Criminal Records Podcast

Mickey Cohen had friends in high places, from celebrities to televangelists to the LAPD. So what happened when one of the nation's most notorious mobsters tried to file his taxes as a legitimate hat salesman?

Sources and show notes at this link

It's an illegal gambling, Nazi-punching, tax-paying good time with Mickey Cohen, a gangster who rose through the ranks during one of America's most infamous eras of organized crime. Just don't ask about who he might have shot on his way to the top.

Sources and show notes at this link

As the internet creates new unmoderated spaces for ideas to spread, the sovereign citizen movement moves on to new audiences and finds a lot of angry divorced dads who don't want to pay child support.

Content notes: This episode continues our discussions of fascist ideology, racism, and antisemitism from part 1.

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Don't feel like paying your taxes? Want to start your own posse? Still mad about the gold standard? Looking for an excuse to blame all your problems on the Jews? Have we got a legally dubious ideology for you!

Content notes: This episode contains discussion of fascism and anti-semitic ideology. Some violent incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco are mentioned but are not discussed in detail.

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When you're unhappy about the price of wheat, there's only one solution: Send a telegraph to the Australian government declaring war.

Sources, show notes, and some pictures from a very real country at this link

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When an Englishman with the rare ability to speak Mandarin Chinese got into a dispute with a corrupt local official in Zhejiang, he took his complaints all the way to the top, kicking off a diplomatic incident involving the emperor himself.

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A negotiation over fishing rights took an unexpected turn when a Lithuanian fisherman jumped onto an American Coast Guard ship to seek asylum. But as investigators dug into the story of this Soviet citizen's attempt to defect, they discovered that the defector's legal status was far more complicated than anyone—even Kudirka himself—could have guessed.

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(Sorry for the late post this week, I'm getting over a migraine!)

In a country where gay sex is illegal, is a magazine for gay people a publication for criminals? Is the content obscene, even if there's no sexual content on the page, just because sex might be suggested somewhere off the page or in the pages of an entirely different publication? And most importantly, can you put this magazine in the mail?

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Hello listeners! Isaac is entering final paper grading/rec letter writing season on top of planning an international exchange school trip for some of his students in May. I've also got plans to visit family on the east coast this month.

Instead of rushing out episodes to cover the time we'll be too busy to record, we decided to hit pause on Criminal Records Podcast for a month. If you're a patron, we've paused billing for the month of May so you won't be hit with charges for content we're not putting out. We'll be back in June with some new weird cases!

If the obscene material you're distributing is so avant-garde that most readers can't tell it's actually obscene, did you commit a crime or not? This week, we're getting into the trial of the scandalous literary magazine editors who brought the work of James Joyce to America.

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