Latest / Crime Bloodlines / The Market's Shadow Permits: How Small Fees Hid A Dead Man's Secret

Transcript

The Market's Shadow Permits: How Small Fees Hid A Dead Man's Secret · Crime Bloodlines

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of December 9th, Jerry Collins was doing
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: what he had done for 20 years, checking his trot
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: lines in the drainage channel behind the Callaway County Fairgrounds
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: before sunrise. The water was low and cold. He reached
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: down and pulled up something that had no business being there,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: a laminated card. Current year official seal, bearing the name
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: of a vendor assigned to an interior booth at the
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: market that was, at that moment, operating less than 200
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: yards away. He pulled up three more just like it.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Four valid vendor permits. floating in a drainage ditch at dawn.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: That detail mattered more than anyone realized on that December morning.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: It would take a financial crimes investigator, a storage unit,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a parallel ledger, and a dead man's missing persons file
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: to understand what those four cards were actually doing in
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the water. Meanwhile, Calloway County ran its farmers and crafts
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: market out of the fairgrounds on Grover Street. On a
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: busy Saturday, roughly 4,000 people walked through those gates. Around
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: 200 vendors set up tables, handmade furniture, estate tools, Canned goods,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: salvaged parts, whatever people drove in to sell. The market
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: was not glamorous. It was practical. It was the kind
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: of place where the same faces appeared in the same spots,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: season after season, and regulars knew each other by first
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: name and table number. The official cost of a vendor
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: permit was $ 40 a year. That number was the public
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: face of the arrangement. The real number, what vendors actually
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: paid if they wanted an interior booth, one of the
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: covered spots with foot traffic and shelter. ran anywhere from
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: 60 to 140, paid in cash, to men they did
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: not know well and could not name clearly. The man
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: behind that second number was Melvin Richardson. Richardson was 53
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: years old and owned Tri-State Climate, a heating and cooling
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: supply operation on the north side of Calloway. He coached
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: youth baseball. He attended First Methodist. His neighbors would later
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: describe him as someone you would never know, the specific
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: phrasing that investigators noted, because it meant he had never
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: given anyone reason to look. Richardson had been running the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: racket since the market's third operating season. By the time
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Collins pulled those permits from the water, the operation had
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: been in place for nearly nine years. The mechanism was
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: precise enough to have its own paper trail, which was
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: ultimately its undoing. Curtis Ware worked as an office manager
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: for the Callaway County Fairgrounds Authority, a position he had
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: held for 14 years. Ware ran vendor renewals. He controlled
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the laminate stock. Over nine years, procurement records would later
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: show The fairgrounds ordered roughly 40% more laminate stock than
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: official permit issuance could account for. That surplus did not evaporate.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Ware diverted it, blank and ready to print, to Richardson's crew.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Two years before the investigation began, Ware bought a boat.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: He paid cash. The shadow permits Ware supplied were not
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: crude fakes. They carried parallel booth assignments and a barely
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: visible validation mark that Richardson's men could read on sight.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: To a vendor, they looked official. To anyone else, they
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: looked like any other laminated card. When a vendor left
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the market, voluntarily or otherwise, Richardson's crew retrieved those shadow
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: permits before anyone else could examine them. The disposal method
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: was simple. Drop them in the drainage channel and let
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: the current carry them away. Most of the time, it worked.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Gregory Pruitt was 48, Richardson's office manager at Tri-State Climate.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Pruitt coordinated the cash collection, maintained a parallel ledger of
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: vendor assignments, and managed the relationship with Weyer. He and
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Ware had shared Thursday dinners in Fenwick for six years.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Investigators would later call Pruitt the paper man, the one
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: who kept the books that were never supposed to exist.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: The vendors who paid were not naive. They understood, in
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: the way people understand, things they cannot prove and cannot
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: afford to challenge, that the men collecting the money had
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: the ability to move them out of a good spot.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Interior booths cycled out at twice the rate of exterior booths.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Vendors reported being told their section had been reconfigured, usually
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: by a heavy, middle-aged man in a dark jacket. Over
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: nearly a decade, roughly 60 vendors paid into a system
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: they had no legal standing to question. One of those
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: vendors was Frank Muldoon. Muldoon was 41 years old. He
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: had worked an interior booth for two seasons, selling from
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: the inside rows where the covered space kept the weather
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: off and the foot traffic came naturally. He was not wealthy.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The booth mattered to him in the concrete way a
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: reliable income stream matters to someone without many of them.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: In the springs, Four years before Collins ever reached into
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: that channel, Muldoon stopped showing up. His car was found
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: parked two miles from the fairgrounds. His sister, Deborah Tice,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: eventually filed a missing persons report, but not for three
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: months because in those three months she had been waiting
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: to hear from him, and by the time she was
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: certain something was wrong, the trail was already cold. The
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: last contact anyone documented was a phone call Muldoon made
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: to Deborah from the market on a Saturday morning. He
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: told her he was having trouble with some people over
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: his booth. That was the last time she heard his voice.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: His missing persons case sat open for four years. No remains,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: no physical evidence, no suspects named in the file. The
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: connection between Frank Muldoon and a drainage channel behind the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: fairgrounds had not yet been drawn by anyone who could
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: act on it. That would change in January. When Gordon
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Davis opened a box and found four laminated cards, Gordon
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Davis was a financial crimes investigator. He was not supposed
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: to be looking for a missing person. He was supposed
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: to be looking at permits. The four laminated cards Jerry
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Collins had pulled from the drainage channel in December had
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: been forwarded to the state attorney general's office after the
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: sheriff's referral. Davis received the box in January. He turned
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the permits over in his hands. They were valid. They
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: were current. They had belonged to Norris Gibbs, a retired
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: machinist who had sold tools at the market for six
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: years and died the previous October. Nobody had reported them missing.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Nobody had flagged them as lost. That was the first
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: image that would not leave Davis alone. A dead man's permits,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: still laminated, still valid, drifting in a drainage channel 200
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: yards from a market that was still open for business.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: He started with procurement records. The Calloway County Fairgrounds Authority
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: had ordered laminate stock for vendor permits across nine operating seasons.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Davis pulled the purchasing logs and set them against the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: official issuance records. The permits that appeared in the authority's
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: own files assigned to named vendors in documented slots. The
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: gap was 40%. Across nine years, the fairgrounds had ordered
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: roughly 40% more laminate stock than its own records could
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: account for. That was not a rounding error. That was
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: not supply waste. Somewhere in the supply chain, blank permit
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: stock was leaving through a door that did not show
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: up on any inventory sheet. The name attached to vendor
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: renewal processing. Year after year was Curtis Ware, Ware had
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: been the fairgrounds authority's office manager for 14 years. He
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: ran the renewal window each season. He signed for laminate shipments.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Two years before Davis received the permits box, Ware had
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: bought a boat in cash. Nobody had asked where the
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: money came from, because nobody had been looking. Davis was
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: looking now. That 40% gap left one in every 2.5
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: applicants without a callback. It raised a question Davis could
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: not yet answer. The blank stock had to go somewhere.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Someone had to print on it. Someone had to distribute
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: what came out. The procurement anomaly pointed to a supply leak.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: It did not yet point to a destination. That destination
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: had a name. Davis found it in a storage unit.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The unit was registered to a shell company. The shell
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: company's paperwork pulled through a business record subpoena, traced back
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: to Tri-State Climate, a heating and cooling supply operation on
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: the north side of Callaway. The owner of Tri-State Climate
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: was Melvin Richardson, 53 years old. youth baseball coach, Sunday
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: regular at First Methodist. Inside the storage unit, a parallel
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: permit ledger. The ledger listed booth assignments. It listed collection dates.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: It listed amounts, figures that ran 60 to 140 per
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: interior vendor per year against the official $ 40 fee. It was,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: in effect, a second set of books for a second
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: system of taxation that had been running inside the market
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: for nearly a decade. The ledger was maintained in the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: handwriting of Gregory Pruitt. 48. Tri-State Climates Office Manager. Pruitt
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: had coordinated cash collection. He had managed the relationship with Ware.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: He had met Ware for dinner in Fenwick every Thursday
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: for six years. He was, in the language Davis would
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: use later, the paper man. Two image loops were now
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: open at once. The supply leak was explained. The parallel
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: system was documented, but the ledger raised its own question,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: one that had nothing to do with money. One entry
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: was different from every other entry in the book. Beside
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: a vendor name and Pruitt's handwriting, there was a small
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: circled X. It was the only mark of its kind
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: in the entire ledger. Every other entry was clean. This
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: one was not. The name next to the circled X
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: was Frank Muldoon. Davis pulled Muldoon's vendor exit record from
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the Fairgrounds Authority files. Muldoon had left the market in
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: the spring, four years earlier. The exit record gave no reason.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Standard administrative notation, Davis cross-referenced the exit date against active
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: missing persons files. Muldoon's file was there. His sister, Deborah Tice,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: had filed the report three months after his disappearance. She
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: told Davis about the last phone call, a Saturday morning.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Muldoon calling from the market, saying he was having trouble
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: with some people over his booth. Then nothing. His car,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: found parked two miles away. No contact since. Four years.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: No remains. No named suspects. No physical evidence in the file.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Davis walked the tree line south of the drainage channel.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Less than a quarter mile from where Collins had pulled
