Dan LeFebvre  04:30

Black Sails is a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel from 1883 called Treasure island. That means we have multiple layers of fiction to unravel from both the novel it based on as well as the mere fact that it’s a dramatized TV series with its own fictional elements. But of course, pirates really did exist. And I know you mentioned this series was better than you expected it to be before watching it. So before we get into some of the details, just to get an overall sense of how well it captured the essence of the Golden Age of Piracy, if you were to give Black Sails a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

Colin Woodard  05:16

If I’m not framing it around the fact that it’s a work of fiction and drama. I’d say, you know, like a B plus, and maybe an A minus, if you’re taking into account that it’s a work of fiction and asked to have the drama and all the rest of it down. Yet, the broad, you know, they have four seasons of action and the broad narrative in in big strokes is fairly accurate. You know, the beginning of a Pirate Republic, it’s, you know, the Spanish gold in the in a REX treasure fleet and its role in the, the increase of the prestige of the Republic and the states and the infuriating the Spanish. And eventually the efforts of the empire and forces of order to try to receive the place and the tensions between all of those things. They are mixing in real people who were there at the time, and the characters in their younger form from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The math and timing works out pretty well for that. So sure that that, okay. And of course, because it’s dramatized a lot of events are conflated characters shifted around a number of characters who are important to the historic pirate Republican NetSol were eliminated to make space for some of the Robert Louis Stevenson characters. So in the details of the plot, are kinda all over the place, but the broad story is the same. And what really intrigued me was, and gives me a gift has been giving them relatively high grade is, whenever they had a situation where they needed a specific detail, it was surprising how often they went out of their way to make it accurate. The ships being named right, the you know, minor characters you never meet, we’re always off screen, being given the proper names, you know, the, at one point, Jack Rackham is, you know, sitting on, you know, taking the crap, and he’s reading a newspaper, and he is in fact, reading the Jamaica weekly current. And it’s the I’ve read those on microfilm, there’s not that many that have survived, but it’s the actual, you know, fled from the Jamaica weekly current the masthead is all the same, you know, they, they could have, you know, cut corners and all of that, but didn’t. So I was surprised at the degree to which they went down into the details to be as accurate as possible in the in some of the fine tuning and livery over the over the script,

Dan LeFebvre  07:55

you don’t get that a lot of details, they just kind of make that up. And nobody’s going to notice that kind of thing. Anyway. So a lot, a lot of shows overlook that. So I’m glad that they they stuck to that.

Colin Woodard  08:05

I was impressed with that. So yeah, so basically, you know, really big shapes are accurate, really small things are very accurate. The middle range is where they, you know, played with and adapted the actual historical storyline and created their own wallets. But that, you know, they they inserted all of their plots in a in a broad story that thematically was fairly accurate to history.

Dan LeFebvre  08:28

Sure show you mentioned some of the characters, I want to ask about that kind of, again, looking overall, because there are four seasons. And so there’s a lot of characters, and a lot of TV shows do make up fictional characters. And then of course, we have the characters from Treasure Island. So I kind of broke them down into three different categories. There’s the real pirates, there’s the characters from Treasure Island, and then I’m assuming anybody that doesn’t fit into those is just kind of made up for Black Sails. So just to give a brief overview of those I would say I think the real pirates are Edward Teach Charles Vane, Jack Rackham and Barney Benjamin Hornet gold would Rogers and Israel Hans characters from Treasure Island, James Flint, also known as James McGraw, Billy Bones Long John Silver, and then I’m assuming the rest are kind of made up for Black Sails at Guthrie family, most notably in this series Eleanor and Richard Max, Mr. Scott, Lord Thomas Hamilton, Miranda, Hamilton those characters is that pretty good summary of the categories for the characters in the series?

Colin Woodard  09:32

Yeah, correct. That’s exactly right. And I’d add a fourth category of major figures from the actual history who were removed you know, you’re missing Stede Bonnet. Black Sam Bellamy, although he’s mentioned and Henry Jennings is barely in there at all even though he played a critical role in the end the actual events but yeah, that’s that’s pretty much it.

Dan LeFebvre  09:51

Yeah, I’m glad you added those that were removed because I didn’t see those industries

Colin Woodard  09:55

weren’t really need and bodies partner in crime is also Have entirely eliminated from this. This universe

Dan LeFebvre  10:03

is in this series. She’s kind of with Jack Rackham. It was that not necessarily the case then she was with somebody else. She

Colin Woodard  10:11

was with Jack Rackham. But she was she, Jack Rackham. And Mary Reed all went off into piracy together. So in the sort of great, you know, myths of piracy have Mary Reed and Bonnie along with Calico Jack going off and doing their piracy. He just removed Mary read from it altogether, which is fine, but given what a large profile, perhaps wrongly the very read and Barney story as with the general public, I was surprised that they didn’t sort of at least mentioned why she was off stage or, or, or wasn’t there.

Dan LeFebvre  10:44

Okay, okay. Yeah, they actually do at the very end of the last episode, we’ll get to that day. They do bring her in at the very end. But we’ll get to that. Now that we’ve kind of established some of the people I want to start digging into some of the details of Black Sails, showing how it sets up the time and place in history. And this is according to the very first episode first season and it talks about the year 1715, Pirates of New Providence Island threatened maritime trade in the region of Bahamas, the laws of civilized nations declare them enemies, and so in return, the pirates adhere to their own war against the world. And then later in the second season, we find out a little bit through flashbacks that it all started when a man named Henry Avery sailed into the port of Nassau and New Providence Island. Once he was there, he bribed the colonial governor to overlook his breaking of the law and allow his men to camp on the beach. And that’s basically how the show sets up that the pirates got their foothold in the region. Is that a pretty accurate summary of how piracy actually started in the Bahamas? Oh, pretty

Colin Woodard  11:37

close. So Henry Avery was real. He had made an incredible capture in the Indian Ocean with great brutality of a treasure of Galleon belonging to the grand mogul of India. And there was a global manhunt for him because his piracy had complicated relations for the British East India Company were in their trade monopoly in India that grand mogul was arresting their agents and furious Englishmen everywhere for this outrage. And so there was an All Points Bulletin for this Henry Avery guy like the world’s first global manhunt, everyone was trying to find him. And he skedaddled sort of around the world to where he thought you’d be least expected, which was to this, you know, backwater colony, the Bahamas, in 1696. And indeed, he went to the governor it was very obvious that he was a pirate but he claimed as to found the ship he was on hold treasure and ivory tusks. So at a time when everyone including the governors of the you know, the English governors everywhere were tasked with fighting this man at all costs. The governor of the Bahamas was looking the other way, taking all this gold and ivory and was given the grand mogul ship as his personal prize. In exchange, some small vessels and Henry Avery sort of he didn’t stay there and start a Pirate Republic. Instead, he basically fenced a bunch of his goods to the governor. And then he and his men slowly trickled down into small vessels and made their way up the eastern seaboard. And most of them back through the back door back to Ireland and England. And Henry Avery was last seen before he disappeared into the mists of history at a crossroads on his way towards the west country where he was born, known to be in the company of a man, a woman he was not married to and was married to another, and another man’s wife and and a large amount of treasure. So he didn’t found the Republic. But when Henry Avery disappeared into the night, it started this legend and lore. When these pirates were over the the the show is accurate in saying that, the Pirate Republic kind of got underway in 1715 or so. But this is by the next generation of sailors who became pirates who were inspired by Henry Avery as they had been growing growing up. There had been plays and novels and sonnets, and you know, all of the multimedia entertainment apparatus of the day, was taking the Avery story and embellishing it, and the myth was that this guy had gotten away with it. In some versions of the story, he’d gone to Madagascar in the Indian Ocean and started a you know, a magical Pirate Republic where pirates can be kings in the streets are paved with gold and you know, you know, living living the good life, right? What’s that? You know, in the hobos in the Great Depression, they had that something Candy Mountain, you know, the sort of utopia that the hobos imagined in their songs. This is kind of like a phobia for sailors and, and seamen, and so he was, yeah, the sort of at a multi media phenomenon of this story of the pirate who’d gotten away and become a pirate king, and Henry Avery had gotten into piracy. He had been a upstanding sailor, but he and his fellow sailors were basically cheated and screwed over by the owners of their ship, and they ended up you know, with their lives in danger and having been completely cheated by some of the most powerful men in England, they rose up in a mutiny and captured the ship and went off onto their own account. And that is that story was the sort of inspiration and template for the pirates who came a generation later and started accumulating in the failed English colony of the Bahamas and taking over and starting their own Pirate Republic. So Avery, in a sense, started the Republic but not literally He provided the the myth and and, and storyline and narrative that inspired a future generation was started up.

Dan LeFebvre  15:42

It’s almost like fiction created the fact that that myth and then people just wanting to buy into that and with this must be a great life.

Colin Woodard  15:53

with humans. It’s all about narrative, right? We’re storytelling species in a good story can transform the world.

Dan LeFebvre  15:59

Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re talking about the ship that he found, found with the treasure and and one of the key plot points in Black Sails, revolves around the ship called the Orca dilemma. And according to the series, she’s the largest Spanish treasure Galleon in the Americas with a total cargo in excess of $5 million. And the storyline for the Orca carries throughout pretty much the entire series. But near the end of season one Captain Flynn’s crew hunts down the Orca. And that leads into Season Two when other pilots start to catch wind of the earth and gold, and it becomes this bargaining chip for most of the things that we see all the way up to the end. Not to get too far ahead of our story. We’ve already talked about how it’s a prequel to Treasure Island. So you have to have treasure on that island. And the treasure is the one that’s taken from the aurka. Is there any historical truth to the aurka, dilema story that we see in Black Sails? Yeah, I

Colin Woodard  16:47

probably should have checked this before. I’m pretty sure that that is the the actual name of one of the Spanish treasure galleons that went down when the 1715 treasure fleet had a calamity on the coast of Florida. So Spain was by far and away the most powerful and wealthy of the transatlantic or global maritime empire is based in Europe, in that time period, and is being controlled, you know, everything you know, from Mexico on South and the entire hemisphere, pretty much. And they had possessions in the Philippines and Guam, and in an Asia and all of the unlike the English, you know, showing up in New England and Virginia and the French showing up in Quebec, the Spanish when they’d come had discovered literally mountains of silver and the Aztecs with their gold and just incredible, you know, comic book kind of riches, which they extract with terrible brutality, and you know, slaving people and slaughtering people, but all of that treasure, and all the stuff that they were trading for in Asia, all had to somehow get back to Spain. And the way it worked with, you know, back in those days, square rig, large ocean going vessels couldn’t sail into the wind very well the other sails kind of flap and you had to turn off the wind until the sails would catch. And in those days, you could be sailing 70 degrees off the wind and you add some wind against your hole and you had some waves and you’re not going anywhere. So my point is that ocean going ships were pretty much compelled to follow established sea routes guided by the prevailing winds. And this compelled Spain to move all of their treasures from Asia across the Pacific to the Americas, in a annual massive, you know, Deathstar. Like treasure Galleon, the Manila Galleon that started in the Philippines, stocked up all the treasure and sailed across the Pacific. We get to Acapulco and unload and then under guard, these mule trains are taken over Mexico to better cruise and loaded into galleons and come to book to Havana their, their central base of their maritime part of their empire in the Americas. And then separately, all of that inconsolable and Aztec gold and all the other stuff that they were, you know, extracting bleeding and stealing was all loaded onto vessels that also converged in Havana. And then once every year or two, it was all put onto the incredibly well guarded treasure fleet, often known as the plate flee plate was the word for silver backbone. And it would the prevailing winds from Havana to get back to Spain required that you sail you kind of be carried by the Gulf Stream up between Florida and the Bahama Islands before you can catch the prevailing winds to Iberia to Spain. And so everybody knew this and but the the treasurer fleet was incredibly well guarded. And I can’t remember seven or nine vessels of which I’m 99% Certain Erica De Lima was the name of the flagship, but in any case, they were sailing through the Straits of Florida in 1715. They’ve been delayed trying to load by late arriving shipments and stuff. And it was bumper size treasure load because there’d been a war going on the war of Spanish the session had ended the year but For so all the groups like several years worth of treasure accumulating on this one bumper treasure fleet. And then our hurricane struck as they were sailing up the Straits of Florida, and blew them and destroyed the fleet up against the then on colonized Florida coast, in a whole stretch of sand now known as the Treasure Coast. And when all those ships were wrecked there with a gazillion pounds worth of treasure and valuables, word got out rapidly dull or quarters right of the Americas. And everybody was converging on to see if they couldn’t get some right by diving by salvaging including the Spanish who send an entire you know, they’re survivors of their crew had set up a camp on the beach, and then they were sort of backed up by more soldiers and sailors and salvage operations. But yeah, the pirates would start laying siege to it and all the rest. So yeah, in the end, a pirate named Henry Jennings had charged in and attack the Spanish camp, and Romans just in time of peace to but he did it anyway and got a massive cache of treasure, which is essentially the treasure that in Black Sails, they’re talking about the Erica gold, the gold, the Orca, silver is the stand in for the treasure from the Spanish treasure fleet of which Henry Jennings got a large quantity. And then being sort of a a person on the run, he sailed to the sort of beginnings of this pirate Republican Nasaan arrived with all this treasure, which sort of transformed the status of the island of the pirate community there overnight. So yes, that part is true. And there was indeed a giant parcel of Spanish treasure that was injected into the early Pirate Republic and, you know, brought it a new level of fame and an attraction to anyone who was looking to, you know, maybe go onto the account.

Dan LeFebvre  21:49

Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking was you were talking about how with Henry Avery and and there was just the lower to this, this lifestyle that was set forth in a lot of the fiction of the day. What do you throw that you throw that gold in there, and that just had to be a new rush of people that were starting to feel, you know, maybe adhering to the law is not what I want to do with my life. Let’s go get some of this treasure.

Colin Woodard  22:14

Yeah, exactly. And be up people from all fields, all up and down the colonies. All showed up there and the Spanish were there to win, right there was a, you know, battles and do people diving and people getting whatever they could, but remember, this is all happening right on the Florida coast, just across the streets from the Bahamas, which were a failed English colony. during that war. I mentioned that it just ended in 1714, the war of Spanish secession The Bahamas has always been a, you know, backwater sort of colony, but it was sacked and destroyed by the French and Spanish, you know, at least twice. And, essentially, you know, the surviving English settlers were living in, you know, heights in the jungle kind of thing. And it’s the pirates who started showing up there as early as 1714 and small little gangs using these dugout oceangoing canoes, these petty aguas are starting to arrive and operate out of there. And ultimately, it’s those folks who shored up the forts and put guns in it again. And we established order they got there before the British Empire bothered to get there and took it for themselves. And it’s that pirate nests that Pirate Republic that makes possible a outbreak of piracy that was so effective that we’re still talking about it today. Wow.

Dan LeFebvre  23:32

Wow. Yeah, that’s, I can understand why they they left a lot of that out and just simplified it to here’s the kicker golden that’s the pirate treasure because that could be a whole series in and of itself. Just just telling that story. Near the end of season two and Black Sails there’s a pivotal sequence of events where we see Captain Flint being taken captive by the governor of the Carolinas Lord Peter ash. And it turns out that Peter was a longtime friend of Flint and Flint companion Miranda Hamilton back before Flint was even a pirates he went by his real name James McGraw. But Captain Flint is now a pirate Lord Ash is known in the areas according to the series, as you know, the toughest governor on pirates. So this sequence culminates in a trial for Captain Flint in Charlestown. What they don’t realize is that Charles Vane has sailed up from NASA and at the last moment he and his crew attacked Charles Town to rescue Captain Flint and kill Lord ash in the process. And this series is always referred to as Charlestown in the Carolinas visually, we can see it’s just off the coast, which plays into the sequence with veins attack on the town as the ship bombards from the coast. So I’m assuming that this is present day city of Charleston, South Carolina. Did pirates really attack Charleston like we see happening in the series there?

Colin Woodard  24:48

Yeah, so originally, it was Charles Town. It got turned to Charleston after the American Revolution because it’s named for a King Charles we were doing a lot of D royal lysing of things right. Church of England became the Episcopalian Church and so on and so forth. So yes, it was it was originally Charlestown and the Carolinas were known as Carolina in the West Indies, and they were later split into two colonies, South Carolina, Charlestown, and then a much poorer backwater, sort of new and troubled colony North Carolina further north, between Charleston and Virginia, which the Virginia is looked down upon to the Charlestonians looked down upon, but Charlestown was founded by English planters from the island of Barbados, so slave lords, who had run out of land back in Barbados, and Barbados was, he was the original like slave plantation colony in the English empire. And it was a brutal Manichaean struggle between the people who first arrived there in the early 1600s. And by the time we get to the 1670s, when Charlestown was founded, and the Carolina colony was starting to be colonized. A few families had one that Manichaean struggle, and had perfected sort of, you know, brutal, you know, lives for sugar slave system and become so rich in the process that when these people who were not you know, pedigreed or from great families returned to England, they were they were the nouveau riche. You could buy everything, you know, like the Russians coming and you know, buying up Kensington these days, these folks were showing up and offending all of the established families by being able to buy all their estates and all the rest. And we’re considered to have terrible manners and all of that, but they were incredibly rich. While they’re when they ran out of land. They, on this tiny island, they turn to this new colony in the subtropical woodlands of the North American mainland, and set up a new West Indies style slave plantation society there, which is where you get the legacy culture of what became the cotton South comes from transposing this model directly by the barber in planters themselves. So yes, that place existed and was very much tied into the West Indies, it was considered part of the West Indies not separate from it. And so as the port most intimately involved in the trade with the Pirate Republic in the Bahamas, through intermediaries, and many of the people in the Bahamas had ties or connections in one way or another to Charlestown. Well, the scene you’re describing where Flint you know, comes a shorter parlay with the governor there and then ends up you know, there ends up being him being captured and there ends up being Charles Vane showing up to liberate him. That’s all keyed off a real historical events, which was one of the pirates they dropped from this Stede Bonnet was indeed captured and brought to Charlestown where he was trying to be home. And there was some sort of uprising popular uprising to storm the, you know, the seat of power that almost succeeded and would have resulted in the overthrowing of the leadership of the South Carolina colony and liberation of Stede Bonnet are ultimately the uprising actually failed, and Steve Monroe was hanging there. But something like that did indeed happen, which is what they’re, they’re keying off. It didn’t involve Charles Vane. But the Attorney General there in South Carolina wrote letters about, you know, something terrible that they had just dodged the details, or kind of never discussed too much. But it’s clear that his government almost fell out when this uprising happened. They

Dan LeFebvre  28:29

probably weren’t too keen on planning that out.

Colin Woodard  28:31

Yeah. And I would love to somebody to dredge up more details about what happened there. But they’re not in the they’re not where they shouldn’t be in the in the British National Archives. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  28:41

it was probably Yeah, it’s probably a little embarrassing for them, that that kind of thing.

Colin Woodard  28:47

Right, because there’s a popular uprising by many of their own people and pirate sympathizers too, which is not something they want to broadcast. In

Dan LeFebvre  28:54

season three, we see another character was Rodgers arriving in NASA as the he’s the English Governor tasked with kicking out the pirates and turning New Providence island into, as the show puts it, a civilized English colony. In his first act there is to offer a pardon to anyone who are tuned from piracy, no questions asked. And a lot of people take the offer a lot don’t most notably in the series, Charles Vane, Jack Rackham, and we’re teach team up to try to defend the harbor against Rogers. And the only person who Rogers offered does not extend to is the guy who was behind the attack in Charlestown in this series, at least Captain Charles Vane and then we see vein getting captured publicly hang by Rogers and NASA which ends up turning into a spark for the pirate resistance against would Rogers, but how accurate was the show’s portrayal of what happened between Woods Rogers and Charles Vane?

Colin Woodard  29:45

The part with the pardon and they and woods Rogers taking control of Nassau is almost completely as it really happens. It was Woods Rogers idea to have the king issue a pardon and he had been lobbying for some time, he believed that through that you could have a divide and conquer strategy. So which which Rogers had been the greatest hero of that war that I mentioned that ended in 1714, the war of Spanish secession, he’d been a privateer, and at a time when most private tears just went out into the English Channel and captured a French, you know, sloop and then went back into port and divided up the plunder and called it good. He built from scratch to frigate size warships, man them with hundreds of men and circumnavigated the planet at a time when very few people had done so to read the Spanish shipping in the Pacific, which nobody had to go around the Tierra del Fuego and through the circumpolar storms going around Antarctica. It took him a couple of years, but he was seeking to capture one of those Manila galleons. And he did it and he in fact, got a musket ball in the jaw and his brother was killed just like the show says happened. And he eventually brought it through all kinds of trials and tribulations back all the way around the world backwards, around Africa and back up and anchored in the Thames and he was the hero of the war. And he used that political capital from having done that and, and writing a best selling book that they refer to in Black Sails as well. To to lobby the king to issue this part and they said, you know, you issue the pardon and back my private, you know, mercenary fleet with some royal navy vessels, and I can go and take Nassau in the Bahamas, you will make me governor, that was kind of the deal. You know, I can be governor, you can be governor which Rogers if you can take and hold this pirate nest. And so that was a deal worked out and he didn’t do come ashore. Charles Vane was not excluded from the list. But Charles Vane refused to participate. He was one of the diehards, right? The idea was divide and conquer and a lot of pirates including Orta, gold and Jennings and many others sign, you know, took the pardon, at least provisionally. And, and and some didn’t. Some are like no way we’re not, you know, we’re committed to piracy. We hate England and all that. And Charles Vane was very much in the latter camp. And so when which Rogers fleet arrives, Charles Vane is the you know, the one who puts together this fire ship, he sets a ship on fire and sends it sailing straight towards the, the, the, the fleet, the English leap, it’s arrived, just like you’re shown in Black Sails, that he then escapes out the back, there’s the bomb. NASA has a you have NASA on Providence Island, you have a sandbar like Island, that’s now Paradise Island, that was then Hogg islands. And they almost meet together and forms the harbor a big long slit like harbor. But if you’re in a really small vessel, you can actually instead of going out the ocean side of the harbor, you can go to the head of the harbor, and navigate around the shoals and go out the back entrance. If you’re really small, he did that he escaped out the back and there was at large for some time. So the Charles Vane defies the pardon. You know, and causes all kinds of trouble part is correct, even if some of the details have been shifted around for dramatic purposes.

Dan LeFebvre  33:14

Yeah, no, it’s that’s that’s impressive that, you know, they they stuck to a lot of the historic detail even I like that, you know, the, the background of was Rogers and that, you know, getting shot and because you see him with scars in this series, and he kind of explains that, and yeah, it’s impressive.

Colin Woodard  33:31

This brother is pulled by the mask on the musket ball, and I was amazed at the point where there’s would have the scene in Black Sails where Woods Rogers and his fleet, his mercenary vessels and real Navy detachment are sailing with him. And like the name of every vessel and the size of it all Exactly, right. They added one more vessel, you know, that was going to be the one that was going to take Mrs. Guthrie back to be in prison, but all the other vessels are exactly right. And even the Commodore the fleet was the real Commodore so I mean, at Chamberlain, so yeah, the they would always zoom in and when they had a chance to use the accurate details they did, it was kind of fun for me to see a CGI of all the ships done well, right. So I’ve been read about them in the documents and you know, assembling what his fleet was like from all the documents where I was writing Republican pirates and then see somebody you know, take that and recreate it was fun in the

Dan LeFebvre  34:25

show, after the news of Charles Vane dies and that news reaches his old mentor Edward Teach, that causes teach to then return to NASA and we find out that another pirate captain Benjamin Hornet gold has aligned himself with what Rogers in the British so on one side, you have the British led by Rogers and corn and gold, along with a bunch of British soldiers who came with Rogers. And then on the other side, you have the pirates led by captains teach Flint Rackham and John Silver. And the pirates have their own crews but they also find an ally of their own and what the show calls the Maroons. They are marooned slaves. Who set up their own village in secret and away from anybody else? The pirates convinced them to help in trying to overthrow the British. And at least as as of the end of season three, it kind of works the the pirates managed to force the British to retreat from the island. Did any of this battle between pirates and England actually happen?

Colin Woodard  35:18

Yeah, in the sense I mean, Woods Rogers came ashore, he split the pirates he occupied the fort for the gold and Jennings both joined him, Jennings actually became a pirate Hunter trying to hunt down Charles Vane. So you know, all of that is pretty true to form. Roger Rogers governorship and re imposition of, you know, organized colonial rule was in jeopardy though for a years thereafter, as the show is kind of suggesting disease didn’t did in fact break out among his people that the locals were, you know, not as susceptible to and so a lot of his soldiers were dead or incapacitated. there was danger of renewed war with Spain, which the black trails touches on as well. He was in a very precarious spot and Charles Vane and some of the other diehards, later Calico Jack Rackham, married named Bonnie take a small vessel and reading things to their they’re all at large. Before Rogers showed up, Vane came ashore and kind of reestablished piracy. There was a pardon came before what’s Rogers did word of the part. And it was brought to them by another ship and other governors. So the pirates, many of them before Woods Rogers arrived, and already gone off to other colonial governors and gotten pardons and come back. So a lot of them had their pardons and which Rodgers took other pardons. But during this interval between when many of the pirates would decide, Oh, I’ll take the part and that’ll be great. And before woods, Rogers arrived, Charles Vane showed up there and like, came down and kicked but you know, like said, No, we’re gonna be pirates again and shook it all up again. And then when Rogers shows up, Vane has that that fire ship incident that covers his escape, and then he’s spending all his time reading all the merchant shipping, trying to come in and out of Nassau to basically make a mess of the finances and the commerce which is really complicating what’s Rogers life. But there’s no point where there’s actually a siege by the pirates, reestablish order once Rogers is there, he is fearful of it. I mean, that’s something he’s he’s watching his back the whole time, but it doesn’t quite materialize in the same dramatic way it does in Black Sails, however, their whole idea. I mean, I love the idea that they took the potential plot lines of an alliance between the Maroons, the enslaved people who’d escaped and had set up longtime, like maroon settlements, they call them deep in the interior, the famous one was deep in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, there was a whole society there have escaped slaves who they had their own matriarchal Queen leader, just like Black Sails suggests. The governors in the real history surrounding the Bahamas, we’re all terrified by the Bahamas, because the pirates let people of African descent join their cruise and become rouse up to become captains and, you know, the word that you could be treated as a human got around, and a lot of slaves were ready to the governor of Bermuda said that the rumor was that the pirates are going to come invade Bermuda and that the slaves knew this. And we’re gonna rise up with them to take Bermuda and turn it into another pirate nests like NASA. So all of that was a real concern. It never actually materialized in, in our in our own history. But it absolutely could have and if you’re going to expand out and dramatize and elongate the Pirate Republic. Yeah, if I were a show director, I would have totally gone to that material to it’s mentioned in Republican pirates, and it’s all out there. But I liked that they decided to take that and the tensions that the genuine distrust that the maroon communities would have of the pirates, the pirates were also, you know, yes. people of African descent were fellow humans, if they were apparently appears to be from the evidence that if you were a fellow like born in the Americas person, that didn’t matter what race you were, you could all join the pirate cruise. But when they would capture a slave ship with, you know, people chained in the hole coming straight from Africa, who’s speaking weird languages, strange customs, right? They’re not Americanized, that Eretz would often just treat them as things right. Seldom is cargo and all the rest, just like the slaveholder. So it seems like it was from the evidence that parents attitudes were defined not by race, but by cultural foreignness. Right. The people were from Africa where they would other and treat His things, but the fellow sailors and people in the new The world seemed to be treated as fellow sailors and people in Pirates. So you know, it’s a mixed bag there. But

Dan LeFebvre  40:07

yeah, and it makes, I mean, the pirates. So there’s that level of trust that yeah, I don’t know that I would have that there, too. But I’ll also when you have some of the pirates that are that are taking the pardon? And basically switching sides, it sounds like like, I mean, do you know that this person who was a pirate before Are they are they still? Or have they turned to the law? And then, you know, gonna turn you in? Like, I mean,

Colin Woodard  40:32

what’s what’s lose? I mean, you’re literally to the pirates get the pardon, but they could be absolved of all their prior acts of piracy. And they could keep their stuff the loot. So why wouldn’t should do it? It’s just like, you gotta, you know, you just gotta absolve for all the piracy you’ve done so far. Are you gonna do more wait and see, but you know, at least I’ve cleared the slate. So it took real diehard types who were, you know, especially furious at England and organized society to not be tempted by the party. But some of the you know, people like Horta, golden Jennings, you know, took the party and never looked back and became, you know, sort of right hand lieutenants to the historical Woods Rodgers in his effort to consolidate control and bring civilization back. In

Dan LeFebvre  41:17

the final season of this series. It’s pretty clear that would Rogers is not going to stay away from long he gets, as I mentioned, pushed out for a little bit comes back, but his fleet manages to track down and reteach his ship, and after boarding it, they overpower the pirates they and reteach and Bonnie Jack Rackham, are captured by wood Rogers. And he wants to make an example of ever teach Blackbeard. So in episode three, season four, he calls for really the most horrendous tortures, they put a bag over his head, tie his hands and legs, tie a rope to his feet, hanging them upside down over the side of the ship. And then using a rope connected to his hands, they pull him under the water from one side of the ship scraping his body against the bottom, that ship comes back. He’s a bloody mess when it comes back up. But teach survives the torture three different times each time more flesh is ripped open by the saltwater in the end, he’s barely recognizable. Everybody is just surprised he’s not dead each time. And then Rogers ends up shooting him in the in the head after the third time. Is that really how Blackbird died.

Colin Woodard  42:22

I mean, that’s called keel hauling. And that was a punishment the Royal Navy would mete out to sailors in the Royal Navy who had been bad, usually not done until it was fatal. But yeah, tear up your back against the barnacles. And which Rodgers in Black Sails is seeking to basically to use this as a method of execution by repeating it until the guy’s dead, which is, you know, to terrorize the the the other pirate captives and show that he means business. The real Woods Rogers was a mixed bag, but he didn’t have the same sort of like sadistic and intensity that the Black Sails, Woods Rogers had. He also never laid eyes on Blackbeard at any point. So When word of the pardons started arriving in the Americas, remember, there was no radio or TV. So once the king had issued a pardon, it had to be sent out on ships and physically in pieces of paper, and word literally had to get around right communication is only as fast as transportation back then. And so it took a while, you know, it’d be delays or weeks or even a month or two between when each column your court knew about this. And Blackbeard was out cruising with his fleet when word started coming around. We know the moment pretty much when he learned of the pardon, he learns it from a vessel he’s captured in the US He’s working his way up the up the Leeward Islands. And he goes off to try to make a final score in the Gulf of Mexico. So he’s off in the Gulf of Mexico theater, and eventually will comes around to take a pardon. From a corrupt governor in the poorest colony of the mall, North Carolina I remember I mentioned that sort of backwater, relatively new colony, it had just survived a war between the colonists and the indigenous people who didn’t want them there. And he goes to the governor of this place in this little town of 600 that sometimes serves as its capital. And he just shows up there and says, Hey, I want to take your part in and you know, wink wink nudge nudge I will spend I’m just going to set myself up in the trash collection business right and if I if I keep finding you know, piles of gold out see one want to trash I’ll sell them to you and my matter all you know that the indigenous people attack again, I’ve just almost doubled the population of your of your army, you know, with all these battle tested men around me so basically he buys off the protection of the governor. In this scheme where he’ll keep he’ll he’ll become an under a world crime figure protected by the cops mayor. He’s bought off the authorities in this tiny colony and he’s fencing his goods to them so they get to hear the governor in this impoverished place. Suddenly you have all these goods coming in. Under pay your debts, and you’ve got all these some, you know, well trained people know how to handle weapons to help keep your place secure. So he goes for that. So he so Blackbird never crosses paths with Woods Rogers, but his death is not unlike what they show in Black Sails. So the unscrewed another governor who was very unscrupulous was the governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood and Spotswood with no authority whatsoever, invaded North Carolina he conspired with a the real the captains of the two Royal Navy vessels posted in Hampton Roads. And they did a two pronged invasion using so like as mercenaries. And basically Blackbeard is surprised at Ocracoke Island. And there’s a battle not between Woods Rogers and Blackbeard but a battle between a lieutenant Maynard the Royal Navy, sailor in charge of the detachment center to capture him. And it happens very much like they depict in Black Sails, the the there’s a broad side across the depths of the of the sloop that the Royal Navy sailors are on. Blackbeard has been boarded, thinking they’ve won the day, there’s bodies on the deck, and then all of a sudden, it’s an ambush coming out from the hold. Come all the Royal Navy sailors and gentlemen who have been hiding down there, surprise them, there’s a giant battle just like in Black Sails, and ultimately, Lieutenant Maynard, you know, and his men kill Black Beard and behead him and take the head back home to their governor as a prize where it’s placed on what’s now known as Black beards point and Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Virginia. So the manner of death is correct. It’s out of sequence in the timeline, and the person who did it is completely different. But yeah, that’s what became of Blackbeard. And they pay homage to all that, and having Woods Rogers take on black beer, but they have they set up the battle to be very similar to what actually happened to black beard. In Ocracoke sound and 1718 Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  47:00

yeah, it’s not Yeah, another example of how they’re fitting it into their story, of course, but still adhering to history pretty well. It sounds like Yeah,

Colin Woodard  47:09

it’s like what’s Rogers gets to take on some of spots, woods, you know, on scrupulousness, and then gets to play the dashing Errol Flynn, like Lieutenant Maynard character in his battle with Blackbeard. Okay, you kind of tie them all together. But again, we could have made it up any way they wanted. They intentionally echoed what actually happened to Blackbeard in history when they decided how that battle would play out, which, you know, is a story and it’s like, Hey, if you’re gonna do it, yeah, right.

Dan LeFebvre  47:36

As I was watching that, you mentioned that the queue hauling of Blackbeard. It really kind of struck me that you know, that Woods Rodgers was sent there to be the English governor is supposed to be returning the island to the civilized world. And although pirates have been romanticized throughout much of pop culture, I think everyone knows that they’re brutal murderers without regard for law and order. They’re pirates. But we don’t really think of the brutality on the other side the brutality of those in a position of Law and Order were the actions of what we call a civilized nation of the time just as brutal as the pirates were.

Colin Woodard  48:12

Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s what you know, really came through in researching the pirate story for when I was writing Republica pirates was that you know, the authorities needed to cast them as you know, demons Villains of All nation, Devil people trying to bring down all that is right and true. And when you really look at it, though, you know, all this propaganda was out there. The pirates themselves, most of them, Charles Manson exception, but Blackbeard and Bellamy and most of these other pirates. You read through all of the surviving documents and all the documents are from unsympathetic witnesses. They’re all from the victims of the pirates are the accounts of what happened. The pirates didn’t leave any letters or anything behind for us. So we have court death. We have depositions given to officials and then court testimony. And despite that, like Blackbeard right, bloodthirsty, scary, Blackbeard, didn’t harm or kill anybody in any of these accounts, you know, there’s probably 1415 Different piracy attacks on ships. He scares people, he acts threatening and says I’m gonna do terrible things lets you do what I want. And so everyone does what he wants me doesn’t have to hurt anybody until his final battle with the Royal Navy and Ocracoke sound. And if you compare that restraint by these particular outlaws to what you know, the legally sanctioned people are doing like privateers like Henry Morgan. I mean, oh my god, Henry Morgan, like, you know, goes to Panama and Saxa city and like, kills every single person, man, woman and child just for fun and the law you know, children in London, you know, caught starving children stealing loaves of bread, you know, are executed and orphans or, you know, sold to people who are chiming sweep up, you know, operators who send the small children up and down the chimneys that scrape them out personally until they fall to their deaths or, you know, die of, you know, not being able to breathe anymore. I mean, it’s like, brutal, terrible time and official and legally sanctioned violence, when you really start reading into it is considerably worse than what the pirates were actually doing. So yeah, it’s it’s a brutal time. But the pirates seem to be acting with remarkable restraint in their actions compared to the norm of violence around them.

Dan LeFebvre  50:33

It leads to another aspect of understanding how why people would turn to piracy when they’re seeing that law and order is not really Law and Order anyway, then. I mean, especially if all this Spanish gold is crashed off off the coast. Why not go get it? Yeah.

Colin Woodard  50:54

And, you know, they, there were many reasons for the outbreak of piracy. But most among them is that, you know, the, the world of the English Empire was starting to get much more difficult for ordinary people. And this is this is in the middle of the sort of what they call the enclosure movement. So the all of the relationships between Lord and serf in the countryside in England were kind of breaking down, you know, serfs run their families to be on 100 year leases for their little scrap of land. But there was suddenly these incentives as the beginnings of industry were start to happen for the Lord’s to get rid of this 150 individual little plots of subsistence farms and make one big sheep pasture and grow sheep for the wool to send to the woollen mill mill would be a much better deal. So over the decades leading up to this, a lot of the Lords were not renewing the lease, which was just like what you know, that wasn’t even a possibility in people’s minds. And so tons of people from the countryside massive numbers were moving destitute into the cities. That’s where the Dickensian phrases about the surplus population and the social Darwinist would use at the end of the 18th century, this is what was driving it. And if you were a person, in the worst possible situation coming to the cities, you had absolutely no prospects. The last straw thing you would do to survive, would be to go be a sailor, because being a sailor was staggeringly dangerous and paid terribly, and the food was awful. And all the rest, but you would use the line was it was much like being in prison, except for the added possibility of drowning, right? It was something we didn’t do unless you had to. When people were doing that, then the worst fantasy session comes along, you know. And when the war ended, the British Navy reduced its size of its force by two thirds, just dumped all these real Navy sailors on the docks, and then the labor market a supply demand problem. And a lot of merchants like yeah, we’ll pay these people a third as much as we used to, which was already starvation wages. And so people were just getting cheated. And the system was consolidating the sort of emergence of an English upper class who would send their children to different schools who would speak a language different than the other people like with their own dialects, that all that stuff was starting to happen and the resistance to it was starting to build. And the pirates, the sailors were in this one position, where they’re operating out of the reach of the law on the ships, right, and the possibility of resisting and taking over the ship. They’re the sort of the people who had the most opportunity to, if they were fed up to finally do something about it in a way that you couldn’t on land back in England. And so the piracy outbreak, I say all this because when the Pirates start saying, you know, we’re, we’re not just brigands, we’re Robin Hood’s men, right, we’re, we’re fighting back, we’re fighting the man, on behalf of all the people who are getting screwed. People on both sides of the Atlantic were like, yeah, like they weren’t buying the pirate story, despite everything the authorities were doing, which made the pirates folk heroes which led to that uprising to free Stede Bonnet led Alexander Spotswood, not to dare to share his plans to stop the pirates with his own House of Burgesses his own assembly, because there were so many pirates sympathizers in Virginia. And it led to the publication of a book in 1724, when some of these pirates were still active, called a general history of the pirates. Legit history. It’s a mix of things that are perfectly accurate, almost quoting official documents and other things are made up. But the point is, this book was a best seller on both sides, the Atlantic, and it casts the pirates in pretty good light. Every pirate mythic story you’ve heard, basically comes from this book, including Treasure Island and all the rest. And because it was such a hit, and the point is they say the pirates at the time are folk heroes, because rightly or wrongly, people bought their version of the story that, hey, we’re fighting the system and the system’s evil and a lot of people felt like the system was being pretty evil.

Dan LeFebvre  54:54

Well, it sounds like in many cases, it was

Colin Woodard  54:58

absolutely, my boy. If you’re kind of describes just how bad it was. And again, it’s it’s also carrying Henry Avery whose crew was was, was betrayed in the most terrible ways by some of the most powerful people in England. And they’re like we’ve had enough, we’re just gonna seize this ship and you know, go live a merry life and a short one that was the fantasy and something about that spirit, you know, grabbed onto the public imagination then, and as a let go yet?

Dan LeFebvre  55:25

Well, if we go back to this series, we see was Rogers can’t seem to get any support from England anymore. So he turns to the Spanish governor in Havana, Cuba, to help him put down the pirate in maroon rebellion. And according to the show, Spain and England are at war. So the Spanish are not likely to help was Rogers. But then Rogers points out that if pirates and slaves are allowed to take NASA then words gonna spread, and there’s gonna be even more uprisings of pirates and slaves. And on top of that, Rogers also mentions that they have the earth a gold that we talked about earlier that pirates are using to fund their future ventures. And the only way for Spain to get that back is to help him. So then we see in the series, Rogers returns to NASA with a Spanish fleet. There’s violent fighting in NASA, and they destroyed many of the plantation of the island as well, we see Rogers killing his own wife, Eleanor Guthrie, that was kind of by accident. He didn’t do it himself in this series, but sent people off and she died. And then so we get this idea of the English going to the Spanish for help, to form kind of an alliance to put down the pirates and slaves on New Providence Island. Does any of that historically accurate?

Colin Woodard  56:37

I mean, if I were a show, right, that I need to figure out how to have some excitement, I might have come up with something like that. But whoa, in the real universe, would Rogers definitely wouldn’t have done that it would Rogers had many flaws, he had some kind of personality flaw that we don’t know exactly what it is. But what we do know is that he managed to make enemies of all sorts of Royal Navy captains and other people need to be as allies, it results in him being suddenly dismissed as the governor of the Bahamas and sent back home, he ends up in debtors prison for a while before in the 1730s. He’s returned to NASA. I mean, he obviously had some kind of, you know, social bilateral screw loose. But one thing he definitely was was a patriot in the English sense. He didn’t like the Spanish, his brother had been killed in that raid he wanted to, he expended a lot of energy, in the period between his round the world trip and going to NASA and wanting to figure out a way to placate another pirate nest in Madagascar, the place that Henry Avery was supposed to go to. He’d invested in large amounts of Bibles, and it approached the Church of England, for sort of a messianic effort to bring the Word of God to the pirates to sort of shift them morally, she was like really committed to bringing law in order about and he didn’t like the Spanish and and a time of war, he wouldn’t have turned to them in reality. But what rings true is the Spanish did indeed, do well, you know, tried to attack Nassau later on and tried to seize the place that was always a danger, and had in an alternate timeline, had the pirates and the maroon communities and enslave people form this kind of alliance. Maybe you’d end up in a situation where a governor might have or where England would have approached Spain, or they would have had similar interests. None of that, though quite happened. What they’re doing there is they’re sort of foreshadowing the Haitian Revolution, which would come a century later, where a enslaved people really did rise up and take over a colony and wipe out the planters and form their own Republic. And it’s sort of like they’re imagining, let’s say, we were a century earlier, and somehow the pirates acted as a catalyst and formed alliances. And that happened earlier. And that had happened to NASA. Yeah, it’s kind of a neat, you know, if you’re trying to create an alternate history sort of event, that’s a pretty cool one. And that would have been threatening Hades uprising, even the early 19th century, was something that terrified, you know, the Power Base everywhere, including the United States, by the by the idea that enslaved people would not only rise up successfully, but would build their own country, and their own Republic that was deeply threatening to all sorts of things. So yeah, that, you know, the themes are interesting, but it didn’t happen in the 1710s. And woods, Rogers would not have been a part of it. It

Dan LeFebvre  59:32

sounds like a putting a lot of things that could have happened, especially with the Orca goal too, because that plot point makes sense to have like the Spanish are wanting their gold back. So it just seems to make sense that it could have happened, even if it didn’t, yeah,

Colin Woodard  59:45

and the Spanish the governor in the era was furious in the real in the real world timeline, at the gold being seized, and by this pirates nests not being pacified and was there was this constant threat that invasion fleet would come at one point you know, I think just Bad weather turned back out Spanish invasion fleet that would have destroyed NASA and burned it to the ground. So there, there are fears that come up over and over again among the pirates that that their their nests could be destroyed and the sort of zone of freedom as they see it would be destroyed by the Spanish is was absolutely true and was a constant menace, facing the Pirate Republic and woods Rogers, you know, early post Pirate Republic, which was on thin ice and you know, provisional state for many, many years after his arrival in 1718.

Dan LeFebvre  1:00:32

If you go back to the series near near the end, there’s a climactic showdown at a new location called skeleton Island. And according to the show, skeleton Allen is a place that not on any charts and the Spanish use it to conduct illicit transactions for decades. But then Henry Adria was the first Englishman to find it. This is all according to the show. And then when he gets there, Henry he gets there he finds us a Spanish ship that set sail from Havana and 1636 the Captain’s Log says there were 31 souls, Avery finds the remains of all 31 on ship. It’s locked from inside the ships hold there’s some evidence that someone were dismembered while still alive. So it starts to add this idea of this island being haunted. And then in the in the series. Captain Flint is recounting the story in the show, and he says the rumor is that the crew refuse to go inland after the first few came back with reports of hearing strange sounds and voices. And this is the setting for where Woods Rogers and Captain Flynn have their final battle once and for all in the series. Not to get too far ahead. We’ll talk about the battle but we see Captain Flint actually burying the treasure from the Erica. It’s been a key part of the story throughout the entire series. So the impression I got was this is Treasure Island from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. Is there any truth to the location and legends of skeleton Island?

Colin Woodard  1:01:50

Yeah, I think they’re at that point they’re pulling in the setting for Treasure Island because they did the plot of that as they go. They’re trying to find the elderly Billy Bones arrives at this little kids fam the in a little kid family owns at the end in the West Country of England. This old man pirate. Billy Bones shows up as a guest he ends up dying while he’s there already has a treasure map. And the kid ends up on this involved in this adventure to go find the treasure left by Captain Flint. And he ends up the cook on the vessel is on is a guy named Long John Silver, an old man who turn leads a mutiny to take things over and they go to skeleton island. So in the end to bond the fictional world of Robert Louis Stevenson to the pirate world they need skeleton Island to be the fulcrum point which has them shifted there but know that island didn’t exist and there wasn’t anything like that. The closest you could say, I mean, there are a couple of things. The idea of us there’s a there’s a stranded sailor there has been stuck on this island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book and that is all modeled off the real Robinson Crusoe. Alexander Selkirk was a guy actually stranded on an island in the middle of the Pacific alone for years and years and years, surviving off goats and stuff and it is his story became very famous in England. So tapping on that was already a trope. Well, he was rescued by who Alexander Selkirk the real Robinson Crusoe was rescued by Woods Rogers during the circumnavigation of the parliament, right. You just have come by and they found this guy. So, the route the Robinson Crusoe story, the real story was first publicized in woods Rogers book. And so that part has some echoes that Robert Louis Stevenson ended up using that island would have been in the Pacific Ocean instead. The other element is that pirates, the real pirates in the Caribbean had all sorts of pirate layers they would go to including, you know, abandoned or unoccupied islands. Outside the view of the major sea lanes, they would go into those places to clean the bottoms their vessels, there’s a whole thing about creating a vessel and one of the things in season one of Black Sails, which is all true, you had to kelp and stuff would grow on the bottom of the hole of your vessel and slow it down, which could result in your death of your pirate. So they regularly had to find a beach where they could at high tide, bring it in and lay it on its side and then when the tide goes out, scrape all the stuff off the bottom and then get it back seaworthy again that you can’t do that, you know, they don’t have shipyards, so they can’t wait somewhere safe to do this. They actually have to do this somewhere where they hope the authorities won’t happen by while their ships careened or otherwise incapacitated. So they had all kinds of layers like skeleton Island, where pirates would go to do r&r To repair ships to you know, find fresh water or to hang out and just recover. You know, when far from NASA, and they were often far from NASA. I mean the pirates based in the Bahamas, rated as far north as Newfoundland In Canada, and what’s now Canada and as far south as the Spanish mean and Venezuela, so I mean, or even some of them even down to the coast of Brazil. So I mean 1000s of miles of range with the Bahamas in the middle, but they were oftentimes when you needed some other place of refuge. So there were many in that sense, there were many skeleton islands scattered all over the place. And finally, even you know, there were places where you could go to fence your goods. There’s a famous place gardener’s Island, in if you look at Long Island in New York, and which starts in New York City and goes out along Long Island Sound and ends in a fork and in the fork of the seaward fork, there’s a little island in the middle, that’s gardener’s island where Captain Kidd went and fenced his treasure to the garden or family or the proprietors of the islands until just two years ago. They’re like 13 generations of them had been proprietor this island continuously. And after Captain Kidd the next generation fence the goods for Sam Bellamy and Paul’s, Greg Williams and others, so there were places you would know you could go not to hide treasure in the ground, but to parlay your treasure with the sort of, you know, Cayman Islands slash Swiss bankers of the era.

Dan LeFebvre  1:06:12

I like that I like that. That comparison.

Colin Woodard  1:06:16

The awful bankers had them to offshore

Dan LeFebvre  1:06:19

bankers again quite literally. Some violence

Colin Woodard  1:06:22

was was very open and the kind of capital they would bring in and deal with to at the time. Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  1:06:28

wow. Well go back to the series. There’s the battle I mentioned it on skeleton island I already mentioned Captain Flint buried his gold there, and the fighting between the pirates seems to come to an end. When was Rogers burns John Silver ship in the harbor while Flint is fighting silver and Israel Hands. And then just then Captain Jack Rackham shows up with his own ship. There’s another battle on the ship that ensues and woods Rodgers ends up a prisoner of the pirates, but they don’t kill him. The reason for that in the in the series because Rackham went to Philadelphia with Max to strike a deal with Eleanor Guthrie’s grandfather, the Guthrie’s are rich and powerful family in this series. So even though her grandfather refuses the deal publicly, grandmother Marian agrees to it. There’s all this political intrigue going on in this series. She turns out to be the one in power anyway. Not really the grandfather, it’s the grandmother that’s that’s the one in power so she finances the support to house with Rogers as governor from England’s perspective, while recommend Max help the Guthrie’s get control of NASA under a new governor. So once Rogers is in pirate custody, he’s basically sent back to England to face his crimes. Is that a pretty good portrayal of what really happened to Woods Rogers?

Colin Woodard  1:07:42

Well, in that we don’t have the Guthrie angle, woods, Rogers loses his governorship unceremoniously and ends up in debtors prison. He’s eventually bailed out of it. And he has all kinds of difficulties and travails. But eventually, people feel bad for him about, you know, 20 years later and send it back as governor, he dies in the Bahamas, in the 1730s. So he had a bad go of it, but he wasn’t like in prison for his crimes and all that sort of thing. In the real world timeline. But we’ll why was he removed from his governor’s post that’s never totally clear. He’s kind of left high and dry by English. He’s constantly saying, Oh, the Spanish are about to invade, I need help. I’m out of money. He’s having to shell out his own money to pay, you know, troops and to bring in, you know, cannon balls and provisions and things to hold this colony for England. And all of his pleas for help go on the answered back, you know, in London. So and then eventually they recall them. So you know, could there have been some additional plotting going on behind the scenes? Yeah, sure. Hypothetically, they tried to get rid of him, somebody else was in there as governor for for quite some time after Rogers left, before he ended up returning as an old man. So you know, there’s, there’s enough room for, you know, maybe scenario tossed in there, but we don’t have any evidence as such.

Dan LeFebvre  1:09:03

One of the things that we see in this series is Jack Rackham is kind of, he’s one of the he’s a wheeler and dealer throughout the entire series. But at the end, part of the deal is that he makes with the the Guthrie’s in England is basically that he wants to be the one to help tell the story of what Rogers downfall in the historical record. So very heavily suggests in the series that he was given that opportunity. Do we know if Jack Rackham was involved in the would Rogers story at all?

Colin Woodard  1:09:35

Yeah, no, what’s Rogers kind of gets to tell his own story in that the the only telling of the story in any form really comes in the general history of the pirates, the book I described. And if you’re like me parsing this book, where some of it is completely made up fantasy, and some of it is absolutely right, almost down to the word. You’re trying to figure out the passages. You don’t know which one isn’t. Right. So I was constantly like Daniel cheating backwards? Where did this come from? Where are these? I find that if I don’t have any source for it, is this possibly true? And what you start figuring out is anything that Woods Rogers could have been the source for about things that were happening in NASA, the book is pretty accurate on a lot of the documents, like you’d see that the, you know, basically sort of secret documents from Woods Rogers back to London, that they’re quoting from them in real time documents that whoever had this book shouldn’t have access to. So I mean, there’s a good case to say that basically, Woods Rogers was approached by the person who wrote under a pseudonym wrote this book, and cooperated with them to sort of tell his story and through the that book going out, that’s what rehabilitates Woods Rogers reputation in England and makes people a little more sympathetic to him and, you know, eventually results in him being set back to being governor. So I think Woods Rogers got his story out through another writer, Calico Jack was dead by them. The book in the series, portrays him as sort of thinking higher ed talker, but who’s very concerned the whole time about his legacy about making his mark. The real Calico Jack was, there’s not that much sight of sight of deep substance there. He ends up betraying well, that well leading a vote against Charles Vane and deposing Charles veinous captain and being elected Captain himself. And then his whole captaincy, and his second trip out with Mary readin and Barney are not very successful pirate trips, he takes all kinds of risks he shouldn’t take, he read a damn body all get captured and sent off to Jamaica for trial because, you know, he’s operating in a small vessel in around the waters of Jamaica, which are the most dangerous place to be it’s like, you know, basically, you know, committing crimes in front of the police station, as it were on gets caught by the police, right? It’s just like really dumb stuff. You’re like, what do you think of? So you didn’t seem to be particularly good at being a pirate. And so his reign as an independent pirate captain was very short and resulted in his hanging in Jamaica, so he was not available to tell any stories.

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:16

Yeah, well, speaking of kind of how his story ended, but I thought, overall, Black Sails did a pretty good job of of wrapping up storylines at the very end of the series, kind of leading into Treasure Island. We talk a little bit about that. In this series, we see John Silva ending up with the marine leader Batty, although initially she’s not happy with the piece and NASA wasn’t really the kind of piece that they had fought for. And we see, silver finds out that the love of flinx life Thomas Hamilton is alive in a plantation near Savannah, Georgia, where people from England make other people disappear. So he arranges for Flint to go there so he can let Captain Flint as a character die. And then he becomes James McGraw again. be reunited. Yeah. And then back in NASA, there’s a new governor that gets installed installed is a former pirate named Mr. Featherstone that we kind of see throughout. Although the real power going into series, it seems like it’s going to be with with Max kind of like the real power and Philadelphia’s mayor in Guthrie and that really your husband. And then since the governor is a former pirate who just happened to be second command on Captain Jack Rackham ship, the last moments of this series, we see Captain Rakim going back out to sea with and Barney and then a new recruit named Mark reed in the in this series. Is there any other like realistic elements is what as far as how the show ends, that we see,

Colin Woodard  1:13:38

they elongate and prolong the tension over what’s going to happen to NASA by quite a bit and have entire invasions didn’t happen in the you know, the, the alliance with the Maroons, and that, you know, uprisings and there’s a whole series of wars that didn’t really take place. In terms of how it all ends, it doesn’t end with any pirate veterans as governors, that would be difficult because one station mattered a great deal back then, you know, a person born poor was just not going to be appointed to be the permanent governor of anywhere. Somebody else would be sent in, which is what happened. But some of these pirates did end up, you know, respectable members of the restored Nassau society, you know, merchant leaders, and I think some of them may have even ended up on the Governing Council, the governor’s council have sort of advisors and stuff. So they, there were people who, who became upper middle classes, we might call it afterwards within living regime. And then the Bahamas eventually stabilizes. It takes really a decade or two for it to happen, but it eventually does so and and carries on without leaving the British Empire to return to piracy again.

Dan LeFebvre  1:14:53

Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Black Sails. Before I let you go. I want to shift to your book, Jay. Have you the Republic of pirates? Can you share a sneak peek of your book for someone who wants to learn more about the true story?

Colin Woodard  1:15:06

Sure, well, this book, I was researching it long before Black Sails existed and many of these other shows that you’ve seen. And my quest was to figure out who these pirates actually were back to the archives, separate fact from fiction and, and solve any the mysteries around them. So this was the first time I think, probably in 40 years that someone had really tried to go into the archives and do this kind of work. And when I was doing this, in 2005 2006, when I was doing the official research on this book, I was kind of the first person to go in with the digital tools available where, you know, the first versions of the big microfilm collections, you still have to if you want to look the newspapers there, you had to go through the microfilm of each newspaper individually, right? That’s incredibly laborious. If you want to, you know, if you couldn’t keyword search it, you couldn’t like say, I wonder who this you know, Featherstone guy is if he shows up, nobody could have you know, search for Featherstone in every newspaper and see what you could come up with. Well, now I could write the first keyword searchable database versions where everything was in PDF or in OCR two images, which was happening. And you could do the work of you know, 20 people in 1950, you could do as one person with, you know, the catalogs and other things available, and then use that to triangulate and figure out where documents might lie. And most of it was done in the National Archives in the UK, where most are the primary sources are was digging and things like people looked at the official records of each colony and each government, but nobody had really plumb the Admiralty, the Navy’s records, which included not only logbooks of all these various vessels, some of the mentioned in the general history of the pirates, and but also the letters of their captains. And the captains were the primary Intel, you know, agents trying to keep track of these pirates on behalf of the Empire. So with their letters, there’s all kinds of gold mines of things that people didn’t know about yet. And if you started tracking each individual pirate, like in a spreadsheet and on a piece of paper, where were they on this day? What’s the prevailing winds? Which direction were they headed? Where did they have to be the next day? If they were going to end up now? You see them here? And then five days later they here? Where did they have to go in between to get there? And then that would allow you to say, okay, you know, which colonial official was there? And go fine, dig up that colonial officials, look them up alphabetically, figure out where their letters are, and see, did they see a pirate vessel go by them. And maybe a previous researcher had said, you know, they mentioned a pirate vessel, but who knows who it is? Well, you know who it is, especially when they described the vessel that matches. So it allowed all kinds of my triangulating and all different ways, rebuilding their story, because if you organized everything in that way, you could kind of figure out where people were, where they were going next and where the archival treasure lay that would solve various mysteries. So we’ll roll that all together and told the story of this Pirate Republic primarily through four principal characters that it focuses on because it tells the story well, Blackbeard, wax and Bellamy indeed Charles Vane, who was not a well known pirate then, and with Rogers, who, you know, the understanding of him as being the person who overthrew the Pirate Republic was not well focused on either. So I sort of put that all together and told the story of this gang of pirates and how they’d captured our imagination. And why both because they were super effective because they had this pirate base, but also for the ideological reasons of they cast themselves not as criminals, but as Robin Hood’s men and many people agreed with. So that was the sort of story in a nutshell.

Dan LeFebvre  1:18:47

Fantastic. I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thanks again, so much for your time.

Colin Woodard  1:18:51

Pleasure anytime.

Dan LeFebvre: We have a few movies to chat about today. And the first one is the 1995 film directed by Martin Scorsese called Casino. Now, if we were to take a step back and… Look at the movie from an overall perspective to give it a letter grade for how accurately it portrayed the mafia. What would it get?

[00:05:37] Scott Hoffman: I would say probably a C, maybe a C minus

[00:05:40] Dan LeFebvre: C or C minus.

OK. That’s actually that’s not bad. Of course, it’s not a documentary or anything like that. It’s still pure entertainment. It’s not bad.

[00:05:48] Scott Hoffman: I’m getting my break a little bit. Yeah, because there were some things that were close, but there were some things that were not close. Yeah. So I’m being freedom here.

The Martin Scorsese, give him a break.

[00:06:01] Dan LeFebvre: Sure. And again, it’s a movie, so you’re going to have that. Early on in the movie, we do see how the outfit gets paid by the casinos in Vegas. And the way the movie sets it up, we see someone going into the count room in the casino, and they take out some cash in a briefcase.

That briefcase is taken to Kansas City, which the movie says is the closest that the Midwest bosses can go to Vegas without getting arrested. That suitcase is because, at least again, this is the way the movie explains it, the, they control the Teamsters union in Vegas. So that’s where you go to get a loan for a casino.

And that loan only comes if you get a suitcase, like a monthly suitcase of cash in return, basically. And that’s how the movie explains how the outfit got paid by the casinos in Vegas. Does the movie Casino do a pretty good job of explaining how they really made their money in Vegas?

[00:06:51] Scott Hoffman: No, not really. They did not, that, that, it’s in that one area especially not, especially in my book Inside, which my book Inside is while fictional, it’s people and events are composites of real people and real events.

And the uniqueness of the book was seen through the eyes of an eight year old, because I’m going to Las Vegas in 1956 with my father, starting one on May. No, the only thing that they would have got right was the word count rule. Cause what happened basically was that was about it. Okay. Because basically what would happen would be that Usually the pit boss.

Now, whoever was running the casino would have the pit boss go into the count room and I spent a lot of time in accountants and counting. You’d go in about two, three o’clock in the morning, three 30 in the morning. That’s when you’d be going in and all the money would be brought in. And the outfits take at that point was 10 percent every day, 10%.

Okay. And the hotel owners, which had the license. And that’s one thing the movie never explained. They. Obviously just talking about casino, but that’s not really how things ran. And then the money would be, as I talked about inside in my book, I talk about this the money was counted. It was put in an envelope.

The pit boss had assigned the day, the time and his name, and then print his name. Okay. And he, they would do that with several envelopes and then put them in a duffel bag. And then they were put in a van and driven out to a building, which my father had bought and created it to look like was owned by a construction company, Georgia construction company was the name he put on there.

It was known Georgia construction company. But if you drove by, we’d say, Oh, it’s just a construction company. The money was taken in there. There were three guys that were in there. Okay. They were armed with shotguns, 38s, 45s. And they would have to sign that they got the money, they got the envelope, same thing.

They’d have to put the time they got it the day they got it, they’d have to sign for it and then print their name. And there were messengers from the outfit that brought the money back to Chicago. Now what the movie was portraying, maybe that occurred when Alan Dorfman got involved, okay?

And that was the reason he got involved, he was executive director. Of the teamster union was because my father and he would joke about it was, he said it was like General Douglas MacArthur being called back by President Harry Truman from Korea that Tony Ricardo in April of 1966 was removing Sam Giancana from day to day operations.

And Antonio Cardo, one of my father, who my father reported to was also a consigliere for Sam Giancana, was a manager for Paul Rica, also a consigliere for Joey Ayupu, took over in 1973. Antonio Cardo wanted him in Chicago. He said, things are running great in Las Vegas. We’ll let Dorfman handle it from, whatever has to be done, but I need you here in Chicago because things were starting to get wild, very wild.

Between 1966 and 1973. It was remind me like in the early sixties, PK Wrigley, who was the owner of the Cubs decided rather than having a manager for the team, he was going to have revolving coaches. So so many, I like say the hitting coach would be the manager for so many games in the pitching coach.

