Part Two: The Worst Team Owner in FIFA History: Uday Hussein

Robert concludes the story of Uday Hussein, football team owner with guest Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastard. It's a
podcast where the president has just found out about that
Republican member of Congress or that the member of his
administration is not Congress who's been talking about teleporting places
with that guy's name. It's faced on him. I just
read Trump's reaction where he was like, I don't know

(00:22):
what he's talking about teleporting what. I gotta get to
the bottom of that. I haven't heard it. I haven't
heard about that. That's kind of crazy. It was a
very like normal. It was one of those every now
and then you get those moments where Trump has the
same reaction to something as like a normal person, and
it's just like unaccountably funny because he's clearly just hearing
about it, and he's like he's saying, what teleport.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Is the kind job he works at, like DHS now
or something something important, kind of important job. But he
told what to a lawful It's.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Really it's really funny just seeing him react to it.
It's just clearly like he's who, what does he know? What?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
No, especially like a month ago, I.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Feel like I would know if one of my subordinates
was claiming to have teleported to a waffle house.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
You don't know what I get up to in my
spare time.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
I don't. I don't, but I do know what things
you claim to do. I at least pay that much attention.
That's a big thing to miss.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Like.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
But hey, he's got a lot of work to do.
He's going to get to the bottom reflecting pond on
the war and such. You know, Molly, are you ready
to talk about Ude Hussein some more? Molly Conger, host
of Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Little Guys, Little Guys, guys. I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Excellent, all right, Robert, drink more of my horrible health drink.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Drinking strange colored beverage.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, it's from the reflecting pool orange.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Wait, your drink is also funny colored. No, this is
plain water in my favorite cup, which is a blue jar.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Oh, that is weird. That's upsetting. I don't believe be blue.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
I don't like that. Yeah, if God wanted jars to
be blue, that color would occur in nature. At the
time of Iraq's first World Cup appearance, Ude Hussein was
President of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, a job he had
received at age twenty, and head of the Iraqi Football Association.

(02:35):
He was also the owner of Al Rashid, Iraq's premier
football club. Their team gets to play in the Iraqi
Stars League, which is the highest division in the country.
And since Al Rashid was the most prominent club and
Uday also ran the Olympic team, this meant that from
age twenty on, Uda is basically dictator of football in Iraq. Right,
Like he's an even if you're not on his team,

(02:56):
if he's not your direct boss, he basically runs how
football works in the whole country.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Right, He's the football He's the football czar.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
He's the football czar. Yes, Saddam made his son. The
footballs are his son, who again does not particularly care
for football. This would be a dream job.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
For someone who liked this playing, or like was an
aspiring player.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
He does not appear to have any interest in.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
This sort of parked him here.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
It's just kind of the job he wound up with.
Like it's different from all of the other nepotism cases
like this, and that does not really seem to want
to run a football team.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Made him general or put him in charge of.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
So many other things he'd rather be doing. But he
sucks in all of them.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Infrastructure. Did he get an degree in engineering? He could
have made it.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, but I'm crazy it was a real degree, Molly.
He didn't go to real school. He has other people
doing his class work for him. But he could have
at least infrastructure. You can't. I'm not gonna like Saddam
was not overall the responsible man, but you could argue
that putting Uda in charge of the football team was
like the least damage he could do. Yeah, Like, if

(04:01):
this guy gets is involved anywhere in like the power grid,
we're gonna have problems. So we don't know precisely what
Ude did to the national team after what he considered
to be their failure at the World Cup, but there
are suggestions that he began torturing his players around this time.
Rad Hamoudi, one of his best players, retired the next year,

(04:22):
which is kind of like sometimes seen as a sign
that that's probably why that like Rod retires early, which
is really weird, and maybe it's because after this defeat,
Ude fucked him up. Right, Yeah, I don't want to
be in this is the this is football. I don't
want to be in this kind of football. Uda had
his people construct a series of red rooms what they

(04:44):
called red rooms in Iraqi state sporting facilities. These were
places where players who failed during important points in games
or training, or otherwise irritated Uday could be sent and
punished depending on the trespass in question. This could vary
from mere threats. Ude was particularly known to threw to
chop people's legs off. That was like one of.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
His well you're not going to get that.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
No, that's not going to improve there, But he never
I don't think he ever did this. This appeared there
was just something he would repeatedly threaten. He may have
had some legs broken, though he would also.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
That was also not improve your soccer playing.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Not gonna help. He would also threaten to like feed
pieces of players to dogs, you know. And he would
also use dogs or threaten to use dogs to abuse
them to beatings that players. I don't know how often
he actually had the dogs maim them, because he usually
didn't hurt them all that badly because again, they are
still playing. But when he would beat them, like if you.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Can punish people, that won't make them less able to
play soccer.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, and I do think most of these are like
threats of the crazier stuff because when it talks about
the actual beatings that I mean, it's usually most of
the claims that Ude ordered people to do these beatings.
Some accounts will say that Uda participated in torture, some
accounts will say he never did. I don't actually know
which is is, but I think he generally, at least generally,
these are people who are working for him doing the torture,

(06:04):
and there is been testing. They're usually the way they're
physically punishing these guys is whipping them with electric cables,
right Like, that's kind of the go to physical punishment.
At least they don't.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Make them run.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
They do that too, but that's not really torture. That's
just like normal workout stuff. I mean, you can do
it in a way that's abusive, certainly, but that's not
that's not going to satisfy a guy like Oude. He
is alleged. And there's I mean, they did find uh
you know the uh like the Iron Maiden, that thing

(06:39):
where it's like this big metal coffin you put someone
that's got spikes on the inside that you can screw
into them. They didn't find one of those at a
facility that was supposed to have been oodas like, there
are accusations that he was really into that, like specifically
into like old timey torture techniques. Again, it's kind of
hard to tell how much of this is literally true,
because I don't I've never run any accounts of him
actually that are of any detail of him iron maidening

(07:01):
somebody to death. Maybe he just had one because it
looked scary, but he may have iron maiden people to
death who weren't on the team. I just haven't heard
of him doing that to team members, you know. Or
maybe yeah, maybe he never got around to it yet.
You know, it's like his unpainted model or whatever in
the corner, right, Because creativity is kind of what gives

(07:24):
life its zest, Ude took to experimenting, or at least
having his tortures experiment over time. As the early methods
of violence did not improve the team's functioning. He found
that in time, whipping people bloody with an electric cable
was fun, but what really took things up a notch
was afterwards, if you would throw them into like a
pit filled with sewage, you know, then you could really

(07:47):
mess people up. They get these horrific infections and stuff.
That a lot. Yeah, that definitely helps. That helps their
game is giving them fucking staff infections. The red rooms,
I think, as far as I can tell, probably got
their name both for like the obvious reason and also
as a reference to the red cards that are thrown
out in football games when a player makes like a

(08:08):
penalty and if you're not aware of sports, right, a
penalty shot is one of those moments in competitive sports
where everything comes down to the actions like a single player, right,
if you get to take a penalty shot, no one
else is kind of it's just can you make this shot? Right?
As an individual player, this means that one person is

(08:28):
to blame if a penalty shot is missed. And because
people who fail on the Iraqi football team get beaten
and tortured, most members of Al Rashid started refusing to
take penalty shots because you can't be like, oh, but
that wasn't my fault, it was this guy, or it
was I didn't get the ball entire right, like everyone
watched you fail to make that shot, and so nobody's

(08:50):
willing to do it. Eventually, they only have like three
guys on the team who are willing to actually take
penalty shots, and these are brave men. One of them
was Abbas Rahim Zayir. He told The Guardian many of
the footballers refused to even touch the ball, but then
we realized that if no one accepted, we would all
be punished. So Zaire basically agrees to be one of
the guys who will make penalty shots so that they

(09:12):
don't all get tortured. It's the only way to deal
with that. In one game, Zayia attempts a penalty shot
and misses. Two days later, when the team returned home
to Bagdad, he was ordered to show up at the
Olympic committee headquarters, which had become Ude's lair, complete with
a basement torture chamber. Per the Guardian, he was blindfolded
and taken away to a prison camp for three weeks.

(09:33):
He shrugged, end of story. That's him like talking to
the reporter there that he doesn't want to talk about
happened to the prison camp. I do have some details
from other people what happens at the prison camps. So
getting a penalty was just as bad, if not worse,
than failing at a penalty shot. Right, if you fail
at a shot, you're gonna get tortured because you didn't

(09:53):
make a point when you could have if you if
you do a penalty and the other team gets to
make a penalty shot, you're going to be punished for
giving them. You know that point basically, right.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Being the goalie has got to be.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
A there's no position on the team under the goalie.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Goalie is one of the only positions on the team.
Were again, like, it's like a shot where it's on you.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
You you let the ball, there's a lot of opportunities
for you to be the guy who gets the blade.
That's obviously not fair, but like that's how it's going
to be looked at by fucking I.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Wouldn't want to be I wouldn't want to be's goalie.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
I would not want to be the goalie under Dah's saying.
Uh so. That piece in The Guardian describes what happened
to Yaser Abdul Latif, former team captain, in two thousand
after he was accused of hitting the referee during a
club match in Baghdad. Quote. He was taken to the
Radwanya prison camp on the edges of the capitol and
confined to a cell two meters square with a tiny

(10:47):
window high in the wall. His head and eyebrows were shaved,
and he was stripped to the waist. He was in
order to perform press ups. For two hours, three guards
flogged him with links of electric cables, spelling off when
their arms grew tired. The torture continued into lower sets,
with an hour's break in between, and the beatings grew
more savage as Latif tired. The only relief, if it
could be called that, came when he was let outdoors

(11:07):
into the winter cold and doused in freezing water.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
I don't know that that's I mean, you shouldn't put
your hands on the record, shouldn't put your hands on
the ref.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
But I don't think that's a fair punishment.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
I think obviously it's bad to put your hands on
the ref.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Wants a red card for sure?

Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, yeah, a red card.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Maybe maybe maybe a five match band, depending on what
you did.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Hepped for days in a cell. Ye, I can give extreme.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
I think did he rejoin the team after this or
was that kind of it for him?

Speaker 1 (11:40):
No? No, he stays back on the team. It is
it takes more, he notes his interview. First off, he's
in that prison camp for two weeks. He goes through
this for two straight weeks and it's more than it takes. Well, first,
it takes a month before he can even sleep on
his back again. But yes, after he recovers, he goes
back to play for the team. And this is what
he's say because the Guardian asked him, asks him basically,

(12:02):
what you did? They're like you and you.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Went back, and he says the joys.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, that's what he says. I never had any choice.
They threatened me if I didn't participate in the team.
They said they would beat me again and again and
consider me an enemy of the regime and that would
mean death. So again he doesn't.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
He was really good at soccer, unfortunately for him.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
I mean, it's also probably hard to find, Like after
a while, you would stop wanting other people to know
you were good at soccer in Iraq.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
You would not put your kids in you for sure.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, I might avoid that for my kids playing games. Yeah.
So the power and money Ude got from his position
and from being able to torture people were far more
of his passion than you know, football. Most people who
knew him will note that he wasn't a big sports
guy and hadn't cared about the national team until Saddam
told him, hey, you can win my approval if you
avoid fucking that up. The Guardian's reporting notes that in

(12:53):
order to burnish his team's performance, he quote kept a
private torture scorecard with written instructions on how many times
each player should be beaten on the soles of his
feet after a particularly poor showing. And you'll find allegations
like that repeated by numerous sources. Where some differ is
in whether or not do they participated in the torture
himself or was just a fastidious manager now. The team

(13:15):
coach for most of this time was a Manuel Baba
da Wood, better known as Ammo Baba. He's fucking cool guy,
am Obaba like Ammo, like bullets Babao now am Yeah,
very cool. Nickname. Ammo was a former footballer himself. He'd
been a star in the nineteen fifties during the Iraqi
team's early days of glory, and he became the team

(13:35):
coach in nineteen seventy eight. Again when I said, probably
the reason why the team performed so well, UDA's first
couple of years in charge is because a better, a
really good coach had started a couple years earlier. Professional Baba, Right, Baba.
Ammo starts working there in nineteen seventy eight. By the
time Uda comes in like four to five years later
or whatever, he's gotten the team like into a really
good position. Right. So, because Ammo is so clearly good

(13:58):
at his job, he is beloved by Iraqis and that
means he's one of the few people with some clout
he's able to resist Uda on occasion without getting murdered, right,
because Ude can't quite murder him in public.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Right, you can't mess with a good thing.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, And they do argue a lot. Da doesn't know
shit about football, so the two like screaming fights with
some regularity. Sophy's gonna show you a picture of amm Obaba.
By the way, this guy looks fucking awesome. He's so cool.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
He's so he's wearing Puma track suit.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
He's clear yeah, Puma track suit. Fucking like black dark
Einstein almost styled hair, Like. He's so cool looking. I
can't believe he's not smoking. He looks like he should
be smoking.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
That's Grandpa Munster.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
What else he plastic.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Knows this man has.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
He's getting amazing nose. He's so cool looking. I love him.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
I love him so much. I'm so sad that he.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Had to deal. Oh you're gonna love Ammo more because
am Obaba's fucking cool. Here's how Justin Sherman describes Ammo
for These Football Times quote. Baba's outspoken nature against Udae
would garner admiration and cult like devotion from many Iraqis,
effectively shielding him from being killed because of the unrested
would unleash through the streets. Still, his lofty status could

(15:13):
not always protect him, as Ude once personally beat him
in front of fifty thousand spectators at the Al shab
International Stadium. He talked nonsense. Boba recalled about Ude. I
told him to go to hell. I said, he knew
nothing about football. How did I survive because the people
loved me so cool.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
So, you know, I've been watching the World Cup and
I keep telling my husband, you know, like because one
of the first matches we watched, there were like an
insane number of red cards, like a record number of
red cards.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
And I was saying, like, yeah, it's kind of it's
kind of more fun.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
It's a little bit more fun when it gets little,
when it gets a little testy, you know, people are
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
I take it back. I take it back. I don't
want to see that. I don't want to see the
manager of the team flog the coach on the field, flog.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
The coach in front of fifty thousand people, and he
one basically just stands there. And I was like, all right,
if you're going to beat me, just beat me, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Like he's you're the one who looks stupid.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
This guy is so cool. I cannot exaggerate how chill
am Obaba seems.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
At least he comes as the beating. That's the right
to the beating. Like, you're the one who looks foolish here, Bud.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, you're the one who's losing control and being an
asshole in public. You know. So.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
By the way, I also figured, since we just sawm Obaba,
I should show you a picture at this point of
the big guy, Saddam Hussein and his oldest son Ude together.
This is from around the time we're talking about this.
This would be like the eighties, somewhere around then. Yeah,
they're handsome guys. Look at them. Look at them, look at.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
The matching matching mustaches. Looks they're good.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Honestly, dudes, is a little whiter than his dad's.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
You know, it's a little exaggerated. It's kind of like out. Yeah,
it's a little much, and he's trying to make.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
You know, you can definitely tell Saddam's the novelist of
the two. You know he has that novelist shirt though.
Oh yes, Sadam's it looks great. He always looked good,
good God. Yeah, I just want to go on record
that I do not think it's just a joke. So

(17:10):
there's this Yeah, no, I won't tell that Saddam. Who's
the same story yet? One day, one day, So that
same year, Ude made what many regime watchers would argue
was his biggest mistake. This is nineteen eighty eight. So
kamal Hanna Jajo was Saddam Hussein's official food taster and valet.
This is basically his body man. You know. Jajhu's the

(17:32):
guy Saddam always wants in the room with him, right,
and if when you sit on that means something, right.
This guy's in a dude too, has a high official rank,
but he gets a lot of time with the boss,
and the boss genuinely cares about him. So Jajo is
about as close to Saddam as anyone can be, and
arguably closer to him than his fuck up fails on
ude because Saddam doesn't want Uda around him all day, right,

(17:54):
he won jo in the room.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
This is the Iraqi equivalent of that young woman who
prints off articles from the internet for Trump.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
That's exactly right. And just as Trump clearly likes her
more than all both of his sons put to kill
both of his older sons put together, Saddam clearly likes
Jahu a lot more than Udeh, which may have been
why Uda hated him. So the following story that I'm
about to relate took place during a party at an
island resort after a dinner to honor the wife of

(18:21):
Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time. So there's this
big diplomatic event between Iraq and Egypt, and they're having
a party at this island resort, and that's when this
all happens. And I'm gonna quote now, nothing that happens
on an island, nothing good happens in an island party
resort party. Now with the president of Egypt in Iraq, No.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
It's not gonna be something Weird's going on already.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Bad it's gonna happen. So this is for a two
thousand and three La Times article. According to the most
widely accepted account, a large group of Hussein's bodyguards had
gathered for their own party on the island while the
state dinner was taking place. They were firing weapons in
the air and celebration, and Shajhu reportedly refused Udae's order
to stop, so Udai killed him. Furious, Hussain jailed his

(19:03):
eldest son and vowed to prosecute him to the fullest
extent of the law. It was only after a letter
purportedly written by Jajo's father and published in the state
media asked that Udae be forgiven that Hussein freedom and
sent him to Switzerland less than sixty days after his imprisonment.
So this is when a lot of people will say,
Da stops being the heir.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Apparent because he killed his dad's favorite friend.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
He killed his dad's best buddy. Yeah, yeah, of his
dad's surrogate son.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
That'll do it. That will that will mess it up
for you.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of
psychology there, right, Like he just wants his dad to
love him and he can't.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yep, yep, yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
I love it, like this sort of this equivalent of
the Secret Service, right, like they're getting drunk and using
their weapons.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
It's just shooting off guns.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
You know, We're all the same all the world over.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
It's just like them. If I was the elite guard,
or hell, if I was like the president at a
fucking big political event like this, I would want to
shoot off guns afterwards, just to blow off some steam.
You know, they can't stop.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
It's nice to know that people are the same everywhere.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, that is something we haven't had happen yet as
a country. Is like at a diplomatic event, the president
just going to a Secret Service guy and be like,
give me, can you have a machine gun? I want
to fire off a few rounds into the dirt.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
We don't know. That doesn't happen at Camp David.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, I yeah, yeah, I'd love to see it. Why not?
America is not doing so so hot. We could use
something lighter, something fun. The president firing a machine gun
blindly at a diplomatic dinner in Switzerland, you know, why not?
I guess the Swiss probably don't want that to happen.
Speaking of the Swiss, as punishments go being forced to

(20:48):
live in Switzerland with millions of dollars? Isn't that bad?
Right to the terrible situation. I would love that punishment. Yes,
I think we'll all take exile in Switzerland with millions
of dollars as a punishment if it's on the table.
But take me one of the downsizes. Swiss law doesn't

(21:08):
really care if you're some two bit dictator's son. Right,
maybe if you're like a high grade dictator's son, you
can get away with a lot in Switzerland. But you
gotta have a lot more than a few million, right
if you want to get that kind of preferential treatment.
You know you're not as Oude. You're not going to
walk around breaking Swiss laws without consequences unless you pay

(21:28):
some pretty hefty bribes at a high level. And sure no,
and because even it's I mean it's thankfully it's not
that bad. Who knows. But like, not long after he
moves to Geneva, he gets into a fistfight with a
cop at a bar, and his dad makes him come
home and marry the daughter of one of his friends.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
This way with a cop at a bar. I mean,
you're just making sound relatable.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
This does sound cool. And you know who else got
into a fist fight with a kappita barly certainly not me? Nope,
but the sponsors of our podcast did. Oh yeah. And
every one of them, whoever comes up to advertise next
on their show, just staggered out of a bar with
the blood of a police lieutenant on their hands. And
it might be the next Dad, the Portland's Police Bureau,

(22:17):
or the Washington State Highway Patrol. We don't know whoever
it is. They just assaulted an officer. It's true, and
we're back. So Oude's forced home. His dad makes him
marry the daughter of one of his buddies, and this

(22:38):
is not a love match, to say the least. Day's
wife leaves him after just a few months, complaining that
he'd started beating her. So when Saddam and Vader Kwait
in nineteen yeah, yeah, oh shocking. Yeah. I don't have
any trouble believing that when Saddam invaded Kuwait in nineteen ninety,
Ude was not in a great position within the regime.
He's not super high up, and some sources I've read

(22:59):
will say that Day's body double at the time was
made to like pose at the front, in and around
combat positions to make it look like Udai was participating
in stuff. But that said, those most of those accounts
come from the body double that we heard from earlier LATIFII,
and he's the guy making things up a lot, right now,
I don't doesn't. I don't have any evidence that he

(23:20):
did anything meaningful during the invasion either. I'm not saying that,
just like Latif exaggerates and lies constantly. Now, if you,
as I mentioned earlier, grew up in the nineties and
early two thousands, you know that Saddam Hussein was infamous
for his use of body doubles. This was a cause
of much hilarity in popular media at the time and
contributed somewhat, I think to the sheer gui with which

(23:41):
Hollywood movies post Desert Storm loved to feature characters dressed
like Saddam Hussein. You know, think of a fucking the
big Lebowski, right, Fucking a Saddam impersonator shows up in that.
There's like a weird number of like Saddams that you
run into in like nineties movies and some early two
thousands movies.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Very much a part of our consciousness.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, and some of us, just you know, Saddam whose
desert storm had happened. He was like a major bad
guy in the American public consciousness. But some that I
think is all these gleeful stories of Saddam look alikes
definitely I think fueled some of that. Now I want
to do something a dedicated thing on Saddam and his
body doubles, because there's shockingly little real evidence behind a
lot of the claims about his body doubles. Again, I

(24:23):
don't doubt that he had people impersonate him for security purposes,
but yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Is this what really sort of seeded into our consciousness,
this idea that all all of these world leaders have
all these bodies Like it's a big quan on psychosis, right,
that it's that all these people have body.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Doubles, and those that those body doubles are people living
like whole lives as this person, and like they have
all these restrictions in place, and they're constantly watched as
opposed to like, well, whenever we're traveling with the president,
we make sure there's a couple of guys who kind
of look like him from behind, if you like, drape
like a coat over him. So if we think there
might be a shooter. We can like run this guy
out who looks like the president, and may they take

(25:00):
a shot at him, But it's just guards, you know,
and then we can deal it. Like I think that
happens a lot, stuff like that, probably. But the crazy
stories you hear about, these like harems of body doubles
of Saddam, these like gangs of them, I think are
mostly fantasies, just like a.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Love Island mansion full of Saddam's.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Right, right, Yeah, too many Saddams. Now. Uda is also
famously alleged to have had a body double, and by
that I mean he is alleged to have had several.
But the guy everybody knows is Latif Yaya, and Latif's
claim is that he knew Udai in grade schools. We
talked about and people had commented how much they looked alike.
And then you know, years go by, and in nineteen

(25:38):
eighty seven, Yaya has been drafted and he's fighting in
the Iran Iraq War and he's somewhere near the front
in nineteen eighty seven when he gets recalled to Baghdad
and he finds himself sitting in a palace in Yaya's
book The Devil's Double. Here's how he described a meeting
with Ude Hussein that again probably didn't happen. He tells
his old school buddy that he wants to take him

(25:58):
away from the front and make him his Fiday, which
is a word that means double, although per Yaya's book,
a fiday is more than a mere double. A fiday
is everything. In Arab culture. Fiday means disciple, a fighter
and a partisan, a serf who must always be prepared
to give his life up for his master. I have
seen so many different news articles quote him saying this.

(26:21):
I don't think that I haven't found any other writing
about a fiday, at least not under the way it's
spelled in this I've never heard of this concept. I
think he's kind of making it up that this is
like a prominent concept in Arabic culture. I haven't found
that somewhere.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Doesn't speak any Arabic language. And yeah, before it was
easy to google things. He could just be making it
up and assuming you'll never know.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
I'm not going to say I've asked anybody who would
be a comprehensive, but no one I've talked to was
familiar with this concept, and I couldn't just google around
to find googling or looking searching around find anyone. But yeah, yeah,
talking about this apparently universal Arabic social role of the Fiday,
which he's like every all of our great Kingdom's had this.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
And I.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Really, because you're the only one talking about it that
I'm finding. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of shit because
it's just not written in English, but like I did
try to account for that, and I didn't run into
fucking anything, so whatever. When he was released, Yahya says
he was given a choice serve Uda as doppelganger or
have his family murdered and his sisters raped for an

(27:30):
article in The Independent, And yeah, to give you an
idea on how this, this, this story that's fanciful is
reported on by credible seeming papers. Here's how The Independent,
in an article by Jerome Taylor, reported on all this.
After rounds of plastic surgery, the transformation was complete. Mister
Yaya said that the between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen
ninety one, he was witnessed to some of Uday's worst excesses.

(27:51):
His prowls through bag that at night looking for women
to rape, his drug abuse, violent outburst, and Pinshant for torture.
He also claims to have survived twelve assassinate attempted assassinations.
Mister yah Yah thought of escaping only after Oudi, angry
that a girlfriend had started to openly flirt with a doppelganger,
tried to shoot him, mister Yaya claimed. He claims he
fled to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and later to

(28:11):
Austria with the help of the CIA. Again, I don't
have any like outside evidence other than this guy's claims
of any of that, any of that shit.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
I would need it. I would need a second source.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
I would need a second source, and there just isn't his.
And there are a couple of journalists who like looked
into this and tried to and like everyone who's investigated
this has been like, I have found no evidence to
corroborate any aspect of his story. That said his story
was as.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
We know he's torturing, we know he's raping.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Right stories up. But this guy, I mean, there was
money in it for Yahya, I think, but I don't
know fully why he did what he did, although that's
my guess because he was eventually portrayed in a film
adaptation of his book, also called The Devil's Double. Uh
Domin Cooper played Ude Hussein and Latif Yaya.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
So oh, well, yeah, we only need one actor, of course.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, Dominic, right, of course, that makes it efficient. Four
and plus Press loved talking to Latif in the years
between the Gulf War and the two thousand and three invasion,
and he always wove a good yarn, but he was
also obviously lying about a ton of it. And again
I will say for his part, he always says I
was actually against the Iraq War. He would say I
never wanted the US to invade because I knew that
would make things worse. He just, I think, was trying

(29:28):
to monetize off the fact that Saddam Hussein was like
the famous bad guy in Western society for a while, right.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
And the network news loves to have a guy on
that will always say yes and will always say something.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Crazy, exactly exactly so. British journalist Ed Caesar finally actually
interrogated Yahya in the early two thousands after years of
him making these claims, not with minimal pushback, and he
found no evidence to support Yaya's claims. To have worked
as a body double for Uday again there. Yeah, there

(30:01):
is some evidence that he was tied to some regime
attempts to maybe like there's some sketchy stuff people have
alleged he may have been involved in. We'll talk about
that all at a later day. What I want to
talk about next is everyone's favorite US military adventure, the
Gulf War. Right, So, nineteen ninety Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait
and the subsequent international response led to the United States

(30:24):
is a disaster for Saddam's military and regime. Uday had
to endure the years of sanctions that followed, although he
would ultimately profit mightily as a result of the some
of the different like programs that were put in place.
I think oil for food is one of them. He's like,
like everyone who's tight and high up in the regime
going to take advantage of all of this to make
money for himself. But this isn't like a great time

