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I'm Jon Meacham, author and historian, I'm proud to present a brand new limited podcast, documentary series called It Was Set, where I guide you through ten of the most historic, impactful and timeless speeches in American history.

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Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike.

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We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now. The future will always be ours. The America John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. My I have seen the glory of the. Directed and produced by Peabody nominated Sea 13 original studios in association with history, it was said, is now available for free on Apple podcasts, Spotify, radio, dotcom, and wherever you listen to podcasts. 13 originals. If someone were to ask how I got involved in motorcycle gangs in the first place, I guess the answer would be that it all started in the Texas prison about six months before I got out in October of 62.

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Back in Episode three, you heard these words from my father, from hate and discontent. They were his very first on page one over the next nearly 500 pages. He goes on to detail his transition from Houston pimp to founding member of the Bandidos to a devoted Cleveland Hells Angel to murder, to a man who'd run out of options. These are his final words on the very last page. To me now, I was in a circle outside of the circle that everyone else was in.

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I wanted to get the shit out of Cleveland and not look back, but there just seem to be no way. I can never leave. Mary and the kids would become the first targets I left town. I had no way of getting them out of there and money to be able to go anywhere and set up housekeeping for him, so I just figured that the best thing to do was to hang in there and become just as deadly as everyone else.

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Play the game and go with the flow. And from then on, I looked at everyone in a different light and saw more of them than I had ever saw before. Nothing was the same anymore, and I didn't feel I could really trust anyone anymore. And now with a smile, as if it were painted on, I was like a time bomb ready to go off at any time.

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Church became something that started building up anxiety in me days beforehand, and when it came time to walk into the clubhouse, I was about a nervous wreck, watching each member for any sign of hostility and wondering if this is going to be the night that I had to get down from my patch or my life.

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My father took writing classes in prison, then learned how to type and then carefully crafted his words over decades to project the version of himself that he most wanted others to see. The meanest and proudest tells Angel on two wheels. A man who pimped, raped and killed, but also had a conscience, he said he was fed up with all the killing. But the most telling part of his whole manuscript to me is that he chose to end it before he rolled over to Cleveland ATF agent Ernie Berkovich.

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He doesn't explain why he was in a circle outside of the circle, as he put it. He never reveals exactly why he rolled or that he even did it at all.

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Maybe he thought this would tarnish the veneer he'd worked so hard at polishing, or maybe it was just too embarrassing for him to actually put it down on the page. I'll never know for sure. But I do know one thing. My father didn't fully appreciate what the consequences of his actions would be if there was ever any common thread throughout his life that was that. Here's the letter he wrote to Bernie Berkovich from prison in 1985. You know, sitting here and thinking about this whole mess, judgment, rhetoric and all and all the smug looks I seen on their faces as I sat there in that witness chair, I now understand why other members didn't step away from the club to I really believe that things would have been much different if it hadn't been for the bribe he took.

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Speaking of different, you know, I'm an oddity in these witness units, among other witnesses, and the sense that each of them representing agents always seem to be working with them in order for an early release. Which leaves me wondering, why have you never taken the initiative to help me since you know more about me and why I've done everything I've done, and at no time have I held back and all the times I gave you 100 percent. Another reason I have this feeling of being an oddity among all these inmates is because, unlike them, I turn myself in and they all traded off and got away with things that are unbelievable.

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Not that I should not have received any time, because, as you know, I expected to pay for this in a way I even welcomed it. It has done a lot to make me feel that I have paid for my crime and this I'm thankful for because it released me from the burden I carried so many years. But then on the negative side, such a stiff sentence caused me to lose my family. As Mary put it, the children will be grown and it was best for them if she tried to make a clean start.

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I agree fully with her now because in view of everything, I had nothing to offer towards their upbringing in here. Plus, all this, the look in the members eyes when they hear that I'd gotten such a stiff sentence told me that they were thinking it was useless to even think of joining me in this quest to stop the killings. From the questions that Caplan kept pressing me about, how much money did I receive for my defection leaves me believing that this is what they thought was the reason for my actions, that I demanded thousands of dollars for my information.

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And that was the way I was being paid back by officials. You and I know that isn't true and was never the case from the start. Sometimes it's very hard to understand all that's happened to me because I'm constantly reminded of it each day. You remember telling me that once this whole thing dies down, there is a possibility that I would get this time cut down? Mary and I lived on this hope for a long time. But as time went on and the possibility of it grew dimmer in Mary's eyes, I couldn't bring myself to repeat it to her anymore.

