May 27, 2026
Gilbert King Presents: Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry
Award-winning investigative reporter and long-time Rolling Stone contributor Paul Solotaroff thought he was chasing a single story in Carmel, NY. Instead, he uncovered a sprawling web of cases that would consume years of his life and become the foundation for Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry. What began as a magazine feature evolved into something far bigger: a relentless investigation that exposed shocking new layers with every turn. Listen to a special bonus episode with Bone Valley creator Gilbert King (@gilbertkingpics), Paul Solotaroff, and Senior Editor at Rolling Stone Liz Garber-Paul as they unpack the reporting, the storytelling, and the cases at the center of The Devil's Quarry. An official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival, Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry will be available everywhere you listen to podcasts on June 10th. Listeners can binge the entire season by subscribing to Lava for Good+ on Apple Podcasts.
Bone Valley Season 5: The Devil’s Quarry is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:00
Speaker 1: I'm here with Paul Solataroff, the writer and host of Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, as well as Liz Garber Paul, the Rolling Stone editor who published Paul's feature story The Devil You Know in Rolling Stone. The new season Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, will begin on June tenth, and it's also an official selection for the twenty twenty six Tribeca Festival. Welcome, guys. Really nice to see you, guys. Are you guys ready to talk some Bone Valley podcasting?
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
00:00:31
Speaker 1: All right, good, Paul, Let's just start with your journalism background, because you know, 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. So can we just talk about your background a little bit? And you know what you were doing when you stumbled onto this case.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: So I took a series of left turns from graduate writing programs into a job at the Village Voice in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight, wound up writing my first ever story about homeless children on the docks of the West Side Highway, which inadvertently became this enormous cluster of a story because it outed an organization called Covenant House, which, through the front doors, was bringing in all of these broken, abandoned, kickout children of the crack pandemic in New York City and then selling some of them out the back door to corporate donors. That story launched me on a trajectory to eventually Rolling Stone, where I have now been for thirty four years. And my remitt a rolling Stone has always been the pursuit of justice for those who otherwise had no shot at it, whether it was homeless kids, whether it was brainbroken NFL veterans who had been utterly screwed out of a pension, or even any kind of clinical acknowledgment of what was this enormous pandemic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was my story, and over the years I have gone after the kinds of stories that yielded the most horrific, unspeakable acts of official misconduct on the parts of crooked cops, big city cops, on the parts of corrupt prosecutors, on the parts of in the bad 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 appointed myself the public advocate for the poor who had been caught in the most horrific domestic policy decision of the American century, which is this headlong attempt to arrest our way out of the drug pandemic and create a massive incarceral state that left us five years ago with a quarter of the world's in prison population.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: Paul, where do you think this came from? I mean, looking back decades of doing this kind of work, was there something that affected you as a child, or some kind of you know, awakening to these issues.
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Where did they come from? I was a bit of a red diaper baby. My father was a famous literary editor, my mother a translator of Tulstoy and Chekhov. None of that was interesting to me. What was interesting was they dragged me to DC for the March on Washington, to the rallies in Central Park in the sixties. I wound up going to the School 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, ultimately the weather Underground. So I was very much subscribed into radical politics as a child, but I was raised to be a novelist and trained to be a novelist. And so what I brought inadvertently to journalism was a storyteller's use of language, of narrative structure, and of that intense fascination with otherness, with the price, the daily price of getting out of bed for people without the kinds of advantages, privileges, associations I'd come to take for granted. And 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 orphan children of the Happy Lands disco fire in nineteen eighty seven. And for two years I sat in an office with no skills, with really no supervision, attempting to console children whose parents had been a 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 West Side Docks, and every day I would take my lunch to eat on these abandoned docks, which were rotting peers that had become a stroll for the eight nine and ten year old kickout children of 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 to get them the assistance, 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, I just follow my app rage.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Can you just talk about having, you know, 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. With now Bone Valley season five.
00:07:33
Speaker 2: I work very closely with the Innocence Project. They have been boone partners on several of my big sort of exoneration stories, and they began telling me about what was happening in Massachusetts, about this bubbling up scandal in the state crime labs. So, in Massachusetts there was this ten fifteen year long open scandal wherein the 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 in order to corroborate these indictments of low level dealers, primarily possession, use sales. Well, 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 were shooting, snorting, smoking, huffing, and otherwise consuming the very substances they were hired to test. These bench chemists had wrongly helped convict we believe fifty sixty thousand low level offenders. Another of these deep, very complicated digs helped to exonerate forty one thousand of these 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 were running Innocence Project in New York. I said, what's next? And they said, ever want to look at small town police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct. Have 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 Putnam County, fifty miles from Rolling Stone's office on Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan, and meet with two young men who had been framed, who had been arrested, framed, convicted, and sent away in their teens to the most medieval prisons in New York State for life without parole for the rape and murder of a girl. They had never met. The first of these wrongfully accused teens, who had spent twenty years his entire young adulthood in Attica, Dana Mora Auburn Western teaching himself how to read. He was a ninth grade dropout when he went away, teaching himself the law at Shwongong Prison library and compiling the most extraordinary legal brief investigating the actual killer of the decedent, Josette Right. And so when I showed up in Carmel. I didn't show up in Carmel. My first toe end of the story was sitting in the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New Rochelle of Anthony de 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, won settlements to the tune of fifteen million dollars and bought himself a very garish apartment in Trump Tower. Remember he was seven team unarrested nineteen, went sent away for life of that pearl. His emotional and developmental timeline were stopped abruptly as a teen. And so what did he buy himself with this fifteen million? He bought himself one hundred and fifty replica championship wrestling belts, framed them and mounted them on the walls of his apartment. He had a nine thousand dollars flat screen TV, which he told me only worked in eight K, which was a problem because we only had four K at the time. And what made it really poignant and what Anthony had intensely in common with the other exoneries I've either held free or who got themselves free. And then I told their stories. Having been entrapped in an eight by non enclosure his entire adult life. He was living in this three bedroom apartment, in fifteen hundred square foot apartment with spectacular views in every window. He wouldn't leave the bedroom. He would pace his bedroom and never leave. And I said, Anthony, how do you eat? How do you get vitamin D? He said, I go down at night when I think the cops are out, are gone. So he was so terrified he bought himself this gorgeous AMG Mercedes suv that he was terrified to drive for fear that he'd be stopped. So 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 snatched them out of their childhoods. And so I spent nine months reporting that story and the corruption, the incompetence, the sadism of the Putnam County Sheriff's office was, if anything undersold to me, it was the most lawless law enforcement agency I have ever had the honor of delving into. And it had a history of criminal misconduct dating back decades. What do you do if you were a police department or a constellation of police departments that has domestics as its variant of violent crime, that has nickel and dime possession as it's underworld, You go and you create crime. And one of the ways that these police police departments did that was by using a confidential informant who turns out to be this central figure of the devil, you know, a man in his thirties, to sell give away drugs to children, to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds of both genders, and 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 wood, or to hang out in an abandoned shack by the railyard to drink Boone's farm. The sheriffs of the cops would swarm the girls. In order to get out of the back seat of that cruiser, would have to blow the deputy. The boys would have to agree to be snitches and sell a nickel of weed to their school friends. That's how you build stats if you are a corrupt sheriff. In a small 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. And that, for me, was the palette I worked with. Those were the earth colors I painted that story with. Within that subculture, these extremely vulnerable children who, let's remember, this was pre helicopter parenting. This was you know, pre you know, children just saying no. The town of Carmel, much of that side of Putnam County offers fuck all for children after school. If you don't play Little League, if you don't play girl soccer, there is nowhere for you to go. And they had to go somewhere to continue to you know, kind of 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 precocious kind of sexuality was what passed for entertainment. What passed for after school activities, 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 follen because I was such an obvious ringer and because I was asking the wrong questions.
00:18:32
Speaker 3: 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 protective over their town and didn't love an outsider coming in and ripping it all up.
00:18:58
Speaker 1: This I'm going to 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 de w no, What was your first introduction to this story and what was your reaction at the time.
00:19:10
Speaker 3: 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've only been a 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 early in my career, I had, and I had also just finished around 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 this street the 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 or not exactly exoneration, but he won his 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. So so my work as an editor on this story was not so much trying to frame the narrative or you know, why would the reader care about this, like, 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 very 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 by the way that Paul had just really brought this slice of you know, bedroom community nineteen eighties to life. And so, yeah, our first job was digging in, reading through all of the reporting that he'd been doing over nine months 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.
00:21:23
Speaker 1: But also recent history.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: You know, memory is a tricky thing. People are trying to tell 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 both 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 corruption that brought them to that point.
00:21:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, and obviously it can be a very dark story time 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 do 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?
00:22:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I think for a story like this, you know, the corruption it's about, how do you how do you get a reader to pay attention to to you know, the vegetables of the story, right, which is the police corruption, which can get somewhat 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 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?
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Right?
00:22:59
Speaker 3: How 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, 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 depths into the reporting that he's done and realize that, you know, it's not it's not someone coming in and trying to change the story at someone coming in and trying to tell the real story.
00:24:35
Speaker 2: Paul.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: I'm just really curious from you from a storyteller's perspective, somebody has you know, done print for decades, what was it like pivoting the podcast in this audio format? Could you talk about some of the things that you found different and really satisfying or unsatisfying.
00:24:49
Speaker 2: Well, I'd always thought of my voice as one of my very few advantages in life, my speaking voice. And then I began listening to playbacks of myself doing narration, and I called Kevin Waters in a panic and said, can we hire someone to do the narration? I really don't want to be the reason that no one listens to season five of Bone Valley. 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 engine, not by the ord, I also am a very self conscious and self scourging stylist of my sentences, and they were too pretty. I think your voice is fantastic than you know. Really, you just it's 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 my voice. And I even thought the same thing, do you want to get another narrator? But you fit that you're the person who did the work, you belong in the story. But I finally figured out, no, the most powerful voice in these episodes is always the victims, is always the lawyers, is always the exonerated Anthony to Pippo. Their stories are vastly more interested interesting than my sentences, 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, your own traumatic renderings of what happened to them.
00:27:07
Speaker 1: I think the other thing I noticed when in the whole writing process is 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. And you 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 in 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.
00:27:59
Speaker 2: 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 get to Danimore, the backyard wrestlers up there bench four fifty, squat five twenty and eat white boys like you for as an amuse boush and both of these young men, by the way, Andy on a good day is five seven and a buck forty. And they entered the as I say, the most raconian prisons in New York State. And they went into these places with what is called a jacket. You go into max prison, you are wearing a jacket of your conviction. They wore the worst possible jacket you can wear, child rapist, murderer, and they were going to have to save their own lives. From the day they walked in. They were going to have to fight their own fights. They were going to have to convince at least a few of the key shot callers on their cell blocks. I didn't do this. I got railroaded, you know, Paul.
00:29:31
Speaker 1: When I go out and speak about the cases of like Leo Schofield and Jeremy Scott, I often get asked, you know, you're dealing with these really dark subjects, really about 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 coming back into it and creating Bone Valley Season five?
00:29:56
Speaker 2: 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 callous around my heart and my soul, this story, and only this story, pierced it. And it pierced it not because of my interactions with the devil who is the titular character in the series. Those were upsetting, but I know those guys. It was the half dozen survivors of this monster who had told these stories first to the cops, then do it udge, then in courtroom juried settings, and who had never been believed, had never been supported, had never been able to feel safe again for the rest of their adult lives. I had a nervous breakdown first 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. And what did it to me? It was living with the stories of this half dozen living witnesses and their untreated horror, fear traum.
00:32:00
Speaker 3: What was so striking about the story was just the brutality and the way that this string of girls 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 very affecting. 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. They had to kind of force myself to do it because reading those accounts was it was giving me kind of visceral reactions because we're talking about teenage girls and sometimes pre teenage girls who are raped and abused with the knowledge of the adults around them, sometimes and not given any kind of resources or ability to get out of those situations.
00:33:23
Speaker 2: And so when Various and Sundry approached me to do the 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 fragile for a minute. And then something happened a year ago this spring, I got a call from not one, but two of this monster's victims who told me, Paul, he's getting out. Paul, he has 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 tail from a neighboring state, no probation, no parole. A man who has lived since a child in the woods in a tent off the grid will return to the tree line, where he will be sight unseen until the time of his choosing, and a victim of his selection, and at that point I had enough distance between me and the secondhand trauma of those nine months in Carmel, and I enlisted with Lava for Good to get final justice for those young women and for the generations they bore who also carry that almost umbilical feed of rage. I will do everything in my power, short of shooting him myself, to make sure he never disappears into a wooded area and pops out again as a school bus of children goes back. I cannot tell the listeners of this series strongly enough we need you and your outrage. What we are up against is the most staggering corruption, the most staggering stone wall, and only the fear created by the passion of our listeners will help finally get to a place of truth, justice and healing for the girls of Putnam County.
00:36:21
Speaker 1: Well, Paul Is, I can't thank you enough for being here and talking about the Devil's Quarry. I just think this is just a fascinating podcast that's going to grip people from week to week.
00:36:29
Speaker 2: I think the.
00:36:30
Speaker 1: 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.
00:36:58
Speaker 2: The Devil's Quarry. Thank you so much. Gilber, of course, thank you
Speaker 1: I'm here with Paul Solataroff, the writer and host of Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, as well as Liz Garber Paul, the Rolling Stone editor who published Paul's feature story The Devil You Know in Rolling Stone. The new season Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, will begin on June tenth, and it's also an official selection for the twenty twenty six Tribeca Festival. Welcome, guys. Really nice to see you, guys. Are you guys ready to talk some Bone Valley podcasting?
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
00:00:31
Speaker 1: All right, good, Paul, Let's just start with your journalism background, because you know, 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. So can we just talk about your background a little bit? And you know what you were doing when you stumbled onto this case.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: So I took a series of left turns from graduate writing programs into a job at the Village Voice in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight, wound up writing my first ever story about homeless children on the docks of the West Side Highway, which inadvertently became this enormous cluster of a story because it outed an organization called Covenant House, which, through the front doors, was bringing in all of these broken, abandoned, kickout children of the crack pandemic in New York City and then selling some of them out the back door to corporate donors. That story launched me on a trajectory to eventually Rolling Stone, where I have now been for thirty four years. And my remitt a rolling Stone has always been the pursuit of justice for those who otherwise had no shot at it, whether it was homeless kids, whether it was brainbroken NFL veterans who had been utterly screwed out of a pension, or even any kind of clinical acknowledgment of what was this enormous pandemic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was my story, and over the years I have gone after the kinds of stories that yielded the most horrific, unspeakable acts of official misconduct on the parts of crooked cops, big city cops, on the parts of corrupt prosecutors, on the parts of in the bad 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 appointed myself the public advocate for the poor who had been caught in the most horrific domestic policy decision of the American century, which is this headlong attempt to arrest our way out of the drug pandemic and create a massive incarceral state that left us five years ago with a quarter of the world's in prison population.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: Paul, where do you think this came from? I mean, looking back decades of doing this kind of work, was there something that affected you as a child, or some kind of you know, awakening to these issues.
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Where did they come from? I was a bit of a red diaper baby. My father was a famous literary editor, my mother a translator of Tulstoy and Chekhov. None of that was interesting to me. What was interesting was they dragged me to DC for the March on Washington, to the rallies in Central Park in the sixties. I wound up going to the School 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, ultimately the weather Underground. So I was very much subscribed into radical politics as a child, but I was raised to be a novelist and trained to be a novelist. And so what I brought inadvertently to journalism was a storyteller's use of language, of narrative structure, and of that intense fascination with otherness, with the price, the daily price of getting out of bed for people without the kinds of advantages, privileges, associations I'd come to take for granted. And 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 orphan children of the Happy Lands disco fire in nineteen eighty seven. And for two years I sat in an office with no skills, with really no supervision, attempting to console children whose parents had been a 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 West Side Docks, and every day I would take my lunch to eat on these abandoned docks, which were rotting peers that had become a stroll for the eight nine and ten year old kickout children of 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 to get them the assistance, 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, I just follow my app rage.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Can you just talk about having, you know, 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. With now Bone Valley season five.
00:07:33
Speaker 2: I work very closely with the Innocence Project. They have been boone partners on several of my big sort of exoneration stories, and they began telling me about what was happening in Massachusetts, about this bubbling up scandal in the state crime labs. So, in Massachusetts there was this ten fifteen year long open scandal wherein the 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 in order to corroborate these indictments of low level dealers, primarily possession, use sales. Well, 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 were shooting, snorting, smoking, huffing, and otherwise consuming the very substances they were hired to test. These bench chemists had wrongly helped convict we believe fifty sixty thousand low level offenders. Another of these deep, very complicated digs helped to exonerate forty one thousand of these 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 were running Innocence Project in New York. I said, what's next? And they said, ever want to look at small town police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct. Have 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 Putnam County, fifty miles from Rolling Stone's office on Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan, and meet with two young men who had been framed, who had been arrested, framed, convicted, and sent away in their teens to the most medieval prisons in New York State for life without parole for the rape and murder of a girl. They had never met. The first of these wrongfully accused teens, who had spent twenty years his entire young adulthood in Attica, Dana Mora Auburn Western teaching himself how to read. He was a ninth grade dropout when he went away, teaching himself the law at Shwongong Prison library and compiling the most extraordinary legal brief investigating the actual killer of the decedent, Josette Right. And so when I showed up in Carmel. I didn't show up in Carmel. My first toe end of the story was sitting in the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New Rochelle of Anthony de 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, won settlements to the tune of fifteen million dollars and bought himself a very garish apartment in Trump Tower. Remember he was seven team unarrested nineteen, went sent away for life of that pearl. His emotional and developmental timeline were stopped abruptly as a teen. And so what did he buy himself with this fifteen million? He bought himself one hundred and fifty replica championship wrestling belts, framed them and mounted them on the walls of his apartment. He had a nine thousand dollars flat screen TV, which he told me only worked in eight K, which was a problem because we only had four K at the time. And what made it really poignant and what Anthony had intensely in common with the other exoneries I've either held free or who got themselves free. And then I told their stories. Having been entrapped in an eight by non enclosure his entire adult life. He was living in this three bedroom apartment, in fifteen hundred square foot apartment with spectacular views in every window. He wouldn't leave the bedroom. He would pace his bedroom and never leave. And I said, Anthony, how do you eat? How do you get vitamin D? He said, I go down at night when I think the cops are out, are gone. So he was so terrified he bought himself this gorgeous AMG Mercedes suv that he was terrified to drive for fear that he'd be stopped. So 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 snatched them out of their childhoods. And so I spent nine months reporting that story and the corruption, the incompetence, the sadism of the Putnam County Sheriff's office was, if anything undersold to me, it was the most lawless law enforcement agency I have ever had the honor of delving into. And it had a history of criminal misconduct dating back decades. What do you do if you were a police department or a constellation of police departments that has domestics as its variant of violent crime, that has nickel and dime possession as it's underworld, You go and you create crime. And one of the ways that these police police departments did that was by using a confidential informant who turns out to be this central figure of the devil, you know, a man in his thirties, to sell give away drugs to children, to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds of both genders, and 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 wood, or to hang out in an abandoned shack by the railyard to drink Boone's farm. The sheriffs of the cops would swarm the girls. In order to get out of the back seat of that cruiser, would have to blow the deputy. The boys would have to agree to be snitches and sell a nickel of weed to their school friends. That's how you build stats if you are a corrupt sheriff. In a small 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. And that, for me, was the palette I worked with. Those were the earth colors I painted that story with. Within that subculture, these extremely vulnerable children who, let's remember, this was pre helicopter parenting. This was you know, pre you know, children just saying no. The town of Carmel, much of that side of Putnam County offers fuck all for children after school. If you don't play Little League, if you don't play girl soccer, there is nowhere for you to go. And they had to go somewhere to continue to you know, kind of 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 precocious kind of sexuality was what passed for entertainment. What passed for after school activities, 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 follen because I was such an obvious ringer and because I was asking the wrong questions.
00:18:32
Speaker 3: 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 protective over their town and didn't love an outsider coming in and ripping it all up.
00:18:58
Speaker 1: This I'm going to 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 de w no, What was your first introduction to this story and what was your reaction at the time.
00:19:10
Speaker 3: 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've only been a 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 early in my career, I had, and I had also just finished around 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 this street the 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 or not exactly exoneration, but he won his 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. So so my work as an editor on this story was not so much trying to frame the narrative or you know, why would the reader care about this, like, 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 very 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 by the way that Paul had just really brought this slice of you know, bedroom community nineteen eighties to life. And so, yeah, our first job was digging in, reading through all of the reporting that he'd been doing over nine months 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.
00:21:23
Speaker 1: But also recent history.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: You know, memory is a tricky thing. People are trying to tell 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 both 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 corruption that brought them to that point.
00:21:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, and obviously it can be a very dark story time 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 do 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?
00:22:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I think for a story like this, you know, the corruption it's about, how do you how do you get a reader to pay attention to to you know, the vegetables of the story, right, which is the police corruption, which can get somewhat 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 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?
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Right?
00:22:59
Speaker 3: How 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, 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 depths into the reporting that he's done and realize that, you know, it's not it's not someone coming in and trying to change the story at someone coming in and trying to tell the real story.
