The Shady World of Cryonics: Missing Heads, Bank Robbers and an Italian Funeral Mogul
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and the Russian futurologist, transhumanist and all-round wacky scientist Danila Medvedev is in his Moscow apartment when there's a knock on the door. Medvedev looks up. Two shifty looking guys are standing on his doorstep. Medvedev is immediately on high alert. It's been over two years since Medvedev's ex-partner Valeria Udalova broke into the premises of Kriaros, the cryonics company they founded together and stole a bunch of frozen heads.

In April 2021 Medvedev had bitten back, travelling to Kryoras's large white concrete facility in the nearby village of Semkos with three supporters, changing the locks and taking pictures of themselves throwing up these signs with the lab's cryostats. Those are thermostats for the ultra-low temperatures you need to freeze a human body.

Kind of like Occupy Wall Street, only for the cowboy world of cryonics. And beyond that, cryonics in the cowboy nation of Russia. Medvedev whips out his phone and starts filming. Take the phone away or I'll break it and break you, one of the men tells him. Who sent you? asks Medvedev, still filming. People sent me, the man replies. People?

Medvedev has a pretty good idea who they are. Eventually, one of the men tells him, "Return what you owe, what is not yours, and don't go to jail." A couple months later, more intruders will enter the facility at Semkoz. Udalova, dressed in a luxuriant light brown fur jacket, quarterbacks them as they prepare to take the cryostats. Before long though, Medvedev is on the scene, and so are the cops.

They're not sure which crazy, futurist device belongs to which mad scientist, or who's stolen them, or really what's going on. Udalova pulls out a massive binder of documents that she says prove her claim to the facility, the cryostats, and the dozens of bodies and heads Cryo-Rus has frozen, in the hopes of reviving them decades, or even centuries, after its foundation in 2005.

Medvedev hasn't bought a thing. The cops let Udalova load up the equipment and leave. Medvedev is dejected, but he won't be defeated. One website called Biohacker News publishes a video of the heist alongside a caption: "The Valeria Udalova faction is the winner of the first transhumanist war." In reality though, this is just one battle.

The war? That will be fought in different countries, bringing in years of pseudoscience, feuds and an Italian funeral home mogul arrested as part of the biggest ever raid on the Calabria mafia, the Andrangheta. The real war? Now that is yet to be won. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the podcast where we teach you not only how to cover your tracks after committing crimes, but actually how to cheat death itself, which is pretty apt given we're recording this on the Easter Monday bank holiday. I'm your host, Sean Williams. I'm a freelance journalist in Berlin. Ordinarily, I'd be coming to you with Danny Gold, but I think as we're recording this, he's in a plane somewhere across the Atlantic getting ready to report on the war in Ukraine, and we'll

And we'll have more on that next week when he gets settled over there. But my guest on today's show is Peter Ward, a journalist based in the UK. Friend, we've worked on a bunch of stuff together over the years, including that Iceland high story we reworked for the show. What feels like a long, long time ago now. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Thanks for having me on, mate. It's great to be on. Yeah, it's great to have you. Just before we get into everything, there's always a Patreon to shout out. Danny just put a mini episode about the so-called contract killer Gasar of NYC, which is quite a good title. We've got scripts, notes, reading lists and interviews, and it's only going to get more now. Danny's back in journalism and...

Tweeting about air raid sirens and getting drunk in Odessa and tweet about stray dogs or whatever people do out there. Um, and we're doing more shows. You guys are suggesting these days. So keep them coming. The underworld podcast at gmail.com. So, um,

Me and Peter have probably witnessed enough organized crimes during our time working on tech stuff to fill up about six or seven episodes at least. But today we're going to talk about robbery, Russian mafias, frozen heads, and weirdly, Seth MacFarlane. Because Peter's got a new book out soon called The Price of Immortality, The Race to Live Forever. And it's all about transhumanists, cryonics, biohackers, and folks who basically want to live forever. So...

That's good because I really want to podcast forever. So it really resonated with me. I went over to your Amazon page before this, mate, and you've got some pretty must have reviews up there already. So I'm not going to blow too much smoke up your ass. But yeah, I've read the book. It's really good. You didn't give me a shout in this one. But what did you want to show anyway? Because I'm such a nice guy.

Yeah, thanks, mate. So I only actually wrote about half of those reviews myself. So some of them are actually genuine. Oh, nice. That's 50% more than the last lot. There is actually also a story about someone telling you to blow smoke up your arse. So, yeah, that's in there as well. And before you think there's not much of a link between chronics and crime, well...

Think about it, right? People are working in cutting-edge science, sometimes quackery. It involves cutting people's heads off or putting them in super-powerful freezers and all sorts. I mean, there's tons of crime in this world. And as we'll digress into later, there's even a link to one of the most famous robberies in American history. So there's tons of going on this episode, plus you lot might actually learn something about science. So double win.

Yeah, mate, I remember you first telling me about the idea for this book. I think it was like before the pandemic in New York at

at Mets game do you remember that I think we're talking about then yeah yeah I'm pretty sure we're extremely high up watching the Mets play uh in the stadium and uh yeah obviously naturally talking about living forever yeah what else do you do for three and a half hours of watching very little action um and then you headed down to Hollywood Florida just before the lockdowns and chaos and all of that stuff and you met

a bunch of guys at something called the Church of Perpetual Life. You want to tell us a little more about them? Because they're pretty crazy.

