This American Life - 427: Original Recipe

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

We discover what we believe might be the original recipe for Coca-Cola…and share it with you! When this episode first aired in 2011, it made international headlines. This, and another story about telling copies from originals. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.(00:00:00) Act One: The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. So we were surprised to find a 1979 newspaper article that appeared to show Coke's original recipe. We spoke with historian Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, and were even more surprised to find reasons to believe the recipe is real. (25 minutes)(00:26:26) Act Two: Jake Halpern tells this story about document expert John Reznikoff, who came into possession of some materials which—if authentic—would change history. Then things got complicated. (32 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org / This American Life privacy policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Hey there, everybody. So I'm not going to beat around the bush. For this week's radio program, we think we may have found the original recipe for Coca-Cola. And I am not kidding. I am not kidding. One of the most famously guarded trade secrets on the planet. I have it right here. And I am going to read it to you.

I'm going to read it to the world. And I'm going to make my case for why I think it's real, despite whatever Coca-Cola might say. And that is just one of the two stories on today's program. Today's show is something we first broadcast 15 years ago, and when we did, it made international headlines. I am not kidding about that. It broke news. But that is so long ago. I bet you've never heard this one, right? From WB.EZ Chicago, it's American life. I'm Ira Glass.

Probably the best story about how protective Coca-Cola is of its secret formula comes in this book that was written by Charles Howard Candler. His dad, Aza, did not invent Coca-Cola, but founded the Coca-Cola Company back in 1892. And Charles, the son, wrote this. One of the proudest moments of my life came when my father initiated me into the mysteries of the secret flavoring formula, inducting me into the holy of holies. Charles then says, incredibly, there was no written formula. And the labels had been removed from all the containers of the ingredients. So they were, quote, identified only by sight, smell, and remembering where each was put on the shelf. And I thereupon experienced the thrill of making up with his guidance a batch of a batch of.

of merchandise 7X. Merchandise 7X. Merchandise 7X is the cartoonishly super secret cloak and dagger name they give the flavoring mixture in Coca-Cola. Charles's dad, Aza, was so paranoid about anybody else getting hold of the secret formula for 7X that even though he was president of Coca-Cola, he's president of the company. He would go through the company mail himself and remove the invoices for any ingredients that had been purchased so that nobody in the accounting department could read what ingredients had been bought for the product.

I learned all this from a history of Coca-Cola, a book written by investigative journalist and historian Mark Pendergras. The company has always said, and as far as I know, it's true, that only two people at any given time know how to actually mix the 7x flavoring ingredient, and that these people never travel on the same airplane in case it crashes. It's this carefully passed on secret ritual, and that the formula is kept in a baby. bank vault at SunTrust, which used to be the Georgia Trust Company. Of course, this makes no sense at all.

Why can't the two guys fly on a plane if the formula is sitting inside a bank vault? Coke's official line on this these days is that they simply do not talk about how many people know the recipe. Though the reason that most of us think of it is one of the biggest trade secrets in the world is probably because that's the story Coca-Cola likes to tell. Coke's secret formula Only two guys in the world know it If something happened to one The formula would be lost forever

And then Cookouts would be catastrophic In this particular Coke commercial I guess the premises that each of the two guys Only knows half the formula It's just one of several commercials That have come out recently That poke fun at the myth of the super secret formula

While at the same time bolstering and selling that myth Cook even has this thrill ride at its museum in Atlanta, the world of Coca-Cola. We follow two characters who are trying to unlock the secret formula for Coca-Cola. And so, with all this money, all this energy, all these millions of dollars spent over the years to convince us of just how impossibly, importantly, importantly, iconically secret the formula to Coca-Cola is, it was a surprise when we stumbled across an article in Coke's hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

February 18, 1979. Not on the front page, but buried. buried back on page 2B, one of their columnists, Charles Salter, without any fanfare at all, published what looks like the original recipe for Coca-Cola. He found it in a pharmacist's old book of recipes. All the recipes, including the one for Coca-Cola, are written by hand. Most of them are for various ointments and remedies. And if that seems like a strange and random place to find this kind of thing,

well, Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist, and it was originally sold at pharmacy soda fountains. The article says that the book passed from one pharmacist to another until it fell into the hands of one Everett Beale, who owned a drugstore in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles from Atlanta. It's mainly identified in the story as a fishing buddy of the columnist. Hello? Judy? Yes, you're late. I know I am.

Did you have a nice flight back home? Everett Beale passed away July 2010. I called his widow Judy at her home in Georgia so many times asking for an interview that at one point she said to me, this is how you people won the war, isn't it? Uh-huh. You people, meaning northerners. And you wanted to know how Everett got this book. Yes.

Well, R.R. Evans was a good friend of Pemberton's. Okay, let's just pause the tape right there to explain who these guys are. The Pemberton that she's talking about is John Pemberton, the guy who invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta back in 1886. Like I said, he was a pharmacist, but he was also a maker of patent medicines. He made something called Globe Flower Cough Cough Cough Cough. He made a blood purifier called extract of Stalingia. R.R. Evans, that's the second person that she mentioned, Judy says, was another pharmacist in Atlanta at the time. And they were best friends and blah, blah, blah.

This book of recipes, Judy says, originally belonged to Evans. She says his name is all over the book. Apparently, after his friend Pemberton invented Coke, Evans copied down the formula in this book, calling it Cocoa Cola. That's right. And after Evans died, the book started its travels. Evans gave it to R.M. Mitchell from Griffin, Georgia. And then Mitchell's widow was a friend of my husband's and told him, you know, after he passed away, to come over and get any books that he wanted to out of the library. So Everett picked out the book.

