The Devil's Quarry, with Paul Solotaroff

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

Episode: The Devil's Quarry, with Paul Solotaroff
Date: July 29, 2026
Guests: Paul Solotaroff (investigative journalist, Rolling Stone, creator of Bone Valley, The Devil’s Quarry)

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Overview

This episode delves into small-town corruption, failed police investigations, coerced confessions, and the harrowing legacy of the Josette Wright murder in Carmel, NY—a real-life horror story unravelled by veteran investigative journalist Paul Solotaroff. The hosts and Paul explore systemic injustice, wrongful convictions, the overlooked predations of a probable serial killer, and the urgent need for oversight and community vigilance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introducing Paul Solotaroff and His Journalistic Path

• Paul reflects on his circuitous path from novelist to celebrated investigative reporter, shaped by his family legacy and formative experiences in NYC.

  • Notable Moment: He witnessed the aftermath of the Happy Land disco fire, becoming a counselor for traumatized children and realizing his true calling was to give them a voice through journalism.
  • Quote: “I needed to give a voice to these voiceless kids...journalism has given me a chance to get into the ring with some of the more despicable characters” — Paul (08:06)

• Paul’s early “Dead Boys” exposé at the Village Voice revealed child abuse and institutional betrayal at Covenant House, a defining chapter in his career (09:59–14:03).

Investigative Work and The Devil’s Quarry

• Paul's investigations have tackled NFL concussions, the Aaron Hernandez case, and major police corruption.
• The “Devil’s Quarry” began when Nina Morrison (now federal judge) of the Innocence Project presented him with the deeply flawed convictions of Anthony DiPippo and Andrew Krivak—two small-town teens sentenced for the 1994 murder of 12-year-old Josette Wright (16:58).
• The show exposes not only the failure to pursue the likely serial predator, Howard Gombert, but also the “ritualized” corruption and incompetence of Putnam County law enforcement.

The Case of Josette Wright—Wrongful Conviction, Systemic Rot

• The police, under public pressure and with little homicide experience, scapegoated “sideways kids”—latchkey teens on the margins—rather than seriously investigating.

• • Quote: “They began to round up the kids they designated the usual suspects…not only did they sell this family an enormous toxic pack of lies, a pack of lies that family still clings to, even after the exoneration.” — Paul (25:36)
  • Coerced confessions and quid-pro-quo deals with vulnerable witnesses (e.g., Denise Rose, coerced under threat of prison) underpinned the prosecution, despite an absence of physical evidence (57:13–62:07).
  • The focus was to close the case, not solve it:
    • “Every point of their investigation seems to focus less and less on finding the actual murderer and more and more on closing out the case.” — Ben (35:07)

• Anthony DiPippo’s Remarkable Role

  • While imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, Anthony (a 9th-grade dropout) became his own best advocate, astonishing even his high-powered defense lawyer, Mark Agnifilo (31:41).
  • Quote: “I had a secret weapon that the prosecution didn’t. I had the actual best lawyer in America teach me how to try this case.” — Paul, paraphrasing Agnifilo (31:41)

The Real Killer: Howard Gombert

• The town’s “pedophile and terrorist of girls and women” was well-known to local authorities but never investigated for Josette’s murder (44:51–48:57).

  • Quote: “They never even swung by his flophouse apartment and knocked on his door...It is unfathomable.” — Paul (46:53)

• Gombert’s long record of sexual violence included multiple charges (children as young as 11 and 12), yet he found sanctuary moving just over the border into Connecticut, where he was finally convicted—but is up for release in late 2026, with no parole or supervision (51:14).

  • Quote: “This guy is walking out of prison a free man.” — Paul (53:29)

• Survivors live in fear:

  • Quote: “He’s been writing me from prison…He is sending me horrifying letters because stalking is part of his M.O.” — Paul (51:12)

Small-Town Policing, Corruption, and National Implications

• The episode indicts not just the individuals involved but systemic patterns in U.S. law enforcement, especially in towns with little oversight:
  • 74% of America is policed by sheriffs who “answer to no one except the voters.” — Paul (62:07)
• Paul draws parallels to urban cases like the Atlanta Child Murders and street-level exploitation in Los Angeles, underscoring that wherever there is power disparity, there is predation on vulnerable children.
  • Quote: “There’s very little to keep the powerful and predatory away from the most vulnerable population…wherever I go, there it is.” — Paul (67:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Journalism, especially longform investigative journalism, has given me a chance to get into the ring with some of the more despicable characters and public policy disasters...” — Paul (08:06)
• “Crack was the original diseased bat from Wuhan. It destroyed New York in a way I have never seen a city gutted.” — Paul (10:22)
• “These are the kids at the back of the classroom…if they'd grown up 10 miles south...they would have been diagnosed and treated…but they grew up in a community in which children, especially female children, were prey.” — Paul (27:19)
• “The Devil in The Devil’s Quarry isn’t just Howard Gombert...it is also the crooked cops...as dangerous to public safety as this man who had a nearly 20 year run of sexual violence against children.” — Paul (62:07)
• “I have never seen anything more extraordinary, heroic than what Anthony DiPippo did in the prison library at Attica.” — Paul (29:55)
• “There is very little to keep the powerful and the predatory away from the most vulnerable population in the country—namely children.” — Paul (67:25)
• Call to Action: “We urge, beg our listeners: call, write the Attorney General of New York State…Letitia James...add your voice to Atlas. It will be the collective that finally gets justice…” — Paul (74:25)

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• 03:51: Hosts introduce Paul Solotaroff, graphic content disclaimer, case overview
• 05:42: Paul’s journalistic origin story and motivation
• 09:59: “Dead Boys” exposé: systemic abuse, confronting the powerful
• 16:58: How Paul got involved in the Devil’s Quarry investigation
• 25:36: The framing of Anthony DiPippo & Andrew Krivak, “sideways kids” and coerced confessions
• 31:41: Anthony’s legal self-advocacy, exoneration with lawyer Mark Agnifilo
• 35:07: The investigation’s disregard for truth—prioritizing closure over justice
• 44:51: Pattern of manipulating and coercing vulnerable witnesses
• 46:53: Introduction and neglect of Howard Gombert as a suspect
• 51:12: Gombert’s predation, upcoming release, terrorizing of survivors
• 62:07: Systemic context: small-town policing, lack of oversight
• 67:25: Patterns of power, child exploitation, American cyclicality
• 74:25: Paul’s message: collective action, contacting authorities, community responsibility

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Takeaways & Call to Action

• Justice is a collective agreement:
  • “It’s not a blue state/red state deal, it’s an all-of-us-agreement. We all bear responsibility for Josette Wright, for Robin Murphy.”
• Amplify the call: Listeners are urged to pressure authorities to prevent Gombert's release and to support efforts for civil commitment.
• Listen, Speak, and Act: “Vote with your voice. Call, write the Attorney General’s office…add your voice to Atlas.”

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Final Thoughts

Paul Solotaroff’s investigation, The Devil’s Quarry, exposes the devastating consequences of unchecked power, complacency, and corruption in small-town America. Through firsthand stories, chilling evidence, and a call for public engagement, the episode pushes listeners to confront uncomfortable truths and act in defense of the most vulnerable.

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To learn more:

• Listen to "The Devil’s Quarry" (wherever you get podcasts)
• Search for Paul Solotaroff’s work in Rolling Stone (notably "Dead Boys" and coverage of police corruption)
• Contact New York Attorney General Letitia James if compelled to support the civil commitment of Howard Gombert

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Transcript

[Ben]

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[Noel]

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[Revisionist History Narrator]

Thirty years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City.

[Dylan]

Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Who will you trust? The people five miles overseas.

[Revisionist History Narrator]

This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough.

[Matt]

But we're not stopping, are we?

[Revisionist History Narrator]

Listen to revisionist history, the Staten island problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben]

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartrad.

[Noel]

Foreign.

[Matt]

Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.

[Noel]

My name is Noel.

[Ben]

They called me Ben. We're joined, as always with our super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal fag.

[Dylan]

It.

[Ben]

Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Quick disclaimer at the top, folks. Tonight's episode contains graphic descriptions of true crimes, so listener discretion is advised. In the woods Outside of Caramel, New York, a hunter discovers the bones of a 12 year old girl, launching an investigation into a mystery that could be accurately described as a real life horror film. Fortunately folks, we are not diving into this alone. We are joined with none other than the award winning investigative journalist, longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone, the creator of Bone Valley, season five, the the Devil's Quarry. We proudly present the legendary Paul Solotarov.

[Paul Solotarov]

Wow.

[Revisionist History Narrator]

Wow.

[Paul Solotarov]

I feel like Conor McGregor jumping the

[Noel]

dire straits of true crime reporting.

[Paul Solotarov]

The dire straits of true crime scoring.

[Noel]

That was a. That was a nod to a conversation we had off.

[Paul Solotarov]

Mike.

[Matt]

Mike, watch your. Watch your legs there, Paul. If you're jumping in as Connor will.

[Ben]

Oh no.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Noel]

Didn't he have a bit of a bad showing this last time around? I heard it was a little underwhelming.

[Ben]

Not every day could be the birthday, I guess. Paul, speaking of jumping in, let's dive in with this at the beginning. Could you set the scene by introducing our audience to a little bit more about your past work and what led you toward investigative journalism? Like, was there a single specific turning point you can recall in your life or did you sort of always know this is your vocation.

[Paul Solotarov]

I, I bought my nose against investigative journalism after hitting my forehead on five brick walls. I'm the son of one of the great literary, literary editors of the second half of the 20th century. Ted Solotarov, who edited Roth Maler, discovered an entire generation extraordinary novelists and poets. And I just assumed that as the first porn I would roll right down the assembly line, went to the Writers Workshop at Iowa to become a novelist. They happily disabused me of that idea very, very quickly. They said, yeah, you can write a sentence okay, but Jesus Christ, is this what you're using for material? That shot me like a water cannon into the playwriting program, the graduate playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama. They wasted even fewer seconds informing me that again, I had the wrong address and politely referred me to the NYU School of Social Work, where I spent two and a half really unprofitable years training to be a clinical psychologist. The only thing I got out of that 45k of student debt was my subject. So I got placed as a counselor in training at a community mental health center in the South Bronx. And I arrived on the scene about an hour and a half after this horrific calamity called the Happy Lands disco fire in which a couple of 3, 400 people were packed into a basement social club and someone threw a Molotov cocktail.

[Ben]

Oh my gosh.

[Paul Solotarov]

And orphaned about 300 children in East Tremont in the Bronx. And lo and behold, I suddenly was that designated healer for 15 or 20 children who were just speechless with grief, with horror, dislocation. And at that point, I realized two things. I still was the person in the room who needed the most help, but I needed to give a voice to these voiceless kids. And when the Village Voice inexplicably came calling in 1988, they needed an associate editor. I took the job so that I could do something that I'd been yearning to do since I was a 9 year old getting mugged on the subways of New York. And that was bully the bullies. So journalism, especially long form investigative journalism, has given me a chance to get into the ring with some of the more despicable characters and some of the more despicable public policy disasters of the second half of the 20th century.

[Noel]

I love the idea of journalism as bullying the bullies. I've never thought about that before, but we sure need that now, maybe more than ever. And there are some folks that are stepping up and some folks that are shrinking back, and you kind of really See who's really got the goods in the face of, you know, real, real bullies.

[Paul Solotarov]

Yeah, Bullying. That looks exactly like fascism.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Paul Solotarov]

Just to put a pin on this, the first story I ever wrote was a product of just looking out over the bridge of my nose. So every day I would take my lunch. The Village Voice used to be in Greenwich Village. The Village Voice used to be the premier American alt news weekly. And it was an extraordinary place for young talent to, to develop, to grow a clip file and then to get the hell out and go re go write for an outlet that actually got read and that actually paid the writer. Every day I would take my lunch on the west side docks. Now, this is 1988, the very pinnacle of the crack pandemic in New York City. New York went from about 300 murders a year to 2,700 in the span of three, four years. And crack was the original diseased bat from Wu ID destroyed New York in a way I have never seen a city gutted. We went from 11,000 homeless population to 150,000, primarily single income, mom and children demographic. And what I saw on the west side docks, which were in terrible disrepair, truly a dangerous place, were 10, 12, 14 year old boys selling their bodies to crack rocks to Wall Streeters who were either on their lunch break or headed home through the Holland Tunnel. Now, anyone driving down the west side highway, either to Brooklyn or to get to New Jersey, saw what I saw on a daily. They saw these shirtless children strolling in November and December in a place with no shelter from the wind in an incredibly brutal winter. And no one stopped. And I began to cultivate those kids. I take them to breakfast, I take them to lunch. And they told me the story that became this enormous bombshell. Again, no intention of destroying the one institution that pretended to care about these kids, a fledgling nonprofit called Covenant Hats, in which I thought, like most downtown New Yorkers, that those blue vans were out there saving these children. Well, they were. However, the founder and director of Covenant House, Father Bruce Ritter, was taking some of these children in through the front door and selling them out the back door to corporate donors. And that story not only leveled Covenant House and was nominated for a Pulitzer, it also really surfaced for me exactly what my remit as a journalist was, which was to give names and faces to the nameless and faceless and to make sure that I told their stories with the kind of power granularity and gut punching specificity that you couldn't work away from.

[Matt]

Wow, Paul. Okay, first of all, for folks who don't know about this story and haven't read your writing because I'm assuming there's some of us out there, including myself, who have not yet. Where can we go to find that pieces on that work?

[Paul Solotarov]

So that story's called Dead Boys. It isn't that easy to find. If I were more ambitious entrepreneur, I'd have my website and I'd have someone curating it. I don't but there are a couple of stories I wrote at the Village Voice that are at this point in the canon. That's one of them. Another called the Power and the Gory about the world's most homicidal bodybuilder. A guy who is utterly legendary, but he actually lived. I may wound up putting a bullet in his brain. That story is included in the best American writing of the 20th century. So if you just google my name, all my stuff pops on Rolling Stone. I've been at Rolling stone now for 33 years and have used that extraordinary platform to break the NFL concussion scandal. Alter Reed Army Medical Field Hospital scandal. I've been able to walk innocent men off death row. I wrote a story that helped exonerate 42,000 drug offend drug defendants. The state of Massachusetts Aaron Bernandez story is mine. I've been given the freedom and the green light to go where my outrage takes me. And as I was telling you guys off stage, in a country that is at this point one outrage stacked upon another, I am never bored and never wanting for work.

[Ben]

Yeah, that is unfortunately incredibly true, Paul. And as we hear this culmination of your work that has taken you to dangerous places mentally and physically, one of the next questions we have to ask is that given, given the tragically high amount of unsolved cases of murder and disappearances in the United States in particular and in the world abroad, what drew you to the case of Josette Wright?

[Paul Solotarov]

Wonderful question. So I was rolling off a series of cases that allowed me to dig deeply into the prison industrial complex. I got the rapper Meek Mill out of prism in 2018. Not because I fell in love with Meek Mill. Trust me, to know Meek is to immediately fall out of love with Meek for me was the most visible example victim of what again all of us know about and nobody talks about the post incarceral system in America. Probations, parole. This endless long tail that law enforcement uses to further impoverish and scapegoat people who have served their time, who have rehabilitated themselves but walk out of prison without their civil rights having forfeited them by virtue of being a felon. So they can't apply for food stamps, can't apply for section 8 housing, can't apply for government backed college loans. And Nick was famously being tortured by a corrupt judge in Philadelphia and had been violated on and off parole for 11 years to the almost annihilation of his career for having allegedly sold two crack rocks to an undercover at the age of 18. And digging into his story, I saw that the entire so called elite West Philly narcotics team was just an armed robbery crew with guns and badges and wrote the story that outed that horrific bunch of sociopaths in blue.

[Ben]

Just another gang, right?

[Paul Solotarov]

Just another day. I couldn't have done those stories without the guidance and the the sage council of the Innocence Project. So along the way I got to be close professional acquaintances with Peter Neufeld, Barry Schacht, Nina Morrison, the guiding lights at the Innocence Project. And it was Nina who told me. Well she called me one day and she said, you've written ad infinitum about big city police corruption. Do you have any interest in digging into what small town policing looks like and how much worse it is than Chicago, Cleveland, Louisiana, Chicago PD which invented police violence. Los Angeles Police Department which perfected it. You know, I thought I'd seen the worst that law enforcement was capable of in the ramparts and crash scandals in LA. Wrong. Just outside of New York City, 50 miles from the Bronx, north of the Bronx, stands the town of Carmel. Not to be confused with the Carmel of Clint Eastwood. This is a working class working corps white flight exer of the Bronx that was essentially a ghost county until urban renewal sent a bunch of angry white hard hats and blue collars fleeing for their lives from the Bronx, Queens, Long island to mid state New York where you could buy a Sears Roebuck kit home for $35,000, plop it on the banks of Lake Carmel or Lake Glenida and live like a pauper kin of course, unintended consequences. All those cops and firemen and sanitation workers who did that, installed $800 septic systems and immediately sent their gray water waste into these gorgeous man made lakes that were, oh by the way, the reservoir assistant us and oops. I have never in my life encountered this profession anywhere except Putnam County. They bring in a guy, not every year, more often than they want to admit to MOW the lakes. MOW because when you introduce all that runoff nitrogen from septic systems into fresh water, what you get are massive spores of E. Coli. E. Coli in turn create these huge blooms of algae. If you want to see Christmas in July? Go swimming in Lake Carmel. You will see weeds rising 30ft out of the lake beds. That's why an ancient lawnmower, that's.

[Matt]

I, I've never even heard of an amphibious lawnmower.

[Raiders of the Lost Podcast Host]

Paul.

[Paul Solotarov]

Nope, neither at all. You know, and I'm sure the guy who, who owns and runs the operates amphibious lawnmower has been deported. So we have to know.

[Ben]

Oh geez.

