Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcasts.
Speaker 2: That you're listening to. You're aware of what's happening. You
Speaker 2: know that this is a show that we do. You
Speaker 2: know what else? What else need I say? Bad people?
Speaker 2: We talked to you about them? How are you doing today,
Speaker 2: Brandy Posey our guest.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm doing good. Just with my one name.
Speaker 2: Over here, I give you two names?
Speaker 4: What Oh no, no, no, I'm I'm thinking about our person
Speaker 4: we've been talking about in the last episode and this
Speaker 4: oh yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, singular name that people know you by. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been keeping notes on just.
Speaker 2: Because look at what they've taken from us, you know,
Speaker 2: look at what they've taken from us exactly heartbreaking. You
Speaker 2: know what's not heartbreaking?
Speaker 5: That woman taking all of uh where they where?
Speaker 2: They ended last episode with that lady like turning pigs
Speaker 2: around on him. His fucking marry you and then take
Speaker 2: all your money scams amazing stuff she.
Speaker 3: Said, Carnival style. Fuck you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's she's so cool.
Speaker 3: She love a queen.
Speaker 2: Oh man, do you think he have to stand?
Speaker 3: Do you think at any point any of them were
Speaker 3: like set a different name or he like reacted to
Speaker 3: a different name, Like, was anybody aware of how many
Speaker 3: scams he's running?
Speaker 2: I think he did a lot because he gets caught constantly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't think he's a very smooth operator. And he
Speaker 2: kind of treats it like tag like when the cops
Speaker 2: finally he'll run, but if the cops actually get him,
Speaker 2: be like, oh, okay, you got me, you got me,
Speaker 2: Come on, you got me. Guys like yeah, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's funny. But he'll also like cop to everything that
Speaker 2: he's done, which is weird. He's like a weird kind
Speaker 2: of criminal. Today. He would have just gone to prison
Speaker 2: forever after his first crime, and we would have been
Speaker 2: deprived so much comedy and also maybe a lot of
Speaker 2: people's deaths. I don't know. So Spears is livid when
Speaker 2: Laura flips the script on him and betrays him, even
Speaker 2: though this is nothing more than he'd done to at
Speaker 2: least like, I don't know, like a half dozen women
Speaker 2: at this point. It's kind of hard to say, like
Speaker 2: a lot of women. His biographer Jerry Jamison, author of
Speaker 2: Vanishing Act, notes humiliated and mortified at being duped and
Speaker 2: outplayed in his own games, Spears would redirect all of
Speaker 2: his energy from spontaneous and short lived crimes forgery, theft, mail, fraud,
Speaker 2: and larceny towards more substantial long cons Now, somehow, probably
Speaker 2: just by reading newspapers and magazines, he'd become aware of
Speaker 2: a real millionaire playboy named Oscar el Delano. The real
Speaker 2: Oscar Delano or whatever was rich as hell and an
Speaker 2: absolute psychopath. Right, He's like a Jay Gatsby type, but
Speaker 2: the most like crazy, creepy, soulless version of that kind
Speaker 2: of guy. And he lives out in Connecticut. Right, So
Speaker 2: he's real enough that you can find news articles mentioning
Speaker 2: this guy that you can use to bolster your claims
Speaker 2: that like, no, I'm a real dude, and I'm worth
Speaker 2: fifty million dollars. How are much money this guy's worth? Right,
Speaker 2: Like spears can prove that there is a real rich
Speaker 2: guy with that name, but far enough, like he's never
Speaker 2: anywhere near Connecticut, so he feels pretty confident. No one's
Speaker 2: gonna call me on my bullshit if I pretend to
Speaker 2: be this guy. And by this point he's traveling around
Speaker 2: like the South and the Midwest, and he's doing what's
Speaker 2: called he called the convention grift, right. So the Roaring
Speaker 2: twenties are a time when there's a lot of different
Speaker 2: fraternal clubs and professional organizations. That's really starting to be
Speaker 2: a major factor in American life. You know, this isn't
Speaker 2: quite the first time, but it's sort of coming into
Speaker 2: like this is when that peaks for the first time.
Speaker 2: Is that being a really common thing? And there's all
Speaker 2: these in person meetups at resorts and fancy hotels around
Speaker 2: the country for different like fields, professional fields, and as
Speaker 2: with modern conventions, people who attend these things are there
Speaker 2: to get drunk and socialized, and you're supposed to people
Speaker 2: to trust, you know, your brothers in fraternal organizations like
Speaker 2: the Freemasons, or your colleagues if you're like, oh didn't
Speaker 2: or whatever, and so attendees have their guard down. They're
Speaker 2: not prepared to like be victimized by someone when they're
Speaker 2: in this situation. And so Spears playing Delano will meet
Speaker 2: people game their trust, pretending to be this eccentric rich
Speaker 2: guy and then ask them about their lives. Like he's
Speaker 2: quizzling them about details about their family and like what
Speaker 2: life is like back at home, because he wants to
Speaker 2: get enough detail to impersonate them over the phone, and
Speaker 2: then he heads back to his hotel room, generally while
Speaker 2: the person he's met was still drunk and partying, and
Speaker 2: he'll like call home to their wife and he'll either
Speaker 2: pretend to be them if he thinks he can get away,
Speaker 2: or he'll be like, oh my god, your husband's been
Speaker 2: arrested by some crooked local cop and I need the
Speaker 2: equivalent of like five to ten thousand dollars in modern
Speaker 2: money to bail him out, right, Like I can, we
Speaker 2: can get him out of jail, but these these crooked
Speaker 2: local cops and whatever small town this convention's in, they're
Speaker 2: not going to let him free unless we come up with,
Speaker 2: you know, thousands of dollars the equivalent of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2: And this works a lot more often than you need, guess, right,
Speaker 2: although maybe not more then you'd guess, because one of
Speaker 2: the more popular scams right now is an AI version
Speaker 2: of the same thing, where like scanners, scammers will find
Speaker 2: gen z or millennial people who have like too many
Speaker 2: videos posted with their face and voice, and they'll use
Speaker 2: AI to fake that person's voice and then call like
Speaker 2: their grandma and be like, Grandma, I've been kidnapped. You
Speaker 2: got to send these guys money or they'll kill me,
Speaker 2: and then Grandma wires ten grand to whatever fucking scammer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, problem right now.
Speaker 4: I told my dad it's a big We need to
Speaker 4: have a family safe word. If it doesn't sound like me.
Speaker 2: That's a very good idea if you've got especially elderly
Speaker 2: relatives that you're worried about my convictimized by something like that.
Speaker 2: But Spears is doing the analog version of this. He's
Speaker 2: really on the ground floor, and he gets away with
Speaker 2: this for like two years. He gets more ambitious as
Speaker 2: time goes on, and he decides to gather a group
Speaker 2: of young female sex workers together to crash the nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty six Freemason convention in Saint Louis, which sounds awesome. Initially,
Speaker 2: the cops think he's running a brothel because he's got
Speaker 2: so many girls coming and going at all hours the night.
Speaker 2: But what these girls are doing is they're each meeting
Speaker 2: people at this convention and getting all the information so
Speaker 2: that like Spears can call their family and do the
Speaker 2: con right. Like, they're gathering marks for him basically, or
Speaker 2: people whose families will be the marks. That way, he
Speaker 2: can automate the process because it's a numbers game. You
Speaker 2: want to make as many calls as possible and the
Speaker 2: hope that you can trick you know, a handful of
Speaker 2: people a day, right and get and get money coming in.
Speaker 2: So the cops actually, yeah.
Speaker 4: Massive adrenaline. The adrenaline junkiness of this guy is like that,
Speaker 4: I think is like what it is. It's chasing that like, ooh, yeah,
Speaker 4: that feeling has got to be crazy.
Speaker 2: He's getting high off of this, Yeah, definitely, Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: that makes a lot of sense. So this actually, he
Speaker 2: gets busted when he's in Saint Louis not because of
Speaker 2: the actual crime he's doing, but because the cops think
Speaker 2: he's running a brothel basically, and so they bust into
Speaker 2: his hotel room and they find him quote, entertaining multiple
Speaker 2: ladies in one bed who were wearing merely skimpy night
Speaker 2: clothing and claim to be spending the night only after
Speaker 2: missing their right home. I think they're just you know,
Speaker 2: he's handsome, he's handsome and charming, and these ladies are
Speaker 2: in on the crime, right, so why not trust him?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I doubt he paid reliably, I gotta say so. The
Speaker 2: cops give up on busting him after they fail to
Speaker 2: find any evidence of a crime, because they're not very
Speaker 2: good at their jobs and they think that something very
Speaker 2: different is going on from what's actually going on. But
Speaker 2: Spears is too greedy and impulsive to take full advantage
Speaker 2: of this, and he's he's kind of incapable of taking
Speaker 2: like this is a message from the universe, and like
Speaker 2: back off, try a new town. Instead, he continues to
Speaker 2: operate an entirely separate con at the same time that
Speaker 2: the Freemason conference is going on, and this one is
Speaker 2: a lot more evil, I guess, because he didn't think
Speaker 2: he'd get enough money from working the convention, So Spears
Speaker 2: placed a bunch of ads prior to showing up at
Speaker 2: Saint Louis, a bunch of ads for manufacturing jobs in
Speaker 2: the local yellow pages, claiming that like, we're a new company,
Speaker 2: we're opening a factory in this town, and we're so
Speaker 2: desperate for skilled workers we're willing to pay like thirty
Speaker 2: percent above market wages, like way more money than people
Speaker 2: are used to and you know, times are tough, that
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six is a good time for some of
Speaker 2: the country economically, but a lot of working people are suffering,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of folks like respond to these
Speaker 2: ads because they need work and this seems like great
Speaker 2: paying work. And when they show up. Anyone who shows
Speaker 2: up for a job interview at Spears's hotel room gets
Speaker 2: hired immediately. But then they get told you have to
Speaker 2: pay a broker fee up front. This is just money
Speaker 2: to make sure you actually show up for your first
Speaker 2: day of work, you know, because we got to like
Speaker 2: buy some stuff to get things set up for you.
