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- [00:00]
Advertiser 1
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- [01:00]
Advertiser 2
Today's podcast is sponsored by Strawberry Me. Feeling like life's gotten messy? Or maybe you're just not moving forward like you'd hoped? A personal coach from Strawberry Me could be the turning point. You need to get what you want from life. Four reasons Coaching might be for you first, gain clarity. If your priorities are all over the place or you're unsure what your goals really are, a life coach can help you get clear on what truly matters. They'll work with you to understand what's important to you and define goals that align with who you are. Next, set goals. Once you're clear on what you want, your coach will help you create specific, achievable goals so you know exactly where you're heading. Then create a plan. Knowing your goals is one thing, but figuring out how to reach them, that's another. Your coach will help you build a realistic plan to get from where you are now to where you want to be. And finally, maintain commitment. Even with a solid plan, it's easy to lose motivation. Your coach will keep you accountable so you stay on track and make real progress. Visit Strawberry Me podcast and take a short quiz to get matched with the perfect coach. Plus get 20% off your first month membership. That's Strawberry Me Podcast.
- [02:14]
Kevin Allison
Hey folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison and every Thursday we release these special episodes where we look back at content from the earlier years of the podcast. This week it's the of true crime stories. Number three. Two stories of people who were very close to people in trouble with the law. In a little bit we're going to hear from Will Luria. But first a story from Jean Ann Lebec. Here she is now with a story we call America for us.
- [03:06]
Jean Ann Lebec
My boyfriend and I had been on a very typical European backpacking adventure a few years ago and we're in our mid-20s. A little background on us. We've been dating for a couple years and had lived abroad for a while and we were able to save up all this money before we moved back to the U.S. so we thought, let's go on this big trip. As per usual, I plan most of it and it's kind of a catch 22 always between us that I'm a control freak that wants to have everything planned. But it's always his fault that he's not participating either when I don't necessarily give him the opportunity to. So we're on this trip and we're checking off places on the itinerary and we're going to Sevilla, Spain. And I really wanted to go to a bull fight. It was kind of a last minute thing on the trip. So I didn't diligently plan the hotel the way I normally had. And so the only room available on the Friday night we got in was at a hostel. And not only was at a hostel, but it was in one of those multi gendered rooms which are usually super cheap but then not many people want to be in them because of exactly the point. It just, it's worse than a college dorm but with strangers. And so we think, you know what, it's only one night, who cares? I normally would not have wanted to be in that situation, but because I'm with my boyfriend, c'est la vie. It's one night, let's just stay there. We walk in the room and it's on the third floor of this old Spanish mansion. And I mean it's a gorgeous home and had an open balcony and there were windows in each of the rooms that faced out to the balcony because the whole middle roof was open because it's for airflow and that the windows in the rooms could be open from the inside as well as from the outside facing walls. There were two bunk beds available. There were three bunks that were lining the three walls. One of the top bunks was open and one of the bottom bunks was open. And I grew up on a top bunk and I said, no problem, I'll take the Top bunk. I had noticed because the window was right flush with the top bunk, it was a little high. And I thought, that's odd. I just want to make sure that it's locked and just normal safety precautions. And there was this old wooden shutter door that made this, er, creaky sound when you opened it. There was no real lock other than this latch. It was pretty faulty. But I thought, you know what? The window's high enough up, it's really creaky. If anyone comes in, I'm gonna hear the creak. And there was no way that anyone just standing could go through the window. It would have to be fairly calculated to put a chair in front on the window on the outside and then go up and then open the window. And I'm usually one of those people that thinks I'm gonna get raped around the street corner. Everywhere I go, I carry my key in my hands and I'm ready to deck some of it if I have to. And I'm always thinking like that. So I'm glad that I ran through this scenario in my head, but kind of checked that box. Being like, I thought about it. I know how it would happen. So you know it's not gonna happen. I can go to sleep in that millisecond between. When your brain's awake, but your eyes aren't open yet. I felt a hand. I had a long summer dress on. I had the sheet on and I had underwear on. So the hand was like, right on my genitalia, ready to go all up in there. And in that millisecond, I'm thinking of John, my boyfriend at the time, who was with me. And I'm thinking, why would you be touching me in a room full of strangers in the middle of the night? And I'm sleeping, like, how creepy. Even though you would never do that. And I remember thinking that I'm blinking. I'm starting to wake up, and I look to my right and my senses are starting to turn on. Like, okay, window. Window was to the right. And I'm looking over, and I don't have my contact lenses, and I have really shitty vision. And I just see this blur of a man, but it's just a mop of black hair and a black beard. And my boyfriend has red hair, so it's not him. And I'm looking, and now he's starting to speak in Spanish to me. He's whispering. I could tell in my limited Spanish that he was just talking dirty to me. I'm frozen just for a second, not realizing what to do. And all of a sudden my fight or flight response is just turned on. And I go immediately to go and punch him, but I fall through the window. He's ducking. I see that there's a chair there. I hold myself with the window pane or else I'm going to fall through the window. And he's able to like scrounge down, run down to the staircase and because of those balconies, how you couldn't see everything, I could see him go down the stairwell, go into the second floor bedroom and close the door. So I'm able to push myself off the window pane. And at this point there was enough commotion that now John's near my bed, like, what happened? And I just remember yelling, he touched me, he touched me, he touched me.
- [08:10]
John
Immediately.
- [08:10]
Jean Ann Lebec
He's asking questions like, touch you where? What happened? Rather than like, go get him, like go get him. And I just. Because I just wanted to act. And I remember being like, we have to go to the lobby and block the door so he can't get out. So we sprint down the stairs and we're in the lobby area and there's the front reception desk and we see a sign that says attendant not there until 8am and then there's a clock to the side that says 6:45. No phones around, thank God. I could see it in the background of the lobby. It was a pretty big lobby. There was a girl on the computer in the back. And I go up to her and I say, can you please call the police? And she's like, I don't speak English. I'm like, pull aside, police. Police. And she got the message and could see that I was agitated. So I saw that she called. John and I are just standing there in the middle of this beautiful old mansion, just waiting for the police. And all of a sudden, down this open stairwell comes the guy. He must have taken off his shirt because now he's putting on his shirt as he's walking down the stairs, kind of in a. Oh, what's the commotion going on down here? And in my head I'm thinking, you fucking asshole. Like, he's walking down the stairs. And then now I have this opportunity again and John's staying there. But I just run up the stairs, I go boom. And I punch him right in the face. And unfortunately, my 5 7, 120 pound frame body didn't do much, but now I'm just a rape. And I'm screaming like, you fucking asshole. What the fuck did you think you. Who do you Think you are? Like, I'm just livid. And he goes to John and goes, you're a man. I'm a man. Like, she's a woman. Like. So I touch her and I'm yelling at John, like, punch him. Knock him out. Like, fuck this guy. Like, this is what the fuck? And just nothing. I remember just being so angry that, like, I'm gonna wait outside, block the door from the inside. I'm gonna wait on the outside for the police. And so I'm waiting outside thinking, like, what the fuck? And here I still don't have my contact lenses on. So not only am I emotionally, everything's starting to come out now, but I can't see either. So it's just such a bizarre memory, too, that I have not my real vision of memory. It's this whitewash blur. I can see the police car rolling up in the distance. And all of a sudden I hear all this racket inside, tables falling down, glass breaking. The guy runs out the door. And I remember being like, no, he's gonna get away. And I grabbed the corner of his shirt and I still remember that feeling of like, you know, that when you can't hold onto something and, like, just trying so hard to hold onto it and grabbing the corner of his shirt and not seeing where John is. And then all of a sudden I see him come out. And the French girl had a boyfriend, apparently, that almost looked like Fabio. Had this, like, blonde hair and a ponytail, just huge, like, wrestler body. And between the two of them, were able to tackle this guy. And John was smart enough to get on the guy's back, like, put his knee in his back and then pull out his wallet and throw it in the opposite direction that he was laying in. So God forbid he got away. At least we could ID the motherfucker. And thank God the police came, he was still there. And we were able to file a police report. We know that he was arrested. Don't know what the Spanish court system ended up doing with them, but justice was served in the best possible way that you could think of in this situation. That it wasn't this. I think of so many stories that you hear of drunk American girls just being not smart, walking through. Like, these things happen all the time, but, like, I happened to be in a situation that I was able to react quickly, didn't have any alcohol in my system, and that I had a loved one with me to be able to help.
- [12:12]
John
Awkwardly.
- [12:13]
Jean Ann Lebec
We go back to the hostel and the hostel owner refunds us and we get a hotel Room like we actually thought we were going to plan on doing the next night. And I just remember laying on the bed, John laying there next to me. And then we started kissing and proceeded to have sex like a normal couple. And I just, for that split second, I remember thinking of what had happened just a mere 12 hours before, 14 hours before, and thought to myself, like, I'm not gonna let this get in my way. Like, I have a habit of ruminating over things, overthinking things. And I thought, like, it's okay to.
- [12:54]
John
Be emotional about this.
- [12:55]
Jean Ann Lebec
But it was a stranger and a horrible thing that happened. It doesn't say anything about anything. And I'm like, I don't want this to affect anything between John and I. And at first I just thought it was the sexual part that, like, this stranger touched me here. I don't want to think about that every time anyone touches me there. But as, like, the weeks progressed and we ended up going home, and we were planning for living in Europe, which we then did and saw each other briefly over the fall. We live in separate cities in the U.S. but we were planning on going to Germany together. And instead what happened was the opposite that I kept thinking not just of the act and what happened, but more bothered that when I was yelling at John to punch him, he didn't have the same response that I had towards this guy of just wanting to deck him, rather than just appreciating John's emotional intelligence differences, for better or for worse, like they're different than mine. And rather than just appreciating that, I just got so fixated that this event was so symbolic of him not sticking up for me or sticking up for us or planning for the future. And I just let that drive a wedge between us. And it was just the elephant in the room all the time. But I decided in a cowardly way not to bring it up. And it was just easier to think about in my head or talk to my girlfriends about it. And John really is such a healthy, good yin yang balance to me instead of just dealing with the normal curves that life throws you as a couple. And even though we were in our mid-20s, this was probably our first big one. And I can't say that I know what it feels like to. To lose a child or, like, face another huge other traumatic event. But I feel like, in my own small way, like, you kind of get a taste of that when something happens like that and two people don't decide.
- [14:55]
John
To take that opportunity to deal with.
- [14:57]
Jean Ann Lebec
It together and say things even if.
- [14:59]
John
You know that they're the wrong emotions.
- [15:01]
Jean Ann Lebec
To have that they're your emotions regardless and deal through it. And I didn't do that. Instead, I asked him to leave, like.
- [15:08]
John
When I was in Germany, and I immediately regretted it. But then, like, we weren't kids anymore. There were consequences that he had flown to Australia to be with friends there. And there were visa issues. There was, like, money issues. I had $1,000 in my name. I couldn't grab a plane and go there. And I thought maybe, like, the break is, like, a good chance for us just to, like. Or really a good chance for me to deal with, like, how I process things, what he means to me, what I need to do, like, myself. That, like, takes two to tango sort of thing. And being more explicit about how I feel and when I feel it. But it took a lot of time and just, like, one decision. How it took almost a year and a half before we were in the same place again, like, geographically, but then also, like, mentally, because that, like, really hurt him that I took such an extreme path just to, like, prove a point out of, like, pride rather than just talking about it as an adult.
- [16:25]
Jean Ann Lebec
Why would you want to be with me either if I just took such drastic decisions rather than just talking about it and drama queen written all over it, or, like, again, like, fuck you. And, I mean, I totally understood that. And it, like, broke my heart knowing that there may not be an opportunity for us to be together again. But thank God that wasn't in the cards and we're back together again and things are great. And I think I'm far better now at. Rather than judging my feelings as ones that I need, like, I can't have some because they're not logical, or, like, because I want to be logical to him, that, no, it's okay, logical or not, that my feelings are my feelings and I just need to share them with the person that I'm most intimate with. And, like, that shouldn't judge right or wrongness of that stuff. And I'm glad, as a life lesson of myself, that I was able to experience something like that at such an earlier age and something that wasn't as largely traumatic because I think just that the lesson that you learn, letting someone go and then being able to get them back, you're able to put it in perspective in a totally different way that the little small things that just piss you off from living together, where they're like, it's not a big deal. Think of what the actual drastic alternative is that he's not in your life. And I know it's absolutely absurd to think in such, like, cataclysmic ways for everything, but the way my brain works, like it really does. Like it's a pill to just drop me into gear of just like, perspective. And I just know I have to remind myself of that all the time in a lot of different areas of my life. But I'm glad I have something to bring me always back to that center when it comes to him.
- [18:36]
Narrator
We'll be right back.
- [18:38]
Advertiser 1
Today's episode is brought to you by alma. ALMA supports clinicians in building rewarding private practices with simplified insurance credentialing in under 45 days, enhanced reimbursement rates and guaranteed two week payback. Plus HIPAA compliant EHR tools like intake forms, progress notes and treatment planners. Learn more about how Alma could support your private practice at helloalma.com getstarted that's hello a l m a dot com getstarted to learn more.
- [19:08]
Ryan Broderick
Do you feel like life is completely out of control? And do you feel that way because you spend all day looking at the Internet? Do you see things in your various feeds and apps that are terrifying and or enraging? And do you often wonder if those things are even real in the first place? Well, I'm here to help. Sort of. My name is Ryan Broderick. I'm a journalist. I cover Internet culture and technology. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day and I have a brand new podcast called Panic World. Whether it's a moral panic about teenagers boiling chicken in Nyquil and posting it to TikTok, or teenagers vaping Tide pods or Taylor Swift being a government psyop, all of these conspiracy theories and more get put under the microscope on Panic World. I don't have solutions, but on my podcast, Panic World, we can definitely, well, we can laugh about it for sure. Listen to Panic World. It's a great show. Love it, and I love you for listening to it. Panic World is available on all apps. Just type in Panic World into the box that those various interfaces have. Panic World. Listen to it. It's good.
- [20:09]
Advertiser 1
Today's episode is brought to you by Alma. As a clinician, you probably chose this field because you wanted to support people in navigating challenges and finding personal growth. But many mental health care providers end up spending almost as much time on billing, insurance and other documentation as you do in sessions with clients. That's where Alma can help. ALMA supports clinicians in building rewarding private practices with simplified insurance credentialing in under 45 days. Enhanced reimbursement rates and guaranteed two week payback. Plus streamlined HIPAA compliant EHR tools like intake forms, progress notes and treatment planners so you can spend less time on the administrative work and more time delivering great mental health care. Learn more about how Alma could support your private practice at helloalma.com getstarted that's hello.com getstarted to learn more. Hello Alma.com getstarted when you think about.
- [21:10]
Advertiser 3
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- [22:24]
Narrator
Thank you. So like most young men, I adored my father. I think he was a hero. He was absolutely fantastic. I remember him waking me up early so that we could play. There was this old video game system made by Magnavox called Odyssey. He would wake me up so that we could play this pixelated golf game that he really enjoyed. I remember him also waking me up so that we could watch Lone Ranger cartoons on Saturday morning. I remember his diesel powered car like he allowed me to unplug it from the wall because that's what you needed to do to let this car run. I remember when he got an injury on his elbow, an unexplained injury. I remember walking in on him in a garage, in our garage. Really dark denky garage. Suddenly the bright light of that day cutting right through that and seeing him at a table with a scale in front of him and all sorts of little bags and boxes all around him. I remember him chasing my mother's car as she drove away right before they got a divorce. When I was about 8, my parents separated and they divorced like most kids in that situation, you spend the week with your mother, you spend the weekends with your dad. And I used to love those weekends. He had a collection of GI Joe toys that, that was superior to my mother's collection of GI Joe toys, which made going to his house that much more enjoyable. So my brother and I would go every weekend. What I noticed is that also during this time, the old diesel car was replaced by a really nice gold Lincoln Continental. Much nicer, right? Just a smoother ride. Then one day, one weekend, my father didn't pick us up. He just didn't show up. And my mother said, well, he's away, but he'll be back. I'm like, okay, all right, so I'll wait a few days. The next weekend he didn't show up again. The weekend after that. Then a few weekends passed by and it was excuse after excuse after excuse. He's away, he's visiting your family, he's in Texas, he's visiting friends. All of these different things were being said every single week. Eventually my uncle pulls me aside, my mother's brother, and he says, I think you should know. And this is. Imagine a nine year old me, not that much shorter than what I am now, but imagine a nine year old me. And he said, I think you should know that your father is in prison. He was going to be away for a very long time. And I had all sorts of questions, trying to figure out, what does a long time mean? What happened? Why is he away? Nobody really knew any of these details. Eventually, I started to sink into my mom's new life. You start calling your stepfather dad. You start calling your new step grandparents Grandpa and grandma. You start to make a new life for yourself, right? Then sometime when I was about 12 years old, something happened. It might have been the smell of my favorite Mexican food, or it might have been because I was watching a White Sox game. But something happened that triggered the memory of my father. And I said, you know what? I need to find out where he is. I need to know what is going on. The only thing I could find out from anybody is that he was at a penitentiary in Minnesota. So I start calling state penitentiaries in Minnesota. Now, you couldn't Google this back then, so you just have to pull out all sorts of phone books and have 411 operators forward you to other 411 operators. But eventually you get some phone numbers of different state penitentiaries in Minnesota. I start asking them, do you have a prisoner called William Lewera? William Lewera? Eventually they're like, ah, yes, there was a William Lewera here, But he's been transferred over to the Illinois State Penitentiary in Chicago. Now, I was in Chicago. That's where I grew up. So now my father was a couple of miles away from where I was. So now, and I knew the exact penitentiary. I had a phone number that they gave me, and I called, hi, I'm looking for William Lewera. Hold, please. They come back to me. They're like, all right, could you tell us a little bit more about him at that age? I didn't really have that many details. I provided what I can, but I guess it was just they had to fact check my story. And then they were going to call me back. They call me back and they're like, okay, we found your father. Could you give us a phone number where he can call. Call you at? So I passed that phone number on. A few days later, the phone rings. I pick it up, and sure enough, it's that familiar voice. Now, I don't think anyone here has ever talked to my father, but my father, his English is pretty good. I mean, it's great. He was born in the States, but it's still. It has a touch, a flare of a Mexican accent across it. He was born on a border town in Texas. So it's got this touch of a Mexican accent that I remember picking up on immediately, right? You know, and he's just like, mijo, son, right? And I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, my God, it's my dad. And we just start catching up on everything that the last three that we've lost the last few years. I start telling them about what I'm, you know, the high schools I'm thinking about going to and, you know, what's going on in my life. I catch them up. My brother, he starts telling me about everything that's going on in his life. He's telling me that he is now the head chef of the prison kitchen. This was a big deal for him. He told me that people loved his cooking. He told me about bookshelves and bookends and things that he was creating in his carpentry class. He was telling me about wallets that he was making in his leather class or something, right? And he's like, I'm gonna make a bunch of wallets and I'm gonna give them to you when I get out of here. I'm like, yeah, that's great, dad. That's great. Then we. We started to write each other. So now I had letters from him. We Were finally reengaged. He then tells me a few months later, he's like, they're letting me out early on good behavior. I'll be getting out in about another year. So by the time I was 14, my father, who I'd not seen for a few years, Was reintroduced into my life. This was no longer the same man that I saw before. This man was much skinnier. He had less hair, and he was afraid. He was afraid of everything. He was afraid of crossing the street at the wrong time. He was afraid of making eye contact with anyone. He was afraid in stores of saying the wrong thing. I also remember that his sunglasses were smaller. He used to have big sunglasses. Now he had more modest ones. My dad had been taken down a few notches. No more nice suits or snakeskin boots. It was now polo shirts and khakis. The one thing about my dad, though, is that he was determined. Now, I should share here that my father went away to prison because he was a major drug dealer in Chicago. Okay, if that wasn't clear, the injury on his elbow was actually a gunshot that he received. The new car was probably bought with drug money. He was caught with about $100,000 worth of cocaine in his trunk. So at this point, I'm starting to learn all of these details, and he's trying to now make a new life for himself again. My father, being the determined man that he is, he buys a car. And then I noticed that about a week later, he has a new car. And then about a week after that, he has another new car and another one in a garage. So what I was noticing is that what my father was doing was just flipping cars. Right? He was your standard flipping car thing, Right, Is what my dad. He would buy old car, remodel it, and sell it. And he was slowly rebuilding himself. He was slowly rebuilding his life. Suddenly, the khakis and polo shirts went away. He started to get nicer clothing. He started to get nicer sunglasses. Now, the jewelry that he lost when he went away to prison, now suddenly, again, with the gold chains and the watches and all of that. I remember one day he picked me up, and he's like, hey, I've got something to show you. Come with me. We get into a car, a different car. It was like a different car every week. And we drive up western avenue in Chicago up to about 60th, 70th street, where there's a lot of other used car lots. And he's like, I know. I have something to show you. And we pull into a lot where there's about a dozen cars and there's all these streamers and a big Mexican and American flag. Two flags right, one right next to each other. And on it there's a little trailer that says Rainbow Auto Sales. And my dad is like, this is mine, this is mine. And he's showing me that he has made it. He has rebuilt himself. A couple of years out of prison. He has now been able to continue his American dream. And he was so proud of showing me all of his used cars that he had. I was so, so happy for him. And I was so happy that my father was back in my life. And finally there was some semblance of balance. Over the next year, as I was prepping to graduate from high school, things continued to change. When I met with my father, it would be over dinners at restaurants where I would not see him. We would go in, he would go into a back room with a couple of other guys. He'd be gone. I'd eat by myself. He'd come back and then we'd leave. Mexican restaurants, Korean restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants, all types of different restaurants. Clothes started to get nicer. The nice boots started to come back. The big belt buckles, the big sunglasses, the huge cell phones, beepers, all that, it all started to come back. And I knew what was happening. As soon as he bought his first nice big house, I knew what the path was that we were going down. Here's a man that I love and love to this day. This guy is incredible. But he was doing this again. When I started to apply for school, I wanted to get away from all of this. I wanted to get away from home. I needed to get away from the tension of a drug dealing dad. So I applied to schools far away from Chicago. The school that gave me the best deal was Boston College. And I said, okay, I'm going to Boston, I'm getting out of here. So I go and communication between my dad and I just is now more over telephone. I eventually drive from Chicago to Boston with as many belongings as I could bring with me, trying to get myself away from Chicago. The summer after my sophomore year, I go back home and my father and I go see the movie True Lies. I'm sure folks remember this movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Arnold. It was a Bill Paxton, right? And I'll never forget this one scene. My father frickin loved it and lost his shit in this one scene where Bill Paxton and is being held over the dam when he's pretending to be Carlos the Jackal, right? And then he pees himself. And I'll never forget the way my dad was laughing. I mean, he thought this was the funniest thing in the world. And he's like hitting me. He's doing one of these things. He's like. He's like, look, he's pissing himself, right? And he's like, laughing, doubled over. He just. Absolutely. And I remember just looking at him and loving it. I mean, that moment, I could still feel him hitting me on my shoulder and me just enjoying the laughter that is so unique to my dad. And I just felt great that night. After we have some dinner, we go back to his place and I just say, all right, dad, that was a lot of fun. I'm going back to school in a couple of weeks, so let's just hang out a few more times before I leave. We say goodbye the next day. I don't hear from him. I don't see him. He's gone. You see, leading up to this night. And in fact, the summer leading up to this day was a very difficult summer. When I had come back from B.C. to visit him, the man had become a lot more agitated, a lot more paranoid. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. He would sit at restaurants whenever he did see with me and making sure he was at a place where he could see the exit. He would always be screening phone calls, never take anything. Whenever he drove me home, it would never be the straight way. It would be a bunch of side roads and alleyways. We would stop extra long at red lights. We would take expressways that would go up north and then back down south just to get me home. At the same time, my aunt who lived with him would be crying tears, telling me, they're outside, they're looking at us, they are looking at us. And sure enough, there'd be cars outside of his apartment, lights down. You could see two figures that were just staring at us at all times during that summer as well. I remember going over about $10,000 worth of 50s and hundreds, making sure that they weren't counterfeit. I remember taking boxes to friends restaurants. My father was kind of innocently pulling me into this. Never knew what I was doing. But again, it's her dad. It's like, what do you do? Your dad is asking you to do something and you do it. He was gone. I didn't know where he was. And I played it all off as if it was normal because all my family members knew nothing. All of his brothers and sisters had also been gone. No one knew anything. No one could tell Me, anything. I went back to B.C. playing off as if I would talk to my dad every weekend and whatnot. The next year, after the final exam of my junior year, as I'm walking up the stairs with my girlfriend, we're about to have an end of school year night out, I hear footsteps behind me coming up the same stairs of my apartment building. And I thought it was unusual because they were so close to me, but I thought it was maybe somebody from another apartment. As soon as we get into my apartment, I hear a knock. They have a picture. Do you know who this man is? No. Do you know who this is? Look at it closely. No. They're like, this is your father, and we want you to tell us where he is, because we know you know where he is. We're U.S. marshals, and we're going to find your father. They immediately separate my girlfriend and I and they question me for a couple of hours. The first thing they make you sign, whether or not this is legit or not, is a piece of paper that says that if you're lying, you're going to pay a $10,000 fine and go to prison for five years. That's a lot of pressure when you're under questioning. They don't give you a place to sit, and you just sort of standing there fielding all of these questions. He wanted to know where my father was. I told him everything I knew, which was nothing. This continued for a few days. I would go back into the U.S. marshal's office in Post Office Square. In fact, whenever I walk through there now, it makes me nervous. And I told them everything. I shared phone records with them. I gave them everything they wanted, and they saw that I had nothing to hide. A few days later, I would find out that my mother back in Chicago, who was divorced from my father for years, got the same visit. I found out that relatives all over the country were getting the same visit. I would later find out that my father was caught with about $250,000 of cocaine and other drugs in his trunk. So he was going to go to prison for a long time. And they were fining him because he was a connection to some higher network. My dad was high up in the Chicago drug cartel, and this was important. They needed to find him. After A while, the U.S. marshal stopped visiting. After a while, the call stopped. I remember that night that they came was the first time I peed my bed since I was about 12 years old. But we would not hear from them anymore. I would often question, you know, what am I becoming what part of my dad am I going to take on? What mistakes am I going to make? My time with my dad was brief and spotted, right? Never continuous. But what I said at the top about loving your dad, I absolutely still, to this day love my father. He was not a perfect man. He made a lot of mistakes and he probably hurt a lot of people. But the lessons I took from my time with him. I love my kids and I will do anything for my kids. He taught me how to be a gentleman with women. And now I have a beautiful wife. He taught me that friends always come first. Regardless of what you're doing, you gotta take care of your friends. He taught me to be a White Sox fan, thank God, not a Cubs fan. And he taught me how to. How to appreciate moments, however briefly. A few months after the visit from the US Marshals, I got a call. I didn't have any. I didn't have a cell phone. I just had a landline. I pick it up and I hear a lot of background noise, cars, ambiance of like a city. Spanish. Now this next part I'm always reluctant to share because I'm not exactly sure of the legal implications. Not for any of you, but more for me. But the voice on the other end was recognizable. I knew the voice. And the voice just said, hey, I just want you to know that your dad is okay. Where is he? Just want you to know that your dad is fine and he's okay. Will I see him again? Your dad is very proud of you. And he wants you to know that he's happy. Then the ambiance stopped. The phone clicked. And I have never gotten another phone call since. But I am at least at peace. And I know that that story has ended and that chapter in my life and his life is now closed. And what I feel is a happy, unsure but still happy ending. Thank you.
- [42:46]
Fiona Apple
Bad world When a girl will break a board Just because you can don't you tell me to den I don't wrong and I want to suffer for my sins I've come to you cuz I need guidance to be true and I just don't know where I can begin what I need is a good defense cause I'm feeling like a cribbing and I need to be redeemed to the one I've sent against because he's all I ever knew of Love that.
- [43:37]
Kevin Allison
That is all for the best of true Crime stories Number three. This is Fiona Apple behind me now. Just heard from Will Luria. And if you have a story about crime or I don't know. That's it. Basically, you know, crime. If you have a true crime story, just send us that. We're at risk. We're at risk-show.com submissions. Folks, today's the day. Take a risk.
- [44:40]
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- [45:24]
Narrator
Hey, folks.
- [45:24]
Kevin Allison
There's so much more of Risk in the holiday season. Risk is always publishing new episodes and new stories, as well as holiday favorites. This holiday season, don't forget, click on Risk.