October 24, 2024 • 44 mins
There's no new weird little guy this week, but I wanted to check in with you about how the show is going so far and squeeze in a few weird little facts that got left on the cutting room floor of past episodes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey, this is Weird Little Guys, but
there's no new weird little guy this week. I mean,
there are definitely more weird little guys crawling out of
the woodwork every day, and I've got a couple of
stories about them in development, but this episode isn't a
(00:25):
new guy. Sorry about that. We're a couple of months
into the show now and I just wanted to take
a minute to do a little navel gazing. So this
is just a little mini episode to check in on
how it's going, talk about what we're doing here, and
shoehorn in some fun facts and odds and ends that
got left on the cutting room floor of past episodes.
(01:01):
If we're being totally honest here, I just didn't get
it together this week. I lost a few days of
research and writing time to a trial at the beginning
of this month, and lost another couple of days to
travel for a family obligation this week, and it just
didn't come together in time. I thought I had a
(01:22):
topic that I could turn around quickly, but sometimes a
story that seems really straightforward turns out to be anything.
But I found a surprising and strange twist to a
story that I thought I knew, and I wanted to
give it the time it deserved to flesh it all
the way out. So we're doing something different this week,
(01:44):
but the timing is pretty good. We're about three months
into this thing, and I have some reflections on the
process so far. I think the biggest realization I've had
so far is that I may have overextended myself a
little bit. If that wasn't obvious in what I'm doing
right now, what was I a person who dropped out
(02:08):
of college, mainly because I have a very adversarial relationship
with the concept of do dates thinking. When I signed
up to write what is basically a twenty page research
paper every week, I mean, just a baffling decision on
my part. But I think it's going okay, don't you.
(02:30):
I don't know if there's a fourth wall in podcasting,
but if there is, I'm kind of constantly knocking on it.
I'm always right there on the edge of the story.
I'm telling you. There will be a few stories I
tell you on this show that I am reluctantly, accidentally,
(02:52):
haphazardly actually in not just as the narrator but as
a chaotic little sidecarre And this little episode is sort
of a meta commentary on the storytelling process. So I'm
busting through that fourth wall like the kool Aid Man today.
I totally get it. If you're not into that, you
(03:13):
can just come back next week when I have a
whole new Weird Little Guy for you. But in the
years I've been doing this kind of work, I've always
been in conversation with the audience, and it feels so
strange to me now that I'm adjusting to this new
medium of podcasting, just not to have that at all.
(03:37):
Those conversations weren't always good. I'll refer you back to
the comment I made a second ago about being an
unwitting side character in some Weird Little Guy's journeys to
Federal prison. But I always felt like I was telling
a story to people who were speaking back to me.
I was getting their reactions and their input and their perspectives,
(03:59):
and sometimes that is part of the story while I'm
still telling it. And maybe that's a weakness or a
flaw or a dead giveaway that I didn't go to
journalism school or whatever, but it's the way I know
how to do the work that feels meaningful to me.
And I'm too old to change now. I alluded to
(04:23):
it a bit in the minisode honoring the anniversary of
Heather Hire's death back in August, but my introduction to
covering court cases and the weird little guys at the
center of them came from my own personal need to
understand the men who came here to Charlottesville for the
Unite the Right rally in twenty seventeen. When the handful
(04:46):
of men who'd been charged for the acts of violence
they committed that day first started appearing in court in
late twenty seventeen early twenty eighteen, I was coincidentally unemployed,
so I had a lot of spare time to go
to and just watch. So I did, and I started
(05:06):
doing it just for myself. I didn't have a lot
going on, and I wanted to see. I wanted to know.
I didn't know what it was I needed to know,
or how I was going to find it out, but
I had the time, and I just sat and I watched,
(05:29):
and I started posting about what I was observing online.
I guess that's very millennial core of me, but I
realized very quickly that there was a hunger in this
community for information about those proceedings that was more personal,
less detached than the coverage that was being offered by
(05:50):
traditional media outlets. I mean, if you just wanted the facts,
there was plenty of news. National outlets were still sending
reporters to a lot of those hearings, but there's something
missing from that kind of coverage. People wanted the facts,
of course, and I did my best in those early
(06:13):
days to get those facts right. But they wanted more
than that. They wanted to be in conversation with those facts.
They wanted to be informed, but they wanted to be
angry too, and they deserved to be. They wanted to
know the ugly truth about what was going on, but
(06:35):
they wanted it presented to them in a way that
felt affirming and grounded in what they already knew to
be true. They wanted to feel heard and to ask questions,
and they wanted to know not just what, but why.
And I did too, So I did my best to
collect every detail and to make myself available to provide
(07:01):
context where I could, and comfort if I could. I
took on the role of audience surrogate for people in
my community who couldn't spend all day in court. I
hate to doubt myself as someone who reads the comments.
It's very embarrassing, but I am and I've seen some
(07:23):
feedback that some listeners don't care for what they call
my habit of editorializing, putting my own voice and my
own judgment and my own feelings into the story. There
were some reviews taking issue with what they believed to
be a put on affect, this melodramatic flourish and the
(07:44):
way that I speak. That is, unfortunately just the way
that I talk. And I've got a pretty thick skin
when it comes to things like death threats. But I'm
surprisingly sensitive to what is completely sane and valid criticism.
You know, some weird little guy can post online about
(08:06):
how he wants to carve his name into my chest
and fuck my corpse or you know whatever, and I
can take that in stride. But a perfectly normal person
thinks I talk too fast. That's going to send me
into a spiral. You know, I'm working on that, Okay.
I am pacing myself. I've been doing exercises where I
(08:28):
practice reading my script with the timer I'm trying. So
I did sit with that feedback about my narrative style
being too personal or too emotional, and ultimately I decided
to disregard it. This is the only way that I
(08:49):
know how to tell stories that weigh heavily on the soul,
because I learned how to do it while trying to
tell stories that were deeply personal for me and for
the audience, I was communicating them too, And because I
learned how to tell these stories in that context, I
know it's important. It's not for everyone, and that's okay,
(09:13):
and it's not better than or even a substitution for
more traditional journalistic approaches to telling these kinds of stories.
But there is a place for this kind of storytelling.
I'm a human being trying to make sense of the
world that we live in, and I hope that I
(09:34):
can try to help you do that too. I don't
just want to present you the facts of a case,
the timeline of a story of a man's life, of
a trial. I'm not just showing you the most fucked
up thing I can find for shock value. I want
us to try to understand what all of this means together.
(09:57):
When I take you on these little journeys into the
story of some weird little guy, we aren't just staring
evil in the face for something to do. We're taking
its mask off to really understand a moment in history
and to place a particular guy into his proper context.
(10:19):
There is one moment in my work that I have
held on to like a life preserver. On the days
I find myself asking what am I even doing? Is
this worth it? What am I adding to the world
by doing this at all? And I hope this person
(10:39):
doesn't mind me sharing it. I don't know who they are,
so I can't ask. It's something so close to my
heart that I almost don't want to let it out
into the world. I don't want to cheapen it or
wear it out by saying it out loud. See this
isn't actually my first attempt at a podcast. Back in
(11:03):
twenty eighteen, James Alex Fields Junior went on trial for
murder for Heather Hire's murder, and for two and a
half weeks, I sat on a bench in a courtroom
that was too crowded to hold the people of Charlottesville
who were desperate to see some approximation of justice done.