With the outfit, the problem was whoever was put in to run day to day was under a federal indictment. So they’d last a year. And then you had another guy who’d be under another federal indictment was going on and on. And it was getting wild horse. It was getting wild because day to day operations, you have to remember everything that was brought into the outfit at that time was 200 million.

And a hundred million dollars was coming from Las Vegas. Wow. All right. And normally every map family has a rule, and this is a standard rule that cops and kids are off limits, but because of the money coming from Las Vegas, that ruled in applied to me. It never applied to me. So that’s why when I was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old, I’m seeing not only mob activities, but I’m seeing my first murder at at nine years old, at 11 years old, I’m seeing the guy’s hands cut off because he owed juice money.

I was 12 years old. The same guy who cut the guy’s hands off when I was 11, he decapitated a guy who owed juice money. These guys were still alive and screaming. Yeah, it was something, like I say, the messengers who were chosen were. We’re guys either that had a part of the outfit, they were either members or maybe made guys.

But we also had Chicago police officers who either were fired from the job or had resigned from the job. We have 50 total police officers, Chicago on the payroll and 30 of them were active officers. 20 of them were either, like I say, either have been fired or they quit knowing that we’re going to be fired.

And there was maybe three or four of them that would wind up in the book, okay, in Las Vegas’s Black Book at that time. And that’s, another story what the movie didn’t really come across, about this Black Book, what was going on with that. And so they were basically the ones who’d be bringing the money back, okay, and they’d be bringing them back, money to my father.

For Tony Acardo or someone else who was designated to get the money and then distribute the money. That’s how it was done then, okay? Dorfman, when he took over, who knows what he was doing, but he didn’t listen to my father because my father said to him, Alan, be careful, Alan. And he wasn’t careful.

He was not careful because in 1970, he was convicted. He pled guilty. Got a year for embezzlement along with other guys from the Team Serpentian. So it’s quite a long story about Alan Dorf. We could do a whole show on that. It’ll be a different one. Yeah, that’s how things work. That’s how things.

[00:12:52] Dan LeFebvre: It sounds very different than in the movie.

I, it’s, it just seems, of course, it’s in broad daylight in the movie and it just seems like it’s just go in and out. Nobody pays attention, but it seems like there’s a very a lot more chain of coming in or like who’s, or tracking every, all the money to a lot more organized,

[00:13:09] Scott Hoffman: because first of all, I’ll tell you why the problem with the movie.

Was this Kansas city reported to Chicago. That was one of the families who reported to Chicago. So there was no way that they were going to at least my father, I’ll say him. I won’t say what Dorfman was doing. My father, Tony Acarno, Sam Giancana, there was no way the money was going to go to Kansas city because they weren’t sure they, first of all, they weren’t sure if they could trust Kansas city and how it was going to be tracked or were they going to skim their own money to say we’re charging you for rent, a rent fee, so there was no way it would have went to Kansas city. And like I say, Kansas city reported to Chicago. Okay. So that would not have happened. Okay. Yeah. And they would not, my upstairs would not have been worried about. Getting arrested. I’ll tell you why, because if their name is not in the black book and in that was the Nevada gaming commission and they would put mobsters name in the black.

Okay. And if your name was put in the black book, like Sam Giancana, his name was put in the black, you could not go into a casino because the casino would lose their license. There was no, give him a second chance. Let’s find them. No, the casino’s license would be pulled. And you have to remember the way my father set it up was that he had private investors who got the license.

These were all business people who were able to get the license because the Nevada gaming commission is not going to give gambling license to mobsters. So the deal would be the map, the outfit would run the casino, but the business men would run the hotel. But my father was very clear. I understand very clear that you bring in hotel people to run the hotel operation.

You guys might be good in your own business, but you don’t know a darn thing about the hotel business. And we want people to be happy. The whole thing with Las Vegas was we want people to go back to their towns and tell their family and friends the wonderful time that they had in Las Vegas and that you got to go word of mouth.

My father was very clear with these guys. And because knowing who my father was. They didn’t monkey around and what he would tell him he says i’ll have someone from the casino talk to you every day And if you need their assistance, they will help you in other words if they’re having problems with somebody Like what happened one time with Lee Marvin, the actor at the Fremont, that’s another story.

But yeah. So that’s how it was really run. Okay. But it was not a fear of going to Las Vegas because we have, there were mob guys who came from other cities to see Las Vegas, but their names were not in the book. So they could go into a casino and not have a problem. So this thing about, they were afraid of being arrested.

That didn’t really work because Sheriff Ralph Lamb was a legendary guy. You can look up to LAMB or your listeners can look them up. It was legendary. I’ll never forget. I’m with my father and he says to my father, you guys know how to run the inside. We’re going to run the outside. Don’t worry. Meaning they’ll take care of the street.

You guys take care of the inside and we never had a problem. Okay. So there was never a situation where I say Sammy Gravano would be walking down Las Vegas Boulevard that somebody was going to arrest them. That wouldn’t happen. Okay. Because he wasn’t in the black book, they would have figured he’s a tourist.

I’m using Mr. Gravano as an example. Yeah,

[00:16:34] Dan LeFebvre: yeah, it’s very different than what we see in the movie. When you were talking about the change of command there and something, that reminds me of something that is a key plot point in Casino with Joe Pesci’s character, Nicky. He seems to go rogue and…

Even has a plan to take down the outfit’s boss Rimo Gaggi in the movie is his name and he’s trying to take control for himself. How realistic would it be for that sort of mutiny that we see happening in the movie Casino to actually have happened in the outfit?

[00:17:04] Scott Hoffman: That wouldn’t happen at all because that character was based on Tony Spilaccio, okay?

And Tony Spilaccio was sent out there in 19, let’s see, 1979. No, I’m sorry, around 1969. He was out there 15 years and he was going off the rails a lot of times. It was maybe by 1978, 79. He was put in the black book, so he couldn’t go into a casino. He was put out there as the muscle. He was the second guy.

And the problem basically was his brother. Michael was telling everybody that someday Tony’s going to run day to day operation. Dan, if you’re a boss over a staff, do you want to hear your staff saying, someday you’re going to be running, you’re going to get my job? No, that’s not going to happen.

Okay? So there was no way that was ever going to happen. One of the things when Tony O’Connell took over in 1943, and he called my father and he was very concerned about the Blackhands, which would be the whole story on the Blackhands, that’s something different. Now, Capone was a Blackhand. And he said, I don’t want to be like those animals in New York.

We’re going to have a one man operation. And basically that’s what the outfit was in the outfit today. There’s still four street crews. It’s a one man operation. The crews report basically to one boss. It’s not like New York with five families, five individual bosses. We’re going all over the place.

Sometimes not recognizing territory and things like that. Tony Ocardo never wanted to be like New York. He didn’t care about New York. He told my father in 1943, when he took over after the Hollywood trial, which is another story he said, when I don’t want to be like those animals. And in fact, I will tell you this, when Sam Giancana was removed, he asked Paul Ricca, who actually had brought was a bodyguard for Al Capone, very smart guy and brought Tony Ricardo in as a driver and a bodyguard.

He asked Paul to go under. Mafia commission, okay, which still exists today, but they don’t meet the underbosses and captains of various families will meet. Chicago still is on the commission today and they’re represented by the Genovese family, but he, Tony O’Connell didn’t even want to go on the commission after he pulled Sam Giancana at that point.

And Sam Giancana was the guy, because of what went on between the Kennedys and the outfit, which is another long story, how it actually began. He was the guy who pushed, he was the guy who really pushed the assassination. So that’s another story.

[00:19:41] Dan LeFebvre: Al Capone. What is that phrase that you’re, I’m not familiar with

[00:19:44] Scott Hoffman: that term. Okay. The Blackhands were this, they were all Sicilians. They were all Sicilians who came to America. And as far as they were now, my father played cards with these guys when, in his teenage years, he knew these guys playing cards.

They trusted him. But the Sicilians the Blackhands rather, they were all extortionists. Okay, but as far as they were concerned, if you were not Sicilian from Sicily, you could not be in the mafia or the mob. They would accept Northern Italians, but they would say to them, you will never be in a leadership.

You can be part of the mob, but you can never be leadership. You’re not from Sicily. You’re not Sicilian. And of course, any non Sicilian forget about it. They weren’t even going to look at them, they didn’t want them at all. They accepted my father because he played cards with them. And when my father became a manager, he was in his twenties Paul Rica asked him to be a manager.

He put them over to black hands. And the first thing he said to him, what’s you guys, what’s your beef, what’s your problem. And he said we don’t know what we’re going to get paid, which in mob life is true. Okay. You don’t always know. That’s why guys took no show jobs with the state of Illinois city of Chicago, the County, my father worked regular jobs, legit jobs.

So he could get a W2, which is again, another story. And so he said, look, you guys hit the street and then I’ll talk with Paul and you’re going to have to pay tribute. Paying tribute means you have to kick up a percentage to the boss. And it was 10%. They said they’d be fine with it. So what the Blackhands would do is basically they went into a business and they would say to them, wow, we hear that the neighborhoods, there’s some problems in the neighborhood and that you need protection.

And the owner would say to them, what are you’re crazy. That’s a good name, right? There’s nothing going on here. And how they would start was that night they break the windows. That’d be the beginning. And then after that, they come back to the guy and they said, they would say to the owner, they said, these guys are violent.

We’re concerned about your life. And that was the phrase, your life telling the guy, okay, we. Phase one was break the windows phase two is you and so they pay extortion money and the black hands were all over Chicago They were not they were very uncontrollable and I will tell you this There’s a note of history where Anton mayor Anton Cermak who supposedly took a bullet Franklin Delano Roosevelt like in 1932 33 in Miami and that’s not the real story not even close.

That’s not the real story why Cermak was killed, he was killed by black hands because he was going to clean up Chicago and get the mob out of, get the outfit out of Chicago. Yeah. That’s a whole nother story.

[00:22:30] Dan LeFebvre: A whole other story there. Speaking of another story, if we shift on from the movie casino to another Martin Scorsese movie, 1990s, Goodfellas from an overall perspective for Goodfellas, if you were to give that one a letter grade for how accurately it depicted the mafia, what would you give that one?

That would be

[00:22:49] Scott Hoffman: probably I’d give him a D plus.

[00:22:52] Dan LeFebvre: D plus. So a little bit better than casino, but still, or it’s a little bit worse than casino, but still yeah. There

[00:22:58] Scott Hoffman: were a few things. There was a, because when I went to college, Long Island university, I’d gotten an academic scholarship. After I had gone to a junior college after telling my father, which is a, again, with me, it’s another.

So with me, I can tell you 12 stories of relate to one story. So I apologize to you and your listeners, . I really do. But with me it’s, it rolls on and I’d gone and I had gotten, I’d taken the one creative writing class at junior college, and the teacher thought I was a pretty good professor. And and his college roommate, who was from Brooklyn, they went together to the University of Illinois.

That’s where they both, graduated. The professor is talking to the his roommate and says, this fellow, Scott Hoffman, I want to show you his work. He’s pretty good as a writer. And he started to tell me the fellow started to tell me his aunt worked in the. Admissions office for Long Island university, which I never heard of in Brooklyn, New York.

So he was telling me about it. I figured, okay, I went to my public library, Chicago public library branch in my neighborhood. And I talked to the librarian very nice. And she said, yes, we have a college reference books of listing of all the colleges. Let’s look it up and see. So we looked it up. I got the address.

I wrote them a letter. They said, send me transcripts because they give two out of state scholarships. Okay. Academic. But you’re going to have to be responsible for your own room and board. Now, when I was one, the junior college, I was working part time because the junior college, the first class started eight in the morning and the last was nine at night.

So it was very convenient for night students. If you had to work during the day, it was convenient for night students. So I applied and they accepted me and I went to New York. I’d never been to New York before. And I was looking at some of the jobs posted, i, the admissions office to see what was available.

And most of them were very low pay in those days, our 0. 35 an hour, 1. 50. Cause we’re talking September of 1968. So the jobs weren’t high pay. So I did what I did best. And I was in a classroom with a guy and I’m telling him I need some work to cover my room and board. I had brought money with me, but it was like 600 in those days.

It wasn’t a lot, but still I had to work to come up with the money. And he’s, and I’m telling him, and I thought he’s going to bug out and say, Oh, you’re crazy. And he says, no, I might know somebody. And he did the guy’s name was Charles Scarfa was known as the grim Reaper. He was a Colombo family guy.

He was involved with maybe a hundred murders. He was also used by the FBI when they were looking to try and find out who killed the three civil rights guys in 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, Michael Goodman, and. I think that Don Chaney, I think that was the other guy’s name, two white guys and a black guy.

So they used him. I don’t know why they used him, but they used him. He was able to help. So I worked, my first MAP social club was, I worked at Colombo. Now at that time in New York, the drinking age was 18 and I was like 19, almost 20. So I could work in it. Later when the federal government. Change the law that everybody, every state had to be 21.

That was different in Illinois. It was 21, but New York, when they told me 18, I was surprised. I didn’t think, I thought it was 21. So I worked there and then someone said to me I think you could earn a little more money. And I know somebody that could help you was Lucchese crime family.

And it was the suite owned by Henry Hill. It was in Queens and Queens Boulevard near Forest Hills. And I went to meet him and he was, to me, he was a twerpy guy, to be honest with you. I know we think a lot of, and he said, no, we can use you. Okay. Fine. And he hired me and that’s where I met and got to know all the real sopranos.

All the real good fellows. And I eventually met all the real sopranos, the Bayardo family. That’s who David Chase used. And the television show, The Sopranos is the Bayardo family, pretty much ran Newark. I later met them, but Goodfellas. Yeah, I knew all of them and things were not quite like what we was making it.

[00:26:49] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. We’ll talk about Sopranos here in a little bit, but before we leave the Goodfellas, since you did meet the real Henry Hill, do you think the movie did a good job portraying him with Ray Leotis playing him?

[00:27:02] Scott Hoffman: No, I met a fat man in 1998. I was in California. And I was invited to a party and who comes with Ray Liotta and a couple, I had two friends.

And he was he goes out to the, like the garden area. He says, I’ll be right back to his friends. I figured, okay, I’m going to go ask him about Henry Hill. And he’s, we had a gold compact and he was a heavy smoker in those days. And I was very sorry to hear when he passed. I don’t know if he still was smoking at that time, but he was a heavy smoker and he was smoking.

And I said, Mr. Liotta, I really enjoy your work and I got to ask you about somebody. He says, sure, go right ahead. And I said what’d you think of Henry? And he says, Henry who? I said the guy you played in Goodfellas, what was his name? Henry Hill. Is that his name? And he says, he was scary to me.

And I’m thinking here’s Ray Liotta, he plays all these tough guys. And he’s telling me he’s scared, and he said, how do you know Henry? And I said I was just in passing. I wasn’t going to tell him how I knew Henry, but I said, just in passing. But to me, Henry Hill was, I always saw him.

He was always afraid. His body language is afraid of Jimmy Burke and Paul Vario. Always really was afraid. And he was one of these guys to me and I’ll use an analogy. This is the same analogy that a kid who lives across the street from a drug dealer and sees all the nice clothes. The guy’s hat guy has and cars and women and jewelry.

And that was pretty much Henry Hill was a mob groupie as a kid. And he was the type of guy, in my opinion, that would do anything to win favor with wise guys, okay? He would do anything. That’s not why they didn’t like Henry. To me, he was not a guy to be afraid of. He wasn’t Sam Giancana, I’ll tell you that.

He wasn’t Tony Accardo, but yet, he did whatever they wanted. And he was, that’s why he was involved. And like I say, all of them were Jimmy Burke Paul Vario, the real Tommy, who was very psychotic, which is another story, Tommy D. Simone, okay. And Angelo Seppi were heavily into cocaine and I knew Pittsburgh guys from the Pittsburgh mob.

One of the guys there was his name was Eugene DeSola called Nicky the Blade. He was a slasher, always using him. And he was the contact, not only on the guns that when they showed in the movie, but the cocaine. He was the contact that brought the cocaine to New York that Henry Hill would buy. But if she got money for and they would be all smoking and then Henry Hill would always say to me let’s why you want something?

And I’d say, no, no, I’m not into drugs on this prescription. I get it. I’m allergic. I told him I’m allergic to cocaine. Okay. And Jimmy Burke says to me, sure. Jimmy Burke wanted me to work at his place. It’s Robert’s lounge, which is located. And South Ozone Park near LaGuardia airport and a kind of a little bit older.

Lucchese guy said to me, Scott, let’s go outside. I want to tell you something. He says, look, you can do what you want. Jimmy Burke. Okay. He’ll pay you more money. I’m going to tell you right now, they bury guys in the bar. So if you want to be around that’s on you. That’s up to you. So I go back and I say to Jimmy Burke my class schedules.

Thanks, Jimmy, a lot. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. But just because of my class schedules, I just don’t think I could swing it. And this time here at with Henry at the suite is it works a little more, but thank you so much. Thanks a lot for thinking of me. So that’s great. Thanks. So I got along Tommy D Simone.

I got along with, because in 1957 Los Angeles became one of mob families who reported to Chicago. And two of his uncles were part of the LA mob. And when we first met he, I’ve been told that this happened a few days before we even met. It was this gentleman walking down the street. It was a middle aged gentleman by the name of Howard Goldstein.

Just walking down the street, just like if you or I would be walking down the street. And Tommy called him a bad name and put three in the hat. And three and a half means put three in the back of the head. And then you put two in the chest. So the next day when I’m seeing Tommy, I’m saying that happened about a week before I met Tommy.

I’m saying, I said, why’d you shoot Howard? This Howard Goldstein. He says to me, Scott, I had a new gun. I had to try it out. Wow. So Tommy B Simone was the type of guy. My father would say, he’s never going to live to 30. And Tommy DeSimone was killed when he was 28. Wow. But he was a very psychotic guy. And his sister, who was 16 years old, was having an affair with 42 year old Jimmy Burke.

So yeah, that was a good fellows. Wow. Wow.

[00:31:37] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. Going back to something that you talked about with Henry Hill, the real Henry Hill, when he, you were saying that he was Trying to gain favor with wise guys and make them happy. And that’s similar to something that we saw in the movie. I think Ray Liotta’s version of Henry Hill mentioned something like, as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

And it tells the story from his perspective and growing up in Brooklyn neighborhood around gangsters. And he seems to idolize them. Of course, everybody’s situation is different, but you had a similar sort of decision to make about whether or not you would follow in your father’s footsteps. Was there a lot of pressure to stay in the life like Henry Hill did in the movie?

[00:32:15] Scott Hoffman: No, it was completely the opposite. In fact, my father, when it all started eight years old he said to me, he said at that age, he said, Scott, look, it’s going to be your decision. What you want to do. But I want your eyes open. You’re going to see everything. It’s going to be rough. It’s going to be hard, but you’re going to see everything, all facets, everything in mob life.

And then you’re going to make the decision. He says, I’m not going to make it for you. You’re going to make the decision because other hosts have said, what was he grooming you? No. And that was really very, an exception. Cause in my families, the father will really want his son, do things to show his son that it’s a good life or the uncle will show the nephew.

Yeah. You can make more money, which is why I really never dated the little Madonna’s mob daughters or mob nieces, because what they would do, say, we’ll use you as an example, Dan. And they would, and yeah, they would say to you, Dan, come down the basement. I want to just talk for a little bit. And you’d say, great.

You was getting a little more serious. With Angela or Maria, and they would say, yeah, Dan, how much money do you earn on these podcasts? Say how much you earn. Yeah, it’s, and a wise guy would say the father of the uncle would say, that’s nice, my niece or my daughter, she’s used to the better things, Dan, the better things.

So I don’t really know if you can afford on that salary, but I can make you a great offer if you come with me, if you come with me, Dan, you’ll be making a lot more money. And you got to remember that the daughters or the nieces, why I call them little Madonnas, cause they were spoiled when they were 16, they had the Corvettes when they were 17, they had the tennis bracelets.

Oh yeah. They would be shopping at Lauren Taylor, Neiman Marcus. So they were used to that life and they wanted a guy who could provide for that life. So that’s what they would do. So at that point, Dan would have to make a decision. Do I end this relationship? Or do I decide to go into the life as mob life is calm and I never wanted that.

Yeah. Don’t blame me,

[00:34:20] Dan LeFebvre: but it makes sense then hearing that how someone like Henry Hill and how we see it portrayed in the movie, at least that they would have, there would be, tantalizing, to make more money. And it seems like it’s better than it is. It sounds like your experience there, as you mentioned, it’s a little.

Little different in that you saw a lot and you were more aware rather than just, I’m going to make a lot of money and have

[00:34:46] Scott Hoffman: two good things. The difference with me was by seeing it young and it was very hard. And I didn’t think about it till I was in my twenties by seeing it so young, by the time I was say 16, which most guys, if they went to high school, they dropped out, but they had no idea what they were getting in.

Dan, I was a hardened seasoned veteran. When you talk about a hardened seasoned veteran, you’re looking right at them. Okay. I knew all facets of the life. I knew what was going on. I knew a lot of things about a lot of people. I wasn’t, I didn’t have any expectations where when guys go at the life, 16, 17 years old.

They’ve got these expectations. Like I say, it’s like the kid who lives across the street from the drug dealer. He doesn’t think about what the legal consequences are going to be. That doesn’t enter into his mind. All he sees is, Hey, this guy got more money. Why should I work at McDonald’s? Look at all the money he’s got.

Look at what he’s making. See, and it was like that with Henry Hill. When I say a mob groupie, he’s seeing all this money flashing. Cause a lot of guys will flash that money and he’s thinking to himself. Wait a minute. This is a lot more money than I could ever make on a straight job, but he found out down the road what things were all about.

And he was eventually kicked out of the WPP program. That’s a witness, program, for witness protection program. He was kicked out of that when they had to move him so many times to Seattle. And that’s why in 1989 his wife, Left Karen left him at that time. Okay, but neither him or Karen were faith Karen was having an affair with Paul Barrio Okay, when Henry was in jail and Henry was running around with women and her so it wasn’t like a happy marriage But she just wasn’t she was going back to New York and the FBI handler says don’t go back to New York This guy’s gonna be looking for Henry So they want, they’ll grab you and they’re going to force you to tell him, where’s Henry?

She said, I don’t care. I don’t want this life because wherever they put Henry, because they put you West of the Mississippi and the WPP program with this protection plant program, they put you West of the Mississippi. They don’t put you East. So he was constantly being moved because what he was doing was going back to criminal life, selling drugs.

He was going right back to it. So eventually when he got to Seattle, they just got tired of it. They kicked him out of the program. They kicked him out of the program.

[00:37:16] Dan LeFebvre: Wow. Wow. One thing I wanted to ask about with in, in Goodfellas, as I was watching that again to prepare for our chat, something that stood out to me was something that’s throughout the entire movie.

And there’s just this level of paranoia that we have. It’s constant paranoia that law enforcement’s going to find them. There is a scene with, in Goodfellas with Ray Liotta’s character, Henry Hill, we’ve been talking about, he’s looking up nervously at, a helicopter about flying over. He thinks the helicopter is looking for him.

But then to contrast that, there’s times in the movie where we see guys, just jumping to violence so quickly without really seeming to care who sees it. So you have some scenes where Henry or people are just extremely paranoid, and then you have scenes of wise guys doing brutal beatings in broad daylight in front of who knows how many witnesses.

Did the guys in the mafia really live in this constant state of paranoia while also maybe not really caring who sees their crimes?

[00:38:12] Scott Hoffman: No, it wasn’t, they were always concerned. They were always concerned because they knew, what the consequences would be, especially when the Rico act came in April of 1970.

That changed. I’ll never forget when I come home in March of 1970 on a spring break from college, I read about it in the New York times. And I said to my father, the RICO act was racketeering influence, corruption organization act. That’s what it was called. It was written actually by Robert Blakely, who was the law professor at Notre Dame for Congress.

I don’t know why they picked him, but they picked him. And I asked my father this isn’t going to really bother the outfit or anything. He says to me, Scott. In years to come, not today, not tomorrow, the rats are going to be jumping off the ship. And that’s because the law was, you’d have to do at least 85 percent of the time, unless this is another thing that the public doesn’t know.

They have a lot of programs in prison. Okay. Like alcohol programs and drug programs. If you qualify, that’ll cut some of your time. All right, that’ll cut some of your time. So you’re not always doing straight 85%. Because of that, the 60 year old guys, the guys in their fifties, they were concerned about that, but guys were never paranoid.

They were concerned obviously because it was always a case of where the law enforcement, the G the FBI, that was their job. Okay. So they’re trying to make cases against you all the time. So they were concerned about it, but it wasn’t a paranoia like that. And as far as the other. No, you would never be, you’d never be doing that in public to anybody.

In fact, I’ll tell you this, when my father got the order on someone, and now in the movies, they always, our television will say whack somebody, but there’s another terminology and the other term is give him his receipt. So Dan, if you’re in a store or your listeners are in a store. And the clerk says Mr.

Lefevre, would you like your receipt? You have those feet pointed at the door and you run out as fast as you can. Going giving a receipt means kill him. So when my father would go, and another thing the public doesn’t know is that if you put a contract out on someone, that was considered their job.

Unless you put money on the contract, then it became different. That was rare. But that was your job, okay? If you were the muscle and the order was given on somebody, you didn’t get paid extra for it. Where they got paid extra and again, the public and probably yourself, you’re not aware is when they go out as juice collectors, okay.

Or street enforcers and juice collector will be collecting either gambling money or loan sharking money, interest juice on it. That’s what they refer to. And the street enforcers were collecting street tax on businesses. Now the juice collectors would get ham. So that’s why they were so aggressive because they’re getting 50 percent of what they bring in.

Be right. He then would get 10 percent commission besides straight salary. Okay. And so that’s why they were aggressive. And so those are two things, just as example, the public doesn’t know. And of course, movies aren’t going to really tell you that they’re just going to show you a guy with a baseball bat.

And that wasn’t even always the case. I saw a lot of different beatings with a lot of different things. All right. But as far as that when my father would get the order and he would talk with, cause they pretty much left it up to him, who we want to use if, when the order was given on someone. The guy would always say to my father, do you want him to make his confessional or do you want him to make his confirmation?

And the confessional meant, did you want him, did you want the body to be found? And the confirmation was you didn’t want the body to be found. And that was always came up. As far as any beatings no, never. That would never happen that, out in public like that. Because again, like you say, somebody could see it.

Now, guys did some crazy, stupid things, and people saw it, sure, and they got caught, but nobody would be out there. If anything, if they go real early in the morning, see basically what they would do, they tail a guy for a period of time and see what time he went to work, what time he came home.

And if he went to work early in the morning, they would be in the driveway with the guy and get out and put a gun in his ribs and say, get in the trunk. So unless somebody is out walking their dog at six in the morning. That was as far as it went, they weren’t gonna stand there and beat anybody with people walking down the street.

That was never gonna happen because obviously if someone sees, it’s like someone sees, give an example. In 2014, there were 14 Colombo guys who were arrested and the guys who weren’t arrested, the old timers went crazy and the reason they went crazy, there was about maybe four guys, five guys under the age of 40, who they texted a guy saying, if you don’t pay, we’re gonna break your legs.

Why would you text anybody? Okay, because now the guy has a text and he’s showing it to the FBI. Okay, so the old guys went crazy. They said, we got to do something with these guys. I hear that, through the mob grapevine, we got to do something. And I tell the guys, look, the younger generation is used to using cell phones.

They’re used to texting and they don’t always think, but you’re not going to text somebody that you’re going to do something physically because that’s evidence. Okay. And the one thing you learn about, and I spent a lot of time in courtrooms, an awful lot of time, is that one of the things that counts in trying to convict someone, you have to show intent.

Okay. You have to show intent because intent is mental state. That’s basically, we’ll just skip around here for just a second. That’s basically what the special prosecutor is doing with Donald Trump. By tapes, emails, whatever he’s trying to show intent. You have to show intent. So if you’re going to charge a guy with a solve And you have a text message that’s intent because you’re telling the guy, I’m going to break your legs if you don’t pay.

So does that make any sense to you?

[00:44:13] Dan LeFebvre: It does. It does. Is that why you’re talking about using a term of you want the confessional and things like that and using terms like that. Is that part of the reason why too? Because then if somebody does overhear it, then it doesn’t seem as straight out as what they’re actually going to be doing.

They’re using code words almost. They

[00:44:28] Scott Hoffman: don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah. It’d be like, that was one thing I always. Not always but it was difficult for me when I was young and even as I got older was mop speak, okay To try and keep mob speak straight from when I would be in school with my classmates.

And that became very difficult. Okay, I’ll give you an example of that. I’m in fourth grade and they’re teaching multiplication tables, right? That was in fourth grade. The teacher writes down six times five on the board. And I’m looking and I’m looking around the room and the teacher sees that obviously.

He says, Scott, how much is six times five? And I said, Oh, that’s a 30. That’s correct. And the reason I’m looking around, because in loan sharking six, it means that if you’re coming in, if I’m going to borrow 500 from you, Dan, you would say to me, Scott, you can buy. I’ll give you the 500, but it’s 600 interest.

You’re going to have to pay. So if I don’t have the 500 this week, where am I going to come up with 1, 100 the next week? So when I saw this six times five, what do you think I’m thinking? I’m only thinking about loan sharks. Okay. That’s it.

[00:45:38] Dan LeFebvre: I could see how that would be really confusing.

[00:45:43] Scott Hoffman: I had to keep things trying and the thing, I’ll never forget. We’re in Lexington, Kentucky. This was 1977. I was 29 years old at that age with my father. We’re visiting someone in Lexington, Kentucky. Okay. We had to see. And the guy, the wise guy says to my father, you took care of the thing, right? My father said, yes, I took care of the thing.

It’s going to, it’s almost done, but I’ve pretty much taken care of it. Don’t worry. The thing is taken care of. So in the car, and I said to my father, what was the thing? He said, Scott, the thing will be taken care of later. It’s the thing that has to be taken care of. I said, you mean capital T H E capital T H I N G.

Yes, that thing. So again, I had, again, that mop speak was hard for me because I had to try and learn stuff and keep it separate from my classmates and everyone I’d see.

[00:46:31] Dan LeFebvre: It was difficult. Was there any times where communication broke down because of that? If any, if you’re trying to figure, I understand as a child, perhaps a little bit different than, somebody who’s been in it for years and years, who was actually carrying out those orders.

But if you haven’t used all these different code words and you’re working with from Chicago to Vegas to, I’m just thinking of even just accents and. Terms that people use across different geographical regions. I could see how it gets so confusing. Yeah.

[00:47:01] Scott Hoffman: Yeah, it would happen. Cause sometimes somebody would say something to my father, the thing, and I’ll say what’s the thing about my father says I’m not really sure I got to check it out.

He would tell me and he, cause he would always tell me what wise guys, you always got to remember this guy. He said, I always remember this 90%, what they tell you is lies. 10 percent is BS. Just think of it in this vein. If mom says she loves you, check it out. So what I do in person presentations, I tell people, I’m sure you have a lovely mother, but if she says she loves you, check it out.

Okay. Don’t accept mom as the final word, and that’s what it would be a lot of times guys. Weren’t always sure when we went to see Joey in MCC after his trial. Which was pretty much the beginning of the end of the outfit in Las Vegas. That’s another story, obviously. And he says to my father, this was after we saw Alan Dorfman and the deal with Dorfman was after he was convicted, he was out on bond.

And he was the only guy was a 5 million bond and put up so much of his insurance company. And he told the feds the G I have something big for you. I have something big. When you’re convicted, I will tell you this from experience, the G wants something big. If you’re not convicted and they’re just charging you, then that’s a different story, but you’ve got to have something really big.

For them to wanna work with you at that point? . So we had won to see Dorfman and my father says to Alan, look, you’ll get a $12,000 a month pension. Okay, your health insurance for you and your wife will be taken care of for life. Just accept what’s gonna happen. Possibly. ’cause his lawyer was telling him, he thought he’d get maybe 15 years and Dorfman had been in jail, like I say, 1971 for nine months.

He said, I’m not going back. He kept saying, I’m not going back, I’m not going back. So we go to see Joey Ayupa, and this is what Joey Ayupa said, how did the Cubs do today? And my father said the Cubs lost. So Joey Ayupa says I think it’s time to make a lineup change. And that was the order on Elendorf.

[00:49:12] Dan LeFebvre: Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I could see how there would be some. Confusion there for sure. It could be confusion

[00:49:19] Scott Hoffman: for sure. Oh yeah. If you’re right, you had a problem.

[00:49:24] Dan LeFebvre: Another movie that I wanted to touch on briefly is the 1997 movie from called Donnie Brasco longtime listeners. I’ve listened to base on a true story.

I actually talked with Joe Pistone, the real Donnie Brasco back on episode number one 73, who I believe that you’ve met as well. Do you think the movie Donnie Brasco did a good job showing how the mafia

[00:49:42] Scott Hoffman: works? I would say this, that he did an excellent job and he deserves all the accolades and all the praise for the work that he did as six years undercover, which is unheard of.

Normally three is the max. You don’t keep a guy under for six years. He did an excellent job. However, and I will use baseball terminology. He really was one for two. And what I say that is a lot of people when they see the movie. All their hearing, and most of the convictions were true, were Bonanno family, crime family men.

But the Milwaukee crime family, who actually reported to Chicago, had Bonanno crime family ties. And he worked undercover, as part of his undercover work, he had set up a vending machine company, and he had been introduced to Frank Ballesteri, who was head of the mob family in Milwaukee. They had about 50, 60 guys.

Ballesteri never wanted to expand the family, he always wanted money. And so he worked with them and was eventually able to get them to say things on the wire and convict the Milwaukee family now, along with the bananas that he convicted at that time. But what happened was, and the case was 41 years ago, what happened was, sure, the Bonanno’s were kicked out of, off the mob commission, but they eventually got back on.

The lower level guys, the underboss, the captains, they probably were sitting in a place saying, thank you to Joe Pistone, because that now opened it up for them. He was able to convict the guys at that time. So the Bonanno family. Those guys moved up and eventually cases were made against them and then guys replaced them.

And today the Bonanno family is flourishing just Joe Peston did nothing. And it’s not any knock against Joe Peston because he put away the guys at that time. Now Milwaukee family was different when Frank Ballesteri went away and his sons Joe Ball and John Ball, who were both lawyers, and Steve DeSalvo, who was his underboss, went away.

Milwaukee family pretty much dissolved. They didn’t work stink quite yet, but all their operations in Wisconsin was taken over by the outfit. So there wasn’t much of a mock family left in Milwaukee. And really today there might be a couple of 80 year old guys, sitting around and talking, but there’s really no action.

So that’s why I say one for two. He put one family basically out of business, but the other family, the banana family, they’re flourishing today, just like all the other four families in New York. Just like nothing ever happened. And I, again, it’s nothing against him because his work was excellent and he put away those guys, but he never made a dent in the family.

He just got rid of the guys at that time. And like my father would say, he would say about, politicians as well as in mob life. The faces change, but the nonsense remains the same. So that’s, whoever you put in, they’re going to still follow the same nonsense. And the Bonanno family is just as active today as they were 41 years ago.

Wow.

[00:52:49] Dan LeFebvre: Wow. This kind of goes back to what you were talking about earlier with having to show intent and having to have all of this evidence. There’s so much work that has to go into it. So you can get it against these specific people like Pistone did against some specific people, but then there’s, yeah, there’s going to be people to

[00:53:05] Scott Hoffman: replace them.

That’s the thing. Sure he can sit back and Joe Pistone is 85 years old. He can sit back and say, I did a great thing. I can be very proud and all the awards he’s gotten and all the shows he’s been gone. He deserves it. He deserves it because of the work he did. But when you look at the reality and I’m a guy who looks at the reality, the Bonanno family was not extinct.

They came back just as strong, just as hard. You’re doing the same things they did 41 years ago. And even if you put guys away, in fact, now the guy who is the leader of them, but not a family, he violated his parole. He’s going away for 11 months and they’ve already got a replacement for him for 11 months lined up.

So like I say, now some families, smaller families like Milwaukee, he was, he made a dent and he was able to do a lot of damage to them and just about make them extinct. So that’s what I mean, one for two, because he could never do anything with the Bonanno family. And if he was sitting there, I would tell you the same thing.

And I believe he would agree with me that he did a great job at the guys at that time, 41 years ago.

[00:54:17] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah, no, that, that makes

[00:54:18] Scott Hoffman: them handled them wrong.

[00:54:22] Dan LeFebvre: You talked a little bit earlier about the Sopranos and we’ve talked about movies so far, but I want to shift to talk about the Sopranos a little bit. As we’ve done with some of the others, if you were to take a step back and give the Sopranos a letter grade for how well it shows the life, what would you give it?

[00:54:40] Scott Hoffman: Probably less than a D okay. You wouldn’t have to go to summer school, but it was like, and I’ll tell you why right off the bat, right off the bat, there is no way Dan, there is no way. That a mob family, Copperjimmy, Hoppo, could ever go to a psychiatrist, and I will tell you why. And I talk about this in Insight, with the fictional character, maybe you’ve read him, Eric Leto, who was gay.

And that’s based on someone who was gay, and he was a boss of a street crew. And I’ll never forget how mad Sam Giancana was, because he was one of his 42’s. And the 42’s was a gang… That’s that Sam Jean Conn had when he was a teenager, they went to a restaurant on Taylor street called 42nd street, which I think was a play on 42nd street in New York.

So everyone always referred to them as the 42s and they were doing stick ups and they got noticed by the older guys. And the guy was, so what had happened was in mob life. And this also happened with the decal Cavati family who was still functioning by Yardo family. It was really not functioning anymore.

Who were the real Sopranos that David Chasings. In a mob family, okay, if a boss is gay, we’ll use that as an example, like I did in my book, the order is given on him, right away, the order is given on him, he’s gotta go, okay, there’s no calling him in, let’s talk about it, no sit down, he can be a made guy, doesn’t matter, he’s gonna go.

Now, if you’re a street crew member and you’re a good earner, because again, as I said earlier, the first conversation of the day is about money, the last conversation of the day is about money. If you’re a good earner, they’re not going to like it. They’re going to say to you, keep it off the street, keep it off the street.

In other words, don’t kiss a guy on the corner. Okay. Don’t hold hands with a guy coming out of a gay bar. Keep it off the street because the guy’s a good earner, a boss, no, a boss is going to go. Okay. Just like in my, like an insight, I talk about the difference between a gangster and a racketeer. And there’s a big difference between the two, basically with the outfit.

We didn’t have any racketeers and the difference is a gangster will give an order right away. Let’s do it. Let’s go right now. We’re racketeer. We want to have a sit down, not that they won’t give the order. Okay. They’ll give the order, but let’s have a sit down because when a guy is made, especially when a guy is made, that’s what you’re supposed to do on a guy, have a sit down, a gangster.

No, he’s not going to forget about it. I want that guy gone. He’s going to be gone. I’m giving you the order. Give him his receipt. Go. Okay. And if a street crew picks up that you’re a racketeer, they start functioning a little different because they don’t have the confidence. It’s and if you have a boss, who’s wishy washy or your listeners, God bless them, have a boss that’s wishy washy.

You’re going to sit there at your desk, looking at your computer screen. I don’t know if I should tell this guy anything because he’s not going to do anything. He’s wishy washy, but if the boss is a strong leader, you’ll feel confident. You’ll go in and say, boss, look, I think we can do this better. This is my opinion, but boss, I want to bring this to you.

And the boss will say, okay, Dan, that sounds good. Let me just look into it, but let me see what happens. And maybe six months, a year from now, that’ll happen. Whatever you suggest will happen as far as policy in the company. That’s a gangster. The racketeer will be wishy washy. Dan, I’ll get back to you, maybe by the time you retire, he’s still getting back to you.

And a mate crew doesn’t like that. They want a guy who’s strong. You have to remember in mob life, everything is macho. Now, one time I asked my father, Dan, and I said to him, I said, dad, I got to ask you a question. I was joking with you, just like I’m joking a little bit with you and your listeners.

Of course. I said, do you ever think a woman could run the outfit day to day operation? And I expected him to say, Scott, this is a guy’s world, it could never happen. He says to me, Scott, let me ask you this. There are women in prison who have shot and killed their husband, shot and killed their boyfriend, maybe shot and killed their uncle.

They’ve used a gun. Haven’t they? And I said, yeah, there are women in prison who have done it. I’m sure you’ve done in stories about women who have used guns. And he says if a woman can shoot a gun, she can give an order, right? She’s not afraid of giving an order on somebody. And I’d say, no, she wouldn’t be afraid because she pulls the trigger.

She wouldn’t be afraid of pulling the trigger on somebody. He said, therefore, he said, a woman could run the outfit. He says, however, guys wouldn’t respect her until she gave that order. Once she gave that order, then it would be a different story. So we never had a woman. I’ve never known a mob family that’s had a woman, but it’s the kind of surprised me what he told me, but it made a lot of sense because if she has can pull a trigger, she’s not afraid of shooting a gun.

She’s not afraid of giving the order. Because she’s already physically able to pull a gun, pull the trigger, and she doesn’t care about human life. It’s not let’s go for counts. Okay. And that’s not going to happen. Yeah.

[00:59:53] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. That’s not the answer that I would’ve expected from that either, but that’s huh.

[01:00:00] Scott Hoffman: And when you think about it, it does make sense.

[01:00:03] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. No, it does make sense. It does make sense. It’s the men, the mentality that’s required to to be the boss.

[01:00:08] Scott Hoffman: Absolutely. When I was 14 years old, when I was 14 years old, my father waited till I was 14. I was a little more mature. And he explained to me what a sociopath.

Behavior was what a psychotic behavior was. I always knew these guys were crazy. I always knew that there was something wrong with them, but I never knew the medical terms that would apply to their behaviors. And after that, then I knew what I was dealing with. Like I say, yeah, if you have that mentality, and if a woman has that sociopath or psychotic mentality, she could do it.

Could do

[01:00:41] Dan LeFebvre: it. But they could never go to the, to a psychiatrist like we see in the, in Sopranos,

[01:00:46] Scott Hoffman: huh? Oh, no. Oh, no. No. Mr. Galdifani, who was a very good actor, would never saw a sunshine the next day. No, he would have been gone right away. As soon as they found out, he would have been gone. Right away, Sam Giancana, or Joey Ayupa, or Tony Ocardo would have called my father.

I want to see you tonight. And if my father could arrange it at four in the morning after, yeah, I would be arranged. Say, okay, I need 24 hours. You got 24, I know you’ll do it. Get it done. He’s gone. This is who’s going to take over. And that street crew didn’t always know, but they would eventually find out they would find out.

And it happens. And this, and like I say, in my book, Eric Leto is based on true guy, a real guy who they kept my father, convinced Sam Giancana, look, he’s bringing in money. Let’s have a little talk with them, but he’s bringing in a lot of money. And he was a very good earner. He was also part of the 40 twos.

And that’s what through Sam Giancana, he says he used to hang out with us. He’s, never showed any feminine sides to him. And we didn’t know. And it was hard,

[01:01:53] Dan LeFebvre: something we see throughout the Sopranos, we see a lot of the character’s families and their home life. We see for example, in Tony Soprano in the beginning of the series talks about how he’s in waste management and the kids think that’s what their dad does for a living.

But as the series continues. The kids in particular, the Soprano family kids, the two kids Meadow and AJ are the two kids. They start putting together two and two and they start to realize that their dad is in the mafia and some of their neighbors start to realize as well. Does the Sopranos do a good job of showing what it’s like for the family and friends of someone in the mafia?

[01:02:30] Scott Hoffman: No, they didn’t. And the thing is when a guy goes away to prison, the kids are told either. Dad is going to college or dad has an out of town job. Okay. That’s what the kids are told because generally And it happens where normally it’s a bureau of prisons bop. They make the decision where somebody’s going to be sent It’s not a judge.

A lot of people will think the judge makes the decision the circuit court judge who’s handling the case. No, he’ll tell a defense lawyer, put it in writing, send it to BOP and they’ll make the decision. And they make, they try and put you within 500 miles of your home. That’s what they try and do.

Some guys, it doesn’t work that way. John Gotti was put in Marion, a level six prison, and that’s more than 500 miles from New York and Southern Illinois. And so they would try and do that. But normally what normally happens is guys don’t talk at home. They, kids don’t really know what their father is doing.

They don’t talk about, say I’m in waste management. No, they were, they just went, they wouldn’t say anything. And the wife would divert the conversation to something else. And the kids would just accept it. Okay. And if dad was away, they were told that dad’s going to college. So he did a lot of, some guys did a lot of postgraduate work.

Okay. They were away a lot and other times it’d be told, okay you dad’s got an out of town job while dad’s away for 20 years. He’s got an out of town job. Now there were some times some women would take the kids to a prison. If it was in, the 500 mile area, they would drive. And that’s where it got rough.

That’s where the kids would start to figure it out. Why is dad locked up? What’s happening? Why does this happen? Of most women. And that would be, it happened, but it was a little more rare, but most women know they wouldn’t say anything at all. Nothing. They would just go along. Like my mother told my father, she knew he told her before they got married and she said, just keep it out of the house, keep it out of the house.

And he never met with anybody else. He would talk with me, he’d go to churches, he’d go to bowling alleys, go to cemeteries. But he didn’t meet with anybody. He kept it out of the house.

[01:04:41] Dan LeFebvre: Interesting. Interesting. There is an interesting contrast that we see in the Soprano specifically when talking about, the kids seem to figure it out that their dad is in the mafia, but then they also haven’t seen any violence and it sounds similar to what you’re talking about, keeping it out of the house.

But there is, I think specifically a scene, I think it’s in a season five, episode nine, Meadow is. Telling her boyfriend that she never saw any violence growing up. Do you think it’s realistic to, for children to never see any of that violence? Yes,

[01:05:12] Scott Hoffman: yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I saw it because I saw it with me.

It was, I was a different circumstance. I didn’t fit into that category, but no, they wouldn’t because they wouldn’t know because they wouldn’t, if anything, a mom would say if someone got older, they’re seeing their teens and say, what does dad do? He works for the state of Illinois. He works for the city of Chicago, and that’s as much as they would say.

They wouldn’t see anything, but you had guys. And maybe this goes back to Tony Ricardo. I call him New York animals. There were two guys Charles Scarfo, who I first worked for. He would talk about his murders in front of the kids at home. Okay. And Vincent Giganti was known as the odd father because he would dress like it was mentally incompetent to stay out of things.

He would talk about his beatings in front of his daughter, what he did, his violence. And Giagatti was actually the number one hammer, the number one shooter for Vito Genovese. And eventually he became boss of the Genovese crime family, but he would talk about it at home. So you did have guys that maybe would talk about it, but that was rare.

Like I say, because. Guys don’t like, like my father would always say to me, Scott, you never want to be a radio. You’d never want to broadcast. So guys never wanted anybody to know because if say soprano kids tell somebody and say that kid’s uncle is a cop and the, that guy said, boy, these soprano kids, Uncle Al boy, I could tell you some stuff about them.

And all of a sudden Uncle Al is going to his boss and says, I might have a contact. What the Sopranos are doing, see, and it might just be very minutia, but it’s still right away. You’re going to hear about it from your father. Why are you talking to this guy? Why are you saying that? That’s what my father would always say.

Keep every conversation vanilla. Okay. Keep it vanilla. I said, what about chocolate? He said, no, keep it vanilla. He said, just, you talk about sports. How’s your family, the weather, nothing that’s ever going to hurt you. Nothing that’s ever going to come back and bite you. Never give up anything to anybody.

[01:07:23] Dan LeFebvre: Wow. Yeah that’s, that is very different than what we see in the Sopranos is specifically, of course, we but it makes sense, to, cause you, you never know, like it might be something small, but it might not, you don’t know.

[01:07:35] Scott Hoffman: Sometimes the smallest thing, it’s like an onion.

My father always, he always remember the more you peel back the onion, the smell gets worse. The smell gets worse. And a little thing can lead to something bigger. Okay, you can lead to something bigger. It might be very small in the beginning, but it can open the door for something else. And if nobody knows what you do, I’ve had guys in the neighborhood.

That got copies of my book. I’m talking about someone who became a CPA or a lawyer, people like yourself, normal, regular people. I hope you’re normal, regular, we’ll find out. And cause we have big Louie and Guido, they make house calls. So we’ll find out if there’s a problem with you.

I’m kidding you. I’m kidding. I, when they bought my book, they said, your dad was such a nice guy. When we’d see him on out there, we’d say, hi, Mr. Hoffman. He was very nice. And when I was a kid, there was this company called Good Humor and they would come with the ice cream at night through the neighborhood.

And he said he’d buy us an ice cream from Good Humor truck. Can’t believe that this was your father. And I said that’s what he wanted you to think. Because if everyone thinks he’s a nice guy and he’s this and he’s that, no one’s ever going to think that there’s another side. Like my father would say, I always remember every life story is like a pancake.

It has two sides. But if you stay on the top of it and don’t flip the pancake over, you’re never going to know what’s underneath. And that was a real problem with a lot of guys who could not separate women from the business. Oh, that was bad. That was, that’s what killed Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill set him up.

Okay. That’s what it was all about. So guys didn’t do it. They didn’t always do it.

[01:09:14] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah, no, it makes sense. It’s hard. Basically living a double life and not everybody can do that.

[01:09:21] Scott Hoffman: No, it was hard. It was hard for me as a kid, in the sense because I had to fit in with my classmates. I had to fit in with kids in the neighborhood.

I had to fit in. So I would have to take different postures on different things and just try and fit in with them and be like them. Yeah. But it was hard because again, I never had a birthdays, I never had bicycle, my father never had a game of catch with me, it was a wise guy that took me to my first baseball game at Wrigley Field to see the Cubs, so we never did, or bowling, or things that maybe your dad would do with you, as a child, as a son, especially, but that never happened.

None of that stuff ever happened. And I was an adult when I was a kid, but I still had a kid’s brain. So it was very, it was not easy to try and decipher because I was a very shy, very quiet child. That’s why my father, when he’d send me out with juice collectors, street enforcers, the muscle, he’d say, don’t worry, Scott, we’ll never say anything.

Don’t worry. And it was the truth. It was very much the truth. I was that quiet of a kid, that shy of a kid. My mother would have to come in the room if I was reading a library book. Just to see what was going on because there was no noise coming from the room, nothing was happening. Like I say, I was that type of child, so I was trusted.

I was always trusted. When I graduated college in 1971, Tony Ricardo says, I’d like to talk to you. And I said, okay, sure. So I went to his house in the forest suburb, and he says, Scott, I know you… You told your dad you’re not interested in being active. And I told my father at that point, I will not, was going to be, I wasn’t going to be active, but I’d still be an observer.

And sometimes when I do the in person presentation, someone says, what’s the difference? I said the difference is when you’re active, they can charge you. When you’re an observer, you’re not involved. So how are they going to charge you? What are they going to charge you with? Where’s the evidence? You observe, you walk away.

Got to remember, you’re not doing the criminal acts as an active person. And so he said to me, Scott, have you thought about it? And I says Tony, I says, it’s just not for me. And I think what I’m doing with my life is going to be the best for me. He says, you’re good at it. And I says, yeah, I says, I’m good at it, but it’s still not for me.

And the reason Dan, I always tell people is what I saw, but that was never the reason. That was never, ever the reason. The reason was I could never be my father. Okay. My father was in the life over 55 years, never went to jail, but he was good at what he did. He was good at what he did. And I, one time I asked him, cause my father in high school got friendly with the assistant principal.

Cause my father worked at a cafeteria to get a free lunch. And the assistant principal says, you’re a smart guy. Let me check your grades. And he saw him and my father was a good student and he said what do you want to, do you want to go on to college? And those days, kids didn’t go on to college, of course.

My father says, you know what, I’d like to be a surgeon. Why don’t I be a medical doc? And the principal says, wow, let me see what I can do. And he had a friend at the university of Chicago. He showed him a copy of my father’s grades. And they were willing to offer him an academic scholarship because the university of Chicago was a pre med student, much like Michael Franzese.

Okay. He was a pre med major at Hofstra, a guy with a lot of talent, but he went the other way, but a guy was very smart, a lot of talent. So the vice principal tells my father, I can get you into the university of Chicago, you could be a pre med major. And my father was very excited, of course, and this was going into a senior year.

And he goes home and tells my grandmother and she says, Oh, that’s well and good, but you have to get a job. And that was the end of the college career. Now, my father was very handy. He could do electrical work. He could do carpentry. He did. He could do plumbing. He didn’t like it, but the plumber talked to him.

They always thought he was a plumber. He could read a poster furniture. He could read blueprints. He worked on cars. So he could have been a building superintendent. So he had options. Dan, he had options. So one time I said to him later in life. I was maybe in my forties and dad was near the end of his life because he died of bladder cancer.

And I said to him, dad, why did you go into the light? Why did you go into the light? And he looks at me, says, Scott, everybody needs a hobby. And I said you could have picked a different hobby. You didn’t have to go into the light for a hobby. That was his answer. He got in, he got, he needed a job.

Giancana. And everything started from there. Everything started. Sam Giancana introduced him to Paul Rico because Sam Giancana was a protege of Paul Rico. He introduced him to Paul Rico after interviewing him. He says, yeah, I’d like you to come and work with me. That’s how it all started.

[01:13:51] Dan LeFebvre: Wow. Something that I found interesting in The Sopranos, if we go back to that, is how it references some of the movies that we’ve even talked about today, like Goodfellas and Casino.

There’s even one scene where one of Tony’s neighbors asks Tony how realistic The Godfather was. Granted, a lot of movies depict things that have happened decades before they were made, but since this podcast is about how realistic movies are, I have to ask. What do you think the Mafia’s perspective was on movies about the Mafia?

[01:14:24] Scott Hoffman: I’ll tell you after the Godfather came out. Now normally, the guy who’s in charge, let’s say Sam Giancana running day to day operations, or you could say Tony Cardo, who’s the equivalent of the CEO, okay? And Sam Giancana would have been, say, the vice president, or the president of the company, not the CEO, of course.

And what the, after the movie, the Godfather came out now, the real term that you call someone is a Don and that goes back to Sicilian mob in Sicily. You call the guy a Don, that’s what you’ll come after the movie came out. Then even wise guys are saying, Oh, the Godfather and calling everybody, the Godfather, they use the terminology.

Everyone was the Godfather all of a sudden, that, and that most in a perspective was. It’s entertainment, and that’s about it. But the movie The Godfather kind of struck a chord, as far as the terminology. And I know it struck a chord with Frank Sinatra, and that’s another story about his lawsuit, okay?

And I know why, and I remember him telling me why he called Mario Puzo, told him to choke on it. Yeah, I know about that. The author of… The book, the Godfather. Yeah. Joe Colombo also had a lawsuit going a lot of defamation to Italians. Yeah. He originally had the Italian anti defamation league and it became the Italian civil rights league.

Frank’s lawsuit was basically the same, but that wasn’t the reason. That’s a whole long other story or what the real reason he told Mario Puzo to choke on it. Okay. And they met each other and Jason’s restaurant in Los Angeles, which a very famous restaurant, I think on Hollywood Boulevard. Maybe it was on the strip.

It was really known for its, it’s trying to think of the word here, chili. They were really known for that really good chili, but it was a place. If you wanted to people watch, you had all the celebrities come in there. So you grab a table and, Oh, there’s Kirk Douglas. And there’s, so it’s, and he saw him there and he had to be restrained.

He was funny after Mario Puzo, in the restaurant. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I remember why he, when he said that he told Puzo to choke on it. Yeah. Yeah. Because Francis Ford Coppola had sent him the script for Johnny Fontaine and he took his red pen. He told me, he took his red pen and he crossed stuff out and take this out, take that out and Coppola wasn’t going to do it.

So Coppola then called Vic Damone, now Vic Damone was a good friend of Frank’s. He called Frank, he says, Francis Ford Coppola has come to me about playing Johnny Fontaine. Yeah. Yeah. And he says, Frank says, don’t take it, don’t take it. You understand? Don’t take it. Picked the loan, turned it down. They find, then they got Al Martino who had gone to England because Martino had problems with the Philadelphia mob in Philly.

So he had to leave the country. And that’s where he made, I think, Spanish eyes, his big song, Spanish eyes. I think it was in England that he made it. And that’s when they contacted Al Martino and Martino took the part. But in the movie, the part was very short. If you remember, it was very short, just at a wedding scene.

That’s all it was very short, but yeah, Frank was hot. Even 10 years later, when I saw Frank in Las Vegas, he said, I’ll cook dinner for you. Frank used to like to cook dinner. That was his way of relax. So we’re sitting in, and this is after he married Barbara Marx and she wasn’t there. One of the Marx brothers, Zepeto Marx, he started dating her and she divorced Zepeto, okay.

And so he was starting all of a sudden, he starts referring to the Godfather. He says, I got that part legit. I got that part legit. I said, Frank, I don’t, of course you got it legit. I don’t know any other reason that you didn’t get it legit. And that’s where it’s a bigger story about really why he was mad at Puzo.

Cause he’s Puzo knew something that wasn’t true. And Puzo really didn’t, and Puzo’s defense, he really didn’t know. But as far as Frank was concerned, yeah, he knew some, told him to choke on it. And I said, then he’s calling Russell Bufalino. Okay. Russell Bufalino was one of the characters in the Irishman.

Okay. I know Bufalino. He’s calling, about maybe breaking Puzo’s legs, but Buffalo, didn’t follow through. He let it go. He let it go. Cause Frank, sometimes his temper, the Jack Daniels, he was a good guy. He was a very good guy. I remember when he got Joe Lewis, the job Joe Lewis was out of money because all these women he was dating were taking them just for the greeter at Caesar’s palace.

Frank was a good guy in that way. He would help people. But you call Bufalino and Bufalino basically said, I’ll get back to you. Bufalino was hardcore in La Cosa Nostra, hardcore. He was the type of guy he was a slow anger guy. He wasn’t like Anthony Provenzano, who was also in the Irish. That’s another story is that move.

But Bufalino was the type of guy, if he had to do something and for La Cosa Nostra, I remember when his wife was pregnant, okay. And her bag broke and she said, I got to go, the bag broke. And he says, I got to go to a meeting, tell the neighbor. Okay, and he walks out the door, and she went and got the neighbor and drove her to the hospital.

But this was, Bufalino, Bufalino let this one go. He let this, because sometimes they get mad at Frank, because sometimes he’d say to someone if he got mad, you want your legs broken? And there’s another story with him and J. Edgar Hoover. That’s another story.

[01:19:38] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. It sounds like we have quite a few other stories to cover perhaps in the future.

But for someone who has a listener who’s listening to this and they’ve only seen mafia movies, they haven’t really dug in to any of the true stories. What do you think they would be surprised to learn about the real mafia that they just don’t show in the movies?

I would say

[01:20:00] Scott Hoffman: probably the violence that they will commit to get money that they don’t care. Like in my book, Inside, in the part where I’m talking about a juice collector goes looking for a guy and his wife is very pregnant. She must have been at least seven, eight months pregnant, at least. And what really happened, I had to water it down, what really happened.

So with them, it was always the ends justify the means. And if it was about money, we don’t care, but with them also, you have to remember that they still had a family. So there were a lot of guys that when they would go home, they flipped the switch or try and be a father or try and be a husband and there were guys that were okay until you put a gun in their hand and then they flipped the switch the other way and became very violent.

As long as you weren’t in their business. Because I’ve had people tell me so and so lived on my block. He said, hello to me. And I’d say, you weren’t in his business. When you’re in the business, then everything changes. But if Dan, you were in the business and someone says, what’s Dan LaFever, what’s it, he’s a nice guy.

He says, hello to me, wishes me Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Very nice, very pleasant, but the real dental fever that’s in the business, in the life, that’s not how you’re going to work. So if you’re in the life, like my father used to say in the life, always remember, Scott, we know. People that are coming to us, we don’t go door to solicit, which is true.

They weren’t on the street corner, handing out cards for business. People were coming to them for gambling money, for gambling, extortion, money laundering, all these things that I saw adult pornography, child pornography, labor racketeering, okay. Everything that I saw that included mopped life, all the schemes, the scams.

Yeah. Yeah. He’d always say that to me. Always remember, we don’t go, we’re not selling encyclopedias door to door. Okay. People are coming to us. That’s why people would say to me, didn’t he care? Because my father was involved as far as the organization part. Once he got the order, there’s been over 1, 200.

Murders in the history of the outfit. They’ve been around for 120 years, and he’s been involved with close to 300 as far as organizing. Did it ever bother him? Not once at all.

[01:22:18] Dan LeFebvre: So what was Marilyn Monroe doing in Chicago at that time?

[01:22:23] Scott Hoffman: At that time, Marilyn Monroe, she had finished her last movie called The Misfits, and a few months after the movie, Clark Gable was in the movie, and both of them, not together but separately, were supposed to do promotions.

For the movie, and he died a few months after the filming of a heart attack. So he was never able to go on any promotions. And she had gone to New York for the premiere in February of 1961. And she had gone with, at that time, he was already her ex husband, Arthur Miller, who in January, my father told me in January 25th, I think of 1961, they went to Juarez, Mexico and got a quickie divorce.

Then they actually were divorced, but. See, he was a screenwriter, and everyone always knew Arthur Miller as this brilliant playwright, okay? Because that’s basically what he was known for, was his playwriting ability on Broadway. But he was the screenwriter for the movie, and John Huston was the director.

So she was coming to Chicago to do a promotion. Sam Giancana said to my father, How would Scott like to meet Marilyn Monroe? Now, Marilyn Monroe, Was it, which is a long story and another long story. She was there right from the beginning with the Kennedys and the outfit when everything started, that’s another story.

And of course my father says, I’m sure anyone, I was 12 and a half years old at that time, he says, anyone 12 and a half and up, any male would want to meet Marilyn Monroe. So he told me, he says, great. So she had come in and was staying at the Blackstone hotel, which is still in business, but the Blackstone hotel on Saturday night was my prostitution there.

It was one of the places that just on Saturday night, so I’m sure the current owners would be very happy to know that their place, their hotel was used for my prostitution on Saturday night. That was the only night they were not a seven day a week place like some other hotels in downtown Chicago. And so she, she came and we started talking and.

She told me, she said that, that was a movie. And right away I said to her, I said my grandfather. And she says how do I know your grandfather? I said, cause my grandfather was the photographer that shot you for the ninth, July, 1953, first edition of Playboy magazine, the cover.

