4: Under the Spotlight

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Speaker 20 Novel.

Speaker 13 May I see a show of hands? How many people in this room have ever dreamt of wearing spantex?

Speaker 11 One day around 2010, a guy named Peter Tangen was flipping through Rolling Stone magazine when an article caught his eye.

Speaker 13 It was called The Legend of Master Legend. I found out from this article that there were more than 100 people, like-minded, costumed activists, that were in the country.
You guys,

Speaker 13 there's really superheroes. There's really superheroes.
How exciting is this?

Speaker 11 Peter Tangen isn't your average comic book fan. He's a photographer, and you've probably seen his work.
One of his main gigs is taking promo shots of Hollywood superheroes.

Speaker 11 He shot Christian Bale for the Batman Begins poster, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, and also Will Farrell as Elf. He likes to mix it up.

Speaker 11 But sometimes, living in the world of celebrities can feel a little little fake. And at a certain point in his career, Peter longed to shoot something more real.

Speaker 11 And this article about real-life superheroes gave him an idea.

Speaker 11 In a TED talk he did in 2015, he remembers the moment.

Speaker 13 And it hits me right then and there, I say, I gotta figure out a way to make Hollywood quality movie posters out of these guys.

Speaker 11 So Peter started reaching out to the real-life superheroes. He got to know their work and shot them in glossy big-budget photos where they posed with steely expressions against a city backdrop.

Speaker 11 Inevitably, he decided to reach out to Phoenix Jones, the greatest superhero of them all.

Speaker 11 Not long after, Phoenix got a Facebook message from Peter and the two of them talked on the phone, but it didn't go well.

Speaker 11 Peter had met a lot of real-life superheroes by this point, and he was skeptical of Phoenix's crime-fighting approach.

Speaker 20 And he's like, what you're doing is kind of dangerous and actually maybe empathetical to the movement. You might want to like calm yourself down, you know?

Speaker 20 Plus, I highly doubt you're actually stopping as many crimes as you think. He's like, I've seen maybe 10 crimes that have been stopped by real life superheroes.
Maybe. And I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 20 Well, we're not friends. I don't like you.
I'm not going to talk to you again. And go fuck yourself.

Speaker 11 It's a wonder why none of Phoenix's old superhero buddies are friends with him anymore.

Speaker 11 Anyway, after this initial call, five months went by. And then Peter called Phoenix again.
And according to Phoenix, this time he was full of praise.

Speaker 20 He calls me and says, look, you need to come to California. I need to take photos and videos and shoot you.

Speaker 11 Allegedly, Peter told Phoenix that he should sit down with the lesser real-life superhero community and tell them it was time to hang up their costumes.

Speaker 20 You're trying to like bring them a place they should not go. You can go there if you want to, but they shouldn't.
And you need to make that really clear because they'll all get killed.

Speaker 20 And then he bought me a plane ticket. I left two days later and I flew down to California to meet Peter.

Speaker 11 The thing about Peter Tangen is that he's a big Hollywood guy and he lives in a big Hollywood house in the hills.

Speaker 20 He lives in a giant glass house and I have a secret identity. So I wore my mask every single day all day.
It was terrible. It's so ridiculous.

Speaker 20 He lives in Van Nuys, California, this glass house on the side of a freaking cliff. Looks like the Iron Man house.

Speaker 20 Literally, every wall is a fucking window. I'm like, why would you invite a superhero with a secret identity to a place where every wall is a fucking window? It was trash.
I slept in my mask.

Speaker 20 It was just horrible.

Speaker 11 As horrible as it was, it actually turned out to be a major turning point in Phoenix Jones's life. Up until then, he and his team had attracted some media coverage.

Speaker 11 But according to Phoenix, he hadn't actively sought it out.

Speaker 20 And every time media would call me, I'd just be like, no, I don't want to talk to you. And he was like, no one knows what you're doing, who you are, what you stand for.

Speaker 20 He's like, and everyone wants to talk to you. So just go out.
Tell them what you mean and what you plan on doing. No one's going to get mad at you for telling what you're doing.

Speaker 20 He's like, you're doing the dangerous work anyway. You might as well protect yourself.

Speaker 11 Phoenix agreed to the photo shoot. In the photos, he stands in a rain-soaked street, fully costumed, and glares down at the camera.

Speaker 11 He'd look a lot like Batman if it weren't for the gold chevron across his chest, which glows with an unearthly yellow light.

Speaker 11 When the pictures were released, Peter's phone started ringing off the hook. Phoenix wasn't just a local news curiosity anymore.

Speaker 11 People around the country wanted to know who this mysterious crime fighter was.

Speaker 11 Peter fielded so many calls for Phoenix that he ended up becoming his semi-official spokesperson. Peter is actually how I got in touch with Phoenix in the first place.

Speaker 11 And Phoenix was going to need his PR rep.

Speaker 11 The photo shoot catapulted him to a new level of fame.

Speaker 11 Phoenix's knack for grabbing people's attention is is one of his greatest assets, but it's also maybe his greatest weakness.

Speaker 11 From the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, this is the Superhero Complex, Episode 4, Under the Spotlight.

Speaker 11 After the Peter Tangen photo shoot, journalists wanted to fly to Seattle and meet the famous Phoenix Jones. One of those journalists was the writer and broadcaster John Ronson.

Speaker 11 John and Phoenix hooked up for a piece that John was writing for GQ.

Speaker 11 John had flown over from England, and according to Phoenix, the idea had been to try and uncover a sex trafficking ring.

Speaker 11 But when they finally tracked down some sex workers, things didn't go as planned.

Speaker 20 We couldn't find anything, right? Because none of them said they were trafficked, which was a giant bust.

Speaker 20 So instead, I went on patrol with John Ronson and took down 30 armed crack dealers, you know, by myself.

Speaker 11 Phoenix and some of the other members of the Rain City crew had taken John on a patrol of the city instead.

Speaker 7 Nothing was happening. He couldn't find any crimes to thwart.
And so he pulled out the big guns.

Speaker 11 That's John. He told me that they headed to the Belltown neighborhood.

Speaker 7 It was a sketchy part of town. It's like three in the morning.
There was about five or six different groups of crack dealers on different street corners and various spires going between them.

Speaker 11 Phoenix described a fairly intimidating scene.

Speaker 20 Seattle's an open-carry state. Dudes walk around with their guns out.
They stand on the corner, right?

Speaker 20 And when people come out of the club, they strong-arm them for money to get their car out of parking lots. Yeah, 30 dudes with open-carried weapons in a parking lot.

Speaker 11 This was clearly a dangerous situation. But John wasn't sure that the superhero's presence made things safer.

Speaker 7 The crack dealers all unified in saying, what the fuck do you think you're doing here in your superhero outfits?

Speaker 7 And one of them said, this may be fun and games for you, but this isn't fun and games for us. This is how we feed our families.

Speaker 7 And then one of them said, if you don't get off our block, we're going to show you what the burner does. And they had a point.
It's like, what the fuck were we doing? Trying to break the back.

Speaker 22 Like, whose business was it of ours?

Speaker 7 I mean, I'm saying ours, what I really mean is Phoenix's.

Speaker 11 The way Phoenix tells it, this was a heroic standoff.

Speaker 20 I look at Ghost and I said, Ghost, man, there's a good chance we're going to die here, bro.

Speaker 20 Are you good? And Ghost is like, yep. And I looked at Jack and Jack's like, you're stupid, Jones.
This is like a movie, you know?

Speaker 20 I looked at El Caballero and Cabby's like, oh, I already called the cops, man. He's like, I hope they don't shoot us before the cops get here.
I already called the cops.

Speaker 11 But John told me the danger really did seem genuine.

Speaker 7 They came up to us and they said, you are are stupid motherfuckers. Do you know that? Do you know that you are stupid motherfuckers?

Speaker 22 We should shoot you.

Speaker 7 And I've got to say at this point, I was terrified. They'd showed us the shape of a gun and the sweatpants.

Speaker 7 They were clearly coming up with a justification to commit an act of violence against Phoenix. And they said, we should shoot you.
But if you refuse to leave, I guess we're going to have to go home.

Speaker 20 And they did. They all went home.

Speaker 7 And so Felix won.

Speaker 11 When Phoenix told me this story, he didn't paint John in a very favorable light.

Speaker 20 John Ronson hailed a cab and then got in the cab and told the cab to wait and was hiding in the cab. And then he wanted to come back on patrol with us.

Speaker 20 And we're like, no, you're hidden in the cab, bro.

Speaker 20 Like, you're crazy. Like, you can't come back out with us.
You hiding a cab with a cardigan.

Speaker 11 When I asked John about it, he told me he wasn't in the taxi, but he did try to hail one down.

Speaker 7 They all had bulletproof vests as superheroes, and I had nothing. I had a t-shirt and a cardigan.

Speaker 7 So I was close to the cab, so I could escape if I had to, but also close to Phoenix, so I could hear what they were saying, so I could write it all down.

Speaker 7 But if Phoenix says that he didn't let me patrol with him the next day because I'd hailed a cab, that's not true. Phoenix was thrilled that I was there.

Speaker 7 And in fact, when I got back to the hotel at like six in the morning or whatever, the first thing Phoenix did was like phone me to talk excitedly about what had just happened.

Speaker 7 And he was like hyperventilating down the phone. That's not someone who was so annoyed with a journalist that they didn't want them to patrol them the next day.

Speaker 7 And the only reason why there was no patrol the next day was because Phoenix was doing a personal appearance at a comic book convention in town. And I don't think he did any patrolling that night.

Speaker 7 So the cab was true. The rest of it was not true.

Speaker 11 Their relationship was not exactly smooth sailing. But John doesn't hold a grudge.

Speaker 7 On a personal level, I liked Phoenix very much. He He was my favourite of all the superheroes that I met.
He was charming, charismatic, fun, odd in a kind of engaging way.

Speaker 7 I'd say the most negative thing I would say about Phoenix is that he had an odd relationship with crime fighting. It was clear that he was kind of addicted to it.

Speaker 7 It felt like there was an addiction there, like he couldn't find any crime to thwart and he was getting more and more frustrated. It's like he needs a cigarette and he can't find one.

Speaker 11 But during his time with Phoenix, John got a sense that crime fighting wasn't the only thing he cared about.

Speaker 7 I think on our first night, we heard a woman screaming, and Phoenix was like, Yahtzee, and went running towards the sound because finally he had someone in distress he could save.

Speaker 7 And then as he was running towards the sound of the woman screaming, this car pulled up and these guys went down the window and went, it's the guy from YouTube.

Speaker 22 Can we get a picture with you? And Phoenix was like, sure.

Speaker 7 So he stopped and took took a picture with these guys. And by the time they were all satisfied, like the screaming woman was nowhere to be seen or heard.

Speaker 11 According to Phoenix, his relationship with fame is practical. It's what keeps him from getting arrested or worse.

