The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania Part 2

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Previously on Dakota Ring.

Please welcome Peter Falk.

Peter!

Peter Falk, the star of Colombo, went on David Letterman and told a wild story.

I got a call from the State Department.

We got a problem in Romania.

Maybe you can help us.

The problem was Romania had run out of episodes of Colombo, and Romanians were mad.

So the State Department drafted Peter Falk into recording a soothing message.

I gotta tell the people, put down your guns.

This all sounded a little far-fetched to me, but it turns out Colombo was very popular in Romania.

It was a national phenomenon.

And there are U.S.

diplomatic cables from 1974 that back Falk up.

Total estimated audience was 10 million.

There are even cables that show the U.S.

government asked Telly Savalis, the star of Kojak, to do the exact same thing a year later.

Look,

pussycat, never, ever, ever talk to me like that.

But when we started looking for anyone who had seen Falk's message, we slammed into a dead end.

I have no memory whatsoever.

I don't remember anything about that incident.

You're just hitting a blank with me.

I'm sorry.

If 10 million people watched Peter Falk's message, I mean, if even a fraction of those 10 million people watched Peter Falk's message, we should be able to find some of those people.

Right?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Last week, I pulled on the proverbial raincoat to make like Colombo and try and figure out if, why, and how Peter Falk's message had been made.

This week, I'm back at it, and what started out as a zany inquiry is going to get a little more serious.

Part two of this caper involves dubbers, propagandists, a couple of 90-year-olds, and a lot more legwork, but also the legacy of a brutal dictatorship.

It's a story about celebrity, diplomacy, memory, and the limitations of all three, and about the power of television, not to get Romanians to put down their guns, as Peter Falk would have it, but to pick them up.

So, today on Dakota Ring, if a message gets made for television and no one remembers it, did it actually happen?

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So, I want to start with the elephant in the room, or you know, the missing film reel in the archive.

You remember what I said said last week?

A detective needs luck.

Obviously, I really wanted to find it, just like Columbo did in season 10, episode 1.

Well, this case is a classic example.

I was in the dark, and suddenly, lady luck showed up.

Because out of the blue, that 15-second videotape showed up on a television news program.

And for me, that turned the whole case around.

I can't tell you how many times I wish something like this would happen to me.

Do you think like they're like trying to see if it's if this tape exists in the archives is like a total dead end in Romania?

So if you get lucky, someone might just say, here, take this flashlight, go down to the basement.

I talked about the odds of finding the message early on in my reporting with Radu Tiginash, the Romanian writer and video producer who surfaced the Letterman interview.

Look wherever you want in boxes and boxes of Indiana Jones style, like you know, endless shelves of like movie reels that are not labeled in any way if the film had not been destroyed or degraded.

Romanian archival material is in general hard to access.

Very little has been digitized for the public, and the state TV network, TVR, had no system for organizing its archives, and film stock was intentionally repurposed and reused in the 1980s.

So I asked around, hoping things would go like this.

Was it the tape that led you to the murder, Lieutenant?

Once I saw that, then the whole thing fell into place.

But I had to accept that for this whole thing to fall into place, I was gonna have to get my answers elsewhere.

So with the help of a Romanian journalist and translator, we started reaching out to Romanians of a certain age, expecting to find someone who remembered the message.

You heard from some of them last week.

I also tried various archival institutions and museums, the Romanian embassy and the Romanian ambassador to America at the time, or rather his children and his number two.

But the Romanian response we got was similar to the American one.

They remembered Colombo, but no one knew where the filmed message was and no one recalled it.

I did learn something interesting when I started looking for someone who worked at TVR, the state TV network.

It was the story of how Colombo started airing in Romania in the first place.

I read about it in an article from May of 1990, filed on assignment from Bucharest, Romania's capital.

One of the people interviewed for the piece was a longtime TBR employee named Jan Ionell.

According to Ionel, in the early 1970s, a police procedural called Manix had been airing on Saturday nights.

Manix, Joe Manix.

Manics was a stylish drama about a Los Angeles private eye created by the same duo that made Colombo.

But then word came down from on high that Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's leader, was personally sick and tired of Manix.

You look like a snoop to me.

So Jan Ionel, the TBR employee, was tasked with finding a replacement.

He described a trip to Munich, presumably to a trade show for TV exports, where he watched 11 shows over the course of the week, including Lieutenant Colombo Police.

Ionel says his higher-ups were skeptical about airing Colombo because of all the murder.

But when Ceaușescu reiterated that he wanted Manix off the air, Colombo went on.

And according to Eonel, Colombo didn't just become a hit with the people.

He said Ceaușescu himself liked it so much that he had copies of Colombo episodes made to take on plane and train trips.

And you know what other show Ceausescu did this with?

What do you think you're talking about?

What do I think I'm talking about?

Talk about murder, dummy.

According to a number of close Ceaușescu observers, Kojak was also a huge favorite of the dictator and his wife Elena.

After reading all of this, I really wanted to speak with Jan Yonell, the TBR employee who'd selected Colombo, if he was even still alive.

I added him to the bottom of the long list of people I was trying to get a hold of, and then I turned to the top of my list.

Up there were a bunch of film producers I thought might have had a hand in the falk message, but not ones who worked for Romania or for a Hollywood studio.

They were ones who worked for the U.S.

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So at the end of the last episode, I hit a dead end with the embassy in Bucharest, where the cables about Peter Falk originated.

But what about where the cables were sent?

American Embassy, Bucharest, to USIA, Washington, D.C.

USIA stands for the United States Information Agency.

It was created in 1953 during the Eisenhower administration, and it was tasked with telling America's story to the world.

Today, the United States is the leading power for peace.

USIA practiced what it called public diplomacy, out in the open communication with foreign publics.

We must combat Soviet propaganda.

This is the job of the United States Information Agency.

They had their own budget.

They also had their own director who had his own relationship directly with the president.

Nick Cull is a professor at the University of Southern California, where he teaches at the Annenberg School, training diplomats.

So especially in the early days, you would see USIA directors sitting in on cabinet meetings along with the CIA, State Department, and the Defense Department.

Just about everyone I had spoken with at the embassy in Bucharest had been USIA, which was sometimes referred to as USIS.

USIS was sometimes called USLIS by

State Department people who were very dismissive of it.

I think secretly the mainstream state people were a little jealous because USIA knew all the celebrities and knew the artists in any one country.

USIA staffers knew celebrities because they worked on cultural exchanges and visits like the famous Jazz Ambassador Program, which sent American musicians on goodwill tours around the globe.

One of the people who we're planning to use, my friend Dizzy Gillespie, who's the father of

modern jazz.

What do you think about that, Dizzy?

I think it did.

That's what Ruth might call a Cool War.

I mean, a Cold War.

USIA was also in charge of Voice of America, the radio network broadcasting in multiple languages all over the world that was particularly important in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Telly Savalis actually did work for VOA before becoming an actor.

Anyway, USIA also ran libraries overseas and student exchange programs.

But most relevantly, they had a staff back home that made and shipped thousands of documentary films, shorts, and newsreels around the world.

So I started reaching out to retired USIA producers at the agency's motion picture and television service, doing the whole rigmarole again, the calls, the voicemails, the scouring of telephone directories.

Same as before, no one knew anything about the Falk or Savalis messages, but unlike before, they had lots of experience making short film projects with famous people like Karen Carpenter, Deion Warwick, the Righteous Brothers, and Olivia Newton-John.

One man even had a whole theory of the case.

I'm going to guess that it was somebody, a Romanian who worked at the embassy, who watched this series and brought it up.

Ken Sale was a longtime producer at USIA, but I think he might have missed his calling as an investigator.

And then some smart American officers said, gee,

because they could see the possibilities.

The request would have been sent to Washington and wound its way to the relevant department, where Ken posited they would have considered a lot of things, including, what's this going to cost?

That would have depended on Fox's availability, schedule, and fee.

So the next step would have been reaching out to Fox representatives.

Ken thought the person who would have reached out was named Pat Woodward, a woman who had come to USIA from Hollywood.

She knew a number of the studio people, and she could get things done in Hollywood if need be.

So they probably asked her.

I'm sorry, she died.

With Falk and the producers on board, Ken thought the film and television service would have assigned the project to an in-house producer, hired a crew, written a script with a closing line in Romanian, supplied, as suggested in the cables, by a Voice of America correspondent.

Would you talk to the people we got phonetic Romanian here?

You know, he would have done his thing in English and then done his closing line in Romanian.

And so if he had a question about it, the USIA producers said, well, trust, you know, because they've done similar types of things like this in the past.

Despite what Falk said to Letterman.

So the guy says to me, can you meet us in the hotel Century Plazas at six o'clock?

This wouldn't have been a last-minute arrangement.

And also despite what Falk said, Why would the Romanian ambassador come here?

Ken thought it would have been surprising for the Romanian ambassador or any other emissary from the Romanian government to have been involved in this part of the process.

Ken's version of events sounded much more plausible to me than what Falk had relayed to Letterman.

Not that you'd ever relay Ken's version on late night TV.

Shortly after I spoke with Ken, his theory of the case got some corroboration.

You had called me yesterday and I was not in.

So anyway, I'm returning your your call.

Thank you very much.

That was a voicemail from a man named Joseph Royster.

Joseph is a 92-year-old who worked at USIA for 35 years as a producer and then the director of languages and news.

I returned his call and gave him the whole spiel.

He was, I'm a little embarrassed to say, the 33rd person I asked directly about the reel.

But this time, something surprising happened.

He knew what I was talking about.

But his fuzzy, it is fuzzy as all kid out.

Oh, my God.

And it wouldn't be worth anything.

No, the littlest fuzz.

I'm very, very interested.

It's just been

so long ago that

I was doing that and I was involved in that.

Joseph struck me as very upstanding.

Like, the problem wasn't just that he was fuzzy on this, it was that relaying fuzz would have been a dereliction of duty.

All of us who were involved in stuff back then,

we stood by our word anything that i would tell you would be too risky he did give me a little bit of fuzz though he told me all the retired producers i'd spoken with 60 and 70 year olds were just too young too junior then to have known about this and almost everyone who did was dead though he did mention someone by name that was a lady who was involved or worked with us at the same time pat woodward is gone Pat Woodward again, the same Hollywood hand Ken Sale had mentioned.

It's gratifying to even speak with someone who sort of vaguely remembers it because I was starting to be like,

maybe it didn't happen.

It did happen.

I can vouch for that.

Okay.

It did happen.

That's something.

That's something.

And I meant it.

I finally found someone with first-hand knowledge of the method, of the making of the message.

Sure, it had taken a frankly ludicrous and possibly misguided amount of effort to do so, but at least this part of the mystery put to bed.

But that bed was about to get unmade in a hurry.

It happened when I returned to the list of people I wanted to speak with.

I was winnowing it down, but I was still trying to talk to someone who'd been at Romanian state television.

Towards that end, I was put in touch with the Romanian translator and film critic Irina Margarita Nistor.

Irina is famous in Romania for reasons chronicled in the short documentary Chuck Norris vs.

Communism, which you just heard.

As explained in that film, Irina personally dubbed thousands of American movies, many of them action films that were smuggled into the country in the 1980s.

While she was dubbing all those movies, she also worked as a translator at TVR.

It would have been after the folk message aired.

But when we were arranging a time to speak, she mentioned someone she thought might know something.

It was actually the man man who hired her at TBR, a man named Jan Yonell.

That's right.

The man I had been trying to find.

Jan Yonell was the TBR employee who had selected Colombo to replace Manix back in the 1970s.

And now, coincidentally, Irina was about to call him.

It was his 93rd birthday the next day.

A few mornings later, afternoon in Romania, Irina and I got on a video call with a spotty connection to talk about her chat with Ionel.

This morning, I got Yon Yonel on the phone.

He said that he's too old to talk to you, but he said, okay,

please be my voice.

So Irina relayed Ionell's recollections to me.

They meandered a bit.

He had told her things like, TBR would move the Saturday afternoon start time of Bewitched, Elena Ceaușescu's favorite show, so she could have luncheons around it.

Ionel had also selected the soap opera Dallas to air on TBR and was a deputy chief of programming, intimately involved in the screening, translation, subtitling, and airing of all foreign movies and TV shows.

Eventually, we got around to the matter at hand.

Never arrived into Romanian television what you said.

He doesn't think that either the Tele Savalis clip or the Peter Falk clip actually aired on television.

No, it wasn't for sure, it wasn't wasn't aired on television.

How does he know for sure?

It was a boss for the film department.

