Episode 160: The 1963 Salad Oil Scandal

Can you can you Roz, you have to hit record on the thing.

I know.

I have I'm starting three recordings at once.

Come on.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Well, this is this is not necessarily.

There's a whole pre-flight

series of checks we have to do.

Yeah, yeah.

In order to

show them, don't show them that we just do this.

Okay, but when the wings fall off, you're not in part with

Roz's pilot.

He's just like, oh, that's bad, huh?

This is your captain speaking.

Hey, so put your head between your legs and kiss your ass.

Goodbye, am I right?

Just as you're going down making frantic mayday calls, so you guys ever see the airplane?

Look, I have now flown on the Boeing 737 MAX 8, and I survived.

No, I survived.

Just on the way down, you're getting like, hey, if you want your relatives to be like sharply attired at your funeral, you can buy your Boeing to Die t-shirt from, well, there's your problem.

Link in in the description link and bio uh so I yesterday I started I I got started but I'm in group therapy uh and I've been going for a number of months uh almost a year now and uh much to my chagrin therapy works on me now uh but I I started my I started my daily my weekly check-in with what's up YouTube and I got that's now I got laughs and also and I got laughs and I also got like a look from the like

from our our group leader who was just like, what the fuck?

And I was like, come on, man.

You're supposed to do bits in there, but you are also a professional comedian is the problem.

It is.

It is the issue.

You have to say those words to me.

Oh, I had to put down comedian on my tax for, oh, I'm so horrifying.

She's like, I am a clown, a jester, a professional oaf.

You laugh at me for money.

I am a professional oaf.

I'll tell you that.

I do social work and I have a professional oaf.

And my favorite thing is when people at work are like, so what's your podcast about?

I'm like, do we have to talk about something?

I think the thing is, like, there's a valuable gap in social work for an oath.

Like, you need an oath.

I agree.

We had a problem where someone kind of rushed us the other day.

And I had to be the, I was like, I'll be the first line of defense.

Please leave my senior center.

Why are you screaming at the seniors?

Please don't do that.

Did they leave?

They did.

Damn.

There you go.

Yeah.

Being oath-pilled, being oath-maxed, it works.

Yeah,

I am oath-pilled, uh, mostly because I don't have a choice.

Liam has replaced John Fetterman as Pennsylvania's greatest oath.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You get like a sort of state oath representation, you know, exactly.

Yeah.

Oh, but I'm not going to go, I'm going to go, I'm going to go wild on Israel and just be like, all right, no, we're doing mandatory BDS now.

And if you don't get in line, Ross will beat you to death with a calipron.

It's like, it's like inverse Germany.

In order to get citizenship, you have to sign a thing that says that Israel doesn't have a right to exist.

Yeah, we say it has a right to exist.

I keep saying it, and people keep yelling at me on Twitter.

Yeah.

We reroute, we hack into ways to reroute everyone using it into brick walls with tunnels painted on them.

This is the first thing that Hezbollah is going to do if it kicks off, right?

Like, it's that's day one, hour one.

You're trying to get like a cap into

wildly, just wildly coyote a bunch of fucking people.

Yeah, which, whatever, man.

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but y'all motherfuckers are going to learn today.

Okay.

Welcome to Will There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Oh, fuck it.

It's good to hear your voice, Nova.

I missed you too, buddy.

My name is Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And I've just been staring at this picture of vegetable oil.

Tell me what the hell that's about or

something.

This is a picture of vegetable oil.

You'll note ingredients, soybean oil and canola oil.

There's nothing particularly wrong about this.

It's going to sound real stupid.

Are soybeans a vegetable?

Yeah.

Well, they're legeum, right?

That was my question.

They're a bean.

Yeah.

So I guess technically.

Vegetable oil.

This is the thing.

Because you're oath-pilled, you're not like soy by definition.

So you don't know about soybeans.

No, I don't know.

I force femming myself by chugging the vegetable oil out of the wise market.

I mean, it worked for me, you know.

Yeah.

No, so an archaic term for vegetable oil is salad oil.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

And salad oil was

responsible for, in addition to another event, one of the worst Wall Street

stock market crashes of the 20th century.

I am baffled and ready to learn more.

Yes.

Do you guys have salad cream, by the way?

What the goddamn shit is salad cream?

All right, Devin, I'm going to need you to edit in like a kind of spinning in like a newspaper in an old movie picture of Heinz salad cream.

Salad cream is like

white ketchup.

It's like if mayonnaise was a little bit more ketchup-like.

Okay, so we have...

Okay, this is going to be a fun cultural exchange.

You guys have rayach, right?

Uh, yes, but only recently, like when I was growing up, we didn't really.

It's like definitely a recent-ish American Edgeway.

Yeah, American Edgeway wins again.

Yeah, apparently.

Yeah, I gotta imagine they're pretty similar.

You know, all these, uh, all these like sort of mayo-based or cream-based,

you know, sort of dressings and condiments are very similar.

Salad cream is like if you had, if you, like, had ranch, but you didn't have any of the spices, because those are like, obviously, like, too intense for us.

I'm prefer both.

okay i'm i'm i'm picking up what you're putting down i don't i don't think we have that i mean i'm sure so i you know i'm a fat boy i like mayonnaise and uh i i haven't seen salad cream but i'm sure in the whatever uk section of the wegmans uh i go to sometimes they have it

do they do they like uh do you like dip like fries which you call chips into it you absolutely can do i preferred it to ketchup growing up i think it's if i moved out of this country it's one of the first things i'd miss yeah you know i i i mean i'm definitely actually pro like mayo-based condiments for fries.

Me too.

Me too.

The Belgians were cooking with that one, literally.

Right down the street, there's a Mexican restaurant that actually does this really nice habanero mayo, which I like a lot.

They only give it to you if you order the chicken sandwich, though, which is annoying.

Is the chicken sandwich any better than it used to be?

Good question.

I haven't had one in a bit.

Speaking of that,

it depends on what time of day you get it.

I've found that, you know, like later in the day, they start giving you the scraps of the chicken thighs rather than

the big ones, you know, that you get earlier in the day.

And the thing is, later in the day is usually, you know, when I've like forgotten to make dinner, that's when I'm going over to Loco Pez to get dinner at the very last second.

Let me suggest a sandwich to you.

Have you guys, since we're talking about Belgians, you guys ever had a mitroyette?

No, but

I want to learn more about it.

It's French for submachine gun.

I guess by by analogy with like sub, like a sub, like a sandwich.

Like a submarine, yeah.

Yeah.

So what it is is it's a baguette filled with like fries, like French fries,

like a sauce, some meat, and like usually like cheese as well.

It's like you get it off like a stand or whatever.

Yeah, really.

Really fucking good, actually.

Well, I mean, of course it's good.

It's like carbs on carbs, but like

this feels like a poutine sandwich.

Yeah, no.

Never has without the gravy.

Roz, next cooking day, will you make one for me?

Could you repeat what I'm making?

That sandwich.

Okay, this entire sandwich we were discussing.

Yes, please.

Yeah, I can give it a shot.

Thanks, dude.

Sometimes I freeze and crap.

Yeah, I barge into Roz's house and I eat his food.

Hell yeah.

Pet his cat, and then I leave.

Yeah, exactly.

I enjoy making food.

You're good.

It's a wonderful thing to do.

Speaking of food, one of the things you need to make food is oil.

One of those oils is salad oil.

Today we're going to be talking about the salad oil scandal of 1963.

That's right.

That's right.

For all of you mad at us because we don't do engineering disasters anymore.

This one's just for you.

That's our segue.

So sorry.

So sorry.

But

before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news.

There's been like 50 different disasters, like actual natural disasters we haven't covered.

We know about the damn collapse.

We know about the semiconductor stuff.

We know about flooding in the global south.

We're really trying.

I'm sorry.

There was a lithium battery factory explosion.

Israel's about to go to war with Lebanon.

All sorts of fun stuff.

Do you want to just catch up on it by just doing another all news?

Oh, my God.

We might have to.

When we get a backlog.

Yeah, but what I've decided to cover instead of all this is a boat boutique issue that only I care about.

I also care about this dictator because,

because, like, you are an absolute dictator over the news section, and you decide what goes in.

And you know what?

I'm forced to support you on this.

So, tell me about this boat.

So, um, we briefly talked in the last episode, or at least showed a picture of the SS United States, which is uh, you know, the crown jewel of the U.S.

Merchant Marine Fleet.

Um, it is moored in Philadelphia, it's been sort of decaying for 50, 60, well, 70 years now.

She's not looking great, to be honest.

It's still the world's fastest liner,

you know, although it's largely been gutted on the interior because they did asbestos of Bateman a long time ago.

And it's owned by the SS United States Conservancy, you know, with the idea that eventually we preserve this, we turn it into a museum ship or a hotel or something like that because it is an intact liner.

That part of South Philly, okay.

It's not supposed to stay there permanently, which is good news and bad news on that one because the Steve Adoring company that owns that pier a couple months ago, more than a couple months ago, decided to double their rent, which the Conservancy couldn't afford.

It's just getting kicked out like a restaurant?

Yeah, so essentially independent bookstore.

Yes.

They sort of,

you know, they doubled the rent.

The Conservancy took them to court saying that wasn't provision in the lease we have.

The verdict was issued like a week ago, I think, a little more than a week ago.

And

the judge said, no, they can't raise the rent, but yes, they can kick you out.

And so they're kicking them out in September.

And no one knows where to put this thing.

Incredible.

I love the legal system.

I love housing law as it applies to boats.

Question mark.

Yeah, can we just throw up, Devin, if you're taking notes, can you just throw up that painting of the heroing of hell we always use?

How boat housing twists.

Here's the thing.

The Steve-Adoring company that owns this pier, right?

I don't know exactly what they expect to do with an ocean liner-sized berth for brake bulk in the year of our Lord 2024.

Free real estate turned into luxury apartments.

So that is sort of one of the understandings.

I think the other thing is

one of their big complaints against the SS United States is that, okay, it's pulling against the seawall down here and,

the bollards are being damaged and so on and so forth.

But

if you look at Port of Philadelphia's renderings, the only thing they want to do with this berth is just fill it in and then use it as like a modern lumber products import terminal.

I thought we were just going to extend the South Philly Walmart.

Yeah.

I think it would be objectively funnier.

Just turn the U.S., the SS United States into a Walmart.

Turn it into the Walmart.

Shit, that Walmart can't get any worse.

Let's do it.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is, again, I mean, it's the crown jewel of the U.S.

Merchant Marine Fleet.

It's still the world's fastest ocean liner.

And they're just going to kick it out.

And, you know,

we don't know exactly what happens to it at that point.

They have to find the seas.

Yeah, they have to find either another berth, probably on the east coast, or, you know, scrap it.

They're 100% going to scrap it.

And that's the saddest thing.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if they like wind up like towing it to a lang or something like that.

that.

Can the Chinese guys who bought the Ukrainian aircraft carrier

off of the Ukrainians after independence not like buy this one as well?

Just turn it into a...

You could probably turn this into an aircraft carrier, maybe.

And it would be fun.

You could probably, well, you could use it as a hotel.

Definitely.

You could use it.

You can't really use it as a ship anymore because

I guess the aluminum hull is having a lot of problems with age.

Just as an extra fuck you to be like launching like fighters against the like uh U.S.

fleet in the Pacific from the SS Taiwan as a province of China, formerly the SS United States, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, the other thing is, uh, you know, there's, there was an attempt to do something very similar with another ship, the SS America, I want to say.

It was bought by Norwegian Cruise Lines, um, and they fucked it.

Oh my God, they screwed the pooch on that one.

Um, that could be an episode,

but yeah, But the yeah, this is this is not this is not a good sign for the SS United States.

I mean, this is one of those things where I can't even say, like, oh, well, you know, donate to the Conservancy because this is a, you know, this is this is a situation where

yeah, you need, you need a lot of money for this.

I mean, this is not going to be funded with small donors.

This is, but they've had similar situations before.

Yeah,

Bill Clinton usually swoops in and like contributes a couple million dollars, but someone tells that be enough.

