Pink Diamonds · Helltown · Crypto
Plus: Another first-thought podcast list
the true crime that's worth your time
Heist podcasts might be my favorite flavor of show. As previously discussed, property-crime properties are the true-crime equivalent of Erica Jong’s zipless fuck: no one gets hurt, no one mortally suffers, and it’s fun to imagine yourself in the narrative (at least, the sudden-wealth bit).
Expanse: Pink Diamond Heist looks to tick all those boxes, and has the added benefit of being completely unfamiliar to most Americans. It’s the story of the 1980s-era Argyle diamond mine smuggling case, which the show — which is from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) — says pulled in as much as $50 million worth of diamonds. Here’s the pitch line:
It's a heist of grand proportions, and a story straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster. Millions of dollars of diamonds smuggled out of the remote Kimberley, in Western Australia then around the world. But the diamonds weren't lost to the eighties when this heist happened, the stolen gems are back in circulation. On Pink Diamond Heist: how did no-one notice diamonds were being smuggled out of the world's most secure mine? Who were the culprits behind this multi-million dollar heist? And where are the stolen diamonds now?
The case is old enough that there’s very little coverage out there, and many of the details “remained a secret – until now” (per a press release for the show) so the five-part series won’t be spoiled by past headlines. The best I could find is this 1996 report, which brings up horse people and a sexual scandal as factors in the case. I’m already intrigued.
The bummer here is that at present, the ABC says the show will only be available on the “ABC listen” app, which seems like a really dumb idea if you want your show out there to be consumed by the masses. You can play the trailer to the podcast at this page and decide from there if you want to commit to another freakin’ podcast app on your phone; in the meantime, maybe the estimable news org will change its mind and put it on all the apps like its 2022, not 2002. — EB
Helltown: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod has already been snapped up for adaptation. Casey Sherman’s book about serial killer Tony Costa dropped on July 12; buried in a pre-release interview is the detail that the book “is already set to be made into a limited series in conjunction with Robert Downey Jr.'s production company, Team Downey.”
Costa — nicknamed “Tony Chop Chop” by area residents — killed and dismembered at least two women in the late 1960s, and is suspected of killing many more. He’s characterized as a “counterculture figure,” perhaps because he had a beard when he was arrested?
His arrest, as the so-called Summer of Love wound down and the Manson family dominated the headlines for their crimes, attracted attention from folks like Norman Mailer (of course) and Kurt Vonnegut.
That latter boldfaced name is a little more interesting: Vonnegut wrote about Costa for LIFE in an essay later republished in his collection Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. (I feel like I spent my childhood looking at this book on my parents’ shelf, just looking at the cover I can feel our living room carpet — that’s where our bookshelves were —between my toes.) He lived in the area where Costa was active at the time, and says his daughter had met Costa; after Costa was convicted the pair maintained a correspondence that went on until Costa’s death four years later.
All this to say that if I had to guess, Downey’s company picked this property up not out of an abiding interest in this — not to be crass, but I’ll say it — low-output killer, but because he wants to play Vonnegut. I have no evidence for this claim. But can’t you see the actor, who clearly considers himself a smarty-pants, yearning to play the Vonnegut? If I’m wrong, I’ll admit that I was wrong…and if it happens I expect all of you to shower me with praise for my predictive powers.
Incidentally, there’s another book about Costa out there called The Babysitter, a memoir by Liza Rodman. Costa, “one of the few kind, understanding adults in her life,” as the book’s promotional copy reads, was her regular babysitter while her mom “worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars.” It came out a little more than a year ago, but escaped my attention until now. I’ve put a reserve on both books, so if I go full Cape Cod on you in the coming weeks, you’ll know why. — EB
[Exhibit B. stocks both these books, in hardcover, so if you want one for your very own, enter code ExHB at checkout and take 15% off that and any other hardback! — SDB]
“Baby Al Capone” just gave his first interview. A lot has happened since 2018, so it’s likely you’ve forgotten about Ellis Pinsky, the 15-year-old kid who stole cryptocurrency then valued at $23.8 million, much from crypto expert Michael Terpin.
I know, crypto is hard to get your head around, but before you scroll past, here’s a very relatable summary of how the heist worked that might make it easier. This is from Krebs on Security, one of the best cybercrime sites out there:
A 24-year-old New York man who bragged about helping to steal more than $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from a technology executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Nicholas Truglia was part of a group alleged to have stolen more than $100 million from cryptocurrency investors using fraudulent “SIM swaps,” scams in which identity thieves hijack a target’s mobile phone number and use that to wrest control over the victim’s online identities.
…
A SIM card is the tiny, removable chip in a mobile device that allows it to connect to the provider’s network. Customers can legitimately request a SIM swap when their mobile device has been damaged or lost, or when they are switching to a different phone that requires a SIM card of another size.
But fraudulent SIM swaps are frequently abused by scam artists who trick mobile providers into tying a target’s service to a new SIM card and mobile phone controlled by the scammers. Unauthorized SIM swaps often are perpetrated by fraudsters who have already stolen or phished a target’s password, as many financial institutions and online services rely on text messages to send users a one-time code for multi-factor authentication. Compounding the threat, many websites let customers reset their passwords merely by clicking a link sent via SMS to the mobile phone number tied to the account, meaning anyone who controls that phone number can reset the passwords for those accounts.
Of course Pinsky’s scheme — cooked up while he was attending high school — got trickier after that, and involved a crew of money launderers and millions in ill-gotten gains. The New York Post has a good recap of how it all went down, right up to when he, and his conspirators, got caught. Since then, his home has been robbed and Terpin sued him for over $70 million.
Pinsky gave his first-ever interview to Rolling Stone this month. If you’ve read other RS content this month, it’s likely paywalled, so if you’re not a subscriber you might have to do a little work to read it in full. That work is worth it, though — here’s a snip:
On the evening of Jan. 7, Pinsky sat at his desk — a folding table from Costco lined with $20 LED lights — and started the process. Over Telegram, he contacted his employee at AT&T and had him port Terpin’s SIM to the phone of an online acquaintance he’d recruited for the task, hoping to leave no physical trace that would connect the hack back to him. Then, he says, he and Harry — joining in from Skype — reset Terpin’s email and made a new password. Pinsky ran a script to search the emails for certain keywords that might contain electronic keys to crypto wallets, software programs where crypto coins are stored. There was evidence that Terpin had crypto — subscription emails and the like — but nothing that would get them in. Harry was about to give up when Pinsky started searching for email accounts with other providers and resetting the passwords to those. Finally, an Outlook account turned up the type of file they’d been hoping to find. “It was called ‘Passwords’ or ‘Keys,’” Pinsky recalls. “At that point, it was like, ‘Holy shit.’ We open that file, and see that there’s just a bunch of keys to various wallets.”
At this point, they were racing against the clock: It wouldn’t take Terpin long to realize that his phone had gone dead, that he couldn’t access his email, and that he needed to lock accounts down. Pinsky says he was able to see the balance for a wallet holding the cryptocurrency Ethereum — “The balance we saw was around $900 million; we were like, ‘Holy crap. That’s crazy’” — but the interface required an additional password, which he couldn’t find (Terpin denies that he ever had anywhere near $900 million in cryptocurrency and argues that Pinsky has fabricated this amount to make his crime seem less financially devastating). Adrenaline racing, they tried a wallet from a company called Counterparty and were able to unlock it with a 12-word seed phrase — a series of words that serves as a kind of password on steroids. Inside were roughly 3 million coins of a currency called Triggers, which Pinsky had never heard of. His first instinct was that it was probably close to worthless, valued at a penny, if that; but he went to CoinMarketCap, the Nasdaq of cryptocurrencies, just to be sure. He’d been wrong: On that day, Triggers was worth more than $7 a coin. Pinsky quickly did the math in his head and then did it again to be sure — he was still in algebra, after all. The math checked out. The account, the very one he now controlled, was worth close to $24 million. He’d won the game. And he hadn’t yet turned 16.
It’s worth nothing that Terpin isn’t completely thrilled by the story, and urges his 33,800+ Twitter followers to take the crime seriously. Of course, if we all did what people told us to do on Twitter...well, that would be no kind of life at all. — EB
I’ll leave you this week with another true-crime listicle that’s probably worth discussion and/or mockery. A couple weeks ago we tossed Rolling Stone’s Top 25 true crime podcasts of all time list into the raptor pen, and I think the consensus across our 23 comments was that the list was probably put together by a hard-working emerging writer tasked with SEO-based content, not someone who was truly down with the sickness.
I suspect we’ll come to the same conclusions with this list from, of all outlets, Vogue, detailing “12 of the Most Compulsively Watchable True-Crime Documentaries on Netflix Now.” The list is a walk through low-hanging fruit, much of it, I’d argue, too heavy to binge-watch (aka “compulsively watch”): for example, Athlete A (number six on the list) is hardly a gulpable romp. And, look, it’s not bad, but Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal (number eight) was actually kind of boring!
Honestly, I found Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel more “compulsively watchable” than many of these, or Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, or The Keepers. Remember, this isn’t “best” or “most popular,” it’s “most compulsively watchable,” which is a different beast entirely.
So, here’s our chance to do Vogue (again, I wonder who dire things are in Anna’s House, that they’d need this kind of farmed list) one better. What Netflix true crime docs deserve the compulsion crown? — EB
Coming up on Best Evidence: Dan Abrams sinks even lower, In The Dark revelations, and more!
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