(30:47):
for him or his dad or his brother. Right the
immediate years after the Gulf War, things are very messy
for the Hussein Its not as bad they're gonna be
right now, UDA's personal situation within the regime is worsened
by the fact that as the nineties went on, it's
become increasingly clear to everyone that Kusey is going to

(31:07):
be the heir apparent, right, SAMs know Saddam's He's he's
younger enough that Saddam learned from his mistakes. He raised
a somewhat gingdler son because still does some violent stuff,
but not as like uncontrollably and not in a way
that's like bad and dangerous for the regime.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
You know, he's learning that he's been passed over, is
definitely going to improve his behavior.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Right, He's gonna a lot nicer guy now.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
It's to be normal now.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, Kusey is just kind of like a much steadier guy,
and he's also like a planner. Right while while Ude
is torturing soccer players, Kussey is taking control of Iraq's
intelligence apparatus and the Republican Guard It's elite internal paramilitary force.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
And that seems like he gives him.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
It gives you an idea of like how Saddam vius
his sons that he's like, yeah, you can keep running
the football team. That sucks now since she took over.
But Kusse gets like the CIA basically yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
So he's still got soccer though, like through the nineties,
he still got football soccer. He's maybe he's maybe he's
getting better at it, right, Like, I mean, he didn't
start out knowing anything about soccer, but he's been in
charge of soccer for years.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Yeah. Yeah, is it getting better? There's not much evidence
of that. There's not much evidence of that right now.
Because I am not a rube, I'm always careful when
trying to validate stories of horrors in Saddam's Iraq, not
because it wasn't replete with them, but again because of
all the disinformation that's out there, in part by like
angry dissidents who wanted to encourage US intervention against Saddam.

(32:38):
One reason that I feel comfortable saying all of the
specific stuff with the football team actually happened is that
the sources on this are a ton of Iraqi pro
soccer players, Like a bunch of their best former football
players have all talked about being tortured by Ude Husseying,
So I assume this is all true, right. The other
reasons they really want to physical Yeah, and there's some

(33:01):
physics people who had injuries and stuff and torture equipment
was found in a lot of the like we found
it as like physical.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
I mean teacher who allegedly died unnamed way, an unnamed time.
This is somebody saying this happened to me, And here's
my scoll.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yes, exactly exactly, we're gonna hear from them now. So
one of these players was Sharar Haidar Mohammad al Hadithi.
He was a top level player in Iraq who did
well enough that he got to represent the country international
on several special teams, including during the nineteen eighty eight Olympics.
Per an article I found in an archive from the
September eleventh, nineteen ninety nine edition of The Mirror. Quote

(33:37):
he says he was hit interesting d the nine to
eleven here is incidental, but the end is also nineteen
ninety nine, so this is really before. This is before
the post nine to eleven, kind of like drive up
for the war in Iraq too, which is why one
of the reasons I'm interested in this source. So quote
he says he was hit repeatedly on the soles of
his feet, dragged on his bare back through a gravel pit,

(33:58):
and then made to jump into a tank of sewage.
So that the wounds would become infected. He was deprived
of sleep and fed bread and water. So yeah, that's
fucking again, that's acclaimed by a specific guy of a
specific torture that was done to him. Yeah, and that's
fucking nightmarish, right because of the team not doing well
in that year's Olympics.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
And again, that's nineteen To make you any better.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
At soccer, not gonna help, not gonna help. Sewage in
open wounds rarely makes football. I know that there are some.
I mean, the Patriots famously get a lot of sewage
in their open wounds, but that's just because they're the Patriots.
You know, that's not best practices for anyone else.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
I mean, Tom Brady thinks drinking water prevents sunburns. He
might think that makes you run.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
Fast, Brady doing that. So in nineteen ninety three, Iraq's
premier team lost a friendly match against Jordan. If you
know Oude at this point, you know the man absolutely
did not believe in friendly matches. He had four players,
including Sharar, who we've just heard from, forced into a
van and driven to a prison camp. Here's how Sharar
describes his time in soccer prison quote. Shara says a

(35:04):
favorite trick of one sadistic prison guard was to tell
them to catch a mosquito in their cells. When half
anesthetized with fatigue from lack of sleep, they held the
insect out for inspection. Their captor would mock them, saying,
but that's a male mosquito, you fools, I want a
female one. Start looking again. It went on day after day,
night after night. One player had a nervous breakdown, others
were injured, and others, like Sharara, quit football and fled abroad.

(35:27):
So yeah, it's pretty bad. That's that's bad creative. I'll
give that specific prison guard that I haven't heard of
that one yet. You know we have to respect ingenuity here,
don't we.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Oh, in the course of team all these years, he's
not actually interested in getting better?

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Is he? He just likes doing because at this point.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
He knows torture anymore.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
This is not important. You wouldn't think he just likes
I think he just likes doing the torture.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
To be honest, I think he's just just I think
he thinks, yeah, that may be it, or maybe he
just knows like a improving the team because he's got
it with this.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Nobody else is doing it this way, you know, the top.
They're not putting Ronaldo in a cell.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
No, And at this point he's he's kind of crashing
out as a person. He knows he's not the Air
Apparent anymore. He's doing a lot of drugs, he's you know,
having mood swings in part probably as a result of that.
He's being violent and he's murdered committed several times. There
are several murders he's accused of throughout this period too,
just at like parties. So this is a guy who's

(36:29):
kind of regularly spinning out of control. And I think
to your point, Molly, I don't think he's focusing much
on whether or not this is making a team better.
I think this has just become an outlet for his anger.
Like he gets to go but to the team when
he's pitched. Yeah, yeah, he just likes it.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Now are just toys.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
It fears weird to say. My favorite, but my favorite
soccer themed account of nightmarish crimes against humanity comes from
an account given by Ude's former press secretary, a Boss Janabi.
After Janabi fled Iraq, he told reporters about what had
happened after the team failed to qualify for the nineteen
ninety four World Cup. Ude presented them with a concrete
ball and made them kick it for hours upon hours

(37:07):
at a time. Just an awful guy. Again, he does
not care about the team at this point. This is
just about lashing out, right, Rice Man. In nineteen ninety five,
Ude had another we'll call it incident. He was at
yet another party. He was drunk and probably on Malli
or coked up. He was on mally a lot in

(37:27):
the nineties or you know. Yeah so no, no, no,
no MDMA, you know at the yeah, yeah, So when
one of his ken folks gave a toast and mocked
Uday's speech impediment at Uday, as the story goes, oh
he just started being lasting. Yeah, he just starts shooting, right,
So this guy makes fun of him, and Ude just

(37:47):
pulls a gun and opens fire with an automatic weapon.
It doesn't stop.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
How kind of drugs was the other guy on that
you would make fun of Uday's speech impediment?