So, it couldn't be shown without him knowing that because it was supposed to be subtitled, because you couldn't show something directly in English with no subtitling.

So, everything would pass through him.

Yeah.

So, it wasn't possible.

Probably it was shown directly to Jaushutku.

Probably somebody tried to show off saying, you know, I can talk to your favorite actors and they will send you a message or something like that.

But it was never aired on the Romanian television.

You know, there are these,

there's like diplomatic cables about it.

There's one that is like from the embassy in Bucharest

saying that it was aired and that 10 million people saw it.

So like

he said no.

He said no.

He said never heard about it Because he would remember such a thing.

It was an event, you can imagine.

For months, I'd been fixated on the making of Peter Falk's message.

Why had this message been made?

How had it been made?

I'd even wondered if it had been made.

And I had gotten answers to these questions.

I thought I was wrapping this thing up, but my call with Irina introduced the hair-raising possibility that I had been focusing on the wrong thing, on the message's creation instead of its transmission.

It had been recorded.

But what if it had never aired?

I don't know about you, but I needed a minute.

We'll be right back.

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So, after I got off my call with Arena, I was disoriented.

I get confused sometimes, you know.

I mean, just trying to keep all the facts straight in my head.

Did this derail the story?

Did it make the story?

Did it make sense?

I started to turn the possibilities over in my head.

And as I did, things began to click into place.

This would explain why so few people remembered the message.

I was also not immune to just how good a twist this was.

The U.S.

had been making all this effort to reach out to Romania and its people, and all they'd done was what?

Send a personal message to a dictator?

Had one of Ceausescu's lackeys gone out and procured the 1970s version of a cameo for their boss?

Screenwriters could hardly have done better.

I could feel myself getting excited about the possibility that this was the key to the case.

But I didn't want to lose my cool.

I knew there was still evidence against it, namely the diplomatic cables.

Falk film clip ran at end of Final Colombo episode Saturday, June 1 at 22.30 on nationwide TV and was repeated Sunday, June 2 on Bucharest channel.

U.S.

diplomatic cables are legit, as I confirmed with Nick Cole, the USIA expert.

My experience has been that if it's reported by the embassy, the thing actually happened, and that

they're not in the business of making stuff up.

It would never occur to me that they would have

lied.

It's

if they were lied to.

Oh, were they lied lied to?

Well, that would be interesting.

It sure would be.

But was it possible the Romanian government had lied to the American embassy about the message airing?

I read back over the final cable for the umpteenth time with this in mind.

The assurance that 10 million people had watched the show came directly from Romanian TV and so easily could have been exaggerated or even made up.

The cables also referred to an initial screening.

After initial screening, the Romanian director of programming told embassy officer, a wonderful job.

It couldn't have been better if I had written and produced it myself.

It sounded like there had been a pre-screening for officials.

Maybe embassy officers saw it there too, and not on television.

In fact, the final cable only reports what Romanians and Romanian employees thought of the message, not what any American staffers made of it.

But of course, there was Richard Gilbert, the cultural attaché at the embassy, who remembered seeing Peter Falk give his spiel one Sunday night while he was sitting in his living room.

So I called Richard back to see what he made of the new theory.

If I were a jury, I'd obviously

come up, go with the vast majority.

Perhaps I recall it incorrectly.

Obviously, other

people recall it differently.

So you can't go with me.

Who could I go with, though?

It's hard to prove something didn't happen, that a message didn't air.

I wish this part of the investigation was sleek and sensible, but really, I just started trying anything and everything.

I got in touch with Jan Jonel, the Romanian state TV staffer, and despite talking on a janky transatlantic call, he did confirm that he did not remember the message.

I ran the new theory by people I'd spoken with before.

Most of them found it plausible.

And then I ran it by new people who'd never heard it before, too.

And that's when it finally happened.

And suddenly, Lady Luck showed up.

In this case, her name was Alexandra Bardan.

Alexandra is a journalism and communication professor at the University of Bucharest who does archival media research in Romania.

After I was put in touch with her, I explained the whole project via email.

She said it sounded fascinating and that she'd look into it.

So one Saturday morning, I woke up to an email from her with a number of PDFs attached.

I could see that none of them were the falk message.

So it wasn't until I actually clicked into the documents that I realized what she had sent me was the proof I'd spent months looking for.

They were issues from four different Romanian publications published in May, June, and July of 1974.

Alexandra had gone into the PDFs and boxed the relevant text out in red.

And in those boxes, as clear as a blurb in TV Guide, which is pretty much what they were, Were announcements like this.

After so many Sunday evenings of captivated participation in the investigations of the insightful Lieutenant Colombo, this week we say goodbye to him.

But before he leaves our small screens, the Los Angeles Lieutenant will return for a minute and exclusively for our viewers, he will deliver a few words from Hollywood.

There was an additional publication from 1975 that mentioned it too.

In other words, it was not just an announcement ahead of time, but an acknowledgement after the fact that the message really aired.

Months after I started, I finally had the proof I had set out to find.

And yet if I had never looked into any of this at all, I might have had a consistently more accurate sense of what really happened than the roller coaster ride I'd been on.

It turned out I'd been in an episode of Colombo all along.

Peter Falk had said what happened right at the very beginning.

He'd taped a message for Romania and it had aired.

The details had been exaggerated for sure, but the gist of the truth was there.

I kind of knew it right from the start.

There's nothing definite.

There's a lot of little things.

Little things.

Of course, if this whole investigation is like an episode of Columbo, it makes sense that when it comes to why almost no one remembers Peter Falk's message, there is just

one more thing.

I can pinpoint the mistake I made, the red herring that led me astray.

It was the assumption that Falk's message would have been a big deal and therefore something Romanians would have remembered.

I took it so much for granted that I hypothesized the Romanian government had successfully bamboozled the United States State Department before it occurred to me the message might have just gone over like a lead balloon.

Even though that seems to be exactly what happened, it was a mistake to believe the message would have been unforgettable.

But it wasn't just my mistake.

It would have reverberated to a society that didn't have much excitement in terms of entertainment.

Something like that would

make a huge tsunami.

Oh, everybody is going to talk about that.

It wasn't only Romania watching Colombo.

Sometimes it's Colombo watching Romania.

And

that's a special, a special thing.

You could chalk this up to the vagaries of collective memory, its quirks, flaws, fickleness.

But I don't think so.

I think there's a reason people think the message would have resonated.

As you know, in the early 1970s, when Fox Message aired, life in Romania was significantly better than it had been under direct Soviet occupation.

Less isolated, restricted, and impoverished.

The country had become a player on the the world stage.

And one of the signs of all of this was on Romanian TV, on how much there was, how many different shows, how many foreign shows.

It was in this period, with a thaw underway, that Peter Falk's message was broadcast.

We would like to thank Romanian television for having put us on the air on Saturdays and Sundays.

And I think it's actually pretty straightforward why Romanians didn't remember it.

But most of all, all of us, myself and the crew and the other actors, it was really boring.

I mean, listen to this.

We want to thank the Romanian people for their great response to our show.

It was forgettable.

I hope someday I can come to your country and enjoy the traditional culture and hospitality of the Romanian people.

There are no guns, no civil unrest.

It was a generic, polite, boilerplate, one-minute thank you that ran after the episode was over.

And so Romanians, though they were behind the iron curtain, reacted just like we would would have.

It didn't stay with them.

They moved on.

They watched other TV.

They watched a show called Madigan that aired in that time slot the very next week.

They lived their lives.

But in the coming years, something would happen to make their previous forgetfulness and disregard seem impossible.

Showing signs of growing egomania, Ceausescu told one of his ministers, a man like me comes along only once every 500 years.

When oil prices crashed in the late 1970s, Ceausescu, a darling of the West, revealed himself to be a tyrant.

He became fixated on paying down Romania's foreign debt and began squeezing Romanians as hard as he could.

That was a world which was closing in ever more, ever more.

Ioanna Yeronim Latham.

You saw a lot of grey around.

It was cold.

There was a shortage of food.

severe.

Over the course of the 1980s, it wasn't just food that became scarce.

Energy was rationed.

Homes were permitted one light bulb, and the streets were barely lit.

Heat was rare and sporadic.

People froze in their homes.

The country's forced birth policy led to untold maternal deaths and brutal orphanages teeming with mistreated children.

And the Securitate, Romania's secret police, swelled to half a million informants.

And the sense that any and everything that happened was to please Ceausescu was basically accurate.

