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This is exactly right. Some far off concept. It's already here. Next starts now.
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Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. What's up, y'all? Summer's got a different tempo.
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Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another. You hear something, you stay a little longer.
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Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be. It's those in-between moments.
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Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn.
00:01:28
I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast,
00:01:33
Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available
00:01:41
on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
00:01:51
get your podcasts. My favorite murder Hello! And welcome to My Favorite Murder. That is Georgia Hardstark.
00:02:18
That is Karen Kilgara. We got a really good explanation from someone on Twitter about why people confuse our names.
00:02:26
Our names? Or our voices? Oh, like who's who? People believe that they misidentify the voice to the name.
00:02:32
I'd love to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not your cheekbones. It has nothing to do with anyone's appearance.
00:02:38
This is from Sydney Medlin on Twitter. She says, remixing up your voices. I've listened from the beginning and I mixed you up for the first 300 episodes.
00:02:48
And I couldn't figure out why. I finally realized it's because you introduce each other.
00:02:52
So Karen's voice says George's name and vice versa. It makes perfect sense. Now that Sydney says it.
00:02:59
Should we start introducing ourselves? That's a little like hoity-toity. I think we should change the entire format of the show.
00:03:06
I think it's time. That makes total sense. I hear that. Yeah. There's some logic.
00:03:11
Also, if you want to hear this. Yeah, always. This is from Rich, sundog925 on Twitter.
00:03:17
He says, Karen, a ski tip my aunt gave me one time was if you get caught in an avalanche
00:03:22
and get covered and disoriented, dig out your mouth and spit. Your spit will fall down due to
00:03:28
gravity and will help orient you. Brilliant. Brilliant. Right? Figure out what up is and
00:03:36
then dig that way. I feel like that's a good life lesson. Which way does the spit go? You know what
00:03:42
I mean? It always comes back to you. So true. This is so deep. Don't spit in the wind. Yep.
00:03:47
When it comes down to it, it just depends on where the spit's going. That's right.
00:03:52
It always will tell you where the spit lands. You're the one that has to generate your own spit.
00:03:58
That's right. So make sure you're hydrated. Another great lesson. And if you're not, grab some snow.
00:04:04
It's all around you. Wow, I really came out right out of the gate with like corrections, corners and commentary.
00:04:12
No, it was good because I had nothing. Not one thing? I don't know. What do you want?
00:04:17
I'd like one long story and two short ones. Okay. Oh, fuck. We watched this documentary.
00:04:26
Maybe one of the like hardest documentaries to watch I've ever seen. It's called Exposed the Ghost Train Fire.
00:04:33
Uh-oh. Did you know about the Ghost Train Fire? Because somehow when we went to fucking Australia and like, you know, we always look for local stories to do.
00:04:41
Creepy things. Yeah. It's the worst one I've ever heard. Oh, no. This Ghost Train fire in 1979 at the like Sydney Amusement Park, like old timey amusement park.
00:04:52
There was a fire that killed six people. And I had to fast forward through that part.
00:04:58
And like this really interesting flamboyant artist was like, I'm going to get to the bottom of this.
00:05:04
And so he died. And so one of the survivors of the fire, whose friends all died that night, he's making the documentary to like get to the bottom.
00:05:12
And it goes all the way to the fucking top. No. Of the Sydney like government, mafia.
00:05:21
What? It's bananas. That sounds incredible. It's on Netflix. Exposed the ghost train fire.
00:05:28
It was like Vince and I were on the edge of our seats, like didn't make plans because we wanted to stay home and watch it.
00:05:34
Canceled all plans through the weekend. Well, did we have any? I'm talking about going out to dinner.
00:05:40
Like we stayed home for dinner. Yeah, you decided to stay where you were and just eat from there.
00:05:45
Yeah, we gave that our HelloFresh subscription a workout that week. Okay I just actually writing that down because every time I go to turn on TV I just feel lost essentially So those ones are like it really nice when you sit down and actually you like oh I glad I watched that Not like you just scanning things all the time
00:06:05
Well, I don't know if you're going to be glad you watched it after you watched it.
00:06:08
I'm going to be left different than I was before having watched it. Yeah. The word I think is devastated, but yeah.
00:06:15
Yeah. What about you? Anything positive to watch after everyone's watched that? Yeah. Here's something super positive. Wait, hold on. I'm scrambling.
00:06:24
The Boy Scouts documentary? Oh my God. Is it the Anna Nicole Smith documentary? Like which one?
00:06:30
Someone said it was great. I bet. I mean, what a life. This is what I have. And it is positive.
00:06:36
Because as we all know, I'm addicted to TikTok. And there's so many wonderful things happening on TikTok right now.
00:06:42
But there is an account. The name of the account is Tuvok12. And it's a huge account.
00:06:47
I believe it's the guy. I'm assuming his name is Tuvok. But what these, it's a group of dudes who roll around a basketball hoop and they're in like, oftentimes on like New York city streets.
00:06:59
It's like six to eight guys rolling up this basketball hoop and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:07:03
And like cheering. And then they pass the basketball to a crowd member and people take a shot.
00:07:09
And then they basically do this super cut of all the people taking their shots and getting like a rating.
00:07:14
and the last person when they hit it these guys go because everyone's like oh and there's these big
00:07:21
reactions to every shot and then when the last person hits it everyone goes insane and like
00:07:25
basically picks them up in the air and like cheers like this guy on his way to work or this girl on
00:07:30
her way to the fucking you know exactly she they do it they fucking make it and suddenly their day
00:07:36
is made because it's random that's performance art i love that the greatest and it's like you
00:07:41
would you want to have it happen to you and you also want to be there when it happens to somebody
00:07:45
else like it's oh my god this looks like the most fun crazy thing it's like dudes bringing the most
00:07:50
fun part of sports right to you on the sidewalk it's great are they the same ones because i've
00:07:55
seen a similar thing where they they run up to the crowd roll out a red carpet and see if someone
00:08:00
fucking walks it i believe it's different because i've seen those guys too and that is my favorite
00:08:06
when suddenly someone like does a little turn is like yo walk your red carpet yeah that's like i've
00:08:11
been waiting my entire life to show off the model walk I learned at fucking, what was the old
00:08:17
modeling? Barbizon. Barbizon School of Modeling? Learn to be a model or just look like one.
00:08:21
They're like, here it is. Yes, I'm talking about myself. Yes, I went to John Robert Powers to learn
00:08:27
to be a model or just look like one. What do you feel like after your education at John Robert
00:08:31
Powers was the biggest piece of wisdom that you took home? Wash your face at night. Like wash your
00:08:38
makeup off at night. No, really. You're right. Because we had this like prim and proper lady
00:08:44
who is like the teacher, you know, and she was very into like fashion and makeup. And she like
00:08:49
gave us all a makeup lesson. And there was one girl who like never washed her makeup off ever.
00:08:54
She never washed her face. And she gave us a lecture so hard. You know, we were like 12 or
00:09:00
13 of like wash your face at night or you will be sorry for the rest of your life. Yeah. And she was
00:09:05
right. You know, I have to say, or I will confess that I was absolutely the kind of young 90s
00:09:12
riot girl rebel alcoholic. I rarely wash my face at all. Very much like, who cares, whatever.
00:09:20
But recently, because I am obsessed with TikTok, I have been exposed to Korean glass skin like
00:09:27
systems. Is that a double wash? What is the glass skin? Also, were you also wearing pancake makeup
00:09:32
at the time in the 90s. So it wasn't that you just weren't washing off your fucking basic powder.
00:09:37
We wore what was the studio fix, studio fix, Mac, Mac studio fix or the other guy.
00:09:43
And we wore just pan like pancake pancake makeup on. It was like powder and wax mixed together.
00:09:50
It was like you should absolutely wash it off the second you walked in your door.
00:09:55
Like it was not great for your skin. OK, what's glass skin? Yeah. So it's like, yeah, you're you're
00:10:00
supposed to wash, you have an oil cleanser, you have a water cleanser. So you double wash your
00:10:04
face and then you start putting on a series of toners and they each have a different value and
00:10:10
a different thing. You do some, you layer up some toners. I've seen people say you should do
00:10:14
seven layers of toner, which seems, it seems made up, but I absolutely have tried a ton of toners.
00:10:20
Then you go to your essence, then you go to your ampule, then you go to your serum. No joke. It's
00:10:27
like you're sitting there. I actually bought, I'm not kidding. I bought myself a hand fan
00:10:31
because you have to just sit there and wait for the layer to dry. So I'm like, this truly is
00:10:40
self-care as I hand fan myself. It's great. It's really fun. You have a glow happening right now.
00:10:47
Thank you. You have a glow. Do you have any makeup on or just the zoom filter? I do. Cause my skin was insanely red today. Earlier when we were on that FaceTime with
00:10:55
Danielle. I had a layer of oil on my shoes. She goes, can we just FaceTime? And I'm like,
00:11:00
well, I'd prefer not to because I like a two inch layer of just straight up oil on my face. So I
00:11:06
got rid of that. And, but it's very fun. I think people that are interested in beauty stuff know
00:11:12
that like Korean skincare has been the premium. Everyone knows that for a long time. Now there's
00:11:18
this accessibility of Korean people teaching you how to do it and what the value is. And you see it
00:11:24
Like within days or weeks, there's kids that have really bad acne and their skin not only clears up, but they get rid of the acne scarring and they get glass skin.
00:11:34
I need that. I think it's really compelling. And also you stick it on the back of your hands and then the back of your hands look really good.
00:11:40
And you're like, oh, this is working. Everything you do to your face, you should do the back of your hands.
00:11:44
And neck. Don't forget. And neck. Okay. Oh, I have actually, sorry. I have another corrections corner.
