Al Letson (0:01)

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. I'm Al Edson, and today we're going back to a simpler time. In 2013, I got a call from a friend and a mentor who asked me if I'd be interested in hosting a pilot for a new show centered on investigative journalism. And that was the start of what would become. From the center for Investigative reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Ledson. It's been 10 years since Reveal became a public radio show and podcast. In that time, we've talked to thousands of people all around the world, bringing you stories that inspire, that enrage, that enlighten to try to give you and me a better understanding of the world we live in. Today we're revisiting our recent 10th anniversary special. It's a celebration of the staff, the people we talk to, and the stories that have made the show what it is and you, our listeners. Hey, this is Lauren from Norristown, Penns. I just want to say that your reporting is essential to communities everywhere and allows for the truth to be discovered. And I just wanna say thank you for all that you do and happy 10 years and here many more. When I first came to the center for Investigative Reporting, I wasn't sure if it was a good fit. I had just finished hosting my own show that was all about talking to everyday people. And I told anyone who'd listen, I wasn't Tom Brokaw or Edward R. Murrow. I didn't even see myself as a journalist. I was a storyteller who worked with journalists. But the folks at CIR said they wanted to try a new approach and, and have the host of Reveal be a stand in for the audience. They said they would surround me with journalists, including former executive director of cir, Robert Rosie Rosenthal. Rosie, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Al. It's always great to be with you. Rosie's too modest to say it, but I will. He's legendary. He's been a part of some of the biggest news stories for decades, including the Pentagon Papers, which shifted the trajectory of the Vietnam War. The. He's also been a part of some of the most prestigious newsrooms like the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Yes, I. I left The Times in 1974, I had a very good career as a reporter at the Boston Globe. I covered, you know, presidential campaigns and did investigative reportings. But I came to The Inquirer in 1980. I was a foreign correspondent, which I loved, in Africa and the Middle east, and eventually became the editor of the Inquirer and was fired. Rosie was forced out after clashing with corporate executives. Newspapers were struggling at the time and the media landscape was in disarray. So when he became the executive director of cir, he and his team knew they had to do something different. And they had an idea. They wanted to take investigative reporting onto the airwaves. You told the Prince story, but you also created radio for it. It was a very creative, take a risk environment. It all grew out of really great reporting. The first step was to gather some amazing producers and reporters to make pilots of the show with me as the host. We didn't really know what we were doing. We were just feeling around in the dark. But we knew our reporter, Aaron Glantz, had a big story. And it was specifically a story about how the Department of Veterans affairs, which is the largest integrated hospital system In America with 9 million patients, people, are coming home from war with PTSD, with traumatic brain injuries, with back injuries, depression, whatever it was, and the government was just giving them painkillers. And. And so what I wanted to do was substantiate that that was true and find out exactly where it was happening and to what extent it was happening. I filed a Freedom of Information act request with the VA for all their prescription records. And a week and a half later, I had a decade of opioid prescription records from the va. I've never heard of that happening. No. Usually you end up with a months long fight or sometimes even years long fight. Sometimes you have to sue to get the records right. And I have to think that there are some people over there in D.C. who were as concerned as we were about this. So what we end up getting is these huge spreadsheets of 10 years of prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone and morphine. And it became very clear almost immediately that there had been a huge 270% increase in the number of opioids prescribed by the VA since 9 11, and that this was, you know, that their. Their patients were dying at twice the rate of the national average from overdose. So we sent Aaron to rural New Hampshire with a microphone to meet Tim Fazio, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in the Iraq War. His parents had told us to go talk to him. And he was deep in the addiction, but trying to get clean. And I end up sleeping on the floor of his apartment in the living room. And in the middle of the night, a buddy of his came over. Both him and his buddy were trying to stay clean. And so they just stayed up together making eggs in the middle of the night. And I can remember standing there with my microphone taping the frying of the eggs. It's three in the morning in Newport, New Hamp. Tim Fazio is cooking eggs over easy. He's dressed in shorts and an undershirt. The Marine Corps veteran says he prefers the night, but there are no loud noises to trigger post Traumatic stress disorder, which he developed after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought the painkillers were okay because the doctors were prescribing it to me, so it was okay. Fazio's medical record shows he started getting opiates from the VA in 2008, two years after he left the Corps. Since then, the agency has provided him with nearly 4,000 oxycodone pills and more than a dozen bottles of Tramadol, another opioid painkiller. He told me he was never in acute physical pain, but he took the pills to blot out the guilt and shame of surviving when so many of his fellow Marines died in combat. If the doctor's giving this to me, I'm gonna take it. You know, if it makes me feel good, I'm gonna take 15 of them. You know what I mean? That story was the first major story about the overdose crisis as related to veterans. It had been something that people were talking about for a long time behind closed doors, just kind of in whispers, and we threw it out in the open, and we wanted more reporters to do the same. So we shared all that prescription data we got from the government, and we trained local journalists how to use it so they could report on veterans being affected in their own communities. This crisis was nationwide. Our story made waves, and lawmakers were paying attention. So Congress started talking about they actually held a hearing in the middle of a government shutdown on this issue. And there's been a real sea change in the number of prescriptions that are made of these dangerous painkillers. And although we're in the midst of a fentanyl epidemic, as we all know, the government is no longer party to that epidem. Instead, it's part of wrestling with that. That story went on to win a Peabody Award, and it was just the pilot episode, but when we were first putting it out There, we weren't sure if any public radio stations would even air it. We thought maybe 10, 150 stations ran the program. We were excited, but also terrified because stations now wanted a weekly show, and that was a tall order. A weekly investigative show is a beast, and we needed someone who could help us figure it out. Enter my friend and former executive producer of Reveal, Kevin Sullivan. So I was brought onto the show after you guys did the pilots. And part of the reason I wanted to do the show was because I listened to the pilots and I was really just blown away. I hadn't heard anything like it before. Just to be really honest. I did the pilots for Reveal because I needed a paycheck. And when they talking about turning it into a weekly show, I thought, I'm going to stay around and keep getting these paychecks, but there's no way this thing is gonna go weekly. Yeah. And to be honest, I had my doubts. And everyone said, there is no way you can do a weekly investigative radio show for public radio. There just aren't the resources. There aren't enough stories. You're never going to make it work. But clearly we did. We assembled a strong team and made some great audio. I mean, man, people don't know how many stories we have done. He told me, get on the ground. And I asked him what I'm getting on the ground for. The show's been around for 10 years now. Any good company will say, let's investigate this. Who else is affected? What else is going on that didn't happen here? And sometimes up to three stories a show. They're saying to us, if you don't let us out of here, we're going to put this prison on the news. We were beginning to figure out what the show was, but we still hadn't broken through. The real turning point for me when it comes to Reveal was the day after Donald Trump was elected president. In 2016, Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. President Elect Donald Trump. Donald J. Trump, a real estate magnate and reality star with zero government or military experience, will soon be our 45th president. How did he pull this off? I think it's fair to say that most news media didn't see Donald Trump's first election win coming, including Reveal. We were prepping to interview one of his supporters based on what the polls were saying that he would lose. We had an interview set up with Richard Spencer, you know, this white supremacist who was, you know, saw President Trump coming in as the future for him. And the people who thought the way he did. And we had set this interview up because we wanted to find out, oh, you know, what are you going to do now that Trump loses? But of course, we were all wrong. At the time, Richard Spencer was one of the leaders of the alt right, a racist movement that was planting roots across the country. Spencer was masquerading his hatred behind a political think tank. He'd been making the rounds, and for the most part, journalists weren't calling him out. When I interviewed him, I told him I thought his shtick was just the same old thing. The only difference between him and the Klan was that he wore a suit. It's all racism and white supremacy. Well, I don't think it is the same old thing that you've heard before. I think you just said that it's not that you're actually intrigued by it. I don't. You know, look, I'm not gonna comment about, you know, some hypothetical Klansman or whomever. There's no such thing as a hypothetical Klansman, because the people that I'm talking about, existence, they have gone out, they have burned crosses on people's lawns. They have lynched people. They've done horrible, horrible things. They are the first American