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: the permits from the water, investigators located Frank Muldoon's remains.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Because of death, blunt force trauma, the case that had
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: sat as a missing persons file for four years was
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: now a homicide. Near the remains, forensic teams recovered a
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: partial boot impression in the soil and a discarded energy.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: drink can. On the can, a partial fingerprint. The print
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: matched Bobby Stiles, a man connected to Richardson's collection operation.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: The boot impression was consistent with Stiles as well. The
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: circled X had not been an accident. There is something
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: about the sequence of that discovery that is difficult to
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: absorb even at a distance. Davis had started with a
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: financial anomaly. He had followed laminate stock through a shell
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: company into a storage unit, and at the bottom of
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: an accounting ledger, in the middle of columns of cash
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: figures and booth numbers, he had found the marker for
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: a death. The circled X was not a confession. It
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: was not a threat. It was a notation in a
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: record that was never meant to be read by anyone
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: outside Richardson's operation. But it connected the parallel permit system
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: to Frank Muldoon's disappearance in a way that nothing else
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: in the case could. Lorraine Voss, the assistant state's attorney,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: had already been building the warrant structure before the remains
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: were found. When Pruitt made the decision to appear voluntarily
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: at the conference room, apparently believing cooperation was still a
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: negotiable condition, Voss had already filed for his call records.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: The warrant was in hand before he walked through the door.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: The records showed two calls from Pruitt's phone to Bobby Stiles.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Both fell within a 40-minute window. That bracketed the last
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: confirmed sighting of Frank Muldoon at the market that Saturday morning.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Pruitt had called Stiles twice in the window, when Muldoon
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: was last known to be alive. He had not called
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Stiles before. He had not called Stiles after. Just those
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: two calls in that window. Pruitt's voluntary appearance ended as
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: something else entirely. The cooperation Credit Vos structured gave Pruitt
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: a path, but it was a narrow one. He was
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: indicted on eight counts. His statement that he had not
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: been present at Muldoon's death was not contradicted by the
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: physical evidence, which placed Stiles at the scene. and Pruitt
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: only at the phone. But the call records in that
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: window meant Pruitt could not step away from what happened
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: to Muldoon by claiming ignorance of the men involved, or
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the timing. Richardson was not charged with directly ordering the killing.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Davis said plainly that he did not believe Richardson had
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: issued that instruction. The conspiracy charge reflected what the evidence
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: could establish, that Richardson ran the operation, that Muldoon's refusal
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: to pay, and his threat to contact the fairgrounds authority
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: had created the conditions the crew acted on. And that
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Richardson's operation was the reason Frank Muldoon was in that
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: situation at all. Bobby Stiles did not offer a statement
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: that appears in the record. The fingerprint and the boot
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: impression were the evidence. They were enough. Picture a Saturday
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: morning at the Callaway Market. Interior vendors are setting up.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: The foot traffic builds slowly in the first hour, then
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: faster as the morning opens. Frank Muldoon is in his booth.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: He has already made the phone call to Deborah. He
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: is having trouble with some people over his spot. walk
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: through what that trouble looked like, tested against what the
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: evidence actually shows. If Muldoon had simply walked away from
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: his booth that morning, and disappeared on his own, no
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: involvement from anyone at the market, his car would not
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: have been found, two miles from the fairgrounds with no explanation,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: and no sign that he had traveled further. A voluntary
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: departure leaves different traces than the ones left here. The
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: car's location, the absence of any contact afterward, the remains
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: less than a quarter mile from the drainage channels, None
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: of that fits a picture when Muldoon left voluntarily. That
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: version collapses the moment you look at the circled X
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: and the distance to the tree line. The version that
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: the evidence does support begins with Muldoon refusing to pay
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: and saying something that Stiles, and whoever else was present,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: interpreted as a direct threat to the operation. Pruitt's two
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: calls to Stiles, in the exact window of Muldoon's last sighting,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: are not explained by coincidence. They are explained by communication,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: a decision being made or relayed in real time. Davis
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: believed Richardson did not issue an explicit order. That position
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: is consistent with everything in the record. Richardson ran a
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: cash extraction scheme that had operated for nearly a decade
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: without violence. The standard collection process involved pressure, favorable booth
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: placement withheld, sections declared reconfigured, vendors rotated out. Physical force
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: was not the normal tool. But Richardson's crew made a
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: calculation that Saturday morning without waiting for instructions, Muldoon had
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: threatened to go to the Fairgrounds Authority. The operation had
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: been running for nine years. The crew made a choice.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: The circled X in Pruitt's ledger, the only mark of
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: its kind in the entire book, suggests that someone in