Yeah, definitely. They are, they're a weird group. Um, so the church of perpetual life is, it's like an organized religion. Um, and they all believe that they're going to live forever. They believe that somehow technology will, will make them choose when they want to die. Um, so they, they hang out in this church in, in, in Florida. Um, and they have these sort of

these get togethers where a lot of it is just like looking at PowerPoint presentations and looking at tiny advances in science. And there's all a bit boring, but there's also a lot of like whipping up the crowd with these sort of rallies against death. So one guy sort of stood up one of the main guys and listed off a bunch of millionaires who died in the, in the previous month since the last meeting, and then sort of mocked them all for dying and not saving themselves with all their millions. So yeah,

Yeah, really odd crowd. There's definitely a little bit of a cultish vibe to it because there's not much. The science will only take them so far and that's not very far at all. So you have to have a lot of belief and that kind of leads you to that sort of cultish, weird religion type vibe. And a lot of PowerPoint presentations, which I'm pretty sure is what Jesus used when he was first calling out of the tomb. Yeah.

Yeah, before we actually kick off with some crimey stuff, tell me if I'm wrong, but there's

There's actually a difference between cryogenics, right? And that's just generally getting things down to really low temperatures and observing them. And that might be bodies. And then there's cryonics, which is specifically freezing bodies at those temperatures, which is anything from minus 150 C to around absolute zero, which I think is minus 273 degrees C, which is theoretically when stuff just stops altogether. Is that right?

Yeah, that's about right. So cryogenics, best way to look at it, cryogenics, legitimate science, cryonics, people trying to reanimate dead bodies after they've frozen them. So less reliable science.

OK. Yeah. So cryogenic sciences we're using as far as I see in MRI scans, storing food for long periods of time, which is all tied in with the future of space travel and probably Elon Musk's next kid's name or something. I mean, does he does he actually come up much in the book?

He actually doesn't. Elon Musk is like the one that all of them want. Like they want him so desperately to get involved in making people live forever. So far he's resisted, but all their other sort of heroes, Jeff Bezos and those guys have, have started throwing money at it. But, but Musk, unfortunately, Papa Musk hasn't got involved. Yeah.

it was kind of a relief to be honest so I didn't have to put up with the Musk girls but yeah I imagine the Venn diagram of transhumanists and people who defend Elon Musk when he calls people pedophiles is like pretty much a circle yeah of course you've got your Ray Kurzweil's and Peter Thiel's and Aubrey de Grey's those have been signed up to be cryogenically frozen according to Ray Kurzweil he's like the head of

or something at Google, I think. He said, quote, my primary strategy for living through the 21st century and beyond is not to die. I think that's more likely to work than cryonics, but they're not mutually exclusive. So, cool. So, yeah, anyway, so today there are around 500 people stored in vats around the world, around two-thirds of them in the US, and the majority of them are two places, which is Alcor and the Cryonics Institute. I mean...

Yeah, I mean, I think we're touching on this a little bit, but is it actually kosher? Does this stuff work? Is there solid science behind it? There is absolutely no scientific evidence that this would work. So I don't want to get anyone's hopes up from the start. I just want to be very clear. If people are starting to get ideas already, this probably isn't going to work. And most people involved in it, actually, they sort of acknowledge that.

they know it's only a tiny chance but their argument is i'd rather take that tiny chance that i'll be reanimated in the future rather than be buried or cremated and have zero chance um so yeah there's no there's no evidence that when you freeze the bodies they're preserved properly and there's definitely no evidence that we'll ever be able to reanimate anybody in the future right okay well that's that's good news that we can all take home after listening to the podcast um

So anyway, so let's take this back a few decades. And that's before the Russians and the Italian mobster and the stolen heads and way, way more. Besides, we're going to go back to 1932. And that's when I guess a baby called Robert Nelson is born in Boston, Massachusetts. Now, I don't know if he was called Bob as a baby, but young Robert's life is pretty tragic from the off.

His mother is an alcoholic and his father, Elvin, leaves before he's even born. Robert's stepfather is actually a guy named John Fats Buccelli. And as you might guess from the name, he is no stranger to crime. In fact, in 1950, Fats takes part in probably the most infamous robbery in American history. That's the so-called Great Brinks Robbery at the Brinks Private Security Building on the north side of Boston. God, I hate the word Brinks.

The newspapers had a field day. Some call it the perfect crime. I was the crime of the century or the fabulous Brinks robbery, which I suppose it was all of those things. Right. But it was pretty nuts. And it goes a little something like this.

Just before 7.30pm on January 17, 1950, a group of armed masked men burst out of the Brinks building, dragging sacks containing almost $3 million in cash, checks, money orders and other notes. And that's about 32 mil today, or like one city apartment or 10 avocado toasts.

When the cops arrived soon after, there were almost no clues. According to witnesses, between five and seven men had entered the building. I'm guessing that's six then. All wearing navy peacoats, gloves and chauffeur's caps. Their faces had been covered with Halloween masks, although in truth, they actually look a bit more like sex dolls, which is even more disturbing.

Anyway, these dolls have opened three or four locked doors to reach the building's second floor, and when they have, they force five employees onto their bellies at gunpoint, tie their hands, and put duct tape over their mouths. Now this could have all gone wrong when a garage attendant buzzes into the building and the gang is ready to mess him up, but when they see him walk away, apparently unaware anything is going on, they just let him leave.