Speaker 11 And that protection is all the more important if, like Phoenix, you're trying to do superhero work as a person of color.

Speaker 20 I'm a black guy in body armor running down the street punching white people. I need some media coverage.
So what does that look like to you?

Speaker 11 Like, what's your strategy? Like what do you hope to get out of being covered in the media?

Speaker 20 Like that kind of stuff? Not being arrested. I think what people don't know is that,

Speaker 20 especially currently, right, there are two different Americas.

Speaker 20 Being a six-foot-tall black dude in body armor, running up to people who have been previously assaulted in the streets is not a solid look.

Speaker 20 People don't approach it the way that you think that they would.

Speaker 20 But when they see Phoenix Jones, they see the symbol, the one that I set up, the one they're aware of, they know what my mission statement is, they know why I'm there, and it puts them as much at ease as a costume vigilante can.

Speaker 20 You know, I guess I shouldn't use that word, as a costume crime prevention specialist. That's what my attorneys told me to use.

Speaker 11 Phoenix always has an answer for everything. He always manages to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he is right and everyone else is wrong.

Speaker 11 When I spoke to Phoenix's former team members, they all brought up his relationship with publicity.

Speaker 11 Here's El Caballero.

Speaker 24 A lot of it, I felt like Jones' heart was for protecting people, but then there was also this part that I saw was actually his ultimate self at that time, which was publicity.

Speaker 11 Midnight Jack told me that the Rain City superheroes initially started out courting the media for strategic reasons.

Speaker 25 It was a way to get a lot of attention on crime trends, to call attention to problem areas that the police were not enforcing.

Speaker 11 But as things blew up, that changed.

Speaker 25 Ben was so hooked on the attention, on the media following and the celebrity status and things like that, that it was a problem.

Speaker 25 So then he started having us fucking,

Speaker 25 not necessarily fake footage, but kind of stage shit.

Speaker 11 When we talked about his relationship with the cameras, Phoenix never admitted to staging patrol videos. But it was an accusation I kept hearing.

Speaker 11 Cavi told me once that you guys were doing some media interview and you started making stuff up and he was like, dude, that didn't happen.

Speaker 20 And you leaned over and you said, hey, man, the history is told by the victors you know oh no i didn't i leaned over and i said history is written by the winners right so you were just making stuff up yeah 100

Speaker 11 phoenix even clarified for me the story cabby had been talking about was when the rain cd superheroes were on good morning america they're like what's your biggest crime you've ever stopped and i was like arson

Speaker 20 can you give me some details i'm like can't give details phoenix couldn't give any details because there was no arson like we didn't have a lot of credentials at that moment, but we're born in America and we're about to go on TV and I was like, fuck it.

Speaker 20 Yeah, straight up.

Speaker 20 And I don't feel bad about it. I wouldn't take it back and I would do it again.

Speaker 11 If you admittedly just like make stuff up to the media, like how do I know what you're saying is true?

Speaker 20 I wasn't admittedly making that. Hold on.
If there's a way for me to tell a story that makes it sound better and doesn't change the core facts that are on a police report, I will probably do that.

Speaker 11 To Phoenix, he's just giving the world what it wants.

Speaker 20 I don't want to do interviews. I don't want to talk to these people.
I don't like you. I want to stop bad people from doing bad things and I want to make people do it themselves and understand it.

Speaker 20 But the government and the world we live in would not let me. So I gave you what you wanted.
You wanted a superhero because that's what you think what I was doing was. So I gave you a superhero.

Speaker 11 Check.

Speaker 20 But no point in any of this was this my like idea or goal.

Speaker 11 It's these types of statements from Phoenix that I have a hard time believing. But I wouldn't necessarily say that Phoenix is lying when he says them.
I think he probably believes them to be true.

Speaker 11 And it's certainly true that as a black man trying to fight crime on the streets of America, the publicity provides him with a level of protection that any of his former team members who were white might not have needed.

Speaker 11 But I find his unwillingness to admit that he enjoyed being a celebrity as a kind of dishonesty. For what it's worth, I think Phoenix liked all the attention.

Speaker 11 and not just because it made it easier for him to catch criminals.

Speaker 11 But one thing does ring true in what Phoenix is saying here: he spends his whole life attempting to live up to a particular ideal of a superhero. And that's a lot of pressure.

Speaker 11 And not everyone has the same idea of what a superhero is. When those interpretations clashed, things got messy.

Speaker 11 That's coming up.

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Speaker 11 While Phoenix Jones was making the most of his newfound celebrity, one of his many appearances caught the attention of Seattle Crystal Marks.

Speaker 11 That's her real name, by the way. So she was kind of born with a brilliant superhero alias.

Speaker 31 I've grown up in love with superheroes my entire life. My dad was a huge nerd into DD.
He was in the Navy where they played D ⁇ D all the time.

Speaker 31 And he got a friend of his to actually get my name worked into a Superman comic book. I thought that was the coolest thing.

Speaker 31 So when I heard that someone was dressing up like one and doing something that a superhero would do, it was irresistible.

Speaker 11 When Crystal saw the news coverage of Phoenix Jones and his crew, she was immediately captivated. Late one night, she set out to see what Phoenix was really about.

Speaker 31 I ended up kind of stalking his team, the Rain City superhero movement, through the streets of Seattle, watching them break up fights.

Speaker 11 Crystal didn't want the Rain City superheroes to see her.

Speaker 31 I threw my hair up on a ponytail and I wore a hat and sunglasses at night in the middle of Belltown in Seattle. It was not the wisest choice.

Speaker 11 She hid behind street corners and counted 30 seconds before creeping along behind the superheroes.

Speaker 31 I realized like, wow, anyone can do this. That's really cool.
But I wasn't seeing the things happening that mattered to me. Homeless outreach.

Speaker 11 As a kid, growing up in Aberdeen, Washington, Crystal had some rough patches in her childhood.

Speaker 31 When I was eight years old, my biological mom and I were kicked out of my grandmother's house and we were homeless.

Speaker 20 We had nowhere to go living in our car.

Speaker 31 We lived under a a bridge, living on my mom's friends' couches. And we did that for a little over six months and that stuck with me.

Speaker 31 I was homeless as a kid and I wanted to see people reached out to in a compassionate way.

Speaker 11 For Crystal, Phoenix's team didn't seem like the heroes she'd been looking for.

Speaker 31 I was. Like, do we need to just be breaking up drunk fights? Can we be doing more?

Speaker 11 So she started looking for alternatives. It turned out Phoenix's crew weren't the only superheroes in town.
Crystal ended up joining another group called the Washington Initiative.

Speaker 11 They started out by patrolling around Belltown.

Speaker 11 That's Phoenix's turf.

Speaker 31 It was a little bit of a not-so-friendly competition, but we realized very quickly after the first couple of patrols where we were just seeing people stumbling to their cars, we weren't really making a difference.

Speaker 31 So our team, the Washington Initiative, switched over to more homeless outreach.

Speaker 11 Phoenix did not take kindly to his fellow crime fighters.

Speaker 11 Evakatis saw Phoenix's reaction firsthand.

Speaker 21 He would get in very animated,

Speaker 21 screeching, yelling matches about how other teams are just trying to copy us or trying to draw his Facebook likes and his fans, his words, away from him and take it for their own, which didn't make a lot of sense or mean anything to me.

Speaker 21 He felt incredibly threatened by anyone else that would try to do this line of work.

Speaker 20 in his city.

Speaker 11 Phoenix used his social media to rail against his new enemies.

Speaker 31 It was this feud online of I do this better and I do this better. Phoenix Jones was constantly saying like, fine, you can say that you do homeless outreach better.

Speaker 31 I'm sure you do, but that doesn't really matter. That's not really taking care of a community as long as you acknowledge that I'm the better fighter.

Speaker 11 The feud between Phoenix and the other Seattle superheroes speaks to something I've noticed a lot in the world of real-life superheroes.

Speaker 11 There seems to be an ideological split at the heart of the community over what a superhero should actually do. Some Some of the real-life superheroes are all about action.

Speaker 11 They want to take down criminals and stop violent crime. But there are a lot like Crystal, who see real superhero work as the humanitarian stuff, like homeless outreach.

Speaker 11 They aren't interested in getting into fights. In fact, they see the flashy, action-packed crime fighting as reckless and irresponsible.

Speaker 11 Personally, I don't understand why these two models can't coexist peacefully. But then, I'm not Phoenix Jones.

Speaker 11 Among the rest of Phoenix's crew, the reaction to their superhero rivals was mixed. Midnight Jack was more action-oriented.
He was all about dousing people with flour and pepper spray.

Speaker 11 Crystal didn't think much of his tactics, though.

Speaker 31 Midnight Jack, as someone out on patrol, he's just not bright.

Speaker 31 Like, there were plenty of times where I've heard of things where he had, like, a flash grenade or like a smoke bomb or something, and he would set it off on accident.

Speaker 31 Like, you don't carry equipment that you don't know how to use.

Speaker 11 On On the flip side, Jack thought the other groups, like the Washington Initiative, were nothing but attention seekers.

Speaker 25 For whatever reason, they don't feel secure in themselves, or maybe they hate their job, or they hate how their life turned out, and so they're going to go and dress up like Spider-Man and run around, take selfies, and shit like that.

Speaker 25 I seen another crew kick a homeless dude awake to give him a water bottle so they could take a selfie of it. You know what I mean?

Speaker 20 Like, I watched that happen.

Speaker 11 At the other end of the Rand City superhero spectrum, Evo had been getting tired of the media circus around Phoenix and of the constant need to seek out drama in the streets.

Speaker 11 He felt inspired by his group's new costumed rivals.

Speaker 20 Holy shit, these guys are really professional. They're on top of this.

Speaker 21 This is very different from what's been going on on our team where it's all about the Facebook likes and it's all about how many followers do you have.

Speaker 11 Evo reached out to the Washington Initiative and struck up a relationship. At one point, he met Crystal Marks for coffee.

Speaker 21 Phoenix fell to pieces over it, and

Speaker 21 he wanted to pat me down to make sure I didn't have any bugs or microchips planted on me, because their entire existence is around spying on Phoenix, according to him.

Speaker 11 Despite Phoenix's paranoia, Eva was undeterred, and he and Crystal hit it off. In fact, a couple years later, their relationship turned into more than a superhero collaboration.

Speaker 21 You know, her hands would brush on

Speaker 21 a patrol, and like, oh.

Speaker 20 And then he and I started dating and we got married.

Speaker 11 These days, Crystal isn't involved in the superhero movement, but she is still a public servant. From 2019 to 2021, she was the deputy mayor of Burian, a city just south of Seattle.

Speaker 11 And when she campaigned for office, she did not hide her past as a real-life superhero.

Speaker 31 It took me sitting down with my husband and saying like, Does this actually translate?

