Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of I Heart Radio. Yo,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Dutton, what's up? I got a question for you girls.
Speaker 1: Do you know what's ridiculous? I do? Actually, you spread
Speaker 1: it up, spread some work. Let me give you a
Speaker 1: little background though. Okay, so you know that I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about some things that I like and that's
Speaker 1: not ridiculous. No, not at all. I like candles, but
Speaker 1: I'm snobby about candles. I only like expensive candles because
Speaker 1: they smell good. Like right now, I'm a little bit
Speaker 1: obsessed with these candles from this company. Oddis V I V? No,
Speaker 1: it's like V I V. Anyway, They're amazing. I'm not
Speaker 1: even getting paid for this. They should pay me, but seriously,
Speaker 1: like they're the most incredible candles. I'll write it down.
Speaker 1: I love them. So I like that. You know what
Speaker 1: else I like? Um, polka music, onion, soup, onion soup.
Speaker 1: Oh no, these things go together, and I like I
Speaker 1: like chips. Odd. Yeah, you back ended on this one totally.
Speaker 1: You slipped it in. Like. So are you familiar? Okay,
Speaker 1: first of all, are you familiar with the Super Bowl? Uh?
Speaker 1: With the football? We just had one? Yes, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a huge bowl. Super Bowl for the whole globe.
Speaker 1: Everybody was yeah, okay, so people have super Bowl parties.
Speaker 1: I've talked about this. Yes, I went to length and
Speaker 1: you went to one. Did you have dips and chip?
Speaker 1: I had chips? No dip, chip and dips? Wait what? Okay,
Speaker 1: so have you ever heard of is it hell of
Speaker 1: a good dip? Let's just say it is and keep moving.
Speaker 1: It's a brand in the store. I don't see l
Speaker 1: u V a hell of a you know, they got ranch,
Speaker 1: they got uh onion, they got them all ranch on
Speaker 1: they so they had this special thing for this is
Speaker 1: taking way too long. They had this special thing for
Speaker 1: the super Bowl. They were giving away super Bowl snack
Speaker 1: scented campbells. Why so they eate a French onion candle.
Speaker 1: And they also had like a recipe for French onion
Speaker 1: soup bites, which okay, aside from that, buttermilk ranch and
Speaker 1: then just potato chips in here, baby, lighten it up. Onion,
Speaker 1: French onion candle. Just go cook some onions. I know
Speaker 1: what you're getting for your birthday. I know I wreak
Speaker 1: of onions all the time. So that that that that
Speaker 1: that that is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. Now it's coincidental, though,
Speaker 1: because I've got something for you that should be right
Speaker 1: up your alley. Okay, yeah, my shooter alley. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know exactly alley. Yeah. The thing I was thinking, that's
Speaker 1: ridiculous capitalism gonna get me right in the shooter alley. Capitalism, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. I just slide past that. Capitalism is ridiculous, Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: But not like in the good fun way. You know,
Speaker 1: it's ridiculous, like in that Picasso of face way. And
Speaker 1: by that I mean it's it's recognizable, you know, but
Speaker 1: it's still distarted and exploited, and it's probably overvalued by
Speaker 1: market speculators. Right. So anyway, I'm not gonna get on
Speaker 1: a soapbox about capitalism. You know my feelings about it.
Speaker 1: All economic models are ridiculous. Young felt that way. Well,
Speaker 1: leaving aside my college freshman opinions about capitalism, I would
Speaker 1: like to tell you about a crime of capitalism, one
Speaker 1: that is ridiculous and one that involves onions. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about onions. You like onions, You like onions. You
Speaker 1: like onions. What's your third favorite onion? Okay, good choice. Well,
Speaker 1: I like onions too. So now imagine if onions were
Speaker 1: suddenly like ninety dollars a bag for onions. That'd be ridiculous, right,
Speaker 1: that would be very right. That's essentially what happened in
Speaker 1: when one man conspired to create an onion cartel so
Speaker 1: that he could have control over all of the onions
Speaker 1: in America. Yes, this is ridiculous Crime A podcast about
Speaker 1: absurd and outrageous capers, ices and cons It's always murder
Speaker 1: free and ridiculous, Elizabeth Zaren. Before we get into the
Speaker 1: onion cartel and the man with the bond villain dreams
Speaker 1: to control all the onions in America, I'd like to
Speaker 1: talk to you about a subject that's very near and
Speaker 1: dear to my heart. No, I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about pork belly futures. Okay, yeah, Now let me
Speaker 1: back up. Do you know what a pork belly future is?
Speaker 1: Kind of I mean, I'm not gonna lie and be like, oh, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And then you ask me something about like let's keep
Speaker 1: it simpler, it's like all you know what it is,
Speaker 1: it's all by cell cell by because I yell it
Speaker 1: into a phone. Yeah. And then I had another guy
Speaker 1: who's like yelling by by sell that yeah, with like
Speaker 1: a bunch of little slips of paper and perfect Yes,
Speaker 1: I know. Okay, Well, do you know what a pork
Speaker 1: belly is? Okay? Now what is a pork belly? It's
Speaker 1: the belly of pork. Fig Yes, it's a butcher's cut
Speaker 1: of park. It's like a big layer of fat on it. Yes.
Speaker 1: Is where we get bacon? Yeah, so I figured you're
Speaker 1: familiar with like how we get bacon. You you've lived
Speaker 1: in the South exactly. Now, hogs are a huge market.
Speaker 1: Everyone around the world loves pork. We talked about chicken,
Speaker 1: but everybody loves park. Did you know how much pork
Speaker 1: we produce in a year as just as a globe?
Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell you in millions of metric
Speaker 1: tons of so China's number one, and they produced five
Speaker 1: point four seven million metric tons of hog every year.
Speaker 1: The European unit two point three million metric tons of hog.
Speaker 1: Now US re number three, number three, number three, so
Speaker 1: we re number three one point to one million metric tons.
Speaker 1: And rounding out the top four is Brazil with three
Speaker 1: point seven million tons. I'm sorry, we are yeah point three.
Speaker 1: Something is this when they're weighing him. Is that rude
Speaker 1: or to tutor? Is that like the bones and everything
Speaker 1: that weight? Yeah, that's like sale price. Wait, they use
Speaker 1: all of it. Let's be frank. Yeah, everything but the
Speaker 1: frank joke. That's good. No, the demand for pig has
Speaker 1: been so high and so just outsized for so long,
Speaker 1: and we were talking to centuries that eventually when we
Speaker 1: get into like capitalism era, the pork belly market was
Speaker 1: always super volatile. It just was like the prices are fluctuating,
Speaker 1: made rise and falls. Hog farmers would make a fortune
Speaker 1: and then they lose everything. So something had to be
Speaker 1: done there, like how do we stabilize this pork belly market.
Speaker 1: Starting in nineteen sixty one, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, that's
Speaker 1: the Dow Jones for raw materials like pork bellies and
Speaker 1: frozen orange juice and wheat futures, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,
Speaker 1: it began trading pork belly futures and that was meant
Speaker 1: to stabilize pork prices, right, But it did bring some
Speaker 1: calm to the pork market and also led to one
Speaker 1: of my favorite films, Trading Places. You like trading Places.
Speaker 1: Did you and your brother trap you guys grow watch
Speaker 1: that growing up? I think, Yeah, what's your third favorite scene? Oh? Goodness,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know that, like I don't really
Speaker 1: remember anything more than an hour. I know, like like
Speaker 1: an eight year all to keep asking you your third favorite?
Speaker 1: Do like that this was your third favorite hero? No?
Speaker 1: The problem that I have is that I'll know that
Speaker 1: I watched something, and then if I watch it, it
Speaker 1: like refreshes my memory. Yes, I honestly I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know it's like Dana Roydon and Edine Murphy.
Speaker 1: Jimmie Lee Curtis. I don't even remember her. Do you
Speaker 1: remember the gorilla like where they remember the blackface scene
Speaker 1: or blackface? Yes, okay, I don't remember some part of it.
Speaker 1: For those who have never seen the film, Trading Places,
Speaker 1: about these dudes, the Duke brothers, Randolph and Mortimer Duke.
Speaker 1: Their super old money. They have like seats on the
Speaker 1: down jone exchange, and the Duke brothers they have a
Speaker 1: commodities brokerage firm, which is what we're talking about now,
Speaker 1: may bide cell raw materials that become the products we
Speaker 1: all by. Now, the two brothers getting a spirit of
Speaker 1: debate about nature versus nurture. So they decide they will
Speaker 1: test their theory with a bet, and so they pick
Speaker 1: rich person Dana Right a poor person Eddie Murphy and
Speaker 1: they have them switch places and then see what will happen. Right,
Speaker 1: So they do this. They decided to ruin these two
Speaker 1: bands live and they make Eddie Murphy rich. They make
Speaker 1: dannack Royd poor and he's just like he hits the
Speaker 1: skids hard. And they just they determined that wealth is
Speaker 1: not about merit. It really is about rather who you know,
Speaker 1: wealth is about access as it he doesn't. It's nurture
Speaker 1: not nature. Right anyway, Dana Chary, Eddie Murphy, they decided
Speaker 1: to get revenge on the Duke brothers for ruining their lives.
Speaker 1: So what do they do. They use frozen orange juice futures.
Speaker 1: Okay yeah, yeah, remember okay, So they're active subterfuge. They
Speaker 1: have this agent, guy Meeks, who has he has the
Speaker 1: crop YOUELD reports. So they get the crop UELD report,
Speaker 1: they switch it out, they give it to the Duke brothers.
Speaker 1: The Duke brothers going, they tell their agents on the
Speaker 1: stock market, Bye bye bye Cell Cell Cell right. So
Speaker 1: they go in there and they have their marching orders
Speaker 1: and they're going to try to drive up orange juice
Speaker 1: to a fixed price. Right, So the Duke Brothers attempt
Speaker 1: to corner them our market. Now, being super wealthy, they
Speaker 1: can do this, and they do it all on margin. Though,
Speaker 1: this is where they make a mistake. You know what
Speaker 1: margin is. It's where you use someone else's money to
Speaker 1: buy a stock and then when the price, when the
Speaker 1: when the time to actually purchase it comes, do you
Speaker 1: have to pay for whatever the price is set at
Speaker 1: that time, so you can say a little bit of
Speaker 1: a fluctuation. You do not know necessarily what the price
Speaker 1: will be. So they buy this on margin. They got
Speaker 1: all these orange juice futures, contracts, markets open, Duke Brothers
Speaker 1: buying a ton and then trading pauses crop, your report
Speaker 1: comes out. Everybody's like, oh no, the Duke brothers, what
Speaker 1: they were told is the opposite. So now everybody's trying
Speaker 1: to drop their orange juice prices. The market response orange
Speaker 1: usee prices drop at great and Murphy. They have bought
Speaker 1: futures on the short so now they can because they
Speaker 1: have promised to buy orange juice, they have to start
Speaker 1: buying to fulfill their orders. And they do this, and
Speaker 1: that that they do is they buy everybody who wants
Speaker 1: to sell oranges except from the Duke brothers. So now
Speaker 1: they have these prices they are contractually obligated to buy.
Speaker 1: It bankrupts them. This is the power of the futures
Speaker 1: market because you're basically saying tomorrow, I will buy this
Speaker 1: these orange juices from this orange juice from you, but
Speaker 1: whatever the prices tomorrow today, and you lock it in,
Speaker 1: and that's supposed to stabilize the market. Some people make
Speaker 1: these bets. Well that's what the Duke brothers ended up.
Speaker 1: How they end up going belly up, much like say
Speaker 1: a pork belly. Now, to bring it all back around
Speaker 1: to park belly, futures farming has gone industrial, right, we
Speaker 1: all know this. It's agri business is big business. But
Speaker 1: that means they can lower the prices of the cost
Speaker 1: to bring a hog to market. That's been really helpful
Speaker 1: to also stabilize the pork product market. Right. This also
Speaker 1: means hog farmers can leverage their size to control prices,
Speaker 1: and this is pretty much how you get price stability. Right.
Speaker 1: This killed off the pork belly futures market. So two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, Chicago mercantile exchanss like, forget this, We're not
Speaker 1: doing it anymore. The agri business basically made it no
Speaker 1: longer necessary. Right. This also happened to be coincidentally one
Speaker 1: year after Congress looked into the fixing of pork billy futures.
Speaker 1: So you know, it was that a little bit of
Speaker 1: congressional testimony. And by the way, trading places was cited
Speaker 1: in congressional testimony to help the sound help the cores
Speaker 1: men and women understand futures. It's not just us good
Speaker 1: teaching tools. It is I'm telling you, Eddie Murphy, if
Speaker 1: you want to get people's attention and hold it, Eddie
Speaker 1: Murphy exactly, throwing some dan A right if you really
Speaker 1: just like, you know, it got some Canadians anyway. It
Speaker 1: turns out this whole thing I'm telling you this all
Speaker 1: applies to the onion futures market. Have you ever heard
Speaker 1: of onion futures? No, I've not. Well, turns out you
Speaker 1: can get onion futures. You can buy onions before they
Speaker 1: come to market, which are also now no longer traded
Speaker 1: on the Chicago mercantilers. They get rid of those two
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and uh there this case. So there isn't
Speaker 1: a classic eighties movie to explain it, so we'll have
Speaker 1: to rely on me, you know, just good. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's the great Onion Scam of nineteen fifty five and
Speaker 1: just imagine trading places like stuff happening. Right You ready
Speaker 1: for the story of Vincent Cassuga and the Onion Cartel.
Speaker 1: Never been more ready. Okay, this story takes place in
Speaker 1: one of my favorite places, Chicago. Chicago's amazing, dude, it
Speaker 1: really is, like I legit love Chicago. I love it.
Speaker 1: There's so much green space for a big city. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of the Midwestern cities because they're built
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century before cars. They have a much
Speaker 1: better layout, plan, gener structure. Everything is just a lot cool.
Speaker 1: I've been finding that it was Indianapolis recently. I was like,
Speaker 1: this is a damn cooling. I mean, not like popping off,
Speaker 1: but I mean like I like the building anyway. Chicago's dope.
Speaker 1: In her book The Futures, author Emily Lambert was writing
Speaker 1: all about the economics, and she was explaining the Chicago
Speaker 1: Mercantile Exchange and so forth. She shared why Chicago and
Speaker 1: onions are so naturally intertwined. Do you know anything about this? No?
Speaker 1: I didn't either, So Lambert writes, and I quote, onions
Speaker 1: were faded to trade in Chicago. The name of the
Speaker 1: city was derived from chicaqua, the Native American word for
Speaker 1: a stinky wild leak plant that grew around the river.
Speaker 1: Chicago is basically a swamp. Before people got there and
Speaker 1: the conditions, people were like, oh, we don't camp there,
Speaker 1: Like that's it's right by the lake. It's just rats
Speaker 1: and onions. Nobody goes there, right. So now this chicaqua,
Speaker 1: this is one. This was the Miami or the Miami
Speaker 1: tribes word for the area. But other people, other indigenous
Speaker 1: tribes in the area, they had their own term for it.
Speaker 1: But yet all of them seem to basically want to
Speaker 1: point out that this place is stinky as hell. Returning
Speaker 1: to a Lambert, she says, quote Chicaqua is the Miami
Speaker 1: Tribes name for the region on which the city and
Speaker 1: campus sits, and is said to be associated in the
Speaker 1: naming of Chicago. It refers to the marshy environment where
Speaker 1: wild leaks, garlic, and onions grow, giving the area a
Speaker 1: strong and pungent fragrance. Other tribes of the region referred
Speaker 1: to the area as the place of onions, and legends
Speaker 1: of a great skunk who devoured humans and covered the
Speaker 1: land and its pungent spray. So it's like if you
Speaker 1: had a hell of a good candle yes, and it
Speaker 1: smelled like skunk. But you know what, though, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna I'm not gonna get on onions. Onions are amazing.
Speaker 1: I love onions. I'm all about like the album Family,
Speaker 1: This fertile ground. Where is where our onion conspiracy takes place?
Speaker 1: Now in this land where the great skunk devours people
Speaker 1: and leaves the land shrouded in skunky aroma, Chicago is
Speaker 1: where we're gonna meet our anti hero. You're ready to
Speaker 1: meet Vincent Cassuga. He was a farmer from New York.
Speaker 1: He was in place called Pine Island. It's a small
Speaker 1: town down by the New Jersey border. Kasuga had a
Speaker 1: big spread, about five thousand acres of a black dirt farm.
Speaker 1: And black dirt is like really fertile, rich earth. So
Speaker 1: he was growing celery, carrots and onions and lots of
Speaker 1: onions and so so that you can picture him because
Speaker 1: Suga was not a big man. He stood about five
Speaker 1: feet four. He comes from Eastern European roots and he
Speaker 1: was born in America the nineteen fifteen. He started farming
Speaker 1: in the US and the thirties. His farm was productive, profitable.
Speaker 1: He's very good at it. Two of his biggest clients
Speaker 1: the U. S. Army and Campbell Suit. So everybody was
Speaker 1: eating his onions now. Because Suga had a scrappy side
Speaker 1: to him. He was a little bit of a totjof
Speaker 1: spark plug of a man. Dude was driven by will.
Speaker 1: He was just like about it. And he always kept
Speaker 1: a revolver on him and a billy club making case
Speaker 1: got the revolver away from him, make a billy club.
Speaker 1: I think he would like the billy clubs. The intro. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like a this off. I just I didn't have
Speaker 1: a Chile. Those things will not okay. Now, my dude, Cossuga,
Speaker 1: Now you know, he's the kind of guy who shoots
Speaker 1: first and asked for forgiveness later, just like all good Catholics,
Speaker 1: you know. But and all truth he did contain multitudes.
Speaker 1: He was a devout Catholic. The dude, I might say
Speaker 1: devout Catholic. He donated millions to the Catholic Church, so
Speaker 1: much that the Vatican invited him out to Rome to
Speaker 1: have private audiences with the Pope. He got the whole
Speaker 1: v I p pass. Yeah, not one pope, three popes.
Speaker 1: He had private on three popes. Not only that, he
Speaker 1: got a ride up and down in the Pope's private
Speaker 1: paper elevator, which I didn't even know that was a thing.
Speaker 1: Apparently they got this like little cart that you shoved
Speaker 1: up and down anything. It's all gold, oh you know it.
Speaker 1: You know, a deep red carpet, gold everything. No, perhaps
Speaker 1: it was his resolute faith. I don't know, but something
Speaker 1: gave Cossuga the strength to go on when others would
Speaker 1: turn back. You know, it's like that. There was one
Speaker 1: time he crashed his plane, so he owned his own plane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was flying a friend home to us. We go
Speaker 1: in New York, somewhere up in there among the clouds.
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, how to change my mind, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go to Pine Island. So he starts to go
Speaker 1: on two extra miles. That's really testing. Your fuel tank
Speaker 1: did not pass the test. Plane runs out of gas
Speaker 1: in the air. He has to ditch it, he crashes
Speaker 1: and totally walks away from the crash. So he's and
Speaker 1: he's hospitalized for weeks. He had to wear a full
Speaker 1: body cast, and then when he was like done, he
Speaker 1: just checked himself out of the hospital and went back
Speaker 1: to farming. Because that's amazing because usually you're here, Oh
Speaker 1: he crashed his plane. Yeah, not this area. So in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, he gets involved in the stock market,
Speaker 1: and that's what will bring us to all of the criminality.
Speaker 1: But first a little break for some commercials and some capitalism,
Speaker 1: and then we'll be back with the commercial involving onion.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, alright, Elizabeth, Okay, Elizabeth. So we're in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Vincent Kasuga has just gotten involved in the
Speaker 1: stock market. He's like, I'm doing well as a farmer.
Speaker 1: I'm going to invest now. Admittedly, this was not the
Speaker 1: thinking of most people at the time, because there was
Speaker 1: a little thing called Black Tuesday that wiped out most
Speaker 1: of the stock market. Everyone else is like, to hell
Speaker 1: with the stock market. That is legalized gambling. Not Kissuga.
Speaker 1: He's like, that's legalized gambling exactly. So he decides to
Speaker 1: get involved, and he's like, I think I can make
Speaker 1: a fortune there, and he was wrong. He goes into
Speaker 1: the thirties, he loses everything. His first pray about he
Speaker 1: and his wife nearly had to like hawk the farm
Speaker 1: that he was betting on wheat futures, and then the
Speaker 1: prices shifted as a telling you boom. He lost it
Speaker 1: all on margin calls. He goes to tell his wife,
Speaker 1: and his wife's like, that's it, You're out, and he's like, okay, okay, baby,
Speaker 1: I promise no more trade and wheat futures, wheat futures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to open all the other but not ever again, babe.
Speaker 1: So that she should have like made him be a
Speaker 1: little more specific, because, like I said, a few years later,
Speaker 1: he's out there and he's deep in the futures market.
Speaker 1: He was flying to Chicago every week so he could
Speaker 1: go trade. He lives in New York, He's got his
Speaker 1: bone pilots. On Monday morning, why is Chicago hangs out
Speaker 1: trade for like three or four days. Thursday flies back
Speaker 1: and does she think he's out like plowing the field.
Speaker 1: I don't know. She didn't tell me all if you
Speaker 1: need me, yeah, I don't know. Then she hears the
Speaker 1: places like called dirt it. I'll tell you that. Vance No,
Speaker 1: I think that. I think she had to be aware
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, so you know, anyway gets back. Isn't
Speaker 1: it worth fun to imagine she had no idea? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: she's just in there, like you know, making let's have
Speaker 1: peanut butter brittle and just on her own, just having
Speaker 1: some me time, listening to her stories, living your best life.
Speaker 1: So dope to the guild, all of mom happy, mother's
Speaker 1: little helpers. He's got a fistful helpers. Okay. Anyway, so dude,
Speaker 1: he gets good at trading. Cassuga starts not losing out
Speaker 1: everything and his wife's money and all of everything on
Speaker 1: the futures market. So he starts making bank. He starts
Speaker 1: getting really good at He starts buying Cadillacs for his brokers.
Speaker 1: That's how good he's getting at it. Multiple brokers, multiple Cadillacs.
Speaker 1: Not just like Steve got your catalect, more like Steve,
Speaker 1: Gary Lionel and Anton gil got y'all got covered you two, Joaquin,
Speaker 1: But there's one there's this one story about him. But
Speaker 1: it's like I was reading and I'm like, what a jerk.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I think, guy, he's he's giving cars to
Speaker 1: his broker's right, there's supposed to be gifts. He's riding
Speaker 1: around one time and uh, well, I'll just put it
Speaker 1: to this way quote from a book he said. He
Speaker 1: presented a broker name Nate Wertheimer, who was at one
Speaker 1: point a chairman of the Murk that's the Mercantile Exchange,
Speaker 1: with a big, fancy Cadillac. Fifteen minutes later, they were
Speaker 1: driving down Michigan Avenue when Kassuga, in the backseat, put
Speaker 1: his dirty feet on the ceiling of the car. We're
Speaker 1: finmer told him to take his feet off the ceiling
Speaker 1: of his car. Your car, Kassuga asked, and then stuck
Speaker 1: his feet through the canvas ceiling. That's like the Charlie
Speaker 1: Murphy story about Rick James and the white couch is.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it's like, he just gave
Speaker 1: you your couch, Nie Murphy, but he just he just
Speaker 1: gave you a car. But you want to get it
Speaker 1: detailed afterwards. Yeah, I think they're both jerks. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know what everyone everyone's jerk in the start
Speaker 1: in life. Everyone life, you're going to broaden it just
Speaker 1: going all throwing the net wide, all right, you leave
Speaker 1: my sister out of here. Sorry. Anyway, back to kiss
Speaker 1: the dude. He like, as I'm trying to convey, he's willful,
Speaker 1: he's controlling, and he's gonna do what he's gonna do.
Speaker 1: Be it his you know, it doesn't matter you're his
Speaker 1: wife or his broker. To hell with you. So if
Speaker 1: you just keeping things, you know, like modern, have you
Speaker 1: bought eggs lately? I have? Have you seen the prices? Yeah, yikes,
Speaker 1: they're coming back down, but bikes, So, like you may
Speaker 1: be wondering what the hell egg producers, like, why did
Speaker 1: eggs suddenly go up in price? Right? They jumped up
Speaker 1: by six over the course of the last year. A
Speaker 1: dozen of grade at large Grade E eggs was a
Speaker 1: dollar seventy nine. A year ago they were four five.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know, we're yeah, we're screwed on that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, across the country, the averages are bitter about this.
Speaker 1: So anyway, as you pointed out, egg prices started to fall,
Speaker 1: they've already fallen about fifty percent back down. Wasn't that
Speaker 1: because of avians? I've seen arguments on both sides. One,
Speaker 1: I've seen that avian flu wiped out sixty million birds, right,
Speaker 1: and so obviously then you have the supply and demand issue. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I also heard that I think it was what
Speaker 1: the U. S d A was telling home farmers not
Speaker 1: to have chickens because they were worried that that's the
Speaker 1: whole pandemic chicken thing. I don't think that affected the
Speaker 1: market anyway, but yeah, but a lot of people I
Speaker 1: know were like, oh, I got chickens, Like you want
Speaker 1: to buy eggs from meat when? Oh interesting you and
Speaker 1: your but I mean black market egg people. Oh yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: after those fifty or sixty million chickets were destroyed or
Speaker 1: whatever it was, the prices started to fall right. Well, ultimately,
Speaker 1: what you notice is it's about still supply and demand.
Speaker 1: You know, there is still an economic theory at work
Speaker 1: underneath all of this, which is supply controls demand, demand
Speaker 1: control supply. Do you have this interaction? Right? Last time
Speaker 1: I went to the store, they were eleven? Don't are
Speaker 1: you kidding me? Ding? Wow? That's insane? Well, my du
Speaker 1: kasuga right, he's like inspired by these types of crazy
Speaker 1: price sikes. He's like, you know, what to hell with these? Like,
Speaker 1: you know, oh, I'm gonna get futures. He's like, what
Speaker 1: if I could like kind of control the price and
Speaker 1: by either controlling supplier demand. Well, I don't know enough
Speaker 1: people to control demand. I can control supply though. He
Speaker 1: starts getting into it right. So his first time he practices,
Speaker 1: he makes a trading places style bet. He goes out
Speaker 1: and he makes a weather bet. He says, okay, he
Speaker 1: purchased a bunch of onion futures, and he bets on
Speaker 1: the price to rise, and then to guarantee that the
Speaker 1: price rises, he goes down to the local weather bureau
Speaker 1: and he bribes them to put out a fake weather
Speaker 1: service issuing a frost warning. So the price goes up
Speaker 1: because the frost warning. But the mercury it never fell.
Speaker 1: There was no frost. It never went below fifty degrees,
Speaker 1: so onion surplus was there. The market was like boom.
Speaker 1: He made a bunch on on that, right, He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: that was a good score. I bet I can go
Speaker 1: bigger because that was not enough for so market manipulation
Speaker 1: was one thing. But he's like, what if I could
Speaker 1: totally control the market, and what if I didn't have
Speaker 1: to rely on lies and false crop reports or weather reports.
Speaker 1: He's like, what if someone could do that? Like control
Speaker 1: the market. That would be a huge fortune. And nobody
Speaker 1: will look for onions. So if someone did that, that
Speaker 1: person would be a master scammer. And he's like that
Speaker 1: person hits up his business partner, Sam Segull, and he's like, Yo, Seegull,
Speaker 1: I got I got I got a new score. And
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, hit me with it. He lays it
Speaker 1: out for him. He's like, oh, bet, I'm down. Let's
Speaker 1: do this. So the two of them they start basically
Speaker 1: setting up everything they'll need to control the onion market
Speaker 1: of America. On New York exactly. This dude has a
Speaker 1: nephew who's still alive, Harvey paffen Roff. He was talking
Speaker 1: to NPR about this and he recalled what he knew
Speaker 1: of his uncle's onion hoarding. So Harvey paffen Roth said, well,
Speaker 1: he was building it was a big shed of corrugated aluminum,
Speaker 1: I mean huge, and he had a conveyor in there
Speaker 1: and he was filling it with onions. So he was
Speaker 1: stock buying all the onions from his farm in the
Speaker 1: trading pits of Chicago. Vincent, his business partner Sam Siegel,
Speaker 1: bought up all the available futures contracts for onions by
Speaker 1: the winner of nineteen fifty five, they had done the impossible.
Speaker 1: You may be wondering, Elizabeth, what is the impossible, Elizabeth?
Speaker 1: What is the impossible? Great question, Elizabeth. According to prof
Speaker 1: he owned all of the longs in the futures market,
Speaker 1: and he owned all of the onions in the United States.
Speaker 1: So basically he had cornered the market. He owned all
Speaker 1: the onions in the United States. That's let's say he
Speaker 1: buys onions from farmers and California, from California to New
Speaker 1: York to Texas, Minnesota, everywhere, Vidalia, the walla wall is,
Speaker 1: everywhere that they had good sweet onions, red onions, white onions.
Speaker 1: He was like, send them my wet you know it,
Speaker 1: pearl onions. So they start stockpiling them and effectively they'd
Speaker 1: start taking them off the markets, and now the supply
Speaker 1: starts going down, down, down, because onions, like apples, can
Speaker 1: last for a while on the marketing called storage in particular,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't take kasukan seagull long. They end up,
Speaker 1: as I said, controlling about of the onions in the
Speaker 1: Chicago market, which represents most of the United States agricultural products. Right,
Speaker 1: So what does this mean in real terms, what do
Speaker 1: you mean? Like they owned the onions right well to
Speaker 1: control the market. If they control they can run the
Speaker 1: price up for the onions, which is what he did.
Speaker 1: So he starts to drive the price up as he
Speaker 1: dwindles the supply, right, says, less and less onions going
Speaker 1: to markets. He's holding them away from the market. I
Speaker 1: have like six for you. That means like in the fifties,
Speaker 1: if you had French onions soup you were eating sue this.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you're pretty much only some good trick to
Speaker 1: suit this. So, now that he has the onion market
Speaker 1: pretty much controlled, he starts buying up onion futures and
Speaker 1: that's going to guarantee his huge paid eight down the line.
Speaker 1: So he also now to do that, he'll need to
Speaker 1: control all the other onion growers in America. So this
Speaker 1: is what he sets to do next. So November and
Speaker 1: December fifty Kasuga calls a meeting of his new de
Speaker 1: facto onion syndicate right, and he brings together with this
Speaker 1: consortion with growers and wholesalers, distributors, and he tells them
Speaker 1: the plan. He informs that he wants to buy onions
Speaker 1: from all of them, right, and he'll set the price.
Speaker 1: He's like McDonald's with potatoes. He's like, this is the price.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'm I'm paying a dollar six d a bag.
Speaker 1: And they're like okay. And these are big time onion guys, right,
Speaker 1: so they can get prices. They feel they can set
Speaker 1: prices too. But they didn't buy onions by the bag.
Speaker 1: They buy him by the train car, right. So that's
Speaker 1: nine hundred sixty dollars per train cars what he's saying essentially, right,
Speaker 1: So in this one train car, that's about six hundred
Speaker 1: fifty pound bags of onions. So there was another VISal
Speaker 1: when his deal that he presented to these guys, he's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you all have to agree not to bring any onions
Speaker 1: to market before the end of the trading season, which
Speaker 1: is in March. So that's the future trading season. So
Speaker 1: that means until at least the end of the March
Speaker 1: of the next year. He has all these gathered men
Speaker 1: make their promise that they will allow him to buy
Speaker 1: up all their onions, so they're still making money, but
Speaker 1: then control the prices will drive up prices and then
Speaker 1: they can release them back onto the market. Everybody wins
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. Right, so what are people supposed to
Speaker 1: do for French onion soup for Christmas? New Year's Eve
Speaker 1: blom and onions. They're they're they're they're doing it for
Speaker 1: the next year for fifty six people have un till March, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're basically you're gonna have the huge surplus come
Speaker 1: out because right now all the harvest stuff everybody's called, well,
Speaker 1: they're they're basically living off the onions from earlier. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't notice it until like Easter. That's when
Speaker 1: you're exactly eastern good. Okay, when you when your family
Speaker 1: is sitting down for your Easter brunch at the outback steakhouse,
Speaker 1: you're like, the blooming onion is fifty dollars anyway, So
Speaker 1: so well they're doing this. Chicago Mercantile Exchange is getting
Speaker 1: rumors that there's a fluctuation onion prices start, people starting
Speaker 1: to notice it, and there's like the supplies dwindling, prices
Speaker 1: are going up. Kassuga tells the growers, we've got this
Speaker 1: market under control, if you boys want to cooperate now,
Speaker 1: He's like basically telling we got it on lock, do
Speaker 1: not mess this up and try to go out there
Speaker 1: and make money right now because the prices are going
Speaker 1: up and everyone's like, okay, now, if you want to
Speaker 1: do some trading places money on your onions, which is
Speaker 1: what Cassuga wants to do, you buy futures contracts, right,
Speaker 1: So you tell an onion buyer, I'll make a contract
Speaker 1: with you come September, I'll sell the bag onions for
Speaker 1: three dollars. Right, And if the price is four dollars
Speaker 1: for a bag of onions, you now lose a dollar
Speaker 1: on every bag because it's going up. The prices down
Speaker 1: to two dollars, you make a dollar on every bag
Speaker 1: on right. So that but if you can drive the
Speaker 1: price down, you can guarantee that you make your money.
Speaker 1: That's Kassuga's plan, right, He's gonna drive the price down,
Speaker 1: even though right now he's driving it up. Right. So
Speaker 1: the onion cartels is not particularly enthused about all Kassuga's
Speaker 1: market eploys are. They're pretty decent guys, but he had
Speaker 1: them leverage because they're like, well, if he does this,
Speaker 1: I'll lose it. He could work this against me, so
Speaker 1: they're feared is turned against them. So now they let
Speaker 1: him set the prices for the market. So Kasuga warns
Speaker 1: in the onion car tell members that if any of
Speaker 1: them choose not to go along with his market moves,
Speaker 1: well then he and seagull Quote would dump the onions
Speaker 1: on the market and decimate prices. Everybody's terrified, so this
Speaker 1: is gonna be a big tissue. So they're forced to
Speaker 1: play Kasuga's game. Everyone's going along with it, and they
Speaker 1: now have to purchase roughly all of the car loads
Speaker 1: that they can, and they're just putting them into cold storage.
Speaker 1: They end up controlling eight and a half million pounds
Speaker 1: of onions. Oh my god, the onion guys exactly. So
Speaker 1: they start they just start stockpiling onions and warehouses, worrying
Speaker 1: about like how they smell going home to their wives,
Speaker 1: and prices keep climbing. The money there, there's just still
Speaker 1: making money. I can smell the Ksuga. So the Kasuga's
Speaker 1: onion car power, it's pan off big time right on.
Speaker 1: Prices continue. They're up to four dollars a bag, and
Speaker 1: remember he started a dollar. So they're all happy with this.
Speaker 1: But they're all cooperating under the standing the agreement would
Speaker 1: remain secret if anybody speaks about it, this smoky back
Speaker 1: room deal, they'll all be busted. Right, This is totally
Speaker 1: illegal what they're doing. So the idea was to keep
Speaker 1: a secret. Now that's the idea, not the reality, right, right.
Speaker 1: So the thing about someone like Vince Kasugas, they never
Speaker 1: know when enough is enough because there's never enough. As
Speaker 1: long as there is more for them, they want them
Speaker 1: more to right. So he would should have been happy
Speaker 1: making his long daddy money off market manipulations. But no,
Speaker 1: he wants to drive the price of onions up and
Speaker 1: then he wants to drive it back down. That's gonna
Speaker 1: take a lot of coordinated effort. So he pulls a
Speaker 1: double cross on the onion cartel because he's like, look,
Speaker 1: these guys are gonna be a problem for me, and
Speaker 1: there's too many. He crossed the onion cartel. He only
Speaker 1: needed the onion cartel to help him drive the prices up.
Speaker 1: Is he he doesn't need their help to drop the
Speaker 1: prices down? Is he the el Choppo of the onion chop,
Speaker 1: the el chopped onions? So once he hasn't all the
Speaker 1: it's like purchasing stockpiled they're redundant. The other one I
Speaker 1: haven't thought this through, because they're like, oh yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna help roll in this together. What are you doing
Speaker 1: now he's got your onions. So he decides it's gonna
Speaker 1: be soon time to release the onions. So New Year's Eve,
Speaker 1: the Onion Car tells, they told you controls nine gay
Speaker 1: percent of the onions and they are all in cold
Speaker 1: storage around Chicago. So Becasuga starts working the other deal,
Speaker 1: he starts deciding how he's going to short the price
Speaker 1: of onions. So he contacts a few people that he
Speaker 1: trusts in the Onion Car tell and he decides, like
Speaker 1: some angry god of gravity, this is how I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make the prices plummet. And they're like, okay, well we'll
Speaker 1: lay it on me. So, because he had one other
Speaker 1: problem that all the onion growers no onions rot. This
Speaker 1: can only go for so long. They're doing it over
Speaker 1: the winter, so that really helps him because these onions
Speaker 1: are basically frozen in box cars in Chicago. But it's
Speaker 1: gonna get cold. It's like stop being cold in March
Speaker 1: when exactly right, and you don't want like train cars
Speaker 1: sitting in mud with stinking onions, right, So the onions.
Speaker 1: They've been stored and there's like, you know, just car
Speaker 1: train car loads everywhere that you can imagine in the
Speaker 1: train yards, just filled with onions. So they realize some
Speaker 1: of them are starting to turn, so they they take
Speaker 1: the train cars and they move them out of Chicago
Speaker 1: and they send part of them to Iowa, and then
Speaker 1: they have the people in Iowa repurpose them. So they
Speaker 1: take the onions and clean them up and rebag them,
Speaker 1: and you shoot and sell the ones that are sailable
Speaker 1: and then dish the other ones, and then they bring
Speaker 1: them back. The people in Chicago see more trainloads of
Speaker 1: onions coming and they're like, oh my god, there's even
Speaker 1: more onions. So the price goes down further. Onions. I
Speaker 1: bet you they took the mushy onions and made them
Speaker 1: into those reconstituted onion rings. Yeah, I think you're probably right.
Speaker 1: They net them. They're all mushy onions. Oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: onion rings are all it's wasted onions like baby people.
Speaker 1: So they've got hundreds of box cars now sitting all
Speaker 1: around Chicago. The only thing left for Cassuga to do
Speaker 1: now is is to screw his partners in the onion
Speaker 1: cartel and and work post side. It's against the middle,
Speaker 1: the middle being him. So after this little break, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you how he's going to screw the Onion cartel,
Speaker 1: screw him. Okay, so Elizabeth, last we left the story,
Speaker 1: Chicago was swamped with onions, just just rife with them, right,
Speaker 1: just onions in every train, heard, every box card. It's
Speaker 1: just there's nowhere for hobos to. People are walking down
Speaker 1: the street and they reach in their pocket for their keys,
Speaker 1: on falls out. So because you guys, I tell you
Speaker 1: he just needs a couple more weeks for his plan
Speaker 1: to hold together, and then he's going to screw his
Speaker 1: cartel members and then short the price and be the
Speaker 1: only one to make big. But he does need a
Speaker 1: couple of them to help him out, because you know,
Speaker 1: he's feeling a little guilty and he's like, look, you guys,
Speaker 1: help me, like I like a couple of years. One
Speaker 1: of the co conspirators, this dude named Dave Slinger. So
Speaker 1: he contacts his boy, David Slinger, and he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is the plan. So Slinger tells us the other
Speaker 1: half of the phone call, and he tells us this
Speaker 1: in congressional testimony. So going from his congressional testimony. Along
Speaker 1: about the twentieth of January, I had onions. I had
Speaker 1: my Indians all hedged, and I got rid of all
Speaker 1: of them, and I went on a ski trip and
Speaker 1: broke my leg and I was confined to the hospital
Speaker 1: in Walsaw. And along about the first February, I received
Speaker 1: a call from Mr Cassuga and he wanted me to
Speaker 1: call William Garring and suggest to him that we go
Speaker 1: short the market. I was completely dumbfounded because I thought
Speaker 1: they were on the long side of the market. I
Speaker 1: do not know exactly what was said after he made
Speaker 1: that suggestion, but I was left with the impression that
Speaker 1: he had reversed his position, that he was shorting the market,
Speaker 1: and possibly his conscience was bothering him, and he wanted
Speaker 1: Gearing also to get in on the short side. I
Speaker 1: told him that I didn't think that. I thought that
Speaker 1: they were going to reverse their position and go short
Speaker 1: the market. The group should be called together and should
Speaker 1: do it together. Now. Mr Cassuga answered that that would
Speaker 1: never do it, would wreck the market in a matter
Speaker 1: of minutes and would go down to fifty cents. That
Speaker 1: the only way to do it was to control it
Speaker 1: somewhat and only one person knows about it. I said,
Speaker 1: all right, I will call William Garring, and so I
Speaker 1: called him, and William Garring absolutely wouldn't have anything to
Speaker 1: do with it. He said, I won't do anything less
Speaker 1: all the group backs together. Don't think i'd call him
Speaker 1: Mr Cassuga back. I believe that was the last conversation
Speaker 1: I had with him until some time in the summer.
Speaker 1: Doesn't that sound the congressional testimony. I don't even know
Speaker 1: the dude. I talked to him one time that if
Speaker 1: you like how they're like, if we're gonna short this,
Speaker 1: we're gonna short this together. Ex fact, they're screwing them together. Well,
Speaker 1: in for a penny, in for a pound together. So
Speaker 1: it turns out everyone was not as greedy as Cassuga was,
Speaker 1: so he basically miscalculate it. He's like, yeah, we're all
Speaker 1: green heads guys, right, They're like, oh no, like no,
Speaker 1: we're onion buddies, and you're a bad guy exactly, because
Speaker 1: is like, well that's on y'all. I got God in
Speaker 1: a and a gun. I ain't gonna let that stop me.
Speaker 1: So come March, when the new trading season kicks off
Speaker 1: for the futures. Kassuga went ahead with his plan. He
Speaker 1: was like, well, I told him, they know what's happened.
Speaker 1: So he hadn't worked out so hard to control all
Speaker 1: of the onions in America to miss out on a
Speaker 1: huge profit. So he and Siegel, they decided time to
Speaker 1: release the Strategic Reserve of onions. It immediately wreaked havoc
Speaker 1: on the market. On February one, totally, god, you caught
Speaker 1: that ninety six, the price of a March future for
Speaker 1: a fifty pound bag of onions was a dollar to
Speaker 1: a dollar twenty five. That's on February one, right, Kasuga
Speaker 1: releases the Strategic Reserve of onions, and then on March
Speaker 1: tewod the price for a fifty pound bag was forty
Speaker 1: four cents. On March five, I'm sorry, it was about
Speaker 1: fifty cents. I'm March fifth and it falls to forty
Speaker 1: four cents and stays there. By March fifteenth, they had
Speaker 1: fallen to ten cents ten cents for a bag. He
Speaker 1: got up to four dollars to ten cents, and dollar
Speaker 1: six was about what market price should be. He going
Speaker 1: around all the stores and where the price tag is
Speaker 1: he puts a little sticker of him pointing that says
Speaker 1: I did that. It's like the Cossuga special. But this
Speaker 1: was the lowest price ever recorded in the Chicago merke
Speaker 1: for fifty pounds onions. That's onions soup for everybody. Coincidentally,
Speaker 1: this was just in time for Cossuga's future contracts to
Speaker 1: come do. That means the onions that he promised people
Speaker 1: to buy at whatever the price was March he was
Speaker 1: they were now worth a fraction of the price of
Speaker 1: what anybody would expect. So he comes in and has
Speaker 1: to buy up all the onions and he just turns
Speaker 1: him over to the market. He makes a fortune, so
Speaker 1: huge profits for Cossuga, none for the onion cartel except
Speaker 1: for you know, his buddy Siegell And uh yeah. So
Speaker 1: now the price for about go onions fell so low
Speaker 1: it fell below the cost of the bag. The onions
Speaker 1: were sold bad. A fifty pound bag of onions cost
Speaker 1: twenty cents the bag. It was the fifty pounds of
Speaker 1: onions inside ten cents. So people were keeping the bag
Speaker 1: because it was more valuable. Like here it is dumped
Speaker 1: the onions right. Consia's former partners in the onion cartel.
Speaker 1: They lose fortunes, right because they're all holding up all
Speaker 1: they're waiting to sell their onions. They you know, so
Speaker 1: whatever they had not given him. So most of the
Speaker 1: onion growers of America they also lose their shirts. They
Speaker 1: had been buoyed by the artificial prices, thinking all, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be a great season, so they're thinking of
Speaker 1: taking out loans, doing stuff. Then the prices suddenly drops
Speaker 1: into like a one week time So now that when
Speaker 1: the market craters, everyone's got all these worthless onions. A
Speaker 1: fifty pound bag of you know, that's now we're ten cents.
Speaker 1: That's about a four thousand percent fall in value. I
Speaker 1: think I think it's four thousand percent. I'm not a
Speaker 1: commodities brooke. I don't know these things. But whatever it was,
Speaker 1: no one was prepared for it, no one but Vincent CoA.
Speaker 1: So this raised an interesting question, which is what do
Speaker 1: you do with all the excess onions that are now
Speaker 1: suddenly everywhere, like onions are essentially worthless and just plaguing Chicago.
Speaker 1: They're just everywhere. There's loading docks, train yards, produced warehouses
Speaker 1: jam packed with onions. The onion farmers in the area
Speaker 1: are just giving up, dude. There was this cat up
Speaker 1: in Hollandale, Minnesota who was so disgusted with the state
Speaker 1: of onion markets he plowed under his whole field just
Speaker 1: in protest. He destroyed the whole crop, like the hell
Speaker 1: with this, like made a big scene and stink about it.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'm not wasting my time on some worthless onions.
Speaker 1: But still if you're not, If you can't plow under,
Speaker 1: what do you do? You go to bird's eye and
Speaker 1: you say, freeze them. Well, there's millions of metric tons
Speaker 1: of useless onions that are on the market in Chicago. Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: to sort through this, I'd like you to do me
Speaker 1: a favorite. Close your eyes and picture it. You are
Speaker 1: the head nun in charge of a Catholic orphanage on
Speaker 1: the South side of Chicago. As the mother's superior, you
Speaker 1: could send one of the novices out to get groceries
Speaker 1: and around errands, but you like to keep a spirit
Speaker 1: of human so at the orphanage you insist everyone takes
Speaker 1: a turn getting the groceries and running errand today is
Speaker 1: your turn. You head out into the Chicago streets a
Speaker 1: stiff cold breeze rushes past you. You clutch your bags
Speaker 1: to your side to brace against the winter winds. After
Speaker 1: a short johnt you catch a street car and head
Speaker 1: to the local market. At your local market, you discover
Speaker 1: something odd is happening. The green grocer is standing outside
Speaker 1: the store. Next to him is a pyramidal pile of
Speaker 1: bags of onions, and he's practically begging people to buy
Speaker 1: a bag. When you pass them, he shouts, hey, sister,
Speaker 1: if you buy a dozen eggs, will throwing a bag
Speaker 1: of onions for free for the kids. If he knows
Speaker 1: you've got the orphanage. The same is you already have
Speaker 1: all the eggs and onions you need, you bottom ahead
Speaker 1: of time because you know the kids are gonna want them.
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, these prices are amazing. After you do
Speaker 1: your shopping, you plan to head down to the cobbler
Speaker 1: to check on some shoes that you had a novice
Speaker 1: drop off. You want the kids to have some fresh
Speaker 1: sold shoes when they put their winter shoes away at
Speaker 1: the end of the season. Spring is arriving fast. It's
Speaker 1: mid March, and you can practically smell the coming blossom.
Speaker 1: You think to yourself. The poet Pablo and Neruda would
Speaker 1: be beside himself, I think, and with onions. So as
Speaker 1: you walk past the gas station, you hear the owner
Speaker 1: of the station calling out to people like a carnival barker.
Speaker 1: He shouts, you fill up your tank, I'll throw one
Speaker 1: a freight bag onions. Like, shake your head and wonder
Speaker 1: if you missed a new bulletin what's up with all
Speaker 1: the onions? As you watch some kids throwing them into
Speaker 1: the Chicago River just like Duncan. Later on, on your
Speaker 1: way back home, you top on the street car. You
Speaker 1: pass by where the stockyards run off to the distance,
Speaker 1: and you see a flatbed truck loaded down with onions.
Speaker 1: It's backs into a feed lot. The stockyard guys begin
Speaker 1: to toss the bags of onions into the hog pens, right,
Speaker 1: but they're careful to keep the bags. The bags are baptable.
Speaker 1: But there that's the most valuable part of this operation.
Speaker 1: And you wonder if this onion diet will result in
Speaker 1: a more savory hand. Probably. I mean, think about all
Speaker 1: the hogs that eat like wild like the acorns and stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah in France. Yeah, so you're about that life,
Speaker 1: you know, you're like, that's gonna be some delicious asshog. Yep,
Speaker 1: I'm just like licking my lips looking at them pigs
Speaker 1: and their own films, which you're also wondering, where are
Speaker 1: all these onions coming from? Chicago is getting back to
Speaker 1: its roots? So how much was all this market manipulation
Speaker 1: worth to Cassuga? Now these guys all of Chicago, right,
Speaker 1: he make how much did he make? Well, all told
Speaker 1: said and done, he pocketed about eight point five million
Speaker 1: from his great onion scams, and that's about nine million
Speaker 1: off of onion future. Now when you make that kind
Speaker 1: of money off of market manipulation, and there's evidence of
Speaker 1: what you did because you called together an onion cartel
Speaker 1: and you decided to betray those same men and bankrupt
Speaker 1: some of them buddies. Yeah, well, some of them are
Speaker 1: going to sue you. That's just what they're kind of do,
Speaker 1: which is what happened to Kassuga. But if you can
Speaker 1: believe it, Cassuga is like, the hell with that, I'm
Speaker 1: suing you for breaking breach of contrast to everybody. So
Speaker 1: Kasuga's lawsuit is going. Oh, he winds his way through
Speaker 1: the courts. The lower courts affirm cassuga side of the lawsuit,
Speaker 1: the defendant appeals, the case goes all the way up
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has to decide
Speaker 1: the onion futures case. In a nineteen nine the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: here's the Cassuga onion cartel lawsuit, and in January they
Speaker 1: sided in favor of Cassuga. That's just some good capitalism.
Speaker 1: So but that's not the end of the story, because
Speaker 1: before the Supreme Court decided to take Cassugas back in
Speaker 1: the in the cartel lawsuit, a future American president got
Speaker 1: mixed up in the onion mess. Can you guess which one?
Speaker 1: I'll give you a hint, Michigan. I don't give another hint.
Speaker 1: Not Nixon, Enter future president Gerald Ford, the congressman at
Speaker 1: the time from Michigan. We always forget about for I did,
Speaker 1: and it's right there for again, and yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: we're just always gabbing about that. And it's like every
Speaker 1: time I walk into the headquarters or read our stitching
Speaker 1: bitch sitting there, I'm like, let's just list the presidents
Speaker 1: and then you go and then we forget. We skipped,
Speaker 1: we're missing we skip poke again. Now forward. He's like
Speaker 1: from a place where there's a ton of onion farmers,
Speaker 1: and he's a young congressman, so he's gonna do the
Speaker 1: business of the people. So Forod gets in there and
Speaker 1: he's got all these angry Michigan onion farmers on his line,
Speaker 1: and he's like, damn it, you can't bankrupt and nearly
Speaker 1: bust all these good farmers. And so he goes after
Speaker 1: Kassuga the market manipulations. He goes to Florida Congress. He
Speaker 1: drops some fresh legislation. He's like, look at this, and
Speaker 1: it's there. It is the Onion Futures Act. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be a bill he proposes to protect onion growers from
Speaker 1: the greed heads like Vincent Kasuga, the congressman forward. He
Speaker 1: puts to forward his bill to make all these type
Speaker 1: of market antics illegal. And the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
Speaker 1: whoa whoa. Yeah, I know, he made us look bad.
Speaker 1: He busted a lot of people. But that's anti capitalism.
Speaker 1: So they fight against it. They're like, they file a
Speaker 1: lawsuit trying to block it. They alleged that this will
Speaker 1: restrict free trade. So it's the same line you always hear,
Speaker 1: which was total horse pucky. But anyway, the Onion Future
Speaker 1: Is Act. It made a lot of good market sense,
Speaker 1: and so the bill gets brought to the floor, it
Speaker 1: gets voted on, it passes presidents, and Howard signs it
Speaker 1: into law. And the onion farmers were like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: like ike. Yeah, well, I mean it's like you have
Speaker 1: that we like well, you know, because it's anyway. They
Speaker 1: they say, it's going to get in the way of
Speaker 1: free trade. Suga is getting in the way. He is
Speaker 1: free trade. That's what free trade looks like. The Onion
Speaker 1: Future Is Acting makes it illegal to sell a futures
Speaker 1: contract on a load of onions anywhere in America. Right,
Speaker 1: So that same yere N six, the Commodities Exchange Authority,
Speaker 1: it brings an action against Cassuga and his business partner Siegel.
Speaker 1: The complain alleges that the two men had conspired quote
Speaker 1: with a group of other persons connected with growing up
Speaker 1: or trading onions and actions allegedly designed to increase or
Speaker 1: to prevent a decrease in the price on the mercantile exchange. Basically,
Speaker 1: they conspired against everybody because Soga being the plane crashing,
Speaker 1: market manipulating spark plug of a man you know who's
Speaker 1: cool with the and Ability club. He's like, I'll fight
Speaker 1: you all. So he goes and he hires a fanciast lawyer,
Speaker 1: and he fights the case, all of the cases, any cases, right,
Speaker 1: And he cites the uncertainty of whether he says, this
Speaker 1: is the nature of farming. Crops fail. What are you
Speaker 1: looking at me for? I think this is my fault.
Speaker 1: Sometimes crops are bountiful, sometimes they're not. All I did
Speaker 1: was make big money on market dynamics. He even says,
Speaker 1: and I quote, if it's against the law and make
Speaker 1: money in the United States, then I'm guilty. WHOA I
Speaker 1: told you guys, he's got back bumped. So yes, sir,
Speaker 1: I would say, you are, you are guilty. But he
Speaker 1: you know, since he's now stolen essentially ninety millions or
Speaker 1: siney something million dollars about ninety four from small farmers
Speaker 1: and other distributors and wholesalers, you know, this is like
Speaker 1: stealing toilet paper from Walgreen. So the cops don't go
Speaker 1: after him. No, nothing happened to this dude. He doesn't
Speaker 1: go to jail. True to the nature of justice in America,
Speaker 1: and according to the American law and Ordercausuga is able
Speaker 1: to essentially steal ninety four million dollars from small farmers
Speaker 1: and all these other people, and all us to do
Speaker 1: is just hire some lawyers to fight a couple of
Speaker 1: cases in court, goes at the Supreme Court and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: give him the big thumbs up, and nothing happens. The
Speaker 1: Commodities Exchange Authority they bring a lawsuit against Cassuga. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe our lawsuit will work. Nope. C A loses in
Speaker 1: court to court ruled that c A what had failed
Speaker 1: to show Kassuga attempted to manipulate upward prices of November
Speaker 1: futures on the Chicago American Dollar Exchange and prices of
Speaker 1: Bunion cash. Blah blah blah, what how they had receipts
Speaker 1: had to do like, you know, get anybody to say it.
Speaker 1: Everyone knew what he did. It has been an open secret,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't prove it in the courts, Like we
Speaker 1: don't care. If that's the facts, you gotta prove it,
Speaker 1: Like this sucks. But Kassuga is like, yeah, that's why
Speaker 1: I pay for the good lawyers, and so he has
Speaker 1: to pay. Eventually, a very small price for this injustice,
Speaker 1: he loses his license to trade commodities for a whole
Speaker 1: ten months, slap on the wrist concent and then he
Speaker 1: has to pay a modest fine. And that was that.
Speaker 1: He never spended hand jail, never had any real consequences.
Speaker 1: He pulls off the biggest scam in American farming history
Speaker 1: and is padded on the back by the Supreme Court. Then,
Speaker 1: in America, the message has always been the same. If
Speaker 1: you're gonna steal, steal big. It's just the thing, right
Speaker 1: And by the way, the Gerald Ford Onion Futures Act,
Speaker 1: that's still a law, and it gets cited as precedent law.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and ten, motion picture box office receipts
Speaker 1: were added to the Onion Futures Act, making it illegal
Speaker 1: to speculate on future box office earning because people are
Speaker 1: starting to do that. Yeah. And then in the next year,
Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, that's when the Chicago Mercan Dogs
Speaker 1: Change stopped selling pork billy futures because they're like, look,
Speaker 1: we just want to get off this whole yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, but it's not illegal to sell a
Speaker 1: pork belly future. It is illegal to sell an onion
Speaker 1: future all thanks to Vincent Cassuga. Right so, and also
Speaker 1: you know Gerald Ford, So thank you Gerald Ford. Well,
Speaker 1: he's gotta gotta fun to me. It's always funny. Gerald Ford.
Speaker 1: The dude pardon Nicks. And he fell down the steps
Speaker 1: of Air Force one a bunch, and he made onion
Speaker 1: futures illegal. That's quite a legacy, just I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: Kick Rocks Coolidge. All right, Well, one final interesting twist
Speaker 1: for you, because Suga went back to futures trading after
Speaker 1: all this once he got his license back after the
Speaker 1: ten months in the like you know, the penalty box,
Speaker 1: and he primarily focused on pork belly futures and potatoes
Speaker 1: at that point and eventually went back to farming and
Speaker 1: commodities broken. But he also did something kind of fun
Speaker 1: in the sixties. He built an inn in Pine Island,
Speaker 1: New York. He named his place the Jolly Onion in
Speaker 1: just to screw with people. And then he was the
Speaker 1: chef of the restaurant and he ran the spot for
Speaker 1: years and he even had like, you know, like a
Speaker 1: really great sweet onion soup recipe that they still sell.
Speaker 1: So he sold the restaurant. The restaurants still open. So
Speaker 1: if you're out there in Pine Island you want to
Speaker 1: go check in hit the tastes like scams. What is
Speaker 1: your ridiculous takeaway? My ridiculous take boy, thank you for
Speaker 1: asking the first time so quickly. I don't have one. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what's your ridiculous take Okay? Now my ridiculous takeaways
Speaker 1: the same thing as from the beginning. Capitalism is some bow.
Speaker 1: My ridiculous takeaway is God, I love French onion soup.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculousulous. Well, you know, thanks for listening. This was
Speaker 1: the Vincent Kassuga onion scam. You know, folks, you can
Speaker 1: find us online at Twitter, in Instagram. If you want
Speaker 1: to bother, you to connect with us, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: like get cozy and comfortable and talk about life. Hit
Speaker 1: us up. You can also email us share with us
Speaker 1: anything of your thoughts, your feelings, your observations. We're here
Speaker 1: for you, folks. That's all we got for you. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. Ridiculos dryings listed by Elizabeth Dunton and Zarin Burnett,
Speaker 1: producing did by by davea Onion Cousting researches by Marissa
Speaker 1: Walla Walla Sweet Onion Brown and Andrea song Sharp and
Speaker 1: Tears in My Eyes From All of the Onions. Our
Speaker 1: theme songs by Thomas Onion chut Lee and Travis Spring
Speaker 1: Onion Dotton. Executive produces are Ben A Fresh Bowling of
Speaker 1: Fresh Onion Soup and No Gotta Get the Onion Rings
Speaker 1: at the Varsity Brown Quiet Say It One More Time.
Speaker 1: We Dequeous Crew. Ridiculous Crime is a production of I
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