonics. And he instantly kind of saw through him. And he said he actually called up some of the suppliers that worked with him. and one of the guys who'd welded shut one of the cylinders after you crammed the bodies in who told him that he could smell the burning hair as he did it, which was pretty grim.

And so Mike Doran saw all that happen and decided, okay, I'm going to take cryonics into a new future. I'm going to make it a ton more professional. I'm going to make it really scientific and we're going to do things properly, which he kind of did for a long time. And then there was one case

that kind of tripped him up. And that's probably putting it a bit lightly. So essentially, a guy called, a woman called Dora Kent, was brought to the facility where Mike Doren worked. And he was a CEO. And this is the company now is Alcourt, which is still going today and is the biggest cry next. It's the one, is it in Arizona?

It's in Arizona, yeah. Back then it was in L.A. So they bring Mrs. Kent into the facility. She's dying. she's got like pneumonia she's really old she's about to die so they decide there's a thing with chronic like the quicker you do the procedure

after death the better it is so they decide okay we're going to bring her in before she dies and then we're gonna freeze her as soon as she dies and we'll have like the best results ever so they do that they get in she dies they cut off her head

and because this is she's only signed up for her head to be frozen not a whole body. So they cut off her head, freeze the head, and then a few hours later, they relax,

they rest, they're like, okay, that was a tough one, but we did it. And then at some point someone realizes that it didn't have a physician

present to declare her dead. So they send off the death certificate and prepare to sort of face whatever comes out of them. And unfortunately someone spots that she died in an industrial facility on the death certificate. And they flag it up as unusual because it's not somewhere where. Because it is unusual. So that alerts the coroner.

And the coroner is a real piece of shit and decides this is the best thing ever. So the coroner basically was the guy who dug up liberarchi to prove that he died of AIDS. like a really nasty piece of work. And so he decides so he goes public with this. He starts calling this cryonics company like a bunch of cultists and they're killing old people.

So he basically contended that they cut off her head before she was dead. And he made up a lot of stuff as well saying that they found satanic material in the company. So essentially, so so Daron knows, at this point that the police are probably going to get involved.

So he has a choice and so does Alcor. The coroner is demanding the head for a post-mortem. And if the head gets put in a post-mortem, then puts through a post-mortem, then that's it. There's no chance of it being reanimated. So he has to decide if he's going to hand over the head or not. And Doren obviously decides, no, he's not going to do that to poor Mrs. Kent. and he's not going to ruin her chances of being reanimated as an 80-something-year-old woman in 200 years time with no body.

So he hides it and he wouldn't tell me where he hid the head, which is really annoying. Even now he won't tell me. He did say that the head's still around. I believe the head's still in the, still alcohol. Yeah. So he did say that they hid it with someone who had nothing to do with cryonics. So I don't know how that conversation went, but you managed to convince them. So basically the next day, the police show up, they raid the facility,

and they're looking for the head. And at this point, they're kind of chilled out about it because they've given them the body, but they're not going to hand it over the head. there is a moment where they realized that they also chopped off the hands and they forgot to hand those over with the body. So there was a little bit of panic over that. But the police come in, they're looking for the head, they can't find it, they go absolutely mental and rest everyone there.

So they're sort of dragged into questioning and this like oddball group of characters just get pulled into the police station. The police are taking the piss out of them. They're saying, one of them is getting his fingerprints taken and he says, oh, do you think you'll have the same fingerprints when you are reanimating the future?

And the guy's like, yes, yes, I think I do. And the police just all, like, roll around laughing, apparently. And then they go, like, they go to Mike Darwin and get really, like, heavy with him. They say, you know, we're going to, if you give us the head, then you'll still have a salvageable business here. they also threatened to completely ruin the reputation of his business partner, a guy called Jerry Leif, who was working at the university at UCLA.

And they tell him to phone Jerry Leif and tell him to get over there. So he calls Jerry and he says, you know, we've been raided. You need to come down to the police station. Jerry's like, yep, absolutely he'll be right there. Jerry never shows up, obviously. Jerry's not done. Jerry can see exactly what's happening. So he drives off.

He goes to a place where this cry nox company, for reasons I have no idea, they have a stash of gold Krugerans. What, okay. That's completely legit. So he goes and picks up the gold Krugerans. He goes to a constitutional lawyer,

like slams him on the table and says, we need your services. We're in trouble here. And this lawyer didn't question it, obviously. Just go straight in. Yeah, I'll do this. probably just saw the headlines. And he goes to, so he immediately files for restraining order against the coroner's office.

So a court case is set. In the meantime, everyone's let go from the prison. So everyone's released. And so this restraining order, court case, this bizarre court case kicks off. And it's like basically the lawyer's saying, you know, how dare you, you know, mess around with this woman's head. she's got a right to do whatever she wants with her body after she dies she signed up for this um like she's he really laid it on thick he was like you're going to put this woman's head through a blender just because you think maybe she broke the rules and it's like okay

i can only imagine what the yeah what the coroner's office was thinking at this point um but uh so essentially the judge possibly because the coroner was such an unpleasant person ruled in favor of Alcor. So he gave them a temporary restraining order and then he gave them like a permanent restraining order and at that point they'd won. They could run out into the streets and celebrate and it was like the first major victory for cryonics.

And then the guy, so that the son of Dora Kent was interviewed outside and he was a sort of big fan of cryonics himself. And he was interviewed outside the courthouse and he said, well, finally people have recognized that cryonics is not just a, crazy thing. And all it took is the death of my mother. So he was very, he was very proud. So yeah, that was another thing of her head. Yeah, just the potential mashing up. So yeah, it was another one of those like chapters in cryonics history where you think that everything's

going to go wrong. It was kind of like the chats with disaster part two. But this time they sort of got away with it. And there's no indication that they did chop a head off before she was dead, but also, you know, there's no way of telling really if they jump the gun. Yeah, it was a major victory for cryonics and really set up everything for the cryonics companies of today. And like from that, Alcor then became like the biggest cryonics company in the world. Is it like, is it kind of conspiracy theory shaped in cryonics a lot of it? Because it feels, the whole idea of it feels like a cult to the extent that people are doing these insane things in the hope of what? Maybe, I mean, do they genuinely think they're going to live forever?

Or what, I mean, what's, or is it just kind of a sort of mad, egotistic sort of run for a lot of these people? It seems like there's a lot of sort of outsized characters in this world. Yeah, it's, so I think the people that, that want to, want to get it done. Usually it's just like a long shot. And a lot of them talk about it like it's plan B. So they think that they're going to do loads of other things, which are going to keep them living forever. But just in case they get hit by a car or, you know,

an anvil falls on their head. Then they're going to get frozen if that happens. And they're like really calculated about it. So if you get, so one person told me, you know, oh, if I knew I was going to die, I'd immediately move to Arizona. If he was given like a diagnosis that he was going to die.

He'd moved to Arizona, so he's closer to the facility when he dies. And he said, like, if he had Alzheimer's or something that was ruining his brain, then he'd immediately kill himself and then right outside alcohol, essentially. So, yeah, they have a lot of people sort of just running up to their front door and shooting themselves. Well, presumably, where do they shoot themselves? Presumably in the heart, then they're not going to sort of, yeah. Yeah, you're not going to ruin your head.

I'm not sure. There have been talks of doing it in the Netherlands. So you can link up with the euthanasia industry. Right. Yeah, this does sound like we're getting into organized crime territory. So you could euthanize someone and then immediately freeze them. It's the sort of conveyor about death and reanimation. It's almost like that Futurama episode where you know,

you put a coin in to kill yourself. Yeah. It's really weird stuff. But yeah, the people that run it, it attracts a lot of big egos. And you know what happens when you have big egos and weird projects? It's like it just attracts like people that want to make money or want to get power out of it.

So a lot of fraudsters are unfortunately attract. to it. And you mentioned like this is a plan B. So the plan A is that presumably the guys who want to like hack their bodies or like take millions of presumably a lot of them bogus supplements and things like that. You read a lot of stories in sort of tech magazines about this kind of thing. Yeah, that's it. Exactly.