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So we lost hope. What I'm trying to get at is, as it stands now, there's still the chance that I can be a part of watching my children grow up. So see what you can do. Regards Bush, Ms. If my father ever had any intention of watching us grow up, I certainly never knew about it. He could have been a part of my life. He just didn't want to be. He was a ghost, nothing more than a cautionary tale.

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And once he entered into his arrangement with Luckovich, they were both playing out their hands to benefit themselves as much as possible. The rest of us be damned. What good is a man who's lost his soul? Can't take a stand, when is flames gonna go? Fend of the enemy saying the jubilee with all the fire we can breed. I'm Jackie Taylor, and this is relative unknown. Bernie, Butkovitz had been trying to develop an informant inside the Cleveland Hells Angels for quite some time, as Bob Samachar, retired CPD intelligence unit sergeant, said back in Episode five, I think he was probably the primary reason that the Cleveland office of ATF had an interest in the angel.

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So it was it was something that was personal with him and according to Somyurek, but couldn't believe his luck when my father took him up on his offer.

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So he came in and shut the door to the office and he said, would you believe it if I told you that we rolled an angel?

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But maybe Berkovich was overplaying his hand. If we go back to their phone call, there's a few key lines that when you put them together, they don't sound like they're coming from a star witness. Now, all I've seen is a clipping on it, OK? I never you know, there's a lot of things I didn't stand there and watch. You know, I wasn't no witness to a lot of things.

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I told you I can't stand there and say, yeah, I seen this thing that I can help you build a whole gang of cases on. Just fucking hearsay.

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I can't remember everything I heard about Bernie Berkovich, but from what I recall, what I heard about him wasn't necessarily that flattering. This is Roger Davidson, the former Akron prosecutor who tried the second murder case against Hells Angel, Andrew Shushan Davidson, and his co prosecutor, Rick Dobens had to rely on the testimony of my father. Testimony they knew was such a problem that they didn't even call him to the stand. But Davidson says more than 30 Berkovich, it was his agency that was a problem.

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Back then, the ATF was not very well respected by law enforcement and quite a few prosecutors, basically what we had heard about the ATF was that they couldn't be trusted. They would talk to detectives and the local police departments and try to get them to take cases on cases that the federal government would not take because of the cases were less than stellar.

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And they would try to convince you that the case was better than it was and possibly tell you facts or dare to try to get you excited about getting involved in their case. I do not believe that the ATF was as well trained, as well organized as well. That is the FBI. And the ATF was, as far as I'm concerned, like a stepchild. These guys were out doing their own thing, and because of what the stuff they were involved in, drugs and alcohol, they're on the road a lot.

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They don't come in every day and report to somebody up above them, their chief agent or whatever. So they're just out there and sometimes they lie to the detectives.

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They were known as just being a little bit like cowboys, cowboys, who is Roger Davidson and put it in Episode seven, had that oh shit moment when my father was pressed to implicate himself in a felony and he gave himself up for the killing of 17 year old Donald Della Sera. Now, both sides were in a tough spot. My father would have to do more time than he thought he would because he had just confessed to first degree murder. And but Kovik needed to work on securing both witness protection and a sentence my father would go for.

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As for the sentence piece, Bernie told him whatever it was, he could likely work off some time with his testimony. But they had to begin building cases, cases which would rely almost completely on hearsay from one man.

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From my perspective, the ATF is the outlaw entity of the federal government.

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This is Bill Mucci. You've heard from Bill throughout this podcast speaking about his groundbreaking exposé of the witness protection program. They have a long history of deceitful practices. I've watched them for 40 years, and frankly, they should be disbanded because they are the outlaws of justice. They get involved with the prosecution ends of things, and I've seen numerous situations over the years where they have been untruthful at least, and infested with fraud at most.

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I had a case where a kid got convicted of first degree murder based on an ATF agents testimony that corroborated somebody who said he saw him at the scene. I didn't understand what was going on. The ATF didn't turn over any evidence on anything, payments, etc. So I filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request and found out that the ATF had paid the guy fifteen thousand dollars after he testified. And the government never told the defense lawyers that. And a judge reversed the kid's murder conviction because of it.

