Dead Fish Tell No Tales: Part 1 | 2

Speaker 1 If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying.

Speaker 1 Maybe you've heard that expression a time or two, and it would stand to reason that a good time to try that concept out would be in a fishing competition.

Speaker 1 I mean, after all, who's going to get hurt too bad by a little cheating?

Speaker 1 It turns out, a whole town could get hurt.

Speaker 1 And that's why when a dynamic duo and a fishing event in Ohio pursue victory by any means necessary, it becomes just as necessary for tournament organizers to bring down the hammer.

Speaker 1 I'm Steve Bessemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

Speaker 1 Today, to tell us a tale of a truly epic and public fail, we have our own dynamic duo: journalists, married couple, and honest anglers Sean Flynn and Louise Jarvis Flynn with part one of our story, Dead Fish Tell No Tales.

Speaker 3 Every small town that wants to be a bigger town has to come up with something special. Claim to fame.
Has to be hyper-local and plentiful, which means it may be a little odd.

Speaker 2 For example, Banner Elk, North Carolina, population 1,350 has a lot of woolly worms and a woolly worm festival that draws 20,000 people every year.

Speaker 2 The good people of Clinton, Montana, all 811 of them, got 10,000 visitors every summer to eat deep-fried bull testicles.

Speaker 4 Walleye fishing is a big deal in all of northwest Ohio and southeastern Michigan, and we're right there on the front lines of it.

Speaker 4 My name is Neil McKinnon III, and I'm the mayor of the great city of Rossford, Ohio.

Speaker 2 Mayor Neil means great city in the sense that Rossford is awesomer because it's not great like, say, the Great Pyramids. It's neither big nor famous.

Speaker 4 I've been here my entire life, and when you love a city like I love this city, it's not enough to just be here. I want to be able to give back.

Speaker 3 By that, he means transforming Rossford, population 6,300, into a major destination. Here's what he has to work with.

Speaker 3 Five square miles on the edge of Toledo, a handful of budget hotels next to the turnpike, an Amazon distribution center, and a Bass Pro shop. Oh, and there's one more thing: a river runs through it.

Speaker 2 Well, next to it, Rossford is on the east bank of the Maumee River, a mere eight miles upstream from Lake Erie. And you know what's in Lake Erie?

Speaker 2 Walleye.

Speaker 4 The walleye come right through Rossford. They go up to Perrysburg, all the way up to the dam, and they spawn.

Speaker 4 And every year that brings tourists not only regionally, but nationally and internationally. If you're an avid fisherman, the walleye run would be on your bucket list.

Speaker 4 That's even if you lived in Germany or a European country.

Speaker 3 Walleye are predator fish with big milky eyeballs that help them hunt in dark, murky lakewater. Because you might be wondering, no, they are not in fact walleyed.

Speaker 3 Both eyes point in the same direction. But that doesn't make them any easier to catch.

Speaker 2 They're fantastic eating. White, flaky, not too many bones, good to fry, grill, bake, whatever.

Speaker 3 Locally, they're a cultural touchstone. Walleye are to Lake Erie what lobster is to Maine, or saltwater taffy is to the Jersey Shore.

Speaker 2 Or bull testicles are to Clinton, Montana.

Speaker 3 In Ohio, you can even get a walleye on your license plate.

Speaker 2 And those fish were going to make Rossford famous. In 2017, the city hosted the first ever Rossford walleye roundup.
Competitive fishing for money. That was Rossford's ticket to greatness.

Speaker 3 Competitive walleye tournaments happen all up and down Lake Erie from spring through the fall.

Speaker 3 Weekend after weekend, you see fleets of fishermen towing their boats from town to town along the lake for these walleye competitions.

Speaker 3 They usually fish in teams of two, and the basic rules are mostly the same.

Speaker 3 You fish in a designated area, the five biggest walleye you catch that day are weighed that day, and the heaviest catch wins.

Speaker 2 And you can win a lot, thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, maybe even a new boat.

Speaker 2 Most tournaments last two days, but the big granddaddy at the end of the season, the walleye fall brawl, goes on for weeks and pays out more than $100,000 to first place.

Speaker 2 Rossford in 2017 couldn't afford anything like that. It was a small tournament, brand new, but a city can dream.