Speaker 2: We don't want you to run out on us. So
Speaker 2: this makes sure you can lock down the job for yourself,
Speaker 2: per the contract that he presented them with. To qualify
Speaker 2: for this connection, you must have personality, first class references
Speaker 2: and twenty five hundred dollars in cash is a fully
Speaker 2: refundable shirty fee. This is a real bonified proposition and
Speaker 2: we invite the strictest investigation of our firm by all
Speaker 2: interested parties. This is a one time offer. This ad
Speaker 2: will not appear again now to allow for that's a
Speaker 2: lot of money for money today.
Speaker 3: This time has got to be crazy. That's like all
Speaker 3: you have probably.
Speaker 2: Yes, and people are going into debt to put this up.
Speaker 2: They're getting loans from their friends and their family, Like
Speaker 2: people are endangering their families in order to afford this
Speaker 2: down payment.
Speaker 3: Basically, well, now I don't like him, and I did, and.
Speaker 2: Now I'm not. He frames himself as a Robin Hood
Speaker 2: and he doesn't rob a lot of rich people, but
Speaker 2: he robs a lot of working people too. Anyone who's
Speaker 2: like trying to show up for a factory job that's
Speaker 2: advertising the Yellow Pages isn't someone who can afford to
Speaker 2: lose the money, right. Yeah. Now, in that ad he
Speaker 2: noted that like we allow for the strictest investigation. What
Speaker 2: that means is the ad had a phone number for
Speaker 2: the company operating the factory, and you could call and
Speaker 2: they would confirm, yep, we're a real company, and we're
Speaker 2: really these are real job offers. Now, what's actually going
Speaker 2: on is that the number is the phone number to
Speaker 2: the room next to where Spears is staying in the hotel,
Speaker 2: and he's working with a separate grifter. He takes on partners, period,
Speaker 2: so he's got a partner who's manning the line, and
Speaker 2: when people call, his partner's like, oh yeah, real business
Speaker 2: opportunity for sure. Now we're talking about like nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 2: This is a beautiful time to carry out a scam
Speaker 2: like this. People are still getting used to phones. Phones
Speaker 2: are not like people learned over how weird a phone is.
Speaker 2: So if you give someone a phone number and say
Speaker 2: this is the headquarters of a big company that wants
Speaker 2: to hire you, most people, if the number works, aren't
Speaker 2: going to look more into it. Why would they? Who
Speaker 2: else would have a phone? No one could fake having
Speaker 2: a phone line, you know, that's not like that hasn't
Speaker 2: really people aren't aware of the possibilities for cons yet
Speaker 2: they're more trusting. Of course, you can only run a
Speaker 2: scam like this for so long before somebody calls the cops,
Speaker 2: which is why Spears bribed hotel employees to warn him.
Speaker 2: If the police showed up, he escaped on time. For
Speaker 2: this time, he doesn't get caught immediately, but the Saint
Speaker 2: Louis Police put out an APB that also kind of
Speaker 2: doubles as like a dating app. Description for our friend
Speaker 2: here describes Oscar Delano, which remember is the name Robert
Speaker 2: is working under now, as quote good looking, a flashy dresser,
Speaker 2: well groomed, tall and fair, and a favorite with the
Speaker 2: opposite sex. Like work harder to get This guy laid
Speaker 2: god fucking Saint Louis police con man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, his like yeah, his dating profess, all of his
Speaker 4: wanted posters just in one place, just like like.
Speaker 2: One of those old FBI like tip line things for
Speaker 2: the UNI bomber that was, like, we suspect he fucked
Speaker 2: really well, like crazy good dick game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly where are.
Speaker 2: You talking about this? Why does that.
Speaker 3: Matter to play for day robin people?
Speaker 2: Why don't care if he's a We don't care if
Speaker 2: he's dating people. Well, So, for his part, Spears fled
Speaker 2: right away with the money and relocated to Kansas City,
Speaker 2: where he invented a new and much more racist name
Speaker 2: for himself. Again, it's the twenties, so he's starts going
Speaker 2: under the name Eastern Mystic kegab jipterm, which I think
Speaker 2: is you know, he's kind of meant to reference the
Speaker 2: slur for a specific group of people. The roma right
Speaker 2: per the book, self styled the International Man of Mystery,
Speaker 2: with robes, bejeweled headgear, crystal ball and the whole shebang,
Speaker 2: was cashing in on doling out health and financial advice
Speaker 2: to the concerned incredulous. His advice to all clients just
Speaker 2: happened to involve spanning the coffers of Guru jipterm right
Speaker 2: now that is this show says, the first time he's
Speaker 2: going to show like an interest in like healthcare stuff
Speaker 2: and like selling people diagnoses and like treatments for ailments
Speaker 2: that they've got. But he's flying too close to the
Speaker 2: sun here. He is wanted in multiple states at this point,
Speaker 2: and every news article about him makes a point of
Speaker 2: discussing how hot he is, which turns him into a
Speaker 2: Robin Hood figure, only without the whole giving to the
Speaker 2: poor after robbing the rich thing. And also, you know,
Speaker 2: he's not just robbing the rich, but he gets kind
Speaker 2: of famous. And that's bad for staying like hidden under
Speaker 2: the radar if you're continuing to commit crimes pretending to
Speaker 2: be a some vaguely like ambiguously foreign spiritual guru. So
Speaker 2: this period of grifting fell apart for Spears. Right as
Speaker 2: he was doing yet another convention con in Topeka, he
Speaker 2: telegrams the wife of a conference attendee, missus George Jarvis,
Speaker 2: and asks for money and is like, you know, I've
Speaker 2: got your husband. He's you know, he's in jail, but
Speaker 2: I've got to bail him out, and or I think
Speaker 2: in this case, he is pretending to be her husband. Right,
Speaker 2: he's like doing a reasonably good impression of his voice,
Speaker 2: but it's not perfect. So this lady gets suspicious and
Speaker 2: she sends the money. She telegrams it to him, but
Speaker 2: she sends it with a note for the telegram operator
Speaker 2: that says George Jarvis is bald. So Spears shows up
Speaker 2: pretending to be Jarvis to pick up this money that
Speaker 2: is this other guy's wife is sent but the operator
Speaker 2: is like, this guy's supposed to be bald, he obviously
Speaker 2: has hair. The clerk calls the cops, and that's it, right,
Speaker 2: he's busting sense.
Speaker 3: His luscious locks gave him away, his.
Speaker 2: Beautiful, gorgeous hair, his sexy, sexy hair, gottam in trouble
Speaker 2: yet again, now one of the most interesting. Again. Every
Speaker 2: time he's caught, he has a habit of like praising
Speaker 2: the police, been like, good work, you guys really did
Speaker 2: a good job getting me down this time and admitting
Speaker 2: defeat and admitting to all of his crimes. And this
Speaker 2: is probably a bad idea from a criminal defense standpoint, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but it helps burnish his reputation because a lot of
Speaker 2: local press. He's always saying like, well, you know, for
Speaker 2: the two weeks that I was committing this crime spree,
Speaker 2: I made fifty thousand dollars or something like that, right,
Speaker 2: and the press will get to write about that, and
Speaker 2: it makes this guy's legend grow, right, he kind of is.
Speaker 2: It's just he's is sort of turning himself into a
Speaker 2: little bit of a mythological figure during this period of time.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of money in writing about him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, does he have cooling down periods to spend any
Speaker 4: of this money because he's making a lot of it,
Speaker 4: but like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he think a lot of it does
Speaker 2: get captured, but I think he's spending it. He likes
Speaker 2: to stay in fancy hotels, he only wears nice clothes.
Speaker 2: He drives exclusively like nice like fancy car. You know,
Speaker 2: he's living large because he knows he's not gonna stay
Speaker 2: free long and he give a time.
Speaker 3: Got it? That makes sense?
Speaker 4: Does anybody tie this guy to Clyde? Is that connection
Speaker 4: ever made at this point?
Speaker 3: It is his life?
Speaker 2: Yes, not usually at this well no, Actually, some of
Speaker 2: the people do report on this. He's well known enough
Speaker 2: that people are usually saying, you know, like Robert Spears,
Speaker 2: who went by this name and this name and this name,
Speaker 2: or whatever name he gets caught under. It's usually obvious
Speaker 2: his other that this is the same guy, because all
Speaker 2: of his crimes are pretty similar. So Spears pled guilty
Speaker 2: to wire fraud in March of nineteen twenty seven and
Speaker 2: was sent to Levenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he remains for
Speaker 2: about eighteen months. By this point, he's in his late twenties,
Speaker 2: and Robert is probably feels like he's too old to change, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm not. I've gotten this far as a con man.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna stay at cod man no matter what am
Speaker 2: I gonna do?
Speaker 3: Get a job?
Speaker 2: Not so. Once he gets out of Levenworth, he goes
Speaker 2: right back to Conning and petty theft, and soon enough
Speaker 2: finds himself behind bars again, this time in Missouri State
Speaker 2: at Tenterie. He meets another inmate there, Ollie Thompson. Now
Speaker 2: Ollie had just been arrested for the first time, and
Speaker 2: his real name was not Ollie Thompson. His real name
Speaker 2: was William Allan Taylor, and he's a con man. He
Speaker 2: comes from like a good family, but he just kind
Speaker 2: of gets into the con man life, I think, because
Speaker 2: he doesn't want to work a real job and it
Speaker 2: gets him in trouble. Eventually he runs out on at
Speaker 2: least one wife and kids by the way, during this
Speaker 2: period of time, but he and Spears become friends behind bars,
Speaker 2: and Taylor kind of worships Spears. Like the vibes between
Speaker 2: these two, you should read is like fifty percent the
Speaker 2: wet bandits from home alone and Taylor is Marv for sure,
Speaker 2: like he's the dummy and fifty percent like a cult
Speaker 2: of two where where our boy is the cult leader,
Speaker 2: Robert Spears whatever name he's going on, is the leader,
Speaker 2: and Taylor is the follower because Taylor is absolutely devoted
Speaker 2: to this.
Speaker 3: Guy, true henchman, henchman, a true.
Speaker 2: He's a true henchman. And for like seven or eight years,
Speaker 2: these guys are traveling the country. They're conning the shit
Speaker 2: out of people, and it's all the same stuff that
Speaker 2: we've been talking about, Like they're running different versions of
Speaker 2: all of these kind of cons. They make a lot
Speaker 2: of money. They also get in trouble several times and
Speaker 2: ultimately get locked up together for like a year or so,
Speaker 2: and they get out in like nineteen forty, and al
Speaker 2: Taylor is like, it's been almost ten years. I feel
Speaker 2: like I'm done traveling around the country grifting like this
Speaker 2: is just an exhausting way to live. And I loved
Speaker 2: it and I love you, but I just don't have
Speaker 2: it in me anymore. So he bids a fond, sad
Speaker 2: farewell to his friend and he moves back home to Tampa,
Speaker 2: where he eventually marries a young woman, Alice may Steele Henry,
Speaker 2: who has no idea that he has like two I
Speaker 2: think it's two previous families, or that he's been crisscrossing
Speaker 2: the country as a con man for most of the
Speaker 2: last decade. He just hides this from her. She doesn't
Speaker 2: find out until after he dies that any of this
Speaker 2: was happening to him.
Speaker 3: Oh No, imagine marrying.
Speaker 2: Someone in for ten years they were a con man
Speaker 2: and just never say a word of it to you.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna add that to the first eight questions.
Speaker 4: I think you're going to be, like, are you a
Speaker 4: were you.
Speaker 2: A con man for ten years? Did you rob people
Speaker 2: at conventions for like a decade?
Speaker 3: I just need to ask this And those might sound silly,
Speaker 3: but I just gotta know.
Speaker 2: How many marriages. Have you had? How many kids did
Speaker 2: you abandon before we met? These are all questions to
Speaker 2: ask folks.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: When he and his wife getting married, Taylor invites Robert
Speaker 2: Spears to the wedding because again he worships this guy,
Speaker 2: but Spears is unable to show because by that point
Speaker 2: he is doing a four year bid in Oklahoma State
Speaker 2: Penitentiary for you Guessed It check fraud is around nineteen
Speaker 2: forty two.
Speaker 3: Only Body Guy.
Speaker 2: He and Al had split up after doing time together
Speaker 2: in Maryland in nineteen forty when Al leaves for Florida,
Speaker 2: they get out of like a prison in Maryland and
Speaker 2: Al goes down to Florida and Robert moves to Minnesota, where,
Speaker 2: per the book Vanishing Act, he heard the new art
Speaker 2: of naturopathy was beginning to take hold. Now, I wouldn't
Speaker 2: say it was beginning in this period of time, like
Speaker 2: the early twenties, is kind of when interest seems to
Speaker 2: peak early in the mid twenties, but it's pretty popular
Speaker 2: in that area in this period of time, in like
Speaker 2: the early forties, and so he's kind of finds himself
Speaker 2: interested in this, you know. Author Jerry Jamison writes, always
Speaker 2: attracted to the medical field for its inherent status. He
Speaker 2: wanted to learn more and felt it was a good
Speaker 2: place to reinvent himself once again, possibly even goes straight.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't do this right away. He starts thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe a naturopathy, Maybe that's like a way
Speaker 2: I could kind of get out of this lifestyle. But he,
Speaker 2: at least initially, the first career he goes for when
Speaker 2: he's trying to make it legitimately is he becomes a journalist.
Speaker 2: You can still make money doing that back then, and
Speaker 2: he like has some articles published for a local Methodist paper,
Speaker 2: and he's fairly popular in town. He's like a pretty
Speaker 2: well known like Methodist reporter in the town where he's living.
Speaker 2: His landlady at the Times later said, I never saw
Speaker 2: him go to church. He just wrote about church people.
Speaker 2: And for a while this seems to be like he
Speaker 2: seems like he's turned a new leaf. He's making legitimate money,
Speaker 2: and he's like starts to have a reputation in town.
Speaker 2: People notice that Bob's really charismatic. He gets asked to
Speaker 2: liver sermons at church and speeches over the radio for
Speaker 2: like the Methodist community, because people are like folks like
Speaker 2: listening to him talk. You know, he's got a good
Speaker 2: pattern and it kind of think, you kind of think
Speaker 2: maybe he might turn things around. That's not what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: But you know who else will never turn themselves around?
Speaker 5: The sponsors that support this podcast never.
Speaker 2: Question never, absolutely not. They will never learn from their mistakes.
Speaker 2: Number one of which is sponsoring my podcast. Thank you
Speaker 2: all for your money, And we're back. So yeah, we're
Speaker 2: we're talking about Robert Spears, who's trying to make a
Speaker 2: go of it in Minneapolis. You know, he's writing for
Speaker 2: the Methodist papers. He's become a figure in his community.
Speaker 2: And he meets a young woman, Foster, and she falls
Speaker 2: in love with him. She's like thirty two, so she's
Speaker 2: a mature adult, but she doesn't seem to have ever
Speaker 2: considered questioning whether or not any of Robert's stories about
Speaker 2: his previous life as a fighter pilot were true. And
Speaker 2: by this point, because he's working as a journalist, he
Speaker 2: was like, oh, I was a war correspondent, and the
Speaker 2: opening stage is of World War two. You know, I've
Speaker 2: been all over the world, all these exciting places and
Speaker 2: seeing all these horrible things. The two get married because
Speaker 2: she just falls for this dude, and you can guess
Speaker 2: what happened next. You know what this guy's gonna do
Speaker 2: when he gets married to a lady, He's gonna leave it, right,
Speaker 2: He is absolutely going to abandon this lady.
Speaker 3: From the book.
Speaker 2: Of course, he's going to abandon her. That's his only
Speaker 2: move in relationships is abandoned them and rob them blind
Speaker 2: from the book self styled. Almost as soon as he
Speaker 2: signed the marriage license, Spears has started making other plans
Speaker 2: for California, a life that didn't include his intended bride, Benita.
Speaker 2: He answered an advertisement in the local paper from the Shirtzers,
Speaker 2: who were traveling to the West and looking for a
Speaker 2: paying passenger for the ride. Fifteen dollars secured a seat
Speaker 2: in the back of the car. So this like family
Speaker 2: the Shirtzers, and there's like one other guy at Novak
Speaker 2: who's paying for a ride in the car and he
Speaker 2: pays fifteen bucks to get a ride to the coast. Now,
Speaker 2: before he leaves, he's got to have some money for California,
Speaker 2: so he steals everything Benita has and makes off with
Speaker 2: like five hundred bucks, which is about eighty three hundred
Speaker 2: dollars in modern money, right, that's like her savings. The
Speaker 2: road trip with the Shirtzers starts off normally enough, but
Speaker 2: the days in close quarters together soon wear on them,
Speaker 2: and Spears begins to get annoyed with the other passengers,
Speaker 2: particularly Novak. They stop in Kansas City for a couple
Speaker 2: of days and Spears visits his mother, who is dying
Speaker 2: and in a home at this point in time, And
Speaker 2: we don't know what happens between them, but the meeting
Speaker 2: goes very badly, and when it they reassemble, everyone can
Speaker 2: tell that Spears is in a terrible mood, like I
Speaker 2: don't know what his mom says to him, but they
Speaker 2: don't doesn't This is not like a happy reunion and
Speaker 2: last meeting between the two. So the car they get
Speaker 2: back in the road and Spears is just just an
Speaker 2: awful person to be around. And when the car stops
Speaker 2: outside of Oklahoma City, he starts looking for his money
Speaker 2: and he realizes that like the five hundred bucks that
Speaker 2: he'd stolen from his latest wife is gone, and he
Speaker 2: immediately assumes that one of the other passengers, probably like
Speaker 2: the shirts are Boy or Novak, had taken it. Now
Speaker 2: I might say that like, well, you just visited your mom.
Speaker 2: The veteran thief and con woman. Yeah, maybe she robbed you.
