WEBVTT - Gilbert King Presents: Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:03.320 I'm here with Paul Solataroff, the writer and host of 0:00:03.400 --> 0:00:07.520 Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, as well as 0:00:07.600 --> 0:00:11.119 Liz Garber Paul, the Rolling Stone editor who published Paul's 0:00:11.119 --> 0:00:14.640 feature story The Devil You Know in Rolling Stone. The 0:00:14.680 --> 0:00:18.080 new season Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, will 0:00:18.120 --> 0:00:21.919 begin on June tenth, and it's also an official selection 0:00:22.079 --> 0:00:25.760 for the twenty twenty six Tribeca Festival. Welcome, guys. Really 0:00:25.840 --> 0:00:28.560 nice to see you, guys. Are you guys ready to 0:00:28.560 --> 0:00:30.680 talk some Bone Valley podcasting? 0:00:31.040 --> 0:00:31.720 Absolutely? 0:00:31.760 --> 0:00:35.199 All right, good, Paul, Let's just start with your journalism background, 0:00:35.280 --> 0:00:37.520 because you know, I've been following you for many years 0:00:37.520 --> 0:00:39.320 and I was just so thrilled to see that the 0:00:39.320 --> 0:00:41.440 guy who's broken all these big stories is now doing 0:00:41.520 --> 0:00:44.480 something with Bone Valley. So can we just talk about 0:00:44.520 --> 0:00:46.559 your background a little bit? And you know what you 0:00:46.600 --> 0:00:48.520 were doing when you stumbled onto this case. 0:00:48.840 --> 0:00:54.520 So I took a series of left turns from graduate 0:00:54.560 --> 0:00:57.520 writing programs into a job at the Village Voice in 0:00:57.640 --> 0:01:03.320 nineteen eighty seven eighty eight, wound up writing my first 0:01:03.360 --> 0:01:07.560 ever story about homeless children on the docks of the 0:01:07.560 --> 0:01:14.360 West Side Highway, which inadvertently became this enormous cluster of 0:01:14.400 --> 0:01:20.400 a story because it outed an organization called Covenant House, which, 0:01:20.920 --> 0:01:25.800 through the front doors, was bringing in all of these broken, abandoned, 0:01:26.319 --> 0:01:30.039 kickout children of the crack pandemic in New York City 0:01:30.760 --> 0:01:33.640 and then selling some of them out the back door 0:01:33.720 --> 0:01:39.319 to corporate donors. That story launched me on a trajectory 0:01:40.520 --> 0:01:45.640 to eventually Rolling Stone, where I have now been for 0:01:46.120 --> 0:01:52.440 thirty four years. And my remitt a rolling Stone has 0:01:52.800 --> 0:01:59.080 always been the pursuit of justice for those who otherwise 0:01:59.360 --> 0:02:03.360 had no shot at it, whether it was homeless kids, 0:02:03.400 --> 0:02:07.600 whether it was brainbroken NFL veterans who had been utterly 0:02:07.640 --> 0:02:11.760 screwed out of a pension, or even any kind of 0:02:11.800 --> 0:02:19.480 clinical acknowledgment of what was this enormous pandemic of chronic 0:02:19.600 --> 0:02:25.519 traumatic encephalopathy. That was my story, and over the years 0:02:25.600 --> 0:02:32.880 I have gone after the kinds of stories that yielded 0:02:33.639 --> 0:02:43.240 the most horrific, unspeakable acts of official misconduct on the 0:02:43.280 --> 0:02:47.440 parts of crooked cops, big city cops, on the parts 0:02:47.480 --> 0:02:52.680 of corrupt prosecutors, on the parts of in the bad judges. 0:02:53.040 --> 0:02:56.639 The larger rubric for my career has been America's War 0:02:56.720 --> 0:03:00.360 on drugs, which very early on in my career I 0:03:00.440 --> 0:03:03.160 realized was nothing more than the war on the poor. 0:03:03.360 --> 0:03:08.600 And so I have essentially kind of appointed myself the 0:03:08.639 --> 0:03:13.080 public advocate for the poor who had been caught in 0:03:13.520 --> 0:03:20.639 the most horrific domestic policy decision of the American century, 0:03:21.000 --> 0:03:28.840 which is this headlong attempt to arrest our way out 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:36.720 of the drug pandemic and create a massive incarceral state 0:03:37.560 --> 0:03:43.000 that left us five years ago with a quarter of 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:46.320 the world's in prison population. 