00:00:00
Anthony Sanders: I have always taken it as the
ultimate compliment when you getting someone
00:00:04
from a daily or big weekly to tell you that
they wished that they could write the style
00:00:13
that The Whirl does, by eliminating words like
accused, alleged, and just go to supposition,
00:00:21
maybe he was supposed to have done it,
anyway. I take that as a real compliment.
00:00:27
Phoebe Judge: The Evening Whirl is an
African-American owned crime newspaper in St. Louis. It's come out every week
for 78 years. This is Anthony Sanders,
00:00:36
the owner. I flew to St. Louis to meet Anthony.
He suggested we meet at his favorite lunch place,
00:00:42
Culpeppers. We talked about the city and how
newspapers are changing, but mostly we talked
00:00:50
about how he thinks and writes about crime. And,
as he said, crime stories in The Whirl don't often
00:00:57
include words like "accused" or "alleged."
Anthony Sanders: And we call it Whirl-esque
00:01:01
type of writing where we go right to
the nature of whatever the story is. [Music comes in.]
It's almost a conviction
00:01:10
before conviction. We say right away that
you the killer, let you prove that you're
00:01:15
not. Let me be honest with you, if it's going to
bring some well respected persons into the story
00:01:20
then we will use the word accused or alleged.
Phoebe Judge: But most of the time it's just...
00:01:26
Anthony Sanders: It's just straight.
Wanted killer, not alleged or accused killer, just wanted killer, ABC.
Phoebe Judge: Right at the top of every edition of
00:01:38
The Whirl it reads, "There is power in naming and
power in shaming." Not only does The Whirl want
00:01:44
to embarrass people who break the law, they do it
in a rather playful way with lots of alliteration
00:01:50
and puns and exclamation points, "Lunchroom
lady bopped in face. Bungling bandit bagged
00:01:56
and booked," and, "Don't call me a slobber, I'm a
real bank robber." For Anthony, this wordplay is
00:02:03
one of the greatest parts of working on a story.
Anthony Sanders: As it starts to come together,
00:02:09
it's like, I guess, a chef or say a cook,
maybe, more than a chef, a good old-fashioned
00:02:16
pot of greens, if you will. As you know you
got the greens and the fat back or whatever,
00:02:23
but it's the other little spices that you add
that's going to make those greens either memorable
00:02:29
one way or the other.
[Music fades out.] Phoebe Judge: Homicide detectives are called
H-men and even get nicknames. Charles "Knuckles"
00:02:36
Johnson, Detective Jeff Stone is "Stone Heart,"
and Detective Tom Carroll is "Pac-Man" because he
00:02:43
"gobbles up bad guys." And here's the thing. In
The Whirl, the police are always the good guys.
00:02:51
Each week the paper gets information from
the police department, and sometimes the
00:02:56
department gets information from the paper.
Anthony Sanders: And I'll put this out there. I
00:03:00
think the St. Louis Police Department as well
as St. Louis County Police Department does
00:03:04
themselves a lot of harm when they have suspect
information, they crack crime — a homicide,
00:03:12
and they don't share it, especially a photograph.
People just do not read words. They look at
00:03:20
the words and read the pictures.
Phoebe Judge: So, you think that they need to be putting out more information?
Anthony Sanders: Yes. Mm-hmm. These guys monitor
00:03:29
this newspaper. They read it. Their friends
read it. And anybody that may be associated
00:03:35
with it reads it.
[Music comes in.] Now, if you're going to solve a crime, you need to
put that on blast, as we would say, to let people
00:03:42
know. Criminals are seeing other criminals they
know that have committed homicides on the street.
00:03:49
It's just emboldening them
to do it themselves. Phoebe Judge: According to
FBI data from September,
00:03:55
St. Louis now has the highest murder
rate per capita in the country. The murder rate has increased more than
60% since 2000, and Anthony says The
00:04:05
Whirl reports on every single one.
Anthony Sanders: There is no homicide that we do not report on.
Phoebe Judge: No homicide
00:04:12
doesn't make it into The Whirl?
Anthony Sanders: That's right, and I'll say that emphatically because we have been accused of
not printing certain murders, and especially those
00:04:21
involving Caucasians. I think it's ludicrous,
but people think that that happens. It doesn't.
00:04:29
Phoebe Judge: In an era of real-time fact
checking, when journalists are terrified
00:04:34
of wrongly assigning blame, not to mention being
sued, Anthony Sanders just doesn't care. This is
00:04:42
how The Whirl has always done it. As they say, "If
that's too much for you, pick up The Times and
00:04:48
read the theater reviews." But The Evening Whirl
has always been criticized, sometimes extremely,
00:04:55
all the way back to its very first editions in
1938. Anthony's predecessor, the paper's founder,
00:05:02
was a man named Ben Thomas, and when he
was criticized, he famously replied, "The
00:05:08
Whirl has preached purity and condemned crime.