[Paul Solotarov]

Well, all right. So in 2020 I get, I get this call from Nina Morrison who's now a federal judge and a great one, telling me that there are these two young men who falsely targeted, arrested, convicted and sent to prison for life for the murder of 12 year old Ch. She said. Paul, if you think you've seen transparent police corruption, wait till you read these trial transcripts. Long story short, I got up there and I spent months with this genius, one of those two kids, Anthony Depo, who was a ninth grade dropout three times and who never, never made it to the 10th grade. This huge hulking Hulk Hogan worshiper, a guy who for giggles broke fluorescent lights and folding chairs over his buddies heads in these impromptu backyard wrestling tournaments they would stage. That guy who had caught the the hostile attention of the Putnam Sheriff's office had been grotesquely framed for the rape and murder of this beautiful 12 year old child who had gone missing in October of 1944. And it took the cops a year and a half to not only coerce, menace and browbeat a false confession from Anthony's best friend, a confession that implicated the two of them, but also to coerce, menace and browbeat their stoner friends into falsely testifying against them. 97 these two young men who had the most innocuous criminal records. Possession of throwing a trash can at a commuter train.

[Ben]

Doesn't Anthony say, by the way, when you speak to him in Devil's Quarry, you talk a little bit about drug charges and he says, yeah, you could call me a drug dealer, but not a successful one.

[Paul Solotarov]

Exactly. Rick Anthony may be the only drug dealer in the history of the continental United States to lose money selling drugs. Which will happen when you're consuming more of your product than yourself. These two guys were part of this kind of ragtag contingent of latchkey kids, kids in the story I called them sideways kids. These are the kids at the black back of the classroom whose feet are constantly drumming under the table, who are staring off into space. These are kids who if they'd grown up 10 miles south in Westchester would have been flagged for ADD or some. You know, or dyslexia and been diagnosed and treated and gone on to become dentists and bond traders. But they grew up in a community in which children, especially female children, were prey. And my initial working title for the story that became the Devil you know was Raped. Valley. It was hard meeting a girl now in her 30s, 40s, who'd grown up in that town and not been sexually violated by an authority figure. Jesus Christ, stepdad, principal, teacher, the cops themselves. Over and over I heard from these girls that in a town with nowhere to go and nothing to do, they go off to the woods with a 40 and a joint. And while away a Friday night, the cops always knew where they were. They roll up, the boys would get cuffed, the girls would get tossed into the back of the cruiser and have to blow the cop to get out of the cruise. And this community of predatory cops, literally leg breaking cops, whose only job, as far as I could tell, and I investigated them thoroughly, was illegally coercing campaign money for the reelection of this crooked sheriff who'd been in power for 20 odd years. Those cops discovered the remains of Jose Bright in a shallow grave 13 months after she went missing. By the way, those two cops never bothered to investigate her disappearance in October of 94. Outside of talking to her teachers, her family, throwing up a couple of missing flyers, never did any legwork. When she turns up dead in 95 with her hands bound behind her, her panties stuffed down her throat, her skeletal throat and her bra tied around a mandible of her skull, those cops immediately thought, oh shit, maybe we should have spent an hour here and there looking into her and immediately began to round up the kids that they designated the usual suspects. Now, not only did they sell this family, not only they sell this community an enormous toxic pack of lies. A pack of lies that that family still clings to that family even after the exoneration of these two young men. I will go into that in a second because it's a miracle that should never have happened. But Anthony Di Pippo, that 9th grade dropout, did something so extraordinary that I just want to write his Nobel speech. It is in all my years of writing about the wrongly convicted, of helping to exonerate the wrongly convicted, I have never seen anything more extraordinary, heroic than what Anthony Depot did in the prison library at Attica. It is. I'll shorthand it by saying this Anthony was finally exonerated by the best lawyer in America, Mark Agniflo. Mark Agniflo is this extraordinary showman who, as he says in the Podcast markets himself exclusively to people who are some of those people. Harvey Weinstein P. Diddy. He got diddy off of 36 of 40 blaringly flagrant sex trafficking offenses. He's now representing Luigi Mangione in the trial of the century that starts this fall. That's who Mark Agniflo is. And what Mark Agniflo told me was when he first met Anthony in the spring of 2016, three months before that trial, his jaw dropped open to listen, to sit across from this immediate, enormous man with an intimidating goatee. Anthony, six, five and a half. Six, six, three, 20 benches an entire block. And Anthony, as Marc Agnipolo realized, was the best lawyer in the room.

[Ben]

Wow.

[Paul Solotarov]

And Marc Niflo said to himself, and then said to me, I realized I was going to win this trial after my first, first five minutes with Anthony because I had a secret weapon that the prosecution didn't. I had the actual best lawyer in America teach me how to try this case. And when he tried that case in the fall of 2016, it wasn't a contest, it was a slaughter. But we'll get to that.

[Matt]

One thing I want to focus on really quickly here is why those particular law enforcement officers looked at these guys and those. Why were those guys the go to potential bad guys in town that may have done this kind of thing? And specifically about gentleman named Pat Costalado, I think is how you say his name.

[Paul Solotarov]

Yes. Pat Castalo. Yeah.

[Matt]

Who is he and why is he, like, targeting these guys?

[Paul Solotarov]

So Pat Castaldo, as near as I could tell, was the chief leg breaker for this crooked sheriff, a goon who was notorious for using his hands and his feet to enforce the law in Putnam County. Big bruiser. Looked like something out of a trashy drugstore detective novel from the 40s. Slicked his hair back in a high type pompadour, wore a mohair top coat in the summer. Clearly thought he was Popeye Doyle. Although as near as I could tell, he can't even drive. Pat Castaldo seems to have about three working neurons. And when he discovered when his department stumbled upon the bones of Josette, they were under enormous pressure already. A second beautiful child girl had gone missing in Carmel six months prior. And so now you had. In a town of no violent crime, in a town where the law enforcement largely consists of these cops responding to bars and domestic spats, you have these cops who have never in their lives worked a murder and as near as I could tell, were never trained to be cops in the first place.

[Ben]

And they're pretty clear about their inexperience when, when you speak with some of these folks or dive into them and Devil's Quarry. We've got to ask Paul and pardon me if this is a bit of a softball, but I think our audience needs to hear it. How did this lack of experience, plus they're already loose and fast nature as law enforcement operatives. How did this inform what they saw as their strategy? Because it sounds when I'm hearing this through and I'm reading your previous work, every, every point of their investigation seems to focus less and less on finding the actual murderer and more and more on closing out the case.

