Dubious

In a phenomenon dubbed "Sudden Russian Death Syndrome", over two dozen oligarchs, media executives, and high ranking military personnel have died in "accidental" deaths since the start of the Ukraine war.

Most have "fallen" out of windows. One fell from his boat and "died instantly" upon hitting the water. One even died from the poisoned toad venom he took from a couple of guru-healers in Moscow who gave him the toxin as a hangover cure. All of these victims of SRDS have run afoul of Putin's favor, and met untimely deaths in the past couple of years. If you like our content please become a patron to support the podcast. You'll get all of our episodes ad-free. 1

We're also talking a bit about the Wagner group, recently declared an international criminal organization by the US State Department. Its leaders have a penchant for Nazi tattoos and brutality, but they also seem to have much more leeway in terms of criticizing the Kremlin than all of the unfortunate oligarchs who fell out of their balcony windows or fell down a flight a stairs. Recently the Russian Army took credit for taking the town of Soledar in Eastern Ukraine, and Wagner Group officials publicly corrected them and chastised the Kremlin for "stealing their victory." In a rare moment of backing down, the Kremlin apologized for the mis-statement. 2

Almost half of the two dozen or so "mysterious deaths" since the beginning of the Ukraine war happened prior to the summer of 2022. 3

1. Elaine Godfrey. Sudden Russian Death Syndrome. The Atlantic. December 2022. ⇤

2. Leila Sackur. Victory claims over small Ukrainian town expose rift among Russian forces NBC News. January 2023. ⇤

3. Giulia Carbonaro. Every Russian Official Who Has Died Since Putin Invaded Ukraine. Newsweek. April 2022. ⇤

What is truth? With George Santos, who knows. This week we're talking about the most prolific liar in the US Congress, Long Island's recent house member elect: George Santos.

In this episode we're talking about who George Santos is and how he got here... here being both the United States and the House of Representatives. If you like our content, please become a patron if you'd like to support us directly. You'll get all of our episodes ad-free.

The only thing we know for sure about George is that he is in fact a child of Brazilian immigrants, the rest is a very moving target. We only know that because he has a pending criminal charge in Brazil, apparently he stole the checkbook of a deceased man his mother was caring for and went shopping on the dead man's account. 1

More interestingly, George is apparently quite friendly with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, via Viktor's cousin in the United States Andrew Intrater. Santos is the largest recipient of funds from Intrater / Vekselberg linked companies in the past election cycle and the only one to get individual donations from both Intrater and his wife. 2

Santos is also linked to an investment firm in Florida called Harbor City Capital which was shut down by the SEC for operating as a ponzi scheme, and directors of that company including Jayson Benoit and Devaughn Dames are now involved in other Republican fundraising and political organizations, such as WinRed and Red Strategies USA.

WinRed in particular has some explaining to do, as Santos and another campaign affiliated with his former Harbor City buddies (Tina Forte who ran against AOC in 2022 and lost by 44 points) are accused of fraudulently over-billing donor credit cards via the WinRed payment processing service. 3

WinRed's treasurer is a man named Benjamin Ottenhoff who came up in the Senate campaigns of Rick Scott, the senator from Florida who, unsurprisingly, was the CEO of a company which at the time pled guilty to the largest Medicare fraud in US history. Funny how Republicans pretend to care about how things cost too much but are either throwing money at scams or perpetrating them all the time, isn't it?

Predictably, an Ottenhoff firm was also paid quite a bit to "consult" on Kanye West's political campaign, too. 4

1. Grace Ashford and André Spigariol. Brazilian Authorities Will Revive Fraud Case Against George Santos. The New York Times. January 2023. ⇤

2. Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rosalind S. Helderman . New details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch. The Washington Post. January 2023. ⇤

3. Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky. Campaigns Linked To Santos Left Donors Feeling Ripped Off After Questionable Credit Card Charges. Talking Points Memo. January 2023. ⇤

4. Roger Sollenberger and William Bredderman. Kanye West’s ‘Independent’ Campaign Was Secretly Run by GOP Elites. The Daily Beast. ⇤

A Virginia school teacher was shot by her six-year-old student after she tried to confiscate the weapon from the child who was showing off the gun in class.

Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said that the shooting was intentional, not an accident. After an altercation with his teacher, 25 year old Abby Zwerner, the first grader shot her twice, once in the abdomen and once in the hand, right there in the classroom. If you like our content please become a patron to support us, you'll get all of our episodes ad-free.

Richneck Elementary went on immediate lockdown and first responders were called. The child was taken “into custody”.

Besides the obvious discussion about gun control and why would such a young child be able to get hold of a gun, in this episode we discuss the story behind the story, and we’ll analyze how the criminal justice system deals with such young offenders. We look at precedents, what the psychiatrists say and at the societal influence that make events such as this one possible. We are of the opinion that this child is also a victim. 1, 2

We also talk about the child sized gun industry and the lightweight, JR-15 weapon, inspired by the AR-15 and designed for juniors by an American company. 3

1. Antonio Planas and Helen Kwong. 6-year-old is unlikely to be charged in teacher's shooting, but parents could be, experts say. NBC News. January 2023. ⇤

2. Erum Salam. Virginia teacher who was shot by six-year-old tried to confiscate gun – report. The Guardian. January 2023. ⇤

3. Snejana Farberov. 'It shoots just like mom and dad's gun': Weapons manufacturer unveils AR-15 for KIDS - called JR-15 - that is 20% smaller and weighs just 2.3lbs. The Daily Mail. Feb 2022. ⇤

A Romanian and an American are discussing the twitter obliteration of Andrew Tate by Greta Thunberg, while focusing on the lesser known details of his criminal activity and arrest in Bucharest, his childhood, chess years and current girlfriend.

The online feud between teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate is probably one of the best Twitter moments ever. Greta won by knockout, despite Tate’s kickboxing background. If you like our content and want to support us, please become a patron.

The Tate brothers – Andrew and Tristan – moved to Bucharest, Romania in 2017 because they thought rape charges are easier to avoid. In April 2022, following a tip-off from the US embassy that a 21-year-old American woman was being held against her will, their Pipera villa was raided. The police found two women being held captive, an American and a Romanian and the brothers were detained for 24 hours, on suspicion of human trafficking and rape.

In December 2022, hours after posting a video reply to Greta Thunberg showing two Jerry’s Pizza boxes, DIICOT - Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism – arrested the brothers again, as well as two women who were helping them: Luana Radu – an ex cop - and Georgiana Manuela Naghel, the latter being Andrew Tate’s girlfriend.

DIICOT alleged that the four suspects – the Tate brothers and their respective girlfriends - formed an organized criminal group that stretched from Romania to Britain and the United States, for the purpose of committing the crime of human trafficking. 1

The authorities say that the Tate brothers misled the victims “into believing that they intended to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship” – the loverboy scam - while transporting victims to Romania and later sexually exploiting them with physical violence and coercion.

Authorities also said one of the suspects raped a victim on two separate occasions in March 2022. At least six victims were allegedly “sexually exploited by the organized criminal group”. 2

In this episode we also take a look at Andrew Tate’s childhood in Chicago, Illinois and Luton, UK, his family history, chess years and kickboxing career. His father, Emory Tate, was a chess International Master. Tristan and Andrew claim that they were very poor, but according to Gandul, their father left them a hotel in Thailand. 3

1. Ovidiu Oanta. The Tate brothers could lose their entire fortune. DIICOT prosecutors seized the million-dollar villa and cars. Stiril Pro-TV. January 2023. ⇤

2. Adina Anghelescu. The victims of Andrew and Tristan Tate are starting to make complaints to DIICOT and are asking for damages. Gandul. January 2023. ⇤

3. Marius Olaru. Catching the Tate brothers, step by step. Gandul. December 2022. ⇤

How the Mormon church turned their practice of baptizing of the dead into a medical data empire, and managed to amass the world's largest genetic database, which was then sold to Blackstone for billions of dollars.

What is Blackstone going to do with the largest archive of print newspapers, human genetic data, and vital records? Let's be honest, it's Blackrock/Blackstone, so it's probably not going to be good. This is a preview, if you like our content and would like to support us, become a patron to get all of our public episodes ad-free.

In the 19th century the early Mormon church was expelled from two different American territories before arriving in Utah, where they remain concentrated to this day. In both cases, stuffing election ballots with overwhelmingly Mormon candidates, intimidation, and land fraud were among the things which got them into violent confrontations with their non-Mormon neighbors. The game was relatively simple: the whole church would move en masse to a small town and as of the next election after their arrival, elect themselves to every single public office.

But Mormon aspirations did not stop at political power, it's wealth that people ultimately want, not redemption. In the early Mormon church's days Mormon doctrine said that the bible's bit about "thou shalt inherit the land of thy enemies" was specifically aimed at them. Non-Mormons in the towns that Mormons moved to in Missouri or Illinois found themselves harassed into selling their property to members of the Mormon church, and those who refused could be dealt with in "other ways" if the Mormons had full political authority in the territory.

Fast forward to the last two decades, and the same Mormon church had not only amassed control of local county deeds and estate records, but also amassed America's largest newspaper archive, and the world's largest genetic data archive. They sold it all to Blackstone in 2018 for four and a half billion dollars, and subsequently, Blackstone was accused of buying apartment blocs in Denmark that were deed restricted against private landlord ownership. That sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it? 1

In the modern Mormon church's case, all of this data is wrapped up in the church doctrine of baptizing the dead. Mormons believe that they can posthumously baptize people who will be offered redemption in the afterlife. It's all very tech savvy and post-COVID, in that people who are dead and buried are baptized "remotely" by stand-in surrogates in Mormon temples. 2

In the US, a charity organization named "Reclaim the Records" is trying to fight back against the practice of hoarding vital records by private companies, by suing government agencies which refuse to honor FOIA requests from individuals, journalists, and non-profits while selling data to for-profit companies. 3

1. Katie Notopoulos. Ancestry.com Is In Cahoots With Public Records Agencies, A Group Suspects. Buzzfeed. October 2018. ⇤

2. Kristofer Rhude. Mormons, Genetics, & Digitized Data. Harvard Divinity School. 2019. ⇤

3. Reclaim the Records. Official Website. 2022. ⇤

How the notorious Jennings, Louisiana sherriff's and police departments covered up the murders of 8 young women between 2005 and 2010.

In this episode we're talking about the murders of 8 young women in southwest Louisiana, as reported in the great book and documentary television series "Murder in the Bayou" by Ethan Brown. The story is not only a true crime television series, but also very close in plot details to the first season of the fictional HBO series True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, written by Nic Pizzolatto. If you like our content please become a patron to get all of our public episodes ad-free. 1

The Jennings, Louisiana law enforcement agencies were notorious nationwide before these murders took place. In the 1990s they made national news in an investigation by NBC's Dateline, into fraudulent drug charges related to vehicle seizures along Interstate 10 between Houston and New Orleans. The Jennings area police complicit in that scam were paying themselves bonuses for fake drug busts and buying lavish toys and properties with the ill gotten proceeds.

But a lot is never enough, and those same police graduated to running protection for other criminal enterprises later on in the early 2000s. Most of the drug and sex trade in Jennings ran through a strip club owner named Frankie Richard, who was not surprisingly also the police's most prized informant. Frankie was implicated in at least two of the murders of the 8 women discussed in this episode, but was never tried for the crimes despite eye-witness accounts detailing the manner in which he and his niece killed the two victims. Another man was stabbed to death after only saying that he knew what happened to one of the dead girls. A third man was mysteriously hit by a train. 2

And last but not least, but perhaps most predictably, Republican congressman Charles Boustany was rumored to have frequented a motel in Jennings where the 8 dead girls often sold sexual favors. Frankie Richard said he had sex with 3 of the girls who wound up dead, and the motel was being managed and operated by one of Boustany's campaign staffers at the time. The accusations cost Boustany his 2008 run for the US Senate, but he remained the US House Representative from the district encompassing Jennings until 2017. Family values, folks. 3

1. David Renshaw. HBO executive admits he rushed ‘True Detective’ writer into creating second season. NME. January 2016. ⇤

2. Ethan Brown. Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?. Medium. January 2014. ⇤

3. Allegra Kirkland. What’s The Deal With Those Wild Prostitution Claims Against A GOP Rep.?. Talking Points Memo. September 2016. ⇤

A Yoga school in Buenos Aires full of classical musicians has operated for over 30 years as a hidden international sex cult.

We're talking about the recent raid by the Argentine Federal Police's Human Trafficking unit of a sex cult that has operated internationally from Buenos Aires for the past 3 decades... at least. If you like our content please become a patron to get our episodes ad-free.

In late August the Argentine Federal Police raided a yoga school filled with cash, gold, property titles, cars, and oddly... sex toys. It turns out that this was the second time the school had been accused of running a human trafficking organization. In the 1990s the school was charged with similar crimes but the case never went to trial, presumably because of the wealthy participants involved. The organization's director Juan Percowicz is arrested and awaiting trial, along with pianist Susana Mendelievich, and renowned oboe performer Mariano Kraus. Opera soprano Verónica Iacono is currently an international fugitive, also facing charges related to the cult. The late violinist Rubén González was the director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he opened the Buenos Aires Yoga School's Chicago location back in the 1990s, as well. 1

This time, there are wiretaps detailing the cult's activities and those wiretaps contain multiple mentions of the world's most famous living opera singer: Placido Domingo. This isn't the first time Domingo has been involved in sex scandals. While paying for sex in Argentina is legal and he faces no criminal charges related to the sex cult in Buenos Aires, he was fired from his management roles in the Kennedy Center Opera Company and the LA Opera Company over complaints that he had sexually harassed female performers. 2

As it turns out Placido was a customer of the young girls which the cult provided to wealthy clients, but prostitution wasn't their main business. The larger share of their profits came from a scientology-type cult which promised people spiritual healing for everything from drug addiction to chronic pain. The young sex workers were just a way to lure in cult members who were then coerced into changing their wills to gift their property to the cult upon their deaths. 3

A man named Pablo Salum has extensive information on the cult going back to the time when his parents joined it in the 1990s when he was a teenage boy. Pablo has started an advocacy organization called "Libre Mentes" or, "Free Minds" in English, which advocates for laws to combat coercive religious cults in Latin America. 4

Episode #Dubimeter: 9.5

1. Phil Greenfield. ASO Concert Strikes Strange Chord. Baltimore Sun. November 1995. ⇤

2. Anastasia Tsioulcas. LA Opera Finds 'Inappropriate Conduct' Claims Against Plácido Domingo Credible. NPR. March 2020. ⇤

3. Frederico Molina. Sex, drugs and promises of happiness: The Buenos Aires Yoga School’s money-making machine. El Pais. August 2022. ⇤

4. Pablo Salum. Here I begin the THREAD where it will be clear to you with documentation, how the human rights organizations were complicit, helped and protected the #Secta who has my family!. Ley Antisectas Twitter account. March 2018. ⇤

A mysterious gunman opened fire on two grid substations in North Carolina, in a targeted attack during a drag show organized by Naomi Dix at a local theater which left more than 38,000 people in Moore County without power, in freezing temperatures.

The Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines went dark in an instant. The drag show was called off early, and shortly thereafter a woman named Emily Rainey seemed to take credit for the power outage in a public Facebook post. The local sheriff has questioned her in relation to the Facebook posts and determined that she's not the culprit after "a word of prayer." ...Right. 1

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This wasn't the first drag show Emily Rainey has protested, she's been attending them in secret according to her Instagram posts for quite some time. She's also a regular guest on the podcast of a priest officially made into a hermit by the Catholic church due to his outrageous political opinions 2

This isn't the first time Emily Rainey has made national news, either. She was forced out of her Army commission after bringing a bus of 100 people to attend the January 6 riots in D.C. after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Since then she's rebranded herself as a right wing activist figure in charge of an organization called "Moore County Citizens for Freedom" but there's just one problem: according to voter records she doesn't even live in Moore County. 3

What she does do, according to her own social media history, is get pregnant after an affair with another woman's husband. The Calvary Christian School in Southern Pines was apparently very concerned about the drag show, but not as concerned with Emily's baby daddy situation. Shocker. 4

1. Khaleda Rahman. Emily Rainey Photo With Sheriff Amid North Carolina Outage Raises Questions. Newsweek. December 2022. ⇤

2. Fr. Dave Nix. In Exile From a Kidnapped Bride. Padreperegrino.org. September 2022. ⇤

3. Tom Cleary. Emily Grace Rainey: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know. Heavy.com. December 2022. ⇤

4. Taylor Shook. 'It was a beautiful moment': Moore County drag show goes on despite power outages. Fayetteville Observer. December 2022. ⇤

The concept of Russian Roulette has a very interesting history and over time, this soldiers’ trick game became a dangerous film stunt.

In this episode we're re-watching the Deer Hunter, the first film made about the Vietnam War after it ended, which featured scenes of POWs (and paid participants in back-alley gambling houses) playing what we know as "Russian Roulette", in which two participants shoot a revolver at their own heads with a bullet randomly placed into one chamber of the gun. If you like our content please become a patron to support us, and you'll get our public episodes ad-free.

It turns out that the history of Russian Roulette started as a ficitonal plot device but became more "real" for lack of a better word when it made it to American film audiences, as multiple people have actually died imitating the scenes from the movie with real guns and real bullets.

The film was a massive success for the director Michael Cimino, it was nominated for 9 Oscars and won 5 of them. It also launched the career of Meryl Streep, who was the lead actress of the film alongside her tragically dying lover at the time, John Cazale, who passed away from cancer shortly after the film was completed. Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro also starred in the film, and they of course went on to great acting careers as well. 1

Long term success was not in the cards for Cimino, however. He tried to rip off the author of the Deer Hunter, Deric Washburn, when the original story was modified into a film script but history has proven Washburn to be a more capable writer than Cimino. Cimino's next film, Heaven's Gate, was a massive failure that actually bankrupt United Artists, the studio which financed it.

While the film industry is distinctly American, Sandra's home country was not spared having to sit through all 3 and a half hours of the Deer Hunter either, she has a hilarious story of the one lady who translated all bootleg American films during the last days of communism, to varying degrees of accuracy. Irina Margareta Nistor was the voice of everyone in a film she translated, and thus the voice of American film for many Romanians. Sadly the title of the Deer Hunter was not available when she translated it back in the 1980s and it came out as "Dear Hunter" which Sandra says is still a running joke today. 2

We also talk about other dangerous (or marketed as dangerous) film stunts, such as the tragic deaths of Vic Morrow and two children on John Landis's set for the film version of The Twilight Zone in the 1980s, The multiple cases of accidental shootings on film sets most notably Brandon Lee's fatal shooting on the set of The Crow, and Alec Baldwin's accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. 3, 4

1. Peter Biskind on Michael Cimino’s Twisted, Tortured Legacy: “A Mystery in Death as He Was in Life”. Hollywood Reporter. July 2016. ⇤

2. Kit Gillet. The Voice That Brought Hollywood Films to Communist Romania’s TV Screens. The Guardian. December 2014. ⇤

3. youtube user Seawyatt. "The Program" deleted scene. Youtube. September 2012. ⇤

4. Pilot Voiced Fears, 'Zone' Co-worker Says. The Washington Post. January 1987. ⇤

In the second part of this series we discuss Putin's first years in office, in particular the Moscow apartment bombings and the Moscow theater hostage crisis. Both events were blamed on Chechen militants despite overwhelming evidence of state involvement.

This episode picks up in Putin's first term as president, which almost immediately was overshadowed by the Moscow apartment bombings, which were blamed on Chechen terrorists despite all signs pointing to the KGB / FSB. The FSB had recently acquired large quantities of hexogen, an explosive found at the scene. Composite sketches of a suspect were circulated by police and local press, and then erased from existence at the behest of the FSB when they decided upon a suspect: Chechen rebellion leader Achemez Gochiyaev. Please become a patron if you enjoy our content and want to support us, you'll get all of our public episodes ad-free.

Key to investigating the FSB's links to these bombings were three people we have mentioned before, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, former media oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and reporter Anna Politkovskaya, all of whom have since been murdered by Russian intelligence or mobsters since that time. If you want to read more on this subject, we recommend Blowing Up Russia by Litvinenok and Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky, as well as From Russia With Blood by Heidi Blake. 1, 2

Following the bombings, the Moscow theater crisis was another event in which the FSB was complicit in killing Russian civilians and blaming the carnage on Chechen militants. An entire theater was taken hostage leading to a multi-day seige from Russian police and military, after which the FSB gassed the theater, killing indiscriminately both hostage-takers and hostages alike. It seems that the lone "Chechen militant" escapee from the crisis, Khanpasha Terkibayev, was kicked out of dozens of local Chechen resistance organizations, because everyone in his home region suspected him of being an informant for the FSB.

1. Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia, Encounter Books, March 2007. ⇤

2. Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West, Mulholland Books, November 2019. ⇤