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Crime Story Episode 43: Leon Neyfakh

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Fear was in the air in New York City in the 1980s. The city was known as a dangerous and seedy place. A bad economy had pushed people into crime, and the city was on the brink of bankruptcy. And in 1975, in response to budget cuts, a group of New York City police officers distributed a pamphlet that said Welcome to Fear City. Recommending that tourists stay away. And if they did come to New York, they should stay inside after six and avoid using public transit. So in December 1984, when a man named Bernard gets shot and nearly killed four black teenagers while he was riding the subway, his actions divided the city. Some saw him as a vigilante born out of a city gone bad. Others saw Getz as a racist who use crime as an excuse. This is where Leon Neyfakh enters the story, host of a new podcast called Fiasco Vigilante. Leon, welcome to Crime Story.

LEON NEYFAKH: Thank you so much for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So take me back to the 1980s. You're a New Yorker. Tell me what New York was like at the time.

LEON NEYFAKH: I am a New Yorker now. Though, I arrived long, long after the these bad old days, as they're often referred to. So I didn't see it firsthand, but I think anyone who absorbed the, like, stream of films that take place in New York and portray it as this shadowy and dangerous place where evil lurks around every corner. And, you know, there were there were a bunch of influential films that kind of characterized New York that way. Taxi Driver, maybe Chief among them.

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TRAVIS BICKLE (FROM "TAXI DRIVER"): Listen, you fuckers, you screw heads. Here's a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up.

LEON NEYFAKH: And basically, you know, one of our tasks in making the show is to kind of go back and try to understand, well, what was the reality? Like this is...

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, that was actually gonna be my next question.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. Like, you know, unmistakably this is the image of New York in the 80s. But what was it really like? And so a lot of people said that, you know, while they themselves weren't always afraid, they were of the, of the mind that everybody else was. And so there was this general sense that, like, New York was a dangerous place. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew that something could happen on the subway at any second, even if it didn't necessarily happen to you. You know, there were plenty of people who had personal stories of getting mugged, of course, but it was more like you heard about people getting mugged, and you were aware that it was a random occurrence that could befall you at any moment. So I think that's where a lot of the fear came from. And people really kind of like at a certain point got fed up with it, and they felt like the city had turned their backs on protecting the citizens.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And so was there sort of this underlying unsaid idea that crime was mostly perpetrated by black men?

LEON NEYFAKH: I don't know exactly how to answer that, like empirically, but certainly the images of criminality that you would see in the pages of, you know, the New York Post and the Daily News would reinforce the sense that, yes, there were there were these young, dangerous black men who would, you know, take the train in from their bad neighborhoods. And they were terrorize people downtown. And there are these, like, criminal elements who don't follow the rules and who come from outside and make the city unlivable. And yes, there was, I mean, unmistakably a racial cast that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay, so that's the context. That's sort of what's happening in the city. That's the conversations that people are having. When Bernard gets gets on the subway, it's December 22nd, 1984. He's heading downtown. What happens?

LEON NEYFAKH: So Bernie gets gets on the train, and at a certain point, he sees a group of young black men approach him, and one of the four either asks him for money or demands money. And it's unfortunately impossible to say for sure what was said. Witness testimony later was vague on this, but in gets his mind in that and, as we'll discuss, turns out to be the most important thing and gets his mind. These guys were getting ready to rob him and hurt him. And so in a split second, Goetz takes a gun out of his pocket and gets up and opens fire. And he hits all four of these young men Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, Troy Canty and Barry Allen, who were all from the from the South Bronx. None of them die by some miracle, even though he shot them at very close range. But they are grievously injured. In this chaos, Goetz gets off the train, jumps down into the tunnel and disappears.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So the police are looking for him, but the press also is really involved because this has become a huge story.

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NEWS ANCHOR: Good evening. It is Christmas Eve in New York and the talk of the town is not peace on earth, but the violence among us, this time in the subways where a vigilante and his gun brought terror this past weekend. The victims...

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. Well, so the newspapers loved this story. I mean, it was incredibly dramatic incidents. There weren't shootings like this very often. This is before the age of mass shootings happening, and no one even noticing anymore. A gunman opening fire in Manhattan was a big, big news story. And the fact that the person at the center of it was nowhere to be found just created this air of mystery around him. And as you know, witness testimony came in from people who were on the train and the reporters who were covering the story or, you know, getting information from the NYPD. There emerged this version of events, you know, in which these four thugs, as they were often referred to in the press, had threatened this man who was minding his own business, in fact, that they had threatened him with sharpened screwdrivers that they had they had screwdrivers in their pockets that they had brandished in an effort to scare him. And, you know, from this version of events, the person responsible turns into someone just defending themselves.

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NEWS ANCHOR 2: In one sense, it makes no difference who the vigilante is. What really is significant is that thousands of New Yorkers are so fed up with punks and crime that they think the shootings are great.

VOICE 1: He was right.

VOICE 2: He was right.

VOICE 1: You must run.

VOICE 2: To do the shooting.

VOICE 1: Yeah.

VOICE 2: It was...

LEON NEYFAKH: And against the backdrop of all of that fear and anger at the city government for not doing more to rein in violent crime. Whoever this guy was looked like a hero. And so, in the New York Post, to a slightly lesser extent in the Daily News, you know, two rival tabloids who were sort of in the middle of a great circulation war. This mysterious gunman kind of emerged as like a mythic avenger. You know, someone people celebrated. And one thing that happened is that the police set up a tip line. If you know who did this, if you know where he is, like, call us and leave us a message. And instead, what happened is, like all these people who had been following the story on the news called in talking about how happy they were that this guy had stood up for himself and how proud they were and how, you know, it's only too bad that he didn't, you know, do anything worse to them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But on the other side, one of the victims, Darrell Cabey, who was the really the worst one, hurt. His mother didn't get any support at all.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. I mean, the the papers did do stories on the victims. It's not like they totally ignored them. But for the most part, they were, like, described as a group. You know, they were this crew. You know, people call them a gang. They didn't really differentiate between them. They they talked about their criminal records and, and, you know, the problems they'd had with the law. And Darrell Cabey, who, as you said, was sort of most seriously injured, he was actually paralyzed in the end and suffered with a sprain. He was in the hospital and no one knew if he was going to survive. And no one was really very worried about it, you know, in the public sphere. And so, Cabey's mom, you know, she's kind of on her own, and the whole family was was sort of on their own. And, you know, I didn't get the sense that they were tracking the media coverage super closely during this time because they were primarily worried about, you know, Darrell surviving. But eventually, you know, they started getting hate mail and, and horrible phone calls and, you know, people writing to to Darrell's mother and telling her that they wished her son had been killed. I mean, it was really like an early kind of doxing situation where all of this, like ambient anger and hatred landed on this poor woman's doorstep.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you have locals engage and animated, but you also have huge political figures weighing in. President Reagan even commented on it.

LEON NEYFAKH: That's right. I mean, Reagan was asked about it in a in a press conference. And, you know, Reagan, I guess, to his credit, maybe was pretty firm in saying that, like, we can't have people taking the law into their own hands. That's not a society. I would lead to a breakdown of civilization. But he also made a point of saying that it's okay to feel understanding or sympathy for someone, as he put it, who is tested beyond his ability to control himself, you know? And so he kind of tried to have it both ways. But yeah, I mean, it was a massive story. There are people covering it from from all over the world.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Eventually Goetz is caught. How does he get caught?

LEON NEYFAKH: He turns himself in. He walks into a police station in New Hampshire, and I think he says something along the lines of, I'm the subway gunman. And so they take him into custody. They call the NYPD, who immediately send people up to New Hampshire to, to to talk to Goetz. And what happens from there is, Goetz just like spills his guts for hours and hours and hours in a recorded interview in which he kind of gave his version of events and gave a lot of insight into his state of mind. And, you know, this, this videotape eventually became very important in the case.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Does Goetz himself see himself as a vigilante? Like, I know he admits to being the subway shooter, but does he actually believe and say that he's taking things into his own hands?

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he stops short of saying, like, he deserves to be honored.

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BERNARD GOETZ: I'm no hero. Basically, I'm a coward.

LEON NEYFAKH: He kind of like, says these quasi self-deprecating things about how he, you know, anyone would have done what he did in his situation was pure instinct. It was, you know, nothing right or wrong about it. It was just what happened. You know, he comes across as paranoid, for one thing, but also a kind of nihilistic.

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BERNARD GOETZ: What if someone else in a subway system were were butchered? And the guys and the guys, you think the guys would have been caught if they would have been anything? It would have been one more statistic, one more statistic, and not don't nod your head yes, because you know better.

LEON NEYFAKH: Extremely angry.

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BERNARD GOETZ: If you don't know better. You just not know New York.

LEON NEYFAKH: Extremely hostile to the city of New York. Like, really sounds like he hates New York at one point. Kind of recoils at one of the New York officers. Ask him a question. Yeah. He's just like, I don't want to talk to you. Like he just he has such a distaste for New York. And one of the questions I've always had about this, but his life story is like. Why did he stay here for so long? And what we found out later was he was always kind of a loner and a shy child. Had a lot of problems with bullying. Growing up in Rhinebeck, New York, upstate. As an adult, was primarily interested in electronics. He... For his job, he was he was the one who tested testing equipment, which I thought was quite funny. But basically, like he he had begun his career as an engineer at Westinghouse, where you just, you know, helping build nuclear submarines for the Navy. But then he was let go because of arguments with other people, just kind of a motif in his life. He was always like, itching for a conflict, is my read on it. He, he, you know...

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Pretty antisocial guy.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. And and a pretty antisocial guy. You know, had made, racist remarks at a community meeting. He was really only friendly to the extent that he was friendly with these guys who hung out at an electronics shop that he liked to buy stuff at, and they would go to, like, ham radio festivals together. But even with those guys, he was he was very much a cipher. I mean, I think they they saw him as like someone who didn't really let anyone close.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right. And what about his relationship with crime? Did you even find out why he was carrying a gun?

LEON NEYFAKH: Yes. I mean, this was like, a very important part of the story. Not long before this incident on the two train, Goetz was the target of an attack also on the subway. You know, we we talked to a guy who worked at the electronics shop. You know, the one where Goetz would always go. And he told us the story about, you know, being there, minding the store, and then suddenly Bernie runs up and, kind of slams against the front door, the window, it becomes clear that someone is chasing him. And so the back story turned out to be that Goetz had been on the subway had, you know, been threatened by a group of guys, black guys who, I don't know, wanted his money or whatever. And he took off and he started running and he started running back to the store, which was like his, you know, home base. And from there, you know, the attacker fled, but I think ultimately was caught and Goetz was quite badly hurt. But also in head think I think that actually this is more important was extremely offended that the guy who had attacked him basically was allowed to walk. And I think it gets us telling, like it's spent even less time at the police station than Goetz did you know, answering questions. And so I think this incident, imprinted itself on Goetz and he was here. He had already had a lot of the fear I think that that this incident hardened. But but but it was after this incident that he decided to buy a gun, and he bought a gun down in Florida, and he brought it back to New York illegally. And basically, I think this was his way of saying like, never again. I'm never gonna let that happen again.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it was that illegal gun that he used to shoot the four boys.

LEON NEYFAKH: You know, he actually bought a bunch of guns, is my understanding. He, like, bought guns for other people and, like, sold them to friends, I guess at cost, because he just, like, believed...

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Believed in the cause.

LEON NEYFAKH: Exactly. Yeah. And so I don't know if it was that exact gun, but yes, he he had an illegal gun on him when these four young men approached him on the two train.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you'd think that with his confession, his confession tape and the illegal gun, that criminal charges would be a slam dunk.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah, well, I mean, so we didn't even really mention this, but in the in the confession, in the interview, the reason you call it a confession is that in this long interview he did in New Hampshire, I mean, he talked completely candidly about how he wanted to kill these guys. He, you know, could tell from that, from the way they were looking at him that they wanted to play with him and play around with him and torture him. And he was he said he he fantasized about clawing their eyes out and, you know, and doing much worse to them than he did.

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BERNARD GOETZ: I, I if I had more bullets, I would have shot him again and again, the... My problem's I ran out of bullets. I was going to I was going to gouge one of the guy's eyes out with my keys afterwards.

LEON NEYFAKH: The most important thing that he said in this interview is that, you know, at one point after opening fire, he he saw one of the four, Darrell Cabey, on the ground, and he seemingly was still he was okay. And in his own telling, Goetz said to him, you don't look so bad... How about another? Or something along those lines? And then he shot him again.

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BERNARD GOETZ: I went to him the second time and I looked at him, and he can't verify this because he was probably out of it by then if I shot him or if he wasn't, I don't know. And I said, you seem to be doing all right. Here's another.

LEON NEYFAKH: And so that's just like whatever you want to say about self-defense. That is not how self-defense usually looks.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

LEON NEYFAKH: So after he's arrested, after he gives this insane confession, you know, everyone's assuming he's going to get indicted, but he doesn't. The grand jury does not indict him. It was like a total shock. And it provoked, you know, outrage among certain people in New York City because, you know, we were talking earlier about how everyone was scared of crime and everyone hated, you know, these... These black thugs coming in from the Bronx and everyone, was happy for Bernie Goetz. Of course everyone wasn't. I mean, we're talking about, a subset of the city and a whole other subset of the city. People who knew these young man, people who lived in their community, people who understood their community. They saw this as a mortal outrage. And I think the the other thing to say there is that, like, it's very rare for a prosecutor to bring charges and not get an indictment. Like the cliche is that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, right? And so there's questions after this non-indictment came down, like did the prosecutor's office really try? That was at least my question. And regardless, it became kind of a moot point in part because of the release of that videotape from New Hampshire, the D.A., Robert Morgenthau does, you know, convene a second grand jury and second grand jury does indict Goetz and that that case goes to trial.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right, because the confession tape eventually gets leaked and that changes popular opinion, right. At least some people who had been supporting him change their minds.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that he was so bloodthirsty in his comments and so clearly unstable made it harder for people to identify with him. Like, you're just kind of a weird guy. I mean, put aside, like, his his antisocial tendencies. I mean, he's he's just a he's he's a tough guy to identify with. And I think it was a lot easier for people to identify with him and put him on a pedestal before they knew who he was. And so, yeah, like the videotape does get leaked, it gets, you know, quotes from a get leaked and initially and then eventually it's shown at trial but Goetz suddenly looks a little bit less reasonable, right? He looks kind of like a, like a maniac. And I think that does hurt his, support. But, you know, I got to say, like, overwhelmingly the mood was still that this was a guy who had simply done what he had to do to protect himself, in an impossible situation. Like a lot of people believe that. I should say, including a lot of black people, like the network news of the time definitely made a point of showing that the people who said that Goetz, you know, did what he had to do included a lot of white people, but it also included a lot of black people. And so it wasn't quite so clear cut in terms of race. But nevertheless, like the fact that Goetz was white and he gunned down these four young men, you know, there's just there's there's no way for racism to not be at the center of that story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How was that handled in the trial, though?

LEON NEYFAKH: It wasn't, whether it wasn't by the prosecutors because they weren't really allowed because of how the judge ruled to bring race into the proceedings, however, Goetz's defense lawyers, which included the superstar Barry Slotnick; they took quite clear but sort of subtle steps to remind the jury that these were four scary black guys. You know, they put up posters of the four of them, and they were sort of like blown up so that they looked huge and scary. At one point, one of the one of the defense attorneys was was questioning James Ramseur, one of the one of the four gunmen who was on the train. And Ramseur had been accused and I think convicted of horrible rape. And the prosecutor really went at him on that and got him angry to the point where, you know, in some descriptions of the courtroom that day, Ramseur kind of like lunged. And for a moment it seemed like, you know, the judge was going to lose control of the courtroom. And, you know, I don't actually know exactly what happened. We don't have any video footage of it. But, you know, we talked to a number of the jurors and one of them, you know, this really stuck with me. She told me that after that incident, you know, she had a dream where she was being threatened by this guy. And so you could say that none of these maneuvers were explicitly racist, but I think they definitely played on, you know, the kinds of race based fears that they assumed at least some people on the jury would, would have.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what about those confession tapes? I was pretty surprised by how the defense handled those. They were pretty smart.

LEON NEYFAKH: Yeah. The confession tape, you would think, would be the last thing the defense attorneys would want on the record because as we discussed, Goetz came across as really unrepentant, like, not at all someone who was describing an act of self-defense seemed like a clear liability for them. But, they kind of decided that it was their - it would be a way to in a relatively risk free way, give Goetz a voice in in the trial. They didn't want to testify. They knew he was too erratic and too easy to provoke to put him on the stand. But they were able to take this video and, you know, spin it as like a portrait of a man who's been driven to like his wits' end by fear, by by the threat of bodily harm, like they rested a lot of their case on the fact that Geotz had this very reasonable fear of being attacked in exactly this way because of the earlier incident. And so, you know, he talks about that incident in this tape. And I think the defense ultimately made the decision that they could show the jury this tape and actually make them see that themselves and Goetz and like, see him as a human being and see him as a frail, scared guy who, you know, was maybe like talking a big game after the fact about what a cowboy he'd been, but that in fact, you know, as you can see clearly from the tape, this is a broken guy who was not at all trying to be a vigilante. Interestingly, the defense kind of had to say that Goetz was an unreliable narrator of what actually happened on the train. I mean, the story about him standing over Darrell Cabey and and saying, you don't look so bad, have another. I mean, that's extremely incriminating. And the way the defense handles that was by saying it didn't happen. He fantasized it. It was like he was in this fugue state where, you know, he was imagining himself as, you know, the guy from from Death Wish or something. But yeah, like they wanted to to show Goetz as an unreliable narrator narrator who may have imagined himself as the aggressor in the situation, but in fact, was like this meek and defenseless person who merely reacted to a threat and did so reasonably.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so how does it work with the jury?

LEON NEYFAKH: Well...

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NEWS ANCHOR 3: Geotz was found not guilty on the four counts of attempted murder and assault charges.

LEON NEYFAKH: They did find him guilty on the weapons charges, but on the attempted murder charges, they acquitted him. And you know, from talking to the jurors and talking to the judge and talking to the prosecutor in the case and talking to the defense lawyers in the case, which we did for this show, what it really seems to have come down to is this idea of subjective reasonableness. And I know that sounds like jargon. It kind of is. But basically the jury was asked to put themselves in Goetz's position not only in the sense of like, what would you do if you were sitting in that seat and these four guys came up to you, but what would you do if you were him, and what would you do if you were him and, and had his specific past experiences? So, for example, the incident on the subway platform where he ended up running to the to the electronics shop. You know, you as a juror had to imagine that that had happened to you and weigh that in deciding whether Goetz's reaction to what happened on that subway car or whatever it was, was reasonable. It didn't matter as they as it was explained to the jury whether these young men were actually trying to hurt him, were actually trying to rob him. All that mattered is that Goetz thought they were. And if the jury concluded that his belief on that front was reasonable, reasonable for him, then they had to quit. And that's what they did.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so did he spend any time in prison?

LEON NEYFAKH: He did. On the weapons charge. He went to jail for under a year, and then he got out and went back to living in his apartment and, you know, had a sort of strange, eccentric life in New York, was often spotted feeding squirrels in the park he loved and continues, I gather, to love taking care of squirrels. And he did face a civil trial in which he was found liable. The massive payout he was supposed to pay in damages to the Cabey family never materialized. You know, he he, at one point he, he submitted his, his assets, and included a $5 guinea pig, if I'm not mistaken.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Where is Goetz now? Is he still in New York City?

LEON NEYFAKH: I don't know. I did not get to talk to him for the podcast. I did email with him, and I do include a quote from one of his emails to me, which I won't I won't spoil here. It's one of my kind of favorite moments in the show because it, you know, the whole time we were doing the reporting, we were like, well, we kind of got to talk to this guy, right? We got to got it. We got to get him. And then we got this email from him, and it had this one line where we're like, oh, this is all we need because it tells you everything. Yeah. But as to where he is, I don't know. He he sent me some photos of himself, rather none of himself of his squirrels. And it looked like he was in some kind of, like, leafy area. So I thought maybe he, like, moved for COVID. But I'm just speculating. I don't know where he where he is now.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what about the boys? The four teens?

LEON NEYFAKH: I mean, this this was a pivotal event in all of their lives. You know, two of them are no longer alive. One Darrell Cabey; my understanding is he lives in an assisted living facility, and another, we interviewed, you know, their family members. We didn't get to talk to either of them directly, but according to Troy Canty's brother, he's a, mechanic somewhere in New York state. Keeps to himself and would only agree to an interview with us if we could arrange for it to to happen on live TV with him and Goetz facing off head to head. And I could not get that done. So.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You know, the story happened in 1984, but it has so much resonance today. Still, what is it about this story that lingers for you?

LEON NEYFAKH: Well, you know, we were almost done with the show when Jordan Neely was killed. There had been an earlier. So we're shooting like early in our production process. It seemed like a random shooting that took place on the train. That was... And when that happened, it was a data point in this growing sense that the city's subway system was becoming unsafe and it had become unsafe during COVID, that it was being, you know, taken over by vagrants and homeless people. And then as we were finishing the show, one of these people who lived on the subway, I gather, Jordan Neely was, you know, having some sort of episode, he had mental illness that he was struggling with. And one of his fellow passengers, Daniel Penny, felt that he was a threat, and he put him in a chokehold of some kind and basically, choked him to death. And so, so I think one one big reason this show came at the right time, journalistically, is that we're in a moment now where people are afraid again, you know, the, the prevailing sentiment certainly about the trains and to a lesser extent, New York overall, is that we're headed back to the bad old days. You know, that it's going to be just like the 80s again. And the crime stats like, don't bear that out at all. But, you know, the the sense that we could have another Bernie Goetz or that we in fact, kind of did have another Bernie Goetz maybe just underscores that, as much as things change, they stay the same. I don't know, so trite, but I think it speaks to, like, the sort of enduring power of fear. That's not to say it's like totally crazy for people to be afraid on the subways because as I said before, you know, random things do happen. And if something is random, then it could happen at any second. I can understand that. But I think, you know, we try to reckon in the show with like, what responsibility do we all have to like keep our fear in check and to like, balance our rights, to be afraid against other people's right to not bear the brunt of our reaction?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Your work is really vast, and you do seem drawn to interrogating major historical events, big ones like Watergate and Bill Clinton's impeachment. What draws you to these kind of stories?

LEON NEYFAKH: I am just, like, very aware that individuals memories are short and imperfect. But then, like collective memory, insofar as such a thing exists, is like really imperfect, like the conventional wisdom about stuff that happened even five, ten years ago is like just often shockingly off base. And as soon as you go back and, like, talk to the people who were there and try to reconstruct the like, cause and effect of like how something turned out the way it did, you see that, like, so little is preserved in the quote unquote, collective memory. And often things get forgotten that kind of change how you look at what happened. You know, with this story, I'll just mention that, like I said before, about the sharpened screwdrivers that these young men had on them. You know, that was that was a detail that every news organization ran with, and it made them sound like they were on the hunt. Right. Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for the Daily News, basically did the reporting to confirm that, yes, they had screwdrivers, but they were not sharpened and they were in their pockets, meaning that Goetz never saw them. They were like they were not brandishing them. They were simply, you know, they were simply in their pockets, apparently, because they were planning to use them to break into arcade game machines, which is like a common hustle at the time, like using screwdrivers to open arcade games and take all the change. And so that detail about the sharpened screwdrivers, you still see that in discussions of the case like that, that that lie just never died. And so, you know, we want people to see these stories that they kind of half remember or half understand with fresh eyes, and we and we and we do that by finding angles and corners of the stories that don't get, like, canonized in quite the same way as, like the most, the most famous moments, you know.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, as a listener, I appreciate it. So thank you.

LEON NEYFAKH: You're very welcome. Thank you so much for for having me on. If you're talking about Fiasco Vigilante. Can I say where we can find it?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yes. It's on Audible, correct?

LEON NEYFAKH: It's on Audible. Yes. So if you have an Audible subscription, it's free to listen to. If you don't, you can go to Audible.com and get a free trial and listen to it. And, check out other seasons of Fiasco on other podcast players.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Great. Thanks, Leon.

LEON NEYFAKH: Thank you so, so much.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thanks, as always for listening to this week's episode of Crime Story. We're actually going to be taking a break for a few weeks for the summer, but we'll be back in September with a whole batch of new episodes. And ahead of that, we want to hear from you. Are there any guests that we should have on the show? Any topics you'd like to hear more of? We'd love your feedback! There's a link to a feedback survey in the episode description, or you can email us directly at CrimeStory@cbc.ca. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikky Manfredi and Sarah Claydon. Sound, designed by Julian Uzielli. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner, our video producer is Evan Aagaard, and our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is the senior manager of CBC Podcasts, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. That's it for now. Have a great summer and I'll see you in September.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 43

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