So they think that they're going to, they think they just need to live for another 30 years because at that point like technology will will will be developed, which will let them live forever. like weird stuff like nanotechnology like nanobots in the blood things like that so they do anything they can to live a little bit longer um it's kind of kind of weird you go to these events and it's full of these like they're all white guys they're all very gaunt because they do intimate and fasting and they've all got like dyed hair as well and they're desperately trying to look younger than they are um so it's kind of like i'm just thinking of a carous shot now it's a little bit like that Steve Vashmi meme you know and it's like

are you doing fellow kids it's a lot of that basically yeah I'm suddenly not that worried about the impending nuclear war that we're about to have maybe just to like wipe the smile off their faces might be worth it yeah but imagine if the frozen people are the only ones that survived and that was our legacy um it's just dora ken's head and our hands had to be able to some skuttling around her a nuclear holocaust.

It would be a tear in the cockcultures. And on that note, I mean, how many stories, as you were reporting out of this book, did you find that that were actually to do with crime? I mean, so much of it is dusting quackery or coercion or fraud or stuff like that. I mean, is there anyone that's not sort of crime adjacent in this one? world? Yeah, I think there were people with like good intentions. But it's in that sort of really that sweet spot of like the science is improving to help us cure certain diseases and help us address aging. But it's not improved enough so that we can do what these people want,

which is radically extend your lives. It's like in that gap, that's where you have all the common and the fraudsters operating. So I mean, a ton of it is, it's, it's, it's, that you see quite a bit of is the stem cell companies. There's so many dodgy people in that. It's just horrible. So one of the things these stem cell companies do is they promise a miracle cure. So it's either you'll live longer or cure your arthritis or we'll do this and that. And none of it is proven that it works.

And all of it is based offshore. None of it's in America. it's based in countries which really lacks medical regulations so they can get away with it. And then what they usually do is they'll get like an athlete or a military veteran, like some kind of more of a war here or the bad and they'll get them, they'll give them treatments,

get them testimonials on the website, or even better get them to tell them how good it is to their fellow veterans who then come in for these really expensive procedures, which the only reason they seem to work is mostly due to like the placebo effect because you're so desperate for it to work that it actually seems to. And then sometimes it just absolutely cripples them later on. They can have like really bad reactions to it. So that's one of them.

But pretty much name any fringe science and there's someone trying to make money out of it. Yeah, there's the guy that does Bulletproof Coffee, Dave Asprey. he turned up to one of these events and told everyone to take ozone gas rectally. So essentially what he's saying is take the gas the gas that's in the atmosphere that protects us from the sun. Take a bit of that. And that is, that can be lethal if you inhale it. And it's also corrosive. And the FDA said it should not be used in any way.

in any health situation. So he said, take that and blow it up your ass. And he was going to make money out of that. So he was just telling him to do it. It's yeah, it's full of it. Just name any health scam and it's there. Because like what's the ultimate thing you can offer someone? It's like, yeah, I'll make you there forever.

We've been doing this for a very long time. Like humans have been conning other humans with immortality scams. like the epic of Gilgamesh you know the first ever recorded story is is a cautionary tale about people wanting to live forever but we don't seem to learn unfortunately we still go for them yeah I'm I'm not sure I'm ever going to I mean I don't know maybe I'll fall pray to it at some point if I'm I don't know if I'm going to like walk into someone's facility and ask them to cut my head off and then stick me in a metal tube or anything but maybe I'll stick, maybe I'll blow, I don't know, laughing gas up my asshole at some point.

Maybe that's going to help me live forever. Yeah. That's definitely less of a sacrifice. But, yeah. You know, if you have a few years and you walk past and you saw a sign, then maybe you just give a go. It probably could make you a lot of money here in Berlin outside the clubs, actually. It's a pretty decent idea to make a few quid. So I guess,

this point we get to the story that we began with although i should mention i did mention set macphile on the top and i realize i haven't mentioned him yet but he's quite keen to to cryogenically freeze himself apparently which i was quite uh surprised by but anyway yeah yeah larry king apparently larry king is another one wait but larry king's been dead i mean larry king has been dead since the times of pharaoh but like but he wanted to cryogenically freeze himself Apparently he was massively into it, wanting to cryogenically freeze himself. But no one would tell me after he died if they have, because they'll never tell you who's been cryogenically frozen.

So he might be frozen right now. I thought it was just that you couldn't never really know if Larry King was dead or not. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, another one, this one's a bit more dark, is Jeffrey Epstein, massive fan of cryonix. And he wanted to freeze his head, but you also wanted to have his penis frozen. Okay.

There's a few scenarios, I could think, that would sort of be slightly more justified in that scenario. So now we've got like a nuclear holocaust, everyone's dead, and it's just Dora Kent and Jeffrey Epstein's penis, and somehow they've got to keep the human race going. Or Dora, that's what I can say. Anyway, so we'll go back to cryorus because I guess cryores is a pretty nice story. Yeah, well, that's the thing.

Like cryores is like bargain basement, right? Yeah, yeah, so cryo Roos is like the worst, the cheapest, the most budget option you can go for. Right. So. Yeah, we did an episode about the gangs of Tollieti and the Lada factory. and sort of how Russian cars were the laughing stuff of the world. So that would seem to segue neatly into Creos, which seems like it pretty much does a similar thing.

So apparently it's frozen 78 people and 45 pets since the early 2000s. Did you, I mean, presumably these are dogs and cats mostly, but is there anything a bit weirder? I think there is a chinchilla. I believe there was one other weird animal I can't remember maybe it was like a parrot or something I'm not sure

but yeah people get their pets frozen quite often it's reasonably cheap to get a pet frozen yeah so frankly no one gives a toss if they like it works or not anyway so yeah I think Oudalova herself

she she had at least two dogs frozen Right. Yeah. So also her mother. Okay. You've met her. What's she like?

She's weird, as you can imagine. And it was one of the most uncomfortable meetings and interviews of my life. So I presume she's not listening because I'm genuinely worried she'll come after me. So I went to Moscow to meet her and Danila. the ex and um she put off the meeting for ages and then eventually we on the last day i was there she agreed to meet so i walked in and um she was wearing this sort of dress this like long flowing dress and she was on the phone when i walked in and she carried on talking but she pointed to the back of a dress to like the the fastener at the top of the dress um and i immediately thought you know

what have i walked in on what what is she expecting here um and so i I didn't really do anything. She kept pointing at the top of the dress. And then eventually I saw that her hair was caught in it. So I reluctantly sort of tried to get her hair out of the clasp of a dress without making the dress fall off, obviously. It sounds a lot on you for it, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

This is actually the foretime. This has happened. And so it didn't come out. I couldn't get it off. So she, still on the phone, she just hands me a pair of scissors and tells me to cut her hair off. So I just cut a lock of her hair, which I didn't keep. And yeah, that was the start of the interview. And from there, it was just kind of...

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then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. So she had her own translator. She doesn't speak great English. So she had her own translator. And the translator was, I found out later when I, translated the interview, she was giving me this sort of glossy version of what

Oudalov was telling me. And Oudalov actually spent a large amount of time calling me an American capitalist, saying that she would throw pins at the article when it came out. And yeah, essentially just a lot of hatred. And I was just sat there smiling because I didn't understand what she was saying until I eventually got it translated afterwards. So yeah, a very, very difficult person, I would say, is the best description. Yeah. And so, Danila Medvedev, I mean, also obviously weird because he was basically married to this woman for a very long time and they set up a cry on his company.

