In 1996, a pipe bomb packed with masonry nails exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The FBI's first suspect was Richard Jewell, the security guard who'd found the bag and helped clear the area. By the time he was cleared 88 days later, investigators had no idea who they were looking for. Columnist John Archibald had covered the Olympics that summer, never imagining the bomber would come to his own city.
On January 29, 1998, a bomb hidden in a FedEx box exploded outside a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing an off-duty police officer and gravely wounding nurse Emily Lyons. This time someone saw the bomber walk away — a UAB student named Jermaine Hughes, who followed him to a gray Nissan pickup with North Carolina plates. The name that came back was Eric Robert Rudolph. Within hours he vanished into the Nantahala National Forest, where he'd stay for five years while locals put up signs reading "Run, Rudolph, Run."

Subscribe to our newsletter:

⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski:

⁠

https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/

⁠

https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/

⁠

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

In October 1997, a vault supervisor named David Ghantt loaded $17 million into a van and drove out of a Loomis Fargo warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the second-largest cash heist in American history. It took him about an hour, working alone. He stole two of the facility's three security tapes. The third one kept rolling.

What followed was five months of botched getaways, wild spending sprees, an FBI wiretap, and a murder plot hatched at a Halloween party. Reporter Jeff Diamant, who covered the case for the Charlotte Observer and interviewed nearly every co-conspirator, tells the story of the crime that came to be known as the Hillbilly Heist — and how a crew that studied Goodfellas managed to ignore every lesson in it.

Subscribe to our newsletter:

⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski:

⁠

https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/

⁠

https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/

⁠

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

Paul Skalnik was a cop turned con artist turned jailhouse informant. Over two decades, he provided testimony or information in more than 40 criminal cases, trading confessions he claimed to have overheard for reduced sentences and early release. Prosecutors in Florida's Pinellas County knew what he was. They used him anyway. Four of the men he testified against were sent to death row. At least one of them, Jim Dailey, is almost certainly innocent — and after more than 30 years, he's still there.

Journalist Pam Colloff spent 20 years at Texas Monthly before joining ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, where her investigation into Skalnik won the National Magazine Award and helped halt an execution. In this episode, Pam tells the story of a con man who married nine women, posed as an oilman, a lawyer, and an FBI agent — and discovered that his most profitable scam was the criminal justice system itself.

Pam Colloff's new book is "Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593230868?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Subscribe to our newsletter: ⁠

https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski:⁠

https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/