CrimeWaves

To mark the beginning of the Paris Olympics -  a re-release of our interview with the bravest man in sports - Vitaly Stepanov, the Russian whistleblower who, along with his wife, exposed the dirty secrets at the heart of international sports.

In the ten years, since the Stepanovs came forward with their extraordinary, covert investigation - countless sports officials have been convicted of running a "mafia-like organization", the Russian team has been banned from Olympics and there have been a number of mysterious deaths of other anti-doping officials. 

Meanwhile, Vitaly Stepanov lives in a secret location far away from the sports world.  He has faced harassment, abuse and death threats.  Other whistleblowers have been silenced, Vitaly Stepanov keeps going. 

The show: Learn more at www.crimewaves.com, you can follow the team on twitter at @declan_hill 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

It was a silent, criminal corporation.  
It was worth tens-of-billions of dollars.
They killed and tortured their opponents, without giving any signals or clues to their existence. 
They were the Super-Cartel.  One of the world’s largest drug traffickers and, virtually, no one knew anything about them.  
This is the story of the investigation that brought them down.  

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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Twitter: declan_hill

It was the greatest case of match-fixing in international sports.  

A group of criminals fixed soccer, basketball, handball, volleyball, tennis and many other sports.   They corrupted national teams, the UEFA Champions League, and games around the world.   They had top officials, referees and players on their payroll.  They threatened, extorted and murdered their way through sports.

At the heart of the investigation against them was one dedicated, obsessive cop.   A man who would stop at nothing to bring down. 

This is his story. 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
www.crimewavespodcast.com
www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

You're in prison. 
The system has convicted you of murder. 
 You're serving a lifetime in prison. 
But you're innocent. You didn't kill anyone.  

So who are you going to call? 

It's no use phoning a lawyer. They didn't work too well at your trial.
It's no use phoning a politician. Those guys campaign on locking up murderers. 
Your family cannot help.
Your friends?  Very few actually stayed with you. 

There is one small organization without much money or resources - the Innocence Project.  They are your last hope.

**

This week on Crimewaves, the true story of an extraordinary fight to free an innocent man and overturn a shocking injustice. 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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Twitter: declan_hill

The extraordinary true story of an innocent man convicted of murder and the small group of investigators who not only prove his innocence but find the real murderer.

**

You're driving in your car on a Houston highway. The police stop you and the nightmare begins... 

They open up the trunk and discover a wig and a ski mask. You say, rightly, "they're part of a Halloween costume."   The police arrest you anyway and put you on trial for murder.

The ensuing court trial is bizarre. Six complete strangers stand there and say that you killed somebody and they saw you. You don't know what they're talking about, but the court finds you guilty. Then you lose your appeal, and now you're in prison for the rest of your life for a crime that you did not commit. 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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Twitter: declan_hill

WARNING - A very disturbing, but fascinating, episode.

What kind of person tortures and kills innocent animals?

The results of this investigation are shocking and they reveal a very dark side of the criminal soul: the links between criminal psychopaths and animal cruelty. 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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Twitter: declan_hill

In the 1870s,  thousands of people poured into the mining town of Deadwood Gulch in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Some of those people are still famous today.   
"Calamity Jane" - known throughout the world as the gun-slinging, bar and brothel owner . 
Wyatt Earp -  the most dangerous of all the gun-slinging US Marshals.
Wild Bill Hickok, a man whose biographers claimed  killed only six people in gunfights.
And there was another person... 
A man whose identity was a mystery until current-day investigators got to work... 
Their trail involved forensic dentistry, genealogy, and, good, old-fashioned detective work to trace the identity of an unknown man dead for over one-hundred-and-twenty years. 

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For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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Twitter: declan_hill

This is the story of two skulls. 

It's actually the mystery of two skulls and a long, extraordinary investigation to find the identity of two people. 

 It  is a tale that features one of France's most famous explorers, pirates, shipwrecks, kidnappings, ambushes and, of course, murder...

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The pirates of the 1700s  were democrats. 
Their ships were crammed with men, and women, of all kinds of cultures. 
Many were former slaves. 
Others were indigenous natives. 
Others were our fore-parents escaping a lifetime of servitude as agricultural serfs.

The pay level between a common sailor and a captain on a pirate ship was only twice as much. However, that pay could be massive. Edward "Black Beard" Teach was worth $12 million. Captain John Bowen, a Creole pirate was worth $40 million.  But the greatest of them all was Black Sam Bellamy - 300 years later, Forbes magazine would estimate that "Black Sam" was the richest pirate of all time.

And then "Black Sam" sailed into a dark and stormy night off the coast of Cape Cod and the legends began...

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Twitter: declan_hill

It's the world's oldest profession.  

Sex workers, prostitutes, and the pimps who live off them have been around since the dawn of time. There are mentions of them in the Code of Hammurabi. The dusty case files of medieval Europe talk about them constantly.  There are references to them in Victorian literature from Charles Dickens' Nancy and Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist to the drunken orgies of the Russian military officers and gypsy girls in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

However, in the 21st century there is, of course, a high tech spin to a very old issue.

OnlyFans is spoken of as the 'Uber of sex work'. A disruptive social media platform that purportedly allows sex workers to communicate and make money from their customers without the dangerous control of their pimps.

Unlikely female allies have hailed the site as 'self-esteem conferring'.  An Australian model raised $1 million to help fight forest fires by posting nude photos of herself. And then the Disney star Bella Thorne made over $1 million in one day by promising to do the same thing. 

However, there's a dark side to this new phenomenon.  Critics are claiming that far from saving people from exploitation, human trafficking and underage harm sites  like OnlyFans are doing the exact opposite.

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Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
www.crimewavespodcast.com
www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill