The Emotional Toll and Seeking Justice

I'm here with Paul Solitarov, the writer and host of Bone Valley Season five. Devil's quarry As well as Liz Garber Paul, the Rolling Stone editor publish Paul's feature story The Devil You Know in Rolling Stone The new season Bone Valley season five, the Devil'sQuarry will begin on june tenth, and it's also an official selection for the twenty twenty six Tribecca Festival. Welcome, guys. Really nice to see you guys here.light Youre guys ready to talk some Bone Valley podcasting? Absolute. All right, good. Paul, let's just start with your journalism background because you I've been following you for many years and I was just so thrilled to see that the guy who's broken all these big stories is now doing something with Bone Valley. C we just talk about your background a little bit and you know what you were doing when you stumbled onto this case. I took a series of left turns Fr graduate writing programs into a job at the Village Voice in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight wind up writing My first ever story about homeless children docks of the West Side Highway inadvertently became this enormous of a story. because it added an organization covenant house which through the front doors was bringing in all of these broken, abandoned kick out children of the crack pandemic in New York City then selling some of them out the back door to corporate donors U that story launched me on a trajectory to U eventually Rolling Stone, where I have now been for thirty For years and my remit at Rolling Stone has always been the pursuit of justice for those who otherwise whether it was homeless kids, whether it was brain broken NFL veterans who had been utterly screwed out of a pension or even any kind of clinical acknowledgement of what was this enormous pandemic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was my story Um And over the years, I have gone after the kinds of stories sad yielded most Horrific. unspeakable acts official misconduct on the parts of crooked cops Big city cops on the parts of corrupt prosecutors on the parts of in the bag judges. The larger rubric for my career has been America's War on Drugs which very early on in my career I realized was nothing more than the war on the poor. And so I have essentially kind of pointed myself public advocate for the poor who had been caught in the most Horrific domestic policy decision of the American century is This headlong attempt to arrest our way out Love pandemic and Create massive incarceral state that left us five years ago quarter of the worlds prison population Paul, where do you think this came from? I mean, looking back decades of doing this kind of work. wasas there something that affected you as a child or some kind of You know, Awakening to these issues, Where do they come from I was a bit of a red diaper baby. My father was a famous literary editor. My mother a translator. of Tolstoy and Chekov U None of that was interesting to me. What was interesting was they dragged me to DC for the march on Washington u to the rallies in Central Park in the sixties I wound up going to the schoolchool of Music and Art, which in those days was in Harlem directly across the street from CCNY, which was a seeding ground of the SDS Um, ultimately the weather underground. So I was very much subscribed. into radical politics as a child I was raised to be a novelist and trained to be a novelist. And so what I brought inadvertently to journalism was The storytellers use of language of narrative structure and of that intense fascination with otherness. with price daily price of getting out of bed people kinds of advantages, privileges, associations I'd come to take for granted if there was one sort of clincher for it in my hopeless attempt to become a novelist and then later a playwright I wound up for two years at the NYU School of Social Work where My placement was in the South Bronx. allegedly ministering clinically to the orphaned children of the Happy Lands Disco fire in nineteen eighty seven. And for two years, I sat in an office with no skills really no supervision attempting to console childildren parents had been obliterated. in a basement fire in an unlicensed club in the Bronx and What? That indenture, that to your indenture did was give me my subject So when I started the Village voice in nineteen eighty eight I was three blocks on West Broadway from the Westide Dcks Every day I would take my lunch to eed on theseese abandoned docks were rotting peers that had become a stroll for the eight, nine and ten year old kick out children. of the the crack SROs on West forty second Street And I saw these children selling their bodies for five dollars crack rocks That became my first story, but it also became my grail Getch them the assistance U ee So the robust response from a city administration that didn't give a fuck about them. I always tell people when asked how I find my stories. Just follow my appay Can you just talk about having decades of cracking these really important stories that aren't just stories for our reading, but they actually go on to improve things and call attention to issues that you care about Can you just talk about where you were or how you stumbled into this case that you wrote about for Rolling Stone is now Bone Valley seeason five. I work very closely with the Innocence proroject. They have been Bon partners on several of my big sort of exoneration stories And they began telling me about what was happening in Massachusetts this bubbling up scandal in these state crime labs. In Massachusetts, there was this ten, fifteen year long Open scam wherein State police crime labs in high rotation for seized narcotics by police departments west and east in Massachusetts were submitting these seizures to be sampled, tested, and certified as narcotics order to corroborate these indictments of low level dealers primarily possession use sales What I discovered in the course of that investigation is that these two labs in Western Massachusetts. one in Boston. were populated by chemists who are shooting, snorting, smoking, puffing and otherwise consuming the very substances they were hired to test. These bench chemists had wrongly could help convict We believe fifty sixty thousand low level offenders, another