terrorists. So it's not hypothetical. I'm not comparing you to this thing that I'm just dreaming up. I'm comparing you to history. And I'm not intrigued by your ideas. I'm saying to you that your ideas sound just like them, except you wear a nice suit and you can speak to me directly, and I respect that about you. That show, I feel like that interview really put us on the map because it showed the combination of, you know, first of all, just the humanity that you and the rest of the staff bring to all of our stories. But it was based on reporting. It was based on knowing everything we could find out about this guy and not letting him get away with anything. In the moment when I came to Reveal, I still didn't really call myself a journalist because, I don't know, I think I had such a high standard for what a journalist should be. But in the time that I was working at Reveal, I feel like you kind of taught me what the job of journalism was. And I think all of it kind of came to a head when we did the Richard Spencer interview. And I felt like it was really important for me to step into that title, to hold it and to hold people accountable. Was hired. They said, you know, Al doesn't have background as a journalist, but he's going to be a stand in for the listener. That's his role. He's a stand in for the listener. I said, okay. I was like, there's no way I'm going for that. There's no way I'm going for that. The ideal of a white ethnostate, and it is an ideal, is something that I think we should think about in the sense of what could come after America. It's kind of like a grand goal. Richard, respectfully, man, so are you saying that America has to end in order for your ethnostate to happen? Because if you are trying to have a white ethno state, what you're basically saying is that you have to forcibly remove people. Because I gotta tell you, I'm African American and I'm not leaving. That interview was a paradigm shift for me and the show. And over time we would go from 150 stations to over 500 across the country in big cities and hundreds of small towns. My name is Elena Claver in Niwot, Colorado. I absolutely love and depend on Reveal for its unflinching courage and tackling important stories. It's too hard to pick one favorite program, but one was Al's interview with a racist white supremacist. And I was completely blown away, not only at Al's sheer bravery, but also the way he maintained his composure and calm in the face of such brutal ignorance and even malevolence. And people weren't just listening on the radio. Our podcast was reaching people all over the world. Hi, Rebuild. I'm Carlos Lopez from Mexico City. First of all, happy 10th anniversary. For me, the podcast is an invaluable source of interesting topics and deeply well told stories about what we experience as a society. I hope you continue telling such relevant and impactful stories for many more years to come. Coming up, the people we get the privilege to interview and the real world impact of a good story. Yeah, we brainwash them because they brain is dirty. Next on Reveal. There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass that's on the media specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. From the center for Investigative Reporting and prx, this is Reveal. I'm Al Edson and today we're revisiting our special 10th anniversary episode. Your Stories have deepened my understanding of the human experience in the real America and has made me feel more connected to this world. Thank you so much, Al and the Reveal team. The Reveal team started out as a small but mighty group. Once we got the show on the air and started picking up stations fast, we began to refine our sound, to really focus on what the show was about. To put it simply, accountability. We don't want to just tell stories about something bad that happened or is happening. We want to hold institutions and people accountable. The first story I did for Reveal was literally just about, like, rich people behaving badly. My friend and former colleague Kathryn Miskowski spent years working on a wide range of investigations at Reveal. So it was this drought story. I don't know if you remember this one. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It was the Fresh Prince of. What did we call it? The Wet Prince of Bel Air. Who is. There you go. Who is the Wet Prince of Bel Air? Climate coverage is in the DNA of what we do. And this is one of our first shows on the issue. From way back in 2015, California was in this terrible drought, and everyone was going to pull together and conserve. And, like, when you went to a restaurant, they wouldn't give you a glass of water because it was like, you need to ask for it. We looked at like, well, what about the people who just aren't conserving and are just using as much water as they feel like it? And so we set out to find out who those people were. I got to, like, run around with a celebrity tour guide in these, like, fancy neighborhoods, like, trying to, like, peek behind hedges and gates and stuff. Yeah, I think Bel Air has the biggest hedges. Usually Steve takes tourists to Bel Air and Beverly Hills to gawk at the luxury. What you can see of it from the street, that is like, David Beckham's driveway and a little corner of Tom Cruise's house. House is probably the wrong word. These are estates, mansions, temples to opulence. Some of them are 30,000 square feet from the street. It's pretty hard to see much since many are cloistered behind towering gates and hedges. We just passed Madonna's old house, and that was on the market for $25 million. Today we are not here trolling for celebrities, but for extreme water wasters to find these people who are wasting precious water. Catherine and her reporting partner, Lance Williams spent months trying to get access to utility records. Not a single agency would cough up the names and how much water they were using. The law allows them to conceal or keep secret Utility records, but says they can make them public if that's in the public interest. Nobody thought it was in the public interest, but Katherine and Lance didn't give up. They kept making public records requests and finally found at least one wet prince of Bel Air. We found this house that used 11.8 million gallons of water in one year, which is, like 90 families. Like, it's, you know, it's an estate. This property is the size of a park and as green as one. It's also the former TV home to the Beverly Hillbillies properties. And it's actually in Bel Air, not Beverly Hills. And this is all the same property. Wow. It just goes on and on. The gardener's looking at us with suspicion. Yes. They're shutting the gates. Surely close the gate. Yeah. They're like, get away. You're not wanted here. So basically, the thrust of the story was like, the rich people are doing whatever they want while we're all, like, letting our lawns die kind of thing. So it really fueled this sort of populist outrage. That outrage motivated the California state legislature to do something. Lawmakers actually changed the law and capped how much water people can use. And if you use more than that, well, you're gonna get outed. Like, your name is gonna end up in the public record. You can end up paying fines, and then everyone's going to know who you are. Changing laws and having an impact is really difficult to do. And one thing is crucial. You have to have the sources, Brave people whose lives are at the center of the stories we tell, People who are willing to come forward and go on the record with our reporters, even when they're in really vulnerable situations and sometimes putting themselves at risk to share their stories. That's especially true of our investigation into labor abuses in one of the poorest areas of the Dominican Republic. It's where we met a teenager named Lulu Pierre. Today is Sunday. I haven't had anything to eat since Friday. I can't do this work. So I resolve not to do it and see what God is going to do with me. I have to go home. Lulu was taken from his family and sent to work in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. It's where a journalist named Sandy Tolan first found him three decades ago. I still carry the memory of him, a child standing barefoot under a punishing sun in a place called Bate 8. All stick limbs and sunken eyes. He was 14. It was 1991. With my cassette recorder rolling, Lulu told us he'd been kidnapped at a market on the Haitian border in broad daylight for decades. I'd think about Lulu Pierre and wonder if he ever got back to his mother. So when I returned to the island three decades later, I tried to find him working with reporter Euclides Cordero Nuel I looked at in the Dominican. Batees went to the Haitian border and to Lulu's hometown in Haiti. We heard he'd made it home, but we never found him. The story didn't end there, because what Sandy and Euclides did find was that all these decades later, the cane cutters were still being paid a pittance and and living in Batees work camps without running water, electricity, or even proper healthcare, there were still huge problems in the Dominican sugar industry. That's Reveal senior reporter Michael Montgomery, who helped produce the story in 2021. You know, we have evidence of forced labor, and this really matters because at the time, this was sugar coming to the United States and into supply chains of brands we all know. Domino, Florida Crystals, Hershey. This is something we consume every day, and yet we didn't know how it's connected to the lives of these cane cutters. So we felt that this was a perfect investigation for Reveal to connect one part of the world to another. Michael, the voices of the cane cutters are so moving. What happened after our story came out? So a lot has happened and, you know, I want to make it clear that there's been a lot of work by NGOs and by anti trafficking groups on this topic. There's been a lot of reports. So our story comes out together with some of these NGO reports. There is immediately a group of lawmakers calling on the Biden administration to take action. U.S. customs opens an investigation, and a year later, citing evidence of forced labor, they issue an order banning the import of sugar from the Dominican Republic that's produced by this company, the Central Romana Corporation. And after that, Homeland Security opened a criminal investigation. So, you know, our story has had quite a lot of impact. That import ban called on Central Romana to improve working and living conditions on its vast plantation in the Dominican Republic. And it was in place for almost two and a half years until March, when the Trump administration allowed shipments to resume. A U.S. customs official cited improvements to labor standards that were verified by independent sources, but did not disclose who those sources were or provide any other details. An