May 16, 2025 • 39 mins
Ferdinand De Lesseps, "the Great Frenchman", is convinced that he is the man to build the Panama Canal. No, he isn't an engineer and, no, he's never actually been to Panama before. But he managed to dig the Suez Canal, and everyone said that would be impossible too. How hard can it be?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin eighteen eighty six. A train near Paris, two men
are sitting in silence. One decides to strike up a conversation.
(00:36):
What's your line of work? He asks his fellow passenger.
It's a mundane, everyday question. Almost everyone in France would
have been astonished to hear it. How has this man
failed to recognize who he's talking to? The twinkling black
eyes and walrus mustache under a shock of thick white hair.
(00:57):
This is one of the most famous faces in the country,
the Grand Francis. They call him the great Frenchman, Ferdinand
the Lesser. He looks younger than he is. He'd never
guess he's eighty. Here's how the New York Herald had
once described La grand Francais. He bears his years with
(01:19):
ease and grace, showing no signs of age in his movements.
His face is tanned and ruddy, with the evidence of
perfect health. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous,
and polished. Ferdinando les Seppe might be surprised that the
other passenger hasn't recognized him, but he's not offended. He's
(01:40):
amused his line of work. He flashes a smile and
says isthmuses. Ferdinand Lessppe built the Suez Canal. Everyone told
him it couldn't be done, the waterway slicing one hundred
and twenty miles through the Egyptian Isthmus. It was too ambitious,
(02:03):
but Ferdinand Lessseppe did it. The new canal was an
instant hit, slashed journey times between Asia and Europe. Instead
of going thousands of miles around the southern tip of Africa,
ships could pay to take the shortcut from the Red
Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, twelve percent of global trade
(02:26):
goes through Suez. De Leasseeppe made a lot of French
investors very, very rich, and now he's trying to do
it all over again in Panama. But for Ferdinand de
les Seppe, Panama will not be a happy isthmus. I'm
Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Ferdinando Lesseppe
(03:13):
was born in eighteen oh five in Versailles into a
distinguished family. His cousin would later become Empress Eugenie, the
wife of Napoleon the Third. Like his father, De la
Seppe became a diplomat. He served in Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia.
He spent five years in Egypt as France's vice consul.
(03:34):
De Leeseppe was charming and charismatic. He made friends wherever
he went. It is wonderful, said his first wife, to
have a husband so liked by everyone. Fernando Lesseppe was
a fine horseman, a crack shot and accomplished fencer. He
was not an engineer, or a financier or an administrator,
(03:58):
all skills you might expect someone to need if they
were going to embark on a groundbreaking one hundred and
twenty mile canal. So how did de Lesseppe get put
in Chos of Suez? In his five years in Egypt,
he had become firm friends with the ruler's son. By
the time the ruler's son took over, De Lesseppe had
(04:20):
left the diplomatic service and recently been widowed. He went
to visit his old friend. They talked about canals. The
idea had been around for years, but nobody had ever
got very far with it. I'll put up some money,
the ruler told De Lesseepe if you can raise the rest.
(04:40):
As the historian David McCulloch puts it, de Lesseppe had
no experience faintly related to such an undertaking. He had
no backing from France's government or from banks, but why
should that stop him. De Lesseppe convened a committee of
experts to come up with a plan. He formed a company,
and he barn stormed around France selling his scheme to
(05:03):
small investors. He was magnetic, a compelling speaker. Thousan of
French families entrusted him with their savings. The British Prime
Minister called the Lesseppe a swindler and a fool, but
then he would say that if the canal were actually
to happen, the British didn't want it controlled by a
(05:26):
French company. But could you really cut a canal right
across the Egyptian desert? It can't be easy to dig
in sand. De Lesseppe had no time for the doomsters
and gloomsters. They never achieve anything, who do not believe
in success, He liked to say. By eighteen sixty seven
(05:50):
they'd been digging for eight years and gone way over budget.
De Lesseppe was running out of cash. He went back
to the French public with another scheme to raise more money.
Lottery bonds, invest in finishing the Suez Canal. With a
chance of winning big cash prizes, public snapped up the bonds,
(06:11):
and two years later the very first ship steamed through
the newly opened canal, the state yacht of Empress Eugenie.
Somehow de Lasseppe had pulled it off. The two sides
of the world approached to greet one another, said one commentator.
(06:33):
Another gave de Lesseppe his new nickname, La Grange Franseille.
The triumph made him a symbol of France's self image
and the age of globalism and technological progress. In the
words of Matthew Parker, the author of Hell's Gorge, he
represented a new patriotism based around not war, but achievement
(06:59):
for all mankind. De Lesseppe married again. He was sixty four,
his glamorous new wife just twenty. Soon they had a child,
then another, and another. The photogenic family was never out
of the newspapers. The Grand Francais set his heart on
(07:23):
conquering another isthmus. As with Egypt, the idea of a
canal across Panama had been discussed for years. As with Suez,
such a canal would save ships. A detail of thousands
upon thousands of miles instead of sailing all around South America,
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they'd be able to shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic.
Surveyors had scoped out the lie of the land in Panama.
Various routes were proposed for locks that might convey a
ship over the hills between the oceans, like a set
of steps. To Lesseppe had strong views about locks. He
(08:04):
hated them more the ship close one set of gates,
open another wait for the water to gush in or out.
Locks make a canal journey slow and cumbersome, And as
far as de Lesseppe was concerned, there was only one
right way to build a canal at sea level. That's
(08:25):
what had done at Suez. You sail in at one
end and out the other. Simple and the Suez Canal
was one hundred and twenty miles. It's only forty odd
miles across the Panama isthmus. How hard could it be?
In eighteen seventy nine, De Lesseppe had the Saciete de
Geography convene a congress in Paris to study all the
(08:48):
possible routes. He invited delegates from twenty two countries, explorers, economists, engineers,
an expert. After expert explained very clearly why the sea
level canal that had worked in Egypt was never going
to work in Panama. For a start, Egypt was pretty flat,
(09:10):
Panama was hilly. How much earth would you have to dig,
how much would it cost? How long would it take?