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And that's the kind of stuff that they do over and over again. It's disgusting. And there are a lot of people who have called for the abolition of that agency.

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As for the witness protection piece, that was trickier. Back in Episode seven, I mentioned that my father wouldn't plead guilty unless we were taken into WITSEC together.

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I said it was a crucial detail that I would come back to while the entire deal to use my father as a witness rested on this one detail, he wanted to be put into WITSEC with his family. Remember when my mom had taken us children down to Florida to start a new life? She wasn't running from the Hells Angels. She was running from my father. She was done with Butch Crouch. Now, Bernie Berkovich needed to convince my mom to go into the program as a family or else the entire deal was off.

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I'm going to do this right. The bigger I am, the more longer you are going to try to keep me alive till you get through with me anyway, which we're going to do it right all the way down the line. OK, it's not like we're going to keep you alive and then dump you. What about my old lady and kids? Chances are if you want your lady and kids, they're going to go with you. A lot of promises were made to my father that if he testified and helped bring down the Hells Angels of Cleveland, that he would be rewarded for his behavior and that he would have this wonderful life and that he would get his wife back and he'd get his children back and he'd live in suburbia.

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And, you know, you might have to do some time, but when he got out, he'd have a wonderful life to go back to. They brought my mother into the equation and essentially bribed her with that promise as well. However, she did not want to go back to my father. That was her worst nightmare.

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They couldn't hold this wonderful idea of a great life with Butch Crouch, they couldn't give that to my mother because it wasn't a great life with Butch Crouch.

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It was full of violence and drugs and alcohol and cheating and potential child abuse down the road and violence that she just escaped. When they realized they couldn't bribe her with that, the threat started happening. In Florida, my mother was receiving death threats at work, she was told that our lives were in grave danger, that my father had turned into a federally protected witness and had decided to turn state's evidence against the club. My mother was told that if we did not rejoin my father in witness protection, we would surely all be killed.

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And it wasn't just my mother that thought her life was in danger. Here's my younger sister, Jamie.

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Grandma told me that when we were down in Florida, she said the feds. So I don't know exactly who. But she said they used to call her and tell her like there might be bombs in her car and she should look underneath her car because people would be trying to kill her. I remember thinking when she was telling me this, why would the government why would the feds? Because, you know, they were at that time, they were like our friends.

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They protected us after we found this out, you know, like, why would they be telling my grandmother that people are going to blow her up?

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I just remember her telling me that every time I turn the key in my car, she was I was I'd always have to take a deep breath.

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She's like, I never knew if it was going to blow up.

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And I think they're trying to get my grandma to convince my mom to come into the program that, you know, my dad was doing this stuff and that they were in danger, but they might try to kill them or something.

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My mom was told by federal agents that while we were in Florida, the angels paid my grandparents and my uncle, Gene Ziga, a visit, she was told that they were sending a message to us. Former Cleveland angel Matt Sanskar admits this was true. They did go see my family. But the message he says they brought was very different than the one we were given. That was on a lot of people's minds that say, hey, we got to let her know, we got to let Mary know and her brother and let their family know that, A, this is butch by himself.

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It has nothing to do with the family. Wouldn't even dream of even hinting anything towards the family, any kind of violence repercussion or anything if we were capable of doing that, nothing.

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But that was given right away. My grandfather said the president of the Hells Angels in nineteen eighty one went out to visit him. And told him we would never hurt Mary and the children ever, but we do want to know our Butches. And that was it. We don't care where Marion, the children are, but if you have any information on which we'd appreciate it shook his hand and left.

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And that was at. They were getting it not just from one specific spokesman or anything, but every day, don't worry about this, don't worry about this. It's a it's a terrible thing, but don't worry about it. You don't have nothing to worry about.

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We had no idea where to Crouch's were, nor did we ask anybody from any chapter from coast to coast to put out feelers to find out where they were holding Crouch and his family. That thought never even came up. But, you know, to go along with the program that he involved himself with, there is those protocols that the feds follow, you know, and one of them is being, hey, you got to instill some fear into the family of the informant.