Speaker 2: That's kind of that's kind of earthing one last ice
Speaker 2: from your mom.
Speaker 3: Just Matilda, just like reaching like a gnarled hand slowly
Speaker 3: towards his bags.
Speaker 2: Notice that, Yeah, robs his ass blind. I don't know
Speaker 2: who stole his money. Maybe he just lost it the
Speaker 2: car with you.
Speaker 3: For the next like two thousand miles.
Speaker 2: They did it now, so there here's a fight, right.
Speaker 2: He gets incredibly angry and accuses Shirtzer and Novak of
Speaker 2: taking his money. They deny it, and he goes crazy
Speaker 2: and he pulls a thirty eight on them. He pulls
Speaker 2: a fucking gun, and he demands the driver, missus Shirtzer,
Speaker 2: pull over. This this whole crime is insane. I can't
Speaker 2: wait to tell you about this.
Speaker 3: Brand man, I can't wait to hear it.
Speaker 2: Certainly, he makes her pull over to the side of
Speaker 2: the road so he can tie everyone up in a
Speaker 2: cornfield and search them. Oh no, yeah, yeah, you have
Speaker 2: now gotten kidnapped into a corn field. I want to
Speaker 2: read from Alan Logan's book. He used a small plank
Speaker 2: of wood to start digging a hole and threaten to
Speaker 2: shoot to maim them, and then bury them alive. They said,
Speaker 2: if they didn't return his four hundred and eighty five dollars,
Speaker 2: He got forty five dollars from Novak and fourteen from
Speaker 2: Young Shirtzer. They continue to deny all knowledge of his
Speaker 2: missing stash. Next, Spears shuffled them back into the car,
Speaker 2: all of them in the back seat. Bizarrely, they say,
Speaker 2: he then soaked a blanket with chloroform and placed it
Speaker 2: over them. He forced them to inhale until they lost consciousness.
Speaker 2: That's how this crime opens. By the way. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fucking nuts. So this is one of the crazier
Speaker 2: for a spur of the moment crime. And I wonder
Speaker 2: was it really spur of the moment, because like he
Speaker 2: had chloroform on him and a gun and something else
Speaker 2: that we'll talk about. Maybe he was planning to do
Speaker 2: this from the jump, Maybe the money was a lie
Speaker 2: to begin with. I don't know. But he is ready
Speaker 2: to chloroform and hold these people at gunpoint. So since
Speaker 2: they're knocked out because he chloroform to blanket, he gets
Speaker 2: behind the wheel and he's driving to the nearest town, Weatherford,
Speaker 2: and he says his plan is he's going to turn
Speaker 2: these former traveling companions of his in to the cops
Speaker 2: for stealing the money that he'd rightfully stolen from the
Speaker 2: wife that he just abandoned. Now unfortunately for him. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you've ever had to chloroform somebody listeners,
Speaker 2: brandy hands.
Speaker 3: In the air. No, yeah, we'll see how the next
Speaker 3: few years ago.
Speaker 2: We'll see. Look, if you can get your hands on
Speaker 2: some chloroform. Du No, it does knock people out, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't like reliably keep people out, like when you
Speaker 2: just sign a spray a blanket with it and throw
Speaker 2: it over their heads. Like apparently that's not I wouldn't
Speaker 2: have known, but apparently that's not a reliable way to
Speaker 2: keep people knocked out. And so his passengers wake up
Speaker 2: and one of them tosses the drugged blanket onto spears
Speaker 2: as he drives into Weatherford. So he's now and so
Speaker 2: he loses control and he rams into a bunch of
Speaker 2: parked cars, but his vehicle keeps like rolling forward, and
Speaker 2: everyone starts fighting him for the gun while they'll they're
Speaker 2: all in the car, and they're all presumably still fucked
Speaker 2: up on chloroform. So he's they're fighting and he has
Speaker 2: the gun out as they're wrestling in with it. He
Speaker 2: fires three times during the fray. He hits Novak in
Speaker 2: the head once but thankfully doesn't hurt him badly. He
Speaker 2: hits the Shirtser boy I think, in the chest, but
Speaker 2: again doesn't wound him badly. And he also pistol whips
Speaker 2: miss Shirtzer, although that may have been an accident, like
Speaker 2: he may have just been because he was flailing and
Speaker 2: couldn't really see because he's got a gloroform blanket on him.
Speaker 2: Like he shoots himself through the hand during this fight.
Speaker 2: Eventually happen, the car comes to a stop and our
Speaker 2: boy hops out and fucking runs like the wind. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it is unclear what his plan was at this stage,
Speaker 2: but bystanders had seen the struggle. They hear the gunshots.
Speaker 2: They see this car careening around town as he's fighting
Speaker 2: for a gun with everyone else in the car, and
Speaker 2: I think the crowd is just like, if there's one
Speaker 2: guy fighting a family of like for a gun, probably
Speaker 2: the one guy is the bad guy. So they just
Speaker 2: start chasing him. This town in Oklahoma. Everyone starts running
Speaker 2: after him as he's like trying to sprint away, and
Speaker 2: in response, Spears pulls a second gun out of his
Speaker 2: like whatever he's wearing at the time, and this one
Speaker 2: was a it was some form of tear gas launcher.
Speaker 2: It's it's just described as a gun that shot tear gas.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like a pepper ball gun or
Speaker 2: like a grenade launcher. But he tear gas is the
Speaker 2: whole town, the mayor. Tear gas is the mayor small town.
Speaker 2: As he's trying to run away.
Speaker 3: Who is this man that just came.
Speaker 2: This is Kao Moos day. We're just chilling in downtown
Speaker 2: bump Fucksville, Oklahoma, and this guy gases everybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sir, this is a Walmart.
Speaker 2: I gotta be cops to do that kind of shit
Speaker 2: to random people in the mayor in the middle of
Speaker 2: the day. Alan Logan summarizes how this all ends. It
Speaker 2: was all just a big under misunderstanding, said Spears. The
Speaker 2: tear gas gun was a product sample from his job
Speaker 2: as a salesman of such wares. The chloroform was also
Speaker 2: a medicinal agent obtained legally from the druggist. Furthermore, he
Speaker 2: claimed that he had been robbed and was dry having
Speaker 2: the shirtzers in Novak to the authorities to alert them
Speaker 2: of the crime. Spears was back in the headlines again.
Speaker 2: Two men shot, three anesthetized and wild thousand mile car. Right,
Speaker 2: he makes so many good news stories.
Speaker 3: Wow, now those reporters were having a ball.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wait, but streaming out on that he did? What
Speaker 2: where do you get a tear gas gun?
Speaker 3: Oh, there's something new to write about, Thank god.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite just nonsense crime sprees. Absolutely gain
Speaker 2: nothing from it. Now, nobody dies of their injuries, but
Speaker 2: Spears could have been in that day. In those days
Speaker 2: in Oklahoma, first degree robbery was a capital offense, so
Speaker 2: you could get the death penalty for first degree robbery.
Speaker 2: And honestly, he committed first degree robbery. Yeah, like that's
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, when you got hear gas here
Speaker 2: mayor to escape? Bro? Yeah, you horrorformed a whole family
Speaker 2: and held him at gunpoint. You tried to shoot him.
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, I don't have a cornfield Jesus.
Speaker 5: How long does he get does he go to what happens?
Speaker 2: He does go to prison. He gets a great defense attorney.
Speaker 2: He's really lucky with that. He gets a really good
Speaker 2: defensive attorney, and he's able to plead down to just
Speaker 2: four years in prison for second degree robbery. He enters
Speaker 2: prison in March of nineteen forty two, and when he
Speaker 2: was asked to write down why he had been incarcerated,
Speaker 2: his answer was a single word framed, how you gassed them?
Speaker 4: Yeah, dude, you had the tear gas gun all the town.
Speaker 4: The best case scenario is your extremely suss with the
Speaker 4: tear gas gun.
Speaker 2: That's that's like why would you eat?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And the chloroform too, What was the why did
Speaker 2: you have all that chloroform?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I do. I kind of think he might have believed
Speaker 2: some of his own bullshit here, right, because and this
Speaker 2: is something that I think Logan points out, Spears doesn't
Speaker 2: consider himself a stick up man, right. Armed robbery is growth.
Speaker 2: It's like a nasty crime for nasty people. I'm not
Speaker 2: an armed robber. I'm a han man sent That's really
Speaker 2: how he sees himself. And I think this is just
Speaker 2: he probably just had like a break, you know, between
Speaker 2: everything going on with his mom, and he's just not
Speaker 2: a very good person. But he's not proud of himself
Speaker 2: for snapping, So maybe just he needs to convince himself
Speaker 2: that this was all someone else did this. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I can't psychoanalyze this guy. It is interesting. Usually when
Speaker 2: he's caught, he honestly admits, this is what I did.
Speaker 2: And in this case he's like, I was Frank. I
Speaker 2: was Frank the whole time, right, So maybe he really
Speaker 2: convinced himself that he had to defend himself. I don't know.
Speaker 2: As was usually the case, he got out of prison early.
Speaker 2: He only serves half of a sentence due to good behavior.
Speaker 2: He's always really well behaved when he's behind bars, so
Speaker 2: he gets out early. So by the time he gets
Speaker 2: out of prison for this latest crime spree, it is
Speaker 2: the mid nineteen forties and he himself is pushing forty now.
