There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 10:00
Part One: The Woman Who Invented Adoption (By Stealing Thousands of Babies)
Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and I said Dominicana myself. I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. What's hanging my overs? I'm Robert Evans, host of behind the ******** podcast, where Sophie shakes her head disappointedly at me. But it's accurate. I'm I'm hungover for this episode as well. We talk about bad people, worse people, all history, everything you don't know about them. My guest for this episode is Sophia Alexandra, comedian, host of the private Parts Unknown Podcast and anything else I should I should I should toss in that? I mean, just. A genius. Genius. Multi hyphenate, multi hyphenate patterning. Yeah, yeah, I will notarize your documents. Excellent. I love having things notarized. I know. I love pretending to. Well, have you ever heard of a lady named Georgia Tan? Have you ever heard of a thing called adoption? No. How do you pronounce that? Oh dear. I've been saying adoption. Adoption. Ohh, Georgia Tan invented adoption. Wow. Yeah. See, seems like a great thing, right? How can you invent adoption? Well, we'll be getting into that a little bit, but it's not always something that people have done, you know? But you're telling me people weren't like, oh, I'm going to raise this baby. Yeah. But they didn't like, it wasn't like, the process of adoption. Like, yeah. You're saying, like, she founded an agency. She founded the she built the modern structure through which we adopt children. Of it isn't, it isn't. We'll get into a little bit. It used to be a thing that people didn't think was a good idea for some reasons, which we'll discuss other people taking other people's babies. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't like that idea. They thought it was a bad idea. Partly because of eugenics, because, like, they were like, if you're, if you're, if your mom, you know, was dumb enough to die, then you're going to grow into a stupid person. And, like, we don't, we don't want to. We want smart people raising stupid babies. That's just that's just bad. The bad stuff, yeah. I mean, everybody was racist in the past and terrible, but just in the past. Just in the past. Thank God we got over that ****. What a beautiful world we live in. What a wonderful place. Now, I do want to note up top that. We we're not in the habit of giving, like, trigger warnings and stuff on the show because it's a show about the worst people in history, and we talk about, like, genocide every third episode. And, like, you kind of know what you're getting into with the show called behind the ********. But there's going to be a lot of talk about child death and molestation in this one. So heads up, everybody. It's I'm so glad this is the episode. I got it. Thanks for coming on, Sophia. I was like, my brand should get more edgy. This might be the darkest one we do. I welcome the challenge. She's pretty big. I am the night. Yeah, we are all the night. Yeah. Now, in 1848, Europe was convulsed by a series of violent revolutions, many of which threatened to end the centuries old order and reign in what the elites at least considered to be an era of unspeakable chaos. the United States did not experience this wave of revolutions, of course, but many of our richest ******** watch what was going on in Europe and got real scared, like they didn't want that happening here. It's all so Europe doing a lot of revolutions and we're like, we don't want none of that. Socialism thing looks real scary. Let's make sure that doesn't happen. So one of these guys was a dude named Charles Loring Brace. Charles was a Protestant minister, and he founded the Children's Aid Society of New York in 1853 and started the first American orphan trains. You heard of the orphan trains? Neither had I before I started researching this. It's pretty fun, like an amazing Disneyland ride. It does. It sounds like a Disneyland ride, but it actually reads like a particularly dark Charles Dickens book. OK, yeah. Yeah, so the purpose of these trains was to transport abandoned children from the cities, particularly New York, into the and and take them into the newly colonized American West. So at the time Charles wrote quote, there are thousands upon thousands in New York who have no assignable home and flirt from addict to addict and seller to seller. Moreover, the cultivators of our soil in America are the most solid and intelligent class. So Charles was concerned because most of these orphans were the children of immigrants. He wanted them exposed to what he called the civilizing influences of American life so that they would not grow into socialist revolutionaries. So he saw all these kids hanging out in, like, New York and stuff and was like, these kids are going to grow up to be like, scruffy, bearded socialists. And they're going to, they're going to overthrow, like, society. And it was just envisioning, like, Williamsburg. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, no hipsters here. I don't want, let's bust them out to California, the least hit place. It was actually a lot more like Ohio at that point. Like, like like we weren't. We weren't that far West with most of our expansion yet. I was just making a joke. Sorry. Excuse me. Fun Podcast no, I'm the ******* you are. You're the main ******* that is like, kind. Every ******* is a woman who's just trying to make a joke. I love that listeners couldn't see because this is a an audio medium, but as soon as. When I said I was the real ******* Sophie started very enthusiastically pumping her fist. Like it was the end of breakfast Club. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I I am. I am the the monster at the end of the the series. The last episode is just going to be about me. It's a pretty great reveal. Hmm. I mean, you've seen me throwing pens, like, you know how how terrible I can be when the mics are off. Terrible at throwing. Sure. Hey. Just threw another pin. You got one pen left. You better. Yeah, but better wait for the most appropriate moment. There's other throwables. I could throw those dog treats. Oh no, don't do that. The dog shouldn't suffer. Sophie looks very angry when I talk about her face. Is one of do not joke about the treats. The dog treats. Lesson learned. So Charles Brace was concerned because there were a lot of orphans and he thought they were going to grow up into scruffy, bearded socialists. So he wanted to send him out to farms in order to get them civilized from 1854 to 1929. Roughly 200,000 children were sent W from New York to the countryside. And on paper, it doesn't seem like it was necessarily a terrible thing, right. You know, you got all these kids. They don't have parents. Send them out West, they can live on a nice farm. Get that clean farm air, you know, could be, could be good idea, could be separated from the only stuff and people they've ever known. Well, yeah, that part's pretty dark, too. It actually gets a lot darker. So most Americans part, part of what made it dark is that most Americans at this point. Hated the **** out of foreign born immigrants. And like, a lot of these kids were like Italian and German and thank God we grew up. Thank God we grew out of that. Now it's all just white. But at that point it wasn't. And so, like a lot of these parents who would have been from like, Anglo stock would look at like a German kid and be like, well, that's not a white kid like, so I don't have to treat him like he's like my son or anything. I can just use him as, you know, like a mule, like, like the same thing you'd use like a draft horse for. So a lot of the families willing to take. Off the orphan train, but they weren't willing to like, raise them as their own. It was much more common to treat them as free labor. So the orphan train was not quite child slavery, but it wasn't super far from child slavery either. And it was it was basically child slavery. So I'm going to quote from the Chicago Tribune article on the subject quote. In 1888, the New York Juvenile Asylum Distributed Flyers announcing that it was bringing a group of children ranging from 7 to 15 years old to Rockford. On September 6th. They may be taken at first. On trial for four weeks and afterwards if all parties are satisfied under indenture girls until 18 and boys until 21 years of age. Haha. Suckers place to have a vagina. Like once every thousand times in history. You'd have to be a farm slave as long if you're late. Like sure we'll be raped, but it ends at 18. Oh God, yeah, you're right. They all got 100 percent. 