9 episodes
My Fugitive Pineapple Street Studios
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- History
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4.9 • 12 Ratings
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Nina Gilden Seavey was twelve on May 5, 1970, the day an Air Force building in St. Louis burned to the ground. Her dad represented a young man accused of the crime: Howard Mechanic. Facing serious federal time, Howard went on the run and became one of the longest-running fugitives in U.S. history. As an adult, Nina picked up the trail. What ever happened to Howard Mechanic? This eight-part series is the tangled story of her search for answers. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. FBI surveillance and confidential informants. Cold War spies, conspiracy theories and the murder of a civil rights icon. And the sacrifices America makes in the name of national security.
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The Conspiracy
The House Select Committee on Assassinations picks up where Church left off. Nearly four decades after those hearings, Nina visits Robert Blakey, HSCA's Chief Counsel, to try to understand why the FBI never looked into a conspiracy to kill King. Blakey tells her, 'I've been waiting 40 years for someone to ask me these questions.' The answers go back to St. Louis, and the COINTELPRO operations against Nina's father's clients, including Howard Mechanic.
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The Spies
After 11 months in prison, Howard is granted a pardon. But Nina has more questions. How is Howard's story connected to the other threads she has pulled? We go back to 1975, and the Church Committee's suspiciously truncated investigation into the possible conspiracy to kill Dr. King.
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The Fugitive
Howard goes underground and emerges as Gary Tredway. He gets married. There are dangerously close calls, but he gets away with it for decades -- until a reporter uncovers the truth.
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The Trials
Howard and others are arrested by the FBI and put on trial by the feds. For reasons neither Nina’s father nor his clients understand, St. Louis is the only place in America where student protestors are facing federal charges -- and the verdict is too much for Howard to bear.
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The Activists
In this episode, we return to St. Louis. Nina learns about the FBI's harassment of her father's clients, Percy Green and Jane Sauer, whose left-leaning groups were targets of COINTELPRO. Howard Mechanic and the student activists at Washington University are also on the FBI's radar, and there are informants among them.
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The FBI
The shadow of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI looms over this story: from surveillance of left-leaning student protestors to harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We learn about Hoover's anti-communist fervor, and how that led to decades of FBI abuses. We also meet Stanley Levison, a communist sympathizer whose friendship with King is considered by Hoover to be a threat to American security.
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Customer Reviews
Brilliant.
First episode is riveting. Can’t wait for more.