Inexplicable Crimetown Review: Ethical Mobsters

The gold medal haircut [right].

From now on, I’m going to be discussing the contents of Crimetown episodes, and specifically, spoiling the episodes. So, if you still aren’t following along, I’d recommend catching up on the past episodes. They’re usually in 30 minute chunks, and I highly recommend them!

The sixth episode of Crimetown is probably the strongest of the season so far, and not surprisingly, it’s because it stars D&D player and former mobster Jerry Tillinghast. Again, it’s the usage of the show’s audio clips and interviews that makes the 35-minute runtime so compelling, as you can hear the weariness and sadness in his voice.

The broad strokes of the show – Tillinghast has to kill one of his best friends, a fellow mobster, who had gotten too mouthy. Unknown to him though, he’s already being tailed by a police officer (Vincent Vespia) and an FBI agent, so he’s arrested shortly after the hit.

However, his brother Harold, who in previous episodes is portrayed as not having the nerve for the mob life, is also arrested. Vespia is convinced that he saw Harold in the car, while Tillinghast’s old lawyer and others swear that he wasn’t. The tension stems from the fact that 1) someone WAS in the car with Tillinghast 2) it almost certainly wasn’t Harold but 3) Tillinghast won’t give up who was in the car with him.

Tillinghast ends up convicted for the murder, but Harold is too. He spends 25 years in prison, because his brother chose his mob family over his actual family member. It’s gripping stuff, and you can hear the regret in Tillinghast’s voice as he talks about it, since after he’s incarcerated, mobsters start turning on one another to avoid prison sentences in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

It’s weird to say about a mob hitman, but Tillinghast, now 70, is the most sympathetic character on the show through six episodes. He shows some remorse and perspective on what he did, which is most evident when talking about Vespia putting him away. His words work as a great stinger to end the episode.

“Life’s too short to hold grudges. Listen, they do what they gotta do. I don’t hold grudges against Vinny or anybody. They’re doing their job. If I put myself in a position where I have to worry about the law, that’s on me. Choices. I made a choice. My favorite word is choices. It should be everybody’s in this fucking world. You make it, you own it. You reap the benefits, suffer the consequences. You made the choice. Be man enough or woman enough to take the pain as well as the gain.

Some odds and ends:

- This episode starts off with another great anecdote, with Tillinghast and his barber winning a gold medal. The narration is priceless. “And my model used to be Jerry Tillinghast.” “Yeah, that Jerry Tillinghast. Mob enforcer, Vietnam veteran, environmental inspector, and hair model.” Like the best mob movies, there is always a sort of bleak or dark humor to the anecdotes on Crimetown.

- In past entries, I’ve been spelling it “Jerry Tillinghast,” based on a bio on the Crimetown site. However, in some entries on their site and in other news articles, he goes by Gerry and Gerald. So, take your pick as to which is correct. (And, by the way – The characters page on their web site allows you to sort and filter by episode, and it’s very helpful! All they need now is to offer a downloadable organizational chart or family tree, a la a proper crime procedural.)

- The episode summary on the web site for Crimetown has some awesome photos. Check it out here!

- The show is on hiatus until late January, which kind of sucks. It was just starting to build up some momentum! Then again, I can understand that download numbers and new listeners would probably be non-existent for the Christmas and New Year’s Eve break.

I’ve written about podcasts here and there, and this entry from 2014, after Serial finished, is still mostly valid. And hey, I host a podcast! If you like pre-2000s video games, check out Your Parents Basement.

Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!

Inexplicable Crimetown Review: A heist, mobster movie echoes and salty language in EP4

From now on, I’m going to be discussing the contents of Crimetown episodes, and specifically, spoiling the episodes. So, if you still aren’t following along, I’d recommend catching up on the past episodes. They’re usually in 30 minute chunks, and I highly recommend them!

The fourth episode of Crimetown is probably the first where we get full-on malice for the entire half-hour, as the focus is on the details of a heist at a mob stash house – a fur coat company – and the ensuing fallout, with mobsters turning on one another. The episode borrows heavily from Tim White’s The Last Good Heist, which is available on Amazon, of course.

The alleged heist by eight thieves and mobsters robbed the Mafia and Patriarca of $3 million (official estimates) or $40 million (mob estimates). The episode ends with the whopper that Patriarca arranged the robbery himself – to humble unruly bosses under him, and also because the Patriarca Family deposits in that vault were taken out the day before.

Listening to this episode, it was impossible for my mind to resist making two connections to mobster movies. First, Robert Dussault – one of the thieves – loves Vegas. He immediately burns through the money, via gambling and a high class hooker. I couldn’t help but think of Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, when he cajoles his fellow mobsters for spending too much after the Lufthansa heist. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” The other movie connection – Casino, which is probably my favorite mobster movie, because it’s a single, self-contained film with no real winners or glorification at the end.

While the previous Crimetown episodes had some salty language, this one doubles down with the jailhouse tapes of Joe Danese, another of the robbery crew members. He’s the star of the episode, with statements like, “I told Chucky Flynn from the start, if he rats, I’m not going to jail over this fucking motherfucker. I’m not going to jail over this fucking piece of shit, I said.”

The Shakespearean drama in the episode is between Dussault, Flynn and Danese. Dussault spent all of his money and was notorious for having a big mouth, so a hit was put out on him. Flynn, one of his friends, was assigned the hit, with Danese overseeing him. But ultimately, Flynn can’t go through for it… Only for Dussault to spill the beans, confessing to the heist, when FBI agents lie to him and tell him Flynn got capped for protecting him.

If the show has a “star,” it’s Jerry Tillinghast, the D&D playing mobster first introduced in the second episode. He pops up again in the fourth episode, as he’s implicated in witness statements and court testimony as participating in the heist. He denies it then, and even though he’s admitted to a slew of other crimes on the pod, he still denies it today. It gives him a weird air of credibility though.

One other thing to post – Full transcripts of Crimetown episodes are now on their website! Awesome! So, if like me, you have trouble spelling some of these names or getting those exact quotes, you can find transcripts here.

I’ve written about podcasts here and there, and this entry from 2014, after Serial finished, is still mostly valid. And hey, I host a podcast! If you like pre-2000s video games, check out Your Parents Basement.

Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!

Inexplicable Podcast Review: Crimetown goes to the zoo in EP3

The old mayor, a dapper lookin' dude.

From now on, I’m going to be discussing the contents of Crimetown episodes, and specifically, spoiling the episodes. So, if you still aren’t following along, I’d recommend catching up on the past episodes. They’re usually in 30 minute chunks, and I highly recommend them!

Episode 3 starts out with a funny-but-sad story about how incompetent some of the workers at the Providence zoo were. Namely, the guy who kept feeding the tortoise even though it had been dead for three days. That was good times, or at least, as good of times as a story about a dead turtle can be. But, it was a good, immediate example of how cronyism worked in Providence before Buddy Cianci’s election.

Of course, as the episode details how he got elected to the mayor’s office, we quickly realize that graft of one kind is just going to be exchanged for graft of another kind. One of the mobsters, Jerry Tillinghast, flat out says that he arranged for a couple thousand Cianci votes. Since the final margin of victory was 709, it pretty much means the Mob delivered the election to him. The podcast has audio from Cianci, and while he doesn’t admit that the votes were delivered to him, he doesn’t deny it either.

The episode doesn’t really get into who Cianci beat in the election, not even mentioning his name, which Wikipedia tells me was Joseph A. Doorley Jr. Interestingly, his entry has this nugget: “The [Civic] Center became a focus of a corruption investigation in 1973. The director of the Center was convicted of soliciting a $1,000 bribe from a concert promoter. The lead investigator for this case was assistant attorney general Vincent Cianci, who used the case as a platform to run for mayor against Doorley on an anti-corruption platform.”

Mike Stanton, a Journal reporter who provided a lot of the reporting backbone for the podcast, also has the interesting piece on Cianci vs. Doorley. The podcast’s usage of audio – both recordings from Cianci, and fresh interviews with Tillinghast and others – is stellar though, and helps the vibrancy of the show.

So, Cianci wins the election by 709 votes, and surprise! The cronyism of the Democratic machine is replaced by the cronyism of the Mob. At least in the early days, they have interviews from Cianci supporters and Tillinghast supporting the idea that Cianci was legitimately working as hard as he could on behalf of the city. But, that’s contrasted with the ethical compromises he had to make – the no-work job for Tillinghast – and his own audio clips admitting that he had an enormous ego.

The fourth episode is seemingly ready to be dropped on Sunday, like the first three were. My enthusiasm is still high, so hopefully y’all are still giving this show a close listen.

I’ve written about podcasts here and there, and this entry from 2014, after Serial finished, is still mostly valid. And hey, I host a podcast! If you like pre-2000s video games, check out Your Parents Basement.

Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!