(11:25):
So I sat on that bench and I took notes
furiously for eight hours every day. I think I gave
myself carpel tunnel, and then I came home and I
wrote a script, and then I recorded a little episode
on the floor of my closet because it was the
only place in my apartment where you couldn't hear the
noise from the cars outside. And I was recording and
(11:49):
editing until three am every night, and then getting back
in my car a few hours later to go back
to court. And I didn't know anything about podcast editing.
I still don't. I don't do that, and I didn't
do a very good job of it. I really just
cut out the parts where I was audibly crying. It's
(12:13):
still online somewhere. It's not very good. I'm not recommending it.
If that trial happened today, I would write that story
very differently. I wish I knew then what I know
now about the law about writing, about editing, about storytelling.
But I did the best I could. And it wasn't
(12:37):
meant for everyone to hear. It wasn't for all of you.
It was a labor of love for my community, for
people I knew needed to hear those facts, but from
someone who cared about them and would treat them with
a fierce gentleness, someone who understood that they were afraid
and wounded and angry, and someone who were did their
(13:00):
right to be that way. They wanted to know the
boring little details of what happened inside that courtroom, but
the cool, neutral detachment of a nightly update on CNN
felt like a slap in the face. So I did
my best, and I found myself asking those questions a
(13:20):
lot that month. Why am I doing this? I'm not
even good at this. What does it add to this
glut of coverage of this trial for me to do this,
for me to try to tell this story and to
put this out. It was a long, brutal and gruesome trial.
(13:43):
There was graphic testimony about blood and tissue embedded in
the shattered windshield of the car. Doctors showed us X
rays and autopsy reports. James Alexfield's junior was being tried
not just for murder, how they hire, but for the
injuries he'd caused to eight of the dozens of people
(14:05):
badly injured in that attack, And each of those eight
victims testified about their injuries. I tried to treat each
victim with the care and tenderness they deserved, not just
choosing the most salacious details about the horrors they'd endured.
And then one night I got a message from a stranger.
(14:28):
It was about the podcast. This stranger, this gentle soul,
had been one of the street medics who was there
on Fourth Street when it happened. They had rendered aid
that saved people's lives. They were understandably pretty traumatized by
what they'd seen that day, and they were having trouble
(14:50):
consuming coverage of the trial. But someone had passed along
to them a detail that I had included that had
been left out a lot of other coverage of the trial.
This street medic had a crystal clear memory of the
moment they covered a woman's compound leg fracture so she
(15:11):
couldn't see it. Amidst the chaos and the screaming and
the blood. They had the presence of mind to make
sure that this woman they did not know and would
never see again, didn't have to see her own bone
sticking out of her flesh. And they did the best
they could with the medical supplies they had on their
(15:31):
backpack to splinter leg and to stop the bleeding and
to keep her calm until an ambulance came, and then
they went home. They didn't know that woman. They didn't
know her name, there was no way to follow up,
so they'd been left wondering for more than a year.
(15:53):
Was she okay? They'd lost sleep asking themselves, did I
do it right? Did I help her? Can she walk?
Did I make a mistake in that moment that costs
someone their mobility? And when that woman took the stand
a trial, she testified about the medic covering the bone
(16:16):
sticking out of her leg. She said she didn't know
how bad it was until she got to the hospital,
and she said on the stand that she's okay now.
She has a metal rod in her leg, but she's okay.
She can walk without pain. Her life isn't over, She's
(16:38):
moving on. And that wasn't headline news. It was just
nine minutes on the stand. I know it was nine
minutes because I bought a little digital watch all those
years ago, and I still obsessively timestamp my handwritten notes,
marking the time several times per page off in the margins.
(17:01):
She was one of nine witnesses who testified that day alone,
and the brief moment in her nine minutes of testimony
where she said she's okay now didn't make it into
the newspaper, it wasn't on MSNBC, it wasn't in the
wire stories. But for someone out there in the world,
(17:22):
it was everything. It was closure and it was peace.
And for six years, that single moment of peace that
I got to give to a stranger who had risked
their life to save someone else's has been a north
star for me. It's a lighthouse in the storm when
(17:43):
I can't remember why I'm writing anything at all. And
now years later, I'm not just writing about local cases
for a local audience, but I try to carry that
same level of responsibility to my audience with me. I'm
trying to weave together stories of terrible men who did
(18:03):
terrible things in a way that shines a light into
the darkness, rather than leading you into that darkness and
leaving you there to fend for yourself. I'm not always
going to get it right, I know that, but I
promise you I am agonizing about the ethics of this
(18:24):
work to the point of madness. I'm doing my best,
and I want to navigate what that means for us
collectively together. So that's all I have to say about
my personal style of narration today. But this is an
ongoing conversation, and it's one I'll never be done having,
(18:48):
and I'll try to have it with you. There are
a lot of things about podcasting I did not know
(19:09):
when I started doing this show, and some things I
didn't even know enough to know I didn't know them.
It didn't even occur to me until I was a
handful of episodes deep that I forgot to tell you
who makes the show possible at all? God bless them.
None of them said anything to me about it. I
(19:31):
left myself a little reminder to record some kind of
closing credit segment, but it's buried under a stack of
other reminders for things like change furnace filter and email
National Archives about that transcript again, both of which I've
been meaning to do for weeks now. Actually, I'm going
(19:53):
to get up and change that filter right now. While
I'm thinking about it, and while I'm checking things off
my to do I have to take a little sidebar
to gush a little bit about the team at Cool
Zone Media. This show would not exist at all if
executive producer Sophie Lichterman hadn't come up with the idea.
(20:15):
Given it its name, convinced me that I could do
it convinced the network that I could do it, and
then held my hand for months while I figured out
what She already knew that this show was the perfect
way to tell these stories. Maybe she just wanted me
to stop derailing other conversations with my excited outbursts about
(20:39):
some new weird guy that I found, and she thought
she could get some peace if she found me another
outlet for that. And the show wouldn't get done every
week if not for supervising producer Ian Johnson. There's so
much business stuff that happens that I am blissfully unaware of.
(21:00):
I don't know how the show gets into your phone.
I just type my little scripts every week. I think
Ian takes care of the rest of that. All of
the research and note taking and conspiracy theorizing and writing
is done by me. Apparently some podcasts have like a
(21:20):
separate guy who does the research. But even if such
a guy were to present himself to me, the research
is my favorite part. I would never let that go.
The moment each week when I have to close my
two hundred browser tabs and stop researching so I can
start writing is always bittersweet. How I wish I could
(21:41):
do twice as much research and half as much writing,
to be honest. But if that's all there was to
the show, just research and writing, it would be unlistenable.
Every week I read my little script into my microphone
in my home office and I think, oh, no, oh,
(22:03):
that was a mess. I'm thinking it right now. I'm
reading into my little microphone in my home office. It's
three in the morning, and this file is late, and
I'm thinking, oh, no, you know, I'm retaking lines fifteen times.