[Paul Solotarov]

Exactly right. So let's set the stage for your listeners. Josette writes, discovered November 25, 199095 in that shallow grave. What those cops found was evidence of a serial killer at large. So she had been bound and gagged in ritualistic and fetishistic style. Meaning this was not the doer's first rodeo. The staging and the concealment of the corpse was planful, was meticulous, and were it not for the fact that she was buried in a forest forest with deer, with coyotes, with other large rodents, that grave would have held her remains for time immemorial. But one of those browsing animals had dug and yanked apart part of her skull and made off with it. And that skull was discovered underfoot by two hunters on the first day of hunting season. So it wasn't as though the cops were looking for for her. Course, cops had no interest in finding Jose. They had written her off as a runaway a year earlier. Back to why they they chose these guns. So as I say, there was enormous community pressure in a town in a county with no serious violence. And it's one of the virtues of living in the sticks, particularly a community that is inhabited by New York cops, by New York firemen, unfortunately not enforced by New York cops. So who becomes a cop in Putnam County? Who becomes a cop in the town of Cornwall? It's two different streams of applicants. It's locals who had childhoods, got picked on, bullied, and aspired to become cops to avenge themselves on the snot nosed kids that roughed them up at 14. The other tributary to that talent pool is the kickouts from mid city police forces. Cops so bad that even mid city forces could no longer afford to keep paying for settlements and judgments against those cops for abusing their fellow citizens. On top of that, as we discovered in Anthony's civil rights trial against those cops after he won his confession conviction and force those cops to Tell the truth in depositions. Was that where big city cops are sent to an academy for six months where they're constantly trained and retrained, particularly if they want to make rec? If you want to become a sergeant, you've got to go for extra training. You want to become a detective, There's a lot of work to do to rise the ranks in the nypd. There is no such pecking order. It's just next man up in these small towns. Long story short, these guys not only had no homicide experience, they had no criminal detection experience. They didn't know what the Fifth Amendment was. They didn't know what Brady Law was. They didn't know what impeachment stuff they teach in the first week at the police academy, these guys had never heard of and admitted under oath. So when you've got a howling community and you live amongst those folks and they want someone arrested Friday, you go and arrest someone Friday. And here were these two kids who had been selling pcp, taking pcp, who've been bringing ecstasy in from New York City, who were standing outside the high school selling weed. Who better to go and arrest? And who better to pick out of a hat, knowing these kids don't have a lawyer. These kids dropped out of high school. We can work these kids to our end. And that's what those comps did.

[Noel]

Oh, my gosh. I can't even begin to picture where this conversation is going to continue to go, but we are going to go there. But first, let's take a quick break, hear a word from our sponsor, and then we'll be back with more from Paul.

[Ben]

Hey, folks, have you ever picked up something at the grocery store that looked healthy, you know, but then you flip it over and you see the list of ingredients and you're saying, I can't pronounce half of these things?

[Noel]

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[Matt]

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[Ben]

So don't delay. Download Wise Code, that's W, I, S, E code, all one word on the App Store today and make grocery shopping a little easier.

[Mangisha]

I'm Mangesha together, and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time, I'm diving into a rabbit hole of Peptides Organoids blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement. To try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us, I learned about some rad science.

[Paul Solotarov]

I can make a brain for you and then we can test what drug is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain.

[Mangisha]

Here are some hard truths.

[Paul Solotarov]

I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to

[Matt]

be almost a four to five year

[Mangisha]

acceleration and get myself into a world of trouble.

[Paul Solotarov]

I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Make it look more to find.

[Paul Solotarov]

They say it works.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I don't know.

[Mangisha]

Listen to Skyline Drive how to live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, Body Bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. I heart open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.

[Dylan]

The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

[Dylan]

Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I'm Rebecca N. Gohin Tawadon Jalakayetli Que la citizen of Cherokee Nation.

[Paul Solotarov]

Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell yeah.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel]

And we're back. Let's jump right back in with pa.

[Matt]

I guess the big question for me is when, when that type of scenario, let's say, is is happening? How on earth as that police officer, that law enforcement officer who is choosing to potentially do this to someone, how do you, how can you feel confident that it's going to work with it? Because they have to face a judge at some point, they have potentially a jury. All these other things like the there's process to go through. How do you get the story to come out in the favor of the thing you want it to be with

[Paul Solotarov]

two fists we have transcripts, we have recanting witnesses. We have the story. Stories of all these kids that they brutalized, of all these kids they stalked and terrorized. A key witness, although he didn't testify at trial for complicated reasons, but the one who first spun this false story was a severe special needs kid who was kind of on the outside of the circle of these druggie kids.

[Ben]

Okay?

[Paul Solotarov]

I named Dom Neglio, a kid who'd been raised in special ed and who was incredibly easy to manipulate and terrorize. He's the one that the cops went hardest at, not as the doer, but as the kid most likely to flip on his friends. And that is, in fact, what happened. But let me just step, take two steps to the right here. Because the day that Josette was discovered, the day that those hallmark signs of a practice serial predator being at large and being responsible for the murder of this child, the cops had that guy in their sights. That man, the town pedophile, the town terrorist of girls and women, was extremely well known to the Putnam Sheriff's detectives, extremely well known to the Carmel pd, Extremely well known to the Kent PD this was a guy who had run sexual rampage through Putnam county and who, by the time Josette disappears, had been charged with rape three times by three different women. Children. Children. One is 111 and one age 12. And the cops who had arrested Gombert multiple times for burglary. He was a lifelong kleptomaniac.

[Ben]

This is Howard Gombert.

[Paul Solotarov]

Howard Gombert, who? This pathological drifter whose M.O. by the way, he was handsome, he was charismatic. Drove a motorcycle, looked like something out of Happy Days. This guy had a sixth sense for vulnerable single moms. He had this extraordinarily extraordinary radar for women who were lonely who were susceptible to long form abuse. And his M.O. was to move in with them within days or weeks of meeting them and then go to work not only sexually violating those women, but their children. And again, everyone in law enforcement in Putnam County. So 70 small towns, each with its own police force, and then this, you know, Free Range Sheriff's Office new and had dealings with Howard Gombert. And yet of the dozens of people they dragged in for questioning, they never even doorstepped Howard Gombert. By which I mean they never even swung by his flophouse apartment and knocked on his door to ask him, where were you on the night of October 3, 1994? October 4, 1994. Never. It is unfathomable. And I spent nine months writing that story and then a year making season one of the Devil's Quarry, answering the question of why those cops gave Howard Gombert a hunting license to go on prey on the children of Putnam County. I have an answer, but I can't tell.

[Ben]

Understood? Yeah.

[Matt]

Wait. Is it because of legal implications or. Why can't you say?

[Paul Solotarov]

There is a great deal happening behind the scenes right now, so let's step back.

[Ben]

Okay.

[Paul Solotarov]

And I'm sorry because we keep getting. We keep wanting to get to the foreground of the story and I keep taking you back. Yeah. When I wrote the story in 2021, I had the first and last nervous breakdown of my career. For nine months I had been warehousing the stories of these six women who had been chilled. These were the survivors of Howard Gomber. These were the women who through spluck, who through pluck or luck, hadn't been killed by him. Who had been raped and beaten and bound and gagged when they were children. Not all of them, but a number of them as children. And there was something about that kind of suffering that did to me what all my years in the ghettos of North Philly, south la, Southside Chicago didn't. They took up residence in my soul and I couldn't break free. And I swore to myself when I got better, I'm never going near this story again. It is poison. However, a year ago, a little more than a year ago, I got a call from two of those victims. And both of them were sobbing. Both of them said, oh my God, he's getting out. The state of Connecticut is releasing this monster at the end of 2026. Where will I live? He's been raiding me from prison. He must have a private detective. He has tracked me down. He is sending me horrifying letters because

[Ben]

stalking is part of his M.O. right?

[Paul Solotarov]

Stalking, command control. All of the hallmarks of a lethal sociopath are from front and center with this man, Howard Gombert. Finally, either was politely asked to leave Putnam county by those cops or figured the jig was up. He moved 14 miles east to the border of Connecticut. He's just over the state line. And instantly began looking for his next cast of victims. And he found them very quickly. But he was 14 miles away. Those cops never so much as paid a courtesy call on him. Long story short, he committed an unspeakable crime against a seven year old girl in New Milford, Connecticut in 1999. She told someone and because this was Connecticut, the cops actually listened to a victim and arrested him immediately. Not just arrested him, made a criminal case, sent him to prison. For 30 years. But in Connecticut, 30 years actually turns out to be be 25. And so this December, unless something happens, Howard John Gombert Jr. Will walk out of Cheshire Correctional, not only a free man, but a man with no tail on him. No parole, no probation, no custodial supervision. Man who has spent most of his life at liberty, camping in woods. This is a survivalist. This is a man who grew up in a tent a half mile behind his father's house in the woods, surviving on what he caught or stole to eat in the dead of a Northeast winner. This guy is walking out of prison free man.

[Noel]

Unless that's a man that could disappear himself quite easily.

[Paul Solotarov]

He will go vanish mode the second he sets foot outside those prison gates. And he knows every inch of those woods in Putnam county and the border of Connecticut.

[Ben]

We're going to pause here for a word from our sponsors and we'll return with more on the Devil's Quarry. Hey folks, have you ever picked up something at the grocery store that looked healthy? You know, but then you flip it over and you see the list of ingredients and you're saying I can't pronounce half of these things.

[Noel]

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[Matt]

You can even take a step further by viewing its nutrition quality and health quality quality, giving you a better understanding of what's really in the food you're picking up.

[Ben]

So don't delay. Download Wise Code. That's W, I, S E code. All one word on the app store today and make grocery shopping a little easier.

[Mangisha]

I'm Mangisha together and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement. To try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us, I learned about some rad science.

[Paul Solotarov]

I can make a brain for you. And then we can test what drug is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain.

[Mangisha]

Here are some hard truths.

[Paul Solotarov]

I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect expect it

[Matt]

to be almost a four to five

[Mangisha]

year acceleration and get myself into a world of trouble.

[Paul Solotarov]

I'd say probably start bone smashing.

[Revisionist History Narrator]

That doesn't work.

[Rebecca Nagle]

To make it look more defined.

[Paul Solotarov]

They say it works.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I don't know.

[Mangisha]

Listen to Skyline Drive. How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.

[Dylan]

The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

[Dylan]

Well, if we don't understand, understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I'm Rebecca Nagle. Gohin Tawa Dong jalaikayetli Que la citizen of Cherokee Nation.

[Paul Solotarov]

Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell yeah.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben]

And we're back. I do want to ask one question here before we lose it, Paul. I, I was gonna ask this earlier because a lot of our audience may not be fully aware of this as we shift back right to Anthony's case and Andrew's case. They are primarily going to trial based on these coerced witness statements as, as you describe in detail in your investigation. This trial doesn't have any physical evidence as you, as you teach us here. But I have to ask, what is the legality of dropping charges against someone for in exchange for a signed statement relating to other crimes like is. Is that legal?

[Paul Solotarov]

It's legal. Ish. Okay, and let's be clear. The. The one witness who sent Anthony and Andy to prison because those friends of theirs got on the stand, were either too high, too narcotized to actually tell a convincing version of the cops side of this, right? And the jury mostly laughed at them. Anthony and Andy were convicted without a shred of physical evidence, without any provable connection to the murdered girl, whom they had met once, maybe twice in passing. By the way, if you're looking into a conviction with zero physical evidence, you can be very confident that's a bogus conviction. It's really hard to murder somebody and dispose of all the forensics, it is vanishingly difficult to do. It only happens on Dexter, Right? It's in real life. Murder is ugly, it's squalid, and it's impossible to completely eradicate. Right? So on the strength of this horrific purger, a young woman with severe behavioral, psychological and chemical issues, Denise Rose, on the strength of her testimony, even the first time she told it was transparently false. On the strength of her testimony and her testimony alone, two young men were sent to Max prison with the worst, what they call jacket you can wear behind bars. Convicted pedophile, rapist, murderer of a child. The fact that Anthony and Andy lived long enough at Auburn, at Dannemora, at Attica, the worst prisons in America, the fact that they survive long enough to fight for their freedom is a miracle. Why did Denise Rose testify against her former boyfriend Anthony? Because she was in desperate trouble with those cops. She had a huge rage problem. She had battle rammed the car of a girl she barely knew. She was facing a felony. Account for that. She was facing DUIs. She was about to go away for serious time. And for someone who is multiply addicted, the idea of being in prison for seven years without your dope and your works was unimaginable to this child. And that's what she was when she was bullied into testifying against them. But again, she wasn't the only one. These other kids who had been beaten into falsely testifying also had minor drug charges pending against them. And you know, you're talking about kids, and I see this over and over in wrongful convictions. The folks who have been coerced into lying are themselves as vulnerable as the kids who get who got framed just by luck of the draw. They're not the ones under the gun, but they could easily be if they don't tell those cops what they want to hear. Sir, back to your question, which was.

[Ben]

Oh, it's the. Is it. Is it legal for that kind of quid pro quo to exist?

[Paul Solotarov]

Right. Well, this is something that has been over in drug trial and murder trial after drug trial and murder trial. It's really hard to make these cases without a cooperating witness. Very often that cooperating witness is tainted by his or her own criminal involvement. And so in case after case after case, you see these kinds of deals being struck. You know, a good defense lawyer will make hay of that. But are there, are there examples I know of where the cops not only caused charges to be set aside, but went and blackmailed judges, went and coerced prosecutors? Absolutely. In this case, I Can't speak to that. But what I can tell you is the devil in the devil. You know, the devil in the devil's quarry isn't just Howard Gombert. It isn't just the demon in the woods. It is also the crooked cops of the Putnam County Sheriff's Department who are as dangerous to public safety as this man who had a nearly 20 year run of sexual violence against children. And again, these kinds of things are really hard to bring off in a big city. The reason for that is in big cities we have oversight, we have a civilian review board, we have good, strong legal aid employers. In Putnam county, again, there's nobody watching the watchers, there's nobody investigating the crooked sheriff, which was how he was able to hold office for decades. He was followed in by a no less morally objectionable sheriff. It's just part and parcel of what happens in 74% of America. 74% of America has as it's not only senior lawman, but Judge Jurian hangman, a sheriff. 74% of America is lorded over by one man, a sheriff who has extra judicial power and answers to no one except the voters. That was the case in staunchly Republican Putnam county where they kept electing the same crooks over and over again.

[Matt]

Okay, so we said this person, Howard Gombert, which we are fairly certain or definitely certain, is responsible for many horrifying, unspeakable things that you've been writing about, he gets out at the end of this year, potentially. I'm looking for an image of him online and I can only find the one that's featured in Rolling Stone in your article from June 9, 2026, which is it's him as a young man. So now he's getting out of prison and no one is going to recognize this human being.

[Ben]

And no parole is insane.

[Paul Solotarov]

It's madness. So I spoke earlier about dealings behind the scenes. We are in aggressive and high level talks with the top law enforcement community of New York State, the State of Connecticut, and it's a little soon to comment on those discussions, but we are doing everything our power to see to it that the communities of Putnam County, New Fairfield county are protected from this man for the foreseeable future.

[Matt]

One last question. Do you we're talking about how it's harder to pull off this kind of thing in a bigger city with the style of corruption that we're seeing on display here within the Devil's Quarry. Do listen to it if you have a chance. You find it everywhere. We all three of us have Looked pretty hard at the Atlanta missing and murdered children case. And I'm thinking now about your writing and work on Dead Boys Fast Sex and Slow Suicide on the west side Docks. And I'm wondering if you see any connection in big cities with that same kind of thing where there are wealthy, powerful human beings that are taking advantage of especially children for their, for their own proclivities. Do you see connections there?

[Paul Solotarov]

Absolutely. And it happens over and over again. So there, there's this long history of, of the wealthy and the powerful using these challenged communities as their atns and their snack bars by which as, as their kind of canned hunting preserves. And you know, it isn't just big cities. I saw exactly this happen at close range in Putnam County. Again, speaking to all of these girls who've grown up there and who had as a right of passage, 13, 14, 15, 15 been violated by a sheriff's deputy, by a guidance counselor, by, you know, by a living boyfriend. There's, there's very little to keep the powerful and the predatory away from the most vulnerable population country, namely children. And wherever I go, there it is. I just wrote a story that won the national, the Los Angeles Press Club award about this extraordinary gang unit in the lapd. Revolutionary. Best bunch of cops I've ever met. But even they were helpless against an American nightmare called Figueroa Avenue. Figueroa in Los Angeles is a 2 1/2 mile run on Strip of 13 and 14 year old girls selling their bodies for $20. It happens. 365. It happens. Rain, sleet, snow, it is all day, every day you drive down Figueroa. Part of it's controlled by the Hoover criminals, part of it's controlled by the Grape Street Crips, part of it by the Bloods. And you realize here are the limits of law enforcement. They literally can't do anything about these 10, 12,000 children either kick out from the foster care system, runaways from abuse of homes, selling their bodies in broad daylight. And 12,000 kids, mostly black and brown, mostly from 10 miles away. You know, they grew up in Nickerson Garden projects. They grew up, you know, in Ramona Heights. And you know, in some cases these 14 year old girls are, are filling the fridges of their destitute families are. And again, it's really hard to arrest your way out of a slow motion nightmare like that.

[Ben]

Especially with no system support systems in place.

[Paul Solotarov]

Right, exactly right. The very system that was supposed to protect those children is effectively leading them to slaughter or foster care system of Southern California. And you know what you realize is that we will always have these horrific scenarios in which the powerful exercise their urges and demons at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable. What you hope for, we as Americans like to believe is true, is that there is this dedicated community of people whose tasks and whose mission in life it is to protect those people. And I've written about great cops, heroic cops, cops who need statues. They're in every city. But it's really hard to be a great cop and be the finger in the dike of a society in which there is this much display parity of wealth and power and this large subpopulation of needy and desperate folk. And what I found just to get us back to Putnam County. So where do we stand now? There are two cases, both of those missing girls, Josette Wright, whose bones were discovered Robin Murphy's. She disappeared six months after Josette. Her body was never found. Her family has never been to a trial. Her family has never been notified of a suspect. In both cases, the law enforcement of Putnam county horribly failed not only those girls, but the entire community. And we made Devil's Quarry to shame them, to expose them, essentially to blackmail them into doing their jobs. Here's what happened. Two weeks before our series dropped, season one of Devil's Quarry dropped. The Putnam Sheriff's Office announced it was reopening these two long dead cold cases and in fact appointing a countywide task force to delve into them from the very beginning. That's encouraging. But again, I know way too much about the law enforcement community in county, way too much about how they're trained or not, about how they're supervised or not. And I had very, very little confidence in that task force to successfully solve the star Aquarius.

[Ben]

But Paul, we must thank you not blowing smoke here. We must thank you for fighting the good fight. Your passion is contagious and you have put yourself honestly in harm's way on various levels for pursuing justice here. What do we hope the audience can take away from the Devil's Quarry? What if we're speaking directly to people as they're experiencing this investigation? What should change for them at the end of the show?

[Paul Solotarov]

One of the things that I realized afresh in reporting this story is that justice isn't a blue stick red state deal. It's an all of us agreement. All of us bear responsibility for Joe Set right for Robin Murphy. By that I mean we all have cell phones, we all have social media. We have been urging our listeners. And by the way, we have an enormous hit on our hands with this series. If you're new to this show, give it five minutes. You will lose the next eight hours of your life. It is impossible to stop listening once you start. We are urging, begging our listeners to vote with their voices, to call, to write. The Attorney General's office of New York State. Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State, has the power to indefinitely remand Howard Gombert to civil commitment under the sexual violent predators law. Please, if you are someone who is passionate about protecting girls, about protecting an entire county and community, please listen and then add your voice to atlas. Because it will be the collective that finally gets justice for those two families and that finally allows the parents and children of Putnam county in New York and Fairfield county in Connecticut to sleep.

[Ben]

Perfectly put. And again, Paul Soloteroff, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Everybody tuning in here on Netflix or your podcast platform of choice, you can find the Devil's Quarry, now available wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Paul Solotarov]

Gemma, thank you so very much. You're extraordinary.

[Ben]

And there we have it, fellow conspiracy realist. This is a harrowing story. We're talking off air. Paul is, in addition to being a phenomenal reporter, he is a man of principle who sacrificed a lot here. We have to have him back on the show.

[Noel]

Guys, dude, some of the, some of the conversations we just had off Mike. Good lord. More to come. Let's just put it that way. And the man has some stories. I know I hung back a little bit on that one because I was just enraptured by the stories this guy was telling, but I look forward to, to, you know, hanging out with him again down the line.

[Matt]

Well, let's just. We're not going to say it fully, Paul, but we did just talk about the current president of the United States and time that you spent with him and that kind of thing. While we may not say it on a podcast like this is that kind of stuff is worth hearing for human beings.

[Noel]

Insight into the character of an individual where it's real easy to make some guesses as to how this guy conducts himself behind closed doors. So to hear firsthand that not only were we right, it's. It's grosser and worse than we could have imagined. It does inform some of the things that it's easy to imagine, wonder about this man, and be like, okay, now I'm going to stop being gaslit and just kind of believe that it's probably worse than, than we imagine.

[Ben]

And please check out Paul's earlier work on Covenant House on the investigations that he mentioned in the course of our conversation tonight. We would love to hear your thoughts folks, because we've we've also received leads from you, our fellow conspiracy realist regarding stories of small town coverups and corruption. They happen everywhere as Paul was saying, so hit us up. Thank you for tuning in. You can find us on the lines, you can call us on the phone, you can always send us an email.

[Noel]

Yes, if you want to find us online you can reach out to the handles Conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff show depending on which social media platform is your favorite.

[Matt]

We have a phone number, it is 1-833-STDW. If you are going to call in about something like this, know that your phone number shows up for us, but the rest of it is just whatever you want to say what you want to call yourself. And we are very discreet and we will not be sharing that with anyone unless we talk to you about it first or you give us permission in that voicemail. Just a reminder about that. If you want to send us an email, we are the entities that read

[Ben]

each piece of correspondence will receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Given the nature of these topics, of course our our same rules apply for email. We will do our best to maintain your anonymity and we will make sure that we have your express permission and correspondence before sharing anything with the wider world. [e-mail].

[Matt]

Stuff they Don't Want yout to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app as Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Noel]

This episode of Stuff They Don't Want yout to Know is brought to you by Wise Code. Guys. You know, these days it feels like every product at the grocery store claims to be healthy and all natural or, you know, better for you than the other stuff. But that often ends up being quite the misleading proposition.

[Matt]

Oh yeah, once you turn the package over, you're left trying to figure out what these ingredients are. Often they're difficult to pronounce and understand.

[Ben]

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[Noel]

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[Ben]

Yeah. And it doesn't matter if you're shopping for yourself or your family or just trying to make more informed, healthier food choices. Wisecode is here to give you another layer of crucial information right at your fingertips.

[Noel]

It's quick, easy to use, and designed to help you navigate the grocery store with more custom confidence.

[Matt]

Download Wise Code that's W I S E C O D E the ultra Processed Food detector on the App Store today and start discovering what's really inside the foods you buy.

[Raiders of the Lost Podcast Host]

On Raiders of the Lost podcast we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary.

[Ben]

It was like the jaw shark didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great.

[Raiders of the Lost Podcast Host]

The cast of Obsession on set, there

[Matt]

was so much magic happening with each scene. We were putting together deep dives into

[Raiders of the Lost Podcast Host]

classics like 2001 A Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost Podcast and ICTOC podcast network

[Revisionist History Narrator]

on TikTok 30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City.

[Dylan]

Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Who will you trust? The people five miles overseas.

[Revisionist History Narrator]

This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough.

[Matt]

But we're not stopping, are we?

[Revisionist History Narrator]

Listen to revisionist history, the Staten island problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.

[Paul Solotarov]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.