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Oft Off Topic
Black Tom Island Incident: Americas forgotten terrorist attack
How does a tiny rock off the shore of New York lead to the formation of the Japanese Internment Camps in World War 2? Tune in and find out as we talk about one of the lesser known, yet very interesting, moments in American history, The Black Tom Island Incident.
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The Black Tom Island incident, Nate. What do you know about the Black Tom Island incident?
Speaker 2:Not much.
Speaker 1:I know Black Tom, but that's comic books, oh yeah, it is a comic book guy, isn't it too? Huh, yeah, wasn't Black?
Speaker 2:Tom, the guy from Deadpool 2, where he's like. You know, he called him racist or no, he wasn't calling him racist. He's like Black Tom.
Speaker 1:He was a white guy and um cable shot in the face and he called it's like you kill black tom, you racist huh, uh, I think wasn't black tom part of the hellfire club in the x-men world.
Speaker 2:Um, I mean that would make sense because then then they'd have the rights for black tom yeah, well, I'm guessing this black tom is probably a different black tom than the other oh, I'm sure they're probably unrelated.
Speaker 1:They, they might be, although now I'm curious. All right, so the Black Tom incident Are you ready to learn about it, nate? I am Okie dokie. Our story starts sometime in the late 1800s like mid-late 1800s, 1850s, 1860s in the waterways between New York and New Jersey. These waterways contain some very important and very busy shipping lanes and, very inconveniently, in the middle of all this was a large rock that Neptune decided to put there just to be a jerk. This rock was such a hazard to sailors and, more importantly, their cargo, because it was a large, sneaky rock, kind of one of those rocks that would hide in the fog and then just jump out. And I wanted to sink your ship randomly. It was quite well known for sinking ships, claiming lives, stealing cargo, stealing cargo, stealing cargo yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:I get it Thief in the night. So one proven way that society has dealt with these sneaky rocks and waterways was by turning this tiny, small, hard-to-see rock into a giant easy-to-see and hard-to-miss island. So they decided that, hey, new York, it's undergoing some massive growth at the time. We've got plenty of construction refuse to deal with, you know old, like scrap pavement and scrap steel beams and this and that, and we've got to get rid of that. We've got an island we could build. Let's just dump all our trash around this rock and build a man-made island. Get rid of garbage, save some cargo, save some lives. More importantly, the cargo I'm guessing it's yeah, sailor, sailor. Lives back then were probably pretty cheap compared to cargo oh yeah, they're like well, we have this.
Speaker 2:Uh, quick, what do we say? The cargo, the sailors? Uh, I think we know the, we know the answer, the question, I think we got we got tons of sailors back home. We only have so many uh tons of coffee and if not sailors we have drunk people. We use, you know, uh, right with a hijack what we could Shanghai them Shanghai.
Speaker 1:We could Shanghai all the sailors we want.
Speaker 2:Because you can't Shanghai cargo, I mean.
Speaker 1:I guess you could, but that's something else. Yeah, that'd be a pirating thing. I guess you Shanghai people and you pirate cargo. So this island would go from being a tiny little rock in the middle of the waterways to a roughly 25-acre-sized island that's just made out of trash and garbage and stuff. It was big enough that various factories and other industries started popping up all over the island, including at one point. It had a powder factory that would blow up in 1875 and kill four people. Good times, this island may have been cursed right off the bat. The island will actually be eventually known as Black Tom Island due to quote-unquote the large number of dark-skinned fishermen that inhabited the area.
Speaker 2:So I want you to make of that what you will here. I was thinking it wasn't going to be racist. No, what a fool I was. Still, you pass me from 30 seconds ago.
Speaker 1:You're like maybe there's like some black elm trees on the island or something. That's why they called it Black Tomahawk. Nope, racism. Good old-fashioned late 1800s racism.
Speaker 2:Well, to be fair though for good old-fashioned 1800s racism, this is pretty mild, Actually, you're 100% correct, they could have called it much worse things.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, Much, much worse oh yeah, let your imagination go wild but think of the worst thing.
Speaker 1:it's probably that yep, black time island was the nicest term they could use in schools from then on right. 1905 rolls around and this island is now big enough and there's enough industry happening on it that the lehigh valley railroad decided make to make it worth their while to take a bunch more garbage and connect that little island to the mainland so they can put a shipping island or train stations out there and make it a big shipping hub for themselves. This way, you know, it's a nice transfer yard. It's conveniently located, kind of in the middle of the water, oddly enough. Yeah, that's weird, yeah, yeah, it's kind of weird because it's only like maybe half a mile off the shore, or my, maybe a mile off the shore. It's kind of weird how it's set up, because it's just like right in the middle of this waterway between jersey and, uh, new york, will you say?
Speaker 2:oh, I mean in in terms of like actual distance. Yeah, only half a mile or a mile is fine, but if you think about it like that's a ways away, like yeah it is, yeah, it kind of is.
Speaker 1:You know, it sort of is out in the middle of nowhere. And because of that reason they decided that, hey, this would be a good place for companies to store all their munitions and stuff, you know, explosives and armaments and this and that Uh-oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh-oh is correct.
Speaker 1:And right now, at this point, it wasn't necessarily, like you know, military stuff. It wasn't like war.
Speaker 1:It's more, like you know blasting caps and dynamite and other stuff. You know that they're making the whole Wild West with. It's not like weapons of war. Yeah, it's not weapons of war, it's innocent stuff like dynamite and muskets, I guess Only highly combustible things that can kill just as much. But that's the way it was supposed to stay, was just, you know, just blasting caps and stuff, no real like weapons of war out there. But then 1914 and World War I breaks out and immediately Black Tom Island becomes a storage center for munitions that are heading from America over to Europe. So at the start of World War I, the United States took a neutrality stance in the war, which you might think would be like, hey, that's good, that way we're not, you know, supporting the wrong side or this or that and you know we're staying out of it, right? Nope, right, because we're neutral. That just meant that even our government was kind of staying out of it. American companies could sell to whatever side they wanted.
Speaker 2:No-transcript over there which is, you know, kind of like doesn't have much foresight, because you're like, look, I know you're selling, so selling both sides, and go ahead and get what you're getting good. But I mean, you see a world war, like it's a it's all of europe is getting up and like their allies to america. It's like, dude, you, you know, like there's no way we're not gonna get involved. Yeah, it's well, but let me, let me. Let me take a step back, though. Were we still during that time? Were we still like quote-unquote isolationist in terms of, like world affairs, because we didn't really start sticking our dick in everything until, like you know, now we do, like we got shit everywhere? But were we at that time, were we still kind of minding our own business? I believe?
Speaker 1:World War, I was kind of the thing that pulled us out of isolationism. So yeah, at this beginning point we were still more or less an isolationist nation.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay, then I retract what I was talking about a minute ago. That would make I mean it's still bad, but I mean that would make sense. Then there would be no real expectations. We would be then pulled into it. Like you know, we're selling the weapons that are shooting our people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and over here we're still dealing with all those uppity natives who didn't seem to like being displaced. So we had our own issues. We were busy doing our own innocent little kind things over here. So, right, pretty quickly we were selling enough arms to Europe that by the summer of 1960, approximately 2 million pounds of small arms and artillery ammunition were being stored at the depot in freight cars and barges. This also included 100,000 pounds of TNT sitting on Johnson Barge number 17.
Speaker 1:A lot of this stuff was actually destined for Russia, the biggest purchaser of arms during the war from us. Russia liked them American weapons. Like I said at the start, we were selling freely to both sides. It's like, hey, whoever's you know can get us the money, we'll get you the weapons.
Speaker 1:But as the war went along and the British Navy started blockading ports all over Europe, it became harder and harder to sell to some nations, germany being one of them. So Germany was there being like, hey, america's supposed to be neutral, but they seem to only be selling weapons to, you know, france and Britain and Russia, our enemies. So when they would ask America, america would just kind of shrug and be like, hey, you know those blockades, what you gonna do? Huh Well, germany didn't really like that answer and they were just like you know, you could get us those arms if you wanted to. We think you're kind of playing favorites, even though you're acting like you know, you're being neutral. We don't like how this is. So they basically took us selling weapons to the Russians as an act of war on their part, and they thus decided that America was the enemy. Now it seems like they didn't really like out and out announce that, hey, we're going after America. So they decided more of they're going to go with the terrorism route and see if they could dissuade America from selling arms by just blowing up stuff around North America, if they could.
Speaker 1:So terrorist attacks from Germany now begin. First up was up in Canada. They actually bombed water supplies in Toronto to try to get Canada out of the war. That apparently didn't work. Up here in Washington State, in Elliott Bay, they actually blew up a ship to be like hey, we got our eyes on you, which I don't. Apparently that didn't work either, because we just kept selling weapons to them. And oddly enough, I never even knew that we had Germans blow up a ship in Elliott Bay up here and I've lived it through my entire life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no idea, two German spy attacks into North America back then, and it's not like we're.
Speaker 2:You know, especially around that time it's not like we're all like, oh, let's not talk about the Germans and what the bad things they did, Right, so you'd think they'd be a little more like, hey, terrorized us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, they kind of were. It's just sort of been forgotten to time. We'll talk about that a little bit more in the upcoming moments. So those two small attacks blowing up the water plant, the water supply in Toronto and the ship in Elliott Bay, those weren't exactly big. Their third attack, though, that would be very big, and that would be known as the Black Tom Island incident, ba-na-na-na-na. This happened on July 30th 1916. So shortly around midnight, shortly after midnight, a man who worked on Black Tom Island, a man named Michael Christoph. He accepted $500 from German spies to get them around security and act as lookout while they committed acts of espionage on the island, or acts of sabotage, I should say. Just so you know, $500 was worth about $15,000 in today's money. So will that $500 be worth it for this man? We'll find out shortly.
Speaker 2:Well, seeing how you know his name, it doesn't sound like things went well for him, just the fact that he has a known name and we know how much they paid him.
Speaker 1:This is very true.
Speaker 1:If I called him the unknown millionaire, then we'd we'd be like, oh, that guy got away with it or we don't know how they got in there. That's, that's how he, that's his happy ending, that is happy. He's just like off at a beach in cuba or something, fanning himself and sipping pina coladas. So, anyways, a small explosion and a small fire at the train depot, which soon, uh, break out, set by those saboteurs, and, as we said, there was a lot of explosives on this island.
Speaker 1:So if there was actually a fire crew, you know, stationed on the island, you know a little like emergency fire crew, ambulance kind of crew thing, well, the small explosion at the start woke up that emergency crew and they leapt into action. Well, actually, half of the crew leapt into action, apparently, the fire crew showed up and half of them were like we're going to stop this before it gets worse and the other half was like, oh, we're out, bye. So, yeah, peace out, we're done. Yeah, half of them were like, yeah, this is past the point of containment, we're getting out of here. Were the people who stayed behind. Succeed no 208.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're like like. You got the people who are like, if I could put out the garden hose, I'm staying, and then I'm not going to be here. And then you've got the people who are like run into danger, let's save things. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:So those people are far braver, braver than me, because yeah, I would have been, I would have looked at him like I'm going to take this time to get what's known as a head start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to think like if there were people in danger, I might do something like that. But if there was this like property of like, yeah, you have to write me up, yeah.
Speaker 1:At least I'll be alive to get the write up, because otherwise Insurance can handle this somewhere in the future, I would imagine. Yeah, so at 2.08 am the second and the biggest of the explosions would go off. It's estimated this explosion was between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale and sent shrapnel and debris flying for miles. Just so you know, 5.5 on the Richter scale would make it 30 times more powerful than the World Trade Center's going down. That's how big of a force is going on here. The explosion created a detonation wave that traveled at 24,000 feet per second, with enough force to lift firefighters up and out of their boots and into the air, throwing them, you know, I guess, walls through the air, injuring many of them, killing some Thousands of women.
Speaker 2:It's always a sign of a big explosion or like something big and impactful. When people get flung out of their shoes, yeah right, they're like oh, their shoes are up behind. It must have been real bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just some smoldering shoes just sitting there in the same place that they were Scorched body you know, 25 feet away Great.
Speaker 2:I love like look at that scorched body, like fuck that scorched body. Look, his shoes are right here.
Speaker 1:Those are still in pretty good condition. Shoes are expensive back in these days, so let's take them. Thousands of windows broke nearly instantly in Manhattan, with windows also being broken as far as 25 miles away due to the shock waves. The blast was even felt strongly in Philadelphia, about 90 miles away, and people even reported being woken up by it in Maryland, thinking it was an earthquake and that was about 200 miles away. So yeah, up to 200 miles away, people.
Speaker 2:Because I mean, I'm assuming Maryland doesn't get many earthquakes, or any really. So I guess they wouldn't know, you know they wouldn't understand like, oh, this is a quick explosion, or like oh, this is actual.
Speaker 1:Well, also at this time too, there was lots of immigrants.
Speaker 2:So I mean they probably came from lands with the.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because this is like when Ellis Island was at their hoppinest, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Gotcha.
Speaker 1:So probably a lot of people showing up from earthquake, earthquake-ridden lands Like California, I guess I don't know what places are riddled with earthquakes America, alright, well.
Speaker 2:They came to America, sir, Like shut up. How about that?
Speaker 1:They just went all the way around the globe and immigrated to the East Coast the long way. The famed St Patrick's Parish in New Jersey had some of its famous stained glass destroyed in the blast, which is pretty sad because this was one of the most famous churches in America at the time, with some old ancient stained glass and big history, and that whole thing was just completely destroyed. The church has actually since appeared in the Sopranos Neat.
Speaker 2:Always bothers me. I always hate it when, like I mean art basically, but stained glass specifically because it's such like, always bothers me. I always hate it when, like I mean art basically, but, like you know, stained glass specifically because it's such like it wasn't. You know leonardo da vinci almost a dicaprio leonardo da vinci? You know he painted. I mean it took a lot of talent and like all the stuff that he painted. And you know, I'm sure it took a while. But stained glass is like, not only do you know the image you're going for, but then you also need to like, first of all make the glass into the color you need, in the shape you need, and then put it a puzzle, like it.
Speaker 1:So I don't know when I hear stained glass gets the story that always bums me out reason stained glass is so expensive because it does take a lot of work and effort to make a lot of foresight and yeah, it's the foresight is all.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like one of my achilles heel. It's like all getting from a canvas like, okay, what am I gonna do, what am I going?
Speaker 1:to do, going together the way it should. Randomly, yeah, new jersey city hall sustained significant damage from this flying debris. Uh hit and damaged the statue of liberty, including severe damage to the arm and torch area. So apparently the shockwave from the blast was big enough it literally moved the entire arm over to where it contacted the head a little bit. That's how much the actual whole statue flexed. This actually caused enough structural damage to the statue that they have since closed off the torch area. That's actually what kind of led to this whole research thing. Because there's a lot of conspiracy theories, because they don't let you go into the torch of the statue of liberty oh, what could be that I didn't, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2:I guess I didn't really take I mean, the reverse a little bit. I do remember you mentioning something about it on a prior podcast, or maybe we were talking about like, about that uh, about how you can't go up in the torch, but I guess I didn didn't realize like it was this. You know, I haven't heard of this, so it's not a surprise. I didn't realize because I didn't know what this was.
Speaker 1:But apparently most people don't know about this. And if you look up, like why you can't go up into the Statue of Liberty arm, there's oh, all sorts of crazy stuff like alien technology up there, the torch, and it's like this just huge area where you can wander around. But no, actually if you see pictures of it, it's like you know a tiny, thin little stairwell that goes like a supply closet size thing and that's what's up in the torch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've never been, I've never seen it, but I've heard the Statue of Liberty isn't as big as yeah yeah you, you look at and you're like, oh my god, that thing's massive, you could run around in it, but I guess it's big enough that a line of people can go up there. Single file and that's about it.
Speaker 2:Especially when you're not there, you see pictures that are a little bit deceptive. One thing that springs to mind and like Jenna and I always point it out when you look at the pictures of Seattle and the Space Needle, if you're looking particularly like, one of the famous ones is Frasier. You know the TV show yeah.
Speaker 1:It looks like the Space Needle is like dominating the skyline and one of the most buildings.
Speaker 2:And most pictures you see of Seattle. It looks like not only is the Space Needle the biggest thing around, but it's also like mixed in amongst all the tall buildings and you're like, no, no, it's way the fuck over there. Yeah, the bigger builds are way the hell over there. And in the end, yeah, it's big, but it's not that big. Yeah, it's really not. If it was with all the buildings that were taller, you wouldn't be able to see it, because the buildings would be taller than it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, compared to the buildings around it, it's pretty small. For the most part, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like it looks real impressive on Frasier, but in reality like it is. No, it's not nothing, you know, you go there.
Speaker 1:Well, when it was built back in like 1963 or whatever. It was actually one of the taller buildings in Seattle. It's just skyscrapers have like gotten so much bigger since then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's not. What was once impressive is no longer impressive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because in Seattle there's I think it's called the Smith Tower or something. At one point it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi in a novel of America or in the world or whatever. And yeah, if you look at it now, it's still there and it is like, mmm, it's in the smaller third of all the buildings around, like I mean, it is literally dwarfed by everything around it. And it's also kind of like weird how they made it the tallest building in the world, because you can tell they sort of like fudged it a little bit, because it looks like a normal building and then at the very top there's like this little spire that they built that goes up like another four or five stories. I hate. You look at, yeah, you look at you're just like, oh, the. The only reason this is the tallest is because they built that little addition. Somebody's like, oh, you're about 30 feet away from being tossed building. They're like, oh well, let's add another 40 feet to it. Look, at least that's what I always came across to me.
Speaker 2:If a woman comes in and she stands at four foot tall, but she has a beehive on her head, so an additional two feet. She is not now six feet tall, she is still four foot tall.
Speaker 1:One thing I think that throws off people's perspective of the Statue of Liberty 2 is also Ghostbusters 2, where they're riding around. I was just thinking about that.
Speaker 2:I was literally just thinking about when you were talking about, like, how you couldn't get up in the thing. The first thing that popped in my head was Ghostbusters 2. Yep.
Speaker 1:Go there and there's spring slime all over the thing, Like we're going to make this statue walk.
Speaker 2:In fact I was going to ask you when we were talking about the size Like is that accurate, the size of the Statue of Liberty with Ghostbusters 2?
Speaker 1:But I get around asking. Actually, if you click under the go under our text channels on discord and click under the general tab, I sent you a picture of like the uh ladder that takes you up to the torch and how tiny it is and also what it's like inside the skull or the side, the crown. So is it big enough? Yeah, it's probably big enough, I don't know. I mean it's literally big enough for like three ghostbusters to stand in there and that's about it. Yeah, it's big enough for like one single file line kind of make it through there comfortably.
Speaker 2:So that was plausible. But yeah, like again the thing that people really think about, because even I thought the torch in my head that thing is massive. You know, in my head the Statue of Liberty can like pole dance in the Sears Tower. You know like that's how big it is in my head. But you know, as we've talked about, it's not.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, I'm like looking at a picture of the torch and it's not a whole lot bigger than a human, to be honest, like you can see people like standing next to it working on it. It's like, eh, it's not that big, but yeah, if you go online, grandpa snuck me back up there in the 80s blah, blah, blah. Yeah, apparently they're all lying, they're all dirty, dirty liars, dirty liars. Yeah, I know, I was very disillusioned when I just realized that people would go on the internet and lie for no real reason. Liars on the internet Everywhere. Also, in our little Discord chat you can also see the aftermath of the explosion, the very last picture I sent there. Yeah, everything's kind of just turned into a fine dust on that island. Yeah, man.
Speaker 2:There is not much on that island, yeah.
Speaker 1:You can see some like train wheels and stuff that were like too solid to get blown up. But yeah, it's um, that whole island just kind of went poof.
Speaker 2:Which also strangely took care of the garbage problem, which also strangely took care of their garbage problem.
Speaker 1:Yes, actually it did so. It was approximately $100,000 worth of damage was done to the Statue of Liberty, and that's pretty significant. How much About $300,000 in then-days money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is about $300,000 in then-days money. I only picked up dollars. I'm like, okay, wait, talk about what.
Speaker 1:You're like, wait a minute, dollars is modern day money. Back then they used shekels. What's going on, sean? Immigrants in nearby Ellis Island had to be evacuated temporarily into Manhattan Because not only flying debris and damages and stuff, and also people were wondering If these were like attacks that were going to go on. Hey, did we just get bombed, or whatever? Well, I guess there really wasn't a ton of bombs back then because, you know, planes were kind of new, but artillery, shells and stuff existed and who knows, maybe we're getting artillery from the shore or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people were in a bit of a panic during all this going on because also you know just, an island's exploding next to you I mean, especially since you know they're talking about like yeah, even though we might not be involved, people do know there's a war going on and suddenly there's a huge explosion. That'd be like I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'd be like ah yeah, and then the old drunk uncles in the corner would be like I told you it would happen.
Speaker 1:You all said I was a liar, but I told you it's damn French. Nearby Fort Wood, at the main entrance, a four-inch thick iron door was actually knocked off of its hinges from that blast too. Like the whole door got like knocked off its hinges and like pushed forwards into the uh fort. So that was pretty impressive too. Following that giant explosion, uh, several smaller explosions rocked the area for several hours, even days too, you know, like unexploded munitions that would just randomly go off, or a stick of dynamite that just eventually got hot enough to blow up. So it was pretty dangerous around that area for a good long while. Afterwards too, just wandering around taking inventory of stuff, and all of a sudden, you know, explosion happens underneath you.
Speaker 2:You wonder even like today, all of a sudden, I know we're like ah, yeah, just stuff that has a.
Speaker 1:we call this a hundred-year dynamite. If it gets disturbed, it won't blow up for a hundred years, A hundred years later, 2016. Boom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hell yeah. No, you know, I've been trying to find, like someone posting a side-by-side image of the Statue of Liberty from Ghostbusters to the reality. Nobody, there's not a single image that has like them side-by-side.
Speaker 1:Probably everybody was just like that's a stupid thing to do. Who would ever think that they would want that? But yeah, the only thing.
Speaker 2:The only thing I saw was talking about um cloverfield. Remember cloverfield, even if you haven't seen the movie. The trailer I do know of it, yeah yeah, the statue of liberty's head got tossed and is like oh my god. And I do remember in that movie they had to make it way bigger because otherwise when they did the actual size it was very impressive yeah, it was like the size of a small bus kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, that's, that's not much. But yeah, if you have something that's like the size of a building, just like rolling down, uh, main street that's it wasn't quite that big, but it was.
Speaker 2:It was actually like big and intimidating and they're like, yeah, no it would be.
Speaker 1:yeah, Hundreds of injuries were reported. Only seven fatalities were reported, by the papers actually, which doesn't seem that big. But also, as people will point out, there was a lot of hobos and black tom fishermen around the island that nobody really cared if they got blown up. So, yeah, the actual fatalities was probably significantly higher than seven.
Speaker 2:Once again talk about that time period. It's like reported. The big quotations are reported.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was like seven white Christian men were killed and others Amongst others. Yeah, amongst others Amongst those people. But, yeah, like the seven fatalities were the barge captain, new Jersey Police Department officer, james F Doherty, lehigh Valley Railroad chief of police, joseph Layden, and also a the sad fatality of this all, a 10-week-old infant named Arthur Tossin was thrown from his crib a mile away from the blast and the force was enough to kill him, or so the parents say. I mean, like seconds before that happened, they might have just like spiked the baby like a football. Yeah, he just like spike the baby like a football. Yeah, he's like, oh, I hate this fucking baby. Yeah, wait, he's a huge explosion, here's my opportunity is this my baby?
Speaker 1:the neighbors, yeah, yeah I mean it is a possibility.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they go the paper's like I hear your baby died. I'm like, yes, blood hair, blue eyes, well, front page.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly. So, yeah, in the end, just that, in one night, six piers, 13 warehouses and dozens of railed cars just simply vanished, and their place was a 300 by 150 foot crater filled with contaminated water and debris. Because you know, when you've got a bunch of explosives exploding, that does leave some toxic waste behind. Yeah, all the blasting residue and nitroglycerin and this and that, not good times. The overall property damage from all this was assessed at $20 million, or $560 million in today's money. News of the blast reaches President Woodrow Wilson and he remarks of the incident as quote unquote a regrettable incident at a private railway terminal which is a really clever way of being like yep, real clever way of being like this isn't a government thing, All those explosives, that's a private sector.
Speaker 1:They can deal with that Wow.
Speaker 2:That was so naked, just like oh this sucks, this happened on private land, exactly.
Speaker 1:Sucking for that railroad company. Thankfully, we are the American government. This has nothing to do with us, as they just walk away.
Speaker 2:I mean, couldn't even just leave it for like later, or implied Like oh, this is a terrible tragedy, you know, mr Wilson. Mr Wilson, what do you think about who's responsible for this? Oh well, you see, it happened on private land. So about who's responsible for this?
Speaker 1:oh well, you see it happened on private land. So we had yeah, it had to be part of the main statement. Yep, however, he did uh, because uh it was during wars were going on across the seas, they decided to uh send out edgar e clark of the interstate commerce commission to uh investigate and see what actually happened at this explosion. And and investigation went abound and one thing they learned is, you know, that giant barge that was just covered in TNT like 100,000 pounds of TNT on it. Yeah, that exploded. Well, apparently, that barge was supposed to have left several days before, but the thing was is the waters were very uncertain and unsafe around there. So in order to leave, they would have had to have paid a $25 towing charge to have like a uh tow boats tow them out to the open sea. So it was safer, but they didn't want to spend that $25. So they're just like, eh, we'll just sit at the port for a while and wait it out, like what's the worst that could happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, look at him. Well, I mean, the captain of that barge did die, so I guess paid for it with his own life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very true, cheap ass. Of course, you never know like back. You know back in these days, I mean here my, you know, if people just disappeared, they're like you'll leave for milk and never come back. They're like oh man, I hate my job, I hate my wife, I hate my kids. Oh, a giant explosion. I guess I'm gonna move across country now and that's it.
Speaker 1:No one ever held back. Then you didn't have to move across country, you could move like two towns over five miles away.
Speaker 2:Very true, yeah, very true like 25 years later, like what they stop, like they're traveling through the country and they stop by a store like frank.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was not hard to disappear back then. Those days Ah, those were the days, Right, I know. It's probably the freedom of being able just to abandon everything you have and just never come back.
Speaker 2:I have no intention of like doing that, but, man, you can imagine just like all this debt just crushing us. You know what? Let's just go, you know this debt just crushing us.
Speaker 1:You know what? Let's just go. You know like this is gonna go live on a beach somewhere in the middle or, you know, in central america and just see what happens no, like again, not even central america.
Speaker 2:Hey, let's move like one state over and, yeah right, start fresh.
Speaker 1:Like uh, I went from townsend to I don't know, my name is uh thomas google yep, just nail a note on your door as you leave Died from the plague, and then nobody will question it and just be like, well, he's dead, I guess we'll just rent out his apartment now. So when it actually came to what caused the blast, the investigators first thought it was going to be smudge pots were behind the whole thing, because apparently smudge pots is an old school, just like a giant oil burning furnace that you could use for Like heat or to get rid of like mosquitoes or other various bugs. And shortly before the fire happened, a bunch of smudge Pots got lit up because they were having bad mosquito Problems that night. So at first Everybody was like, oh well, that's what it is, good job, everybody, we're all done, yay. And they almost like sealed up the investigation On that, just like right off the bat. Just like, well, smudge pots, people weren't careful, that's what blew up a whole smudge pot thing.
Speaker 1:But then they're just like, hey, those germans started attacking us in other parts of the country. Let's investigate a little bit further. Maybe we should uh, you know figure out if this has to do with that war over yonder. So the government decided hey, let's go assign the fledgling bureau of investigation to this case. They can figure it out. There are, you know, you know, top dogs. The only problem is they were really small at the time only 260 agents at the time but because of this and other things, this group would eventually become the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI. So investigating this is kind of what started the FBI for America. Yay, yay, right, yeah, yay, exactly Yay. America, yay, yay, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yay, the only thing I think of is like if the FBI didn't do all the heinous shit the FBI did, then another, you know it'd be like we'd be talking about, I don't know, the.
Speaker 1:International Bureau of Investigation yeah, International.
Speaker 2:Bureau of Dickheads or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, they would have done the exact same thing. Yeah, fbi, you're not so important. If you didn't do all this heinous stuff, somebody else would have. I think you're so cool.
Speaker 2:Right, you think you're so original.
Speaker 1:Since the precursor to the FBI was so understaffed, president Woodrow Wilson also sent in the Secret Service to help them out. And also they teamed up with the New York Bomb Squad and they all joined to form an action, uh, or an investigating super group that all the kids thought was cool. Comic books and mass merchandising spree was to follow the investigation crew you know what's so stupid.
Speaker 2:You know it's so stupid for a heartbeat, just a heartbeat, and it's so stupid. I thought you're gonna say new york jets, like fucking scooby-doo, like come on, scooby and the new york jets. Let's go figure out why this happened. Why is this huge explosion?
Speaker 1:oh, look, it's joe namath to help us out.
Speaker 2:Joe namath hi, kids wanna watch me throw a football kelly jean joe namath. What's all this? What's all this? Powder burns. We found a small infant. Is it white? No, then who cares?
Speaker 1:that's pretty accurate for the time. So after a year of investigating in 1917 they finally get their big break and they find out about that Michael Kristoff guy and the $500 the German spies gave him. So they swoop in and they pick him up and they start interrogating him. And in the middle of all this interrogation, just like in a Law and Order episode, somebody busts in and goes like hey man, you guys messed up all this paperwork. You gotta let him go until you get all this paperwork sorted out. So they let him go run into the courts, get their paperwork all squared away, go back to arrest the dude and surprise, surprise, he's gone. Nowhere to be found, you think.
Speaker 2:You just got a shit ton of money and like, as we were just talking about one talent over, yeah, exactly Like let's go, Fuck this, let's go.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, you know. As soon as they let him go, that man just hopped on a bus and he just did not look back.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, the moment he walked out the door, Yakety Sax kicks in. He, like sped, walked to his house, started packing shit up, ran out the door.
Speaker 1:That money probably didn't last him too long because eventually it did turn out that they caught up with him in like various other prisons he was getting in and out of over the years from other stuff that he did.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, apparently he wasn't a great guy Cause, yeah, he fled from the police and he immediately went back into prison for other stuff. I guess you've got a bunch of money like that.
Speaker 2:And especially for back then, lay low. Yeah, yeah, you go, you find a nice little place and you settled down, unless he was using it for, like I don't know, the the love of the game.
Speaker 1:He's like, I know I've got all this money here, here, but it did only translate to fifteen thousand dollars after uh oh okay, yeah, you know, yeah, I mean it's 500 bucks back then, which is 15 000.
Speaker 2:Uh, when, for some reason, I guess in my head you did say that my in my head, as I was talking just now, I was. I translate 15 000 back then, not thinking about what's got you, you're thinking he's running around like a couple hundred grand okay, fair enough. Yeah, you know, he ran away. Great, I could totally see why?
Speaker 1:yeah, he probably ran away and drank all that money away in like a sitting or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like one night he decided to go and just you know, go whoring and he's like wakes up the next day.
Speaker 1:He's like, well there that went During that whoring time. He probably caught something bad, because he died of tuberculosis in 1928 while in prison. That's got to be a bummer of of a way to go in prison with tuberculosis, because you're not getting great medical treatment there back in 1928.
Speaker 2:If any, your treatment was stay in this room. There you go.
Speaker 1:They probably just pull you aside and just have some twisted-looking German doctor do quote-unquote procedures on you.
Speaker 2:Herman.
Speaker 1:Goering, he's going to find out what's wrong with you, sir. Is he going to fix me? No, no, no, no, no, he's just going to find out what's wrong with you. As far as the actual German saboteurs who did the explosion and the whole setup thing, one of them was actually caught in the Mexican border in 1980, trying to escape America, or, you know, just trying to escape while the heat died down. 1980?, 1918. Oh, okay, that's like 1980.
Speaker 2:He's like 1980s, like Jesus Christ. How did they even know he was? That would be amazing. We had this old ass motherfucker across the bridge. He's German. He clearly had something to do with the bombing.
Speaker 1:You're at the Mexican border in 1980, and there's like this 95-year-old dude just like mean-mugging, this other like 95-year-old dude I think I know you from somewhere.
Speaker 2:Black Tom Island. You blew it up. World War I and II and Vietnam and the Korean War and all those shits passed by.
Speaker 1:Even better too is the German spy. Sneakily he's got like the old-school German pointy hat from World War I.
Speaker 2:With that like spike on top.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly Were you from World War I Nein.
Speaker 2:Good times, yeah, it's good times. So well, I mean, I guess, I mean I don't even know how they would like link it, unless he had stuff, that because yeah, it was 1918 I guess, but like it was the mexican border, it's not, they didn't say how they caught him, because it's not like they got had a fax machine back, then they just faxed the picture down to him or something.
Speaker 1:I mean so yeah, not exactly sure how they caught him, because it's not like they had a fax machine back, then they just faxed a picture down to him or something. So yeah, not exactly sure how they caught him.
Speaker 2:Unless he was like oh sorry, I need to declare I bombed Black Tom Island, jesus. I was asking if he had any apples or anything, but okay.
Speaker 1:Hey, hey German dude, why are you wearing this shirt that says blew up? Black tom island, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt with a with a like a picture of him with two thumbs who blew up black tom island.
Speaker 2:This guy, the further shirt, him like for their shirts. Two thumbs, the bombs, like about to explode.
Speaker 1:The back of the shirt's the explosion ah, ask me about what I was doing on black tom island.
Speaker 2:Two years ago. I like how you used two years ago because it going forward for the rest of it. You wore this shirt 20 years later. Guess what I was doing? A black tom island two years ago.
Speaker 1:Originally I was gonna update the shirt every year. But it turned out to be very expensive, right? Custom printing presses weren't a thing back then. I only did it like three times, then I realized it was too much. Right Now I just take a sharpie and I just draw a one in front of whatever number is there he's got his shirt covered in sharpie.
Speaker 1:So the other German spy that we know of, that night he actually managed to escape capture and kind of went around doing spy stuff all throughout World War II until the the russians captured him and killed him. So that probably wasn't fun either. I can't picture being captured as a spy by russians turning out to be a good thing yeah, I don't, I don't think, um, the russians are.
Speaker 2:They are not exactly known for, uh, hospitality, yeah, hospitality and light touch. Yeah, oh, this guy is, uh, yeah, he's, he's got information we want. So let's just kind of we'll talk sternly to him. You know, I'll count to three, very, very angrily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was like world war one back in those days. They just stuck you in a room with a horny rat sputin and let him have his way with you, right? Yeah, this giant horse dick. Yeah, just like said in the song.
Speaker 2:Oh it was like nothing, Go ahead. I didn't know where I was going with it.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to say I love this. There's this one meme where it's like that song Rasputin by Boney M yeah, Rasputin's grandchildren were alive when that song came out. So there's, a nine-year-old business and all of a sudden a song about how good your granddad fucks comes on the radio. It was song about how good your granddad fucks comes on the radio.
Speaker 2:It was like grandpa, I mean. But let's be real, of all the things people said about your grandfather, that was probably like on the, the happy end yeah, honestly that what.
Speaker 1:That is kind of like one of the nicer things they could have said about him on, things could have gone a lot worse, I guess I assume there's still relatives around right.
Speaker 2:I mean, or did they do that with the hitler family? Did or like we're to end our bloodline?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't really know. Hmm, Speaking of Russians, though, one side effect from all this happening was, uh, Russia was not happy about that explosion because, uh, that was all there, more, mostly their arms and shipments. They were on that Island waiting coming over to them. So, uh, they were not exactly happy with the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company, and they decide to sue the pants off them for gross negligence, as you know you tend to do. But in a fun moment of lawyering, the lawsuit take place right after that Bolshevik revolution. So the government of Russia changed hands and the railroad company was like hey, man, that contract we signed was for the previous government, not with this one. That just came because of revolution, so we should be off the hook.
Speaker 1:I mean, it sounds very lawyerly, and of course it sounds very lawyerly, be like yeah, well, I mean, we didn't sign it with this king. Yeah, that would be kind of like be like hey, we signed this with the blast president, not with the current one. But the courts did not agree with that. Ok, yeah, of course, do not agree. In fact, it almost kind of backfired on the uh uh, railroad company, because I guess the former remnants of the old government were still kind of hanging around in some uh way or another. So, uh, with the method that the railroad company tried, there was a chance they opened themselves to get sued by both governments, the previous one and the older one, or the previous one the current one, yeah. So they kind of had to like do some last minute, uh, apologizing, of course you'd. No, no, we didn't mean that we weren't trying this, please don't sue us twice.
Speaker 2:I was drunk, it's Russia.
Speaker 1:As a fellow Russian, you know what it's like being drunk around the clock. I'm drunk right now. It is the Russian way of things. So the cost of all that exploded munitions and property damage was valued at $50 million, and that's basically what I think the Russians got rewarded with. Somewhere around $50 million too, and all this basically got lumped into that giant $33 billion of post-World War I reparations that Germany was stuck with. Remember that, nate? Remember how well that worked out? Oh, yeah, it worked out beautifully.
Speaker 2:I think bad happened.
Speaker 1:Oh well, germany handled it in the best way possible. See, what they actually did is you know those Capital One cards you get where it's like transfer all your balances to this card and get a low interest rate. Well, they did that. They just got a Capital One card and they transferred all $33 billion to that and then they made like two payments and then they just stopped paying it. They changed their address a couple of times, moved PO boxes and they just waited for the whole thing to get forgotten about. So that's how it worked out. Sounds like a way to go. Yeah, it's the American way of avoiding debt. The Germans were pioneers in that. Yes, I am joking about how they did that.
Speaker 1:Somewhere there's poor people listening to the podcast. Be like yes, I know that method. Right, consolidate all your debt to one company and then screw over that company. One more big fallout from this whole thing One of the investigators from all this, from the island blowing up, was Harvard Law School graduate, john McCloy, who had gone on to help create the policy of Japanese internment camps in World War II, using this Black Tom Island as an example of why we need them saying that, hey, if we don't lock up all these Japanese, we could have ourselves another Black Tom Island incident with terrorisms, and even FDR used Black Tom Island to justify the internment camps going on. Actual saying is we don't want another Black Tom Island. So there you go. This was used for racism years on afterwards and that's pretty much the end of the story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always hate the internment camp stuff because, yeah you, just at the same time there were germans walking around, you know, but of course you know, oh, that's color difference there.
Speaker 1:Racism, yay, yay. Well, you gotta do that old family guy thing where you whip out that uh color gradient thing and it blows oh yeah it's like not okay, yeah right, that's pretty much how it works. The same with the cataloging all the dead people on Black Tom Island. They probably just went around with one of those gradient cards like those little paint swatches, and just hold it up next to the skin color and be like, eh, it doesn't count, eh, yeah, so did you learn? Anything fun and exciting from this Nate. I did actually.
Speaker 2:I mean, we talked about how the Statue of Liberty was damaged and, you know, obviously like one of the excuses for internment camps, and just you know it was, I don't know, it was very enjoyable.
Speaker 1:How easy it was to just disappear back in the day. Yeah, it counts for all the dads who went out to go get grab a gallon of milk or some cigarettes and never came back.
Speaker 2:Right, you come to find out later on. They have like two more families. Yeah, exactly, you weren't even the first family, right, you're the second?
Speaker 1:Yeah, why did daddy leave us? Oh, he went back to his original family. You mean his second family? No, his original family. We were the second family, unfortunately. So do, do, do, do, do, boink. I should probably stop the recording before I forget Doink, doink, doink, because sometimes I wonder what happens.
