
In This Episode
After the killers are arrested, Chip Yablonski must run a new election campaign against Tony. If he can take the presidency, then he can find out who ordered his father’s murder.
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TRANSCRIPT
[voice over]: Campside Media.
Nicolo Majnoni: Two long years after his family was murdered, Chip Yablonski walked into a Pennsylvania courthouse. It was the final day of the trial of Paul Gilly, the ringleader of the trio of killers. The sun had already set below the horizon as the sheriff brought in Paul Gilly. It was March 1st, 1972. In some sense, Jock had caught his own killers. Remember when the men showed up at Jock’s house pretending to look for a job and he wrote down their license plate number? Police found that note and used it to track down Paul Gilly. They found Paul with a stockpile of weapons in his house and a map. With Jock’s hometown underlined in big red ink. They arrested him and used eyewitness accounts to track down Buddy Martin and Claude Vealey. The prosecutor started by convicting Buddy and Claude, the lowest criminals on the totem pole.
Chip Yablonski: We were there for every day of every trial. The only time I missed any time is when Shirley was having Alexa.
Nicolo Majnoni: In the midst of this horror, Chip welcomed a daughter, Alexa. And now, at long last, Chip was seated again in the front row as the moment came for the closing arguments of the final killer’s trial. Well, not the very last, not if all went well. It was clear to everyone that Chip’s ultimate goal was to get not just the killers, but the men who’d hired them to kill.
[news clip]: Paul Gilly is the man on trial here, but the prosecution’s strategy is clear. To trace the blame for the Yablonski killings, much higher indeed, namely Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers Union.
Nicolo Majnoni: This trial, Paul Gilly’s trial, was crucial to making their way up the chain to Tony because Paul was the only one of the three killers with a direct connection to the union by way of his father-in-law. But Paul continued to plead not guilty as character witnesses lined up for him.
[news clip]: His second wife describes him as a kind man with a heart as big as the world. He was a house painter in business for himself with five or six employees.
Nicolo Majnoni: As the jury filed out to deliberate, it felt like this could go either way. And just a few hours later, they filed back in. Chip watched from his front row seat as the verdict was read. Guilty. On every count. You could practically hear the courtroom exhale. Before the courier could read the punishment, a jury member yelled out, death. Paul was the last of the hitmen. All three were now convicted. Chip was thrilled.
Chip Yablonski: He couldn’t die soon enough, as far as I was concerned. He put a bullet into my family’s head. Son of a bitch.
Nicolo Majnoni: Paul Gilly tried to stand, but deputies pulled him down as the court erupted in chaos. Reporters scrambling, people holding back tears. Chip congratulated the prosecutor. They were one step closer to Tony. Once they’d convicted Paul, had his life in their hands, he cut a deal. He ratted out his father-in-law in exchange for a more lenient sentence. Paul’s father-in-law went on to implicate Tony Boyle’s lieutenants from the notorious Harlan County, Tony’s own personal enforcement arm of the union. But that is where everything stalled.
Chip Yablonski: The moment they started climbing the ladder, there were some darn good lawyers on the other side.
Nicolo Majnoni: The closer they got to Tony, the tougher the lawyers they faced. They’d hit a wall. Tony’s inner circle, the Harlan County men, were intensely loyal to the union. They were men who would never betray Tony as long as he was president of the union, which is why Chip knew he had one move left. Take the presidency from Tony. Beat him in a new election. If he could get Tony out of the Union, then maybe those Harlan County conspirators would turn on Tony, give the DA evidence to convict him. So Chip turned in full force to his final option, his Hail Mary, beat Tony at the ballot box. From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom; Coal Survivor, Episode 6: The Rebellion Lives On. I’m your host, Nicolo Majnoni.
[overlapping voices]: This small organization is opposing a well-entrenched leadership of the United Mine Workers of America. / Then it was real. It was like, all of a sudden there was this thing looming. / I broke up with my girlfriend because I said, look, the crusade’s on. / Kids, ladies, look around the back of the phone. Look behind you and see what bums look like. / Down in my guts, I can tell you. That you can win. You can win!