And as part of the larger effort to cut costs and energy use, television changed too.

Its hours dried up and so did its programming.

The oil-drenched soap opera Dallas, the most popular foreign show ever broadcast in Romania, was abruptly taken off television in 1981, mid-run.

By the late 1980s, Ceausescu was the most dictatorial and controlling leader in the Eastern Eastern Bloc, overseeing its most repressed and isolated country, and television was only broadcast for two hours a day.

In the scheme of all this hardship, the disappearance of TV might sound trivial, but imagine if TV all but vanished and what you could watch to escape from the brutal dictatorship you were living through was the propaganda and speeches of that very dictator.

In this context, in this decade, missives from the outside, however dull, were a big deal.

All those dubbed American action movies smuggled in the 1980s found huge audiences.

And the shows that had aired in the 70s lingered in the cultural memory.

These were precious moments when you could see some other life, some other color, some something else.

And I think this is where the confusion about Peter Falk's message comes from.

The memory of the horrors of the 1980s have been laid retroactively over something that happened in the 1970s and then resurfaced in the 2020s.

In Colombo, events may happen in order.

The beginning may be at the beginning, but we remember things out of order.

We project our subsequent understanding backward and it can lead us to misunderstand the past.

Eventually, in December of 1989, communism would fall in Romania.

There was a moment on television when Ceaușescu was booed in public during what was supposed to be a major speech that is widely considered to be the trigger point of the Romanian Revolution, much of which unfolded live on TVR.

On Christmas Day, Ceausescu and his wife Elena were put on trial.

Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed after a trial, they said.

They'd been found guilty of genocide, and they were charged also with smuggling huge amounts of money out of the country.

Their deaths were also shown on TVR.

The same state TV service that had once aired Dallas, bewitched Kojak, and of course, Colombo.

As the 1990s dawned, Romania began to find its footing as a democracy.

And among all the momentous things that happened, something small happened too.

Colombo returned to Romanian television.

It would have been right around when Peter Falk appeared on David Letterman in 1995.

They understand that Colombo was a TV show, right?

They did understand.

Knowing everything that I know now, I still understand why Falk thought this was a big deal.

He was approached by serious people from a major U.S.

agency.

They were laboring under a misapprehension about the benefits of aligning with Ceausescu, but they surely talked in weighty terms about how consequential a message like this would be, how much it would help America prosecute the Cold War.

And so Falk took this story and ran with it, elaborated on it, exaggerated it,

made it seem important.

Part of the myth of Colombo, a TV show that has traversed the globe.

He didn't know, or he didn't want to know, that his message wasn't that special, that it was just one of thousands upon thousands of times during the Cold War when America's Foreign Service tried something, deployed a visit, a collaboration, a newsreel, a pamphlet, a PSA, most of which almost no one remembers at all.

It's ironic that Peter Falk, of all people, would make the truth seem like some big, swaggering thing, when in this case, it was more like an unassuming little guy in a rumpled brown raincoat, one that no one paid that much attention to, but that was a part of a long, meandering and dogged effort to set things right.

What are you gonna do?

That's the job.

Right?

You take the go with the bait.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willip Haskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at Slate.com.

This podcast was written by me, Willip Haskin.

I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Joel Meyer.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

I would like to give an especial thank you to Iwana Godanu

who was totally instrumental in figuring this all out.

I want to give another thank you to Andrada Loftauru, who translated and worked with me from Romania again.

I'd also like to thank Andrei Kodrescu, Ilinka Kalgarenu, Cameron Gorman, Gabriel Roth, Harry Geisel, Elaine McDevitt, Michael Messinger, Gerald Krell, Ash Hawkin, Tom Mullins, Jessica Leporin, Jerry Gruner, and Marie Whalen.

There's a number of documentaries that were instrumental to reporting this episode and that I also highly recommend.

Videograms from a revolution, Chuck Norris vs.

Communism, the autobiography of Nikolai Ceaușescu, the rise and fall of Ceausescu, and whatever happened to blood, sweat, and tears.

If you can't get enough Colombo, please make sure to listen to our previous episodes on McGruff the Crime Dog, who was directly inspired by the lieutenant.

It's also a two-parter with some wild music.

You won't be disappointed.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads, and their support is crucial to our work.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll be back next week.

Till then.

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