of these deep, very complicated digs helpeled to exonerate forty one thousand of these lowow level offenders and to get them compensated for their years wrongfully spent in prison. Once that story was done, I'd get together with Nina Morrison and Peter Neufeld who are running U Innocence proroject in New York. I said What's next? And they said Ever want to look at small town police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct Ifave had any interest in that And I said, boy do I ever And so that was the launch point. to drive up to the town of Carmel in Putnham County. fifty miles from Rollingstone's office on fifth Avenue, midtown, Manhattan and meet with Two young men been framed who had been arrested, framed Convicted sent away in their teams to the most Medieval prisons in New York State. for life without parole. for the rape and murder of a girl they had The first of these wrongfully accused teamens who had spent twenty years his entire Young adulthood in Attica Dana Mora Aber Western teaching himself how to read It was a ninth grade dropout when he went away Um teaching himself the law Wongun prrison Library piling the most extraordinary legal brief investigating the actual killer of the decedent Joseette Wright And so when I showed up in Carmel, I didn't show up in Carmel My first toe into this story. was sitting in the penthouse apartment Trump Twer in Nurichelle. was Anthony to Pippo who had been out of prison for five years after exonerating himself in a twenty sixteen trial who had then filed a federal civil rights suit for wrongful arrest conviction imprisonment against Putnam County in the state of New York one judgments I'm sorry, on settlements So the tune of fifteen million dollars bought himself a very garish apartment in Trump Tower. Remember he was seventeen un arrested. nineteen went sent away for life of that parole his emotional and developmental timeline stopped Yeah abruptly. As a teen. And so what did he buy himself with this fifteen million bought himself one hundred and fifty Rplica Championship wrestling belts frameed them and mounted them on the walls Part this He had a nine thousand dollars flat screen TV, which he told me only worked Okay which was a problem because We only had four K. R Right And what made it really poignant What Anthony had Iensely in common with the other Eonares. either held free or who got themselves free. and then I told their stories was having been entrapped in an eight by non enclosure. his entire adult life He was living in this three bedroom apartment, fifteen hundred square foot apartment with spectacular views in every window He wouldn't leave the bedroom. He would pace is Bgro and never leave. And I said, Anthony How do you eat How do you K vitamin D He said I go down at night when I think the cops are around They're going He was so terrified. He bought himself this gorgeous AG Mercedes SUV that he was terrified to drive for fear that he'd be stopped T What happens in these cases of men who have been wrongfully accused tried, convicted is even after establishing Absolute innocence, they are always in the dark tunnel. too afraid to rejoin the society that snch them out of their childhoods And I spent nine months reporting that story And corruption incompetence He Sadism Putnam County Sheriff's Office was if anything undersold to me was The Most Lawless law enforcement agency Ahead ever had the honor of delving into and it had a history Ciminal conduct dating back dececades What do you do if you were a police department or a constellation of police departments that has omestics as It's variant of violent crime that has nickel and dime posossession as It's Underworld Cate crime One of the ways that these pol police departments did that. by using confidential informant who turns out to be the central figure of the devil you know A man in his thirties. to sell give away. children thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds of both genders. Then subject them to or tip the cops off They would get arrested You know, they'd all go off to smoke a joint in the woods or to hang out in an abandoned shack by the rail yard. U to drink Boon's farm The sheriffs or the cops would swarm. The girls in order to get out of the back seat cruiser would have to blow the deputy Bys would have to agree to these snitches and sell a nickel of weed to their school fruit That's how you build. if you are a corrupt In a small town town of twenty five thousand. It was hard. to find a young woman who had not been sexually violated or threatened with it or whose best friend? had not had to do something she didn't want to do to get out of the back of that cruiser That. For me, was the palete I worked with Th thoseose were the earth colors I painted that story with in that subculture extxtremely vulnerable children P Let's remember This was pre helicopter parenting This was, you know Tree You know, children just say no The town of Carmel, much of that side of Putnam County offers fuck off for children after school If you don't play littleittle League If you don't play girl's soccer There is nowhere for you to go. and they had to go somewhere to continue to, you know kind of u create their own adventure and they go into the woods or they go to a rave up on a hill and the police would swarm. So You had this culture where this cious kind of sexuality was What passed for entertainment, what passed for after school activities U and a lot of it was born out of boredom But also a lot of it was born out of parental neglect I remember feeling this acutely very early on in my reporting trips to Carmel I had the distinct feeling I was being followed because I was such an obvious wringer And because I was asking the wrong questions, there can be Especially with the smaller communities right outside of New York, there can be a resentment to the, you know New York media coming in and reshaping these foundational narratives. and they didn't particularly They felt very um prrotective over their town and didn't love an outsider coming in and ripping it all up. I'm gonna ask you to go back a few years. Sure. What was it like when this story, which later became his story for Rolling Stone, the Dvil you Kn What was your first introduction to this story and what was your reaction at the time So I believe the first introduction was you had filed the story to Sean Woods our editor in chief and he had gone through it and I I've only been at Rolling Stone for sixteen years But I had a history of working with Paul. I had fact checked him when I was in the fact checking department. It transcribed for him. A Early in my career I had and I had also just finished aroundround twenty twenty one, I had recently finished a story that I wrote myself about police corruption in Philadelphia about a guy named Jimmy Dennis who had been picked off the street a twenty year old kid in the mid nineteen eighties and had been on death row for twenty five years before he won his own exoneration. So we're Not exactly exoneration, but he won his freedom. U So Sean felt like I was in a good place to pick up Paul's story. and run with it. And I was I'm always impressed by Paul's drafts when they come in He has such a natural talent as a storyteller Um, so so my work as an editor on this story was not so much trying to frrame the narrative or you know, why would the reader care about this? likeike let's get into that. It was really more let's get into the nitty gritty. How do we know what we know? How can we safely make the statements we're going to say it's almost just like high level fact checking at that point. and I was veryery fortunate to be working with an incredible fact checker, John Bernstein on this story And so we just kind of, we read the story. We're so impressed U by the way that Paul had just really brought this slice of you know, bedroom community nineteen eighties to life Um, And so yeah, our first job was digging in, reading through all of the reporting that he'd been doing over nine months And and really trying to kind of parse what was legend and what was fact. And I think especially in a case like this where you have where it's historical in one sense, but also recent history You know, memory is a tricky thing. People are trying to tellell their story to the best of their ability and remember where they were at that time and having to kind of sort through legal documents, bothem contemporaneous and, you know, within the last few years, and then all of the incredible interviews that Paul had done with people who are remembering this time. You know, it was just, it was immersing myself into This very troubled community's corruption that brought them to that Yeah. And obviously it can be a very dark story at times you're dealing with the murder and torture of these young girls. What was it like within Rolling Stone? Were they supportive of these efforts and did they encourage Paul to just keep digging or to just maybe focus on some of the corruption and less about The actual crimes? How does that work? No, I mean, I think for a story like this, you know, the corruption It's about how how do you get a reader to pay attention to you know, the vegetables of the story, right? which is the police corruption, which can get someomewhat tedious as a reader And really and what's so incredible about this story is The very real characters who come out of it And so we were, I mean, We're on the culture side of Rolling Stone. We don't shy away from the dark stories at all We also don't want them to be Exploitative. you know, And so how do you tell these stories without making it tabloidy, right How do you bring this town to life without making it one dimensional And that was we just leaned right into that. I think one of the things that was most surprising to me Um as you know the outsider kind of coming into this story was how committed so many people in that community were to the version of events from You know, the nineteen nineties, right? The prosecutor's version of events that Anthony and Andy were guilty and how hard it was even when confronted with you know, legal papers and verdicts and Anthony's release from prison, how hard it was for a lot of the folks from that community to let go of the narrative that they had been sold And I wasn't really prepared for that as much because you know, working with places like the Innocence Project, Following these stories, you kind of assume that, you know, everyone wants everyone does want justice, but what that justice looks like can be very different to different people. I hope have come to appreciate, especially with, you know, with Andy's eventual release, like that there is a lot of truth to the story that Paul wrote and hopefully they'll listen to this podcast and get even more depth into reporting that he's done and realize that, you know, it's not It's not someone coming in and trying to Change this story at someone coming in and trying to tell the real story. Paul, I'm just really curious from you from a storyteller's perspective, someomebody who's you, done print for decades. What was it like pivoting to podcasts in this audio format? Could you talk about some of the things that you found different and really satisfying or unsatisfying? Well, I'd always thought of my voice onene of my very few advantages in life, my speaking voice And then I began listening to playbacks of myself u doing narration. And I called Kevin Worrison a pack and said Can we hire someone to do the narration? I really don't want to be the reason that no one listens to seeason five of Bone Valley. Um I will tell you it is an acquired skill. It is a lot of failure. and a lot of humiliation, listening to yourself in playback. The main challenge I had is while I write by the enge, not by the yard I also am very self conscious and Um self scourging stylist. of my sentences and They were too pretty. I think your voice is fantastic. Thank you. You know, really, you just it just fits the actual show and you feel like a natural character within the show. And so I thought I know how it was for me, I couldn't stand listen to voice. and I even thought the same thing. Do you want to get another narrator? but fit you're the person who did the work. you belong in the story. But I finally figured out No Most powerful voice in these episodes is always the victims is always the lawyers is always the exonerated Anthonya Pipo Their stories are vastly more interested interesteresting than my sentenceces. And it is time to let go of the wheel and let the people whose story This belongs to write the narrative through their own recollections, there own traumatic U renderings happened to them? I think the other thing I noticed when the whole writing process was right when you approach it like a print story, you insert quotes because you're not hearing them. But when you're doing a podcast, that voice becomes much larger. and you're right. It's the people who've experienced trauma, pain that really resonate in the story know, for me, I think it was just listening to Leo Schofield talk about his case and the pain that he felt just constantly being defeated in courts and having to learn that I'm going to die in prison if something's not corrected That's more powerful than anything you could write anyway. Just hearing that voice crack and the emotion. And I think that's what really drew me. and I've definitely been hearing it in season five. You definitely have these powerful stories and interviews with people along the way that just, yeah, just get out of the way of it, which you do really well. You're eighteen years old. You're Anthony to Pippo and yes, you're a large young man who thinks he's a backyard wrestler at six five and two forty. What you don't understand is that when you Yet Danamore The backyard wrestlers up there. Bench four fifty Squat five twenty And Eat boys like you. for As an Nu boo And Both of these young men, by the way, Andy A goodood day is five, seven and a buck forty They entered as I say, the most draconian prisons in New York State And They went into these places with What is called a jacket I Max Prison, you are wearing a jacket of your conviction They wore the worst possible jacket you can wear est murderer they were going to have to save their own going to have to fight their own fights. They were going to have to convince At least a few of the K. callers on their cell blocks I didn't do this You know, Paul, when I go out and speak about cases like Leo Schcofield and Jeremy Scott I often get asked You know, you're dealing with these really dark subjects. really not the worst of humanity sometimes. What do you do for your own self care? And I know for a fact that this story stayed with you and haunted you for a long time and you maybe felt you were kind of done with it. Can you just talk about the process of back into it and creating Bone Valley season five. So I do these stories one after another after another, and I'm always writing about suffering that's almost unimaginable to me or would be unimaginable, except I've seen it over and over and over again. And so while I've learned to compartmentalize and to build a layer of callus, around works and my soul This story and only this story. And it pierced it not because of my interactions with deevil. is the titular character in the series Those were upsetting But I know those guys was the half dozen survivors of this monster Wh? had told these stories first to the cops then to a judge Then in courtroom. Juried settings And Go ahead N Led. had never in ed had never Ael feel safe again for the rest of their adult lives I had a nervous breakdown firstirst and only of my career when I finished reporting this. I was not institutionalized, but my wife was very close to getting me admitted somewhere did it to me was living with the stories of this half dozen Living witnesses and they're un ed H her fear What was so striking about the story was just the brutality and the way that this string of girls uh who had been victimized by this same man had just gone under the radar and hearing the way that They were able to describe their experiences in such kind of Stark terms. was was very affecting It's not it's very hard sometimes to get to get victims of sexual traumatic abuse to speak. and even just reading their accounts, not listening to them, just reading their accounts was difficult. I had to kind of force myself to do it because reading those those accounts was Um, It was giving me kind of visceral reactions. because we're talking about teenage girls and sometimes pre teenage girls who are U raped and abused with the knowledge of the adults around them sometimes and given any kind of resources or ability to get out of those situations. And so when various and suundry approach me to do podcast version I said absolutely not. I mean, Jason approached me five years ago to do this I would not go near it because I was very, very ragile. for a minute And then something happens A Ye ago this spring, I got a call from not one but two of this monster's victims told me getting out ' a release date I am terrified Is there someone you can call? Is there someone who you can Take me to who will believe me this monster will be released without an administrative tale from a neighboring state probation No parole man who has lived since a child Woods in a tent. off the grid Turn to the tree line where he will be ight unseen Time of his choosing a victim of his select And at that point I had enough distance between me and, you know, the secondhand trauma of those nine months in cararmel And I enlisted with Lava for good two Get Final justice for those young women And for the generations they bore. Aso Cry that almost Hico of rage will to everything in my power of Shooting him myself Make sure Heer disappears into a wooded area pops out again. This is a school bus Children goes by. cannot The listeners of this series strongly enough We need you and your outrage We are up against is the most staggering corruption. most staggering stone wall. And On. the fear Created Bye passassion of our listeners will Help Fine Get to a place of truth Justice and healing for the girls of Putnam County Paul Liz, I can't thank you enough for being here and talking about the Devil's quuarry. I just think this is just a fascinating podcast that's going to grip people from week to week. I think the story is just enhanced by the work that you've put in and the audio is phenomenal. I think you're going to see a difference. I think you know at Bone Valley, we like to think we want stories to make a difference in the outcome, not just entertain people, but actually go on to help increase justice and healing and all of those things. And I think you've gone a long way towards getting us there with this story. So thank you again. We're looking forward Bone Valley season five. Devil's quarry Thank you so much, Gil. Thank