Speaker 4 I wanted all the trappings, all the bells and whistles, and the more people that came to Rossford, the better. I mean, I wanted to do food trucks and a beer garden.

Speaker 4 I wanted to bring one or two national acts in to headline and to have some local acts open up. I wanted to turn it into something national.

Speaker 4 I wanted to make this the biggest walleye tournament on planet Earth.

Speaker 2 Mayor Neal says that a lot. The biggest tournament on planet Earth.

Speaker 3 Aspirations of global domination. I see no way this plan could go awry.

Speaker 4 You know that old saying, this isn't our first rodeo? In 2017, it was our first rodeo.

Speaker 2 We're in the back room of a bar called Moe's Place on Rossford's very short main drag.

Speaker 4 I think we're really good at the fishmen. Basically, whatever the entry fee was back then, you got twice that back in freebies.

Speaker 2 Bass Pro Shops was the main sponsor. There were 13 two-person teams for the first Rossford walleye roundup, each of which paid a $500 entry fee.

Speaker 2 After two days of fishing, the winner was a father and son team from Michigan. They took home $3,500, new rods and reels, and free lodging and entry for next year's Roundup.

Speaker 4 Even if you didn't win anything, Fastbro is the consummate host, and I thought the visitors at Convention Bureau did an amazing job of taking care of the fishermen.

Speaker 6 The police provided security for their boats.

Speaker 2 This is Todd Kitzler, Rossford's police chief.

Speaker 6 They were all parked in the same kind of hotel complex, so they didn't have to worry about their boats getting broke into. They got a lot of spastic equipment on.

Speaker 3 Rossford aimed for VIP service and word got around. The next year, there were twice as many teams and the purse was twice as big.

Speaker 2 And it kept growing year after year. The 2020 roundup was canceled because of COVID, but the next year, 2021, was a monster comeback.
Almost 50 teams and a total payout of $30,000.

Speaker 2 We were growing.

Speaker 4 And this isn't arrogance or ego. We want this to become the biggest and most famous famous professional walleye tournament on planet Earth.

Speaker 2 That really was our goal at the beginning.

Speaker 4 We were getting up there. The feedback we were getting from the fishermen was amazing.
And all of a sudden, there were certain corporate sponsors that were showing up that were never there before.

Speaker 4 So we thought... We were either on the launch pad or we were launching.

Speaker 2 By 2022, Rossford was attracting some of the best walleye fishers around.

Speaker 2 There were two guys, in fact, that everyone in Walleye World was talking about. Two guys who'd been on the most remarkable tear of anybody in

Speaker 2 walleye history.

Speaker 7 All right, in first place

Speaker 7 in the open division

Speaker 7 and currently leading the walleye slam and the ball ball, Chase Kaminsky, Jacob Rodgan, your champions.

Speaker 5 And they were coming to Rossford.

Speaker 7 Congratulations, guys. You guys earned it.
You've been fishing your ball.

Speaker 3 That's Jason Fisher. He owns and runs the Lake Erie Walleye Trail, a series of roving tournaments that run all season.

Speaker 3 You just heard him at the end of the 2021 season when Chase Kaminsky and his fishing partner, Jacob Runyon, dominated with wins at the Walleye Fall Brawl, the Walleye Slam, and the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship.

Speaker 3 That's a walleye triple crown. And yep, the man who runs the fishing tournaments is named Fisher.

Speaker 3 He's probably so tired of that.

Speaker 8 I always joke we're all too old and fat to play baseball. So here we are.
We fish. We show up.
Whose equipment's the best? You got flashy boats, flashy trucks, stickers all over your gear.

Speaker 8 And you go out and just kind of stack it up at the end of the day. And when it's all said and done, you know, these guys are buddies.
They're just normal Joes. They all have jobs.

Speaker 8 Nobody does this for a living.

Speaker 2 Jason's a good guy, well-liked. You can see it in the way the other anglers interact with him.
And he knows as much about walleye and what it takes to catch them as anyone competing.

Speaker 8 They can be tricky, especially inland lakes. But here on Lake Erie, it's the most plentiful fish out there.
There's a lot of different ways to catch them.

Speaker 8 And you can have a lot of success here on Lake Erie. And some people would think walleye fishing is easy, but that's because they do it here.
Go everywhere else in the world.