So he's not like, he's not exactly the level-headed one, right? He's also completely bad shit. Yeah. Well, he's a lot. He's like the acceptable face, I guess. guess he didn't say he wanted to throw pins at your story. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, like he was already off to a good start because he didn't do that. But, um, but he was very welcoming. And it helps that he speaks like perfect English. And so he was like showing me around

everywhere. Tommy, um, who to talk to and things, um, very helpful. But, um, so, so to characterize them, Udala was the one that gets stuff done. Um, Medvedev is kind of the dreamer. Um, and so his, everyone criticizes him saying, that you never really get stuff done and she knows how to get stuff done. And when you, you know, you learn who she partnered with then you're not really surprised

that she does have a can-do attitude. Tell us about that then. There's a certain guy. I mean, we should kind of do a run-up with the company, right? So in 2015, the company's struggling a bit. So it signs a deal with a guy named

Philippe Polistina. Who's he? He's pretty interesting. Yeah. So he is like an Italian funeral industry mogul. And I don't want to be, you know, stereotypical. But if someone told me that they were head of the Italian, at the peak of the Italian funeral industry, I would immediately worry slightly. So, so Udala. So Udala, basically,

originally Medvedev was the CEO of the company. And then they both kind of agreed that he was doing a terrible job. And so Udlover took over. And then she launched like these weird schemes. One of them was like a cryo token, a cryo, which was almost definitely a scam. But then one of them was to partner with this guy in Italy who was essentially just bringing customers from Italy to be frozen. and obviously for legal reasons I'm not going to speculate on

who the customers were that were coming from this guy so essentially Medvedev and his crowd because when so Medvedev and Oudelova were married and they broke up because Medvedev had an affair so when that happened the Kriynax industry in Russia split into two factions and they started going at each other one of the accusations they threw at Oudolova was that she was in bed with this guy

polystyna, not literally in bed, and that he was part of the Italian mafia. So that was obviously refuted strongly, but then he got arrested in this crackdown. So he was accused of being part of the Indrangata family. And we know that he'd been moving bodies essentially from Italy to Moscow to be frozen. So at this point you don't know who's in the Cryonix company, like who's been frozen there. There's absolutely no evidence suggests that anyone was there improperly or that it was anybody linked to the Indrengata family. But people did make those claims anyway. Right.

I mean, he gets rounded. This is not just like a knock on the door, right? He gets rounded up in a raid that's like the second biggest raid on the Italian mafia in history. There's like two and a half thousand Italian cops in Calabria and they arrest over 300 people. So, I mean, you know, I don't want to speculate either. But that's the context to how this guy gets sort of, you know, rounded up by the cops. Yeah, and I put this to Udalova, who obviously said it was a travesty of justice. He was released and he was released.

and the charges were dropped and, you know, he's an upstanding Italian businessman and, you know, Medvedev and his crew had been unfairly, you know, labeling him as a mafia guy. And Medvedev said, well, said it almost exactly what you say.

It was a huge operation. It wasn't like they were just going door to door and asking if, you know, you were part of the Italian mafia. They obviously talked him for a reason. I'm ever there actually told me and I couldn't verify it that he'd been arrested before with the same crowd.

Okay. So. It's hard to catch a break as an Italian funeral mogul these days. To be fair, I would instantly, if I was looking for a mafia member, I'd probably just go down to the funeral industry mogul. Just asking what's going on.

Yeah. So, so, all war broke out basically and that's when people started to steal dead people. Right. So that is kind of where we had it at the top of the show where there's, well, I mean, I think I mentioned that in the opening story, he's going in and taking stuff or he's going in and sort of occupying their facility. But it goes back and forth a while, right?

It goes back and forth a few times with people nicking stuff and, and, breaking into facilities and whatnot. Yeah, there's several grades. So it starts with, so Oudelova is a CEO. Medvedev, after being sort of second in command and being basically left out a bit, decides Oudelover's doing a terrible job. I'm going to come back and take control. So he gets, so there's a board of directors of like basically co-owners.

One of those people is Mike Doran from the previous story, Doran who clues Dora Kent. So Medvedev knows he just needs enough votes to vote out of her role as CEO. So he gathers the votes. He gets Darwin's vote as a proxy vote for the rest of the people are there.

And so they have this really awkward meeting in which she's voted out. And then they think, okay, we've won. Needle over says, no, you've not won because I changed the laws of the company without you realizing to say this whole meeting is illegal. And also, by the way, I took a van and I stole all of the frozen heads from the company.