00:11:52
Okay. And this is for episode 402 when I covered the Claudette Colvin story On Facebook the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University left a comment for us Wow Correcting a few things in the research All
00:12:06
right. And I was like, oh no, God. What did I do? Okay, here's what they said. We're longtime fans
00:12:12
of the show and we're so excited to hear Karen sharing the story of Claudette Colvin. She was
00:12:17
certainly a trailblazer in the civil rights movement and we are committed to sharing her
00:12:20
story along with that of Mrs. Parks and the countless other men and women who made the
00:12:25
Montgomery bus boycott successful. We'd like to clarify just a couple of things though. And then
00:12:30
there's a smiley face. Oh, so gentle. So, so gentle. Number one, the bus boycott did not
00:12:36
immediately end with the Supreme Court's ruling. It lasted another month later and Montgomery's
00:12:42
black citizens finally returned to the buses on December 21st, 1956, 382 days after the boycott
00:12:49
started. That's a long time. Wow. And number two, while Rosa Parks was fully aware of the attempts
00:12:55
and plans for implementing a boycott, she was not planted on the bus to start a protest. She stated,
00:13:01
quote, I did not intend to get arrested. If I'd been paying attention, I wouldn't even have gotten
00:13:06
on that bus, end quote. And then it says in brackets, because she had a run in with that
00:13:11
same bus driver 12 years before. And then in parentheses, it says Rosa Parks, my story by
00:13:17
Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins. So they're basically attributing that piece of information to that book.
00:13:22
And then it goes on to say her arrest and the ensuing boycott was kind of a perfect storm of
00:13:27
events coming together. Also, Mrs. Parks was arrested and spent a few hours in the county jail,
00:13:32
was eventually allowed to make a phone call and was finally released when E.D. Nixon posted her
00:13:37
bail. We'd also like to give a shout out to the other ladies of Browder versus Gale who were also
00:13:42
arrested before Rosa Parks, including Aurelia Browder, age 39 at her arrest, Mary Louise Smith,
00:13:49
age 18 at her arrest, and Susie McDonald, age 77. Hey, girl. I love it. Right? What a range. That's
00:13:57
amazing. And then it just says, great job. That is so nice of them. Thank you so much for that
00:14:02
lovely update. And that's a real honor to get that information from them. Thank you, guys.
00:14:08
Definitely. Incredible. That's incredible. Thank you so much. We love to hear that stuff.
00:14:13
And we love to learn. Never stop learning. We have no choice on this podcast. We have to learn.
00:14:19
Wash your face, put on sunscreen, never stop learning. Seven layers of toner. Never stop learning.
00:14:24
That's right. Well, should we do Exactly Right Corner? Yep. All right. We have a podcast network called Exactly Right Media.
00:14:32
It's our five-year anniversary. Yeah. Five years ago this week, we launched that podcast network,
00:14:37
which is now home to more than 15 shows with all our favorite podcasters. And we also have a staff of 35 producers and other professionals who work on all aspects of the network.
00:14:49
So we are so proud of that. We are business ladies now. It's wild. Five years. That's crazy.
00:14:56
Yeah. This network has been through high school and is now in her first year of junior college.
00:15:01
Oh, I'm so proud of her. Yeah. Okay. So what's happening this week on Exactly Right?
00:15:05
Well, over at I Saw What You Did with Millie DeCerico and Danielle Henderson. They have a new episode every Tuesday with a different double feature.
00:15:12
And this week they're getting freaky with the movie Seven. I love that movie. From 1995.
00:15:18
And No Country for Old Men from 2007. Wow, those are strong contenders. And on Do You Need a Ride?
00:15:25
A podcast that actually precedes the Exactly Right Network. Can you believe it? It's so old.
00:15:30
Chris Fairbanks and our friend Karen Kilgareff are joined by comedian Brandi Posey, a best friend of the network and the co-host of the podcast Lady to Lady on Exactly Right.
00:15:41
This episode is so much fun. It's going to be a two-parter because of that. You can't fit all the fun into one episode.
00:15:46
It has to be two. I feel like Brandi Posey, when she's on Dooney Ride, it's actually the ideal of the version of that show because it really is just three people in a car hanging out together.
00:15:56
There's nothing put on about it. They're just as like blabbing as you drive around town.
00:16:01
Yeah. Trying to make each other laugh. Yeah. Very authentic. Oh, and speaking of Lady to Lady, comedian Leah Rudnick is Bab, Tess, and Brandy's guest
00:16:09
this week on Lady to Lady. She does hilarious impressions on TikTok. And this week, she's also on Bananas with Kurt and Scotty.
00:16:17
And on Parent Footprint with my lovely cousin, Dr. Dan, he chats with Kelly Corrigan, host
00:16:23
of Tell Me More on PBS and the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast. big time, big name. It's going to be a great episode. So make sure you check out Parent
00:16:32
Footprint. Also, we are fast approaching the deadline to order merch in time for holiday
00:16:37
delivery. So head over to myfavoritemeritor.com and click shop and you can get all of your holiday
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presents and get them on time. I also personally recommend adding the new cream SSD GM sweatshirt
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and dad style hat to your cart. Yeah. Dad hats are all the rage. Get a sweatshirt and a hat and now you're in disguise.
00:16:59
Courtesy of my favorite murder. Thank you. For all your stalking needs. Stalking.
00:17:04
Or stalking. Or stalking. Right? Yeah. Could go either way. It's a double entendre.
00:17:09
No, it's not. It is, actually. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:17:21
This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter. the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary,
00:17:30
massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth.
00:17:38
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat
00:17:42
and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?
00:17:48
And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust,
00:17:53
the author and the listener. have in telling this story if I don go through it But there places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic That great
00:18:05
Because it served the story. People will say, like, oh, my God, I cried at the end.
00:18:09
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club
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and start owning. That's redfin.com. I'm first. I'm just going to tell you what the story is and then get into it and we can talk
00:20:27
more about it. I avoid so much sports stuff that I didn't know about this. So I don't know if you
00:20:33
do either. You might. Vince knew all about it. Now I know all about it and everyone should know
00:20:38
about it. This is the story of the famed boxer, Sonny Liston. Oh, I know a little bit about it,
00:20:44
but not that much. You know, that famous photo of Muhammad Ali standing over his opponent on the
00:20:49
ground. That's Sonny Liston on the ground. Yeah. Okay. So we're starting in early January 1971.
00:20:56
Geraldine Liston returns to her Las Vegas home that she shares with her husband, a famous boxer
00:21:01
and former heavyweight champion named Sonny Liston. She's been away for a few days visiting
00:21:06
family, but she could tell when she walks in the door that something is wrong by the smell.
00:21:11
And very soon she discovers her husband's body in their bedroom. He's been dead for about a week.
00:21:17
The medical examiner will say that Sonny died of natural causes, but many people will be skeptical about this.
00:21:23
And there are dozens of theories about what may have happened to him. In a documentary made at the end of the Clinton administration about him, legendary sports reporter Jerry Eisenberg says, quote,
00:21:34
There are more theories about what killed Sonny Liston, who killed Sonny Liston, why he was killed, whether it was a natural death, whether he was a drug addict, whether he just died.
00:21:43
There are more theories about that than there are about how many female visitors there were to the Oval Office in the recent White House.
00:21:50
End quote. So. Wow. So this story is a bit about those theories and Sonny's death, but it's also about the way he was treated in life.
00:21:59
Sonny was a black man who grew up under the most desperate of circumstances, and then he was never really given a chance at any point after that.
00:22:07
He made mistakes, but he was also mistreated by his father, mistreated by his managers, and mistreated by the press.
00:22:13
And the main sources for this story are a documentary called Pariah, The Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston, which I just watched over the weekend.
00:22:20
It was great. And a book called Sonny Liston, The Champ Nobody Wanted by A.S. Doc Young.
00:22:27
And the rest of the sources can be found on our show notes. So Charles Liston, who goes by Sonny, is born sometime around 1930 in Arkansas.
00:22:36
he grows up never knowing his exact birthday and this is just emblematic of his difficult childhood
00:22:43
like he was the second youngest of are you ready for this 25 children no it was from two marriages
00:22:52
but it was still 25 children well yeah 25 children is like that just goes to show it was bottom of
00:22:58
the barrel in terms of attention care direct and help i mean like yeah like by the time he came
00:23:05
along, it was just like another mouth to feed. I was the second of two and it was like you.
00:23:11
Exactly. 12 of the children are his full siblings and 12 of the half siblings are from his father's
00:23:17
previous marriage. But by the time he comes around, I mean, shit's already hard and then
00:23:21
it's another mouth to feed. So he doesn't even know his birth date, which I think says a lot.
00:23:25
The family lives also in Jim Crow era, Arkansas, and Sonny's father is a sharecropper,
00:23:30
meaning he farms on a land owned by someone else and then gives a person who owns it a
00:23:35
percentage of what he grows. But Sonny's father is actually subletting the land from another
00:23:40
sharecropper. So he gets even less of what he would already have made. They are extremely poor.
00:23:46
Sonny has essentially no formal education. By the time he's eight years old, he's working full time
00:23:51
in the fields. Eight years old. Some reporters tell a story saying that when the family mule dies,
00:23:58
Sonny, it basically becomes his... job to pull the plow. His father is abusive and, you know, whips him and he won't learn to read or
00:24:06
write until much later when he's an adult. So it is a hard childhood, a hard life right from the
00:24:12
start. About his childhood, Sonny says, quote, I never had the opportunity to attend school more
00:24:17
than two months in succession. I had to help out around the little plot of ground we grew cotton on,
00:24:23
end quote. So Sonny is beaten pretty much every day. In 1942, when Sonny is about 12,
00:24:29
his mother leaves the family and moves to St. Louis to find work in a shoe factory.
