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Back in the 1970s, before Nick Morrison was a KNKX staffer, some friends asked him if he would help them smuggle a few bricks of marijuana across the border from Mexico. He said, sure. What came next? In the beginning, normal drug smuggling stuff. A rambler with secret compartments, a jungle, a mango orchard, an operation that seemed to be going great. But in the end? A single terrifying moment that made Morrison regret his decision - and change his ways.

This week on Sound Effect, we share stories of imperfect crimes. We start by talking to 88.5’s Nick Morrison, who was once hired to smuggle pot . We then meet a man who was a lifelong prankster , until one prank recalibrated his moral compass. Next, a story of an unlikely group of men who robbed a bank , how it went wrong, and some odd takeaways from it. Then, a police officer goes into a prison, and asks the prisoners to think about the one thing they could have done different to have avoided

On August 7th, 2006, at 5:13 pm, a group of four men wearing ski masks, body armor, sweatshirts, and carrying assault rifles and pistols burst into a Bank of America branch in Tacoma, Washington. Waiting outside the bank, in the getaway car, was Alex Blum, a "good kid" who had just achieved his lifelong dream of becoming an Army Ranger. Why did Alex throw away his dream? And how did he end up a bank robber? Alex Blum's cousin, Ben Blum, tackles those questions in his recent book "Ranger Games: A

Age 14 is often a time of pushing boundaries, experimenting with the the distinctions between right and wrong. Derek Erdman tells his personal story from when he was this awkward age. It involves youthful mischief, an answering machine and the Survivor song, Eye Of The Tiger. Derek played a prank that went a little bit too far. But in the end, this one event helped reshape his moral compass and put him on a better path.

When Seattle Police Officer Kim Bogucki stepped into the Washington Correctional Facility For Women in Purdy about 10 years ago, she had no intention of starting a non-profit. Bogucki was doing gang prevention work and went to the prison to ask some of the women for permission to work with their children. The women were distrustful of police and gave Bogucki a chilly reception. “Probably the last time that those mothers saw police, we were taking them away from their children,” said Bogucki. But

In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of people were still figuring out this whole internet business. As is often the case, way out ahead of the learning curve were the cyber-criminals, and law enforcement had some catching up to do. The FBI often relied on the knowledge of private security professionals. So in 2000, they contacted a Seattle expert named Ray Pompon, and recruited him to go undercover as part of a sting operation. Pompon shared his story with host Gabriel Spitzer.

Murder is a crime where, by its nature, it’s impossible for a victim to get justice. That’s what was on Tony Bamonte’s mind as he worked to solve those crimes as the sheriff of Pend Oreille County. “The police, we’re the voice of the dead,” Bamonte said. “We’re there to defend them and stick up for them and try find out who killed them. That’s who we are. They have nobody else speaking for them.” Not long before he retired in 1990, Bamonte went back to school for a masters degree. For his thesis

Everybody loves a good mystery ... some of us more than others. So when Tom DesLongchamp discovered an unusual looking cassette tape in a bargain bin, and discovered a collection of unidentifiable disco songs on one side of it, his curiosity was aroused. That curiosity soon transformed into a fixation, or maybe even an obsession. He created a website dedicated to finding the disco mystery man. He took to Reddit, and starting pursing every lead he could think of to try and figure out who this

This week on Sound Effect, take a trip down a rabbit hole. It all started when contributor Warren Langford brought to our attention a man who was trying to track down a mystery disco musician on a cassette he found. That led us to Seattle’s first openly-operated gay disco bar in Seattle, Shelly’s Leg , and the story behind the owner Shelly Bauman. In researching Shelly’s Leg, we came across a rumor about a relative of our current President, which is quickly debunked. What wasn’t a rumor, however

The first openly-operated gay bar in Seattle was a nightclub called Shelly’s Leg. It was founded in Pioneer Square in 1973 by a woman named Shelly Bauman. It quickly became an important center of LGBT life in Seattle. But it's the bar's origin story -- and the freak parade accident at the heart of it -- that caught our attention. Sound Effect Producer Kevin Kniestedt sat down with Bruce Buls a former Seattle disc jockey and good friend of Baumann’s back in the 70s, to learn more about Shelly’s