5 | Bully

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Previously on Crook County. After six months, he proposed to me.
Kenny got engaged,

but called it off only a few months later. He realized, at 19 years old, what am I doing being engaged? The cops organized a few phony busts.
So I took two of those, and the girls would come with me, and, you know, a little party, everybody would be laughing, having a good time. And a robbery at the club turned out to be an inside job.
While Danny was working, he had someone come in and rob the place,

so of course Dan's going to put up his arms, take the money, and leave.

Danny had to go, and Kenny was asked to step in.

Got him in the car and drove him to one of the chop shops,

dropped him off there, and whatever I did with him from there, I don't know.

I'm your host, Kyle Tequila welcome to crook county when we were growing up dad was the coolest guy in the whole town.

Everybody wanted Dad as their dad, but they didn't know what was going on at home.

The games that they played for me and Ken was really bad.

There was a lot of violence.

Episode 5, Bully

You can begin to listen to that crowd.

They know, they can tell, slowly but surely,

the 1970s are disappearing.

The 1980s will be upon us.

Here we are!

Everybody!

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Well, that is the first of 1980 in America.
We have a brand new decade. It's a whole new beginning.
Everybody, please, kiss your loved one. Come on, kiss your loved one.
Your wife, your husband, your sweetheart, and whoever is next to you. Everybody, let's hear it.
Everybody, sing it out. Come on.
Nixon. Watergate.
The end of the Vietnam War. A global recession.
Gas shortages. rolling blackouts, crime waves, record unemployment, and the ominous shadow of the Cold War.
The 1970s was a decade steeped in anxiety and uncertainty, and the curtain had been pulled back on the American dream. Hell, even disco was dead.
History may label this decade the Great Awakening, but for Ken, now in his mid-twenties, it felt more like some terrible dream. And while the world was racing toward the glimmering promise of the 1980s, Ken stood still, feeling nothing at all.
No comfort, no hope.

He was simply numb. After the hit on Danny, the bosses knew they could count on Kenny for heavy work.
And when the calls came, it wasn't so much of a question as a demand.

And Kenny had no choice but to comply.

As the pressures of his new reality mounted, he withdrew further and turned to cocaine to numb his pain.

In this world, emotion was a weakness, and sympathy could get you killed.

If he wanted to stay alive in his new role within the outfit, he would need to dig deep down to the darkest part of his soul and abandon the light forever. I could be a pretty nasty person.
Anyway, I was recruited into doing some hits, okay? So there's another part of that. So not only working and running whorehouses, I'm doing occasional hits on the side, ordered hits.
Our own people that went rogue. I asked him what he means by going rogue.
So what these guys would do, these guys are the guys that would fuck up. They'd steal.
They'd rat. They were just bad seats, or they were overly aggressive, or they became dangerous.
They became rogue, meaning they lost control of what they were doing. They just started getting violent and could start bringing the heat down on this particular outfit that I worked for.
So we wanted to keep the heat away. So if somebody became rogue, somebody needed to do something about these people.
My job was to be the heat, be the heat for my particular outfit. You know, I got a reputation, though, after a while, where, you know, if they knew I was coming, they were running.
I remembered something he used to tell my brother and I when we were kids. He would say when he was young that he was the bully of the bullies at his school.
And if we ever saw someone getting bullied at our school, that we should step in and stop it. He was quite proud of this bit of parenting advice.
And to be honest, I was quite proud of him too. I always admired him for it.
And to this day, I think about those very words. I even taught that same lesson to my own kid, defend the weak and have the courage to fight against those who would fight against you.
And now, more than 20 years later, here's my dad telling me that he was hired to apply a version of that logic to the metaphorical bullies of the outfit. At least, that's what he's telling me.
It is very possible that he's just softening the blow about the kind of people that were in his crosshairs. I mean, does it really make me feel any better that the only people he killed were bad guys? Honestly, the answer is yes, it does.
But the simple fact is, I will never really know if any of this stuff is true. All I can do is take him at his word.
Whether it was a hit, whether it was a beating, just depend on what the punishment was. Now, I never decided what the punishment was.
I was always given the punishment on a little piece of paper by a guy named ***. He always gave me my assignment.
Big fat ***. And now, let me introduce you to the next character in our story.
A feared boss within the outfit, and a man who would make an enormous impact on the life of young Kenny. Paul Taglia.
Which, I will remind you, for the safety of everyone involved, is not his real name. I would get a phone call, get on the phone, meet me, and I knew exactly where to meet him.
And I'd meet him in a parking lot. One of the houses were there, one of the whorehouses were there.
I'd meet him in that parking lot. I'd walk up to his big fucking Cadillac, and he'd roll on his window, hand me a little piece of paper, and he he'd drive away.
And on the piece of paper was where the person was going to be, the type of car he drove, and license plates. And all that did was made me do more work, but it kept them even further away from the hit, because now I had to do all the legwork.
So I'd have to go look for the car, look for the license plate, wait for the person to get in there, scope them, watch them. Okay, that's who I got to hit.
I got to hit that guy right there based on the license plate and the car description. Okay, so now I got a description of the guy you have to hit and then i would

do my due diligence for about two weeks follow him around get a pattern and then um after i figured out how i was going to do it and i always did it one way i would uh i would do it that's all

there was to it it didn't happen a lot but it happened people it happened enough where i can

where it really bothers me didn't happen a lot, but it happened, people. It happened enough where I can, where it really bothers me.
It really bothers me a lot. I don't like to talk about this.
I don't want to talk about that shit, man. First of all, I'm trying desperately to forget all this stuff.
A therapist is probably going to tell me, no, you need to spit it out and then deal with it. Well, I think I've already dealt with it, but I'm still trying to bury it because it's not a pleasant thought.
It's not something that I'm very proud of at all. I got to take a quick break.
Yeah, I got my fucking legs are swollen for some stupid fucking legs. We decide to break for the day.
He's exhausted, and honestly, so am I. There's so much to unpack here, and I don't even know where to begin.
I started recording these interviews back in 2017, and it was apparent then that his health was failing him. Since then, he's continued to decline, and I honestly don't know how long he has left.

He recently showed me an entire backpack full of prescriptions he's taken

for a dozen or so conditions.

He's pale, swollen,

shakes uncontrollably,

his legs are covered in red marks and bruises,

and he has a hard time walking.

He's about the furthest thing you can get

from the fearless mafia heavy of his youth.

What the hell happened to this man? How was he able to do the things he did? What kind of person is my father? And what kind of person does that make me? Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.
And I was like, what? Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking.
It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan.
I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice.
They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody.
It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story.
This is My Friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever podcast from Noisa.
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Look at this guy, man.

Look at you. Holy shit.

Come here. How you doing, buddy?

Good to see you.

It's been way, way too long. I'm back in Chicago, visiting my Uncle Rich, Ken's twin brother.
Was that long ago? Yeah. I got married and, well, I left school in 07 and I moved to Atlanta.
All right. Okay.
I pretty much came back, like, maybe once. Okay.
And it was too much drama, and so I never came back. I left high school, never even looked over my shoulder.
It's like, fuck you, I'm out. It's his birthday.
That's right. It's not your dad's birthday.
Yeah, you should remember that. What, it's like in two days, isn't it? No, it's today.
Holy shit. Did you wish your father a happy birthday? I should call my dad.
You probably should. I'm the shittiest son of a kid.
Oh, my God. That's hilarious.
Nice going, Kyle. Boy, you look like your dad.
God, that look, that look. Did I just give you the Ken look? That was a Ken look.
Holy shit. Is it going to give you the chills? No.
No. Um.
I'll vomit, but.

Fair enough.

And that's a Ken look too.

I know.

Holy shit.

I am my father's son.

You know the first time that I met your dad?

We spent some time

catching up

and cracking jokes

about my old man.

What's the project again?

So it's a podcast.

So what's the deal?

I can tell Rich

is a bit hesitant

to dig up the past like this.

And I get it. From what I've been hearing, it's not like they had the happiest childhood.
My name's Rich. I'm the oldest twin, Ken's fraternal twin brother.
By how long? Six minutes, I believe it is. And since I came out first, I've always said that the problems I have with my back and my neck and stuff are your dad's fault because, you know, he was stepping on me that whole time in the womb.
They were the firstborns of the family, followed by younger brothers Stan and Matt. Stan's five years younger than myself and your dad, and then 11 for for Matt.
He tells me there was a joke in the family that Ken must have had a different father. Why is that? Explain that one.
Because Ken and I are so different. We don't look the same.
We don't act the same. I mean there was nothing about us at that point that was even close to being twin material.

So, yeah, it always pissed off Marlo when we would say that.

But it's a family joke.

She was probably like, wait, do they know?

How did they know?

That's kind of funny because, you know, there was some kind of half-truth meaning behind our thought process, but, you know. That's interesting.
If you remember from episode one, Kenny was kicked out of his house by his mom for accusing her of having an affair, which she was, and which, of course, started off this whole chain of events that led to Ken joining the outfit in the first place.

I ask Rich what he remembers. I was out.
So when I came home, I walked through, because I would always come in the basement door. And when I walked into the basement door, I heard screaming and yelling from the kitchen.
So as you walk up the stairs, you walk right into the kitchen. on one end of the kitchen was mom with dad's 45.

Just screaming. So as you walk up the stairs, you walk right into the kitchen.
On one end of the kitchen was Mom with Dad's .45, just screaming bloody murder at him, pointing the gun, just shaking, you know. And Ken was in the other corner of the kitchen, just in the back.
I don't remember anything that was said, just a lot of noise and stuff. And I walked up to Mother, and she's like this.

I just stepped right in front of her,

so now I got a gun pointing right at my chest.

I grabbed her hands, and I lifted them up

so her hands are now over her head.

And I'm holding her hands on the gun.

I turned to Ken and said,

You should leave.

And he left.

And that was it, and he never came back. Wow.
Wow, wow, wow. I loved my grandma Adele.
She was the sweetest old woman you could ever meet. She loved science and history and Native American culture.
The stories of her younger years are full of intrigue and adventure. She moved out to California in her late teens and was one of the first women ever to work at NASA.
She then took a job in the FBI and was only one of a handful of women there. She was a trailblazer and painted beautiful landscapes inspired by all her travels that filled the walls of her home.
She taught me how to play piano and to appreciate the wild beauty of nature. And to picture this saint of a woman pointing a gun at her teenage son is completely unbelievable to me.
But if I've learned anything at this point, it's that nobody is exactly who you think they are. And apparently, my sweet old grandma wasn't always so sweet.
Did she ever tell you the stories about her brawling in Chicago and stuff, the street fights? No, tell me everything. Never heard about that, huh? No.
Yeah, I remember Ma telling me that her and her friends, pals, whatever, would go out for the street fights, and the girls would take towels, and they would wrap up their boobs. I mean, like, tape them down, you know, so that there was nothing hanging out there, nothing to grab onto, nothing to get hurt, basically, before they went to their street fights.
You mean the girls were fighting? Oh, yeah. She was a badass.
We're talking knives and clubs and all sorts of stuff. Grandma Dull.
You bet. Sweet old grandma.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, sweet my ass.
You didn't grow up with her. Okay, so if grandma was some sort of fearless, knife-fighting street pirate,

then I guess you can argue that a hot temper is just in our blood,

and Ken was just a chip off the old block?

Anything could set him off. Anything.

Blind rage, out of control, could not stop him temper.

And until he got past that rage, you couldn't stop him. it's like he didn't even know what he was doing practically he tells me a few old stories like ken punching out a gym teacher in high school or stealing rich's car at 16 and disappearing for a week apparently driving it all the way to california and i was gonna have him arrested for car theft you know? And then showing up like nothing happened.
He gets out, hey, Reg, what's going on, buddy? Everything's fine. I'm like, fucking asshole.
You stole my fucking car. And stories of cruel violence.
He shot me once, he stabbed me once. That was fun.
You can't just stop there, you have to tell me the story. It was a BB gun, but it was a BB gun that could go halfway through a two by four.
I still have that BB gun, by the way. It's downstairs.
You still have the BB in your flesh? No, that we dug out. Is that, wait, so did the stabbing come because you did the BB out of you? That was a different, that was a different time.
No, he, he stabbed me with a needle. The needle was probably about eight inches long.
And he just, you know, in his blind rage wisdom, I was walking up the stairs and he just came up behind me and just stabbed me right in the ass. Quack! I'm beginning to doubt my dad's bully of the bullies claim.
The story's always been that he was the bully of the bullies, and he would beat up, like, the bullies at school. As, you know, he's the protector of the innocent at school.
Protector of the innocent? He was a frickin' psycho! Protector of the innocent? Did he tell you that? He said he was the bully. He was the bully.
Yeah, he was a bully.

Yeah, this one hurt.

I know it may sound silly after everything else we've heard,

but this one positive character trait was something I held on to my whole life.

It was foundational to the image I had of my father.

And to learn it was complete bullshit is a fucking hard pill to swallow.

You know, as he got older, I'm sure he learned how to control that and use it to his advantage. But, you know, as we were growing up, just totally out of control.
There was a lot of pain and agony and, you know, there was a lot of violence. Violence, both physical and emotional, was a constant part of their daily lives.
Their father would beat the kids bloody. Whap! Right across the head.
Boom! Against the wall. Knocked me out.
And their mother, as we've learned, was just as cruel. And she picked up a kitchen chair, and she was going to crack me over the head with it.
They would starve their kids while mom and dad ate a nice meal. I remember eating dog food because I was so damn hungry.
Or when I'd give the dog a treat, I would bite the ends off and I would eat it before I would give it to the dog. I was hungry.
And at times, two things so horrible, my uncle won't even speak of them. You know, some of the torture stuff, I wouldn't, I never speak of it ever.
Yeah. Cause I don't really want, you know, mom and dad to be portrayed as, you know, animal child abusers, even though it was kind of like that, you know, we probably would have been taken away, you know, in today's day and age, you age.
I'm sure we would have been taken away if somebody would have said something. But that's not how it was back then.
I mean, the amazing thing is I don't see you as having any of this volatility. Nope.
And this violence. Not like that.
He never struck us. That's amazing.
He never struck us. And that's another thing that's so bizarre about this.
It's like, why, again, why we never even, like, you know, I've seen him beat up a guy or two or three or five. Did he tell you about beating the guy up and left him on the hood of his car? Do you know about that one? This is when we were working at the bar up in Northbrook at the hotel.
Ken and I were both working there. You know, they had cops that would come in and they would be the security.
You know, part-time job stuff. And he was telling me about this call that he had that there was a guy passed out on the hood of his car in the middle of an intersection.
And, oh, okay, fine. Well, the next day, I'm talking to Ken, and he's telling me about this guy who he dragged out of the window of his car, beat the shit out of him, and left him on the hood of his car in the intersection.
I'm like, oh, that was you. What's interesting about this incident is it would have been in those early years after Ken joined the outfit,

so it's very possible it was mob-related.

I asked him if he knew what his brother was into at that time.

I knew that he was definitely dealing drugs.

I knew that he was working, quote-unquote, in a whorehouse,

but I never got into any of those details.

I really didn't want to know.

It wasn't my lifestyle.

It was nothing I really cared about.

If that's what you want to do, that's what you do.

You could see why he could be an enforcer,

because he just had that mentality, very violent mentality. I should have warned you, I have to wear a mask.
Oh, hi. Yeah, yeah.
Do I need to worry about some contagion? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Well, I have met you several times, but you were a child. I was a baby, huh? Yeah.
This is Maureen, my dad's high school girlfriend. Thank you for having me and doing this.
I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what you're doing here.
Your father wouldn't tell me anything. He was very short and said, I don't have time.
Kyle will tell you everything. All right.
Well, that's true. I will tell you everything.
And hopefully you'll tell me everything. Maureen.
It was a name that would occasionally echo through our childhood home. She was like this mythical creature who, at the very mention of her accursed name, would send my mother into fits of rage and jealousy.
And I just, I feel so bad that she, I know how much time she spent hating me, hating him, thinking, you know, thoughts. I'm a woman.
I know how women think. And if there's one regret that I have,

is that I feel bad that your mom thought Kenny and I were having an affair.

And we never did.

Never, ever, ever, ever.

Not since we were high school sweethearts at 16 and 17 years old.

Tell me about it.

Stop. We were just, we were like the movie Grease, you know? It was like, sort of like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
No, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. No, I'm not doing this again.
First, my dad is John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. Okay, fine.
But now you're telling me he's John Travolta from Greece? I just, I can't. I'm not going to do it.
Okay, let's move on. He was cool.
He was a real cool kid. He was my first boyfriend.
And it was fun. We had fun and we had good times.
And of course, we wanted to grow up and get married and have a house full of kids and just didn't work out that way. I have a million questions for Maureen because she has a truly unique perspective in all this.
As someone who saw a softer side of Kenny during those formative teenage years. I don't think I've ever loved anybody as much as a friend as him.
You know, they say that you've got, if you've got five good friends on one hand, you're a lucky person, and he's one of them. He's been a, we've been good friends.
I asked her about Kenny's fabled hot temper. I never saw him with a temper or being aggressive or anything like that.
Or if she was aware of the abuse the brothers were victims of at home. He didn't want to be at home.
He didn't like being there. He liked being at our house.
My mom would come into my room at 10 or 11 o'clock and say, Maureen, someone's in the backyard. At first I looked out the front window and I see his car.
I go in the back. He used to take a tent and tent in our backyard and sleep.
Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah.
Yeah. My mom said that she had seen it a few times, but it was too late to wake me up.
And then that was, and I went in there, and I was like, what are you doing? He said, I don't want to go home. Or if she knew of his ties to the mafia.
There would be no way Ken would do any of those things. Everybody adored him.
They loved him. they cared about him, and they trusted him.

She goes on to say that she only recently heard about it from Kenny's mother, Adele.

When he went over to California, she started calling me and telling me all these things.

And that's when I found out about the mafia.

That's when I found out about drugs.

She said, well, you know he was a junkie.

I said, no, he didn't know that, but now I do, I guess.

And she also told me that he murdered someone.

Oh, my God, I can't believe he killed people.

Oh, my God.

How did he get that way?

She's crying.

It takes a moment to collect herself.

And then, suddenly, she remembers something from long ago.

Did he ever tell you the story of Kenny Mandelke, the boy that drowned? No. It was his best friend.
They were all set to go scuba diving. There were like five boys.
And I had to work that day, and my parents had to work at the restaurant. There was no one to watch my four siblings.
And I said to Kenny, I said, would you do me a big favor and watch the kids? And he said, I'm already written, signed up to go scuba diving with Mandelke and the rest of the guys. And I said, please.
And he said, okay, I'll do it. So so he stayed home the equipment that he was to have used was given to Mendelki his buddy and Mendelki's equipment failed and he was like he's dead and it should have been Kenny That should have been the equipment that he should have used.
And it was really bad. That was the first time that Kenny had to deal with death of a friend, of a good friend.
And also, he felt guilty that if he would have gone, you know, Mandelke would have lived, and then he took off. And I think, now that I think in hindsight, where him taking off, he took off in his car, and he was gone for like two days after the funeral, right after the funeral.
Nobody knew where he was. Richie went out for like a day looking for him.

I think he ended up in Iowa or somewhere.

He just ran.

He just kept running and running and running until he probably ran out of money and gas and came back.

And probably be the start of major issues

because that was hard on him.

Really, really hard. You know, I'm glad you brought up workout martial arts stuff because that's something I actually completely forgot about.
Well, how do you think I could have done half the shit I did if I didn't have all that martial arts training? Well, that's what I want. Talk to mom about that.
I had years of martial arts training. Years of martial arts training.
I was a beast. It was widely known around the family that Ken was a fourth-degree black belt.
There were legends about his prowess on the mat, how he even defeated his own master at one point. Even the style of martial arts he practiced sounded exotic and dangerous to us as kids.
It was at Chung Mu Kwan. It was a really soft form.
It was kung fu. It wasn't hard-formed kata bullshit.
Almost like a dance-like movement. Chung Mu Kwan.
I had never heard of it before and never had a reason to look into it

until, of course, I started down this insane family rabbit hole of mine. I wasn't expecting to find anything interesting at all, to be honest.
But when I learned the history of this mysterious brand of Kung Fu, I was absolutely shocked at what I found. Many students are attracted to Chung Mu Kwan because the training looks impressive.
The schools say that by developing a strong mind and body, you not only learn self-defense, but also learn to understand yourself and find true happiness. A school brochure says Chungmookwan is an investment in life.
I found this investigative news report from 1989 about Chungmookwan. It's fascinating.
There are 10 Chungmookwan schools in the Chicago area and a dozen others across the country. They were founded here in the late 1970s by John C.
Kim, a former maintenance man who promotes himself as a martial arts master. His followers say he has supernatural powers.
His powers are phenomenal. They made him seem like a god to us.
We talked to dozens of former students and instructors who've been with Chung Mookwon over the last 12 years. Most of them asked us to disguise their identities.
They say they're afraid because the schools they were at thrived on an atmosphere of intimidation and violence. Our investigation found that some of the schools have also exploited students to take their money and to take over their minds.
That's why experts call it a cult. So not only is my dad in the mob, which is bad enough, by the way, he's also in some goddamn kung fu mind control cult.
Jesus fucking Christ, he's either an evil genius or the unluckiest man alive. Experts say that some Changmukwan students seem to be subjected to a form of mind control that begins with a martial arts training.
For example, constantly repeating a movement or holding poses for long periods on orders from their instructor. Okay, let's stop there for a second.
Now listen to this clip from my dad. You would do a form for an hour, hour and a half.
That's all you would do is a form. A form is just movement.
So constant movement for an hour and a half. What happens is that they go into an altered state of consciousness.
In that type of altered state, they're very susceptible to suggestions. It's the same kind of thing that takes place in a hypnotic trance.
Now, let's go back to episode one, where my dad talks about mentally preparing himself for a hit. I sit in my car and I do what I always do.
I breathe. I make myself aware.
I heighten my senses, my sight, my smell, my hearing. I don't know how I do it, but I do it.
As I'm listening to the music, I feel my senses start to kick in. As they kick in, the moment arises.
The moment always hits me. I don't know how it hits me, but I know when I'm ready for the moment.
And there it is. This whole time, I've been struggling to understand just how he could take that enormous leap from doorman to hitman, or how he could jump back and forth so easily from mob life to family life without us ever even coming close to knowing.
What happens is that they go into an altered state of consciousness. It's the same kind of thing that takes place in a hypnotic trance.
Hypnotic trance. Hypnotic trance.
I think it was the perfect storm. Combination of terrible childhood, abusive parents, hitting the streets as a kid, no prospects, finding a father figure who just happens to be in the outfit.
And then you introduce Chung Mu Kwan and its meditative mind control techniques. But, you know, it taught you, you know, all the points, all the points that can maim, kill, temporarily put somebody out of business.
I always had that advantage. I had no fear at all.
and that really got me through a lot next week on Croke County he was fucking up made guy or not he was fucking up man and eventually it was going to catch up to him, but I took care of it myself. I'm going comatose and everybody knows.
Crook County is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV in association with Common Enemy. All episodes are written, produced, and hosted by me, Kyle Tequila.
Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set.
Main title song is called Aloha by the band Starry Eyes. End credit song is called No Show, also by the band Starry Eyes.
Sound mix by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the excellent team at UTA for their support, and to my fearless attorney, Wendy Bench, for her guidance.
To stay updated on all things Crook County, follow us on all socials at CrookCountyPodcast, or leave us a voicemail by visiting crookcountypodcast.com. For more podcasts like

Crook County, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit tenderfoot.tv.

Thanks for listening. The story continues next week.
I'm a passenger I'm setting fire I will watch you choke And I will watch you show And I will watch you show

And I will watch you showI want you to jump Thank you. THE END The End