Nicolo Majnoni: Chip had still been in his 20s when he ran his dad’s campaign. He was a kid. But now other 20-somethings and one teenager looked up to him, called him the general. And General Chip needed a new election. But to get one, he had to battle the Labor Department in court, which was a long, drawn-out process. The case ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court. And finally, two months after Paul Gilly’s conviction, and two years after Jock’s murder, Chip got the court’s decision. The election between Jock and Tony was overturned, deemed corrupt, and the court was granting them a brand new election. Chip broke the news to his ragtag crew. Hard-hitting Clarice, Professor Don, almost a priest Ed.
[news clip]: The U.S. District Court has overturned the 1969 election of United Mine Workers President W.A. Tony Boyle.
Nicolo Majnoni: But as the word made its way around the crew, their exuberance turned from, we did it, to more like, oh shit, we did. Like the dog that caught the car.
Bob Haputman: When the judge ordered the new election, everything changed.
Nicolo Majnoni: Bob Haputman, aka Bob the Kid there.
Bob Haputman: Yeah, then it was real. It’s like all of a sudden there was this thing looming and all kinds of new things we had to figure out. It just became overwhelming.
Nicolo Majnoni: The judge set a timer. You have seven months to do what no one in generations had done. Run and win a democratic election. A new countdown clock had begun. Just three weeks after they’d gotten word they could run a new election, Chip led his team into their first battle, nominating someone to run against Tony, someone who could beat him. They would hold a convention to do this. Everything rested on the miners’ choice. And Chip was determined to let the miners pick their candidate democratically from the rank and file. You know, by the people, for the people. Union rules said they had to choose someone had spent time in the mines so it couldn’t be Chip. But the miners were so used to having a pre-determined candidate that they just assumed Chip would still do what Tony had done. Basically, tell them who the candidate would be and then massage the vote for that candidate.
Ed James: Chip didn’t want that. He said, no, no. We’re going to go through all the rules, the committees. He wanted miners buy-in.
Don Stillman: I mean if you’re trying to bring about a democratic union, you not only want the final steps to be democratic, you want the very first steps to be democratic.
Nicolo Majnoni: Ed and Professor Don there. The official union conventions were million-dollar affairs, complete with filet mignon and tens of thousands of dollars in swag. Chip’s crew? They could just afford $8 motel rooms. Their main logistics man was Bob the Kid, and they were barely even able to find actual venue.
Ed James: A lot of venues did not want to take us. They’re worried about a bombing or violence. And they wanted a huge indemnity insurance policy, and we didn’t have any money.
Nicolo Majnoni: But yet again, Chips Crew got creative. They found a miner with connections at Wheeling College in West Virginia. That miner convinced the college to take a chance on Chips crew. So they had a venue. One problem solved, 10,000 to go. On May 27th, 1972, less than three months after the Gilly trial, Chip and his skeletal underfunded crew made their way to the event hall across the Wheeling College Quad. Chip’s crew could have easily been mistaken for college kids taking summer classes. They were literally renting college dorms to sleep in. They didn’t look like adult revolutionaries. Just to be safe though, police sent bomb squads throughout the campus. The proceedings were opened by the priest who officiated Jock’s funeral, invoking the name of the original rebel.
[clip of priest]: We can’t forget the Yoblanski family who died for democracy. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Nicolo Majnoni: Then Chip came to the floor. He’d never thought of himself as a natural leader like Jock. But that day, standing at the podium, under a portrait of Jock, his arms outstretched, Chip channeled his father. He was on fire.
Chip Yablonski: Down in my guts. I can tell you that you can win. You can win, and you’ve got to go down the street for the next six months working your tails off because it’s not going to be easy, but come mid-December, you will have won. And God bless you for doing it.
Nicolo Majnoni: Chip made it clear this would be a democratic convention, and that they would be choosing someone from the coalfields to lead them. In an interview from that time, he said, I’m agnostic about who you choose and how you wanna do this on every point, except for one.
Chip Yablonski: Whatever we do, we have to win.
Nicolo Majnoni: And then the convention began. Nominees were chosen by going around the room, district by district, and people would literally just shout from the audience, I wanna nominate my buddy, Harry.
If enough people seconded Harry or whoever, they would go on the ballot. That would turn into a list of candidates, and it was here that the games really began. The nominees and miners spilled out into the college quad, each man making his case while Bob frantically set up supplies.
Bob Haputman: Just running my ass off, putting chairs out, and worrying about logistics. There’s all kinds of soap opera stuff going on among the people. Who was meeting whom in back rooms? But we didn’t really have no idea who said what to whom.
Nicolo Majnoni: And by Saturday night, through the confusion, two candidates emerged, Arnold Miller and Mike Trbovich. 49-Year-old Arnold was a veteran of World War II, a mine electrician. He had black lung and was a real miner’s miner.
Arnold Miller: I carried whatever I thought was appropriate, shotguns, pistols, I’ve got a house full at home.
Nicolo Majnoni: Competing with well-armed Arnold that night was Mike Trbovich. Mike was almost the same age, but much more of a known quantity. He’d work really closely alongside Jock during his campaign. In a lot of ways, he was the most obvious candidate.
Mike Trbovich: We believe in a democratic union. This is what we have been fighting for for three years. We want many things, but we want to understand that we are members of the United Mineworkers of America. [applause]
Nicolo Majnoni: So as Saturday wound down, there seemed to be an understanding. Mike is our guy for president, Arnold would be VP. But during the night, some miners kept politicking. Everyone has a different story of what happened late Saturday.
[overlapping voices]: Well, there had been some bickering. / And ther`e were a couple different factions. / Everybody was pushing and shoving and promoting themselves. / People hadn’t had that much experience working with each other. / And there was a lot of political infighting and a lot bitterness. / It was pretty clear that everything was going to come unglued. / Even to the last day, I don’t think it was clear to anybody whether Arnold or Mike would be the top candidate.
Nicolo Majnoni: One person even begged the press not to write about all the chaotic details.
Mike Trbovich: Had they printed what they had seen there at the winning convention, it would just destroy the whole reform movement.
Nicolo Majnoni: The next morning, Mike and Arnold sat on the edge of their seats. It was the final day of the convention, and the votes were slowly counted, district by district. Chip was anxious too. This Democratic convention was a big risk. To have any chance of beating Tony, the miners needed to close ranks behind one presidential candidate. But at first, it seemed like the miner’s were in a dead heat. One district for Arnold. One district for Mike, two for Arnold, two districts for Mike. Nerves frayed as the vote tally slowed down. When some voters flipped for Arnold miners yelled out, double cross. But the organizers calmed the crowd and continued. An old friend of Jock’s reminded the miners that this was the point of democracy. It was gonna be messier, more uncertain. Finally, the results came back.
[news clip]: In a short, low-budget, but spirited convention, the Miners for Democracy placed the mantle of leadership on the shoulders of Arnold Miller, a West Virginia miner who is himself a victim of black lung.
Nicolo Majnoni: It was close, but a clear majority of miners picked Arnold for president. The convention worked out a compromise where Mike, the second place candidate, would run as VP. Chip’s crew had faced their first real test and they just barely passed it, but they did it. Democracy and unity. After the break, the reformers pack heat and ride into enemy territory. [AD BREAK] As Arnold began making his way around the coal fields, talking with miners and rallying support, Chip made his way to Charleston, West Virginia, to the new campaign headquarters. Chip parked on the street next to a string of humble downtown shops, a pizza place, a used car dealership, a work uniform store. He opened a side door and climbed a narrow flight of stairs to their home base. A small series of offices lined with tacky carpeting. And lit by fluorescent bulbs. Tony Boyle had a $180 million bank to wage his war from. Chip Screw had two rooms above a pizza place.
[news clip]: This small organization is opposing a well-entrenched leadership of the United Mine Workers of America. That leadership has many resources for getting out the votes. It has a large organization, a large treasury to finance campaigning. There’ll be an uphill fight all the way.
Nicolo Majnoni: Uphill against a man who showed them he was willing to do anything, even the worst thing to win. And Tony’s side was sending all kinds of threats.
Ed James: Chip called and said the FBI had warned him that there was a contract on it in his life and said you guys have to tighten up and become more careful.
Nicolo Majnoni: Chip said he’d already bought a gun, and maybe they should arm themselves too. So, almost the priest Ed went shopping.
Ed James: I bought a 38 snub nose and a shoulder holster, and we bought a shotgun for the office, which I believe Arnold Miller sawed off down to the legal limit. But then again, I’m not sure anybody among our staff knew how to fire the shotgun anyway.
Nicolo Majnoni: Chip’s life was starting to look chillingly like his dad’s had in 1969. And in this moment, outnumbered, outspent, in danger, reporters increasingly skeptical of them, no one would have faulted the crew for just easing up, backing down. But sometimes, when the odds are stacked like that, when you feel like you have nothing to lose, sometimes you choose the most reckless option. When they sat down to decide how to kick off this campaign, that’s exactly what happened.
Ed James: Our first rally was in Everett, Kentucky, which is Harlan County.
Nicolo Majnoni: Harlan County, Tony Boyle’s stronghold, the most dangerous corner of the union, in the district where the Jablonski murders were commissioned. That Harlan county.
Ed James: We never thought we’d get any support down there, but we wanted to show we weren’t going to be intimidated. It’s like an animal, a cat marking a tree.
Nicolo Majnoni: They didn’t feel like they could beat Tony head on, so they chose scrappy guerrilla warfare. In July of 1972, Chip’s crew loaded up their cars with guns and a pack of rowdy miners, and they headed south to Harlan County.
Ed James: It was like something out of a cartoon with guns sticking out the windows. We had two carloads of people from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Was just armed to the teeth.
Nicolo Majnoni: As they rolled into Harlan and began setting up, they saw Tony’s men were already there, hovering around the rally. It was like a signal. Tony was watching, taking note of who stood against him in this fight. Was a new Paul Gilly hiding in the stands? [applause] Reporters were there watching too, eager to see how this scrappy team would do. And the event didn’t start out great. At first, most of the attendees were just members of Chip’s crew. When Arnold, the presidential candidate himself, arrived in Harlan, he had to dodge attacks from gun thugs. And when no one was looking, the crew’s cars were vandalized. This could go south very quickly.
Clarice: If we wanted these people to stay with us and to stay strong, we had to show them that they had something much more going for them than these guys did.
Nicolo Majnoni: When Tony’s men looked at Clarice, I imagined them smirking. A puny lawyer from Washington DC, a city slicker. But they didn’t know Clarice. A child of Polish immigrants, a challenger of schoolyard bullies. Clarice described what it was like to stand on stage and look straight into the eyes of Tony’s man at the back of the room. What it was to address the women and children in the crowd.
Clarice: I said, kids, ladies, look around the back of the room, ok? Look behind you and see what bums look like. You know, jerks that are trying to scare you.
Nicolo Majnoni: During rallies like this, Clarice’s voice would drip with disgust, which was echoed in the faces of the women as they stared back at the goons.
Clarice: And they all looked around, and those guys just slunk right out of the room.
Nicolo Majnoni: The guns they’d brought honestly wouldn’t have been enough to protect them in a region where they’d be outnumbered in a heartbeat. So, as they would have to do in every aspect of this campaign, they had to fight scrappy. With weapons, even a broke campaign over a pizza shop had.
Clarice: Humiliation and embarrassment does a really good job against people who are trying to intimidate.
Nicolo Majnoni: With that, they sent a clear message. You’ve already done your worst, Tony. We have nothing to lose and we’re not backing down. The rally and their campaign was off to a powerful start. Candidate Arnold Miller came out and proclaimed, the days of fear are over. Chip’s crew returned to Charleston, rejuvenated and ready to fight. And back at the campaign headquarters, the momentum continued. More people were coming on board to donate, to volunteer.
Bob Haputman: Everything changed. I mean, we had been like basically four or five of us and all of a sudden there were 20 of us.
Nicolo Majnoni: New staffers scurried up and down the stairs. Phones rang off the hook. Typewriters clanked like little symphonies. As Bob looked around, he saw new amenities pop up.
Bob Haputman: Like mailing equipment and a receptionist type person or a typing table, something that I thought was a luxury. Don bought a nice chair. Ed had like a cork board with all kinds of things pinned to it.
Nicolo Majnoni: And so, around a luxurious new chair and some cork boards, Chip’s crew met to divvy up the responsibilities of the guerrilla campaign. Professor Don would run communications. Almost a priest Ed would take on overall strategy. And Bob the Kid would leverage his 11th grade education and run the research and logistics department. Oh, and he’d help with poll numbers too. All that administrative stuff was fine, but they needed to get out of the office and meet miners. And an almost priest, a few Ivy League grads, and a high school student from Philly were not gonna resonate with the miners. Especially with Tony out there screaming that smelly outsiders were taking over the union, Chip’s crew needed an insider. Specifically, a man who’d been inside the mines. Someone like Eddie Burke, the coal miner you heard from in episode one who grew up in a coal town. Eddie had been a big fan of Jock’s because Eddie’s dad died of black lung. And he knew Jock was one of the only union officials fighting for black lung benefits. Eddie had followed Chip’s revival of Jock’s revolution and quickly volunteered to help. And Eddie was kind of perfect for this job, not just because of his mining connection. This was a revolution and Eddie Burke had always been prone to rebellion. From the time he was arguing with principals in middle school. Until he was an adult, challenging dumb rules at work.
Eddie Burke: I always tell people, they say, how’d you get involved in this? I said, mostly two words. They said, what do you mean? I said think about two words, how come? Why is that? No shit. You know, I said that’s what’s got me this far in life is two words!
Nicolo Majnoni: So Chip sent Eddie out to campaign at the mines. He’d approach miners coming out of their shifts.
Eddie Burke: Hey. I need to have a few seconds. First of all, I hope you all have a safe work shift today. Be careful out there, but I’m here to talk about people’s gonna be fighting for you instead of those fucking crooks up there.
Nicolo Majnoni: The mine chaplains didn’t always like the salty language.
Eddie Burke: And then some, some preacher say, I don’t appreciate you talking about that. I apologize to the preacher over there. I apologize. I shouldn’t have said that. Yeah. But, but, but be sure and vote for them anyway. They don’t talk like this, you know.
Nicolo Majnoni: And when he wasn’t out in the coal fields, Eddie was parked in one of Tony Boyle’s campaign offices. You see, when the election was overturned, Chip had asked the courts to let them put observers from his team inside Tony’s campaign to keep an eye on Tony. And the courts granted it. This was huge. It would be much harder for Tony to cheat this time because monitors would be allowed to go sit in Tony’s campaigns offices, to go to meetings, to read Tony’s finance reports. So, Chip’s team assigned Eddie to be one of those monitors. And Eddie made his way to Tony’s campaign office in Charleston, West Virginia, which happened to be a converted former coal operator’s mansion. But when Eddie went there, when he showed up at the office.
Eddie Burke: They said they didn’t have office space.
Nicolo Majnoni: They didn’t know who they were dealing with.
Eddie Burke: I said, that’s no problem. I’ll sit right here. So I sat from late June until December on a couch, a leather couch, as soon as you came in the front door.
Nicolo Majnoni: Tony’s men quickly realized he was not gonna budge, and that they didn’t want one of Chip’s guys sitting at the very front of the office where he could see everything. Suddenly, miraculously, they found an office for him.
Eddie Burke: And I refused to leave. I said, I don’t need one. I’m perfectly comfortable with this. This is my office. And I sat there and I recorded observations.
Nicolo Majnoni: We should put observations in air quotes here.
Eddie Burke: Sometimes it would be, I am now writing because it really seems to be frustrating, the person in the blue shirt. And I’d be walking around writing down license plates, just to aggravate someone. But I got used to being called a variety of names that my mother and father would be very upset to hear. I’d just smile back at them. My biggest weapon was smart. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Nicolo Majnoni: Eddie’s weapon was a smile, but it wasn’t a weapon they could unleash on a national scale. Eddie, candidate Arnold Miller, they were all going miner by miner, mine by mine. Chips crew, they needed to reach all the miners if they had any shot at winning this. Tony had such a hold over the miners for so long, that Chip’s crew had to present their case. But they’d never be able to reach all 200,000 miners one bath house at a time. There was, of course, no internet, no social media. So their only option was the good old postal service. They went to court again and forced Tony to turn over the union mailing list. And then they went to work crafting the perfect brochure. I’ve held the brochure in my hand. You can feel how much work went into it. It described the revolutionary concept of Arnold Miller, a miner, representing them. It listed their platform. Better pensions, much more safety on the job, sick pay, the ability to walk out if you felt you might get killed on the job. It went on and on. So they had the perfect piece of campaign messaging, the equivalent of like 300 modern day email blasts in one riveting glossy brochure. And they were about to fire them off to the post office when they realized they needed to actually mail these brochures, which meant organizing 200,000 mailers by zip code. The crew turned to their fixer, Bob the Kid.
Bob Haputman: So we started the process of, okay, how do we do that?
Nicolo Majnoni: How they did that was have Bob sit in a room for a week, nearly day and night, and put nearly all 200,000 pieces of mail in order by zip code. Then he stuffed all 200,000 pieces of mail in almost a priest Ed’s station wagon. Ed’s driver’s seat was jammed and Ed was almost a foot taller than Bob.
Bob Haputman: I think I’d probably use a telephone book behind my back to make the seat fit.
Nicolo Majnoni: He drove 12 hours like that to Washington, DC, where he discovered he had a new problem.
Bob Haputman: Literally as I drive into the post office and get into the loading docks. I run out of gas
Nicolo Majnoni: Young Bob decides, I’ll deal with that later. He starts unloading the letters so precisely ordered by zip code.
Bob Haputman: And they say what you printed on the piece doesn’t match the kind of permit you have and we shouldn’t take this.
Nicolo Majnoni: Bob immediately starts crying.
Bob Haputman: This campaign, you know, I got 200,000 pieces here, you know our whole campaign, you know I did anything I had to because there’s no turning back at this point.
Nicolo Majnoni: He cried, he begged, he may have yelled.
Bob Haputman: And there was a postal employee by the name of Mr. Wright. I always remember Mr. Wright.
Nicolo Majnoni: Mr. Wright took pity on this poor, hysterical teenager and found a way to get the mailer through. And their message went out. As the mailers flew across the country, Bob had a 12-hour drive back to their Charleston base camp. 12 hours to ponder what an adventure this had been.
Bob Haputman: By that time we were brothers. I mean it was a tight family.
Nicolo Majnoni: They all lived in cheap apartments across from each other in Charleston. They ate every meal together. They did nothing but campaign.
Ed James: We took a vow of chastity and poverty. We got paid $400 a month. I broke up with my girlfriend because I said, look, the crusade’s on. We can’t have relationships. Just work, work, work.
Nicolo Majnoni: Though, young Bob did find time to lose his virginity somewhere on the campaign trail.
Bob Haputman: I had met a friend of one of Ed’s roommates was in town as a house guest and we wound up getting together. Very unusual experience, not repeated. So it was a coming of age.
Nicolo Majnoni: The crew talked into the night about dreams, even bigger than just the election. That if they won this, it could be the first domino in a new future for Appalachia. They could leverage it to improve healthcare, education and the environment for this impoverished region. Something that had been part of Jock’s dream too, back in 1969. In fact, it felt as if the Yablonski mission and the Yablonski family itself had expanded to include a dozen or so 20 year olds. And it was fitting, because this fight had started with family. Now there was a new family, bigger, more efficient, with shaggier hair. But for all the new observers and mass mailings, it was still powered by Jock’s original dream, that if you bring democracy to working people, give them some say in their industry, good things will happen. And he was killed because of that dream. But that was 1969. Now, it was December of 1972. Chip’s crew had been campaigning for six months. For Bob the Kid, that was not an insignificant percentage of his life. And Bob felt the pressure as the week of the elections came.
Bob Haputman: We thought we were running a good campaign, we thought we had good issues, and we had reasonably good feedback. We just weren’t sure if it’d be enough.
Nicolo Majnoni: But on December 8th, election day, they would find out.
[news clip]: The United Mine Workers Union will begin voting this Friday for a new president. / It’s been one of the most closely monitored elections. More than a thousand men from the Labor Department are overseeing the election. To see that it’s fairly conducted. All indications are that it will be a close election. Polls show that many of the miners still haven’t decided how to vote.
Nicolo Majnoni: For all the fancy polling, no one had any idea how this would turn out. If Tony won, he could walk free, his lieutenants closing ranks around him. If Tony lost, he’d be exposed. The veil of secrecy around him would be ripped away. And there was even less telling what Tony would do then. That’s next time on Shadow Kingdom. Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media. It’s hosted and reported by me, Nicolo Majnoni. The show is written by Joe Hawthorne, Karen Duffin and me. Joe Hawthorne is our managing producer. Karen Duffin is our story editor. The associate producers are Rachel Yang and Julie Denesha. Sound Design, mix and mastering by Erica Wong. Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam. Cello performed by Linnea Weiss. With additional sound design support from Mark McAdam. Studio engineering by Rachel Yang and XXX. Fact Checking by Amanda Feinman. Our executive producers are me, Nicolo Majnoni. Along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Mary Nauf and Alison Falzetta from Crooked Media. Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Shaer and Vanessa Grigoriadis are the Executive producers at Campside Media.