So this is the biggest armed robbery ever at the time, and the gang members are kind of ingenious. They agree not to spend a dime of the cash for the next six years to avoid detection, and then split it up, leaving it at a depot in town. And they even hire mobsters to watch that depot for 18 full months. But these are career criminals, and one man's stupidity brings the whole thing crashing down.

Joseph Specks O'Keefe leaves his loop with another one of the group while he goes behind bars for a separate crime altogether. And then he writes a bunch of letters behind bars, threatening other gang members if they run off with the cash, then demanding money in the letters, and then, and this is music to the cop's ears, suggesting he might even talk.

When Specs gets out of prison, the gang ringleader, Fats Pino, sends a hitman to whack him. But when the assassin fires a machine gun at Specs in the Dorchester suburb of Boston, he only causes the guy minor wounds. And that is a big, big mistake.

Specs then runs straight to the feds and testifies against his Brinks co-conspirators. All eight are caught, and two die before they're even tried, although only 58 grand of the 2.7 million they took is ever recovered. And that 58 grand? It came from a false wall in the office of a contracting business run by Edward Wimpy Bennett, and yes, Fats Buccelli.

Actually though, because the authorities never find the mother load from the heist, both men cop pretty short sentences. Only, that's not quite it for Fats. Months after his release, he's shot in the back of the head and killed.

do we actually know who killed him at all uh i don't think we do no um i don't think that was ever discovered but um yeah you might like uh one thing worth noting about this case is that i think partially um inspired uh some of the scenes from goodfathers i think um with that whole heist when they start whacking everyone afterwards um in part yeah okay well

Bob Nelson, I'm going to call him Bob. I don't know if he's going by Bob by the time he's 18. When do you start going by Bob? It feels like that's like a 40 and up. I feel like it's a rite of passage, right? I think in Boston, you have to pick when you're 18. Yeah. Well, who gets wimpy? Shit. So Bob Nelson is 18 at the time that they all get caught for this.

And he says that his stepfather's death leaves him, quote, devastated but not surprised, but also that he felt strangely freed from his path, which is ever so slightly messianic. Anyway, the path he takes is pretty odd by all accounts. He gets deep into the work of a guy named Robert Ettinger, who writes a 1962 book called The Prospect of Immortality, which says that a person could be frozen now and thawed out centuries ahead.

Yeah, interestingly, that book, actually, if you read it and you can still find it, that gets really dark really quickly. So Ettinger discussed freezing everyone prior to birth and then essentially removing the need for childbirth. And then he said that we should only heat up the ones who didn't have certain diseases. So it's kind of got echoes of Silicon Valley today. You have this kind of utopian future, which quickly turns into like a eugenics inspired dystopia. Yeah.

You're only like a sort of, it's sort of like a Kevin Bacon rule, right? You're only ever six steps away from phrenology in Silicon Valley. Yeah, exactly.

So this book, so yeah, it's like literally God level shit. I mean, whether you believe that that God is particularly good or not, uh, living forever and, and, and so on. And the young Bob, he is well into it. In 1967, he freezes the body of 73 year old James Bedford, a psychologist who is the first person on earth to be cryogenically frozen. Um, is he still around? Is he still, he's not with us, but is he with us? I don't know.

I mean, he's still around. His body is with Alcor, which is the biggest cryonics company in the world. So basically after he was frozen by Bob, he ended up going on this sort of tour of places that would let you store a frozen body. And every now and then a sort of insurance company would call up and ask why the company had a frozen body on the premises and he'd get turfed out.

And then he was lost, actually, for quite a while. So the crime industry, despite him being the first person ever frozen, and despite obviously him being dead and frozen, managed to lose him. And he eventually turned up. His family had been looking after him for a long time. And so a couple of people went on this sort of

uh mission to find james bedford and he was brought back to alcoa which is where he is now um they did actually open him up and he didn't look like he was in a very good state to be honest um someone had squashed his nose as they put him in or something um and he hadn't been preserved very well i i mean this is objectively funny but yeah i guess it's i guess it's sad that he's had his body smashed to pieces but i mean like so so bob

like the, basically the criminal or, or the kind of escapade side of his life doesn't end with his stepfather. Right. I mean, he's got a pretty torn rep in the, in the cryonics community. Like, um, I got a bit from your book, which says the opinion on Nelson varied within the community. Some felt he did the best he could with the resources he had while others labeled him a con artist and a fraudster. Um,

Where do you come down on that side of things? Oh, absolutely a fraudster. So he obviously, he didn't like his stepdad, but I think he probably learned a few lessons from him. So for example, he sort of walked into his first meeting about Chronix with like-minded people and he came out as they'd elected him a leader, despite having no, he was a TV repairman at the time. So he obviously like had the ability to sort of influence people.

So after he froze James Bedford, he ended up freezing a bunch of other people. Some he knew and some he didn't. They all sort of paid him. They gave him money for him to basically take care of their bodies forever. And so that money sort of went missing. Presumably he spent it on himself. He apparently went on a lot of holidays and he eventually couldn't afford to keep him frozen. So to cut a long story short, he...

He basically took all these bodies. He started cramming them into cylinders so they were all squished together so he could fit more people in. And then he rented out an underground crypt in California, put them in there and then occasionally top them up with everything they need to stay frozen. And then he spent the money. When the money ran out, he just left them to decompose.

So he, he wrote, he actually wrote a book about this. He sounded very sorry in the book, but I think that was a loss of self-promotion more than anything else. So when the families of the dead came and found out what had happened to their relatives who are now just, you know,

in these sort of metal these sort of cylinders crammed together and and very warm um and rotted um they sued him and obviously they won uh so that was called the chatsworth disaster uh it's named after the cemetery where the crypt was and uh yeah it was the first sort of infamous incident in uh in cryonics history and yeah it kind of just moved on from there really it was a

Did he kind of face any criminal charges at that point then? No, he was just sued. He didn't have any criminal charges because he'd managed to get around sort of storing bodies in a weird way by renting out the crypt, essentially. So technically they were underground and buried. Yeah.

But no, he didn't have any criminal charges and he carried on. So he didn't actually freeze any more people, but he did sort of keep in touch with the crime industry. And when he did die, eventually he was actually frozen. So they still let him be frozen.

um and the did they smash his nose in as well then yeah hopefully um so we just punched him on the way in um so some people within chronic thought he you know said he's a massive fraud he's dangerous and others just said oh he was a pioneer and he did what he could with uh with whatever he had um but he definitely tried to take down a few people with him like people like his secretary who he made

head of the cryonics chapter just before all the shit hit the fan basically so he tried to pin it all on her a little bit yeah just all around not a nice person and not exactly the person you want to sort of

Port as your poster boy for cryonics. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, you've got a gentleman called Mike Darwin who we'll go into in a minute, but he says, or you say in the book that he has nothing but scorn for, for Nelson's actions. And Mike Darwin told you that Nelson was a sociopath and claimed that he was involved with the Boston mafia and had no remorse for those he hurt. So,

I think that's pretty unequivocal. But Mike Darwin, I guess, takes us to another chapter of your book. So tell me how we get from Bob, Bobby, Robert Nelson to The Curious Case of the Missing Frozen Head.

Yeah. So this is one of my favorite chapters to work on because it was just so weird. So Mike Doran was a slightly strange kid. He walked in on his cousin who had died from, I think it was complication of diabetes. And she'd basically been decomposed for like a week. And his mom told him, oh, why don't you go and look for your cousin? And he walked in and she was like dead and seriously decomposed.

And it messed him up quite a bit. So he decided he would just wage war against death, essentially.

So he got into cryonics really early when he was like 12, 13. And when he was about 16, he went to California and met Bob Nelson, who at that point was like the, you know, the darling of cryonics. And he instantly kind of saw through him and he said he actually called up some of the suppliers that worked with him. And one of the guys who'd welded shut one of the cylinders after he crammed the bodies in.

who told him that he could smell the burning hair as he did it, which is pretty grim. And so Mike Darwin saw all that happened, decided, okay, I'm going to take cryonics into a new future. I'm going to make it a ton more professional. I'm going to make it really scientific and we're going to do things properly.

um which he kind of did for a long time um and then there was one case that kind of tripped him up um and that's probably putting it a bit lightly um so essentially uh

A guy called, a woman called Dora Kent was brought to the facility where Mike Doran worked and he was a CEO. And this is the company now is Alcor, which is still going today and is the biggest cryonics company. It's the one, is it in Arizona? It's in Arizona, yeah. Back then it was in LA. So they bring Mrs. Kent into the facility. She's dying. She's got like pneumonia. She's really old. She's about to die.

so they decide there's a thing with chronics like the quicker you do the procedure after death the better it is so they decide okay we're going to bring her in before she dies then we're going to we're going to freeze her as soon as she dies and we'll have like the best results ever um so they so they do that they get in um she dies uh they cut off her head

because she's only signed up for her head to be frozen, not her whole body. So they cut off her head, freeze the head, and then a few hours later, they rest. They're like, okay, that was a tough one, but we did it. And then at some point, someone realizes that they didn't have a physician present to declare her dead. So they send off the death certificate and

prepare to sort of face whatever comes out of them and unfortunately someone spots that she died in an industrial facility on the death certificate and they flag it up as unusual because it's not somewhere where because it is unusual

um so that alerts the coroner and the coroner is a real piece of shit and decides this is the best thing ever so um the coroner um basically was the guy who dug up liberace to prove that he died of aids um like a really nasty piece of work um

And so he decides he's going to, so he goes public with this. He starts calling this cryonics company like a bunch of cultists and they're killing old people. So he basically contended that they cut off her head before she was dead.

And he made up a lot of stuff as well, saying that they found satanic material in the company. So essentially, so Doran knows at this point that the police are probably going to get involved. So he has a choice. And so does Alcor. The coroner is demanding the head for postmortem. And if the head gets put in a postmortem, then puts through a postmortem, then that's it. There's no chance of it being reanimated.

So he has to decide if he's going to hand over the head or not. And Doran obviously decides, no, he's not going to do that to poor Mrs. Kent. And he's not going to ruin her chances of being reanimated as a, as an 80 something year old woman in 200 years time with no body. So he hides it and he wouldn't tell me where he hid the head, which is really annoying. Even now he won't tell me. He did say that the head's still around.

I believe the head's still in the still alcohol. Yeah. So he he he did say that they hid it with someone who had nothing to do with cryonics. So I don't know how that conversation went, but he managed to convince them. So basically the next day the police show up, they raid the facility and they're looking for the head.

And at this point, they're kind of chilled out about it because they've given them the body, but they're not going to hand it over the head. There is a moment where they realize that they also chopped off the hands and they forgot to hand those over with the body. So there was a little bit of panic over that. But the police come in, they're looking for the head. They can't find it. They go absolutely mental and arrest everyone there. So they're dragged into questioning everything.

And this like oddball group of characters just get pulled into the police station. The police are taking the piss out of them. They're saying, but one of them is getting his fingerprints taken. And he says, Oh, do you think you'll have the same fingerprints when you reanimate in the future? And the guy's like, yes, yes, I think I do. Um, and the police is all like roll around laughing apparently. Um,

And then they go to Mike Darwin and get really heavy with him. They say, if you give us the head, then you'll still have a salvageable business here. They also threatened to completely ruin the reputation of his business partner, a guy called Jerry Leaf, who was working at the University at UCLA.

And they tell him to phone Jerry Leaf and tell him to get over there. So he calls, he calls Jerry and he says, you know, we've been raided. You need to come down to the police station. Jerry's like, yep, absolutely. I'll be right there. And Jerry never shows up. Obviously Jerry's not done. Jerry can see exactly what's happening. So he drives off.

He goes to a place where this cryonics company, for reasons I have no idea, they have a stash of gold Krugerrands. Whoa, okay. That's completely legit. So he goes and picks up the gold Krugerrands. He goes to a constitutional lawyer, like slams him on the table and says, we need your services. We're in trouble here. Yeah.

And this lawyer didn't question it, obviously. He just goes straight in. Yeah, I'll do this. Probably just saw the headlines. And he goes to... So he immediately files for a restraining order against the coroner's office. So a court case is set. In the meantime, everyone's let go from the prison. So everyone's released. And so this restraining order, court case, this bizarre court case kicks off. And it's like basically...

the lawyers saying you know how dare you you know mess around with this woman's head she's got a right to do whatever she wants with her body after she dies she signed up for this um like she's he really laid it on thick he was like you're gonna put this woman's head through a blender just because you think maybe she broke the rules and it's like okay i can only imagine what's the yeah what the coroner's office was thinking at this point um

but uh so essentially the judge possibly because the coroner was such an unpleasant person ruled in favor of alcohol um so he gave them a temporary restraining order and then he gave them like a permanent restraining order and at that point they'd won they could

run out into the streets and celebrate. And it was like the first major victory for cryonics. And then the guy, so the son of Dora Kent was interviewed outside and he was a sort of big fan of cryonics himself.

and he's interviewed outside the courthouse and he said well it's finally people have recognized that cryonics is not just a crazy thing um and all it took was the death of my mother so he's very he's very proud um so yeah that was another thing of her head yeah just a potential mashing up um

So, yeah, it was another one of those like chapters in cryonics history where you think that everything's going to go wrong. It was kind of like the Chatsworth disaster part two, but this time they sort of got away with it. And there's no indication that they did chop her head off before she was dead. But also, you know, there's no way of telling really if they jump the gun. Yeah, it was a major victory for cryonics and really set up

everything for the cryonics companies of today and like from that Alco then became like the biggest cryonics company in the world is it like is it kind of conspiracy theory shaped then cryonics a lot of it because it feels the whole idea of it feels like a cult to the extent that people are doing these insane things in the hope of what maybe

I mean, do they genuinely think they're going to live forever or what? I mean, what's or is it just kind of a sort of mad, egotistic sort of run for a lot of these people? It seems like there's a lot of sort of outsized characters in this world. Yeah, it's so I think the people that want to get it done are usually it's just like a long shot. And a lot of them talk about it like it's plan B. So they think that they're going to do loads of other things which are going to keep them living forever.

Um, but just in case they get hit by a car or, you know, an anvil falls on their head, then they're going to get frozen if that happens. Um, and they're like really calculated about it. So if you get, um, so one person told me, you know, Oh, if I knew I was going to die, I'd, I'd immediately move to Arizona. If he was given like a diagnosis that he was going to die, he'd move to Arizona. So he's closer to the facility when he dies.

And he said like, if he had Alzheimer's or something that was ruining his brain, then he'd immediately kill himself. And then right outside alcohol, essentially. Um, so yeah, they can, they have a lot of people sort of just running up to their front door and shooting themselves. Well, presume where do they shoot themselves? Presumably in the heart. Then they're not going to sort of, yeah. Yeah. You're not going to ruin your head. Um, I'm not sure. Uh,

there have been talks of doing it in in um the netherlands so you can uh link up with the um with the uh euthanasia industry so um right yeah this does sound like we're getting into organized crime territory here

So you could, you could euthanize someone and then immediately freeze them. It's the sort of conveyor belt of death and reanimation. It's almost like that Futurama episode where, you know, you put a coin in to kill yourself. Yeah.

It's really weird stuff. But yeah, the people that run it, it attracts a lot of big egos. And you know what happens when you have big egos and weird projects. It's like, it just attracts people that want to make money or want to get power out of it. So a lot of fraudsters are unfortunately attracted to it. And you mentioned this is a plan B. So the plan A, is that presumably the guys who want to hack their...

their bodies or like take millions of presumably a lot of them bogus supplements and things like that you read a lot of stories in sort of tech magazines about this kind of thing yeah that's it exactly so they think that they're gonna they think they just need to live for another 30 years because at that point like technology will will be developed which will let them live forever like um weird stuff like nanotechnology like nanobots in the blood things like that

So they do anything they can to live a little bit longer. It's kind of weird. You go to these events and it's full of these, like, they're all white guys. They're all very gaunt because they do intermittent fasting. And they've all got, like, dyed hair as well. And they're desperately trying to look younger than they are. So it's kind of like... I'm just thinking of carrot pot now. Yeah.

It's a little bit like that Steve Buscemi meme, you know, and it's like, how are you doing, fellow kids? It's a lot of that, basically. Yeah, I'm suddenly not that worried about the impending nuclear war that we're about to have. Maybe just to, like, wipe the smile off their faces might be worth it.

Yeah, but imagine if the frozen people were the only ones that survived and that was our legacy. It's just Dora Ken's head and her hands. Dora Ken's head just scuttling around a nuclear holocaust. It would be her and the cockroaches. And on that note, I mean, how many stories as you were reporting out of this book did you find that were actually to do with crime? I mean, so much of it is dusting quackery or...

or fraud or stuff like that. I mean, is there anyone that's not sort of crime adjacent in this world? Yeah, I think there are. There are people with like good intentions, but it's in that sort of really sweet spot of like,

the science is improving to help us cure certain diseases and help us address aging but it's not improved enough so that we can do what these people want which is radically extend your lives it's like in that gap that's where you have all the common and the fraudsters um operating so i mean a ton of it is stuff that um you see quite a bit of is the stem cell companies um

There's so many dodgy people in that. It's just horrible. So one of the things these stem cell companies do is they promise a miracle cure. So it's either you'll live longer or we'll cure your arthritis or we'll do this and that. And none of it is proven that it works. And all of it is based offshore. None of it's in America. It's based in countries which really lacks medical regulations so they can get away with it.

um and then what they usually do is they'll get like an athlete or a military veteran um like some kind of more of a war hero the bad and they'll get them they'll give them treatments get them testimonials on the website or even better get them to tell them how good it is to their fellow veterans who then come in for these really expensive um procedures which

The only reason they seem to work is mostly due to like the placebo effect because you're so desperate for it to work that it actually seems to. And then sometimes it just absolutely cripples them later on. It can have like really bad effects.

bad reactions to it. So that's one of them. But pretty much name any fringe science and that's someone trying to make money out of it. Yeah, there's the guy that does bulletproof coffee, Dave Asprey. He turned up to one of these events and told everyone to take ozone gas rectally. So essentially what he's saying is take the gas that's in the atmosphere that protects us from the sun

take a bit of that and that is uh that can be lethal if you inhale it and it's also corrosive and the fda said it should not be used in any way in any health um situation um so he said take that and blow it up your ass um and he wasn't making money out of that so he was just doing it so

It's yeah, it's full of it. Just name any health scam and it's, and it's that because like, what's the ultimate thing you can offer someone? It's like, yeah, I'll make you live forever. We've been doing this for a very long time. Like humans have been conning other humans with immortality scams. Like the, the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know, the first ever recorded story is, is a cautionary tale about people wanting to live forever, but we don't seem to learn. Unfortunately, we still go for them. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ever going to. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I'll fall prey to it at some point if I'm there. I don't know if I'm going to like walk into someone's facility and ask them to cut my head off and then stick me in a metal tube or anything. But maybe I'll stick. Maybe I'll blow, I don't know, laughing gas up my arsehole at some point. Maybe that's going to help me live forever.

Yeah. That's definitely less of a sacrifice, but yeah, you know, if you've had a few beers and you walk past and you saw a sign, then maybe you just give it a go. But it probably could make you a lot of money here in Berlin outside the clubs. Actually, it's probably a decent idea to make a few quid. Um,

So I guess at this point we get to the story that we began with, although I should mention I did mention Seth MacFarlane at the top and I realize I haven't mentioned him yet, but he's quite keen to cryogenically freeze himself, apparently, which I was quite surprised by. But anyway, yeah. Larry King, apparently. Larry King is another one.

Wait, Larry King's been dead. I mean, Larry King has been dead since the times of Pharaoh, but like he wanted to cryogenically freeze himself. Apparently he was massively into it, wanted to cryogenically freeze himself. But no one would tell me after he died if they had, because they'll never tell you who's been cryogenically frozen. So he might be frozen right now. I thought it was just that you couldn't never really know if Larry King was dead or not. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, another one, this one's a bit more dark, is Jeffrey Epstein, massive fan of cryonics. And he wanted to freeze his head, but he also wanted to have his penis frozen. Okay. There's a few scenarios I could think that would sort of be slightly more justified in that scenario. So now we've got like a nuclear holocaust, everyone's dead, and it's just Dora Kent and Jeffrey Epstein.

and Jeffrey Epstein's penis. And somehow they've got to keep the human race going. Anyway, so we'll go back to Cryo Russ because I guess Cryo Russ is a pretty nutty story. Well, that's the thing. Cryo Russ is like Bargain Basement, right?

yeah uh yeah so cryo russ is like the worst the cheapest the most budget option you can go for um right so yeah we did a we did an episode about uh the gangs of toliatti and the lada factory and sort of how russian cars were were the laughingstock of the world so that would seem to segue neatly into cryo russ which seems like it pretty much does a similar thing uh

So apparently it's frozen 78 people and 45 pets since the early 2000s. Did you, I mean, presumably these are dogs and cats mostly, but is there anything a bit weirder? I think there is a chinchilla, I believe. There was one other weird animal, I can't remember, maybe it was like a parrot or something.

I'm not sure. But yeah, people get their pets frozen quite often. It's reasonably cheap to get your pet frozen. Yeah. So frankly, no one gives a toss if they like it works or not anyway. So yeah. Yeah. I think Udalova herself, she, she had at least two dogs frozen. Right. Yeah. So also her mother. Okay.

um you've met her what's she like uh she's weird um as you can imagine and it was one of the most uncomfortable meetings and interviews of my life um so and i presume she's not listening because i'm genuinely worried she'll come after me um so i i i went to moscow to meet her and and danilla the ex and um she put off the meeting for ages and then eventually we on the last day i was there she agreed to meet so i walked in

And she was wearing this sort of dress, this like long flowing dress. And she was on the phone when I walked in and she carried on talking, but she pointed to the back of her dress to like the fastener at the top of the dress. And I immediately thought, you know, what have I walked in on? What is she expecting here? And so I didn't really do anything. She kept pointing at the top of the dress. And then eventually I saw that her hair was caught in it.

So I reluctantly sort of tried to get her hair out of the clasp of her dress without making the dress fall off, obviously. This happens a lot in your parade, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. This is actually the fourth time this has happened.

And so it didn't come out. I couldn't get it off. So she, still on the phone, she just hands me a pair of scissors and tells me to cut her hair off. So I just cut a lock of her hair, which I didn't keep. And yeah, that was the start of the interview. And from there, it was just kind of, so she had her own translator. She doesn't speak great English, but she had her own translator.

um and the translator was i found out later when i translated the interview she was giving me the sort of glossy version of what udalova was telling me and udalova actually spent a large amount of time calling me an american capitalist um saying that she would throw pins at the article when it came out um and and yeah essentially just a lot of hatred um and i was just sat there smiling because i didn't understand what she was saying until i eventually got it translated afterwards um

So, yeah, a very, very difficult person, I would say, is the best description. Yeah. And so Danila Medvedev, I mean, also obviously weird because he was basically married to this woman for a very long time and they set up a cry on his company. So he's not like...

He's not exactly the level-headed one, right? He's also completely batshit. Yeah, well, he's a lot... He's like the acceptable face, I guess. I guess he didn't say he wanted to throw pins...

at your story so yeah yeah yeah so that like he was already off to a good start because he didn't do that but um but he was very welcoming and it helps that he speaks like perfect english and uh so he was like showing me around everywhere telling me um who to talk to and things um very helpful but um so so to characterize them udalova is the one that gets stuff done and medvedev is kind of the dreamer

um and so his everyone criticizes him saying that you never really get stuff done and she knows how to get stuff done um and when you you know you learn who she partnered with then you're not really surprised um that she does have a can-do attitude stuff done tell us about that then there's a certain guy i mean we should kind of do a run-up with the company right so in in 2015

the company's struggling a bit. So it signs a deal with a guy named Filippo Polistena. Um, who's he? He's pretty interesting. Yeah. So he is like, uh, an Italian funeral industry mogul. And I don't want to be, uh, you know, stereotypical, but if someone told me that they were head of the Italian, at the peak of the Italian funeral industry, I would immediately worry slightly. Um, so, um,

So Udalova basically, originally Medvedev was the CEO of the company. And then they both kind of agreed that he was doing a terrible job. And so Udalova took over and then she launched like these weird schemes. One of them was like a cryo token, which was almost definitely a scam.

But then one of them was to partner with this guy in Italy who was essentially just bringing customers from Italy to be frozen.

And obviously, for legal reasons, I'm not going to speculate on who the customers were that were coming from this guy. So essentially Medvedev and his crowd, because when, so Medvedev and Udalova were married and they broke up because Medvedev had an affair. So when that happened, the Kryonix industry in Russia split into two factions and they started going at each other.

One of the accusations they threw at Udalova was that she was in bed with this guy, Polistena, not literally in bed, and that he was part of the Italian mafia. So that was obviously refuted strongly. But then he got arrested in this crackdown. So he was accused of being part of the Indrangetta family. And we know that he'd been

moving bodies essentially from Italy to Moscow to be frozen. So at this point, you don't know who's in the cryonics company, like who's been frozen there. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that anyone was there improperly or that it was anybody linked to the Indrangetta family. But people did make those claims anyway. Right.

I mean, I mean, this, I mean, he gets rounded. This is not just like a knock on the door, right? He gets rounded up in a, in a, in a raid. That's like the second biggest raid on the Italian mafia in history. There's like two and a half thousand Italian cops in Calabria and they arrest over 300 people. Um, so I mean, you know, I don't want to speculate either. Um,

But that's the context to how this guy gets sort of, you know, rounded up by the cops. Yeah. And I put this to Udalova, who obviously said it was a travesty of justice. He was released and he was released and the charges were dropped.

And, you know, he's an upstanding Italian businessman. And, you know, Medvedev and his crew had been unfairly, you know, labeling him as a mafia guy. And Medvedev said, well, said almost exactly what you said. He said, well, there were 300 people arrested. It was a huge operation. It wasn't like they were just going door to door and asking if, you know, you're part of the Italian mafia. They obviously targeted him for a reason.

A murderer actually told me and I couldn't verify it that he'd been arrested before with the same crowd. OK, so it's hard to catch a break as an Italian funeral mogul these days. To be fair, I would I would instantly if I was looking for a mafia member, I'd probably just go down to the funeral industry mogul. Just ask him what's going on.

um yeah so so all war war broke out basically and that's when people started to steal dead people right so that is kind of where we had it at the top of the show where there's well i mean i think i mentioned that in the opening story he's going in and and taking stuff or he's going in and sort of occupying their facility but it goes back and forth

a while right it goes back and forth a few times with people nicking stuff and and breaking into facilities and whatnot yeah there's several grades so it starts with um so udalova is the ceo medvedev after being sort of second in command and being basically left out a bit decides udalova is doing a terrible job i'm going to come back and take control

So he gets, so there's a board of directors of like basically co-owners. One of those people is Mike Doran from the previous story, Mike Doran, who is Dora Kent. So Medvedev knows he just needs enough votes to vote her out of her role as CEO. So he gathers the votes. He gets Doran's vote as a proxy vote, but the rest of the people are there. And so they have this really awkward meeting

in which she's voted out and then they think, okay, we've won. Noodleover says, no, you've not won because I changed the laws of the company without you realizing to say this whole meeting is illegal. And also, by the way, I took a van and I stole all of the frozen heads from the company. So she basically just took all of the frozen heads out of there as a way to say, you're not taking control of the company because I've got the heads and you'll never find them.

Um, so yeah, that's the first raid is the heads. So the heads go to, it's crucial to like keep track of this cause they go back and forth quite a lot. Um, there's heads and there's body and there's full bodies and the heads are easier to transport obviously because they're just smaller. The body's really hard to transport cause they're in these gigantic bats. Um, so she just takes the heads and says, okay, I'm still CEO because I've got the heads.

So then the pandemic kicks in and it's a bit weird. Medvedev's kind of brewing in the background to figure out what to do next. And then, like you said at the start, he decides to go in and take control of the facility that has the bodies.

So he goes in with, he gets rid of Udalova's security, tells him to get lost. And then they celebrate taking control of the bodies. So at this point, Medvedev has the bodies and Udalova has the heads. And the key thing to understand here, this is, and it's ridiculously complicated, is Medvedev has the,

So in amongst the heads is Medvedev's grandmother and in amongst the bodies is Udalova's mother. So they each have the other one's loved one in their possession in that current arrangement. And there's no suggestion that they could mix them up and make some kind of like a weird family hybrid.

Yeah, that would have been, that would have been the solution. Clearly every, everyone would have come out of that a winner. Um, but no, uh, so then Udalova decides, so Udalova then makes several attempts to take the bodies. Um, she shows up one time and the police, um, basically chase her off and tell her to get lost. Um,

And even though she got the bodies onto a truck and there was liquid nitrogen pouring out of the cylinders, the cops sort of chased her down and sent her back. And then, like you said at the start, she comes back and she takes the bodies. And that's when you think,

okay um udala over now has the bodies and she has the heads and she has this new facility which she's built and she takes uh the bodies to this new facility which is nothing but like an abandoned piece of ground with a with a building with no doors or windows um but she leaves in there but it's not quite over because medvedev decided finally he's gonna make a move

uh and before she took the bodies he'd gone up to a new facility and found the heads so he stole the heads back um so essentially they've just swapped um they've swapped body parts uh she has now has the bodies he has the heads they each have their loved one their relative um but it's oh my god

but now that's where we are now that's that's where we've left it yeah that's essentially where we are now with it going through the courts um there's various people they're suing each other they're counter suing um there was this the threat made against danila because he had the heads um uh where the two guys showed up his door um udalova says that she was um she had um a threat against her life at one point um there's there's lots of it's just like an all-out um

all out conflict, I guess. Is anything going on in Russia right now? I've not really been watching the news lately. I think there's, there's another war somewhere, but it's utterly bizarre because like they're going at each other all the time. Like the, the Russian army is like building up on the Ukrainian border. And it's just weird that they think that all of this is, is to save people's lives. And all they're doing is like,

carting these bodies and heads off between each other, playing tug of war with them. Couldn't be anything further than like this, uh, immortal, immortalist utopia that they, that they like to make in the future. Well, I mean, that's, uh, as farcical note as any to sort of end the show on. I mean, you probably been asked this question about a billion times since you started working on the book, but I mean, is there anything that you've seen, uh,

Out of all of this stuff that's made you think that we might live forever or might we get the sweet release of death at some point? I think on balance, yes, death is coming for us all. I mean, the question, that was my question going into it. And then the question as the story unfolded and as the pandemic started and war and everything else broke out and my reporting went through all of that.

the question became, do we, would we want to live forever? Um, and what kind of world have we got, um, that would, you know, that would warrant living forever in it. Like maybe we need to work on, on, on the world a little bit more before we decide we're going to live forever in it. Um, yeah, so that was my takeaway. Um, probably death is a good thing on balance. And we'll end it there, mate. Um, when, when's the book coming out?

So in America, it is out on the 19th, which is tomorrow, April 19th. Oh, okay. So yeah, and in the UK, it's May 5th.

So you have to wait a little bit longer than the UK. And I hope you don't die in the meantime, because that would be terrible. I was going to say, yeah, that would be ironic and terrible and terrible. Yeah. Well, Peter Wolf, thanks ever so much for your time, mate. Yeah, lots of crime and fraudsters and scammers and all that kind of stuff that our listeners love. So I'm sure everyone enjoyed it. And yeah, maybe we can catch up again at some point when you're on to some other sort of weird and wonderful stuff.

uh topic yeah sounds good thanks so much for having me on mate all right cheers mate