I burped into the microphone more times than I'm willing
to admit. I'm so sorry, Rory. I'm always having to
(22:25):
stop and look up something like how to pronounce some
town in Michigan, because you know, they don't say it normal,
and I know I'd never hear the end of it
if I just read it, assuming they would say it
like the rest of the world, like myland, Michigan. It
says Milan. It says Milan. That's a city we've all
heard of, but it's Mylan. And there are still, to
(22:49):
this day takes that have to be cut because you
can hear my voice thickening with grief. That's the sound
of the tears threatening to spill over it's someone else's
job to edit that out now. But if it ever
stops happening, I think the show is over. If I
(23:10):
can do this without feeling it at all, then my
heart has gotten too hard and it's time to stop.
It's time to close my laptop and walk away and
walk into the sea, because I've lost my humanity. But
every week, somehow, my editor Rory Gagan returns to me
(23:32):
something that I barely recognize, something all cleaned up and beautiful,
with perfectly placed music beds. And that music, I've seen
so many listeners asking about the opening theme that was
created just for the show. Why the incredibly talented Brandon Dickert.
(23:53):
This is another one of those podcasting things that I
never even thought to wonder about. But of course, course
it's someone's job to make custom music for a show.
And when Sophie told me it was time to brainstorm
what kind of music we wanted for the show, I
completely froze. How could I possibly know what kind of
(24:14):
musical vibe I'm trying to create here? I mean, how
is it even possible to describe a sound you've never heard? Like?
I know music can evoke an emotional response, but the
idea of reverse engineering. That is like asking me to
translate hieroglyphics. It felt impossible, What does that even mean?
(24:38):
So I sent her a bunch of very stupid ideas
and she was very patient with me. I had a meltdown.
I was googling things like spooky sounding music, Comma not
scary and whimsical spooky tunes. I just panicked and I
sent more a bad ideas And I've just gone back
(25:01):
to my email now to see what it was that
I finally came up with that was good enough for
the experts to work with. And who was a bulleted
list that says Twin Peaks theme interstitial music for an
evil NPR broadcast, a riff on the X Files theme,
question mark, David Lynch's Elephant Man theme but more lively,
(25:26):
and Tim Burton spooky but goofy, something like Danny Elfman.
And I could not have had such good luck if
I planned it. Brandon Dickert wrote back, I play in
a band with the bass player from Oingo Boingo, so
I'm very familiar with the Elfman vibe. What he's just
(25:49):
casually in a band with John Avila, No big deal.
So when people compliment the music, and I say, I know,
isn't it incredible? I'm not tooting my own horn. I
had nothing to do with that. I'm just so impressed
and grateful for the theme Brandon Dicker wrote for me,
(26:10):
and as for the show itself, I think I'm getting
the hang of it. One problem I will absolutely never
have is a lack of ideas. I am never going
to run out of guys. There are, in fact, entirely
too many guys. I have a running list of episode
topics i'd like to get to that's a year long already,
(26:33):
and every week my research into one weird little Guy
turns up at least one or two new options for
guys who probably need their own episode. If anything, the
problem is I lose a whole day of research time
every week to tracking down some strange loose end that
really just needs to get added to the list for
a future episode. And every weird Little Guy I do
(26:55):
get to is just bursting at the seams with strange
facts and side stories that end up cut because I
just don't have the stamina to weave together every thread.
When the first episode came out, I was kicking myself
because I forgot to include a particularly funny little tangent
(27:17):
that episode was about Kevin alfred Strom, the neo Nazi
pedophile who was the original source of a quote often
misattributed to Voltaire back when he got arrested for possession
of child sexual abuse material. He's actually living here in
the Charlottesville area. A strange coincidence. I suppose it really
(27:37):
makes you wonder what it is about this place that
attracts Nazis. But two years after he completed his very
brief federal sentence, he started a blog. And that's not
really surprising. He was an early adopter of the format,
and he'd been running the online publication for the neo
Nazi organization National Alliance for many years. He has a
(28:00):
lot of websites, so Kevin Strow making a website isn't
the surprising thing here. But this one didn't have his
name on it. In fact, he didn't want anyone to
know that it was his website at all. It was
made to look like a local news website for the
Charlottesville area, and it had a number of posts about
(28:24):
innocuous local goings on. This was back in twenty ten.
That was the year that we had a really wild
late season snowstorm just unbelievable amount of snow for this area.
So there were a couple of posts on this quote
unquote local news blog about the weather, about enforcement of
(28:44):
the city's snow removal ordnance, and the giant mountain of
snow in the Barracks Road shopping Center parking lot that
we all called Mount Chipotle for months before it finally
melted away. But mixed in with these low stakes, low
cool public interest stories and what looked like a high
school essay about the film Nosferatu written by his teenage son,
(29:08):
there were a couple of opinion pieces about how this
Kevin Strom guy really isn't so bad and you know,
he was railroaded by a politically motivated prosecution because of
his pro white beliefs. And aside from a few weirdly
personal attacks on Strom's ex wife and those uncomfortable pro
(29:29):
pedophilia op eds, the site was like seventy percent normal.
I mean that other thirty percent is really really not normal.
But most of the posts were normal, and most of
the content isn't about Kevin Strong. But the site's IP
address provides us a little clue. A lot of websites
(29:55):
were created using that same IP address, like a lo
like over one hundred a lot, and a lot of
those websites definitely belong to Kevin Strom because they are
things like his personal website, Kevin Alfredstrom dot com, his
Ham radio website, his third wife's personal blog, several websites
(30:17):
belonging to National Alliance, websites devoted to Strome's hero, the
anti semit revelop Oliver, and a bunch of Nazi themed
parked domains with no content on them, things like minecomf
dot net and Turnerdiaries dot org. Some of the sites
don't have any immediately clear connection to Kevin Strom or
(30:41):
obvious pro Nazi content, so it kind of looks like
he may have been earning money on the side doing
perfectly normal web development work. So I've put a reminder
on my to do list to check out what kinds
of clients we're hiring a not seed pedophile to make
their business website. In twenty ten, and for all the
(31:19):
time I spent detailing Gerald Drake's Internet activities in the
second episode one about the Civil War reenactor using a
fake anti fascist group as cover for the bomb threats
he was sending his former friends, I forgot to tell
you about his hobby of pretending to be a cop
on Reddit. I mean, his trip Advisor reviews were a
(31:43):
rich vein of content, from Burger King in Madrid to
five guys in Paris. The man absolutely loved to tell
you about a fast food meal in a faraway place.
And I spent hours reading his posts on the sex
Doll Forum. Quite frankly, it would have been malpractice if
I didn't tell you that the last thing he did
(32:04):
before getting arrested by the FBI was post about the
great customer service at a company called sex Doll Queen.
I left out some of the nastier sex doll stuff.
I mean, I saw things that I wish I hadn't,
and it just felt superfluous to tell you that he
(32:24):
bought a doll second hand at an estate sale, But
when he, in turn was trying to sell it on
the sex Doll forum, he assured the other users that
not only had he never used it, but he knew
the dead guy he bought it from never used it either,
because he was too sick before he died, So it's
(32:46):
basically brand new. But I can't believe I forgot to
tell you he spent years cosplaying as a retired cop
on Reddit dot com. He had a bunch of posts
spanning several years where he claimed to be a retired
police officer, and that's just simply not possible. He worked
(33:09):
for twenty five years for the Saint Clair County, Michigan
Road Commission as an equipment welder. It's not like he
has a LinkedIn. I can't pin this down with absolute certainty,
but I'm assuming he lost that job when he went
to jail for sexual imposition of a minor in two
thousand and three, and so that would mean he got
that job when he was twenty years old. And he
(33:32):
certainly didn't become a cop in his fifties after becoming
a registered sex offender. He couldn't even buy a gun
at a store, let alone carry one for work. So
he was never a cop, I'm really sure of that.
