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Crime Story Episode 51: Marc Smerling

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In journalism, at our core, we set out to find the truth. Sometimes it's a small truth, like prove a mayor didn't know that his brother's son got that city contract. Other times, the search is bigger. Like did that soccer official take a bribe, or how did that Australian breakdancer actually make it to Paris? It was this most basic of quests that legendary film producer and true crime journalist Marc Smerling embarked on a few years ago. And this time, the question was huge. Was Pope John Paul I murdered? Pope John Paul I was only 33 days into the top job when he was found dead, giving him the unfortunate designation as the Pope with the shortest reign in history. While the Vatican insisted that he died of a heart attack, they have never been able to shake the rumours of murder and conspiracy. Marc set out to separate the facts from fiction in his podcast The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, and he joins me today on Crime Story. I'm Kathleen Goldhar. Marc, welcome to the show.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, I'm really glad to have you. This podcast was... you couldn't decide one day from the next, uh, what to believe, what you were telling us. So let's just start at the beginning and Anthony Raimondi. What does he say about the death of Pope John Paul I?

MARC SMERLING: Anthony says that his, um, cousin, Luigi Raimondi -- and there was a Cardinal Luigi Raimondi -- called his father, who is an old member of the Sicilian Black Hand, in Brooklyn, and asked him to send somebody over to help murder Pope John Paul I. So, you know, that's the story. And because Anthony had... was sort of the guy coming up in the Colombo crime family, he says he was the likely choice. He went over there, and he sort of came up with a plan of how to kill Pope John Paul I, and then he was there for when it happened.

SOUNDCLIP

ANTHONY RAIMONDI: I said, Jesus Christ, they're going to kill a Pope. I said, All right. I said, Good luck with it. My grandfather goes, No, he goes, You gotta go with him. I gotta go with him? I said, I'm not killing no fucking Pope, Papa. I mean, I don't care on the streets. On the street, you're loansharking, [indistinct]. And you got a problem with a guy, the guy gets whacked. Who gives a shit, you know? We're talking about the Pope. This is the guy who can, like, supposedly, directly talks to God. But my grandfather turned around and says, You're my grandson, I love you. You gotta go. Just when he said it like that, I knew I had to go.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Why did people want to kill the Pope?

MARC SMERLING: Well, there was a lot of conflict in Italy at this time. It's called the 'Years of Lead.' And there was a lot of conflict between the right, the far right -- and it might sound familiar -- and the, and the left, the Communist Party in Italy. And the Communist Party was gaining a lot of ground in a lot of elections in Italy. And it was sort of supposed that Pope John Paul I would be more for the communists than he would be for the fascists. And that scared a lot of people in the Catholic Church because Soviet communism did not recognize organized religion. Also, you know, there was this more pedestrian conflict that was going on. There was something called the Vatican Connection case, which is a true case where the Vatican was accused of working with the Sicilian Mafia and American Mafia to circulate counterfeit stocks and bonds around the world. And it was a big scam. And that it was feared that if Pope John Paul I became Pope, which he did, and then, you know, did what he would usually do, which was be an honest guy, he might expose other people in the Catholic Church who were involved in that scam and maybe even excommunicate them. And then they could be subject to Italian laws.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And screw up the money-making possibilities at the Vatican Bank. I mean, the Vatican Bank's illegal activities were making people very, very rich.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. I mean, the Vatican Bank was essentially an offshore bank within the heart of Rome. You know, so if you knew a priest and you knew somebody who was connected to the Vatican Bank, you could take anything, really. You could even take stolen goods and pass them through the Vatican Bank. Because the Vatican is its own country in Rome. It's [KATHLEEN: Yes.] seen as a separate country.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Like Washington, D.C. [MARC: Exactly.] Or not country, but its own district. [MARC: Yeah.] Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: And so it had diplomatic immunities that countries have, so. And the Vatican Bank shared those immunities as well. So for years, you know, the Mafia was using the Vatican Bank to clean its, its illegal moneys.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's talk about his death. Before the suspicion sort of, like, took over, what did we know about how he died, when he died, that kind of thing?

MARC SMERLING: So, Pope John Paul I became Pope in 1978. Thirty-three days after he became Pope, he died, supposedly in his sleep, of a heart attack, according to the Vatican. But there are a lot of things that happened around his death that gave people pause, particularly journalists at the time. Because... You know, it wasn't that the Vatican didn't do an autopsy -- because they didn't usually do autopsies -- but in this case, because of certain things that were happening in Italy, people wanted to see an autopsy done. But the Vatican didn't do it. What the Vatican did was call the embalmers -- very quickly, within several hours -- and Pope John Paul was embalmed, and then he was very quickly entombed. And the Vatican also misspoke or lied about who had found the body. The body was found by a nun. She had, you know, come in to give him his coffee in the morning. He didn't answer the door, and then she went into his chamber and found him dead. The Vatican said that his secretary found him dead. And, and that also created a lot of suspicion.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And his secretary was a man.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah, was a man.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Which is the reason why they-- Yeah. Like, just to be clear, they had some weird problem with a nun waking him up.

MARC SMERLING: Well, that's what they said afterwards when the lie was revealed. But, you know, the conspiracy theorists believe that the nun was shuffled off to a convent -- which was true -- in the mountains of northern Italy and never heard from again. You know, so, were they covering up a murder, or were they just fumbling through some uncomfortable situation where a woman was in the papal chambers?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You hinted at this at the beginning, but I just want to dive deeper into Anthony himself. Tell me a bit about who he is in terms of his connections to the Mafia.

MARC SMERLING: Right. So, who Anthony is exactly is always in question, right? [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] He is a grand storyteller. I call-- I always tell people he's sort of, you know, like Zelig. Remember the movie Zelig? [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] Anyway. So, he grew up in a Mafia-connected family in Park Slope -- back then it was South Brooklyn -- in a building that was owned by his grandfather, who came over from Sicily. And he said that that generation of his family was largely members of the Black Hand or the Sicilian Mafia. And so they had connections here in America, and they had connections back in Italy. Anthony, from a very young age, wanted to be part of the Mafia. He didn't matriculate in school very well. And at 16 years old, he got in trouble in school, and he went to his father and Hugh McIntosh, who is a notorious Colombo enforcer. And it's true, it's his cousin. And he said, I want to join the Mafia. And Hugh McIntosh put a gun in his mouth and said, Are you ready to do this to somebody? You know, Could you have the balls to do this? And he said, If you don't let me join, you might as well pull the trigger. That's Anthony story. And I believe some of that story. Hugh McIntosh was a brutal guy. And then he, you know, he joined the Mafia at 16, sweeping up at the Diplomat Lounge, which was a Colombo hangout. And then, you know, he was working under Joe Colombo at that time, who was the boss. And then when Colombo died he was working with Hugh, under Persico, who became the boss. And these connections back to Italy are very important to his story, right. Because, you know, even though his father and grandfather were not directly working for the Colombos, they were connected to many of the Italian Mafia families in America. And they had these connections back in Sicily. So, according to Anthony, his father was a hitman. And he would be called upon by anybody in the Mafia to do a job every once in a while. And his uncles were enforcers, and they did sort of back and forth between Sicily, Italy and New York. Um, and that's how he got connected to his cousin Luigi. And he also says he's cousins with Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank. Um, and that's how he sort of got pulled in to help with the murder of Pope John Paul I.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me what it was about him that made you suspicious. Or were you sort of bumped up with what he was telling you as possibly true, versus like what you said, he's a great storyteller.

MARC SMERLING: Well, conspiracies are always hard for me, I think. Because big conspiracies like this sort of suggests that there are a lot of people in the know, and nobody talks about it over many, many, many years. And that's just not the experience we have in reality, right? [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] When it comes to JFK or those grand conspiracy theories, the amount of people who would have to be in the know is, is pretty unbelievable. The Vatican is a little different, right? The Vatican, you know, is largely a closed society. We don't really know what happens day to day within the Vatican and the Pope chambers and among, you know, the higher up in the clergy. So, it may be easier to cover something up like this. But, you know, it's such a grand story and such a huge conspiracy, I always come with a lot of suspicion into those sort of stories. And often I avoid them because they're sort of, you know, they pull you into a world where, you know, people are conflicted. No matter how much you explain it, they're going to have a way to, to untangle your explanation and throw it [KATHLEEN: Of course.] back at you, and you know?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: So, I was suspicious of that. I wasn't really suspicious of anything he was telling me about his role in the Colombo crime family in the beginning. Um, I was a little suspicious of his stories about Vietnam because they sounded very much like movies to me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I just want to spend a little moment there. Tell us the story he told you about what his job or his place was in Vietnam.

MARC SMERLING: Anthony says that, you know, around the time he joined the Colombos, not long after, he was given the job of sort of sitting at the bar at a club called the Cadabra Club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And um, he was there to sort of do business for Colombo -- collect money, disperse money, whatever he needed to do. And one day a guy came in to the club, and he wanted to know who was the boss. And here's this, like, 16-, 17-year-old kid, and he beat him very badly. And Anthony says he went back to Joe Colombo and Colombo said he would take care of it, but his, his cousin, Hugh McIntosh, told him that you can't have him take care of it because if you do, he owns you. This rings really true to me because I've heard this from other gangsters. You know, who are young and something happens and they have to go out and kill somebody or they have to go do something serious, and they do it on their own because they don't want to be sort of a slave of a boss. Anyway, so Anthony gets a gun and he goes and kills this guy. And a year goes by before he's arrested -- someone rats him out. And, um, he's put on trial and he's convicted, under laws that... you know, he's young and, you know, it's, it's very foggy. And then, you know, he makes a trade. He says, I, I'd rather go to Vietnam in this secret unit of violent ex-convicts and do a couple tours than go to prison for 25 years. And so that's what he does. He goes to Vietnam; he does three tours, he says. And then he comes home and he goes back to the Colombos. So he, you know, learned about poisoning people and killing people in many different ways during his time in Vietnam. That's what he says.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you believe that he went to Vietnam?

MARC SMERLING: It's impossible to prove under his story. Like, some of the stuff that Anthony says is, is really difficult to disprove or prove, you know. He says, because it was a secret unit, there would be no records. So, of course, we did an extensive search with military, and there is no record. Surprise, surprise. He's got, you know, dog tags, and you look at the dog tags, and when we ran the dog tag numbers, it ended up being his prison number for when he went to prison for loan sharking and extortion years later. So, it's all very foggy, you know? Um, do I believe it? I can't say that I believe that story. Yeah, I can't.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You can't say you believe that story.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But that is quite the story to keep going. I mean, that is a real story.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah, but then there's people--

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You gotta live that story.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. But also there are people that support that story. [KATHLEEN: Right.] You know, there are people from back when he was younger who he put me in connection with, and, you know, people who were close to the Colombos or in that world, who say, oh, yeah, I remember when he came home and he told me stories. That's the thing about Anthony. Anthony's been telling these stories a long time. He was telling these stories to his cousins and to guys in the Mafia, way back when he was still in his 20s. So the question is, you know, was he telling them way back because they were true or because he believes they were true? So, it's a really interesting journey because you get to fall in love with Anthony, which I did. He's really, really an interesting guy and he tells a great story. And I-- it's hard not to be sympathetic to his story, because a lot of it is true. A lot of the trauma of being sort of a child in this world of the Mafia is true. And you can see in his story a young man struggling to find his place in the world. And maybe he found that place in the world in his mind, and maybe he found that place, you know, through these crazy stories that are true. Who knows? It's really hard to prove.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: One of the more awful things that Anthony did suffer, and you show that it did happen, was a plane crash right outside his school when he was a kid.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. Well, that was, that was-- that story is why I ended up making the podcast. Because, um... like, I think it was the second time we met. We met briefly in a conference room, and he told me a little bit about his life. But the second time we met, we went on a tour of Brooklyn and he took me to Saint Augustine's Church -- which is the church I got married in -- and he told a story about a plane crash. Uh, when he was... basically, I think he was 8 years old. Maybe 12, I can't remember now. And that a plane basically flew by his classroom window on the fourth floor of Saint Augustine's Catholic School and crashed on Fourth Avenue. Third, Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. And I was like, well, this is definitely not true. 'Cause when I'd sat with him the first time, I was sort of like, well, these stories are kind of wild, you know. Maybe, maybe there's some truth. But I think they were largely untrue. But then I did a research on that and it definitely happened. He was definitely there.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's crazy.

