Transcript of 3 | Coming Clean

Welcome to the Criminalia podcast. I'm Maria Tremarkey. And I'm Holly Frey. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art themes. We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mock tales inspired by each story. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It was big news.

I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news.

A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story. I saw the whole thing that happened. An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.

He did not kill her. There's no way.

Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free? Did you kill her?

Listen to The Real Killer Season 3 on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Monster, BTK concludes.

The judge asked Dennis Rader to take him through all the killings in the courtroom, live on TV.

He was not expecting that. He's exposed and known for what he is.

To hear the final four episodes early and ad-free, subscribe to iHeart True Crime Plus. The latest episodes will become available Apple for free every Monday. Monster BTK. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Where is Missing Mom of Florence?

This week on Cribs Stories, we're joined by Payne Lindsay from Up and Vanished podcast.

She just fell off the map completely.

Looking at her, it would be uncommon for Florence to go hiking or camping without her children, leaving them with no idea where their mother was.

Her personal items found outside of this man's tent. What the hell happened?

Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Crook County is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free. But if you want to hear the whole season right now, it's available ad-free on Tenderfoot Plus. For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.

You're listening to Crook County. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast. This episode also contains subject matter, including graphic depictions of violence, which may not be suitable for everyone.

Listener discretion is advised. Previously on Crook County.

I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.

My father, Kenny, lived a secret double life for over 20 years. I didn't know he was in the mob until maybe 20 years after you guys were born. He was also hiding a destructive heroine addiction. It's crazy to have someone that was so strong in my life, and he was everything to me.

So he fucking punched him in the face over drugs because he was destroying our fucking family.

Until it almost killed him in 2013.

And he called my son, Kyle, and he asked Kyle for help.

No more secrets, no more lies. It's time I learn the truth. My name is Kyle Tequila. Well, my dear brother, welcome to Crook County. Listen, there are girls in and out there for years and years and years and years and years.

All right? Go in there, crack a deal with the client, come back to us, pay us our fucking portion, go to work, get out quick, and wait for the next guy. These girls were pure business, and they made a ton of fucking money.

Episodes 3, Coming Clean.

My son, Kyle, Justin and Jesse. Bro. Hey.

Good to see you, man. How are you?

Hello. Gus. Justin. Kyle.

Good to meet you, buddy. Jesse. Very nice to meet you. What's going on, brother?

Justin lives with me. Jesse's the-House Manager. House manager. House manager. All right. And I'm the king.

The king? Okay, perfect. Where does the king live? Right here. I don't know where they I'm visiting my dad for the first time in a year. He's showing me around his place of work, a group of small apartments that serve as a halfway house for people in recovery.

This is one of our units here. It's a girls house.

All right. How many units are there?

We got four units.

That's cool. A little compound, huh? That noise you hear is a carpet cleaning crew getting a unit ready for another client. We don't know if everybody's out of here.

Five o'clock, and then go, Well, you know what? No, you can leave. Go.

He also lives here in one of the units. Nice, man. It's better than the last place.

You think it was better in the house?

The house felt really cramped and your room was weird in the living room.

Look at my room here. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the same. But that's okay. Listen, it doesn't cost me a dime. This is Mark with my pain in the ass. Hey, buddy, Kyle. This is my son, Kyle. This is the kitchen.

That's your real father? Real father, real son.

Real father, real son.

You have a He's a good stock. Look at this handsome man. I know. Yes, he did well. So you got your look from him? Your look from him? No, my mom. I figured as much. Definitely. It's hard to believe it's already been six years since I dropped him off at rehab. He's still not as old strong, assured self. I don't think he ever will be, but he's come a long way from the shaking, broken-down man I picked up from the airport in 2013.

I'm going to ask you guys to leave while we do this interview because he needs quiet.

I'm going to do comfortable in the yoga. What are you I'm not going to be listening to what you're talking about?

I'm trying to go get played. All right, go get played. I don't want to interrupt that.

That's a really important stuff.

No, you guys are dry. I'll be in the bathroom for a minute.

Okay. Yeah, all right. Sounds good, guys. A little Sinatra, huh? Yeah. Smart. Set the mood. I like it. I like Sinatra. It feels right that we're talking about the Mafia, and you got Sinatra on the background. We decided to do the interview in his room because of the noise. It's a tight space with little but a twin bed against the wall and a crate with a cheap lamp on it. I Can you maybe bring a chair in here or you can sit on the bed. It honestly reminds me of my freshman year dorm room at SIU. All that's missing is a Bob Marley poster tacked to the wall. You'll talk into it. I'll just sit right there or something like that. And so we begin. Filming Can you hear me in here? What are you doing these days and where am I right now?

