Harry Bedlow · Paul Holes · Robert Telles
Annnnd...what's good this weekend?
the true crime that's worth your time
Another weekend, another couple days where many of us can trade our day jobs for true crime. It’s a slow weekend for new true-crime releases, I’m afraid — and I’m so behind on shows like Making the Cut (that’s Amazon’s Project Runway ripoff) and She-Hulk that I really only have the bandwidth for a single-serving property.
That’s why my weekend pick is Truth & Lies: The Crypto Couple, which actually aired on ABC last night. Like I said, I’m behind.
This is an hour-long look at alleged Bitcoin launderer Heather Morgan, who goes by the name Razzlekhan in her career as a rapper (see the video above) and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, who were arrested in February for their alleged roles in a 2016 cryptocurrency scam to the tune of $4.6 million. We wrote about their arrest when it went down, suggesting then that it was ripe for adaptation, and ABC’s take is likely just the first run at this narrative rich story. Here’s a quick reading list on the case:
Who is the ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’? A ‘rapper’ charged with laundering $4.5 billion in stolen Bitcoin is baffling the internet [Fortune via Yahoo News]
Meet the ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’ rapper accused of laundering billions of dollars in crypto [Washington Post]
Self-proclaimed 'Crocodile of Wall Street' snagged in big Bitcoin bust [Reuters]
Why didn’t ABC go with the whole “Crocodile of Wall Street” thing, you’re probably wondering, as “the crypto couple” is a bit of a snooze. Great question! The special was initially listed as Truth & Lies: The Crocodile of Wall Street (examples at Primetimer, Distractify, various click farms), but that name appears to have been changed at the 11th hour.
Meanwhile, a longread on the case by Nick Bilton that ran in this month’s Vanity Fair barely touches the CoWS nickname. Has someone already snagged the term for the title of an upcoming project, prompting avoidance by others? Guess we’ll find out eventually.
So that’s me — but what about you? What true crime are you reading, listening to, or watching this weekend? Let’s hear it.
The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America is a deep dive into a 1700s-era Manhattan rape case that is both frustratingly familiar and bizarrely foreign to the 21st century reader.
The crime
In 1793 Manhattan, a man drives off some French sailors catcalling a teenage girl and escorts her home. Some days later, they go out on a date; they’re supposed to be with another couple, but Lanah Sawyer finds herself alone with him after midnight.
The man has lied about his name: he’s the notorious scion of a rich family named Harry Bedlow, who takes her to a “bawdy house,” and rapes her. In this situation, most families at the time stayed silent, but Sawyer is part of a newly empowered middle class, and her stepfather pursues both a criminal and civil case against Bedlow. The case, and revelations about it, lead to riots and years of legal disputes.
The story
Author John Wood Sweet has the advantage of detailed notes from the trial, so we get much more detail about what happened afterwards than is normally available in these historical cases. The morning after the assault, Bedlow hurries off; Sawyer stays behind to fix her damaged dress. Apparently afraid to go home, she visits female relatives, and that night, tells her mother what happened, before they go together to let her stepfather know.
A few days later, Sawyer, her stepfather, and their lawyer file a formal complaint against Bedlow with the mayor, a process that requires Sawyer to recount her story again. Bedlow is eventually arrested, and put on trial for rape: a crime for which the penalty is execution. In the decade previous, only two white men in New York had been prosecuted for sexual assault: one was convicted of a lesser crime, and got off with a small fine. The other was convicted, but the judge refused to enter the sentence, so he was simply released.
The book is at its best when dealing with the legal intricacies of the cases, which are in some ways very different from our own legal system, and in some ways very familiar. While the written law about rape in the 1790s is vague, the case law and commentaries offer a checklist of things that should be considered by the jury, with the stated goal of ensuring that women don’t victimize men by falsely accusing them of sexual assaults. The defense lawyers tell the jury that they have to consider the virtue of the victim before the assault, the extent to which she fought back physically, how loudly she yelled, how long she took to report it.
In the same way that science fiction comments on current events by putting them in a fantastical environment, Sweet is able to use the legal standards around sexual assault in the 18th century to comment effectively on how victims are treated today. Juries then were told to consider these factors; juries today are told not to, and do anyway.
Until the mid-19th century, defendants in criminal cases were generally not allowed to testify in their own defense, to avoid tempting them to perjury. As such, the defense is based on the testimony of the owner of the bawdy house, Ann Carey (called “Mother Carey” because of her advanced age; she was 54). She’s a less than credible witness, but it’s enough to allow the jury to acquit Bedlow.
News of the acquittal leads to riots in Manhattan, with vigilantes pulling down and systematically dismantling Cleary’s house (a tradition which perhaps unfortunately has fallen by the wayside), and Bedlow fleeing the state. Adding fuel to the flame is a written account of the trial and testimony by a young British lawyer looking to make a name for himself. These sorts of accounts of sensational cases were common in London at the time, but were an innovation in New York, and caused an uproar. The public was aghast at how Bedlow’s lawyers had treated Sawyer; the lawyers were aghast that their tactics had been publicized.
At the initial trial, Bedlow’s lawyers suggest that this wasn’t a criminal case, but rather a civil one, and that Sawyer should bring a suit for seduction. After Bedlow is acquitted, they do just that. Of course, Sawyer herself can’t bring the case – her stepfather does. And the assault isn’t the source of the damages, but rather the damages incurred by her stepfather as a result.
Bizarrely, the law required Sawyer’s stepfather had to attest that Sawyer was his servant or employee, and that Bedlow made use of “swords, staves and knives” to take her, and imprisoned her for three days, all of which was understood to be a legal fiction. The true crime was the loss of the woman’s “virtue,” and juries awarded damages proportional to its perceived value. Poorer women got little; women of color got almost nothing. Sawyer’s stepfather was awarded a substantial sum, though collecting it wound up being another issue, involving debtor’s prisons and the enforcement of promissory notes, giving Sweet another chance to delve into the weeds of 18th century law.
The fact that we have good records about law and legal standards means that Sweet can provide a lot of detail and get wonderfully process-y with them. The geography of New York, too, makes the Manhattan of Sawyer’s time seem both familiar — getting ice cream and taking a walk in Battery Park — and utterly foreign: walking fifteen minutes up Bowery to get to a farm. The attempts to shoe in historical figures get a little silly at times — the son of the man who made George Washington’s favorite pair of dentures? — but Alexander Hamilton was legitimately involved in the case, though not in a way that makes him look good.
Sweet very much wants this to be a story about a young woman’s courage and resilience: Sawyer had to retell her story again and again in front of skeptical or outright hostile audiences and maintain her composure throughout. This leads him to gloss over some issues with her testimony and argue that she must have decided to push the case herself, rather than being pressured by her stepfather.
Sweet’s desire to focus on the victim is admirable, but it’s also belied by the content of the book. Simply put, we don’t know very much about Sawyer. It seems she might have eventually gotten married and moved to Philadelphia; we don’t know. We know a great deal, however, about her stepfather and about her attacker.
That’s not Sweet’s fault: it’s because men are easy to trace in the historical record, and women tend to disappear. This is really a story about the rise of the middle class in the federal period, and how it started to hold the wealthy accountable in a way that they hadn’t been previously. But that’s not about empowering women, but rather the men around them, and to pretend otherwise is to be more optimistic than histories like this can justify. — Dan Cassino
Dan Cassino is a professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His latest book is Gender Threat: American Masculinity in the Face of Change, which makes for a wonderful present for a very, very specific audience.
Look at Dan’s fancy bio! We’re so lucky to be able to bring you perspectives from a great group of contributors, but we can only do that with your support: while Best Evidence can be a labor of love for Sarah and me, we always compensate our contributors. (Not as much as they deserve, but we do compensate them.) When you pay for a subscription to Best Evidence, you’re allowing us to pay writers, and occasionally even ourselves. Thank you for your support if you’ve provided it; if not, perhaps today is the day?
As expected, Las Vegas administrator Robert Telles has been charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of journalist and true crime author Jeff German. Thanks to everyone here for continuing to indulge my obsession with this case — I’ll make this brief.