And if you go and you look on the line, you’ll see the cover. And I’ll tell you why this way. And she says, Oh, yeah, I remember your grandfather. I remember your grandfather. And he says, yeah, he was good, but I remember your grandfather. And I’ll tell you in a second, why would that, so why did that happen?

Now, Hugh Hefner had heard about my grandfather being a very good portrait photographer. There was a specific reason why he wanted my grandfather to shoot the cover. And the reason was in those days they didn’t have airbrushes. So my grandfather by hand would put in all the skin tones on the face, the arms, even at the part of the breast that’s showing.

That she’s showing on the cover, everything was put in by hand. So when the pictures were developed, everything looks natural. If you were to look or your listeners were to look at that July, 1953 edition, first one, it would look all normal to them. Just like you look normal to me. And I probably look normal to you, your skin tones.

And Hugh Hefner told my father, I’ll pay you 50. When 1953, that was a lot of money. 50 was a lot of money. Cause you have to remember in those days, the newspaper was maybe 5 cents, 6 cents. The CTA, Chicago Transit Authority, take a bus was 10 cents. Gas was maybe 15 cents a gallon, maybe. The rent was maybe 40 a month, 45.

So 50 was a lot of money, you could buy a lot of food. And Hafner didn’t have the money, but his father, Glenn, who gave him the money to start the magazine, gave him the 50. His father was an accountant, Glenn was an accountant. So my grandfather, and then he talked to my grandfather about shooting the centerfold part.

My grandfather said, no, I don’t do that. And cause my grandfather liked to shoot weddings and people that were going to get married, family stuff. He didn’t really go for that. And he really wasn’t too hip on even doing the magazine, but the 50 enticed him. He says when do you want Marilyn Monroe there?

And my father says, okay, she in town. He says, yeah, she’s in town at that time. And okay. I wired there seven 30 in the morning. Cause my grandfather always said you have to do someone early, especially celebrity, those types of people. We have to do them early in the morning before they start getting busy.

And then they might get tired, not follow instructions later on in the day. So Hefner said, fine. Okay. 730 is fine. So 730 comes, 730 goes, 830, 930, She walks in with some. Now, my grandfather had a young couple who was getting married, but wanted to take some pre wedding photos. My grandfather, again, by hand, we’re putting the skin tones and everything.

And they had a one o’clock appointment. So she comes in at 1230 and says to my grandfather, I’m Marilyn Monroe. He said, I know who you are. You were supposed to be here at 730 and you didn’t show up. I’ve got someone scheduled at one. And she said, and he said, I’m not doing you. He says, you can walk out the door right now.

And my grandfather had come from Poland at the age of 13, and he was already a photographer at that point. So he had been in the business a long time. And for the people that you’re listeners that are Polish to understand what I say, the Polish temper. We sometimes could get a little sharp. And so she says I’m here.

And he says, I don’t care who you are, what you’re here. I have somebody at one o’clock and just like your appointment was at seven 30. I wouldn’t have taken anybody ahead of you. You might as well leave right now. Go. So she left and later that afternoon, he gets a call from Hugh Hefner and Hugh Hefner says can I get her in tomorrow?

Can she come tomorrow? My father, my grandfather says, okay, I’ll give her one more chance. And that’s it. Otherwise you get somebody else to do the shooting that you have here at 7 30. And then I will do the shooting of her. And he said, yes, she’ll be there. And the next day she was there at 7 30. It took about two and a half hours.

He spent a lot of time, a lot of different angles, taking different pictures. And of course, later on with the negatives, he put everything in by hand. So she’s telling me, she says, your grandfather was very good, but he was tough. And he said, she said, I guess I pushed the envelope a little too much. I said, yeah.

I said, you got to remember, I said, my grandfather, I was the only grandchild that he would let turn on the television. He didn’t even like the other grandkids. Okay. So he was, he had his favorite. I was the one, he liked me. I was quiet, shy kid. And we’d come over and watch wrestling on television or something.

He took more than me. So we’re talking and she’s telling me about her life. She had a very hard life. Her mother was a schizophrenic in and out of asylums. And when she was born, she was put right away into a foster home, right away, right from birth, and she was in 12 consecutive foster homes and eventually an orphanage, and eventually she was able to track down her biological father.

And I said what did he say? And you met, and she says, I told him I’m Marilyn Monroe. And he said, yeah, I can see your Marilyn Monroe. She said, I’m your daughter. And he said, I’m married now, I have my own family, call my lawyer. And he walked away from her and never made any contact with her at all.

Never wanted to make any contact. And this bothered her head started to drop a little bit. You can see when someone’s hurt and their head drops a little bit, you can see in their eyes, you look at the body language, see, and I could see right away, so I, I stopped the subject. I said look, you’ve been very successful in life.

And it was his loss, not your game. Okay. And then she says to me how old are you? And I said I’m 12 and a half years old. Kids at a certain age, they always throw in that half year. Yeah. You did it when you were a kid. Oh, yeah. And she says, yeah, 12 and a half going out 40, 12 and a half going out 40.

And then she says to me, you’ve lived what? A thousand lives. I said, maybe a thousand one. She started laughing for what she didn’t know that I knew the 1959 movie. Let, something like a hat with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon, I knew how she got the role. She was not the original one who was supposed to get the role.

Jack Lemon wanted Shirley McClain. He had done summer stock with Shirley McClain. He wanted Shirley McClain. He had won the Academy award for the movie. Mr. Roberts is a best supporting act. So he thought he had all the juice to get her in and Billy Wilder had agreed. There was an investor with a lot of money.

Into this movie. Okay. As an investor and he had outfit ties and Sam Jean called my father and says we got to get Marilyn Monroe to part hip Sidney Koroshek, Mr. Koroshek, lawyer, Sidney Koroshek call the studio and Sidney Koroshek called the studio and Marilyn Monroe was called in for a screen test.

But it was already rigged. She was going to get the part. And they went through the motion and made it look like, Oh, this is official. Okay. This is like when we used to go fix cases with circuit court judges. They sit there. Yeah. Okay. You didn’t get due process. The case was fixed to begin with. And she got the part was very successful, was a very successful movie about gangsters in Chicago dressing up as women.

And but she didn’t know I knew that. Okay. She didn’t know I knew that. So I said, I really enjoyed Some Like it Hot. I said, Ms. Monroe, you were really good. So you can call me Marilyn. I said, okay, thank you. And in my book Insight, I talk about my father always telling me with. Wise guys, you call him by Mr.

So and and if he’s with a woman, if it’s his wife, you call her Miss So and or if it’s his side girl, it’s Miss, never until he tells you, you respect them, never until he tells you, which was I had, it was a long time before I’d call Sam Giancana, Sam or Tony Occardo, Tony, until they gave me the go ahead and said, Scott, why don’t you call us, by our first name?

And I’d say my father wants me to respect you. He said, I know your father, you’d call us. And we continued talking and we must have talked for a good hour and 45 minutes, just to go back with Joe DiMaggio. He says, you remember Joe DiMaggio? I said, Joe D had 361 home runs, played 15 years with the Yankees.

She says, maybe you should be dating because they had been divorced. I think they were married a year. It was real short. They were married a year. And they got back together the second time, but of course it didn’t work out. And years later, I would see, I saw Joe DiMaggio at a baseball show in Las Vegas, many years later after Marilyn Monroe died.

And he always said the Kennedys killed her, the Kennedys killed her, it really was hot. Because every year on her birthday, we go to Forest Lawn, I think she’s buried in Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, and he’d bring flowers every year. He loved her very much, but he was old school Italian, and she wasn’t.

That type of woman, she wasn’t going to put up with, he wanted her to be like his mother. Basically. That’s her. That’s really what it was about. That’s what she told me. I said, good luck with Mr. DiMaggio. And then we left. So now she was about, with the Kennedys, like I say, and going back with the outfit from the beginning.

And I always remember I was with my father when he gave the order on Marilyn Monroe. Okay. And he gave the order on Marilyn Monroe to my father and told him the two mobsters he wanted to be sent to Los Angeles to carry out the order. And my father always told me from the beginning, you have to carry out the order, no matter what it is, you must carry it out.

Otherwise, next time you’re going to be the next order, so you’ve got to carry it out. So we leave and we’re in the car and I’m looking at his face, I said you’re going to carry it out. He says, yeah we’ll take care of it. I’ll get back to him. We’ll take care of it. And he sat on it and he sat on it and he sat on it and he kept telling Sam G and kind of yeah I’m working on it.

It’s okay. Cause Sam G and kind of always trust him cause they knew each other. At that point, almost 40 years, okay? He said, okay, I know, Dave, you got to take care of it, yeah. He sat on it, and finally, he told Sam Giancarlo, they’re going out tomorrow. That was the day when they found Marilyn Monroe’s body.

And that’s another story, because I met Thomas Noguchi, the coroner, in 1975. And they said, why didn’t you do a toxicology report? Because on her death certificate, it says, probable suicide. It does not say suicide. Probable suicide. Probable leaves the door open because it’s not saying suicide. It’s saying problem could be something else.

I said to him you’ve seen the photos and he started to get a little antsy with what photos. I said, the ones that were taken by the coroner’s office, which I’d seen through somebody else, through a friend, everyone in the mob life was a friend. It showed him, showed me the pictures. She had bruises on her body.

So that means she was fighting back. Okay. She was fighting back. And he says, I don’t know anything. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I don’t know. And we didn’t do the toxicology report and that was it. And he’s walking away. So I got some opinions on really what happened, with her there.

And I’m not saying it was the way that. The story came out like a lot of things are not always the way the story comes out.

[01:35:28] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah, there’s a, there’s what the public hears. And then there’s the way that things actually happen. They don’t always align. That’s for sure.

[01:35:37] Scott Hoffman: That would be like in Las Vegas.

You’d see, I’d see entertainers and you’d see him on television, but then I’d see their, what they were like in their private, what the private face was. My father always called the private face. And you’d see that with the entertainers. And you’d see them on television and you were thinking, Oh they’re this way, they’re that way.

And that wasn’t always the case. That was not always the case at all. Some were very bad, some are very good. And the ones that were good often surprised you. The ones that were bad, they would surprise you too. I guess you,

[01:36:10] Dan LeFebvre: you never know. You never

[01:36:12] Scott Hoffman: know. No, you didn’t know because you didn’t know them.

You only saw them on television. Yeah. It’s like people watching mob movies. They only see what they see.

[01:36:22] Dan LeFebvre: You only know what’s in front, what has been scripted out in front of you.

[01:36:27] Scott Hoffman: That’s it. They read my book inside then they’ll see. Yeah. But they all see what they see and they think that’s how it is.

And they think, oh, the life is glamorous and all, and it’s really not. It’s a lot of pressure. My father used to always say, Dan, being in the life was a two shoulder operation. He says, over the left shoulder, you’re looking to see who’s trying to kill you. The right shoulder, you’re looking to see the G trying to make cases and put you away for a lifetime.

So it was a lot of pressure, but for him, it never bothered him. The pressure just didn’t bother him. But for someone like Carl Rica, he used to cook a lot. That was his way of releasing the pressure. Sam Giancana was sex. It’s always women’s sex. Tony Icardo had wood in his backyard. He chopped the wood to release the tension.

But with my father no, maybe that’s why he called it a hobby, but he was able he was able to, he never had something that he had to release maybe because he understood what had to be done and he treated it that way. And it was a business. Him, I think was always a business. Yeah.

[01:37:33] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah. That makes, that makes sense that, everybody’s different and what they can handle and what they can’t and, if they need that release versus some people don’t.

[01:37:41] Scott Hoffman: Yeah. Just like sometimes you’ll see in a family there’s always one kid who’s going to take care of mom and dad and the other five are going to say you’re going to tell you, take mom to the doctor, you take the adder and you say, wait a minute, you’ve got five other brothers and sisters.

Why can’t you divide up the time? Why is all the pressure have to be on the one kid on their shoulders that you see that. Yeah. And that’s how it was a lot of times in mob life. I hear stuff through the mob grapevine, but cause I know how the G works. I know what they’re doing, the cases they’re trying to make.

So I’ll hear stuff through the grapevine and guys want to talk to me because there’s certain things that I know that go beyond statute of limitations. So that tells you what it could be, but I don’t rat anybody out just like I don’t give up anybody who’s in the WPP, the witness protection plan. I program, I don’t give up anybody.

I really don’t. The only time I would tell somebody as far as like an Irish name, because he took himself out after a year with Sammy Gravato. He didn’t want the restrictions. He took himself out after a year because he was in Phoenix. He’s still in Phoenix living and his name was Joey O’Brien. That was the name they gave Sammy, Joey O’Brien.

But that’s because he took himself out of the program. But otherwise, I don’t give up any, but I don’t read anybody else. Thank you so

[01:38:55] Dan LeFebvre: much for coming on to chat about the mafia and the movies. I know you talked about your book inside there. Can you give an overview of your book and where listeners can pick up their own copy?

[01:39:06] Scott Hoffman: Sure. Basically, my my book is, it’s individual stories while it’s fictional. It’s composites of real people and real events. And I’ve not had anybody tell me they disliked the book. Okay. And some people said to me, maybe they’re afraid to tell you they dislike. I said, no, I said, I’ll give you a fast example.

I was at a restaurant where I older couple had bought the book. And I said, cause I always tell people, if you buy the book and you see me catch me, I’ll sign it when I saw he signed the book and this guy is standing next to me and we’re talking, I’m talking with the husband and wife. He says, boy, this sounds really interesting.

And I said, I’ll give you the information. He says, I haven’t read a book in 38 years. He said, when I graduated high school, that was last time I read a book. I have not read a book. So I said to him, sir, I said, look, I’ll give you the information, how to get it. I’ll tell that in a second. And if you read it and you don’t like it, I will reimburse you because I used to see him in the restaurant where I went for dinner.

I will reimburse you the cost. It won’t cost you a darn thing. He says, that’s fair enough. I gave him the information. And he got the book on a Friday. I saw him like the next Tuesday, Wednesday, he said to me, Mr. Hoffman, I got the book on a Friday. I couldn’t stop reading it. I read the whole weekend.

So that’s all I’m doing. So to find, to get my book, if you go on Amazon and put in Scott, S C O T middle initial M last name, Hoffman, H O F M a N. And the word inside, you will see the book and the book is sold as a paperback also sold as Kindle. And I’ve had some people buy it as Kindle because they like to read it on the train or or on a commuter bus or something.

They do that. But again, I haven’t had anybody that said they didn’t like it, but then again, maybe the guy is right. Maybe they’re afraid to come. No, I wouldn’t do anything. Nothing’s going to happen. I said, just, I’ll kid with people. I’ll say big Louie and Guido, they make house calls and people get shake yet.

I’m just kidding you. I’m just kidding. Just kidding.

[01:41:00] Dan LeFebvre: Thank you again so much for your time, Scott. Again, I will include a link to your book inside and the show notes for this so people can pick up a copy and learn what it’s really like.

[01:41:07] Scott Hoffman: Yeah, like I say, though, while the book is fictional, but they’ll be able to pick up on stuff because it’s not written in chapters. It’s one story after another, as you’ve seen. As you’ve seen. So thank you, Dan, very much. And again, thank your listeners very much for having patience with me.

There’s text on the screen telling us we’re in Pripyat on April 25^th, 1986. It’s 12 hours before the explosion.

Nikolai Fomin is meeting with Anatoly Dyatlov. He says once the safety test can be completed successfully, Viktor Bryukhanov will be promoted. That means Fomin will take Bryukhanov’s place and someone will need to fill Fomin’s place. Dyatlov says he wants to be considered for that position.

Just then, Bryukhanov enters the room. The test is ready to go, Fomin says. But Bryukhanov stops him short. He’s been trying to get this test done for three years and of course now that it’s almost here, he gets a call from the grid controller in Kyiv. They can’t lower the power for another ten hours. As frustrated as that makes them, they’ll have to delay the test. Dyatlov says he’s not worried about it. He’ll just go home to get some sleep and come back in the night to oversee the test personally.

I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest this specific conversation took place, but the dialogue sets up some things that were very real.

It is true that promotions were in store for many of the characters we see in the series. There were talks of Bryukhanov being promoted. That would mean he’d leave Chernobyl and go to Moscow. That would also mean his role would need to be filled, and Nikolai Fomin was in line to do just that.

It’s also true that there was a delay in the test, although it was Nikolai Fomin who fielded the request to delay the test. If things had gone to plan, the test would’ve already been done by the time the weekend rolled around.

To fill in some historical context, the test they were running was simulating if the station lost power. They wanted to determine if a slowed turbine could provide enough electrical power to operate the core’s cooling water pumps for long enough until the diesel pumps came online.

They’d run the test a year earlier but the turbines weren’t able to hold power long enough, so in the meantime new voltage regulators had been developed. With those installed, it was time to run the test again.

There happened to be planned maintenance that would involve shutting down the reactor anyway, so they were trying to take advantage of that to run the test at low power.

The plan was to start shutting it down on Wednesday, April 23^rd. But they pushed it back a day and decided to start shutting down the reactor beginning at 10:00 PM local time on Thursday, April 24^th, 1986. The power would be down enough by the following morning, around 10:00 AM on Friday the 25^th, to begin the test. That should only take a few hours, so everything should be done by 1:00 PM and Unit 4 would go into the weekend completely shutdown.

After Nikolai Fomin signed off on the plan, they started preparing for it. As it got closer to the time to start, they decided not to start at 10:00 PM after all because that would mean there’d be a shift change pretty much right as the test was getting started. So, instead, they decided to start it after the new shift came in around midnight.

Things were delayed a bit, but by the time 2:00 PM rolled around on Friday, the power had been dropped enough that they could finally start the test.

That’s when the call happened that we find out about in the series. A dispatcher at Kyiv’s electrical grid told them they couldn’t lower the power anymore. Since Chernobyl was providing power to Kyiv and it was Friday before a big holiday—May 1^st was the May Day holiday—there was a lot of last-minute work as people were trying to hit their productivity quotas to get bonuses before the holiday. They weren’t allowed to go offline and begin the test until after 9:00 PM on Friday.

If we go back into the series, after that bit where we find out about the delay in the test, we fast forward to March of 1987 where the KGB Chairman Charkov threatens Valery Legasov. During the conversation, we find out Volkov was fired for, as Legasov puts it, “the crime of knowing.” If you remember from a previous episode, he was the guy who wrote the article that Ulana Kyomyuk found about the void coefficient issue.

Charkov tells Legasov that he needs to perform his duty to the State for the upcoming trial which, basically, means not talking about how the other reactors could do the same thing if they’re not fixed.

I couldn’t find anything to suggest this conversation took place in March of 1987, but the date of March is significant because that’s when the trial was supposed to take place. It ended up getting postponed to July, though, after Nikolai Fomin attempted suicide in his cell by cutting his wrists with shards of broken glass from his own glasses. The prison guards saved him, and the trial was postponed while he recovered.

As for the mention of someone being fired for “the crime of knowing”, it wasn’t just one person who was let go because of the disaster.

While there are likely a lot of people we don’t know about being let go, but we do know over 60 people who were fired or demoted in the aftermath of the disaster. And there were some high-ranking people in that mix, too.

So, it wouldn’t surprise me if Legasov’s job was in jeopardy at this point although, as the series suggests, he was also more of a public figure than many of the other scientists at the time because of his report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Back in the series, now it’s July of 1987. We’re in the city of Chernobyl where it’s time for the trial of the three men in charge that night: Viktor Bryukhanov, Nikolai Fomin and Anatoly Dyatlov.

As a quick little side note, three other men were also arrested but they don’t make an appearance in the series at all so it makes sense why they don’t show up in the trial. Those other three men arrested in August of 1986 along with Bryukhanov, Fomin and Dyatlov were Boris Rogozkhin, who was the Shift Supervisor on the night of the 26^th, as well as Yuri Laushkin, the safety inspector at Chernobyl, and Alexandr Kovalenko, who was the Manager of the Reactor Workshop and approved the test’s plans along with Bryukhanov and Fomin.

It is true, also, that the trial took place in the city of Chernobyl. The reason for that was because Soviet law required a trial take place near the crime. And the high radiation levels made a convenient excuse for why attendance had to be limited—which also meant they could control how much information got out. The last thing they wanted was for journalists and victims families to be there.

So, for the most part, the three-week trial was behind closed doors. Although, one impression I got from the series as I was watching it while we see Shcherbina and Legasov talking outside the building where the trial is being held is that the rest of the city is abandoned. While obviously many had been evacuated, the Chernobyl power plant was still in operation. So, many of the people working there at the time would sit in on the trial as their work schedule allowed.

Going back to the series now, we see the trial itself. Much of the trial ends up being Boris Shcherbina and then Valery Legasov explaining everything that happened.

And the HBO miniseries does a very good job of summarizing everything. We’ve talked a lot about what happened up until this point as we’ve seen things throughout this series, but before we dig into the timeline of what happened ourselves, the one key thing I want to point out about what we see in the trial is simply that we don’t really know everything that happened in the trial. The transcript of the trial has never been released.

There were people in attendance who took notes, but most of those were confiscated by the KGB. The most we’ve learned about the trial comes from Deputy Chief of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at Chernobyl’s Nuclear Safety Department, a man named Nikolaii Karpan, who was allowed to keep his notes and published a book that included transcripts based on his notes. Others, such as Dyatlov himself, have talked about what happened after being released from prison. But, in both cases, the best we have is the recollection of people who were there and not any official transcripts.

From that, we know the trial was basically a show trial. The issue was entirely on the operators. The design wasn’t going to be at fault, because that would mean the Soviet system that allowed for lax safety standards was at fault, too.

With that said, as we are nearing the end of the overall series, now is a great time to do basically what the HBO miniseries does in the trial: Review everything that happened in the timeline it happened. But, of course, in the miniseries we only see things happening a little before, during and after the disaster.

The real history of the Chernobyl power plant starts in 1970.

That’s when a 35-year-old Viktor Bryukhanov visited the area for the first time. He had been appointed as Chernobyl’s Director and was tasked with building the power plant. The official name of the power plant, by the way, isn’t Chernobyl. That’s just what we know it by because it was located in the city of Chernobyl. The official name is the Vladimir I. Lenin Atomic Power Plant.

The nearby town of Pripyat was also built at the same time to house the 50,000 or so workers, support staff and their families.

The location was chosen primarily because it was not too far from Kyiv, where it would provide power. It was also close to a huge river where it could pull water for cooling and a pre-existing railway line.

There were already RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union, and they were chosen for Chernobyl as well because it was the cheapest to create the most amount of power while also being the safest—or so they thought.

Four reactors were built initially and in November of 1977, the first reactor was ready for operation. Unit 2 went online in 1978 while Unit 3 was ready in 1981.

In September of 1982, there was a partial meltdown in Unit 1 because of a faulty cooling valve. No one even noticed it happened until a few hours later and it was covered up for the public until 1985. They just fixed the reactor and put it back into operation about eight months later. Also in 1983, they focused on getting Unit 4 up and running. It went into operation on December 20^th, 1983. Everyone was excited about the news of all four reactors were running.

In 1984, there were “emergency situations” in both Unit 3 and Unit 4 that only came to light in 2021 when Ukraine declassified some KGB documents about it. We still don’t have all the details about the full extent of everything that happened.

And that brings us to April of 1986.

At 1:00 AM on April 25^th, they started reducing the power at Unit 4 in preparation for the safety test.

By 2:00 PM, the emergency cooling system for the core was disabled to keep it from interfering with the test. At this point, Unit 4 was operating at about 50% of its normal power.

About 15 minutes before they were to begin the actual shutdown of the reactor, the call came in from the grid controller at Kyiv. They were ordered not to lower the power anymore until after the peak hours were over. The operators at Chernobyl didn’t know it at the time, but the reason for this last-minute request was because of another nuclear power plant had a unit go offline unexpectedly. So, the power at Chernobyl was needed to keep Kyiv from losing power.

Without much to do, they waited. The emergency cooling system was already turned off and that was a process that took at least 45 minutes to turn it off or on, so they decided not to turn it back on again since they’d just be turning it back off again in a few hours. So, the reactor stayed at 50% power from 3,200 MWt (megawatt thermal) to 1,600 MWt for another nine hours while they waited for permission to continue.

They couldn’t perform the test until the reactor was down to 700 MWt.

Around 4:00 PM, there was a shift change. The evening shift leader, a man named Yurii Trehub who we don’t see in the series at all, wasn’t familiar with the test at all. He didn’t have to be, it was supposed to have been over by 1:00 PM before his shift even started. What could he do? He walked into his shift to find the reactor at half power with the core’s emergency cooling system turned off—that last bit came as a surprise to him. He also didn’t have permission to continue. The test had been postponed, not canceled, he was told. So, he made use of his time by studying up on the test plans.

At 8:00 PM, Trehub started to get worried that he hadn’t heard anything yet. So, he made a phone call and was told to wait until Anatoly Dyatlov came in. And Dyatlov, in turn, wasn’t planning on arriving at the plant until they’d received word from the dispatcher at Kyiv that they could proceed.

Around 9:00 PM, that call came. They could proceed with the shutdown starting at 10:00 PM. Trehub called Dyatlov to let him know, but found out from Dyatlov’s wife who answered that he was already on his way.

At 11:00 PM, Trehub started to get worried that Dyatlov hadn’t arrived yet. But without cell phones like we have today, there wasn’t a lot he could do. He got a call from someone in Unit 3 to let him know Dyatlov had stopped off there first.

By 11:10 PM, Dyatlov had arrived in Unit 4’s control room and Trehub began the next step: Reducing the reactor’s power levels even further.

At midnight, there was another shift change. Yurii Trehub, who didn’t expect to be involved in the test only to arrive to find out he was going to have to, was replaced at the controls by Alexandr Akimov. As part of the shift change, Leonid Toptunov also started his shift.

Just as had happened with Trehub, Akimov and Toptunov expected everything to already be done by the time they started their shift. They expected an easy shift with a reactor that had already been shut down. Instead, they arrived just in time to finish the program. With the shift change and others who wanted to monitor the test, there were 20 people in the control room at this point.

Like Trehub, Akimov wasn’t familiar with what he should be doing so he was furiously trying to read up on it and get advice from the others in the room like Trehub, who had spent most of his shift reading up on it. Trehub didn’t leave, he wanted to see how the test would go so he was there to answer questions. Although, he only had one shift of reading up on the test so he had plenty of his own questions about what should be done. In some ways it was the blind leading the blind.

Meanwhile, Dyatlov wasn’t interested in answering questions and was pushing Akimov to work faster instead of reading the instructions.

Toptunov continued adding control rods into the reactor, slowing down the nuclear reaction. The power continued to drop from 1,600 MWt to 520 MWt. All of a sudden, an emergency alarm went off. The supply of water had dropped below acceptable levels. Toptunov wasn’t sure what to do, but Trehub hopped in and started checking on the power levels. Then, Akimov noticed the power levels had dropped way too far and were continuing to drop. Toptunov had accidentally switched the control rods regulators out of order and that had caused a massive dropoff in the power levels.

Although they were wanting to shut down the reactor for its routine maintenance, the turbine test they were performing had to be done at 760 MWt power, so they’d let the power drop way too low.

At 12:28 AM on Saturday the 26^th, the computer indicated the reactor’s power level was at just 30 MWt.

Akimov and Toptunov began removing control rods to help increase the reaction and bring the power levels back up. By 12:32 AM, the power had increased to 160 MWt, then 200 MWt.

At this point, they had a decision to make.

Either they could abandon the test and continue shutting things down for the maintenance or they could raise the power for the turbine test. Some people in the control room that night would later say they saw Akimov and Dyatlov arguing over the decision. Ultimately, Dyatlov was the most senior person in the room and he insisted on moving forward with the test. Instead of raising the power, though, Dyatlov decided they’d keep the reactor stable at 200 MWt and do the test that way instead of trying to raise it to the planned 760 MWt.

At 12:43 AM, Dyatlov ordered the operators to turn off the emergency signal from the two turbines that would be involved in the test.

At 1:03 AM and then 1:07 AM, two reserve pumps were activated to increase the flow of water. This was just part of the test—but of course, the test was supposed to be run at 760 MWt and not 200 MWt. Because of the lower power, the reactor became more unstable. At 1:19 AM, another alarm sounded. This was for low steam pressure. Because they’d introduced more water, that slowed the reaction down even further. Water absorbs neutrons and slows the reaction more than steam does. They turned off that alarm as well as the pumps.

Meanwhile, what they didn’t know, was the reactor running at such low power meant there was a byproduct of nuclear fission accumulating in the fuel rods. Xenon-135 is an unstable isotope that can have a huge effect on the reactor. It’s called xenon poisoning for a reason because it’s basically poisoning the core.

That made it extremely difficult for them to maintain even 200 MWt. To counteract this, Toptunov kept removing the control rods to keep the power levels from falling further. By 1:22 AM, only nine of the 167 control rods were in the core.

At that time, the reaction started to pick up.

This wasn’t intentional but was a result of the pumps being shut down. That meant there was less water cooling the reactor, so as the water reached boiling it turned into steam. As we just learned a moment ago, steam doesn’t absorb neutrons as much as water does. So that means with an increased amount of steam and less water, the nuclear reaction was rising. And fast.

Toptunov reported this to Akimov, but he didn’t really pay attention to it. He was too focused on starting the turbine test. That was supposed to start in a few seconds.

At 1:23:04 AM, the command was given to start the oscillograph, marking the beginning of the turbine test. By 1:23:40 AM, things were out of control.

The steam wasn’t absorbing enough neutrons, there were too many voids in the steam—we learned what a positive void coefficient means in the last episode—and there simply weren’t enough control rods in the core to slow down the reaction. The power was rising way too fast. Uncontrollably fast.

Realizing things were spiraling, Akimov ordered Toptunov to press AZ-5, the emergency shutdown of the reactor. That would insert all the control rods to stop the nuclear reaction. Except, if you recall from previous episodes, we learned the control rods in RBMK reactors like those in Unit 4 were tipped with graphite. That meant before slowing the reaction, they actually accelerated it as the graphite tips hit the water that had been absorbing neutrons.

That quick rise in heat was enough to cause some of the fuel rods to fracture.

The fuel rods, in turn, caused the control rods to get jammed so they couldn’t be inserted fully. That basically meant the only part sticking into the core was the graphite tips. The neutron-absorbing boron that was supposed to slow the reaction was ineffective. Instead, the graphite tips were continuing to increase the reaction. The control rods were having the opposite effect that was intended.

Pushing the AZ-5 button wasn’t the end. Instead, it was basically like pushing a self-destruct button.

The amount of power that they’d struggled to keep at 200 MWt for the test shot up to more than 30,000 MWt within a few seconds. The fuel rods broke down entirely, feeding the reaction further. The temperature rose even more, boiling the cooling water and turning it into so much steam that the core simply wasn’t designed to contain.

At 1:23:44, the steam exploded. That explosion tore apart the lines running coolant into the core. This even further accelerated the reaction.

At 1:23:46, two seconds later, there was another explosion. That was the explosion that destroyed the core and threw the core’s radioactive graphite blocks all over the place.

Inside the control room, they didn’t know what had happened. But we learned about that more in-depth when we saw it take place in the first episode, so I won’t repeat that story here.

Around this time it’s assumed the explosion caused the first death: Valery Khodemchuk, who was working in the part of the building that collapsed. They never found his body.

At 1:26:03, the fire alarm went off, calling in the fire department to deal with the fire. Under ten minutes later, they were fighting the fires on the roof.

A lot of these things we learned about in earlier episodes, but I’ll give the recap for the sake of the timeline.

Dyatlov was trying to continue to feed cooling water into the reactor. He didn’t know it had exploded. He didn’t believe it could explode. Nothing in any of their training had suggested that could be the case. There were even some who said RBMK reactors were so safe they could be installed in Red Square in Moscow without any harm.

Bryukhanov was called at 2:00 AM to let him know about the accident.

By 2:15 AM, an emergency meeting was called by Pripyat city officials. They still didn’t know the extent of the damage, but they decided to block anyone from coming or going from the city. To do that, they’d need help so the call is put out for police and military assistance.

Around 3:00 AM, Bryukhanov calls his boss, Vladimir Marin, to report the situation. He reported the explosion was at 1:21 AM. Later, he’d report the firefighters had extinguished the flames by 3:30 AM.

In truth, more firefighters arrived around 4:00 AM to combat the flames. At this time, everyone still believed the reactor was intact and they were trying to extinguish the fires before they affected the core.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, news of the accident had reached Antanolii Maiorets, the Minister of Energy. He started trying to get updates on the situation to feed to his boss, Boris Shcherbina. The typical protocol for any accident would be for a commission to be formed to look into the cause. Shcherbina was in charge of that commission.

Around 5:00 AM, a deputy minister surprised others in the city meeting by saying he had already ordered 1,100 buses to come to Pripyat just in case of an evacuation. No one wanted to evacuate. That would admit something more serious and insight a panic.

Back in the reactor, they were continuing to try and feed water into the core. They thought perhaps the water wasn’t getting into the core because of blocked valves. So, they spent hours trying to fix that, manually turning valves and checking things.

Around this time is when the second victim was killed. Vladimir Sashenok was an Automatic Systems Adjuster who was found unconscious in ankle-deep radioactive water. He’d been pinned under a beam in Room 604 after the explosion and was now unconscious, radioactive burns all over his body. They managed to rescue him, at great cost to the two men who pulled him out, but Sashenok he died at the hospital around 6:00 AM.

He had just celebrated his 35^th birthday four days earlier.

By 6:35 AM, nearly all the fires had been extinguished. The only fires left were those inside Unit 4. There were 186 firefighters working on the flames now.

Around 9:00 AM, the first of the commission into the accident began to leave Moscow for Pripyat. Maiorets left around 4:00 PM. When he arrived in Pripyat, he went to look at the reactor and was in shock. This was worse than the reports indicated. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, that first-hand look at the damage caused Maiorets and those with him to absorb massive amounts of radiation.

Even though people were seeing graphite scattered about, some of them thought it came from Unit 5—they were planning on expanding the Chernobyl plant to go from four reactors to six. But when they checked on that graphite, it was still intact. So they were at a loss to know where the graphite came from, their minds simply not being able to comprehend Unit 4’s core exploded.

Then, Bryukhanov joined the city commission meeting around 11:00 AM. Time and time again, Bryukhanov was told not to panic. The commission from the government will be here soon and they’ll decide what to do.

Early in the afternoon, two other nuclear experts from Moscow arrived by the names of Boris Prushinsky and Konstantin Polushkin. Arguably, those two men had more experience on RBMK reactors than anyone else on the commission. The first thing they wanted to do was to see the damage with their own eyes from the air. So, they did just that—after lunch, of course.

When they saw the damage, they knew the reactor had exploded. No one could deny that anymore.  

That evening, Boris Shcherbina and Valery Legasov arrived in Pripyat a little after 8:00 PM. Maiorets and others were already meeting when they arrived. The news of the exploded reactor was a surprise, but it was undeniable. It also meant they were entering unknown territory. No one knew what to do. They had to come up with ideas.

Also in Pripyat around this time, townspeople were gathering on what’s now known as the bridge of death. They were watching all the flames and glow in the night sky over the plant. They didn’t know it was burning graphite they were looking at, or that the wind over them was blowing a lethal dose of radiation. No one on that bridge survived.

At about midnight on Sunday, April 27^th, buses began to arrive at Pripyat. Around this time, too, General Nikolai Antoshkin arrived in Pripyat. Like many who arrived soon after the explosion, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was walking into. When he got there, Shcherbina told him they needed helicopters.

An hour later, Unit 1 was shut down while Unit 2 stopped around 2:00 AM.

At 7:00 AM was when General Pikalov drove the truck to get a more accurate radiation reading. There was no doubt then…the graphite was still burning and radiation was still being given off.

One of the things they decided in the commission meeting was to try to stop the burning reactor by dropping sand and other things from helicopters. Shcherbina had already ordered the assistance of military helicopters from Antoshkin and those started to arrive on Sunday morning. There were about 80 of them so far, with more on the way.

Also on Sunday morning, Shcherbina made the decision to evacuate Pripyat. But he didn’t quite give the order yet, he wanted to see the damage at Unit 4 first-hand. Along with Legasov, General Pikalov, General Antoshkin and a few others, they flew a helicopter over the reactor to see the damage.

Although others had seen it in the daylight before, this was the first time many of those in the helicopter saw it from the air in the daylight and it quickly became apparent this was not a minor thing. This would have global implications.

The order to evacuate Pripyat came at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning. The buses rolled in and, at about 1:00 PM, the announcement was made to the people of Pripyat telling them to evacuate.

You can hear a bit of that when we learned about it in episode number two of this series.

A line of buses stretching 12 kilometers, or about 7.5 miles, along with the nearby trains and boats on the river were used to evacuate a majority of the 50,000 or so men, women and children living in Pripyat at the time. Some stayed behind to help with the emergency services.

About that same time on Sunday morning and continuing through May 1^st, the helicopters started dropping the mixture they’d hope would smother the fire and stop the nuclear reaction. Looking at this from a historical lens, we now know that almost none of the neutron-absorbing boron reached the core.

On Monday the 28^th, some other countries started detecting the dangerous radioactivity. The staff at a nuclear power plant in Sweden noticed increased radioactivity during a routine check of their shoes. Then in Denmark, the announcement was made of an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

On Tuesday the 29^th, American satellites took photographs of Chernobyl and saw the roof was gone and it was still smoking. Something had obviously gone wrong.

On April 30^th, an official statement declares that two people died during the accident— Khodemchuk and Sashenok—and another 197 have been hospitalized. But, it’s okay, their radiation levels are under control and going down.

May 1^st was a holiday: May Day. As fate would have it, the wind changed direction and blew the radiation toward the largest town nearby, Kyiv. But still, the annual parades and celebrations continued in Kyiv and Minsk. Everything is normal. Meanwhile, at this point, any of the Soviet elite who had family in the area had already secretly told them to leave.

On May 2^nd is when the three men volunteered to turn the valves for the sluice gates that would avoid another potential explosion. We learned more about this in episodes two and three of the series.

The construction workers also started the project of digging under Unit 3 with the purpose of building a liquid nitrogen heat exchanger under Unit 4. We also learned about this in episode three.

On May 9^th, Vladimir Pravik became one of the first to die from acute radiation sickness. He was one of the first firefighters who arrived on the scene right after the explosion and was set to celebrate his 24^th birthday just a few days later.

On May 10^th, the senior reactor operator that night, Alexandr Akimov, succumbed to his radiation burns and died.

On May 14^th, Leonid Toptunov died. He was another operator that we see heavily featured in the HBO miniseries.

On May 27^th, the idea of a concrete structure to cover the exposed reactor is devised. It’s what we now know as the sarcophagus.

Another problem arose, though, because the power from the Chernobyl plant was still very much needed. So, on September 29^th, Unit 1 was started back up. Soon after that, on October 10^th, the construction resumed on Units 5 and 6. On November 9^th, Unit 2 restarted.

Restarting Unit 3 was delayed, however, because if you recall from earlier episodes we learned that Unit 3 and Unit 4 were connected.

Work on the sarcophagus began on December 14^th, 1986. They used 300,000 tons of concrete and 6,000 tons of metal to build an encasing structure over Unit 4. It was designed as a relatively short-term solution for the next two or three decades.

It wasn’t until April 21^st, 1987 that Unit 3 was powered back up. Three days later, they decided to stop construction on Units 5 and 6.

In 1991 there was another disaster, this time in Unit 2. A fire broke out because of a defective switch. That ignited some insulation that then led to a leak of hydrogen. The roof collapsed and Unit 2 was decommissioned.

Another major event happened in 1991: The fall of the Soviet Union.

Not to get too far ahead of our timeline here, but a 2006 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev is relevant to our story today when he quoted as saying: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

In December of 2000, Unit 3 was shut down, marking the final reactor being shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant.

Then, in June of 2003, a replacement for the original sarcophagus was announced. Named the New Safe Confinement, the plan was to build something that would last a lot longer than the original structure. Construction didn’t begin until September of 2010, and it was completed in 2019.

The New Safe Confinement should contain the radioactivity in Unit 4 for at least the next hundred years…

…that is, if everything goes according to plan.

A soldier is trying to get a woman to evacuate the radiation area.

She refuses. She says she’s 82, and has lived here her whole life.

Why do I care if it’s safe or not?

She says she was 12 when the Revolution came. Czar’s men, then Bolsheviks. They told us to leave. Then there was Stalin and his famine, the Holodomor. My parents died and two of my sisters died. They told the rest of us to leave. No.

Then the Great War. German boys. Russian boys. More soldiers. More famine. More bodies.

So, I should leave now because of something I cannot see at all? No.

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest this introductory sequence was based on a specific person, what it depicts was something that’s very real. For one, not everyone wanted to leave the area. That’s probably not too surprising, it’s still common for people to not want to leave their homes when natural disasters like hurricanes are bearing down on them.

Being 82 years old means she’s talking about a revolution 70 years before the time period of the series. Since that time period is 1986, 70 years earlier was 1916.

That’s close enough to the Russian Revolution in 1917, so I’m going to guess that’s the revolution she’s referring to. There’s way too much to cover in this episode about that, but in a nutshell, the Russian government wasn’t doing well during World War I—which was from 1914 to 1918. In February of 1917, there was a revolution in Russia that basically ended with Czar Nicholas II abdicating the throne. That ended about 300 years of the Romanov Dynasty ruling over Russia since 1613 with the first Czar, Ivan the Terrible.

So, the government changed from a monarchy to…well, kind of chaos for a while, until in September Russia was declared a democratic republic. That didn’t last long, though, because in October of 1917, there was another revolution that saw Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party take power.

So, that’s why the lady was talking about the Czar’s men and then the Bolsheviks.

She also mentioned Stalin’s famine, the Holodomor. We learned more about that when we learned about the movie Bitter Harvest back on episode #40 and again with insights from the screenwriter of the movie in episode #57 of Based on a True Story.

That was a man-made famine in 1932 and 1933 when the Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, forced unrealistic grain quotas that led to the famine. Since Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR, they were hit especially hard. We don’t know the exact amount of people who died, but estimations range between 3.5 and 10 million people, most of them in Ukraine. Today, Ukraine recognizes Holodomor as a genocide carried out by the Soviet regime.

The next thing mentioned by the woman is the Great War with German and Russian soldiers. Even though a lot of people referred to World War I as the Great War, I don’t think that’s what she was talking about. World War I was taking place at the same time as the revolution she mentioned at the very beginning. Then, she seems to go in order of historical events, so mentioning the Great War at the end would be after Holodomor in the early 1930s. That makes me think she’s talking about World War II.

During World War II, the Germans occupied much of Ukraine after Operation Barbarossa when the Germans invaded. While Chernobyl technically existed, it wasn’t until the 1970s when it was picked for the nuclear power plant. So there weren’t a lot of residents in the area during World War II. Most of the residents at that time were Jewish and with the Germans invading and occupying the area until 1943, sadly that means most of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

Perhaps the most well-known incident happened at Babi Yar, a ravine located just outside Kyiv and about 133 kilometers or 82 miles away from Chernobyl. It was there on September 29^th and 30^th in 1941 that the Nazis murdered 33,371 Jews in one of the first massacres of the war. Throughout the war, the location was used for continual murdering by the Nazis so much so that by the end of the war it’s estimated between 100,000 and 150,000 Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners and others were murdered there.

For the purposes of our story today, I think it’s moving to hear how it’s possible for a single person, like the woman in the beginning of this episode, to have lived through so many horrors and atrocities. And after seeing so many horrible things, now she’s supposed to run away because of something she can’t even see? We can understand why some would be hesitant.

Back in the series, we see a time and place on the screen. It’s August of 1986 in Kyiv. That’s four months after the explosion. Lyudmilla Ignatenko enters a building with another lady. There’s not a lot of explanation here, but it looks like she’s moving into an apartment.

The impression I got from the series, though, was that people from Pripyat were relocated to Kyiv. Granted, we don’t see any of the other people from Pripyat relocating, we only see Lyudmilla entering a new, or at least an empty, apartment. But then again the series focused more on Lyudmilla and Vasily than it did other townspeople in Pripyat.

In either case, what we do know from history is that after the town of Pripyat was evacuated everyone was moved elsewhere. A city named Slavutych was built just for the evacuees of Pripyat. It’s located about 30 miles, or 45 kilometers, from Pripyat.

However, with that said, in the timeline of the series no one was living in Slavutych yet. Construction on that city started in October of 1986 and the first residents didn’t move in until 1988. And because the evacuation of Pripyat happened on April 27^th, 1986, a day after the explosion, the residents had to stay somewhere in the interim.

If we go back to the series, one of the most heart-wrenching sequences happens next. It’s when three soldiers, Pavel, Bacho and Garo, go around the now-abandoned city and shoot any animals they find. Most of them are loveable pets who were left behind in the evacuation and are just excited to see a human again. There’s one especially sad scene where Pavel comes across a dog with her puppies in a house. They’re so cute! But, they must be killed to avoid spreading radiation. They’ve been ordered to shoot the animals while others are digging up the ground and others still are cutting down trees.

This is all a part of the cleanup effort, trying to get rid of any radiation on the plants and the top of the ground, as well as killing any poisoned animals before they spread the radiation further or die horrific deaths themselves because of the radiation poisoning.

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest things happened exactly like we see in the series with Pavel, Bacho and Garo, the essence of what we’re seeing here is true.

There were about forty men who took to the streets to hunt the pets. They weren’t keen on going to the radiation zone at first since they weren’t given anything to protect themselves against the radiation, but they did what they had to do.

At first, the pets did exactly like we see them doing in the series as they’d run up to the people. Then they’d scatter at the sound of the guns. Before long, many of the animals stopped trusting the humans and it got more difficult to find them.

That scene with the dog and puppies? It happened. More than once. In the bookVoices From Chernobyl, one of the hunters recounts the story of finding a dog with her puppies and how he shot them one-by-one. There’s a story of an older lady who had shut herself in her house instead of evacuating. She had three dogs and five cats, and the men forced most of them away from her despite her screams and protests. They left one cat and a dog.

All the animals were collected and buried in mass graves. The graves were supposed to be lined with plastic or protected in some way to keep the bodies from decomposing into the groundwater—kind of like what we heard happened to Vasily Ignatenko. But, that didn’t happen for the pets. They were put in the ground and covered with dirt. Most of the time they were already dead. One of the hunters recalled an instance where a dog was only injured, but they didn’t have any bullets to kill it. So they buried it alive.

Before the evacuation, everyone was told they’d be back within a few days. For two months, the hunters drove around the streets taking out the household pets. Horses were put down. But not necessarily all the animals were killed. One of the hunters recalls they left the pigs alive. Otters they let free so they could swim away in a nearby river.

It must have been devastating to have to do that.

While not as prominent in the series, we do see some of the other cleanup effort: Cutting down trees, digging up the earth, and so on.

All that happened, too, but of course there is more to the story than we see in the series.

For 30 kilometers, that’s about 18 miles, around the Chernobyl power plant the military was in charge of cleanup. Houses, cars, buildings, roads, trees, literally everything was deemed contaminated and needed to be cleaned.

To do this, they’d first spray things down. We saw some of that in the series, too. Something else we see is helicopters dropping something on the trees. While I was watching that, I wasn’t sure exactly what the liquid was for. There wasn’t a fire, so it’s not like when they drop water to put out wildfires. So, I thought perhaps it was to kill the trees to make them easier to chop down. After researching it more, I was wrong.

What they dropped from helicopters was a liquid solution they called “water soup.” The purpose of that wasn’t to decontaminate or kill or do anything other than to be a liquid that would make anything radioactive adhere to the surface.

Imagine you’re going down a dirt road, the dust gets kicked up and then settles somewhere else.

This process was similar. They wanted to avoid any radioactive or anything getting kicked up by the next phase of the cleanup.

That next phase involved spraying a special decontaminating agent on anything and everything: Grass, plants, cars, mechanical equipment, houses, any structures, pretty much everything. If something was beyond decontamination, it’d be destroyed or buried. Entire buildings and structures were buried to limit the continued contamination. And that last part, especially, would certainly kick up plenty of radioactive material and things you don’t want flying around as you’re trying to clean up in the area.

An entire forest was cut down, too. It was about 10 square kilometers, or a little under 4 square miles, so not a huge forest—but enough to be a big job. That was nicknamed the Red Forest because the trees were so affected by the radiation from explosion that they actually turned red.

If we go back into the series, Ulana Khomyuk is continuing her investigation into what happened. She pulls some documents from the KGB archive—it got redacted some before she was allowed access to it—and after Anatoly Dyatlov refused to talk to her in the last episode, this time he’s finally willing to talk. Khomyuk brings the document.

In their dialogue, we find out the document is from 1976 and it talks about RBMK reactors under extreme conditions. They forgot to redact the table of contents, though, so Khyomuk points out some of the pages they did redact are talking about a positive void coefficient and the AZ-5 button. That seems to be of interest because they pressed the AZ-5 button and then the reactor exploded.

Dyalov says void coefficients have nothing to do with AZ-5 and then tells her that she’s looking for answers, but even the right question won’t find the truth. There is no truth. You’ll only get lies in return for your questions and I’ll get the bullet.

As we’ve learned throughout this series, Khomyuk is a fictional character so of course the specifics of this scene are made up. But this brings up a great point, because even though we’ve learned what the AZ-5 button was already, there’s a new term the HBO miniseries talks about here that we haven’t explained in our own series yet: Void coefficients.

What are they and was Dyaltov correct in the series to talk about how they have nothing to do with the AZ-5 button?

To start, a void coefficient isn’t unique to the reactors at Chernobyl. A void coefficient is just a way of measuring how the reactor changes as voids are introduced. The voids are things like steam bubbles in the water. And the measurement is basically to know if the void coefficient is positive or negative. If it’s negative, that means it’ll be less reactive and if it’s positive it’ll be more reactive.

For an RBMK reactor type, the void coefficient is extremely positive. So that’s why it needed to be monitored closely.

How about the idea of the void coefficient having nothing to do with AZ-5?

That’s not entirely true, but that doesn’t mean the series is wrong when it suggests Dyatlov thought it was true at the time. If you’ve listened to the first few episodes in this series you’ll know there was nothing in the training on RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union at the time to suggest anything otherwise.

However, looking at this from a historical perspective, we know that’s not true. We talked about this before so I won’t go in-depth explaining what AZ-5 does again, but the reason it’s not true has to do with the design of the control rods because they’re tipped with graphite.

Going back to the series, there’s another date on the screen. It’s September of 1986, and they’re still trying to clear the roof of debris. Boris Shcherbina makes some calls and gets a police robot nicknamed “Joker” from West Germany.

After lowering the robot to the roof of the reactor by helicopter, we see Shcherbina and Valery Legasov in the control room with a bunch of monitors. They decide to start by testing the robot’s functions. Good signal. Motors are good. Move one meter forward, all good. Okay, now let’s go one meter backward, all goo—uh…wait a second. It just died. In the control room, all the buttons go from green to red. Is that the signal? No, the signal is fine. There’s so much radiation the robot itself died.

That’s all true, although there’s more to the story that we don’t see in the series.

The plan wasn’t one that Shcherbina or Legasov came up with themselves, but rather it came from technicians at the Ministry of Energy.

Joker was a real vehicle they bought from West Germany. It was specifically designed to handle radioactive material, and the plan was to use it alongside two other rovers that were developed for the Soviet lunar exploration program. They didn’t want to pick anything up and move it elsewhere since that’d just create another contaminated site they’d need to deal with. Instead, they wanted to do exactly like we see in the series: Push the radioactive debris off the roof and back into where the core of Unit 4 used to be. That way they could lower the radioactivity enough to build a roof over the whole thing to seal it off.

That was the plan.

Just like we see in the series, Joker and the other rovers weren’t up to the task. They all failed. It was back to the drawing board.

The date was September 16^th when the commission met in Shcherbina’s office to decide what to do next. They had to clean the rooftops if they ever wanted to build a huge metal and concrete roof—something they called a sarcophagus—over the whole thing to seal it off. It was just too dangerous to build if the rooftops weren’t cleared of radioactive materials first.

And their attempts at using remote vehicles failed miserably.

There was only one option left to clean up the radioactivity too dangerous for machines to do. Everyone in the room knew what that meant. Humans had to do it.

Back in the series, we see text on the screen saying it’s October, 1986. General Tarakanov gives a bunch of soldiers instructions for how they’re going to clean it up. Russia needs it done. You’ll have 90 seconds to solve the problem. Enter through the reactor building #3 and climb the stairs to the roof. When you get to the top, wait for a moment to catch your breath.

When you enter the work area, look for the graphite. Some of the blocks might be 40 to 50 kilograms—that’s about 90 to 110 pounds—and it all must be thrown over the edge in a specific spot. He points to a photo of the roof, showing where they’re to throw the graphite over so it lands in Unit 4.

After 90 seconds, a bell will ring and you’ll return immediately. Go back down the stairs for decontamination.

And not to get too far ahead of our story today, but at the end of the episode we see Tarakanov thanking what he says are “the last of 3,828 men.”

This recreation of how the cleanup process went is pretty accurate!

Although, it didn’t start in October like the series suggests. It also didn’t end after December like the series implies by showing that scene with Tarakanov at the end. That scene comes after we see text on the screen with the date of December, 1986 and a conversation between Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk. We’ll get to that conversation in a minute.

In reality, the cleanup operation started just three days after the decision was made to use humans, or bio-robots as the planners called them. As we learned a moment ago, that decision was made on September 16^th.

We don’t see this at all in the series, but before anyone went onto the roof to clean things up someone had to go up there to do a test. To figure out the plan, basically. That was done by a radiologist in the Army Medical Corps who wore protective gear that included pieces made from hastily torn down lead from the walls of government offices in Chernobyl, along with ten different dosimeters to monitor the radiation levels. He sprinted across the roof of Unit 3 and threw five shovelfuls of graphite over the edge to the remains of Unit 4 before sprinting back.

He was on the roof for 73 seconds. In that time, he absorbed 15 rem, which is three times what the U.S. federal government considers to be safe to be absorbed in an entire year.

General Tarakanov was a real person, and he was in charge of the soldiers tasked with doing the cleanup. He gave each soldier the chance not to go. There were some who didn’t want to go, but they also recognized they were the last chance. If they didn’t do it, no one else would. In the end, no one refused to go.

On the afternoon of September 19^th, the first wave of soldiers began the bulk of the work. It was work that lasted for 12 hours a day and for 12 days, until October 1^st. They were armed with shovels, rakes, wooden stretchers to carry larger pieces of graphite and sledgehammers to break out pieces that had been melted into the bitumen.

The time of 90 seconds we see in the series is a simplification. They were trying to limit each person’s exposure to no more than 25 rem, but they did use a bell or a siren when the time was up. Each soldier’s contribution was meticulously logged.

One person threw down three pieces of graphite weighing up to 200 kilograms, or about 440 pounds. Another threw down seven pipes weigh up to 30 kilograms, or 67 pounds.

Each soldier was only supposed to go on the roof once, but some went again.

At the end of the cleanup operation on the roof of Unit 3, just like we see in the series, there were three men who climbed to the top of the chimney to raise a red flag. That was done to signal the cleanup was finished. There are photographs of the men attaching the flag to the top of the chimney of taken by war photographer Igor Kostin that I’ll include in the resources for this episode over on the show’s website.

As a quick little side note, Kostin was one of the few photographers to document the accident. His photographs are some of the only surviving images of Unit 4 just a few hours after the explosion. Many of his photos didn’t survive due to the radiation while others were so heavily affected by it that the radiation itself is visible in the film. I’d highly recommend you look at his photographs to get a good idea of what an absolute mess the whole area was after the explosion.

If we go back to the series, it’s December of 1986 now. There’s a brief mention in the dialogue between Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk about Legasov going to Vienna to speak to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Before he does that, Khomyuk wants to tell him what she’s discovered about what happened. She shows him the document she also showed to Dyatlov earlier in the episode. That’s the heavily redacted document that talks about a tie between the AZ-5 button and the void coefficient in RBMK reactors.

To her surprise, Legasov already seems to know about this.

He tells Khomyuk about an RBMK reactor in Leningrad back in 1975 that had a fuel channel rupture. The operators pressed AZ-5 and the power went up first before it went down.

In the series, Legasov mentions a colleague named Volkov wrote the article Khomyuk found. Vladimir Volkov was a real person, he was the head of the Kurchatov Institute’s RBMK safety research group.

As you already know, since the composite character of Khomyuk is involved in this, that’s not what really happened. But the idea of something happening in Leningrad in 1975 is real. And it didn’t have to be found by someone from the commission in some KGB archive, because someone who was there for the Leningrad accident was also at Chernobyl.

He’s not in the series at all, but Vitalii Borets was one of the most experienced nuclear engineers in the Soviet Union at the time. In November of 1975, he was working at the Chernobyl power plant when he took a business trip to Leningrad for some training at an RBMK reactor some 50 kilometers, or about 30 miles, outside the city.

On November 30^th, he was stopping the reactor and shifting to another mode of operation when he noticed something was wrong. As the reactor slowed to a lower power level, inserting the control rods to slow the reaction didn’t slow the reaction like it was supposed to. In fact, it did the exact opposite: The nuclear reaction was increasing rapidly.

They managed to avoid an explosion by using the AZ-5 emergency shutdown, but not before one of the fuel channels melted releasing radiation into the air. We still don’t know exactly how that affected the people of Leningrad.

The issue had to do with the design of the control rods. They were six meters long, or just under 20 feet. Because of the graphite tips, when they were inserted into the core at a depth less than two meters, or about six and a half feet, they caused a spike in the reaction.

This issue as well as the incident at the Leningrad power plant was something the Soviet government kept under wraps. What they did do was to give orders to change the control rods in RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union to avoid the issue from happening again. Although they didn’t say why they were making the changes, so no one at Chernobyl really thought it was a big deal. It was just an order to make a change. And they did make the change in Unit 3 at Chernobyl, but they hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet in Unit 4.

However, because Borets happened to be there when it happened, he knew there could be an issue. Even he didn’t know the full extent of why it happened, only that it did. By the time 1986 rolled around, it was an incident that happened over ten years earlier so it wasn’t something that was on the top of his mind as he helped plan the test at Chernobyl.

After the explosion, of course, that was a different story.

Speaking of the story, there’s also more to the story of Legasov going to Vienna that we don’t see in the series. The timeline in the series is a bit off because it talks about Legasov going to Vienna during a conversation that supposedly happened in December of 1986. In truth, Legasov went to Vienna from August 25^th to the 29^th in 1986. He was the head of the Soviet Union’s delegation to explain to the International Atomic Energy Agency what had happened at Chernobyl.

While he was there, Legasov presented a report on the disaster and answered questions for over three hours from scientists of other countries. Of course, not all the details were included in the report. That report basically blamed operator error and left out the issues with the reactor design. Not only that, but the report was prohibited from being seen back in the Soviet Union. So, that meant there were people around the world who knew more about the disaster than those working on it.

Later, Legasov admitted to playing a part in the coverup of information when he said:

“I did not lie in Vienna, but I did not tell the full truth.”

Episode number three starts with a continuation of what we saw at the end of the last episode. We’re in darkness with the three men submerged in radioactive water trying to turn the valves that’ll avoid an even worse disaster.

Unfortunately, their flashlights went out at the end of the last episode. In this one, they manage to get the lights working again and continue on. They also manage to find the valves and get them turned. In the next scene, we’re back above ground where the men are received with cheers and claps—the three men were successful. Finally, some good news!

That’s true.

Setting up the terrible disaster they were trying to avoid by going into the water was something they showed in the last episode—so that’s when we learned about that as well.

The three men aren’t listed in the credits for the HBO series with first names—they only have their last names: Ananenko, Bezpalov and Baranov.

Those were really the men who volunteered to go, but of course there’s more to the story than we see in the series.

Alexei Ananenko knew where the valves were located because he was a senior reactor mechanical engineer. Valery Bezpalov was a turbine engineer who was going to turn the second valve. And then Boris Baranov was a shift supervisor. He decided to go along with the other two men to both carry a flashlight for the others so they could see what they were doing as they used both hands to turn the valves—but he was also there in case of emergencies. He would rescue the other men and/or be the backup to turn a valve in case something happened.

The whole ordeal losing their light like we see in the series actually happened, too. Although they weren’t able to get the light working again as fast as we see in the series. Instead, once their light failed they had to feel their way in the darkness using the pipes to guide them to the valves.

Of course, that wouldn’t look good on screen since…well, pitch darkness doesn’t create good visuals. So, I can see why they changed that in the series.

The three men were told their families would be taken care of. I couldn’t find any sort of proof in my research to know if that happened or not. While the men were expecting to sacrifice their lives for what they’d done—spending a lot of time in highly radioactive water will do that—they all seemed to survive the ordeal much better than others. In one of the excellent books that I used during my research for this episode, called 01:23:40, the author, Andrew Leatherbarrow, mentions that he actually spoke with Alexei Ananenko in March of 2016, just before the first edition of Leatherbarrow’s book was published. Valery Bezpalov was still alive in June of 2019 while Boris Baranov died of a heart attack in 2005 at age 65.

So, all in all, considering what they volunteered for in 1986 all three men seem to have lived rather normal lives afterward.

If we go back into the series, even though they successfully avoided the thermal explosion thanks to the three men turning the valves, they’re far from being safe. The next major plot point happens as they’re trying to solve the issue of the meltdown burning its way through the platform under the reactor and into the earth. If it does that, the radioactive material will leak into the drinking water and poison it for everyone around.

To avoid that, the plan is to install a liquid nitrogen heat exchanger underneath the concrete pad. To do that in time before it burns through the concrete pad, they need to bring in more men. According to the series, 100 coal miners from Tula in Russian SSR are brought in to do this.

Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina tell the miner’s crew chief, a man named Andrei Glukhov, what the situation is. They don’t beat around the bush—this job involves digging underneath a nuclear reactor that is actively melting down. But if we don’t do it, the nearby river feeds into the primary water supply for about 50 million people. They could all be poisoned and lead to untold scores of deaths.

There are elements of truth to this, although there is more to the story that we don’t see.

For one, the character of Andrei Glukhov was not a crew chief at a coal mine in Tula. You can read more about the real Glukhov in Adam Higginbotham’s book Midnight in Chernobyl. Glukhov actually worked in the reactor’s physics laboratory at the Chernobyl power plant. He was a friend of Leonid Toptunov and in the morning hours of April 26^th, just after the explosion, he called his friend to find out what happened. When he was finally able to get a hold of Toptunov, Glukhov asked about Unit 4. Toptunov told his friend that he had been told not to talk about it…but look out the window.

