Made de san j oh, thanks Sunny sumone on I hadturdays nice. So
nat Hey, everybody, welcome to our Thursday shows. Yes, we have
a guest today that I personally am super excited about. Uh. He's a
journalist, podcaster and co founder of Campside Media. His name is Josh Dean.
And I went after this guy. I tracked him down on Facebook.
I full court press to get him to come be a guest on our show.
Hi Josh, Hello, thank you. I'm happy to have people drop
into my DMS and ask me to do it. Oh nice, I was
telling Lynette. I remember it was like a long time ago. It was
when I watched the documentary the Alisa Lamb the Hotel Cecil documentary. Scene yeah,
crime scene is what was called? Yeah, Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel
crime scene colon Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, Well we just call
it the Cecil Hotel Documentary. And Lynette and I are obsessed and we watched
that documentary and I was like, there's this guy on there, Josh Dean.
He's cute. I looked him up and he knows like everything about this
case, right, And I was like, we got to get him on
the show. And that was way that was a lot a long time before,
and I think I looked into it and I was like, oh,
and he's behind a lot of podcasts that we like. Because Lynette and I
love podcasts. We've been doing we've been recording this podcast, which started out
as a parenting podcast, but we started podcasting like fifteen years ago. Literally,
Oh, you guys, we're ogs and we love the narrative podcasts.
We're always looking for new ones to listen to. Yes, well, that's
our specialty. So I'm glad. I'm happy to talk about it for as
long as you want. I'm probably more than you want to know. So
okay, So your newest one that we are plugging today is called White Devil.
I am up to date on this. Tell us, how did you
get involved in this story? This one? It's an unusual one for me
because I don't usually do like torn from the headline stuff, like the sort
of zeitgeisty tabloid stuff, and that's what this was when I first heard about
it. But it was during the pandemic and a friend of mine. I
don't really know what we were doing. We were just looking for a project
to sort of kick the tires on and he sent me this headline and I
was like, oh, so you know the term socialite was used shoots cop
in Belize and I was like, well, I don't know much. I
have been to Belize once on vacation. I don't know much about the culture
or the crime, or anything about its elite or or various social classes.
But the premise of it was really interesting. It was that a white woman
of privilege, or seemingly of privilege, had been alone on a pier at
night with this black cop, fairly senior cop, and he ends up dead.
And there's no other suspects or witnesses. So as like a mystery,
you know, it's like a knives out type closed door mystery. It wasn't
indoors, it was outdoors, but there were no other plausible suspects. The
problem is, and I say problem, I've now spent three years on it,
so obviously it wasn't that big of a problem. It was pretty clear
to me that it wasn't actually a mystery. That circumstances almost an evidence,
and even the police, the prosecutor, weren't really making a case that it
was murder. It seemed to be an accident. Of course, even that
is a bit of a mystery, like how does that accidentally happen? But
what pulled me in was that everything that I expected to transpire did not happen,
in fact, the opposite of what I thought was going to happen.
So this woman was married or common law wife of a very very powerful person,
and you would expect it's the sort of thing where if this thing makes
the news, it's quickly buried or it goes away. She walks away and
everything is totally fine, And in fact it sort of sets off sets in
motion a series of events that leads to this incredible I mean fall, I
guess, but it's more like I describe it sometimes as the worst divorce story
you've ever heard. It's actually way worse than that. But it's it's a
kind of family drama masquerading as a crime story. And I don't know,
I just got fascinated with it. And it's strike I said, It's not
a typical story that I would do, but that's it. I got really
interested in the third world and financial colonialism and power and influence and all these
things, and that's often what happens. I like start with an interest in
one thing and then end up falling for something else. Well, it's a
really interesting story and it has a lot of pathos that you wouldn't expect on
the surface of the story. Yeah. Sure, but she's not the most
likable. No, it's it's you know, it's an interesting Yeah, it's
here to tell you that, but yeah, like I really want to like
her, but she just sometimes says and does stuff that I'm like, Ah,
there's no hero in it, right, it's certainly like a anti hero
story because it's not someone that you would root for. And however, this
sort of opposing forces are far more malevolent and terrifying, and I think,
well, we're not up to the ending yet. But the point we try
to make at the end is that, like, she's not even well liked
necessarily by a lot of Beligians who started rooting for her because she represented something
that they're all really familiar with, which is that like, if you have
no power or agency, the institution is just due to you what they want
to do. I mean, of course this is not unique to Believes,
but it's way more on display in the Third World than it is here.
Well, not for long, I know, let's not go there. Yeah,
so you're still are you still currently working on the story. I think
it's so interesting is that you're a journalist. Yeah, like what your life
is like and how if you get involved with these stories, you can't just
make a podcast about it and go okay, have a good Like you're working
on things for years. Yeah, you said three years you've been working on
this correct? Three years since it started? Yeah, I mean not,
you know, obviously not full time because I'm part owner of this company and
I executive produce other people shows and I work on other projects. But yeah,
for the most part, it's been part of my life for three years.
And before that, Hooked was part of my life for three years.
I mean the clearing was two years. Now. They overlap, like Hooked
was still going on as I started this one up, and we did Hollywood
and Conqueen at the same time as Hooked, and like Crime the Cecil Hotel
project was right when the company was starting up. So I'm often juggling things,
but this was the major project in my life for the last two years,
certainly, and you know, we didn't know how long it would be
and how long I would work on it. As you might imagine it was
legally pretty challenging. So the last six months have been very intense lawyering.
Wow. Yeah, I guess you would need a team lawyers. Wow.