And Egypt was dry. Panama's river Chagres cut across any
route the canal might take. Have you ever seen the chuglis,
asked one delegate to de Lesseppe's conference. I have. I've
(09:32):
watched it after a storm rise ten feet in an hour.
I've seen it gushing like a torrent fifteen hundred feet across.
What's going to happen to the ships in your sea
level canal when all that floodwater hits them? Problems, problems, problems,
said de Lesseppe. Of course there are problems. There were
(09:53):
problems at Suez too. People had said you could never
dig through sand, but men of genius came forward to
solve every problem by inventing machines, massive steam powered dredges.
Men of genius will invent whatever is needed for Panama too.
(10:13):
The Congress ended with a vote on which plan to support.
A surprising number of delegates were nowhere to be found.
One later explained that it was obvious which way de
le Seppe wanted the vote to go, and he didn't
agree with it. But he'd also dined very well in Paris,
and he'd hate to upset his hosts. Others were braver
(10:37):
in order not to burden my conscience, said one with
unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure, I say no. De le
Seppe got up to cast his vote and make an announcement.
I vote yes, and I have accepted command of the enterprise.
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The room erupted. Lesseeppe was seventy four years old. It
has been suggested he said that after Suez I ought
to take a rest. But I ask you, when a
general has just won one battle and is invited to
win another, why should he refuse. By the end of
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the vote, Yes had a resounding majority. Look more closely,
and the result seems less reassuring. Most of the Yes
delegates were French, not many were engineers, and of the
engineers only one had ever actually been to Panama, and
he had a financial interest in del Sepe's plan. Still,
(11:46):
now de la Seppe could go to the French public
to seek investment and claim the packing of experts, just
as it done with Suez. De la Sepe's son from
his first marriage, his loyal right hand man, Charles, wasn't
sure this was wise. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle,
he said to his father. Should not one be satisfied
(12:09):
with completing one miracle in a lifetime. Cautionary tales will
be back in a moment. If Ferdinand de Lesseppe was
(12:30):
going to persuade ordinary French families to invest in his
Panama Canal company as they had in Suez, it would
probably help if he'd actually been to Panama. On December thirtieth,
eighteen seventy nine, his ship docked in the small town
of Cologne. Down the ramp walked de Lesseppe with his
(12:51):
beautiful young wife and three of their little children. In
a white linen suit. De Lesseppe gave a rousing speech.
The canal will be made, he said, again and again.
The canal will be made. On was a railway town,
and not somewhere travelers like to linger. Unpaved streets strewn
(13:16):
with garbage, a couple of seedy hotels, and that was
about it. You landed in Colon only to get the
train to Panama City. The railway across Panama had been
built by American investors in the mid nineteenth century, when
the easiest way to get from the east coast of
America to the west was not to go through America
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at all. Instead, you'd take a ship down to Panama,
make your way by land across the forty mile Isthmus,
and take another ship back north. De Lasseppe had arrived
at the start of the dry season. The skies were blue,
the breeze was pleasant. It was the perfect time of
(14:00):
year to visit Panama if you wanted to enjoy a vacation,
the most uninformative time if you wanted to understand how
hard it might be to build a canal. De la
Seppe and his entourage bordered the train for Panama City.
It took them across a swamp, through a jungle, and
(14:20):
up into the hills. The scenery was stunning, and on
board the train, the Champagne flowed freely. De la Seppe
was captivated La plu Bergen dumand he declared the most
beautiful place in the world. Then the train ground to
a halt. Everybody out. It was time to cross the
(14:44):
Chaghlis River, which flowed gently down a valley forty feet below.
There was, however, a problem. A few months earlier, after
a storm in the rainy season, the river had swelled
forty six feet. The railway bridge, huge and sturdy and
made from iron, had been battered and mangled out of shape.
(15:08):
It wasn't safe to take a CA train across it,
but another train was waiting on the other side to
take them on to Panama City if they'd cared to
cross the bridge on foot. Some of the passengers looked
down at the drop and across the twisted bridge and
decided and had had too much champagne to risk it.
(15:31):
De Leasseeppe gathered up his small children and led them
happily across. It was all a big adventure. If the
destructive power of the floods had impressed him, he kept
it to himself. Writing back to France, he mentioned only
that there'd been a small delay on the railway in
(15:52):
Panama City. On New Year's Day, they'd arranged a boat
for the three mile trip to the bay where the
canal would meet the ocean. De Leeseppe had brought a
shiny new pickaxe from France to strike the symbolic first blow,
but her heads were saw from the night before, and
the boat was late to leave. After more Champagne, they
(16:15):
neared the bay and realized they'd missed the tide. They
couldn't land. No matter, said de la Seppe. If the
first blow is only symbolic, we can do it right
here on the boat. He handed the pickaxe to his
seven year old daughter and lined up an old Champagne
crate emptied of bottles. The Bishop of Panama blessed the work,
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and the little girl brought the pickaxe swinging down onto
the wooden box. Construction of the Panama Canal had big gun,
sort of, and after his trip across the Isthmus, Ferdinand
Lesseeppe was in a confident mood. Our work, he declared,
will be easier at Panama than at Suez. The Congress
(17:07):
in Paris had made a rough guess at what might
be involved, how much earth they'd have to shift, how
long it would take, and how much it would cost.
De Lesseppe had brought with him to Panama a technical
committee to give those numbers a sense check. They decided
their need to do even more excavation, half as much again.
(17:27):
But they also decided oddly that this would be quicker,
not twelve years, but eight and cheaper two de Lesseppe
once again barnstormed around France, drumming up interest in shares
in his Panama company. Everywhere he went he flew the
flags of France and America, though the French government had
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nothing to do with his scheme, and the Americans were
just as wary of this Panama project as the Brits
had been of Suez. A single share in the company
would cost something like a year's wages for a typical
worker in the Suez company had cost the same, and
now they were trading at four times as much and
(18:15):
paying dividends of seventeen percent a year. The French public
had a question to resolve. Why had Suez succeeded. Was
it because of la craent Francis the sheer force of
personality of Ferdinand Lesseppe. If so, it might be worth
(18:35):
betting that it'd put it off again. But there was
an alternative explanation. Perhaps everyone had initially overestimated how challenging
Suez would be. Maybe with hindsight, it wasn't that hard.
