Here's another bonus broadcast runs about five minutes. This will release in about two months on my second podcast, but you get to check it out in advance. Listen like subscribe true stories with Seth Andrews. This one is called The Banjo Player. I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is a true story. Alphonse played banjo in a band, a prison band. On the paperwork, he was known as Prisoner eighty five. In life, he had been a troubled kid and the young man, a cocaine addict and a cheater and an abuser, and ultimately a killer. He was only thirty three when he finally landed behind bars. But in contrast to his lawless life in the free world, Alphonse was a model prisoner. In fact, he demonstrated such good behavior that when he went to the warden and asked for a banjo, he wasn't just allowed the instrument, he was given permission to form his own prison band, which he did. Now did this music endear Alphonse to the rest of the inmates. It did not. He was mocked and threatened and shunned by almost everyone. They hated him, and this wounded him greatly. You know. Inside prison cells, anytime is hard time, long time, so many hours to fill. Felons locked in cages, looking for ways to set their minds and hearts free. In isolation, they lose themselves. Sometimes they find themselves. They read and write, and draw, and paint and study, and in the case of al Beyond working in the prison laundry. His escape was music. He claimed he had written over five hundred songs, including a song written especially for his own mother. Such a strange, peaceful chapter for a guy who had been expelled from school at fourteen for punching a teacher, who would belonged to two gangs, who once shot somebody to death over a craps game and got away with it due to lack of evidence, who had killed another man in a fight over a girl and murdered others after that. In fact, he was so twisted that after he had killed some of his victims, he sent flowers to the funerals. Oh man, If anybody ever belonged in prison, it was this man. But the free world bad Boy was a very different man in prison. He was quiet and reserved and sensitive and often scared of the inmates that hated him, and then something happened that would make his fellow inmates hate him even more. Here's what happened. There was another prisoner who was complaining about pain. He complained to the guard's eye, need to see a doctor right away. The guards thought he was faking, and to punish him, they tossed him in solitary. When they found him lying on the ground the next morning, he was unconscious. A few hours after that, this inmate was dead from bleeding ulcers. He had not been faking after all. And all the prisoners had watched the guards do nothing and essentially killed this man. They wondered if they might be next. They decided to protest. They made a decision as a group, the prisoners would do no work in the yard, no work in the laundry, no work anywhere in the prison. They would all go on strike. All of the prisoners would strike. But Alphonse had been on his best behavior. He had been enjoying the privileges. He savored his banjo and playing with the band on Sundays, and he decided not to join the prisoner's strike, and that decision would result in the longest night of his life. After lights out, he could hear the voices of the other inmates. Hey, rats, we're going to get you. I'm going to kill you. I'm gonna kill your entire family. Alphonse sat in that cell, terrified, listening to the constant threats. The next day, he tried working in the laundry as usual, but there were so many threats, so much harassment, the guards put him back into his cell, and that's where he sat for so very long, isolated and lonely and terrified. In the months and years after that prison strike, Alphonse would survive multiple attempts on his life, including a literal backstabbing which put him in the hospital for a week. And the most interesting part of this story about the sensitive prison musician, scared of his fellow inmates and desperate to stay on good behavior. That man had become famous worldwide for some of the worst behavior in the history of the Chicago Mob. Alphonse Capone and That's a True Story True Stories podcast dot Com