Let's can we talk about Hooked just for a few minutes, because I of
course love that podcast. It's so good for all of our listeners. You
know, I've talked about it before. It's about a I don't want to
spoil it, but it's a it's about two people that are robbing banks,
and there's that one talk about pathos a lot behind the scenes, drug addiction,
alcoholism. Did you get you got close to those to that guy too,
right? Yeah? So that was you know, it's similar to this
one in the sense that it was a headline that I was drawn to I
had seen. I was actually looking for a bank robbery story for reasons that
are too boring to even explain. But what I was looking for was a
objectively successful one. And I saw this story from the Seattle Paper about a
guy who'd robbed thirty banks in fifty two weeks or fifty four weeks, I
think, and I was like, WHOA, that's got to be some kind
of record. And it really didn't mention much at all about his story,
and so I wrote to him in prison. His name was Tony Hathaway,
and he wrote me back, I still got I read from the email on
the show, I think, and I've got it somewhere, and it was
like a real sucker punch of an email because he was like, I don't
know what you know about me. I was an engineer at Boeing, I
hurt my back, I was prescribed oxy conton you know, so on so
on, and I ended up addicted to heroin and I started robbing banks to
pay for my drug habit. And he doesn't mention his son in that email,
but I was like, WHOA, that's not the story that I thought.
I thought I was gonna write like a fun romp about this guy who
robbed a bunch of banks and was just good at it, because I I
largely considered bank robbery, I mean, not always a victimist crime. He
didn't carry a weapon, obviously, people get hurt all the time, but
you're stealing money from you know, insurance company basically, or the US government
or whatever. I did not know that that was going to be my almost
three year trip into the opiate epidemic, which is in the way that White
Devil is really a story about power and colonialism and what it's like to be
someone with no with no power facing sort of ultimate power. That was a
story about the opioid epidemic, and it just so happened to be about a
bank robber who provided a really I don't want to say fun way in but
at least a cinematic way in the opposite. Like you, you can't help
it root for this guy even when he's getting ready. When he tells you
the story of getting ready to rob the bank, you're like, oh,
I hope he makes it. Oh God, I hope he gets away with
it. Yeah, And I haven't even said the worst part yet, because
it's he is really likable, and yet he robs the first bank with his
son, who goes to prison and Tony does not. So if I just
told you those facts, you'd probably be like, I don't like that guy
at all. And yet you hear his story and it's very hard not to
root for him. I mean, you know that he's been to prison and
come out, so it's not like he didn't pay any kind of penance for
his crimes or his sins, and he feels very guilty about it, obviously,
but the story of him and his son is just a gut wrenching because
his son also got addicted dopey. It's unrelated. It's not like they were
using drugs together, So it just happened like that was the Well, ultimately,
yes, but not at first. So when Tony, Tony doesn't know
his son is addicted until he finds out that he is, and then his
son doesn't know that Tony's addicted until he finds out, and they're both on
parallel tracks headed for disaster. They each realize that the other is an addict,
and then they begin to I mean, as they explain it, each
of them was worried that the other one would die, which I think is
a fair thing to worry. So they felt like it's better for us to
be together using I mean, and certainly not everybody. He's a likable guy.
I got messages about people who were like, how could you do that?
But he to this day will say like, I felt like my son
was safer with me than on his own on the streets. And you know,
in the logic of that moment, I think we even said in the
show, like that's what good parenting looked like to him at the absolute rock
bottom of his life. And luckily it has a happy ending because they're both
still alive and could have ended a lot worse. So great. One of
the things I found really interesting and real about it was his both of their
struggle with sobriety, and you know, there were times where you thought,
you know, he got it together and he got help and he was sober,
and then you could hear it in the interviews. I remember there's this
one moment in a in one of the episodes that's like later in the series
where he sounds slurry and you're talking to him and you're like, well,
we're not really seems like we're not addressing the elephant in the room. Is
that he sounds a little like Annonicole Smith right now. And then eventually you
tell us, yeah, that he was started drinking again. It came out,
yeah, so you know in the moment. I don't remember how long
it took me to realize it. Obviously, when I listened to the tape
afterwards, I was like, this is so obvious, and you're not the
first person who's like, oh, you couldn't tell. And obviously ultimately I
did, and we started talking about it. But yeah, he fell off
the wagon, and we have to remember, so he gets out of prison,
he's just kind of getting back on his feet, and then the pandemic
hit, so he really had no chance to re ender society at a normal
time, and so there he is stuck at home and actually his son is
living with him at that time too, and later his grandson too, and
I think they didn't have jobs and they just started drinking. Yeah, and
obviously he's got to dig to personality clearly, and alcohol became a problem and
almost almost killed his on, Like, I think he got really in it.
And then his son quit Cold Turkey Tony did two. I mean the
third time he's quit Cold Turkey quit. Well, no, I guess Heroin
was in prison, soeah forced to quit. Yeah. It's so interesting though,
the personality type that would come up with the idea of robbing a bank
and then do it because it seems really scary and I'm a risk taker,
but I'm a risk taker with anxiety, So I always when I hear stories
like that, I'm always like, how do you like? What's that moment
when you're like, Okay, I really think I have this worked out,
but I'm really going to just walk in there, Like I feel like that's
like diving off of the highest high dive. So could you know mad respect
to people that go through with it, well yeah, you know they were
that addicted to heroin and running out of money, and I think just realized
we could do this, like I mean, and that's the when people ask
me, like why was he so good at I mean, he was an
engineer, right, he was designing airplanes before he became a heroin addict,
and so he just sort of solved it like a problem and thought, well,
you know, if I make it really quick, that's the most important
thing. I got to get in and out as quickly as you can,
and you think about like what could go wrong, and try and plan for
those eventualities, like well, you don't want to pull out and immediately be
in traffic, so you don't go at rush hour. You want to make
sure you're near I don't mean to be giving bank robbers less, by the
way, but make sure you're near like a highway, so that when you
get on a surface road you don't have to go very far and then you
kind of kind of escape. You know. We think that most bank robbers
get caught, and I think they do it's because they're acting in desperation.
They're not usually thinking like I need money so badly, but I'm going to
spend three days working this out. They're just like, I need money really
badly, and I have a gun, and I'm going to walk in there
and take it, and then of course they get caught. It's as Tony
explained it, it's not actually that hard. But of course the flip side
of that is there's not a lot of money to take, so it's not
that hard to steel. Like he was getting two thousand and six thousand,
ten thousand dollars, which would cover his addiction for like a week or two
and then and that's why he robbed thirty banks, not because he loved it
so much if he had gotten like a million dollars the first time. But
the tellers don't, for a good reason, don't keep a lot of moneys
in the drawer money in the drawer, because then they would get robbed more
often. So it's actually the banks have put in place a lot of defenses
to keep people from robbing banks often. You know, like you're not going
to walk out of there with a lot of money and you're probably gonna get
caught unless you're very careful. And he even he knew like okay thirty times,
like I'm not going to get away with this forever eventually, and it
saved his life, honestly, like he to this day is thankful for being
arrested. Do you still keep in touch with him? I do not as
often as I would like. I mean, there was almost a really happy
ending to that story, and that like six months ago I heard from him,
and he had been applying to Bowing over and over again since he got
out of prison, and I again, I think I may have said this
in the last episode. I was like, that would be the greatest ending
to the story if Bowing hired him. I mean, Bowing could use some
good pr let's be honest. Yeah, things have not gone well for Bowing
over the past couple of years. I was like, what a great story
if they like hire this guy back and say, like we believe in second
chances. And he fell victim to circumstances that were not entirely in his control,
but unfortunately he got through I want to say, like two rounds.
And he asked me to write a recommendation and I did, and then they
ran a background check on him. Yeah, but of course, like he
was honest in his interview. It wasn't like he went in there and was
like, please explain this gap in your resume. He's like, let me
tell you the story, and apparently he started telling it and they stopped him
at one point. They're like, thank you for being honest. But then
of course they hired this outside agency firm to do the background check and then
they put forward a recommendation. And I guess that gets to Bowing's lawyers and
they're like, whoa wait, this guy's like a felon and was a drug
egg and rob we can't hire him. And he's like, but I was
honest. I think it's it's a situation where or the system just couldn't make
an exception for him, no matter what the manager who wanted to hire him.
So that was a real bummer. I don't know, this was like
six months ago. I don't know if he's found a job since then.
I was really hoping that would be you know, I feel like I don't
know what, you know, having a previous drug addiction or robbing banks has
to do with how good you are at being an engineer, you know.
Yeah, No, it doesn't have anything to do with that. I think
it has more to do with what we as society, Like we tell ourselves
that people make mistakes, and they do their time to serve, you know,
to sort of pay for those mistakes, and then we forgive them and
we let them back into society. I don't think that's actually the truth.
It's very hard for people to overcome that scarlet letter. I mean, it's
a lesson we could probably all learn, which is like, you shouldn't be
judged on the worst day of your life or even the worst year in his
case, because I've spent a lot of time with that guy, Like he's
a good human being and you know, certainly didn't deserve what happened to him.
And I I'm not saying we should hand him the greatest job of all
time, but if he's qualified for a job at a company where he used
to work successfully, why not hire him again? If he's just because he
did something bad and served his time. So it's a bit of a bummer,
but I'm sure like lots of people listening to this who will not lots
However, many felons you have in your audience are probably like, tell me
about it, man, Like it's hard, you know, I don't know
if you guys are big with felons. All felons, all of them.
They're all doing time. Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be
right back. All right, Okay, Yeah, that guy, though,
is so he is so he comes across as warm and intelligent and like somebody
you'd want to be friends with. And I think that's I mean, it's
not the only thing, but it's important when you're telling a story like that,
which is really like a character study of this guy's life completely, I
would say, like the similarity. My projects are all so different, but
three of them I put Conquein aside for a minute. We haven't talked about
that yet. But yeah, well one project that kind of serves it's like
its own specific use case. But Hooked, White Devil and The Clearing are
all shows where I met a person. I spent a long period of time
talking to that person, and that became the back bend. The bone of
the story is this like trust between subjects and journalists that led to this narrative.
Seeing a narrative in a way that I wouldn't normally have seen it,
Like, you know, you could kind of only tell Tony's story by talking
to him for a really long time. Same with April and the clearing,
like she has to let me into her world and be willing to tell me
everything about her past, And then the same with the Clearing, which what
was that story again? Her dad's a serial killer? Yes, yeah,
yeah yeah. And in all those cases though, it's really about like I
spent so much time talking to someone that I got to see a side of
the world that I wouldn't have seen of their life that I wouldn't have seen,
and like, you know, to go to I double for a second.
Whether or not you like Jasmine, it's hard to argue that like what
happened to her was not incredibly unjust and almost unbelievable, And the fact that
she is unlikable explains how she survived, right. I think only someone who
is like that much of a scrapper, who has like not really cared what
people think of her could have made it through what she went through. And
Tony's case, only someone who is that like likable and kind and decent could
tell the story that he told to me, including using heroin with his son
and robbing a bank together and have people not be like, oh yeah,
fuck you man, Like I'm not gonna feel sorry for you. Your son
went to prison and you didn't. He did. Ultimately, Well, so
how what is your process like finding these stories to do podcasts to do you
know, I know you're you're a journalist, but like, tell us how
what what do you look for? What's your process of like finding your next
project. I'm sort of stuck in that process right now. I don't have
something to do that won't happen project. It's I'm a bit of a generalist
or no, I am definitely a generalist if you think, like you know,
the Clearing was about serial killer, but Hooked was about bank rubber and
a opiate epidemic. This one's about sort of financial corruption in a sense.
And like con Queen's about a con and I wrote a book about the CIA,
it has much more to do with like And this is what makes this
question really hard to answer, even though I wish it wasn't because then my
life would be like I have a lot of easier time picking projects. It's
like they almost find me, which sounds like a dumb cliche, but it's
sort of true. Like I really never thought that I was going to do
the story about Jasmine Harden and the Ashcroft family. I never thought I would
do a story about this guy in Seattle who robbed thirty banks. It's something
a headline or a detail. And this is the case of the clearing too.
Actually, because I had read a headline about her father. This is
April Vlascia Edwards was her maiden name, her father being this serial killer who,
you know, according to the story I read, had maybe murdered dozens
of people. I was like, Oh, why don't I know who this
person is? And then I look into it and I find out, well,
he may not have actually done that, but there's this cop in Montana
who's obsessed with him and tried to blame him for all those murders. So
I just started like poking at it, like digging a little bit, and
I got really interested, originally in the idea that there was this cop who
had an obsession with this murderer, and that maybe that cop had completely lost
his mind and was actually trying to blame him for things he didn't do.