Those who don't like it can kiss our behind."
00:05:13
The very first editions of The Whirl
covered nightlife and celebrity gossip in St. Louis's Black community. This was
during the Jim Crow era, when the daily
00:05:24
newspapers wouldn't hire Black reporters
and rarely covered Black neighborhoods.
00:05:29
[Music ends.]
Most mainstream papers in America wouldn't even run African Americans' obituaries. And one day Ben
Thomas came across a scoop he couldn't turn down.
00:05:40
There was a rumor that a couple of high
school teachers had been molesting their
00:05:44
students. Nobody was reporting on it. Ben got
ahold of the police records and ran the story.
00:05:51
He had to reprint that edition three times, and
The Whirl has been a crime newspaper ever since.
00:05:57
[Music comes in.]
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In the Ben Thomas era, the writing was even more
playful. A lot of crimes were written up as jokey
00:06:19
little poems. For example, about a man on his way
to prison for selling heroin: "I will sit and lick
00:06:26
my toes and blow snot from my nose. Where I'll end
up in life, only God knows." I asked Anthony where
00:06:34
the name 'Evening Whirl' comes from. He said he
didn't know. He thinks of 'Whirl' as in kicking
00:06:40
up dust, which is certainly appropriate.
But then when we were researching the story,
00:06:46
we came across the phrase in a Mark Twain
novel. The novel is called The Gilded Age,
00:06:52
and the line reads, "Both chatted away in high
spirits and made the evening whirl along in the
00:06:59
most mirthful manner." Missouri was Mark
Twain's boyhood home, and given what we
00:07:05
know about Ben Thomas' literary interest,
maybe this is how the paper got its name.
00:07:11
Ben Thomas retired in 1995, and Anthony Sanders,
who'd been helping out since he was 18 years old,
00:07:18
took it over.
[Music fades out.] Anthony says he can't write poems like Ben, but he
still brings plenty of his own personality to the
00:07:26
reporting, once writing that a murder victim was
"in a flying casket to hell." And since Anthony
00:07:33
took over, he's increased the paper's readership
from 4,000 to almost 55,000. The paper has
00:07:41
done so well that he's even hired a reporter.
Anthony Sanders: Well, it had to take its lumps,
00:07:46
but perseverance overruled. What happened
is that we had to do some of the things
00:07:56
that we know that will help strengthen the
paper. We started picking up some of the
00:08:03
internet lingo and incorporating that into
it. That helped a little bit, because we were
00:08:09
told that we were going to go the way of the
dodo. But nevertheless, I mean, here we are.
00:08:15
Phoebe Judge: Do you have a favorite issue?
Anthony Sanders: No, I haven't done it yet.
00:08:22
Phoebe Judge: It just hasn't happened...?
Anthony Sanders: I'm never, ever satisfied
00:08:26
with what happens after it's printed. Sundays,
I could be on cloud nine, but by Monday morning,
00:08:35
I'm getting ready for the next one.
Phoebe Judge: Anthony lays out each edition
00:08:39
of the paper in his house, working through the
night on Sundays to get it to the printer on
00:08:44
time. Then on Monday mornings, he picks them up
and personally delivers the papers to stores.
00:08:50
He took me along on the route. His first stop is
always a BP at the corner of Jefferson and Clark
00:08:56
Avenues. The woman behind the counter said she
remembers reading The Whirl when she was a kid,
00:09:02
back when it was 50 cents. Now it's $1.50.
Cashier: Well, it's a popular paper. We have...
00:09:09
What shall I say, residential criminals? I don't know.
Phoebe Judge: Do you have
00:09:16
people who come in and ask for it?
Cashier: Yeah. All the time. I mean, it sells just as much as The Post. Yeah.
It gives us the daily news constant,
00:09:29
what's going on in the neighborhood, the area,
who did the most stupidest stuff for the week.
00:09:34
Phoebe Judge: Do you ever have anyone who's
come in and says to you, "Wait, do you have
00:09:39
The Evening Whirl yet? Is it here yet?"
Cashier: Yeah, "I might be in the paper."
00:09:42
Yeah. I've had people sign
the paper, their signatures because their picture's on there. Yeah.
Phoebe Judge: So, they come in here to say,
00:09:51
"Oh, boy. Did I make it?"
Cashier: Yeah, they do. I mean, we get quite a few people that come in and
want to know if they made the week news.
00:10:00
Phoebe Judge: This is one of
the many contradictions about the paper. It's openly pro-police, a
self-described crime-fighting newspaper,
00:10:09
and yet the men and women written up in the pages
of The Whirl often see it as a badge of honor.