Per CNN, Telles was charged earlier this week, and made his first appearance in court Tuesday, in a brief hearing during which his arraignment was postponed, NBC reports. The 45-year-old official, who was recently the focus of German’s reporting on alleged misconduct and corruption within the city’s leadership, “perpetrated by lying in wait,” the prosecutors’ complaint reads, a special enhancement that will have an impact on sentencing, should he be convicted.
“Telles was upset about articles that were being written by German as an investigative journalist that exposed potential wrongdoing, and Telles had publicly expressed his issues with that reporting, … And then ultimately Telles was also upset — from what we found out later — that there was additional reporting that was pending,” Las Vegas Police Capt. Dori Koren said of the case.
Yesterday, Las Vegas CBS 8 uncovered video of Telles from a 2020 arrest for a since-dropped domestic violence charge. “This is like totally, you guys just want to take me down because I’m a public official. I didn’t hit anybody. I didn’t touch anybody,” he says in the footage.
Telles remains held without bail at the Clark County Detention Center, with an arrangement postponed until later this month. As of publication time, he remains in his position as city administrator, but (per a statement from Clark County officials), his offices have been closed and staff has been asked to work from home. — EB
Buried Bones is a completely competent podcast that — to its credit — isn’t focusing on the lowest-hanging fruit. In many ways, though, it also feels like the product of a bygone era, when podcast apps weren’t bursting at the seams with compelling shows. Given its lack of topical urgency, and some significant questions around its production, it’s hard to give Buried Bones a whole-hearted recommendation.
Buried Bones is the newest show from Exactly Right, the production company behind My Favorite Murder and Murder Squad. Right there, you see the challenge this podcast presents: on the one hand, we have My Favorite Murder, a podcast that frustrates many of us here with its mommy juice/“murderino” aesthetic.
And on the other hand, we have Murder Squad, the abruptly canceled podcast from alleged sexual harasser Billy Jensen and Buried Bones co-host Paul Holes. I’m not going to unpack the allegations against Jensen, and Exactly Right’s alleged role in a cover-up, all over again, as Skye Pillsbury did far better than I ever could back in July. The main thing to know is that Holes, a former police officer frequently touted for his role in the capture of the Golden State Killer, and Jensen have been a true-crime package deal for a good while now…and that when the allegations against Jensen were made public, some months after their shared podcast was abruptly pulled by Exactly Right, Holes remained silent, and continues to be silent to this day.
This troubles me. In my day job, I write about restaurants, and if the former business partner of an alleged abuser opened a new spot, this is something I’d note as I wrote about the new venture. That doesn’t mean the new restaurant’s food isn’t delicious, or the service isn’t great — but more often than not, people want to know where what they consume comes from. Information like that is important context that helps folks make an informed decision on where to dine or shop, what to listen to, and on and on. Have you bought a MyPillow recently? Yeah, now you get it.
Paul Holes isn’t Mike Lindell, and he and Buried Bones co-host Kate Winkler Dawson are fine in the one episode that’s dropped so far. It’s about the death of Rice University founder William Marsh Rice, who was killed by his valet as part of a will forgery scheme. (The Wikipedia entry is pretty thorough, by the by. [“If you have a copy of Popular Crime to hand, James’s rundown is solid as well.” - SDB])
It’s an interesting enough case, to be sure, and it’s not one that you hear about every day. This makes its coverage on a podcast not unwelcome, but it also made me wonder why it was chosen for Buried Bones, a podcast that (per its press materials) uses “21st century forensic and victimology techniques” to reexamine old cases. In the case of Rice’s death in 1900, 20th century “forensic and victimology techniques” worked pretty well to find the killer, so suggesting that Holes’s and Dawson’s present day smarts are necessary to shed new light on the case is a stretch.
I feel like we’ve said this on Best Evidence about properties before, but it bears repetition in the case of Busied Bones: it’s not that the podcast is bad, but it doesn’t feel necessary, especially when there are so many far more worthy, rigorous, and engaging podcasts out there. And when you add to that the ethical cloud that’s hanging over Exactly Right and Holes, one really wonders if it deserves any more of our attention. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Murder rugs, tiny crime scenes, and CNN.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Twitter and Instagram. You can also call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.