If that were the case, we shouldn't be quite so
(18:55):
impressed that de Lesseppe had managed it. Psychologists now have
some jargon for thinking about questions like this. We have
to weigh up two types of explanation, dispositional and situational.
(19:16):
We might attribute an event to someone's disposition, what type
of person they are, or to their situation, chance and circumstance.
For example, suppose someone's late to a meeting, sorry, they say,
stuck in traffic. That's a situational explanation. Do you believe it? What?
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Do you suspect that they're probably just the type of
person who's late to everything. Researchers have found that humans
are innately biased. We're too quick to jump to the
dispositional explanations, too slow to believe the situational. Even if
we know the traffic was bad on some level, we
(19:58):
tend to think that it must have been their fault.
In one famous experiment in nineteen sixty seven, subjects read
articles that are either praised or damn Fidel Castro. The
experimenters told them how the articles had come about. It
was an exercise, they explained. We flipped a coin heads
(20:19):
and we told the writer they had to make the
case for Castro tales, and we told them to argue against.
Then they asked, what do you think the writer's attitude
is towards Fidel Castro? The answer is obvious, right, You
simply can't tell. But even though the experiments subjects knew
(20:42):
the article came from a coin toss, they couldn't quite
bring themselves to believe it. They were more likely to
say that the writer of the pro Castro article probably
liked Castro and the writer of the anti Castro article
probably didn't. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error. We're
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inclined to attribute things to people, not chars, and that
leads us astray because it makes us too likely to
expect the same outcome when the person's the same but
the situation is different. The sale of shares in the
(21:26):
Panama Company was a huge success. Tens of thousands of
ordinary French people applied to buy more than twice as
many shares as were available. The world of finance had
never seen anything like it. In January eighteen eighty one,
the first group of French engineers went out to Panama.
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Their task higher local laborers and clearer path along the
route the canal was to take. It soon became clear
that Panama was nothing like Suez. The jungle was so dense,
said one worker, you could only see a few yards
in any direction. Hacking away with machetes and axes, you
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had to watch out for the snakes, some of the
world's deadliest species, and you couldn't avoid the mosquitoes, the spiders,
the ants, the ticks, and the jiggers that laid eggs
under the skin. The workers would spend their evenings trying
to pick them out. De Leasseeppe had enjoyed Panama in
(22:31):
the dry season. When the rains came, said one engineer,
it was like working in a steambark. The tools rusted,
colorful mold sprouted up on belts and bags and boots.
Nothing dried. Did sleep, then put back on the sweat soaked,
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rain drenched clothes you'd taken off the night before. After
just six months, only one in ten workers was still
on the job. And the worst of it wasn't the
climate or the bites. It was the illness. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia,
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the biggest cause of death, malaria, chills and shivering, then fever,
thirst and sweat, and often those who lived never really recovered,
and yellow fever too, which we heard all about in
another cautionary tale. Less common than malaria but much deadlier.
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The cause of all these tropical diseases at the time
nobody really knew. There were vague ideas about bad air,
hence mal area, but many people had no doubt the
cause was moral turpitude. Workers in Panama didn't have much
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to do for entertainment. There were no theaters or concert
halls or galleries. There were, however, plenty of brothels. You
could gamble, and you could drink. In fact, you probably
should drink, because wine was a lot less likely to
make you ill than the local water. Was all this
debauchery being punished by the fates through disease and death.
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It's the fundamental attribution error, again, that innate human tendency
to look for explanations in people's characters, not their circumstances.
One man was especially convinced, Jule Donglais. He was France's
top civil engineer, and in eighteen eighty three, with costs
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mounting and workers dying and nowhere near enough earth being
dug de Lesseppe offered him a huge salary to go
out to Panama and sort everything out. Was Joule Donglais
afraid of disease, not at all. I intend to show
the world. He announced that only the drunk and the
(25:05):
dissipated will die of yellow fever. Cautionary tales will be
back after the break. When Jule Donglais arrived in Panama,
he found a mess of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Some
(25:29):
workers were collecting wages for five different jobs because nobody
was tracking who was spending time on what. Somehow, more
than one hundred thoroughbred race horses had been shipped over
from Europe, and the canal company was paying the stabling costs.
Although this particular extravagance seems not to have offended Donglais
(25:50):
too much, as he promptly arranged for his own horses
to be shipped over as well. Along with his wife,
his twenty year old son, his eighteen year old daughter,
and his daughter's fiancee, they rode in the hills, exploring
the countryside. The work, meanwhile, was being done with a
(26:10):
mishmash of badly planned tools. The company had built railroads
to reach parts of the planned canal route, but they'd
managed to build them in six different gages. Trucks from
one couldn't run on the others. Donglais surveyed the route
and found seventeen types of rock formation, an engineering nightmare.
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The hard volcanic rock was bad enough. Even worse was
the clay. Utterly impossible, said one engineer. For a man
to throw off his shovel, he has to have a
little scraper to shove it off. And then when the
rains came the sides of the ditch, your doug would
come slipping right back in again, great avalanches of sodden
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clay that swept away train tracks. The only thing to do,
Donglais realized, was make the sides less steep by digging
them wider. Donglais did some sum In total, he reckoned
that have to shift one hundred and twenty million cubic
meters of earth. That'd be like digging two meters down
(27:19):
across the whole of Manhattan. More to the point, it
was also two and a half times the amount that
Paris Congress had initially estimated. Back in Paris, de Lesseppe
took the news calmly. He decided there was no need
to revise his estimates of the cost or the timescale,
Everything he said, is proceeding as planned. Donglais too was optimistic.
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It only requires that we quadruple our efforts, he said,
which is absolutely possible. And for a while it seemed
it might be. New machines arrived, custom built for the challenge,
monstrous contraptions on wooden legs, with a tall tower and
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a wheel hauling huge buckets on a chair, and great
pipes spewing jets of water to fire the earth in
the buckets far away from the ditch. It looked just
like the sort of fantastic invention that de Lesseppe had
promised men of genius would come up with. Maybe, just maybe,
(28:26):
Jule Donglais could turn the project around. But then donglais
eighteen year old daughter fell ill and died yellow fever.
My poor husband is in a despair, which is painful
to see, wrote Madame Donglais. My first desire was to
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flee as fast as possible and carry far from this
murderous country those who were left to me. But my
husband is a man of duty. A month later, the
sun fell ill and died yellow fever. Madame Donglais controls
her health with courage wrote Monsieur Donglais, but she is
(29:13):
deeply shaken. Then the daughter's fiance died yellow fever, and
then yellow fever came for Madame Donglais too. After his
beloved wife died, Jule Donglais ordered that the family's horses
be shot. It was too painful to think of someone
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else riding them into the Panamanian hills. He quit his
job and returned to France a broken man. The United
States had never been keen on the idea of a
French owned canal through Panama. It would, as President Rutherford B.
(30:00):
Hayes put it, be virtually a part of our coastline.
American newspapers sent reporters to see how things were going.
The news they sent back was dumbfounding hospitals with a
seventy five percent death rate, a ship that arrived with
thirty three workers and twenty seven died in the first
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three weeks. Corpses left on streets for buzzards to pick at,
laborers dropping dead on the job, and being unceremoniously rolled
down the embankment to be covered up with excavated spoil.
None of this made the newspapers in France The French
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media had been on side ever since they pushed that
successful share issue. Oh Ye of little faith, wrote La Libertee.
Hear the words of Monsieur de le Sep and believe
they didn't ask many questions. When an earthquake struck Panama,
journalists allowed de le Sepe to get away with blithely
(31:05):
promising there will be no more earthquakes. By the time
he entered his eightieth year, de Lesseppe was still as
vigorous as ever. His wife was expecting child number twelve,
but he was being forced to divert his energies to
(31:25):
maintaining the project's reputation. This wasn't easy, As a writer
in the New York Tribune explained, every difficulty by which
the company is beset requires two distinct efforts. It must
be overcome, and it must also be kept secret from
the supporters of the project, who would otherwise be discouraged.
(31:48):
How long could the awful secret of the true situation
in Panama be kept from France? Too? Many French families
were starting to discuss how sons and husbands went out
to Panama and didn't come back. The price of shares
in the Panama Canal company started to wobble. De le
(32:10):
Seppe tried to shore up the situation with an upbeat
speech at the annual shareholders meeting. The efforts actually put forth,
he announced, may be considered as more than half the
total efforts necessary, more than halfway there. It was a
strange thing to claim. In fact, they dug only about
(32:31):
ten percent of the canal. Then de Lesseppe casually proclaimed
that they had changed the course of the Chagles River.
He meant they'd come up with a new plan for
a dam that would change the course of the river,
but the newspaper reports made it sound like it had
happened already. For all the Lesseeppe tried, the company's finances
(32:54):
were becoming stretched. Every new bond issue got fewer and
fewer takers, Borrowing money became more and more expensive. De
Leeseppe reached for another tactic from his Suez playbook, a
lottery bond. France's laws said the government had to approve
(33:14):
every lottery. Debate was fierce. The amount de les Seppe
wanted to raise was more than he had said the
whole thing would cost, But the vote went in his favor,
and the Leasseeppe barn stormed round the country for one
last time. His message was simple, you can't stop now.
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Hundreds of thousands of French men and women had money
on the line in Panama. They'd mortgaged their houses, they
had sold off their jewelry. If the lottery bond failed,
they'd be ruined. But if each one bought a bond,
it would raise the cash to finish the canal. I
appealed to all Frenchmen, he said. I appealed to all
(34:00):
my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. Your fates are in
your own hands. Decide. In December eighteen eighty eight, it
fell to de le Sppe's son and right hand man,
the loyal Charles, to announce the results of the investment drive.
(34:20):
They had sold fewer than half the bonds they needed
to The company was bankrupt. It was over A reporter
tracked down Ferdinand de Lesseppe. The blood had drained from
his face. Sitting possible, he said, set indign It's impossible,
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and indignity all at once. Ferdinand de Lessepe's age caught
up with him as the liquidators picked over his company's books.
The Grand Francais hold up in his country house, His
prodigious energies finally spent, the liquidators found a scandal. The
(35:12):
company had bribed politicians to approve the lottery. For years,
they'd been paying newspapers not to print negative news. Over
two thousand, five hundred editors had been secretly on the
company's pay roll, including not just the big dailies, but
such unlikely outlets as Marriage Journal, the bee Keeper's Journal,
(35:37):
and the Choral Society's Echo. Some people had set up
publications just to be able to take the company's money.
The losses were astronomical. The Lessep's company had burned to
the kind of money only usually spent on a war.
It's hard to be sure about the cost in workers' lives.
(36:00):
A reasonable estimate is that twenty five thousand people died
in the failure to build the canal. Of course, the
canal does now exist, and will pick up the story
of how that happened. In the next episode of this
two part Panama special, Ferdinand and Charles de l'eseppe went
(36:23):
on trial for fraud. Both were sentenced to prison. Charles
served his time, but nobody had the heart to lock
up his father. Now a doddering, bewildered old man who
spent his days at home staring blankly at the fire
or out through the window. There was sympathy because amid
(36:45):
all the corruption, Ferdinand Leseseppe had never tried to enrich himself.
It was never about the money for La Grand Francis. Instead,
he'd been guilty of one big error, the fundamental attribution error.
Having led one triumph, he assumed, like many others, that
(37:06):
the essential ingredient for a second triumph was Legrand Francis himself.
You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, Charles had once
told his father de Lesseppe had wrongly concluded that he
could work a second miracle whenever he wanted. For a
(37:35):
full list of our sources, see the show notes at
Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
(37:57):
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melany Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jama Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
(38:19):
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
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Pushkin eighteen eighty six. A train near Paris, two men
are sitting in silence. One decides to strike up a conversation.