Speaker 31 Does this type of real-world experience of breaking up fights, doing homeless outreach, does that actually translate into public office? And he helped me list out all the ways that it did.

Speaker 31 Leading groups, making decisions, strategic planning, all of this stuff. And so I ran in 2017.
I took out the incumbent in the primary with five people in the race.

Speaker 31 And then I came in first in the general and I became deputy mayor two years into my term.

Speaker 11 When I interviewed Phoenix, this was one of the parts of his story I was most interested in asking him about. I'd heard stories of him referring to people like Crystal Marx with a derogatory term.

Speaker 11 It's a story I'd heard from a lot of people who knew him. Apparently, Phoenix called the heroes who focused on homeless outreach real-life sandwich handlers.

Speaker 11 That seemed to be one of the centers of beef around certain members of the Reigns of Heroes was that like you were like, if you want to help people by giving them out food, like you can't be on my team anymore.

Speaker 20 That's not what I said. Say what happened.
For sure.

Speaker 20 If you want to take our main focus and make it humanitarian aid, then you should find another team. Because we do humanitarian aid for sure, but the concept is stopping crime.

Speaker 20 No point in feeding people if the food you feed them gets robbed at their house. It's that simple.

Speaker 20 I've never seen a comic book where the superhero runs around feeding people cheeseburgers except for the hamburger cartoons that I got from the McDonald's in like the 90s.

Speaker 20 We just have different concepts apparently of like what fighting crime is. You can definitely hand out food.
You should definitely do that. There is nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 20 You don't need to wear an outfit for that at all. Actually, wearing an outfit to hand out food to regular ass homeless people makes you an asshole.

Speaker 20 Why is that?

Speaker 20 Because you're showing up and saying, You guys are so disadvantaged that look at me in my giant suit handing you sandwiches that I made in my own house. I mean, it's absurd.

Speaker 20 I think showing up in a suit and saying, Hey, I put on this armor to protect you guys because I care about you being stuck out here makes way more sense than me saying, Hey, here's a fucking cheeseburger.

Speaker 20 By the way, look at my outfit. I mean, it's insane.
It's just incredible. It's like the disconnect between that and fighting crime is mind-blowing to me.
I don't even get it.

Speaker 11 Phoenix has a a very specific vision of what it means to be a superhero. And for him, anything less than active crime fighting doesn't measure up.

Speaker 11 But when you make busting criminals your goal, it isn't just the criminals you have to watch out for.

Speaker 11 Phoenix's daredevil crime-stopping approach brought him onto the radar of a powerful enemy, the Seattle Police Department.

Speaker 11 That's coming up.

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Speaker 11 For a while, at least, it seemed that Phoenix Jones had managed to fulfill his dream of becoming Seattle's very own night wing. the superhero Phoenix had looked up to as a kid.

Speaker 11 Things weren't always perfect in the City superhero movement, but for now, Phoenix was patrolling the streets several nights a week, chasing down criminals and snapping photos with fans.

Speaker 11 But the more attention he got, the more he rankled the local authorities.

Speaker 11 The problem was that Seattle already had its own force of professional crime fighters, and they felt that Phoenix Jones was stepping on their toes.

Speaker 33 Police worry Phoenix's recent taste of fame pushes him to put himself in harm's way. They insert themselves into a potentially volatile situation and then they end up being victimized as well.

Speaker 33 Don't insert yourself into those situations. If you see something, call 911.
Police hope he stops before it's too late.

Speaker 11 A pattern began to emerge.

Speaker 11 Phoenix and his crew would make the news for their latest act of costumed heroism. And the Seattle Police Department would issue an increasingly exasperated statement.

Speaker 11 to the effect of, thanks, but you can leave the crime fighting to us.

Speaker 6 I didn't know anybody who actually thought it was a good idea for them to put themselves in harm's way, put on these outfits, if you will, and make themselves a target for others.

Speaker 11 Carmen Best was the chief of the Seattle Police Department from 2018 to 2020. She was the first black woman to lead the force.
But before Carmen became chief, she held a lot of different roles.

Speaker 11 And she was there during the height of the Seattle superhero movement.

Speaker 6 While you truly respect what they were trying to do, I was very concerned, one, for their safety and two, for their full motive because we really discourage as a profession people doing what we would view as a vigilanteism.

Speaker 11 Carmen told me that the police department had been watching the superheroes out on patrol and making their TV appearances with growing concern.

Speaker 6 They don't have all the same protections that a law enforcement officer who's sworn in, who's had the training that we have in place.

Speaker 6 There was an instance when one of them was was injured pretty significantly and was stabbed. You know, we definitely were cautioning them when that occurred.

Speaker 6 You know, it was our, you know, our worst fears realized in that situation. And also intervening in the manner that they did, they put themselves in some legal jeopardy as well.

Speaker 11 Carmen didn't know which would-be superhero it was in this instance. But Phoenix claims he's been stabbed on patrol more than once.
And she definitely remembers him.

Speaker 6 Of course, his name came up. He did the most amount of interviews and was pretty extroverted, if you will, in how he approached this whole thing.

Speaker 6 In my opinion, I think the opinion of many within the police department, this seemed a little bit like fantasy work, you know, putting on a uniform or an outfit, because you're actually not a superhero.

Speaker 6 You're a person who's intervening in what can ostensibly be some pretty dangerous situations.

Speaker 6 And you could interfere in such a way that causes harm to not only yourself, but to the person you're trying to assist as well. So we were very concerned about it.

Speaker 11 I understand this argument. And I think it applies to a lot of of people in the real life superhero community.
But I also think that this is one of the areas where Phoenix does have a point.

Speaker 11 He's not the type of Yahoo who simply put on a costume and jumped into this job without thinking about it. He actually put in the time to train.

Speaker 20 I can't imagine being a cop and not having the certain skills. You know? It's not like going and lifting weights.
It's like running and training my knife disarms.

Speaker 20 Like I have, I do Wednesday knife disarms, right? I do Saturday hand-to-hand combat. Like I do that that all the time, always.

Speaker 11 And he isn't only prepared for physical altercations, he also has clearly spent time studying the laws around what he can and can't do when fighting crime.

Speaker 20 Oh, I don't hire a lawyer anymore because I know all this stuff. I mean, you get sued 27 times.

Speaker 20 I know all of the laws. The hard part for me is filling out the paperwork appropriately.
I've won them all, just to be clear.

Speaker 20 Every single one of them I've won, except for one I consider a win, but technically it was not a, it was like a no-contest. The guy just didn't show up.
But I mean, that's still kind of a win.

Speaker 11 A lot of the media reports and statements from the Seattle police around 2011 seem to speak to an underlying worry that Phoenix might use excessive force in his crime fighting or that he wasn't accountable for his behavior.

Speaker 11 But those are the same accusations that the U.S. Department of Justice made about the Seattle Police Department in the same year.

Speaker 11 The DOJ's Civil Rights Division received a letter in 2010 from the Washington ACLU and 34 other civil rights and community-based organizations.

Speaker 11 The letter requested an investigation into multiple incidents of excessive force by the Seattle Police Department, particularly force used against persons of color.

Speaker 11 The DOJ launched an investigation, and their report found that the SPD were engaging in a pattern or practice of unnecessary or excessive force and that the chain of command does not properly investigate, analyze, or demand accountability from its subordinate officers for their uses of force.

Speaker 11 They also found serious concerns about biased policing.

Speaker 11 To date, in April 2022, the Seattle police are still under federal oversight as a result of that report, though a lot of activists in the city think the reforms haven't gone far enough.

Speaker 11 It's also a reminder of what Phoenix was talking about earlier, about the additional risk that he faces because he's trying to fight crime as a black man.

Speaker 11 Phoenix talks about crime fighting like it's his whole reason for being.

Speaker 11 It's intense, but it's also not unique. A lot of people are drawn to this line of work, but very few of them grind the nipples off a Batman outfit and go around hiding trampolines in alleys.

Speaker 11 I feel like a lot of people, like the more traditional path for someone who had those ideals ideals about fighting crime would be to just join the police force.

Speaker 11 I'm curious why that was not appealing to you.

Speaker 20 Because I want to help people.

Speaker 11 And you don't see the police as being helpful.

Speaker 20 The police are very, very helpful in certain situations when they understand it on the right day when you catch the right officer and you happen to have an open and shut situation.

Speaker 20 But that's not what I consider policing. Where police really shine is investigating crimes that have already taken place.
But that is not justice to me. That's legalized retribution.

Speaker 20 I think if you're a police officer or a crime fighter, your job is to intervene between the incident and the person at the moment of that incident, not to investigate afterwards.

Speaker 20 Like investigating afterwards is what you've done when a plan fails.

Speaker 11 Talking to Phoenix, the biggest beef he seemed to have with the cops was that he thinks they aren't effective at stopping crime. But Phoenix saw that as an opportunity.

Speaker 11 A gap the cops weren't able to fill, but a superhero might.

Speaker 11 Cabby also saw the Rain City superheroes as a way of making up for the police's ineffectiveness.

Speaker 24 They show up after a crime has happened.

Speaker 24 And a lot of things happen in between when a crime is happening and when law enforcement actually arrives or medical services arrive to actually deal with the problem.

Speaker 11 That in-between space was where the Rain City superheroes saw work to be done.

Speaker 11 But even at their most intrepid, they always got law enforcement involved, despite their ambivalent relationship with the cops.

Speaker 11 In fact, on their patrols, Evo told me there was even a role dedicated to police liaison.

Speaker 21 I started being on 911, which means if we saw an actual crime happen, we would call Seattle police right away. That was like step one was call them.

Speaker 21 Always know where we're at. The street corners, know the intersections, know exactly where we're at so we can report it.

Speaker 11 But when the police did show up, things could get tense.

Speaker 11 Cabby told me a story about a patrol when things went south.

Speaker 24 We rolled up in Belltown and saw this guy harassing this man and woman who were a mixed-race couple. And instantly we knew like we felt like this guy was racist like trying to attack this couple.

Speaker 11 According to Cabby, one of the other Rain City superheroes, Captain Karma, approached the man and told him to leave the couple alone.

Speaker 24 And this guy like...

Speaker 24 Butterfly kicked him right in the chest and threw him out in the street.

Speaker 20 I was like, what the f?

Speaker 11 Cabby Cabby says he ran over and pinned the guy in a wrestling hold until the police finally arrived.

Speaker 24 They pull up and they pull out their guns and like, let him go, let him go. And we're like, we want to press charges.
This guy just attacked a couple with their baby.

Speaker 24 We think he's a racist or whatever. Like, they're like, let him go.
And we're like, this guy's violent. And they're like, let him go.

Speaker 11 So the Rain City superheroes did what they were told. And they let the guy go.

Speaker 24 And he runs up and he punches the cop in the face.

Speaker 24 So then then all of a sudden the cops who have their weapons drawn are wrestling with this guy and the guns are pointing around like to all these different people putting everyone's life in danger.

Speaker 24 And so I grab the guy again.

Speaker 11 Kebby claims he broke the guy's wrist. The police demanded that the superheroes unmask and hand over their footage, which they agreed to.
But then the police let the guy they had just subdued go free.

Speaker 24 I'm like, nope, I want to press charges. They're like, sorry, we can't press charges against him.
I'm like, why is that? Because that's crazy. And they're like, diplomatic immunity.

Speaker 24 He's from the Russian embassy. So they ended up letting him fucking go.
Pardon my language. And we were there looking like dumbasses, I guess.
I don't know.

Speaker 24 Sitting there with our masks off, like hands on the hood, like we were criminals.

Speaker 11 Russian diplomats aside, there are a lot of videos that showcase the dysfunctional relationship Phoenix and his crew had with the Seattle police.

Speaker 11 And Phoenix became increasingly vocal online with his criticisms of the cops.

Speaker 35 Let's make sure I understand this. Guy assaults person.
Guy walks away clean and free. Nothing happens.
Police won't take my statement, won't take my paperwork. I am pretty pissed off right now.

Speaker 11 Phoenix had a couple of favorite targets to beef with.

Speaker 20 Seattle has lost its mind when it comes to what a real crime is. It's lost its mind.
And part of that is Pete Holmes and his inability to do his job.

Speaker 11 Phoenix is talking about former Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes.

Speaker 20 Me and Pete Holmes have a history of hating each other too. The district attorney of Seattle is a complete joke.
He is trash.

Speaker 9 Trash.

Speaker 11 From 2010 to 2021, Holmes was in charge of all misdemeanor prosecutions in Seattle.

Speaker 11 He has sandy gray hair parted at the side and glasses, and he embraced a lot of left-leaning policies when he was in office.

Speaker 11 He declined to be interviewed for this series, but he's gone on record multiple times telling Phoenix to stand down. Holmes once said to the press, quote, Mr.

Speaker 11 Fodor is no hero, just a deeply misguided individual. He also argued that Phoenix couldn't rely on Seattle's Good Samaritan laws to protect him.

Speaker 11 He said, quote, Our state's Good Samaritan statutes are designed to protect individuals who happen upon, rather than actively seek out, opportunities to render assistance to others.

Speaker 11 These laws are not designed to protect a branded, costumed character, his roving video crew, or their copyrighted videos from the reach of tort plaintiffs.

Speaker 11 It's not surprising that Phoenix and Pete Holmes kept butting heads.

Speaker 20 The first couple times, the first like 10 or 12 times, it was just me pleading with him to actually charge the criminals and him explaining to me how I'm not a police officer and me being like, yeah, no shit, idiot.

Speaker 20 I don't need to be a police officer. And him saying, well, it draws a weird precedence.

Speaker 20 No, No, what draws a precedence is a guy running around in a rubber suit and actually finding crime that draws a precedence.

Speaker 11 Maybe you should do your job throughout 2011 things were getting increasingly tense between Phoenix and Seattle's law enforcement and while his fellow superheroes didn't necessarily disagree with him They worried that Phoenix's outspokenness would provoke a backlash Jones really instigated the hatred of SPD That's Cabby.

Speaker 11 He was just always like in interviews anything.

Speaker 24 He was like cops if they would do their job blah, blah, blah. It was like, dude, I mean, that's not really how it is.
He was a total dick to them, which I understand a young black dude.

Speaker 24 I get it. And I'm not an apologist for law enforcement.
Basically, people call and they show up afterwards. It's like trash collectors.
It's like, you deal with it afterwards.

Speaker 24 But at the same time, we got all put under the whole blanket.

Speaker 11 Oh, these guys think they're vigilantes.

Speaker 24 They're taking the law in their own hands. It's like, no, we're not.

Speaker 11 In the early hours of October 9th, 2011, Phoenix was out in downtown Seattle patrolling with Ghost, a videographer named Ryan McNamee, and the journalist T. Krullos, who we met back in episode 1.

Speaker 11 It had been a long night, and Phoenix was nearly ready to wrap things up. Then he says, one of his crew spotted a fight outside a bar.

Speaker 20 Phoenix, look down.

Speaker 9 Huge fight. Go, go, go, go, go.

Speaker 20 I take off running towards it because I can see these guys are kicking this person on the ground, just beating him up.

Speaker 9 Come in, left the one!

Speaker 9 Come on,

Speaker 16 they're kicking each other, punching each other. That's T.
Pushing each other down the street.

Speaker 11 Phoenix ran at full tilt and leapt into the middle of it.

Speaker 36 I'm like, break it up!

Speaker 20 Fight breaks up, everything's cool. Then they start yelling about getting a gun and all kinds of other stuff.
They take off to their car. They try to chase me around.

Speaker 20 The guy chasing me comes at me, so I just spotted my pepper spray. No big deal.

Speaker 16 He pepper sprays them. And the pepper spray dissipated into the air, and everyone was coughing and rubbing their eyes.

Speaker 11 In the midst of this chaos, a woman started attacking Phoenix with her shoe.

Speaker 9 I have body armor, so I'm okay, but I still don't know. I don't give a shit!

Speaker 20 And then she fell on her face. The minute she fell, those dudes went crazy.

Speaker 20 And they started coming back at us. No!

Speaker 9 No! I don't want to hurt them!

Speaker 16 They all sort of grouped together and then they rushed us.

Speaker 20 And attacked us.

Speaker 16 I actually got punched in the face and I was like, don't, don't punch me.

Speaker 23 Holy shit.

Speaker 9 The cops are already coming in.

Speaker 16 We were in a very chaotic situation. I was genuinely very afraid for my safety.

Speaker 5 This is getting serious.

Speaker 20 Turn your camera off. Put your camera.
The camera is up.

Speaker 16 At one point it looked like they might be looking for a gun.

Speaker 5 Are they getting guns?

Speaker 11 Phoenix pulled out his trusty pepper spray again and gave the attackers another dose.

Speaker 20 Ghost got kicked and fell over a trash can and busted his finger up. I had to have hand surgery from how bad he hurt his hand.
We got rockets, fucked. They started throwing rocks at us.
Watch out!

Speaker 20 And then tried to run us over with the car.

Speaker 20 Keep that lobsters.

Speaker 11 Finally, the cops showed up and they were pissed.

Speaker 16 The first thing this officer said was, Phoenix Jones, I'm tired of playing these games with you, man.

Speaker 9 I'm tired of this game. We're about to arrest a whole bunch of you and clean things up.

Speaker 11 According to both T and Phoenix, the police officers were not interested in hearing what Phoenix had to say.

Speaker 20 They wouldn't look at our video. They wouldn't listen to us.
They're like, we've had enough of you, superheroes. You've already peppersprayed three people today.

Speaker 20 Which is true, but you arrested the other two. Like, maybe you don't understand how this works, you know.

Speaker 20 And then the cop was saying stuff about, like, you're not a police officer, you don't have any authority. You guys are really arrogant to think you can make a difference.

Speaker 20 And I was like, yeah, it's crazy to think you can get into a car, drive to a crime, and make a difference, right?

Speaker 20 Douche.

Speaker 11 The cops arrested Phoenix and took him away in their car.

Speaker 11 The people who Phoenix said had been fighting were let go, and the other Rain City superheroes melted into the night. T was left standing on the street corner alone.

Speaker 16 And that's when I looked down at my hands and I saw that my hands were shaking from the adrenaline of what had just happened.

Speaker 16 I've always liked Phoenix personally, and I think that he's done some good things for the city of Seattle. But it made me realize that the real-life superhero thing could be really dangerous.

Speaker 16 And in that circumstance, I think that his intention was to help save people, because he saw people fighting. But that his interaction made the situation a lot worse.

Speaker 16 The pepper spray made everyone angry and it turned the scene into total chaos.

Speaker 11 The tables had turned on Seattle's comic book Crusader.

Speaker 11 This time, it was Phoenix who ended up behind bars.

Speaker 29 Phoenix Jones was arrested by Seattle PD on suspicion of assault.

Speaker 36 Officers say Jones told them he spotted two men fighting, but could not explain why four people, including two women, got pepper sprayed.

Speaker 37 Pepper sprayed. Pepper sprayed.

Speaker 38 Priest reports of citizens being pepper sprayed by Jones and his group.

Speaker 20 Pepper spray, no big deal.

Speaker 16 Pepper sprayed made everyone angry.

Speaker 38 The officer wrote that Jones had a history of injecting himself in these incidents.

Speaker 20 No big deal.

Speaker 16 Everyone was coughing and rubbing their eyes. No big deal.
Turned the scene into total chaos. No big deal.

Speaker 36 Jones has been advised to observe and report incidents to 911.

Speaker 9 Holy smokes, Batman, I bet this never happens to you.

Speaker 11 What's a superhero to do when his back is against the wall?

Speaker 11 That's coming up on the superhero Complex.

Speaker 11 The Superhero Complex is hosted and written by me, David Weinberg, and reported by me, Amalia Sortland, and Caroline Thornham. Production from Amalia Sortland and Caroline Thornham.

Speaker 11 Sean Glenn, Max O'Brien, and David Waters are executive producers. Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz.
Production management from Cherie Houston, Frankie Taylor, and Charlotte Wolfe.

Speaker 11 Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Original music is composed by Paul Housden.

Speaker 11 Special thanks to Peter Tangen, Willard Foxton, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvell, Beth Ann Makaluso, Oren Rosenbaum, Shelby Schenkman, and all the team at UTA.

Speaker 11 For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

Speaker 39 Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page, as a Google Doc, and send me the link.
Thanks.

Speaker 12 Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Speaker 34 Here's the link.

Speaker 20 But there was no link. There was no business plan.
I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet.

Speaker 4 I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.

Speaker 4 Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 40 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 14 America, y'all better wake the hell up.

Speaker 20 Bad things happen

Speaker 20 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 40 Listen to Graves County on the iHeart iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 23 Atlanta is a spirit. It's not just a city.
It's where Cronk was born in a club in the West End.

Speaker 20 Four World Star. It was 559.

Speaker 23 Where preachers go viral and students at the HBCU turned heartbreak into resurrection. Where dreamers brought Hollywood to the South and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth.

Speaker 11 Nobody's rushing into relationships with you.

Speaker 9 I'm Big Rube.

Speaker 23 Listen to Atlanta News on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 41 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me.

Speaker 37 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 2 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 4 She received death threats before the bombing. She She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 1 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 37 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 41 I'm Ivalongoria. And I'm Maita Gomez Rejoon.
And this week on our podcast, Hungry for History, we talk oysters plus the Myanmar Chief Stops By.

Speaker 2 And if you're not an oyster lover, don't even talk to me.

Speaker 41 Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster.

Speaker 32 No way.

Speaker 41 Bring back the ostracon.

Speaker 19 Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.