Speaker 1 (37:55):
I know, right, because you have to think you'd stop
this at a certain point. He just shoots people periodically.
Maybe you're just so fed up with the fucker right
that you just can't hold it in anymore. He must
have been pretty annoying. Fuck, I don't think it was
a good party, even though udas on fucking ecstasy. So

(38:18):
as the story goes, he just he just starts firing
and he is six people. He kills six people. All
of the dead are supposed to have been bodyguards. But
his relative who had made fun of him was badly injured. Okay,
so yeah, that's kind of guy he is. Ude was
also brutal other Iraqi team, Yeah, in a bad mood
while fucking rolling. Now. Ude was also brutal to any

(38:41):
other Iraqi team that had the misfortune to play Al Rashid.
And I'm going to quote again from George Woodward's article
in Tribuna. Special punishments reserved for those who committed offenses
against Al Rashid. For example, injuring one of their players.
For such an offense, Al Zarra defender Abier Sjamal was arrested.
He was taken to the stadium where the match had
been played, and in front of the Al Rashid sentenced
to sixty five lashes, such as the fate of anyone

(39:03):
who defies football and does not respect the rules of
fair play, said the local police chief.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Wait, so his team would we have to always win
because you're gonna let.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Him win.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
A lot, which probably doesn't help the.

Speaker 3 (39:18):
Team, Like they would win all their domestic matches, but
then when they play somebody outside of Iraq, they're not
gonna let I don't think.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
They did win. They didn't win all their domestic matches,
but I do think there was a lot of a
lot of people would get especially if you ever foul
his team, you're going to get fucked up. But if
they get bat he's gonna fuck them up his team,
you know. Yeah. So. Abbas Talawe, the captain of the
of an opposing Iraqi team, once annoyed Ude by complaining

(39:46):
that the referee had been ruling unfairly against his team. Quote.
The referee, it seemed to me, was was against us.
He ignored fouls by the opposition and gave a penalty
against us. As captain, I protested and got a red card.
That made me furious and I spat the referee. After
the game, I was told I was banned from football
for a year, and to make me understand my offense better,
I was sent for thirty three days to Ude's private

(40:07):
prison in al Radwania. There, every morning, his personal executioners
beat me fifty to seventy times with an electric cable
source exists. Again when it comes to like truth and stuff,
these are all very consistent stories from a lot of
different guys under their own names, you know, and it's
all very similar kinds of torture.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
And this, to me is more believable than some of
those stories about sort of specific person like very detailed
accounts of him his own personal actions, whereas this is
delegating this violence to a state apparatus that we do
know did exist.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
We know the prisons that.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
A lot, we know the prisons existed, and like you know,
periodically he probably did lash out personally with violence, like
against that coach and just start beating people. But generally
he's he's delegating that because he's got goons. That's the
benefit of being the dictators.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
You can just point to a guy and say put
him in the pit.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
Yeah, God, if I had goons, I would have fun.
I would have fun with my goons. Don't don't you worry.
That's where that Nope, not going to make that joke anyway.
It will not surprise you that many other players and
officials claim that while Ude Hussein ran Iraqi football, it
was basically a crime to beat Rashid. Sometimes, sports journalist
Sala Hassan explained a red card for an Al Rashid

(41:21):
player was forbidden. Many of their goals were scored official
from obvious offsides. Leaders of opposition teams would be suspended
before facing Al Rashid, and when the team was on
a winning streak, life could occasionally be good. Players who
performed well were lavish, with Rolex watches and supercars. No
normal Iraqi could ever afford it. Not worth it, but
not worth it now. When top players failed, they were

(41:43):
punished like anyone else. Aved Rodi was one of Iraq's
greatest stars of all time. He's the guy who scores
their only goal in the nineteen eighty six World Cup.
Here's an account he gave reporters later. Once I was
unable to attend a team meeting with Ude, Ude sent
a car for me in the middle of the night.
I was taken somewhere outside the city, beaten and told
I would no longer play football. I was punished five

(42:03):
or six times, had my head shaved three times, was
held in custody twice, including exile to a military camp
where I was made to do hard labor.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
And that's their best guy.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
That's their best guy. That's like they're fucking messy. That's
their legendary that you know.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Crazy. Also, I'm very proud of you for knowing who
MESSI is. Good job.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Of course, I've been time in the rack. I have
to know who MESSI is. A quarter of the people
I met had a messy jersey. It's interesting. I came
across and then one of the articles I was reading
about that, there was this like paragraph because he's one
of the things that he would do was like when
he was pissed, he would have everyone's head shaved. He
would have people's like like his players shaved. And is

(42:43):
that like yeah, yeah yeah. And one of one article
felt the need to go into like in Muslim culture,
you know, you're not supposed to shave your head, and
so this was like directly demeaning and that's not at
all what's going on. I'm sorry, you don't need to
do this, like here we have to explain what these
way these Muslims would be their head shaved. No, no, no,

(43:06):
you take here's an experiment. Get some goons, go up
to any random person, restrain them violently and forcibly shave
their head and see if they're traumatized. People don't like
doing that, you know, it doesn't matter that they're Muslim.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
I French collaborators too, Like it's it's culturally legible.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah, exactly. It would be like if you were like
and in French culture, being beaten while having your head
shaved in the street is bad. It's like this is
bad everywhere man.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
In the French culture, this is seen as particularly negative.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah, nobody likes having that happen to them. And it's
also this misunderstanding of Iraqi because like the picture was painting,
is that like as Muslims, they never shaved there and
that's just not at all. Iraq has a massive thing
of like barbers are a huge deal in Iraq. One
of the coolest things that when I was in like Iraqi,
Kurdistan in the north during Ramadan one year, because like

(43:58):
it's Ramadan. Shit gets in the middle of the night
because it's too fucking hot during the day and you
can't eat or drink anyway, so like everyone becomes nocturnal
for a lot of things, and like, I remember going
out with a buddy because he wanted to get a haircut.
It's like fucking midnight, and the barber's like using fire
and stuff to like cut his hair in parts. It
was really cool. It was a really elaborate, really good
hair like and my buddy who was in Iraqi, was like, no,

(44:19):
iraqis have the best barbers in the world. He was
very proud about this in an article where they were like,
here's how this strange foreign culture feels about having their
head shaved. Like, that's just racism. Guy.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
It's like, if there were six you would have to
explain that this is particularly uniquely bad.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, it's not. There's just nobody likes it when you
forcibly shave their heads were beating them. It's generally unpleasant
for people, you know, who else will forcibly shave you
and beat you. No show, I would hope not good God.
I just let's just go on for a second here

(44:59):
and weird back. I've made my apologies to the sponsors.
Let's talk about Ude Hussein in nineteen ninety six. Ude
was the target that year of an assassination attempt on
the street, so Baghdad, a team of heavily armed men's Yeah,
fucking finally, a team of heavily armed men spotted him
driving his red Porsche and opened fire. He was hit

(45:20):
and wounded eight times and barely survived. Saddam pulled out
all of the stops though, flying in a French shirt
surgeon to fix his oldest boys. So you could tell
something you care about him, you know.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, he didn't want to die. That's beautiful. He loved
his son, That's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Stalin wouldn't have done that for his boy, I'll say
that much.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
So Ude survives, but permanently injured. He would spend the
rest of his life in wheelchairs or using a cane.
This contributed to further slight. Yeah, and this does not
make him better or like calmer. The fact that he's
now grievously injured and in pain all the time.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
He's not normal now.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Yeah, this is the assassination attempt doesn't make him ginder.
This tributes to his yeah kind of derangement. And it
also he gets, you know, starts taking this out on
his players in By nineteen ninety seven, Ude Hussein had
been the head of Areki Football for more than a decade,
which meant he was a fairly well known figure within FIFA. Right,
this is a guy who is not at all a

(46:22):
Fridge figure that in the world of professional football he
can't be. These are not crimes that are completely.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
He was not saying like you can't sit with us.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
No, no, they're not. Though he's basically like a team
owner and manager rolled into one a lot of the time.
So in nineteen ninety seven, Ude's team failed to win
a qualifying match with Kazakhstan and lost their chance to
attend the nineteen ninety eight World Cup. Ude lost his
shit and once again ordered players whipped and beaten, this
time to such an extreme that he was reported repeatedly

(46:54):
to FIFA. They carried out an investigation, but Iraqtanni anything
had happened, and after FIFA's experts examined twelve players, they
found there was no evidence to support any of the
allegations against Ude and the team management.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Famous and honest, ethical FIFA concerned with human rights. Yeah,
so yeah, absolutely, I think definitely.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Stuff human rights, Yeah for sure. So earlier I told
you about Sharar al Hadithi, the famous player who was
beaten on the soles of his feet dragged across concrete
and then made to jump into sewage. He was one
of the players swept up in this, and he claims
the team wasn't inspected by FIFA until weeks after they'd
been beaten. He also claimed for the Mirror team captain
Ruddy Shanishal had been thrashed with an electric flex but

(47:39):
had been refused to tell FIFA what happened. Right that
another guy had been very recent and they saw injury,
but he wouldn't say how he'd been injured. Now it
should be clear to but that does show that the
FIFA inspectors saw injuries on at least one player, according
to his account. Right, that is important to note. It
should be clear to everyone that these athletes were loath
to tell FIFA what was really happening because their families

(48:01):
were cententially hostages of the regime. That sucks. But FIFA
definitely had evidence and should have known something was going
on with the Iraq.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
I think FIFA should have saved the Like FIVA's not an.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
Intern, they're not going to help them though, but they
should have said, you guys can't play in the in
FIFA games anymore, like you're out of FIFA.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
I'll even go so farth to say, I'll hear a
number of arguments about what they should have done, but
what's undeniable is they did nothing right right right, And
I think that's I'm not going to say, I don't
know what would have worked best, but they don't do
fuck all right. They just continue acting like everything is fine.
Is a normal yeah, yeah, yeah, it is a normal team,
you know, owner or whatever.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
It's just a coincidence that every guy on the team
has these weird scars on his back.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Yeah, yeah, just a weird little going culture, all these
stories for former players who keep escaping the country. Yeah.
In nineteen ninety nine, after Sharar escaped Iraq, he brought
claims of abuse against Iraq's team back into the mainstream.
FIFA was forced to address the situation again, and per
the Mirror quote, FIFA said last week had considered the
matter still as still closed unless Sharar was prepared to

(49:06):
talk directly to it. Well, if he wants to report
directly to us again, you know, maybe we'll reopen it.
But yeah, he didn't come to us. You know, there's
just a bunch of articles about him saying this stuff.
So because playing for Iraq in Iraq was so darn miserable,
many of the best players in the country tried to
get hired for teams overseas. Anyone who managed this found
themselves in the unhappy position of having to convinced ude

(49:27):
husaying that they should be allowed to leave the country
rather than stay. He was often willing to agree for
sixty percent or so of a new player's salary. That's
what he would take from these guys, who like went
to play for European teams. Per an article in The Mirror,
Janabi confirms this once I collected for ude a total
sum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from players
for just six months. He says, So it is doing

(49:50):
pretty good grift here, you know.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
I mean, that's makes good money. He can get it.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
It also kind of I wonder if, well, maybe it
was part of his grift. Im I just make it
being a nightmare to play football in Iraq, the best
players will get hired overseas and then I can take
money from them. Like, I wonder how conscious a part
of the grift that became for him.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
I mean, it probably wasn't intentional the first time. But
once it started happening. Once, once the first guy signed,
once the first guy signed in Italy, He's like, you
know what, yeah, this could.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Be he found money. Yeah. So Uday's grifts in the
latter years of Saddam's regime were legendary, as the BBC
reported quote, UDA's criminal empire was involved in smuggling sanctioned
goods such as oil and cigarettes and cocaine, alongside running
a fast food restaurant chain called Super Chicken in an
ice cream company called The Wave. He also headed television
in radio stations, was chairman of the board of seven newspapers,

(50:42):
and was at the helm of a rack's most successful
sports club. Ude took particular pride and the fearsome image
he cultivated and referred to himself as Abu Sarhan, the
father of wolves, because he's like he's got his feed
eyen too. He's got like his little militia at this point,
who wear like Darth Vader helmets. Literally they have like
fake Darth Vader helmets that they never fight. They like
they get there, they last like three seconds in combat.

(51:06):
These guys immediately run.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
And he ran a chain of ice cream stores that
for me is.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
The line he was a renaissance man. You know, he
runs a football team, he tortures a football team, He
runs an ice cream company. He tortures ice cream, gets sales.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
How many locations were there of super Chicken? And was
it good?

Speaker 1 (51:25):
You know? I do want I do want to eat
at Uda Hussein super Chicken. I want to eat UDA's
forbidden chicken recipes.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
I need to track down a review of super Chicken
because was he as good as he was at running
a soccer team?

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Oh guess he was as good. Oh guess he was
as good Molly.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
Delegating? Was he really involved in the chicken?

Speaker 1 (51:48):
From a food safety standpoint? I would hope he was
delegating quite a lot, I trust to like, yeah, good
at that? Yeah he has. There's a lot of sewage
in the Uday husseying story, so I don't feel great
about that chicken. Ude also extended his control in Iraqi
sports to the national volleyball team, which he had imprisoned
in the basement of the Olympic National Committee building, where

(52:10):
he kept his torture dungeon in what he described as
a motivational exercise to make sure the team really knows
I mean business so I'm going to imprison them in
the basement for a while.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
I mean, they would be really motivated to get out
of there.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
Yeah, I bet that would motivate your volleyball team. Maybe
more volleyball teams should try this. Look, you took long.
Ude Hussein's been ignored for his coaching wisdom, but maybe
it's time we revisit him. You know, maybe this is
what could make your own personal pee wee volleyball team
really really cross the limits. Create a torture dungeon and

(52:45):
lock them in it.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
Depending on the dimensions of the pit, it could really
motivate them to get better at jumping and leaping.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Sure, exactly exactly, this could create a whole new generation
of Olympic whatever that sport is where you jump and
there's a stick, the pole ball. We can make kids
better at that. You know, maybe torture's not so bad
an idea. Maybe we have, Like they just had the
enhanced Games where all the athletes were on steroids, and
actually they weren't particularly impressive. It kind of was sucked. Yeah,