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: the operation knew that what happened to Muldoon was different
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: from everything else they had done. It was recorded. Failed. Kept.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: That is the detail that resists easy explanation even now.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: The ledger was evidence. Keeping it was a liability. But
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Pruitt kept it, and the X stayed in it, and
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: four years later, Gordon Davis found it in a storage unit,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: registered to a shell company that no one was watching.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Deborah Tice waited four years to know what had happened
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: to her brother. The last thing she heard him say
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: was that he was having trouble with some people. She
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: did not know, in that moment, that the trouble was
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: already past the point where it could be talked through.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: The arrest warrants went out in April. Bobby Stiles was
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: taken first. The physical evidence had been enough. A partial
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: boot impression pressed into soft ground near the tree line.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: A partial fingerprint lifted from a discarded energy drink can
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: less than 30 feet from Frank Muldoon's remains. Both matched styles.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: The case that had sat untouched for four years closed
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: around him in a single morning. Richardson was indicted on
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: 12 counts, racketeering, extortion, and conspiracy in connection with Muldoon's death.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: He did not order the killing. The record is clear
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: on that point, and the charges reflect it. but he
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: built the operation, ran it for nearly a decade, and
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: created the conditions in which his crew decided that a
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: vendor who threatened to talk was a problem that needed
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: to be solved permanently. The jury deliberated for nine days.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: They convicted on all counts. Richardson received 22 years. Two
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: appeals followed. Both were denied. Pruitt cooperated partially. It was
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: not a full accounting. He gave enough to structure a credit,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: not enough to escape consequence. Lorraine Voss had already obtained
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: his call records before he walked into the conference room.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Whatever Pruitt thought he was holding back, the warrant had
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: already taken it. He was convicted on eight counts and
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: sentenced to 14 years. He served 11. When he walked
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: out at 59 years old, his daughter Melissa was there.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: He did not return to Calloway. Curtis Ware, the man
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: who diverted blank laminate stock from the fairgrounds authority for
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: nine years, who bought a boat in cash and kept
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: his office job, was indicted on four counts of fraud
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: and theft of government property. Six years. He served four
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: and relocated out of state. The operation could not have
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: run without him. The permits were the mechanism, and he
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: was the source of every blank sheet. Stiles was convicted
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: of murder in the first degree. Life without parole. The
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: jury had been out nine days. Nine days considering the ledger,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: the call records, the boot impression, the fingerprint, the laminate
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: procurement numbers, the turnover anomaly. The shadow permits pulled from
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: a drainage ditch by a fisherman, checking his lines before dawn.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Nine days to reach a verdict that covered 60 vendors.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Nearly a decade of extortion. And one man found in
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: the tree line south of a channel that was supposed
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: to carry the evidence away. The four permits Jerry Collins
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: pulled from the water on December 9th were entered into evidence.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: After the trial concluded, they were returned to the Calloway
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: County Fairgrounds Authority. One of them was framed and hung
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: in the lobby on Grover Street. The following April, the
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: market reopened. Single $ 40 fee, booth assignments by lottery. Frank
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Muldoon sold tools at a weekend market. He had two seasons.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: He called his sister on a Saturday morning to tell
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: her he was having trouble with some people over his booth.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: That was the last time Deborah Tice heard his voice.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: She filed a missing persons report. Three months after he vanished,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: the report sat. His car remained parked two miles from
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the fairgrounds, and the case went nowhere for four years.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: until a fisherman found four laminated primates floating in a
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: drainage channel and thought something was wrong. Muldoon's name was
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: in a ledger hidden in a storage unit registered to
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: a company no one was watching. His booth number was there,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: his exit date was there, and next to his name
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: was a small circled X, the only mark of its
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: kind in the entire book, written in Gregory Pruitt's handwriting.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Someone in that operation knew that what happened to Muldoon
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: was not the same as anything else they had done.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: They recorded it anyway. and they kept it. That single
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: mark is what connects a vendor permit racket in a
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: small county to a man who has not been home
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: in four years. It is the detail that should not exist,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: and it is the detail that brought everything down. Deborah
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Tice finally learned what happened to her brother. The trouble
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: he mentioned in that last call was already past the
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: point where talking would have changed anything. She deserved to know.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: It took four years, a fisherman, a financial crimes investigator,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: and a ledger that no one should have kept, but
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: she knows now. Frank Muldoon was 41 years old. He
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: sold tools on the weekend. On weekends, he sold tools
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: from the back of a white pickup truck parked outside
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: the hardware store on Clement Street. This show is made
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: by Oboe Media.