A People's History of Violence

A time capsule episode and a recent history of last month. We discuss the motives and means of near-miss assassin Thomas Mathew Crooks and the strange coincidence of an elder care worker trying to kill the heads of a gerontocratic political class. We also talk about the rarity of sniper assassins, the reality of secret service protection, and most of all the greatest of all Assassin Groups: IMRO....

The Final Part, Into the Maw Where is the body. Who did it. In this final part to the final chapter of our Hoffa and the Teamsters series, we hope to answer to the entangled questions of where Hoffa's body is, who ultimately commissioned his death, and finally, what force derailed this entire investigation? Why, to this day, do FBI excavation teams fruitlessly dig hole after hole in suburban Michi...

THE FINAL CHAPTER, THEY DISAPPEARED HIM: TIMELINES. WITNESSES. PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. On the cusp of retaking the presidency of the largest and most powerful union in the continent, and with an angry rank and file sweeping him forward, Jimmy Hoffa was abducted and murdered. The shipping company owners, white house staffers and collaborationist teamster regional chieftains could rest easy and look forw...

As the economic order falls apart, the conspiracy to get rid of the Hoffa problem and the Teamster problem begins to take shape. Music: Thanks as always to Komakino for our opening and closing theme. Opening and Interlude background music were "Soothing Gloom" (opening), and "Not meant to be" (interlude) provided by the artist Survival Spheres, more of their work here: https://www.youtube.com/@Sur...

On this penultimate 2 part Hoffa series episode we begin with Hoffa at his lowest point: in prison stuffing mattresses on the orders of Robert F Kennedy. As Hoffa is removed from the seat of power the control of the Teamsters apparatus returns to to Frank Fitzsimmons and the local barons: blood soaked and ready for siphon money cutting deals with employers as the economic crisis of the 1970s dawne...

MORE ON OUR PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/extended-preview-97903649 This is an extended preview of a Patron-Only episode. For more, including the second half of this episode extra pictures and documents, sign up for a Patreon subscription today. In this solo episode, Isaac showcases some of the most interesting pieces of evidence he has collected over time in researching the April 4, 1968...

MORE ON OUR PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/aPeoplesHistoryofViolence This is an extended preview of a Patron-Only episode. For more, including the second half of this episode extra pictures and documents, sign up for a Patreon subscription today. In this solo episode, Isaac showcases some of the most interesting pieces of evidence he has collected over time in researching the April 4, 1968 murde...

MORE ON OUR PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-38-hit-97064811 We're a bit late in commemorating the death of Class A War Criminal Kissinger, but, we hope you see it was worth the wait. In this episode, Isaac and Peter lay out the case for Kissinger's direct guilt in the 1970 mob-hit-style murder of Chilean General Rene Schneider.; a man who simply got in the way of Kissinger's plan to...

Happy Hoffa Holidays Listeners. Here we have the legal offensive that took down Hoffa, and along the way rats, spies, crooked lawyers, and a cowardly supreme court. Your loyal not-spy co-hosts continue the story of Jimmy Hoffa's trials where red-hunter Walter Sheridan employs the slippery Ellroyan thug Edward Grady Partin to infiltrate Hoffa's camp and come up with extremely convenient stories to...

Welcome back listeners. Hoffa is on top, and the Wire Men are coming for him. As the 1950's come to a close, Jimmy Hoffa, Harold Gibbons, and the Teamsters are at the height of their power. They are within an arm's reach of what Hoffa described as labor's "Atom Bomb": an alliance between the Teamsters and the the most militant communist and socialist-led unions in the country, with the aim to cont...

Decorated APHoV guest, Professor Tim Gill joins us to talk about the exploitative working conditions in a favorite form of on-screen violence: Professional Wrestling. We talk about the efforts to unionize wrestling, 'carnie language', the recent death of Bray Wyatt, Vince McMahon, and the nature of reality in the 'reality era', man. Link to Tim's 2022 article in Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2022/1...

AND WE'RE BACK.Can a single piece of evidence say whether the murder of the president was the work of a lone assassin or a "professional hit"? Can "new s--t come to light" in an 80-year-old homicide? In this episode, Isaac and Peter warily stare into the abyss of Kennedy Assassination research, and try not to get consumed. We explore the recent revelation in the New York Times that Secret Service...

