Selects: The Kitty Genovese Story
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Hey everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2016 episode on the murder of Kitty Genovese. Her story is fairly famous. She was murdered while an entire apartment block of people watched and did nothing. But that's not exactly the real story. Like most things in life, there's more to it, and we explained what actually happened.

We relied a lot on the excellent documentary The Witness for this episode, and I highly recommend watching it. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

True crime edition, actually. Yeah. But so much more than just a single crime. Agreed. A crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world, throughout decades. And it's true, man. There are very few crimes you can point to that had more of an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovese. Agreed. And there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there.

We are not trying to become one. No. This is just something we do from time to time. Sure. As I researched this, and as I watched... Did you watch The Witness? Of course. The documentary recently. On Netflix right now. It is. HBO documentary. And I was disturbed, and I'm glad it finally covered it in the documentary, but I was disturbed that...

Kitty Genovese, and we'll get to her murder, but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol for people not helping out. Right. What came to be known as bystander apathy or the bystander effect, that the more people who are around, the less likely anyone is to help. Yeah. So she became such a symbol that...

You never hear about Kitty Genovese and who she was as a person. That was one great thing about that documentary. There are multiple great things about it. But that it really talked about her and showed her and revived her spirit. Which I was really looking for because even in researching online, it's hard to get a lot of information. Some things, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning that she was gay.

Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't know that she was gay. No, it's true, but it's been out since, I'm not sure when actually that came out. It was just this year. Oh, okay, so it was fairly new. This year or last year, yeah. I thought it was in the last five years maybe. So, in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute about Catherine Genovese. Kitty. Yep. Born in 1935 in Brooklyn.

to Vincent and Renee Le Genovese, Italian-American parents. And it's weird. I don't see... Oh, yeah. Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petroli at first. So they lived in Brooklyn, and she was very well-loved in school. Yeah, she was like the leader of her clique. Yeah, and she was apparently a lot of fun and a good mimic person.

of her teachers and she was voted class cut up in her senior year graduating class. She went to an all-girls school in Prospect Heights. And it was just, by all accounts, this vivacious idea

Fun-loving, really sweet, sweet lady. Yeah. Or girl at that point. Her little brother, Bill, who ended up being featured in the documentary The Witness, was just in love with her. She was just amazing to him. They had a very special relationship. Yeah. I think she was about 13 years older than him. Yeah, quite a bit. Maybe 12 years older. Yeah.

I had a sister like that. Like there's a very special relationship. There's none of that sibling rivalry. They're not old enough to be your mother. It's just a unique situation to be a younger sibling sister.

and to be able to inherit, like, all that worldly wisdom. Yeah. And they're going through all their own things and their own struggles and their own travails, but to that 13-year-old younger brother, they know everything, and they're the coolest person walking the planet, and they're the kindest person walking the planet because they've lived long enough to, like, figure out some of the major stuff, you know? Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older, and we very much had and still have that relationship where...

And she and my brother are great now, too. But, you know, when you're two or three years apart, there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads. But by the time I came along, I was like, you know, my sister was six. It was perfect. I was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill. And it seemed like one of the older brothers...

Always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she always liked him better kind of attitude. Seemed like everybody kind of knew she liked Bill the most. Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for, but that's just those family dynamics, man. You know, the thing is, whenever you do start to kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's died violently and young, it's easy to...

canonized them. You know? Oh, yeah. Really put them up on a pedestal and forget their flaws. And of course, I'm sure Kitty had tons of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from what I'm gathering that were...

you know, just terrible flaws or that made her like a bad person. She seemed like she was a, like a overall above average great person. Yeah. Agreed. So, um, New York was getting, uh, too dangerous for her family. They thought to have all these kids. Uh, so they moved when she graduated high school to new Canaan, Connecticut, uh,

And she said, you know what? I'm staying here in New York. I'm 18 now. I love it here. She got married for a brief time to a guy. What was his name? Rocco? I don't remember his name. It's either Rocky or Rocco. And...

In the documentary, Bill tries to get in touch with him. He's like, I really, because he found out she was gay and was like, you know, we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his own privacy. He said, my relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah. It's like, that's an odd response. It was. I think he just didn't want to.

Mean if she was gay and they were married for a short time. He either didn't know and Maybe felt the fool or he did know and was maybe trying to do right by her in some way sure Either way he didn't want to talk about it right but um she worked as a secretary for a little while she was a waitress for a little while and

Eventually, she was a barmaid, bartender, and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis, Queens called Ev's 11th Hour. That is a great bar name. Well, and from all accounts, it was one of those wonderful neighborhood bars. Opened at 8 a.m.? Yeah, where the people were in there getting sauced pretty early in the day. Sure. And everyone knew everyone, and everyone loved Kitty, and she helped take care of everybody, but was very much an independent person.

kind of firecracker of a woman. Sure. Drove a red Fiat. Convertible. Her dad used to tease her about like, when are you going to find the right guy? She was like, I make more money than any guy I would go out with. I don't need that. Which is, I guess, 1960s for dad, I'm gay. I'm gay. Yeah. And I can't say it. But she did make pretty good dough as the bar manager. And then in March 1963, she met a woman named Marianne Zalonko.

At Swing Rendezvous, it was an underground lesbian bar in the village, and they...

Moved in together shortly thereafter. Yeah. And Kitty actually used to bring Mary Ann home with her to visit, but her family was all like, well, they're just good friends and roommates. Right. It's the 60s. Right. The early 60s. Yeah, and there's an audio interview with her in that documentary that's really touching. She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was able to speak to her in, I think,

what was so compelling about this documentary was that he was, it was a search of a man looking for closure. It's a harrowing, sometimes almost unbearable to watch. Yeah. Search. It was tough. I mean, like he's at odds with his family here or there. Yeah. Um, he, uh,

And he's just doing things where if you watch it in the context of the documentary and you just follow along the documentary, it all makes utter and complete sense. Right. But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough to be like, this is a documentary, which means this guy really did this stuff. Yeah. And there was a camera following him along while he was doing it. I was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh, I know. You know, he really...

At one point he calls it an obsession, but he doesn't come off as obsessed. Right. Agreed. All right. So let's detail the crime, and then we will take a break after that. How does that sound? Yeah. All right. So flash forward to March 13th, 1964. It's 3.15 in the morning.

And Kitty Genovese is, as she often did, was making her way home from work late at night as a bar manager. Yeah. And was being trailed by a man, a man by the name of Winston Mosley. Yes. Who is...

definitely the villain of this story but is not the only one that will turn out right so Kitty was 28 and at the time she was killed and Winston her killer was 29 just turned 29 I think like a week or so before and

And I think you said this is March 13th? Yeah. 1964? Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids. Yeah, his wife Elizabeth worked the night shift. She was a hospital nurse. And Winston's mother stayed at home with the kids. So he basically said, you know, I own my own house. I've got a great job operating computers.

No one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with him yet, but I'm making money doing it. Yeah, he was a smart guy. So I'm going to indulge myself. I'm going to go out and stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's what I'm going to do. So that's what he was doing on this night. He was cruising around looking for a woman to kill, basically. Yeah, that was his direct quote in questioning. Yeah. I was looking for a woman to kill. Yeah. So he...

He saw at, I believe, a red light, this little red Fiat convertible caught his eye, and there was Kitty driving. So he started to follow her, and she parked. And she parked in the parking lot for the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed up to the side of

of her apartment building, which is a two-story Tudor job that had shops in the bottom and apartments in the top, right? - Yeah, this was in Kew Gardens in Queens. So he followed her on foot at this point. She sees him and knows that something is going on. He has a knife in his hand, so she starts running. He catches up to her outside of a bookstore.

and stabs her twice in the back right off the bat with this knife. Right.

And she had been running toward a bar that she thought would be open, but it turned out apparently there was a new manager, and the new manager had closed down early. So when she's stabbed twice in the back, it's on this darkened street. But right across the street, Austin Street, is a 10-story apartment building with dozens of windows looking out onto Austin Street where she's being stabbed in the back. And she screams. She cries out.

I think she said something like, oh, God, he stabbed me. Help me. Help me is what they said basically definitively is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to this recounted that one guy said that he was, I think, a 10 or 11-year-old kid who was inside one of the apartments in the Mowbray apartment building and that he was awakened from a deep sleep. The scream was so loud. He said it was the loudest thing he's ever heard. Yeah.

So she screams, and a man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings opens his window. What's his name? Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey, get out of there. What are you doing?

And Mosley took off. Yeah. Took off running away. He's very frequently misquoted as having said, like, let that girl alone. But even by his own words, in his own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there. Yeah. At any rate, he scared him away. Right. So...

In between that time, about 30 minutes passes, Kitty makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building, right? Yeah. And goes inside the vestibule, and you think the horror is over for her. She could probably survive these wounds. Right. Is in shock, I would imagine. And then Mosley went to his car,

Yeah, he stabbed her at least twice.

12 more times they think at least she was stabbed at least 14 times He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her, but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah I'm not sure which one's correct. Yeah, but at one point and this is really important here as he's stabbing her and she's screaming and

In the vestibule, there's a staircase that leads directly up to a door. And behind that door lived a man named Carl Ross. And Carl Ross opened his door and looked down one single flight of stairs at Winston Mosley stabbing, um...

Kitty Genovese, who was bloody. There was no confusing what was going on. And he closed the door and he called his girlfriend and his girlfriend said, don't get involved. Yeah. I'm worried for you. Just leave it alone. It's none of your business. And he did. He didn't do anything, at least for a little while. All right. So that's a good place to break here. And we're going to come back and talk about who saw and heard what and what they did about it right after this.

Stuff you should know.

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And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

Summer's here and it's officially the season of wellness. For me, that means feeling energized, focused, and confident. And Symbiotica has become a key part of my routine. I take their Magnesium L-3 and 8 and Liposomal Glutathione every morning. It's an easy ritual that gives me sustained energy and focus all day long. Every formula is science-backed and highly absorbable, so I know I'm actually getting what my body needs.

Go to Symbiotica.com and use code IHEART to get 20% off your order. That's Symbiotica.com and code IHEART for 20% off today. All right, so at this point, Kitty Genovese is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule. A woman did come down and was with her. Her name is Sophia Farrar. She's still with us.

And she was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she went down there and apparently was with her as she passed away, tried to calm her down, evidently did calm her down, and likes to think that she at least saw...

a friendly face and that she was being cared for as she passed. Right. The weird thing is, is that is not mentioned. I guess we got to get into the New York Times now. Yeah. So, so after the murder, like the next day, the Times ran four paragraphs on the Kitty Genovese murder. It was not incredibly newsworthy at first because that year there were 636 murders in New York City. Yeah. And that was just one of them. Just one.

But a couple weeks later, the head, the city editor of the New York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with, I believe, the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said, did you hear about that Genovese murder? That's one for the books. 38 people standing around watched the whole thing. Nobody did a thing about it. Yeah. Now you've got a story. Abe Rosenthal.

legendary journalist is like, uh, thank you for that. Uh, here's my diners club card. I have to go now and get this story done. So he did. He assigned it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name? Um, his name was Martin Gansberg and they wrote,

On the front page, I shouldn't say they wrote. It was definitely all Gansberg, but he was assigned and definitely under the direction of Abe Rosenthal. Like, this is the story. 38 people stood around and did nothing. Yeah, the title of the article was 37. It was 37 at the time. 37 who saw murder, didn't call the police. And basically the entire article and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades was...

A, not about this woman at all, hardly. Right. She became a symbol. B, not necessarily even about the crime, but about the crime of these people who didn't, the crime of apathy. Yeah. For these 37 or 38 people. But it was very much misconstrued in the New York Times to the point where in 2004, they all but wrote a retraction with new information that

Because the original article they said like these people witnessed it. That is not true. Maybe only a couple of people might have actually seen anything with their eyeballs.

The other 35 or 36 may have heard someone screaming. They might have thought it was a drunken couple in their neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been some apathy involved, for sure, for some of them. But to characterize this as 37 or 38 people witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and windows to it was not accurate at all. Right.

They said specifically, well, the way that they put it was that there were

And the way the story read was that 38 people had watched this murder, which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks and that the man had been chased off twice and came back two more times. But that this whole thing had taken place over 30 minutes, this long, prolonged attack, and that 38 people had just been sitting there watching it doing nothing. Right.

And it is definitely a mischaracterization of what had happened. Like you're saying, for the most part, people were earwitnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not 38 eyewitnesses to it. And most people weren't in a position to do much, if anything, about it, certainly physically. But...

I don't know if you could call it like a retraction because the point that Abe Rosenthal, he never apologized for it ever. Even in the documentary he's interviewed. Yeah. And he's like, this is great. I'm glad that it did what it did. Yeah, sure. The point is still there, that there was apathy in that there were two people who could have done something and they didn't. But then...

From what the other witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly. Right. That it was a violent crime being committed on this woman and people still didn't do anything. Yeah, they misreported possibly that no one called police. Apparently, perhaps up to three people called the police, although police logs showed only one call came in.

And it may be a case of these people now telling themselves, like, I called the cops. I did something. Sure. When they may not have. They did not report at all that Ms. Farrar had gone down to be with her. She was not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like,

Yeah, you know, this bystander effect, it had good. It led to the 911 being created, apparently, in some ways. And people studied this in class, and it raised awareness. So, you know, if they stretched it a little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what Abe basically... That was his position. That still is his position, but... Well, he's dead now. Oh, did he finally pass away? Yeah. And then I finally came around and be like, no, you know, the truth is...

is what you should print. And if you're a reporter and you run a story, you should print the truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers. No, no, absolutely. I agree with you. And I think the one thing that you can hang on Abe Rosenthal is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner to be as sensational as possible, to shock and outrage the public as much as possible. But I still think it's rooted in the basic fact that

there was apathy involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish the job that Kitty Genovese might have survived had somebody done more than just sit up, look out their window, and go back to bed. Yeah. Or not even bother to look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, this had a lot of impact because this story comes out in 1964, right?

And for 40 years, it wasn't until 2004 that the Times saw fit to go back and really reinvestigate. Yeah. And they did. There was a great article called Kitty 40 Years Later, I think. And the author goes through and reinvestigates the case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But within that 40-year period –

The effects that this murder had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of 911. Yeah. It's a big one. Sure. And it created this whole field of psychology that looks into the psychology of crowds, you know, and why we would just stand around. What is this diffusion of responsibility? None of that understanding existed until the Kitty Genovese murder. Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone...

Why is a solo witness more apt to act than a group of people? One thing I saw is that it's called social influence and that we take our cues from others. So if inaction is basically what is on the table right then, we're going to be inactive as well. If people are starting to move toward it, toward the problem, we'll probably join in too. I could see that or people thinking like,

Either I'm not, someone else is better equipped to deal with this than me, or I feel like someone else will do this. Right. So I don't have to. Yeah. A lot goes into play. It's pretty interesting. One of the less productive things that came out of it, though, is this idea that when you live in a city, in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one. Yeah. And Kew Gardens became the...

The center of this or just such a symbolic example of urban uncaring, I guess. And Kitty Jo Navis became a symbol of that as well. And the need to do something, to act out, to help other people when you see them need help. All right. So let's take another quick break here. And we're going to get back into what happened to Mr. Mosley later.

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We look for a constant.

And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

Summer's here and it's officially the season of wellness. For me, that means feeling energized, focused, and confident. And Symbiotica has become a key part of my routine. I take their Magnesium L3 and 8 and Liposomal Glutathione every morning. It's an easy ritual that gives me sustained energy and focus all day long. Every formula is science-backed and highly absorbable, so I know I'm actually getting what my body needs.

Go to Symbiotica.com and use code IHEART to get 20% off your order. That's Symbiotica.com and code IHEART for 20% off today. So a week after this murder, Mosley was breaking into a house. He's not a good guy. No, he was a terrible guy. He was...

Beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic was just a burglar. And he was just straight up robbing a house one day of a television. And one of the neighbors saw this, called the cops. Cops came and arrested him. No, no, no. No, that's not true. What? The neighbor, here's the thing. This is the great ironic twist of the Kitty Genovese story. He went to a different neighborhood. He was robbing a house and the neighbor said, hey, what are you doing?

And he started to run from the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and held him until the cops came. Oh, well, yeah. He called the cops. That's how he went down. Intervention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not apathy. Intervention. Right. A week later. Yes. Okay. So at any rate, he calls the cops. He gets arrested and very, like, matter-of-factly says that he killed Kitty Genovese. And not only that, but he killed supposedly two other women, a woman named Barbara Kralik.

Actually, she was a girl. She's only 15. And then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both of them had been sexually assaulted. And he was never tried for those. But he did plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which did not work.

Sentenced to death and by luck of timing was able to appeal and the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in that time period. And he was re-sentenced to life in prison. Yes, supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence about his mental state during his sentencing. So he was able to get it reduced. So he was hanging out, doing his time.

And he was in Attica, I believe. And he had injured himself and was being taken to the hospital. And on the way there, he got the gun away from the guard who was escorting him and took off. And for, I think, five days, he basically died.

Just the city of Buffalo was in mortal fear of the fact that the guy who murdered Kitty Genovese was now on the loose in their town. And they were afraid, rightfully so. He raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him, he got a hold of five people and held them hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while with the FBI before they finally got to him.

He was a bad dude. So they sent him back to prison, and they said, you're not getting out of here ever. Yeah, he was later a part of the Attica prison riots as well. And the one lady that he killed, he burned her alive. Like, the family was upstairs. Yeah. And he broke into her house, raped her, killed her, and burned her alive in the home, and the house went up in flames. Right. So it sounded like he had no—

He sounded like a true sociopath. Like he had no, not that there was ever a reason for killing someone, but it was always just at random because he wanted to do that. That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a self-indulgence. So in the documentary, very powerful scene where the son of, I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty, who it's told through his eyes, interviews and sits down with one of the sons of Mosley and

And it's just like, I mean, you cut the tension with a knife, obviously. It's just so like fraught with tension. And, um,

He had told his son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. He also said that he was just a getaway driver for some mobster, and the Genovese family was related to the crime mob family, the Genovese family. And none of this stuff is true. And the brother was just like, hey, no, we're not related to that family at all. We have nothing to do with that. And he just gives him a look when he talks about the racial slurs, like...

Come on, man. That's not what happened. So it was a really, really powerful scene of these two guys kind of working it out in a way. I didn't see them working anything out. Oh, see, I did. Which made it even worse for me. I thought there was some between them. They kind of came to a nicer place. Oh, really? Than where they'd started. I did not catch that at all. Maybe you skipped forward or something. Maybe.

I was like, I can't take this. Gotta fast forward. Well, the son was saying, like, you know, I think, you know, we need to move. No, the son of Winston Mosley was saying that they needed to move on from all this. And then the brother was saying, I definitely don't, you know, the sins of the father aren't the sins of the sons. Yeah, he said that. So, you know, I felt like they were better off than when they started for having that conversation. I honestly did not catch that. Yeah. Well, regardless, Winston Mosley, after...

I guess after his second...

His first escape, his second little crime spree in Buffalo, when he was captured, he apparently reformed himself, or he claimed to be reformed. He got a degree in prison. He wrote an editorial that the New York Times published where he basically said, I'm a changed man. And everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the time your first parole hearing's coming up. This is great timing. He went up before the parole board, and they said no. Yeah.

Uh, he went up before the parole board again. They said, no, he went up 18 times, uh, when 18 times the parole board said no. Yeah. I think the last one was just a couple of years before he died, but he died in 2016 at age 81 in prison. Yeah. And he, uh, the brother tried to get an interview with him and he said, uh, no, that he didn't want to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this brother's pain of like really wanting to try and to talk him into it again. Um,

And basically the people that were the go-between were like, yeah, you can try. We can't keep you, but he's not going to change his mind. So he never got that interview. But I feel like he got – I don't think he was looking for answers. I mean, in the documentary, he went back to many of these apartment windows just to look at what their vantage point might have been. He got an actress to recreate what the screaming would have sounded like.

From down there on the street, which was very chilling Scene and I don't know that he was looking for like you said he was at odds with his family at times You could tell the one little brother was like man. This is hard on all of us. So you need to stop, right? But I don't think he was necessarily looking for the closure in that I want to find out for sure if these people could have stopped it I think the closure comes more in the journey of

Learning about his sister and learning as much as he can about this case, right? It's really interesting. It was very interesting That 2004 Times article and then now this this documentary has definitely exonerated Q gardens as a whole they've said now there's there's way more nuance to this. There's way more. Yeah but two things two people that have Not been exonerated our guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Karl Ross. I

Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top of the vestibule who opened his door. Yeah. The ironic thing about Carl Ross is if you notice it says 38 witnesses, 37 did nothing. That last 38th witness that the Times is referring to was Carl Ross. They said he's the one who called the police. He called the police like long after Kitty Genovese was dead. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So he was actually –

He was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever, but he was exonerated initially by this Times article when it turns out that he was one of the two people who could have done something and didn't. The other one was Joseph Fink, who saw the initial attack from his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator in the Mowbray apartments across the street, and he apparently saw what was happening and

left his elevator and went to bed yeah that was that but again it seems like the overall feeling is okay other than those two guys everybody else is fine i just disagree with that i think that there's a lot more that people could have done that didn't and i don't think it's uh i just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that yeah yep you got anything else no man

If you want to know more about Kitty Genovese, just search the internet. There's a lot about her. But be careful what you read because it's all over the place, frankly. And since I said internet, it's time for Listener Mail. Fish fraud follow-up.

Hey, guys. I recently began a job as a marine fisheries observer for the Department of Fish and Game in the Bering Sea. And just listen to your fish fraud episode. Each season, a percentage of vessels, fishing here at least, are randomly selected to have an observer on board to monitor the operations and bycatch that come up in their pots or nets.

He typed that.

We are generally a great deterrent of any mischief at sea, but from what I have seen, most of the fishermen are real sharp, honest folks who know what they're doing. Of course, this is only a small portion of all the vessels on the water, and it isn't going to solve that problem by any means, but I thought you'd like to know that there is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors. Thanks for all the laughs, my dudes. And that is from Kevin Alexandrowitz.

in Olympia, Washington. Thanks a lot, Kevin. Had no idea, did you? That these people did that? That there's basically like a sky marshal program fighting fish fraud on the high seas. Yeah, we talked about that. We did? Yeah. I don't remember that. Yeah, we were just like, it's just so infrequent and random that, you know, what good is it doing? And it sounds like he agrees in some ways. Yeah, I guess so. But still, have fun out there on the high seas. Don't get seasick.

If you want to get in touch with us like Kevin did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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