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Do you have to do that? They pile up fear like you wouldn't believe, and frankly, I don't think fear is that much of a factor in a lot of these guys. I've repeatedly seen people go back to their, quote, dangerous areas. I don't think fear is as emphatic as what they paint it to be. But believe me, that is the word that is used every day to keep people in line. Ninety percent of the time, there's no danger involved in that danger is manufactured in a lot of respects to keep people in tow.

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Probably half the people in that witness program don't need to be in it, maybe more. And if you look at our normal child welfare agencies, if somebody is put in danger or not being taken care of by families, they don't take them and send them to Billings, Montana. They put them with another family member who can handle it.

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If I had my choice, I would have gone to my grandparents, I would have stayed with them. Why were we kept away from the only safe, happy environment that we knew which was in Ohio? I feel that they used my father and I feel that they used my mother and they put us in a place where it's just been for decades full of struggle. I don't think that my father actually felt like our lives were in danger. I think he knew all along that the club was never after us.

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I think that he also used it as leverage in a scare tactic to keep my mother around. This whole thing has infuriated me over the years, my mother was tricked into going back to an abusive, horrible man, she was forced into it with threats of us being killed. Our family was torn apart. And who's who's who's to answer for that? So many things have changed around us, but our inner drive to be there for the people that we care about the most.

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It runs deeper than ever. Recently, a really good friend of mine had surgery. I wanted to be there for her by her side, holding her hand in the hospital.

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But I couldn't be wanted to show her how much that I cared, even though I couldn't be there. So I went online and I ordered her some food to have delivered to the house and I got her some flowers to cheer her up, supporting your loved ones from afar. That's something that's really important. Sending gift deliveries to family, splitting a takeout order with a friend or helping someone out financially. Our normal has changed and we're all just finding new ways to connect and to continue to support one another from afar.

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So what we need now more than ever is an easy way to support each other. And with the PayPal app sending and receiving money, it's faster and easier than ever. You can stay connected with the people that you love the most and you can support the places and the causes that you care about. PayPal is making it easy to pay safely and quickly. Just download the PayPal app today. Terms and conditions apply. December 3rd, nineteen eighty one side, one tape, one interview with Clarence Butch Crouch, conducted by Lieutenant Jerry Ruby of the Brecksville Police Department.

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Do you know anything about the death of Denise Patrick? This was certainly the most interesting case I had in my legal career of 41 years. This is Ohio senior Assistant Attorney General Jim Corcoran. Back in the early 80s, Cochran was a young prosecutor in Cuyahoga County who got handed a grisly murder case. You know, the discovery of the crime happens in June of 1976, and it was about a year and a half after the crime actually was committed.

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Everything from that point on needed to be related to who actually committed the murder and the only person that came forward to say that was Butch Crouch and of course, he doesn't come in out of the cold until November of 1981. Make no mistake about it, Butch was an outlaw. He had an outlaw lifestyle. He was doing it out of self-preservation. He thought the club was going to kill him for a variety of reasons. Now, whether or not he was paranoid about it or was true, I don't know.

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But that's when he contacted the ATF agent, Berkovich.

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From that point, he gives a bunch of different crimes up and what he gives up in detail is this crime about the knees, part of it, the murder damaged part of it. Denise Pasovic was the wife of Cleveland, Hells Angel, Tommy Pavic. About a month later, they knock on Jerry Ruby's door in Brecksville police department and say, Jerry, there's someone here that we want you to interview. And so they bring him to Butch and they do an interview of him and then they eventually bring him back to the police station and they transcribe that interview.

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OK, tell me what you know about her in detail. Just go ahead. I forget the date which can be verified, but there was a concert downtown. We went downtown to a Chuck Berry concert. We came back to the clubhouse being Tommy and Denise. And Tommy was arguing with Denise out in the car. In the Cadillac, and they have been arguing for like about an hour or so, and he got out of the car, slapped her around a little bit, throwed her back in the car.

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She was in the back seat and he got in the front seat and started off the motor and started watching it up real loud, got in the engine and everything.

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And then he shut the engine off and he was screaming and hollering at her. And I was standing up on the porch kind of higher than the street on the steps.

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And I seen a gun flash and he turned around and shot her over the back seat like that, shot her in the head for it, and and then he turned the gun around. When we were running to the car, he turned the gun around and he pointed up in the air like that and shot like he was going to kill herself.