unnamed US Official told the New York Times that the decision to rescind the order had not followed established processes. A spokesperson for Central Romana declined the comment. Our stories come about in lots of different ways. Sometimes reporters get lucky and just stumble into a good story. Other times, they cover an issue for years, become experts in a topic, build up their sources, and then, bam, they discover something huge, Something so big and so complicated, it's impossible to explain in an hour. In 2020, we found one of those stories, and it would ultimately become Reveal's first serial, American Rehab. It was produced and reported by a team of journalists, including my former colleague Laura Starcheski. My dear friend Laura Starcheski. How are you? I'm pretty good. I'm better now that we're together. And Ike Shreeskandaraja. My melo, my brother. Oh, God. Al Letson, everybody. Dude, it's been too long. Feels good. American Rehab came out of years of covering the drug rehab industry. The opioid crisis was surging, and reporters Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter had uncovered all kinds of crazy stuff in drug treatment programs, but nothing compared to this one story that show kept hearing. She was telling me this wild story that had to do with, like, a cult and Ronald Reagan and the NFL and the salvation army and. And at the core of all of it was this phenomenon where people were going to what they thought was an addiction treatment program, and in some cases, being forced to go by court order and, in fact, being made to work but not getting paid. So the work is the treatment. And she found one story here, and she found one story there, and she was starting to get these tips that were pouring in and wanted to map how widespread this phenomenon was. Where were these workers that no one wanted us to talk to and no one wanted us to find? And we ended up, after trying everything else to just, like, tail a van full of people going to work from the addiction treatment center from Senacor and see where it went. Senacor is the name of the drug treatment program at the center of this investigation. People were going for help and then were forced to work for no pay or pennies on the dollar. They were shuttled to job sites in these unmarked vans. Every morning before 6am unmarked white passenger vans full of rehab participants pull out of the Senegor parking lot. The vans go to job sites all over Baton Rouge. We're going to follow a van, see where it goes, and try to talk to the people inside. So we wait. 10 minutes go by. Is there another entrance and exit? I don't think so. 20. There's a van, one of the big white passenger vans pulls out of the Sencor parking lot. It has no Senacor logo on the side, no markings of any Kind. It just says vehicle number 20 on the back. And we can't see inside. We start following it. Why are there two cars all of a sudden in between us and the van? We're immediately paranoid that they know our plan and are trying to stop it. And that became a whole episode of the series, which was really fun. And of course there were like silly moments of us just trying to keep up with the van. We're not professional drivers. Are they getting off at the next exit? I can't. I can't see. Oh, Jerry. Damn. And we lose the van. Are they still in the right lane? I don't know. All we can do is try to see if they're still on here because if they got off, then we're kind of screwed. This is the point where sho jams the gas pedal to the floor and passes a whole line of cars. My God, you're amazing. Yes. Wow. American rehab had everything from a car chase to unforgettable people. Yeah, we brainwash them because their brain is dirty. Like, that clip is my all time favorite sound bite. It's just so good. You get lucky once in a while. Like once in a while. Lifetime. Want to meet somebody like Candy Ladson. Candy with a K. K, A N, D, Y, not no fucking C. And who just is an incredible storyteller, has lived this wild life and was at the beginning of something. The origin story of the popularization of this form of rehab. And he could really sell it. So this form of work based rehab started at a place called Synanon. It's where Candy got sober long ago, before drug rehabs as we know them even existed. Candy was 83 when we spoke, living in Santa Monica in an apartment that's not far from where Synanon was founded. Synanon helped Candy get off drugs. The Korean War is how he got on them. When we landed at Inchon off the boat, and we would run it because the Koreans was up on top of the hill shooting.50 caliber machine guns with tracer bullets. And tracer bullets light up and then traces was hitting the sand and lighting up. So as you ran, they could get a flasher where you. Where you was. Candy was born in Raccoon Bend, Texas, a small town with not a lot going on. So when he was just 15 years old, he lied about his age and joined the US Army. Not long after that, he was on that beach at Incheon outside of Seoul, dodging tracer bullets. Then I looked at my left and it was a boy from Georgia named Country who shot crooked Dice. But he told good jokes. So he tell you a good joke. Joking had me laughing. But he'd be cheating you out your fucking money. And I saw a bullet hit country right in the middle of his head, his forehead, and the blood skeeted in the air. So I didn't want to get shot in my face. It wasn't only the Korean People's army that