Well listeners, we finally did a heist episode, we had fun with it. On November 24, 1971, the night before Thanksgiving, a man identifying himself only as Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Airlines flight, and after receivingCooper said he had a grudge, but not against the airline. Only recently, in the 2010s civilian researchers uncovered a fascinating body of physical and circumstantial evidence p...

In this extended edition Part III of our series on the death of Jimmy Hoffa and the fall from power of labor in the US; we pick up in the 1950s and early 60s, which sees the Teamsters Union at the height its power. Despite escalating waves of prosecutions and new laws criminalizing their tactics by a rogues gallery of Jim Crow senators and grim capitalist republicans, the IBT organizes the south w...

In the first full-length episode on the origins abduction and murder of Jimmy Hoffa, we take a trip back to the depression-era Teamsters and the powerhouse union they built with strikes, blockades, and yes, bombs. From a grocery store warehouse strike, to gunfights on the picket line, we look at how the Hoffa and the teamsters used the power over transportation to break the hold of the "Little Bas...

On July 30, 1975 James Riddle Hoffa, the once and-he hoped-future president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was abducted and murdered. The body of never found. Hoffa's murder capped off a deadly open war between pro-Hoffa and mobbed-up anti-Hoffa forces for control of North America's largest union; a union that once had the power to shut down the continent's transportation network a...

We're back, people. Before starting in on another series, writer and cultural critic Leonard Pierce stops by to talk to us about Film Noir. It's a story of blacklisted working class and communist writers, near-bankrupt studios and b-list actors trying to pull something off with nothing to lose, and getting sex, contempt for cops, and a lot else past the red scare-era censors in the process. Pierce...

In the final part of our series taking apart the true crime myth of In Cold Blood, we make the case with evidence with eyewitness statements, letters, and testimony that the killers were part of a Murder-for-Hire plot. One that arose out of the collapsing "vast empire" of Herb Clutter's wealth. Behind the myth we find a far more interesting hardboiled reality of clandestine meetings, straw-purchas...

Wanting to take a look at something more optimistic after our last prison-heavy episode, Peter and Isaac decide to leave the forced-scarcity war of all against all and instead have a look at a complete opposite: the prisons of min-incarceration social-democratic Norway. Of course, it's worth discussing the well-stocked grocery stores, "social worker" CO's, relatively nice-looking prison "rooms", a...

In this second episode on the Clutter murders made famous by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, we clean up even more of the mess left by Truman Capote’s sloppy work by having a look at the two killers. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were not the simple embodiments of hick evil they were made out to be. Like their victim Herb Clutter, they were products of the epochal changes that the twentieth centu...

When we left off on episode 1 it seemed like Herb Clutter's "vast empire" was personally and financially collapsing in the days leading up to his death, but why? What happened? Peter and Isaac use this short minisode to discuss the disastrous year of 1957 (thereabouts) in Herb Clutter's life uncovered in the newspaper archives. Multi-car pileups, lawsuits, a plane crash?, and the worst blizzard in...

In this episode we begin to take apart a monumental myth of True Crime lore. The high school assigned text and Kansas government official truth of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The official story seems like a simple one: Herb Clutter and his family were massacred in his modern Holcomb, KS farmhouse in 1959 by two paroled ex-cons: one dreamy and deranged, and the other a demonic sociopath, thus en...

Subscribe now for the full episode!....In second part of our Nordstream Sabotage/Bombing series, we take stock of the New York Times' bumbling half-assed attmpt at making a plausible story for the bombing before re-examining Seymour Hersh's account detail-by-detail. Isaac and Peter tear through some more bumbling attempts to make alibis for ships and planes by the info-saturated "OSInt" types, and...

(UPDATE 3/10/2023): Since releasing this patron-only ep, the NYTimes floated an absurd theory that the bombing might have been done by private people in a small boat for their own reasons. Peter and I will be releasing a patron-only follow up episode soon that discusses in detail why they're wrong but listeners to this ep will see that it's obvious. Enjoy! Well folks, we have deep dive on deep div...

In Part II of this Peter-led series dissecting the memoirs of Boston's fin-de-siecle Irish gangsters, we move on to the upper tier of memoirists. Discussing the memoirs of actually Irish-born Patrick Nee and actual martial artist Ed McKenzie, we find some ex-goons that actually have some self-awareness, insights and some interesting stories. It's an episode with armored car robberies, bumbling IRA...