But he was never a Confederate soldier either. He just
(33:54):
liked pretending to be those things, and sometimes it seemed
like he liked imagining being a cop, like it was
part of a kind of sexual fantasy for him, like
in this post from twenty seventeen, pulled over a car
for speeding and as I walked up to it, I
see it as driven by the most drop dead gorgeous
(34:16):
blonde I have ever seen in my crummy life. My
brain overrode my mouth and I set out loud. What
was I thinking? God, I'd love to fuck that. She
heard me and smiled. She knew she wasn't getting a
ticket from me or this post, also from twenty seventeen,
(34:37):
did undercover and we were even allowed to do small
amounts of drugs and did hook up with the babes.
A good undercover officer becomes the creep to not be
called out. But in a lot of the posts where
he's claiming to be a former cop, he's definitely trying
to use that as a position of perceived authority to
(34:57):
lend more weight to his opinion. Usually that opinion is
about something really racist. On a post about racial differences
in standardized test scores, Gerald claimed that when he was
a police officer, they had a special, dumbed down version
of the sergeant's exams for black officers because otherwise they'd
(35:18):
never get promoted. He claimed that black officers would get
points on their exam just for spelling their own names right.
But it's worth noting that Gerald misspelled the word sergeant
in his post about this, And a lot of the
things that get left out are just these strange little
(35:38):
tangents you didn't even know you were missing out on,
like how Gerald had a poshmark account that he used
to buy designer panties for his sex dolls. But other
things that I accidentally leave out or just run out
of room for are things that you might have been
left wondering about. Like in the Very Black episodes, I
(35:59):
devoted a lot of time to the side story of
the Casanova Lounge, the only gay bar in Somerset County,
Pennsylvania in the late nineties. But by the time the
Casanova Lounge's story ended, Very Black wasn't part of it anymore.
So I just sort of left that thread dangling, and
I did see some listeners asking about whatever happened to
(36:21):
Pat Kramer and her bar. The Casanova Lounge closed its
doors in two thousand and one after a tumultuous four
years in existence. The Kramer sold the property to Madeline
and Barry Layman, who turned it into a private banquet
space for Christian events. They renamed the building Baca House,
(36:41):
with Baca being the Hebrew word for a half shekel.
In Exodus, Abaca is listed as the amount paid as
an annual temple tax for the use of the sanctuary,
and the building was used for church groups, baby showers,
wedding receptions, ladies, Bible studies. Around two thousand it was
started being used for actual church services, and it was
(37:04):
for many years a Somerset County polling location. The layman
sold the property in twenty fourteen to one of those
troubled youth outdoor adventure camps run by a former Marine
drill sergeant, but the Kramer stayed in the hospitality industry.
They opened a restaurant in another town nearby and ran
(37:24):
it for more than a decade before they finally retired.
In the episode, I mentioned that some of the patrons
at the Casanova called Pat Kramer mother, and as she aged,
she still did most of the cooking at her own restaurant,
and in her last few years in her restaurant kitchen,
her customers called her nana. Her husband, Mary at Kramer,
(37:47):
passed away in twenty twenty two, but Pat's still out
there enjoying her retirement. And on that note, maybe I
don't need to say this. I hope. I don't need
to say this, but please don't take it upon yourself
to find or contact the subjects of the show, any
(38:10):
of them. Don't find the weird little guys or their victims,
or their neighbors, or their families, or the side characters
and their stories. I'm not sure why that's an urge
people sometimes feel, but if you do feel that pull,
please resist it. After the Frank Sweeney episodes came out,
(38:32):
I saw that a listener to the show had sought
out and found a social media profile belonging to Frank's
German girlfriend, and they posted a link on her page
to the episode about him. And you know, if Frank
were to find this episode on his own and listen
to it, that's one thing. I have no control over that.
(38:56):
But there's no need to tap the glass, so to speak, right,
need to insert yourself into that process. It's just kind
of weird and rude, and it doesn't feel right to me.
I mean, I can't stop you from doing it. I'm
just telling you it would be my preference that you
not do that. I try not to provide unnecessary personal
(39:19):
details about people, and I change the names of the
victims in Frank's story. But I don't want to have
to worry about listeners of the show using my research
to harass anyone. So enjoy the stories, talk about them
amongst yourselves, tell me what you think of them, but
(39:39):
please don't seek out the people in these stories to
tell them what you think of their lives, especially when
it comes to people who found themselves a part of
these stories through no fault of their own. People like
the Cramers, So let's keep in touch, you and me.
(40:00):
I'm not great at that in my personal or professional lives,
but I'd like to have that line of communication open.
I set up an email address for the show. It's
Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com, So if
you'd like to send me a message that's just between
the two of us, that's the best way to do it.
(40:22):
A lot of listeners have reached out to me on Twitter,
either by tweeting at me or at the network, or
by direct message to me, and I do try really
hard to read all of your messages, but it's really
easy for those to get buried or lost in the shuffle.
But if you send an email to the show, at
least they'll all be in one place where I can
(40:43):
always find them again. Again. I'm not promising this means
I'll get any better at answering anybody, but at least
this way, I'll know where all of the messages I'm
not answering even are, so I can properly orient my
anxiety about that. And if you've got something to say
about the show that isn't something you want to keep
(41:05):
between the two of us, you could post it on
the subreddit. I sound like, go grandma right now. I
think I'm probably not using the right Internet terminology. Just
before the show launched, Ed Zitron, the host of Better Offline,
gave me some absolutely fucking unhinged advice. Honestly, Ed he
(41:29):
told me that I should go ahead and make my
own subreddit for the show, that I should be the
moderator of that subreddit, and that I should engage directly, often,
and if necessary, adversarially with the listeners. And I think
Ed does do that on his subreddit. I have a
(41:49):
lot of respect Fred, and I really enjoy his show,
but I think what I told him at the time
was I would rather lay down in traffic than do
any of that. As human beings, we are simply not
wired to know this much about what strangers think of us,
and that sounded like a recipe for madness. But I'm
(42:12):
also very weak, and when I saw that someone else
had created a subreddit for the show, I couldn't help myself.
I thought I could play it cool and pretend I
wasn't checking in on the posts every week, but I
ended up creating a Reddit account so that I could
pop in and answer questions occasionally. So if you're so inclined,
(42:35):
you could go there and post your thoughts or feelings
or questions or whatever. Be nice. Though I'm not the
moderator of that space, I don't know the person who is.
But don't make their life hard. Don't make anybody's life
hard if you can help it. And please don't be weird,
whether you're sending an email to me directly, or posting
(42:59):
on the subred or leaving a review or whatever. You know,
the old thing seeing like no one is listening, love
like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one
is watching. Well, I've got a slightly different version that's
been more useful to me in my life, and it's
(43:20):
email like you're going to get subpoenaed and post like
you're going to have to hear it read back to
you in a hostile tone during a deposition. Because if
you don't want to explain the joke to your mom,
your boss, or a federal judge, don't write it down.
That's just some free life advice for you in general.
(43:41):
But really, please don't email me something that's going to
make you the subject of an episode. I already have
too many ideas on the list, and I really don't
want to have to put your picture on my red
stream board. Weird Little Guys the production of cool Zone Media.
(44:02):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hey, this is Weird Little Guys, but
there's no new weird little guy this week. I mean,
there are definitely more weird little guys crawling out of
the woodwork every day, and I've got a couple of
stories about them in development, but this episode isn't a
(00:25):
new guy. Sorry about that. We're a couple of months
into the show now and I just wanted to take
a minute to do a little navel gazing. So this
is just a little mini episode to check in on
how it's going, talk about what we're doing here, and
shoehorn in some fun facts and odds and ends that
got left on the cutting room floor of past episodes.
(01:01):
If we're being totally honest here, I just didn't get
it together this week. I lost a few days of
research and writing time to a trial at the beginning
of this month, and lost another couple of days to
travel for a family obligation this week, and it just
didn't come together in time. I thought I had a
(01:22):
topic that I could turn around quickly, but sometimes a
story that seems really straightforward turns out to be anything.
But I found a surprising and strange twist to a
story that I thought I knew, and I wanted to
give it the time it deserved to flesh it all
the way out. So we're doing something different this week,
(01:44):
but the timing is pretty good. We're about three months
into this thing, and I have some reflections on the
process so far. I think the biggest realization I've had
so far is that I may have overextended myself a
little bit. If that wasn't obvious in what I'm doing
right now, what was I a person who dropped out
(02:08):
of college, mainly because I have a very adversarial relationship
with the concept of do dates thinking. When I signed
up to write what is basically a twenty page research
paper every week, I mean, just a baffling decision on
my part. But I think it's going okay, don't you.
(02:30):
I don't know if there's a fourth wall in podcasting,
but if there is, I'm kind of constantly knocking on it.
I'm always right there on the edge of the story.
I'm telling you. There will be a few stories I
tell you on this show that I am reluctantly, accidentally,
(02:52):
haphazardly actually in not just as the narrator but as
a chaotic little sidecarre And this little episode is sort
of a meta commentary on the storytelling process. So I'm
busting through that fourth wall like the kool Aid Man today.
I totally get it. If you're not into that, you
(03:13):
can just come back next week when I have a
whole new Weird Little Guy for you. But in the
years I've been doing this kind of work, I've always
been in conversation with the audience, and it feels so
strange to me now that I'm adjusting to this new
medium of podcasting, just not to have that at all.
(03:37):
Those conversations weren't always good. I'll refer you back to
the comment I made a second ago about being an
unwitting side character in some Weird Little Guy's journeys to
Federal prison. But I always felt like I was telling
a story to people who were speaking back to me.
I was getting their reactions and their input and their perspectives,
(03:59):
and sometimes that is part of the story while I'm
still telling it. And maybe that's a weakness or a
flaw or a dead giveaway that I didn't go to
journalism school or whatever, but it's the way I know
how to do the work that feels meaningful to me.
And I'm too old to change now. I alluded to
(04:23):
it a bit in the minisode honoring the anniversary of
Heather Hire's death back in August, but my introduction to
covering court cases and the weird little guys at the
center of them came from my own personal need to
understand the men who came here to Charlottesville for the
Unite the Right rally in twenty seventeen. When the handful
(04:46):
of men who'd been charged for the acts of violence
they committed that day first started appearing in court in
late twenty seventeen early twenty eighteen, I was coincidentally unemployed,
so I had a lot of spare time to go
to and just watch. So I did, and I started
(05:06):
doing it just for myself. I didn't have a lot
going on, and I wanted to see. I wanted to know.
I didn't know what it was I needed to know,
or how I was going to find it out, but
I had the time, and I just sat and I watched,
(05:29):
and I started posting about what I was observing online.
I guess that's very millennial core of me, but I
realized very quickly that there was a hunger in this
community for information about those proceedings that was more personal,
less detached than the coverage that was being offered by
(05:50):
traditional media outlets. I mean, if you just wanted the facts,
there was plenty of news. National outlets were still sending
reporters to a lot of those hearings, but there's something
missing from that kind of coverage. People wanted the facts,
of course, and I did my best in those early
(06:13):
days to get those facts right. But they wanted more
than that. They wanted to be in conversation with those facts.
They wanted to be informed, but they wanted to be
angry too, and they deserved to be. They wanted to
know the ugly truth about what was going on, but
(06:35):
they wanted it presented to them in a way that
felt affirming and grounded in what they already knew to
be true. They wanted to feel heard and to ask questions,
and they wanted to know not just what, but why.
And I did too, So I did my best to
collect every detail and to make myself available to provide
(07:01):
context where I could, and comfort if I could. I
took on the role of audience surrogate for people in
my community who couldn't spend all day in court. I
hate to doubt myself as someone who reads the comments.
It's very embarrassing, but I am and I've seen some
(07:23):
feedback that some listeners don't care for what they call
my habit of editorializing, putting my own voice and my
own judgment and my own feelings into the story. There
were some reviews taking issue with what they believed to
be a put on affect, this melodramatic flourish and the
(07:44):
way that I speak. That is, unfortunately just the way
that I talk. And I've got a pretty thick skin
when it comes to things like death threats. But I'm
surprisingly sensitive to what is completely sane and valid criticism.
You know, some weird little guy can post online about
(08:06):
how he wants to carve his name into my chest
and fuck my corpse or you know whatever, and I
can take that in stride. But a perfectly normal person
thinks I talk too fast. That's going to send me
into a spiral. You know, I'm working on that, Okay.
I am pacing myself. I've been doing exercises where I
(08:28):
practice reading my script with the timer I'm trying. So
I did sit with that feedback about my narrative style
being too personal or too emotional, and ultimately I decided
to disregard it. This is the only way that I
(08:49):
know how to tell stories that weigh heavily on the soul,
because I learned how to do it while trying to
tell stories that were deeply personal for me and for
the audience, I was communicating them too, And because I
learned how to tell these stories in that context, I
know it's important. It's not for everyone, and that's okay,
(09:13):
and it's not better than or even a substitution for
more traditional journalistic approaches to telling these kinds of stories.
But there is a place for this kind of storytelling.
I'm a human being trying to make sense of the
world that we live in, and I hope that I
(09:34):
can try to help you do that too. I don't
just want to present you the facts of a case,
the timeline of a story of a man's life, of
a trial. I'm not just showing you the most fucked
up thing I can find for shock value. I want
us to try to understand what all of this means together.
(09:57):
When I take you on these little journeys into the
story of some weird little guy, we aren't just staring
evil in the face for something to do. We're taking
its mask off to really understand a moment in history
and to place a particular guy into his proper context.
(10:19):
There is one moment in my work that I have
held on to like a life preserver. On the days
I find myself asking what am I even doing? Is
this worth it? What am I adding to the world
by doing this at all? And I hope this person
(10:39):
doesn't mind me sharing it. I don't know who they are,
so I can't ask. It's something so close to my
heart that I almost don't want to let it out
into the world. I don't want to cheapen it or
wear it out by saying it out loud. See this
isn't actually my first attempt at a podcast. Back in
(11:03):
twenty eighteen, James Alex Fields Junior went on trial for
murder for Heather Hire's murder, and for two and a
half weeks, I sat on a bench in a courtroom
that was too crowded to hold the people of Charlottesville
who were desperate to see some approximation of justice done.