was trying to kill Candy. Now, by his account, his newly integrated platoon wanted him dead, too. Candy says a group of white soldiers with Confederate tattoos abandoned him behind enemy lines. He was stuck alone in enemy territory, scared. He looked into a tree where he thought the North Koreans were hiding, and he begged them to shoot him anywhere but his face. Ten hours later, he found the tire tracks in the mud from army jeeps, and he followed them all the way back to his camp. So look. So look. When I had gotten back from the field, Sergeant Willie, who was in World War II, said, Young blood, where you been? And I told him, he said, here. He said, take this. This will calm you down. Because I was shaking, and it was a cigarette, and it was twisted at the end, and I lit it and smoked it. And it was China white heroin, like pure opium. And that's how I started using drugs. I had never had a drug in my life before. Candy spent years addicted to heroin. He eventually kicked the habit, and he credited Synanon with saving his life. This is part of what makes this story so complicated. Some of these rehab centers profit off the unpaid labor of people in the throes of addiction, and also sometimes the treatment works. Laura, when you guys were working on this, I feel like you had to walk a tightrope between compassion and asking hard questions about the most difficult times in people's lives. I've worked in a lot of newsrooms, and the Reveal newsroom felt to me like a real sense of mission at the heart of it. I guess I just don't think that there are many places that have all of those ingredients mixed together. The like, caring, compassion, and also this hard bitten mission of uncovering things that people in power really do not want uncovered. Reveal's reporting on rehab centers had a big impact. Many employers canceled contracts with senacorps, the rehab at the center of our story, and at least one of their programs that use unpaid labor closed down. We reached out to Centacor to see if they've changed their labor practices more broadly since our series first aired, but they never got back to us. And in a different drug rehab program, a federal judge ruled that 172 participants were owed more than $1.1 million in back wages. After a short break, an investigation that goes all the way back to slavery. Do you feel like descendants of the formerly enslaved who have worked land on these plantations are warranted some kind of payment or reparations for the time they spent enslaved? No. No, no. That's up next on Reveal from the center for investigative reporting and PRX, this is a special 10th anniversary episode of Reveal. Congratulations on your steady year anniversary and I'm wishing you 100 more. I'm Al Letson. And today we're taking a look back at not just our favorite stories, but yours, too. My name is Punta Daleski Boseman. My favorite episode was the story related to the Mississippi young black athlete that was killed, supposedly by suicide. As I was listening to the story, I could literally put myself there while all the events were occurring. And that's excellent storytelling. On Reveals part. Punta, thank you so much for that message and for shouting out Mississippi goddamn the Ballad of Billy Joe. I first heard about Billy Joe Johnson's death way before I came to Reveal. I was in Mississippi working on a story about an oil spill in the Gulf. I met some black folks from a small rural town called Loosedale. And they kept telling me about Billy Joe Johnson, a high school football star with a bright future whose life was cut short. Once I heard what they had to say, I couldn't let it go. But I didn't have the resources to investigate. So I held onto that story for almost a decade until I came to Reveal and could finally dive into Billy Joe Johnson's death. In December of 2008, a month after Obama was elected, a white cop pulled Billy Joe over. Authorities say Billie Joe handed the officer his driver's license. The officer then went back to his cruiser to run check. He said while he was looking down, reading the license, he heard the gunshot. He looked up and Billy Joe was lying on the ground, blood pooling from his head, a shotgun on top of his body. Initially, police said Billy Joe died of a self inflicted gunshot wound. The official story left so many questions unanswered. Trying to get to the bottom of what happened was personal to me because when I met Billie Joe's family, I could feel their pain and their rage at a system that wouldn't listen to them. I understood that in my gut. I grew up in a little town in the south and watched injustice all around me. Black people's issues were minimized or completely erased. I understood why the Johnsons and the black community felt unheard they thought Billie Joe was murdered and, and felt like no one had seriously looked into it. And that's what I wanted to do to give Billie Joe's case the investigation he deserved. It really set the tone for how we were going to tell the story. That's Reveal's Jonathan Jones. He was my reporting partner on this story. Yes, we were gonna go deep and forensically look at what had happened to Billy Joe Johnson, but it wasn't like it happened in isolation. How we perceive things, how we understand things happen in the context of everything else that go on in America. With this series, I wanted to draw a line from Billie Joe's death to the larger story of this country. Dying as a young black man in the Deep south in police custody carries the weight of history. So while we spent most of our time in Lucedale, Mississippi, Billy Joe's hometown, we also drove to Montgomery, Alabama, home to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a place that's dedicated to the victims of lynching. It was such a delicate line to walk because we in no way wanted to suggest to the audience that Billy Joe Johnson was lynched. We didn't know. At the same time, the sins of the past were the lens through which his parents saw Billy Joe's death. To understand his family, you had to understand history. I could have spent hours just walking the pavilion, but there's a structure in the main exhibit that has its own gravity. I followed the paved pathway that leads to it. There are no walls, just a roof and what looks like columns. When you get closer, you see the columns are suspended from the roof to the wood deck floor. The monoliths are rust colored metal rectangles. Engraved on each are State, county and the names of people. Clay County, Mississippi. William Gates. People who've been lynched. John Williamson, Milt Calvert. I knew I was going to see a lot of names but Cleveland McBee. But when you look out across the the structure, you realize how big it is. Winston County, Mississippi. It's breathtaking. Eli Bryant, Lewis Hodge. I couldn't count the columns. It's. It's that many. Daniel McDonald. William. I don't think this story will ever leave me. It's always on the edges of my mind when you go that deep into who Billy Joe was as a young man, the loss his family feels and how it's all entwined with the history of the Deep South. It's heavy and something that neither Jonathan nor I could easily let go. After we did that series, various people have reached out about suspicious deaths and you know, I've looked into some of them, and some of them you look at, and you see that there's hundreds of pages of police investigation files. They talked to 44 people. They followed every lead that the family gave them. None of the sort of rigorous investigations occurred at any point for the Johnson family. And so it's not as if everybody has the same experience from the local law enforcement, the Department of Justice, civil rights division. They all failed this family, and in some ways, then they failed America. And that. That really sits with me, and it makes me very angry. Examining race in America is something that's important to us. At reveal, this nation has failed to deal with its history of racism. It's messy and hard to look at and doesn't serve some people's narrative about the country. That's always been the case. But right now, we're at a flashpoint where the speed of misinformation and the obscuring of the the past has increased exponentially. Books about race are being banned from school libraries, and some states have made it nearly impossible to teach black history in public schools. That's why it's even more important to tell those stories. In 2024, we brought you 40 acres and a lie, our three part historical investigation into a government program that could have changed the trajectory of black Americans coming out of slavery. Today, we refer to the program as 40 acres and a mule, and we think of it as a promise that was never kept. But our investigation found that black Americans were actually given land only to have it taken away. Our reporting took us to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to have hard conversations, the kind that leave you thinking long after the mics go off? Do you feel like descendants of the formerly enslaved who have worked land on these plantations on Edisto island are warranted some kind of payment or reparations for the time they spent enslaved? No, no, no. Why is that? Anybody in this country who wants to do better has the opportunity to do it. There are many, many, many black folks around this country that have been very, very successful. Now you explain to me why. That's Jenks. Michael. Speaking with Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan. Jenks lives on a sprawling, beautiful former plantation that was passed down to him from his great, great grandfather, a wealthy slave owner from South Carolina. It's part of his generational wealth. But as we learned for a brief moment, some of that land was given to formerly enslaved people. We also know the federal government actually gave them land titles. We found names of more than 1200 black Americans who were given land titles across the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. There, black folks were trying to build their own communities when it was taken away and given back to the first former enslavers like Jenk's great great grandfather. I mean, I guess I'm trying to understand how it's all up him hundreds of. We keep giving away stuff. That's all we go be able to do is give away because people don't want to work, because they don't have to work, because all we're doing is giving them freebies. Nobody ever gave me anything other than this, but I now had to sweat bullets to keep it. I respect that. I just, you know, there's no denying that hard work has gone into your life, but I think even you just said, I haven't been given anything, but I was given this. And so is it not fair to at least acknowledge that there has been some privilege in having hold of this land? Did they not have land? They meaning black people? Yeah, they had