0:03:46.640 --> 0:03:48.160 Paul, where do you think this came from? I mean, 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:50.640 looking back decades of doing this kind of work, was 0:03:50.640 --> 0:03:52.960 there something that affected you as a child, or some 0:03:53.080 --> 0:03:56.040 kind of you know, awakening to these issues. 0:03:56.120 --> 0:03:58.400 Where did they come from? I was a bit of 0:03:58.400 --> 0:04:03.400 a red diaper baby. My father was a famous literary editor, 0:04:04.200 --> 0:04:09.080 my mother a translator of Tulstoy and Chekhov. None of 0:04:09.080 --> 0:04:11.640 that was interesting to me. What was interesting was they 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:16.320 dragged me to DC for the March on Washington, to 0:04:17.440 --> 0:04:21.240 the rallies in Central Park in the sixties. I wound 0:04:21.320 --> 0:04:23.160 up going to the School of Music and Art, which 0:04:23.160 --> 0:04:26.559 in those days was in Harlem, directly across the street 0:04:26.600 --> 0:04:32.560 from CCNY, which was a seeding ground of the SDS, 0:04:33.120 --> 0:04:37.320 ultimately the weather Underground. So I was very much subscribed 0:04:37.880 --> 0:04:43.640 into radical politics as a child, but I was raised 0:04:43.640 --> 0:04:46.080 to be a novelist and trained to be a novelist. 0:04:46.120 --> 0:04:51.200 And so what I brought inadvertently to journalism was a 0:04:51.279 --> 0:04:57.880 storyteller's use of language, of narrative structure, and of that 0:04:58.160 --> 0:05:06.479 intense fascination with otherness, with the price, the daily price 0:05:06.720 --> 0:05:11.280 of getting out of bed for people without the kinds 0:05:11.320 --> 0:05:16.440 of advantages, privileges, associations I'd come to take for granted. 0:05:17.200 --> 0:05:19.520 And if there was one sort of clincher for it. 0:05:20.480 --> 0:05:23.760 In my hopeless attempt to become a novelist and then 0:05:23.839 --> 0:05:27.520 later a playwright, I wound up for two years at 0:05:27.680 --> 0:05:32.680 the NYU School of Social Work, where my placement was 0:05:32.720 --> 0:05:39.279 in the South Bronx, allegedly ministering clinically to the orphan 0:05:39.400 --> 0:05:44.240 children of the Happy Lands disco fire in nineteen eighty seven. 0:05:45.200 --> 0:05:48.360 And for two years I sat in an office with 0:05:48.400 --> 0:05:58.080 no skills, with really no supervision, attempting to console children 0:05:58.560 --> 0:06:02.560 whose parents had been a obliterated in a basement fire 0:06:02.960 --> 0:06:07.800 in an unlicensed club in the Bronx. And what that 0:06:08.120 --> 0:06:12.360 indenture that to your indenture did was give me my subject. 0:06:13.200 --> 0:06:16.400 So when I started the Village Voice in nineteen eighty eight, 0:06:17.320 --> 0:06:20.760 I was three blocks on West Broadway from the West 0:06:20.800 --> 0:06:23.760 Side Docks, and every day I would take my lunch 0:06:24.680 --> 0:06:31.320 to eat on these abandoned docks, which were rotting peers 0:06:31.760 --> 0:06:35.440 that had become a stroll for the eight nine and 0:06:35.600 --> 0:06:40.560 ten year old kickout children of the crack SROs on 0:06:40.640 --> 0:06:44.240 West forty second Street, and I saw these children selling 0:06:44.240 --> 0:06:48.080 their bodies for five dollars crack rocks. That became my 0:06:48.160 --> 0:06:52.280 first story, but it also became my grail to get 0:06:52.760 --> 0:07:03.440 them the assistance, the robust response from a city administration 0:07:03.760 --> 0:07:06.840 that didn't give a fuck about them. I always tell 0:07:06.880 --> 0:07:10.800 people when asked how I find my stories, I just 0:07:10.920 --> 0:07:12.000 follow my app rage. 0:07:12.760 --> 0:07:14.960 Can you just talk about having, you know, decades of 0:07:15.040 --> 0:07:19.280 cracking these really important stories that aren't just stories for 0:07:19.360 --> 0:07:21.840 our reading, but they actually go on to improve things 0:07:22.120 --> 0:07:25.280 and call attention to issues that you care about. Can 0:07:25.320 --> 0:07:27.240 you just talk about where you were or how you 0:07:27.280 --> 0:07:30.920 stumbled into this case that you wrote about for Rolling Stone. 0:07:30.960 --> 0:07:33.000 With now Bone Valley season five. 0:07:33.000 --> 0:07:36.400 I work very closely with the Innocence Project. They have 0:07:36.520 --> 0:07:40.360 been boone partners on several of my big sort of 0:07:40.400 --> 0:07:44.360 exoneration stories, and they began telling me about what was 0:07:44.400 --> 0:07:51.320 happening in Massachusetts, about this bubbling up scandal in the 0:07:51.440 --> 0:07:57.600 state crime labs. So, in Massachusetts there was this ten 0:07:57.760 --> 0:08:04.880 fifteen year long open scandal wherein the state police crime 0:08:04.960 --> 0:08:11.680 labs in high rotation for seized narcotics by police departments 0:08:11.800 --> 0:08:16.600 West and East in Massachusetts were submitting these seizures to 0:08:16.640 --> 0:08:23.200 be sampled, tested, and certified as narcotics in order to 0:08:23.320 --> 0:08:31.200 corroborate these indictments of low level dealers, primarily possession, use sales. Well, 0:08:31.760 --> 0:08:35.560 what I discovered in the course of that investigation is 0:08:35.600 --> 0:08:41.800 that these two labs in western Massachusetts, one in Boston, 0:08:42.400 --> 0:08:48.559 were populated by chemists who were shooting, snorting, smoking, huffing, 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:55.400 and otherwise consuming the very substances they were hired to test. 0:08:55.679 --> 0:09:03.120 These bench chemists had wrongly helped convict we believe fifty 0:09:03.280 --> 0:09:07.920 sixty thousand low level offenders. Another of these deep, very 0:09:07.960 --> 0:09:14.720 complicated digs helped to exonerate forty one thousand of these 0:09:15.480 --> 0:09:20.400 level offenders and to get them compensated for their years 0:09:20.640 --> 0:09:24.640 wrongfully spent in prison. Once that story was done, I'd 0:09:24.720 --> 0:09:29.280 get together with Nina Morrison and Peter Neufeld, who were 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:33.920 running Innocence Project in New York. I said, what's next? 0:09:33.920 --> 0:09:37.839 And they said, ever want to look at small town 0:09:38.080 --> 0:09:45.000 police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct. Have any interest in that? And 0:09:45.040 --> 0:09:48.640 I said, boy do I ever? And so that was 0:09:48.679 --> 0:09:52.800 the launch point to drive up to the town of 0:09:52.840 --> 0:09:57.520 Carmel in Putnam County, fifty miles from Rolling Stone's office 0:09:57.559 --> 0:10:03.600 on Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan, and meet with two young 0:10:03.679 --> 0:10:10.600 men who had been framed, who had been arrested, framed, convicted, 0:10:11.160 --> 0:10:17.080 and sent away in their teens to the most medieval 0:10:17.120 --> 0:10:22.560 prisons in New York State for life without parole for 0:10:22.640 --> 0:10:25.959 the rape and murder of a girl. They had never met. 0:10:26.240 --> 0:10:29.880 The first of these wrongfully accused teens, who had spent 0:10:30.040 --> 0:10:37.000 twenty years his entire young adulthood in Attica, Dana Mora 0:10:37.640 --> 0:10:42.280 Auburn Western teaching himself how to read. He was a 0:10:42.360 --> 0:10:48.200 ninth grade dropout when he went away, teaching himself the 0:10:48.320 --> 0:10:55.600 law at Shwongong Prison library and compiling the most extraordinary 0:10:56.040 --> 0:11:04.280 legal brief investigating the actual killer of the decedent, Josette Right. 0:11:05.280 --> 0:11:08.200 And so when I showed up in Carmel. I didn't 0:11:08.200 --> 0:11:11.960 show up in Carmel. My first toe end of the 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:17.520 story was sitting in the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower 0:11:19.000 --> 0:11:23.480 in New Rochelle of Anthony de Pippo, who had been 0:11:23.520 --> 0:11:28.880 out of prison for five years after exonerating himself in 0:11:28.920 --> 0:11:35.360 a twenty sixteen trial, who had then filed a federal 0:11:35.400 --> 0:11:42.520 civil rights suit for wrongful arrest, conviction, imprisonment against Putnam 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:46.880 County in the state of New York one judgments I'm sorry, 0:11:46.960 --> 0:11:52.280 won settlements to the tune of fifteen million dollars and 0:11:52.360 --> 0:11:58.720 bought himself a very garish apartment in Trump Tower. Remember 0:11:58.760 --> 0:12:03.000 he was seven team unarrested nineteen, went sent away for 0:12:03.160 --> 0:12:11.400 life of that pearl. His emotional and developmental timeline were 0:12:11.440 --> 0:12:15.000 stopped abruptly as a teen. And so what did he 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:21.079 buy himself with this fifteen million? He bought himself one 0:12:21.160 --> 0:12:28.080 hundred and fifty replica championship wrestling belts, framed them and 0:12:28.679 --> 0:12:33.280 mounted them on the walls of his apartment. He had 0:12:33.360 --> 0:12:36.880 a nine thousand dollars flat screen TV, which he told 0:12:36.920 --> 0:12:42.520 me only worked in eight K, which was a problem 0:12:42.559 --> 0:12:46.960 because we only had four K at the time. And 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:51.679 what made it really poignant and what Anthony had intensely 0:12:51.720 --> 0:12:57.360 in common with the other exoneries I've either held free 0:12:57.520 --> 0:13:00.199 or who got themselves free. And then I told their stories. 0:13:01.360 --> 0:13:07.360 Having been entrapped in an eight by non enclosure his 0:13:07.720 --> 0:13:12.160 entire adult life. He was living in this three bedroom apartment, 0:13:12.160 --> 0:13:15.679 in fifteen hundred square foot apartment with spectacular views in 0:13:15.720 --> 0:13:19.240 every window. He wouldn't leave the bedroom. He would pace 0:13:20.320 --> 0:13:24.439 his bedroom and never leave. And I said, Anthony, how 0:13:24.440 --> 0:13:29.120 do you eat? How do you get vitamin D? He said, 0:13:30.280 --> 0:13:32.280 I go down at night when I think the cops 0:13:32.320 --> 0:13:36.959 are out, are gone. So he was so terrified he 0:13:37.000 --> 0:13:43.440 bought himself this gorgeous AMG Mercedes suv that he was 0:13:43.600 --> 0:13:49.880 terrified to drive for fear that he'd be stopped. So 0:13:49.960 --> 0:13:53.840 what happens in these cases of men who have been 0:13:53.840 --> 0:14:03.319 wrongfully accused, tried, convicted, is even after establishing absolute innocence, 0:14:03.520 --> 0:14:08.800 they are always in the dark tunnel, too afraid to 0:14:08.960 --> 0:14:19.080 rejoin the society that snatched them out of their childhoods. 0:14:19.160 --> 0:14:24.680 And so I spent nine months reporting that story and 0:14:25.840 --> 0:14:34.640 the corruption, the incompetence, the sadism of the Putnam County 0:14:34.680 --> 0:14:39.880 Sheriff's office was, if anything undersold to me, it was 0:14:40.760 --> 0:14:48.880 the most lawless law enforcement agency I have ever had 0:14:48.960 --> 0:14:53.880 the honor of delving into. And it had a history 0:14:54.520 --> 0:15:00.120 of criminal misconduct dating back decades. What do you do 0:15:00.440 --> 0:15:03.640 if you were a police department or a constellation of 0:15:03.640 --> 0:15:12.160 police departments that has domestics as its variant of violent crime, 0:15:12.760 --> 0:15:20.520 that has nickel and dime possession as it's underworld, You 0:15:20.720 --> 0:15:24.600 go and you create crime. And one of the ways 0:15:24.720 --> 0:15:29.360 that these police police departments did that was by using 0:15:29.920 --> 0:15:33.640 a confidential informant who turns out to be this central 0:15:33.680 --> 0:15:37.760 figure of the devil, you know, a man in his thirties, 0:15:38.600 --> 0:15:46.520 to sell give away drugs to children, to thirteen, fourteen, 0:15:46.680 --> 0:15:52.000 fifteen year olds of both genders, and then subject them 0:15:52.520 --> 0:15:56.080 to or tip the cops off. They would get arrested, 0:15:57.120 --> 0:15:59.400 you know, they'd all go off to smoke a joint 0:15:59.400 --> 0:16:02.720 in the wood, or to hang out in an abandoned 0:16:02.720 --> 0:16:08.840 shack by the railyard to drink Boone's farm. The sheriffs 0:16:08.840 --> 0:16:12.520 of the cops would swarm the girls. In order to 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:16.440 get out of the back seat of that cruiser, would 0:16:16.440 --> 0:16:20.800 have to blow the deputy. The boys would have to 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:24.560 agree to be snitches and sell a nickel of weed 0:16:24.840 --> 0:16:30.200 to their school friends. That's how you build stats if 0:16:30.240 --> 0:16:34.360 you are a corrupt sheriff. In a small town of 0:16:34.400 --> 0:16:39.000 twenty five thousand, it was hard to find a young 0:16:39.080 --> 0:16:44.240 woman who had not been sexually violated or threatened with it, 0:16:44.840 --> 0:16:50.000 or whose best friend had not had to do something 0:16:50.080 --> 0:16:52.040 she didn't want to do to get out of the 0:16:52.120 --> 0:16:56.840 back of that cruiser. And that, for me, was the 0:16:56.880 --> 0:17:02.120 palette I worked with. Those were the earth colors I 0:17:02.200 --> 0:17:10.560 painted that story with. Within that subculture, these extremely vulnerable 0:17:10.680 --> 0:17:17.640 children who, let's remember, this was pre helicopter parenting. This 0:17:17.920 --> 0:17:23.320 was you know, pre you know, children just saying no. 0:17:24.920 --> 0:17:28.360 The town of Carmel, much of that side of Putnam 0:17:28.359 --> 0:17:34.439 County offers fuck all for children after school. If you 0:17:34.480 --> 0:17:37.880 don't play Little League, if you don't play girl soccer, 0:17:38.600 --> 0:17:40.840 there is nowhere for you to go. And they had 0:17:40.880 --> 0:17:45.480 to go somewhere to continue to you know, kind of 0:17:46.960 --> 0:17:49.720 create their own adventure, and they go into the woods 0:17:49.840 --> 0:17:51.800 or they go to a rave up on a hill 0:17:52.480 --> 0:17:57.640 and the police would swarm. So you had this culture 0:17:58.359 --> 0:18:06.880 where this precocious kind of sexuality was what passed for entertainment. 0:18:07.160 --> 0:18:12.280 What passed for after school activities, and a lot of 0:18:12.280 --> 0:18:15.480 it was born out of boredom, but also a lot 0:18:15.520 --> 0:18:18.399 of it was born out of parental neglect. I remember 0:18:18.440 --> 0:18:23.359 feeling this acutely, very early on in my reporting trips 0:18:23.359 --> 0:18:26.040 to Carmel. I had the distinct feeling I was being 0:18:26.080 --> 0:18:30.800 follen because I was such an obvious ringer and because 0:18:30.840 --> 0:18:32.679 I was asking the wrong questions. 0:18:32.760 --> 0:18:37.560 There can be, especially with the smaller communities right outside 0:18:37.560 --> 0:18:41.160 of New York, there can be a resentment to the 0:18:41.280 --> 0:18:46.120 you know, New York media coming in and reshaping these 0:18:46.160 --> 0:18:53.399 foundational narratives. And they didn't particularly They felt very protective 0:18:53.720 --> 0:18:56.679 over their town and didn't love an outsider coming in 0:18:56.720 --> 0:18:57.719 and ripping it all up. 0:18:58.040 --> 0:18:59.280 This I'm going to ask you to go back a 0:18:59.359 --> 0:19:01.879 few years, sure, what was it like when this story 0:19:01.920 --> 0:19:04.200 which later became his story for Rolling Stone? The de 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:08.280 w no, What was your first introduction to this story 0:19:08.480 --> 0:19:10.000 and what was your reaction at the time. 0:19:10.680 --> 0:19:14.960 So I believe the first introduction was you had filed 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:18.840 the story to Sean Woods, our editor in chief, and 0:19:18.960 --> 0:19:22.040 he had gone through it. And I've only been a 0:19:22.160 --> 0:19:25.320 Rolling Stone for sixteen years, but I had a history 0:19:25.359 --> 0:19:27.560 of working with Paul. I had fact checked him when 0:19:27.560 --> 0:19:30.119 I was in the fact checking department. It transcribed for 0:19:30.240 --> 0:19:34.080 him early in my career, I had, and I had 0:19:34.080 --> 0:19:38.360 also just finished around twenty twenty one, I had recently 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:41.840 finished a story that I wrote myself about police corruption 0:19:42.119 --> 0:19:45.760 in Philadelphia, about a guy named Jimmy Dennis who had 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:48.920 been picked off this street the a twenty year old 0:19:49.000 --> 0:19:52.919 kid in the mid nineteen eighties and had been on 0:19:53.040 --> 0:19:55.760 death row for twenty five years before he won his 0:19:55.800 --> 0:19:59.720 own exoneration, so or not exactly exoneration, but he won 0:19:59.760 --> 0:20:03.040 his So Sean felt like I was in a good 0:20:03.080 --> 0:20:06.239 place to pick up Paul's story and run with it, 0:20:06.280 --> 0:20:09.200 and I was. I'm always impressed by Paul's drafts when 0:20:09.200 --> 0:20:12.879 they come in. He has such a natural talent as 0:20:12.880 --> 0:20:17.679 a storyteller. So so my work as an editor on 0:20:17.720 --> 0:20:23.040 this story was not so much trying to frame the 0:20:23.119 --> 0:20:27.040 narrative or you know, why would the reader care about this, like, 0:20:27.160 --> 0:20:29.400 let's get into that. It was really more let's get 0:20:29.400 --> 0:20:31.399 into the nitty gritty. How do we know what we know? 0:20:31.840 --> 0:20:34.320 How can we safely make the statements we're going to say. 0:20:34.800 --> 0:20:37.920 It's almost just like high level fact checking at that point, 0:20:37.960 --> 0:20:41.959 and I was very fortunate to be working with an 0:20:42.040 --> 0:20:46.160 incredible fact checker, John Bernstein, on this story, and so 0:20:46.200 --> 0:20:48.480 we just kind of we read the story. We're so 0:20:48.600 --> 0:20:55.000 impressed by the way that Paul had just really brought 0:20:55.119 --> 0:21:03.720 this slice of you know, bedroom community nineteen eighties to life. 0:21:04.000 --> 0:21:07.720 And so, yeah, our first job was digging in, reading 0:21:07.760 --> 0:21:10.200 through all of the reporting that he'd been doing over 0:21:10.320 --> 0:21:15.800 nine months and really trying to kind of parse what 0:21:16.000 --> 0:21:18.600 was legend and what was fact. And I think especially 0:21:18.640 --> 0:21:21.560 in a case like this where you have where it's 0:21:21.720 --> 0:21:23.480 historical in one sense. 0:21:23.280 --> 0:21:24.919 But also recent history. 0:21:25.359 --> 0:21:27.840 You know, memory is a tricky thing. People are trying 0:21:27.960 --> 0:21:31.080 to tell their story to the best of their ability 0:21:31.080 --> 0:21:35.360 and remember where they were at that time and having 0:21:35.440 --> 0:21:41.600 to kind of sort through legal documents both contemporaneous and 0:21:41.840 --> 0:21:44.240 you know, within the last few years, and then all 0:21:44.240 --> 0:21:47.600 of the incredible interviews that Paul had done with people 0:21:47.640 --> 0:21:49.479 who are remembering this time. You know, it was just 0:21:49.560 --> 0:21:54.720 it was immersing myself into this very troubled community corruption 0:21:54.920 --> 0:21:57.320 that brought them to that point. 0:21:57.520 --> 0:22:00.000 Yeah, and obviously it can be a very dark story 0:22:00.240 --> 0:22:02.480 time you're dealing with the murder and torture of these 0:22:02.520 --> 0:22:05.760 young girls. What was it like within Rolling Stone? Were 0:22:05.800 --> 0:22:09.440 they supportive of these efforts and do they encourage Paul 0:22:09.480 --> 0:22:12.359 to just keep digging or to just maybe focus on 0:22:12.440 --> 0:22:15.320 some of the corruption and less about the actual crimes. 0:22:15.359 --> 0:22:16.359 How does that work? No? 0:22:16.440 --> 0:22:18.600 I mean, I think for a story like this, you know, 0:22:18.640 --> 0:22:21.440 the corruption it's about, how do you how do you 0:22:21.480 --> 0:22:25.119 get a reader to pay attention to to you know, 0:22:25.200 --> 0:22:28.080 the vegetables of the story, right, which is the police corruption, 0:22:28.840 --> 0:22:33.840 which can get somewhat tedious as a reader. And really, 0:22:33.920 --> 0:22:37.800 and what's so incredible about this story is the very 0:22:37.920 --> 0:22:41.040 real characters who come out of it. And so we 0:22:41.040 --> 0:22:44.639 were I mean, we're we're on the culture side of 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:48.080 Rolling Stone. We don't shy away from the dark stories 0:22:48.119 --> 0:22:53.920 at all. We also don't want them to be exploitative, 0:22:54.119 --> 0:22:56.080 you know, And so how do you tell these stories 0:22:56.119 --> 0:22:57.840 without making it tabloidy? 0:22:57.960 --> 0:22:58.120 Right? 0:22:59.840 --> 0:23:02.080 How how do you bring this town to life without 0:23:02.440 --> 0:23:07.040 making it one dimensional? And that was we just leaned 0:23:07.119 --> 0:23:08.919 right into that. I think one of the things that 0:23:09.000 --> 0:23:13.800 was most surprising to me, as you know, the outsider 0:23:13.920 --> 0:23:19.119 kind of coming into this story, was how committed so 0:23:19.240 --> 0:23:22.800 many people in that community were to the version of 0:23:22.840 --> 0:23:27.880 events from you know, the nineteen nineties, right, the prosecutor's 0:23:27.960 --> 0:23:31.640 version of events that Anthony and Andy were guilty, and 0:23:31.720 --> 0:23:36.280 how hard it was even when confronted with you know, 0:23:36.920 --> 0:23:42.080 legal papers and verdicts and Anthony's release from prison, how 0:23:42.119 --> 0:23:44.600 hard it was for a lot of the folks from 0:23:44.600 --> 0:23:48.760 that community to let go of the narrative that they 0:23:48.760 --> 0:23:52.400 had been sold. And I wasn't really prepared for that 0:23:52.480 --> 0:23:55.480 as much because, you know, working with places like the 0:23:55.480 --> 0:24:00.000 Innocence Project following these stories, you kind of assume that, 0:24:00.480 --> 0:24:03.439 you know, everyone wants everyone does want justice, but what 0:24:03.480 --> 0:24:06.639 that justice looks like can be very different to different people. 0:24:06.880 --> 0:24:09.480 I hope have come to appreciate, especially with you know, 0:24:10.400 --> 0:24:13.920 with Andy's eventual release, like that, there is a lot 0:24:13.960 --> 0:24:18.919 of truth to the story that Paul wrote, And hopefully 0:24:18.960 --> 0:24:21.880 they'll listen to this podcast and get even more depths 0:24:21.920 --> 0:24:26.199 into the reporting that he's done and realize that, you know, 0:24:26.240 --> 0:24:31.000 it's not it's not someone coming in and trying to 0:24:31.200 --> 0:24:34.639 change the story at someone coming in and trying to 0:24:34.680 --> 0:24:35.600 tell the real story. 0:24:35.760 --> 0:24:35.960 Paul. 0:24:36.000 --> 0:24:38.560 I'm just really curious from you from a storyteller's perspective, 0:24:38.600 --> 0:24:41.520 somebody has you know, done print for decades, what was 0:24:41.520 --> 0:24:44.760 it like pivoting the podcast in this audio format? Could 0:24:44.800 --> 0:24:46.560 you talk about some of the things that you found 0:24:46.640 --> 0:24:49.480 different and really satisfying or unsatisfying. 0:24:49.520 --> 0:24:55.399 Well, I'd always thought of my voice as one of 0:24:55.440 --> 0:25:00.119 my very few advantages in life, my speaking voice. And 0:25:00.119 --> 0:25:05.000 then I began listening to playbacks of myself doing narration, 0:25:06.040 --> 0:25:10.320 and I called Kevin Waters in a panic and said, 0:25:10.840 --> 0:25:15.080 can we hire someone to do the narration? I really 0:25:15.560 --> 0:25:20.359 don't want to be the reason that no one listens 0:25:20.800 --> 0:25:26.280 to season five of Bone Valley. I will tell you 0:25:26.560 --> 0:25:30.320 it is an acquired skill. It is a lot of 0:25:30.400 --> 0:25:35.680 failure and a lot of humiliation listening to yourself in playback. 0:25:37.440 --> 0:25:42.160 The main challenge I had is while I write by 0:25:42.200 --> 0:25:46.919 the engine, not by the ord, I also am a 0:25:47.480 --> 0:25:57.120 very self conscious and self scourging stylist of my sentences, 0:25:58.520 --> 0:26:01.800 and they were too pretty. I think your voice is 0:26:01.840 --> 0:26:05.040 fantastic than you know. Really, you just it's it just 0:26:05.080 --> 0:26:07.919 fits the actual show, and you feel like a natural 0:26:08.000 --> 0:26:10.800 character within the show. And so I thought, I know 0:26:11.119 --> 0:26:12.760 how it was for me. I couldn't stand listen to 0:26:12.760 --> 0:26:14.560 my voice. And I even thought the same thing, do 0:26:14.560 --> 0:26:16.639 you want to get another narrator? But you fit that 0:26:16.680 --> 0:26:18.639 you're the person who did the work, you belong in 0:26:18.680 --> 0:26:23.439 the story. But I finally figured out, no, the most 0:26:23.920 --> 0:26:30.400 powerful voice in these episodes is always the victims, is 0:26:30.520 --> 0:26:37.000 always the lawyers, is always the exonerated Anthony to Pippo. 0:26:39.160 --> 0:26:44.400 Their stories are vastly more interested interesting than my sentences, 0:26:45.200 --> 0:26:48.439 and it is time to let go of the wheel 0:26:49.440 --> 0:26:55.600 and let the people whose story this belongs to write 0:26:55.960 --> 0:27:05.120 the narrative through their own recollections, your own traumatic renderings 0:27:05.800 --> 0:27:07.199 of what happened to them. 0:27:07.320 --> 0:27:10.280 I think the other thing I noticed when in the 0:27:10.320 --> 0:27:13.000 whole writing process is right, when you approach it like 0:27:13.000 --> 0:27:16.720 a print story, you insert quotes because you're not hearing them. 0:27:16.760 --> 0:27:20.159 But when you're doing a podcast, that voice becomes much larger, 0:27:20.400 --> 0:27:23.720 and you're right, it's the people who've experienced trauma pain 0:27:24.160 --> 0:27:27.639 that really resonate in the story. And you know, for me, 0:27:27.760 --> 0:27:30.040 I think it was just listening to Leo Schofield talk 0:27:30.080 --> 0:27:33.560 about his case and the pain that he felt just 0:27:33.760 --> 0:27:36.320 constantly being defeated in courts and having to learn that 0:27:36.520 --> 0:27:39.280 I'm going to die in prison if something's not corrected. 0:27:40.000 --> 0:27:42.879 That's more powerful than anything you could write anyway, just 0:27:42.960 --> 0:27:45.720 hearing that voice crack in the emotion, and I think 0:27:45.760 --> 0:27:48.680 that's what really drew me, and I've definitely been hearing 0:27:48.720 --> 0:27:53.560 it in season five. You definitely have these powerful stories 0:27:53.600 --> 0:27:56.880 and interviews with people along the way that just yeah, 0:27:57.040 --> 0:27:58.240 just get out of the way of it, which you 0:27:58.320 --> 0:27:59.080 do really well. 0:27:59.240 --> 0:28:02.600 You're eighteen years old, you're Anthony to Pippo, and yes, 0:28:02.640 --> 0:28:06.800 you're a large young man who thinks he's a backyard 0:28:06.840 --> 0:28:11.840 wrestler at six five and two forty. What you don't 0:28:11.920 --> 0:28:16.560 understand is that when you get to Danimore, the backyard 0:28:16.600 --> 0:28:23.040 wrestlers up there bench four fifty, squat five twenty and 0:28:23.800 --> 0:28:30.240 eat white boys like you for as an amuse boush 0:28:31.280 --> 0:28:34.760 and both of these young men, by the way, Andy 0:28:35.480 --> 0:28:38.000 on a good day is five seven and a buck forty. 0:28:39.480 --> 0:28:44.640 And they entered the as I say, the most raconian 0:28:44.680 --> 0:28:48.800 prisons in New York State. And they went into these 0:28:48.840 --> 0:28:54.960 places with what is called a jacket. You go into 0:28:55.080 --> 0:28:58.400 max prison, you are wearing a jacket of your conviction. 0:28:59.240 --> 0:29:05.720 They wore the worst possible jacket you can wear, child rapist, murderer, 0:29:06.280 --> 0:29:09.640 and they were going to have to save their own lives. 0:29:10.360 --> 0:29:13.560 From the day they walked in. They were going to 0:29:13.560 --> 0:29:16.440 have to fight their own fights. They were going to 0:29:16.640 --> 0:29:22.080 have to convince at least a few of the key 0:29:22.880 --> 0:29:27.760 shot callers on their cell blocks. I didn't do this. 0:29:28.640 --> 0:29:30.720 I got railroaded, you know, Paul. 0:29:31.000 --> 0:29:33.400 When I go out and speak about the cases of 0:29:33.440 --> 0:29:35.920 like Leo Schofield and Jeremy Scott, I often get asked, 0:29:36.600 --> 0:29:39.720 you know, you're dealing with these really dark subjects, really 0:29:39.720 --> 0:29:43.000 about the worst of humanity. Sometimes, what do you do 0:29:43.040 --> 0:29:44.680