Interview with me on Pirate Cat Radio
My friend Nero Nava’s weekly radio show. An hour of talk and an hour of music.
{frisco} 33 – The Trial That Fell Apart: The Strange End of the Nick DeJohn Murder Case
The jury’s out, sequestered up at the Fairmont like kings in exile, and Frisco holds its breath after four weeks of front page testimony. Part Three opens with the strange coda nobody asked for — a state Attorney General’s daughter kidnapped for an hour and a half, grilled about her father’s trip to Chicago, then let go with a mobster’s name dropped on the way out. The cops call it a prank. Nobody believes that, and nobody does anything about it either. Then Inspector Frank Ahern takes the stand and finally gives the State what it’s been missing all trial: Leonard Calamia’s own confession, a hand-drawn map of a barroom, and the names of every man who waited for Nick De John in that basement.
But this case doesn’t want to be won clean. Alibis collapse on the stand — Catherine Calamia can’t keep her dates straight, Sebastiano Nani can’t explain a hotel register with his own signature on it, and a mysterious in-law who was supposedly dead three weeks before the murder somehow lets a witness into a basement anyway. The jury tours the murder scene, La Rocca offers the judge a drink. Thirty hours of deliberation takes the jury to seven-five for acquittal — with the jury still reading back transcripts when the District Attorney asks for the judge to dismiss both the jury and the case.
And that’s it. No verdict, no reckoning — just three gangsters walking out the city jail smiling, two more still in the wind, and a District Attorney’s decision nobody in the room, on either side, seems willing to explain. Nine dead men traced back to the Chicago Cheese Syndicate mob moving into town, and Frisco never gets its answer for a single one of them.
Some cases close. This one just swirled like mist out into the cool Frisco night and disappeared.
Fourth of July Present
Fifty Shades of Baby
I know I said a year ago or more that I would not share any more demos from my next album, but I changed my mind. Here’s a rough mix of “Baby Knows.” I had a recording session yesterday and brought in a sax player. I love what he did. i think you will too.
On The Threshold of Freedom
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
{frisco} 30 A Frisco Murder on a Foggy Spring Night, The Nick De John Killing Pt. 1
Go to the Frisco: The Secret History website to listen to this episode.
I apologize for sending you to the Frisco website to listen to the episode, but I’ve gotten too many complaints from people who are having a hard time finding other episodes. They are easy to find here.
Benicia Sundown
{frisco} 27—Lu Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band Save Trad Jazz, An Interview With Hal Smith
Click here to listen to the episode.
In this episode, I interview drummer and jazz historian Hal Smith. We discuss the music scene in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s and how one man, Lu Watters and his band The Yerba Buena Jazz Band, saved traditional jazz after the emergence of swing music. The musicians, the clubs, and how an girlfriend’s irate father with a pistol put Lu and his band on the front page, launching their career.
All in all, fascinating story!
Driving Down 880 South
solitude
{frisco} Bones Remmer Bribe Refused—Freddie Sez No To Gambler’s Cash
One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight
Pop Down The Years
