Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This is the second of three episodes of Unlicensed Season 3 we will be putting on this feed. I've said a lot of nice things about this show, I love it with my whole heart, and I hope you listen to it with a free trial on Audible. Okay, here you go. I mean, yeah, probably I have it. Bitch, I'm a hoarder. Wait, why do you need files from 2005? Are they just now investigating the- Wait, wait, wait, wait, Ellen, you're being dramatic. You are dramatic. Okay. Okay.
You are convinced? And I will not deny your truth. I need to clean out my closet anyway and... Oh, Jesus Maria and Jojo, that's terrifying. Are you okay? Well, why didn't you call me? Sooner, I mean. Fine. I'll dig out what I have and burn it. What? And give it to whom? Who are they? What are you getting me involved in, Ellen? You like drama, not me. Unlicensed. Episode 2. Junk Drawer.
There are a variety of models for understanding how we store memories. Like boxes in a warehouse, or a palace of many rooms. Perhaps your memories are more of an uncharted forest, or a misty swamp. But no matter how well organized the visualization of our memory is, things still get lost.
They're not gone. Memories are never gone. Only hidden. The face of a loved one long since passed. An important document that you know you put in a special place, but you forgot which place because it's not where normal files should go. A set of car keys you were just holding, dammit. Yet, you still know the phone number of the house you grew up in. 555-6223.
You remember the birthday of a boy you dated for one month in college. Tobias, April 22nd, 1985. You even know the name of the actor who starred in CBS's short-lived The Law is the Law back in 1994, Miles Fletcher. You remember everything. It's all in there. Maybe in a box or in a palace room or sunken in the misty swamp. But it's there.
in the junk drawer of your mind. And when you need a memory badly, you sometimes have to empty the whole thing out and search through the pile. Though, often, the memory we most want is sitting right on top, in plain sight, just like your keys.
We learned yesterday that two Eagle Rock residents who were ransacked within days of each other were also former employees of Precision Audio Works in Long Beach back in the late 1990s. One of those residents, Caroline, hired us to do some legwork on the potential targeting of former employees of the now-defunct stereo manufacturer.
Caroline thought if we could track down other employees, we could see if they'd been broken into as well. See if we could figure out what this mystery ransacker is after. Then she handed us a company directory to get us started. It's a 20-year-old list, so most of the numbers were landlines that have been disconnected or reassigned. After about a dozen calls, we do reach one of the former employees, a woman named Ellen Rahimi who lives in Torrance.
She didn't have a break-in. Or at least she doesn't think she did. A few weeks ago, she got home from running errands and found a pile of boxes all over the floor of her garage. Papers everywhere. The shelf they had been sitting on had collapsed, so she thought nothing of it, just a strange accident. But now that we are mentioning the break-ins, she's worried.
"Were the papers important?" I ask. But instead of answering, Ellen immediately launches into shit-talking her ex-boss, Neil Bacardi,
Like, he was hands-off in the sense that we rarely saw him, she said, but the ultimate micromanager. He'd send a critical memo addressed to one employee about something like lunch breaks or phone etiquette, but he'd have the memo delivered to every single staff member. Ellen cringes as she relates this memory.
My friend Wade, who worked in operations, got a memo, I mean, we all got the memo, about keeping personal phone calls to a minimum and that everyone could hear him talking to his mother. It was humiliating. Oh, in Neil's phrases, she says he loved the word confront, but as a noun, not a verb. Like, we need to have a confront about dirty dishes in the break room.
Fucking love that phrase, Ellen says. Not even passive-aggressive, just aggressive-aggressive. Was he dangerous? I ask Ellen. But she's looking at Molly, who's taking a drink of water from her 15-year-old Nalgene bottle. I hope you wash that bottle daily, she tells Molly. Good way to get mouth sores.
I ignore her comment and tell Ellen we've managed to verify most of the people on the list, but there's one name, Melissa Sterling, that we can't find. Does Ellen remember Melissa? Ellen pauses and thinks. It doesn't look like she's trying to remember something. It looks like she's trying to frame something she does remember. Finally, she says, "Melissa Sterling is long gone.
"Gone where?" I say. "I don't know," she says. "Just gone." Very useful. Great. I ask her if she has thoughts on why someone would be breaking into former Precision Audio employee homes. Are they looking for someone? Some thing? Is it intimidation? Like they're sending a message? Ellen says, "I don't know." I press a little harder.
"Even if you don't know, do you have any wild theories or ideas?" She doesn't say anything, just kind of shrugs. "Is that a yes?" I ask, and she replies, "I think you should be looking for the man who did this, not trying to figure out what he wants." Molly looks exasperated. I can't tell if Alan is hiding something or just annoying. Maybe both.
but I don't want to press her too hard. She's prickly, and we need everyone's cooperation. I want to know more about Melissa Sterling. I know there's something about her that Ellen doesn't want us to know. I don't think she's going to give it up very easily. So I tell her we'd like to reach out to her friend Wade, who worked in operations.
She gives us his number and looks relieved to see us go. Ellen Rahimi calls Max Silver, one of her oldest friends. Since back in college, they've been an unlikely duo. Max, the theater nerd, the flashy dresser, the witty joker. Ellen, the math geek, the queen of neutral-toned clothes, the deadly serious.
They used to do everything together, even got a job at the same stereo manufacturer in Long Beach just after college. They've always gotten on each other's nerves, but love each other dearly, almost like siblings. Ellen and Max have grown apart in the last couple of decades. Sometimes they go months without talking, but whenever they do, it's like old times. Ellen confides to Max that some investigators came poking around
She tells him she's worried. He tells her she's dramatic. She thinks that's rich coming from a professional stripper. She doesn't say that out loud because she doesn't want to hear him snap back. It's burlesque. There's a difference. You'd know if you ever came to my shows. Ellen asks Max if he happened to still have the quote stuff he took when he left their old job in Long Beach. He says, sure.
but with a question mark at the end. "What kind of things did you take?" she asks. "Was it, like, files?" Max says he doesn't remember. She says he might not be safe with that stuff. What did he take? Anyway, maybe she can help him hide it. Where exactly is he storing it? People are looking for something, something serious, she thinks. He rolls his eyes, and while she can't see him, she can feel him do it.
Ellen promises they'll hang out soon, though that promise has failed to materialize the last four times she's offered it. Before he hangs up, he tells her he loves her, even though she's being so extra. But inside, Max is worried too. "Bacardi was a fucking psycho," Wade says. "Hated the guy. But I don't know. I can deal with assholes." Wade Nichols lives in an apartment in Century City,
Top-of-the-line appliances, polished wood floors, a well-appointed terrace that looks unused. He tells us no one's broken into his place, but he's also got cameras everywhere. So let him try. His issue with Precision Audio Works was not that Neil Bacardi was difficult. It's that he drove the company into the ground. Wade worked there under previous ownership, but then they sold the company and Neil showed up.
According to Wade, Neil steered Precision Audio away from what they did well. Neil stopped concentrating on the quality of his stereos and started focusing on no-bid government contracts. "The government doesn't put the same screws to you about delivery that, say, a retail chain will," Wade says.
And it makes sense. If you sell stereo equipment to Circuit City, they need a certain quality, a specific quantity, by a set date. If not, you risk losing their business. But state and municipal projects have dozens of layers of bureaucracy between the legislation, who authorized the funding, and the office that issued the contract.
Precision Audio was over-promising emergency broadcasting communications equipment for EMTs and fire departments and then under-delivering. Not only could they not manufacture enough units in the allotted time, half of the equipment didn't even work. It's like going to a bad restaurant, Wade says. The food's terrible and I didn't get enough of it.
Precision Audio eventually lost their retail contracts with the box stores, leaving their decent quality stereos to gather dust in warehouses, while Bacardi raked in giant checks for work he only had to appear to perform. How did he keep getting these contracts if he never delivered, I ask Wade. It seems like someone in the government, for all their inefficiency, would at least recognize that he's not delivering and stop writing him checks.
Wade doesn't know exactly why, but he seems pretty convinced that the government is just stupid and this all makes sense. I think about the governor, of course, and have a hard time totally disagreeing with Wade.
This morning, I read a news story that the governor is promising a 20% increase in police funding across the country if he's elected president, which is, of course, something a president has zero control over. But politicians just have to promise big things. And if they happen to get their funding, it funnels down through so many agencies who need to spend the money that they get in order to ask for a bigger budget the next year.
So it makes some sense that Neil Bacardi could capitalize on this system. But I still think he must have had a contact in the government feeding him these contracts. There's a thin line between unethical and illegal. It probably just depends on whether or not anyone investigates your actions.
And it's horrifying to think that no one in the state of California cared to look into precision audio, pocketing tax money, and not delivering emergency communications equipment. All of this was 20 years ago. The no-bid contracts are done. What could this have to do with break-ins at homes of former employees? Is someone, maybe Neil Bacardi, looking for something?
Could it be someone from the government looking for dirt on Bacardi? Wade shrugs. "I don't know, man," he says. "I'm not sure the state would want to prosecute him because they'd end up looking worse. They're the ones who gave away their money to an obvious fraud. Plus, like you said, it was 20 years ago," he says. As we leave, Wade adds that knowing how that place was run, how petty Neil Bacardi's memos were,
It's probably a personal vendetta. I wouldn't be surprised if he's looking for something on someone. He says he was a fucking psycho. Max Silver removes his makeup. It was a great show tonight. Small crowd, but they loved him. Though they don't know him as Max Silver. Max's drag name is Sharon Passwords.
And Sharon lip synced, wop, with his best friend, Jamal Sanger. Stage name, Barbara Ganoush. The vibe was electric. The audience ate from Sharon and Barbara's hands. Literally. They fed the crowd dick shaped gummies. It's 2 a.m. and Max has removed the last of Sharon passwords from his face and nails.
He sits at his vanity, exhausted but still buzzing from the show. Behind him in the mirror, he sees his closet, packed too full of costumes and props to ever shut the door all the way. He sighs, thinking he needs to clean that shit out, and then he sees a black trash bag just barely visible in the back corner under all the clothes, shoes, and wigs.
That trash bag has been there for a long time. He hasn't opened it or thought about it in what, 20 years? He doesn't remember exactly what's in it and he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to be dramatic like Ellen.
We're back in Eagle Rock to see Caroline. Since she was the front desk office manager, she would have seen most of Neil Bacardi's correspondence. I thank her for the cup of tea she hands me and ask if she knew what was happening with the no-bid government contracts. She says of course she knew about those deals, but she didn't know the specifics. The less you knew, she says, the better.
I just set up meetings for him, sent his memos out to the staff, and patched phone calls to him. Actually, I usually told callers he was in a meeting. Neil was hardly ever in the office.
"So no one was on to him?" I say. "Did you ever have to field calls or emails from angry government officials wondering where their emergency broadcast equipment was or why it was poorly made?" "Oh, absolutely," she says. Caroline remembers someone from the California Department of General Services calling at least a dozen times. The Bureau of Land Management sent some stern letters. "Yeah."
She said, "They were hounding Neil and he wasn't getting back to them. The worst," she adds, "was a threat from the Federal Contract Compliance Office to file a report on Neil and Precision Audio. I asked if that report was ever filed. Caroline says, 'No, probably not,' because ultimately the whole thing caught up with him anyway and he disappeared. The company dissolved after that."
"So you saw and heard all of this," I say. "You knew everyone who was trying to get a piece of Neil?" Caroline nods, wide-eyed. "We still don't know who is breaking into homes. We think that they're looking for something specific, because they're rifling through drawers and cabinets, but not taking anything. If Caroline was Neil's administrative front, she would have had his calendar, his call logs, his emails, his memos.
Anything he said or did would have gone through her. If someone is trying to get dirt on Neil, Caroline would be their biggest target outside of Neil himself. "Do you still have any of your files, emails, etc. from when you worked at Precision Audio?" I ask Caroline. She says she doesn't. But it's not like she can just write a note to whoever's breaking in explaining that to them.
If they want to harass her again, or even hurt her to get what they want, she's not going to be able to stop them. I think you're right, Molly, Caroline says. I might be the top target for whoever's doing this. We need to find Neil Bacardi. We need to size him up, see if he's being hounded by someone, or if he himself is perpetrating these crimes.
Caroline shakes her head. He's not someone to mess with. I agree, but I also know that we need to be proactive. If we can't understand who's doing this, then we can't understand why, and the violence will continue no matter how many people we warn.
Caroline has no idea what happened to Neil, if he's still in Long Beach or the United States, or even if he's still alive. Until the break-in started happening, she thought she'd long since been free of Neil. She never would have wanted to track him down, and she still doesn't. But Molly and I do. Honestly, what's the worst that could happen? Tina Sterling calls her son. She still sometimes says the name Melissa.
The name she gave him when he was born. It's been 15 years since he changed his name, but it makes him feel like a stranger to her calling him Max Silver instead of Melissa Sterling. The shift from woman to man, from daughter to son, was surprisingly easy for Tina. But she loved the name Melissa. It was the name of her favorite aunt. Max is just, well, just a random name. But...
Tina manages to get through a phone call without deadnaming her son. She's proud of this accomplishment, but annoyed that Max is not coming home this week for Thanksgiving. And he's noncommittal about Christmas plans. Plus, he seems distracted. "What's that noise?" she asks. "Sorry, Mom, just cleaning out my closet." Max is distracted.
He opens a large black trash bag he had taken with him when he left Precision Audio. It's full of financial and payroll files, mostly. Though Max is surprised to see, he had tossed some other junk in there over 20 years ago when the company started to fall apart and he got laid off. Ellen told him people were targeting former Precision Audio employees and they might come for him. Should he throw this stuff out?
Burn it? Ellen said a couple of private investigators were looking into the case. Maybe you should reach out to them? Maybe then people would finally look into Neil Bacardi's shady dealings. Max? Hello? Tina calls into the phone. I'll call you back, Mom. He says, what about Christmas? She asked. But Max is already hung up.
We meet the man named M at a BevMo parking lot in Glendale.
He hands over a black contractor-sized garbage bag to us. "I don't want any of this shit," he says, and gets back in his car. Before he can close the door, I ask, "What's in here? What do we need to prepare ourselves for?" He agrees to tell us, but he wants us to leave him out of any discussions we have about Precision Audio. Don't even mention it to Ellen.
"I took all this when we were laid off," Em explains. "We had just gotten fired, and as I was packing my stuff, I slipped into the boss's office and swept everything off his desk and in his drawers into this bag.
I don't remember what all it was, only that at the time, it felt like it could be incriminating. I knew illegal shit was going down, and I thought I'd be some kind of hero, some kind of whistleblower that the LA Times and CNN and everyone would come to me for this big story like it was Enron or some shit. Em fidgets with his seatbelt clip. He says, no one ever did. Not the FBI, not the cops, not even the fucking Better Business Bureau called me.
He emphasizes that he doesn't want to be part of this investigation any further than this moment. "I don't wanna be a hero anymore," he says. "Only level of courage I want is the ability to tell my mom I'm not flying to Atlanta during Christmas. Absolutely not." Em gets in his car and Lou gives him a business card. "We help people," she says. Em drops it into his cup holder and drives away. - In the 1963 thriller, "Charade,"
starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, a man named Charles Lampert is killed. He's the husband of Reggie, played by Hepburn. But Reggie and Charles were on the outs. She returns home from a vacation with a friend to find her apartment empty and then learns from the police that Charles was murdered. He left behind a travel bag, which had a letter addressed to her, a ticket to Venezuela,
and a bunch of phony passports with different identities, not to mention miscellaneous toiletries and personal items. Reggie knows that solving Charles' murder starts in this bag. But what's significant? The letter? The passports? The country of Venezuela? Maybe even the toothbrush? Spoiler alert for this 60-year-old movie, but it's actually the stamps on the envelope.
Rare and valuable collectibles worth a quarter of a million dollars in the junk drawer of memory. We know what we're looking for, but rarely what it looks like. Back in our Azusa office, we dig through the bag M gave us. Folders full of financials, memos, and printed emails to and from Neil Bacardi. Deposit slips for hundreds of thousands of dollars made between 2000 and 2003.
Lou skims through the memo file. She is delighted to find several examples of the phrase, "We need to have a confront about XYZ." Ellen was right. Neil did love that phrase. Is it a business colloquialism? Something popular in the early 2000s like synergy or blue-skying or best practices? I think it's his own original term. He just liked the way it sounded.
Sort of funny, but not as funny as the all-staff memo with the subject line "Zima Fridays," which promoted a sort of break room barbecue every Friday at 4:30 for the employees that involved, presumably, an all-Zima cooler. Also in M's bag are some promotional cards, heavily used ashtray with the company logo on the bottom,
Let's see. Oh, pay stubs, tax forms, some residue from a paper shredder at the bottom of the bag. I'm not sure there's anything here of use.
Neil sounds like a jerk. Fine. Sounds like he had some very unethical business dealings. Okay, so... I agree. M wanted to be a whistleblower, but whistleblowing takes a lot of expertise. I'm not sure he knew exactly what data he was supposed to collect to build whatever case he wanted to build. And he never contacted any media or law enforcement about what he had.
Maybe it's because once he got it home, he realized there was nothing incriminating in these documents. And honestly, he mostly just took personal items from Neil's desk. And I am so glad he did. Lou, did you look at these VHS tapes he kept? I thought they were real for a second, just movies from the 1990s, but they're mock busters.
I don't know what mockbusters are. And then Molly holds up three VHS tapes with colorful sleeves. Jurassic Safari. On the cover are three people in a Jeep trying to outrun the most hand-drawn looking T-Rex I've ever seen. Doll Story. An animated film about a bunch of toys, though they clearly can't call them that in the title. They come to life when the humans aren't around. And my favorite, James Gold, Tomorrow Lives Forever.
Clearly a 007 ripoff. The guy on the cover is in a rented tux that is a full size too large. You can see the manufacturing seams on his plastic gun. The actor's name at the very top, above the title even, is Miles Fletcher, which sounds like a name I should know, and he has a face I feel like I should know too. But I think that's the point of these movies.
to capitalize off of familiarity. It looks like you should recognize it, but it's not that at all. - The name's Gold. James Gold. Oh my God. These are hilarious. Where can I get a VCR? Oh, oh, do you think Tammy's dad would have one at his pawn shop? - I look at the credits on the back of the box. The production company is Pyrite Pictures.
And look at that. Listed as an executive producer, Neil Bacardi.
I pull up one final folder from the bottom of Em's trash bag. I think the folder is going to be empty, but it is not. Out falls a floppy disk. It's an old-school five and a quarter inch disk. There is no label on the disk at all, save for a post-it note on which someone has scrawled in all caps, "THROW AWAY!" with two exclamation points.
I can see from other handwritten notes in the file that it matches Neil's handwriting. Ooh, a mysterious piece of evidence. We don't know that for sure yet, but Neil wanted it destroyed, so we better find a way to read this thing. We take a break for dinner. Lou has kept this office clean for almost a year. I'm so proud of her. She's come so far.
We both tidy up our makeshift workspace on the floor, carefully putting all the items and files back into the trash bag. I carry it to the storage closet, but when I open the door, it's an absolute mess. Yeah, no, that closet needs some work. Earthquake really did a number on it. It's now floor-to-ceiling, crushed drywall, bent shelving, and archival boxes that have all split open. I'll get to it someday. Let's go for tamales.
But Hector, who runs the tamale shop next door in our strip mall, is already closing up. Business was slow today, what with Thanksgiving only a couple days away, so he already cleaned up all the pans in the oven. He could get a couple tamales out of the fridge for us, though. I tell Hector and Lou that there's a new Thai place that just opened down Gladstone. Let's all three go to dinner. Sounds good. My treat. Sounds good. I leave the bag in one of Hector's booths and the three of us pile into my car.
After dinner, we drive back to the strip mall. We're walking to Hector's tamale shop to get the bag I left when I notice something strange. The blinds on the office door look different. We approach the door and discover that not only are the blinds damaged, but the glass is almost completely gone. Shattered.
I'm so busy trying to process what I'm seeing that I don't process at all what I'm hearing, glass crunching beneath our feet. We step inside my office. I feel scared, violated, and surprisingly, kind of sad. Inside,
They've torn through every drawer and cabinet. My beautiful, tidy office is now a complete mess. It looks like how it used to look before I came around to organization. I find a note with no attribution, but it is in what I immediately recognize as Neil Bacardi's handwriting. It reads...
"You know what I want. Give it to me. And if you try to erase, copy, or destroy it, I will destroy you. All caps. Two exclamation marks." Molly's standing by the closet. The door is wide open, and whoever was in here even ripped out all of the broken shelves and drywall that the earthquake left. "Well, at least you don't have to clean the closet now."