So she basically just took all of the frozen heads out of there as a way to say, you're not taking control of the company because I've got the heads and you'll never find them. So yeah, that's the first raid is the heads. So the heads go to, and it's crucial to to keep track of this because they go back and forth quite a lot. There's heads. heads and there's body and there's full bodies and the heads are easier to transport obviously because they're just smaller the body's really hard to transport because they're in these gigantic bats so she just takes the heads and says okay i'm still CEO because i've got the heads um so then the sort of the pandemic kicks in it's a bit weird um medvedev's kind of brewing in the background

to figure out what to do next and then like you said at the start he gets he decides to go in and take control of the facility that has the bodies. So he goes in with, he gets rid of Udala over security, tells them to get lost. And then they celebrate taking control of the bodies. So at this point Medvedev has the bodies and Udalova has the heads.

And the key thing to understand here, this is, and it's ridiculously complicated, is Medvedev has, so in amongst the heads is Medvedev's grandmother. And in amongst the bodies is Oudalova's mother. So they each have the other ones, loved one, in their possession, in that current arrangement.

And there's no, there's no suggestion that they could mix them up and make some kind of like a weird family hybrid. Yeah, that would have been, that would have been the solution, clearly. Everyone would have come out of that winner. but no so then Oudelova decides so Oudleover then makes several attempts

to take the bodies she shows up one time and the police basically chase her off and tired to get lost and even though she got the bodies onto a truck and there was liquid nitrogen

pulling out of the cylinders the cops that would chase her down and sent her back and then and then like She said at the start, she comes back and she takes the bodies. And that's when you think, okay, Udala over now has the bodies and she has the heads. And she has this new facility which she's built.

And she takes the bodies to this new facility, which is nothing but like an abandoned piece of ground with a building with no doors and windows. But she leaves them there. But it's not quite over because Medvedev decided finally he's going to make a move. And before she took the bodies, he'd gone up to a new facility and found the heads. So he stole the heads back. So essentially they've just swapped. They've swapped body parts. She now has the bodies, he has the heads.

They each have their loved one, their relative. But it's... Oh, my God. But now... That's where we are now. That's where we've left it. Yeah, that's essentially where we are now. with going to the courts

there's various people that they're suing each other counter suing there's the threat made against Danila because he had the heads where the two guys showed up his door

Udalova says that she was she had a threat against the life at one point there's lots of it's just like an all out all out conflict I guess is anything going on in Russia

right now I've not really been watching the news lately. I think there's another war somewhere, but it's utterly bizarre because they're going out each other all the time, like the Russian army is like building up on the Ukrainian border. And it's just weird that they think that all of this is to save people's lives. And all they're doing is like carting these bodies and heads off between each other, playing tug of war with them. it couldn't be anything further than like this immortalist utopia that they that they like to make in the future

well i mean that's uh as farcical note as any to sort of end the show on i mean you've probably been asked this question about a billion times since you started working on the book but i mean is there anything that you've seen out of all of this stuff that's made you think that we might live forever or might we get the sweet release of death at some point? I think on balance, yes, death is coming from us all. I mean, the question, that was my question going into it. And then the question, as the story unfolded, and as the pandemic started and war and everything else broke out

and my reporting was, went through all of that. the question became do we would we want to live forever um and what kind of world have we got um that would you know that would warrant living forever in it like maybe we need to work on on on the world a little bit more before we decide we're going to live forever in it um yeah so that was my takeaway um probably death is a good thing on balance and we'll end it there mate um when when's the book coming out? So in America it is out on the 19th, which is tomorrow, April 19th. Oh, okay. So yeah, and in the UK, it's May 5th. I say after we're a little bit longer in the UK. And I hope you don't die in the meantime because that would be terrible.

I was going to say, yeah, that would be ironic and terrible and terrible. Yeah. Well, Peter Wolfe, thanks for thanks for so much for your time, mate. Um, yeah, lots of crime and fraudsters and scammers and all that kind of stuff that our listeners love. So I'm sure everyone enjoyed it. And yeah, maybe we can catch up again at some point when you're onto some other sort of weird and wonderful topic. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks so much for having me on, mate.

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