October 17, 2023 • 53 mins
Eugene Francois Vidocq is without a doubt one of the most interesting figures in modern history. He’s a former criminal turned undercover informant who went on to found the French national police force and the world’s first private detective agency.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know, a little overlooked historical figure edition.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yes, yeah, boy, god, this guy. Could you could do
a ten parter on his life easily.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I mean, it's it's nuts. So we're talking about a
man named Eugene Francois Vidocq. He is known as the
father of criminology. Yeah, pretty much on the nose. That's
a really good title for him. Yeah, he's also an
inspiration for plenty of detective first early detective stories. He
(00:54):
was at one time as famous as Napoleon in France
and in Europe in general. He was in famous, incredibly wealthy,
and it was because he dedicated himself as a public
servant to the city of Paris to basically wipe out
crime as best he could at a time when Paris
was more overrun with crime than maybe it ever has
(01:16):
been in its history.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah, it was. It was a time where the army
was very busy, I guess it is the best way
to say it, and like the army took up a
lot of the men who might normally be cops, and
they were preoccupied more with warring than with just taking
care of regular police work. And Vidok stepped up in
(01:39):
a big way, and like I said, like I had
to stop researching because I was like, we can't do
a twelve hour podcast on this guy.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Rightly, no, but you can definitely go down a rabbit
hole with him. And one of the reasons why is
because depending on the source you consult, he was either
a total scumbag, scoundrel or genuinely unjustly slandered. I leaned
toward the second one, or closer to the second one. Obviously,
no one's perfect, but I do think that the stuff
(02:10):
that is really questionable or makes him into a questionable
person or character, I think is remnants of his political
rivals smearing his name so well that it still is
around today.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Here's what I think is that he was, and as
you'll see, started off as a scoundrel and a criminal,
later changed his tune because I think it was beneficial
for him to not be in prison all the time,
and I think he tried to do the right thing,
but also like a little bit of that that scoundrel
(02:49):
lived within him, but he also had people that had
it out for him. I think he's a complex guy.
I don't think he did a one to eighty and
was like and now I am pure. I think he
I think he, you know, did what was best for
him usually, but also wanted to put criminals behind bars
and make a few bucks while he did it.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So I have a counterpoint to that, but I'll bring
it up when we get to that part. But we
should tell everybody. One of the reasons Vidock is famous
if you have heard of him, is because not only
was he the father of criminology, he started out as
a genuine bona fide criminal who was serving time in prison,
would escape prison, and then one day he basically switched
(03:30):
sides from an outsider's standpoint and became like the top
cop in all of France while he was.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Serving Yeah, a good way to stay out of jail.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
For sure. Well let's start. Let's start with his early life, right,
because he was unquestionably a troublemaker, a hot head, and
just a handful. You could definitely say his parents actually
let him get arrested when they stole from him once.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, I mean you would classify as a juvenile delinquent today,
But it wasn't because he was some you know, poor
kid from the poor streets who had to steal to survive.
His parents did pretty well, they had a successful bakery
and how do you pronounce that rs? I think so yeah,
(04:18):
A R R A S. And it seemed rather middle class.
But like you said, he he stole from his parents.
He was. He was a scoundrel. He pick pocketed. He
was from very early on seemed like he was a
bit of a ladies man and he would you know,
this was sort of his early life until he ran
away literally to join the circus, right like people actually
(04:42):
did that. And he did that for a few months
until he didn't like the work. Then he would eventually
work for a Punch and Judy street show, which is
if you guys are don't know who Punch and Judy were,
they were They were puppets.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Right, yes they were. Punch was a wife battering puppet
and Judy was the abused wife. They got into hysterical
right yeah, really violent fights all the time, but it
was puppets and kids thought it was hilarious. And he
worked for that show and he had to. I guess
he got fired in a way.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I think so. I think as a fifteen year old
he said some kind of a tryst with the wife
of the guy who was running the thing. Yes, so
that's not very specific. It says that they were embracing,
so who knows what that means.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, but it definitely goes to underscore a lot of
things about him. He was very much into the ladies.
He didn't mind if it was someone else's lady, if
you were someone else's lady. And he was willing to
put himself in great danger and at great personal risk
to satisfy his own wants, needs, desires.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
That's a very nice way to say it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So he moved back home, he went back to ras
or Us and his I don't know if we said
his dad was a baker and his parents were totally normal,
fine parents. But again they basically when he was caught
stealing from them when he was thirteen, they said, okay,
you're going to jail. When you moved back home after
the circus and the Punch and Judy show, he wasn't
(06:12):
even sixteen yet, and they said, all right, you're going
to join the army whether you like it or not.
They shipped him off to the army. Well he was fifteen,
that's how bad a kid he was.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, I think he's drinking, getting fights and womanizing, and
you know, he's just one of those kids. They'd probably
just say today that he was I don't know, what
would you call it hot head? Yeah, teenage hothead. Yeah,
he'd like to steal things sometimes.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Right, and embrace other people's wives exactly. So he did
serve in the army. Apparently he was in battle a
few times because this was a post post French Revolution,
and I think he may have been in the army
when Napoleon first took power. At the very least, France
was on all sorts of advance. Like you said, it
(07:00):
had drained them their population of potential police people policemen,
and so he fought in a few battles. He definitely
saw some action and it was fine. But I think
probably the biggest takeaway was that he learned how to fence.
He became a very great fencer, and that served him
well because he was also known to get into duels
(07:22):
with people. And he actually had to desert the army
because he was coming up on charges because he challenged
a sergeant to a duel. The sergeant refused him, and
he smacked the sergeant around, and that is not something
you do in any army at any period of time.
And so he took off and was now a desert
ye from the army. And this is when his actual
(07:46):
criminal life really began. Everything else was petty, in temperate,
that kind of thing. This is like, Okay, I'm a
deserter from the army. I need to support myself somehow.
I guess I have to turn to a life of crime.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, he actually deserted a few times. I don't think
he was super popular among his peers there. Sure he
had a habit for just sort of not being there
all of a sudden when they called roll call. But eventually,
when he finally left for good, he joined up with
what was called the Rolling Army. You want to do
the French there, you're a French guy.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
It was the Army Rulan.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Okay, the Army Rulant, which was everything I saw about
this was that it was a side army. I think
it was a couple of thousand men, and that they
they sort of just did what they wanted. They were
fake uniforms. They plundered the countryside they gave themselves fake orders,
(08:40):
and I'm not exactly sure what real army work they did.
I'm sure they did, right.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I don't think so, I think or was it all just.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
A thing to like? I think they're under in pillage.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yes, that's what that's my take. I don't think they
were officially sanctioned at all.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, no, they weren't officially sanctioned, but I just I
figured they were. I thought that the real army might
have used them at times.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I don't know, I don't know enough about it. It's possible.
I mean, you got a couple thousand people with guns
ready to fight. Why not?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah? Well, I know they worked fake uniforms. And he
made up a rank for himself and took a alias.
He was Lieutenant Rousseau, and eventually even made himself captain.
I don't know why I didn't start off as captain
as long as he's making things up.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, he kind of sold himself short there, didn't he.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Well, he became captain eventually, so he ended up.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
In Paris eventually after he left the army. Roulant and
this is around seventeen ninety five. The French Revolution had
been successful. But there's something to understand about it. Like,
one of the reasons Paris was so over him with
crime was not just that there was a lack of
potential candidates for the police. There was also like the
(09:55):
threat of revolution and regime change was constant during these decades.
It wasn't like the French Revolution happened and it was over.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, it was a mess.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It was a mess. First Napoleon comes along is like, hey,
I'll take over from here. I'm now emperor. He he
ran France for a really long time, for a decade
or something like that. Then he was deposed and a
new king was installed, a new king was installed. After that,
that king was just deposed and a new citizen king
was put into place. And then around that time finally
(10:26):
our our protagonist dies. But like throughout all this time,
like there there's a lot of tension and conflict in
the country, and because everybody was preoccupied with that stuff,
crime was allowed to flourish. It was a really dangerous
lawless time. It particularly in Paris, because a lot of
(10:47):
people were also coming to Paris looking for opportunity and
that kind of thing, and so it was a just
to put that in your in your pipe and hold
it in your hat for later, because that's that's that's
this is the backdrop that he shows up in Paris against.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
That's right. So he ends up in Paris during this
very tumultuous time. Great time to be a criminal in Paris. Sure,
you know very I don't know about easy to get
away with stuff, but you know, you could be a
pretty successful criminal at the time. And that's what he did.
It sort of threw his twenties and into his thirties.
He was in and out of prison, kind of off
(11:25):
and on because of various schemes. It was never like,
I'm not going to say it was victimless, but it
was never like violent crimes. It seems like he was
like a really good, really good forging documents and things
like that, and all of his schemes seemed to be
kind of like on the more intelligent side.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, he was definitely intelligent, yes.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, So it's not like he was walking up and
bonking someone on the head and stealing their purse. He
graduated to more elaborate kind of you know, forgeries and
things like that.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah, and he also he was a criminal with a heart.
He landed in this one prison. Oh what is it
called Bagno, I believe.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Oh was that where he the the bread.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Guy was, Yes, So so this is a really good
example of that. He Yeah, he was finally caught and
sentenced for I think just three months in prison, just
three months. But while there he was so moved by
a guy who had been given six years for stealing
grain to feed his family, who, by the way, the
bread guy, right, people are confused. So he was so
(12:36):
moved by that and thought that it was so unjust
that he'd been given six years. He forged documents that
that that he signed as like the head of I
think the prison or the police as saying like this
man is to be released, his his sentence has been commuted,
and the guy made it made made off like he
was released. And I think it took a few months
(12:59):
for the whole thing to finally be found out. But
I think the doc was in jail at the time
when they did find out, and they gave him eight
years for that for forging papers that released a man
who had been given six years for stealing grain.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah, so this time he went to a hard labor prison.
Like you said, it was called a I don't know
how it's pronounced. I think they started in Italy under
a different name, but B A G n O the
bag no, the bagno, like if you've ever seen the
movie I looked into these, the movie Papion. The island
(13:35):
prison they were on that was one, and I think
it was just like a very tough It was like
the toughest of the tough prisons, hard labor, usually in shackles,
very hard to escape from. Yet he did manage to
escape even from here, and I think he escaped as
a sailor and was caught and put back and then
(13:56):
escaped again posing as a nun. So as you will
see later, he was, in fact a master of disguise,
was very good at it, and if he was able
to pass himself off as a nun, clearly pretty good
at it.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, And it's really something that he escaped not just
once but twice from a galley prison. Because they were
originally before they moved them onto land, they were ships,
giant ships with tons of oars sticking out of them,
and you would be sentenced to hard labor rowing those
oars day in and day out. It was a really
rough place to spend eight years, and it would also
(14:34):
be a really difficult place to escape from, but he
did twice. So he started to get a reputation as
someone who no prison could hold in addition to being
a master of disguise. And when you start kind of
doing stuff like that, your name gets around and you
start to become a bit of a legend among not
just the criminals, but also like law enforcement as well.
(14:56):
So his star is starting to rise. And I think,
as we reached this point, Chuck, it's time for message break.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
What do you think as we reached this point? I agree?
Speaker 3 (15:35):
All right, So where we left off, Vidoc has escaped
prison a couple of times. He was a juvenile delinquent.
He was a delinquent into his twenties and into his thirties,
through his twenties and into his thirties, and then finally
ends up back in Paris. He was trying to get
pulled into the criminal underworld again because he was well known,
(15:58):
and he was kind of in a bad spot because
if he said no, he would get blackmailed by these
low lifes and threaten to turn him in because he
was a fugitive at this point still. So finally he
was like, all right, what am I doing with my life,
all this on the run stuff, on the lamb in
disguise as a nun. This is for the birds. In
(16:21):
eighteen oh nine, he said, I'm going to go to
the cops and I'm gonna say I would like to
turn myself in and make myself well, sort of turn
myself in. What he really wanted to do was turn
into a police informant and get out of jail. And
they said, hey, great idea, but you're gonna do that
for at least a little while in jail.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Right, that is, I mean that sounds like, oh that's cool.
That was an incredibly dangerous position to put himself in
for two straight years.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
This still is.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
He was an sure he was an informant, a volunteer
informant for the police, and he would he would inform
on anybody. And so I was saying earlier that I
would bring up a counterpoint to the idea that it
was just completely self serving from what I saw. Another
explanation is that he never actually thought of himself as
a criminal. He thought of himself as an outlaw by circumstance,
(17:13):
like he had made a lot of bad decisions. He
knew that and that had made him run a foul
of the law. But he wasn't a criminal, Like, that's
not how he wanted to support himself. He didn't have
the heart of a criminal, and so this was a
way to basically say, I don't want to be a
criminal anymore. I don't want to be associated with these people.
I want to change sides, and this is how I'm
(17:33):
going to try to do it. Or another way to
look at it is that he was he was he
finally grew up essentially and realized like, okay, this is
this is not okay. I need to I need to
change things, and I've worked myself into such a deep hole.
This is the alternative to just going like, okay, I'm
(17:53):
going to become a criminal from now. Those were his choices.
That's how deep the Holy Doug was. And the thing is, Chuck,
no matter how you interpret whether it was a selfish act,
whether it was you know, you know, his destiny, whatever,
that shows a remarkable amount of initiative to do that.
Like he said, I'm not going to be a criminal.
I'm not going to turn a life crime. I'm going
(18:13):
to basically put myself in the hands of cops who
hate me and see if they will have me as
one of their own.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah, I think he probably grew up. I don't know that.
I buy that. If he had come from nothing, I
could buy that. But he came from a pretty good
He wasn't forced into committing crimes to survive.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No, But I think that's why he didn't see himself
as a criminal, because he had made choices or whatever.
He wasn't a criminal. He just didn't see himself like
that from what I saw.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
So he made choices to commit crimes, but didn't see
himself as a criminal.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yes, okay, yes, he made choices that were that were criminal,
but he wasn't making choices like to do crime. That
wasn't as his aim was for crime. He was just
making bad decisions that were criminal, and that made him
a criminal in the eyes of society. I'm not saying
like it was. It didn't make him a criminal. He
(19:09):
just didn't think of himself as a criminal. To him,
there was a differentiation between people who commit crimes and criminals.
He did not think very highly of criminals, like career criminals,
somebody who would slit your throat for your wallet or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
That Elvis was a drug addict, but Elvis was on pills,
and he looked down on real drug addicts that were
taking hard drugs like heroin.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny you bring that up, because I think of
this same him turning over himself to the police to say, hey,
I want to inform for you as very similar to
Elvis showing up at the White House and volunteering to
be an undercovered narc agent for Nixon.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Oh, totally yeah. And I think they're both pretty hypocritical.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
For sure. So for sure, Yeah, that's the thing. I
don't want to give the impression that I'm just like
an apologist for Vidalk. I just think that there is
an alternative explanation, and one of them is that he
didn't see himself as a criminal even though he was
a criminal. Oh, I totally agree.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I totally believe that, like there are nothing but innocent
people in prison. If he asked them, okay, you know,
sure that was what's it called chawshank?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Oh? Is that who that was? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:21):
I remember that great scene when they were at lunch
or whatever, when they were all saying like like, hey,
none of us did it, Like, no one in here
did any of the crimes that we're in here. For
it's pretty funny anyway. So he for two years worked
in that prison, like you said, just what he would
do was pass on information to his girlfriend, who would
(20:41):
get it to the police chief of Paris, and it
was going really well, apparently so well that at some
point he helped Napoleon's Empress Josephines catch the person who
stole her emerald necklace, and so he was on Napoleon's
radar at least for a moment. I'm not sure how
much Napoleon hung onto that, but it was a sort
(21:04):
of a feather in his cap as an informant for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
For sure. And that police chief was named Jean Henry
or Henri not with an eye but a why so
I'm not sure how it's pronounced exactly, but he was.
He was finally smitten. After two years with Vidoc, he
was all in for this guy. So he said, Okay,
we're gonna let you out, but this is an unofficial release,
(21:30):
like you're actually not going to get pardoned or released
on paper, because we need you as a police informant.
What they used to call thief takers. They were kind
of like the predecessors to bounty hunters, where anybody could
go catch thieves and bring them in for money. He
was an undercover version of that, and that's new, brand new.
(21:50):
They did not have undercover police at the time. So
Vidoc has basically carved out a totally unique, peculiar place
for himself in the Paris Police. And it's largely because
Jean Henry believes in him and sees also the value
in him going back into the underworld and informing on them,
(22:13):
not just from jail, but like from the actual outside
crime world.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
And John Henry also said stay away from my.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Wife exactly, I better not find you in bracing here.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So as a cis what you would call it today,
I guess he was doing his thing. He knew the
people very well, he knew his old haunts. He was
not unwilling to just hand over his friends and former
sort of cohorts in the thievery world in the underworld.
(22:48):
He would do that at a moment's notice. Dave Ruse
helped us out with this. He found one case where
he was actually in on a robbery, helped planet, helped
execute the robbery, and then when the cops come, he
pretended like he had been shot, so he could you know,
get out of the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Well, no, so that the the the robbers who were
there wouldn't know that he was a police informant. They
would mean it was yeah. So and by the way,
that that that burglar, the robber Saint Germain, was a
really wanted man. He was also a murderer and it
was actually a pretty interesting, I guess project that he
(23:28):
undertook and got the guy. But and we didn't say. Also,
the reason he was able to go back into the
underworld again was because the police staged an escape, like
they allowed him to escape to make it look like
he'd broken out of prison, not that they'd released him,
so that he would seem like it was Vidalk who'd
broken out of prison again and now he was back
(23:49):
in the Paris underworld.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
That's right. So this underworld at the time was it
was a Paris where they policed in a in a
way that wasn't an They were confined to districts, and
if you were in a district, you couldn't go to
another district to investigate. You had to stick to your district.
The criminals at the time knew this. They were savvy
(24:12):
and so they would commit crimes not near where they lived,
which made it a lot easier to get away with stuff.
And so Vedock comes in and says, hey, I was
one of these guys. You guys are dumb and how
you're doing things, because all you have to do is
go on the other side of Paris to commit a
crime and you're probably going to get away with it
unless you're caught red handed. And so what you guys
(24:33):
should do is continue to allow me to work undercover
and know it's not something you've ever done, because you
like to wear these ridiculous uniforms that identify you from
a mile away, and get rid of these districts and
allow cops to investigate wherever they need in order to
solve a crime. And they said okay. In eighteen twelve
(24:55):
they made Vedock chief of the security brigade in French
it is the what.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Were god de la surtee fantastic?
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And they said go hire some men, and he said,
all right, I'm going to go hire eight former criminals
x cons that I used to know. These are the
best of the worst. And it's sort of like the
dirty doesn't he's like, except that it was the dirty eight.
This is the dirty Ocho and they said, come with me,
and we're all going to be this undercover agent security brigade,
or we're going to clean up Paris.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, and I think that definitely undermines the idea that
he had no loyalty whatsoever to people he'd met as
a criminal in Paris. He just didn't have loyalty the
actual real criminals. He distinguished the difference between people who
commit crimes and actual criminals.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
And so he accused of disloyalty.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah. I mean we said earlier that he had no
loyalty whatsoever to the Paris criminal community.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Oh, I don't think so. I think he turned in
people he thought should be turned in, right, was loyal
to his friends.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
So these are the people that he picked. And yes,
it's very, very unorthodox. And I think if Paris hadn't
been overrun with crime, he never would have been able
to put together a Paris wide undercover police force made
up of ex convicts. It even sounds nuts today in
twenty twenty three, I can't imagine what it sounded like
(26:17):
back in eighteen twelve. But his whole premise was, if
you send somebody who's a cop, give me a great
cop who could do undercover work. He'll get sniffed out
immediately and they will murder him. He will die. You
can't have people who don't come from this do this
(26:38):
kind of work like That's it was very dangerous undercover work.
And so that's the main reason why he chose these
ex counts. But I also get the impression too, is
that part of it was to just kind of demonstrate
his point that just because somebody had done time and
been convicted of a crime doesn't mean they could never
be trustworthy.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Again, I think he misspoke. I think snipped off the case, right.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
That's right, I mean, and how could I missed that one? Uh?