What's it look like? Oh, gosh, it's 133 years old. It's just leather bound. And I wear gloves. The last time I looked at it, you know, I like. to wear gloves. Everett was so intrigued by the Coke recipe that he spent the last year of his life while he struggled with cancer, researching and writing his own book, a history of the inventor of Coca-Cola that's still unpublished. Interestingly, just like the characters in Lord of the Rings, when they get a hold of the ring, once Everett had the secret formula, like the people of Coca-Cola, he started to get protective. The recipe book now sits in a bank vault. Or take his reaction

when his fishing buddy Charles did the 1979 newspaper story about the recipe book. The newspaper published a photo that was big enough that you can read all the ingredients and the amounts, the entire recipe. See, Charles did that and Eric was unhappy about that. Oh, he was. And I won't go into that. Oh, really? Yeah.

And was he happy that there was an article? Yeah, but not the formula page. Oh, here it is. Yeah. So I'm looking at it here. We sent a copy of that photo where you can see the recipe for Coca-Cola to that historian of Coca-Cola, the guy who wrote that book, Mark Pendergrast. And my question for you is, could this be real?

Yeah, yeah. I think that it certainly is a version of the formula, and it's very, very similar to the formula that I found that I talked about and printed in the back of my book. This was an amazing discovery. In Mark's book, he tells the story of looking through Coca-Cola's archives and being shown the yellowing pages of an old nobable. book that belonged to the inventor of Coca-Cola, John Pemberton.

The cook people told him that it was from way before Pemberton moved to Atlanta, way before he invented Coke. But in fact, it was quite clear that it was a formula book from at least after he'd invented Coca-Cola because it mentioned Coca-Cola. So do you think they just didn't know? Apparently not. So in this formula book, there was a piece of paper that had a big X on the top of it. And as I looked at it, I thought, you know, I saw this flavoring ingredient. It had Noroli. It had coriander.

I thought, my God, this is a Coca-Cola formula. I couldn't believe it. And did the company confirm that that's what this was? Of course not. The company denies that that's what it was. New York Times, May 3, 1993, the U. Your Mark's book was published. Coca-Cola calls the recipe in his book, quote,

The latest in a long line of previous unsuccessful attempts to reveal a 107-year-old mystery. But here's our things to get interesting. When you compare these two recipes, the one that Mark found in John Pemberton's own notebook, stored deep inside Coca-Cola's very own archives, and the one from the 1979 newspaper clipping found 40 miles away in Griffin, Georgia. Oil of lemon. Not only do they match up, ingredient for ingredient, identical.

Oil of coriander. The recipe in the newspaper fills in things that the one in the Coke archive leaves blank. The recipe from Coke's archive, just list numbers next to each ingredient, but the newspaper says what the numbers stand for, ounces and drops and drams. The recipe that was found in Coke's archive is just labeled X. The newspaper one says clearly,

this recipe is Cocoa. I got into this wondering if it might be possible that this super secret recipe had been hiding in plain sight in an old newspaper clipping for decades. But once I learned that it actually matched this recipe in Coke's own archives, written by the creator of Coke, It was hard not to get very excited.

These last two weeks I've been carrying around a printout of the recipe everywhere I go. This one that I have right here with me in the studio today. And I've been telling everybody I see, I think I may have found the secret formula for Coke and then I just watch them freak out. So now, right here on the radio, I will read you the formula. You have heard the facts. You can draw your own conclusions as to what this is.

That's after a quick break. Stay with us. It's this American life. Okay, so it's time to read you. What I believe is the secret formula for Coca-Cola. But first, is it legal for us, Stephen, talk about this on the radio? Is Coke going to sue us both? No, I don't think they will.

Because if they sued anything pertaining to the formula, then they would have to then produce the formula in order to say that what you were doing was an infringement on their formula. And they will never do that. Great. Here we go. The 7X formula is just one element in these two recipes. It's made from 20 drops of orange oil, 30 of lemon oil, 10 of nutmeg oil, five of coriander oil, 10 of Noroli oil. Neurole is a kind of orangey flavor, 10 of cinnamon oil, and 8 ounces of alcohol.

You mix that together, and then you take a little bit of that flavoring. One recipe says 2 ounces, the other says 2.5. You put that into another container where you're going to mix the syrup for the soda. The other ingredients, three ounces citric acid, one ounce of caffeine, two and a half gallons of water. The recipe calls that Aqua, two pints of lime juice, an ounce of vanilla, one and a half ounces of caramel coloring. And then we arrive at the two most controversial ingredients in Coca-Cola, 30 pounds of sugar, pounds, and at the very top of the page, first ingredient, F.E. Coca, which stands for fluid extract of Coca. That would be the flavor of the Coca-leaf, which includes a small amount of cocaine. In fact, Mark says the cocaine figures in a big way in the creation of Coca-Cola.

Before he invented Coke, John Pemberton had a hit with another drink called French wine cocoa. Its ingredients, wine, cocaine, and caffeine. Hard to see what people want for that one, right? Then, in 1885, Elgana voted for prohibition. And Pemberton realized that he was going to have to get rid of the wine in his best-selling drink. So he kept the two other ingredients, the cocaine and the caffeine. People love those.

But when you mix cocaine and caffeine together, they're bitter. So he pours in a ton of sugar to cut the bitterness, and voila, Coca-Cola. Pemberton called it his temperance drink. I mean, this is an interesting thing. They still do use Coca-leaf for Coke, but they decokanize it in Maywood, New Jersey, at the Step-on Chemical Company. Wait, wait, so there's a plant in New Jersey, then basically they import tons and tons of Coca-leaves. they remove the cocaine from the cocoa leaf? Correct. And it's been decokaneized there since 1903.

1903 being the year that Coca-Cola rids itself of cocaine. So there's all the circumstantial evidence pointing to this recipe being the original recipe for Coca-Cola, or at any rate, one of the original recipes. But the only way to tell for sure would be to make a batch. Taste it. The historian had never done that. The columnist back in 1979 never did it. That would be the final test.