Right at the very moment, I am the manager of a sober living area where we have four apartments that we have clients in that are far enough in their recovery, at least 60 days of recovery, but they live under my direction in these apartments here. Being a drug addict myself who who has been sober for six years, I am working with those people. We could hold up to six girls and 10 guys all in separate apartments. I run them. I'm in charge of that. I babysit. That's basically what I do. I babysit. I drug test, I breathalize, I make sure they're on track, I make sure they're looking for work, I make sure there's not too much idle time with them. What my job is is to get them ready to go back out in the world. That is what I chose to do. We are very, very sick people, and I am a firm believer in AA Okay, it saved my life. While, on the other hand, drugs ruined my life. It ruined everything. Ruined my family, ruined my homes, ruined my businesses, ruined everything because I was a raging addict, a raging heroine addict, believe it or not, at my age.

So I came out here to California with my My son got me into treatment six years ago. I had a couple of relapses, but they got me sober. Like I said, I've been sober for six years, and now I work with these people. That is what I do now to thank God for not letting me be dead or something else would happen to my family. So that's my give back. That's what I do. I'm going to help the people that need to help the most because I know I needed a man. I needed a bad. So that's what I do. Yeah.

This is a big moment One that I honestly wasn't expecting. I have never in all my life seen my dad cry.

Anybody that listened, guys, you guys got family members that are drug addicts, alcoholics. There's someone in your family somewhere, a grandparent, an uncle, an aunt that's genetic, it carries down that gene. Maybe your kids, maybe some of you kids listening to this. Go get help. You cannot control this You cannot. It is the sniper. It is the devil. It lays in wait for you, and it will take you out at your weakest moment. Go get help. See me, It saved my fucking life. It saved my life, that's for sure.

Now, Does anybody around you know about any of this stuff? No.

Are you kidding me? No one knows anything. Oh, my God. They know I'm from Chicago. I know I've got a little bit of an accent. They hear it in my... They hear wordies that I say, stuff that I say. I think they snicker behind my back that I'm a gangstaister from Chicago, but they don't know anything. I don't tell them any stories. I do not share. We do a thing in treatment in AA that's called sharing. We share our life story, what got us in the treatment. But I've never shared. That's the one thing I haven't done with AA is share because it's not something I really choose to share.

Starting a few months into his recovery, I would regularly visit him. It was during these visits that he started opening up about his past. The story here, the memory there, but never the whole picture. It seems he's finally ready to tell me everything. Thanks for joining me on Crook County. For ad-free listening and exclusive content, dive into tenderfootplus. Com right there in the show notes. Tenderfoot Plus is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and other podcasts. Podcast players. You'll unlock access to early episodes, upcoming bonus material, the Tenderfoot podcast library of over 400 ad-free episodes, as well as subscriber-only specials. Subscribe now at tenderfootplus. Com.

What's the one thing you've never told anyone? People just like you tell all in a podcast called The Secret Room. If you're a true story fan and you cannot get enough of people's most intimate dreams, desires in shame. You will love the secret room. Like Milla's deathbed confession that her daughter's absent father is a movie star.

I wish I could tell someone who the father is while I'm still on Earth.

Or Jen's secret love affair with a man on death row.

It's turned my world upside down, and something he just did has devastated me.

Or the way that Joey falls in love with inanimate objects.

I know people who were in relationships with construction equipment.

People all around you carry the most amazing secret Secrets. You're invited to the Secret Room for a front row seat to spectacular stories that will touch you, jar you, and amaze you. I'm Ben Ham, your host. Search for The Secret Room, a podcast about the stories no one ever tells.

Monster BTK concludes.

The plans were made.

Search warrants were drawn in advance.

On that day, I remember it was radio silence. When the chief came out and said, We've caught BTK, denial was the first reaction. Now that they got them, how am I going to get my hands on him? The judge asked Dennis Rater to take him through all the killings in the courtroom, live on TV.

He was not expecting that. And you see him trying to maintain control. You see his voice change. He's acting like he's bored. He's exposed and known for what he is.

To hear the final four episodes early and ad-free, subscribe to iHeartTrueCrisePlus. The latest episodes will become available for free every Monday. Monster, BTK. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jake Baisley Well, it doesn't happen very often down here.

In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

I am confident that Julie Bethley is guilty.

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head, something's not right.

I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere.

It's sickening.

If you step so many, that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.

Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet, and that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Where is Missing Mom of Florence?

This week on Crime Stories, we're joined by Pain Lindsay from Up and Vanished podcast.

She just fell off the map completely.

Looking at her, it would be uncommon for Florence to go hiking or camping without her children, leaving them with no idea where their mother was.

Her personal items found outside of this man's tent. What the hell happened?

Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm going to warn you, this story is very complex with a lot of characters over several decades long. I'm going to do the best I can to break it down into easy to digest characters. Some characters may come in and out of focus as the story progresses, so I may remind you about them with a little description or a previously heard sound bite. If you still find yourself getting lost, well, that makes me a shitty storyteller, so I'm sorry. But if you do have questions or just want to say hi, please visit us at crookcountypodcast. Com. You can even leave me a voicemail, which I may play on a future audience Q&A episode, so that's cool. You You can also follow us on all socials at Crook County Podcast. Okay, let's jump back to the very beginning. A 17-year-old kid named Kenny just got accidentally recruited into the outfit for robbing a drug dealer.

So these two come up on me. I'm sitting down and I'm thinking to myself, Ah, fuck. Here we go. And I'm completely unprepared, completely. Came up on me and the bigger guy goes, the older guy goes, Is that him? And the kid goes, Yeah, that's him. That's the guy that robbed me, Uncle Bob. He ran a fucking crew. So he tells me, he goes, Are you looking for a job? I'm like, Yeah, I'm looking for a job. I'm fucking starving here. That's how I got in a fucking outfit. That's how I got in. He was impressed.

That reminds me, before we dive into this, I had a serious conversation with a criminal defense attorney about all this. He's very worried about this story going public.

You need to be careful. No matter how much you disapprove of what your father did, you're going to have the FBI breathing down your back because he's not just a street thug he's connected to a syndicate. If your dad was serving life for murder, the government would be far less interested. Please understand that with your dad being alive, that means others are alive. The information is too recent. The 1980s is yesterday, and I really believe that it's a mistake. I would encourage you not to do it.

I also asked my dad to weigh in on this, and here's what he said.

They're all dead, man. You have to realize that I was really young. That's why they call me Kid. Everybody was at least 10 years older than me, at least 10 years older than me. And if they're not dead of old age, they're dead from a hit, they're dead from an overdose, aren't, like I said, dead from old age. I don't think there's anybody left. I doubt it very much.

So after talking it through, we both agreed that for his own safety and mine, to give fake aliases to everyone involved in the outfit and to remove or obscure any specific identifying details about people, places, and dates. I should also know that there's no way for me to prove any of this. Since most of the information was never reported anywhere that I'm aware of, I'm going solely here on my dad's word. And I'll leave it at that. So without further ado, let's meet our first character in the outfit, the made guy who recruited my dad, Mickey Giannaro.

It was He was a powerful man, good guy, businessman, well-dressed, well-kept, well-spoken, good-looking guy. Always took time to say hi to me. Always took time to little chat with me just a little bit. And there I never saw him do that with anybody else. Always took a couple of minutes out to say hi to me. And I liked the way he behaved. He didn't act like a gangster, okay? He acted like a normal person. He wasn't a sociopath, narcissistic, a gangster guy. Those guys loved to play the part, loved to play the part of a gangster. I never could understand that greaseball bullshit. But he didn't do that. So I admired him.

Mickey was also the son of a notorious street boss they called The Old Man.

And he was, at that time, in Cook County, the king of the chop shops. They'd heist a car, they'd heist a truck with cars on it, and bring them back to his shops, chop the shit out of them, change the numbers, and shipped them out. They shipped them out all over the world, as far as Saudi Arabia. I mean, they were going all over the world, these cars. And it was a big, big, big moneymaker. I only saw him a couple of times, a gravely old guy, if I can remember correctly. He looked like a typical fucking greasy gangster. I don't know how else to put a real fucking grease ball. But he was a very powerful man.

Kenny spent his first year working for Mickey until he learned the ropes.

I was in Turnboy when I first started. The low level, very, very low level, dropping money off, collecting gambling money. No hits yet, but doing some beating. But I always had somebody with me, so I was assisting the person that was doing the heavy work. That's where I learned how to do heavy work.

It didn't take long for Kenny to prove his worth, so Mickey gave him a new job.

I was selling dope for him on the side. I'd get a half a key, I'd break it up at a scale. Some of it I'd cook up for the free base clients, and the rest of it I just ate balled up. And I can't remember how the free base sold. I really can't. You smoked that shit. That stuff was insane. It was Just a rush of euphoria would just look like a tidal wave, just knock you over. The problem was now you're chasing that shit all the time because you don't get that after that. You get that first hit, that's it. You're not going to find that. You're always chasing that first blast. Anyway, all right, but he wasn't supposed to do that. That would have been bad for me, and that would have been very bad for him because I I was just taking an order. I was just obeying orders. But you can't do that, man. You cannot do that.

No selling dope. This is one of the many strange rules the outfit had for itself that I find fascinating. They're Our entire enterprise is built on crime. But drugs are where they draw the line?

We could not sell dope, people. We could not sell dope. We were not allowed to sell dope. If you got caught selling dope, you were in big ass fucking trouble because that could bring heat on you. The whole thing, we don't want to bring any heat on any of us. So if you're going to do something stupid like sell dope, it's going to bring heat on you. People were coked up all the time. So you're dealing with people that were fucking high 24/7 on coke. So No one's in their really right mind. No one's sober. Everybody's fucked up. And it dictated a lot of things. It got a lot of people killed.

That actually makes good sense. And of course, everyone knew the risks, but many guys did it anyway. The money was just too good. And Kenny, he was happy to take a small slice of it.

Listen, here's the deal, man. This was quick, fast money. All right? This was not my career. This is not what I chose to do with my life. I'm 17 years old. All right? I'm living in the back seat of my car. I'm hungry. I'm a survivalist, and it's a job, and it's income. I could start to get some security in my life, at least get an apartment. So I'm taking this. I'm jumping on this.

As I got deeper into the details of my dad's life story, I began to wonder just how much of this stuff is actually true. The no selling drugs thing, for example. How do I even attempt to verify something like this or any other inner workings of an organization notorious for their secrecy, especially in the '70s and '80s when the Mafia moved the streets with near impunity. I thought it would be a good idea to find an outside perspective on the inner workings of the outfit, a Mafia expert that could weigh in when necessary throughout this series. So I reached out to veteran crime reporter Jeff Cohen of the Chicago Tribune. Jeff is an expert on organized crime in Chicago and covered one of the largest Mafia trials in history, the infamous FBI Operation Family Secrets, that almost single candidly took out the entire Chicago outfit in 2007. I sent Jeff a few rough versions of these episodes to get him up to speed.

That's quite the family tale you've got there.

Yes, it is. Unfortunately, yes, it is. Yeah. Thankfully, he agreed to add his voice to this story. So I asked him about the no drugs rule.

Yeah, as crazy as it sounds, it is actually true that most of the time drugs was not their business for a variety of reasons, I guess. I think it was more difficult for them to control, I think, is one of the elements that was typically a problem. You had large amounts of money moving between people that they couldn't necessarily keep their fingers on. It was also a real area of heat back, especially in the '80s, when you had the war on drugs. It just was not a clean business for them. It wasn't something that they could run tightly, make sure it stayed under the radar, they could get reliable money out of it. It was none of those things. It could sideways in a minute. You had major federal heat on it all the time. And it was just more trouble than it was worth, I think, a lot of times for them, even though it was big, big money. But whorehouses, chop shops, any illegal business that's along that line definitely would have been within the outfits purview at that time. Whorehouses, especially, anything related to sex and vice, they typically had a piece of it across the Chicago area.

What's the one thing you've never told anyone? People just like you tell all in a podcast called The Secret Room. If you're a true story fan and you cannot get enough of people's most intimate dreams, desires, and shame. You will love The Secret Room. Like Milla's deathbed confession that her daughter's absent father is a movie star.

I wish I could tell someone who the father is while I'm still on Earth.

Or Jen's secret love affair with a man on death row.

It's He's turned my world upside down, and something he just did has devastated me.

Or the way that Joey falls in love with inanimate objects.

I know people who were in relationships with construction equipment.

People all around you carry the most amazing secrets. You're invited to the Secret Room for a front row seat to spectacular stories that will touch you, jar you, and amaze you. I'm Ben Ham, your host. Search for The Secret Room, a podcast about the stories no No one ever tells.

Monster BTK concludes.

The plans were made.

Search warrants were drawn in advance.

On that day, I remember it was radio silence. When the chief came out and said, We've caught BTK, denial was the first reaction. Now that they got them, my I got to get my hands on him. The judge asked Dennis Rater to take him through all the killings in the courtroom, live on TV.