00:10:16
Anthony Sanders: And what we have found
is that they — perpetrators will have these papers. I mean, I've had that told
to me so many times in criminal cases,
00:10:27
where a lot of times it's been someone police had
been actively looking at for years and they have
00:10:34
been committing crimes continuously. And they know
who they are, but they just trying to get enough
00:10:40
information to get warrants issued. You know
what I mean? When they do, they go in the house,
00:10:44
and there's Whirls all over the place, but
they've been chronologicalizing their escapades.
00:10:51
[Music comes in.]
Phoebe Judge: One of the most persistent criticisms of
The Evening Whirl is that it's a Black-owned
00:10:59
newspaper that exploits African Americans in order
to sell copies. The St. Louis chapter of the NAACP
00:11:07
attempted a boycott of the paper in the mid-'80s.
James DeClue, the president of the chapter,
00:11:12
called The Whirl "the dirtiest, lousiest evidence
of lies about a people I've ever seen." I asked
00:11:20
Anthony what he thinks about this criticism.
Anthony Sanders: I have had a lot of,
00:11:26
I guess you'd say, talks with myself about this,
and it's a question that I always ask myself.
00:11:33
Would I be a reader of The Whirl? I happen to be
knowing the paper, but I've been a part of it for
00:11:38
so long, I guess, it's like, "Duh, you've been
with the paper almost 60 years or 50 years and
00:11:45
you only 68 years old. So how much of a choice did
you have?" But once again, I stand on it, and I've
00:11:54
said that several times to several of our people
that always question that. But I'm very, very
00:12:00
loyal to it, and I'm very passionate about it.
Phoebe Judge: Whether or not you agree with
00:12:06
Anthony, The Evening Whirl is a piece of history.
It's being preserved at Washington University's
00:12:13
library in St. Louis. That was our last stop
for the day. The librarian who greeted us says
00:12:20
students come in every week to study the paper
and its representations of race, drugs, and guns.
00:12:27
And right now, there's a campus project
called "Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis." In spite of the salacious and often offensive
writing, some of the only surviving historical
00:12:39
documentation of gay African Americans
in St. Louis is in The Whirl. This says, "Lesbian mob queen faces the music."
Anthony Sanders: Where you see that? Oh,
00:12:49
up there?
Phoebe Judge: Can you just... "Lesbian mob queen faces music."
[Music fades out.]
00:12:53
Anthony Sanders: It says, "The entire city wanted
to look at the woman who smashed last week's
00:12:59
Whirl headline story. She so magnificently
conducted her stable of women in the Stroll
00:13:05
and the successful robber of a couple who was
passing through the Stroll area and thought
00:13:10
the girls were in trouble and stopped. But to
their sorrow, Diane, 26, taught her protegees
00:13:16
to hold onto their money when investigated
by police by inserting it in their vaginas.
00:13:25
And that is what they did."
[Music comes in.] Phoebe Judge: Oh, my gosh.
Anthony Sanders: Yeah.
00:13:29
Phoebe Judge: The Whirl has never
pretended to be something that it's not. In an edition from 1978, Ben Thomas wrote, "The
city wonders who it will be. Just take it easy.
00:13:40
You will see. Guns will roar and rip like hell,
and how The Evening Whirl will sell." Anthony
00:13:49
says that somewhere over the past 78 years, The
Whirl has become shorthand, a way of saying,
00:13:57
"Be good." So, when friends say goodbye they'll
joke, "Don't let me see you in The Whirl."
00:14:04
Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer,
Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Alice Wilder is our intern. Special
thanks to Russ Henry, Miranda Rectenwald,
00:14:28
and to the archives at Washington University
in St. Louis. Julienne Alexander makes original
00:14:35
illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You
can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we've
00:14:41
also got new T-shirt designs, including one with
the diver from the La Brea tar pits episode and
00:14:47
one that glows in the dark. We've also got magnets
and stickers and brand new Criminal tote bags.
00:14:52
Maybe these things would make nice holiday gifts.
Order now, and we'll ship them right away.
00:14:58
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North
Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member
00:15:05
of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best
shows around. Shows like The Heart, which just
00:15:12
won first prize at the Third Coast International
Audio Festival for their story about one woman's
00:15:18
experience with female genital mutilation. We'll
put a link to their story in our show notes. And
00:15:24
Radiotopia's flagship show 99% Invisible hosted
by Roman Mars. 99% Invisible is ostensibly a
00:15:33
show about design and architecture, but really
it's a show about who we are through the lens
00:15:38
of the things we build. It'll make you look at
everything around you in a new way. Go listen.
00:15:44
Radiotopia from PRX is supported by
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And thanks to Adzerk for providing their
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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [Music ends.]
Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.