So we set out to do it. This is it. This is it at the top, the first one up there. First obstacle on our path, kind of a huge one. Coco leaves are a schedule two controlled substance. Totally illegal in the United States. When we asked the company that brings them in under special federal supervision and decokanizes them for Coca-Cola, this company, Step On,

and asks them to sell us some, they stop returning our calls. No cocoa leaves. No way to make the sacred recipe. But then, my fellow This American Life producer, Ben Calhoun, turned to an obscure back-alley resource called the Internet. Wow, look at this. I just typed Coca-Tee into the search. Five, six, seven. There's like a dozen things, more than a dozen. Fifteen, twenty things come up, which are Coca-Tee, just in Amazon.com. Right. So the way that, you know, Coke does it with taking the cocaine out, this company says that they do the same thing. So the hardest part was done, except for making the soda.

For that, we turned to professionals. When we first sent you guys this recipe and you took a look at it, can't just ask you, like, what did you think when you saw the ingredients? It was pretty dizzying for me. Yeah, I mean, it took a little while to sort of translate the handwriting and figure out what it was. Meet Eric Chastain and Mike Spear, respectively the VP of Operations, and the marketing director at Jones Soda in Seattle. Jones makes us living on flavors like cream soda.

and green apple soda, but they're also known for being willing to try anything. They've made turkey and gravy soda. They've made Brussels sprouts soda. We sent them our recipe. And by the time that Ben and I got to their office, Mike and Eric had already made up a couple bottles of our recipe, and we're ready for a taste test. Our stuff versus real Coca-Cola.

It's the first bottle of Coke we've ever had in this office. Just get it out as soon as we can. Just get rid of it. We were worried that asking you guys to go out and make Coca-Cola was like asking you to like go into the table. death star and bloops and planets or something. Well, there was a little debate over that. There was a debate, yeah, for sure.

First, samples from our soda, the one from the 1979 newspaper, are poured into little cups. We're instructed to sniff first, then take a small sip, roll it around in our mouths. We really do not know what to expect. I have this feeling like I'm gonna drop acid right now. It's kinda tasty.

It's kind of tasty. It's not bad. It's definitely got a medicinal note. to it. Yeah, it does. I find it to be really medicine-y. And if you didn't tell me that this was the Coca-Cola recipe, I wouldn't have known. It tastes like, it tastes fruity. Yeah. It does taste a little fruity. Ben says the flavor is like fruit loops. To me, it's more like orange-flavored baby aspirin, which means we failed, right? We made the recipe. You would never mistake it for Coca-Cola. But then it occurred to us, maybe the original version of Coca-Cola did not

tastes like Coke today. Charles Candler, that guy who was taken into the Holy of Holies to learn the secret recipe from his dad, wrote this, the Pemberton product, that is the original product, did not have an altogether agreeable taste. It was unstable. It contained too many things, too much of some ingredients and too little of others. The bouquet of several of the volatile essential oils previously used was adversely affected by some ingredients. That, that could be the lime and baby aspirin flavored mess that we had just tried. But there was another possibility. The soda guys thought that technology has gotten so much better at extracting flavors like orange oil and lemon oil from fruits in the last 125 years.

It's possible that all our ingredients are much, much stronger than Pemberton worked with back in 1886. David, Dave. David, it's Eric and the rest of the gang at Jones. So Eric and Mike called the flavor company that they're working on with all this. It's a company that specializes in beverage flavors called Sovereign down in Orange County, California. and asks if they could do a version that tones down the citrus and other flavors. Maybe reduce some, I don't know, maybe 5, 10%. Okay, got it.

Chemicals are all over here. A few hours later, we have flown south to Los Angeles. We are in Sovereign's Lab, a room that smells like you're inside of a bag of jelly beans. And we do a second taste test. All right, so we've got the revised cola on the left, and then Coca-Cola on the right. In the lab with us and Mike from Joan Soda, were David Ames, who runs the flavor company and his staff. Going with the idea that our essential oils were much stronger than Pembertons,

they ended up cutting the amount of flavor in half, and then they tried it, and they thought, oh, let's cut it in half again. Hmm. What do you think? It's interesting. It's definitely more mellow. But also the flavor profile is almost at the same intensity as the Coke flavor profile. I feel like you guys just knocked off Fort Knox.

We all look at each other, like, what had we done? How close do you think you are to the taste of actual Coca-Cola now? You know, I would say, probably, what, in a scale of 10? We're probably around 9, I would say. Eight and a half, nine. Later I talked to Steve Warth, the guy who did the heavy lifting and converting that old formula into modern lab measurements. He's the one in charge of developing Sovereign's flavors.

He says the ingredients in this old recipe were no surprise to him. Most of them are the same ingredients you use to make any cola. Orange oil, lemon oil, nutmeg, and cinnamon would be the main ones. I noticed that the nirale and the coriander seemed higher than what I've seen elsewhere. Steve says that if we ever decided to match Coca-Cola the way it tastes today. Lots of things about the formula are widely known. We'd have to replace the citric acid in the old formula with phosphoric acid.

That's what modern sodas used. We'd replace the lime juice with lime oil. We'd swap this sugar. for high fructose corn syrup. I know in some of the other flavor companies that I've worked at, we've worked on trying to get as close. We've had customers that come in and say, I want an exact match for Coke.

And they're usually pretty close. So basically this idea of, like, Coke, it's this super secret thing that nobody could crack. From your perspective, that's just like, that's just some very cheerful showmanship on their part. Well, actually, no. It isn't. If you want to go side by side and match it exactly,

that's very difficult and that's not only difficult for Coca-Cola, it's difficult for everything. That's because even if you know that there's, say, cinnamon in a drink, you don't know where it came from, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and that can make all the difference in the flavor.

I asked the flavor guys at Sovereign if they could pick out the real Coca-Cola from our formula in a blind taste test. I'd be able to tell. Yeah, there's probably a good chance that we will, yes. So we marked the little plastic cups which had real Coca-Cola with a sharpie, just a little dot on the bottom of the cup.

The cups with our formula had no dot. Everyone tasted. David, the guy who runs the company, was sure that he was drinking our formula, and then he flipped over the cup and saw... Sharpie. I got a Sharpie. Meaning, he thought our formula was Coca-Cola.

I got a Sharpie. Do you think ordinary consumers would be able to pick out which one of these is real Coca-Cola? You know, I highly doubt it. I seriously doubt that. I think if we would do a blind test right now with a regular consumer, I think we will be able to fool them. Attention to all fair-way shoppers.

Take a moment to look down on your shadow card. You may have the wrong card. If you have the wrong car, please have the wrong car, please and turn to the pocket. Thank you. Ben and I put on lab coats, and we set up a table in aisle 2B of a supermarket one afternoon with bottles of our soda,

that is the formula from the 1979 newspaper article, and Coca-Cola. Taste test time. One of the first people who came up to us was actually a woman who had worked, supermarket tastings herself. Use your smiles. People love to see a smile. And when you get a smile back, that's when you're like, hey, you want to try a sample? Do I have to make the... No, you don't have to. That's what I do sometimes.

So Ben and I smiled. With each person, we would give them our formula first. I taste berries. And then we gave real Coke. Second. It tastes like R.C. Cola. Tecigar? It tastes a really cheap cola. And before we told people what they were, we asked which they like better.

I like the first one better. Probably the second one. Yeah, the second one I prefer. 60% of the people preferred our formula over Coca-Cola. The first one. Though, to be fair to Coca-Cola, the people who said they drank a lot of soft drinks, they always preferred the Coke.

It's better than the first one. And when we asked people to guess which of the two drinks was Coca-Cola, to our surprise, actually, of the 30 people that we polled, 28 could tell which was Coca-Cola. A formula was that different. People saw a family resemblance, though. I was thinking it tastes more like the old vanilla Coke.

It had an after-taste. It made me stop and think for a minute. But I can tell it was somewhere in there or it was manufactured by a Coke. It tastes like weird soda trying to be Coke. There was just one more person that I wanted to taste the soda that we made and look at the recipe.

And that was the Coca-Cola Corporation's resident expert on the history of the product and its early formulas. My name is Phil Mooney. I'm the archivist for the Coca-Cola company based in Atlanta, Georgia. My quick reaction is that it's sweeter and flatter than Coca-Cola. It doesn't have what we call the bite in the burn that Coca-Cola has. Does this seem like it could be an ancestor or relative of Coca-Cola? I, you know, quite frankly, I don't think so.

I told Phil everything that we knew about the recipe, the newspaper article it came from, how it matched a recipe deep in his own archives. He was not impressed. Very, very not impressed. And really, this is not unusual. I can't tell you how many people have come forward over the years and claimed to have the formula for Coca-Cola. I probably have three or four dozen examples of that, and they'll say, well, you know, I knew this old pharmacist. I mean, almost the same story that you told me, and he got this recipe from a friend of, you see, it's a friend of Acer Candler or John Pemberton.

And do most of them have these same ingredients? They have lime and they have Neroli and cinnamon and nutmeg. Almost all of them are very, very similar. if not identical. We went around and around on this. To me, the fact that the recipe showed up over and over gave it credibility. Cokes inventor John Pemberton

was known to have sold the recipe to several different people back in the early days. And the fact that it had appeared in his own notebook in Cokes' archive seemed like the clincher. But Phil said that no, no, that notebook, if we would look at it more closely, was full of all kinds of failed attempts at soda recipes and variations on recipes,

so it was hard for him to believe that the real formula for Coke was stuck in there among that stuff. Could it be a precursor? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Is this the one that went to market? I don't think so.

But we don't know. We're pretty sure. We're pretty sure that the final recipe was not the one represented in that book. I asked him if anybody at Coca-Cola who had access to the original recipe, which he says they still have, actually checked to see if it matched the one in that notebook,

and he politely sidestepped that question, and we moved on. It was all this fuss about the secret formula, but it seems like the basic ingredients of Coca-Cola are actually on the public record. Absolutely. So he put it to him. Was the secret formula really a secret? He said that even if somebody cracked the entire manufacturing process,

which he said they'd have to do and produced something very, very close, Coke has this whole other thing nobody can touch. There's a psychological element to the... this product. We've got a hundred and twenty-five years worth of marketing and advertising and people's memories. Well, in the supermarket, when we were in the supermarket, one of the young women who tasted the product, she tasted an unmarked little cup of Coca-Cola, and she said, that tastes like my childhood. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

That's what, 125 years of omnipresent worldwide distribution and promotion buys you. I told Phil that we were going to put up the old recipe that we found on our website, and asked him if it would be okay with Coke if listeners would try to make batches themselves. All the ingredients and oils that you need are online. They're cheap too. And he laughed and said, yeah, yeah, let them try. They'll come running back to Coke. Coming up, how much does one of President Obama's old spark plug sell for and the search are other historical originals in a minute? Chicago Bubble Radio when our program continues. It's American Life from Ira class. Today's show Original Recipe,

stories of people going to great lengths to find the authentic original item. Today's show is a rerun. We have arrived at Act 2 of our show, Act 2. Ask what your handwriting analyst can do for you. Ask what you can do for your handwriting analyst. When you find an old authentic original, it can, of course, mean lots and lots of money. Jake Halpern tells what happened when somebody stumbled onto a trove of astounding papers, which lots of people thought was worth millions. John Resnickoff buys and sells relics and documents. He's got a sprawling office in Westport, Connecticut that's Florida's sealing history.

Old documents hanging everywhere signed by Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or John Hancock. He's got Abraham Lincoln's spectacles in a file cabinet. And in the middle of the room, as if some movers just dumped it there, something that looks like an old school desk. That's Abraham Lincoln's desk. And why is it sitting here? Good question. I need to get it restored. By the way, $325,000 if you're interested. In a back room, there's Annie Oakley's gun leaning up against the shelf, where Ernest Hemingway's typewriter sits. alongside Franklin Roosevelt's chess set.