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Do we break now or do we go for a
little bit longer?
Speaker 2 (27:08):
I think we should talk a little bit more about
the Security Brigade.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Okay, so started in eighteen twelve, Like you said, it
turned out to be a really big success. Napoleon just
a year later signed a decree that said the Security
Brigade is a state police force now and you can
have his up to twenty eight men is what they
grew to. And I think through four or five years
(27:35):
into it, they uh. And of course some of this
stuff is we should say v duck would write a
lot about his h and his memoirs and stuff. He
was not shy about tooting his own horn, let's say.
And he's one of those guys where like if you
read his memoir there, you know, some of it could
be boasting, some of it could be stretching the truth
a little, but we do know that they were super successful. Like,
(27:58):
no one is doubting that. But he touted fifteen murderers
in just one year. Fifteen murders, three hundred and forty
one thieves, thirty eight receivers of stolen goods, fourteen escaped convicts,
forty three parole violations, forty six forgers, swindlers, con men,
two hundred and twenty nine vagabonds and suspicious types. So
(28:21):
they're they're kicking butt and taking names in Paris.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, and make a note of this for later and
put in your pipe in your hat that this this
is a group of criminals who are showing up the
regular police. Yeah, and the regular police are not really
fans of being shown up in the public. Like the
public was reading all about this stuff, and.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, they're retting famous for it very much so.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
And they were pulling in like the big whales while
the police were chasing down you know, pickpockets and stuff
like that.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yeah, Oliver twists.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So there was a definite rivalry. Yeah he was a pickpocket, right, No,
I don't think so. Are you thinking of Annie? Annie
was a pick No.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
I've already misspoken on Oliver Twist and Annie before, so
I'm not gonna do it again. Forget everything I said,
everybody right in.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
So yeah, yeah, for sure we.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Know how to make the division symbol and a keyboard.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Exactly, No, you do so he yuh? What was I saying, chuck?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (29:24):
You were saying that he was landing the whales.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yes, So there was a lot of rivalry and disdain
for the security brigade from the regular police. Just remember
that they didn't like him.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
They did not, all right, So a few things, you know,
they found some great anecdotes from the security brigade. We
already know that he knew a lot about the crime
world and these criminals, and he was apparently there was
this one story where like he would know their methods,
like specific people in their methods. And there was one
(29:57):
story about this robbery that they found where a thief
had cut around a lock and he was like, I
know who did that, Like, I know that work. That
is Foucard. And in the movie version, they said that
can't be a facade falsades in prison and someone steps
up and said facade escape from prison one week ago,
and Beatog says, then it is him. That's awesome I scene.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
I feel like the guy who stepped up to inform
everybody that he escaped from prison was agad or Spartacus
from the Bird Cage.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
I never saw that movie.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Really, I'm excited for you.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Chuck, you big hole.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
You need to fill that hole, and you'll do it
over and over again. You'll keep filling that hole over
and over again because it's such a great movie and
you can just watch it so many times. Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
And I also don't email about end scene. We've already
been over that before. It was just a joke.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I meant and scene and scene.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Uh what else? It was an envelope, a scrap of
envelope with a half of address, and supposedly Vidoc was
able to make out the full address because he knew
about all the criminal hangouts, like this is where it
must be.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
M h.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
That was that kind of hang.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I mean, that's just like who else is going to
be able to do that, nobuddy Vidoc. He also he
was not shy about, you know, going out guns blazing.
They got a tip that a stage coach was going
to get knocked over in the forest outside of Paris,
so they got on the stage coach undercover, and when
the bandits inevitably showed up and stopped the stage coach,
(31:32):
they got out and started just shooting, and it got
root and tooting really fast.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Now should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, I think we've established that the security brigade was
pretty successful.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
They were very successful. They're doing great work, and we'll
be right back to talk about his pioneering work in criminology.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Right for this, Chuck, I feel like in the movie version,
(32:25):
that would have been a montage that we just discussed.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
I think dep Pardue it definitely was a montage. I
think depard who played him in a movie called v Doc.
But it wasn't like his life story. It was like
a lot of mistakes I think movies make. They're just like, hey,
let's just talk about this one central crime and plot,
and Vdoc is the guy on the case.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Okay, that makes sense. It sounds like they were trying
to grow a franchise unsuccessfully.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Yeah, I guess he did that with the Charlotte Holmes movies.
I think I'd just like to see a movie about him,
like his life.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, it rights itself.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Even if you strip away like the legend stuff, it
rights itself. He's just that fascinating. So yeah, we called
him the father of modern criminology, and not just us guys.
Everybody calls him that. And the reason why is because
he was pioneering all sorts of techniques of criminology. They're
still used today.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
It's amazing it is.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
On the one hand, you can be like this is
all low hanging fruit, like he's the first guy doing it,
but when you put it all together, it's it's like
he was a sharp dude. And it also shows how
zeroed in and focused he was on fighting crime that
this is what he thought.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
I think it was. I don't think it was low
hanging fruit. If like, no one else is doing this stuff, right,
I think that's a retrospective look like, I don't know.
I think if it was low hanging people would have
been doing it.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Okay, you don't. Let's take ballistics for example, He's credited
with doing the first ballistics comparison in the history of
law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah. So, eighteen twenty two, the body of Comtessa Isabelle
Darci was found shot to death. They arrest the husband.
Even back then, it's likely that the husband did it,
and they took his dueling pistol and it's like, this is,
you know, the murder weapon. And he was like, it
wasn't me. She had an Italian lover, and I guarantee
(34:25):
it was that guy. And Vidoc very simply was like, hey,
let's remove that bullet from the skull. They got the
bullet out and they were like, you can't put a
bullet like that in a dueling pistol, and they tracked
down the Italian lover. He confessed. And I see why
he called low hanging fruit, because it seems like it
makes so much sense just to say, well, hey, let's
look at the bullet. But I don't know if no
(34:46):
one else is suggesting it.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
No, no, for sure. And even if that had been
his only, you know, contribution, you know, you would be like, yeah,
that's need or whatever. But I wouldn't call it remarkable.
It's the fact that he came up with so many,
many different things.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, And the only reason I call it low hanging
fruit is not to put him down, but because I
think that over time somebody would have had the same thought. Right, No,
one just had. But he was basically standing under the tree, spinning,
grabbing all the fruit. That was one of the things
that makes him remarkable. He was a fruit cramper.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
He was grabbing that falling fruit.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I got another one.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Footprint analysis. Yeah, like, we would have no idea that
bigfoot exists if vid doc hadn't come along and figured
out that you can actually make a reverse a negative
of a footprint if you fill the footprint in with
plaster plaster of Paris appropriately.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, He's like, can I get plaster? And they're like,
this is Paris? What are kidding?
Speaker 2 (35:47):
It's everywhere. So he actually this was a lead heist.
Someone had stolen a bunch of lead and it turned
out to be a former police agent. But he he
made a cast of the footprint compared to to the
boot treads of other suspects and found one that matched.
And the guy was like, yes, that was me, the
DUC you found me out.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Amazing. He also early on and this one, to me
is really remarkable. He was like, all right, that footprint
thing worked, and he was like, fingerprints, that's got to
be a thing, Like look at these, look at this,
Look at your thumb everybody, and everyone looked at their
thumb and they all had you know, pastry cream on it,
and so they licked it off and then looked at
(36:29):
their thumb and they're like, oh wow. And he said,
we could probably use this too, but they just couldn't
find like a way to do it. They didn't have
the technology yet. They couldn't find an ink that would
work and record the fingerprints properly. So that didn't happen.
But he had the idea.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah. He also so that ink in the forge proof
paper he came up with while he ran a paper
mill during one of his down periods between fighting crime.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yeah, I think that was later in life. Wasn't that
like a retirement job or Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 2 (37:00):
It was in between his reign as head of the
Security Brigade and his next neck act.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
We'll just leave it at that, Okay, I got you.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
So what else?
Speaker 3 (37:12):
The other thing he did was he was really good.
He had a great memory apparently, and was really good
at remembering like the people and the faces of the
people of the underworld and their names. And he was like,
first thing he did was said, all of you cops
should get good at that too, because that really helps
if you like go to the prisons and observe the
(37:33):
guys in the prison and the exercise yard and like
remember their faces, remember their names. And maybe we should
start writing this stuff down and keeping track of criminals. Actually,
and they went to oil do we have never done
such a thing, and he said, we'll start doing it.
And that was the beginning of I mean, it was
like a card catalog at the time, but that was
(37:54):
the beginning of what do you call it?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
The criminal database? Yeah, mental database, y profiling, sure, but
I mean it was everything like if you were a forger,
they would have a sample of your handwriting. Like it
was really detailed. I saw that it had I think
thirty thousand crooks information but it covered millions of pages. Essentially. Yeah,
(38:18):
they were really like into it. And then another thing
he helped establish was essentially the criminal profiling from a
psychological standpoint. He wrote a treatise called lesva LUs Psychology
de lu.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Mouse a psychology Physiology.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Okay, let me try that again. Lesv LUs Cologne physiology
delu mour a de lu langau longa longog. I think
that's how you say language, but anyway, it means thieves.
And I added the colon. And he actually used a
comma an anatomy of their mores and their language. And
(38:58):
it was a study of like the mind of a thief,
and it was evidence based, like it was a scientific
paper that he wrote about the criminal mind. And I
think that actually undermines the idea that his memoirs were
like him just being over the top. I saw that
he had written a manuscript for his memoirs, handed it in.
(39:19):
Then after he handed it in, the publisher hired a
ghostwriter to punch it, and that he wasn't super happy
about that when he found the final product when he
read the book.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So oh, he's in fact a humble man.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I don't know about that, but I don't he was
as boastful as he has a reputation for based on
his memoirs.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Okay, Like we mentioned, he was a master of disguise,
as were his men in his police force. And they
could do it all. They were like Monty Python. They
would dress up as, like we said, nuns and women
and old people, young people, thieves obviously, and it was
a time and it sounds a little nonsensical that thieves
(39:59):
would dress and speak in a certain way and wear
their hair in a certain way, but there's been times
in history when that was the case, like a if
you look at it, some of the old gangster British
gangsters of a time sort of did the same thing.
You carry yourself and I think today even and you
would call it profiling, but you know, there's there's certain
(40:20):
ways of dress to sort of be in the world
where crimes are happening. There always has been.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
You wear track suits, yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Oh no, I'm wearing a tracksuit right now.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Criminal, I would turn you the fire of a dock.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
But they had their own style, so they would obviously
were very good at mimicking that style. And in the
memoirs and this you know, could have been a ghostwriter
because it is very flourishy. Apparently he had a habit,
very cinematically of pulling off his mask or's costume at
the at the last moment and saying it is I
(40:55):
viduc as the shackles are being put on the criminal, yes,
or like Tom Cruise, any mission I possible movie.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
It's right, so Chuck, I said. Everybody should remember that
he had lots of enemies in the real police, regular police,
and they they routinely accused him of illegal activity like
planning evidence, accepting bribes, and trapping people, kidnapping young women
to take them off to convents to become nuns at
their parents' behest. Yeah, I saw that all of the stuff.
(41:24):
These are accusations. None of these things were ever proven.
He was never even taken a court for most of them.
There were two cases that solid his reputation that gave
the police the chance to really drag him through the mud.
One was that one of his agents was accused of
helping a group of robbers that he actually busted. That
(41:46):
he had taken some money from them for bringing a
key so they could break into a place easier. He
got two years. It's not clear that that actually did happen,
but the guy got two years anyway. And Vidoc had
so laid his reputation on the line that not only
he could be trusted, but his agents could be trusted too,
that he resigned. He was like, that's fine, I'll resign.
(42:07):
I'm clearly not meant for this any longer, Like my
reputation has been tarnished, and I'm just going to go
off and start a paper mill. He was brought back
and he was the head for another year something like that,
and then he said, you know what, forget this, I'm
going to go out and start my own detective agency,
the world's first detective agency, I think, almost twenty years
(42:29):
before the Pinkertons even started.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, I think part of the I think it was
twofold a is for the cops, like they definitely didn't
like that he was out shining them, and I think
they were always suspicious that he never left his criminal
pass behind because he lived beyond his means of his salary.
I saw, so I can't remember how much he made
as a salary. I think it was like five thousand
(42:56):
francs at the time, and he lived as a man
who had much more money than that. So he had
all kinds of side hustles. He was in real estate.
Think he helped run a tavern, and so he made
extra money doing other things. And I think they were
always suspicious that he was still dabbling in criminality. One
(43:16):
thing he did that was I thought fairly interesting, and
I'm not sure how illegal it was. There was a
thing at the time where you could pay somebody to
take your place in the army. Basically, if you didn't
want to go to the army, you could offer up
a substitute. You could pay that substitute, and they were
glad to take the money to do that. And what
(43:36):
he would do was he would catch a criminal and say, hey,
you want to go to prison or you want to
go to the army. And if they said I'd rather
go the army, he would say, here's your substitute, Now
give me my money. So whether or not that's actually illegal,
who knows. It's borderline. And I think stuff like that
sort of made the cops added to their ire I
(44:00):
think because he was making more money than they were.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
So did that. That definitely happened. That was proven that
he did that. That wasn't just an accusation that like
turned into fact over time.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
I'm not sure I read it in a book. Uh
you know, it wasn't like some internet articles show it
was from an actual book.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
It was not on YouTube, No, it was.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
It wasn't a book.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Okay, So regardless of this, he has he's founded this
new this detective agency again the first detective agency in
the world. And he started out basically collaring white collar
criminals for large you know, corporate clients, people who swindled them,
made off with money and bezzled that kind of stuff.
(44:41):
And there was one case in particular, uh, And this
was after years years of this successful detective agency continuing
to show up the security brigade that his successor's brother
ran a bank and when the bank got knocked over,
the brother came to the doc the head of the
security brigade who he was related to. So there was
(45:05):
a case where a guy he had caught a guy
who had absconded with money. He brought him into the
office for questioning and got the guy, convinced the guy
to give up like twenty two hundred francs to just
begin repayment, put it in his account as he normally did,
to then hand over to the people who'd hired him
less than forty five percent they promised him for finding
(45:27):
right that happened, and a week later the cops show
up and arrests him for false imprisonment, impersonating a police officer,
and taking bribes essentially. And this is where his reputation
really got tarnished.
Speaker 3 (45:44):
Yeah, it was a by most accounts, it was a setup,
like a complete set right.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Like he they looked all over to find people who
would say in court that he was a crook. They
couldn't find anybody, even other criminals. They couldn't find anybody
except for this one guy, COMPI, who was the one
person who accused him. So he regardless is convicted given
(46:12):
I think like five or six years, and within apparently
weeks find he gets his case in front of the
appellate court, who took like less than a day to
throw the case out because he'd clearly been railroaded and
exonerated him. But his reputation had been so solid even
at the time, his star really fell and he looked
(46:32):
around for somebody to sell the detective detective agency to.
Apparently there were plenty of buyers, but they were like fraudsters,
just looking to take advantage of people. So he just
closed the thing down instead. Amazing, And there's here's another example.
So you hear that he got ten months. He spent
ten months in jail for that crime, right impersonating a
(46:54):
police officer and all that he didn't he spent ten
months in between the time he was incused, in the
time he was finally brought to trial, and then after
that he was acquitted within weeks of being convicted. Does
that make sense, Like that kind of detail like matters
hundreds of years on it does.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
So the cherry on top of this story is that
Vidoc left behind a really interesting literary legacy, and not
only just the books he wrote. He wrote memoirs, like
we said, he wrote that that crime book, the science
book that was so great. But Victor Hugo, he had
(47:35):
friends like this, Victor Hugo and Balzac one of my
favorite names. They use him as inspiration. If you read
the book le Meserab or go see that Broadway show.
If you see that awesome movie and you cry every
time Anne Hathaway sings like I do.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
It's amazing because she's good or bad at it?
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Have you never seen it?
Speaker 2 (47:56):
No? I saw. Though it's stage play.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
It's great for the music, Jesus great. They did something
different in that musical where they they didn't lip sync.
They actually recorded them singing in the moment on stage,
on the scene, and they had never done that before.
And so it's like palpable and real and boy it's good.
I loved it. So ley Miz though is the story
(48:20):
about a man who gets put in jail for stealing bread.
So that might sound familiar from Vdock's real life, but
apparently Hugo actually used both of the characters Jean Valjean
and who's the other guy? Javert as inspirations. You know,
(48:41):
he was the inspiration for both because he was both
criminal and cought. Later on, not only that, but mentioned Baalzac.
He cited Vdoc specifically as inspiration for Valtrind his character. Then,
of course, once you see who the character is, it
makes a lot of sense. Escape convict and criminal mastermind
(49:03):
who repents and becomes a police officer, a minister police
in Italy. Yeah, not bad.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
So what's widely believed to be the first modern detective
novel was The Murders in the Room Morgue by Edgar
Allan Poe, and there's an amateur French detective named Dupin
and Poe said that he definitely based Dupinn on Vidoc.
One that's a little less clear, a little less direct,
(49:32):
is Sherlock Holmes. There's some traits between Sherlock Holmes and Vidoc,
like Masters of Disguise and like dealing with the criminal
underworld for information and all that stuff. But Sherlock Holmes
was based on a French detective that came before Monsieur Lecoq,
and Emil Gaborio, who wrote the books that Lecoq was
(49:54):
the protagonist of definitely modeled Lecoq on Vidoc. Lecoq was
based on Vidoc, and Sake. Sherlock Holmes was based on Lacock.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
So I think by transitive property. Oh nice, is that it?
Speaker 2 (50:11):
I hope?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
So man mass.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
So that's it.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
What a guy?
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yeah, he definitely deserves a at least a decent movie.
If not, that's a franchise, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
Yeah, in can't you find someone besides George de Pardieu?
I mean surely, I feel like he was just the
guy for so long. He's old now, and I think
he didn't get me too.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I don't know. I know that France kind of was like,
you stink because he moved so we wouldn't have to
pay high taxes. Maybe that's that's the last thing I
heard of. Oh there's one other thing. There's a group
called the Vidoc Society in Philadelphia, that's made up of
like criminologists and people in law enforcement who take cold
cases on pro bono during their monthly lunches and try
(50:59):
to inject new life into the cases.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
You know, they love that name for sure. The v
DOC Society cool and they all come in in disguise
and then rip off their masks. I at lunch, it's
right every day.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Well, that's VIDOC for you. If you want to know
more about them. There's a lot of interesting contradictory stuff
out there to read. And since I said contradictory, that means,
of course it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (51:27):
I'm going to call this my Way or the Skyway.
That has nothing to do with it. It's just about
the Skyway disaster. We heard from a doctor. This is
a really good email. Hey, guys, just recently started listening
to the show. Found the episode of high regency Skywalk
disaster very interesting. I'm a physician and was in residency
at a hospital in Kansas City, not far from the
(51:50):
Crown Center at that time, and I was on call
that Friday night and was watching TV with a number
of other residents when I heard the news and we
knew that we were in for a busy night. I'm
writing in basically to mention two things I thought you
might find interesting. Ironically, the Kansas City metro area had
planned for a mass disaster drill the next day. Of course,
(52:12):
the drill was canceled and instead the response to the
actual disaster was analyzed, resulting in significant changes for future
plans for a response to a mass disaster. Now that's incredible.
And this one. Both of my sons graduated from college
with engineering degrees a few years ago. They were taught
about the high disaster in their classes and there's still
(52:33):
lessons to be learned from what happened even decades later.
And that is from doctor Paul M. Jost of Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
Thanks a lot, doctor Jost. That was an amazing email. Like, geez,
it's some background right there.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah, and hey, way to get on listener mail as
a new listener. That's well done.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, just pat yourself on the back. Tick off your
lab coat so you have a little extra stretching room
and pat yourself on the back.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
That's right. And also, doc, I got this shoulder thing
going on.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Well, if you want to be like doctor Jos and
send us some really r kane info about an episode
that we did. We love to hear that stuff. You
can send it to us, feed email, It's stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know, a little overlooked historical figure edition.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yes, yeah, boy, god, this guy. Could you could do
a ten parter on his life easily.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I mean, it's it's nuts. So we're talking about a
man named Eugene Francois Vidocq. He is known as the
father of criminology. Yeah, pretty much on the nose. That's
a really good title for him. Yeah, he's also an
inspiration for plenty of detective first early detective stories. He
(00:54):
was at one time as famous as Napoleon in France
and in Europe in general. He was in famous, incredibly wealthy,
and it was because he dedicated himself as a public
servant to the city of Paris to basically wipe out
crime as best he could at a time when Paris
was more overrun with crime than maybe it ever has
(01:16):
been in its history.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah, it was. It was a time where the army
was very busy, I guess it is the best way
to say it, and like the army took up a
lot of the men who might normally be cops, and
they were preoccupied more with warring than with just taking
care of regular police work. And Vidok stepped up in
(01:39):
a big way, and like I said, like I had
to stop researching because I was like, we can't do
a twelve hour podcast on this guy.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Rightly, no, but you can definitely go down a rabbit
hole with him. And one of the reasons why is
because depending on the source you consult, he was either
a total scumbag, scoundrel or genuinely unjustly slandered. I leaned
toward the second one, or closer to the second one. Obviously,
no one's perfect, but I do think that the stuff
(02:10):
that is really questionable or makes him into a questionable
person or character, I think is remnants of his political
rivals smearing his name so well that it still is
around today.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Here's what I think is that he was, and as
you'll see, started off as a scoundrel and a criminal,
later changed his tune because I think it was beneficial
for him to not be in prison all the time,
and I think he tried to do the right thing,
but also like a little bit of that that scoundrel
(02:49):
lived within him, but he also had people that had
it out for him. I think he's a complex guy.
I don't think he did a one to eighty and
was like and now I am pure. I think he
I think he, you know, did what was best for
him usually, but also wanted to put criminals behind bars
and make a few bucks while he did it.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So I have a counterpoint to that, but I'll bring
it up when we get to that part. But we
should tell everybody. One of the reasons Vidock is famous
if you have heard of him, is because not only
was he the father of criminology, he started out as
a genuine bona fide criminal who was serving time in prison,
would escape prison, and then one day he basically switched
(03:30):
sides from an outsider's standpoint and became like the top
cop in all of France while he was.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Serving Yeah, a good way to stay out of jail.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
For sure. Well let's start. Let's start with his early life, right,
because he was unquestionably a troublemaker, a hot head, and
just a handful. You could definitely say his parents actually
let him get arrested when they stole from him once.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, I mean you would classify as a juvenile delinquent today,
But it wasn't because he was some you know, poor
kid from the poor streets who had to steal to survive.
His parents did pretty well, they had a successful bakery
and how do you pronounce that rs? I think so yeah,
(04:18):
A R R A S. And it seemed rather middle class.
But like you said, he he stole from his parents.
He was. He was a scoundrel. He pick pocketed. He
was from very early on seemed like he was a
bit of a ladies man and he would you know,
this was sort of his early life until he ran
away literally to join the circus, right like people actually
(04:42):
did that. And he did that for a few months
until he didn't like the work. Then he would eventually
work for a Punch and Judy street show, which is
if you guys are don't know who Punch and Judy were,
they were They were puppets.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Right, yes they were. Punch was a wife battering puppet
and Judy was the abused wife. They got into hysterical
right yeah, really violent fights all the time, but it
was puppets and kids thought it was hilarious. And he
worked for that show and he had to. I guess
he got fired in a way.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I think so. I think as a fifteen year old
he said some kind of a tryst with the wife
of the guy who was running the thing. Yes, so
that's not very specific. It says that they were embracing,
so who knows what that means.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, but it definitely goes to underscore a lot of
things about him. He was very much into the ladies.
He didn't mind if it was someone else's lady, if
you were someone else's lady. And he was willing to
put himself in great danger and at great personal risk
to satisfy his own wants, needs, desires.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
That's a very nice way to say it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So he moved back home, he went back to ras
or Us and his I don't know if we said
his dad was a baker and his parents were totally normal,
fine parents. But again they basically when he was caught
stealing from them when he was thirteen, they said, okay,
you're going to jail. When you moved back home after
the circus and the Punch and Judy show, he wasn't
(06:12):
even sixteen yet, and they said, all right, you're going
to join the army whether you like it or not.
They shipped him off to the army. Well he was fifteen,
that's how bad a kid he was.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, I think he's drinking, getting fights and womanizing, and
you know, he's just one of those kids. They'd probably
just say today that he was I don't know, what
would you call it hot head? Yeah, teenage hothead. Yeah,
he'd like to steal things sometimes.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Right, and embrace other people's wives exactly. So he did
serve in the army. Apparently he was in battle a
few times because this was a post post French Revolution,
and I think he may have been in the army
when Napoleon first took power. At the very least, France
was on all sorts of advance. Like you said, it
(07:00):
had drained them their population of potential police people policemen,
and so he fought in a few battles. He definitely
saw some action and it was fine. But I think
probably the biggest takeaway was that he learned how to fence.
He became a very great fencer, and that served him
well because he was also known to get into duels
(07:22):
with people. And he actually had to desert the army
because he was coming up on charges because he challenged
a sergeant to a duel. The sergeant refused him, and
he smacked the sergeant around, and that is not something
you do in any army at any period of time.
And so he took off and was now a desert
ye from the army. And this is when his actual
(07:46):
criminal life really began. Everything else was petty, in temperate,
that kind of thing. This is like, Okay, I'm a
deserter from the army. I need to support myself somehow.
I guess I have to turn to a life of crime.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, he actually deserted a few times. I don't think
he was super popular among his peers there. Sure he
had a habit for just sort of not being there
all of a sudden when they called roll call. But eventually,
when he finally left for good, he joined up with
what was called the Rolling Army. You want to do
the French there, you're a French guy.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
It was the Army Rulan.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Okay, the Army Rulant, which was everything I saw about
this was that it was a side army. I think
it was a couple of thousand men, and that they
they sort of just did what they wanted. They were
fake uniforms. They plundered the countryside they gave themselves fake orders,
(08:40):
and I'm not exactly sure what real army work they did.
I'm sure they did, right.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I don't think so, I think or was it all just.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
A thing to like? I think they're under in pillage.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yes, that's what that's my take. I don't think they
were officially sanctioned at all.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, no, they weren't officially sanctioned, but I just I
figured they were. I thought that the real army might
have used them at times.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I don't know, I don't know enough about it. It's possible.
I mean, you got a couple thousand people with guns
ready to fight. Why not?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah? Well, I know they worked fake uniforms. And he
made up a rank for himself and took a alias.
He was Lieutenant Rousseau, and eventually even made himself captain.
I don't know why I didn't start off as captain
as long as he's making things up.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, he kind of sold himself short there, didn't he.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Well, he became captain eventually, so he ended up.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
In Paris eventually after he left the army. Roulant and
this is around seventeen ninety five. The French Revolution had
been successful. But there's something to understand about it. Like,
one of the reasons Paris was so over him with
crime was not just that there was a lack of
potential candidates for the police. There was also like the
(09:55):
threat of revolution and regime change was constant during these decades.
It wasn't like the French Revolution happened and it was over.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, it was a mess.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It was a mess. First Napoleon comes along is like, hey,
I'll take over from here. I'm now emperor. He he
ran France for a really long time, for a decade
or something like that. Then he was deposed and a
new king was installed, a new king was installed. After that,
that king was just deposed and a new citizen king
was put into place. And then around that time finally
(10:26):
our our protagonist dies. But like throughout all this time,
like there there's a lot of tension and conflict in
the country, and because everybody was preoccupied with that stuff,
crime was allowed to flourish. It was a really dangerous
lawless time. It particularly in Paris, because a lot of
(10:47):
people were also coming to Paris looking for opportunity and
that kind of thing, and so it was a just
to put that in your in your pipe and hold
it in your hat for later, because that's that's that's
this is the backdrop that he shows up in Paris against.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
That's right. So he ends up in Paris during this
very tumultuous time. Great time to be a criminal in Paris. Sure,
you know very I don't know about easy to get
away with stuff, but you know, you could be a
pretty successful criminal at the time. And that's what he did.
It sort of threw his twenties and into his thirties.
He was in and out of prison, kind of off
(11:25):
and on because of various schemes. It was never like,
I'm not going to say it was victimless, but it
was never like violent crimes. It seems like he was
like a really good, really good forging documents and things
like that, and all of his schemes seemed to be
kind of like on the more intelligent side.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, he was definitely intelligent, yes.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, So it's not like he was walking up and
bonking someone on the head and stealing their purse. He
graduated to more elaborate kind of you know, forgeries and
things like that.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah, and he also he was a criminal with a heart.
He landed in this one prison. Oh what is it
called Bagno, I believe.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Oh was that where he the the bread.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Guy was, Yes, So so this is a really good
example of that. He Yeah, he was finally caught and
sentenced for I think just three months in prison, just
three months. But while there he was so moved by
a guy who had been given six years for stealing
grain to feed his family, who, by the way, the
bread guy, right, people are confused. So he was so
(12:36):
moved by that and thought that it was so unjust
that he'd been given six years. He forged documents that
that that he signed as like the head of I
think the prison or the police as saying like this
man is to be released, his his sentence has been commuted,
and the guy made it made made off like he
was released. And I think it took a few months
(12:59):
for the whole thing to finally be found out. But
I think the doc was in jail at the time
when they did find out, and they gave him eight
years for that for forging papers that released a man
who had been given six years for stealing grain.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah, so this time he went to a hard labor prison.
Like you said, it was called a I don't know
how it's pronounced. I think they started in Italy under
a different name, but B A G n O the
bag no, the bagno, like if you've ever seen the
movie I looked into these, the movie Papion. The island
(13:35):
prison they were on that was one, and I think
it was just like a very tough It was like
the toughest of the tough prisons, hard labor, usually in shackles,
very hard to escape from. Yet he did manage to
escape even from here, and I think he escaped as
a sailor and was caught and put back and then
(13:56):
escaped again posing as a nun. So as you will
see later, he was, in fact a master of disguise,
was very good at it, and if he was able
to pass himself off as a nun, clearly pretty good
at it.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, And it's really something that he escaped not just
once but twice from a galley prison. Because they were
originally before they moved them onto land, they were ships,
giant ships with tons of oars sticking out of them,
and you would be sentenced to hard labor rowing those
oars day in and day out. It was a really
rough place to spend eight years, and it would also
(14:34):
be a really difficult place to escape from, but he
did twice. So he started to get a reputation as
someone who no prison could hold in addition to being
a master of disguise. And when you start kind of
doing stuff like that, your name gets around and you
start to become a bit of a legend among not
just the criminals, but also like law enforcement as well.
(14:56):
So his star is starting to rise. And I think,
as we reached this point, Chuck, it's time for message break.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
What do you think as we reached this point? I agree?
Speaker 3 (15:35):
All right, So where we left off, Vidoc has escaped
prison a couple of times. He was a juvenile delinquent.
He was a delinquent into his twenties and into his thirties,
through his twenties and into his thirties, and then finally
ends up back in Paris. He was trying to get
pulled into the criminal underworld again because he was well known,
(15:58):
and he was kind of in a bad spot because
if he said no, he would get blackmailed by these
low lifes and threaten to turn him in because he
was a fugitive at this point still. So finally he
was like, all right, what am I doing with my life,
all this on the run stuff, on the lamb in
disguise as a nun. This is for the birds. In
(16:21):
eighteen oh nine, he said, I'm going to go to
the cops and I'm gonna say I would like to
turn myself in and make myself well, sort of turn
myself in. What he really wanted to do was turn
into a police informant and get out of jail. And
they said, hey, great idea, but you're gonna do that
for at least a little while in jail.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Right, that is, I mean that sounds like, oh that's cool.
That was an incredibly dangerous position to put himself in
for two straight years.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
This still is.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
He was an sure he was an informant, a volunteer
informant for the police, and he would he would inform
on anybody. And so I was saying earlier that I
would bring up a counterpoint to the idea that it
was just completely self serving from what I saw. Another
explanation is that he never actually thought of himself as
a criminal. He thought of himself as an outlaw by circumstance,
(17:13):
like he had made a lot of bad decisions. He
knew that and that had made him run a foul
of the law. But he wasn't a criminal, Like, that's
not how he wanted to support himself. He didn't have
the heart of a criminal, and so this was a
way to basically say, I don't want to be a
criminal anymore. I don't want to be associated with these people.
I want to change sides, and this is how I'm
(17:33):
going to try to do it. Or another way to
look at it is that he was he was he
finally grew up essentially and realized like, okay, this is
this is not okay. I need to I need to
change things, and I've worked myself into such a deep hole.
This is the alternative to just going like, okay, I'm
(17:53):
going to become a criminal from now. Those were his choices.
That's how deep the Holy Doug was. And the thing is, Chuck,
no matter how you interpret whether it was a selfish act,
whether it was you know, you know, his destiny, whatever,
that shows a remarkable amount of initiative to do that.
Like he said, I'm not going to be a criminal.
I'm not going to turn a life crime. I'm going
(18:13):
to basically put myself in the hands of cops who
hate me and see if they will have me as
one of their own.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah, I think he probably grew up. I don't know that.
I buy that. If he had come from nothing, I
could buy that. But he came from a pretty good
He wasn't forced into committing crimes to survive.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No, But I think that's why he didn't see himself
as a criminal, because he had made choices or whatever.
He wasn't a criminal. He just didn't see himself like
that from what I saw.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
So he made choices to commit crimes, but didn't see
himself as a criminal.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yes, okay, yes, he made choices that were that were criminal,
but he wasn't making choices like to do crime. That
wasn't as his aim was for crime. He was just
making bad decisions that were criminal, and that made him
a criminal in the eyes of society. I'm not saying
like it was. It didn't make him a criminal. He
(19:09):
just didn't think of himself as a criminal. To him,
there was a differentiation between people who commit crimes and criminals.
He did not think very highly of criminals, like career criminals,
somebody who would slit your throat for your wallet or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
That Elvis was a drug addict, but Elvis was on pills,
and he looked down on real drug addicts that were
taking hard drugs like heroin.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny you bring that up, because I think of
this same him turning over himself to the police to say, hey,
I want to inform for you as very similar to
Elvis showing up at the White House and volunteering to
be an undercovered narc agent for Nixon.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Oh, totally yeah. And I think they're both pretty hypocritical.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
For sure. So for sure, Yeah, that's the thing. I
don't want to give the impression that I'm just like
an apologist for Vidalk. I just think that there is
an alternative explanation, and one of them is that he
didn't see himself as a criminal even though he was
a criminal. Oh, I totally agree.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I totally believe that, like there are nothing but innocent
people in prison. If he asked them, okay, you know,
sure that was what's it called chawshank?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Oh? Is that who that was? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:21):
I remember that great scene when they were at lunch
or whatever, when they were all saying like like, hey,
none of us did it, Like, no one in here
did any of the crimes that we're in here. For
it's pretty funny anyway. So he for two years worked
in that prison, like you said, just what he would
do was pass on information to his girlfriend, who would
(20:41):
get it to the police chief of Paris, and it
was going really well, apparently so well that at some
point he helped Napoleon's Empress Josephines catch the person who
stole her emerald necklace, and so he was on Napoleon's
radar at least for a moment. I'm not sure how
much Napoleon hung onto that, but it was a sort
(21:04):
of a feather in his cap as an informant for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
For sure. And that police chief was named Jean Henry
or Henri not with an eye but a why so
I'm not sure how it's pronounced exactly, but he was.
He was finally smitten. After two years with Vidoc, he
was all in for this guy. So he said, Okay,
we're gonna let you out, but this is an unofficial release,
(21:30):
like you're actually not going to get pardoned or released
on paper, because we need you as a police informant.
What they used to call thief takers. They were kind
of like the predecessors to bounty hunters, where anybody could
go catch thieves and bring them in for money. He
was an undercover version of that, and that's new, brand new.
(21:50):
They did not have undercover police at the time. So
Vidoc has basically carved out a totally unique, peculiar place
for himself in the Paris Police. And it's largely because
Jean Henry believes in him and sees also the value
in him going back into the underworld and informing on them,
(22:13):
not just from jail, but like from the actual outside
crime world.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
And John Henry also said stay away from my.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Wife exactly, I better not find you in bracing here.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So as a cis what you would call it today,
I guess he was doing his thing. He knew the
people very well, he knew his old haunts. He was
not unwilling to just hand over his friends and former
sort of cohorts in the thievery world in the underworld.
(22:48):
He would do that at a moment's notice. Dave Ruse
helped us out with this. He found one case where
he was actually in on a robbery, helped planet, helped
execute the robbery, and then when the cops come, he
pretended like he had been shot, so he could you know,
get out of the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Well, no, so that the the the robbers who were
there wouldn't know that he was a police informant. They
would mean it was yeah. So and by the way,
that that that burglar, the robber Saint Germain, was a
really wanted man. He was also a murderer and it
was actually a pretty interesting, I guess project that he
(23:28):
undertook and got the guy. But and we didn't say. Also,
the reason he was able to go back into the
underworld again was because the police staged an escape, like
they allowed him to escape to make it look like
he'd broken out of prison, not that they'd released him,
so that he would seem like it was Vidalk who'd
broken out of prison again and now he was back
(23:49):
in the Paris underworld.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
That's right. So this underworld at the time was it
was a Paris where they policed in a in a
way that wasn't an They were confined to districts, and
if you were in a district, you couldn't go to
another district to investigate. You had to stick to your district.
The criminals at the time knew this. They were savvy
(24:12):
and so they would commit crimes not near where they lived,
which made it a lot easier to get away with stuff.
And so Vedock comes in and says, hey, I was
one of these guys. You guys are dumb and how
you're doing things, because all you have to do is
go on the other side of Paris to commit a
crime and you're probably going to get away with it
unless you're caught red handed. And so what you guys
(24:33):
should do is continue to allow me to work undercover
and know it's not something you've ever done, because you
like to wear these ridiculous uniforms that identify you from
a mile away, and get rid of these districts and
allow cops to investigate wherever they need in order to
solve a crime. And they said okay. In eighteen twelve
(24:55):
they made Vedock chief of the security brigade in French
it is the what.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Were god de la surtee fantastic?
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And they said go hire some men, and he said,
all right, I'm going to go hire eight former criminals
x cons that I used to know. These are the
best of the worst. And it's sort of like the
dirty doesn't he's like, except that it was the dirty eight.
This is the dirty Ocho and they said, come with me,
and we're all going to be this undercover agent security brigade,
or we're going to clean up Paris.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, and I think that definitely undermines the idea that
he had no loyalty whatsoever to people he'd met as
a criminal in Paris. He just didn't have loyalty the
actual real criminals. He distinguished the difference between people who
commit crimes and actual criminals.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
And so he accused of disloyalty.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah. I mean we said earlier that he had no
loyalty whatsoever to the Paris criminal community.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Oh, I don't think so. I think he turned in
people he thought should be turned in, right, was loyal
to his friends.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
So these are the people that he picked. And yes,
it's very, very unorthodox. And I think if Paris hadn't
been overrun with crime, he never would have been able
to put together a Paris wide undercover police force made
up of ex convicts. It even sounds nuts today in
twenty twenty three, I can't imagine what it sounded like
(26:17):
back in eighteen twelve. But his whole premise was, if
you send somebody who's a cop, give me a great
cop who could do undercover work. He'll get sniffed out
immediately and they will murder him. He will die. You
can't have people who don't come from this do this
(26:38):
kind of work like That's it was very dangerous undercover work.
And so that's the main reason why he chose these
ex counts. But I also get the impression too, is
that part of it was to just kind of demonstrate
his point that just because somebody had done time and
been convicted of a crime doesn't mean they could never
be trustworthy.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Again, I think he misspoke. I think snipped off the case, right.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
That's right, I mean, and how could I missed that one? Uh?
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Do we break now or do we go for a
little bit longer?
Speaker 2 (27:08):
I think we should talk a little bit more about
the Security Brigade.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Okay, so started in eighteen twelve, Like you said, it
turned out to be a really big success. Napoleon just
a year later signed a decree that said the Security
Brigade is a state police force now and you can
have his up to twenty eight men is what they
grew to. And I think through four or five years
(27:35):
into it, they uh. And of course some of this
stuff is we should say v duck would write a
lot about his h and his memoirs and stuff. He
was not shy about tooting his own horn, let's say.
And he's one of those guys where like if you
read his memoir there, you know, some of it could
be boasting, some of it could be stretching the truth
a little, but we do know that they were super successful. Like,
(27:58):
no one is doubting that. But he touted fifteen murderers
in just one year. Fifteen murders, three hundred and forty
one thieves, thirty eight receivers of stolen goods, fourteen escaped convicts,
forty three parole violations, forty six forgers, swindlers, con men,
two hundred and twenty nine vagabonds and suspicious types. So
(28:21):
they're they're kicking butt and taking names in Paris.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, and make a note of this for later and
put in your pipe in your hat that this this
is a group of criminals who are showing up the
regular police. Yeah, and the regular police are not really
fans of being shown up in the public. Like the
public was reading all about this stuff, and.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, they're retting famous for it very much so.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
And they were pulling in like the big whales while
the police were chasing down you know, pickpockets and stuff
like that.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yeah, Oliver twists.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So there was a definite rivalry. Yeah he was a pickpocket, right, No,
I don't think so. Are you thinking of Annie? Annie
was a pick No.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
I've already misspoken on Oliver Twist and Annie before, so
I'm not gonna do it again. Forget everything I said,
everybody right in.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
So yeah, yeah, for sure we.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Know how to make the division symbol and a keyboard.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Exactly, No, you do so he yuh? What was I saying, chuck?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (29:24):
You were saying that he was landing the whales.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yes, So there was a lot of rivalry and disdain
for the security brigade from the regular police. Just remember
that they didn't like him.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
They did not, all right, So a few things, you know,
they found some great anecdotes from the security brigade. We
already know that he knew a lot about the crime
world and these criminals, and he was apparently there was
this one story where like he would know their methods,
like specific people in their methods. And there was one
(29:57):
story about this robbery that they found where a thief
had cut around a lock and he was like, I
know who did that, Like, I know that work. That
is Foucard. And in the movie version, they said that
can't be a facade falsades in prison and someone steps
up and said facade escape from prison one week ago,
and Beatog says, then it is him. That's awesome I scene.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
I feel like the guy who stepped up to inform
everybody that he escaped from prison was agad or Spartacus
from the Bird Cage.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
I never saw that movie.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Really, I'm excited for you.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Chuck, you big hole.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
You need to fill that hole, and you'll do it
over and over again. You'll keep filling that hole over
and over again because it's such a great movie and
you can just watch it so many times. Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
And I also don't email about end scene. We've already
been over that before. It was just a joke.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I meant and scene and scene.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Uh what else? It was an envelope, a scrap of
envelope with a half of address, and supposedly Vidoc was
able to make out the full address because he knew
about all the criminal hangouts, like this is where it
must be.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
M h.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
That was that kind of hang.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I mean, that's just like who else is going to
be able to do that, nobuddy Vidoc. He also he
was not shy about, you know, going out guns blazing.
They got a tip that a stage coach was going
to get knocked over in the forest outside of Paris,
so they got on the stage coach undercover, and when
the bandits inevitably showed up and stopped the stage coach,
(31:32):
they got out and started just shooting, and it got
root and tooting really fast.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Now should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, I think we've established that the security brigade was
pretty successful.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
They were very successful. They're doing great work, and we'll
be right back to talk about his pioneering work in criminology.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Right for this, Chuck, I feel like in the movie version,
(32:25):
that would have been a montage that we just discussed.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
I think dep Pardue it definitely was a montage. I
think depard who played him in a movie called v Doc.
But it wasn't like his life story. It was like
a lot of mistakes I think movies make. They're just like, hey,
let's just talk about this one central crime and plot,
and Vdoc is the guy on the case.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Okay, that makes sense. It sounds like they were trying
to grow a franchise unsuccessfully.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Yeah, I guess he did that with the Charlotte Holmes movies.
I think I'd just like to see a movie about him,
like his life.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, it rights itself.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Even if you strip away like the legend stuff, it
rights itself. He's just that fascinating. So yeah, we called
him the father of modern criminology, and not just us guys.
Everybody calls him that. And the reason why is because
he was pioneering all sorts of techniques of criminology. They're
still used today.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
It's amazing it is.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
On the one hand, you can be like this is
all low hanging fruit, like he's the first guy doing it,
but when you put it all together, it's it's like
he was a sharp dude. And it also shows how
zeroed in and focused he was on fighting crime that
this is what he thought.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
I think it was. I don't think it was low
hanging fruit. If like, no one else is doing this stuff, right,
I think that's a retrospective look like, I don't know.
I think if it was low hanging people would have
been doing it.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Okay, you don't. Let's take ballistics for example, He's credited
with doing the first ballistics comparison in the history of
law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah. So, eighteen twenty two, the body of Comtessa Isabelle
Darci was found shot to death. They arrest the husband.
Even back then, it's likely that the husband did it,
and they took his dueling pistol and it's like, this is,
you know, the murder weapon. And he was like, it
wasn't me. She had an Italian lover, and I guarantee
(34:25):
it was that guy. And Vidoc very simply was like, hey,
let's remove that bullet from the skull. They got the
bullet out and they were like, you can't put a
bullet like that in a dueling pistol, and they tracked
down the Italian lover. He confessed. And I see why
he called low hanging fruit, because it seems like it
makes so much sense just to say, well, hey, let's
look at the bullet. But I don't know if no
(34:46):
one else is suggesting it.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
No, no, for sure. And even if that had been
his only, you know, contribution, you know, you would be like, yeah,
that's need or whatever. But I wouldn't call it remarkable.
It's the fact that he came up with so many,
many different things.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, And the only reason I call it low hanging
fruit is not to put him down, but because I
think that over time somebody would have had the same thought. Right, No,
one just had. But he was basically standing under the tree, spinning,
grabbing all the fruit. That was one of the things
that makes him remarkable. He was a fruit cramper.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
He was grabbing that falling fruit.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I got another one.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Footprint analysis. Yeah, like, we would have no idea that
bigfoot exists if vid doc hadn't come along and figured
out that you can actually make a reverse a negative
of a footprint if you fill the footprint in with
plaster plaster of Paris appropriately.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, He's like, can I get plaster? And they're like,
this is Paris? What are kidding?
Speaker 2 (35:47):
It's everywhere. So he actually this was a lead heist.
Someone had stolen a bunch of lead and it turned
out to be a former police agent. But he he
made a cast of the footprint compared to to the
boot treads of other suspects and found one that matched.
And the guy was like, yes, that was me, the
DUC you found me out.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Amazing. He also early on and this one, to me
is really remarkable. He was like, all right, that footprint
thing worked, and he was like, fingerprints, that's got to
be a thing, Like look at these, look at this,
Look at your thumb everybody, and everyone looked at their
thumb and they all had you know, pastry cream on it,
and so they licked it off and then looked at
(36:29):
their thumb and they're like, oh wow. And he said,
we could probably use this too, but they just couldn't
find like a way to do it. They didn't have
the technology yet. They couldn't find an ink that would
work and record the fingerprints properly. So that didn't happen.
But he had the idea.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah. He also so that ink in the forge proof
paper he came up with while he ran a paper
mill during one of his down periods between fighting crime.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yeah, I think that was later in life. Wasn't that
like a retirement job or Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 2 (37:00):
It was in between his reign as head of the
Security Brigade and his next neck act.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
We'll just leave it at that, Okay, I got you.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
So what else?
Speaker 3 (37:12):
The other thing he did was he was really good.
He had a great memory apparently, and was really good
at remembering like the people and the faces of the
people of the underworld and their names. And he was like,
first thing he did was said, all of you cops
should get good at that too, because that really helps
if you like go to the prisons and observe the
(37:33):
guys in the prison and the exercise yard and like
remember their faces, remember their names. And maybe we should
start writing this stuff down and keeping track of criminals. Actually,
and they went to oil do we have never done
such a thing, and he said, we'll start doing it.
And that was the beginning of I mean, it was
like a card catalog at the time, but that was
(37:54):
the beginning of what do you call it?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
The criminal database? Yeah, mental database, y profiling, sure, but
I mean it was everything like if you were a forger,
they would have a sample of your handwriting. Like it
was really detailed. I saw that it had I think
thirty thousand crooks information but it covered millions of pages. Essentially. Yeah,
(38:18):
they were really like into it. And then another thing
he helped establish was essentially the criminal profiling from a
psychological standpoint. He wrote a treatise called lesva LUs Psychology
de lu.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Mouse a psychology Physiology.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Okay, let me try that again. Lesv LUs Cologne physiology
delu mour a de lu langau longa longog. I think
that's how you say language, but anyway, it means thieves.
And I added the colon. And he actually used a
comma an anatomy of their mores and their language. And
(38:58):
it was a study of like the mind of a thief,
and it was evidence based, like it was a scientific
paper that he wrote about the criminal mind. And I
think that actually undermines the idea that his memoirs were
like him just being over the top. I saw that
he had written a manuscript for his memoirs, handed it in.
(39:19):
Then after he handed it in, the publisher hired a
ghostwriter to punch it, and that he wasn't super happy
about that when he found the final product when he
read the book.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So oh, he's in fact a humble man.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I don't know about that, but I don't he was
as boastful as he has a reputation for based on
his memoirs.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Okay, Like we mentioned, he was a master of disguise,
as were his men in his police force. And they
could do it all. They were like Monty Python. They
would dress up as, like we said, nuns and women
and old people, young people, thieves obviously, and it was
a time and it sounds a little nonsensical that thieves
(39:59):
would dress and speak in a certain way and wear
their hair in a certain way, but there's been times
in history when that was the case, like a if
you look at it, some of the old gangster British
gangsters of a time sort of did the same thing.
You carry yourself and I think today even and you
would call it profiling, but you know, there's there's certain
(40:20):
ways of dress to sort of be in the world
where crimes are happening. There always has been.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
You wear track suits, yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Oh no, I'm wearing a tracksuit right now.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Criminal, I would turn you the fire of a dock.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
But they had their own style, so they would obviously
were very good at mimicking that style. And in the
memoirs and this you know, could have been a ghostwriter
because it is very flourishy. Apparently he had a habit,
very cinematically of pulling off his mask or's costume at
the at the last moment and saying it is I
(40:55):
viduc as the shackles are being put on the criminal, yes,
or like Tom Cruise, any mission I possible movie.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
It's right, so Chuck, I said. Everybody should remember that
he had lots of enemies in the real police, regular police,
and they they routinely accused him of illegal activity like
planning evidence, accepting bribes, and trapping people, kidnapping young women
to take them off to convents to become nuns at
their parents' behest. Yeah, I saw that all of the stuff.
(41:24):
These are accusations. None of these things were ever proven.
He was never even taken a court for most of them.
There were two cases that solid his reputation that gave
the police the chance to really drag him through the mud.
One was that one of his agents was accused of
helping a group of robbers that he actually busted. That
(41:46):
he had taken some money from them for bringing a
key so they could break into a place easier. He
got two years. It's not clear that that actually did happen,
but the guy got two years anyway. And Vidoc had
so laid his reputation on the line that not only
he could be trusted, but his agents could be trusted too,
that he resigned. He was like, that's fine, I'll resign.
(42:07):
I'm clearly not meant for this any longer, Like my
reputation has been tarnished, and I'm just going to go
off and start a paper mill. He was brought back
and he was the head for another year something like that,
and then he said, you know what, forget this, I'm
going to go out and start my own detective agency,
the world's first detective agency, I think, almost twenty years
(42:29):
before the Pinkertons even started.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, I think part of the I think it was
twofold a is for the cops, like they definitely didn't
like that he was out shining them, and I think
they were always suspicious that he never left his criminal
pass behind because he lived beyond his means of his salary.
I saw, so I can't remember how much he made
as a salary. I think it was like five thousand
(42:56):
francs at the time, and he lived as a man
who had much more money than that. So he had
all kinds of side hustles. He was in real estate.
Think he helped run a tavern, and so he made
extra money doing other things. And I think they were
always suspicious that he was still dabbling in criminality. One
(43:16):
thing he did that was I thought fairly interesting, and
I'm not sure how illegal it was. There was a
thing at the time where you could pay somebody to
take your place in the army. Basically, if you didn't
want to go to the army, you could offer up
a substitute. You could pay that substitute, and they were
glad to take the money to do that. And what
(43:36):
he would do was he would catch a criminal and say, hey,
you want to go to prison or you want to
go to the army. And if they said I'd rather
go the army, he would say, here's your substitute, Now
give me my money. So whether or not that's actually illegal,
who knows. It's borderline. And I think stuff like that
sort of made the cops added to their ire I
(44:00):
think because he was making more money than they were.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
So did that. That definitely happened. That was proven that
he did that. That wasn't just an accusation that like
turned into fact over time.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
I'm not sure I read it in a book. Uh
you know, it wasn't like some internet articles show it
was from an actual book.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
It was not on YouTube, No, it was.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
It wasn't a book.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Okay, So regardless of this, he has he's founded this
new this detective agency again the first detective agency in
the world. And he started out basically collaring white collar
criminals for large you know, corporate clients, people who swindled them,
made off with money and bezzled that kind of stuff.
(44:41):
And there was one case in particular, uh, And this
was after years years of this successful detective agency continuing
to show up the security brigade that his successor's brother
ran a bank and when the bank got knocked over,
the brother came to the doc the head of the
security brigade who he was related to. So there was
(45:05):
a case where a guy he had caught a guy
who had absconded with money. He brought him into the
office for questioning and got the guy, convinced the guy
to give up like twenty two hundred francs to just
begin repayment, put it in his account as he normally did,
to then hand over to the people who'd hired him
less than forty five percent they promised him for finding
(45:27):
right that happened, and a week later the cops show
up and arrests him for false imprisonment, impersonating a police officer,
and taking bribes essentially. And this is where his reputation
really got tarnished.
Speaker 3 (45:44):
Yeah, it was a by most accounts, it was a setup,
like a complete set right.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Like he they looked all over to find people who
would say in court that he was a crook. They
couldn't find anybody, even other criminals. They couldn't find anybody
except for this one guy, COMPI, who was the one
person who accused him. So he regardless is convicted given
(46:12):
I think like five or six years, and within apparently
weeks find he gets his case in front of the
appellate court, who took like less than a day to
throw the case out because he'd clearly been railroaded and
exonerated him. But his reputation had been so solid even
at the time, his star really fell and he looked
(46:32):
around for somebody to sell the detective detective agency to.
Apparently there were plenty of buyers, but they were like fraudsters,
just looking to take advantage of people. So he just
closed the thing down instead. Amazing, And there's here's another example.
So you hear that he got ten months. He spent
ten months in jail for that crime, right impersonating a
(46:54):
police officer and all that he didn't he spent ten
months in between the time he was incused, in the
time he was finally brought to trial, and then after
that he was acquitted within weeks of being convicted. Does
that make sense, Like that kind of detail like matters
hundreds of years on it does.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
So the cherry on top of this story is that
Vidoc left behind a really interesting literary legacy, and not
only just the books he wrote. He wrote memoirs, like
we said, he wrote that that crime book, the science
book that was so great. But Victor Hugo, he had
(47:35):
friends like this, Victor Hugo and Balzac one of my
favorite names. They use him as inspiration. If you read
the book le Meserab or go see that Broadway show.
If you see that awesome movie and you cry every
time Anne Hathaway sings like I do.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
It's amazing because she's good or bad at it?
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Have you never seen it?
Speaker 2 (47:56):
No? I saw. Though it's stage play.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
It's great for the music, Jesus great. They did something
different in that musical where they they didn't lip sync.
They actually recorded them singing in the moment on stage,
on the scene, and they had never done that before.
And so it's like palpable and real and boy it's good.
I loved it. So ley Miz though is the story
(48:20):
about a man who gets put in jail for stealing bread.
So that might sound familiar from Vdock's real life, but
apparently Hugo actually used both of the characters Jean Valjean
and who's the other guy? Javert as inspirations. You know,
(48:41):
he was the inspiration for both because he was both
criminal and cought. Later on, not only that, but mentioned Baalzac.
He cited Vdoc specifically as inspiration for Valtrind his character. Then,
of course, once you see who the character is, it
makes a lot of sense. Escape convict and criminal mastermind
(49:03):
who repents and becomes a police officer, a minister police
in Italy. Yeah, not bad.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
So what's widely believed to be the first modern detective
novel was The Murders in the Room Morgue by Edgar
Allan Poe, and there's an amateur French detective named Dupin
and Poe said that he definitely based Dupinn on Vidoc.
One that's a little less clear, a little less direct,
(49:32):
is Sherlock Holmes. There's some traits between Sherlock Holmes and Vidoc,
like Masters of Disguise and like dealing with the criminal
underworld for information and all that stuff. But Sherlock Holmes
was based on a French detective that came before Monsieur Lecoq,
and Emil Gaborio, who wrote the books that Lecoq was
(49:54):
the protagonist of definitely modeled Lecoq on Vidoc. Lecoq was
based on Vidoc, and Sake. Sherlock Holmes was based on Lacock.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
So I think by transitive property. Oh nice, is that it?
Speaker 2 (50:11):
I hope?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
So man mass.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
So that's it.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
What a guy?
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yeah, he definitely deserves a at least a decent movie.
If not, that's a franchise, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
Yeah, in can't you find someone besides George de Pardieu?
I mean surely, I feel like he was just the
guy for so long. He's old now, and I think
he didn't get me too.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I don't know. I know that France kind of was like,
you stink because he moved so we wouldn't have to
pay high taxes. Maybe that's that's the last thing I
heard of. Oh there's one other thing. There's a group
called the Vidoc Society in Philadelphia, that's made up of
like criminologists and people in law enforcement who take cold
cases on pro bono during their monthly lunches and try
(50:59):
to inject new life into the cases.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
You know, they love that name for sure. The v
DOC Society cool and they all come in in disguise
and then rip off their masks. I at lunch, it's
right every day.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Well, that's VIDOC for you. If you want to know
more about them. There's a lot of interesting contradictory stuff
out there to read. And since I said contradictory, that means,
of course it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (51:27):
I'm going to call this my Way or the Skyway.
That has nothing to do with it. It's just about
the Skyway disaster. We heard from a doctor. This is
a really good email. Hey, guys, just recently started listening
to the show. Found the episode of high regency Skywalk
disaster very interesting. I'm a physician and was in residency
at a hospital in Kansas City, not far from the
(51:50):
Crown Center at that time, and I was on call
that Friday night and was watching TV with a number
of other residents when I heard the news and we
knew that we were in for a busy night. I'm
writing in basically to mention two things I thought you
might find interesting. Ironically, the Kansas City metro area had
planned for a mass disaster drill the next day. Of course,
(52:12):
the drill was canceled and instead the response to the
actual disaster was analyzed, resulting in significant changes for future
plans for a response to a mass disaster. Now that's incredible.
And this one. Both of my sons graduated from college
with engineering degrees a few years ago. They were taught
about the high disaster in their classes and there's still
(52:33):
lessons to be learned from what happened even decades later.
And that is from doctor Paul M. Jost of Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
Thanks a lot, doctor Jost. That was an amazing email. Like, geez,
it's some background right there.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah, and hey, way to get on listener mail as
a new listener. That's well done.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, just pat yourself on the back. Tick off your
lab coat so you have a little extra stretching room
and pat yourself on the back.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
That's right. And also, doc, I got this shoulder thing
going on.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Well, if you want to be like doctor Jos and
send us some really r kane info about an episode
that we did. We love to hear that stuff. You
can send it to us, feed email, It's stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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