Speaker 1: Since twenty sixteen, we've had this great opportunity to share
conversations with those that have been featured on NBC's The Voice.
But where can we get them all in one place?
Very easy? Ero dot net a r r oe dot net.
It's under that voice. Enjoy the exploration. Nikki. I'm so
fascinated with this because you actually took a step back
into your hometown to go into a storyline that's been
hanging around. It's almost like it's been waiting for you
to come back and do some digging.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I don't know about that, but when you
kind of look back over my life, it definitely does
feel that way. I feel like I was perfectly crafted
to be able to tell this story from a way
that was really authentic, that honored the people who needed
to be honored while telling it.
Speaker 1: There is so much going on inside this story that
I just want listeners to understand that you're going to
experience something and then you're going to turn around at
your own city and look at your city and go,
oh my god, Nikki's onto something here.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was.
Speaker 2: You know, at first, when you hear the story, it's
like it can't possibly be exactly you feel like, you know,
there's got to be rumors, you know, let me just
do some digging just so I personally could sleep at night.
And it took a while before I was able to
sleep at night. Let's just say I.
Speaker 1: Know what research is like, because once we lock in
as creative people and as journalists, we can't let it
go so easily. Sure, midnight comes all too fast, but
man that the imagination will work all night. Did you
experience the same thing?
Speaker 3: Oh for sure.
Speaker 2: When I first decided to tell the story in a
way that really highlighted the damage that it was having
on black women within the community, I had to kind
of really go into the CD under belly, and a
lot of that was police reports and autopsy reports, and
you know, I had to read through them, digest them,
really get an understanding of what I was looking at
and all of the correlation between all the different facts.
And I am not a person who has nightmares. I
haven't had nightmares since I was a child. And there
were many a nights where I was waking up in
cold sweats, crying because all of the research had embedded
into my psyche.
Speaker 3: And it took a long while before those stopped.
Speaker 1: So when you go in there to look at all
of those records and the research that they put into
it before you got there, how do you keep interpretation
out of it? In other words, it's like it's I mean,
it's right there in front of you, but they put
it in a language that it almost feels like only
they know that word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it almost feels like it's by design, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I went into it at first, you know, a
lot of it was foreign and we had to really
rely on partners. I mean, I'm grateful for the network
that I've built through the years, as well as my
counterpart could be your heart. Right away, we had some
legal minds around. We had people who had been in
this work and had seen these things before, so they
were able to really kind of help guide what we
were kind of seeing. But when I was going into it,
I wanted to be proven wrong. I mean, I wasn't
looking into this research hoping to be proven right. I
was really really hoping that we had gotten this all
completely wrong and that these terrible things weren't allowed to
happen in our city for decades.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, that's not with the research.
Speaker 1: Did the city turn a blind eye in other words,
did they sit there and think, God, she's not going
to dig up anything. Nah, she's not going to do it,
and then all of a sudden, here you come, Nikki.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was it was necessary that
they didn't think that I would. I think they thought, unfortunately,
maybe people wouldn't care.
Speaker 3: There was a level of complacency.
Speaker 2: I mean all throughout this story, there were many a
times where people had tried to say something or try
to report this detective or let the ug know what
they thought was going on, and everybody just kind of
shrug their shoulders. And when you understand the environment the
community in which this was happening to, that shrug the
shoulders mentality happens with everything across the board. I mean,
it is a neglected, disenfranchised community that oftentimes the greater
city does not listen to. And so I think they
just didn't realize that times had changed and that people
were now starting to listen to these stories.
Speaker 1: See, this is every bit the reason why these city
councils and police forces need to really take a look
at who's doing the podcasting, because you're not armchair quarterbacks.
When it comes to the department of being a detective.
You guys are physically getting your hands dirty and getting
authentic information that can be used to help free people
from this torture that they've mentally been through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, grassroots is really where you're going to
have the most impact of change, and that is because
we're so close to the problem. Do you really believe
in direct action organizing? When I say we, I mean
our organization that was birthed out of the story, which
is Justice for Windeye.
Speaker 3: And the reason why we go for direct action organizing.
Speaker 2: Is because we believe that the people who are most
impacted by the story should be at the forefront of
the change, at the forefront of telling that story.
Speaker 3: Because we're in it.
Speaker 2: When you get into the bureaucracy of local government and
policing and all of those things, you get so detached
from the actual human impact. It just becomes a job.
It just becomes numbers on a board, and you don't
really realize that these are lives that have to grow
and try to thrive in the community that is really trying.
Speaker 3: To kill them.
Speaker 1: You know, you talked about human impact and the very
second that you introduce us to to defective or detective
Roger It's one of those moments where you go, she's
now identified a source, and every time that I hear
this information, it's going to be that place where I go,
this is not a happy zone, but she's going to
find it for us where we can find out answers.
But why does every town have to have a crooked cop?
And it's like, my god, here we go, mister Roger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the system is really created to kind of be
a safe haven for bad actors. Right, Not every cop
is a bad cop, right, but when you have a
system that glorifies and romanticize the job like we do
with cops, I mean we.
Speaker 3: See it on our TV shows. I mean this is
a true.
Speaker 2: Prime podcast with just birth out of cop dramas, right,
and they become like these heroes that can do no wrong.
And so when that is given kind of the overall umbrella,
you can have these bad actors who really want to
be able to abuse that romanticization of their job so
they can do nefarious things. And at first, I'm sure
it probably starts off small, you know, utilizing your power,
we're in your authority this way and finding out that
nobody really cares, and then you just kind of continue
to push the envelope. And that's exactly what I noticed
Roger Glubski had done. He would try it in small
ways with a number of people, and then would push
the envelope when he could feel like he could get further.
Speaker 3: And the cloak.
Speaker 2: Of that blue line of silence and you know, we
love our boys and blue, he was able to hide
up under that for decades.
Speaker 1: The podcast we're talking about is The Good Friends Untouchable.
One of the things that I have really become, I'll
admit it addicted to, is that I depend on podcasts
like yours to be my news. It's not always about
what is the latest action that's going on on CNN.
It's about going to a podcast like this and learning
about the community of Kansas City, learning about the people,
learning about the history. And I need this and this
is my source of news information.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I believe that's the case for a lot of people,
especially as what we see as news has transformed so
much in the last twenty years, but also as we're
starting to see news in general being defunded and being
controlled at higher levels. Sometimes you feel like the most
authentic stories you're going to get is from the ground,
from the actual people who are living in it rather
than people who are trying to tell it for them.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Nicki Richardson coming
up next, the name of the podcast The Good Friends Untouchable.
We're checking back in with Nicki Richardson. Boy, Nico Quinn
is put in a situation that you and I and
everybody else have talked about. I hope we never have
to see this, but Nico Quinn had to see the murder,
and it's like we all talk about it, Oh, what if,
what if? What if? Well, her what if became reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know that you for me and you.
Speaker 2: You know, we understand kind of the time frame that
that was thirty years ago, but if you talk to Nico,
it's like it happened just a couple of days ago.
It is still something that keeps her up at night.
She remembers the site of her cousin's open face. After
you know, a gunshot hit just went through it. That's
never going to leave you. We are connected with a
lot of members of her family. We did a visual
for a number of the unsolved homicides that we have
then covered while doing this research, and really was able
to stand with the grieving family is that were reliving
that moment right there on that block, and it's just
a really traumatic experience. And I drove by that street often.
Speaker 1: How many walls did Nico hit in trying to find
you know, their own information, because I mean, you came
in there. You have the skills and the talent to
be able to knock down different things. But the thing is, though,
is that you had to have a physical team in
order to start getting some answers here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean she had to hit an infinite amount
of ceilings. I mean you're already going up against a
system that feels like the job is done. You know,
once mont got arrested, there was no need to go
back and look at that case.
Speaker 3: And so she was trying to let people know that
they got it wrong.
Speaker 2: That had no intention of admitting that they had done
anything wrong. There was no technology backs in. This was
not in the era of social media and internet. You know,
I was able to do a lot of my research
from my laptop. That was not something that Nico had
the opportunity of doing. And then the times were just different.
I mean the early nineties when you're thinking about the.
Speaker 3: Crime Bill and.
Speaker 2: You know, super Predators is being labels for the youth
at that time, there was just not a lot of
space given to her. So yes, you know, me and
our team, we definitely were able to pick up on
Nego's work, but it was really just the times that
we were in that was able to allow us to
accelerate the process.
Speaker 1: See, this is every bit the reason why I said
in the beginning that you've been called to do this,
because I mean, it's been sitting here very patiently, and
people need to understand this. This is nothing new to
you that you've actually created a justice foundation, and listeners
need to understand this is not just somebody that's sitting
in a podcast studio or you know, at a at
a broadcasting school try to do a podcast. You you
take this very seriously, Oh for sure.
Speaker 3: I mean I have, I have put the.
Speaker 2: City on my shoulders and I don't know how else
to say it. And I don't even know how else
to respond to the information that I received when I
realized all the different entities in which the story touched
and how it really crippled you know, a neighborhood that
I feel like is my home. I had to feel
like I needed to step up and be a part
of the solution. The fight is definitely not over and
we have a lot of work to do, and that's
why we wanted to build the organization, not just to
repair but what is done in the past, but make
sure this type of crap never happens again.
Speaker 1: Your sound bites are so spot on. Is it connected
to that one thing that you just said, which was
people can't let this easily go. It's not going to
go into a little cavern and it was once upon
a time this happened. It's just it's still very visible
in people's lives.
Speaker 3: Yes, for sure. I mean.
Speaker 2: Groupski comes up. I mean in almost like every community conversation.
Speaker 3: That I have, and we never we never got to
see our justice.
Speaker 2: It was very much interrupted and impeded in another traumatic way.
And so our community is still trying to figure out
exactly what does justice look like for us now and
how do we repair these damages and move forward?
Speaker 1: Does it Nico kind of put each and every one
of us in a position of who would we call
when the unthinkable happens, because many people would freeze on
the spot and not know where to turn.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, and even more so now.
Speaker 2: You know, at first we knew who to call at
the very beginning of doing this work. When I say we,
I mean me and Kdesion, our team of researchers. We
could go to the FBI. I mean yes, we can't
go to our local police because they're very much involved.
We can't trust our local government because they pay for
the police. So we have to go outside. And that's
when you really go to the FBI, to the DOJ. Well,
now we're in a new era to where we're hearing
from those counterparts that they can't work on this case anymore.
And so we're asking that question again, Well, now what
do we do when we can't go to the DOJ
and the FBI. And that's why we have to really
solidify ourselves as a justice organization here online dot County,
because who else can you go to if there's not
forces that is holding people accountable and making sure that
information is being transparent for the community at large.
Speaker 1: Not only transparent, but it's got to be authentic. It
can't be this dang news by kind of a thing
where you know where it's click bait and then we
have well I have to believe it. It was on the
internet not so true, because when you've got somebody like
LaMonte McIntyre involved here, you better get your story straight
for sure.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Lamon Is is such an amazing
storyteller of his in his own right, but he doesn't
have to be a storyteller because he's lived it.
Speaker 3: He's just literally telling you his lived experience.
Speaker 2: And when you recognize that he was he was put
in jel for twenty three years, he was seventeen years old,
he was seventeen years old when he was arrested. His
life was completely taken away from him. And to be
able to see him and stand in front of him,
you can't.
Speaker 3: You can't deny it. And so it really the women
definitely need to be uplifted.
Speaker 2: But if it wasn't for Lamont fighting for his own justice,
he himself didn't even know what he was unfolding. He
himself didn't know all of the inner outs that what
happened to his mother happened to a number of other women.
He was just trying to get free and to have
somebody just that genuinely just trying to tell their story
for no other reason than their own self preservation.
Speaker 3: It's really kind of hard to deny.
Speaker 1: You just said something that was so interesting that it
took my imagination in a completely different direction when you
were talking about Lamont and you said his life was
taken away from him. But the thing is what I
heard was his laugh is taken away from him. To me,
that's the universe speaking saying, you know, when something like
this happens to Kansas City or other community, the laugh
is gone. So therefore lives change. So we need people
like you to step in there to go, all right,
where can we rebuild this? Because if it's not rebuilt
one hundred years from now, this city is still going
to be in pain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: And you know, we were really talking with our elected
officials right now about what exactly that's supposed to look like. Yep,
because there's so much damage. But you know, so Glupski
picked his victims in a very specific way. He knew
where to go to get the most vulnerable people that
he could use and he could manipulate. And so we've
been having conversations with our local government about how do
we repair those gaps within our systems that allowing people
to be victimized, Because when they're vulnerable like that, it's
easier for them to be exploited by people with power
and without power, and so having conversations kind of more
in that holistic way has been a lot more beneficial
than just having a conversation about police brutality, but making
sure that they very much understand that that's a part
of the conversation too.
Speaker 1: When you dig into research like this, do you ever
put yourself in a humanism way of saying, my god,
the description and the pattern that this person shows in
order to get their victims, that's my life. Oh my god,
this could have been me almost definitely.
Speaker 2: You know, like I said, I was raised in this neighborhood.
My family has a couple of homes here in the neighborhood.
I went to school not that far. And you know,
my mother, she had interactions and run ins with Glubski.
She knew who he was, oh boy, And you know
he used to, you know, drive up and down the
street when I would walk home to and from school.
And during that time that I was going to high school,
he was allegedly assaulting a high school student at another
school just down the way. The difference, I think is
how we labeled our young people during that time and
how we just label young people in general, and just
how labels really did break down the stability of this
community by calling it crime Britain and bad.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was considered to be a good student.
Speaker 2: You know. I went to a good school. Yeah it
was in the inner city, but it's one of the
top schools in the and so I'm not the person
you would pick and you would victimize. But if you
go just down the way, there's a bad school that
has bad.
Speaker 3: Kids in it.
Speaker 2: And so when something happens to those kids and they're
trying to say something about it, oh, they're just trying
to get out of trouble or they're just trying to
get that cop in trouble, and so.
Speaker 3: They're not going to listen to them.
Speaker 2: And so keeping that in mind and educating our community
about the harm that that does has been really transformative.
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you about that, because all
of a sudden, when you start turning stones over and
you're on digging some secrets here, you know that that
police department, in local officials, they're gonna be looking at
you saying, this girl is a trouble maker. Let's keep
an eye on Nikki.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been called that in a couple of rooms.
I like to think that I'm making good trouble, worthwhile trouble.
Sometimes you need to make a little bit of trouble,
and I don't mind making this type of trouble.
Speaker 1: So now these secrets that are supposedly supposed to be
buried in my heart, after listening to this podcast, they
weren't buried that deeply. They were there at surface level.
We chose not to look at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was definitely an open secret, see and I
And that's how I realized that there was some there there.
I was at a girlfriend's house and was just having
conversations about the crazy stories that I was hearing from
these women and that I was looking into it to
see what the validity was. And as I was having
the conversation with her, it was actually her boyfriend's mom
and sister were in the other room and they overheard
me mention the name Gulupski and they instantly started whispering
boy and you could just hear the tenseness and their voices.
Speaker 3: Is she talking about? Is that the guy that? Oh,
my goodness, that's him.
Speaker 2: And I realized at this point in time that oh,
he was just really an open secret. Everybody knew that
this was happening, just he was willing to stand up
and actually do something about it.
Speaker 1: Did you use the voice when you stepped into that conversation?
And here this is this is what I hear in
a lot of people that are journalists or even radio people,
is that when you when you're connected to something that
you know, you walk in and just go, so, what
do you know about Roger? I mean, it's such a
it's so low keyds he so tell me everything, you
know what's going on?
Speaker 3: Very much so, very very much so.
Speaker 2: And you know, at first, people would say things behind
closed doors, and it was very much along the line
of you know, yeah, well we knew Roger Glupski was
kind of a creep and da da dada dah. But
as the stories kind of came out, a lot of
people were a lot more vocal about yeah, we all
kind of knew, and you know, we were just kind
of letting it slide. And a lot of that was
because they felt like they were getting something out of it.
As sad as it was, a lot of the women
that he was harassing, he was naming them as confidential informants,
So it was always framed this is what he needed
to do to get the information to get bad guys
off of the show street, and that these women just
happen to be collateral damage in that process. So it
was just a lot of you know, people just kind
of shrugging their shoulders and then now realizing, oh, that
was actually really really bad.
Speaker 3: What we did.
Speaker 1: Where can people go to find out more about what
you're doing? Once again, this is not your first rodeo.
This is something that you continue to dive into all
the time. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're actually dealing with a death and a jail
case right now, a civil rights case, and we're kind
of assisting the family and their legal team as they're
trying to seek justice in that and our organization is
Justice for wind Out. You can find Justice for wind
Out on Instagram and Facebook. You can also just go
to our website at justicefowindot dot org and look at
all of the different cases that we've worked on.
Speaker 1: Please come back to the show anytime in the future, Nikki.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 3: Oh. I appreciate it so much. I look forward to
coming back.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant Today, Okay, you too.