(00:36):
What's your line of work? He asks his fellow passenger.
It's a mundane, everyday question. Almost everyone in France would
have been astonished to hear it. How has this man
failed to recognize who he's talking to? The twinkling black
eyes and walrus mustache under a shock of thick white hair.
(00:57):
This is one of the most famous faces in the country,
the Grand Francis. They call him the great Frenchman, Ferdinand
the Lesser. He looks younger than he is. He'd never
guess he's eighty. Here's how the New York Herald had
once described La grand Francais. He bears his years with
(01:19):
ease and grace, showing no signs of age in his movements.
His face is tanned and ruddy, with the evidence of
perfect health. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous,
and polished. Ferdinando les Seppe might be surprised that the
other passenger hasn't recognized him, but he's not offended. He's
(01:40):
amused his line of work. He flashes a smile and
says isthmuses. Ferdinand Lessppe built the Suez Canal. Everyone told
him it couldn't be done, the waterway slicing one hundred
and twenty miles through the Egyptian Isthmus. It was too ambitious,
(02:03):
but Ferdinand Lessseppe did it. The new canal was an
instant hit, slashed journey times between Asia and Europe. Instead
of going thousands of miles around the southern tip of Africa,
ships could pay to take the shortcut from the Red
Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, twelve percent of global trade
(02:26):
goes through Suez. De Leasseeppe made a lot of French
investors very, very rich, and now he's trying to do
it all over again in Panama. But for Ferdinand de
les Seppe, Panama will not be a happy isthmus. I'm
Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Ferdinando Lesseppe
(03:13):
was born in eighteen oh five in Versailles into a
distinguished family. His cousin would later become Empress Eugenie, the
wife of Napoleon the Third. Like his father, De la
Seppe became a diplomat. He served in Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia.
He spent five years in Egypt as France's vice consul.
(03:34):
De Leeseppe was charming and charismatic. He made friends wherever
he went. It is wonderful, said his first wife, to
have a husband so liked by everyone. Fernando Lesseppe was
a fine horseman, a crack shot and accomplished fencer. He
was not an engineer, or a financier or an administrator,
(03:58):
all skills you might expect someone to need if they
were going to embark on a groundbreaking one hundred and
twenty mile canal. So how did de Lesseppe get put
in Chos of Suez? In his five years in Egypt,
he had become firm friends with the ruler's son. By
the time the ruler's son took over, De Lesseppe had
(04:20):
left the diplomatic service and recently been widowed. He went
to visit his old friend. They talked about canals. The
idea had been around for years, but nobody had ever
got very far with it. I'll put up some money,
the ruler told De Lesseepe if you can raise the rest.
(04:40):
As the historian David McCulloch puts it, de Lesseppe had
no experience faintly related to such an undertaking. He had
no backing from France's government or from banks, but why
should that stop him. De Lesseppe convened a committee of
experts to come up with a plan. He formed a company,
and he barn stormed around France selling his scheme to
(05:03):
small investors. He was magnetic, a compelling speaker. Thousan of
French families entrusted him with their savings. The British Prime
Minister called the Lesseppe a swindler and a fool, but
then he would say that if the canal were actually
to happen, the British didn't want it controlled by a
(05:26):
French company. But could you really cut a canal right
across the Egyptian desert? It can't be easy to dig
in sand. De Lesseppe had no time for the doomsters
and gloomsters. They never achieve anything, who do not believe
in success, He liked to say. By eighteen sixty seven
(05:50):
they'd been digging for eight years and gone way over budget.
De Lesseppe was running out of cash. He went back
to the French public with another scheme to raise more money.
Lottery bonds, invest in finishing the Suez Canal. With a
chance of winning big cash prizes, public snapped up the bonds,
(06:11):
and two years later the very first ship steamed through
the newly opened canal, the state yacht of Empress Eugenie.
Somehow de Lasseppe had pulled it off. The two sides
of the world approached to greet one another, said one commentator.
(06:33):
Another gave de Lesseppe his new nickname, La Grange Franseille.
The triumph made him a symbol of France's self image
and the age of globalism and technological progress. In the
words of Matthew Parker, the author of Hell's Gorge, he
represented a new patriotism based around not war, but achievement
(06:59):
for all mankind. De Lesseppe married again. He was sixty four,
his glamorous new wife just twenty. Soon they had a child,
then another, and another. The photogenic family was never out
of the newspapers. The Grand Francais set his heart on
(07:23):
conquering another isthmus. As with Egypt, the idea of a
canal across Panama had been discussed for years. As with Suez,
such a canal would save ships. A detail of thousands
upon thousands of miles instead of sailing all around South America,
(07:44):
they'd be able to shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic.
Surveyors had scoped out the lie of the land in Panama.
Various routes were proposed for locks that might convey a
ship over the hills between the oceans, like a set
of steps. To Lesseppe had strong views about locks. He
(08:04):
hated them more the ship close one set of gates,
open another wait for the water to gush in or out.
Locks make a canal journey slow and cumbersome, And as
far as de Lesseppe was concerned, there was only one
right way to build a canal at sea level. That's
(08:25):
what had done at Suez. You sail in at one
end and out the other. Simple and the Suez Canal
was one hundred and twenty miles. It's only forty odd
miles across the Panama isthmus. How hard could it be?
In eighteen seventy nine, De Lesseppe had the Saciete de
Geography convene a congress in Paris to study all the
(08:48):
possible routes. He invited delegates from twenty two countries, explorers, economists, engineers,
an expert. After expert explained very clearly why the sea
level canal that had worked in Egypt was never going
to work in Panama. For a start, Egypt was pretty flat,
(09:10):
Panama was hilly. How much earth would you have to dig,
how much would it cost? How long would it take?
And Egypt was dry. Panama's river Chagres cut across any
route the canal might take. Have you ever seen the chuglis,
asked one delegate to de Lesseppe's conference. I have. I've
(09:32):
watched it after a storm rise ten feet in an hour.
I've seen it gushing like a torrent fifteen hundred feet across.