Speaker 8 You know, they are a difficult. They're a very finicky fish.

Speaker 2 There's definitely a level of skill separating your typical weekend caster from serious walleye competitors. But it also means that at these walleye tournaments, all the regulars are experts.

Speaker 2 So the difference between first and second place or first and fifth comes down to ounces. So there's skill involved, definitely, but there's also luck.

Speaker 8 If you look out at that lake right there, you can't see any walleyes.

Speaker 8 So, you know, you got to find them and then then you have to catch them. So it's a difficult thing to do.
And it's difficult to always be the top dog, the number one guy.

Speaker 8 And then you factor in all the actual competition. Everybody else is doing the same thing.
You know, so it's a very difficult thing to do. Guys will get a win, maybe two.

Speaker 8 They'll finish top fives, but it's tough to win event after event after event.

Speaker 3 The tournament regulars, they pretty much know each other. They fish together and against each other month after month and year after year.
For the most part, they're friends or at least friendly.

Speaker 3 I mean, nobody is really a stranger here, at least not for long.

Speaker 8 You know, you're just out here just trying to

Speaker 8 fuel your spirit. Keep it going.
You know, it's just what that's what we do, and that's all these guys are. They're just little kids and grown-ups' bodies out here having fun.

Speaker 2 By the end of 2021, Chase and Jake seemed to be having a lot of fun, catching fish and cashing checks. They were killing it.
Maybe a little too hard. People noticed.
People talked.

Speaker 4 I think because of the tournaments that they had won, they were on everybody's radar screen.

Speaker 2 Here's Mayor Neal again.

Speaker 4 I would compare it to a local charity golf outing. You never want to win it because there's always suspicion.

Speaker 4 You want to come in second because nobody cares who came in second and you still get a couple of prizes.

Speaker 4 So I heard the same whispers and the same animosity towards them more than I did hear from anyone else. I just thought it was jealous.

Speaker 2 But there was something Mayor Neal did not know. Chase and Jake were actually disqualified for one of those big tournaments they initially won.

Speaker 2 It was the fall brawl, the big granddaddy with the $100,000 prize.

Speaker 3 In December 2021, their names and fish had just disappeared from the website. quietly and without any initial explanation.

Speaker 2 Did they withdraw? Was there some kind of unfortunate technicality?

Speaker 2 A rules violation, perhaps? It was all very

Speaker 7 fishy.

Speaker 3 So really, only the walleye knew that a murky little mystery was about to unfold. On Thursday, April 14th, boats started pulling into Rossford for the 2022 Walleye Roundup.

Speaker 3 Chase and Jake arrived in style, hauling Chase's $100,000 Ranger 662 light gray.

Speaker 3 Two days of fishing would commence the next morning.

Speaker 4 We have a dinner, registration, a welcoming, food trucks. The attitude of the fishermen the night before was excellent.
It was like a tailgate party, but everybody's rooting for the same team.

Speaker 4 I'm obviously very biased, but I loved every second of it.

Speaker 3 There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Mayor Neal does not notice because the next morning is perfect.
Sunny, 50 degrees, 20 grand on the table.

Speaker 4 Now, everybody's optimistic. Everybody can't wait to get on the water.

Speaker 3 Every other year, the boats had launched from Rossford. But remember, that's eight miles up the river from Lake Erie.
So for 2022, the launch moved to Cullen Park in Toledo, right on the water.

Speaker 4 I thought

Speaker 4 it was the right move for the tournament, especially the right move for the fishermen. Them being closer to the lake where they're actually going to fish, I was more than fine with it.

Speaker 2 Logistics may not seem important,

Speaker 2 but just wait.

Speaker 3 It's late afternoon, and all the boats putter back to Cullen Park with their five biggest walleye.

Speaker 3 A tournament official inspects the boats as usual, looking in the live well. That's the compartment on your boat full of water.
It's like a well that keeps the fish alive.

Speaker 3 And he looks in there and he counts the fish. One, two, three, four, five.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he makes sure that they're all still alive.
That's part of the rules.

Speaker 2 He's also checking to make sure that there aren't more than five fish on the boat. You can't catch, say, eight big fish and save three of them for the second day of competition.

Speaker 2 You've got to start fresh. After the inspection, the fishermen drive their catch back to Bass Pro shop in Rossford to be weighed.
Now, in most tournaments, there's no driving at all.

Speaker 2 The fish are weighed right there, near the boat launch. But the Roundup is launching their boats from Cullen Park.
That's 20 minutes up the highway.

Speaker 3 That's 20 minutes alone, unsupervised with your walleye.

Speaker 2 Very unhappy walleye.

Speaker 3 Super unhappy by the time they're put on a scale in Rossford. But as Police Chief Todd Kitzler knows,

Speaker 3 dead fish tell no tales.

Speaker 4 Is that fish dead or is that fish alive?

Speaker 2 Well, it might have been alive at Cullen.

Speaker 4 It might have been dead at Baspro. It could have been a fish from the day before.

Speaker 2 You see where I'm going with it.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, a live fish you almost certainly caught that day during the tournament. A dead one? That could be some monster you caught two days ago and kept on ice.

Speaker 3 But that would be cheating.

Speaker 3 after the first day there's no clear frontrunner no big trophy fish to get everybody stoked chase and jake had a good catch nothing of remarkable size but heavy enough to be in contention

Speaker 2 day two of the tournament something shifted

Speaker 4 The mood had definitely changed.

Speaker 4 There was no excitement with it. There weren't a lot of trophy-sized fish.
A lot of the teams, I think, were pretty much beat up and tired. The conditions weren't that great.

Speaker 4 And it was a long 48 hours. I think most of them were just ready to go home.

Speaker 3 And the winners? That would be Chase and Jake.

Speaker 3 With a two-day total of nearly 69 pounds of walleye.

Speaker 4 It wasn't till the end when it was over and the winners were announced that in the four or five years that we have done this, it wasn't whispers anymore.

Speaker 4 People were visibly frustrated and verbally frustrated.

Speaker 2 How did Chase and Jake do it? Again.

Speaker 3 Nobody could figure it out. I mean, they fished the same waters, had their fish inspected by the same officials, and weighed them on the same scale at the same time as everybody else's.

Speaker 3 How much luck was reasonable?

Speaker 2 And would it ever run out? Not anytime soon, Chase and Jake left Rossford with a check for $10,000. And this is a twist, they're fish.

Speaker 2 This detail is important. At most tournaments, everyone donates their fish to a local soup kitchen or food pantry.
No one wants good walleye to go to waste.

Speaker 2 The Rossford Roundup donated fish to Toledo's Helping Hands of St. Louis.

Speaker 4 These guys fish competitively, and when they're not fishing competitively, they're practicing.

Speaker 4 So there's not a professional walleye team that doesn't have more fish in their freezer than they know what to do with.

Speaker 4 On the last day, these two guys, who are as accomplished as anybody and have been on such a hot streak,

Speaker 4 they didn't donate their fish back.

Speaker 4 I'm thinking, you just won this tournament, you just won all this money, you just got all this recognition, and you want to take those fish home and clean them.

Speaker 4 Look, I love wallings as much as anybody, but if I win $10,000, I'm not cleaning fish.

Speaker 2 I'm going to eat lobster. Am I wrong?

Speaker 4 It didn't make sense to me, and I thought it weird, but that was it.

Speaker 2 Definitely weird.

Speaker 2 But there was another weird thing too. On the first day of the roundup, after their boat was inspected and their fish were counted in the live whale, Chase and Jake took a wrong turn on their way in.

Speaker 3 Another team followed them because they thought Chase and Jake knew a shortcut. But no.

Speaker 2 They drove to their hotel, where Chase unloaded a black bag from the front of his boat. And in that bag were three walleye.

Speaker 3 We know this because the other team had a dash cam in their truck that was recording. And they asked Chase what he was doing with all those extra fish.

Speaker 9 This chick that I brought up here to the hotel never had walleye. I'm trying to cook.

Speaker 5 It was fucking fucking something.

Speaker 3 If you missed it, let me translate. Chase is explaining that he has a new lady friend in his hotel room who has never eaten walleye, so he's just going to cook one up for her.

Speaker 2 I have doubts.

Speaker 3 Do tell.

Speaker 2 One, I've stayed at that hotel. There are no cooking facilities, nothing with which one could properly prepare a fish.
Two, smuggling three extra fish under your boat is wildly against the rules.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Chase was reminded of that, and he had an explanation.

Speaker 3 And scene.

Speaker 2 Chase and Jake having those extra walleye and then Chase and Jake winning?

Speaker 2 Not a good look.

Speaker 2 So a few days after the Roundup, someone gave that dash cam video to the tournament director, who gave it to Mayor Neal, who gave it to Police Chief Todd.

Speaker 4 As soon as I got the info, I'm like, I turned it over to the detective and said, hey, put everything on hold, put all your efforts into this and figure this out one way or the other.

Speaker 4 Let's put this to bed or let's charge someone.

Speaker 2 At first blush, that might seem a bit overzealous. Police investigating a fishing rules violation.
But take a step back. Teams pay $500 a boat to enter.

Speaker 2 Corporations put their brands and their goods and their money behind it. Thousands of dollars are on the line.

Speaker 3 And let's not forget, nothing less than the reputation of Rossford is at stake here, too. Nobody wants to be the walleye cheating capital of the world.

Speaker 8 Let's do what we got to do because it's the integrity of the tournament.

Speaker 2 It was thoroughly investigated. But violating a tournament rule is not the same as breaking the law.
And no one had any evidence of that. Water under the bridge, so to speak.

Speaker 4 I was already looking towards next year's tournament, how to make that bigger and better. You know, I really wanted to grow this tournament from plus or minus 50 teams to 150 teams.

Speaker 4 And again, not to repeat myself, I wanted food trucks. I wanted live entertainment, beer garden, activity for kids.
I wanted to make this the biggest walleye tournament on planet Earth.

Speaker 2 That's a lot of pressure for the little city of Rossford.

Speaker 3 Even more for the walleye.

Speaker 3 That summer 2022, A quiet controversy followed the boats from tournament to tournament like a strange little storm cloud on a sunny day.

Speaker 3 As the walleye migrated east to colder, deeper waters, the fishermen and the cloud followed. Along the way, Chase and Jake kept gathering checks.

Speaker 7 Ninth place,

Speaker 7 winning $933,

Speaker 7 weighing 34.12 pounds. Chase Kaminski, Jake Runyon.

Speaker 7 We got the Lake Erie walleye trail stop number three here. We got Jake Runyon, Chase Kaminski.
They're ready to rock and roll.

Speaker 7 $1,380 number 30 coming up they got five big weigh the big team chase peters 30 17 chase kaminski jake runyon chase kaminsky jake runyon totaling four thousand three hundred and eight dollars in the open division

Speaker 5 i think there was some crazy stat they won nine out of twelve tournaments that they fished which is ridiculous i mean just absolutely ridiculous And it started to get to the point of like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 3 This is Mike Miller. He's been fishing tournaments since 2005, though he took a few years off to get his deck building business established.

Speaker 3 He's been suspicious of Chase and Jake from the very beginning, especially Chase.

Speaker 5 All right, hold on a minute. Nobody's even seeing where this guy's fishing.
Okay.

Speaker 5 Other teams would talk about it. They were never seeing him on the water during tournament day or in practice.
So it was like, how is he doing this?

Speaker 2 When Mike and others are wondering out loud how Chase and Jake are winning, what they're really asking is, how are they cheating?

Speaker 5 You know, people were definitely starting to take sides. And I would actually get into arguments with people.
Like, how do you not understand what he's doing? Are you that blind?

Speaker 5 How can you just look past it? Like, it's black and white. It's right here.

Speaker 2 Just look.

Speaker 5 All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Speaker 2 And it was like, all right.

Speaker 5 It wasn't ever ruining friendships with anybody, but people around the fishing community knew that I was on his ass, so to speak.

Speaker 3 Summer turned to fall, and the walleye were surely getting tired. It's the end of September, and boats are gathered in Cleveland for the Walleye Trail Championship.

Speaker 3 That's Jason Fisher's big tournament. The event is also a fundraiser for a little boy with cancer.
Giving back is not unusual in this community.

Speaker 3 Free rods for kids, a little swag to get the next generation excited, that sort of thing.

Speaker 5 It was a beautiful day, sunshine, everybody was in great spirits.

Speaker 3 At the end of the weekend, Team of the Year will be crowned. Chase and Jake are top contenders.
Here's Jason Fisher.

Speaker 2 They were fixing to win their fourth straight event, which it's not probable, and I don't think it's possible. Actually, Chase and Jake don't need to win this tournament to be named Team of the Year.

Speaker 2 That's based on points. And they'd accumulated so many over the course of the season that even with a middle-income,

Speaker 2 they're shoo-ins.

Speaker 8 I had literally done the math. This team needs to beat this team by five places in order to win team of the year.
And, you know, I think there were seven that were relatively in contention to win.

Speaker 8 So I had those nailed down.

Speaker 2 If Chase and Jake finished in 11th place, 11th, they would be team of the year.

Speaker 2 Fishing wasn't great that weekend. By day two of the tournament, they only needed five fish weighing a total of 17 pounds, max, a scooch over three pounds per fish.

Speaker 3 That's a fraction of their usual haul. In Rossford, they brought in more than 30 pounds of fish on both days.

Speaker 8 When they were coming up to the scales, I saw their fish and I knew that they had to be in 11th place, either here nor there.

Speaker 8 I'm looking at them and put the fish in the basket, and I'm like, okay, four-pounder, four-pounder, four-pounder. I'm like, all right, 20 pounds.
I think they probably got it.

Speaker 7 Bump number 12, we got Chase Kaminski, Jake Runyon, weighing a big fish, our current

Speaker 7 team of the year race leaders.

Speaker 7 Waying it a big fish,

Speaker 7 790. Weighing it a big fish, 790, locking it in, 790.

Speaker 7 Wayne in five.

Speaker 8 I got it. Well, when they put the first fish on the scale, the big fish, in my gut, there's something, no way.
There is no way that's an eight-pound fish.

Speaker 2 Weighing in five.

Speaker 7 I gotta tell you, you gotta beat 16-some pounds.

Speaker 8 And then when they put the other fish, so five total on the scale, and it was like 33 and some chains.

Speaker 7 33.91, 33.91. Your new leaders locking it in.
Team of the year.

Speaker 7 Definitely team of the year champions. Round of applause by Chase Kamitsky, Jake Runyon.

Speaker 3 Mike Miller is watching all of this from the lawn.

Speaker 5 Just like, no way. Like, there's just like looking at them.
You can just look at these fish and you can just tell that these fish weren't the size that they were supposed to be.

Speaker 3 Jason, who weighs hundreds of walleyes every month, knows that.

Speaker 8 You need almost a seven-pound average. They just didn't have seven-pound fish.
So I said, I want to take a look at them.

Speaker 5 And now there's grumblings in the crowd. And then they come off a stage and I say, hey, Jake, let me see that bag of fish.
And he ignored me. I'm like, Jake, Jake, let me see that bag of fish.

Speaker 5 And he walks over to me. Him and Chase walk over to me and he opens the bag up like three inches just so I could peer, you know, peek in there.

Speaker 5 And I look and I see that these fish are not seven pound fish. They're four and five pound fish.
So I go to reach my hand in there and grab one and he snatches the bag away from me.

Speaker 5 You know, and he's like, F you, Mike. And Chase is going off about like how he wants to kick my butt, just like some high school stuff, you know.

Speaker 5 So everybody sees this, what's going on. You can see Jason, the tournament director, up on stage looking at us and seeing what was happening.

Speaker 5 And then that's when he told them, Hey, come here, I want to see those fish.

Speaker 5 And Chase ran to his truck.

Speaker 2 He left Jake holding the bag. Literally, a bag of walleye.

Speaker 8 It's just like the fear in their face. You know what I'm saying? Like, I could tell he was like, oh, I'm in trouble.
It's about to hit the fan.

Speaker 8 I felt a hard object in the belly of the fish. I'm like, oh my God.

Speaker 8 There's typically not hard objects in the belly of a fish.

Speaker 3 What happened next was so weird, so shocking.

Speaker 2 Lake Erie walleye will never, ever get more hits.

Speaker 1 Next week on Big Time, Chase and Jake Face the Music.

Speaker 1 This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.
Bussemi.

Speaker 1 This episode was reported and produced by Sean Flynn and Louise Jarvis Flynn. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.
Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Speaker 1 Our production team includes Amy Padullah, Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Danya Abdelamede. Fact-checking by Gray Lanza.
Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviram.

Speaker 1 Our theme was written by Nicolas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations. Production help from Matt Rand.

Speaker 1 Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 1 Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening.