A lawyer, a hacker, a Schechter
Plus fake corn and a doc short
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Organized — specifically, the Chicago “Outfit” in the seventies and eighties.
The story
The second season of Pushkin’s Deep Cover, Deep Cover: Mob Land, starts us out amid the itinerant “retirement” of Bob Cooley, now in his late seventies and renting a room full of V8 bottles and Pringle tins at the edge of a desert. Cooley has a yappy dog (relatable) whom he offers to murder so Deep Cover host Jake Halpern won’t have to retake their interview audio (very relatable); he’s joking, but when he talks about killing off various past personae into which he disappeared instead of witness protection, or how he thought of bribing judges to fix Mafia cases as “tipping,” he’s serious.
Cooley, who marched into a prosecutor’s office one March Saturday in 1986 and started info-dumping all his First-Ward Cosa Nostra secrets, is one of those GoodFelloid footnote figures who’s irresistible to journos, particularly in the podcast space: he knows a lot of dirt; he’s got an atypical story of his own to tell; and (usually) he’s bored AF in whatever off-brand Scottsdale the Marshals parked him in and looking to captivate an audience. But much depends on the journo’s ability to assess how interesting the guy is, really — and more to the point, how to foreground the unique aspects of the subject’s story without getting bogged down in Mob 101 listicling or “I got on a plane to report this out so by god every feckin’ detail’s stayin’ in” minutiae. I’ve only listened to a couple of episodes, but on balance, Deep Cover succeeds there. Halpern gives you enough background on Cooley, the Outfit, or the restaurants where the city’s power brokers drank and bullshitted to contextualize, but doesn’t go overboard showing his work; you get the occasional evocative detail (a landline at a table in Counsellors Row; those Pringles cans) but it doesn’t strain or get cutesy. It’s process-y enough, and enough about That Thing Of Theirs in a city besides my own, that it drew me in and kept me there.
With that said, while I’ll recommend it, I’ll also recommend 1.25x speed or higher. Deep Cover is a Pushkin property, with all the ponderously paced thoroughness that implies, and with each ep coming in at around 50 minutes, I found that it just moved better at a notched-up playback speed. There isn’t really any fat on the episodes; it’s just a little too stately for this guy at regular speed.
Deep Cover dropped its first second-season ep Monday, and will drop new eps each Monday thereafter (Pushkin+ members can listen to the whole season now, though, so maybe free-trial it this weekend to pair with post-nor’easter shoveling). If you’ve already sampled it, or plan to, let me know what you thought — or rec other pods from this “house” — in the comments! — SDB
It’s time to choose the February bonus-review topic! Once again, a good mix of media and topics — a cybercrime pod, a “family with dark secrets” doc, a sleazy-lookin’ docuseries, and a Beeb miniseries starring Emily Watson that keeps finding its way into these polls and then not getting picked. Maybe its time has come; vote now! — SDB
[CW for racial violence]
The crime
From Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of A Great Day’’s IMDb page:
During 1880-1968 over 4,000 African Americans were lynched at the hands of white mobs. These lynchings were commemorated through souvenir postcards that would ultimately be subverted by Black activists to expose racist violence in the U.S.
Also criminal: that that number seems low to me.
The story
Given the title, I imagine it goes without saying that to “recommend” this documentary short directed by Christine Tucker (Homegoings) is not something I can really do. It is worth your time, however. It’s a harrowing 15 minutes, just one grievous and revolting image after another, interspersed with academics commenting that “Lynching becomes a form of leisure” as part of the backlash to Reconstruction, say, or that to date, exactly zero anti-lynching bills have ever passed in Congress, which is not exactly the brief respite from the visuals you have in mind.
But sometimes the role of the audience is to witness testimony, and as grisly and appalling as this testimony is, it’s only 15 minutes, and it’s well done — it doesn’t go on too long, or push too hard, and in a more general sense, it’s good to see storytelling in shorter/less expected formats. I think Lynching Postcards could only have the runtime it ended up having, and when you have a variation on the phrase “such-and-such miniseries could have been a two-hour docudrama” in as many reviews as I do, you welcome a narrative that’s confident at an unconventional length. The short is evocative of other things, too, bringing to mind everything from Shirley Jackson’s most famous story to the esoteric retail-postcard choices made by my hometown during the same era. (The hospital, okay, sure, but this joint?) Lynching Postcards comes to us from MTV Documentary Films, an outfit that I think is in good position to promote more diversity, in subject matter and on the filmmaking side, and in terms of generational demographics as well. And I didn’t even know my esteemed colleague Marcia Chatelain — with whom I was just talking yesterday about something else entirely — had consulted on the film before I sat down with it.
Again, it’s tough going; the number of school-age children in these photos alone will nauseate you. But that’s the point, so if you feel you can, give it a look; it’s on Paramount+. — SDB
Your subscription dollars let US subscribe to Paramount+ and other streamers. That in turn lets us review even more true crime for you (and pay our contribs better to help us do that) — and we do take requests! If you can spare it, just $5 a month gets you behind the paywall for nearly three years of archives…
…but if you can’t, we’re still glad you’re here. And sharing B.E. is free! — SDB
And now, a handful of links to send you into the weekend. And to keep Eve from despairing that she just tidied up the story-budget doc and then I went and spilled a bunch of longreads everywhere. — SDB
‘Attica’ directors Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry on revisiting America’s deadliest prison riot [Gold Derby] // I felt sort of comforted by the fact that Curry was also introduced to the events of Attica by Pacino’s Sonny ranting about it in Dog Day Afternoon.
The Great Organic-Food Fraud [The New Yorker] // If you’ve run out of NYer views for the month, Modern Farmer also wrote up the story of Randy Constant’s organic-corn grift.
The Library of America Interviews Harold Schechter about True Crime [LoA archives] // Schechter comes up a fair bit around here — he’s prolific in the book space, and early on adopted a clever one-word-title “bit” for his subjects, but don’t hold that against him, as he’s a fairly good/unadorned writer whose compendium of true-story Hollywood films I quite liked. His anthology True Crime picked up where books like Solved! left off, and here, he talks to the Library of America’s Rich Kelley about successful fictionalized accounts of true crimes, why he didn’t include gangsters in the tome, and trends in true-crime writing over the centuries.
Teenage killers murder three people [History] // Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate’s killing spree took its last lives on this day in 1958; the pair was arrested the following day. Leaving aside the statutory crime within the relationship between Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the teenagers’ “road trip” has spawned some of the better regarded art in response to a real-life case; Badlands is underrated as a true-crime comment IMO, and Sissy Spacek’s performance is a stunner. You can’t stream it for free as of this writing, but you can read an academic analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska — the title track of which is also about Starkweather and Fugate — and the outlaw in American songcraft right here.
Searching For Susy Thunder [The Verge] // Claire L. Evans goes in search of a band groupie turned “phone phreaker” of the pre-internet days. You can watch Susy explaining her tradecraft to Geraldo Rivera on 20/20 right here.
Next week on Best Evidence: We need to talk about We Need To Talk About Cosby, plus bugs, whether Omar’s coming.
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