(11:25):
So I sat on that bench and I took notes
furiously for eight hours every day. I think I gave
myself carpel tunnel, and then I came home and I
wrote a script, and then I recorded a little episode
on the floor of my closet because it was the
only place in my apartment where you couldn't hear the
noise from the cars outside. And I was recording and
(11:49):
editing until three am every night, and then getting back
in my car a few hours later to go back
to court. And I didn't know anything about podcast editing.
I still don't. I don't do that, and I didn't
do a very good job of it. I really just
cut out the parts where I was audibly crying. It's
(12:13):
still online somewhere. It's not very good. I'm not recommending it.
If that trial happened today, I would write that story
very differently. I wish I knew then what I know
now about the law about writing, about editing, about storytelling.
But I did the best I could. And it wasn't
(12:37):
meant for everyone to hear. It wasn't for all of you.
It was a labor of love for my community, for
people I knew needed to hear those facts, but from
someone who cared about them and would treat them with
a fierce gentleness, someone who understood that they were afraid
and wounded and angry, and someone who were did their
(13:00):
right to be that way. They wanted to know the
boring little details of what happened inside that courtroom, but
the cool, neutral detachment of a nightly update on CNN
felt like a slap in the face. So I did
my best, and I found myself asking those questions a
(13:20):
lot that month. Why am I doing this? I'm not
even good at this. What does it add to this
glut of coverage of this trial for me to do this,
for me to try to tell this story and to
put this out. It was a long, brutal and gruesome trial.
(13:43):
There was graphic testimony about blood and tissue embedded in
the shattered windshield of the car. Doctors showed us X
rays and autopsy reports. James Alexfield's junior was being tried
not just for murder, how they hire, but for the
injuries he'd caused to eight of the dozens of people
(14:05):
badly injured in that attack, And each of those eight
victims testified about their injuries. I tried to treat each
victim with the care and tenderness they deserved, not just
choosing the most salacious details about the horrors they'd endured.
And then one night I got a message from a stranger.
(14:28):
It was about the podcast. This stranger, this gentle soul,
had been one of the street medics who was there
on Fourth Street when it happened. They had rendered aid
that saved people's lives. They were understandably pretty traumatized by
what they'd seen that day, and they were having trouble
(14:50):
consuming coverage of the trial. But someone had passed along
to them a detail that I had included that had
been left out a lot of other coverage of the trial.
This street medic had a crystal clear memory of the
moment they covered a woman's compound leg fracture so she
(15:11):
couldn't see it. Amidst the chaos and the screaming and
the blood. They had the presence of mind to make
sure that this woman they did not know and would
never see again, didn't have to see her own bone
sticking out of her flesh. And they did the best
they could with the medical supplies they had on their
(15:31):
backpack to splinter leg and to stop the bleeding and
to keep her calm until an ambulance came, and then
they went home. They didn't know that woman. They didn't
know her name, there was no way to follow up,
so they'd been left wondering for more than a year.
(15:53):
Was she okay? They'd lost sleep asking themselves, did I
do it right? Did I help her? Can she walk?
Did I make a mistake in that moment that costs
someone their mobility? And when that woman took the stand
a trial, she testified about the medic covering the bone
(16:16):
sticking out of her leg. She said she didn't know
how bad it was until she got to the hospital,
and she said on the stand that she's okay now.
She has a metal rod in her leg, but she's okay.
She can walk without pain. Her life isn't over, She's
(16:38):
moving on. And that wasn't headline news. It was just
nine minutes on the stand. I know it was nine
minutes because I bought a little digital watch all those
years ago, and I still obsessively timestamp my handwritten notes,
marking the time several times per page off in the margins.
(17:01):
She was one of nine witnesses who testified that day alone,
and the brief moment in her nine minutes of testimony
where she said she's okay now didn't make it into
the newspaper, it wasn't on MSNBC, it wasn't in the
wire stories. But for someone out there in the world,
(17:22):
it was everything. It was closure and it was peace.
And for six years, that single moment of peace that
I got to give to a stranger who had risked
their life to save someone else's has been a north
star for me. It's a lighthouse in the storm when
(17:43):
I can't remember why I'm writing anything at all. And
now years later, I'm not just writing about local cases
for a local audience, but I try to carry that
same level of responsibility to my audience with me. I'm
trying to weave together stories of terrible men who did
(18:03):
terrible things in a way that shines a light into
the darkness, rather than leading you into that darkness and
leaving you there to fend for yourself. I'm not always
going to get it right, I know that, but I
promise you I am agonizing about the ethics of this
(18:24):
work to the point of madness. I'm doing my best,
and I want to navigate what that means for us
collectively together. So that's all I have to say about
my personal style of narration today. But this is an
ongoing conversation, and it's one I'll never be done having,
(18:48):
and I'll try to have it with you. There are
a lot of things about podcasting I did not know
(19:09):
when I started doing this show, and some things I
didn't even know enough to know I didn't know them.
It didn't even occur to me until I was a
handful of episodes deep that I forgot to tell you
who makes the show possible at all? God bless them.
None of them said anything to me about it. I
(19:31):
left myself a little reminder to record some kind of
closing credit segment, but it's buried under a stack of
other reminders for things like change furnace filter and email
National Archives about that transcript again, both of which I've
been meaning to do for weeks now. Actually, I'm going
(19:53):
to get up and change that filter right now. While
I'm thinking about it, and while I'm checking things off
my to do I have to take a little sidebar
to gush a little bit about the team at Cool
Zone Media. This show would not exist at all if
executive producer Sophie Lichterman hadn't come up with the idea.
(20:15):
Given it its name, convinced me that I could do
it convinced the network that I could do it, and
then held my hand for months while I figured out
what She already knew that this show was the perfect
way to tell these stories. Maybe she just wanted me
to stop derailing other conversations with my excited outbursts about
(20:39):
some new weird guy that I found, and she thought
she could get some peace if she found me another
outlet for that. And the show wouldn't get done every
week if not for supervising producer Ian Johnson. There's so
much business stuff that happens that I am blissfully unaware of.
(21:00):
I don't know how the show gets into your phone.
I just type my little scripts every week. I think
Ian takes care of the rest of that. All of
the research and note taking and conspiracy theorizing and writing
is done by me. Apparently some podcasts have like a
(21:20):
separate guy who does the research. But even if such
a guy were to present himself to me, the research
is my favorite part. I would never let that go.
The moment each week when I have to close my
two hundred browser tabs and stop researching so I can
start writing is always bittersweet. How I wish I could
(21:41):
do twice as much research and half as much writing,
to be honest. But if that's all there was to
the show, just research and writing, it would be unlistenable.
Every week I read my little script into my microphone
in my home office and I think, oh, no, oh,
(22:03):
that was a mess. I'm thinking it right now. I'm
reading into my little microphone in my home office. It's
three in the morning, and this file is late, and
I'm thinking, oh, no, you know, I'm retaking lines fifteen times.
I burped into the microphone more times than I'm willing
to admit. I'm so sorry, Rory. I'm always having to
(22:25):
stop and look up something like how to pronounce some
town in Michigan, because you know, they don't say it normal,
and I know I'd never hear the end of it
if I just read it, assuming they would say it
like the rest of the world, like myland, Michigan. It
says Milan. It says Milan. That's a city we've all
heard of, but it's Mylan. And there are still, to
(22:49):
this day takes that have to be cut because you
can hear my voice thickening with grief. That's the sound
of the tears threatening to spill over it's someone else's
job to edit that out now. But if it ever
stops happening, I think the show is over. If I
(23:10):
can do this without feeling it at all, then my
heart has gotten too hard and it's time to stop.
It's time to close my laptop and walk away and
walk into the sea, because I've lost my humanity. But
every week, somehow, my editor Rory Gagan returns to me
(23:32):
something that I barely recognize, something all cleaned up and beautiful,
with perfectly placed music beds. And that music, I've seen
so many listeners asking about the opening theme that was
created just for the show. Why the incredibly talented Brandon Dickert.
(23:53):
This is another one of those podcasting things that I
never even thought to wonder about. But of course, course
it's someone's job to make custom music for a show.
And when Sophie told me it was time to brainstorm
what kind of music we wanted for the show, I
completely froze. How could I possibly know what kind of
(24:14):
musical vibe I'm trying to create here? I mean, how
is it even possible to describe a sound you've never heard? Like?
I know music can evoke an emotional response, but the
idea of reverse engineering. That is like asking me to
translate hieroglyphics. It felt impossible, What does that even mean?
(24:38):
So I sent her a bunch of very stupid ideas
and she was very patient with me. I had a meltdown.
I was googling things like spooky sounding music, Comma not
scary and whimsical spooky tunes. I just panicked and I
sent more a bad ideas And I've just gone back
(25:01):
to my email now to see what it was that
I finally came up with that was good enough for
the experts to work with. And who was a bulleted
list that says Twin Peaks theme interstitial music for an
evil NPR broadcast, a riff on the X Files theme,
question mark, David Lynch's Elephant Man theme but more lively,
(25:26):
and Tim Burton spooky but goofy, something like Danny Elfman.
And I could not have had such good luck if
I planned it. Brandon Dickert wrote back, I play in
a band with the bass player from Oingo Boingo, so
I'm very familiar with the Elfman vibe. What he's just
(25:49):
casually in a band with John Avila, No big deal.
So when people compliment the music, and I say, I know,
isn't it incredible? I'm not tooting my own horn. I
had nothing to do with that. I'm just so impressed
and grateful for the theme Brandon Dicker wrote for me,
(26:10):
and as for the show itself, I think I'm getting
the hang of it. One problem I will absolutely never
have is a lack of ideas. I am never going
to run out of guys. There are, in fact, entirely
too many guys. I have a running list of episode
topics i'd like to get to that's a year long already,
(26:33):
and every week my research into one weird little Guy
turns up at least one or two new options for
guys who probably need their own episode. If anything, the
problem is I lose a whole day of research time
every week to tracking down some strange loose end that
really just needs to get added to the list for
a future episode. And every weird Little Guy I do
(26:55):
get to is just bursting at the seams with strange
facts and side stories that end up cut because I
just don't have the stamina to weave together every thread.
When the first episode came out, I was kicking myself
because I forgot to include a particularly funny little tangent
(27:17):
that episode was about Kevin alfred Strom, the neo Nazi
pedophile who was the original source of a quote often
misattributed to Voltaire back when he got arrested for possession
of child sexual abuse material. He's actually living here in
the Charlottesville area. A strange coincidence. I suppose it really
(27:37):
makes you wonder what it is about this place that
attracts Nazis. But two years after he completed his very
brief federal sentence, he started a blog. And that's not
really surprising. He was an early adopter of the format,
and he'd been running the online publication for the neo
Nazi organization National Alliance for many years. He has a
(28:00):
lot of websites, so Kevin Strow making a website isn't
the surprising thing here. But this one didn't have his
name on it. In fact, he didn't want anyone to
know that it was his website at all. It was
made to look like a local news website for the
Charlottesville area, and it had a number of posts about
(28:24):
innocuous local goings on. This was back in twenty ten.
That was the year that we had a really wild
late season snowstorm just unbelievable amount of snow for this area.
So there were a couple of posts on this quote
unquote local news blog about the weather, about enforcement of
(28:44):
the city's snow removal ordnance, and the giant mountain of
snow in the Barracks Road shopping Center parking lot that
we all called Mount Chipotle for months before it finally
melted away. But mixed in with these low stakes, low
cool public interest stories and what looked like a high
school essay about the film Nosferatu written by his teenage son,
(29:08):
there were a couple of opinion pieces about how this
Kevin Strom guy really isn't so bad and you know,
he was railroaded by a politically motivated prosecution because of
his pro white beliefs. And aside from a few weirdly
personal attacks on Strom's ex wife and those uncomfortable pro
(29:29):
pedophilia op eds, the site was like seventy percent normal.
I mean that other thirty percent is really really not normal.
But most of the posts were normal, and most of
the content isn't about Kevin Strong. But the site's IP
address provides us a little clue. A lot of websites
(29:55):
were created using that same IP address, like a lo
like over one hundred a lot, and a lot of
those websites definitely belong to Kevin Strom because they are
things like his personal website, Kevin Alfredstrom dot com, his
Ham radio website, his third wife's personal blog, several websites
(30:17):
belonging to National Alliance, websites devoted to Strome's hero, the
anti semit revelop Oliver, and a bunch of Nazi themed
parked domains with no content on them, things like minecomf
dot net and Turnerdiaries dot org. Some of the sites
don't have any immediately clear connection to Kevin Strom or
(30:41):
obvious pro Nazi content, so it kind of looks like
he may have been earning money on the side doing
perfectly normal web development work. So I've put a reminder
on my to do list to check out what kinds
of clients we're hiring a not seed pedophile to make
their business website. In twenty ten, and for all the
(31:19):
time I spent detailing Gerald Drake's Internet activities in the
second episode one about the Civil War reenactor using a
fake anti fascist group as cover for the bomb threats
he was sending his former friends, I forgot to tell
you about his hobby of pretending to be a cop
on Reddit. I mean, his trip Advisor reviews were a
(31:43):
rich vein of content, from Burger King in Madrid to
five guys in Paris. The man absolutely loved to tell
you about a fast food meal in a faraway place.
And I spent hours reading his posts on the sex
Doll Forum. Quite frankly, it would have been malpractice if
I didn't tell you that the last thing he did
(32:04):
before getting arrested by the FBI was post about the
great customer service at a company called sex Doll Queen.
I left out some of the nastier sex doll stuff.
I mean, I saw things that I wish I hadn't,
and it just felt superfluous to tell you that he
(32:24):
bought a doll second hand at an estate sale, But
when he, in turn was trying to sell it on
the sex Doll forum, he assured the other users that
not only had he never used it, but he knew
the dead guy he bought it from never used it either,
because he was too sick before he died, So it's
(32:46):
basically brand new. But I can't believe I forgot to
tell you he spent years cosplaying as a retired cop
on Reddit dot com. He had a bunch of posts
spanning several years where he claimed to be a retired
police officer, and that's just simply not possible. He worked
(33:09):
for twenty five years for the Saint Clair County, Michigan
Road Commission as an equipment welder. It's not like he
has a LinkedIn. I can't pin this down with absolute certainty,
but I'm assuming he lost that job when he went
to jail for sexual imposition of a minor in two
thousand and three, and so that would mean he got
that job when he was twenty years old. And he
(33:32):
certainly didn't become a cop in his fifties after becoming
a registered sex offender. He couldn't even buy a gun
at a store, let alone carry one for work. So
he was never a cop, I'm really sure of that.
But he was never a Confederate soldier either. He just
(33:54):
liked pretending to be those things, and sometimes it seemed
like he liked imagining being a cop, like it was
part of a kind of sexual fantasy for him, like
in this post from twenty seventeen, pulled over a car
for speeding and as I walked up to it, I
see it as driven by the most drop dead gorgeous
(34:16):
blonde I have ever seen in my crummy life. My
brain overrode my mouth and I set out loud. What
was I thinking? God, I'd love to fuck that. She
heard me and smiled. She knew she wasn't getting a
ticket from me or this post, also from twenty seventeen,
(34:37):
did undercover and we were even allowed to do small
amounts of drugs and did hook up with the babes.
A good undercover officer becomes the creep to not be
called out. But in a lot of the posts where
he's claiming to be a former cop, he's definitely trying
to use that as a position of perceived authority to
(34:57):
lend more weight to his opinion. Usually that opinion is
about something really racist. On a post about racial differences
in standardized test scores, Gerald claimed that when he was
a police officer, they had a special, dumbed down version
of the sergeant's exams for black officers because otherwise they'd
(35:18):
never get promoted. He claimed that black officers would get
points on their exam just for spelling their own names right.
But it's worth noting that Gerald misspelled the word sergeant
in his post about this, And a lot of the
things that get left out are just these strange little
(35:38):
tangents you didn't even know you were missing out on,
like how Gerald had a poshmark account that he used
to buy designer panties for his sex dolls. But other
things that I accidentally leave out or just run out
of room for are things that you might have been
left wondering about. Like in the Very Black episodes, I
(35:59):
devoted a lot of time to the side story of
the Casanova Lounge, the only gay bar in Somerset County,
Pennsylvania in the late nineties. But by the time the
Casanova Lounge's story ended, Very Black wasn't part of it anymore.
So I just sort of left that thread dangling, and
I did see some listeners asking about whatever happened to
(36:21):
Pat Kramer and her bar. The Casanova Lounge closed its
doors in two thousand and one after a tumultuous four
years in existence. The Kramer sold the property to Madeline
and Barry Layman, who turned it into a private banquet
space for Christian events. They renamed the building Baca House,
(36:41):
with Baca being the Hebrew word for a half shekel.
In Exodus, Abaca is listed as the amount paid as
an annual temple tax for the use of the sanctuary,
and the building was used for church groups, baby showers,
wedding receptions, ladies, Bible studies. Around two thousand it was
started being used for actual church services, and it was
(37:04):
for many years a Somerset County polling location. The layman
sold the property in twenty fourteen to one of those
troubled youth outdoor adventure camps run by a former Marine
drill sergeant, but the Kramer stayed in the hospitality industry.
They opened a restaurant in another town nearby and ran
(37:24):
it for more than a decade before they finally retired.
In the episode, I mentioned that some of the patrons
at the Casanova called Pat Kramer mother, and as she aged,
she still did most of the cooking at her own restaurant,
and in her last few years in her restaurant kitchen,
her customers called her nana. Her husband, Mary at Kramer,
(37:47):
passed away in twenty twenty two, but Pat's still out
there enjoying her retirement. And on that note, maybe I
don't need to say this. I hope. I don't need
to say this, but please don't take it upon yourself
to find or contact the subjects of the show, any
(38:10):
of them. Don't find the weird little guys or their victims,
or their neighbors, or their families, or the side characters
and their stories. I'm not sure why that's an urge
people sometimes feel, but if you do feel that pull,
please resist it. After the Frank Sweeney episodes came out,
(38:32):
I saw that a listener to the show had sought
out and found a social media profile belonging to Frank's
German girlfriend, and they posted a link on her page
to the episode about him. And you know, if Frank
were to find this episode on his own and listen
to it, that's one thing. I have no control over that.
(38:56):
But there's no need to tap the glass, so to speak, right,
need to insert yourself into that process. It's just kind
of weird and rude, and it doesn't feel right to me.
I mean, I can't stop you from doing it. I'm
just telling you it would be my preference that you
not do that. I try not to provide unnecessary personal
(39:19):
details about people, and I change the names of the
victims in Frank's story. But I don't want to have
to worry about listeners of the show using my research
to harass anyone. So enjoy the stories, talk about them
amongst yourselves, tell me what you think of them, but
(39:39):
please don't seek out the people in these stories to
tell them what you think of their lives, especially when
it comes to people who found themselves a part of
these stories through no fault of their own. People like
the Cramers, So let's keep in touch, you and me.
(40:00):
I'm not great at that in my personal or professional lives,
but I'd like to have that line of communication open.
I set up an email address for the show. It's
Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com, So if
you'd like to send me a message that's just between
the two of us, that's the best way to do it.
(40:22):
A lot of listeners have reached out to me on Twitter,
either by tweeting at me or at the network, or
by direct message to me, and I do try really
hard to read all of your messages, but it's really
easy for those to get buried or lost in the shuffle.
But if you send an email to the show, at
least they'll all be in one place where I can
(40:43):
always find them again. Again. I'm not promising this means
I'll get any better at answering anybody, but at least
this way, I'll know where all of the messages I'm
not answering even are, so I can properly orient my
anxiety about that. And if you've got something to say
about the show that isn't something you want to keep
(41:05):
between the two of us, you could post it on
the subreddit. I sound like, go grandma right now. I
think I'm probably not using the right Internet terminology. Just
before the show launched, Ed Zitron, the host of Better Offline,
gave me some absolutely fucking unhinged advice. Honestly, Ed he
(41:29):
told me that I should go ahead and make my
own subreddit for the show, that I should be the
moderator of that subreddit, and that I should engage directly, often,
and if necessary, adversarially with the listeners. And I think
Ed does do that on his subreddit. I have a
(41:49):
lot of respect Fred, and I really enjoy his show,
but I think what I told him at the time
was I would rather lay down in traffic than do
any of that. As human beings, we are simply not
wired to know this much about what strangers think of us,
and that sounded like a recipe for madness. But I'm
(42:12):
also very weak, and when I saw that someone else
had created a subreddit for the show, I couldn't help myself.
I thought I could play it cool and pretend I
wasn't checking in on the posts every week, but I
ended up creating a Reddit account so that I could
pop in and answer questions occasionally. So if you're so inclined,
(42:35):
you could go there and post your thoughts or feelings
or questions or whatever. Be nice. Though I'm not the
moderator of that space, I don't know the person who is.
But don't make their life hard. Don't make anybody's life
hard if you can help it. And please don't be weird,
whether you're sending an email to me directly, or posting
(42:59):
on the subred or leaving a review or whatever. You know,
the old thing seeing like no one is listening, love
like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one
is watching. Well, I've got a slightly different version that's
been more useful to me in my life, and it's
(43:20):
email like you're going to get subpoenaed and post like
you're going to have to hear it read back to
you in a hostile tone during a deposition. Because if
you don't want to explain the joke to your mom,
your boss, or a federal judge, don't write it down.
That's just some free life advice for you in general.
(43:41):
But really, please don't email me something that's going to
make you the subject of an episode. I already have
too many ideas on the list, and I really don't
want to have to put your picture on my red
stream board. Weird Little Guys the production of cool Zone Media.
(44:02):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Molly Conger
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