What of the miners we see in the series, then?

There was a plan to dig beneath the reactor in May. But it wasn’t the first plan after avoiding the threat of thermal explosion. The first idea the state commission had was to try and cool the melting reactor core from beneath. To do this, they’d pump in liquid hydrogen underneath the reactor.

But that didn’t work.

Not because the plan was a bad one necessarily, but the drilling crews couldn’t get close enough to Unit 4 because of the high levels of radiation. So that’s when they had the idea to drill horizontally from a safe area behind Unit 3.

That didn’t work either.

Again, it wasn’t because the plan was a terrible one, but this time it was an issue with the equipment. What they had available at the time couldn’t correctly build the entire frozen platform that would be needed to cool the reactor down. They could do parts here and there, but it wasn’t enough.

As a quick little side note here, one of the ways the HBO series oversimplifies things is by suggesting there were three people—Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk—behind the ideas for how to solve a lot of the problems after the accident. We already learned there were hundreds of people involved and that’s especially relevant here as ideas for how to slow the meltdown were being bounced back and forth by scientists. It wasn’t just Valery Legasov coming up with ideas like the series suggests. In fact, many of the ideas that were proposed were ideas that Legasov didn’t like. For example, one of Legasov’s colleagues in the scientific community was a man named Yevgenii Velikhov, and he was the one to propose freezing the earth under the reactor and then building a concrete platform. Legasov wasn’t so sure of this idea.

But it is true there was an idea similar to what we see in the series: Build a concrete platform that could be cooled. To do that they needed to build a tunnel and then a chamber under the reactor for housing the freezing chamber that would be used to cool down the entire concrete platform.

As an added benefit, they planned on the platform being used to help support a structure over the entire reactor. They anticipated it would need to be built to keep radioactivity from escaping after the immediate threat of the continuing meltdown was solved.

To get this built, the series was correct to suggest there were people brought in from Tula. The series mentions in dialogue that there are 100 men who gather their equipment and get into trucks to head to Chernobyl…but that’s not the full story.

According to Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl book, over 230 miners came from the Donbas region as well as over 150 from Tula.

On top of that, because of the delicacy of the situation, the miners weren’t allowed to use heavy mechanical equipment they were accustomed to. The state committee didn’t want to risk the heavy equipment damaging the foundation in any way. That could lead to releasing radioactive elements into the ground.

What that meant for the workers was they basically had to dig things with shovels or in many cases, literally by hand. There was a lot of digging and pushing dirt with bare hands. The miners worked for three hours at a time and they did all this for free.

At least that’s what they thought. They did end up getting paid rather well for what they did, but they didn’t know about any special compensation at the time. That came later. At the time, all they knew was if they didn’t do it, no one would. They were doing a job they knew needed to be done to avoid poisoning the drinking water of millions of citizens.

Something else that sort of underscores the complexities of reality compared to the HBO miniseries—well, in the series, we see a bunch of miners arriving at Chernobyl on buses. In the true story, each miner was approved by the state committee before they could go to Chernobyl. But, of course, we can’t see everything in the series.

Speaking of which, if we go back to the series, we’re back at the hospital where some of the men at Chernobyl when the explosion happened are being treated. Men like Anatoly Dyatlov, Leonid Toptunov, and Alexandr Akimov.

Ulana Khomyuk visits the hospital to talk to get a picture of what happened in the control room that night.

At first Khomyuk tries to talk to Dyatlov, but he’s not in the mood to talk. So she goes to talk to Toptunov. During their conversation, Toptunov tells Khomyuk that the power level jumped from 200 to 400 megawatts super-fast. Khomyuk asks him why he didn’t press the AZ-5 button to initiate an emergency shutoff. Toptunov says he told Akimov about the increase and it was Akimov who pressed the AZ-5 button.

Then comes something that seems to shock Khomyuk.

Toptunov tells her that it was only after Akimov pressed the AZ-5 button that the reactor exploded.

That doesn’t make sense. Why would the reactor explode after the emergency shutoff button had been pressed? That’s the whole point of an emergency shutoff—to, you know, shut the reactor off in the event of an emergency. Haha!

Khomyuk verifies this and Toptunov repeats that’s what happened: The AZ-5 button was pushed by Akimov and then it exploded.

So, Khomyuk goes to talk to Akimov to get his side of things. He confirms it and tells Khomyuk that he pressed the AZ-5 button before the explosion. But he’s confused on why shutting it down didn’t work.

There are some elements of truth to that, but the specifics of what we’re seeing here are made up for the series. If you recall, the character of Ulana Khomyuk is a fictional one that’s intended to be an amalgamation of all the scientists who worked on the Chernobyl accident.

So, obviously, it wasn’t just one person who was talking to three of the men in the control room to figure out what happened. There were a lot of people trying to get to the bottom of what happened talking to a lot of the people who were working at the power plant that night.

With that said, though, as we learned earlier in this series the characters of Dyatlov, Toptunov and Akimov were real people. And the things we see Toptunov and Akimov tell Khomyuk in the series were also true: The AZ-5 button was pressed just before the explosion occurred.

That night, as they were running the test, Leonid Toptunov was looking at the computer data when he saw the power levels rising way too fast. Akimov was too busy focusing on the test they were running so he didn’t notice the levels until Toptunov shouted to Akimov that the levels were rising way too fast. Akimov must’ve realized how serious the situation was because he ordered Toptunov to push the AZ-5 button.

So, he did.

We already learned what that button does in the first episode of this series so I won’t repeat all of that now, but just as a quick refresher, when the operator pushes AZ-5, all the control rods are inserted into the reactor at once to stop the fission reaction.

It’s not a normal thing to push AZ-5, but think of it like the emergency brake in your car. If something is going wrong, you’re going to use it. At least, I would hope you do. Some cars these days have automated braking because they can sense a wreck—but you get the idea. It’s not something you use on a daily basis. That’s why it’s called an emergency haha!

And in the emergency, the AZ-5 button should’ve stopped everything and let them take a breather to figure out exactly what happened. According to Dyatlov’s recollection later, it was about 12 to 15 seconds after Toptunov pushed the AZ-5 button was pushed that the reactor exploded.

That’s another big reason why everyone was so confused in the moments immediately following the explosion. There are the obvious after-effects of what an explosion must be like…but then there’s the other part of it that just doesn’t make sense.

Imagine pulling the emergency brake in your car and instead of the car slowing to a stop as you’d expect, it just explodes.

Wait. What? Why? That’s not even anything close to what that is supposed to do!

So, you can imagine the pure confusion in the immediate aftermath of that!

If we go back to the series, as Khomyuk is leaving the hospital she happens to notice Lyudmilla Ignatenko in a room with her husband, Vasily. If you recall, he was one of the first firefighters to arrive on the scene. He’s not looking good now in the series, and Lyudmilla wants to be with her husband so he doesn’t die alone.

But when Khomyuk sees that Lyudmilla is holding Vasily’s hand, she scolds her and forces her out of the room. Lyudmilla is pregnant, she shouldn’t be touching Vasily’s hand! Khomyuk scolds the doctor in charge for letting it happen—something the doctor had told Lyudmilla not to do, but the doctor was so overwhelmed with other patients she didn’t keep an eye on Lyudmilla. Then, Khomyuk says something to the effect of how everyone is going to hear about this.

Just then, two KGB agents step out of the shadows. They heard everything and, as you can imagine, they don’t like the idea of Khomyuk telling anyone anything. So, they arrest her.

That’s made up, but mostly for reasons we’ve talked about already with Ulana Kyomyuk not being real. However, Lyudmilla and Vasily Ignatenko were real people.

A fantastic book to learn more about them is a book called Voices From Chernobyl from Svetlana Alexievich—she interviewed the real Lyudmilla and it’s so sad to read. It’s not a happy story at all, but I think you know that. I can’t replicate those words here, but if you want to dig into some of the stories of those who lost loved ones at Chernobyl, check out Svetlana’s book.

As for the idea of Khomyuk being arrested like we see in the series, that didn’t happen. How could it? Khomyuk wasn’t a real person. But it is true that the KGB tried to silence, detain and arrest people in an attempt to cover up what was happening at Chernobyl.

In all honesty, we’ll probably never know exactly how many people were arrested like we see happen to Khomyuk in the series. But I don’t think we need to. The series isn’t even trying to be accurate here, because we know this is a fictional character who is portraying the idea of something that happened.

On one hand, there was the state committee that was charged with figuring out what happened. On the other hand, the Soviet Union didn’t want too much information getting out—especially to other countries.

Going back to the series, at the end of the third episode we see Legasov tracking down the head of the KGB, a man named Charkov. In their conversation, Charkov lets Legasov know the KGB is a circle of accountability—just like the old Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.” And the Americans think Reagan came up with that, Charkov laughs.

Then, after Legasov tells Charkov he needs Khomyuk to continue his work, Charkov agrees to let her go on the condition that Legasov is held responsible for her from here on out.

All of this is made up, of course, because Khomyuk isn’t a real character so she couldn’t have gone to prison. What is real, though, is that the real KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, was certainly involved in the Chernobyl situation. Something we don’t see much of in the series was just how much happened outside of the Chernobyl area. At Chebrikov’s command, the KGB was very involved in trying to keep anyone who might try to report on the situation to foreign nations—people like diplomats and news correspondents.

The accident itself was no secret. It couldn’t be since, as we learned, neighboring countries were detecting radiation. It was showing up in media across the world.

For example, there was a headline in London saying 2,000 people were killed while the official death toll at Chernobyl was two people, who they claimed were killed in the blast itself.

The number of 2,000 was an estimate, mostly because foreign nations like the United States had satellites that had taken photographs of the damage. Even though they couldn’t tell a lot of details from that, they knew at least 4,000 people worked at the power plant at any given time so the idea that only two people had perished from a blast that size seemed unbelievable. That number ended up being increased to 30, but almost everyone believes that list is only limited to the people in and around the explosion when it happened. Even to this day, it’s hard to know the exact number of people who were affected or killed because of the radiation…but it’s safe to say it was more than two and more than 30.

As for the “Trust but verify” line we hear Charkov say in the series—he is correct to say it was not President Ronald Reagan who came up with that.

But then again, most Americans at the time didn’t think he did come up with it, either. This was in the era of the Cold War, so tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high. Reagan found out about the phrase when he was preparing to meet with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. That phrase was one Reagan liked best of the Russian proverbs and sayings, so he used it.

I don’t think Gorbachev liked that Reagan used it.

Since then, a number of American politicians have used the saying and attributed it to Reagan. But that wasn’t during the timeline of the series, and it was not Reagan who came up with it originally.

At the very end of the third episode, we see Vasily Ignatenko and other first responders being buried. There aren’t many people there, but one of the people watching is Vasily’s wife, Lyudmilla. Obviously she’s filled with emotion as she watches her husband be put into the ground in a metal coffin that’s then covered with cement. It’s hard to lose a loved one, and this was not a normal funeral.

That is true, although there is more to the story.

The amount of radiation absorbed by the first responders and others closest to the exploded core was so high that officials were afraid their bodies would decompose and release radioactive materials into the ground that could then poison the water and so on.

To avoid this, their bodies were put into plastic bags, then inside regular coffins, and those coffins were then sealed in welded zinc caskets. Once buried, they were covered with cement.

On top of that was the secrecy around it. The Soviet Army was in charge of the funerals wanted to keep everything a secret so no foreign correspondents would know what was going on, or the extent they were going to try to contain the radioactivity of the bodies.

They waited for hours before burying Vasily, as Lyudmilla recalled being driven around for hours before finally getting to the cemetery. It’s almost as if they were trying to lose a tail in case someone was following the car from the hospital to the cemetery. Finally, after everything she had been through watching her husband die a gruesome death at the hospital for 14 days, Lyudmilla had enough. She burst out in a flurry of emotion and the Soviet colonel finally gave the order to go to the cemetery.

When they got to the cemetery it was like they couldn’t get it done fast enough. A minute or two and it was done. The zinc caskets were lowered and covered with cement. Lyudmilla went back to the dormitory where she’d been staying while her husband was in the hospital. The whole time someone was there making sure she didn’t talk to anyone or anyone to her. The day after Vasily’s burial, she was given a plane ticket and escorted to the airport. As she recalled, when she got home she slept for three whole days.

If you want to hear this in Lyudmilla’s words, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the book Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. In that book, Lyudmilla recounts what happened. It’s so sad the terrible way Vasily died from radiation poisoning and what Lyudmilla had to go through—and all this as she was only 23 years old.

Episode number two starts with some text on the screen to let us know we’re now at the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Energy in Minsk. It’s 8:30 AM on Saturday, April 26^th, 1986. So, that’s seven hours after the explosion.

Ulana Khomyuk, who is played by Emily Watson, gets woken up by her colleague, Misha. They’re the only ones there because it’s a Saturday…but they’re both workaholics, so they’re at work anyway.

Misha remarks how hot it is in the room and goes to open a window. A second after he does, the dosimeter alarm starts going off to indicate high radiation levels. He immediately closes the window.

A leak? The Americans?

Ulana opens the window quickly to gather a sample from the outside of the glass. She takes it into the lab where she tests it. The printer spits out a piece of paper that she takes back to her colleague.

It’s uranium decay. U-235. Reactor fuel. They call the closest nuclear power plant. It’s not them. What’s the next-closest? Chernobyl—but there’s no way it’s them, they’re 400 kilometers away and that’s too far to be leaking that kind of radiation. They’d have to be completely split open.

But, maybe they know something anyway. Ulana gives them a call. It rings. And rings. And rings.

Now, they’re concerned.

This scene is made up for the series, although there are elements of truth to it.

For example, in the first few shots we see a mural just before the text on the screen setting up the location as being at in the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Energy in Minsk. But that mural isn’t in Minsk. It’s actually at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, in Ukraine and not Belarus.

That’s 530 kilometers, or 330 miles, away from Minsk.

So, it is a real mural—a beautiful mural—and it is tied to nuclear energy, so I can see why they’d want to include it in the series.

But one of the biggest changes in that first sequence comes from probably one of the biggest fictional elements in the entire series: Emily Watson’s character, Ulana Khomyuk. She’s a composite character.

So, of course, there couldn’t have been a way where she noticed uranium-235 because, well, she’s not a real person. Although, as we learned in our last episode, uranium-235 really is what they used to enrich the uranium-238 that was in the fuel rods for the reactor at Chernobyl. 

So, elements of truth.

If you haven’t already, there’s a great series of podcasts released by HBO with the writer of the miniseries, Craig Mazin. In that series, he talks about how and why he created the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk. In a nutshell, there were just too many real people—hundreds of scientists—who were trying to figure out what happened at Chernobyl. It’d be impossible to have hundreds of characters in the series and be able to keep track of who is who.

So, that’s why they made up the character of Ulana Khomyuk who they could turn into someone doing many of the real things those hundreds of scientists did…just in a way that’s a lot easier to keep track of as viewers.

Something else that’s worth pointing out is even if the specifics of the sequence we see in the opening of episode two isn’t entirely accurate to what really happened—the basic gist is true.

First, to clarify, the place where this is happening in the series is in modern-day Belarus. That’s an independent country now, although in 1986 it was part of the Soviet Union as Byleorussian SSR. The SSR stands for Soviet Socialist Republics—the same thing as in USSR, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

What I mean by the opening sequence being basically true is it is true the radiation from Chernobyl drifted into the country we now know as Belarus. In fact, most of it did. Some experts say that about 70% of the radiation from Chernobyl drifted into Belarus.

Of course, not all of that happened in the first seven hours like we see in the opening sequence, but nevertheless the impact of the Chernobyl accident on Belarus is an important part of the story.

And the mention of iodine-131 is also true.

Iodine-131 is a byproduct of nuclear fission in reactors like the one at Chernobyl. When there’s too much of it in the atmosphere, it’ll get absorbed into your thyroid gland thereby increasing the risk of thyroid cancer.

There are still studies being done on residents of Belarus due to their exposure of Chernobyl’s fallout. One of the studies, which I’ll link to on this episode’s page over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com, concluded that childhood exposure to internal iodine-131 as a result of the Chernobyl accident is tied to increased risk of neoplastic thyroid nodules.

Without getting too sidetracked with the medical side, that’s a tumor that can be cancerous. So, basically, the study on people who were children in Belarus at the time of the Chernobyl accident has proven to be linked to an increased risk of cancer later in life.

Going back to the series, as the series shifts back to Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina being pulled into the story to figure out what’s going on…we’re faced with something we’ve seen a little bit in the first episode, too.

I’m speaking about how the series mentions the dosimeter reading of 3.6 roentgen.

In the first episode we see this reading, but in the second episode we see that Legasov isn’t happy with this reading. What bothers him about this is that he knows 3.6 roentgen is the maximum amount the lower quality dosimeters will go. So, that’s not necessarily an accurate reading—it’s just as high as they’ll go.

That whole concept is true—the dosimeters they were using at first maxed out at 3.6 roentgen. As I was watching this episode in particular, I was confused about why the number was 3.6. That just seems so random…but once I researched it more, it made a lot more sense.

To understand this more, we have to understand what that unit of measurement even means—a roentgen.

It’s named after a person named Wilhelm Roentgen. He won the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his 1895 discovery of what we now know as X-rays. Then in 1928, his last name was adopted as the first international measurement for ionizing radiation like happens at a nuclear power plant. It’s worth pointing out that in 1998, after the timeline of our story today, that unit was redefined, so it’s not really used for ionizing radiation anymore.

Now if we do the math to figure out how many seconds there are per hour, that’d be 3,600. And that is why the dosimeters they used at first could only go up to 3.6 roentgen, because they were maxing out at 1,000 microroentgens per second. There are 1,000,000 microroentgen in one roentgen, so 3,600 seconds times 1,000 equals 3,600,000 microroentgen or…3.6 roentgen per hour.

So, what does that mean for safety though?

After all, radiation is something that occurs in nature and everywhere all around us to some degree, most of it coming from the sun. While there are a lot of different factors that can determine how safe levels are—not every person is the same, not all factors are the same—but generally speaking, 60 microroentgens per hour is safe.

That’s 0.00006 roentgen per hour.

120 microroentgens an hour starts to get into dangerous territory.

With that in mind, it makes sense that the dosimeters they had at Chernobyl were sensitive enough to detect up to 1,000 microroentgens per hour. After all, that’s way more than is safe!

That level is definitely not safe—and the readings they got, just like we see in the series, were maxing out the dosimeters.

A level 3.6 roentgens per hour is detecting levels that aren’t safe.

Of course, if we’re looking at what deadly means—it’d take about five hours of constant exposure to 500 roentgens per hour, or 500,000,000 microroentgen per hour, to prove fatal for a human.

So, no, 3.6 roentgens isn’t safe, but it’s also a far cry from a fatal amount of 500 roentgen.

And it kind of makes sense for that to be a maximum level when you think about 120 being considered a risk in everyday life—1,000 should be a big warning.

When they ran the dosimeter in the control room, it read 800 microroentgens per second. That’s a lot, but then they ran it in another part of the control room and it went past the maximum of 1,000 microroentgens that the dosimeter could read.

After the explosion on April 26, 1986, and after the dosimeters read 800 microroentgen in one part of the control room and then maxed out the dosimeter at 1,000 microroentgen in another part, Anatoly Dyatlov figured it might be about 5 roentgens per hour. That’s about 1,388 microroentgen per second.

If that was the case, it’d make sense why the dosimeter would max out. It’d also make sense why it wasn’t seen as an extreme emergency quite yet, because something the series doesn’t mention is that the operators at Chernobyl already had a documented plan for the maximum amount of radiation. That was 25 roentgen per hour, which is a little under 7,000 microroentgen per second. Even at that rate, they were technically allowed to be there—but just for a few hours, and only in an extreme emergency.

So maybe that’s why Anatoly Dyatlov didn’t consider it to be the emergency we now know it was. But that’s pure speculation on my part—it’s hard to know what goes on in someone’s mind.

If we go back to the series, we’re at the point where we see Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina arriving at Chernobyl. We don’t see the specific time they arrive via helicopter, but we do see that they’ve been ordered to go there by Gorbachev himself. The way we see it depicted in the series, Shcherbina is the political leader of the committee digging into the accident while Legasov is the nuclear scientist to explain how nuclear reactors work to Shcherbina.

As we mentioned in the last episode, both Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina were real people. And the series is correct to explain their roles in investigating the Chernobyl accident.

Boris Shcherbina was, as the series suggests, a political leader. His official role at the time was as deputy prime minister in charge of energy for the government. He had a background in oil and gas. Something else to keep in mind was that in 1986, oil and gas were still making a lot more money for the Russian government than nuclear power was. Those two things are why the series is correct to show why Shcherbina wasn’t up on the nuclear side of energy.

That’s where the other man we see with him comes in: Valery Legasov.

Legasov’s role at the time was as first deputy to the director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy.

In the morning hours of April 26^th, Shcherbina found out he was in charge of the commission to determine what happened at Chernobyl. After going back to Moscow—he had been in Siberia, which was part of his normal weekend routine to check on various construction sites he was overseeing—Shcherbina had a chat with his boss about the accident and rounded up some experts, one of them being Legasov, to fly to Pripyat.

Legasov found out he was a part of the committee, not from a phone call while he was at home like we see at the end of the first episode, but rather he was at a state meeting about atomic energy. In that meeting they mentioned the Chernobyl accident, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. A little bit later, while the meeting was on break, Legasov found out he was being ordered to the airport as part of the state commission.

And it is true that Legasov and Shcherbina had a conversation on the flight to the accident zone. They talked about the nuclear industry as a whole as well as some other nuclear accidents—in particular the more recent partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in the United States. That was in March of 1979, so relatively recent in the minds of another nuclear accident now in 1986.

One difference from how we see things happening in the series to reality is the way Shcherbina and Legasov approached Chernobyl. In the series we can see them flying in helicopters near the power plant. They’re close enough to where Legasov can see the core is exposed right away, although Shcherbina isn’t quite sure how he can tell that from the position they’re in. Legasov points out the ionizing radiation in the air as being how he knows.

In truth, Legasov, Shcherbina, and the rest of the state committee flew into Kyiv. That’s about 130 miles, or 209 kilometers, away from Chernobyl. When they landed in Kyiv, they took cars to the nearby city of Pripyat where they’d basically set up their base of operations for the investigation.

Oh, and its daytime in the series, but in truth they arrived in Pripyat around 8:00 PM, about an hour or so after the sun had gone down. With that said, though, the series is correct to show Legasov and the others seeing something not right from afar. Even before they got there, Legasov later commented on what it was like when they drove up to Pripyat, saying the sky near the plant had a deep crimson glow to it.

Things were worse than they originally thought.

Going back to the series, it’s April 27^th now, or 30 hours after the explosion. One of the first things they do is to figure out the real readings. Legasov doesn’t trust the number they received being at 3.6 roentgen because he knows that’s the maximum of the dosimeters they had—and also what he’s seen with his own eyes makes him think things are a lot worse than 3.6 roentgen.

To get the reading, we see them using a lead-lined truck with a high-range dosimeter. General Pikalov offers to drive the truck so no one else takes the risk. When he arrives, he tells Legasov and Shcherbina that the reading is not 3 roentgen—it’s 15,000.

General Pikalov is based on a real person who was there. The real Pikalov was in charge of the chemical warfare divisions of the military, so he was there to try to measure the radioactivity. And he did drive a truck like we see in the series to get a more accurate reading. It’s still not entirely accurate, but it’s enough to let everyone know they’re dealing with a lot more than they had initially thought.

From that, they determined the reaction was still happening—the reactor was still heating up. It wasn’t stable, it wasn’t cooling down. It was going to get worse if they didn’t do something.

With that said, though, the reading we see in the series is true. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the reading of 3.6 roentgen per hour was way off. Things were a lot worse than that. And the series is correct to give the number of 15,000. Although, it’s not like that was the number universally around the entire power plant.

In the series, when Shcherbina asks for an explanation of what the 15,000 number means, Legasov says it means the fire they’re watching with their own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. That’s every hour. Hour after hour, and at that point they’re 20 hours since the explosion so 40 bombs worth by now.

This example is made up for the series as a better way of describing what happened. A huge way we know this is because, quite simply, in 1986 we still didn’t even know exactly how much radiation the bombs in Hiroshima gave off. After all, that wasn’t a nuclear power plant. We know how powerful the bomb itself was, but we’re talking about radiation here…and that bomb was a surprise to a civilian population. They didn’t have dosimeters at the ready to determine how much radiation people were hit with.

In 2018, though, there were some tests done on a jawbone from someone who was in the attack and they found it to have absorbed 9.46 grays of radiation.

And again we’re hit with yet another form of measurement for radiation. Think of it kind of like how liquid can be measured in volume or in gallons…two measurements for the same amount of liquid. Okay, that’s not exactly a 1-to-1 example because if you’re a nuclear engineer you’ll know grays are measuring absorbed radiation compared to roentgen which measures ionized radiation…but for our purposes today, my point is merely that there are different ways to measure radiation in different ways.

Using a converter, I found 9.46 grays of radiation converts to 1,078,667,351 microroentgen, or 1,079 roentgen.

So, as far as my research is concerned that number doesn’t necessarily equate to 40 Hiroshima bombs—but at that point it almost doesn’t even matter what the specific numbers are. It’s not the survivable 3.6 roentgen per hour. It’s a number so high that it simply means if you’re in the area you’re going to die. Humans can’t survive anywhere near that kind of radiation. It’s the kind of deadly that kills humans many times over, the only thing at that point is just a matter of when you die as a result of the radiation.

And that right there brings to light something we see throughout the series that is very true: Most of these people working on figuring out and dealing with the Chernobyl accident were doing that knowing they were giving their lives doing so.

One of the books I used as a resource for this entire series is called Chernobyl Notebook by Grigoriy Medvedev. His book offers some of the few first-hand accounts and have been used as a source for many people since then. In his book, Medvedev recounts someone who made that sacrifice.

Here’s a quote from his book:

“Making a preliminary assessment of the situation and the actions of the operating personnel after the explosion, we can say that the turbine operators in the turbine hall, the firemen on the roof, and the electricians headed by Aleksandr Grigoryevich Lelechenko, deputy chief of the electrical shop, displayed unconditional heroism and self-sacrifice. These people prevented development of the disaster both inside and outside the turbine hall and thus saved the entire plant.

“Aleksandr Grigoryevich Lelechenko, protecting the young electricians from going unnecessarily into the zone of high radiation, himself went into the electrolysis space three times in order to turn off the flow of hydrogen to the emergency generators. When we take into account that the electrolysis space was alongside the pile of debris, and fragments of fuel and reactor graphite were everywhere, and the radioactivity was between 5,000 and 15,000 roentgens per hour, one can get an idea of how highly moral and heroic this 50-year-old man was when he deliberately shielded young lives behind his own. And then in radioactive water up to his knees, he studied the condition of the switchboxes, trying to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps…

His total exposure dose was 2,500 rads, enough to kill him five times. But after he had received first aid (they injected physiological solution into his vein) at the medical station in Pripyat, Lelechenko rushed back to the unit and worked there several more hours.

He died a terrible painful death in Kiev.”

With that quote, we get an idea of just one person who sacrificed their own life to try and stop the damage from getting even worse. It’s worth pointing out, though, that while Medvedev said in his book they gave their lives to save the entire plant, if we were to look at the entire story through a lens of history we know that isn’t always the case. Not that it was on purpose, but sometimes the actions they took actually made things worse.

One example of this is something we don’t see in the series at all, even though it relates to things we’ve seen already in the series.

Remember back when Anatoly Dyatlov was in the control room soon after the explosion? Well, as the firefighters were working to extinguish the fire in the turbine hall, Dyaltov had the radiation measured. Of course, the dosimeter showed a value of 3.6 roentgen per hour. It maxed out.

A little later, Dyatlov then decided it’d be safer for any non-essential personnel to go to a different building. He didn’t think things were as bad as they were, but he wanted to be safe. It was Reactor #4 that had the emergency, after all, so he ordered everyone to go to the closest safe reactor nearby. They went to Reactor #3.

And to make it even safer for them, he ordered the ventilation in Reactor #4 to be turned off so they could crank the ventilation in Reactor #3 into high gear.

That wouldn’t be a bad idea if the situation was as Dyatlov thought—but the fact was that Reactor #4 had exploded. So, by turning up the ventilation in Reactor #3, they were basically pumping in the radioactive air from outside that Reactor #4 was spewing into the air.

And that is an example of how someone makes what they think is the best decision at the time, but in reality it ends up making things even worse.

If we go back to where we are in the timeline of the series, we see a lot happening on April 27^th, the day after the explosion. Since they know it’s a big deal, one of the first things we see them trying to do as a resolution is to dump a ton of…well…according to the series, it’s actually 5,000 tons of boron and sand.

We see the first helicopter trying to deliver its load of boron and sand over the exposed core simply fall apart in the sky.

The basic idea of dropping things on the reactor is true, although there is more to the story we don’t see in the series.

For example, in the series we see Legasov asking Shcherbina for the 5,000 tons of boron and sand. In truth, Shcherbina had the idea to use clay and boron. Legasov asked for 2,000 tons of lead, but he also was the first to admit that probably wouldn’t be enough—this was a bad situation to the level he’d never dealt with before.

So, in the end, Shcherbina ordered 6,000 tons of boron, sand, clay, and lead that they planned on dropping onto the open reactor from helicopters. And there was at least one helicopter that crashed in the process—although I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest the helicopter just fell apart in the sky like we see in the series. In fact, there’s video footage of a helicopter crashing as it dropped its contents at Chernobyl—but that was because it got too close to a construction crane, it clipped it and went down. It’s not like it fell apart on its own because of the radiation. I’ll include a link to that in the resources for this episode if you want to watch that.

The purpose for dropping these items wasn’t random. Sand would suffocate the fire. Lead lowered the graphite from the exploded core that was still burning. And if you remember from the first episode, boron was in the control rods to absorb neutrons to slow the nuclear chain reaction—so dropping that with clay would help slow any continuing reaction from getting worse and worse.

Something else we don’t see in the series was that there were people who didn’t like this idea. For example, someone who isn’t in the series at all was Valentyn Fedulenko, who was considered an expert on RBMK reactors. Legasov was a nuclear expert, but not necessarily very experienced with RBMK reactors. In fact, he didn’t have any experience with them. When he found out he was on the committee for the Chernobyl accident, his first reaction was to grab any technical info on RBMK reactors and talk to people he knew that had worked with them to get a better idea of the specifics on how they worked.

While Legasov was a nuclear expert, Fedulenko was considered the top expert on RBMK reactors specifically. When he arrived in Pripyat on April 27^th, he didn’t like the idea of dropping sand, clay and lead on the reactor. A big reason for this was because he knew the reactor’s lid had been blown off—but the way it landed was to leave the core partially exposed. He didn’t think the helicopters could accurately drop their load onto the partially exposed reactor core.

But, it happened anyway. By the time April 28^th rolled around, 300 tons of materials had been dropped. Another 750 tons on April 29^th. Another 1,500 tons on April 30^th. Another 1,900 tons on May 1^st.

We’re getting a little ahead of the series timeline here, but with purpose because the amount of material dropped to smother the core ended up becoming an issue itself. They couldn’t just keep doing that because it was so much weight that they thought maybe the reactor would collapse on itself to lower levels of the unit. 

So, that’s why they stopped dumping material onto the reactor. But that didn’t fix the issue.

If we go back to the series, things get bad enough that radiation levels are detected as far as Sweden.

That happened, and a lot of people think the detection of the radiation by surrounding countries ultimately would become a big reason why the Soviet Union couldn’t hid everything.

Even though people like Shcherbina, Legasov and others knew about the accident soon after it happened, most of the world outside the Soviet Union didn’t know anything at all had happened until the morning of April 28^th. There was a sensor at Sweden’s Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant that detected higher than usual radiation.

At first, they thought it was a mistake. Maybe a broken detector. Maybe it was a leak on-site. They evacuated their 600 or so staff members as they tried to figure out what was going on. Soon they figured out it wasn’t internal.

But if it was external, what could it be? Maybe a nuclear bomb. Would that mean war had broken out? What could that mean!?

By the evening of April 28^th, it wasn’t just Sweden that had detected elevated radiation. Finland and Norway were also getting similar readings. Okay, so it’s not nuclear war. It’s something else. But everyone has done internal testing and it’s not them…these readings are coming from somewhere else. As that alerted them to there being an issue, ultimately that would lead to the Soviet Union being forced to admit there was an accident at Chernobyl.

If we go back to the series, one of the other major plot points we see happens when the entire city of Pripyat is evacuated. That happened, although there is more to the story than we see in the HBO miniseries.

Starting at midnight on April 27^th, buses started to arrive in the city of Pripyat with the idea they’d be evacuating civilians. Things were still in a bit of flux—no one knew it’d be a permanent evacuation.

On April 27^th, 1986 at about 1:00 PM, there was an announcement broadcast the city of Pripyat. Here’s an excerpt from that announcement:

[ PLAY 20 SECONDS OF THE CLIP ]

Now, I don’t speak Russian, so I’ll admit that I had to use a translator for this…but that announcement says something like:

“Attention! Attention! The City Council informs you that in connection with the accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station, unfavorable radiation conditions are developing in the city of Pripyat. The Communist Party, its officials and the armed forces are taking necessary steps to fight this. Nevertheless, in order to ensure complete safety for residents, children first and foremost, it has become necessary to carry out a temporary evacuation of the city’s residents to nearby settlements of Kyiv oblast. For that purpose, buses will be provided to every residence today, April 27, beginning at 14:00 hours, under the supervision of police officers and representatives of the city executive committee. It is recommended that people take documents, absolutely necessary items and food products to meet immediate needs. All houses will be guarded by the police during the evacuation period. Comrades, on leaving your dwellings temporarily, please do not forget to close windows, switch off electrical and gas appliances and turn off water taps. Please remain calm, organized and orderly of this short-term evacuation.”

We know from history this announcement was repeated multiple times to residents in the city right before they were to supposed to evacuate. Some sources I saw mentioned giving the residents two hours while others mentioned them having less than an hour. In ether case, there wasn’t much time.

Can you imagine? What would you do if there was an announcement like that where you live? This was a Saturday, so imagine you’re out on the town during the weekend and you hear that being broadcast.

What would you do? Would you believe it at first? Would the first thing you do be to rush home and pack all the belongings you’ll need for the rest of your life? I know I wouldn’t. I’d wonder what’s going on. Should we do what it’s saying? Why is that being said? What in the world is going on?

What we don’t know from history is just how much everyone understood the seriousness of what it meant. How could they know this was evacuating their homes forever? Nothing about this announcement suggested they’d be leaving Pripyat to never return—quite the opposite, actually.

For the most part, the series is correct to show there wasn’t a huge issue with the evacuation. Most people just did what they were told. Did they understand it? No, not necessarily. But they didn’t need to understand. They did what they were told and, looking at it from a historical lens, we know that worked out for their best to leave the radioactive area near and around Chernobyl.

If we go back into the series, at the end of the second episode we see the next attempt to slow the heat from continuing to rise. This comes in the form of trying to release water from tanks before the heated sand—basically a lava-like material at that point—hits the tanks. If they don’t, the lava hitting the tank will instantly heat it up so fast it’ll cause a thermal explosion that’ll destroy the remaining reactors at Chernobyl and release so much radioactive material that millions of people will probably die and entire regions like Byleorussia and Ukraine will be completely uninhabitable for at least 100 years.

To avoid this, they have to open the valves and release the water before the lava gets there. But the men who do that will be exposed to so much radiation they’ll likely die. According to the series, the three men who volunteer for this are Ananenko, Bezpalov and Baranov.

That whole scenario is true, even down to the names of the three men who were sent to try and avoid this disaster…but because the TV series shows more of this in the third episode, we’ll talk more about them in our next episode as well.

One thing we don’t see in the series at all is that the boron they dumped along with the sand didn’t make it to the core. The purpose was exactly what the series shows, to use a mixture of sand and boron. The sand to help smother the fires and boron to absorb the neutrons to halt the continuing heat generated by the ongoing fission reaction.

But next to none of that boron even made it to the core, so it was kind of pointless. The reason we don’t see that mentioned in the series, though, is because at the time they didn’t know that. We only know that now looking at the event through a historical lens.

That’s just another example of how they tried to do the right thing, but what they tried doing ended up only making things worse.

One thing they did know though, was the detection of ruthenium. That’s a chemical element that belongs to the platinum group on the periodic table, atomic number 44. The reason that’s important is because they found the ruthenium was melting. And because they knew the melting point for ruthenium is 2,250 degrees Celcius—or about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit—that means the fires near the core were at least that hot.

There are actually pictures and footage of the molten lava-like substance they managed to get, and I’ll include links to those in the resources links for this series.

That basically meant they had a nuclear meltdown on their hands.

Now, I know a nuclear meltdown is something we’re all familiar with…by that, I mean it’s a term we’ve probably all heard. But if you’re like me and not a nuclear engineer, what exactly does that mean?

To understand that, we have to have some basic knowledge about how a nuclear reactor works. We talked about that in the last episode. So, in that episode we learned about parts like a control rod and the uranium used as nuclear fuel.

To build on that knowledge, a nuclear meltdown occurs when the core gets so hot that the uranium melts. When it does that, it can burn through any casing and fall to the bottom of the reactor. Then, as it continues to get hotter and hotter, it’ll turn into the molten lava-like material they talk about in the series. That’s what can burn through any of the protective layers in the reactor and, eventually, hit the ground itself.

Once it does that, the only thing left is the earth itself. Everything, including the water in the ground get contaminated by the radioactive molten uranium.

These days there’s usually a layer of metallic alloy beneath the reactor to catch things before they get to the earth below. That’s an safety feature added in the wake of the Chernobyl accident.

That means at Chernobyl, there was no extra safety feature in case of a meltdown. There was just a water reservoir that was used for the emergency cooling pumps. That water was what they were concerned about. The moment the meltdown hit that, it’d start a new chain reaction of destruction. The water would instantly heat up, turning it into steam in an explosion that would hit the other three reactors at Chernobyl. Doing that would mean the nuclear fuel in those reactors would vaporize.

That’s the explosion they were trying to avoid.

The series is correct to show that some of the Soviet scientists working on the Chernobyl accident gave estimates that the potential explosion would basically flatten 200 square kilometers—that’s about 77 square miles—poison all the water in the area, killing who knows how many of the 30 million people who used it as drinking water and render Byelorussia and Ukraine uninhabitable.

Of course, thankfully we can look back on this event through a historical lens to know that did not happen. So that means it’s all speculation on how terrible it could have been.

But that’s what they were afraid of happening.

To avoid that, they needed to release the water from that reservoir. The challenge to that is just what we see in the series: The valves for that have to be turned by hand. Those valves were in the basement. And that basement was flooded with what was now radioactive water.

That brings us back to the three men who volunteered to turn the valves: Alexei Ananenko, Valery Bezpalov and Alexandrovich Baranov.

And that story is something we learn more about in episode three of the miniseries, so we’ll do that as we pick up next time where we’re leaving off about the true story behind episode number three of HBO’s Chernobyl!

There’s some text on screen that gives us a time and place.

Moscow. April 26, 1988. And while it’s not included in the text, the camera shot behind the text is a clock giving us the exact time. It’s 1:10 and since it’s dark through the apartment window, we can assume that’s 1:10 AM.

The apartment belongs to Valery Legasov, who is played by Jared Harris. He’s just poured himself a drink and is listening to a cassette tape. On the recording, his own voice talks about how stories only want to know who is to blame. And, in this story, the best choice was Anatoly Dyatlov because he ran the room that night and he didn’t have friends—not important enough ones, at least. So, he’ll serve ten years in a prison labor camp.

Legasov stops the playback. Then, he hits the record button and continues the story where it left off. This time he’s speaking into the cassette tape.

He ends the recording by saying he’s given everything he knows. They’ll deny it, of course. They always do. He stops the tape and puts it with others—five others, for a total of six. Each tape is labeled with a number 1 through 6. He wraps them all in newspaper and then walks outside to hide the bundle in a grate nearby. He also takes out his cat’s litter so it seems like he’s just doing chores to the man in the car obviously watching his house from the street. We can assume it’s a KGB agent, although the series never really tells us for sure. It seems to work because the man stays in the car.

With that done, Legasov heads back inside.

A few minutes later, we find out why the episode has the title 1:23:45. It’s the time. Looking at his watch as the seconds tick closer to 1:23 AM and 45 seconds, that is exactly the moment when Legasov climbs up on furniture in his apartment and hangs himself.

Then, the next shot we see transports us back in time exactly two years and one minute earlier. Then, of course, we see the explosion—which we’ll get to in a moment, but before we do, we can tell from how the series sets up this opening sequence with the timing that it’s saying Valery Legasov committed suicide exactly two years to the second after the Chernobyl accident.

There’s a lot of what we saw in the opening sequence that is true, but the biggest inaccurate thing is the idea that Legasov committed suicide to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the explosion down to the second. That is simply not true.

It is true that Legasov committed suicide near the two-year anniversary of the explosion, but not necessarily down to the exact second of the explosion itself. In fact, as we’ll learn about in more depth later on, there was more than one explosion.

The truth is that Valery Legasov hung himself in his apartment on April 27^th, 1988—that’s two years and one day after the explosion.

Or, maybe he didn’t intend for it to be timed perfectly with the explosion itself, but maybe it was because the next day, on the 28^th of April, 1988, that’s when he was scheduled to release the outcomes of the investigation into the causes of the disaster.

There are also some discrepancies to exactly where Legasov hung himself. Some sources say it was in his Moscow apartment like we see in the series. Some say it was in the stairwell of his apartment complex.

He didn’t leave a note, so there’s a lot of speculation as to his reasons—and my own speculation is that it’s too close to the anniversary of the explosion to be a coincidence.

What he did leave were tapes of his memories that he’d been recording since he became involved in the Chernobyl disaster. Some also point to something we don’t see in the HBO miniseries at all: It’s not the first time he attempted suicide.

For that, we’d have to go back to the summer of 1987.

But, that attempt didn’t succeed and for a while Legasov threw himself back into his work. Meanwhile, his health continued to fail due to the radiation he was exposed to and on the two-year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, a proposal he had to launch a new committee on chemical research was rejected. That same day, he gathered all his personal belongings from his office. The next day, he was found dead at his apartment.

While ostracized for his involvement during his life, in the aftermath of his apparent suicide, Legasov’s tapes couldn’t be denied. They were circulated in the scientific community and eventually extracts of them were published the following month, May of 1988. Nearly ten years later, on September 20^th, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin, posthumously gave Valery Legasov the title of Hero of the Russian Federation—Russia’s highest honorary title.

But, alas, even though the HBO miniseries starts at the end, we don’t want to get too far ahead ourselves in the story.

Let’s go back into the timeline of the first episode now. There’s text on the screen that tells us we’re two years and one minute before Valery Legasov’s suicide.

Of course, as we learned, the series wasn’t quite right with the timing of Legasov’s suicide, but if we were to follow their timeline then two years and one minute earlier would be April 26^th, 1986 at 1:22 AM. That timing is correct to set us up just before the explosion.

We’re in Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR.

A woman named Lyudmilla Ignatenko, who is played by Jessie Buckley, happens to be awake to use the restroom. Afterward, she goes to the kitchen to get a drink. She doesn’t even notice the bright light in the distance out the window of her apartment. Then, a moment after we see the blast, the sound hits, shaking the apartment.

That, she noticed. So did her husband, Vasily, who wakes up. Together, they look out the window at the glow in the distance. The explosion throws a pillar of blue light into the sky that looks like something we’d expect to see in a science fiction movie.

Before we go any further, I wanted to touch on how the explosion looked. What we see in the series is most likely pretty accurate, but I also think we should set some expectations. It’s not like it was caught on film, so no one really knows what it looked like for absolute certainty.

Remember, this was in 1986. There weren’t cell phones with cameras in everyone’s pocket. There weren’t security cameras in houses, businesses or even cars like we see today.

It was also 1:23 in the morning. And Chernobyl was specifically built to be away from the huge city it provided power to: Kiev. Of course, that’s now the city of Kyiv since Ukrainian independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The city of Pripyat mentioned in the series is a real city. It’s located about 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, away from Kyiv and was built in 1970 primarily as a home for people working in and around the Chernobyl power plant. By 1986, there were about 49,000 people who lived in Pripyat. For comparison, the city of Chernobyl itself where the power plant was had about 14,000 residents in 1986.

So, that’s another limitation of the eyewitnesses to the explosion. Not only was it in the middle of the night in the year 1986 where automated monitoring technology just wasn’t as common as it is today…but it’s not like there were millions of people around.

With all that said, it’s not like there was no one around either.

There were people who worked at the plant 24/7, many of whom were alerted by the explosion itself and rushed to see what happened.

To see the explosion itself, there were some people who just happened to be fishing nearby at that moment. And by nearby, I mean very nearby. You see, there was a pond near the power plant that held water used to cool the plant. That pond was also used to stock fish—something they used as a way of showing how safe everything was.

So, there were a couple of guys who happened to be fishing in that pond about 800 or 900 feet away—about 250 meters or so—away from reactor number four when it exploded.

According to these eyewitness accounts, there was a fireball that rose from Reactor #4—or, as they referred to it, Unit 4. Along with the fireball rose a mushroom cloud of smoke. A red column of light from the explosion turned blue as it rose into the sky, surrounded by the black cloud of smoke.

It’s probably not what you want to see coming from a nuclear reactor. But, of course, that’s also looking at things through a historical lens where we already have an idea of what happened at Chernobyl.

At the time, they had no idea just how bad it was.

Yes, there was an explosion—two of them actually, one right after the other.

Yes, there was a fire.

The fishermen kept on fishing, though. There was no way they could’ve known how serious things actually were.

Going back to the series, inside the control room right after the explosion we can see the man in charge is Anatoly Dyatlov. He’s played by Paul Ritter in the series.

“What just happened?” Dyatlov asks the others in the control room as dust falls from the ceiling as a result of the blast. No one seems to know the answer.

Then, someone named Perevozschenko bursts in the room exclaiming there’s a fire in the turbine hall.

After a moment’s pause, Dyatlov figures it out…the turbine hall. That’s the control system tank. Hydrogen. That would cause the explosion. He turns to two of the men working the controls, Akimov and Toptunov, and berates them. He blames them for blowing up the tank.

That is all a pretty good dramatization of what most likely happened in the control room that night.

The reason I say it’s “most likely” what happened is simply because we have to rely on the memories of people who were there that night to piece together the story. That’s not unique to our story today—there are lots of times in history where we can only rely on the memory of those who were there. But it’s important to know that because memory can often be an unreliable interpretation of what happened, especially when it comes down to specific things we see in the HBO series like who said what.

With that said, the men we see in the control room in the series were real people. Anatoly Dyatlov was the deputy chief engineer. Aleksandr Akimov was the chief of the unit’s shift and Leonid Toptunov was the reactor operator. And it is true that one of the mechanics came into the control room to let them know the turbine hall was on fire.

Not to skip too far ahead of where we are in the timeline of the first episode, but a little later in the first episode there is some dialogue where Dyatlov, Akimov and Toptunov are talking about the tank. Dyatlov mentions the tank on 71 is 100 cubic meters. Akimov corrects him, saying it’s 110 cubic meters.

While it’d make sense for people who work at the Chernobyl power plant to understand what all that means, for those of us who didn’t, what they’re talking about is the location of the control system tank.

It was 71 meters, or about 233 feet, directly above the control room. It also held 110,000 liters, or about 29,000 gallons, of hot water and steam. As a quick little side note, that doesn’t mean the series is wrong to mention hydrogen. Hydrogen can be created by the reaction between steam and the fuel used in a reactor, and since hydrogen is extremely combustible it’d make sense to assume the hydrogen was the cause of the explosion.

But, the location of the tank is important because something we don’t see mentioned in the series is that Dyatlov expected all that hot water start leaking through the roof of the control room they were in at any moment.

One of the orders we don’t see him giving in the series that he actually did give was for everyone to move to an emergency control room. But, the series probably just simplified this, because it is true they never moved. Everyone was too focused on the alarms and indicators in the control room giving readings they couldn’t make sense of to pay attention to Dyatlov’s order to relocate. And, since the ceiling hadn’t started leaking yet, he didn’t push the matter. After all, every second mattered, and he knew they had to keep the reactor cooled.

This is important to keep in mind, though, because the more time that passed without the water leaking through the control room ceiling the more that became an indicator to Dyatlov that the explosion was probably not the control system tank.

If we go back into the series, though, Paul Ritter’s version of Anatoly Dyatlov has just come to the conclusion that it must be the control system tank that exploded. He orders water be pumped through the core. All that matters now is to keep the core cool, so the fire doesn’t affect it.

The man who burst into the room stops Dyatlov and says, “There is no core! It’s exploded!”

Anatoly Dyatlov pauses for a moment at this, thinking it through…then he disregards it. He’s in shock. The man persists, saying he saw the lid is off! But Dyatlov won’t believe him. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode, Dyatlov replies. You’re confused.

This whole concept of refusing to believe an RBMK reactor could explode was true…but it wasn’t because of a lack of education. If anything, it was quite the opposite: Their training was one of the main reasons they couldn’t even fathom the reactor core was what had exploded.

It was one of those things where the eyes saw something so unbelievable that the mind couldn’t comprehend the reality of it. There were simply too many fail-safes. Too many safety systems in place for that to happen. It wasn’t possible.

Even some of the plant workers who saw the aftermath of the blast would later recall their minds didn’t want to believe what their eyes saw.

To put it another way, they were simply blinded by their belief that the reactor was so safe it could never explode. Whatever had happened must have been something else—it couldn’t be the reactor. At least, that was the mindset for most people at the Chernobyl power plant that night. Of course, they would find out just how wrong they were.

Going back into the series, we see Anatoly Dyatlov ordering the men in the control room to pump more water into the core to keep it cool. We talked about that briefly a little bit earlier.

Now, if you’re like me and not a nuclear engineer, right about this point in the story it’s very helpful to understand how nuclear reactors work. So, remember where we were in the series with Dyatlov wanting to pump water into the core because it will make sense on the other side of this explanation of how nuclear reactors work.

In a single sentence: Nuclear reactors heat up water until it becomes steam which spins a turbine to generate electricity.

Of course, that is an extremely simplified version.

There are different kinds of nuclear reactors, but the one we hear about in the series is an RBMK reactor. And it is true that the Chernobyl reactor was an RBMK reactor. RBMK stands for a High-Power Channel-Type Reactor. Obviously, that’s the English translation. The letters RBMK line up better with the actual Russian words, reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalnyy.

But, as you can tell from my butchered pronunciation, I can’t speak Russian! So, we’ll stick with calling it a High-Power Channel-Type Reactor, or just stick to RBMK haha!

There are a few things about RBMK reactors that’s helpful to keep in mind as we continue to learn about what happened at Chernobyl.

One of those things is they’re unique to the Soviet Union, and now Russia since there are still RBMK reactors around today even though the Soviet Union is not. That means in 1986, no other country had engineers with experience with RBMK reactors or any other training for them outside the Soviet Union. And as we’ve learned so far—inside the Soviet Union, the training for RBMK reactors only ever implied they had so many fail-safes and safety systems that the idea of an RBMK reactor exploding was unfathomable.

Another thing to keep in mind about RBMK reactors was that…well, Chernobyl wasn’t originally supposed to be an RBMK reactor. It was supposed to be what’s known as VVER. The English translation for that is Water-Water Energy Reactors. That was the Soviet version of the same type of nuclear reactor that’s in the United States, which is called Pressurized Water Reactors or PWR.

However, they decided to build RBMK reactors in Chernobyl instead because RBMK reactors could output twice the amount of energy as a VVER reactor and RBMK reactors could be built by machine plants that didn’t have any sort of nuclear industry-specific high-precision equipment.

So, basically, RBMK reactors were cheaper and more powerful.

That’s a win-win…right? Well, if that were true then we probably wouldn’t be telling the story today.

The last key thing to keep in mind about an RBMK nuclear reactor that I wanted to mention at this point in the story is that RBMK reactors use a graphite moderator in the control rods. No other reactor types do that, and we see graphite mentioned quite a bit in the HBO miniseries.

What does that mean, exactly? To understand that we’ll have to dive back into how nuclear reactors work for a moment.

So, earlier, we learned a nuclear reactor heats water to the point of becoming steam to then generate electricity.

The part that we’re talking about here is how an RBMK reactor heats the water. It does that through something called a fission reaction. That’s what happens a neutron hits a larger atom, splitting into two smaller atoms. Energy is released as well as additional neutrons, which can then repeat the process. That’s the chain reaction.

To help ensure the chain reaction continues more, something called a moderator is added to slow down the neutrons. That way you’ll get a better chain reaction and, in the process, more energy released. That results in more heat which results in more steam which results in more electricity.

The fuel used for a nuclear reactor is uranium. The uranium is made into pellets that are stacked into a metal tube called a fuel rod. In an RBMK reactor, it’s uranium-238 that’s slightly enriched with uranium-235.

The fuel rods with enriched uranium are positioned vertically inside the core of the reactor.

The core of an RBMK reactor is graphite—the same thing used in pencils, although for a nuclear reactor we’re obviously talking about something much bigger. The graphite core is more like the size of a house, and the graphite is a lot more pure than what’s in a pencil.

In the core, there are 1,660 vertical holes. That’s where the fuel rods are inserted.

But, it’s not like there are 1,660 fuel rods inserted.

You don’t want the chain reaction to go on and on unchecked forever, so there are also what are called control rods. The control rods are made of a material called boron carbide and, in RBMK reactors, there are graphite tips on the control rods. That graphite tip will play a part in the story later, but the boron carbide is a material absorbs the neutrons which, in turn, slows the fission reaction down.

With all that explained, the basic process then is that cool water is pumped into the core. It cools the core down, but it also flows around the fuel rods where the fission reaction heats up the water. Since heat rises, the steam comes out the top of the reactor where the reactor design forces the steam to the turbine where the electricity is generated.

More cool water is pumped in, it cools the core, is heated and leaves as steam.

If things get too hot from the chain reaction generating too much heat than the water coolant can handle, then you insert more control rods to absorb the neutrons and slow down the chain reaction.

And so on and so on, the balance continues as electricity is generated.

Okay, so in a nutshell, that is how RBMK nuclear reactors work. And yes, all that is still an extremely simplified version.

But that will help us understand the rest of the miniseries a lot better because…well, it’s a lot easier to understand how things went wrong when we know what they were supposed to be doing in the first place!

So, remember where we were in the miniseries?

Anatoly Dyatlov gave the order to pump water into the core just before he left to go to the Administration Building to talk to Viktor Bryukhanov and Nikolai Fomin. He really did do that, but it wasn’t the only order he gave. That was just one of the orders Dyatlov made after the explosion that would end up making an already terrible situation even worse.

The order to pump water into the core was his primary focus though.

A big part of that has to do with what we talked about earlier—the disbelief that the core itself had exploded. But the indicators in the control room were also telling them that there wasn’t any water at all flowing into the core. If the fuel rods didn’t have any coolant, they’d melt. That would be bad.

So, he thought the huge graphite core was still there and since they’d pushed the AZ-5 button—we’ll hear more about that later in the series—but basically that button inserts all the control rods into the core at once to completely halt the fission reaction. Since they did that, Dyatlov believed that all he had to do to cool the reactor down was to keep pumping cool water in. Since the chain reaction had been stopped with the control rods, the cool water wouldn’t be heated anymore and any residual heat that was there would eventually cool off with more cool water added.

At least—that was the idea behind his order to keep pumping the water into the core.

He also believed the fission reaction had been shut down. But because the indicators were showing no water was being pumped into the core, that’s why Dyatlov’s order was to try and restart the emergency water pumps. Those had been shut off for the test, but now he ordered them to restart those pumps in an attempt to cool the reactor before the fuel rods melted.

Or, basically, get water into the core as fast as you can. That will save the reactor and the fire brigade can handle the fire before things get worse.

That was the plan, at first.

Something we don’t really see in the series, though, is that plan was more complex than it sounds because Dyatlov realized pretty quickly that the fission reaction had not been shut down like he thought at first. From the control room indicators, they could tell the control rods hadn’t descended all the way like they were supposed to when they shut down the reactor. Not only that, but the control rods had stopped about one-third of the way down.

That’s additionally bad because, as we learned earlier, the control rods in RBMK reactors have graphite tips. So, not only was the boron not slowing down the fission reaction, the partially-inserted control rods with graphite tips were basically acting just like the graphite core around it—increasing the fission reaction!

Thinking fast, Dyatlov thought if the button to insert the control rods all the way didn’t work, maybe they could be fully inserted manually. So, he ordered a couple of interns who had been in the control room to learn from the test to go try that. But then he immediately realized that was a bad idea because the control rods were huge—they can’t be inserted through manpower alone. Even the manual controls required a servo motor that was powered by electricity. Since there wasn’t power, the servo motor wouldn’t be able to help move the control rods so there’d be no way they could be lowered manually.

But, the two men had already left the control room. Dyatlov ran after them for a moment, but they were down the hall and out of sight.

They couldn’t have known it at the time, but they were trying to do an impossible task and running even closer toward the exploded core.

While he was in the hall outside the control room, Dyatlov noticed it was filled with dust and smoke from the fire in the turbine hall. That was a fire he already knew about, and one that we talked about briefly before when we found out about his decision to call the fire brigade to deal with the fires.

If we go back into the series now, there’s text on the screen to tell us it’s 2:30 AM.

There are two things we see happening that we’ll talk about. The first is what I just mentioned, the fire brigade coming—we’ll come back to that in a bit.

The other is when we see Viktor Bryukhanov getting the phone call that wakes him up about the accident. He meets Nikolai Fomin at the Administration Building where they both go into what looks like a bunker with a long conference table in it. Dyatlov is already there and he starts filling them in on what happened.

The basic concept of this is true, although it was around 2:00 AM when Bryukhanov got the call to wake him up about the accident. That’s kind of splitting hairs, though. What’s not splitting hairs is something we see Con O’Neill’s version of Viktor Bryukhanov tell Dyatlov that there’s no way they can blame him for the accident—he was asleep when it happened!

This whole conversation we see between Dyatlov, Bryukhanov and Fomin in the series is a simplified version of what happened. In truth, they talked on the phone first…they didn’t talk in person for a few hours after we see it happening in the series.

Something else we don’t see in the series is that even though Bryukhanov didn’t know the extent of the explosion he had gotten the call about, as the bus he was riding to the plant got closer, he noticed the top of Unit 4 was gone.

At that moment, he knew he would be blamed for it. He was in charge of the power plant, so it didn’t matter that he was asleep when things went wrong. It was a big enough of a deal that he’d take the fall for it. Anything that goes wrong, you’re the one in charge so you’re the one who takes the blame. That’s how things worked in the Soviet Union.

Talking to Anatoly Dyatlov also wasn’t the first thing Bryukhanov did when he arrived at the plant. He actually decided to investigate himself and went toward Unit 4. But, he stopped when he saw pieces of graphite on the ground and the building next to the reactor hall in complete ruins. He didn’t want to see more, so he went back to his office to make phone calls.

It was to the chief of the night shift, a man who isn’t in the series at all. His name was Boris Rogozhkin. He was the one who had gone to the control room to talk to Dyatlov, Akimov and Toptunov. So it was Rogozhkin who told Byrukhanov over the phone what Dyatlov had said: We pressed the AZ-5 button, and 12 to 15 seconds later there was an explosion.

The AZ-5 button is the emergency shutdown that lowers all the control rods into the core, stopping the fission reaction. It definitely was not supposed to cause an explosion!

Once Bryukhanov got off the phone with Rogozhkin, he turned around and started calling his superiors to let them know about the accident—at least, what they knew so far. After that, Bryukhanov called Dyatlov to tell him to come over to the underground bunker to talk to him directly. But that wasn’t until around 4:00 AM, not soon after 2:00 AM like we see in the series.

Speaking of which, if we go back into the series, we see the firefighters continuing to battle the flames.  According to the series, they first arrived on scene around 1:30 AM.

We see shots of them here and there between things we’ve seen in the reactor. Time passes until around 3:30 AM, and there’s some dialogue between the firefighters that lets us know they’ve done everything they can from the outside. They need to start making their way to the roof now. We also see some of the firefighters reacting to some of the debris—debris that’s molten hot in some cases, other debris that’s not hot to the touch but still causes burns after the firefighters pick it up.

The series has so many different angles to tell the story that we don’t see everything from every angle—and that makes sense.

But in the true story, by the time 2:00 AM rolled around, firefighters were starting to address the fire on the roof of Unit 3—it was connected to Unit 4. They quickly realized it was more than just fire. Less than half an hour later, the firefighters were starting to get sick. They didn’t know exactly what the cause was—but they knew enough about fighting fires to know there was something different this time.

Still, there was a fire to be extinguished.

We don’t see this character in the HBO miniseries, but the commander of the fire department that responded was the 35-year-old Major Leonid Teliantnikov.

By the time 2:30 rolled around, the fire on the roof of the reactor hall had mostly been extinguished, but Teliantnikov noticed his men weren’t right. They were sick. So, he ordered them to go in an ambulance to the Pripyat hospital. An hour or so later, around 3:30 AM, Teliantnikov and his men were battling the flames on the roof of Unit #3. Except, he’d been exposed too much himself. So, he went to the hospital himself, leaving the firefighters without their commander.

This is way beyond the scope of episode number one, but it was closer to 7:00 AM when the firefighters finally had the flames extinguished.

And since I mentioned episode number one, if we head back to the HBO miniseries we’re at the end of the first episode where a phone rings.

Tying into the beginning of the episode, Valery Legasov is the man who answers the phone. On the other end of the line is Boris Shcherbina. Through the conversation, Legasov finds out about the accident and that he’s been assigned to a committee to manage the accident.

Specifics of the conversation were surely made up for the series, but the basic concept here is true.

Boris Shcherbina was a real person. He really was in charge of the commission to get to the bottom of things…and to offer another bonus point to the accuracy of things, the creators of the series even found an excellent actor of the same age. The real Boris Shcherbina was 66 years old in 1986 when he was put in charge of the commission, while the actor playing Boris Shcherbina in the HBO miniseries, Stellan Skarsgård, was 68 years old in 2019 when the series was released…and probably a year or two younger when they filmed the series before being released.

So, that’s a minor thing, but something I think is worth pointing out to highlight the level of detail the creators went to in this series.­

Both Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina were very real people involved in the true story…

…and those are two names we’ll hear about a lot more in our upcoming episodes as we dig into the rest of HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries!