The Green Binder: How Vending Routes Became a Fire Racket

True Crime: Killer Secrets · Aug 11, 2026 · 19m

The Green Binder: How Vending Routes Became a Fire Racket

Dry, upright on a warm transformer pad in a frozen substation, a green binder held tabs, neat pages and a secret that tied nine fires to a decades-long protection racket in Portsmith-how did vending route fees turn into arson and who was covered up by official files? What name in those pages would topple a deputy marshal and a records clerk?

In this episode, we follow the trail from a lineman's photograph to the ledgers that mapped payments, the van that was burned, and the people who moved cash and closed cases-can one binder and one…