Speaker 2: The life of a traveling con artist is not easy
Speaker 2: on your body, nor are repeated prison stints or shooting
Speaker 2: yourself in the hand and during a chloroform gun fight.
Speaker 2: As a general rule, most physicians avoid against advice against
Speaker 2: getting into chloroform gun fights if you can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you want to stretch, drink some water and vitamins.
Speaker 2: Will always be hydrated before a chloroform gunfight. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 2: Vitamin C. I always take that with that airborne stuff
Speaker 2: before I get into chloroform gunfights. The vitamin C really
Speaker 2: helps you overcome the chloroform. I assume I'm usually not
Speaker 2: aware of what I do in those mo What if.
Speaker 4: These are things that his mom gave him on the deathbed.
Speaker 4: As she was stealing the money. She was like, I
Speaker 4: have this dear gas gun and this bottle of chloroform.
Speaker 2: Take this too, yeahs your this is the family chloroform. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: my granddaddy and now it's your chloroform. Use it well.
Speaker 2: Incredible good stuff. So he decides I'm kind of getting old,
Speaker 2: I'm tired of getting arrested all the time. I need
Speaker 2: a new career, I need a new grift. And initially
Speaker 2: he's traveling around Texas during the oil boom, figuring there's
Speaker 2: so much money flooding into the state. There's got to
Speaker 2: be a way for me to grift some of it.
Speaker 2: But he actually fails at this. He can't find a
Speaker 2: way to make money off the oil boom, which is
Speaker 2: amazing actually really hard not to in that period of
Speaker 2: time in Texas. But as Jerry Jamison writes in the
Speaker 2: book Vanishing act As, Spears was kind of traveling around
Speaker 2: trying to figure out a con He starts to notice something. Quote,
Speaker 2: an unusual number of clinics were popping up in every community,
Speaker 2: large and small, urban and rural, that were curiously called
Speaker 2: natural apathy medical centers. Spears was vaguely familiar with the term,
Speaker 2: as we'd not it up in Minneapolis. He'd become aware
Speaker 2: of it as a thing, But once he starts doing research,
Speaker 2: he realizes, oh shit, these guys have figured out a
Speaker 2: run around on the whole medical system. But becoming a
Speaker 2: natura path you can't prescribe like the drugs a doctor
Speaker 2: can totally, but you can prescribe treatments and diagnose diseases
Speaker 2: to patients in like a lot of the United States,
Speaker 2: and the AMA can't really do anything about it.
Speaker 3: Out it.
Speaker 2: So our man decides to move to Dallas because by
Speaker 2: the late forties, Dallas is the friendliest place in the
Speaker 2: country for fake doctors. It is the it is the
Speaker 2: capital of the fake doctor world. Dallas, Texas well now Dallas.
Speaker 2: What's changed is now Dallas is like a major hub
Speaker 2: for real and fake doctors, huge numbers of both in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Like Dallas the city of anyone who calls themself a doctor.
Speaker 2: We don't care if you're selling bullshit or real medicine.
Speaker 2: If you call yourself a doctor, Dallas is the city
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 3: Eh.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So for an idea of how inundated Dallas, Texas
Speaker 2: was with fake doctors, Harry Hoxy, who was a Dallas resident,
Speaker 2: had created a fake was a naturopath who created a
Speaker 2: fake cancer cure that was so dangerous the AMA and
Speaker 2: the FDA labeled him the country's number one cancer quack.
Speaker 2: But Hoxy had made a shitload of money and he'd
Speaker 2: invested it in oil, which had allowed him to bribe
Speaker 2: local politicians to support the nascent movement of Christian fundamentalists
Speaker 2: who didn't believe in real medicine. That's a big thing
Speaker 2: for Hoxy. And there's some other guys, some major like
Speaker 2: super wealthy, like in cleaning the wealthiest man in the
Speaker 2: world at the time, who like live in and around
Speaker 2: the Dallas area, who were major advocates for like snake
Speaker 2: oil medicine. And so they're kind of like bribing elected
Speaker 2: leaders to make sure that Texas stays a friendly climate
Speaker 2: for this kind of shit.
Speaker 3: Is this like crossing with like Christian scientists.
Speaker 2: Well, it's Christian fundamentalism. Christian science is a different thing. Generally.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there are some Christian scientists mixed up in this,
Speaker 2: but it's not wholly based in that. In nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 2: Texas created a state Board of Naturopaths, who had meant
Speaker 2: to monitor the field and ensure all practitioners were performing
Speaker 2: ethically and were competent to do so. They announced new
Speaker 2: requirements to call yourself a naturopathic doctor. First, you had
Speaker 2: to have a college degree from a real school. And
Speaker 2: second you had to have a state certified medical exam
Speaker 2: in order to get licensed. Right, so you have to
Speaker 2: have a real and you have to pass a medical
Speaker 2: exam before we'll call you a notchropathic doctor. That sounds okay, right,
Speaker 2: Like give it the standards of the time.
Speaker 3: That's not nothing, you know, that's that's not nothing. I
Speaker 3: like that. It's like the high minded grifters or like
Speaker 3: we need to.
Speaker 2: Put some to put some guard rails on this. Yeah, however,
Speaker 2: this is Texas, and if you grew up there like
Speaker 2: I did, you know the government isn't allowed to do
Speaker 2: good things or even competent things. Now. These requirements thus
Speaker 2: had a loophole. Out of state naturopaths could present a
Speaker 2: license valid in any other state and pay fifty dollars
Speaker 2: to be admitted to practice in Texas. So when Robert
Speaker 2: Spears finds this out, he's like, all I gotta do
Speaker 2: is get a fake diploma and find another doctor to
Speaker 2: call me a doctor, right, So he finds a psychiatrist.
Speaker 2: And this guy's a real psychiatrist, a pretty prominent one,
Speaker 2: doctor Robert Reddick. He was like the psychiatrist for the
Speaker 2: Manhattan Project, Like this is a major figure actually in
Speaker 2: the field. But Reddick, after the Manhattan Project, had come
Speaker 2: to work work at a statemntal hospital and it's just
Speaker 2: horrified because it's a nightmare in there. He sees they're
Speaker 2: testing drugs on people, they're performing a lot of medical
Speaker 2: operations without consent, They're doing a lot of horrible things.
Speaker 2: And he becomes both deeply cynical about like the mainstream
Speaker 2: medical establishment for good reason. There's a lot to be
Speaker 2: cynical about if you're working at a state mental hospital
Speaker 2: in the fucking forties. And he also becomes a whistleblower
Speaker 2: and he tries to tell everybody about the illegal things
Speaker 2: that are happening in this facility and other facilities around
Speaker 2: the country. Now, the other side of that is, as
Speaker 2: he's becoming increasingly angry at like the mainstream medical establishment,
Speaker 2: he gets obsessed with natural cures, and one day he
Speaker 2: just gets angry enough that he starts issuing medical licenses
Speaker 2: in the state of Maryland to anyone who will pay
Speaker 2: him money, which is a weird way to go. I
Speaker 2: guess it's all bullshit. Look I'll show you. I think
Speaker 2: that's kind of his attitude. That makes sense.
Speaker 3: It's like, watch how bullshit this actually is.
Speaker 2: Look at how bullshit this is. Because I'm making it bullshit.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to defend him on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah you do.
Speaker 2: I have more understanding where like, yeah, that is, I
Speaker 2: get why you'd be really angry at everything after that
Speaker 2: set of experiences. Yes, of course, so Spears cobbles together
Speaker 2: like five grand worth of modern money and he gets
Speaker 2: his license from doctor Reddick, and he gets that. Alongside
Speaker 2: he has a diploma that's forged for him by another
Speaker 2: naturopathic doctor. And this doctor who forges his diploma had
Speaker 2: previously just recently gotten arrested after providing a fatal botched
Speaker 2: abortion and then providing poison. He'd also gotten in trouble
Speaker 2: but not convicted of providing poison, like I think it
Speaker 2: was fucking bacteria to a group of people who like
Speaker 2: murdered this whole family of rich people and then adopted
Speaker 2: their son and eventually murdered him to like get the
Speaker 2: get the money basically like and he gives he provides
Speaker 2: them with the poison. So that's the doctor who gives
Speaker 2: Spears his fake diploma. Spears takes the products of these
Speaker 2: two august individuals and presents them to the naturopathic Board
Speaker 2: in Texas. Overnight, he becomes a doctor. Now he's not
Speaker 2: an MD, but he starts writing his name out as
Speaker 2: Robert Spears, MD, because who's gonna stop him? Right, like
Speaker 2: he's gonna stop me. He starts his practice in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty and by nineteen fifty five he had gone from
Speaker 2: being a newbie to one of the most successful and
Speaker 2: famous naturopaths in the entire state and thus the whole country.
Speaker 2: What the fuck he is really good at this? Why
Speaker 2: being a fake doctor?
Speaker 3: The guru bullshit of it all. I'm sure he's great
Speaker 3: at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a confidence scheme and he's great at that.
Speaker 2: He's a confidence man. Now, when you've got a group
Speaker 2: of legal fake doctors who can hand out quote unquote
Speaker 2: medicine as long as it's not the drugs real doctors prescribe,
Speaker 2: and you don't have to abide by any ethical standards.
Speaker 2: People are going to primarily visit that doctor for one
Speaker 2: of three things. To lose weight, to have an back alley,
Speaker 2: or illegal abortion, and to cure an incurable disease. Right,
Speaker 2: those are the three reasons people go to doctors like this.
Speaker 2: Either they just it's something cosmetic, it's not there's no
Speaker 2: access to legal abortion, or a doctor has told them
Speaker 2: we can't cure you and they don't want to believe that, right,
Speaker 2: Those are the reasons people are going to these guys. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, Spears people in a lot of ways. Yeah, yes, And.
Speaker 2: From what we know, at least I know, Spears seems
Speaker 2: to have not gotten too far into the third business.
Speaker 2: He makes his money primarily selling weight loss treatments and
Speaker 2: performing illegal abortions, right, or at least telling people he's
Speaker 2: performing illegal abortions. A lot of the times he's just
Speaker 2: giving them bullshit and like nothing happens because again he's
Speaker 2: a con man, and they can't come after him because
Speaker 2: it's illegal. You know, then they'd be admitting to having
Speaker 2: committed a crime. Now his primary customer base are rich
Speaker 2: suburbanites who live in fancy neighborhoods like Highland Park in
Speaker 2: the DFW area, which I think is still the wealthiest
Speaker 2: suburb in the country. He would put together groups of
Speaker 2: rich white ladies and he would hold presentations kind of
Speaker 2: like someone trying to sell their friends on an MLM,
Speaker 2: only he was mainly he was like pitching weight loss
Speaker 2: cures primarily and some other quack remedies. He's got these
Speaker 2: pills he calls b Slim Reducer pills, which I'm going
Speaker 2: to guess we're just methamphetamine or amphetamine of some sort,
Speaker 2: or at least just pyrophedra concentrated. He's also got his
Speaker 2: radionics machine, which uses electromagnetic waves to treat illnesses. Another
Speaker 2: popular product among the Dallas Wine mom set was the
Speaker 2: electro psychrometer, which Jamison describes as promising to quote, provide
Speaker 2: insights into the mental state of an individual and thus
Speaker 2: provide and much the same way as a licensed therapist
Speaker 2: might some coping mechanisms for the triggers that cause weight gain.
Speaker 2: So he's mostly selling all these ladies on these things
Speaker 2: as cosmetics, right, that's the primary business, at least at
Speaker 2: the start of this, and he does very well. These
Speaker 2: groups of high society ladies are really profitable. He calls
Speaker 2: them his milk routes. And he has a different group
Speaker 2: of ladies that he'll go to every single day and
Speaker 2: pitch to, and he brags at the time. By the
Speaker 2: early to mid fifties, he's pulling in like four grand
Speaker 2: a month, which is about fifty thousand dollars a month
Speaker 2: in modern money, and not a doctor. Spears was not
Speaker 2: only popular with the rich ladies. In nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: he was named president of the Texas Naturopathic Association. So
Speaker 2: he is running the whole association four years into his career.
Speaker 4: He's like, I see the top of that pyramid and
Speaker 4: I want it.
Speaker 2: And I want to be there. Yeah. Well, now, Spears
Speaker 2: became hugely influential in the burgeoning field. His natural charisma
Speaker 2: and skillet lying made him the most interesting fake doctor
Speaker 2: at any professional event. He was now attending of the
Speaker 2: kind of conventions he'd once robbed from At cocktail parties.
Speaker 2: He would claim the scar from the gunshot wound on
Speaker 2: his hand had been cast by a gardening accident.
Speaker 3: Classic rake through the hands.
Speaker 2: You know, ched myself bad.
Speaker 3: But you couldn't heal that.
Speaker 2: But you can feel that. Yeah, come on, man, I
Speaker 2: was way worse. You should have seen it. The whole
Speaker 2: hand was gone.
Speaker 3: It used to be fair. This hand used to be
Speaker 3: so fat.
Speaker 2: This hand used to be fat as hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look at it now.
Speaker 2: Much of his popularity was due to the success of
Speaker 2: his radionics machine, which briefly became a must have item
Speaker 2: for suburban DFW housewives. And speaking of wives, Robert Spears
Speaker 2: was about to get his first real one, Francis Massey.
Speaker 2: She was the most similar to him out of all
Speaker 2: his wives except for the one who conned him. Before
Speaker 2: they met. Francis had gotten interested in bogus medicine and
Speaker 2: even taken a class in the use of the electro
Speaker 2: psychometer in Waco. She decided this made her basically a professional,
Speaker 2: and she started marketing herself as a licensed psychiatrist. After
Speaker 2: this point, she charged five dollars a treatment, which is
Speaker 2: like fifty dollars to day, and scammed enough people that
Speaker 2: the FBI actually had a sizable file on her, totally
Speaker 2: separate from the one on her husband. Here's how one
Speaker 2: report from one of her patients recorded her work operating this.
Speaker 2: I found this in Jamison's book, but this is from
Speaker 2: an FBI report. In the summer of nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 2: I was directed to Francis Spears when I had a
Speaker 2: nervous breakdown. She would take me to an upstairs room
Speaker 2: where she would have me lie on a day bed
Speaker 2: and give me a handle type object on a cord
Speaker 2: to hold in my hand. The cord was attached to
Speaker 2: some type of machine, but I don't think it was
Speaker 2: plugged into an electrical outlet. She would tell me to
Speaker 2: imagine I was in a mental institution and how terrible
Speaker 2: that would be, and tried to make me concentrate on
Speaker 2: the absolute worst situations I could imagine. At the same time,
Speaker 2: I had headphones on listening to a record with extremely
Speaker 2: high pitched notes, and she said this would fix any
Speaker 2: sinus trouble I might have. After that, I determined that
Speaker 2: Miss Spears was not competent to help me, and I
Speaker 2: did not return.
Speaker 3: Just like a touch of the MK.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and these devices, one of them that when it's
Speaker 2: plugged in, it sounds like it's basically a galvanic skin
Speaker 2: response measuring things, which is what an E meter is
Speaker 2: like the scientologist. There's a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: grifts who are kind of using the same like tools, right,
Speaker 2: So it's it's not a surprise that Francis is this
Speaker 2: is gonna be a love connection for doctor Spears.
Speaker 4: I wonder if he walked into her office and saw
Speaker 4: that machine unplugged and was like, oh.
Speaker 2: Baby, this is a grifter who knows that a grift. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they get hitched, and in an uncharacteristic move, Spears sticks around.
Speaker 2: He buys a huge, fancy house for them in Dallas
Speaker 2: and they they have like two kids together, I think,
Speaker 2: like and he actually sticks around to try to raise them.
Speaker 2: So this is he has really made a change. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's still a grifter, but he has he has shown
Speaker 2: some growth here, Like he actually does care about this
Speaker 2: last family of his.
Speaker 4: Well, and he's technically straight by the eyes of the
Speaker 4: quote Uno law like he has yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I think that's why he's able to function because
Speaker 2: he's still getting whatever kick conning people gives him, but
Speaker 2: it's legal now and he's making a lot of money
Speaker 2: and he's like partying with the mayor of Dallas, Like
Speaker 2: he's holding Evince at his house that high society goes
Speaker 2: to he's a respected man For a while. Near the
Speaker 2: end of nineteen fifty six, Spears started talking to his
Speaker 2: friends and colleagues about his next scam, medical device, which
Speaker 2: he described as quote an electronic machine which was for
Speaker 2: the purpose of testing a single drop of blood and
Speaker 2: then from that test diseases could be ascertained. And that's right,
Speaker 2: motherfucker's this guy invented farrahnos like sixty Yearslaney. It's the
Speaker 2: same con and he had exactly as much real technology
Speaker 2: is therapous.
Speaker 3: Did That's amazing? But how are you looking?
Speaker 2: Yeah he was, Yeah, I bet not nearly as good.
Speaker 2: But he was doing the grift way before turtleneck Lady.
Speaker 3: There ain't an original thought in this world anymore.
Speaker 2: No, No, he was the last original thinker, Robert Spears.
Speaker 2: So now because he's Robert Spears, he does start marketing
Speaker 2: this gadget is being able to cure illnesses to writing.
Speaker 2: The electrical impulses made by the machine could cure polio?
Speaker 2: What sir, s share, man, share you're polio? Why not? Bro?
Speaker 2: Fuck it now? So far, nothing he's done as a
Speaker 2: natural path is quite evil enough to like crass. It's
Speaker 2: bad but like, I wouldn't do a whole episode of
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards on this guy if he was just
Speaker 2: yet another kind of grifter in an age in which
Speaker 2: those were thick on the ground. That changes, and the
Speaker 2: amount of harm he's doing is he gets more and
Speaker 2: more into providing illicit abortions. Now, he first got connected
Speaker 2: to that chunk of the field when he met another naturopath,
Speaker 2: Donald Loomis, at a convention in Saint Louis. Donald had
Speaker 2: been previously a major fitness influencer of his day, and
Speaker 2: like Hollywood, studios would for years bring him in to
Speaker 2: help actresses cut weight or actors like put on muscle.
Speaker 2: And then after that he becomes a naturopath and he
Speaker 2: sort of uses his connections to become the go to
Speaker 2: abortion doctor for MGM studios. Like if MGM has a
Speaker 2: starlett who has an wanted pregnancy, they called Donald and
Speaker 2: he takes care of this, and he's bribing the cops.
Speaker 2: He's bribing everybody so it doesn't get in trouble. He
Speaker 2: used appendicitis as a co word for pregnancy and an
Speaker 2: appendectomy to refer to abortions. So many actresses were booked
Speaker 2: for appendectomies in the late forties and early fifties that
Speaker 2: appendicitis was described as a Hollywood epidemic. Jamison writes, Loomis,
Speaker 2: with a built in clientele and the impurmature of his employer,
Speaker 2: quickly built up a lucrative business, even providing a mobile
Speaker 2: service to the stars, arriving at the Beverly Hills Mansions
Speaker 2: in his white paneled van. The health grew would show
Speaker 2: up for a purported work out, perform his duties, and
Speaker 2: be on his way, receiving compensation from both the studios
Speaker 2: and the patient, willing to pay well for his services
Speaker 2: and discretion. Thus, Loomis preferred abortionists to the rich and famous,
Speaker 2: not only found himself wealthy, but in demand. Clark Gable,
Speaker 2: it was once said, nearly kept Loomis busy on his
Speaker 2: own little Clark Gable fact for you there.
Speaker 3: Damn wrap it up, Clark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not Clark's strong suit.
Speaker 3: I no, not so much. We do.
Speaker 2: On our second ad break, Sophie, we have not. Then,
Speaker 2: why don't you all wrap it up and listen to
Speaker 2: these ads and we're back. Yeah, we're talking about the
Speaker 2: abortionists to the stars now, Lewis, I think he's pretty
Speaker 2: good at this. I don't think like in terms of
Speaker 2: the health outcomes of his patients are pretty good, So
Speaker 2: I'm not this is important background setting. Spears is going
Speaker 2: to be a lot less good at this, and there's
Speaker 2: going to be a lot more negative consequence for the
Speaker 2: women that he's working on than like Loomis experiences. So
Speaker 2: these two meet up at a convention in the fifties
Speaker 2: and Loomis takes Spears and another doctor named Tiska under
Speaker 2: his wings and they perform an underground business, splitting up
Speaker 2: the West and Southwest between their practices through the fifties
Speaker 2: while he's like also a successful naturopath. The business booms,
Speaker 2: but they start to get increasing police scrutiny on them,
Speaker 2: and Spears is like, this doesn't seem safe. I want
Speaker 2: to take a step back and keep selling fake medical
Speaker 2: devices because that seems a lot safer and more reliable.
Speaker 2: But then disaster strikes for him. So there's several high
Speaker 2: profile deaths due to naturopaths in this period of time
Speaker 2: in Texas because these people are selling fake medicine and
Speaker 2: sometimes just poison as medicine, and the state is finally
Speaker 2: stepping into regulate things like there's a real push to
Speaker 2: seriously regulate what a naturopath can do and who can
Speaker 2: call themselves that. One of Spears's fellow doctors, Howard Harmon,
Speaker 2: winds up recording the state representative behind this push in
Speaker 2: a hotel because so this representative is trying to push
Speaker 2: for like a more restrictive law, but he's basically open
Speaker 2: to bribes, and he records. Harmon records doctor Spears meeting
Speaker 2: with this guy and being like, look, how much is
Speaker 2: it going to cost for you to turn around on
Speaker 2: this issue, and how the state rep is like sixty
Speaker 2: grand and Spears is like, gun, I'll pay it. I've
Speaker 2: got the foundation funds, Like, we'll bribe you with that. Basically,
Speaker 2: this had been his real job since he'd become the
Speaker 2: head of the state Naturopathic Association. Right as he's bribing
Speaker 2: lawmakers and police to look the other way because a
Speaker 2: lot of people are doing illicit abortions and other healthcare
Speaker 2: procedures they're not supposed to be doing, and he's taking
Speaker 2: bribes to keep that going. And once he gets caught
Speaker 2: bribing a state official, his license was revoked and his
Speaker 2: life starts to fall apart. He does steal hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of dollars from the association's petty cash fund. But
Speaker 2: I think he's burning through that pretty fast. His wife
Speaker 2: has expensive tastes, the house isn't cheap to maintain, and
Speaker 2: he's also got to be on the run now again
Speaker 2: because he's in trouble increasingly and immediately he becomes a pariah.
Speaker 2: And these high society places he and his wife had
Speaker 2: gotten used to frequenting. So by this point he'd soured
Speaker 2: on Loomis and the other guy, but because they had
Speaker 2: been drawing too much attention, so he tries to, you know,
Speaker 2: as he's kind of trying to figure out, like, what's
Speaker 2: going to keep me in business, he gets back into
Speaker 2: the abortion business, but he tries to at first basically
Speaker 2: try a hands off approach. So there's this other naturopath
Speaker 2: named Fyman, who's the guy he'd bought his fake degree from.
Speaker 2: And Fiman had built this intrauterine paste, right, and he
Speaker 2: marketed it under the name Metrovact. Now, there were a
Speaker 2: lot of pastes that were meant to induce abortion in
Speaker 2: this period of time, right, non surgical abortions, and they
Speaker 2: look kind of like toothpaste tubes and you'd squeeze some
Speaker 2: into the cervix and it would induce a miscarriage, you know,
Speaker 2: within like a day or so. It's violet covered. There's
Speaker 2: a very strong chemical smell to it. But also so
Speaker 2: the name it's it sounds like like a modern product,
Speaker 2: so it's people think like, okay, this is safe and
Speaker 2: it's legal to sell. You can't transport it over state lines,
Speaker 2: which Fireman is doing. Fireman is moving it through this
Speaker 2: huge underground network. It's worth adding this fact about Fyman's
Speaker 2: violet covered abortion paste from Jamison's book Vanishing Act. There
Speaker 2: was no doubt that it induced abortions, but the FDA
Speaker 2: quickly announced that this preparation was the most dangerous in existence.
Speaker 2: The results were devastating. If the drug got under the bloodstream,
Speaker 2: the patient always died. So it's not safe stuff, and
Speaker 2: these guys don't really care about the impact it has
Speaker 2: on people. In fact, Spears cares so little that he
Speaker 2: tries to get Fimen to license this formula, and Fimon's like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm making money off of it. So Spears has a
Speaker 2: pharmacist with this an unbelievable name, Napoleon Bonaparte. Barbie Craft
Speaker 2: him a lookalike paste. Then God knows what's in this shit.
Speaker 2: It's just poison that burns people's insides, right, that's the
Speaker 2: product that he's selling. He just has this pharmacist cook
Speaker 2: up another pace that will burn people from the inside.
Speaker 2: Fucking Napoleon Bonaparte, Barbie amazing name.
Speaker 3: Wow, that is crazy.
Speaker 2: Quite a name. By mid nineteen fifty seven, Spears's old
Speaker 2: practice had been replaced by an underground traveling abortion clinic
Speaker 2: offering house calls and motel calls. Now he didn't always
Speaker 2: use the paste. He seems to prefer using herbs and
Speaker 2: tees in many cases, and these usually don't do anything
Speaker 2: at all. In fact, when he's caught for the first
Speaker 2: time and arrested for providing abortion services in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 2: when Dallas cop writes, he takes the money from women
Speaker 2: and prescribes certain medicines, but these medicines are harmless. That will,
Speaker 2: unfortunately not always be the case. After getting free from
Speaker 2: these charges in Dallas, Spears moves the family to southern California,
Speaker 2: where they can live closer to Don Loomis, whose abortion
Speaker 2: business was thriving still. The two partnered up and were
Speaker 2: soon making more than twenty two thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 2: But this doesn't last long. In July of nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: one of his patients, a twenty two year old school teacher,
Speaker 2: had gotten sick and I think eventually died after coming
Speaker 2: into UCLA Medical Center. And when she'd come in, she
Speaker 2: claimed that doctor Spears had performed an abortion on her
Speaker 2: using a violet paste that per Jamison had destroyed the
Speaker 2: soft tissues of her inner organs. So he is gotta
Speaker 2: get in a lot of trouble for this. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is going to bring serious charges that he can't escape from.
Speaker 2: He gets arrested while he's still on the phone with UCLA,
Speaker 2: and the police raid his house. They find surgical tools,
Speaker 2: they find ingredients to make more of the pay whatever
Speaker 2: fucking paste he's using, and they find fake diplomas. They
Speaker 2: also arrest Donald Loomis, even though he'd been bribing the
Speaker 2: cops like Spears gets them all busted because he's so
Speaker 2: lazy and does not care at all about the health
Speaker 2: of the women he's working on. I think Loomis at
Speaker 2: least cared about because he wants to repeat business. If
Speaker 2: you're going to be MGM's abortion doctor, you can't have
Speaker 2: that many bad reactions because it's MGM, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of money they've got behind, right, they don't care about
Speaker 2: their health, but there's a lot of money here. Fucking
Speaker 2: Spears just doesn't give a shit. And because he's so
Speaker 2: sloppy and reckless, a woman's life is destroyed. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it also just rolls up this whole abortion market that
Speaker 2: had been running. Point, Yeah, it's fucked up. Spears is
Speaker 2: near seventy. He's old at this point, and he is
Speaker 2: tired of running. He's been doing this his whole life.
Speaker 2: He has no idea how to get out of this one,
Speaker 2: and he kind of accepts I'm fucked, but he decides
Speaker 2: I'm going to go out, leaving my family a bunch
Speaker 2: of insurance money. Now we don't know exactly what happened next,
Speaker 2: but you remember that old buddy of his, his crime buddy,
Speaker 2: Al Taylor, right, yes, yeah, So while all this is
Speaker 2: going on with Spears, while he's starting and falling as
Speaker 2: a naturopath and becoming an abortionist, Al Taylor is kind
Speaker 2: of laying low in Florida, living a fairly normal life.
Speaker 2: You know. His ex wife is like later is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he was a normal guy. He seemed good with the kid. Periodically,
Speaker 2: that weird guy Spears, who I never liked, would call
Speaker 2: and he'd either travel to visit him or vice versa,
Speaker 2: and Al would get really weird, Like he always talked
Speaker 2: about his old buddy like he was a god, and
Speaker 2: he seemed to be like hypnotized by him. What probably
Speaker 2: was happening is that periodically Spears and Taylor would hook
Speaker 2: up for like a couple of weeks or a couple
Speaker 2: of nights to run a con or two for old
Speaker 2: time's sake, because it was fun and like this was
Speaker 2: how they would like blow off steam while he's a
Speaker 2: successful natural bath. So it seems like Spears kind of
Speaker 2: gets with his buddy and he's like, hey, I've got
Speaker 2: another con. We don't know exactly what happened. We know
Speaker 2: that on November sixth, nineteen fifty nine, Robert Spears booked
Speaker 2: a plane flight from Tampa to New Orleans. He had
Speaker 2: previously taken out one hundred thousand dollars air travel insurance
Speaker 2: policy on himself, but he never gets on that plane. Instead,
Speaker 2: his friend Al Taylor gets on and takes his seat.
Speaker 2: Immediately beforehand, Al takes out a thirty seven five hundred
Speaker 2: dollars insurance. He calls his wife three times before getting
Speaker 2: on the plane and she could tell something was wrong
Speaker 2: with him. National Airlines Flight nine sixty seven took off
Speaker 2: at eleven twenty two pm. It last made radio contact
Speaker 2: at around twelve forty four am. Nothing seemed to be wrong,
Speaker 2: but then the flight simply disappeared off the coast of Mexico.
Speaker 2: Debris washed up in the surrounding communities for months. All
Speaker 2: forty two people aboard are presumed to have died. Now
Speaker 2: we don't know what caused flight nine sixty seven to
Speaker 2: go down. There was a thorough investigation this before black boxes.
Speaker 2: Investigators suspect a bombing because of how the plane goes
Speaker 2: down and how much is left that somebody smuggled a
Speaker 2: bomb off and set it off. And right around this time,
Speaker 2: another guy whose Spears and Taylor were kind of connected to,
Speaker 2: had killed himself on a plane, taking out the whole
Speaker 2: plane for the insurance money. So this is probably a
Speaker 2: con that they kind of wrapped up from him. There
Speaker 2: are some people who doubted Taylor. Really it seems like
Speaker 2: he did. He Spears may have tricked him. Taylor may
Speaker 2: not have known that this was happening, yeah, or maybe
Speaker 2: he knew kind of what was because he took out
Speaker 2: an insurance policy. But maybe he just had a bad feeling.
Speaker 2: But Spears may have set him up with a bomb,
Speaker 2: we don't really know. For his part, Spears takes Al
Speaker 2: Taylor's car because he's got a nice car and drives
Speaker 2: it from Florida to like the southwest, where he hooks
Speaker 2: up with that other Natura path that he'd worked with
Speaker 2: for a while, and he hangs out and that guy notices,
Speaker 2: like when he's laying low, like because it's a major
Speaker 2: story and he's reported on as dead, and like his
Speaker 2: wife is talking to the press about how distraught he is,
Speaker 2: and eventually Taylor's wife is saying, Hey, I don't think
Speaker 2: that was hit. I think my husband's missing, and I
Speaker 2: think maybe this guy killed him because he was supposed
Speaker 2: to be on it. Like he like something's fucked up here.
Speaker 2: Tursky gets like weirded out because Spears is traveling around
Speaker 2: with a trunk ful of dynamite and repeatedly talks about
Speaker 2: how he knows how to make bombs and eventually blows
Speaker 2: up his friend Al Taylor's car with a bunch of
Speaker 2: dynamite to try to hide the evidence. Yeah, so we
Speaker 2: don't know who blew up the plane or that it
Speaker 2: was blown up, but we know Robert Spears was supposed
Speaker 2: to be on it and got his friend, the patsy
Speaker 2: who worshiped him, to get on it instead, and tried
Speaker 2: to have his wife cash in that one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: dollars life insurance policy. His plan was for it to
Speaker 2: support their kids, right, her and their kids. Well, he
Speaker 2: was because he was gonna either go to prison or
Speaker 2: have to flee the country because everyone thought he was dead.
Speaker 2: But he wanted to do something for his family, and
Speaker 2: so he may have orchestrated the murder of forty two
Speaker 2: people on a plane to try and get his wife
Speaker 2: and kids the insurance money. Yikes, that's probably what happens. Well,
Speaker 2: we don't know. Wow, he does get caught, the guy
Speaker 2: he's hiding with turns him in, he gets arrested, he
Speaker 2: gets convicted of a he doesn't get convicted of blowing
Speaker 2: up the plane, but of a bunch of other crimes,
Speaker 2: and he dies in prison not long after.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just general shadery, I think is probably the charge
Speaker 4: that he finally caught at the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Two years later, like while he's serving his five
Speaker 2: year prison term for car theft, Spears does an interview
Speaker 2: with Eddie Barker of krol DTV in Dallas and says, well,
Speaker 2: I had knowledge of the probability of a bomb on board,
Speaker 2: and basically because I knew someone else had a bomb
Speaker 2: on board, I wanted to have a ticket in my
Speaker 2: name and like a guy filling the seat so that
Speaker 2: they could cash it on the insurance. But also like
Speaker 2: who else had the bomb? Yeah, there's some there was
Speaker 2: like a mob guy who was on the plane, but
Speaker 2: like the mob didn't really do hits by killing a
Speaker 2: whole plane of random people. That's kind of bad business
Speaker 2: for the mob.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of trouble doing that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think Spears probably blew that plane up for the
Speaker 2: insurance money, which definitely, if the other stuff didn't, definitely
Speaker 2: qualifies him as a bastard.
Speaker 4: Yes, did his wife get the insurance money?
Speaker 3: Did that happen?
Speaker 2: No? No, you don't get that when you because first off,
Speaker 2: he's not dead.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, once he's.
Speaker 2: Proven a lie, there's not going to be an insurance payout.
Speaker 2: Like you're fine man, that's true.
Speaker 3: God, so all that I got killed all those people
Speaker 3: for nothing?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 4: What an asshole? And as Wow, that's you know, when
Speaker 4: I was so hopeful in the last episode when you
Speaker 4: said no pedophiles.
Speaker 2: Not a pedophile probably yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you know we're still we're still
Speaker 3: bat in a thousand in that category for sure.
Speaker 1: Just a mass murderer and a guy who uh picked
Speaker 1: on people that were in vulnerable situations trying to get.
Speaker 3: You know, care, Yes, exactly. That should have been legal
Speaker 3: the entire time, and yeah it.
Speaker 2: Never should have been okay, yeah, but what can I
Speaker 2: do stop people from committing crimes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean the the part that somebody was so desperate
Speaker 1: enough that they went to him to end a pregnancy
Speaker 1: and then they end up dying because he's given them
Speaker 1: a toxic.
Speaker 3: Purpose paste awful.
Speaker 1: Great, and you know there's things that could have been
Speaker 1: done so that they didn't need to go to that
Speaker 1: kind of person.
Speaker 5: But uh, America, that'sis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, some of this is just yet that's how
Speaker 2: things were back when all this stuff was illegal.
Speaker 4: A good reminder for the future. Yeah, yes, yeah, there
Speaker 4: will be a way will always happen regardless that's why
Speaker 4: it needs to be legal and easily accessible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, legal and like regulated so that people are Actually
Speaker 2: it is healthcare medicine. It is healthy as opposed to poison. Yes, yep,
Speaker 2: cool stuff.
Speaker 1: BRANDI you want to plug your pluggables for us one
Speaker 1: last time?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Please?
Speaker 4: So, guys, I have a new album that just came out,
Speaker 4: comedy album. It's called Milk Job. You can listen to
Speaker 4: it wherever you listen to albums. I put it out
Speaker 4: on my comedy record label that I've been running for
Speaker 4: a few years now. It's called Burn This Records. And
Speaker 4: the thing that you could do that would be super
Speaker 4: helpful is if you followed us on YouTube, because we're
Speaker 4: getting into the YouTube video world starting this year with
Speaker 4: my special so burn This Record on YouTube. I also
Speaker 4: have a podcast myself called Lady to Lady with Babs
Speaker 4: Gray and Test Barker. We've been around for fifteen years.
Speaker 4: It's a real good time. And I'll be on Warp
Speaker 4: Tour all summer long. So follow me at bran Dazzle
Speaker 4: wherever you follow people that you like, and uh yeah.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Follow brand Dazzle and follow this podcast to our inevitable
Speaker 2: conclusion when we get rated for providing fake medical treatments.
Speaker 3: No, no, one.
Speaker 2: Day, so one day, god willing, you know, god willing.
Speaker 1: I think I was just relieved for a second that
Speaker 1: you say anything about palms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's for the best, probably best not to
Speaker 2: not to, not to poke that bear.
Speaker 3: Let's not do either of those things.
Speaker 2: You know what poke bear? What they seem like whimps? Nope,
Speaker 2: Bye bye.
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