pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In late October 1921, a 67-year-old sports columnist finished a piece on boxing at the New York Morning Telegraph and died of a heart attack at his typewriter. He was Bat Masterson, born in Quebec in 1853, a former buffalo hunter who survived the five-day siege of Adobe Walls in 1874, took a bullet to the pelvis in Sweetwater, Texas, and walked with a cane for the rest of his life. This episode follows how a frontier survivor became a Manhattan celebrity.

Masterson won election as Ford County Sheriff by three votes, lost his brother Ed to a cowboy's bullet in April 1878, and then began treating his reputation as something he could sell. He worked as a hired gun in a Colorado railroad war, dealt faro in Tombstone beside Wyatt Earp, and helped stage the Dodge City Peace Commission, a show of force that never fired a shot. In 1902 he moved to New York, wrote three columns a week for nearly two decades, and befriended Theodore Roosevelt.

• In 1872 Masterson tracked a contractor who had skipped out on his wages for nearly a year, then took the $300 at gunpoint on a Dodge City train platform while a crowd cheered.
• At Adobe Walls, 28 buffalo hunters held off hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors led by Quanah Parker, thanks to long-range Sharps rifles and thick mud walls.
• He ran for sheriff against the same 315-pound city marshal he had grappled with in the street months earlier, and won.
• On his second day in New York he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, paid a $10 fine, and complained about the mush-headed police.
• Roughly 500 people attended his funeral, where Damon Runyon gave the eulogy, and his gravestone in the Bronx reads: Loved by everyone.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In November 1934, a woman named Helen left her husband's bullet-riddled body beside an Illinois cemetery, wrapped in a blanket because he always hated being cold. The dead man was Lester Joseph Gillis, known to the press as Baby Face Nelson and to his friends simply as Jimmy. This episode traces his path from a Chicago boy who shot a playmate in the jaw at age 12, through a gas station that fronted for tire thieves, to jewel robberies, a prison escape in 1932, and a crew of his own.

What set Nelson apart was volatility. He sprayed submachine gun fire at bystanders in Brainerd, Minnesota, shot a paint salesman dead over a traffic dispute, and carried a custom fully automatic .38 pistol against agents armed with six-shot revolvers. His gang financed John Dillinger's Crown Point escape, and the botched raid at Little Bohemia in April 1934 brought calls for J. Edgar Hoover to resign. The story ends near Barrington, Illinois, where a mortally wounded Nelson walked into gunfire and killed two more agents.

• The nickname came from the wife of Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who told the press the man who took $18,000 of her jewelry had a baby face.
• At Little Bohemia, agents opened fire on three innocent diners leaving in a Chevy coupe whose radio drowned out the warnings, killing one of them.
• Agent W. Carter Baum was shot at point-blank range by Nelson, and his weapon was later found with the safety catch still engaged.
• A punctured water pump on Nelson's stolen Ford V8 forced the final stand on November 27, 1934, where he absorbed nine bullets and still stole the agents' car.
• Agents Herman Hollis and Samuel Cowley both died from the Barrington firefight, and Nelson was dead that evening at age 25.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Arsenic, element 33, has been an assassin's tool, a cosmetic, and a medicine, sometimes in the same era. The explanation starts on the periodic table, where it sits directly below phosphorus. The two elements bond in nearly identical ways, so cells that depend on phosphorus for DNA and energy let arsenic in by mistake. Once inside it cannot do the job, energy molecules fall apart, and the cell dies. The element is odd in other ways too: heated past 600 degrees Celsius it never melts but turns straight into toxic gas, and it can give off a strong smell of garlic.

This episode traces what people did with that chemistry. For centuries arsenic poisoning passed for cholera or dysentery and earned the name inheritance powder, until chemist James Marsh devised a test in the 1830s that made it traceable. Manufacturers then sold it as brilliant green dye for gowns, toys, sweets, and wallpaper. Modern medicine learned to aim the poison, from an early syphilis drug to a leukemia therapy, while millions today drink it unknowingly in groundwater.

• The Marsh test converts arsenic in a tissue sample into arsine gas, which leaves a silvery black mirror on heated glass.
• Napoleon, who died on St. Helena in 1821, likely lived among arsenic green wallpaper that fungi in the damp air converted into toxic gas.
• Hair analysis decades later showed that the Australian racehorse Phar Lap, who died in 1932, was killed by a massive arsenic overdose.
• In 2000 the FDA approved arsenic trioxide for a resistant form of acute promyelocytic leukemia, using it to trigger programmed cell death in cancer cells.
• People native to Chile's Atacama Desert carry a variant of the AS3MT gene that clears arsenic faster. A 2010 claim that a Mono Lake bacterium built its DNA with arsenic was refuted by 2012 and retracted in 2025.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Arnold Rothstein, known as the Brain, built a criminal empire with arithmetic instead of muscle. Born in New York City in 1882 to an affluent family, he was the son of Abraham Rothstein, a businessman so upright he was called Abe the Just, and the brother of a future rabbi. Arnold hated school, loved numbers, and gambled from childhood despite his father's orders. By 1910, at 28, he ran his own casino in Manhattan's Tenderloin district, invested in a racetrack at Havre de Grace, Maryland, and paid for a network of informants. He was a millionaire by 30.

This episode explains how a man who despised leaving anything to chance moved from playing the odds to engineering outcomes. It covers his hidden hand in the Black Sox scandal, his recognition that Prohibition was a national market, and his role as banker and mediator to New York's gangs under the protection of Tammany Hall. It ends with the poker debt he refused to pay, the shooting at the Park Central Hotel on November 4, 1928, and the power vacuum that followed.

• Gamblers Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell each brought Rothstein a plan to bribe the White Sox. He hid behind layers of go-betweens and is estimated to have won about $350,000 betting on Cincinnati.
• Called before the Chicago grand jury, he posed as a wronged businessman and was never indicted. The grand jury records and signed player confessions later vanished.
• During Prohibition he bought freighters to import Scotch whisky and mentored Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky from his post outside Lindy's restaurant on Broadway.
• In late 1928 he lost more than $300,000 in a three day poker game with Titanic Thompson and Nate Raymond, claimed it was fixed, and stalled on paying.
• Dying in the hospital, he told detectives to stick to their trade and he would stick to his. F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby on him.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Apollo Robbins once walked into the protective bubble around former President Jimmy Carter, chatted with the Secret Service agents on the detail, and came away with Carter's itinerary and the keys to the motorcade. He used no weapon and no gadget, only an understanding of how attention works. Born in 1974 in Plainview, Texas, Robbins was a soft-spoken child who wore leg braces and grew up with a father who was entirely blind. Kept from the playground, he learned to watch people closely, and he picked up his first sleight of hand from his two brothers.

This episode follows how that childhood produced a self-described gentleman thief whom Forbes called an artful manipulator of awareness. The central idea is that attention is not a floodlight but a laser pointer, and whoever steers it controls what a person perceives. Robbins turned the Carter stunt into a career teaching law enforcement, founded the consulting group Whizmob Inc. in 2006, started a training company with his wife, the magician and mentalist Ava Do, in 2012, and became a resource for neuroscientists and filmmakers alike.

• Robbins did not beat the agents with speed. A question or a squeeze of the shoulder floods the brain with input and masks the lighter touch of a hand in a pocket.
• After the motorcade incident, law enforcement agencies sought him out, and he visited prisons to learn directly from thieves, grifters, and con artists.
• Whizmob brought law enforcement officials and former convicts together as experts on current fraud, theft, and scams, with Robbins translating between the two sides.
• He appeared on Nova ScienceNow in 2011 and served as a consulting producer on National Geographic's Brain Games in 2013, giving researchers field evidence a quiet lab cannot supply.
• For the 2015 film Focus he taught Will Smith and Margot Robbie the craft of grifting, and he also advised a television heist series.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Alvin Karpis did not die young in a hail of bullets like most Depression era outlaws. Born in Montreal in 1907 to Lithuanian immigrant parents and raised in Topeka, Kansas, he was running with gamblers and bootleggers by about age 10. Prison introduced him to Fred Barker, and after his release in 1931 the two formed the Barker-Karpis gang. Nicknamed Creepy for his smile, Karpis was the planner with a near photographic memory for bank layouts, escape routes, and police patrols, working out of the bribed safe haven of St. Paul, Minnesota.

This episode follows the gang from bank jobs to the kidnappings of brewer William Hamm and banker Edward Bremer, a crime that drew the anger of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the full attention of the FBI. After 1934 wiped out Dillinger, Nelson, Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, Karpis was the last Public Enemy Number One. J. Edgar Hoover flew to New Orleans in May 1936 to claim the arrest. Karpis then spent 26 years on Alcatraz, met a young Charles Manson at McNeil Island, and died in Spain in August 1979 at 72.

• Karpis dismissed the legend of Ma Barker as a criminal mastermind, saying the gang sent her to the movies while they planned jobs. The FBI promoted the myth after agents killed her in a shootout.
• The Hamm kidnapping in 1933 brought a ransom of $100,000 and the Bremer kidnapping doubled it to $200,000, but Bremer's father was a personal friend of the president.
• In 1934 Karpis paid underworld doctor Joseph Moran to cut away his fingerprints, a mutilation that later made it hard for him to get a passport.
• Hoover claimed he grabbed Karpis before he could reach a rifle in the back seat of a car that had no back seat. None of the agents had handcuffs, so Karpis was tied with a necktie.
• At McNeil Island Karpis taught Charles Manson to play guitar, then refused when Manson begged for introductions to his contacts in Las Vegas.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The African buffalo looks like a creature that should rule by force. A Cape buffalo bull can weigh up to 900 kilograms and carries a boss, a shield of fused bone across the forehead. Yet the herd is a matriarchy that settles its travel plans by something close to a vote. First described by the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman in 1779, Syncerus caffer is the only surviving species of its genus, split into four subspecies that range from the huge Cape buffalo of the open savanna to the small, reddish forest buffalo of about 265 kilograms.

This episode covers how the animal evolved, how it organizes itself, and how it shapes the land. Herds of a thousand or more break apart and rejoin with the seasons. Young males leave at four or five for bachelor groups, where rank is settled mostly by posture instead of combat. Feeding and ruminating fill 17 to 19 hours a day, and by mowing down tall, woody grasses the herds open the way for smaller grazers. The story also takes in the long contest with lions, the rinderpest catastrophe, and the buffalo's place in African art and myth.

• During rest periods, adult females stand, gaze in a chosen direction, and lie back down. The herd moves the way most of them pointed, and a split vote can divide it for a few days.
• Genetic evidence indicates the small forest buffalo is closer to the older lineage, so the armored giant of the savanna is the newer model.
• A buffalo eats up to 15 kilograms of grass a day and needs about 45 liters of water every 48 hours, which ties herds to permanent water.
• Lions cannot break a buffalo's neck, so a pride attacks from behind and suffocates it by clamping over the nose and mouth. Buffalo answer by backing into thorny thickets or mobbing the pride.
• Rinderpest, brought with European cattle in the 1890s, killed an estimated 95 percent of African buffalo. About 400,000 mature animals remain, and the species is listed as near threatened.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The hippopotamus of board games and cartoons is chubby, sleepy, and funny. The real animal is a one and a half ton fighter with an evolutionary secret. Its Greek name means river horse, and until 1909 naturalists grouped it with pigs because of its molar teeth. Molecular evidence overturned both ideas: the hippo's closest living relatives are whales, dolphins, and porpoises, with a shared semi-aquatic ancestor that split off roughly 60 million years ago. Hippos are the last survivors of a once diverse family called anthracotheres.

This episode walks through the body and habits of that survivor. Dense bones let it sink and trot along the riverbed instead of swimming. Its jaws open 100 to 110 degrees, and its lower canines, which never stop growing, can reach 50 centimeters and are used only for combat. By day hippos crowd together in pods of up to a hundred. At dusk they leave the water and walk three to five kilometers alone to eat about 40 kilograms of grass. The account closes with their long, violent history with humans and their vulnerable status today.

• The so-called blood sweat is a secretion containing two acidic pigments, hipposudoric acid and norhipposudoric acid, that work as both sunscreen and antibacterial agent.
• Hippos sleep underwater and surface to breathe every few minutes by reflex, without waking.
• Males mark territory by muck spreading, spinning the tail to spray dung. In the dry season the sheer volume can strip oxygen from the water and cause fish kills.
• In Virunga National Park, poaching for meat and ivory cut the population from around 29,000 in the 1970s to just 800 or 900 by 2005.
• Hippos that Pablo Escobar imported for a private zoo in Colombia escaped after his death in 1993 and have multiplied into an invasive population of more than a hundred.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The phrase public enemy calls up pinstripe suits, tommy guns, and Al Capone, but it began as a political weapon in ancient Rome. In AD 68 the Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus, cutting him off from the protection of the law so that anyone could kill him without penalty. The term surfaced again in the United Kingdom around 1642 and turned lethal in the French Revolution, when Maximilien Robespierre argued in 1793 that the government owed enemies of the people nothing except death.

This episode follows the label across the Atlantic to Chicago in April 1930, where Frank J. Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission faced gangsters everyone knew were guilty but no court could convict. His answer was publicity: a short list of public enemies with Al Capone at the top, mailed to police, sheriffs, and newspaper editors. J. Edgar Hoover then took the idea national, reserving it for charged fugitives and turning Public Enemy Number One into a running drama that laid the ground for the Ten Most Wanted list in 1950.

• The law of 22 Prairial in 1794 stripped defendants of witnesses and counsel and made spreading false news to divide or trouble the people a capital offense.
• Loesch cut a list of about a hundred known hoodlums down to 28 names, a cast small enough to fit on one newspaper page, and put Capone's brother right behind him.
• Hoover reversed Loesch's approach: where Chicago named men whose crimes could not be proved, the FBI named only fugitives who had already been charged.
• From June 1934 to May 1936 the number one title passed in sequence from John Dillinger to Pretty Boy Floyd to Baby Face Nelson to Alvin Karpis.
• During the Depression many people resented the banks, so Hoover used the label to recast robbers such as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker as villains instead of folk heroes.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Say Machine Gun Kelly and some people see a tattooed musician on a red carpet while others see a Prohibition era gangster with a fedora and a tommy gun. This episode is the biography of a name instead of a person. The original Machine Gun Kelly was an American gangster who lived from 1900 to 1954, and for his whole adult life the name meant real danger and federal manhunts. Then, only four years after his death, a 1958 Hollywood film carried his name onto theater marquees and turned a threat into entertainment.

Once the man was gone and the movie had made him a character, the name was free to travel. Radio disc jockeys who grew up on that mythology borrowed it to promise rapid fire patter. Basketball adopted it as shorthand for relentless scoring, from an American player born in 1961 to a Filipino-American player born in 1982. Musicians then pulled it in opposite directions, from folk storytelling to punk defiance to modern crossover stardom, until a single phrase had shed nearly all of its history.

• The four year gap between the gangster's death in 1954 and the 1958 film is the hinge of the story: the physical threat was gone, so the name could be sold as a thrill.
• Radio personalities M.G. Kelly, born in 1952, and Shotgun Tom Kelly, born in 1949, used weapon names as a metaphor for fast talking energy on air.
• Harry Kelly and Kelly Williams both carried the Machine Gun Kelly nickname on the basketball court, where it described a style of shooting and nothing else.
• James Taylor recorded a song called Machine Gun Kelly on Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, and the punk band Angelic Upstarts cut their own track on Last Tango in Moscow.
• The American actor and musician born in 1990 built his early career on the full name, then shortened it to MGK, reducing a century of history to three letters.