He was not expecting that. And you see him trying to maintain control You see his voice change. He's acting like he's bored. He's exposed and known for what he is.

To hear the final four episodes early and ad-free, subscribe to iHeartTrueCrisePlus. The latest episodes will become available for free every Monday. Monster, BTK. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beazley's.

It doesn't happen very often down here.

In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

I am confident that Julie really badly is guilty.

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head, something's not right.

I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere.

It's sickening.

If you step so many, that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.

Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet, and that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Where is Missing Mom of Florence?

This week on Crime Stories, we're joined by Pain Lindsay from Up and Vanished podcast.

She just fell off the map completely.

Looking at her, it It would be uncommon for Florence to go hiking or camping without her children, leaving them with no idea where their mother was.

Her personal items found outside of this man's tent. What the hell happened?

Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Eventually, Mickey saw a new opportunity for Kenny within the outfit, something a little more permanent, and introduced him to a man named Jack Erickson, a crew boss who would end up playing a much larger role in entrenching Kenny within the ranks.

My boss, my crew boss, was Jack. Jack, Jacky Lemon's Erichson. A great guy. I love Jack, man. I really admired him. He was a great guy. Well-kept, still a gangster, but a Out kept gangster. His jeans were even creased. He was one of those guys. Everything was perfect on him. Clean, neat, nails done, manicure, pedicure, one of them guys.

Jack became a father figure to young Kenny.

Oh, he was a mentor. He trained me. He trained me. He just took me under his wing and he trained me. I was the young guy. You got to remember, I was the absolute youngest guy there. These guys had 20 years on me. I was the kid. So he just took me under his wing and trained me, took care of me, make sure I did everything good, make sure I didn't get in trouble, make sure he had my back. I felt safe. I just felt safe when I went out to do bad work because I knew I had the mob behind me. The outfit was on my back. I had that always to fall back on. So that relieved a lot of the fear.

Jack also had a very important job within the outfit, one that required a unique personality and responsibility.

Yeah, he ran the whorehouses every night, just bouncing from whorehouse to whorehouse, checking on the bank, seeing how things were going, making sure nobody was selling dope, making sure the girls weren't too high because they were always high, making sure the guys weren't too high because they were always high, just keeping things runnable. Babysitting, basically. Kind of like what I do now for a living. Babysitting a bunch of drug addicts, alcoholics. That's what he was doing back then. So that's what Jack did.

Jack saw a lot of potential in Kenny.

He trusted me. He trusted me because I didn't steal money I didn't do dope while I worked. I didn't sell dope while I worked. I just did my job and my count every night, right up there every night for years, man. It's hard to find an honest guy in the fucking outfit. I was an anomaly. I don't even want to say a rarity, an anomaly.

And so he made him an offer he couldn't refuse, running the door at one of the brothels in Cook County.

So for the years I spent working in the whorehouses, the clubs, and they were scattered all over Cook County, DuPage County, and Caine County. We can only put them in the unincorporated areas because we had the county police pretty much taken care of. We'd rent a house, a single family home, and we'd get in there, gut it to an extent, put about six bedrooms in there, small rooms with little peep holes. You had a peep hole in the door and a peep hole in the walls. Not everyone could be peeped, but if we could peep them, we peeped them. The living room would stay as a living room. The kitchen would stay as a kitchen. We had a front area where they came in, a little four-year area there, where we would take their ID, look them up in the card catalog that we had. We actually gave them a fucking Can you believe that shit? Match the ID with the picture, the picture with the face, and then we'd let them in. Now, how did they become members? They would come in, I want to be a member of this club. There's a guy, there's a I've never seen people out there that want to join whorehouses.

Guys are horny baskets, okay? The people that frequent whorehouses know where whorehouses are. You don't have to advertise this shit. They just know where they are. They would come in and want to join the club. We would put them through a process. We would make sure we check their employment, check their ID. We even had something with county, with the county vice guys, where we would have them run something by them. I don't know what it was. I can't remember. But we would run something with them. Then after we got him checked out, I didn't do the checkout process. That wasn't my job, so I can't really expound too much on this. Anyway, they became members through a process that we put them through, pictures and verification. Basically, we wanted to make sure they weren't vice, the honest vice. We wanted to make sure they weren't the honest vice. How does that sound?

Sounds like my dad was a bona fide pimp. That's how it sounds. You'd think after all this time, nothing would shock me anymore, but you would be wrong. All right. What was it like once you got inside?

A guy would come in, bring him in, I'd introduce them. The girls would be sitting there. The girls would stand up. I'd introduce him to all the girls by name. Jane, apparently. Cindy. We did have drinks. It wasn't a bar, but they would go, You want to drink? They'd go back in the kitchen. They make the guy a drink, mostly just beer, beer and wine. Then they would sit and talk to the girls. It could go on anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours. Some guys just came in there and just partied with the girls, sat and partied with them. We didn't mind. They were members. Plus, when somebody else came in, it made that person rush a little bit because there was someone else in there, that guy that's already in there was going to take the girl that this new guy came in. You know what I'm saying? So they maybe kick it up a little bit. They make their choice a little bit faster. So right They'd come in, chatted up with the girls, decide who they like. The girl would take them back to one of the rooms, and they would negotiate a deal.

So much for whatever sex they wanted. They'd seal the deal. The girl would leave the guy in the room. The girl would come out, come see me, and say, $100 for blow job and missionary sex. She would hand me 50, half the take, and then she would be on her way. That was the end of the operation. That was how it worked. Very simple.

Did things ever get out of control?

Oh, yeah, they got out of control. People come in drunk or all coked out. But they got their asses beat bad. We would make a phone call, and there would be four muscle showing up within 15 minutes, and it was When we got them to their cars, we'd put them in their cars and they'd be hanging half in, half out. And just county stopped by and they knew it was a whorehouse there. And But we want to keep them on property. We'd get them out on the street in their cars. Yeah, they didn't last long. They got beat pretty bad. They got beat really bad.

Just who are these people? Just drunk?

Just drunk assholes. Are these members? No. Yeah. These are members. Yeah. These are members. Or a guest of a member. Or a guest of a member. A member could bring in one guest. All right? And alcohol and drugs turns people weird, man. People go stupid sometimes. I mean, 90 % of the time it was fine. But that 10 %, there was something would go wrong. That's just law of average, man. Something's bound to go wrong eventually. But we jumped on there quick.

I have to keep reminding myself he's still only 19 at this point. Everybody else's age is fresh out of high school, going to bars and trying to get laid without a care in the world. I can tell you I was an absolute moron at 19. That's a fact. But I can only imagine three years selling drugs and handing out beatings at a brothel for the Mafia will make you grow up real fucking fast. I wonder, can you even try to have a regular life? What would you do in your free time?

I don't know. I hang out. I had friends, some friends that I'd hang out with. Do normal guys stuff. Watch football on Sundays. I was just a normal guy, just a normal young guy. That's all. Go to bars with my friends, pick up chicks.

He tells me he wasn't looking for a girlfriend, let alone anything serious. But one night, as things do, all that changed.

Met her at a club called SOP, some other place in the Splains, I think it is. Saw her sitting at the end of the bar. Beautiful redhead. Sexy. I fell in love with her pretty quick. So I just walked up to her. Just a matter of course of time, we just ended up dating.

I'm sure you've guessed it already, but that pretty little redhead at the bar was my mother.

I thought your mother was beautiful. I think I was 19 when I met her. She was 20. Yeah, listen, I had to work to get your mother, damn it. That wasn't easy. She wasn't like one of the whores. I could just say, Hey, come on, let's go. I had to work for that. I had to work for your mom. That was a job. That was a job. That was a job, man. It was worth it, though. It was well worth it.

Next week on Crook County. We would have to take bus every once in a while, just so Cook County cops could show that they're making some progress here when half the motherfuckers were running their own hordes on the side out of our fucking clubs. Crook County is a production of iHeart podcasts and Tenderfoot TV in association with Common enemy. All episodes episodes are written, produced, and hosted by me, Kyle Tequila. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Main title song is called Crush by the band Starry Eyes. End credit song is called Trouble, also by the band Starry Eyes. Sound mix by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the excellent team at UTA for their support, and to my fearless attorney, Wendy Bench, for her guidance. To stay updated on all things Crook County Today, follow us on all socials at crookcountypodcast, or leave us a voicemail by visiting crookcountypodcast. Com. For more podcasts like Crook County, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit tenderfoot. Com. Tv. Thanks for listening. The story continues next week.

I'll never surrender. I'll never surrender. Thank you for tuning in to Crook County.

New episodes are released weekly, completely Really free. But if you're itching for more, check out Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit tenderfootplus. Com to subscribe for early access to the full series, plus an ad-free experience. Welcome to the Criminalia podcast.

I'm Maria Tremarke. And I'm Holly Frey. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art themes. We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mock tales inspired by each story. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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