00:24:35
Speaker 2: Paul.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: I'm just really curious from you from a storyteller's perspective, somebody has you know, done print for decades, what was it like pivoting the podcast in this audio format? Could you talk about some of the things that you found different and really satisfying or unsatisfying.
00:24:49
Speaker 2: Well, I'd always thought of my voice as one of my very few advantages in life, my speaking voice. And then I began listening to playbacks of myself doing narration, and I called Kevin Waters in a panic and said, can we hire someone to do the narration? I really don't want to be the reason that no one listens to season five of Bone Valley. 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 engine, not by the ord, I also am a very self conscious and self scourging stylist of my sentences, and they were too pretty. I think your voice is fantastic than you know. Really, you just it's 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 my voice. And I even thought the same thing, do you want to get another narrator? But you fit that you're the person who did the work, you belong in the story. But I finally figured out, no, the most powerful voice in these episodes is always the victims, is always the lawyers, is always the exonerated Anthony to Pippo. Their stories are vastly more interested interesting than my sentences, 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, your own traumatic renderings of what happened to them.
00:27:07
Speaker 1: I think the other thing I noticed when in the whole writing process is 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. And you 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 in 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.
00:27:59
Speaker 2: 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 get to Danimore, the backyard wrestlers up there bench four fifty, squat five twenty and eat white boys like you for as an amuse boush and both of these young men, by the way, Andy on a good day is five seven and a buck forty. And they entered the as I say, the most raconian prisons in New York State. And they went into these places with what is called a jacket. You go into max prison, you are wearing a jacket of your conviction. They wore the worst possible jacket you can wear, child rapist, murderer, and they were going to have to save their own lives. From the day they walked in. They were going to have to fight their own fights. They were going to have to convince at least a few of the key shot callers on their cell blocks. I didn't do this. I got railroaded, you know, Paul.
00:29:31
Speaker 1: When I go out and speak about the cases of like Leo Schofield and Jeremy Scott, I often get asked, you know, you're dealing with these really dark subjects, really about 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 coming back into it and creating Bone Valley Season five?
00:29:56
Speaker 2: 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 callous around my heart and my soul, this story, and only this story, pierced it. And it pierced it not because of my interactions with the devil who is the titular character in the series. Those were upsetting, but I know those guys. It was the half dozen survivors of this monster who had told these stories first to the cops, then do it udge, then in courtroom juried settings, and who had never been believed, had never been supported, had never been able to feel safe again for the rest of their adult lives. I had a nervous breakdown first 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. And what did it to me? It was living with the stories of this half dozen living witnesses and their untreated horror, fear traum.
00:32:00
Speaker 3: What was so striking about the story was just the brutality and the way that this string of girls 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 very affecting. 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. They had to kind of force myself to do it because reading those accounts was it was giving me kind of visceral reactions because we're talking about teenage girls and sometimes pre teenage girls who are raped and abused with the knowledge of the adults around them, sometimes and not given any kind of resources or ability to get out of those situations.
00:33:23
Speaker 2: And so when Various and Sundry approached me to do the 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 fragile for a minute. And then something happened a year ago this spring, I got a call from not one, but two of this monster's victims who told me, Paul, he's getting out. Paul, he has 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 tail from a neighboring state, no probation, no parole. A man who has lived since a child in the woods in a tent off the grid will return to the tree line, where he will be sight unseen until the time of his choosing, and a victim of his selection, and at that point I had enough distance between me and the secondhand trauma of those nine months in Carmel, and I enlisted with Lava for Good to get final justice for those young women and for the generations they bore who also carry that almost umbilical feed of rage. I will do everything in my power, short of shooting him myself, to make sure he never disappears into a wooded area and pops out again as a school bus of children goes back. I cannot tell the listeners of this series strongly enough we need you and your outrage. What we are up against is the most staggering corruption, the most staggering stone wall, and only the fear created by the passion of our listeners will help finally get to a place of truth, justice and healing for the girls of Putnam County.
00:36:21
Speaker 1: Well, Paul Is, I can't thank you enough for being here and talking about the Devil's Quarry. I just think this is just a fascinating podcast that's going to grip people from week to week.
00:36:29
Speaker 2: I think the.
00:36:30
Speaker 1: 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.
00:36:58
Speaker 2: The Devil's Quarry. Thank you so much. Gilber, of course, thank you