I was like, what a crazy story that is? Like a cop was
trying to assign murders of someone who didn't commit them, even though he did
commit some murders and is already in prison, so we don't really need to
like prove that he's a terrible person. But in the process of doing that
one I'd reached out to April, his daughter, who was the person who
had him arrested, and she'd never spoken to anyone and just was at the
right place at the right time and felt like she wanted to start opening up.
And then we started having these conversations and she was like, would you
work with me on something to try and figure out what my dad did do
and what he didn't do, because she had also been grappling with this cop
trying to say her dad was the worst murderer. I mean, it's bad
enough that your dad is a murderer and that you had him arrested, like
plenty to deal with there, But then if there's someone out there saying,
like he also murdered all these other people, and you're like, I'm not
sure that he did, but I'm also not here to say that he's a
good person. Like what a strange conundrum that is for a child like my
dad is a terrible person, and I helped get him arrested. But he's
not as terrible as this person is saying that he is. Like, it's
not like she was trying to clear his name, right, she was just
like I just wanted the truth to be out there, which I guess is
like the commonality in those three stories anyway, Hooked, White Devil, and
the Clearing or that they're all like an attempt to correct a narrative that exists.
You know, which is right. You know the story of jas and
Harten, if you believed it was that she would just kill this cop on
purpose or even if it was an accident, then tried to get away with
it, when in reality that's not what happened at all. Hooked, it
was like, oh, yeah, he robbed thirty banks, but you need
to know his backstory. And with the Clearing, it's yeah, April's dad
was a serial killer. Certainly he killed five people, not sure he killed
fifty, And so maybe we're like, we can tell the true story that
makes everybody feel a little bit better, including by the way, the family
members in cases who maybe have decided that he is the killer and he just
wasn't yeah, yeah, that's so true. Right. I have a question.
So with like the Hollywood con Queen, a lot of these stories seem
like ripe for the TV streaming movie adaptation. But if you don't have the
rights to them, like what happened with Hollywood con Queen, why is that
not your show? That's that's a that's a painful one. Well, because
you did the podcast first, correct we did? Yes, yeah, I
mean we do, or I do. Like in the case of the Clearing
was not a campsite show, that was before we had the company. Same
with crime Scene, the a Hotel. So those are my own things before
I had the company, so I would have some portion of the rights.
Now as a company, we we typically have some portion, if not a
controlling interest in the rights, so that we at least are like major players
and any adaptation, it's certainly part of our business. The problem is what
you're thinking of, or what you're talking about, is the Apple TV plus
docuseries about the con Queen in the dock space. There really is no such
thing as right like this as a scripted project. If someone wanted to make
a show called Chameleon Hollywood Conqueen, they couldn't because we own the rights.
They actually also couldn't take our exact story in the way that we told it
and make a scripted project where they change the name like that would be a
violation of our rights. But in true nonfiction doc unfortunately, there's no protection.
So and I'm not saying that the people who did that doc actually were
simultaneously working on it to us, like I'm Scott Johnson, the Hollywood Report
or journalists who they used was on the story too, So it's you know,
you kind of can't own a true story. And what happens often is
if you're not aggressive enough, if you don't move fast enough, and we
didn't, then someone else is just gonna do it and make a documentary.
And our lesson from that was we should be pretty aggressive in the documentary space,
and now we are. You know, we're trying to like simultaneously make
documentaries that come out of the podcast and not just scripted projects because scripted TV
is a crapshoot. We'll be lucky if, like you know, we have
fifty podcasts, if like a handful of those make it to TV, someday
we will be doing well. But nothing has yet with docs. I think
you can have a higher batting average. And I sure wish that one was
ours, because I feel like we we kind of you told this story better.
You told it as more of you didn't give it away right from the
beginning, right, Yeah, and we were also I mean, that one
is a really hard one for us to be. Bro always like, why
don't you make another one like that? That is a really hard one to
emulate because what you heard was actually true. We were reporting and investigating in
real time, which is not a I would not recommend it as a strategy
for making a podcast because I mean, one of my other partners, Vanessa,
was co hosting it with me, and she would periodically say, like,
what if we don't find him, Like what's the ending going to be?
And I was like, don't worry, We'll find him, and she's
like, yeah, but what if we don't, because there's only going to
be eight episodes, and like what happens? And I would say, don't
worry, we will. Luckily we did. I think I just convinced myself
that we would, and then we fortunately did solve it. I'm not convinced
that we still couldn't have made a satisfying show where we got close, or
we left it a little bit open ended, and then we're like, we'll
be back when they catch him. It certainly is way more satisfying by the
end of that show we're talking about don't you think it's weird in that show?
Like? What was why was he doing it? Really right? There
was no direct money that he was making. He was just making other people
spend their money on travel and not reimbursing them. But what was in it
for him? Well, I should quickly describe what he was doing. Right.
You can talk about Hollywood con Queen. For anybody that hasn't seen it,
listen to the podcast. It is behind a paywall, but it's worth
it. If you haven't heard it the first time, I like to say,
yeah, it's part of Sony's binge. It is definitely worth it.
You can also hear another great show of ours called Wild Boys, which is
a favorite. I had nothing to do with that one. It's about a
person and it's not immediately clear whether it's a man or a woman who is
impersonating Hollywood executives and calling aspiring below the line talent. So like stuntmen and
photographers and makeup artists, and like the jobs that like make movies happen,
but aren't famous people that do them. So those are people who are always
like middle class living basically, and it's still so competitive and hard to break
into. And so this person would call up, pretending to be like a
studio executive and say like, I want you to be, yeah, be
the head Amy Pascal saying I want you to be the head hair and makeup
person on my movie. And it's filming in Indonesia and all you have to
do is get yourself there. And I know, like, if you haven't
listened to the show, you're thinking like, oh, come on, like
who would do that? Turns out hundreds of people did it. We thought
it was dozens, and now I'm pretty sure it's hundreds. And I would
have done it. I would have been such a sucker for that. I
mean, as you know, Vesa and I were both freelance magazine journalists before
we did this, So for us, it was really easy to imagine because
like numerous times in my career, someone who I've never met a magazine editor,
or someone who could have been impersonating a magazine editor would send me an
email or call me and say like, hey, do you want to go
to France and interview this person. I'm like, hell yes, and they're
like, okay, well, you got to buy yourself a ticket and we'll
pay you back. And in my experience they always paid me back. But
I did front my own expenses many times, and so I wasn't that weird.
And I think if you don't work in the gig economy in this,
especially in the creative world, like it's not that unusual. It is a
little unusual if you work in Hollywood and you're like Amy Pascal is not calling
the makeup artist, right, That's where it was unbelievable, you know,
or like hiring stuntman Kathleen Kennedy or Stacy Snyder, they're not hiring the stunt
men. They're basically they hired the director and like the lead actors and actresses,
and then other people do that, yes, anyway, putting that aside,
and then that like dozens, if not hundreds of people go. He
was making money because there were people there who were like the cab driver,
the hotel manager were like cutting him in and he operated at such volume that
we do think he made six figures, if not well into the seven figures
but still your question is valid, and everyone to this day asked me like,
even if he was making quite a bit of money, it's still way
too much work to justify, Like like what would make you think you'd even
get away with it? It's so crazy. One day you sit down and
you're like, you know what I'm gonna do for a living. I'm gonna
make up a fake movie and I'm gonna pretend to be powerful people, and
I'm going to hire hire people to go and work on that movie, and
they're gonna pay like one thousand dollars. And if I get one hundred people
to do it, that's one hundred thousand dollars. It's just insane. He's
not passive income for sure, it is he. I mean, you're a
box money. And if you think so, these people are in Indonesia on
the set, you know, he's got to deal with Hollywood people who are
in the Pacific time zone. And then he was like often in England,
we found out later. And so if you think of the time zones that
are being managed and all these different people, like the project management required for
that, like he would have been a really good actual movie producer, a
sociopatht Yeah. I mean it's the amount of volume of work that he put
into it, like writing scripts, right and like sending it to them and
you know scripts, and like multiple cell phones he was. He would be
like four personalities on a given day, like a man, a woman,
a producer, a director. It was like level he had at the same
time. Oh, and there were calls. We have recordings of him being
like the studio ahead that's a woman, and then her assistant, who's a
man. So he would like click, you know, hold for my assistant
and then he changes his voice. I mean it's it's kind of incredible.
But he was sally harassing people too. Yeah. I mean where it goes
from like amusing to sort of disturbing is that, Yeah, he was sexually
harassing men because he's gay. He was also like really messing with people's heads,
like and this is like, you know again to go back to the
gig economy. I think when you think that you've gotten the break that you've
been waiting for forever and it turns out to be fake, it just destroys
your ego and your and your confidence and your sense of self. And I
remember talking to this actor who we didn't put him in the show. He
called me, I think after the show came out, just to like thank
us for helping stop this. And he said he was in his forties.
He was like a really handsome guy. He's like, I I scrapped and
I clawed, and I tried everything to make it in this town, and
I just I just ultimately decided to give up. And I was I was
like, I'm working in a bar and I'm doing fine, and you know,
I've got a kid now, and then this opportunity popped into my life.
And for like a month, I had hoped that like this thing that
I had all but given up, that I thought was never going to happen
to me, finally did happen. And like miracles do happen, and you
do get your break. And then he's like when it turned out to be
a scam, it just completely shattered him. He was like in therapy and
just like had nothing left in confidence. And I felt so bad for him.
And that's where it became like a Haha, it's kind of a funny,
you know, it's a great party story, and like people are like,
how bad really was it? And some of these people were left the
business because of it, or some of these men who were sexually harassed,
who were like sending nudes or who were like doing you know, quote unquote
sex scenes by a video cam, like they were obviously traumatized and hurt.
And then there were like people like Heather the makeup artists as an episode two,
she feared for her life because when she realized it was a scam,
she didn't know what it was right, so she when it dawned on her,
she was in a cab in Jakarta in traffic, in like a bad
neighborhood with a cab drivers speaking Indonesia, and she's like, am I about
to be raped and murdered? Like yeah, and so to her, even
when she found out what it was, she thought like, in my head,
for a brief amount of time, I thought I was going to die,
and then on top of that, I had money taken and I was
exploited, and I feel terrible. But it was more for her, like
there was real trauma done. And then there were a handful of people who
kind of were amused by it, or at least were like, uh,
I'm okay, turned out alright for me. Approximately how many people did he
did he con We think it may be in the hundreds. Wow, that's
insane because by the way, and when he he didn't even stop, he
overlapped. He moved to London and then became a food world scammer on the
side. Yeah, he had a blog. He would go into restaurants and
tell the chef that he was like somebody famous and he was making a Netflix
show and they would comp him food. Okay, like this is At the
same time, I'm like, how did this guy sleep right and get some
ideas? Though we're in a golden age of scams. Anyone out there who's
got a great idea in a little initiative. I think the internet has made
it pretty so easy. I gotta drink more coffee, like get more energy,
Like yeah, you know, I get I have a lot of ideas,
no following through exactly. And also with AI now too, I'm sure
it's like pretty easy to do. It's going to be scary, right because
he had to do the voices. Now he's just going to be able to
get like chat GPT to do the voice right, right. Okay, so
should we break against'say, let's take another quick break. Okay, I want
to talk about the Cecil Hotel. Now, I want to know how you
got into that one. Also, by the way, this just occurred to
me. Have you heard the podcast Killed, which is about it's about I
don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's called Killed. It's about newspaper it's
about like magazine writers and there's stories that get killed and then what the story
was and what happened behind the scenes. I have said it's justin Harmon.