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But then he shot it in the air and we got him out of the car, looked at the knees and she had a hole in her bleeding all up here and got Tommy went up and took him in the house. Someone said, take the car, drive it around the block, take the car and hide it around the apartments on Aspinwall. So I took the car and drove it around on Aspinwall and drove it between the apartments and went back to the clubhouse and hid in this came down on me and took the body.

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And we went out to wariness where they had them barrel stashed and there was dynamite and stuff like that inside a big package that was inside the barrel. And it was the same barrel that I pulled out of the garbage dumpster, it was blocking the street in front of the clubhouse about maybe two, three months before that, because I've been bitching about the barrel being gone because I thought somebody took it home for a garbage barrel and I pulled it out for the clubhouse and it had some kind of residue at the bottom of it because I turned it upside down a drain.

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But it never did all completely get out of there. And anyway, we took the body out there, took it down there, dug up the barrel, put it in this barrel and cut her throat.

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And dumped her in the barrel. It was determined that the crime was committed on October twenty fifth, nineteen seventy four, the way it was determined that way is because there was a Chuck Berry concert that was in town that night. And when Bush was debriefed in nineteen eighty one, he links that event to that particular night. What they did after that is they had to figure out how to keep the heat off of the clubhouse because this wasn't TCBY, which was a term that meant taking care of business.

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This had nothing to do with the motorcycle operations, had nothing to do with their criminal operations. It was strictly Thomas Pavic losing his cool and killing his wife in front of a bunch of witnesses. So they decided that they didn't want to bring it down on time, they didn't want to bring it down on the clubhouse at the time, and that's when they developed this idea that they would hide her body, cut up the car and then move forward like she just disappeared.

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The dates are fairly important here on November 3rd, nineteen seventy for Thomas Pattycake reports, the Cleveland Police Department, that his wife has been missing for several days. He said that on October 25th, she disappeared in the night sometime around three o'clock and took his automobile, and she hasn't been heard from since and it was just listed as a missing person at that time. You know, kind of gun he used, it was a 38, 38, yes, small 38.

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Whose gun was it? It was Tommy's Tommy's gun. Yes. Do you remember you were at a concert, Chuck Berry concert with the niece, and you probably spent some time with her.

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Can you sort of think back and see if you can recall what type of clothing she was wearing that night? Would that be possible? OK, Levi's she had on Levi's, I'm pretty sure. Can you recall anything else she might have been wearing? I can't remember what the shirt looked like. She always wore them high spike boots who was present when the shooting took place. Other than yourself, about four or five people, but I can't remember who all the more.

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All right. Who took her out of the car? Me and George. You and George Rothrock. Yeah. OK, when you took the body out of the car, what did you do with it? We took it down over the fence, over where the barrel was in the woods.

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George Rothrock, Inas Cernik and yourself took the body out there. Where was Tommy all that time? He was in the clubhouse. Was you upset?

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Yeah, he was screaming and hollering and everything.

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And did you find out later on why he killed her or what the reason was? No, it was. It was they was just arguing and hollering and he shot her. That was all. It was just him and her in the car. OK, why did you choose the location of Brecksville to dispose of the body? That's where George and them were stashing all the dynamite and guns and weapons and stuff in that barrel. That's what they had it up there for.

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And when I started hollering about the barrel and everything, they said they had some TCBY and I said, oh, all right. And I shut up about it because I brought it up at a meeting and they said it was for TCBY. And I said, OK. And I never seen it again until that night when you guys went to the barrel to put her body inside it. Was there anything inside it that you had to take out? Yeah.

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What was inside big package full of plastic explosives and stuff? When she was put in the barrel, were you present, I mean, did you walk down there? Yeah. Did you put her in the barrel? No, George did. OK, do you remember how she was placed in the barrel, George cut her throat and pushed her in? That's all I know, OK? You don't know she was feet first or headfirst or anything about that at first headfirst.

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Yeah, he had her like this and dug up the barrel like that. And I went back for something. And what was I looking for? Oh, for her belt. Her belt was gone. Mm hmm. I found her belt hanging on the fence. I brought it back. George cut her throat and pushed her in the barrel. Why did George cut her throat to make sure she was dead? Do you know if she was dead at the time?

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She wasn't in the car. She was breathing real hard at the clubhouse. And when did you know this in the driveway?

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I pulled around and parked over there because I went back in the house and I said, she's still breathing. I said, you know, maybe we could get her over to Euclid Hospital. And they said no, because Euclid would just get a whole bunch of shit started. She'd die probably, and they'd say, Tommy did it. So I don't know. How about on the way out there? They said she was dead and said she was dead.

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This was a cold case before they even had the name cold case for these old types of cases. OK, Denise's body was buried in a barrel that was in the ground alongside Interstate 70 seven, and it happened to be in Brecksville, Ohio. And that's why there was a connection to Gerry Ruby, who was the chief investigator in Brecksville. Jerry didn't know about this activity until about two years later when the body was discovered, there was a couple of boys that were running around in the woods at the time.

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One of the boys tripped over the barrel, lip lifted over a cover from it. They open up the barrel and of course, they saw this decomposed body. And that's how the case was originally reported. The body was transported to the coroner's office, where it was identified pretty quickly through dental records, but of course, before they had to have dental records, they needed to have some idea as to who might be involved in this. There was a ring on her finger that Thomas Patrick gave to his wife and it said With love to Danny Tommy, and there was a date on it.

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And of course, that also led to the identification of the body. And then shortly after that, they called Thomas Patkin and he identified the ring as being his wife's. Really, there's nothing to indicate that he had done anything wrong. Remember, his original story was she disappeared in the middle of the night. She took my car. I haven't seen her since.

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Were you did you hear anything, any conversations that you might have been with any people or anything about about any type of alibi or story that was being put out about what happened there? Because, you know, a lot of people were looking for Cleveland cops and everybody else, you know? Yeah.

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Tommy had put the story out that she had run off with the car and everything. And then and then later on, he spread the story out when when they found the body and everything, he was spreading the story that it was the outlaws that did it. You know, he said that they like he went and made a report that his wife was missing. She stole the car and this and that and that she was going to Akron and going down there and this and that, you know, he's trying to cover himself.

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That's about it.

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Then December twenty six to nineteen seventy four, Jeff Wagner, who was Denise's father, contacted the Cleveland Police Department and said, Look, something's happened to my daughter. She always contacts us around the holidays. She hasn't done that so far. I really think that somebody has done her in. And so now we had Jeff Wagner adding to that. And from that point, it was a missing persons case. And I got to say that what they did on a missing persons case was not a lot of investigation.

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And so it just sat there until these kids tripped over the body in June of nineteen seventy six. Cherry was dedicated to that family and trying to get some resolution, some justice for these folks because they were telling him that, hey, it had to happen by Tommy. At the time in 1976, with nothing substantive to help solve the case, Jerry Ruby focused on an unlikely piece of evidence. This barrel, do you know can you recall the color of the barrel now, it seemed like it was green, that's all.

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It seemed like it was greenish looking. I know it had one of them brown tops on it with a clamp over it.

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OK, do you know where the plant is on London, on London Road, the 3M plant? No. How did this barrel how did you guys get this barrel, where to come from? You got to remember, this is eighty one when Crouch comes in out of the cold, but Ruby's got this dead body in 76, nobody had attempted to trace Beryl's, you know, in criminology before. But you basically have Denise's body buried in the barrel.

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It's her coffin, you know, if I can use the expression. And he needed to find out where that came from. So he's got to try to figure out some way to connect anything to this particular crime. And that's when he picked up the markings from the barrel. There's actually markings on the barrel which brought it right back to that 3M plant, which was located very close to Aspinwall Drive, which is where the Hells Angels clubhouse was at.

[00:38:01]

And of course, he added that up with the fact that Denise Parnevik lived in that area. It was a garbage truck that came by in front of the clubhouse one day and it was dropped off and it's one of them roll off boxes, great big boxes. It's about this big around this wide. It was sitting there and it had these oil drums, these big fifty five gallon drums up on up on top of it. I went out there and got a couple of them and pulled them down and took them over behind the car.

[00:38:32]

Lot to use as garbage cans and they came up missing. And that's when I started screaming and hollering and nobody ever said anything. And I kept hollering about it and we got that fucking drum and they said, we got it for TCBY and never mind it. I said, OK, OK. Do you remember the inside color of the barrel? Brownish, brownish, brownish, I think.