100%, yeah. The pair. Well, I mean, you wanted me to come on in the dark. No, you're 100% darkening it right up. Yeah, Marguerite Thompson was one of those little kids, she later recalled to to the Tribune, a scene that does seem eerily reminiscent of a slave auction quote. There's skinny muscles being poked and squeezed on the station platforms before they were taken in by families who wanted a little more than farmhands and showed them little affection. So, like, they would literally train these kids over to like, some town in the Midwest and like, set up an like, like, put them up on like a block and like. Look at this one's muscles. This kid will push a hoe real good. This kid would be good at farming. Like, pick up these kids. They're yours until they're 18 or 21. Like, yeah, it was an indentured child slave thing, but black people didn't even get out at 18 or 21. No, it's certainly not that bad. It's not nearly that bad. But it happened until 1929, which was kind of shocking to me that like, up until like when my grandpa was a kid, they were sending kids West on trains and making them indentured servants until the age of 18. It's gross. Thompson was taken in by a Nebraska family at age 6 and made to wash dishes by a foster mother who she said never gave her so much as a glass of milk. All she got from me was to work. I never got any love in that home, so it was like an indentured child. Labor trains. This is how kids were treated in up until the 1920s, and the only gives a dark meaning too. I, Choo Choo, choose you right. Yeah, you, I, Choo Choo, choose you to. Get kicked in the head by a mule trying to trying to tell my my farmland and buried in the back 10. So sad. Yeah, that probably happened a lot. Probably a lot of little kids buried on a lot of little farms out in the Midwest. And the orphan trains weren't even the worst case scenario for parentless children in New York City. Most abandoned babies were just found dead by the cops. The ones who survived were taken to Bellevue Hospital where according to Barbara Raymond quote, they were randomly assigned religions and names and infant found in an alley would be named Charlie Alley. The girl, found under a Cherry Tree near a hill, would become Cherry Hill. Infants, whose discovery coincided with a sensational murder trial, were named after the victims, witnesses or perpetrators. The abandoned children were cared for by prisoners and, if they were named after perpetrators. So ****** ** just because, like, there's a famous murder in the newspaper and you find it appear like you would be little Charlie Manson. Little little Charlie Manson. But you so bizarre, weird thing to do. I love that you skipped over that. Like, that wasn't the weirdest part of the whole thing. Randomly assigning religions is pretty weird. You look like, but isn't everybody Christian at that point or Protestant or whatever? There's Jewish people too. But like, I like just the idea that, like, you're randomly being, like, Protestant for you. Yeah, Catholic. Do you like? You look like you'd be. I'm more disturbed by the. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And also naming a girl Cherry Hill. It's like, that's the earliest stripper name, right? Yeah. There's not a lot of, not a lot of professions. Yeah. After that, Charlie Alley has a lot of options. Charlie Cherry Hill. He's going to grow up to be a card shark, and we Charlie Alley. Alley sounds like it could be anything. Honestly. He could be Charlie Ally could be an actor. Charlie alley. Yeah, I mean, it does. One thing I'm excited for when this drops is all the people on Twitter with last names that are hill and Alley realizing, like, what their family came from. Somebody, somebody found your uncle in a ditch. Like, I mean, maybe. Or they just had that last name. Listener. Don't don't step off that ledge. Things are good, Mr. Hill. You're fine. Yeah. But Mr Manson? Yeah. Bad news. So children's asylums is where most of these kids who survived wound up, and they were not safe places. The infant mortality rate at children's asylums averaged about 50% in Oh my God. Oh my God. Half the kids died in the good ones. Oh my God. The bad ones, like New York's Randall Island infant mortality rate was 100%. What? You're just sitting babies off to die? Who is working at this ******* death asylum? Prisoners. Ohh, so they don't give a ****? No, like a lot of them are like violent criminals and stuff who are like, well you. We gotta do something with you. Let's have you take care of babies. What kind of the point of building 2 is like people didn't care about babies back then. Like, a lot of it's probably that, like, so many babies died, like, just because, like, you don't have, you don't have, like, antibiotics and stuff, like, so infant mortality is a lot higher. But, like, but it's not 100%. It's not 100% unless you're at Randall's Island. Oh my God. How do you tell a kid they're going to Randall Island and them not flip the **** out because they know everyone just dies there? Well, these are infants. Older kids didn't have 100% mortality rate, but if you're shipping a baby there, they're just not going to make it. That's just the baby Death Island, man. So if you live in Randall's Island, there's probably a lot of baby ghosts hanging around there. That's crazy. Yeah, it's pretty ****** ** right? Now, how do you ship a baby? In the crate, I feel like they were just putting the boxes. Yeah, catapults maybe. Like who's who's taking care of a? Of a shipment of babies. I mean, it doesn't sound like anyone is. And then they're just probably dying on the way there. Yeah, I think a lot of them did die in transport. I think they're probably wasn't a lot of feeding going on. I mean, I can't even picture a baby train that would be appropriately suited every time it would stop. Like the babies would just slide off the seats. There's no way. There's no way this could work. That's probably where most of that mortality rate went down. And honestly, I'm imagining one person minding a whole train full of babies because they don't care about them, and I'm imagining that person being very drunk because it's like 100% you'll be drinking. Themselves and crying. Yeah, I would be drinking too, even if I wasn't going to kill the babies. Yeah, yeah, we would. Which I probably would to get some sleep. Yeah. If I was a monster, you you joke about that, but that's literally the next thing we're about to talk about. I'm not joking about that. There's a Chekhov short story where there's so, you know, Russian Russia. I'm Russian. So Russians hadn't had surfs, you know, for a really long time, which is just like white people owning white people. And then there's a checkoff short story about this little girl who's like taking care of a baby, and she's just as exhausted and wants to sleep because she's essentially, you know? A child slave, yeah. She's like rocking the baby, and in the end she just wants some sleep and she, like, smothers the baby not on purpose, but because she's so, like, delirious and ****** **. So yeah, definitely, definitely. Children got murdered just so people could get sleep, and that's what we're about to talk about next. The baby farms. So there were baby farms back then. That's crazy because babies can't breed. No, no, they cannot. Can't milk them. What a terrible farm. It's a terrible idea for a farm. Like, So what was actually going on is that, like, there there would be houses and apartments where, you know, since there were so many extra babies and it was so terrible to send them to asylums, sometimes the government would pay women to take care of these babies. And and so, like, a woman wind up with, like, a house full of babies. Now, some of the baby farmers received regular stipends from the government and just had it, and thus had an incentive to, like, take care of the infants that the government was handing them. But many of them were given one payment in a single lump sum. So they had no reason to keep the babies alive. So they would take the money and then let the babies starve or just straight up murder the baby and then get more babies so that they could get more money. That's why they were called baby farms. So the babies is what they were processing, essentially, for money. This was illegal to kill the babies because you weren't going to get any more money out of them. But it wasn't that illegal. In 1895, one baby farmer was convicted of killing at least 53 babies. Yeah, those are some serious numbers. A lot of babies. You're putting up some stats on the board. Yeah, 5353. That's like a basketball score. Yeah. Messed around and got a triple double. Yeah. You want to guess what her sentence was for 53 baby murders? Nothing. 3 to 7 years. OK, well, I guess I'm glad she got something expected. I expected them to just be like, yeah, get out of get out of here, you scamp. Yeah. Have another couple of babies on the way out there. Just a complementary baby on the way out the hallways. Nothing but babies. A couple of them. Oh boy, this is the America that baula George Tan was born into on July 18th 1891. Names kids Baula or Bula Bula Bula. I keep saying wanting to say Bula, but it's BEULAH Bulla, bulla bulla. I think Beulah, but I believe Beulah seems right. It's one of those what? All of the versions we've just said. Pretty good names. Pretty good names. But she went by Georgia. She was born in Philadelphia, Ms. Real different from the Philadelphia people know who knew that there were several philadelphias. People really had a lot of hope for the concept of brotherly love back in the baby killing days. Take the hand of your brother, take the hand of your sister and then let's murder somebody. Let's kill some ******* babies. It's the 1890s. George's father was George Clark Tan. He was a local judge. Her mother was also named to Boula Isabel Tan and Barbara Raymond, the author of a book called The Baby Thief, visited Hickory, which is the town where Georgia grew up, and talked to some of the older folks who'd known her family at the time she was told. Quote George's mother was the most respected woman in Hickory. Her daddy was a federal court judge. The Tam home was the second one built in town. There were no streets then, only passed through the woods. So this is kind of the world that Georgia Tann is grown into. Is this important for the baby murders? Oh yeah. Yeah. The baby murders are important for this because it sets up sort of how babies were treated at the time. And it's good to have the woods if you're a baby killer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would turn out to have been handy that she has. Need the words or a lake? Someplace to a quarry? Yeah, yeah. Quarry would be really very least the crack. Crack. Yeah. George's mother was from a well off family in Philadelphia. Her father's family had old Revolutionary War connections and connections to the Confederacy. Judge Tan was seen as the most educated man in Hickory, which was not a super high bar in the 1890s, but whatever. He was infamously arrogant, domineering, and a womanizer who cheated on his wife and broad daylight as the biggest man in town. Like he loved nooners. And insects. He was famous in daylight. He would not ****. He would not **** at night. Couldn't get this guy to **** with like this room up. He was famous for like at noon, having his mistresses come by his judge offices and like. For a nooner. Yeah. Which people were like, I don't know why his wife puts up with it. She was like, but we live in the oldest, second oldest house in town. Yeah. Second oldest house in town. Which is a good thing then. Yeah. Yeah. As the biggest man in town, Judge Tan had a number of different jobs in his portfolio. One of them was dealing with all of the orphans in the area since this was the 1890s and early 1900s, and the medicine was mostly a mix of whiskey and uncut heroin, there were quite a few orphans to go around. Since the orphanages were constantly low on space. Judge Tan often found himself sending abandoned. Children off to workhouses and state. Insane Asylums which were even worse than the orphanages of the period. Oh my God, insane asylums. There's no room for this baby in the in the in the baby house. Let's just send him about all the crazy people. He's this dude again. They didn't care that much about little kids at the point, so not a nice man himself. Even Judge Tan was kind of ****** *** at the injustice of the system, so he wants some of George's earliest memories were her dad being like sucks that there's nothing to do with these babies but send them off to the crazy house or a workhouse like. So, yeah, she grew up, you know, seeing that social problem as a central issue in her life. She also grew up quite wealthy. Her father wanted to make her into a high society woman, she later recalled. Quote I was glued on a piano stool at age 5, and I didn't entirely get away from a piano until it was grown. She hated playing the piano, but she was hungry for her father's affection and approval. This was partly for the same reason any child seeks parental approval. But she also had more mercenary ambitions as well. Young George's chief dream in life was to become a lawyer back in the early 1900s. The way you did this was by apprenticing to an active attorney. You know, that's what Kim Kardashian's doing right now. It is. Didn't she help get someone out of like, she doesn't or something? Yeah, it seems like, but apparently she had worked for months before hand. I just read this Vogue article. But they were. But they were saying that actually, that's how everybody used to become a lawyer. You apprentice for four years and then actually that's another way you can still do it now, but people choose to do it even though there's another way now because a lot of them feel like that's like a true way to learn the system. That seems like a better way to. Business is good idea. Almost any job other than like medicine. I mean you still do that in medicine after college, you do your residency. Yeah. Seems like that is how almost every career should be done. Agreed. Yeah. Apprentice stand up comedian getting getting the other stand up comedians liquor and yeah, yeah, holding their gluing their broken dreams back together, taping their drugs to the inside of their thigh during their drive over to the venue. I'm going to print this comedian. Not allowed to joke yet, but two more years, like, no, they're just letting me do setups right now. I can't, I can't write any punch line with the punch lines. Ohh, Speaking of apprenticeships, that's not a good way to seek into an ad. The also seed isn't the right way to say segue. This is a mess. Sophia, help me out here. How do we what do you do? Do you like products? Let me tell you something. One thing that everybody knows about me is I'm a product head. Product head. How about give me a product service head on top of that? Service head, product head. If your head is like Sophia's. And full products and services. Here's some other products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. We're back good products, solid services products better than the services in my opinion. But you know, it's different every time. It's actually. Who knows? It might have been another Koch brothers ad when getting a lot of those randomly. Yeah. What the hell? Who's screening those? Nobody. The ones that I read are screened and, like, we get to pick them. But, like, when it's random, it could be anything, you know? We could be. It could be nordyne defense systems, Raytheon adds. Awkward. Would it be if there is a baby farm commercial right after this? Kill some babies, get some dollars more dead babies. More dollars in your pocket? Yeah. I mean, it's nice work if you can get it. Be better than a factory. For who? The baby or you? Yeah, you. As the as the baby murderer. The professional baby. Yeah, as the murderer. It's nice to not have a job other than the murder in which is more of a hobby. It's more of a hobby. Kind of a calling. They're more of a mission, if you will. That's a real symptom of how like dark life was in the 1890s, that there's some people, like in a cramped apartment, smothering babies, like looking at other people, go into factories and like ****. At least I'm not doing that. Like silver lining. Silver lining OK, so yeah, Georgia's cheap dream was to become a lawyer. She apprenticed with her father, they called it reading law, and she passed the State Bar exam as a young adult, all in the hope that her dad would let her work as a lawyer. But as she later explained, quote, he wouldn't let me practice because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman, and I was the only girl in the family, so he'd let her learn to be a lawyer, but he wouldn't actually let her do it. So instead, but how do you prevent a grown *** woman from doing something? Well, it's like. Using her fortune or whatever. I think that was a lot of it. I think a lot of it would have just been like social shame that like that that wouldn't have gone over well. Hmm. You know, she's in rural Virginia in 1900. And I guess I'm just saying I would have been braver. Some people wouldn't have. Yeah. Yeah, most most people weren't. Some people were. But yeah, uh. So instead, Georgia majored in music at Martha Washington College in Abington, Virginia. She graduated in 1913 and wound up teaching school in Columbus, Ms. It became clear after a very short span that this was not her strong suit and not the way she wanted to spend her life. Since lawyering was close to her, she gravitated towards the next most interesting career social work. Now, Georgia was a lesbian and a stocky, not traditionally feminine looking woman that could well, why did we not start with the fact that she was a lesbian? Looks like the best to me as a queer person. I wish you had told me that. OK, OK. Well, I'm very proud of her lawyer. A lesbian. This is very good. Very empowering. Yeah. Yeah, and a murderer, yes. A mass murder, triple threat, triple threat and an entrepreneur. Oh **** yeah. I mean, she is like, she's a, she's a powerful woman in an era where that didn't happen very often. She's definitely like an impressive figure, but also not in the best way. But yeah, so she yeah, she was she was a stocky, she was like a a heavy build and such. And so she wasn't like a traditionally feminine looking person, which was a difficult thing to deal with in 1906 in particular. So she did not fit in well with high society. She didn't like doing the parties and galas and wearing the dresses and stuff. And so charity work when she was like a teenager was kind of, she called it her refuge, like during her adolescent years. And it kept her out of parties and stuff. So like, well, other girls would be doing like, cotillions and stuff like that, you know, the old South sort of thing. She would be working in poorhouses, volunteering and stuff, which sounds great and I think was at the start, like, I think she came into this out of a place of. Wanting to help people. The genesis of Georgia's career came when she was an adolescent and her father got involved in the case of a single mother who had gotten heavily addicted to the morphine in her cough syrup. At that point, the penalty for drug addiction was to be sent to an insane asylum because, again, it was 1906. Her children were institutionalized with her, Georgia later recalled to a reporter quote. Hours later, the mother cried out something about her baby. As the effects of the dope began to wear off, officials at the institution called my Father about it. The whole family had retired, but we got up and drove into the country. And there, at under a pile of filthy rags in a corner of a shack, we found a pitiful baby which had evidently been given a little bit of dope. So they find this like a baby that had been abandoned by this woman who was addicted to the morphine in her cough syrup and like, pulled it out of the house after, like, the woman in the asylum, like, realized that she left her baby behind. So the Tans took the baby back to their house in Georgia, took care of it for a time. It and the young mothers, other kids were eventually sent to an orphanage. This event seems to have inspired much of Georgia's later career. A few years later, when Georgia was 15, her father placed two children in the protection of the Mississippi Children's Home Society. These kids were not orphans, though. As Georgia later recalled quote, the father was a man of intelligence, but of a mean disposition that was always getting him into trouble. The mother was from an ordinary poor family. The children were sweet, attractive in appearance, and Georgia was able to use their attractive. Coherence to basically market the kids to a wealthy family in town. This rich family adopted both children. This was the first adoption Georgia arranged again when she was 15 years old. Speaking years later to a reporter, she considered it a huge success. The girl now has a degree in music. The boys finished his law degree and began his practice. Each was given an opportunity and made the most of it. So there's some darkness in that story. These kids were not separated from their parents because their parents were abusive or so drugged up that they couldn't take care of them. The dad, you know, was in jail a lot for disorderly conduct. And the mother was poor. That's well, the dad probably beat them. I mean, yeah, but every I'm going to guess that was like every family and in town at that point. Sure, yeah, but like she she didn't, like specifically state that he was abusive to the kids. She just thought that they were too poor to have beautiful kids and so sold the kids to a rich family. Tell me where she's wrong. Well, yeah, that's that. That that would sort of prove to be her calling in life was finding ways to get poor kids into wealthy families. And do they just have to be beautiful? Yeah, she liked, she liked the blonde kids those were the favorite kids to. She couldn't sell a redhead. Well, I mean, who could? Yeah, exactly right. Ron Howard. Starting at around 1920, Georgia Tann gave up teaching and began exploiting her dad's connections and powers a judge to start placing children with other families. She worked with the Kate Mcwillie Powers, receiving home for children in Jackson, Ms initially she did the important work of placing orphan children with foster homes, but according to the baby Thief quote, she became obsessed with finding adoptive homes for children who had already had homes. She would acquire these children through kidnapping or deceit and if she saved my God and if she saved them from anything, it was poverty. Georgia considered poverty the worst. Possible condition. It was her upbringing. She was from a very snobbish family that looked down on people in those shanty houses who got their hands dirty for a living, Andrew Bond of Biloxi Ms told me. Georgia felt she was taking children from trashy people and elevating the children. Now that book the baby thief, which is a chilling read but an excellent piece of journalism, goes into detail about one of Georgia's very first baby abductions. Quote 1 spring morning. She drove her Model T to a cabin in Jasper County near her Hickory hometown. Asleep inside was Rose Harvey, who was young, poor, widowed and pregnant and suffering from diabetes. Who 2 year old son Onyx played on the back porch. Georgia lured the sturdy, black haired, brown eyed boy into her car. George's father, George C Tan signed papers declaring Rose Harvey an unfit mother and young Onyx and abandoned. Child Onyx was placed with an adoptive family headed by a man named Rufus Raspberry. Shortly afterward, it was I'm sorry, was Rufus Raspberry a fake person someone made-up? Because yes, the answer to that is yes. He sounds like he belongs in like an old like Fable Book from the South and Young Rufus Raspberry I'm more thinking of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory situation. Roll doll. Yeah, yeah, you. Rufus Raspberry is the bet. That's a good reason. Give him a child today. Need to have a child stolen for you, this Raspberry Junior. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give your life. That's amazing. It could have been your life. Shortly afterwards, she stole Onyx's young brother from their mother as well. The mom tried to get her children back in court, but George's dad was the judge, and so that did not happen. That's terrible. She's like, well, let's ask the opinion of this neutral judge. Daddy? Judge. Dad? Daddy, what do you think? Do you think I should get to steal? These babies that's so ****** **. But also you said she like blonde babies. Why did she steal this, this dark haired child? Well, I mean, you know, you're not going to start with the blonde babies. You work your way up to them, you know? You, you, you. That's that's just the way it goes. You know, George's methods eventually got her kicked out of Mississippi and then Texas, but she finally thank God. I was like, I don't think anybody cares about this. It's one of those things where like if you're getting kicked out of Texas in like 1915 for. Not treating children properly, you it's probably pretty bad. Yeah, like it's Texas, man. Yeah. Anyway, she finally found her forever home in Memphis, TN, where she became the executive director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. She got right to work, matching orphaned kids with new parents, but also abducting poor kids to sell to rich parents. It turned it turned out there was a lot of money in selling the right kinds of babies to the right people. Now, I should note at this point that it convincing people to adopt. Makes it all was something of a coup for Georgia. When I said she basically invented modern American adoption. This is what I'm getting at. In the early 1920s, it was not a thing people did thanks to the then Popular Science of eugenics. According to the adoption History Project quote Henry Herbert Goddard, a national authority on feeble minded children, insisted that compassion for needy children was short sighted because adoption was a crime against those yet unborn. The eugenic threat adoption posed, according to Goddard, was directly tied to illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were likely to be feeble. Ended themselves and have feeble minded children whose adoptions would contaminate the gene pool by reproducing future generations of defectives. Guided, advocated segregating these children and adults and benevolent institutions where they're dangerous sexuality could be contained. Damn yeah, dangerous sexuality. That's the name of my next album. That is a good album name. Yeah, that's a really good album name. Should see the cover also. Baby farm. It's just *******. It's just *******. The concerns even common people had about adoption are embodied by this 1928 letter one couple sent to the US Children's Bureau when they were considering an adoption quote. We are very anxious to adopt A baby, but would like to get one that we know about its parentage. Are there any homes or orphanages where a person can find out whether there is insanity fits or other hereditary diseases in its ancestors? We would like to have one from Christian parentage, so. Even people who are open to adopting at this period of time are really concerned about it and it it's not something that really happened very often. When Georgia started her business in 1924, the Boston Children's Aid Society, which is one of the largest such organizations in the US, arranged roughly 5 adoptions a year. In 1928, Georgia Tan arranged 206 adoptions in Memphis alone. So. According to the baby thief quote, she developed both her business and the institution of adoption by doing something unprecedented, making homeless children acceptable, even irresistible, to childless couples. She accomplished cover them in sprinkles. Irresistible. What does that even mean? Well, she accomplished this by insisting, when most child placement workers apologize for the unworthiness of adoptable babies, that they were neither children of sin or genetically flawed. They are, she said repeatedly, blank slates. They are born untainted, and if you adopt them at an early age and surround them with beauty and culture, they will become anything you wish them to be. So. It's kind of, she's kind of a mixed bag because that's a good thing to convince people when they think that, like, well, no, if a baby's mom is dumb, the baby's going to be. While she's saying that cool ****. She's like, literally taking a baby stroller. Like, putting it in her. She literally stole a baby with ice cream once by, like, luring it into her car with ice cream. Dude, I wasn't too far off when I said irresistible with sprinkles, right? It's kind of scary how close you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. George's babies also came with a guarantee of satisfaction. Or you could return it within 30 days. Yeah, actually. Oh my God. She not only she not only invented adoption, but she invented the return policy on a baby. Insane quote. 100% of our children turn out, on average, better than 100 children raised in their families of birth. The reason is that ours is a selective process. We select the child and we select. Home. Now, Georgia's adoptions were approved by judges. Of course, it was not unheard of for some of these judges to approve more than a dozen per day as George's business took off. George's favorite judge was Camille Kelly, a juvenile court judge. In the guise of advising parents on how to deal with unemployment or divorce, Kelly would in their parental rights and transfer custody of their kids over to Georgia. Fully 20% of the children Georgia placed were given to her by Justice Kelly. So parents would come in being like, we just lost her job and like, we need to, you know, get benefits or something like that and she be like, OK, you got to fill out this paperwork and then. Tries the paperwork. Was giving up your rights to your kids. Oh my God. That's like when they have, you know and like. Sitcoms or something, they have. You sign a paper and then they like take the top layer off and they're like, haha, you just you sign the family farm away. Yeah or whatever. But in this case, it was your baby. Yeah, yeah, they didn't want your farm. She's smart, yeah. Mary Long was one of her victims. When she was 15, she lived on a farm with three sisters, a brother and her mother who was dying of cancer. Their mother asked the state Welfare Department to take her children temporarily while she waited for her relatives to arrive in town and to take them. Instead. The welfare worker took them to Kelly's juvenile courtroom. Kelly turned the kids over to Georgia. Tan Mary later recalled meeting Georgia. Quote, she had a tight lipped hatchet face. She was hateful looking mean. Judge Kelly promised to send them all to an orphanage for safekeeping. And she. Mostly did that, but Georgia Tann wanted Mary's youngest sister, 5 year old Christine. When they arrived at the orphanage, Mary's young sister was abducted and pulled into Georgia Tann's waiting limousine. Bessie, Bessie. Bessie. Bessie. I can still hear her screams. I begged the nuns at Saint Peters to tell me what had happened. Finally one said Georgia Tann had flown Christine out of the state to be adopted, so damn, didn't want the older ones, just took their young sister and was like, this is the only kid I need. Stick the rest with the nuns. Jesus, who gives a ****? Georgia was only able. But I gotta say, if you're getting abducted into a limo, kind of best case scenario. Adoption. Yeah, most people. I mean, an abduction of people mostly just put you in a van. Yeah, it is better than a van. You know, you're getting put into that nice car. I'm just here for the silver lining. You know? All about that silver lining. Speaking of Silver Linings. It's time for another ad break, and the Silver Linings of these ads is that none of them will be about babies getting stolen or murdered. Beautiful, beautiful products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. We're back. Georgia was only able to get away with any of her crimes due to the shocking and total collusion of the local government in Memphis. Some of this was due to bribery of the traditional sort, but much of it was due to Georgia's ability to secure children for their wealthy and powerful people in town. When one member of the Tennessee State legislatures grandchild was delivered stillborn, Georgia Tann stole and procured a new infant for his daughter the very same day. The baby was handed over to the legislators daughter while she was still anesthetized. And giving birth. She never even knew her original baby had died. Holy ****. Yeah. You need a baby today. I can get you a ******* baby. Like, I'll find you a damn baby. I mean, she she also invented that, like, 30 minutes or less. Pizza guarantee. Yeah, she kind of invented, like, Amazon's whole policy of same day delivery, prime membership, baby delivery. You know, Jeff Bezos, now that we've said it, our phones have sent him that. And he's like, he's already he's already. We've been working on this for months. Way to ruin it. The problem is getting drones that won't fall out of the sky. With the baby in them, we've lost a lot of babies that way. We have fun. By 1929, Georgia had gotten so good at stealing babies that she just had too damn many of them. More than she could place using her usual methods. I mean, that's such a classic baby abduction problem. I know. After a while, you're just like, there's too many babies got too. I stole too many damn babies. Yeah, it's a we, we've we've all been there once or twice. Babies on layaway. Gotta give some away. Put some in one of the baby farms just so you can get rid of the excess. Send them over to that island in New York where all the babies die. Ohh, so many options. So many options. She brought up this surplus baby problem to her friend Ada Gilkey, a reporter with the Memphis Press Scimitar. The holiday season was approaching and Anna needed a bevy of space filling, heartwarming Christmas content. The two hit upon the idea of solving both of their issues by using the space to advertise George's babies. One of Georgia's ads was just a picture of several babies under the header 1A real live Christmas present. Oh my God, it's like getting a puppy. Yeah, that's exactly how it sounds. I'm going to read you some of the copy from that. Real life Christmas present, baby. I could write that copy. OK. What's your what's your guess? OK? Do you want to have a true Christmas experience? Do you want to experience what Mary's experience when she had Jesus? Well, I have some top notch, 100% blank slate, beautiful babies that are going to turn out to be anything you want them to be. Do you want to have the happiest little bundle under your Christmas tree? Come to Georgia's babies. Babies by church. Yeah, that's that's not super far off. Yeah, I wasn't trying to be funny. I was just trying to nail it, you know? You nailed it. Yeah. So that they add red wanna real life Christmas present. Well, here's your chance for 25 children ranging in age from three months to 7 years will be presented at to as many lucky families Christmas Eve. The press symitar is making special arrangements with Miss Georgia Tan to place these babies. A December 1929 ad featuring a picture of two adorable babies said this. See if you can pick out the boy in the picture. No, you missed. It's the other one. The Curly head on the right and his playmate on the left is the girl. She is 8 months and the little boy is 1 year old. They have golden hair, blue eyes and good dispositions. Applications should be sent to the press. Simitar adoption editor say whether you want a boy or girl, brunette, blonde haired or redhead. Blondes, by the way, are in the majority. Oh my gosh, she's gotten better at stealing the blonde babies by that .1929. She's like, I know what the market needs. I know what people want and they want. They want blonde babies like she. Yeah, the ads were an instant staggering hit the newspapers, adoption. Editor, which is not a thing that exists, received dozens of calls that very day. Georgia ran different ads with different babies every day that December. She called them Christmas babies living dolls and advised readers to put your orders in early. You want to get that baby before Christmas? Yeah. You don't want to also, like, be the one person who didn't get a baby. Yeah, you don't. Your friends are going to make fun of you. Oh, you didn't get the baby for Christmas, loser. The Hot Christmas gift. It's a literal baby. Yeah. The ads also took on an unsettling error, like even more than sort of the commercializing of babies. There's one ad from November 1930 that described A5 year old girl this way. A solemn little trick with big brown eyes. Madges, 5 years old and awful lonesome. What? Why is she a trick? I don't know. My only hope is that it meant something less. Like risque in 1930. Yeah, like is she they're trying to be like, she's ready to ****. She's 5. Why? Why? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, although we'll be talking about George's love of molesting babies later, so that might have been a part of it. It's ****** **. I said this was going to be like, yeah, December 1935 AD for a 5 year old boy was titled yours for the asking. And red, how would you like to have this handsome boy play catch with you? How would you like his chubby arms to slip around your neck and give you a bear like hug? His name is George and he may be yours for the asking. Jesus, yeah, this is 1935. Like, we're not. That's not that far in the past. Like. They have planes that can go across continents. World War Two, yeah. It's crazy. The Christmas ads were so successful that Georgia usually sold out of babies. This provided her with an ever growing list. Imagine that she's running that ad and then on top of it is that big sold out. Like stamp that they do no more. Baby, I'm going to go drive into the poor part of town and pick some up. But like, you know, you got to give me like 4 hours to grab the next wave. The ads provided her with an ever growing list of future clients who she could abduct children for and Market 2 directly. The Christmas baby stories were also a wild success from a content standpoint. They became the newspaper's most popular articles in a rampant source of discussion for the people of Memphis. According to the baby thief quote, would the child be dressed in lace or simply a diaper? Or as was Master Paul advertised on December 14th of that first year, nothing at all. Our photographer caught the young gentleman Alan nude, but he wasn't the least bit perturbed. He is 7 months old and blonde. Like, Oh my God, elderly citizens saved their favorite pictures. Young matrons, bridge parties were enlivened by spirited but friendly arguments over whether Baby Bonnie was cuter than Master Paul. George's ads made adoption a household word in the region and adoptable children, their faces illuminating the newspapers that shared table space with readers. Coffee cups and jam pots began to seem part of their family. I really like the the jam pots were mentioned. We want to make sure you knew people were having jam at the time. It was big. I mean, it's one of those things. So like, this is again, part of, like, the complexity of it is because, like back before Georgia Tann started her work, it was considered like shameful to it. Consider adopting a kid because like, you know what's gonna come from you're, you know, you're making, you know, you're essentially like letting this lower class person infiltrate a good family. And she ends that stigma by making everybody just kind of baby crazy. But she's also doing it by turning babies into a commodity, SO2 babies for the price of 1. One deal, throwing a redhead full free redheads half off. You know, you take a blonde, get a free redhead. Well, get some colds cash for a future baby. You don't even have to keep the redheads alive, you can just smother them. 30s. Eventually, other newspapers started running Georgia Tann's baby ads, too. By 1935, Georgia Tann had placed children with parents in all 48 United States, along with four other countries. Thanks to the ads and the growing success of George's business, she started to get a little bit famous. This brought more applicants to her, for which she had to find more babies. It also made her rich. And this is probably where she should we should talk about just how Georgia Tan monetized adoption. So, according to the baby thief quote, she didn't openly affixed price tags to children, but instead charged fees for transporting them to their new homes. Georgia directed prospective adoptive parents to make their checks out to her, not to the Tennessee Children's Home Society, and to send them to her private post office box in Memphis. These fees included travel expenses for a worker and the baby to be adopted, and were due in three installments. She charged California residents $168 for the first visit in New York City. Residents, $228.81, adoptive parents and other areas were charged fees somewhat between these figures. The next installment of Georgia's fee was due upon delivery of the child. Georgia enjoyed handing babies to happy, excited couples, and she often made this trip. Itself, California residents were charged $360.00 New Yorkers paid $268.81 now, there were no quality workers pay more for the first installment, but less for the second. I don't know, it's probably just because she wanted the money. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's the only thing that bothers me about this financial. Where the books don't add up. There were no qualifications for adopting a child from Georgia Tan, other than that you know you have access to money, a former children's Bureau worker later told Barbara Raymond quote she placed with no regard to whether children would be happy in their adoptive homes. It was hit and miss. She was trying to place every child in Memphis. She wanted to get her hands on every child she could. Since Georgia Tann didn't actually care about any of these kids, she regularly made parents wait more than a year between the second and third trips. This made it seem to the parents like Georgia really did carefully scrutinize every placement before approving an adoption. The reality is that this was all done to justify charging a **** load of money. On the 3rd installment, California residents could expect to spend a total of $731.44 for a baby. New Yorkers paid a total of a little over $766. In modern terms, that's roughly $11,000 per baby. So. These are a high dollar item. Georgia Tann sometimes sold babies for several times that much. Ultra wealthy couples could be expected to pay as much as $10,000 in 1930s dollars, which is roughly 140 grand today. Normally surrogate. Like having a baby via surrogate, that's about 100 grand. Yeah, it it it. That's very expensive. But adoption is not supposed to be that expensive. And at the time, normal adoption agencies did not charge anything except for, like, fees to cover their basic operating costs. And so she was working through a state agency, but she was getting paid personally herself for delivering the babies. Which is a nice racket, if you could make it work out. Yeah, she's a ******* Jeep. Much of Georgia's profits came from bilking new couples for her travel expenses. This led to her increasingly selling her babies. To out-of-state couples. By the late 40s, more than 90% of her stock was sent out of Tennessee. The more places she sold babies, and the more babies she sold, the more famous she became, and the more people reached out to her wanting to adopt babies of their own. This led to an increasing series of what Miss Tan called Roundups. Oh God, that's so dark. Yeah, roundups roundups were conducted by groups of varying sizes that included her and or one or more of her subordinates. They were accompanied by an ever changing assortment of memphians, juvenile court employees, social workers, and deputy sheriffs. Armed with papers signed by Judge Camille Kelley, the groups descended upon the apartments, homes, farms, and even houseboats of poor parents rounding up their children, looking them over, and carrying off those Georgia deemed most marketable. The reason most often cited, and Judge Kelly's authorization, was that their parents were providing a poor home environment. Angel wasn't required to explain why she often seized only the youngest members of a sibling group, not all. Yeah, that's cool. Super cool, Georgia. Most of the children she abducted were babies or toddlers. Usually the cutoff was around age 5. When she abducted older children, including teens, it was because of specific requests she received from different clients. As her business grew, Georgia began stealing children in order to fulfill specific orders. One example of how this worked is the story of a 31 year old widow and mother of six named Grace Gribble. Now, Grace had a social worker from the Memphis Family Welfare Agency named Sarah Simms. Sarah visited regularly. Check in on Grace and her family. But Sarah was also working with George Tan. Done, done. Done, done, done, done. And one day Sarah showed up with one of hands other employees, a woman named Helen Rose. Sarah told Grace that she needed to sign 6 papers that would guarantee her children free medical care from the state. This was all a ruse, though the papers were really forfeitures of parental rights once they were signed. Helen told Grace I'll take the three youngest children now. Grace started sobbing while Sarah and Helen took three of her children and stuffed them into the back of one of Georgia tann's limousines as grace begged them to stop. Helen coldly explained that. We have an order for a boy of this age and type. Grace went to the local juvenile court. Someone ordered your baby. Sorry. Someone ordered your baby. I got. I got this order. Like, what do you want me to do? Not fulfill a baby order? So Grace went to the local juvenile court to try and get her children back. She found Georgia Tan there and asked where are my babies? To which Georgia replied they're on their way to a much better life than you could provide them. You should thank me. For some reason, Grace was not grateful. She continued to beg Georgia Tan to not abduct her children. Georgia advised her. Forget them. Now, unlike most of Georgia's victims, Grace was eventually able to find a lawyer. It took her seven months to do this. During this time, her six year old was given to a family in Florida. Her three-year old was adopted by a doctor in Memphis, but her four year old was rejected by the couple who bought him. They sent him back to Memphis on a train with a dollar in his pocket, but they had specifically requested specifically requested him. He's probably had a dent or something. You know, you want a fresh baby. He spent seven years in foster homes before being adopted again, this time by Alcoholics. Jesus yay. Grace did eventually get a trial, but courts being what they were in 1940, the issue that interested the court wasn't where this woman's children stolen from her. It was does she have as much money as the new parents of her children? In the end, the judge ruled that the adoptions would be allowed to stand. Grace would not get her children back. The judge told her quote, this is one of the sad tragedies of life that even a mother must endure for the best interest of her children. Sorry the other people have more money, you understand? You're rich or you're poor. Think about that. People can't raise babies or you can't. You're poor. You can't have several little pores. Yeah, gotta give them away. You gotta give them away. Georgia Tan was able to get away with so much in part because she had a tight relationship with the man who was basically the dictator of Memphis at this point. EH boss Crump? According to the New York Post. That is also a fake name. With what? What was it? Rest. Russell Raspberry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not Russell Rufus, Rufus. Raspberry. That's that's the best thing to come out of this story is that a man named Rufus Raspberry once existed. Yeah. And what is it, boss Crump? That sounds like a video game, boss that you have to beat at the very end. Everything was ridiculous in the 30s. Like, man, yeah. Is just a silly time. According to the New York Post quote, Crump, also a transplanted Mississippian, was the sometime mayor and leader of politics. Named after? Yes, I hope so. He developed a cozy patronage with tan. She paid him off and brought the fame of her society to Memphis. He in turn protected her from crying investigations while city police ignored the complaints of families who lost children to tan and sometimes even helped Tan sees kids. So the cops got in on it. You need help stealing babies, Georgia? Yeah, not not a big shocker, Georgia. Tan seemed to see much of what she was doing as a sort of class war. She believed the poor were unworthy parents and that their children were better off dead if they couldn't grow up wealthy. This had the benefit for Georgia. Making her look outwardly spotless to the world, most of the coverage around here focused on either the adorable pictures of babies and newspapers or her work adopting out babies to the rich and famous. She provided Joan Crawford with her twin daughters. Oh my God, are you serious? I am serious. She provided babies to Lauda Turner and Pearl Buck and Herbert Lehman, the Governor of New York. A number of the children she stole later grew up to be prominent themselves, including the wrestler Ric Flair. Ric Flair was stolen as a baby by Georgia Tann. Joan Crawford got her kids from? Yeah. We should have led with this. We buried the lead on this one. You know where Joan Crawford's babies came from? Yeah. Hundred. They were stolen from some poor family. So we don't know where they're really from. No. One of Georgia's legacies that actually persists to this day is, like, in most of the country. It started to change. The records of, like, where the child came from are sealed. And like, you like, in a lot of cases, you can't find out what your past is, something that's. Yeah. Now you can. Figured out at a certain point. It used to be that it was just destroyed and like that you had no access to them. They were basically sealed in most of the country. And that's something Georgia lobbied for specifically to make it harder for people to figure out where she was stealing babies from and stuff. Yeah, I can't believe that that legacy is kind of stayed. That's what I mean when I say she kind of invented the modern way of adoption. And, like, a lot of not all of it's bad, but it all started because, like, she was just trying to figure out a better way to steal and market babies. That's ******* nuts. It's ******* wild. And Georgia Tann's business was even darker than it seems because for Georgia, babies were just products like melons or bottles of beer or cartoons of milk. And with any product, you're going to have some spoilage or breakage to deal with. In the case of Georgia Tan, that spoilage came in the form of a **** load of dead babies. But we're going to talk about all that and so much more when we come back on Thursday. This is a good note to end the episode on how you feeling about Georgia 10. When I first made-up. Patch of her. And then I sewed it on my jacket and now I've torn it off. Yeah, it just feel like. My previous love of her was just, you know, yeah, not justified. Not justified. It was you get, you get excited because of the lawyer thing and then it was like a lesbian lesbian lawyer. This is amazing. Baby stealer. Oh, this is taking a dark turn. Baby murderer even darker. Oshima molested some of the babies. OK, I'm going to head out. I'm out sees he went to plug your plegables sure I. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sofia TH ESOFIYA and listen to my podcast private parts unknown. We talk about sex and sexuality and we travel around the world. Pretty cool. That does sound pretty cool. If you want to find this podcast on Twitter, Instagram, Instagram, it's app. ********. Pod is the is the is the handle for both. You can find us on the Internet at behindthebastards.com, which is where we'll have these sources for this. Podcast listed if you want to really get deep down into baby murder. If there's more links for you, bummed the **** out. The baby thief is a fine piece of journalism on a super bummer of a topic. Gray. We have shirts. You can buy shirts, you can buy beer cozies, you can buy phone cases, you can buy munitions. All branded with behind the ******** and babies. Yes. Yeah, we we do. Now sell babies. Are you running on special? Yeah. You know what? I am OK to tell us what the special is. 2 brunettes for the price of a blonde. Oh my God. I'm going to get in on this. Yeah, everybody should get your baby. You don't want to be the only person on Easter. Yeah, and and and try to try to text ahead of time because I need to like, have time to drive down to the poor part of town due to a couple of kids. You know it goes you need a little bit of lead time. Need a little bit of lead time to steal some babies. You know, I only have so much room in the trunk of the car. I mean, I'll provide the limo. I'll rent a limo so that you can really steal and style the old fashioned way old fashioned way, checking him in the back of the limo and driving off. That sounds great. Well, Oh yeah. I have a podcast. It's called. It could happen here. It's not as depressing as. This, but it's the title sounds like it probably is. It's it's pretty depressing. It is pretty depressing. We don't talk about child molestation, though, but it could happen here. I'm, I think you are not thinking of like, an ice cream party. It's like negative things. It's not about the possibility of an ice cream party that I'm saying no one's ever like. It could happen here about something great, like a festival. Yeah, that could happen here. No, it's it's a bummer. That he was so committed to depression, you are thinking that's all I ever do is sad stuff. That's the end of the episode. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREA. Ker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm dua Lipa and I'm thrilled to be back for the second season of my podcast Dua Lipa at your service alongside me and my guests lists and recommendations. The show features conversations with some of my biggest inspirations working across entertainment, politics, activism and much, much more. So please tune in and join me on this very special adventure. Listen to Dua Lipa at your service starting Friday 23rd of September on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.