It's like what you'd see if the Smithsonian had a going out of business sale. The strangest thing that he bought and sold recently was President Obama's old Jeep. It helped that Obama had mentioned the car in a speech at Chrysler. And I put a little clip of that on a YouTube video. I don't do my best Obama impersonation. My first car was a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I loved that car. It sold for a lot, though John wouldn't say how much.

When the guy who bought it had it repaired, John asked if he could keep the spare parts. He stores them in a closet in his office. I'm not kidding, right? So I guess these are struts. Yeah. Those are Obama's struts. And in the bottom here, I'll grab a spark plug.

There. There's a spark plug from Obama's core. I actually just sold one of these for $500 because it was Obama's. So. Sucker, right? $500 for a spark plug? But five minutes in John's office and you realize people will buy anything

connected to historical figures, assuming it's real. This business, especially their rare document business, can be risky. There are so many fakes out there. So John is a fanatic about authenticity. He studied fakes to see how they're made.

He owns a huge collection of forgeries he bought from another collector and he uses it as a reference. He can sometimes even identify a particular forger. And part of his office looks like a lab on CSI. He's got a special high-powered magnifier called a proscope and a video spectral comparator,

a $30,000 machine used to analyze ink. John's called as an expert witness on handwriting in all kinds of court cases. He's a go-to guy in his field for spotting fake autographs. At the risk of sounding egotistical, everybody in the business who wants an opinion on pretty much any presidential person, the first person they come to is me.

And that's a big change in the 13 years. 13 years ago, that's when John's career all but collapsed in a scandal so deep and far-reaching that people are still arguing about what exactly happened. Even John himself isn't entirely sure. He made mistakes he didn't know he could make, mistakes he didn't even suspect. And for years, he didn't talk about it, until now.

It all started in 1992, when John got a call from a guy named Lawrence X. Kuzak III. Very nice, very friendly guy, and he had some beautiful stamps that he was selling that were his father's or his father's collection. And I remember it included some very nice illustrated envelopes from the 19th century. And I bought them in several batches and became very friendly with him. He seemed to be very educated, extremely well polished, very well dressed. The two of them hit it off. They started to hang out on the weekends. John was engaged at the time, and Kuzak, everyone called him Lex, had a pretty young wife. They'd all have dinner at an Italian place. To John, Lex was a kind of worldly older brother. They started confiding in each other.

In the beginning, he unraveled his military career, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever heard. John had a particular reverence for soldiers. His own dad had served in the Pacific in World War II, and John still talks about the time. when he was eight, and his father took out his arm in uniform, covered in metals and ribbons, laid it out on the family's ping pong table. Ever since John had been sort of obsessed with the military, he'd never joined himself, but he was eager to listen to someone like Lex, who told him he'd been in the Navy, flying F-16s during Vietnam. Lex was quiet about it. John had to pry the details out of him, that he'd been downed in

Cambodia and survived by hiding in a swamp, breathing through a reed. What really struck John, what blew him away, was when they visited the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Lex's sister-in-law had been admitted, so they went down for Pleeb weekend. You know, a very proud group of friends and family. And when Lex came out, he was in a completely white uniform, Lieutenant Commander's uniform, because he was a lieutenant commander,

wearing the hat, wearing the Navy Cross, wearing all the medals on his chest. and there's, you know, 3,000 people there, and they're all saluting him. And he's giving back, if you can imagine my hand going to my head, a perfect salute. And I'm like, wow, I'm with a war hero here right now. And this is my buddy. A few months after they met, Lex got to talking about his father, also named Lawrence Cusack, who died in 1985.

Cusack, Sr. had been a distinguished lawyer. He'd worked for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese New York for many years, and he was personal counsel to John Cardinal O'Connor, the Archbishop. As Lex explained it, he had some pretty high-powered clients. At one point, Lex revealed to me that his dad had worked for the Kennedys, and anytime I meet somebody who has any connection with anybody famous, I'm like, where are the papers? You know, the papers are valuable. Anything he signed would be valuable. And a conversation ensued on that, and he said he'd look.

A month or so later, Lex mentioned something else interesting. Well, then Marilyn Monroe gets introduced into the equation. My father also worked for Marilyn Monroe. And he... Can you just describe how that all that goes down? Well, Marilyn Monroe had a New York residence, too. And he said he did some legal work for her and indicated that there was a relationship that his father helped to hush.

When he tells you this, like, what's your reaction? That's pretty, like, crazy news, right? Well, yeah. I mean, naturally, and I think anybody would have this reaction, you know, the dollar signs are coming in my eyes. I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is, you know, this is a career maker for me. This is the treasure that I've been searching for my whole life.

And now are you starting to kind of tell him, like, can I see these papers? I'm pushing him. I'm saying, go, go look for them. Where are they? But, you know, go get them. You know, go through the files. You don't know what you might be sitting on. You might be sitting on fortunes. Maybe it's hundreds of thousands. Maybe it's millions. JFK and Marilyn Monroe. This was arguably the most storied love affair and cover-up of the 20th century. We've all heard the rumors about it for 50 years.

But it's just that. Rumors. No one ever had any hard and fast. proof until maybe now. He forced himself to be patient as Lex searched through his father's extensive and mysterious files. John can't quite remember how long he waited, maybe weeks or even months, until one day Lex finally shows up at his office with a discovery in hand. He brought in a briefcase into the office and I remember there was a document that

I believe was on a sheet of stationary. that was written in Kennedy's hand, and it sure looked like Kennedy to me. And it basically was written to Marilyn Monroe and indicated some kind of payoff. He agreed to pay something or give her something or set up a trust, I think it was. In other words, jackpot. Agreement made this third day of March, 1960, between John F. Kennedy residing at the Carlyle Hotel, New York, New York, Maryland Monroe residing at 444 East 57th Street, New York, New York, Witnesseth. Whereas a result of a relationship between Marilyn Monroe, herein referred to as M.M.

And John F. Kennedy, herein referred to as JFK, M.M. believes she has suffered irreparable harm to her well-being and to her professional life and career, and that such has been the cause of personal hardship and suffering, which is not possible to measure. MM shall never discuss nor reveal to any persons the specifics of the said relationship between her and JFK. And there were other documents like this one. Lex kept finding them. Letters on Kennedy's U.S. Senate stationary on White House stationary. There were index cards and personal notes.

The documents proved JFK's relationship not just with Marilyn Monroe, but with other sketchier characters as well. This is a memorandum. and I'll read a little, shall I read some of it? Yeah. Monroe will refrain from discussing her knowledge of any meetings or discussions of any kind which may have taken place at which were present, JFK and Gene Kana. Who's Gene Kana? Sam Jean Kana.

The mob boss? Yes. I mean, are you nervous holding these things in your hand for the first time when you're doing it? I'm nervous on a number of levels. I was scared. I'm thinking that, you know, this is really dangerous stuff. How do I handle this? Is this too big for me? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do it right?

And also, what's going through my head is, oh my God, here it is, the Holy Grail. Oh, my God, this is worth a lot of money. In all, Lex on earth more than 300 documents, a whole archive. And John, of course, considered that maybe, like the Holy Grail, it was too good to be true. So he said about authenticating the papers. He went to at least half a dozen experts in the field, not just handwriting experts, but people who specialize in Kennedy documents. But John didn't want the contents of the papers to get out.

He wanted to protect their value, so he sent the experts only a few documents each, or sometimes portions of documents he'd Xeroxed, excluding the juicy parts. And each one, one by one, authenticated them and said they were real. One of these experts was John's mentor and a giant in the field, Charles Hamilton. And right away he looked at it. And this is, if you look at that book right there where it says, the robot, okay, that's all about John Kennedy's handwriting. So here's the guy that wrote the book.

And he looked at it, maybe spent 10 minutes with it, this is authentic and wrote a letter on it. And that gave me tremendous confidence. It's an important moment for me. It's, you know, everyday business for him. because he doesn't know really what this signifies. He has no idea then that he's signing off on the fact that JFK gave hush money to Marilyn Monroe, that there was ties to the mob, that, you know, the amphetamines, all these crazy parts of it. He is just kind of an effect put his stamp of approval that this is a bona fide chapter in American history.

his imprimatur on it meant that everything because everything was from the same archive and existed from the same barrel of apples was authentic John isn't it possible that if you had come to him and said look the stuff that I'm giving you here is red hot this this confirms some stuff that the people don't want to believe and that and some of it is is is kind of incredible that he might have said all right let me break out the magnifying glass and take a little bit of a closer look at here, this is huge what I'm about to do. You know, that I won't concede because I think the way in knowing how a handwriting expert looks at things, either it is or it isn't. So either it was his handwriting or it wasn't. What it said wasn't important. So the papers were authenticated, and John laid the groundwork to sell them.

He enlisted another dealer of historical papers and artifacts, a well-connected guy named Tom Cloud, to handle the actual sales. Lex would get most of the money. Tom and John would make up to 20%, which they would split evenly. They came up with a strategy. They'd quietly sell the documents to Tom Cloud's roster of wealthy clients on the condition that they'd not disclose what they'd bought to anyone for a few years. Meanwhile, John and Tom would find someone to write a book about the archive, which would then lead to a movie deal. Once the book and movie were released, of course, the value of the documents would likely skyrocket, and investors would be happy. Everything started to fall into place, an acquaintance connected them with the perfect writer to publicize Lex's archive,

Seymour Hirsch, the famous investigative journalist who'd won a Pulitzer for breaking the Milai Massacre story. Hirsch, as it turns out, was already under contract to write a book about JFK's presidency, called The Dark Side of Camelot. Quesack began sending copies of the documents in batches, and Hirsch started checking that the names and other details in the documents were consistent with his own research. All of a sudden, a document would come out, and Hirsch would independently verify that there was a name of a doctor that injected Kennedy with, you know, painkillers for his back, and that nobody knew this, and he found out the name of the doctor through somebody who he had,

interviewed, and it would be impossible for Lex to have produced that name, or these names like, or the people who are co-signing the documents or advisors to Marilyn Monroe, that were being verified along the way. There was more confidence. The confidence was building. And this was something they could use to build investor confidence, too. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh is on board and is independently verified key parts of the archive.

Hershey's book would come out in November of 1997. In addition, Hirsch was working on a documentary about the archive in collaboration with ABC. By the end of the summer of 1997, about 140 different investors had made purchases from Tom Cloud. The trust agreement between Kennedy and Monroe had a loan sold for $450,000. At this point, the documents had already netted roughly $5 million. It was all going great. They were making a lot of money. John and his fiancé got married, Lex's wife was a bridesmaid,

and John had a baby boy. Then one day, John's in Cape Cod, and he gets a phone call. August 22nd, 1997, sitting on the beach. What happens then? I believe that's the day. Now, I could have it wrong. It's either August 22nd or August 27th. And I'd like to know what that date is, so I could say that's the day that changed my life.

That's the call I get from Cloud about Lex. being sandbagged by Peter Jennings. Cloud is Tom Cloud, Lex and John's business partner. ABC's Peter Jennings had interviewed Lex for a segment that would air on 2020. Where did the collection come from? The answer lies with Mr. Lex Cusack. My first thought. John and Lex had been excited about the segment.

They saw it as a kind of phase one of their media launch. Were you aware at any time before your father died that he'd done any work for the Kennedy family? No. What became clear very quickly was this wasn't just. a puff piece hyping Hirsch's book. It was an investigation. You might have heard something about it. It became huge news. What happened was that ABC had gotten wind of some suspicious inconsistencies in the archive. For starters, one of the letters from Cusack Sr., which was dated 1961, had a zip code in the letterhead. Turns out, there were no zip codes in 1961. They

weren't announced until 1962. So ABC hired an expert of its own, a former document examiner for the FBI. He did forensic analysis of the documents, scrutinizing the paper, the ink, the type. The examiner found that the typeface turned out to be something called Prestige PICA Selectric, which didn't exist until the early 1970s. And whoever typed these documents had also made corrections using a particular kind of lift-off correction tape. And liftoff tape was not invented or placed onto the market until 1973, a full 10 years after President Kennedy was killed. So this is a blatant forgery by any standard.

Blatent forgery. Jennings takes all this evidence and calmly and methodically presents it to Lex. Lex appears stunned, almost as if he can't process what Jennings is saying. How do you explain that? I really don't know. I don't know. I mean, this is a problem we grapple with often is that, are these the original documents, are these copies that were made of the documents? Are these...

Throughout the remainder of our original... interview, Mr. Cusack offered various explanations for the problems we showed him. But the one that he repeated most often was that the documents we had questioned might be later copies of originals. What he meant by this was never clear. So somebody might have put their signatures on those documents at a later time. I'm not talking about the signatures. I'm not talking about the handwriting. The documents themselves. I'm talking about the typewriter technology. It was not available at the time these documents were allegedly drawn. There must be an explanation of, you know, why those documents exist, if in fact they were produced later.

Mr. Cusack, somebody has forged the documents. It's, I think, quite a lot of, the other experts will not agree. I'm bound to ask you, Mr. Cucet. Did you forge these documents? No, sir, I do. By this time in the interview, there's a pregnant bead of sweat sliding its way down Lex's cheek. He looks desperate and trapped.

If the camera panned out, you'd half expect to see him manacled to the chair. So this is what Tom Cloud tells John when he calls him on that day in August. My heart dropped out of its spot in my body at that point, and it was, oh no. Here's the interesting thing. It's not, oh, no, the papers are fake. Or, oh, no, I've been duped by Lex. It's oh, no, we've told the truth. And now we're in for it because we've antagonized the Kennedys, the one family in America you do not antagonize. Plus, the mob and God knows who else. must be this very powerful family trying to prevent this information from coming out and that

there's no way that these are fake, that these are real, that, you know, Lex is a war hero, he's an honest and good man, and this can't be, and this is a big conspiracy, and we need to get to the bottom of it. The notion of a conspiracy might sound a bit far-fetched and frightening, but it also offered some assurances, at least in this scenario, The world as John knew it remained constant. The papers were still real. The choices he'd made were the right ones.

And Lex Cusack was still his dear and trusted friend. That's what I'm thinking. And, you know, what seems like minutes afterwards, it's a grand jury investigation. John hired a criminal defense lawyer, and the two of them made a trip down to the U.S. District Attorney's office in Manhattan. They met with the prosecutor, Paul Engelmeyer. And even here, John didn't feel safe. We went in, we went in for the proper session. I told my side of the story.

I remember walking into Engelmeyer's office and on his wall was a picture of Kennedy on the beach in hyenas. And that just in my mind was, oh my God, this is a setup. I'm going down because I've revealed the biggest secret of the last 40 years. and they don't want this secret to come out. So somehow they're going to make it look like I'm a bad guy. He's working for them. You know, this is all conspiracy. And all these bells are going off in my head.

During this period, things got pretty dark for John. He began taking medication to reduce his anxiety and to prevent panic attacks. Still, he was paranoid. He became convinced that something terrible would happen to him, that his car would blow up when he turned the key. I'm thinking that somebody's going to kill me, basically. That's what's going to happen, that this stuff was not supposed to be released.

And the one would they, there's going to be an accident. And all this time, John is rehashing the Peter Jennings interview and the inconsistencies with the documents. The typeface and the zip code, the liftoff correction tape. What explained all that? First chance he got, he confronted Lex. We met somewhere. I don't remember where and he was holding his hands in his head. He didn't know what to do.

He'll just give all the money back. Of course, he had spent most of the money then. I did, you know, who did that? Where did these come from if they're not real? How could they be? I did it, he said. You know, I did it. It just got carried away.

He's confessing to you. I forged these documents. He didn't say exactly that. He said, I did it. I'm the one who did it. And I said, what are you talking about? How could this be? How could this possibly be?

What are you telling me? And even, and then he recanted. He said, no, you know, I just said that because it was a moment. I didn't really do it. I don't know what this could be. Maybe it's a conspiracy. Maybe I don't know what he was saying. I don't remember.

But he was equivocating. What especially bothered John was something else completely. During the 2020 segment, Peter Jennings had reported that ABC could find no evidence that Lex was a retired naval officer. I mean, that was a big thing for me, the military thing. You know, if he was this military hero, these can't, you know, in my mind, these can't possibly be non-authentic. When you confront him with this, what does he say?

On one hand, he says, well, it was just kind of a story that got carried away. On the other hand, he said, well, there are things that I can't talk about. Like, the indication to me was, okay, he was, you know, MI5 or that it really was real, but he was like some kind of covert agent and he couldn't talk about it. It seemed believable. Before you scream to yourself, how could he be so stupid? Consider that John's realization about Lex meant dismantling everything he understood about himself.

John's entire career was based on knowing the real thing when he saw it. He could judge the authenticity of stamps and signatures and documents, and most importantly, people, especially friends. In other words, John was no dupe, no way. And not only was there a lot of money on the table, these documents were going to make his career. So while it might sound crazy that he'd believe that Lex was MI5, it made even less sense that John himself,

was a sucker. I would hang on anything that would be a thread that would be, yes, see, I was right. Here's the record of him being, you know, a covert agent for the CIA in military clothing or whatever would happen that would make this whole thing, the whole nightmare end. John's lawyer told him that he had to clear his name, and the only way to do that was to secretly record Lex. He needed to get him on tape discussing their earlier conversation, or Lex confessed and recanted, because that would show the prosecutor that John was innocent. After all, Lex wouldn't

be confessing and making excuses if John were in on the scam. John at first refused, arguing that Lex hadn't done anything wrong. His lawyer insisted. And he said, well, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. But tomorrow, if you don't do it, it's fine, but you need to get a new lawyer. So John did it. His lawyer hired a private detective to wire John's office with a hidden microphone. He and Lex talk for an hour. They're both tense and emotional. Lex leaps from topic to topic, offering one wild, half-baked explanation after another while John tries to pin him down. The thing that I can't get out of my mind is when you can do everything. guilty of you. Oh my God. I've ruined this guy's life. Okay. Well, that's true. Okay. So I'm going,

oh my God. Lex tells John he only confessed in order to protect his father's reputation. He didn't want anyone thinking his father had forged the documents or that his father was somehow connected to the mob. Though maybe his father did fake some papers for whatever reason. And what I was like a mob lawyer and now it's sort of like, you know, I can't let that happen. So it's sort of like, what if you just say, you know, we'll give everything back and the whole thing will go away? You know, we'll just pay everybody back. There was a big mistake. We don't know what caused it.

That was like kind of a nervous breakdown practically. I couldn't figure out what the hell. You know, it was not to shock. You know, what? Lex seems genuinely confused. The only thing Lex essentially admits lying about is his Navy career. He tells John it was more or less a joke that got out of hand until a number of people, including Lex's own wife,

were under the impression that he actually fought in Vietnam. The thing barely hangs together. As for the crisp white lieutenant commander's uniform that John had seen him wearing that day in Annapolis, Lex didn't want to comment for this story. So all I have to go on from him is the TV footage and the wire recording. There, Lex mostly comes across as pathetic. He doesn't show any of the smooth cunning of the Hollywood con man.

Instead, his genius, if that's what it is, is his lack of finesse. If he's conning John, then his disguise is the pitiable friend who got in over his head, and he plays it very, very well. So well that after the secretly recorded meeting, John says he didn't feel relieved or justified. He felt awful. There was an Irish pub like on the street over from my office. And I remember drinking three Guinnesses in like 10 minutes.

And I'm not a drinker. I was like, wow, what did I just do? Is there part of you still believing this guy could be a decorated Navy officer who has the real documents and I'm betraying him? I think there's still like, I don't know why, but like a one-one-hundredth of one-percent part of me that still thinks that. John says the real aha moment for him finally came when an FBI agent told him point-blank that Lex had never served in the military.

In other words, Lex's best move, whether by luck or design, was that he hit John's Achilles' heel. He passed himself off as a decorated soldier. So Lex's deepest betrayal wasn't the JFK papers. It was claiming he breathed through a reed in Kennelly. Cambodia. Lex was convicted in federal court of mail and wire fraud and served nearly 10 years in prison. He got out about three years ago. Seymour Hershey's reputation took a temporary hit, especially after he testified at trial that he quote unquote misstated things regarding his

independent verifications. John was cleared of any wrongdoing, but his life didn't just bounce right back. His business suffered. He had to resign as president at the Professional Autographed Heelers Association, an organization he founded. His marriage, fell apart. The JFK papers nearly ruined him, and it's not surprising. He's had a hard time trusting people since. You know, I definitely have trust issues in my life.

There's no question that I have trust issues because of this. I mean, you know, you get paranoid. Does is Lex my friend because I'm such a great guy, or is it because

I was a foil in his plot to take over the world? Or, or And then I'm thinking, you know, is this person really my friend who really is my friend, another person in my life? And I do do that. And I feel terrible and guilty about when I'm distrustful and I shouldn't be. But it's there.

And I have to temper that all the time. But in a weird way, he's thankful, too. His paranoia made him better at what he does. It was after the Cusack fiasco that he threw himself into studying. fakes and forgeries and made himself so good at spotting them. When I showed John a copy of one of the Cusack documents, he started to analyze the handwriting all over again. It was a document from an archive that had fooled so many experts and that some people in the field, even to this day, argue, is real. He turned the paper upside down just as his

mentor Charles Hamilton taught him to do. So you aren't distracted by the actual letters. You just see the lines, the curves, and the dots. Now, the jays were always different, but look at the jack, for instance, upside down. And just look at the way the spacing and how it's inconsistent and bouncy. It's very, very good. The forgery is very, very good. I have no idea how they were made. No idea.

That, to me, is the big mystery in my life. I don't know how he did it. I don't know how they were so good. I have no idea. Or if he did it. I don't even know that he did it. Maybe somebody else did it. and he pushed them forward.

How hard is it to pull off? How hard is it to pull off what Lex pulled off? I don't think anybody has ever done that in the history of our field as successfully as he did for the amount of time that he did. And how was he able to do that? Shear genius, I'd say. Shear genius. And perhaps Lex was a mastermind.

But then again, we all want to think we can only be fooled by a genius. Jake Halpern, he's the host of the podcast Deep Cover, which does investigative stories about secrets and deceptions. Special thanks today to Scott Mori and the New York Botanical Garden, Emily Heimsoff, Matt Costello, Maggie Ward, Ritchie Valenti, and Margo Helgin, John Nees at Galco's Soda Pop Stop, production help on this rerun from Stone Nelson, Adrian Willie,

Catherine Raimondo, and Ruby Schwartz. Thanks also to our This American American American Life Partners. These are people who subscribe to support the show and who listen to ad-free. They get access to our live events. They get lots of bonus episodes, including a brand new one this week. We're visiting some stories that are suddenly very relevant again because of things happening in the news. To join this party, go to this Americanlife.org slash life partners. The link is also in the show notes. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Toyman. Malatia, you know, in the mailroom this week. I was surprised to catch him opening a love letter that he got from some random listener. This is not unusual. I can't tell you how many people have come forward over the years. I probably have three or four dozen examples of that. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.