[00:38:55]

OK, the question about the barrel was a significant or insignificant to me as a prosecutor. It was significant because it was one piece of evidence, one piece of hard evidence that the crime was committed in an area and that it also supported Butch Crouch's testimony about how the crime occurred and how the body was hidden. So I thought it was very important. Let's face it, Russia is at war with the United States and we're losing. I'm Tim White, the host of the new podcast World with the story of the long covert war between Russia and the United States.

[00:39:48]

I'm interviewing former CIA directors, KGB spies, American counter spies and international experts to excavate the secret history of political warfare. Trumpet long been an object of interest for the Soviet KGB and connected to what's happening to our country today. Donald Trump exhibits a shocking degree of ideological solidarity with Vladimir Putin.

[00:40:15]

There is no question in my mind that that behavior represents a threat to our democracy itself. Listen and subscribe to Whirlwind for free on Apple podcasts, Spotify, radio, dotcom, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:40:40]

Shortly after Detective Ruby's interview with my father, Tommy Patrick, was indicted for murder. The trial was set to begin in early 1983 when the Akron Beacon Journal ran the story on March 20th. Federal investigators have charged the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Robert W. Griffin has endangered a key government witness against the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. The alleged breach in security occurred Monday when Griffin led about 15 members of the motorcycle gang leave his courtroom by a back exit that normally is not open to the public.

[00:41:17]

That gave the Angels a chance to see how bodyguards will escort star witness Clarence Butch Crouch to and from Griffin's court, where he is to testify against Tommy Perovic, a gang member on trial for aggravated murder. Investigators said the gang would like to kill Crouch. That gave the Angels a chance to scope out our security. A detective said it's unbelievable that a judge would allow them to do that. Investigators said the case against parodic is the strongest one developed since Crouch voluntarily became a government witness.

[00:41:52]

The trial was delayed for more than three full years and two weeks before it was set to resume. Jim Cochran paid my father a visit. I went on a plane trip with Jerry Ruby up until milind Michigan, where he was being held as a federally protected witness, and I met him for the first time and we talked for hours about the case. And he was kind of all over the place. He was talking about his manuscript at the time.

[00:42:21]

Butch told me in that interview that his lifelong ambition was to own a whorehouse in New Orleans and and of course, he wasn't going to do that as a federally protected witness.

[00:42:33]

So I guess he had to resort to writing something. And he was complaining about the food in the jail and, you know, all those other things, but on the facts of this case, he was crystal clear.

[00:42:47]

And again, I'm looking at this guy in nineteen eighty six and the crime occurred in nineteen seventy four. And he still remembers these facts. Everything that Butch was telling me, I believed. And it was also corroborated by other evidence.

[00:43:03]

My father also told Cochrane's something I never had the answer to until now. When we were in the prison up in Milen, I did ask, how did you get in touch with ATF? And he said Petkovic came into the clubhouse and started handing out cards and everybody was like laughing at him and things like that and, you know, because they all knew that if they testified, they were as good as dead. And he kept that card. In a year or so later, when he's down in Shreveport, Louisiana, with his mom and he's kind of like on the outs with the club, he decides that they're probably going to kill me if I ever go back to Cleveland.

[00:43:48]

So I'm going to contact Berkovich. And he also the clubhouse money, he owed them several thousand dollars. And he thought that that was as good as a reason as any for them to kill him because he owed them some money. And so that's why he just he got paranoid. The narrative that Bush should always put out was that he was fed up with the killing, it's what he said on the witness stand over and over, and it's how he portrayed himself in so many of us letters.

[00:44:20]

For a while, I made myself believe this as much as I hated him for who he was and what he'd done and how many lives he'd ruined. I needed to believe that there was some decency in him, some moral conscience. But Cochran's explanation for why he flipped seems more likely. Maybe it was as simple as owning the club money. Maybe that's what he meant by being in the circle outside of the circle. Clearly, it was hard for my father to sell himself as a man of character.

[00:44:51]

Angels defense attorney Alan Kaplan took advantage of this in the earlier trials. The Hells Angels had hired an attorney, a very good attorney that went around nationally and defended them, so he had a regular script on how to cross-examine Butch Crouch as an informant for the ATF. But this case was different. It wasn't based on hearsay, but you didn't hear about this crime, he helped to cover it up. And there was also the testimony of Denise's family in the hard evidence to.