(53:12):
what if what about the torture games? All the teams
worked the way Udais did. Everybody's just like, yeah, everybody
has sepsis. It's just a hospital ward. That's the whole competition.
So Uday continued trying to impress his father, leaning towards
by this point, but kind of the later period of
Saddam's regime, Saddam doesn't really want to be dictator as

(53:35):
much as he wants to be a novelist an artist,
and that's how he really wants to spend time. During
kind of the latter years of his reign, Ude knew
that he'd failed to earn his father's respect as a
future dictator candidate, but he could still do it as
a writer, and so in the last years of the regime,
Uday got his PhD, publishing a four hundred page thesis

(53:56):
titled The World after the Cold War, which was written
by a guy Ude paid and printed en mass to
be distributed around the country for the BBC quote. In it,
Ude argues that American domination of the world stage will
fade by the year twenty fifteen, and new superpowers such
as Japan, China, and the European Union will challenge the

(54:16):
United States's moral and economic position. A couple of interesting
things twenty fifteen not bad honestly, on guessing the year, ude,
you could have done worse, Like could have done worse
up close. But in terms of the new superpowers being Japan, China,
and the European Union, I don't know, man, that that
might not be the specific list that had gone with,

(54:38):
Like Japan especially is kind of a weird one. No
shade to Japan. I just wouldn't really call it the
new superpower in the wake of the US, you know, fading,
nor the EU really again, nothing against them, that's just
a weird way to anyway, It's not quite what happened.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
I mean, it's not Uday's fall. It's the guy you paid.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
It's the guy you as fault. I do want a
copy of food Aide's thesis because the cover apparently has
like a picture of Saddam Hussein as Saint George slaying
the dragon. Oh really, suck it up to your kid. Yeah,
hopefully somebody out there has found one. Yeah. So in
two thousand and three, the United States invaded Iraq in
April of two thousand and three. Yeah, I mean initially

(55:22):
pretty good. The Saddam's regime did not last long, right,
It was after the stuff afterwards that didn't go so well.
In the immediate afterway math of the invasion, like April
of two thousand and three, US Army soldiers found at
the Olympic headquarters in East Baghdad Ude's old stomping grounds,
a medieval torture chamber that was linked back to Uday.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Was that the one the.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
Yeah, the Iron Maiden, the Iron Maiden. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Yeah,
it's very fun. They also found, you know, his personal zoo,
which had lions, cheetahs, and a bear. They found he
only won there drug collections. Yeah, I think he had
one bear. He had a lot of drugs. He had
a lot of liquor. He was noted by the US

(56:07):
soldiers who like found his home as having quote the
biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen. He has
a massive, like porn printed out porn collection.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
To be fair, have those guys been to Clarence Thomas's house?

Speaker 1 (56:20):
No, No, Although Army Captain Ed Blanco of Montville, New
Jersey said it looked like something out of the Playboy mansion,
which is very funny. That's from a Washington Post article
by Nico Price. To quote from that article. Among the
photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's
twenty one year old daughters dressed up very nice in

(56:41):
evening clothes, Bolanco said, adding out the soldiers took them
to protect the president. You know what's the funniest, actually funniest,
that's actually funny. It's so so funny and just the
it is very America in two thousand and three that
like these America, We're gonna protect the president by getting
the pictures of his daughters out of here. You know

(57:03):
the fact that would wind up in a Washington Post
article is extremely funny to me. Obviously, Uda and his
brother are killed by US forces at a compound that
they were inhabiting. I'm not gonna go through like it's
not worth really going to a ton of detail about that.
He's killed. And obviously his days is a soccer uh
as a force of power within the world of professional

(57:25):
soccer come to an end tragically.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
Not really loveday, I he would he couldn't he could
have made those pictures of George Bush's daughter's naked.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Yeah, I gotta say the interviews blank, he would have
been grocking hard. He would have loved groc the interview
with that that Captain Bolanco about like what they found
in UDA's house is endlessly entertaining. This is the Captain.
There were dome pairing on French wines, uh, some thirty
or forty years old, a lot of very good brandy,

(57:58):
a lot of good whiskey. Blanka said. There were boxes
of Cuban cigars that said Udai Saddam Hussein on them,
one hundreds of them. My guy smoked them. He said.
There were also this is the Washington Post. He said
there were also six bags of heroin, but he didn't
know how much they held. I'm gonna guess not all
that heroin made it his way back to their bosses.
If I know you, I don't know how much some

(58:18):
of that heroin got done.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
I don't know, not very much. Actually, it was a
lot of bags with.

Speaker 1 (58:24):
Empty yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna yeah, it's one of
those like yep. They found eight bags of heroin, and
three bags were returned to custody at the base, and
an entire bag of heroin was returned to the You know,
I'm imagining they're being shrinkage at several points here. Anyway,
that's the Uday Hussein story. Well that's the story. That's

(58:45):
not his this is not the whole uday who say story,
This is Uda Hussein as a soccer team owner.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Yeah, and it looks like it looks like the Iraqi team.
So they are in the World Cup again this year
for their their second turn.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
I think they got crushed earlier today.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Yeah, but they made it back. That's that's what matters, right, Thanks,
We'll be happy.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Getting to the World Cup at all.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Big deal is a big, huge deal.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Even if you get out of spanked by Senegal the
group stage.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
And it you know, it says a lot. I think
you can obviously, Ude whose hand isn't the only setback
that Iraq has in terms of its football team. There's
other things to go on in that country that they struggles.
They've had other struggles.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Non football related struggles.

Speaker 1 (59:27):
Yeah, but that said, you know, it's really got I'm
really happy for the country that their team is now
without Uda made it back to the World Cup and
is there again. That's great, that's that's hopeful for the future.
You know, I want good things for Iraq. How you feeling, Molly?

Speaker 2 (59:43):
You know that was fun.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Not the torture parts, not the sewage, in the in
the wounds parts that that sucked for everybody, but uh.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
I mean overall, in terms of what you kind.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
Of presented to me today, one of my friends least
likely to want sewage in an open wound, you know.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
Thank you the opposed to but a lot. I love
a clean wud.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
I can tell we all do. That's why lightsabers are great.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
The things you could have presented to me today, I'm
very pleased.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Yeah, good, good, Yeah, I thought I thought you'd enjoy
Yude Hussein soccer team owner. Good stuff. Anyway, Molly your
podcast Weird Little Guys people can and should and also
legally musk listen to it, and you're committing a felony
if you don't. Right after this podcast listen to Molly's.
You know you could be shot. You probably can.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
I'll put you in the secret room I keep under
my podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
You're right, you're right. Molly's got a red room for
people who don't listen to her podcast. Yeah, that's right,
that's right. Anyway, Well, goodbye bye.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

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Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
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