Yeah, I do know it. It was an audio Chuck show. Yes,
that's a pretty good show. You Yeah, so did you? Is
that how you started out? You started as a journalist after college. Yeah,
so I moved to New York to work in magazine journalism, and like,
it was definitely not an overnight success because it was a tough business to
break into, and I worked on staff at various places and then ended up
at Men's Journal, which was a men's lifestyle magazine owned by Yon Winner,
who owned Rolling Stone. Yeah, and I was there for a while and
I got fired. Why he was the best. You know, editors in
chief would change quite often, especially if you worked for Yon Winner, so
you would like he was a very mercurial I mean, he's still alive,
so he still probably is a mercurial guy. He was a little bit temperamental,
so he fired people, and then ultimately I think I had the fourth
editor in five years, and he and I just didn't get along very well,
and so he fired me. And it was one of those like pivotal
I mean really pivotal moment, because I remember thinking, like, I could
go get another job, but really, what I want to do is just
right all the time, So why don't I try and be a freelance writer.
And then for the next fifteen years that's what I did. I wrote
magazine features, including for Men's Journal, because of course he got fired at
some point. Then another one came in and I was back in good graces,
and so I just wrote magazine stories for Yeah, I want I think
fift yeah, fifteen years. Wrote two books and then books. Tell us
your books to see it. What's the CIA book. It's called The Taking
of K one twenty nine and it's about a really Banana's operation to steal a
submarine from the Russian This is true story a sunken submarine that had a bunch
of secrets on it, and the government convinced Howard Hughes to create this elaborate
cover story that they were trying to mine the bottom of the ocean, and
then they built the ship to like basically steal the submarine without anybody knowing it.
It's like one of those like truly stranger than fiction stories from during the
Cold War. Now you're really getting to see how eccentric my interests are,
because when I tell you what, my husband would love this book. By
the way, I'm gonna I'm gonna order it for him when I get home.
What's it called again? The Taking of K one two nine, Okay,
okay? And then the subhit head is something like how the CIA used
toward Hughes to steal a Russian submarine something like I should probably know that,
but I don't remember, okay. And then my first book, this will
tell you there here's like the spectrum of so there's like one about the CIA
and the Cold War. My first book was called show Dog. I spent
a year on the competitive dog shows circuit. I love it to write about
what it was like. It was like, my idea was basically, I
love best in show. I wonder if it's actually like that, and it
really yes, yeah, like parody, but like only with the dial turned
up like three notches. Like all of those people in that movie are like
real archetypes you will find on the dog show circuit. And it was really
fun and and lightning. And you know, my was my son was born
that year, so like my wife while she was pregnant, was getting dragged
around to dog show like she was real patient with me because she spent like
every weekend at a dog show somewhere in the eastern the United States. And
that was Yeah, that was the first one. And then and then it
was mostly just doing books or was going to keep doing books and magazine stories,
and then the clearing came along. And actually right around the time that
I did the clearing is when I started work on that the crime scene,
the docuseries you're talking about for Netflix, which was also based on a magazine
story of mine that I had written for a publication. It was like a
digital what was the name of it, medium? Are you talking about Medium?
Yes? Yeah, so Medium is like a self publishing site though,
so they had a professional arm for a well they Okay, so that must
have been a long time ago, because I went and read your entire Medium
article, which is really long. It's got like six thousand words I think
maybe more maybe more like ten. Okay, it's really long, and it
was so good. And by the way, we I completely agree with your
take on it and have. So we're talking about Alisa Lamb and of Alisa
Lamb, who for people that most people know who that is. But she
was at the Cecil Hotel. She was on vacation and she there was that
famous viral video of her in an elevator looking like with her hands and pushing
all the buttons and then she steps out of the elevator and then she stubspecon
and then they found her body in a water tower above the on the roof
of the hotel. And I know Lynette and I were fascinated with this story
for so long and it was such a crazy mystery. So how did you
get started on that one? Because you got real involved and then you're in
the documentary. But that's a TV documentary. That's not a podcast, right,
No, it's a TV docu. It was a Netflix documentaries four parts,
And I want to know your thoughts of what exactly happened. Okay,
all right, a lot of questions. I'll start with what it was the
premise of it, you know, similar to what I said about how White
Devil started with a premise, which is like what, like, how could
this have happened? How does this one person end up dead? And the
person who must have done it seems like the last person in the world.
This was one where a woman goes missing in this hotel in downtown LA.
It's pretty CD it's like known for transience and like it's not the kind of
place you would stay if you know you knew where you're going. But she
was a college kid from Canada who probably booked it on the internet and had
no idea where she was staying, ends up dead on the roof. Well
is missing for a while, and then it's ultimately found dead in a water
tank on the roof, and the cops say very little to the public,
but they do release this like last known sighting video, which is CCTV footage
from the elevator, as you said, of her like making weird gestures,
and the internet just took it and ran. They were like, oh my
god, she's possessed. It's got to be ghosts or like that. You
know, that's a hotel that and this is true. Two different serial killers
had lived in in the past they were no longer there, including the night
Socker yep, and then a copycat German guy who came pretending to write a
book about like LAPD and in fact use it as a cover to kill prostitutes.
Oh yeah. So it had all of the elements to be an incredible
mystery like supernatural White Hotel. And it was like right at the beginning of
the internet web sleuth explosion, so like read it and unsolved read it on
Soolved Mysteries and web slutes dot com, all these places where people were gathering
to quote unquote solve crimes latched onto this and found all kinds of crazy things
that they felt like, you know, it was murdered, she was set
up, it was the government, it was ghosts. It was like,
you know, a million different theories in my story was meant to sort of
follow the you know again, to go back to all these I mean White
Devil being the most recent example. It's like, what happens if we just
follow the facts of what actually happened instead of all of the stuff around the
xterior that that's painting a different narrative and at least it's all those weird coincidences
though, like what was the word something lamb Like, oh yes, lamb
Alisa was the name of a medicine given to There was a hep a or
hep seb outbreak in the homeless population nearby because La skid Row is right around
the corner. Yeah, and the medication given to them was Lamb dash Elisa,
which is her name backwards. Yeah, there's so many weird There was
a bunch of weird stuff that lent itself to conspiracy theories or like the body
was ultimately discovered because a British couple that was staying in the hotel opened the
faucet and like discolored water came out. And that's also roughly the premise of
the Jennifer Jennifer Connolly movie Dark Was it dark Water? She's staying in a
haunted hotel where dark water porsche from the ceiling and the body is ultimately found
in a water tank. It's crazy. I mean, all that said,
it's when you actually like look at the facts of it. There was no
evidence of foul play. I mean, you know, I don't believe that
ghosts are killing people. Some people might. The footage was almost you know,
it's very hard to confirm as one hundred percent because I couldn't get the
original footage, but it was probably not being played at It was like playing
back at an abnormal speed, so that like behavior that you were seeing in
the video was probably not what it looked like at real speed. Also,
and maybe most importantly, she had psychological problems and had stopped taking her medication.
So very likely. Yeah, I think she was bipolar. Yeah,
which was yeah, which and we've had I mean, I know personally no
people with bipolar disorder and seeing somebody in a manic episode. There's manic episodes,
and then there's sort of like psychotic break within a manic episode caused by
bipolar and it creates behavior that's very similar. I mean, it happens,
yeah, and if you you know, not to give give away the ending,
but I think I think, yeah, if you look at what she
was doing, kind of peering around the corner, looking nervous, like,
it's very likely she believed that she was in danger or someone was following her.
And I you know, I talked to a friend of mine who's a
shrink who's in the show, and he was like, if someone really was
going through that kind of episode and was having a psychotic break of some kind,
truly believe that she was being followed or in danger, ends up on
the roof and sees this ladder. In that moment, you might believe that,
like jumping into that tank is the safest place you can go because like,
no one's going to look for me here. But then, sadly,
what happened when she got in there, she almost certainly couldn't go out get
out, and then there were you know, of course lots of speculation about
her body because she was found either nude or in her underwear, and of
course people thought, oh, sexual assault. Well, if you talk to
like a medical professional who's like dealt with drownings or near drownings, like people
often take their clothes off when they're very cold, even though it sounds counterintuitive.
For one thing, it weighs you down, but also it makes you
feel like you feel like you need to shed your clothing for whatever reason.
And so like it's not weird that she would have done that if she was
trapped in there and ultimately drowned. And so it's just a horrible tragedy of
a woman who had psychiatric problems and stopped taking her medication for better or worse,
had an episode at the wrong place with no friends or family around,
made a series of bad decisions, and died. And it's like a terrible
ending. And I feel horrible for you know, her family, for having
to live through this internet conspiracy meme, right, And you know, it's
like with everything else, you you have moments of existential drama of like am
I doing the right Like are we making people's lives worse by trying to tell
the true story because you're making it a bigger deal. And that series was
huge when it came out during the pandemic, and I'm sure for the family
it was terrible. I mean, I just wrote some stuff at the end
of White Devil that says the same thing about Henry rama, which is like
having this story told publicly is not a thing the family ever wants to hear,
whether or not you know the person you're talking about is guilty you're not
guilty, or whether it's a crime or not a crime if you're close to
the family, or if you're in the family of a victim of a crime
or a tragic circumstance, like the last thing you probably want to do is
have it become widely known publicly, and obviously as journalists we have some culpability
in that. I feel like you wrote about that a lot in the Medium
article, which you can read for free, by the way, if you
just go to Medium and look up Josh Dean, or look up the Elisa
hotel or look, you can read that whole article. And you really do
grapple with that in a I think, I think in a very sensitive way
of like what is your responsibility? And are you making things worse? And
you know, what is what is the point of all of this? You
know, we I have those feelings all the time. Like I said,
I just had them again, and as we recorded the finale of White Double
the other day, I like felt we had to I felt like we had
to write a new ending to accommodate it because I just needed to be said,
and in that one, especially because I just think if I you know,
if that's if you're in that family, it's not so much even though
I'm sure this is terrible, like that it's widely covered. I mean,
there's certain murders and cases that are just widely covered and there's nothing you can
do about that. It's the fact that she was like almost a meme and
that people were like saying these crazy things in the family. It's probably like,
no, she was she had problems in this. You know. The
explanation is not that it's not that hard to solve. Why are you saying
that there was ghosts or why are you saying it's a serial killer? Why
are you? And the fact that the people on the internet who try and
solve these crimes don't have those feelings, I think I don't. Rarely are
they thinking, Oh, I wonder if this is upsetting for me to say
that, like ghosts killed this family's daughter, right, Like I more like
I'm the only one who sees the truth. And you know, as a
journalist you're trying to only tell the truth at least hopefully, but I'm not
sure it like makes families feel any better. That's gotta be tough, Yeah,
I think about that when I watch crime documentaries that think about the family
and how they must feel seeing, you know, their story of their loved
one being told. It's gotta be hard. It's you know, very popular
genre and like I'm certainly not here throwing stones, Like I have a company
that has done plenty of crime stories, and we try and you know,
at least have layers to what we're doing, like to make sure that you
know, it's not just about the crime. If I think about the clearing,
which is the thing I've done that's probably the most like it's about a
cerracill, right, I think that's where people get the most uncomfortable. It's
like, oh, the Ted Bundy tapes. We're like treating Ted Bundy as
entertainment. This is pretty horrible. And the clearing is the one where I
probably felt the most like is this something I want to do? But because
I was working with the daughter of this guy and the person who ultimately led
to his arrest, and she was kind of the one driving the project in
the sense that I wasn't like, hey, come, I did ask for
an interview, but I didn't say, hey, let's do a project together
where we set out to like tell the true story of what did or did
not happen in your father's life. It was her very much wanting to know,
like the life I thought that I knew was kind of a lie.
You're a journalist, maybe you can help me like write my own biography,
which I think is how I would describe what that project was, and so
I felt like, you know, it had a redeeming quality to it because
she was there. If it had just been me, it starts to become
a little murkier of like, eh, what am I trying to do here?
But when we do projects, you know, Suspect, which my partner
Matt Shared did like our biggest show ever. Again, the premise of it
is like a true true crime catinet it's a murder at a Halloween party.
Who committed this murder? In reality, what it is is a story about
wrongful policing and the fact that the person sent away for that murder for four
years about charges was the only black guy at the party, right, it
was all white people and one black guy. He's the one who goes to
of course he didn't do it. And the guy who will certainly did do
it walked out, was able to keep his phone, you know. And
so on that project, we didn't set out to like do this like Twisty
who done it? It was more like what went wrong here and what can
we do to try and point the finger at the right person or who we
think is the right person? And actually that you know that project led to
Emmanuel the wrongfully well not convicted, wrongfully charged. He's now suing King County
for millions and I hope he gets it. And what's the name of that
podcastspect Aspect? This is the thing three seasons now, I think that was
season one. Okay, So Lynette and I, I'll speak for both of
us, we originally liked true crime a lot. But the things that we
like about true crime are what you're talking about. It's the human story behind
it. Like I do not like or care for anything that's just about serial
killers, or I don't. I don't really anymore listen to like sort of
the one offs that are just about, like you know, I don't.
I don't want to hear just about a murder. I want we want to
hear right, like the humans story about it, the psychological part, the
people involved, the police stuff, all the stuff. And I feel like
all almost everything that's in your catalog is like right up our alley. That's
why we were so so tell tell us more more of your titles. Well
just quickly on that point. I'm glad to hear you say that that's like
what that's our We try and when we pick stories, do the stories that
you know. Obviously they need to have commercial appeal. We want people to
listen to them in large numbers, but we hope that there's some layer or
layers beyond that, which is, you know, either we're doing some good
by telling the story in eversially it hasn't been told before, or you know,
from a perspective of someone who's like someone you do want to root for,
or or like you know, in the case of hook, we're talking
it's really the story they will be an epidemic just happens to be about a
bank robber, because if it was just the story of you know, some
hopeless addict, you might never listen to it. Even though we can argue
about whether you should or shouldn't write, like if it's too bleak, you're
just like, I don't know that I want to go there, So I
don't want to say we trick people into it, but we try and find
stories that, you know, in the case of Suspect, for instance,
like the reason Matt did that is because Emmanuel the wrongfully charged black man wrote
to Mat because Matt had written a story for Atlantic. I think about touch
DNA and how it's kind of bullshit and all these cases have convictions have gone
through with expert testimony based on touch DNA, which is the idea that like
if you pick up a coke can, some amount of your DNA is on
there. Turns out to be like wildly speculative in most cases, and it
flat out wrong. And so Emmanuel in prison, stuck there in King County
jail, wondering like how do I get out of this hell? Having to
pick up that article, wrote to Matt, and we all get these letters.
And of course everybody in prison is innocent, right, I mean,
that's like almost unanimously to They'll all tell you that they're innocent or not innocent,
but enough of them are that if you pay attention sometimes And in that
case, Matt did started communicating with the manual, read a little bit about
the story, realized like this guy did definitely did not do it, and
like what the hell went wrong? And like that's one where the story kind
of found him in the way I was describing earlier, and some of our
other stories, like, I mean, another very successful show we did because
called Devil in the Ditch, which was about a woman Larryson Campbell's her name
from a sort of southern Gothic town in Mississippi, and her grandmother was killed
and they always suspected that someone in the family did it, but that person
was never charged. And she goes back to kind of like dig up old
ghosts in her family, and it's like, is it a good idea to
try and solve a murder inside your own family or not? I think the
jury is out. If you asked her, depends who in her family you
asked whether that was a good idea or not. But again, really interesting
with some of them, maybe not all of them. Or you know,
our other the show that won podcast Atcavey that sort of the best picture of
podcasts two years ago is called Wild Boys. It's also in the Chameleon Yeah,
yeah, great, loved the Chameleon franchise. There was Wild Birdies.
Yeah, but that's the kind of stories that I love. Do you know,
do you remember that podcast Lynnette about the two about the brothers that just
like our turn up and they said that they were raised basically by wolves.
Uh yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they walk into a like a rural
British Columbia town and say, yeah, they grew up in the woods with
no modern no computers, no TV, eating like foraging for calories, and
they fooled this entire town to the extent that like Canada's version of sixty Minutes
profiles the like wild boys of Vernon, British Columbia. And of course it
was not true. Wow, that was a crazy story though. Yeah,
and and that one, you know, that's one we might have done it.
But Sam Mullins very talented host. Sam grew up in that town and
he remembered it, and at some point in his adult life he wasn't He
was not a journalist. He was like a performed spoken word performer comedian,
and that's rare for us because almost all of our host journalists. But he
was a very talented storyteller and he just these were his like the woman who
kind of took the boys in and arguably saved the younger one who almost died
because he was a fruitarian, like living on not enough calories to survive,
and she saved him. And like Sam, she was like Sam's mom's best
friend. So he just had trust of this town to tell the story of
what happened, how it got taken, and then ultimately the truth came out.
And then the second half of that series is about what they're doing now,
and that's one where we are in the process of making a documentary.
So hopefully that's that's awesome, that deserves a documentary. It does. And
I sometimes like to say, like, and this is not true of every
show we made, but most of them, it's like the person who's doing
it is hopefully the only person in the world who could really do that story
well, which not in one hundred percent of our cases, but it's often
like you know, Larison's family or Sam's hometown, or that you know Emmanuel
wrote only to Matt or you know, it's like Tony and I was the
only person talking to Tony. It wasn't like people were chasing that story.
And I think that's the barliest buyer to hit, which is like, we're
not just doing this for entertainment. We're doing it because the person who's telling
you has the you know, empathy, understanding skill set to like do it
in the most definitive way possible and hopefully it's a net positive even if it's
about something terrible. Well, you're doing the Lord, Yes, camp Side
Media, White Devil, listen to it. The finale's not out yet.
I think I just listened to episode ten this morning. Leven eleven, Yeah,
okay, ca, okay, and that's the last one. Really really
great series. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. This has
been really interesting and so fun talking. Yeah, all of these are right
up the alley of all of our listeners. Definitely some fodder. I'm MBus
of your studio too. We gotta get some some video games, some arcade
games. Well we don't, thank you, we don't play them. Yeah,
it's there for looks all right, all right, thanks everybody, gosh,
thank you, Okay, all right, thank you guys.