[00:45:29]

Cochrane says that Kaplan didn't even put up any witnesses in the Tommy Petkovic trial. While we were waiting for the jury to return, Alan Kaplan came over to the trial table and he said while we were gone for lunch, we went for Chinese food. And this was the fortune that was in Tommy's fortune cookie. And he handed it over to me. So I unwrapped and I read it and it says, you will soon be wearing new clothes. And so, of course, you know, when after the verdict came in, Tom was immediately remanded to jail, so I guess he got his new clothes.

[00:46:15]

Tommy Patrick was sentenced to life in prison for killing Denise. It was the fifth murder trial my father testified in and the only one which resulted in a conviction. A few years later, on Saturday, April twenty first nineteen ninety, while working alone in a sewage treatment station at the Maryland Correctional Institution, Petkovic climbed a step ladder wrapped in electrical cord around his neck and stepped off. Over the years, I've thought a lot about my father's motivations and the price he made us pay and whether any of it was worth it.

[00:46:56]

It's an impossible question for me to answer. Was destroying my family worth giving closure to someone else's? Without Bush Crouch testifying in this case, the Wagners have no closure on this homicide.

[00:47:17]

They suspected from the beginning that it was related to the Hells Angels and specifically to Tommy Patrick, but they had no way of proving it and neither did Gerry Ruby, who was the chief investigator in the case.

[00:47:33]

So in my mind, without crotch testified, these people have no closure on the loss of their daughter in the loss of their sister.

[00:47:42]

And I realize what a burden it would have been for anyone to be in witness protection, especially somebody who had an estranged father that they didn't know very well, the only thing I would like Jackie to know is that without her father being in witness protection, without her father testifying in this particular case, that Denise Wagner, part of the murder, would not have been brought to justice.

[00:48:13]

As far as Bush is concerned, I had no idea where he went after he walked out of that courtroom from testifying.

[00:48:20]

So I just assumed that after his release from prison that he went into the witness protection program, took on a new identity and lived out his life. There's one other piece of information here to address. Other than my father who's gone and my mother who won't speak about it, there's only one other person I would have liked to ask about my father's true motivation in rolling over or if we were ever really in any danger, Bernie Berkovich. But I can't ask him either.

[00:48:58]

But Kovik was an amateur pilot, and in 1987, he climbed aboard his homemade two seater biplane along with the passenger. Here's retired CPD Intelligence Unit Sergeant Bob Samak. He was taking a friend up for a ride one day and part of the gears for the flaps failed and the plane went into a spin and he couldn't control it and it crashed and they were both killed.

[00:49:29]

I personally believe that the Hells Angels got onto that airfield in the cover of darkness and manipulated some of the bolts. I personally think that they killed them and I think they did because of his relationship with which in the fact that they were doing everything they could to try to put some of the angels in prison. I can't prove it never will be able to. But I truly believe that not based on any evidence. That's my personal opinion.

[00:50:03]

Would the man who's lost it. So on the final episode of Relative Unknown. Well, I asked Jack. I said, I know where your dad is in your Abati. So my aunt, my uncle and I drove across the border to go see my father. She kept telling me, It's OK, baby, I'm here. I'm here for you the whole time. Don't worry.

[00:50:36]

Don't worry. Have to confront my father's past in more ways than one. My phone rings, I look down at my phone and it's somebody from Ohio and I said, hello? He said, Hey, Jackie, this is a.. Sean. And Andy is the man that my father testified against twice. But now I'm talking to him on the phone. This man that I've been hiding from my entire life for episode transcripts and story extras visit a relative unknown dotcom relative unknown as a creation and presentation of C 13 originals, a division of kadence 13 and Roomer eight executive produced by Chris Corcoran, Zach Levitt, David Beilinson, Michael Golinski and Sooky Holly, written, produced, directed and edited by Zach Levitt, produced and edited by Perry Croal.

[00:51:32]

Our theme song is Change on the Rise by Avi Kaplan Original Music composed by Joel Goodman, Mixed and Mastered by Bill Schulz. Production Support by Ian Mont and Lloyd Lockridge Field Recording by Rich Berner, Michael Golinski, Perry Croll and Connor waddingham production, engineering and coordination by Sean Cherry and Terrence Malick on Artwork, Marketing and PR by Kurt Courtney Josephine of Frances and Hilary. Chef, I'm Jackie Taylor and thanks for listening to Relative Unknown.

[00:52:05]

I feel a change on the rise.