Can someone tell like Peter Thiel or elon musk that the like uh birth owners are woke and that the ship is like racist oh yeah that's a good idea wide around the block yeah i mean again south philly so

yeah it's that it's these woke longshoremen um you know they want to they want to kick out the boat yeah um just because

telling the truth about pronouns or whatever on a west coast they are woke

ILWU very left-wing union

but yeah so this is an unfortunate piece of you know, just,

I don't know,

just wantonness to kick this thing out.

I mean, you know, especially since I know they've been close to a hotel deal a couple of times before, but they are again close to a hotel deal now.

This is just forcing everyone's hands when it's not advantageous to be.

So, yeah, that's anyway.

Good luck with the Steve Adoring company on trying to attract break bulk to this pier in 2024.

It's going to be fine, you know?

Yeah.

I hope it was worth it.

Fuckers.

Yeah.

Another

news.

They did a just up oil destroyed

Stonehenge.

Neolithic thing.

I highly

think it's amazing.

It lasted so long, but then a little bit of cornstarch with orange dye.

Gone.

Yeah, what you see here is a bunch of like UDMH like floating over the horizon.

Fuck, we should have done the Chinese space program dropping a like rocket stage onto a dude's house.

Yeah.

That was pretty funny.

It's pretty funny.

And it looks a lot like this.

So yeah, just off oil, you may be aware, protest group want no new gas and oil contracts in the UK, which is a good thing.

Have, like, in order to draw attention to the fact that everything is going to be fucked if we don't do that, sprayed harmless orange like uh like dye or like paint or whatever onto like the henge at stonehenge and this kicked off the like mother of was that an apartment complex the henge at stonehenge yeah yeah yeah the villages at the henge at stonehenge um

and then what happened was curiously a bunch of people on the right whether they know themselves to be on the right of politics or not discovered overnight a new interest in conservation and in like neolithic ritual sites.

These are also all the same people who have been calling English heritage woke and soy for the last five years.

But now they were very, very concerned that this orange paint was going to permanently damage the structure and kill a bunch of rare lichens and stuff.

Which I think that one thing that might kill a bunch more rare lichens is climate change, but I'm not an expert on lichens.

It might do that.

And then everything was fine.

Like it's already clean again.

It's been washed off with no lasting harm to the thing but someone took a garden hose and fixed it yeah ex well i mean pretty much right

um

but uh that

the sort of uh stonehenge is about to get put on the world heritage danger list because there's this uh plan to just drive uh like road tunnel straight under it yeah this the stupid tunnel project yeah that's that's uh that's one of the dumber one of the dumber ideas out there they're trying to expand a highway

through the sort of Stonehenge area.

What is it?

Salisbury.

Salisbury Plain.

Salisbury Plain.

You know, this is like one of the most expensive projects in Britain because HS2 was canceled.

I think HS2 being canceled was one of the things that was said to be funding this incredibly stupid and stupid project.

I know Gareth Dennis can rant about this for quite a while.

But one of the things that always gets me about the reactions to Just Stop Oil protests is like they always do some kind of like, you know, relatively harmless and easily reversible vandalism.

And it's like everyone comes out of the woodwork, like, oh my God, they destroyed the Trevi fountain by like, I don't know, putting

red water on there.

Yeah.

And it's like, okay, well, they got to change out the water.

They do that pretty regularly anyway, because otherwise you get mosquitoes.

Yeah.

I mean, this is not, this is not like, these are not like huge, huge, like, you know, it's not like,

they aren't like,

you know, burning down buildings or like slashing famous artworks.

They're doing like mostly

harmless stuff.

I don't know.

But they don't mark such a reaction.

They're doing propaganda of the deed without doing the deed.

Yeah.

I mean, it's impressive in that way, I suppose.

I mean, part of the reason why the like process landscape and the direct action landscape in the UK looks like this is actually as a response to policing.

Like a lot of the kind of discourse about this in like sort of mainstream respectable publications was how we need to like crack down, things need to be even harsher on protesters.

Well, it's like barely possible to crack down on this.

This is the result of the previous crackdown.

Like they, there used to be like a pretty like

sort of lively

set of actions going on at like oil refineries and like oil infrastructure and gas infrastructure.

And everyone involved was like put under like insanely restrictive conditions.

The sites themselves have these like

sort of like blanket orders over them.

So you get arrested for looking at them funny.

And so if you want to protest something about the fact that like the entire planet has been set to broil and part of that is like happening at like a facility like down the road from you,

then your option is, I guess, to like throw some soup on a painting or

like turn some lichens orange, you know?

Yeah, go, go sit in traffic, you know, that sort of thing.

Because it's either that or do the like the Andreas Malm stuff.

And that's scary.

Yeah.

With the deed attached.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, if you, if you're going to do that, you're embarking on a very different and much more illegal course.

Not that we would ever encourage you to do that, Bob.

Yeah, I mean,

yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

You go read how to blow up a pipeline, and it's like, oh, I'm going to blow up a pipeline, and they fix it in two days.

And you go to prison forever.

Also true, along with this

very serious risk that you will kill someone.

Of course.

Whereas this, you're not even going to kill any moss, really, it turns out.

Yeah, it turns out this is, this is just, you make, you make all the, you make a lot of, a lot of stupid people very angry.

Yes.

And I.

I do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like, I, I, I think

a lot of the kind of what you might call most attention-grabbing bit of like British environmental process, whether that's just off oil or extinction rebellion, not to conflate the two,

but like

they're very effective at like raising awareness.

But part of the problem I want, like I worry, is that like people are very aware of climate change.

They just don't want to believe it.

You know, it's just like

breast cancer awareness.

I'm aware of it.

I'm not doing anything to stop it.

I don't think I can.

Yeah, except if you had like a kind of 100 or like 99.9% chance to get breast cancer unless you like did something to change your entire life urgently.

You know?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Everyone else also had to do that thing.

Yeah.

That's the other part.

I mean,

I read an interesting Guardian article.

Fucking liberal moment for me to say that.

I read an interesting Guardian article with a guy.

uh a psychoanalyst i don't have a lot of time for psychoanalysis as a discipline uh but like talking about the kind of like psychology of denial and different kinds of denial of which like, you know, hopelessness is a kind of denial because you like don't think that there's anything anyone can do.

But also the people who think that like, oh, well, you know, there's

it just, it's just going to be fine.

And I think that's going to be fine.

That's the situation that you kind of have to like throw yourself into at least some of the time to not go insane, right?

Unless you're very, very comfortable.

with thinking about the possibility

to get like to get up and go to work in the morning, some of the time you have to be able to be like, it's probably going to be fine.

I'm not going to think about it.

They'll probably work it out.

Yeah.

It's just the rest of the time.

Like, yeah, I don't know.

I have a lot of thoughts about climate, and I'm not going to rail that.

I'm going to keep blasting that AC.

Yeah,

which actually I am doing right now because it's 94 degrees out there.

95, yes.

How's the heat dome treating you?

We're dying.

It was.

It was fine other than the fridge not working, but I don't know if that was related.

Dying.

it might just be because of the humidity.

I'm hearing a diversity of opinions about this.

He's tougher than I have.

He grows in the south.

50% of Philadelphians have been killed by the heat dome.

Welting flower.

I, I don't know.

I, I, I was, I was outside for a bit during the heat dome.

It was annoying, but it was like,

I didn't die.

I'm right there with you.

This is the, this is the thing that, that, like, scares me apart from all of the other things is that, like, I am a pussy, right?

My, my threshold for discomfort in terms of like heat is really low.

Like,

I grew up in a cold country, and whenever it gets like the slightest bit warm, I'm like, this is almost unbearable to me.

Yep.

I was out on the porch.

I put the umbrella up.

I thought it was, you know, it was nice for about 20 minutes.

And I was like, yeah, it's a little bit too hot.

I'm going to go back inside.

Yeah, okay.

So, which, so we're all pussies.

That's good to know.

But yeah, I show you that

I'm going to expose myself to 97 degrees.

90 degrees, that's a little bit easier.

You go out for a nice bike ride, you get a breeze the whole time, it's fine.

I mean,

I will say this, like, as far as Stonehenge itself,

it's pretty, pretty far inland.

I think Salisbury Plain is pretty high above sea level.

And, like,

it's going to be like fine.

Like, all the grass around it's going to be dead.

All the people are going to be dead.

But, like, the rocks are going to be like, you know, bleached and everything.

It'll still be fine.

The North Atlantic current or whatever it is shuts down and then it gets whacked by a glacier.

That's the problem.

I would hate to get whacked by a glacier.

I would also hate to get whacked by a glacier.

Oh, yeah.

You're just like watching it approach like that guy in Austin Powers.

Well, I watched it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We need to do the like fossil fuels episode at some point so I can properly get into it about climate change.

But like someone called me a doomer about this the other day.

And I'm like, I'm not trying to be.

I'm really not.

But like,

everyone else is the doomer.

I'm the only smart person.

Yeah, that's right.

We're all the only smart person.

You're the people doing the doom.

I'm just talking about it.

You're doing it.

I'm just here, man.

I'm just clocking in for my shift at the podcast.

In fact,

it's hard not to be a doomer about it.

It's hard not to be a doomer about it.

But if I, I, I adopt the stance some days more than others.

It's like, if I think too hard about this, I'll

so sorry.

Yeah, it's fine.

But yeah, shout out to these guys who are doing something about it, even if that something is like blasting orange cornflower, you know, know, it's more I'm doing.

But speaking of oil,

that was if you showed me Drake's well book on goddamn time.

We've made it.

No Drake's Well.

Yeah, exactly.

There's a different type of oil.

Oh.

So I want to acknowledge before we start, a really big source I used for this, and one of the only sources, in fact, was, because it's very hard to find sources on this, was The Great Salad Oil Swindle by Norman C.

Miller, who was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

This is a book that is

long out of print and actually now somewhat of a rare book.

It's like $400 on Amazon.

Did you spend that?

No.

No, it's on the Internet Archive for free.

You couldn't do it.

Until Chuck Wendig kills it.

Yeah, exactly.

We have the credit card, which I don't get to use enough.

I don't think there are any in stock on Amazon either.

Well, I thought we'd start about edible oils or, as we probably know, cooking oils, right?

Sure.

Yeah, I can't remember being able to afford these.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's look at some.

Here's olive oil.

It's made of olives.

Yeah, don't buy Italian olive oil because the mob waters it down.

Sounds insane.

Sounds fake is true.

Sounds fake is true.

Yeah.

You know, but olive oil, you know, that's...

Don't buy Canadian maple syrup.

The Quebecois mob waters it down.

I just go to

the Plains of Abraham and shout scoreboard over and over.

If you want something that sounds healthy but isn't, you get avocado oil, right?

Very high smoke points, very nice for that.

I use it sometimes.

There's peanut oil, which you can use with similar properties if you're not allergic to peanuts.

Otherwise, it might kill you.

Peanut oil smells really good.

Yeah, it depends.

I mean, Corinne can't have it, but it probably will kill her.

I just don't want to find out.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Quebec Croix fact about peanut oil.

Oh, my God.

On the Montreal Metro, they use wooden brake shoes.

And the way they keep them from catching fire is soaking them in peanut oil i mean makes sense yeah man i've heard it smells fantastic down there yeah you taught me that yeah um

we have canola oil you've never heard of a canola plant i know what you're doing here i i i i have played multiple years of farming simulator i know what canola is canola is an attempt to rebrand like Canadian oil.

What it is, it is r seed.

It is rubbed seed.

No one likes that word.

No, for no obvious reason.

It's worse in British English because we don't even say seed.

Like in British English, it is r like the yellow fields that you see out of the train, that is a field of.

Oh, my God.

You can't be calling it that.

No, we're going to have to.

We're honestly probably going to have to censor that for the algorithm, probably.

Now,

seed oil, as it was originally...

You know, the plant was originally constituted.

It was not very edible.

It was like good for like other uses for oil, like, you know, varnish or like a lubricant or something.

And the Canadians came up with a way to reduce some of the acids in that particular oil.

So

that's why canola is an acronym for Canadian oil low acidity.

Huh.

Yeah.

I didn't know the acronym part.

I only knew that it was Canadian.

Yeah, it's Canadian oil, low acid, just like Canadarm and the CanDu nuclear reactor.

They love it for everything.

Yeah, they love that abbreviation.

Don't buy canola oil from Canada, the Canadian, the Ontarian mob waters it down.

Yeah.

And of course, we have salad oil or vegetable oil, which often is just soybean oil, right?

It could be made from a lot of stuff.

Like vegetable oil is like, you know, it just has vegetables in it.

But a lot of times it's just soybeans, right?

We didn't even talk about palm oil.

The like

one of the best containers for a homemade IED in Iraq, the yellow palm oil container.

I'm reliable.

Isn't that also something that like, you know, the extractive industry there is like constantly killing people?

Oh, yeah, it's insanely evil.

Like pound for pound, I think it's the most evil oil short of like petroleum oil.

Like,

yeah, palm oil.

Real bad.

Yeah.

So fumble on my phone.

How do you produce these industrially, right?

Long story short, you have your feedstock.

You know, maybe it's olives, maybe it's avocados, maybe it's peanuts, maybe it's soybeans, maybe it's so and so forth.

You crush it, you extract the liquid, you know, the resulting crude vegetable oil is strained.

That's a hell of a phrase.

Yeah.

And then they refine it, right?

They remove the impurities and so on and so forth.

The good stuff that comes out of the refinery, this is shipped close to its destination in bulk, and they bottle it and they put it on grocery store shelves.

And the other other residue, the nasty stuff, has a lot of uses, including like feedstock for soap production, right?

Which we will talk about briefly later.

You know, so that's your basic process.

Anyway, now we have to talk about a guy.

This is Anthony Tino DeAngelis.

Oh, this is an incredible guy already.

Yeah.

Look at that face.

Look at the guy behind him who looks miserable.

Look at the tie clip.

Oh, they don't, they don't drip like they used to.

All right, let me just put a marker down now.

Don't buy American vegetable oil.

It's watered down by the mob.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

He does more than water this stuff down.

Yeah.

So he's born in 1915 to Italian immigrant parents in the Bronx.

He's a very ambitious child.

He quit school when he was 16 to get into business.

He borrowed $500 from his parents.

He's been doing the like goodfellas thing of being like ever since I was a kid.

I wanted to be like

I always dreamed of ripping off the government organization.

I always dreamed of being a vegetable oil guy.

I'll put a pin in Born 1915 for when we get to the end of the presentation.

He borrowed $500 from his parents to get into the candy store business, which immediately went bust because of the Great Depression.

It took the family's savings with it.

But undeterred, he got a job in a Bronx meat and fish market.

and quickly progressed to being a manager of 200 employees in only three years.

right?

But when he was this manager, he got into an argument with his superior and he quit.

And the manager did, in fact, come crawling back for Tino, who was essential to the business.

But Tino's pride wouldn't let him go back to the market.

So he became a foreman at the City Provision Company.

And he said he was a legend there at how efficiently he could dismember a hog.

That's not a fun thing to be a legend of.

Yeah, that don't like that.

Very efficient.

could he could he could partition that hog faster than anyone else this guy was the the big boss of like the venom snake of hog butchering love to be the uh i don't know the fucking babe ruth of just killing pigs yeah he was he was boss hog uh no the the uh the the hogs were already dead he was just chopping them into pieces Sure, yeah.

Huge consolation for the hogs, I'm sure.

In 1938, he opened his own hog processing company,

where he claims to have pioneered the concept of having hogs slaughtered in the west and brought frozen for processing in the east because shipping livestock is difficult and expensive, especially, you know, at that point you're shipping them on trains, which, you know, they get delayed.

And when they get delayed too long, then you have to feed and water the hogs on the train,

which is annoying.

And then sometimes they just die.

Sometimes if you have a really bad delay, you know, it's shipping livestock.

Sometimes you lose the entire potato harvest because you left it somewhere and you forgot about it.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, he's processing frozen hogs from Chicago as opposed to shipping them in fresh.

And this saves a lot of money.

He's very successful.

He's so successful that with his company, he managed to avoid the draft because his company was an important supplier to the Army.

Right.

And he claims during this period of his life, he worked constantly like 16-hour days and only took breaks to go to his bicycle club.

Fucking nerd.

Yeah.

This does not look like a guy who has ever bicycled.

I bicycle a lot, and I also don't look like someone who ever bicycled.

The problem with bicycles is they're not that difficult.

I cannot ride one.

So

difficult in the sense that they don't burn a lot of calories.

Did you never learn how to ride a bike, Nova?

No, like my parents never taught me, and I've tried a couple of times to learn, but like, I don't know.

It's just,

I'm, yeah.

No, I can't ride a bike.

Come to the States.

Got to get two propane tanks on each side.

The old Nate Maffey, right?

Yeah.

So with the money he makes from this hog processing company, he buys a controlling stake in the Adolph Goebel Company of North Bergen, New Jersey.

It was a name you could have back then.

It was normal.

It was normal back then.

Yeah, that company is from like 1905, I believe.

Like, why should I change?

He's the one who sucks moment.

Exactly.

Adolph.

Yeah.

He bought the Adolph Goebel Company of North Bergen, New Jersey in 1949.

It was a big meat packing firm.

This is for his first scheme, right?

Because Tino is a patriot, and there's nothing more patriotic than ripping off the federal government.

That's the damn truth.

Yeah.

Saluting.

Yeah.

The new National School Lunch Act meant the government would be buying massive quantities of food for school cafeterias across the country.

President Eisenhower decides to end malnutrition, and as a result, a million guys like this go,

I can put like circus animals into old mattresses and I can sell it to the federal government.

So he needed the Adolph Global Company for the capacity to meet these orders, right?

And he delivers.

18.9 million pounds of smoked meats and sausages to the government and was promptly sued for overcharging $31,000 for underweight deliveries.

Now, Tino claimed this is because the Department of Agriculture specified too short of a smoking time, and that would lead to undercooked meats that he didn't want to deliver to the children.

That's why the weights were off because it had been smoked a bit longer.

Chicken to feds for like $31,000.

It's a lot of money, but like he could have gone bigger.

Yeah, he probably could have gone bigger.

But the thing is, the concerns about children's health that he had were somewhat mitigated by the fact that 2 million pounds of the meat that he delivered were never inspected.

Oh, all right, yeah.

What's it?

Don't worry about it.

Snitches, mostly.

Yeah.

There were some.

You would really taste the fucking

guy this used to be.

Yeah, you could really taste the Hoffa.

Now, that and some accounting irregular areas later, and in 1953, Goebel was bankrupt.

But Tino's ambition knew no bounds, though.

He set his sights on a new government program.

Oh, come on.

Milk, milk, milk.

Food for peace.

Oh, boy.

Uninspected meat for a gift from the American people.

Just dumping a sack of uninspected meat out of the back of an aircraft.

Oh, he did that to the Yugoslavs, actually.

Jesus.

Right.

You know what?

Like, they were doing a genocide, but maybe they had the right to shoot down the fucking F-117, you know?

Oh, but the F-117 was never packed with uninspected chicken.

Yeah, actually, the Sam site only detected it when it opened the Bombay doors to drop uninspected chicken on certain positions.

I think he sent a barge full of meat to Yugoslavia.

Just a barge.

I don't like the phrase barge full of meat.

And it turned out it all went off either in transit or beforehand.

Oh, God.

Can you imagine opening those doors?

I don't want to.

Oh, God.

This is fucking asshole.

I have a barge full of meat.

Yeah, the meat deck.

Yeah, the meat deck.

It doesn't have a poop deck.

It doesn't have to be its meat decks all the way down.

I work on the meat deck crew on the barge full of meat.

So, so Food for Peace, right?

It sounds like a charitable program.

This feels great way to rip off my government.

This was pushed by Hubert Humphrey, right?

Public Law 480, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, signed into law by Eisenhower in 1954.

This provides food aid to impoverished countries, but it's not direct aid because we have to do some fuckery, right?

No, there always is.

Yeah.

What did Thomas Sankara say?

Food aid is when you give us like tractors and fertilizer and shit.

Yeah.

He probably said it more eloquently than that.

But well, a fertilizer and shit is redundant.

But a barge full of shit.

Oh, my God.

It's not full of shit.

It's full of uninspected beat.

Weren't you listening?

So the main purpose of Food for Peace, you know, it's a diplomatic thing, right?

But it's also we're stabilizing food prices in the United States by dumping our agricultural surplus abroad.

Yeah, I mean, it's a classic of foreign policy.

The EU has done it.

The Soviet Union did it.

And of course, you guys did it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, me and Ross personally, that's why we podcast because they shut down our uninspected meat plant.

Well, this is actually a surplus podcast that goes out around the world.

Yeah, we're like Voice of America, but way shittier.

Voice of America and that were all CIA agents.

Yeah, we're doing radio-free Europe here.

So now

please ignore our opinions on Cuba.

Yeah, go ahead.

These impoverished countries' currencies were nearly worthless.

So big commercial shipments of grains, soybeans, or salad oil, again, that archaic term for vegetable oil, these weren't possible without somehow greasing the wheels, right?

Now, the obvious thing would be for the government to buy the food and then give it to the countries, but that's too obvious.

That's just what they're expecting, right?

Got to keep the commies guessing.

Yeah.

So essentially,

well, you also,

a lot of agricultural subsidies are very unpopular in cities at this point in time.

So essentially, the country seeking food aid would pay the United States government in their local currency.

The U.S.

government would then bid out the shipment to private companies.

The lowest bidder wins.

They ship the bulk agricultural product to the impoverished country.

Then the government pays them in dollars for the shipment while retaining the foreign currency, which then usually wound up being spent on USAID projects in said foreign country.

Thus the illusion of free enterprise was maintained while

also

allowing shippers to make healthy profits.

In an insane like three-card Monte thing with like six different middlemen.

Yes, exactly.

I'm also like thinking, you know, since you mentioned agricultural subsidies being unpopular in cities, that like this being the 50s, you were doing the plot of like American graffiti or Westside story, right?

Guys are pulling switchblades on you on every corner, and like incidentally, all of the money that could be used to like fund like a library or something is going to like a six-way backhanded deal to deliver a shitload of like salad oil to an impoverished country in a way that mostly enriches one fat bicyclist.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a mad dash to participate in this program because big charity means big profits.

So, naturally, Tino DeAngelis wants in.

Tino,

Oh, big T.

Big T.

Yeah.

Tino.

Yeah.

So now let's talk about the business secrets of Anthony DeAngelis.

Everything they don't teach you in Hollywood Business School.

Everything is bribery.

You must have a plan to bribe every single person you see.

I don't actually see an issue with this, really.

That's kind of like I've been discussing with my parents as I gear up to have children,

like how my dad did.

He goes, a lot of bribes.

A lot of bribes.

Like,

once you had figured that out, it was kind of over for us.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, this is the thing.

These were the salad days, so to speak.

Before 1977, no Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Like, so long as you're not bribing an American in America, it's not even a crime that the U.S.

government cares about.

He's bribing a lot of Americans in America.

It's still not a crime the U.S.

government denied.

We've used this exact stock image before, haven't we?

Yeah.

Tino DeAngelis had sort of advanced bribery technology of the kind of latest run of 50 Euros.

Big Tony D got shooters.

Big Tony D got shooters.

I believe that.

No mafia links were ever proven.

Okay.

Except for one of his subsidiaries.

Me too.

He did have a Chicago subsidiary of the company we'll get to that had a lot of mob guys in it, but the New York one was.

clean, supposedly.

We don't know.

Okay.

Now, Tino was very well liked in his community, not just because of his big personality, but because he was very liberal with his checkbook.

You know, he was constantly helping people out with medical bills, debts, contributing to charities, slipping everyone a $10 bill constantly.

The florists.

The florists, the mailman, the truck drivers, bank tellers, some random kid on the street.

This man was just leaking cash like a sieve everywhere.

He waited.

This man's so bad.

In fairness, I do this too.

And as far as I know, I'm not affiliated with the mob.

So

who's to say?

No, I

yeah, I want to be Tony DeAngelis real bad.

I want to, you know, I like.

Just start giving your money away.

It feels good as hell.

I do.

Links in the description, probably.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Give Lutheran Settlement House your money because we need it because Benefit State of Trust just went under it.

We're fucked, folks.

So people like Tony, Tino, because he's, you he's giving away money all the time.

I think it would be a fun bit if we just switched from Tino to Tony and Tony D'Angelo.

Better than Tony D'Angelo, you fucking homophobic dick.

And this is, this is, you know,

he's somewhat of a braggart.

You know,

yeah, you're willing to tolerate that if, you know, he's constantly bettering your financial position, right?

Anyway, Tino starts the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Company of Bayonne, New Jersey.

Oh, Bayonne.

Oh, Josh Munson, if you're listening, sorry.

It is somewhere in this tank farm.

I am not sure of the precise location.

I fucking love North Jersey, dude.

What a shit.

Beautiful.

It's beautiful.

I'm feeling

this.

I'm feeling the like Springsteen in my ears as I'm looking at this.

A real down and out at the Longhorn Steakhouse at Bayonne.

So Tino had some legitimate ideas for getting into the salad oil business, right?

More than

three.

Yeah.

Namely, he was going to make it really, really big, and he was going to use a disadvantageous location to his advantage, right?

At this point, most salad oil processing happened in the Midwest.

It was crushed, it was refined, it was canned and shipped to customers or down the Mississippi River by barge for export, right?

Makes sense.

But Tino has a worse idea, right?

Buy the unrefined oil in the Midwest, ship it on trains to Bayonne, then refine and can it there, and then put the refined oil directly on merchant ships for export.

Sounds like it's going to be like way more expensive.

Yes.

I mean, that's the kind of innovation that like drives

invest in this motherfucker immediately.

Well, he has financial connections just across the Hudson River.

Hell, those guys is bribing.

Exactly.

This is a very expensive and impractical proposition, but he managed to convince the financers.

Allied is soon very well capitalized.

They set up the refinery.

The tanks that they bought were originally for petroleum, and it took them about a year to clean them.

I'm doing air quotes, clean them.

Can you do that?

Like food-grade stuff, I mean, if nothing else, like a single molecule of benzene remaining in the thing kind of fucks everybody, right?

Like,

we'll talk about this more later.

Oh, boy.

What's the worst part about this whole night?

He puked in a perfectly food-safe bucket.

Yeah.

You know, got to work wheeling and dealing, right?

So the spectrum from

food grade to biohazard

very often takes a like sharp detour, you know?

Yeah.

I, well, you know, it adds spice, right?

You know, you, you, get that, get that in your nose.

Did you guys, when you grew up, did you have the like vomit bowl?

The like stoneware bowl that like lived under the sink that was only ever used for like when a kid was sick and was throwing up?

Yes.

Good.

I did not have one of those.

Where did you throw up, Roz?

The toilet.

But what if you're like too sick to get out of the way?

What if you're on the couch, dude?

You're like six years old, you have like hyper like gastritis or flu or whatever,

and you're throwing up like a lot, but you can't get off the off the sofa or out of bed.

Good question.

Huh.

Did this just never happen to you?

I might have just not gotten that sick.

I will say my favorite is when people reveal themselves as having a dual-purpose vomit and popcorn bowl.

That's that I managed to

have done that.

I don't ever like using a word like degenerate.

I think it always lends credence to the far right.

But in this case, I'm not sure what else I can say.

Disappointment to humanity, I think.

Yeah.

Use two bowls, folks.

Buy a second bowl.

Have the readily distinguishable.

The popcorn bowl should be like a big glass or like Pyrex bowl.

And I strongly believe that a vomit bowl should be like earthenware, like stoneware, like white glaze on the inside, kind of like buff brown on the the outside, ugly as hell.

Yeah, that's that's that's my vomit ball.

We are begging you to use two balls.

Two bowls, please.

Yeah, yeah.

You've heard of two chains.

Now get ready for two bowls.

Of course, the real, the real struggle thing is when you're eating like too much cereal out of the popcorn bowl.

That's when you have like depression.

How much cereal do you?

Okay, yeah, fair enough.

I've had some pretty weird depression meals.

Big, big, I think it's a joke in forgetting Sarah Marshall, a movie which has not aged well.

But yeah, you can, you can fully like have too much cereal out of a out of a popcorn ball.

You know what movie has not aged well?

And

I could hear Roz's annoyance psychically.

Animal House has not aged well.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

No, I agree with you on that one.

That one did not age.

It did not age well.

I was, I was, I, Corinne had never seen it and I put it on and I was just like, I, I, I was like, I have to caution you.

This is like a racist Disney cartoon from 1940.

Like, this has not aged terrifically.

And she's like, how bad can it be?

We get like 12 minutes in, and she's like, This is actually kind of offensive.

I'm just like, it's um,

there's a real kind of like, um, uh, what do you, what do you call that point in like a sort of submarine environment where there's like a sort of change in the density of the water or whatever.

Um, it doesn't matter.

Anyway, the sort of dividing line for that for me is like about 2000, because like any comedy made in the 80s or 90s invariably has a trans joke, like and also has like

ace ventural head detective.

Usually combine the two, you know, like fucking crocodile Dundee or like feel up a woman's cough or whatever and be like, oh, I thought you was a bloody Sheila or whatever.

You know, it sucks.

Shit sucks.

You can't watch old movies.

I think Trading Places held up pretty well, which is really racist.

Trading Places was great.

I love Trading Places.

It's such a good movie.

Yeah.

The two fucking like Statler and Waldorf guys, great.

Oh, yeah.

So Tino paid a quarter set premium for

a quarter cent premium per pound of crude vegetable oil.

He sold the refined oil at undermarket rates.

No one knew how he made money, but the customers kept coming back.

This is kind of a recurring thing, whether like then or now.

We haven't gotten any better at this, that like even professional auditors, like big name auditors, seem to be able to avoid asking the question, how does your company make money?

Pretty soon he had a near monopoly on salad oil exports out of the USA, all on the taxpayer's dime.

He had only 22 employees and they were all paid exorbitant wages.

They were all provided Cadillacs on the company's dime.

It's a job creations program.

That's what's great about America.

What's the fucking problem here?

And you're telling me that this is not in any way mob affiliated, these 22 guys driving their Cadillacs around Bayonne, New Jersey.

Look, I'm just saying what the book said and most of the articles I read.

The fucking waste disposal business.

Yeah.

It's not to say there weren't problems from the get-go.

Just after Allied settled a civil fraud case about shipments of oil to Spain,

Tino landed a huge government contract under his shortening Corporation of America subsidiary to export $70 million of salad oil to India and Brazil.

And when the oil got there, all the cans, which were proudly stamped, donated by the people of the United States of America.

Come on.

All the cans burst open.

Well, if that isn't a metaphor, you just have like rancid salad oil all over yourself.

You're going to get botulism.

Thanks.

There's rancid salad oil filling warehouses from Calcutta to Kiritiba.

You know, the Catholic Relief Agency in India had serious doubts about whether the product was edible at all from the get-go, which we'll get to later.

But this does inspire Tino into a genuine efficiency that he came up with.

No longer would the salad oil be shipped canned.

Instead, tanker ships would be cleaned and then filled with the product in bulk, and it'd be canned at the destination.

That's smart.

That's thinking with the brain head there.

I, once again, for the second time on this slide, I'm uncomfortable with the word cleaned.

Yeah,

that's a lot of work.

I'm in there with the power washer for a few days.

It'll be fine.

It's like when you let a dish to you leave a dish overnight to soak, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, I do that fucking dish.

You and I don't know it.

You have kind of the like cast iron with the layers of seasoning, except it's been seasoned with like bauxite or whatever was last in the fucking like carrier.

And probably crude oil.

Just straight benzene.

Probably tastes pretty good.

Like, crude oil is usually sweet.

So Texas crude, baby.

Yeah.

Delicious.

Okay.

So we got to talk about a financial instrument.

Oh, boy.

All right.

All right.

Let's go.

We tried to get Riley on for this.

Well, I tried a little bit.

I should have DM'd them earlier.

That's on me.

That's fine.

Yeah.

So

the warehouse receipt loan and field warehousing, right?

So

before everything was an app and everything that can't be an app was switched to just-in-time delivery, businesses used to have a thing called inventory.

I remember that from video games.

Yeah, and that inventory was stored in warehouses.

They're all luxury apartments now.

Exactly.

Except this one.

This was a U-Haul.

Yeah.

This is my house.

The gigantic U-Haul.

It used to be a Pennsylvania Railroad

joke, folks.

Yeah, this was a Pennsylvania Railroad cold storage warehouse.

That's why they used to keep all the guns in case there was like a communist uprising.

The cold guns, yes.

It would feel nicer with your hands.

Why do they call it uprising when you cold eat the open the cold gun?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, just like that.

the guy who owns you haul is actually like a big architecture buff and that's why they he goes they go for these big old-fashioned warehouses and they restore them really nice um oh shit yeah this one they they they actually redid the keystone up here this is in south philly um anyway so ah crap okay so inventory doesn't do a lot if it's sitting around and waiting to be sold right and sometimes you're a company you say money me money now me a money needing a lot now I'm saying that constantly.

I also say that constantly.

I do like that that's written into the notes.

So it's like every month of my life, I get a new thing to become obsessed with.

Is it ever anything inexpensive?

No, it is not.

Oh, I hear you.

I had, I had the, hey, so.

I'm thinking of upgrading my PC chat with my wife yesterday.

Oh, that's a rough, that's a rough conversation.

It's right there with I need a Dodge Viper chat.

Yeah, yeah.

I, so, so, I mean, just on a like a lower level, right?

Like, um, I need a new pair of jeans, right?

And, like, I actually do need them at this point.

Wear shorts.

I, I might, I might enter into a shorts era due to climate change.

Yeah,

I found out I could wear shorts at work a couple weeks ago, and I have been just

that was dangerous to tell you that.

I've been thinking about entering into a crop-top era, but it's about like hating my body less, you know, which

we promote it on this podcast, folks.

Joe Biden's economy has forced me to consider nudism for economic reasons.

Yeah, I can only afford a crop top.

I can't afford the rest of it.

I gotta be honest with you right now.

I am shirtless.

I record shirtless via lunch.

Yeah, yeah.

It's reasonable.

Absolutely reasonable.

So it results in the invention of a new financial instrument, the warehouse receipt.

And by new, I mean it started in the 15th century in Italy.

Fucking Gorgia is new again.

My parents had a cat named Lacrisia Borgia.

Sick name for a cat.

It was.

She was a mean cat.

I love her.

All Borges are cats, but all Medicis are dogs.

I'll buy that.

So the merchants would store their goods in public warehouses, which were regularly inspected to prove the inventory was there.

And then those merchants could take out loans using the merchandise as collateral.

Is this what a bonded warehouse is, by the way?

I think so.

Because I've heard the term before, and i always understood it to mean a warehouse that is in some way like regulated like that but i actually know i'm not i'm not a hundred percent certain um i think a is a bonded warehouse uh government owned um

well is government government uh like inspected and shit oh yes at least it is it is in the term in terms of bonded whiskey it it is a government warehouse it's it's a it's a it's a customs bond so either the government runs it or like a company like pays a bond to the the customs.

Yeah,

yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So later these dedicated warehousing companies emerge and they operate large public warehouses for the storage of all kinds of inventory, merchandise, so on and so forth, with the expectation the owners would use said inventory as collateral for loans.

But this is inefficient, right?

You have to actually physically haul the inventory to the public warehouse.

And when it's sold, you have to haul it back.

It's redundant storage, so on and so forth.

So we get this concept.

The concept haven't been invented yet.

Yeah.

So we get this concept of the field warehouse, right?

And here's what the field warehousing company does: they come to your factory, they put their name on your warehouse or your tanks, or your bunkers, if it's some kind of bulk

product.

They hire some of your staff to do periodic inspections of the merchandise.

Now the inventory is easily on hand

and it can also function as collateral.

and there are definitely

fucking corrupt

and there's definitely no conflicts of interest in the structure whatsoever so hypothetically right i have six tanks full of vegetable oil and a little bit of benzene for spice right yeah i want to financialize these i go to a field warehousing company they come out they paint their name on all the tanks they hire my employees to like watch the tanks yeah reporting to them and then i say to my employees do you want a second Cadillac?

If so, pump all of the vegetable oil out of these and continue selling it as normal and tell them that they're still full.

And then I can, like,

I can financialize a fraudulent asset that I'm still like extracting.

Yeah, you're way ahead of us.

I'm not a financial genius.

I don't have a lot of corporate instincts like that.

I came up with that off the dome instinctively on hearing the concept.

You can go further.

We're going to go further than that.

Because I'm thinking, like, Tino DeAngelis is smarter than me, at least on things like this.

And like, if I'm minute one hearing about this, like, I could steal from these motherfuckers so easily, then I guarantee you this guy heard them coming from down the block.

There's a lot of trust in this relationship.

Or bribery, I imagine.

Yeah.

Let's talk about American Express.

It's the credit card that is sometimes accepted.

Yeah, exactly.

American Express was like a bigger going concern in like the 50s.

Um, American Express, of course, emerged from uh one of the several um express companies that was originally a lot of it was uh forwarding uh

freight on like baggage cars on passenger trains um but eventually american express mostly does financial services at this point you know there was american express they did credit cards they did um Travelers checks.

Yeah, I was a bad person.

I was a very cheap English.

They spun out into Lehman Brothers, I think.

Oh, hey, I remember those guys.

I wonder what they're up to.

Yeah.

Go to money order, stuff like that.

Yeah, American Express did a lot of it.

They were big, respected businesses at the time.

It's not like now where it's just like, yeah, the credit card that doesn't get accepted anywhere.

So Tino needs more money so he can cause more problems.

So he signs a contract

for me every day of my fucking life.

Yeah.

Tino signs a contract with American Express Fieldware

And Field Warehousing was not American Express's main line of business.

It was very much a sideline of business.

They'd never made money off of it.

I think they just started the division in like the 30s.

It just never took off.

Right.

Side hustle, you know.

Sometimes it's like podcasts.

You know, you start five and like maybe one's like successful and you stick with that one.

You know, yeah.

Tino was going to change all of that.

He would become, he would have the most extensive and enthusiastic use of warehouse receipts of any account the company had.

Another sort of warning sign for the auditor, there, typically.

Yeah.

If you are making money in this field and no one else is, what's how, why?

Yeah.

Now, the problem was, Tino can't get a loan, even with the warehouse receipts he gets from American Express that prove that the salad oil is there, since his meat packing company was still in bankruptcy for defrauding the government.

This is a great American businessman.

As a matter of fact, his company couldn't actually get an account with any of the big Manhattan banks.

He had to bank with a very small bank called the, I think, First National Bank of North Bergen, New Jersey.

Oh, Jesus, man.

Yeah.

Sounds like some way you get shot robbing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they, it's like, you know, that scene from the Dark Knight where they're all just.

The mob bank?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Except that they're successful.

And you are, you, if you, you know, you are left in a pile of red mist.

However,

he couldn't bank with the big Manhattan banks, but what he could, and he couldn't get loans from them for his warehouse receipts.

What he could do, and what he did, was to pass those warehouse receipts along to the shipping lines, the exporters, who would then go to the Manhattan banks and take out the loan and then send him the cash.

This is smart, but also there's like six layers of bribery there.

I'm very confused.

Sounds like

keep going.

It's fine.

I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

So by 1957, about $2 million in loans against the stored salad oil had been secured, but Tino wasn't satisfied.

You know,

he's got to expand the business rapidly, right?

He needs to.

Because otherwise, there's just a bunch of tanks full of allegedly salad oil with an Amex logo on the outside.

Right.

Exactly.

Allegedly salad oil.

This is.

It's full of something.

I believe a photo of the tank farm.

I only started finding photos like about dishes before we started.

It looks like where I want my salad oil to come from.

Hell yeah.

Let's talk about the tanks.

These were all existing tanks that Tino bought, and they were storing petroleum products.

Tino spent about a year preparing them for edible oils.

What kind of preparations did he do?

Well, you got to get in there, take the like whatever lining is on the inside out, power wash the whole thing.

Really good.

Put in a new liner

and then clean the whole thing down really thoroughly again, right?

If I'm guessing.

Maybe.

He may have done that.

Okay.

I don't think he did that.

It was a lot of work.

He did.

Yeah.

He did take advantage of a few things.

Now,

in a big tank full of any kind of oil, it's normal to have some water in there.

And the oil floats on top of the water.

Yeah,

this is from condensation and things like that right um now one thing you got to think about here is uh well let's say a tank was full of 80 sea water oh

and 20 full of salad oil oh boy would anyone really notice or care so long as the contracts are fulfilled The tank's 100% full.

You can tell.

You can bang on the side or whatever.

Yeah.

Well, there's a couple.

We'll get to the sampling devices and how they fooled them in a second.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

Is this going to be like alpha doing the like, oh, yeah, the cars are just over there.

We have to drive them all over.

Please don't notice us doing this in order to meet the obligation requirements.

Accuracy international hiring a factory for the day.

Yes,

they do do that, actually.

Yeah.

Oh, Jesus.

American Express field warehousing never really took a hard look at the tanks.

Usually Tino's men would do the sampling and measuring at the top of the tank.

call it down to the field warehouse guy who may or may not have also been on the payroll of Allied, or at least receiving kickbacks from them, right?

Um, sometimes the tanks straight up weren't full, they had to use some sleight of hand to fake the splash from the sampling device dropped in the tank.

Everyone was making money, so no one paid too much attention, right?

You just drop it into an empty tank, you hear it thunk off the bottom, and everybody just goes, Yep, it's good, cool, good.

It's good, let's go home.

You guys want subs for lunch?

Let's do this.

If someone really did want to look into it more closely, Tino would take them to tank 6006.

And kneel them over the edge.

Tank 6006 was unique.

Now, most storage tanks of this kind have something called a floating roof, right?

That is the roof of the tank rises and falls with the quantity of liquid inside.

It essentially just floats on top.

And this means that the concentration of, if you have a volatile, flammable product, like gasoline, this minimizes the air exposure, which means you can't have a situation where, you know, you have have an air-fuel mixture that causes it to spontaneously explode, right?

Now, tank 6006, though, was always full, or at least appeared to be, right?

Because tank 6006 had a hatch, had several hatches, only one of them worked, that was designed for inspecting the product.

Oh, for God's sake.

When they inspect the product, essentially they put a long tube down here, right?

And that long tube, you then draw it out,

and that sort of preserves the

liquid in such a way that you can then send it over to the chemists and they can determine what each layer of liquid is here, which would presumably be water and salad oil, right?

This tank was entirely full of seawater, as it turned out, but there was a cylinder around that hatch attached to the roof that was entirely full of salad oil.

Oh my God, this guy's a fucking genius.

I love crime.

I love this is.

What the fuck?

But yeah, so, you know, this is pure salad oil of the highest quality.

That's what the

field warehouse guys wanted to see, right?

Furthermore, all of these tanks were interconnected by a series of pipes.

The inspection was a slow process.

Tino's men held the keys to all of the tanks, including the ones that weren't technically theirs.

They were owned by the field warehousing company.

So inspectors could take a look at a few tanks.

And then Tino took them to lunch.

And while they were at lunch, Tino's men pumped the salad oil into the next tanks that were going to be looked at.

And Tino was very careful about this.

His men kept two sets of inventories, one for the inspectors and one that was real so they could actually fill with the huge orders of vegetable oil we were still getting.

This is amazing.

Why do I feel patriotic for America?

Yeah, we listen, Ronz is right.

There's nothing more patriotic you could do than ripping off your government.

Lipping off your government.

I don't know.

Yeah, lip off your government.

Come here, Abe.

I'm going to give you that whole Nancy Reagan.

Now, one of the issues with this is it required keeping around actual tanks full of product, or at least partially full of product.

This leads Tino to a new innovation.

Um, we'll bring in another company and just tell them they own tanks that they don't own.

Just, he's looking at this like very ruthlessly as like, what is an externality?

And it's like having any vegetable oil, having any like non-paper assets.

He goes to H.

Lawrence Kaufman of the Harbor Tank Company, which owned and operated several tanks in northern New Jersey, with a proposition.

You're going to lease and operate some of our tanks in Bayonne.

You're going to hire my guy, Joe Lamusio, to supervise them.

Of course he is.

And you're going to kick back a third of the storage fees to Lamuscio.

Right.

Not mob-affiliated.

Yeah.

This is kind of corrupt deal.

That's fine in the late 50s.

It's basically legal.

Kaufman agreed, and Tino took him on a tour of the tank farm to show him which tanks he'd be leasing.

He's like, ah, that one and that one and that one and that one and that one.

Kaufman was apparently not paying too close attention because all those tanks belonged to other companies.

They've just got the like Amex logo on the outside.

Taped out.

Not even Amex.

It was like, you know, a tank that belonged to like,

I don't know, the petroleum refinery next door.

So the deal still went through.

Lamuccio provided extensive false inventories to Harbor Tank.

who then proceeded to issue their own warehouse receipts, which Tino proceeded to convert into massive loans.

Eventually, Tino went so far as to lease Harbor Tank, Kaufman's company,

tanks that didn't actually exist.

Hell yeah.

Full of phantom salad oil, all of which was counted towards the company's huge line of credit.

He just has as many salad oil tanks as he needs to.

Yes.

Through these methods, Allied Refining did $166 million of business business in 1961 with the largest salad oil storage depot in the world by several orders of magnitude.

And that's so much money as well in like $1961.

$166 million?

It's like a billion or so.

Yeah.

It contained, according to the warehouse receipts, twice as much salad oil as existed in the entire country.

If the census figures were to be believed.

A thing someone could have checked at any time.

Yes.

Hi, it's Justin.

So, this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

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Back to the show.

Okay, we got to talk about commodities trading.

Oh, yeah.

This is this is the real money because like just defrauding a bank, easy.

Baby shit.

You can do this any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Inside a trade-off game.

Now we're into the real shit, which is stonks, as you say.

So certain kinds of things are commodities, right?

I think, you know, crude oil, coal lumber soybeans barley maybe salad oil right yeah hog bellies uh like oranges actually there's weirdly like uh intense laws about some of these for exactly this reason now not onions definitely not onions

some of it stuff like it's it's like a sort of like huge federal crime to like release like details of the annual like orange harvest report ahead of time, for instance, because of this.

Yeah, imagine if that was a plot point in a movie.

Yeah, right.

It could be called changing situations.

So these things are commodities are fungible, right?

So a 50-pound sack of two-row barley is, broadly speaking, interchangeable with any other 50-pound sack of two-row barley.

100 tons of anthracite stove coal is interchangeable with any other 100 tons of anthracite stove coal, right?

Introducing like non-fungible coal where the coal just has like a shitty drawing of an ape like carved into it.

Oh, that would be like the

Anthracite football in Pottsville.

There was a football.

I forget if it's Potts Town or Pottsville.

They had an NFL franchise briefly.

For non-fungible league.

Yeah.

And then someone carved them like a football out of the room.

It was Pottsville.

Pottsville Marine.

Pottsville, yeah.

And that's like the only remnant of the team is the Anthracite.

When the NFL killed them on purpose.

Yes.

The NFL is a profoundly evil organized.

They're still bitter about it.

Any number of ways.

Including this.

So now you can trade these commodities and make a bunch of money in the commodities market.

This is not simply just buying a shitload of coal and waiting for the price to go up and selling it.

That's a very slow way to make money.

What do you want to do is trade futures?

Yeah, I love futures markets.

This is, again, one of the easiest ways to get stupid rich with

a huge amount of crime and very little effort.

You can also get stupid poor.

I've already been stupid poor.

I'd like to try stupid rich.

You can get stupid.

You can have a negative net worth of several hundred million dollars.

No problem.

Yeah.

Although, to be fair, once that happens, you're in the zone of like, you know, if I owe the bank, you know,

a million dollars, then I have a problem.

If I owe the bank $100 million, the bank has a problem.

Yep, this is true.

So, a future contract where I agree to purchase some amount of

a commodity.

I'm not very good with this, by the way.

I had to call up some people.

No, the explanation is very, very, very good.

You can also read Terry Pratchett's book, Feet of Clay,

for like a sort of like hypothetical explanation of futures markets.

So, I like to buy 500 tons of soybeans for a certain price at a certain time in the future, right?

Now, I've made a bet with the seller and the bet is this if the market price of soybeans is up then i get 500 tons of soybeans at a steep discount the market price goes down then the seller has just sold 500 tons of soybeans to some sucker for well above market price right yeah yes old-timey country hustle despite the fact that this all happens on a trading floor uh between two people who are never going to ever see a soybean in their life exactly yeah i don't have room in my apartment to store 500 tons of soybeans.

So what I've really done is make sort of a deal with the seller to pay the difference in the price in lieu of actual physical delivery.

And I can do this with any commodity I want, which is why futures trading is great if you have some kind of inside information on any industry, except for onions and movie tickets, which makes you go to jail.

Yeah.

I mean, the sort of like dirty secret of all this is that most trading is insider trading on some level.

It's just about how you choose to insert.

It's just taking the sneer off here.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And like, this is a quite abstracted financial instrument that bears very little relation to like your actual soybeans or hog bellies or orange juice or whatever the fuck.

It's always those old wives' tales about a commodities trader like forgetting that, you know,

this futures contract actually stipulates delivery and then they wind up with a barge of coal they don't know what to do with.

There's a really interesting article by a financial reporter who tried to buy like one barrel of oil on like on the oil market and found that it was like basically impossible to do because those things aren't connected to production.

You can roll up to a refinery with your own barrel and like fill a barrel of oil.

Yeah, exactly.

But like if you you can't buy it through an oil market, even though the nominal purpose of that is buying and selling oil because that's not what it's for.

Exactly.

It's like, you know, you can

you can have a coal mine and all that coal goes on a train to the power plant and it changes hands 4,700 times on the way to the power plant.

Exactly.

It doesn't change anything.

It still goes to the power plant.

Yes.

Yeah.

And anyway, past performance does not guarantee future returns.

Any investment can lose money.

Do not try and day trade on this.

Leave this kind of dark art to its practitioners, right?

So when honest and dishonest graft aren't enough, you get into soybean futures.

Yeah, it's like the three kinds of

kind of like states of truth.

Truth, lies, and futures markets,

which is like lying too.

Yes.

So most of his salad oil was made of soybeans.

So naturally, Tino went long on soybean futures.

Lots and lots of soybean futures.

That's where like a good chunk of his ill-gotten money went.

You know, bets that the price of soybeans would go up.

Furthermore, he thought he could manipulate the market.

He does own twice as much salad oil as existed.

It's what we call a monopoly.

So, Tino sets up several accounts with several commodity brokerage firms to make it look like a lot of people were bidding up the price of soybeans, right?

Monopsidy?

Yes.

Yeah,

I think it is a monopsidity, yeah.

Yeah, it might be a monopsid monopoly monopoly because he is both buyer and seller.

Yeah, he's buying all.

He is a monopsony, but he's serving another monopsony, which is the government.

Yes.

Christ on sale.

He's just a middleman.

Atlas shrugged assent.

Yeah.

This is like 30 pages deep into John Galt's speech in front of the UN or whatever.

He was sure.

that new big orders would come through the Food for Peace program soon since there were, you know, starving children in Africa who needed salad oil right cool sure um yeah so tino and his friend sam engel who is one of the tank watchers set up accounts in the name of over 200 people as well as more than a few dummy corporations right

um

and they approach among other firms uh the brokerage firm era hopt and company right

Ira Hopt is not in the futures business.

They didn't know very much about the futures business.

It was mostly full of young go-getters, and the company was in the midst of a massive expansion.

So these young go-getters are like, Yeah, let's get a new client who's going to fuck it.

Let's go.

The senior partners did not want to do business with Tino.

They were like, This guy's, what are you guys thinking of?

We shouldn't do that.

But Tino drove a hard bargain.

He said the banks loved him.

They're like, We've done business.

We've been in business for a long time.

Come on, be our futures broker.

Come on.

You want to do it?

Don't you want to do it?

Yeah, you want to do it.

The banks even came around to convince the firm.

And Tino now had a broker for his massive futures position.

And he paid for the margin, the collateral.

I'm not entirely certain how this part works.

The brokerage.

The brokerage.

He paid for the brokerage in warehouse receipts.

Oh, okay.

Just like leveraged to the hilt on entirely like fictitious assets and being like, hey, in order to financialize these fictitious assets, I'm going to pay you you in.

Check this shit out.

Fictitious assets.

Yes.

That's a software.

In 1962, Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining took in $320 million

and managed to spend $319 million of that.

Don't back down.

Double down.

Triple down.

Quintuple down.

Keep spending.

Keep spending.

This is my man is like.

machine off seven seven antis deep on a Bellatro run where the numbers are getting up into like inexpressible other than through like standard form

and just being like, yeah, fuck it, keep going.

More, more, more of this, more of this.

Yeah, gimme, gimme, gimme.

My ship's going to come in.

So the money was rushing in and out, just it rushing in and then rushing out just as quickly, straight into futures contracts.

And Tino was losing money on all of them.

But he was sure that one day Food for Peace would secure a massive export deal.

But until then, he was holding his precarious position, but he still needed more money.

Oh, you got to invent more tanks at that point.

Got to like three times the amount of salad oil that exists.

He turns to industrial scale check kiting.

God, geez.

This guy, this guy, he's, he's like,

it's like virtuoso stuff because he goes on to a whole new scam that I didn't even like conceive of.

He doesn't like just stick with the one.

He's got like a lot of strings together.

He's diversified.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So despite the swindle, Allied Refining did actually refine and export salad oil.

One of the biggest accounts was Bunge and Born, which is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Yeah, this is before the Nazis.

So like all the like

Anglos in Argentina are just like

disaffected English people who are just like named Bunge or whatever, who are just like, yeah, I fucking own a salad oil business or whatever.

I think Bunge is still around, actually.

Oh, it survived us.

They were one of these exporters that were taking Tino's warehouse receipts and then loaning him money, right?

They had this friendly business-type arrangement because Allied was frequently behind on loan payments.

But Bunge was fine with that and would delay cashing Allied's checks, but they charged interest for this.

Furthermore, they also sold Tino their own warehouse receipts.

Oh, for God's sakes, man, come on.

Which the exchanges took as collateral for futures contracts.

Tino needed an inside man, and he found one in the form of James Katerina, a clerk in the financial department.

Now, Bunge isn't a stupid company, right?

They demanded payment in cashiers' checks.

from the manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company because they were concerned about the small size of Allied's bank, the First National Bank of North Bergen.

Yeah, the vibe I get from Bunge is sort of like smart mark, you know?

Yeah.

Normally, the transaction would go as follows.

If Allied were paying Bunge, the North Bergen bank would call up Manufacturers Hanover.

Manufacturers Hanover would issue a cashier's check and would simultaneously bill First National Bank of North Bergen, who would deduct the amount from Allied's account.

Thus,

you couldn't write a check and have someone sit on it.

It's a cashier's check, right?

The transaction is instant or nearly instant.

Oh, oh, fuck.

Just, I'm detecting a slight latency into which Tino DeAngelis is going to insert his entire dick and balls.

Yes.

Okay.

The fatal flaw in this arrangement was that the cashier's check was delivered by an Allied refining courier, and the manufacturer's Hanover bank was across the street from the Bunge offices in Manhattan.

Here's how you check kite on an industrial scale.

Yeah, let's hear it.

You just told me:

the Allied courier picked up a $1 million cashier's check from Manufacturers Hanover, ran across the street, gave it to the Bunge Vegetable Oil Office.

This check would quickly make its way to Katarina for a ship swift deposit, right?

Katarina would then excuse himself to the men's room where the allied courier was.

Yeah.

They exchanged the $1 million cashier's check for a $1 million Allied check.

Katarina then went back to his desk and put the Allied check in the drawer.

The courier would race across the street back to manufacturers Hanover Bank and tell them the deal was off.

The cashier's check had not been used all before the North Bergen bank had been contacted.

Then Katarina would wait for the signal to deposit the check months later, if at all.

How long, O Katerina, must thou test our patience?

Katarina compensated for the missing funds by juggling the company's funds around its several bank accounts, and Katarina never held back more than three checks at a time.

So the kiting was hard to notice in a company as large as Bunge, right?

It's not hard.

It's not hard if you're like manufacturer's Hanover because you have a guy come sprinting in every time from the same company, being like, you got to cancel this shit right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They sometimes did this twice in one day.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I mean, I'll say this: the courier is getting a lot of cardio in.

Like, he's doing fucking wins, but he's doing the bleep test between

two buildings.

So, um,

but the futures market, despite how much the Tino has invested in it, is still looking pretty bleak, but he has one hope:

the Soviet Union.

Hope for all of us, hope for humanity.

Do you want the massively annoying and loud Soviet Union drop?

Obviously.

Of course.

Yeah, these guys.

So, yeah, the thing about having a massive futures position like Tino's is that if the price drops, you get screwed.

Tino couldn't afford this in 1963.

He needed those massive food for peace contracts now.

But harvests were bountiful and the world was satiated.

Everything is already like oiled up sufficiently.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's like, oh, shit, we invented GMOs.

Now everyone can eat.

Damn.

So Tino starts a rumor.

The Soviet Union had been somewhat excluded from Food for Peace because of communism, you know, but they were in active talks to buy American wheat.

This is the Khrushchev Thor Thor stuff, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, so perhaps maybe they also need salad oil.

Yeah, who doesn't?

Yeah, exactly.

Just like, you know, as the banner says in the middle, they're forward to the victory of communism, but it's like, you know, but that has to be lubricated.

The road to like communism has to be lubricated with Western salad oil occasionally.

Exactly, exactly.

Tino's precarious position became more credible in the eyes of traders, even if he himself knew it was all built on rumors.

In fact, he knew that the USSR had just exported a shitload of sunflower oil to Spain, which had, by the way, denied him a Spanish salad oil contract, which he blamed the Opus Day for.

Yeah.

He thought Opus Day had a personal grudge against

the rucible beef.

Yeah, Opus Day very in with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yeah.

But, okay, salad oil, soybean oil, the futures prices were up at this point, right?

He could have started started backing out of his position at this point, but Tino DeAngelis decided that no, that's the coward's way out.

Well, also, if you try and back out of it, people might start asking questions.

Like, you have to go forward with some of this.

I have to go forward.

I have to go.

I have to corner the market.

So, Era Hopton Company is still being paid in warehouse receipts for an increasingly elaborate tank farm, which existed entirely in Tino DeAngelis's mind palace, right?

Mind full of salad oil.

Yeah.

These were in turn presented to the banks as collateral for Allied Refining's increasingly precarious futures position in October of 1963.

He drove the price of soybean oil contracts from $5,520 to $6,180.

On paper, his contracts were worth $160 million.

He stepped up the check kiting.

He started taking personal loans.

The problem was with this level of exposure, just a one-cent drop in the price of

soybean oil would put Allied on the hook for $13,500,000 in margin within 24 hours.

That's bad.

Don't do that.

Of course, again, all of Allied's money was fake, and all that fake money had already been spent.

And no one wanted to buy salad oil at such exorbitant prices except maybe the Russians in Tino's head.

He was a poor dumb asshole.

A partner for Era Hopton Company, who had been skeptical of Tino from the start, named Fred Barton, he returned from a European vacation on November 11th.

He took one look at the books and said, We got to shut this thing down, guys.

This is really bad.

So they froze Tino's ability to buy, and his other brokers became nervous.

By November 15th, they couldn't buy any futures at all.

It's over.

It's fucking over.

It's so dragging over.

Oh, but it gets so over so quickly.

Hold on one second.

I'm just thinking about how badly you're like fucked at this point.

Like you owe infinity amounts of money as a company that owns and makes very little on a...

commodity

on whose futures you are extremely leveraged on the back of a bunch of checks that are going to come due at any point now.

Yes.

Beautiful.

It's beautiful.

So what followed were some desperate attempts on Friday, November 15th to prop up the price of soybean oil involving the various dummy accounts.

It failed miserably.

Allied

owed a massive amount of money,

$5.1 million to Error Hopton Company alone.

Furthermore, the Commodity Exchange Authority had just started poking around as an attempt to to corner the market.

Now, the big problem here is attempting to corner the market is legal.

It's not illegal until you actually do it.

Oh, what is they don't give him a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry, do they?

Exactly, exactly.

Now, Allied's man at Bunge.

Katzerina.

Katzerina, yeah, had quit his job that same day.

Smart guy.

Yeah, and on that day, he deposited $3 million in kited checks.

Never mind.

I called my shot a little too early, huh?

With the price of soybean oil falling, Tino's warehouse receipts were rapidly losing value.

He could see no way out except maybe to flee the country.

So on that Sunday...

I should have done that a long time ago.

Yeah, you know,

you got to give you a little bit of soybean.

You got to...

Yeah, exactly.

Defect.

You could still defect.

On that Sunday,

he didn't drop the bankruptcy petition himself.

He had one of his men do it.

Now, bankruptcy petitions require a financial statement listing the company's assets and liabilities.

And Allied's main asset was all the stuff you did.

Exactly.

Allied's main asset was Mind Palace salad oil tanks.

And this caused a lot of consternation in the offices of Allied Refining.

In the meantime, the brokers needed their cash.

Tino's cronies who had done the dummy trading also needed to be paid off.

This was achieved with warehouse receipts and bad checks, respectively.

Sounds like a Warren's Even song.

Big fan.

Tino's bankruptcy petition, which failed to mention any of the company's assets at all, was so bad it was rejected by the courts.

Just written in crayon to say, I'm bankrupt.

I have no money, frowny face.

Word got down to the commodity trading floors, though, that Allied was declaring bankruptcy.

All hell broke loose the price of soybean oil cratered and then Bunge found out that $3 million of checks that they thought had been deposited months ago had bounced whoops

chaos also reigned at Ira Hopton Company the brokerage firm they were now owed uh 14 million dollars by allied refining that they would in turn pay directly to the exchanges They managed to get a day loan from a bank to pay the exchanges, which is not strictly legal.

And then they had to get an overnight loan to pay for the day loan, pledging the customer stocks as collateral, which is more illegal.

Oh, no, don't do that.

These guys just decided to have their own little sideline into financial crimes.

This was done

surreptitiously without the managing partner, Morton Kamerman, knowing anything about it because he would have put a stop to that instantly.

You can't do that.

Tino still tried to convince Hopton Company that he would solve it and promised and delivered more warehouse receipts.

The difference was that unlike the previous American Express warehouse receipts, which were for fake oil but guaranteed by Amex, this one was just a forgery.

Just again, crayon.

Just straight up.

I have all the salad oil.

Yeah.

Bunge was suspicious about the bounce checks.

Finally, someone had the temerity to actually go check the damn tanks themselves.

A vice president checked with Amex Warehousing was confused when the company told them that the VP himself had ordered the transfer of oil out of the tanks several weeks ago.

In the meantime, Bunge's inspectors arrived on property and checked the Ford tanks with their product, and they were empty, empty, half empty, and one was full of something.

Oh, this is seawater.

Piss.

Yeah, it's piss.

American Express arrived on the scene and tried to find the damn oil.

Tino was nowhere to be found.

I hope in the course of some of this, he invested in a pair of good running shoes.

I don't think it's going to help him.

It was only Tuesday, right?

Late that afternoon, Allied successfully petitioned for bankruptcy.

The second time's the charm.

I presume you actually list the assets at that point, which are

oil tank full of piss.

Yeah, air.

Air Hopton Company is in a bleak situation.

Another brokerage firm, Williston and Bean.

They all have these just dumbass names.

I don't know the answer to that.

They were another broker for Allied and the dummy companies.

They were also threatened with insolvency when Tino's bad check bounced.

Both Hopton Company and Williston and Bean were suspended from trading.

Both assured their customers they were solvent or almost solvent.

After all, they got all these warehouse receipts that very nearly cover their liabilities, right?

It was beginning to become a major scandal, though, that was sending panic through the markets, right?

Two major brokerage firms were almost taken out by a vegetable oil guy.

Come on.

What happens when you don't do your due diligence, you know?

Then on Thursday, November 21st, 1963, Bunge came out publicly and said there was, in fact, no vegetable oil.

They filed a lawsuit against American Express.

Hold on, hold on.

Read me that date again thursday november 21st 1963 put a pin in that you know what my favorite stephen king book is yeah yeah we're gonna we're gonna get there i think so the media you know they're they're starting to they're they're starting to pick up on this they're trying to go down to the tank farm they're trying to get pictures over the fence you know so no one will let them in this is going to be the biggest story of the week though this insane salad

yes it absolutely is it's all anyone's going to be talking about story of the year 1963.

air hopt and company was uh their customers are trying to close their accounts but they can't because trading is suspended just 20 700 people's life savings hanging in the balances you know just like there's only one thing i can think to do to get the heat off me i gotta call my friend i gotta in texas

there was hope however that friday would bring better news and cooler heads would prevail and that somehow despite hops now 37 million dollars in liabilities their customers could be be made whole.

Speaking of made whole.

Yeah.

Yeah, made whole.

So

November 22nd, 1963.

For viewers listening without the benefit of the slideshow, we are looking at a picture of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

What might say moments before disaster?

Moments before his head just did that.

Yeah, before he was killed by the Russian Cuban CIA mafia Teamsters.

Go watch the bonus episode on that.

Yeah, yeah.

Listen to the Warren Commission.

The official narrative is 100% believable.

Yeah, this is the original Kennedy before the reverse Kennedy.

And

you have to imagine.

Few is the number of people who are still thinking about salad oil as they watch the president's head explode.

Yes.

In fact, this actually closed trading.

Force majeure, you know?

So in the meantime, you know, everyone gets the news.

Okay, Kennedy's dead.

The markets plunge.

Right.

In the meantime, American Express was inspecting the tanks.

Just like, I got to go to work on the fucking salad oil tank farm in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Yeah.

The creditors had already hired E.W.

Seybolt and Company.

And they did an independent inspection, which was much better than the American Express inspection.

And what they found in the tanks was disgusting.

Yeah, it was piss, dude.

It's late, no, it's worse than that.

Oh, God, it's piss and benzene.

Yeah, it's in late November.

Most of the oil in the tanks and congealed and frozen.

The tank heaters didn't work.

Eventually, they resorted to just cracking open the frozen mass and found that just below the surface was liquid, seawater, straight from Kil Van Cole, which is a little passage that links the Hudson River to,

whatchamacallit, Newark Bay.

Below the water was something only described as sludge.

Super sludge, yes.

Surveyors also found tanks that were supposed to be full of salad oil instead full of gasoline or acidulated soap stock, straight up seawater, and of course, more sludge.

They could not find the Harbor Tank Company's tanks, nor could they find anyone who worked there.

All of those guys just took those Cadillacs and drove to Mexico, and God bless them.

Yeah.

They were right to do it.

Yeah.

Another brokerage firm that Allied had paid in warehouse receipts, D.R.

Comenzo, was suspended from trading, and Ira Hopton Company was liquidated.

Number of brokerage firms taken out up to three at this point.

Yes.

Also, JFK's skull.

Don't forget about that.

Yeah.

It's weird how Oswald took

three brokerage firms to kill him, even though he was a trained brokerage

arbitrator.

It took another week.

It took another week to figure out how much oil there was, how much oil there wasn't, and how much oil there was supposed to be.

And what the hell that sludge was.

Yeah.

Allied's remaining stocks in the tank,

stock of oil, obviously, it was impounded by the FBI.

Various steamers that were coming to pick up oil were turned away.

Ships en route to Allied refining with cargo were left steaming in circles until a new buyer could be found.

The Census Bureau ceased publishing statistics about salad oil entirely.

That was the kind of death of American innocence.

You know, it was never the same country after that.

I remember that time.

Something just broke.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everybody remembered where they were when the Census Bureau said that they were going to stop publishing

salad oil stats.

This month's salad oil stats, we're just not going to publish.

Attino finally appeared in bankruptcy court on Wednesday, November 27th, having hired counsel only an hour before

and just pled the fifth to everything.

So it was a solid strategy, you know?

Yeah.

Shut the fuck up Friday.

Yeah.

Shut the fuck up Wednesday in this guy's case.

Allied refining was completely out of money and couldn't even cover day-to-day expenses.

Creditors started revving up to go after American Express.

This is why you can't use their credit cards yeah on december 2nd the wall street journal finally reported the reality of the salad oil situation fully 1.8 billion pounds of salad oil never existed wow

miraculous this man invented more salad oil than you could ever even conceive about it was also my god he's greasy like well that's his job yeah he's an oily man like

So to make a very long story short, if I hadn't been fighting with my two refrigerators yesterday, I'd have put more detail here, but I was distracted.

Anyway, so Tino's

to answer the listener questions.

Yeah, well, the beer fridge started working before the main fridge did.

Thank God.

Yeah.

Tino's fraud was uncovered.

He winds up in this lengthy criminal trial.

It has a bunch of twists and turns involving Swiss bank account, Allied's petty cash expenses,

Tino's mistress.

The real question of just how the hell he spent all of that money anyway.

No one could figure out what happened to all the money.

Because even considering all the futures contracts and the fact that the business was run at a loss,

it's just really hard to spend all that money.

It's just in his mattress or something.

It's in Krugerands.

It was sent to like his other companies, which send it to his friends' companies, so on and so forth.

Oh, he did get his,

he did get his meat packing company back at some point before this.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Because

the creditors are like, well, look, he's such a good businessman.

Maybe we should put him back in charge, even though he went bankrupt from defrauding the government.

I love

it.

Yeah.

The only thing that could really be pinned down was like $500,000 in a Swiss bank account.

Every time the trustees tried to track down a lead as to where the money went, they found a drained bank account.

Eventually is convicted of fraud and conspiracy.

He goes to jail for seven years.

That's, I mean,

it's, it's both, it's a lot and it's not a lot, you know?

Yeah.

Is it a crime to destroy three brokerage firms or is it praxis?

I don't think anyone's particularly sympathetic here.

These everyone involved is a crook.

The author, the author who keep in mind works for Wall Street Journal or worked for Wall Street Journal is like, no, no one's sympathetic here.

They're all idiots.

so the creditors try to go after american express american express tries to cover its ass it was true that american express had sold off the field warehousing division shortly before the scandal that didn't matter most of the swindle was done under ame's lack of watch right but since big finance is

yeah big finance is a big club This sort of proceeded slowly.

It proceeded out of court.

It was, especially the big creditors were like kind of amicable about it.

They're like, well, you know, you pay us when you pay us.

It's just generates a vote too bad.

It generates a lot of lawyers' fees, you know.

Yes, exactly.

Some of the small creditors had been swindled by

DeAngelis Grumbled, and eventually Amex agreed to pay $60 million out of the between $85 million and

$139 million of warehouse receipts owed.

That was nice of them.

Because

no one was sure which ones were real and which ones were fraudulent.

I mean, it was all fraudulent, but some was more fraudulent than other ones.

Eventually, those angry creditors went on to successfully sue Lawrence Warehousing Company, which had bought the Amex warehousing subsidiary, except for the tank farm.

Smart.

They sued it for $9 million and put it out of business, despite the fact they had nothing to do with this whatsoever.

Fuck them.

um american express stock drops upon settlement of the case uh warren buffett swoops in and buys five percent and that's one of the ways he makes his fortune huh uh tino ultimately got away with swindling the banks out of 180 million dollars which is about 1.8 billion dollars today um he got out of prison in 1972 on parole and started a cattle ponzi scheme for him well like a Ponzi scheme that like defrauds castle Well,

he was.

I'm not entirely certain how that one worked.

There were like two cattle ranching companies that he pitted against each other.

I'm not sure.

Dude, Drock.

I guess he died in 2009.

He's born in 1915.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Hell of a rod, man.

Yeah.

Died at the age of what, 94?

No, that can't be right.

94, yeah.

I'm so bad at mouth.

And that's, that's the story of the salad oil scandal.

Which we managed to stretch out to two hours.

It's a good story.

It's a good story.

It's fun, yeah.

This has been a beautiful moment in American capitalism, you know?

I believe

this is one of the greatest stories ever told.

This man can rise from nothing.

to defraud the banks out of $1.8 billion.

And listen, like capitalism might ruin the lives and crush the dreams of untold billions of people, but it does produce stories like this.

Yes.

Communism is not as funny.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

They would have sent him through like a gulag or done some kind of like commissar bullshit, you know?

Yeah.

Here it's like, ah, seven years.

All right, you're out.

You can do a Ponzi ski, and that's not even illegal yet.

I'm never going to look at salad oil the same way.

Exactly.

Well, what do we learn?

We should do fraud.

Yeah, we should

get rich, get stupid rich by defrauding the federal government to American Express and the federal government and just a whole bunch of other people.

Today, you have to do it with like apps and shit.

I don't want to do that.

I would rather

see the salad oil.

Have you ever seen those spam emails we get that are just like, have you thought about developing an app for your podcast?

I'm just like, what would that even look like?

What are you talking about?

What would a podcast app look like?

Yeah.

I mean, we

harvests and sells all of your data.

All of it.

Give it to us.

Well, it's just,

you know, you can do various drops from the podcast.

That's kind of worth it.

Yeah.

I think we might pay for that.

And obviously then we get all of their data.

All your information.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there's your problem podcast wants to make and receive phone calls.

Exactly.

I have to use your phone number to call up my broker about a soybean oil future.

Which we need.

Give us a result.

this is the thing that I'm always curious about, and I say this without any kind of self-interest or criminal motive, probably.

Um, you hear about these things, and they're always like tremendously successful with a guy, and then you know, they go to prison or whatever.

And you think, is that a loophole that they've closed now, or could you get Stupid Rich doing the same thing again?

Like, file the serial numbers off, do the exact same scam?

And would that work?

Do you reckon?

Um, we have to figure out what that pair of jeans are.

One way to find out at her.

I need that pair of jeans.

So, like,

I might get into maybe the canola industry or something.

We have a lot of podcasts in storage.

We could probably get warehouse receipts.

This one's recorded.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Don't worry about it.

Exactly.

We just shift the same WAV files around in between different folders.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Start using the web files that we record locally as extra stock, you know?

Oh, you don't want those.

There's a lot of bags bangs and boops in here.

Devin is doing the Lord's work.

Oh, I mean, impeccable stuff.

This is true.

Um, all right, so I guess with that, um, everyone should remember: uh, uh, defrauding the government is fun and easy profit, anyway.

This does not construe legal advice.

Please don't do that.

Yeah, um, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

Yes.

Yay, Liam, and hello, Devin, November, Justin, and possible guests.

Nope.

It's a pretty good effort, but you fell out the last hurdle, you know?

Yeah.

I'm an engineer at a nuclear power plant.

Sweet Jesus lives.

Strong opening.

This is the story of the time we had to buy all the underwear at our local Walmart.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

I'm fucking invested.

Let's hear it.

We fucked up so bad all of us shit and pissed ourselves.

I did not include any slides, so please feel free to insert any generic nuclear power photos and cartoons that you find suitable to go along with this story.

As I see, you have done.

Yes.

Power plant was recently shut down for a routine refueling outage.

Approximately one-third of the uranium rod assemblies in the reactor core had to be removed and new assemblies added, so we could continue another 18-month long run.

To perform this work, the head of the reactor vessel had to be unbolted and set aside.

A refueling crane crane then shuffles fuel assemblies around.

This is all performed under about 10 feet of water so that the workers above do not become irradiated.

That's important.

Additionally, there were many other maintenance jobs being performed by several dozen workers in the reactor building.

One of those workers included me measuring something for some future project that never ended up being installed.

You're in the background of like Dr.

No's lab.

You're like working on the fucking death ray.

This is one of those people.

You're not working on the death array.

You're working on like a ladder that's going to make maintenance on the death ray a little easier.

Super villain bank work, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're like, well, you know, it would be easier to calibrate this machine if we could get a man over here.

One of the byproducts of uranium fission is iodine-131.

This is a radioactive gas with a half-life of about eight days.

This half-life is in the sweet spot to be short enough to adversely affect your health if exposed, but long enough that the gas will persist for a few weeks before decaying completely.

When the reactor head is lifted, some of this gas is released into the building.

Where you have a kind of like radioactive ghost, the building is like haunted for a week or so.

To reduce iodine gas in the building, several air filter fan units are mounted around the perimeter of the reactor.

These must be set up and wired in at the beginning of the refueling outage before the other work starts.

This is an undesirable job because the reactor building is still very hot, very humid, and has an elevated background radiation rate.

Naturally, the job to install the filters usually goes the electrician with the least seniority and experience.

Dishonorable should be the guy with the most, you know.

On this particular day, I was in the reactor building.

and observed that the reactor head was about to be lifted from the reactor vessel.

Being aware that the dose rates in the building were about to go up, I decided this would be a good time to exit and check on a project in a different building.

Yeah.

Funny that they didn't like tell you about this.

You just look over and see them like cracking open the reactor.

I'm gonna go.

I don't want to deal with this.

Yeah, now I am going on break.

Yeah.

Upon exiting the reactor building, I had to remove and discard my outer anti-contamination jumpsuit, gloves, hard hat cover, and boot covers.

Then I had to pass through a series of radiation detectors.

These detectors are to ensure that you do not inadvertently carry radioactive particles out of the building with you.

These detectors are very sensitive.

Many workers have been known to lose shirts and shoes that must be confiscated and appropriately destroyed if contaminated.

Oh, my Adidas.

They're just like shredding them.

Yeah.

I think they got it.

I don't think they shred them.

I think you have to like put them in a barrel full of concrete.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, you're right.

That's like, yeah, it's like hot waste.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

This is just a pair of like perfectly like fresh Nikes just being welded into a barrel.

Yeah, fucking fucking dump a barrel full of Air Jordans.

Dunks, y'all, get ready for dumps.

Yeah, what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us, and it's just a little graphic of an Air Jordan.

Fortunately, I passed through the radiation detectors without issue.

You always want to do that.

Key ticket.

Unfortunately, short.

Shortly after I exited, one worker after another started setting the detectors off.

When this occurs, a radiation control technician waves a Geiger counter wand around you to try and find the location of the radiation particles on your clothes and body.

More unfortunately, the Geiger counter was detecting low levels of radiation emitting from every body part of the workers.

This was a telltale sign of iodine-131 gas contamination.

These contaminated workers were not allowed to leave the plant.

This is for the safety of the workers and the general public.

This is the great thing about nuclear power, right?

Is that sometimes the safety stuff is like, oh, this is genuinely, like, existentially terrifying.

And the other is like, oh, you got to stay at work like indefinitely.

This is for the safety of the workers and the general public, and this is to prevent radioactive material from getting outside the plant.

The typical process is for contaminated workers to change into new clothing, usually new underwear and hospital scrubs, and then sit in front of a fan until all the gas blows off.

Price on sale.

With more and more workers setting off the detectors, the radiation control area was rapidly becoming quite crowded, and the radiation control techs were starting to panic while the magnitude of the situation was unfolding.

That last bit is a sentence I never want to hear.

An investigation was quickly convened as it was discovered that the air filter fans were all wired backwards.

Just hot boxing the fucking reactor.

This is why you should get the guy with the most experience to do it.

So the fans were, in fact, blowing particles on the filters back into the reactor building.

Uh-huh.

Yep.

The air filters were quickly shut down, but the damage had been done.

Approximately 50 workers were contaminated with iodine gas.

They were all moved to the lunchroom where they were told they could not go home until they were no longer radioactive.

Is it like an after-school detention until you stop being radioactive?

You'll have to stay stay here.

They also told that all of their clothing would be confiscated and destroyed.

On the scale of like radiation exposures, right?

Where one end is you turn into the like melty popsicle from Chernobyl and the other end is like nothing.

This is pitched at the low end, but fuck if it's not irritating.

It's like, yeah, we have to like weld your clothes into a barrel.

I'm sorry.

You're radioactive.

I have to remove and destroy all your clothing.

That pickup line never works.

No, it doesn't work.

Yeah, it doesn't work.

In the club with the Geiger counter.

Oh, listen here, ma'am.

Please stay in the containment room.

This was a problem because the plant's storeroom quickly ran out of scrubs and underwear.

Oh, boy.

All this news was generally not well received.

No.

Most of the workers were out-of-state contractors and wanted nothing more than to leave and never come back again.

I was recruited to pass out water bottles and to switch on the TVs to a movie channel in an attempt to prevent mutiny.

Yeah, fair.

This did not ease the mood.

The plant manager sent his secretary to the nearest Walmart with instructions to purchase their full inventory of underwear and undershirts.

I can only imagine what the Walmart workers must have thought.

He's just like, take the nuclear power plant's card, just go buy everything,

come back with a U-Haul.

Full of underwear, yeah.

Well, you know,

just a bunch of like lightly radioactive guys sitting in a lunchroom wearing like animal kigarumis and just fuming.

Meanwhile, in the quarantine lunchroom, the situation was tense.

Most were visibly upset.

A few sat quietly in the back, occasionally glaring at plant management.

Others were more vocal and would colorfully shout out their displeasure until red in the face.

Yeah, while you're radioactive, there's nothing you can you have to stay in the

containment room.

You have to stay in the shame cube.

Go with the shame cube.

Go with your hole.

Radiation control techs cycled workers through the radiation detectors.

Some were allowed to leave after an hour or two.

Others had to stay all night into the early morning.

Eventually everyone off-gassed and were allowed to leave in their new underwear to their homes and hotel rooms.

No one received a radiation dose greater than what the government permits.

Oh,

the air filter fans were rewired and turned back on.

The reactor was refueled, and life went on.

This is a radiation safety success story.

This is the shit that you have to do every day to prevent like atrocity is sometimes you have to hold a couple of dozen guys hostage in a lunchroom while someone goes.

Just a bunch of nude men in the lunchroom.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, I got a sausage delivery for you.

Naked, radioactive man

in your area.

A low-level Dr.

Manhattan.

Just all the Dr.

Manhattan, like re re-sort of cohering himself bits, but it's like I saw 50 to 60 naked men in the cafeteria.

Angry naked men.

Angry naked men.

Ask me about my Saturdays.

This one was beautiful.

Thank you so much for sending it in.

Yeah.

Keep up the good work.

Love the show from Ryan Redacted, P.E.

Thanks, Ryan Redacted.

Thank you, Ryan Redacted.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be about the nude angry men at Chernobyl.

Yeah, there's some real nude.

I mean, the problem is Chernobyl, they didn't have like a nearby Walmart.

It's the main problem.

Exactly, exactly.

If the Soviet Union had focused more on consumer goods, this would not have been a problem.

You didn't see a bunch of nude angry men in the break room because they weren't that.

It's haunted by ghosts of nude angry men.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

No, I'm good.

Listen to all the other podcasts, please.

Yeah, yeah.

Listen to podcasts.

It's good for you.

Yeah.

We need to develop more social relationships because you're

yeah, because

you don't have any friends in real life.

Give me money.

I need it.

Give her money.

Me money now.

Me needing a lot of money now.

All right.

Bye, everybody.

All right.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Oh, that was really good, guys.

That genuinely might be an Alzheimer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Feel very positively about it.

How do I stop this thing?

Oh, fuck my ass.