All Night Long

or a new baby, or even a noisy neighbor. But on those rare occasions when we can sleep for more than a few hours, we wake up feeling fresh and ready to tackle whatever's ahead of us. One man, though, didn't believe in a good night's sleep. For him, forty winks was about thirty nine too many. His name was Albert Herpin, and while he was from Trenton, New Jersey,

he was born in France in eighteen sixty two. Very little is known about his life up until the turn of the twentieth century, but that's when things began to get interesting. In nineteen oh four, an article was published in The New York Times about mister Herpin. It listed his occupation as hustler, or someone who tends to the horses at an inn. But that's not what made him newsworthy. The reason he was in the papers was because he

did not sleep. This wasn't a one off occurrence either, like staying up all night to cram for a big test the next day. Albert Herpin had not slept in ten years now. According to the National Institute of Health, we need sleep for a variety of reasons. These include keeping our metabolism in check, fighting illness, and improving our brain health. We're at risk of a number of diseases and complications if we don't get enough sleep each night.

But Herpin didn't care. In fact, he advocated against sleep. Another article published in nineteen twelve in New York's The Evening World newspaper stated how he quote believes a nap of only five minutes duration would give him new life. Apparently, he would sit in an armchair every night and read the newspaper, never closing his eyes. To him he was resting, but never sleeping. For anyone else, this would have severely

affected a person's health and well being. Experts say that losing even an hour and a half of sleep each night can impact our alertness, our moods our memory. We can feel fatigued and become uncoordinated, but Herpin said that he never felt any negative effects. Papers like The New York Times claimed, I quote, he is in perfect health and does not seem to suffer any discomfort from his remarkable condition, But the reason for his chronic insomnia is troubling,

to say the least. A reporter for The Times Picayune in New Orleans quoted him as saying that he hadn't slept since his son was born. Four years later, his wife died, and the shock of losing her left him struck with anxiety. It had gotten so bad he couldn't sleep. He still went through the motions of getting ready for bed, crawling under the covers and laying his head down. He just wouldn't close his eyes. Instead, he would rest fully awake and then get up at five o'clock every morning

to start the day again. Herpin's condition was so strange it piqued the curiosity of a facility in Vienna, which offered him ten thousand dollars to study him. Pretty soon, other institutions followed suit, but he rejected most of their offers. He even received a few marriage proposals here and there, but instead chose to remain unwed. And Yet, according to some reports, Herpin did allow himself to be observed by at least one group of doctors who watched him for

one week. Not once during those seven days did he catch a nap or get a full night's sleep. He remained awake and alert the whole time, confusing everyone looking on. Sadly, none of the attention he received had panned out into something lucrative. Later on in Herpin's life, he found himself broke and living in a one room shed by himself. He had no bed and would stay up every night

reading news papers to pass the time. During the day, he'd perform random jobs around town, like street sweeping, but it doesn't seem like his lack of sleep hurt him that much. He died in nineteen forty seven at the age of ninety four. So were the reports true. Was this one man able to beat the odds and stay

awake for three decades? It's hard to say. One teen in nineteen sixty four managed to stay awake for eleven days straight to win his school science fair, and the effort earned him a world record, which still hasn't been beaten. But there's also the idea that Herpin suffered from something called paradoxical insomnia, in which he only thought that he'd been awake, when in fact he'd been asleep the whole time.

Whatever the case, Albert Herpin was a unique individual. He ignored the experts and even his own body to chart his own path. But whether he really did stay awake for almost thirty years or not remains to be seen, and trying to figure out the answer to that question, well, that's enough to keep you up at night. It's one of the most well known and watched sporting events in America. Every February, two football teams go head to head to determine who is the biggest and best team of the

year in a match known as the Super Bowl. Tickets can go for thousands of dollars. The halftime show is performed by some of the most popular musicians in the world, and the biggest draw is, of course, the commercials. But in nineteen eighty five, the Super Bowl drew a very different kind of crowd, a crowd that had no idea what it was walking into. It was December of that year, and the Washington Redskins had become a pretty popular team. Tickets were getting harder to come by, and the waiting

list for season tickets was impossibly long. But that didn't stop one up and coming television station from making a name for itself. It was known as Flagship International Sports Television, and it sent out three thousand invitations to a special brunch along with a pair of complimentary tickets to a Redskins Bengals game. But there was more. In addition to the meal and the game, attendees could also enter a

raffle to win a number of prizes. These included ten Redskins season tickets and for one lucky winner, a trip to New Orleans for Super Bowl twenty. Not everyone was able to make their way to the Washington Convention Center for the game, but one hundred and sixty seven people called the special number on the invitation to let the organizers know that they were coming. Finally, on December fifteenth

of nineteen eighty five, the big day arrived. Guests had been told to come to the Convention Center at nine am, but a lot of people showed up much earlier, eager to eat and secure their chance at winning a trip

to that year's Super Bowl. Oh and reporters had also been invited to document the events for the local papers, and so after their meals, groups of ten to twenty guests were whisked off to a special room, or the MC A man named Louis McKinney spoke for a few minutes before giving them their big prize, a pair of handcuffs. McKinney would yell the word surprise, and an instant later the auditorium would swarm with US Marshals, who took each winner into custody. There had never been any tickets, nor

a raffle. Mister McKinney had actually been the chief of Enforcement Operations for the US Marshals. All the people in the lobby who had welcomed the winners into the convention center had either been local cops or US Marshals as well. What everyone had actually won was a one way trip to prison, courtesy of a secret plot known as Operation Flagship. There was no Flagship International Sports Television or FIST, but there was a Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, an elite group

of US Marshals operating under the same acronym. Their goal was to track down and capture the worst of the worst when it came to wanted fugitives, but doing so on an individual basis was going to be expensive and time consuming, so instead, Chief Deputy US Marshal Tobias Roche and US Marshall Herbert Rutherford the Third developed a coordinated effort to send invitations to the last known addresses of

about three thousand fugitives. The hope was that the recipients would be blinded by the chance of going to the Super Bowl and ignore all the red flags in front of them. What red flags might those be? You're asking? Well, For one, the invitations had been signed by I Michael Dettna, whose last name was the word wanted is spelled backwards. There was also the business manager who handled calls from

the criminals saying that they were coming. His name was Marcus Kran that's nark spelled backwards, and anyone put on hold had to listen to one specially chosen piece of music, the song I Fought the Law. And yet, despite all the warning signs that this was a setup, over one hundred wanted criminals showed up at the Washington Convention Center

to eat a free meal and watch a football game. Instead, they were caught and cuffed and what's become known as one of the biggest mass arrest events in US law enforcement history. And this wasn't the only one either. Similar schemes were also conducted in New York and Connecticut. In total, over thirty three hundred wanted fugitives were caught by the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team during the nineteen eighties. Because sometimes the swift hand of justice needs to become a fist

to take on crime. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.