it, and then it was taken away. The series 40 acres in a Lie, was a partnership with the center for Public Integrity and Mother Jones, and it was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Nadia spent two years on this project as the lead producer, going through hour upon hour of tape. You know, working at Reveal for a decade now, I have heard some really great stories and heard a lot of great tape that ends up on the cutting room floor. Like sometimes your good stuff, it doesn't fit. Like what you're trying to do or you're long and you just have to figure it out. And I feel like the cuts that you guys had to make. Oh, some cuts were brutal. The cut that like, did not make it. That I think about all the time. Same. It's the same one, I think. Yeah, the bricks. Right, the bricks. The McLeod Plantation, which is in Charleston, South Carolina, it's a plantation unlike many other plantations. You walk and take a tour of the plantation from the perspective of the enslaved. And so we met a woman named Toby Smith, who's a historian. And Toby was our tour guide. She stopped us at a wall. It's just a brick wall. They had to turn these bricks over because you can't put wet bricks in the kiln. And sometimes the bricks would be too heavy and they would squeeze too tightly and it would leave finger marks like these. These are some of our children. There were small fingerprints in the brick. And she shared with us that they had found out that those were the fingerprints of small children. Sorry, I've never talked about this before, and it's like making me emotional. Because small children, small, enslaved black children were also the ones who had to hold the brick and form the brick with their own hands. Children were used in every single horrific way possible. Bought, sold, raped, abused, beaten, lynched and hung. Everything that happened to adults happened to children. And we have to reconcile ourselves to that. That's the hard part, reconciling the past with the present. While none of us were alive then, we still have to deal with what's left. Just like the fingerprints in the bricks. As we were finishing this series, our partner, Public Integrity, went through some serious turmoil. The nonprofit news organization laid off most of its staff. Reporters and editors who originally brought us the 40 acre story lost their jobs. It was incredibly difficult to watch these reporters, you've been working on this story so deeply with, go through that. This is kind of the sad reality of the industry we're in right now. You know, it's really fragile right now. Journalism is being challenged in ways we haven't seen before. About 8,000 people have been laid off from news jobs in the past two years alone. With President Donald Trump back in the White House, major news networks and public media are both under attack with lawsuits and threats to pull broadcasters licenses and calls to end funding for NPR and pbs. But we're still here, and we aren't going anywhere. Someone has to be the voice of the little guy to speak truth to power, to meet people where they are and take you with us. The town of Alamogordo comes out of the desert kind of all of a sudden. Where am I Right now? It is the Blue Moon Hookah Lounge in Dearborn Heights. You pull into a parking lot at Barton Springs, a natural swimming hole. We're so deep in the mountains, there's no GPS signal. You feel like you're driving into the clouds. Talking to my former and current colleagues and hearing old shows, it really reinforces what Reveal means to me. A good friend of mine, a former editor of Reveal, sums it up perfectly. He used to say, investigative journalism is really a hopeful enterprise. Yes, we uncover bad things, but we do it with the hope that the knowledge will create change. And he was right. Our investigations have and will continue to make changes, because that's what we do. Our job is to shine a light and declare that facts are facts and the truth is true. We're going to keep revealing as long as you keep listening. Our lead producer for this week's show is Michael I. Schiller. He had help from Steven Rascon. Cynthia Rodriguez edited the show. Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Legal review by James Chadwick. Our production manager is Ulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando My Man Yo Arruda. They had help from Claire C. Note Mullen and from Julia Haney. Our interim executive producers are Bret Meyers and Taki Telenides. Our theme music is by Kamara Lightning. Support for reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan foundation, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, the park foundation, the Schmidt Family foundation and the Hellman Foundation. Support for reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. Thank you everybody at the team at Reveal. Al and all the collaborators. You remind us how complicated life can be, but how we are more similar than we are different. Over the past decade, I have worked with so many people who have made this show. Incredible, amazing experiences. I mean, changed my life. There's no way I could fit all those people in this episode. So I just wanted to send out a heartfelt thank you to all of them. You know who you are. This program would not be here without you. We are a co production of the center for Investigative Reporting and prx. I'm Al Letson and remember, there is always more to the story from prx.