MARC SMERLING: And people have forgotten that. But, you know, two planes collided over New York City. One crashed in a field and one crashed in Park Slope. Everybody was killed.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he says one of the more... obviously this is in his mind and he admits it, but he says he saw a figure on the, on the, the, the wings, and that kind of [MARC: Yeah.] informed a lot of the way he thought about life after.

MARC SMERLING: Yes. Well, you know, that's also informed me on how he thought about life after. Right? So, when I heard that story, I thought, we have to start the podcast with this story because it really explains how he sees the world, you know. But yes, he said he, he saw death riding on that plane. And he saw him walking down the street when he was in the ambulance. Because he got glass in his face from when it went by the school. The plane went by the school.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

[music]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's so fascinating because I, I also fell in love with him, and you kind of have to keep reminding yourself that he was a violent man. I mean, it's the same reason why we fell for Tony Soprano, right? It's the same [MARC: Right.] idea. He-- the humanity comes through, and you have to battle the idea that the good versus the bad and, and the character of the person. It's, it's...

MARC SMERLING: Yeah, well.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It really comes through that way.

MARC SMERLING: You know, the Mafia is really good at recruiting young men who are damaged goods.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Mm-hmm.

MARC SMERLING: You know, they're, they're already vulnerable. And that's what they do, they use them. And they use them up and then they discard them. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] And because of the world they're living in and the fact that they usually go to prison for fairly long terms at some point, they become great storytellers in prison. Because in prison, stories are like cigarettes or anything else. They're tradable, you know. Tony Fiore in Crimetown used to tell me that guys who were in prison would come to him and say, Hey, Tony, tell the story about the Emerald Square Bank's heist. And, you know, and they would trade him cigarettes which he would trade for food, and blah, blah, blah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Amazing.

MARC SMERLING: Because he was just such a good storyteller. And plus, stories can elevate your image among a lot of men where image is really, really important. And a violent image is especially [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] important.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Let's jump to the story of his life then. What does he say he did to participate in the murder of the Pope?

MARC SMERLING: All right, so, he says that, you know, he was doing his normal Colombo crime family stuff. A lot of which I'm sure is true. I'm sure he was right hand to Hugh McIntosh, he was right hand to Carmine Persico. Anyway, so he's doing this stuff, and one day his father gets a phone call, and, um, it's about this counterfeiting stock scheme. The Vatican has a tremendous amount of counterfeit stocks and bonds. They need to unload them. If he has a connection within any of the, the trading floors, he can make some money. So he starts getting bundles of counterfeit stocks and bonds. He teams up with a guy who's in the podcast named Joe Plumbo, um, who works on Wall Street. And they start, you know, selling these stocks as counterfeits. The trouble is the FBI gets onto it, which is well documented in the Vatican connection case. And, um, they hear from the Vatican that they're under surveillance, and they should get on a plane -- Joey, him -- and they should go to the Vatican and lay low, because there they can't be arrested. So they jump on a plane, they go to the Vatican. Eventually, Anthony invites his girlfriend, Doris, to come. She's also on the podcast. And they, they're in these separate quarters in this hotel in the Vatican. And it's being worked out between Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank -- this all according to Anthony -- and the FBI. And eventually a deal is cut. Because the FBI doesn't want, according to Anthony, um, it to be known that there's maybe millions, maybe a billion worth of counterfeit stocks and bonds out there. So, according to Anthony, Marcinkus agrees to pay a fine, a fairly hefty one, and then Anthony goes home. Several months later, they get another call from the Vatican, and Anthony's got to go back because the Pope has died. Who is, at least, of knowledge of this scheme, if not participant; who was an advocate for the poor; has been alleged to be a communist, even though he was not; and, um, and is always sort of selling off chattel of the church to build orphanages and everything. And he doesn't sound like a Pope who's going to be down with counterfeiting and all this other stuff. And he may even be a Pope who, you know, starts throwing prelates out of the church because of things they've done in the past, particularly people around the Vatican Bank. [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] Anthony is beckoned by the head of the Vatican Bank, Paul Marcinkus, is what he says. And then he goes over there and he comes up with a plan, which is to poison the Pope.

SOUNDCLIP

ANTHONY RAIMONDI: I said, what's his whole schedule? He goes here, he goes there, all right. At nighttime, he always liked tea. But he liked it extra sweet. I said, Okay. I says, Here's what we can do. I says, Can you get liquid Valium? He says, Yeah. All right. Bring him his tea and you have liquid Valium in it. I says, Can you get cyanide? Potassium cyanide? If you have a high level of potassium in your body, you're gone. You're dead.

MARC SMERLING: And then the Pope is murdered, according to him. And he flies home and never hears anything about it again.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Does he say he poisoned the Pope?

MARC SMERLING: No, he says he, he told them how to do it and witnessed it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay.

MARC SMERLING: But some-- But Paul Marcinkus, he says, is the man who actually poisoned the Pope.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What do you believe? Because clearly his girlfriend went with them to the Vatican before. We know there are connections. What did you find out? Like, what do you think?

MARC SMERLING: I mean, it's really... it's really hard, because... You know, Joey and Doris tell stories about going with him on the first visit when they're running from the cops. And, you know, they, they tell a story about being sort of sequestered in hotel rooms. So there's no way to cross their stories when you speak to them. And their stories have details, but, they're not very detailed.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Mm-hmm.

MARC SMERLING: So, I'm not saying that this did not happen. But it happened in such a way that makes it very difficult to confirm or deny. You know?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: So you've got the story of the counterfeiting, which is a real story about the Vatican connection -- and a lot of those guys went to prison -- but the main guy from the Vatican connection case connected to Anthony was out of prison when this was all going down. And so that's very possible.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you keep, I mean, what I found interesting about your podcast and your investigation is I can hear you, episode by episode, bumping into things that either make you think, oh, well, maybe this could happen. And then there's other times where you bump into something and you're like, no, it didn't happen.

MARC SMERLING: Or it maybe didn't happen

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It maybe didn't happen.

MARC SMERLING: I mean, there's a couple things I don't think happened. I don't know if the Pope was murdered or not. I mean, there were a lot of people killed in Italy during this time. The body count is incredible, and it's not just people who were, you know, law enforcement people going up against the mob. I mean, the prime minister of the country was murdered. [KATLEEN: Mm-hmm.] So, you know, it seemed like anybody was vulnerable who went against the Sicilian Mafia at this time. Or against the right-wing factions that were happening or even the left-wing, severe left wing factions, you know? So, it was a crazy time in Italy. So, the body count would say, maybe the Pope was murdered over this.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's not out of the possibility of the realm of it.

MARC SMERLING: It's not out of the [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] possibility. And, you know, the Vatican acted really strangely after.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: And it could have been they were stumbling along and they were completely, uh, innocent of anything. But, you know, they did some silly things. Um, so maybe that happened. Whether Anthony was part of it is really... you gotta decide for yourself by listening to his story. You know? I mean, we did a lot of work to triangulate his story. And it didn't start out like we were going to tell this story that we're gonna sit around all day long and go like, Is this is true? And, Let's find out if it's true. But it ended up being kind of like that. And a lot of his stories, if you listen to the podcast, do end up being true. He has confirmations about it. So it's, it's, it's a really confounding journey.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You talk to him a lot. I mean, that's another part of this podcast that's really quite fascinating. I mean, he was open to every time that you questioned his truthfulness.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. Yeah, he was really open to that. And he had good explanations sometimes. You know? Um, and sometimes he didn't. But, you know, he's a very bright guy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He was sick. Is he still alive? How is he doing?

MARC SMERLING: He just got out of the hospital again.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Ugh. Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: So, you know, he's not, he's not doing great. You know, he's lost a lot of weight. So it's true that he's dying. And it's true that, you know, he wants to confess. You know? Um, so a lot of stuff is true. And you could be listening to a guy who's at the end of his life, is trying to make some sort of meaning out of it. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] You know, so I tried to put-- because it's definitely not for the money. You know, because he's not going to be around to spend it if there was money. And there are usu-- if anybody in Hollywood knows, there isn't much money. Um, it was definitely for something that he needed to do to become a whole person.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you think he regrets his choices?

MARC SMERLING: Oh, yeah. It's very clear. That he regrets being in the Mafia. You know, he said to me at one point, if he could do it again, he'd be a lawyer. [KATHLEEN: Ha.] In a different kind of Mafia. Um, but, you know, he-- it's very clear that he has regrets.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How do you, as a journalist who does speak to all these criminals, quote unquote, "criminals," and complicated narrators... tell me a little bit about your process and what you think is important about hearing from these people and what you get out of speaking to them.

MARC SMERLING: Well, you know, all guys in the Mafia, most of them exaggerate their roles. It's just part of the culture. You know, uh, they put themselves in places that they may have been adjacent to, but they weren't actually in. You know, that's pretty normal. But you can hear when they're telling truths, you know. You can feel it to a large extent. And the other stuff, you know, you try to figure it out. You try to triangulate it and figure out if it's truthful or not. And I guess where I stand is if I can't prove it and I can't disprove it, I'll let the audience [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] make their own decision about it. Because ultimately this guy's got a right to tell his story, and, um, I think it's a worthy journey to go on. I think that's one question we need to always be asking ourselves in this genre -- that's, you know, occasionally feels a little bit exploitive, you know -- is, why are we telling this story?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: And with Anthony, I really felt like he deserved to have his story told. He had really fashioned this incredible story that touched so many incredible events. And, you know, underneath all that, I found this human being who was just suffering so greatly with his imminent demise. And in that suffering, there was a sort of story about the Mafia that I find common to almost everybody who joins the Mafia. Which is, this is not a career choice that ends up well. You know? It's a career choice that ends up in a very dark and lonely, sometimes broke, place. So I thought his story was, you know, had the elements of being the fantastic Mafia story. [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] The Forrest Gump of the Mafia, so to speak. But underneath it, I could reveal this guy who is just, just in this terrible, terrible life. And how that life affected him. You know, and there's something Shakespearean about that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I really appreciate that answer, because, you know, so often if you start a podcast that doesn't give you some kind of satisfactory answer, you feel a bit let down at the end. Especially if there's sort of a promise of something. But in your podcast, I didn't. I really was, like, appreciative of the complicated nature of the end. And so I think that comes through really nicely, which is a real accomplishment.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah. Well, I, I think that the big revelations with Anthony are not whether this is true or that is true about his life. The story he tells about his life. But the big revelations are, who is this guy? [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] And why is he telling these stories. And if you can let yourself just unlatch from the truth or the, you know, of his, of his, his stories, you can kind of hold on to him and go on the journey with him. It's-- I was, I was telling your producer the other day, it's very much like the Big Fish, the movie. You know, I don't know if you remember that movie.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I don't.

MARC SMERLING: Oh, it's so good. Um, but basically, Albert Finney plays this guy who raises this young man, you know, a child, and the child believes all his crazy stories. And they're really, really crazy stories. And then he gets sick and he's dying, and, and, you know, this young man is now grown up, and he's at his father's deathbed. And, you know, his father starts telling stories, which he's heard many, many times by now. And he says to his father, You know, dad, you don't have to tell me those stories anymore. I'm grown up. I know they're not true. And Albert Finney pauses, and he goes, You're telling me my life is not true. That everything about my life is a lie. And the kid realizes that the stories aren't about what really happened. They're about his father and how he sees himself in the world.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARC SMERLING: And I really feel like Anthony is that guy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, thank you for bringing us that story, then. I appreciate the time you gave us, too.

MARC SMERLING: Yeah, thank you for having me. And, you know, hopefully people will find a lot of fun in hearing it.

[Episode closing music]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We release a new episode every Monday, so please remember to follow the show in your podcast app. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel or by subscribing to CBC Podcasts' True Crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad-free. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikki Manfredi and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Julian Uzielli. Media clips courtesy of UCG Audio. 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.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 51

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