00:24:34
And so shortly after she leaves, Sonny makes his way to St. Louis, like hitchhiking to live with
00:24:39
her. She's like gets out of there. Sonny's mother enrolls him in school, but Sonny doesn't take to
00:24:44
it. And after 12 years of a complete lack of formal education, it's too much for him. He's also
00:24:50
physically large already as a young child. He looks like a man. So the other kids make fun of
00:24:56
him, especially because he has several grades behind them. So he's even larger, you know,
00:25:00
bigger than the little kids there. So it's hard for him. He leaves school. And fairly quickly in
00:25:05
St. Louis, he falls in with a bad crowd in his poor neighborhood. He starts committing thefts,
00:25:10
which is kind of the only way a lot of them can make money. When he's around 18 years old,
00:25:15
he's given a five-year prison sentence for robbing a gas station. He serves a sentence
00:25:19
at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. This prison has been referred to as,
00:25:26
quote, the bloodiest 47 acres in America. Oh, God. Due to the rampant, unchecked fighting and
00:25:33
assaults. And it's so bad that some of the prison guards just like won't even go in certain sections
00:25:37
of the area because horrible. They're afraid for their lives. So you can imagine what it's like to
00:25:42
be a prisoner. In this brutal atmosphere, it becomes clear that Sonny is not someone you want
00:25:48
to get in a fight with. Besides being a big guy, he's very strong. And a prison chaplain notices
00:25:54
this and wanting to help Sonny, he enrolls him in the prison's boxing program. And soon it's
00:26:00
planned to see that Sonny has potential to box professionally, which is like a way out of his
00:26:05
poverty, you know, could be a huge opportunity for him. He'll start his fight slowly, but he can take
00:26:10
a punch. In fact, he can take many, many punches. And once he lands a punch on his opponent,
00:26:17
it's lights out. And his jab, I mean, he has like the largest reach in his punch of anyone ever.
00:26:24
If you can imagine that. Like he doesn't need to get close to you to fucking knock you out.
00:26:27
Right. But documentary is great because you see so many of his fights and you're like,
00:26:31
oh, wow. So a local professional is brought in to the prison to test Sunny's abilities.
00:26:37
Sonny wins in two rounds and the professional boxer calls it quits and says, I don't want no more of him.
00:26:44
End quote. Like the professional's over this shit. Yeah. I'm going to get my ass beat.
00:26:48
The professional's manager, a man named Jerry Mitchell, offers to manage Sonny. And somehow Mitchell and the prison priest pull strings and get him paroled in 1953 when he's about 23 years old.
00:27:00
So in the same year he's paroled, he wins five amateur titles. He has to start in the amateurs, even though he's like so good because he needs to like build up a name for himself.
00:27:08
Yeah. Sonny's first professional fight is in September of that same year. It's supposed to last four rounds, but it only lasts seconds.
00:27:17
He knocks out his opponent with his first punch in the first round. Like this guy is good.
00:27:24
Sorry, but that must have been really satisfying to see because it would be like, ding, it's over.
00:27:29
Walk away. Yeah. Do you want to know a little bit about boxing in general? Because I didn't know anything about it.
00:27:35
Absolutely. I only know a little bit about it because of my father and because of my friend, Kevin
00:27:41
Sasha, who's obsessed with boxing. Oh. Listening to other people talk about it who really love it and kind of defend it or say
00:27:47
there's more to it than you understand kind of thing. I feel like I have a little bit of appreciation.
00:27:53
It sounds like professional wrestling in my house. Yeah. Same thing. You know, like I could talk about it now.
00:27:57
So boxing, and thank you to Allie, my researcher, she was like, I don't know if you want to read
00:28:03
this, but maybe you need some information about boxing. I don't know if you know anything. And I'm
00:28:07
like, thank you. I know nothing. Turns out boxing is our nation's oldest spectator sport that
00:28:12
continues to operate. Nice. And the way it's organized is antiquated and confusing. There's
00:28:17
no one organization that governs all of professional boxing the way we have like the NFL for football
00:28:23
and the MLB for baseball. Like that's not a thing. Instead, there are several sanctioning bodies and
00:28:29
these organizations supervise individual fights and titles, but don't really regulate the athletes
00:28:35
or managers. And the boxers can bounce between fights organized by any of these organizations.
00:28:40
So it's kind of like a free for all. It seems like it's by territory. The amateur boxing circuit
00:28:45
doesn't have a clear pathway to the professional circuit and amateur boxing and professional boxing
00:28:51
actually have different rules. You pretty much box as an amateur until a professional agrees to
00:28:56
fight you. So it's not like they pair people up, but it's like that. Boxers' managers negotiate and
00:29:03
set up fights between their athletes. And this is one reason why the sport is notorious for being
00:29:08
corrupt. So professional boxers fight for a prearranged amount of money, split between the
00:29:14
winner and the loser based on however the managers negotiate the prize. So it's just kind of all over
00:29:18
the place. And this is another reason why the sport is notorious for being corrupt is because
00:29:23
the money is up to the managers. Title fights are kind of arbitrary. Anyone can challenge the current
00:29:29
title holder. So if you're like the heavyweight champion and I show up and I'm like, well, I want
00:29:33
to fight you and become the heavyweight champion. I mean, you shouldn't fight me. He has to fight you.
00:29:39
No, he can agree to fight me. It just takes like basically an invitation. Yes. It's not like the
00:29:45
challenger has to beat every other professional boxer in his weight class to then challenge the
00:29:49
title holder. So this is so anyone could come up and do it. But generally, a challenger does emerge
00:29:54
after winning other fights And because different sanctioning bodies have their own titles there are actually multiple heavyweight champion titles And the way a boxer is seen as the real champion is if he has multiple
00:30:07
titles or the more prestigious titles. Basically, the thing to keep in mind is that the organizations
00:30:12
who give out the titles don't oversee the athletes and who fights whom is up to the managers and to
00:30:18
some extent the boxers too. Boom. Boxing in a nutshell on a true crime podcast. What more do
00:30:25
you need? It's all happening here. Never stop learning. Add that to your cocktail repertoire.
00:30:34
As part of Sonny's parole, he also has a job at a St. Louis construction company,
00:30:39
which in the 50s, a construction company in a big city. What does that mean? The mafia.
00:30:45
There you go. The construction company is managed by a man named Johnny Vitale. I mean, has there ever been a more mafia name than that?
00:30:54
I think there was a Johnny Vitale in my third grade class. That's such a classic name.
00:30:58
Was he a maid kid? He was maid. He drove to school backwards. It's clear pretty quickly that, well, Jerry Mitchell is Sonny's manager on paper.
00:31:11
Several mobsters are actually in control of his contract. This is fairly common at the time.
00:31:15
This also means that when Sonny is not fighting, he is kind of an enforcer on mob business.
00:31:22
He's a big, intimidating guy. He kind of is sent to beat people up when they owe money.
00:31:27
He's that guy for the people he works for. So he gets out and he's like, you know, doing this cool, respectable job boxing.
00:31:36
But he's also having to do this stuff in the back. You know, it's like it's a trade off.
00:31:41
Right. Sonny continues to have frequent run-ins with law enforcement in St. Louis.
00:31:45
One night in 1956, there's like an argument with a police officer over a parking ticket or a legally parked cab waiting to...
00:31:54
Something happens. And there are many accounts of what happens, but basically the officer goes to pull out his gun.
00:32:01
Sonny is able to get a hold of his gun and beats the cop up and runs off. Yeah. Yeah, you're not allowed to do that.
00:32:10
No. No. So he gets arrested. And before his trial, police target him relentlessly. Like the cops
00:32:16
know him and dislike him in St. Louis. He's harassed every day. He's arrested as many as
00:32:20
50 times. They just won't leave him alone. And once he's tried, he's sentenced to only nine
00:32:26
months in prison for grabbing the gun and beating up the cop, which is like it's 1956 St. Louis.
00:32:32
So it's not a long time. Some people think that the short sentence is because of Sonny's mob
00:32:37
connections. And once he's released St. Louis police, make it clear to Sonny and his handlers
00:32:42
that he is no longer welcome in the city. Like he better get out or something bad's going to happen
00:32:45
to him. So Sonny's contract is sold to another mob connected manager, boxing manager in Philadelphia.
00:32:52
So Sonny moves to Philadelphia. He marries Geraldine in 1957. And in the documentary and
00:33:00
the photos of them videos, it's clear they have a very loving relationship. She supports him.
00:33:05
She loves him. And she's the one who finally teaches Sonny how to read and write.
00:33:11
A friend of Sonny's named Willie Reddish Jr. says, quote, she was his blanket, I'll say.
00:33:16
She covered him and protected him and kept him warm. So he finally like finds love.
00:33:22
That's lovely. Yeah, it's very sweet. So between 1956 and 1962, Sonny's management changed his hands multiple times.
00:33:31
It's all under the table, all connected to the mafia. And basically it's impossible to accurately track.
00:33:37
By this point, Sonny has beaten nearly every other major professional heavyweight boxer.
00:33:42
Like there's, he's just like knocking them down. There's nobody in his way. In boxing matches, the managers and the press create a narrative around the matchup.
00:33:51
This is like what they always do. Same thing with today. Same thing with professional wrestling.
00:33:55
There's a good guy. There's a bad guy. In Sonny's case, he's always cast as the bad guy.
00:34:00
He's reported on relentlessly and always in a negative light. You know, he has this like great scowl that's so intimidating to his rivals, but they take
00:34:08
that as him being the bad guy. And they also know that, you know, he's, quote, the black guy who beat up a white cop.
00:34:14
So in 1950s. That's like the scariest thing that the white kind of culture can imagine is like, oh, no,
00:34:20
a violent, like, right, big black guy that can knock people out in one punch. Totally.
00:34:26
So he is the bad guy. He's called, you know, things like Savage and other racist names.
00:34:32
When he comes into the ring, he's always booed because of this villain character he's been cast as.
00:34:37
And New York State won't sanction any fights he's in. They're like, ban him. So this does get to Sonny.
00:34:43
He's not perfect. He's been involved in violent crimes. But boxing should have been his opportunity to move to a better life, to get some respect.
00:34:51
But because he was contracted to criminals from the beginning, it never really becomes that opportunity for him.
00:34:57
Yeah. Sonny wants to be seen as a person, as a force. And his Philadelphia neighbors say that in person, he's polite and warm. He likes kids and he wants the opportunities to volunteer and mentor them like other athletes do. But no one would ever let him do that because of his reputation. His niece says, quote, Uncle Charles, that's what he was called by this family, was really a soft and gentle person. Seriously. I think at some point they called him the bear, but he was never like that with me. End quote.
00:35:26
So in 1962, boxing's heavyweight champion is a man named Floyd Patterson. Again, there's no organized system in boxing that would necessitate Sonny fighting Floyd.
00:35:37
But in 1962, Sonny has beaten pretty much every other high profile heavyweight. And there's no one else to fight, essentially.
00:35:46
So there should be a title fight between him and Floyd. So Floyd is also Black. But unlike Sonny he is a black celebrity with whom white people can find palatable You know he smiling all the time He cute He like digestible for this racist white world Yeah He also had a troubled childhood in New York
00:36:07
but he was sent to a reform school as a teenager where he got his start in boxing and was given
00:36:12
chances that didn't involve having to be a mob enforcer. So he's a poster child of the civil
00:36:19
rights movement whose strategy revolves around nonviolence and a clean cut professional image.
00:36:24
you know, you have to somehow ingratiate yourself. And that's what he was able to do.
00:36:29
So there's a lot of pressure on Floyd not to fight Sonny because of his reputation. Sonny wasn't part
00:36:36
of the civil rights movement at all. In fact, he had said derogatory things about it. So there was
00:36:42
like this really bad reputation for Sonny. And John F. Kennedy himself tells Floyd not to fight
00:36:47
Sonny. Like it'll tarnish your reputation kind of thing, or like don't give him the opportunity.
00:36:52
Right. He's invited to the White House. He is kind of this more like press friendly boxer.
00:36:58
Yeah. So this is also very convenient because Floyd's manager, whose name is Cuz D'Amato,
00:37:04
is sure that Floyd can't win against Sonny. So they're saying it's because of these things,
00:37:08
but really it's like everyone's kind of scared of Sonny winning. Eventually, though, Floyd either
00:37:13
has to legitimately protect his title or he has to lose it. So he has to agree to fight Sonny,
00:37:17
saying, quote, I think he has every right to fight for the championship, despite his
00:37:21
unfortunate background. So he's like the nice guy. It sucks so bad. Just like that idea of like,
00:37:27
well, you're going to be the villain because you grew up rough. Like we've all decided you're just
00:37:32
a bad person. Right. It's like you had no choice but to join up with the mob or go back to the
00:37:38
streets. So. Right. So the fight happens in September of 1962 in Chicago, which by the way,
00:37:45
my grandpa was a boxer in Chicago. Oh, way back in the day. I wonder if he was, I should ask my dad about it.
00:37:52
Yeah. I'm sure he was not on this level. He was like a lightweight. But he might've been in the crowd.
00:37:57
He might've been in the crowd. He could have been friends with everybody. Sure. Best friends,
00:38:01
even. It's a huge deal, this fight, because it's boxing's golden boy against its fucking villain.
00:38:08
And as usual, Sonny walks into the ring to loud boos from the audience. The fight lasts two minutes
00:38:14
and six seconds. Sonny knocks Floyd out in the first round and the audience is eerily silent
00:38:22
when it happens. There's no applause. There's no cheering on the like legit champion, you know,
00:38:28
like what a bummer. Like I fought my way to the top. I finally got this opportunity
00:38:31
and I'm not getting any accolades for it, even though I'm like the villain. It's still,
00:38:35
I still won. Yeah. And when Sonny arrives back home in Philadelphia, he expects a crowd of people
00:38:40
to be waiting for him at the airport. He's the champion. He's bringing home that heavyweight.
00:38:44
championship, this would be normal for the return of a new heavyweight champion.
00:38:49
There would be a parade, all this press. Instead, there's a smattering of reporters and no other
00:38:55
fanfare. Sonny's friends and family say this totally deflates him. It's heartbreaking. I hate
00:39:01
it. He wanted this reputation as like the champion. He's worked hard. It's one thing to be like, oh,
00:39:06
you're the villain. But it's like, if you win, you win. I mean, like, that's it's so awful. And
00:39:12
just to think of that person being like, oh, oh, no, no parade, no nothing. And they do some really
00:39:19
good reenactments in this documentary. And there's a scene of that. It's just like heartbreaking.
00:39:24
Sonny's friends and families say this totally deflates him. And in the weeks and months after
00:39:29
the fight, Philadelphia police continue to arrest Sonny and on one occasion arrest him while he's
00:39:35
signing autographs outside a drugstore. The press continues to report on him using words like
00:39:40
Savage and Jailbird. So about a year later, Sonny and Floyd have a rematch. This lasts
00:39:46
four seconds longer than the first fight. Sonny wins again, but one major event happens after the
00:39:54
fight when the ring is full of press and officials after he's like, you know, getting his fist pumped,
00:39:59
whatever that's called. We are the champion fist pump. A 21-year-old heavyweight, I know a lot about
00:40:05
boxing. A 21 year old heavyweight contender named Cassius Clay jumps in the ring, just like jumps in
00:40:13
calling the fight quote, a disgrace and challenges Sonny to his face. Oh shit. That's really how it, that's how they did it.
00:40:22
I don't think this was normal. I think some people were like, this is rude. This kid,
00:40:27
a lot of people didn't know, did have like run his mouth and talk a lot of shit. And of course,
00:40:33
we're talking not about Cassius Clay, he will later become known as Muhammad Ali.
00:40:39
Right. So at the time, he's not Muhammad Ali just yet, but by the time they fight, he is.
00:40:43
So I'm going to start calling him Muhammad Ali here. This is like a lot of shit I didn't know about either about the nation of Islam.
00:40:50
So if there's one boxer that white people hate more than Sonny Liston, it's actually
00:40:56
Muhammad Ali, this plucky 21-year-old kid. While Floyd Patterson was sanctioned by the civil rights movement,
00:41:02
Muhammad Ali is a member of the Nation of Islam and a close friend of Malcolm X.
00:41:08
And he flaunts this fact, you know, because Black people have been violently oppressed
00:41:13
in America for centuries, Malcolm X and his followers reject the idea that Black liberation
00:41:18
must be achieved without any violence. And this, of course, terrifies white people.
00:41:23
Yeah. Besides his ties to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali is famously boastful.
00:41:29
And this is unacceptable to white people who expect black athletes to act non-threatening and deferential.
00:41:36
Like they need them served in the way that's palatable to them. And Sonny and Muhammad Ali like refused to do that.
00:41:43
And thank God they did. Because the idea that anybody would listen to that bullshit and then we wouldn't have like float like a butterfly sting like a bee.
00:41:51
Like all the drama and all the personality and authenticity that Muhammad Ali brought to boxing and made it like this sexy exciting what the hell is going to happen kind of thing Like thank God that it was like who cares what you think I doing it
00:42:06
my way. Like you can have equal rights, but you have to still be subservient. That's not equal
00:42:09
rights. No. Well, and also it's the white framework. It's saying we make this demand and then you have
00:42:15
to answer to it. It's like, no, you don't. You don't have to listen to any of that shit. Totally.
00:42:19
And the boasting is actually part of Ali's technique. He talks up his own abilities.
00:42:25
He plays mind games with his opponents. The same way Sonny did that scowl. Ali was super boastful.
00:42:31
In the lead up to his fight with Sonny, Ali actually shows up outside of Sonny's house
00:42:36
at night in the middle of the night, blows an air horn and like trash talks to his house,
00:42:41
which is like, I don't think that's a very sportsman like, but I am not a sports person.
00:42:47
He's getting creative. Yeah. So the fight takes place on February 25th, 1964 in Miami.
00:42:53
For the first time in his career, Sonny is cast as the good guy. People cheer for him instead of Ali.
00:43:01
He is also heavily favored to win the match. Sonny is bigger than Muhammad Ali and has made quick work with every other heavyweight.
00:43:09
There's this new kid. Sonny is going to win like he always does is the idea. What nobody accounts for is Ali's speed.
00:43:17
Sunny simply can't catch him to land a punch. You've seen him fight. He's like all over the place.
00:43:22
Yeah. Ali, on the other hand, is able to land punches. Still, there's no knockout.
00:43:27
The two fight for six rounds until Sunny refuses to keep fighting in the seventh round.
00:43:32
They go to sit down in their corners and Sunny just refuses to get up, which many people find baffling and suspicious because he, of course, has been exhausted.
00:43:44
He's taken punches. He's been hurt. But everyone is surprised that Sonny just like won't go back out for another round and like get knocked out, which is the way I think that these things are supposed to end.
00:43:54
Right. Like that is the like sportsman way to do it or something like in chess. I don't know.
00:43:59
It's like maybe he was exhausted, but usually if no one gets knocked out, then you just have to wait for the score and the judgment at the end.
00:44:07
So you have to do all nine rounds, right? Ten rounds, nine rounds. Probably. I'm saying whatever number, but you have to go to the end.
00:44:16
Exactly. You have to go till the bell rings. Exactly. There's a way it's supposed to end.
00:44:21
Right. And this is not one of them. And so Ali does win because of this. And some people speculate
00:44:28
that because of the odds favored Sonny so heavily and because he was always under the thumb of the
00:44:33
mob, this fight may have been fixed. He threw it. He threw it is what people think.
00:44:39
Wait, I'm looking up how many rounds I just have to because now it's driving me crazy.
00:44:46
it's 15 rounds. That's too many. Where did I get nine? Cause that's enough. Can you imagine having
00:44:53
to fucking stand up and go fight people for 15 rounds and it's three minute rounds? Oh, that's it.
00:45:00
So exhausting. Let's just shorten it guys. Let's do two rounds of seven and a half minutes.
00:45:08
And then, and no hitting anyone's stomach. Exactly. Nobody makes it too hard. Yeah. So
00:45:14
So the people who would have bet on Muhammad Ali because he was not supposed to win would
00:45:19
have made a shit ton of money. That's how betting works, everyone. But things get even more confusing when Sonny and Ali have a rematch in November.
00:45:27
The fight is originally supposed to take place in Boston. The Kennedy family is like, hell no, get out of our city.
00:45:33
Snobs. Yeah, because of the reputations. So it's moved to rural Maine. So I'm sure this town in rural Maine is like, hell yeah.
00:45:41
yeah nothing happens here in rural Maine so this rematch is even more puzzling and to some
00:45:47
even more suspicious than the first fight halfway through the first round Ali jabs Sonny and it's
00:45:54
difficult to see from the camera angle and it's difficult to see in person in the audience but it
00:46:00
doesn't look like Sonny has been hit that hard and there's a video of it I mean a fucking punch
00:46:05
from Muhammad Ali is a punch from Muhammad Ali it's a punch it looks hard to me and apparently
00:46:10
he would do this punch where he then twist. It's like a, almost like a martial arts move.
00:46:15
So it's like just double downs that, you know, and so, so Sonny stumbles, he falls
00:46:21
from that one punch. He tries to get up again and stumbles. And so that's the picture where Ali is
00:46:28
standing over him and he looks like he's yelling at him. He's yelling at him to get back up
00:46:33
because he's like, nobody's going to believe this. He knows that that punch he just delivered
00:46:39
either didn't look like or was not enough to actually knock Sonny out. And so because that first fight was already like suspicious that he threw it,
00:46:47
it looks to everyone like he threw this one again. So it's like Muhammad Ali was actually kind of yelling, like, get up, don't cheat.
00:46:54
Like, actually have this fight with me. He says, quote, nobody will believe this.
00:46:58
Yeah, get up. No one's going to believe this. So eventually Sonny does get back up.
00:47:03
The fight resumes and then the referee is informed that Sonny had actually been counted
00:47:06
out on the ground. So the fight's over. So that one ends again in a like weird way that nobody is happy with.
00:47:14
Wow. There's also rumors that Sonny would put the stuff in his glove that would blind his opponent,
00:47:19
like some ointment or something. And there is video footage of Muhammad Ali from that fight.
00:47:24
Like, I can't see anything. His eyes are watering. He's like sitting in the corner tearing up and they're trying to wipe his eyes out.
00:47:30
So that's a possibility as well. That'd be very upsetting if you were having to box someone and you couldn't see.
00:47:36
You had to do it purely by instinct. Whoever you were fighting, you could literally be fighting a
00:47:42
third grader, but if you're doing it blind, that's very difficult. Definitely. So everyone is like,
00:47:48
did he throw it? It's really suspicious. His reputation is just as bad, if not worse than
00:47:54
it was before because of this. And he lost to Muhammad Ali. Like he finally lost.
00:48:00
a fight. He's not the best anymore, you know, according to that. So Sonny, Geraldine and their
00:48:05
two children, they move to Las Vegas. And here Sonny actually finds some degree of peace. He's
00:48:12
not bothered by the police officers or dogged by the press because much of Las Vegas is entirely
00:48:18
run by the mob. Yeah. So no one's like messing with him anymore. He moves into a really nice
00:48:23
house in a nice neighborhood. But the problem is that Sonny doesn't have that much money because
00:48:28
so many people were taking cuts of all the boxing prizes he's won that he doesn't really have
00:48:33
anything saved. You know what I mean? Like he's not in charge at all. He gets a cut of his own
00:48:39
life. When you work for the mafia, you're not like, hey, can I see the breakdown on that last
00:48:43
check you sent me? You're just like, thank you. Appreciate it. You're not getting 50 50.
00:48:48
You're not. And he still has to get involved in mob business and he still has to take more fights
00:48:53
between 1964 and 1970, even though he's in his late 30s at this point. So like he
00:48:58
doesn't have a savings that he can rely on. He still has to do this stuff. In Las Vegas, Sonny is closely connected to a mob figure named Ash Resnick, who had become one of
00:49:07
his later managers. And Resnick has attracted attention from the FBI, who think he might be
00:49:12
the clear connection point between the mob and boxing, which they're always trying to take down.
00:49:17
You know, those FBI people, they hate it. They hate crime and the specific kinds of crime.
00:49:23
Totally. So Sonny winds up working as an enforcer for Resnick, but also on the side becomes involved
00:49:31
in dealing heroin. Oh. Friends say he would never actually use the drug because he's,
00:49:36
you know, terrified of needles, but he does start drinking very heavily and hanging out in the bad neighborhood. In Las Vegas? Yeah. Caesars?
00:49:46
in 1970 Sonny is now about 40 he has one more fight against a man named Chuck Wepner and Wepner
00:49:54
and Sonny hit each other so hard that they each get cuts on their faces the whole thing is a bloody
00:50:00
mess but Sonny actually wins in the end so anyone betting against him would have lost a lot of money
00:50:05
I think this was another thing that they thought was fixed that Sonny was supposed to beat Wepner
00:50:10
but in the documentary it's like there was never a chance for him to go down in a way that made it
00:50:16
look like it wasn't fixed. If you're not actually getting beat by someone, you can't just fall.
00:50:21
Yeah. Right. And so he was like, there's nothing I could do about it. So the mob is pissed about
00:50:26
that too, because people lose a shit ton of money on that fight. Here's the thing. Why does mob keep
00:50:31
setting up fights for Sonny Liston supposed to lose when he's huge and good at boxing and has
00:50:36
an insane reach? That's exactly why. Because no one's going to make a ton of money on Sonny winning.
00:50:42
Oh, that's true. Because everyone's betting on him winning. That's gambling. Yeah. Yeah. That's the whole idea.
00:50:52
Wait, how does gambling work though? You mean odds? Like you mean the odds would be really,
00:50:56
really against him going down? Girl, before I saw this documentary, I would have said the same fucking thing. So
00:51:02
no shame here. So at the end of 1970, as we said, Geraldine goes back home to visit her family.
00:51:11
Sunny stays behind in Las Vegas. When she returns on January 7th, she walks in the house.
00:51:17
There's a smell. She says, quote, I walked in and the house was smelling really bad.
00:51:21
I think Sunny must have been cooking something and let something spoil. My bedroom was the first bedroom and he was laying there, end quote.
00:51:29
When Geraldine finds Sunny, he's been dead for about five days. Tragically, their young son Daniel is with her at the time.
00:51:36
So just so tragic. When police arrive at the scene, there's no sign of a struggle. There are no signs of wounds on Sonny's body. There are, however, needle marks and heroin in his system. And this is confusing because he doesn't like needles. But, you know, he was involved in heroin dealing. So, right. Some people assume he was doing heroin.
00:51:59
People are skeptical of Geraldine herself because she came home around nine and didn't call the police until like midnight.
00:52:06
So they think maybe she was cleaning up drugs that were around the house or, you know, stuff that would make him look bad.
00:52:13
But she says this isn't true at all. So the medical examiner rules that the death is of natural causes, which isn't even right with what they found.
00:52:25
You know what I mean? Right. Doesn't make any sense. it's unclear why it's not even ruled as like an accidental overdose. So that doesn't make any
00:52:32
sense. Many people believe that Sonny was actually murdered, but no one particular theory has a lot
00:52:37
of evidence to back it up. It's more that the circumstances of Sonny's life and death point
00:52:42
to all sorts of reasons why someone might've wanted to kill him. Unfortunately, there's a lot
00:52:46
of suspects. One theory is that Sonny was supposed to intentionally lose that last fight and that his
00:52:53
mafia bosses had lost a lot of money. Some people believe he was killed in revenge for not throwing
00:52:58
that fight or any number of other reasons tied to his mafia involvement. So that's pretty good
00:53:04
theory in my mind. Yeah. If he didn't do heroin and he died of a heroin overdose. It's the perfect
00:53:09
cover. Exactly. If he was dealing it, didn't do it, then it's almost like they've forced him to
00:53:15
deal it or whatever. It's like he's in with the bad guys. This is what happens. It's like the old
00:53:20
saying of like, if you don't want a haircut, don't hang around the barbershop. You can't be messing
00:53:25
with stuff going, oh, I don't do these drugs because eventually you'll either start to do them
00:53:29
or people will think you're on them. Right. So the idea I think is that he was incapacitated and
00:53:34
someone shot him up with an overdose of heroin. Which then like societally it's like, oh, then
00:53:40
if you're on drugs, then you whatever. Right. Or bad heroin. They didn't test the heroin that they
00:53:45
did find there. Another theory relates to one of the heroin dealers Sunny had been spending time
00:53:50
with just a few weeks before his death that dealer had been arrested in a huge bust Sonny had been there during the bust but it seems like the cops like knew him and maybe knew he was like connected or maybe were fans of his So they let him go which made it look to this
00:54:06
drug dealer like he was an informant. Oh, so maybe he was killed for assuming that he was an
00:54:11
informant. Another theory is that Sonny's latest manager and Las Vegas boss, Ash Resnick, this dude,
00:54:18
some people think that amid the growing pressure from the FBI attention to his mob dealings,
00:54:23
Resnick had Sonny killed. And there is a theory that Sonny had lost those Muhammad Ali fights on
00:54:29
purpose. And one of his payouts was a cut of Muhammad Ali's prize money for the rest of his
00:54:37
career. He was spreading that rumor. And whether it was true or not, if it was true, people like
00:54:42
Resnick were getting pissed off that he was like, talking, talking too much, right? Yeah.
00:54:48
Another theory involving Resnick revolves around one of the police officers who reported to the
00:54:52
scene when Sonny died. And he's interviewed in this documentary. A jailhouse informant claims
00:54:58
that the police officer was corrupt and had been hired, possibly Rory Resnick, to kill Sonny
00:55:02
with a lethal injection of heroin. These theories have swirled around for decades, but at the time,
00:55:08
there's no homicide investigation at all. And, you know, it could have been shot into him against
00:55:13
his will. Maybe he was into heroin and someone else shot it for him, but purposely gave him an
00:55:18
overdose, that kind of thing. But no one ever knows. There's no investigation. Sonny's family buries him with a headstone that has no exact date of birth because it's unknown
00:55:28
and no exact date of death because it's unknown, which is just tragic. Yeah, that's sad. It simply
00:55:34
says 1932 to 1970. And beneath that on the headstone, it says, quote, a man, end quote. Yeah.
00:55:43
It says his name, the years, and then a man, like he was a man. And that is the tragic and mysterious story of the life and death of Sonny Liston.
00:55:54
Wow. That was great. I really enjoyed researching that one. I mean, that is a historical, incredible story.
00:56:02
Yeah. The kind of behind the scenes stuff that actually really affects, say, things that are like
00:56:08
multi-billion dollar industries like boxing or any professional sport where there's so much more
00:56:13
influence and so much more going on behind the scenes than anybody knows especially back then
00:56:19
when there was kind of no transparency whatsoever and it was yeah god incredible and like who knows
00:56:26
what else is fixed now everything's fixed everything's fixed it goes all the way it's all
00:56:33
Fixed. America's Got Talent is fixed. It's all fixed. It's all fixed. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth?
00:57:06
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.
00:57:14
And it's like, OK, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.
00:57:17
I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:57:26
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic.
00:57:32
That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end.
00:57:37
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Ear Say, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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00:59:48
we gonna take a soft curving arc left okay it not a full hairpin left turn but it is i excited to say just a classic true crime story One of the sources is a book by Ann Rule So okay Yeah
01:00:05
We're working on the fundamentals. Love it. The sources used in today's stories are a 2004 episode of Forensic Files called Bad Medicine.
01:00:13
Oh, this is classic. Right? The book Last Dance, Last Chance by Ann Rule, the great Ann Rule.
01:00:18
And a 2020 episode of the Oxygen series License to Kill. and the rest of the sources are in our show notes. So we begin in Western New York in the late 1990s.
01:00:29
A 26-year-old woman named Sarah Smith lives here with her husband Dan and their two young children.
01:00:35
Sarah has that special sparkly quality that brightens the day of everyone around her.
01:00:40
Her husband Dan will later remember that his friends, quote, told me I was so lucky
01:00:45
because she was such a great person and I knew I was lucky, end quote. Yeah, it's always how it goes with these.
01:00:51
Right. So in 1997, Sarah arrives at a medical office in West Seneca, which is a suburb of Buffalo, because she's going to get breast augmentation surgery.
01:01:01
Obviously, this is a serious procedure, but Sarah has no reason to be concerned.
01:01:05
She trusts her doctor, a man named Dr. Anthony Pignotaro. Now, we're going to go into a true crime story where the doctor's last name sounds exactly like a rhyme of Pignotaro.
01:01:17
And it's so distracting and it's going to distract us the entire time. Can we call him Dr. P?
01:01:23
We can call him Dr. P, although that is like, and then it's pee and poo. I might call him the doctor.
01:01:28
I'll say Anthony. Sometimes I'll just say his last name for fun times. And while we're here, let's promote Tig Notaro's new podcast with Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin called Handsome, available everywhere you get your podcasts.
01:01:42
Okay. Hell yeah. So Sarah trusts Dr. Tig Notaro, and it is easy to see why. He is a married father of two.
01:01:51
He comes from a well-respected local family. His own father is a renowned surgeon.
01:01:57
Anthony is described as charming, charismatic, an excellent communicator with his patients.
01:02:02
He's also a bit flashy and over the top. He drives a red Lamborghini. Sometimes he even gives his patients a ride in the Lambo.
01:02:09
He's also an inventor. His best known creation is a snap-on toupee. Wait, how does that work?
01:02:18
Worst case scenario, it's a hairpiece held on by four bolts that have been drilled into the patient's skull.
01:02:24
There's got to be a better way. Wait, is this in the 90s? There's got to be a better way.
01:02:29
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what year he invented that, but it's pretty rough. But the good news is Dr. Pig Notaro isn't just the inventor.
01:02:37
He's also a customer. He has bolts in his head himself for toupees. And he actually goes on to multiple talk shows to demonstrate the snap on touffé, snapping off full heads of hair and back on.
01:02:52
You know, he wouldn't have you do it and not do it himself. That's sure. She believes in it.
01:02:58
That's the pig notaro promise. So despite the doctor's reputation, when Sarah Smith goes in for her procedure, things feel off.
01:03:09
For starters, the doctor has set her up for surgery in the basement of his medical office.
01:03:15
It's not a hospital. It's not a certified surgical space. It's a basement. On top of that, there are only four staffers in attendance for this operation, the doctor
01:03:25
himself and then a practical nurse, which is a nurse that is not yet an RN. And this practical nurse only has six months experience in a non-surgical setting.
01:03:35
And then also a 17-year-old high schooler described as, quote, an intern. And then the fourth person present is Anthony's wife, Debbie, who works as his office assistant.
01:03:47
She, for some reason, is also in the operating room. Oh, no. Red flags abound. Just everywhere.
01:03:52
Yeah. There's no registered nurse on site. There's no anesthesiologist on site. What?
01:03:58
Right? No one's monitoring her the way an anesthesiologist needs to be doing during a surgery.
01:04:04
This is not only extremely unusual, it's very dangerous. As one medical expert will later tell a local reporter, quote, you will not find any reputable plastic surgeon who gives general anesthesia in his office.
01:04:17
Wow. End quote. And it's so annoying, too, because like we're taught, especially as women, you be polite.
01:04:22
You don't question the doctor. You don't question the man. How would you know? Yeah.
01:04:27
There's no reason. Like you have to advocate for yourself. We know that now when you go into a doctor's office.
01:04:34
You can have the confidence of saying, hey, I don't think you should be running an after
01:04:39
school program during my breast augmentation surgery, motherfucker. You're absolutely within your rights to say that.
01:04:46
Something's wrong here. Yeah, totally. Could we get the onlookers out of the surgical space, please?
01:04:52
But she probably didn't have the confidence to do that. I think that trust, she had the trust piece.
01:04:57
This is a man who's established in this town. His family is established. Who are you to go in and say, this is not where this is supposed to be happening?
01:05:04
I mean, you said that yourself. And I didn't mean, who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
01:05:10
So, of course, it won't surprise us when the worst thing happens here. Sarah wakes up during her surgery, which is such a nightmare.
01:05:19
The doctor gives her more sedatives. It seems to do the trick. But then the doctor's wife, Debbie, the office assistant, notices something is wrong.
01:05:28
she later says quote i was watching sarah's face and i could see that her skin was getting gray
01:05:33
i tried to tell anthony but he was too busy with what he was doing oh god end quote just horrifying
01:05:39
so the doctor does brush off his wife in the surgical basement until sarah's blood pressure
01:05:46
monitor alarm goes off her lips are turning blue she's having trouble breathing this is when the
01:05:52
doctor starts to panic at first he taps on sarah chest there no response then he orders someone to call 911 Soon paramedics arrive at the scene And according to reporter Ali Vander Hayden they see quote Dr Pignotaro attempting to create an airway for Sarah using a coat hanger
01:06:10
This whole scenario, the surgery and this is like so troubling. So Sarah's rushed to the hospital where she slips into a coma and sadly later passes away.
01:06:22
She was only 26 years old. When her husband Dan learns that his wife is dead, he says, quote, it was like somebody grabbed my ankles.
01:06:29
I fell on my knees with shock. End quote. Now, what's worse is that the doctor tries to kind of blame Sarah for the tragedy.
01:06:39
According to Ann Rule's book, quote, he insisted that Sarah Smith had come to him with a defective heart and liver dysfunction.
01:06:47
End quote. This isn't the exoneration the doctor thinks it is. After all, it's routine to investigate a patient's health before surgery.
01:06:55
So even if what he claims to know about Sarah's health is true, and it's not clear or proven in any way that it is, as her surgeon, he should have known it beforehand.
01:07:06
So the doctor will also argue that as awful as the situation is, accidental deaths sometimes happen during surgeries, which globally is true.
01:07:17
But Sarah's death doesn't seem like an unfortunate accident. There are obvious indications of negligence on the doctor's part, so much so that the paramedics who responded to the scene are compelled to file a police report.
01:07:29
Wow. Yeah. And they've seen some shit too, right? And they're like... Right. I mean, that's serious.
01:07:35
So eventually the Erie County District Attorney's Office takes over the investigation and they make several alarming discoveries.
01:07:42
One is that the basement that the doctor operates in is even worse than it sounds.
01:07:47
it is stocked with outdated, inadequate medical equipment. It's missing some life-saving devices that are standard in any surgical setting.
01:07:56
And it's eventually determined that had Dr. Pignotaro had the most basic tools like a ventilator,
01:08:01
Sarah's life could have been saved. Investigators also learn that Dr. Pignotaro isn't actually a board-certified plastic surgeon.
01:08:10
He received some training as an ENT after getting a medical degree at a university in Puerto Rico.
01:08:17
although he did not speak Spanish and he had to learn it on the job. After graduating, the doctor reportedly struggled through his residency.
01:08:27
He was described by his fellow residents as, quote, a disaster. Oh, my God. That's not what you want to be called.
01:08:34
No. Yet in the years since and against the odds, Anthony Pignotaro managed to build a decent reputation back in Western New York.
01:08:43
But underneath his veer of success and trustworthiness, and long before Sarah Smith's death,
01:08:48
there was a trail of troubling medical accidents and potential malpractice hanging over the doctor.
01:08:54
Investigators identify several former patients whose procedures were botched. This includes a 30-year-old patient
01:09:01
who had worked on in his sinus area. During the procedure, quote, Anthony clumsily entered the outer layer of the man's brain.
01:09:10
End quote. Luckily, that man survived without any nerve damage or an infection. But a woman named Terry Lamardi didn't get off so easy. After going in for a liposuction procedure, Terry went home in extreme pain. That night, she said that there was, quote, so much blood pouring down her legs that her daughter had to soak it up with a mop. So Terry called Dr. Pignotaro, but instead of expressing any concern, he tried to convince her that the pain and bleeding were totally normal.
01:09:39
Terri and her family didn't buy that. She was brought to the ER. She was given serious news.
01:09:44
Not only had the doctor nicked her intestine during this surgery, and now that intestine
01:09:49
was infected, but he'd also cut off the blood supply to her abdomen during the procedure.
01:09:55
What the fuck? Those are really big issues. This is very doctor death. Like, it's that thing where you're hearing it and you're like, my neck is bracing and
01:10:05
it's like, oh, this is worst case scenario. these poor, poor people. But because the blood supply got cut off to her abdomen, her stomach
01:10:14
was now beginning to decay and she would have to have corrective surgery, the first of many
01:10:19
to remove all that dead tissue. And in the midst of all of this, Dr. Pignataro shows up at Terry's
01:10:26
hospital bedside to berate her for seeking outside medical care. Fuck you, dude. So those red flags
01:10:34
turn into a fireworks display of get the fuck away from this person. Like, how insane do you have to be?
01:10:41
Oh, my God. He was told to leave. Security guards were placed outside of Terry's room until she was discharged.
01:10:49
And all of that took place only several months before Sarah Smith's procedure. Wow.
01:10:54
Shortly after Sarah's death, the local media picks up on this story. And according to author Anne Rule, Dr. Pignotaro seems delighted by the attention.
01:11:03
What? She writes, quote, he was secretly pleased. The media coverage was, quote, wild, and he had always reveled in seeing his name in print and his face on television.
01:11:13
Nah, dude. I mean, that right there, that's one of the signs of a psychopath or a sociopath.
01:11:18
Totally. A few months later, in January of 1998, the doctor is arrested and handed five criminal charges.
01:11:25
They are for second degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second degree assault, reckless endangerment, and falsifying records.
01:11:33
to avoid a trial. The doctor takes a plea deal pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide.
01:11:39
He loses his medical license. He's fined $5,000. He's given 250 hours of community service and he's
01:11:46
sentenced to six months in prison. That's it. That is not okay. Right. It's such an insane
01:11:52
breach of trust. Six months and you have ended the rest of someone's life. That is just unacceptable.
01:12:00
I would imagine, but this is just a guess, an uneducated guess, that doctors have the kind of insurance and the kind of like they make people sign the kind of waivers that keep these numbers out of the putting them out of business category.
01:12:15
That's my guess. So as a result of all of that, Anthony Pignataro becomes the first doctor in Western New York to be convicted of homicide and imprisoned following a patient's death.
01:12:27
So it's rare. Yeah. Six months later, when he's released from jail, he returns to a life that has completely changed.
01:12:34
He's lost his medical license. He's facing several medical malpractice lawsuits from former patients.
01:12:40
And he claims to be receiving death threats. He said someone, and he doesn't know who, spray painted the word killer on the side of his family's home.
01:12:49
So at the same time, inside that home, things are going very badly because Anthony's wife, Debbie,
01:12:55
learns that her husband has been cheating on her with a woman named Tammy. Tammy spelled T-A-M-I.
01:13:01
What a bummer to be like, my husband ignored me and killed someone. Yeah. It's like, it just keeps coming.
01:13:07
Totally. Which is kind of all of life, really. Right. Do you see that tweet that was like, I always thought being an adult was just one
01:13:15
bad thing after another. Nope. It's all at the same time. All the time. onslaught. But this, I think is that special. And I mean, I already said this in a way,
01:13:28
but it's like when you are entrusting a person like a doctor that you can't question because
01:13:33
you don't know and they do know, that's why that breach of trust is so extreme and so upsetting
01:13:39
is because the degree, the certificate, the title, the status they have, that's supposed
01:13:46
to be guaranteeing you that this is an expert that's taking care of you. This guy is so not an
01:13:51
expert. It's shocking. Yeah. I'm surprised if his father was like prestigious, that he allowed his
01:13:56
son to do such a thing. Yeah. It almost seems like that's probably a part of it. Right. Because I feel
01:14:02
like that was a doctor death part of the story where it's like when there's all this pressure to
01:14:06
become a doctor. Totally. Okay. So the then doctor carried on this affair as Debbie stood beside him
01:14:14
and acted as his fiercest defender in the dark days after Sarah Smith's death, all while juggling her own emotional trauma following the tragedy.
01:14:23
So it turns out Anthony even wrote love letters to Tammy while he was in prison.
01:14:27
So it's just kind of one betrayal after another. So Debbie and Anthony split up only to reconcile a couple months later
01:14:36
to sustain their household while Anthony's out of work. Anthony's mother, Lena, begins to support them financially,
01:14:42
but she has one condition. Anthony must promise to end his affair and be a faithful husband to
01:14:48
Debbie and a good father to the couple's two children. You can only assume he agreed,
01:14:53
yes, mother, I will do everything you say. So after all that, things at the Pignatara house
01:14:59
finally seem to be going well until the summer of 1999. And that's when Debbie comes down with a
01:15:05
strange and sudden illness. Oh no. Yeah. She says, quote, I thought I had the flu because I'd get
01:15:11
nauseous and vomit and just not be myself, end quote. But then her symptoms evolve. She's no
01:15:17
energy. Her arms and legs are tingly and numb and she's having trouble walking. Georgia, what is that?
01:15:23
What are those the symptoms of? Poisoning! That's right. Poisoning. It's so horrible that there are
01:15:31
so many stories like this that that is the way you have to be. We've been watching forensic files
01:15:37
and, you know, reading and rule books. And we have been ingesting years and years and years of true crime.
01:15:44
This is what happens. What a monster. What a fucking monster. What a selfish, horrible, empty human being.
01:15:52
Truly. So Anthony insists that Debbie's going to be okay, but she's worried and she makes an appointment with her doctor.
01:15:59
The doctor's not sure what's going on. She's sent to specialists. They rule out diabetes, heart disease, meningitis.
01:16:05
All the while, Debbie is getting sicker. So now her doctors urge her to go to the hospital.
01:16:12
Anthony up until now has been critical of Debbie seeking medical help, but now he kicks into doctor mode.
01:16:17
He tells hospital physicians that he knows exactly what's wrong with Debbie. It's her gallbladder and it needs to be removed at once.
01:16:24
The doctors, of course, ignore him. They're like, sir, you've been decertified. We know who you are.
01:16:30
Fortunately, Debbie makes a full recovery. And even though the cause of her illness is still a mystery, her doctors seem satisfied that she's out of the woods.
01:16:37
And they send her home. But once she's there, Debbie's symptoms reemerge. This time, they're more severe.
01:16:44
Her health deteriorates to the point where she has to use a wheelchair to get around.
01:16:49
She's also experiencing memory loss. So she goes back to the hospital But this time a physician named Dr Michael Snyderman takes a sample of her bone marrow for analysis He says quote I looked once I looked twice and I couldn believe my eyes
01:17:04
It looked like something I remember reading about in medical school. I ran down to the library and got a book about toxicology.
01:17:10
And then I also went on something called Medline on the computer. Thank God for computer.
01:17:16
It's like, yeah, it's a website, sir. I was able to complete the description of arsenic in my mind and it fit her perfectly.
01:17:25
End quote. I mean, are you kind of like, shouldn't one of the many doctors who saw her before that
01:17:29
have like just suggested poisoning? I don't know. It's 1999. That's pretty modern.
01:17:36
It is pretty modern. You're right. But maybe it's a combination of the thing where doctors kind of tell you how sick you are.
01:17:41
You can be saying anything to them and they'll be like, you need to lose weight pretty much
01:17:45
to almost every woman that goes to the doctor's office. I mean, back then, starting to change now,
01:17:52
but I think that kind of patient advocacy, if they're like, oh, I don't know, it's not diabetes, we don't know.
01:17:58
Subsequent testing reveals that Debbie has consumed, get this, around 29,000 micrograms of arsenic.
01:18:06
That sounds like a lot. You can hear the Forensic Files narrator saying that phrase.
01:18:12
Forensic Files reports that this is one of the highest arsenic levels ever reported in a living person. Holy shit. It's so much poison that the police
01:18:21
immediately open an investigation and the rest of the Pignotaro family is tested for arsenic
01:18:27
poisoning. Anthony and their son are both clear, but their daughter has elevated levels of arsenic
01:18:33
in her system. She had also come down with a strange and sudden illness earlier that year,
01:18:39
but she was not as sick as her mother. And I'm sure her mother being so sick, it was like
01:18:43
no one could focus on it maybe. To rule out incidental or environmental poisoning,
01:18:49
the family's groundwater supply is tested for arsenic contamination, but it is clean
01:18:54
and investigators feel even more certain that this is a case of intentional harm.
01:18:58
So now they need to identify a suspect. Of course, they start with the most obvious person,
01:19:03
the husband, Anthony Pignataro. And given the timeline here with Debbie's symptoms beginning
01:19:09
not long after she reconciled with Anthony, he's looking very suspicious. But he denies ever harming his wife.
01:19:17
Instead, he actually floats a theory that Sarah Smith's husband, Dan, might be behind Debbie's poisoning.
01:19:24
This grieving widow, or like, is somehow getting access to your wife and daughter.
01:19:29
Just suggesting that theory, you might as well go, I did it. Like, just suggesting it is so childish
01:19:35
and so, and kind of like, I think I'm the smartest person on the planet. Totally.
01:19:40
It's like, you fool. What are you doing? Okay, so of course this theory falls apart
01:19:45
because the Smith family was out of town. They actually left town shortly after Sarah's death.
01:19:51
Samples of Debbie's hair show that she'd first been exposed to arsenic after the Smith family departure.
01:19:57
So just impossible. Not only that, whoever did this to Debbie clearly had close and consistent access to her
01:20:03
over the period of several months. and this basically only leaves members of the Pig Notaro family, but the investigators do not think
01:20:11
it's the children. In fact, they turn to them and ask them for information. They begin to interview
01:20:18
the daughter who tells investigators that right before she became sick, she'd eaten leftover soup
01:20:23
that was sitting in a pot on the stove. And it turns out Anthony made that soup specifically for
01:20:29
his wife. Oh, so he didn't even mean to poison his daughter. No, but he's cooking up big pots of
01:20:34
poison. So. And leaving it on the stove. Yeah. And not letting anyone know. So this makes
01:20:39
investigators think Anthony had been lacing Debbie's food with arsenic and that the daughter's
01:20:43
poisoning was accidental. The daughter also tells investigators about small pest traps her dad had
01:20:48
purchased for the home. She describes them as, quote, little round tins that he set out on the
01:20:53
floor. End quote. Investigators find one product that fits her exact description. They reach out to
01:21:00
its manufacturer and they learn that two of these traps contain enough arsenic to kill a 150 pound
01:21:06
person. They also find this product for sale at a drugstore near the Pignotaro family home. So at
01:21:12
this point, investigators feel very certain Anthony is behind Debbie's near fatal poisoning. They're
01:21:18
just searching for his motive and it doesn't take them long to find several, of course. Of course.
01:21:24
It's revealed that while in prison, Anthony had unknowingly befriended a jailhouse informant.
01:21:29
So through phone records, investigators confirm Anthony stayed in touch with this informant
01:21:34
after his release from prison. So when the police go to talk to that informant, the man shares a ton of incriminating information
01:21:41
with them. He says Anthony has developed a heroin habit. That's our theme between the two stories.
01:21:47
Yeah. Like I saw what you did He was still seeing his mistress Tammy with one M and one I And remember his own mother threatened to stop supporting the family financially if he went back to that affair
01:21:59
So investigators learn Anthony had recently taken out a life insurance policy on his wife, Debbie.
01:22:04
There it is. There we are. Paraphrasing Anthony's own words, the informant tells police, quote,
01:22:11
if he were to collect on it, he said he could start over with Tammy, end quote. this informant even claims that anthony once bragged that he quote knew how to poison someone
01:22:22
so if that isn't bad enough investigators turn up more incriminating evidence while searching
01:22:27
the pig notaro home they find a document labeled quote md colon mass destruction do you see the
01:22:35
play on words there but then also mass destruction md got it it's a sort of autobiography slash
01:22:42
manifesto written by Anthony outlining a grand conspiracy by both the medical establishment and
01:22:48
the legal system to blackball him after the death of Sarah Smith. The investigators then make a
01:22:55
connection. Anthony urged the doctors to perform gallbladder surgery on Debbie after she was
01:23:00
hospitalized. In that delicate state that she was in, he must have known that a procedure like that
01:23:07
could kill his wife. Oh, right. But if Debbie were to die on the operating table, that would prove
01:23:12
Anthony's talking point that he tried to use after Sarah Smith's death, that people do sometimes die
01:23:18
on the operating table during routine surgeries. So basically, if Debbie died during her surgery,
01:23:24
he'd be not only vindicated, but he might even earn the public's sympathy. Oh my God. Which clearly
01:23:31
is his theory, because that sounds completely insane. Like no one would think that, sir.
01:23:37
The evidence now against Anthony is overwhelming. He's taken into custody where police ask him directly if he tried to kill his wife.
01:23:43
Anthony reportedly looks down at the floor and says, quote, well, I can see why some people might think that.
01:23:49
He eventually confesses to the whole scheme. It's now believed that the vandalism at the Pignatara house,
01:23:55
the spray-painted word killer, was Anthony's doing, of course. If there's ever a spray-paint message, I think we've learned this at this point,
01:24:03
spray-painted messages are always done by the owner of the house or car. Almost always.
01:24:08
Right. Except for that one that's like, you whore, whatever. There's like one where a woman wrote on her husband's car.
01:24:14
I think it's like we have to assume that it's highly probable or possible that it was them themselves.
01:24:20
That it's some kind of a weird move. It was seen as an attempt to craft a cover story ahead of Debbie's murder by poisoning.
01:24:27
So like this people were out to get him. That's that kind of fucked up thinking though, where it's like, so you're trying to tell the world people are out to get you to somehow cover.
01:24:37
for your wife's death. Totally. Like to never stop and think to yourself, this is backwards.
01:24:44
This is bad thinking. Anthony Pignotaro is yet again handed multiple charges, including attempted murder and first
01:24:51
degree assault, the latter of which carries a sentence of up to 25 years in prison.
01:24:56
And Anthony once again takes a plea deal and pleads guilty to first degree attempted assault.
01:25:01
He is given 15 years in prison, the maximum sentence possible for this specific charge.
01:25:07
But Anthony doesn't seem to have much remorse for his actions, unsurprisingly. Instead, he harps on the grand conspiracy against him and continues suggesting that he's being unfairly blackballed by the medical community.
01:25:21
Then in the early 2000s, Anthony tries to claim that Debbie was suicidal and likely poisoned herself.
01:25:28
Let it go. Yeah. Shut up at this point. Debbie answers this ridiculous claim saying, quote,
01:25:35
I mean, if anybody knew me, they would know that I would never do this to myself. First of all,
01:25:40
I wouldn't do it to my children. Second of all, if I wanted to hurt myself, I wouldn't do it this
01:25:45
slow, torturous, painful way, end quote. Which is just like, Debbie's just like, you know what?
01:25:51
Enough. Now her life is forever changed by the enormous amounts of arsenic that she unknowingly
01:25:56
ingested. She will experience physical effects because of that poison for the rest of her life.
01:26:01
and it is actually doctors now believe that her survival was a fluke. Her husband poisoned her so much and over so many weeks
01:26:10
that she actually developed a tolerance level that saved her life. Wow. So insane.
01:26:17
And thank God. So fast forward to late 2013, Anthony's released from prison. This of course worries both his family and investigators.
01:26:26
They all consider him a dangerous person. So a protection order is put into place so Anthony can't come anywhere near his own children.
01:26:34
In 2017 an investigation by Syracuse news station WKBW reveals that Anthony is back in western New York and he legally changed his name Oh That scary He also filed papers to start a business called Tony Haute Cosmetic LLC Sorry
01:26:56
What the fuck? Which offers medical products and services out of a local apartment.
01:27:02
Oh, no, thank you. I'm going to go over and get my laser peel. Sure. At 24C over on the fucking third floor of this apartment building.
01:27:11
Oh, my God. This news motivates the New York state attorney to launch yet another investigation into Anthony Pignataro.
01:27:18
In response, he skips town and heads down to Florida. Right? Two years later, in February of 2019, a Miami-based news station, WSVN,
01:27:29
learns that Anthony has been advertising his services on a website called eldercare.com.
01:27:34
Stay away from them, dude. Dark. Yes, leave the old people alone, you asshole. He's listed as a quote senior caregiver and at the time was operating out of South Florida.
01:27:46
As long as he's not providing medical services, then that's above board. But some of his victims worry about the damage he could do while taking care of elderly patients.
01:27:57
Terry Lamardi is one of those people. She ultimately needed 13 corrective surgeries to fix the damage of Anthony's botched liposuction procedure.
01:28:06
And she says, quote, with Dr. Pignotaro being out there somewhere in the world with nobody keeping an eye on him, I guarantee you that he will hurt somebody else.
01:28:16
End quote. It's unclear where Anthony Pignotaro is today. And that is the story of disgraced plastic surgeon, the former Dr. Anthony Pignotaro.
01:28:26
Oh, my gosh. Let's all go to Google and make sure he's not our doctor. Or our like, you know, the threading expert at our...
01:28:37
Right. Or our new stepdad, your new stepdad. You don't know. Don't let him apply eyelashes to you, please.
01:28:45
Shit. Can I please repitch my idea of taking all sociopaths and psychopaths and putting them
01:28:50
on an island? I know you're against it. Let them work on each other. Yes, exactly.
01:28:56
Let them do their bidding to each other. It's like escape from New York, but it's all these people who just have no conscience.
01:29:03
whatsoever. So, so bad. So bad. Sorry. I left you on a, on a real creepy down note, but.
01:29:10
You know, I love it there on that Island, on the creepy down note Island. I mean, I feel like a lot of us really flourish there.
01:29:16
I really thrive there. It's why we come here every week to do this with each other.
01:29:22
We appreciate you guys coming onto that Island with us. Thank you for canoeing over. We really appreciate it.
01:29:29
We do. Did you bring snacks? We love snacks. Give it. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
01:29:34
Give it. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production.
01:29:48
Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck. Our managing producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton.
01:29:52
Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo. This episode was mixed by Liana Scolacci. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Allie Elkin.
01:30:00
Email your hometowns to MyFavoriteMurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at MyFavoriteMurder and Twitter at MyFaveMurder.
01:30:08
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