What's going to happen to the ships in your sea
level canal when all that floodwater hits them? Problems, problems, problems,
said de Lesseppe. Of course there are problems. There were
(09:53):
problems at Suez too. People had said you could never
dig through sand, but men of genius came forward to
solve every problem by inventing machines, massive steam powered dredges.
Men of genius will invent whatever is needed for Panama too.
(10:13):
The Congress ended with a vote on which plan to support.
A surprising number of delegates were nowhere to be found.
One later explained that it was obvious which way de
le Seppe wanted the vote to go, and he didn't
agree with it. But he'd also dined very well in Paris,
and he'd hate to upset his hosts. Others were braver
(10:37):
in order not to burden my conscience, said one with
unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure, I say no. De le
Seppe got up to cast his vote and make an announcement.
I vote yes, and I have accepted command of the enterprise.
(10:59):
The room erupted. Lesseeppe was seventy four years old. It
has been suggested he said that after Suez I ought
to take a rest. But I ask you, when a
general has just won one battle and is invited to
win another, why should he refuse. By the end of
(11:22):
the vote, Yes had a resounding majority. Look more closely,
and the result seems less reassuring. Most of the Yes
delegates were French, not many were engineers, and of the
engineers only one had ever actually been to Panama, and
he had a financial interest in del Sepe's plan. Still,
(11:46):
now de la Seppe could go to the French public
to seek investment and claim the packing of experts, just
as it done with Suez. De la Sepe's son from
his first marriage, his loyal right hand man, Charles, wasn't
sure this was wise. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle,
he said to his father. Should not one be satisfied
(12:09):
with completing one miracle in a lifetime. Cautionary tales will
be back in a moment. If Ferdinand de Lesseppe was
(12:30):
going to persuade ordinary French families to invest in his
Panama Canal company as they had in Suez, it would
probably help if he'd actually been to Panama. On December thirtieth,
eighteen seventy nine, his ship docked in the small town
of Cologne. Down the ramp walked de Lesseppe with his
(12:51):
beautiful young wife and three of their little children. In
a white linen suit. De Lesseppe gave a rousing speech.
The canal will be made, he said, again and again.
The canal will be made. On was a railway town,
and not somewhere travelers like to linger. Unpaved streets strewn
(13:16):
with garbage, a couple of seedy hotels, and that was
about it. You landed in Colon only to get the
train to Panama City. The railway across Panama had been
built by American investors in the mid nineteenth century, when
the easiest way to get from the east coast of
America to the west was not to go through America
(13:39):
at all. Instead, you'd take a ship down to Panama,
make your way by land across the forty mile Isthmus,
and take another ship back north. De Lasseppe had arrived
at the start of the dry season. The skies were blue,
the breeze was pleasant. It was the perfect time of
(14:00):
year to visit Panama if you wanted to enjoy a vacation,
the most uninformative time if you wanted to understand how
hard it might be to build a canal. De la
Seppe and his entourage bordered the train for Panama City.
It took them across a swamp, through a jungle, and
(14:20):
up into the hills. The scenery was stunning, and on
board the train, the Champagne flowed freely. De la Seppe
was captivated La plu Bergen dumand he declared the most
beautiful place in the world. Then the train ground to
a halt. Everybody out. It was time to cross the
(14:44):
Chaghlis River, which flowed gently down a valley forty feet below.
There was, however, a problem. A few months earlier, after
a storm in the rainy season, the river had swelled
forty six feet. The railway bridge, huge and sturdy and
made from iron, had been battered and mangled out of shape.
(15:08):
It wasn't safe to take a CA train across it,
but another train was waiting on the other side to
take them on to Panama City if they'd cared to
cross the bridge on foot. Some of the passengers looked
down at the drop and across the twisted bridge and
decided and had had too much champagne to risk it.
(15:31):
De Leasseeppe gathered up his small children and led them
happily across. It was all a big adventure. If the
destructive power of the floods had impressed him, he kept
it to himself. Writing back to France, he mentioned only
that there'd been a small delay on the railway in
(15:52):
Panama City. On New Year's Day, they'd arranged a boat
for the three mile trip to the bay where the
canal would meet the ocean. De Leeseppe had brought a
shiny new pickaxe from France to strike the symbolic first blow,
but her heads were saw from the night before, and
the boat was late to leave. After more Champagne, they
(16:15):
neared the bay and realized they'd missed the tide. They
couldn't land. No matter, said de la Seppe. If the
first blow is only symbolic, we can do it right
here on the boat. He handed the pickaxe to his
seven year old daughter and lined up an old Champagne
crate emptied of bottles. The Bishop of Panama blessed the work,
(16:38):
and the little girl brought the pickaxe swinging down onto
the wooden box. Construction of the Panama Canal had big gun,
sort of, and after his trip across the Isthmus, Ferdinand
Lesseeppe was in a confident mood. Our work, he declared,
will be easier at Panama than at Suez. The Congress
(17:07):
in Paris had made a rough guess at what might
be involved, how much earth they'd have to shift, how
long it would take, and how much it would cost.
De Lesseppe had brought with him to Panama a technical
committee to give those numbers a sense check. They decided
their need to do even more excavation, half as much again.
(17:27):
But they also decided oddly that this would be quicker,
not twelve years, but eight and cheaper two de Lesseppe
once again barnstormed around France, drumming up interest in shares
in his Panama company. Everywhere he went he flew the
flags of France and America, though the French government had
(17:51):
nothing to do with his scheme, and the Americans were
just as wary of this Panama project as the Brits
had been of Suez. A single share in the company
would cost something like a year's wages for a typical
worker in the Suez company had cost the same, and
now they were trading at four times as much and
(18:15):
paying dividends of seventeen percent a year. The French public
had a question to resolve. Why had Suez succeeded. Was
it because of la craent Francis the sheer force of
personality of Ferdinand Lesseppe. If so, it might be worth
(18:35):
betting that it'd put it off again. But there was
an alternative explanation. Perhaps everyone had initially overestimated how challenging
Suez would be. Maybe with hindsight, it wasn't that hard.
If that were the case, we shouldn't be quite so
(18:55):
impressed that de Lesseppe had managed it. Psychologists now have
some jargon for thinking about questions like this. We have
to weigh up two types of explanation, dispositional and situational.
(19:16):
We might attribute an event to someone's disposition, what type
of person they are, or to their situation, chance and circumstance.
For example, suppose someone's late to a meeting, sorry, they say,
stuck in traffic. That's a situational explanation. Do you believe it? What?
(19:38):
Do you suspect that they're probably just the type of
person who's late to everything. Researchers have found that humans
are innately biased. We're too quick to jump to the
dispositional explanations, too slow to believe the situational. Even if
we know the traffic was bad on some level, we
(19:58):
tend to think that it must have been their fault.
In one famous experiment in nineteen sixty seven, subjects read
articles that are either praised or damn Fidel Castro. The
experimenters told them how the articles had come about. It
was an exercise, they explained. We flipped a coin heads
(20:19):
and we told the writer they had to make the
case for Castro tales, and we told them to argue against.
Then they asked, what do you think the writer's attitude
is towards Fidel Castro? The answer is obvious, right, You
simply can't tell. But even though the experiments subjects knew
(20:42):
the article came from a coin toss, they couldn't quite
bring themselves to believe it. They were more likely to
say that the writer of the pro Castro article probably
liked Castro and the writer of the anti Castro article
probably didn't. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error. We're
(21:05):
inclined to attribute things to people, not chars, and that
leads us astray because it makes us too likely to
expect the same outcome when the person's the same but
the situation is different. The sale of shares in the
(21:26):
Panama Company was a huge success. Tens of thousands of
ordinary French people applied to buy more than twice as
many shares as were available. The world of finance had
never seen anything like it. In January eighteen eighty one,
the first group of French engineers went out to Panama.
(21:48):
Their task higher local laborers and clearer path along the
route the canal was to take. It soon became clear
that Panama was nothing like Suez. The jungle was so dense,
said one worker, you could only see a few yards
in any direction. Hacking away with machetes and axes, you
(22:10):
had to watch out for the snakes, some of the
world's deadliest species, and you couldn't avoid the mosquitoes, the spiders,
the ants, the ticks, and the jiggers that laid eggs
under the skin. The workers would spend their evenings trying
to pick them out. De Leasseeppe had enjoyed Panama in
(22:31):
the dry season. When the rains came, said one engineer,
it was like working in a steambark. The tools rusted,
colorful mold sprouted up on belts and bags and boots.
Nothing dried. Did sleep, then put back on the sweat soaked,
(22:51):
rain drenched clothes you'd taken off the night before. After
just six months, only one in ten workers was still
on the job. And the worst of it wasn't the
climate or the bites. It was the illness. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia,
(23:12):
the biggest cause of death, malaria, chills and shivering, then fever,
thirst and sweat, and often those who lived never really recovered,
and yellow fever too, which we heard all about in
another cautionary tale. Less common than malaria but much deadlier.
(23:32):
The cause of all these tropical diseases at the time
nobody really knew. There were vague ideas about bad air,
hence mal area, but many people had no doubt the
cause was moral turpitude. Workers in Panama didn't have much
(23:54):
to do for entertainment. There were no theaters or concert
halls or galleries. There were, however, plenty of brothels. You
could gamble, and you could drink. In fact, you probably
should drink, because wine was a lot less likely to
make you ill than the local water. Was all this
debauchery being punished by the fates through disease and death.
(24:19):
It's the fundamental attribution error, again, that innate human tendency
to look for explanations in people's characters, not their circumstances.
One man was especially convinced, Jule Donglais. He was France's
top civil engineer, and in eighteen eighty three, with costs
(24:42):
mounting and workers dying and nowhere near enough earth being
dug de Lesseppe offered him a huge salary to go
out to Panama and sort everything out. Was Joule Donglais
afraid of disease, not at all. I intend to show
the world. He announced that only the drunk and the
(25:05):
dissipated will die of yellow fever. Cautionary tales will be
back after the break. When Jule Donglais arrived in Panama,
he found a mess of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Some
(25:29):
workers were collecting wages for five different jobs because nobody
was tracking who was spending time on what. Somehow, more
than one hundred thoroughbred race horses had been shipped over
from Europe, and the canal company was paying the stabling costs.
Although this particular extravagance seems not to have offended Donglais
(25:50):
too much, as he promptly arranged for his own horses
to be shipped over as well. Along with his wife,
his twenty year old son, his eighteen year old daughter,
and his daughter's fiancee, they rode in the hills, exploring
the countryside. The work, meanwhile, was being done with a
(26:10):
mishmash of badly planned tools. The company had built railroads
to reach parts of the planned canal route, but they'd
managed to build them in six different gages. Trucks from
one couldn't run on the others. Donglais surveyed the route
and found seventeen types of rock formation, an engineering nightmare.
(26:31):
The hard volcanic rock was bad enough. Even worse was
the clay. Utterly impossible, said one engineer. For a man
to throw off his shovel, he has to have a
little scraper to shove it off. And then when the
rains came the sides of the ditch, your doug would
come slipping right back in again, great avalanches of sodden
(26:56):
clay that swept away train tracks. The only thing to do,
Donglais realized, was make the sides less steep by digging
them wider. Donglais did some sum In total, he reckoned
that have to shift one hundred and twenty million cubic
meters of earth. That'd be like digging two meters down
(27:19):
across the whole of Manhattan. More to the point, it
was also two and a half times the amount that
Paris Congress had initially estimated. Back in Paris, de Lesseppe
took the news calmly. He decided there was no need
to revise his estimates of the cost or the timescale,
Everything he said, is proceeding as planned. Donglais too was optimistic.
(27:46):
It only requires that we quadruple our efforts, he said,
which is absolutely possible. And for a while it seemed
it might be. New machines arrived, custom built for the challenge,
monstrous contraptions on wooden legs, with a tall tower and
(28:06):
a wheel hauling huge buckets on a chair, and great
pipes spewing jets of water to fire the earth in
the buckets far away from the ditch. It looked just
like the sort of fantastic invention that de Lesseppe had
promised men of genius would come up with. Maybe, just maybe,
(28:26):
Jule Donglais could turn the project around. But then donglais
eighteen year old daughter fell ill and died yellow fever.
My poor husband is in a despair, which is painful
to see, wrote Madame Donglais. My first desire was to
(28:50):
flee as fast as possible and carry far from this
murderous country those who were left to me. But my
husband is a man of duty. A month later, the
sun fell ill and died yellow fever. Madame Donglais controls
her health with courage wrote Monsieur Donglais, but she is
(29:13):
deeply shaken. Then the daughter's fiance died yellow fever, and
then yellow fever came for Madame Donglais too. After his
beloved wife died, Jule Donglais ordered that the family's horses
be shot. It was too painful to think of someone
(29:36):
else riding them into the Panamanian hills. He quit his
job and returned to France a broken man. The United
States had never been keen on the idea of a
French owned canal through Panama. It would, as President Rutherford B.
(30:00):
Hayes put it, be virtually a part of our coastline.
American newspapers sent reporters to see how things were going.
The news they sent back was dumbfounding hospitals with a
seventy five percent death rate, a ship that arrived with
thirty three workers and twenty seven died in the first
(30:21):
three weeks. Corpses left on streets for buzzards to pick at,
laborers dropping dead on the job, and being unceremoniously rolled
down the embankment to be covered up with excavated spoil.
None of this made the newspapers in France The French
(30:42):
media had been on side ever since they pushed that
successful share issue. Oh Ye of little faith, wrote La Libertee.
Hear the words of Monsieur de le Sep and believe
they didn't ask many questions. When an earthquake struck Panama,
journalists allowed de le Sepe to get away with blithely
(31:05):
promising there will be no more earthquakes. By the time
he entered his eightieth year, de Lesseppe was still as
vigorous as ever. His wife was expecting child number twelve,
but he was being forced to divert his energies to
(31:25):
maintaining the project's reputation. This wasn't easy, As a writer
in the New York Tribune explained, every difficulty by which
the company is beset requires two distinct efforts. It must
be overcome, and it must also be kept secret from
the supporters of the project, who would otherwise be discouraged.
(31:48):
How long could the awful secret of the true situation
in Panama be kept from France? Too? Many French families
were starting to discuss how sons and husbands went out
to Panama and didn't come back. The price of shares
in the Panama Canal company started to wobble. De le
(32:10):
Seppe tried to shore up the situation with an upbeat
speech at the annual shareholders meeting. The efforts actually put forth,
he announced, may be considered as more than half the
total efforts necessary, more than halfway there. It was a
strange thing to claim. In fact, they dug only about
(32:31):
ten percent of the canal. Then de Lesseppe casually proclaimed
that they had changed the course of the Chagles River.
He meant they'd come up with a new plan for
a dam that would change the course of the river,
but the newspaper reports made it sound like it had
happened already. For all the Lesseeppe tried, the company's finances
(32:54):
were becoming stretched. Every new bond issue got fewer and
fewer takers, Borrowing money became more and more expensive. De
Leeseppe reached for another tactic from his Suez playbook, a
lottery bond. France's laws said the government had to approve
(33:14):
every lottery. Debate was fierce. The amount de les Seppe
wanted to raise was more than he had said the
whole thing would cost, But the vote went in his favor,
and the Leasseeppe barn stormed round the country for one
last time. His message was simple, you can't stop now.
(33:36):
Hundreds of thousands of French men and women had money
on the line in Panama. They'd mortgaged their houses, they
had sold off their jewelry. If the lottery bond failed,
they'd be ruined. But if each one bought a bond,
it would raise the cash to finish the canal. I
appealed to all Frenchmen, he said. I appealed to all
(34:00):
my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. Your fates are in
your own hands. Decide. In December eighteen eighty eight, it
fell to de le Sppe's son and right hand man,
the loyal Charles, to announce the results of the investment drive.
(34:20):
They had sold fewer than half the bonds they needed
to The company was bankrupt. It was over A reporter
tracked down Ferdinand de Lesseppe. The blood had drained from
his face. Sitting possible, he said, set indign It's impossible,
(34:49):
and indignity all at once. Ferdinand de Lessepe's age caught
up with him as the liquidators picked over his company's books.
The Grand Francais hold up in his country house, His
prodigious energies finally spent, the liquidators found a scandal. The
(35:12):
company had bribed politicians to approve the lottery. For years,
they'd been paying newspapers not to print negative news. Over
two thousand, five hundred editors had been secretly on the
company's pay roll, including not just the big dailies, but
such unlikely outlets as Marriage Journal, the bee Keeper's Journal,
(35:37):
and the Choral Society's Echo. Some people had set up
publications just to be able to take the company's money.
The losses were astronomical. The Lessep's company had burned to
the kind of money only usually spent on a war.
It's hard to be sure about the cost in workers' lives.
(36:00):
A reasonable estimate is that twenty five thousand people died
in the failure to build the canal. Of course, the
canal does now exist, and will pick up the story
of how that happened. In the next episode of this
two part Panama special, Ferdinand and Charles de l'eseppe went
(36:23):
on trial for fraud. Both were sentenced to prison. Charles
served his time, but nobody had the heart to lock
up his father. Now a doddering, bewildered old man who
spent his days at home staring blankly at the fire
or out through the window. There was sympathy because amid
(36:45):
all the corruption, Ferdinand Leseseppe had never tried to enrich himself.
It was never about the money for La Grand Francis. Instead,
he'd been guilty of one big error, the fundamental attribution error.
Having led one triumph, he assumed, like many others, that
(37:06):
the essential ingredient for a second triumph was Legrand Francis himself.
You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, Charles had once
told his father de Lesseppe had wrongly concluded that he
could work a second miracle whenever he wanted. For a
(37:35):
full list of our sources, see the show notes at
Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
(37:57):
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melany Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jama Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
(38:19):
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
show ad free. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
(38:43):
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.