This is a Firing Squad

This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio. Just a warning, this podcast includes adult language and situations, references to drug use, violence, and some things that will be very hard to listen to.

They bring us all together and they take us outside into a courtyard and stand us up against the wall. This is a firing squad.

Welcome to the Journalista Podcast. I'm Steve StEB your host. This is a memoir about the dangerous and improbable life of Cookie. Hood party girl, mus mother, journalist warrior. Cookie is a classic broad right out of a Bogart movie. She looks like she's been through some shit, with a deep, coarse voice and a street tough demeanor. She's not famous, but she did break the biggest story of the nineteen eighties.

In the eighties there was Cold War trauma. We bought the commis inside picker our friends with a contrus. Freedom was then Prussolas sent them lots of money for guns and land muns. Congress to the Contra money floor just because they moved a teeny bit of floor. But then a hero claims fort His name was Oliver North.

Ian Reagan went.

Around the sissy Congress.

North North, you see, Nor secretly sold mistress to a harmless country called Iran that would always be a grateful ally. Then he gave the prophets to the conference genius.

It all blew up in their faces. You've probably seen the iconic image of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in his snappy uniform with his hand in the air, standing before a joint session of Congress investigating the Iran Contra scandal.

Do you solemn this way that in the testimony you're about to give will be the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the truth.

So help you God, I do, please me shill. Some of you might know him from his short tenure as the head of the NRA or frequent appearances on Fox News. You might remember President Reagan saying this on your television back in nineteen eighty seven.

First, let me say I take full responsibility from my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about that activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities.

But the sales were uncovered by the press. Step Reagan, the North whale began to stress because what they did was technically high thereason.

In the end, several dozen Reagan administration officials were indicted with eleven convictions, including the Secretary of Defense, two national security advisors, the Assistant Secretary of State, chief of the CIA's Central American Task Force, chief of Covert Ops CIA, former Air Force Major General Richard Seacourt, and of course Oliver North. Sounds like justice will not exactly the next president and former CIA director under Nixon, George H. W. Bush,

Oh North, he's a soldier and a hero and the lost, and now he's on Fox news News.

I fucking love that. We already know the end of the story. But that's not the good part. It's the journey. Cookie's journey always at the crossroads of history, one way or another. So how does a half American, half Nicaraguin party girl from New Orleans with absolutely no journalism experience break the biggest story of the eighties. That's what journalista is all about. I'm here right now to introduce my very very good friend. She's like my family member, Cookie Hood.

For me, which led you to believe Eve, I thought you were.

Full of shit. I get a box in the mail. It's from Cookie Hood, and I'm like, hmm, what could this be. I opened this.

Box and it was a treasure troth it was. It was filled with photographs, press passes, newspaper clipping.

Letters from famous people, singing your prayers words.

I sent you the receipts.

Yes, and you had a picture of like laying on a couch next to Ed Bradley, and you know, all kinds of Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter Carter. Yeah, it's a fun story to tell, and I'm just really glad we're doing this together. Are you excited.

I'm stoked, stoked, I'm stoked. Mike Wallace once said to me, Cookie, I'm gonna give you the best piece of advice. Always cover the story, never be the story, and as you'll be able to tell in this podcast, I was the story a lot of times, so I was breaking Mike's number one rule. But he said to me a few times, you know what, it's you. It's okay that you're the story.

You should be the story. All right, Well, let's get into this before Cookie changes the world. She has to go through some serious bullshit. Let me take you back to December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy four. Cookie is just sixteen years old.

One of my friends. We went to his mountain retreat where his family lived. He decided to bring back a pound of weed to take back to Monagua for New Years. And I'm going to be getting dropped off in my neighborhood, which is a very wealthy, cloistered neighborhood. We're driving in. It's after dark as we're passing in front of the house. Coming in the other direction are two taxis, poor people taxis. They stop in front of the house and we're side to side with them. All the doors fly open. Masked

This is how the New York Times described it.

The next day, leptist gorillas invaded a Christmas party for the United States ambassador and seized about twenty prominent Nicaraguans as hostages to be exchange for political prisoners.

For a little context, I turned to Justin Woolf, PhD, professor of Latin American history at Tulane University right here in New Orleans. His first book was The Everyday Nation, State, Community and Ethnicity in nineteenth century Nicaragua. That's a mouthful. He knows his shit, but he looks a lot like the bass player from zz Top.

It was a Christmas party in honor of the US Ambassador to Nicaragua, Shelton Turner, and so the lot of diplomatic big wigs, a lot of members of the Somosa family and government were all there. It was a big celebration in the midst of kind of tragedy and misery all around. I've got the earthquake in nineteen seventy two, and so the party is a let them eat cake kind of moment. Here's an event that will highlight for the Santinistas kind of terribleness of the regime. It allows

And for Cookie, it wasn't just a bunch of big wigs and politicians. It was personal.

I had family, aunts, uncles, neighbors in that party. So Moses starts sending all the guardia, all the soldiers there to surround that house. And there was some shooting going back and forth, and we're like, man, this is some serious shit.

The soldiers gun's drawn, pull them out of their car at gunpoint, throw them to the ground, and begin searching it for weapons. The friend who brought the weed, he's shitting his pants about Now.

My cousin says, don't say anything. I'm going to do the talking. Don't speak Spanish. We want them to think that you're just an American. And we see this guy pull out, I mean, the biggest bag of weed.

The Samosa garsmen think these kids were sent there to be a distraction from the Sandinista commandos attacking the party.

My other friend and my other cousin, who were underground Sandinistas, they knew they were fucked. They took the four of us, pushed us into a military vehicle, took the weed, and just whisked us away.

The soldiers take them to the same prison where the guy who brought the weeds brother was murdered by the Guardia a few years earlier.

And he starts crying in the vehicle, saying, we're never going to get out of this alive.

Samosa declares martial law and no one can give any orders except the dictator himself.

Being arrested was a shock in and of itself, because I was always in a family and in a bubble that nothing could ever.

Happen to me.

All you have to do is make a call, you're out of trouble. But here I am being thrown into a prison. I had only heard at that time that you know, women were raped, and you know whatever.

This prison is a very dangerous place. Cookie and her friends are interrogated through the night. The Guardia trying to get these teenagers to spill the beans on the Sandinista attackers. Then some fucking crazy shit happens.

There's been a big kidnapping on the West Coast. The victim is Patricia Hurst, the daughter of newspaper executive Randolph Hurst and a granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst.

Patricia Hurst is nineteen at a sophomore at Berkeley. She and her fiancee were in her apartment near the campus last night when a woman and two armed men burst in, beat and bound her fiancee and a neighbor dragged Patricia down the stairs, threw her into the trunk of a car, and drove off.

The Hurst newspaper heiress has been missing for nineteen months. First she was kidnapped, then she announced that she had joined ranks with her kidnapper, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later indicted in connection with the San Francisco bank hold up and labeled a fugitive.

The Samosa guardsmen were not the brightest people, and this commandante just got in his head that I was Patricia Hurst because she was a wall at the time. I'm a white American. He just thinks he's hit the lottery.

It was a story that dominated the news for a couple of years. Pretty girl, daughter of a famous newspaper tycoon, kidnapped and turned into a domestic terrorist. And to be honest, she did look a lot like Cookie.

Once that commandante started saying, it's Spanish. Yes, she's Patricia Hurst. The Spanish just came out of me. I'm like, no, you idiot, I'm not Patricia Hurst. And then he says, this bitch speaks better Spanish than you and I she speaks like a local. After being interrogated all night, then we're thrown into cells. We are now realizing that our

The soldiers raise their weapons ready to fire. Commandante gives the teenagers the one more chance to confess what they know about the Sandinistas. And remember, these kids don't know anything.

My friends and family they know I'm wild and crazy, but no one, absolutely no one is going to believe that I was killed by a firing squad.

Wow, We'll be right back. Welcome back, terrorist attacks, hostages, murder, firing squads. Before we find out what happened to cookie, a little background. The United States had occupied Nicaragua for years and left in nineteen twenty five after putting the first Samosa dictator in power, Augusto Sandino, the opposition leader, says no way, and all hell breaks loose. The US Marines come back. Sandino wages a gorilla war and is

The US Marines leave and there's this kind of effort to negotiate a peace and for the Sandinistas. Under Sandino to put down their arms and kind of come into the government. There's this key meeting with the new government to kind of negotiate and to the Saninistas in a sense. But at the end of that event, as Sandino and his key lieutenants are leaving this kind of negotiation party, is.

There an agreement made?

There there's an agreement, but Somosa doesn't believe that the agreement will hold. Somosa orders his men to detain Sandino, his brother, as well as a couple of his other key lieutenants. They take them out to today where the international airport in Monagua is and they execute them.

Sandino's murder creates the Sandinista movement as we know it today, but it's his defiance and courage standing up against the US occupiers and wealthy elites that makes him a hero to the poor in the working class.

The Santainistas of the sixties and seventies. They are going to kind of recuperate the legend of Sandino and the vision of the Somosas as the kind of implacable enemy the people.

Back to the firing squad. No Cookie and her friends didn't die. The story doesn't end in front of a firing squad. They shoot over their heads, scaring the crap out of them.

My family in Generals were trying to get through to Samosa to tell them let the kids out. We want to go pick them up and bring them home. We don't know that that's happening. That comen Dante, who at that point knew that we were going to be released, that we really were who we were friends of. Samosa just said, I'm gonna fuck with these kids, you know, scare the fuck out of them so that they don't fuck with us anymore.

How did it feel when they were pointing guns at you like they were going to shoot you?

I just kept saying, this can't be happening. It's like those movies where somebody who's innocent is being accused of being guilty, but he's not, and he spends the whole movie trying to convince the people that he's not guilty. That went on for a few hours. Of course, I'm thinking I'm talking the soldiers out of shooting us.

Was that the first time you ever had a gun pointed at you?

Hmmm? Maybe, maybe not, who knows. It was definitely a shocker.

The next day The New York Times reported on the results of the negotiations.

The Nicaraguan government agreed today to release twenty six political prisoners and fly them to Cuba in exchange for the lives of a group of prominent politicians and business leaders seized by leftist gorillas at a Christmas party here Friday night. A government spokesman said that the eight gorillas and the freed political prisoners are all believed to be members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The gorillas had also demanded a five million dollar ransom.

Somosa, as ruthless as he was, he had one weakness, and his weakness were his friends and his family. So he was not gonna lie wow his friends or family that were in that house to be harmed. A smart dictator would have killed everyone in that house, Sandinista's, the hostages would have been killed. Everybody would have been killed. So he created the future of his own demise.

Something tells me Cookie would have been a good dictator. So her family finally gets through to Samosa, and Cookie and her friends are released. She's driven home, back to the neighborhood where the whole thing started. She gets there just as the bus arrives to pick up the commandos. It's filled with the recently released Sandinista political prisoners and the million dollars they got from Somosa.

So again my vehicle crosses with this vehicle and I could see these political prisoners, and a couple of them, actually quite a few of them later became very famous and very important to our story.

Do you want to name one of them?

Danielle Ortego.

Ortego goes on to become the leader of the Sandinistas and head of the new government after the revolution, and of course public enemy number one to the Reagan administration. Professor Wolf tells us why this is so important.

The last major Saninista offensive is in nineteen sixty seven, and it's a disaster. Almost every Saninista member who's engaged in that event dies. It's like really bad. So you have this very successfully planned action. You have the success of getting leaders from within the Saninistas who'd been captured out. You get money, which is key if you're buying arms and all of that kind of stuff. Plus they've gotten their message out in public. Censorship is one of the

Now that underground revolution that was going on has now come to light. And funny story, one of the hooded guys that was in that house, My aunt, who I was staying with at the time, was one of the hostages. She asked this hooded terrorist, can I go to the bathroom? And he answers her, of course, Donia Telma, of course, missus Thelma. He knew her, he knew who she was, and she recognized the voice. Didn't know who the voice was,

Tell me a little bit about the crazy childhood you had.

Well, my father was an American, my mother was from Nicaragua. My dad was an executive with the airlines.

Tucker airlines.

It was an El Salvador airlines that flew throughout Central America. The journalists used to call it take a chance airlines because you never knew. And my mother stay at home, but she came from a very, very wealthy family in Nicaragua. So I was raised in both countries, and the summer vacation times were different in each country. Here in Nicaragua, so I was literally in school all year long here and there. I guess the biggest difference was when I

You have to do this.

You have to be able to know how to work. Whereas on my mother's side of the family and living in Central America, it was all maids and chauffeurs and nannies and cooks. But I managed somehow to always find the party.

And your family was close to the dictator Simosa.

Absolutely I played with his kids. I played with the children of generals. And obviously my family and friends were all from that one percent that owned and had everything. Ninety nine percent had nothing, but I didn't see it. We lived in a bubble, and the bubble was parties on the weekends. If you were dating someone. You couldn't go out unless you had a chaperone, sort of antebellum

When the earthquake hit, Nicaraguan officials in Miami today issued an urgent appeal for blood donors. They said there's an immediate need for twenty to twenty five thousand pints of whole blood for the victims of Saturday's earthquake in Monogua. The United States sending three million dollars in food, medicine, tents, purification equipment another aid. Looting continue today and what's left for the Nicaraguan capital with troops doing little or nothing to stop it.

Ninety percent of the city has been utterly destroyed. Even the few tall buildings which do remain will soon be brought down by dynamiting. There is not a single building in the downtown section safe for occupancy. The city will be leveled, as explained by Nicaragua's former president and now Commander in chief of the Armed Forces, Anastasio Somosa.

So the capital as you now know it will cease to exist.

That is right.

We are going to live in tents until we make an appreciation of the situation and decide.

The government will have to decide.

What they're going to do.

Even though it's a disaster, it's really important for the Sanonistas. Now, what we have is the Sananistas who have really shown themselves, I think and beyond anyone else, is actually caring about the kind of post earthquake disaster, helping people setting up soup kitchens, but also organizing people right, trying to say like, look, we are never going to get to a better place until Somosa is gone.

The US started sending supplies, you know, for instance, peanut butter. I mean, nobody knew what peanut butter was. The poor people. They started sending morphine. A lot of people in the wealthy families got hooked on morphine. Drugs just blew up with the rich kids. But I was already doing drugs here in New Orleans. But when I'd go to Nicaragua before the earthquake, I was still being the good girl.

Everything was broken, including the bubble that protected Cookies family and the oligarchs that had flourished under the Samosa regime, but they were still holding on trying to pretend like everything was the same, like the earthquake never really happened, business as usual.

The second change came about every August. First was a holidayy in Nicaragua. It was a religious holiday where rich and poor didn't work, rich and poor drank.

To excess grades and that's the.

Grades horseback riding. But of course only the rich people were allowed to be on the horses and on the floats, and the poor people, who were allowed to drink would be on the periphery watching. They were partying, but they were watching us partying to an excess and to a degree that they would never have been able to.

These prades like their own, like little marti gras type of things, like.

A morna guard thing. But you're on these carts, you know, that were decorated, and you're just going through the city and it's surrounded by poor people.

The Associated Press describes it like this.

The ten days of festivities have their roots in the eighteen eight vy five discovery of the three inch tall statue of Santo Domingo de Guzman, also known as Saint dominicue Guzman, the founder of the Dominican Religious Order. A peasant was cutting down a tree in what was then the outskirts of Manawa when he found the tiny rendering of the saint with a tonsure and beard, clad in

And I think it was that day that I started to see the faces of poor people, actually see them so literally.

You're on a float in a parade that was all rich people.

Partying and several floats, like you said, like a parade, and.

The audience for that are the poor people.

It's always been that way, but that particular year, because there had been some shootings and some revolutionary movement in the mountains, Samosa was starting to do a crackdown and decided, of course, our rich people and friends and family can't be involved. It has to be the poor people who really had more to gain by a revolution. So that particular year, Samosa prohibited the sale of liquor to poor people. So, yes, they were all from work, and yes they were lining

Now, change is coming. A respected journalist is murdered, and Nicaragua will never be the same. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We've talked about Cookie's younger life and the origins of the dark divisions that created the Nicaragua we know today. But this segment is about a crime, a heinous act that changed the course of history and cleared the path that Cookie never saw coming.

Romero Romes King Las noticiace in lacion Al La s Sinato and doctor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardinali.

That was Monagua evening news. Pedro Chimorro had been murdered. This is what The New York Times said when it happened.

Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, an editor known for his outspoken opposition to the dictatorship of General Anastasio Simosa de Baile, was shot to death today in downtown Monagua. The fifty three year old editor and publisher of La Prinsa of Monagua, the country's only opposition paper, was shot eighteen times by three men in a car who forced his auto to the curb. Mister Chimorro died on the way to a hospital.

It's a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Who killed Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. Before we get into that, who was he and why does he matter?

Somosa had a mortal enemy. He was a newspaper man. His name was Pedro Juaking Chamorro. He was married also to a well known society lady Violetta Barrios.

The Chamorrow's were close family friends, and Violetta became Cookie's aunt by marriage just a few years later. Justin Wolf gives us a little background.

The head of the oldest kind of most traditional elite family in Nicaragua and really a revered business, intellectual and social figure in Nicaragua. The Chamoto family had really been important since the eighteenth century in Nicaragua. Chamorro's are presidents twice in the nineteenth century again in the twentieth century. It's one of those long kind of political dynas families, right if we think about the U assets like the Kennedys or the Bush family.

Members of the Congress. It is my great privilege, and I deem it a high honor and personal pleasure to present to you her Excellency, Yoletta Chamorrow, President of the Republic of Nicaragua.

That was in nineteen ninety one, Violetta Chamorrow, the first woman president of Nicaragua, speaking to a joint session of the US Congress. If you recall, we met Chamorro's daughter Christiana on the parade float with Cookie a few minutes ago. They were childhood friends. She was running for president last year in Nicaragua and in a fair election the likely winner then Daniel Ortega, went full dictator.

High profile opposition leaders arrested one by one in just the last few days, months before a crucial election in which strongman President Daniel Ortega is trying to cling to his fourteen years of power. As fears grow, this is only going to get worse.

Earlier this week, the pro government prosecutor had charged tomorrow, Nicaragua's most competitive presidential candidate with alleged money laundering and what it termed as ideological deviations.

Her crime running for president against Danielle Ortega. She was under house arrest until a few weeks ago. That's some serious fascist bullshit.

By the mid to late seventies, Chamorro is not only an opponent of Somosa, but he is looking around and he is looking, for example, at the Sandinistas, who some of his children are members of, and seeing them. Eventually, by nineteen seventy seven is probably the only viable path

Okay, so who killed Pedro Chimorro. There were a lot of suspects, in fact, just about everybody. Let's start with the obvious choice, the brutal dictator, anastasi of Simosa. He clearly had no problem killing his own people, and like any good strong man, he made a lot of people disappear. But why would he murder a high profile journalist from one of the most prominent and beloved families of Nicaragua. Chimorrow decided to go after Simosa in his newspaper Loprenza,

So what happened to this person who wanted freedom?

Well, they murdered him. Who murdered him?

Forces?

That was the voice of Pedro Chimorro's wife, violetta future president of Nicaragua. Was she right? Somosa clearly had motive. Chamorrow had the power and the voice. He was a threat to the regime. But Cookie, who grew up knowing them both, who as a child actually played with their children, has a different perspective.

I don't think better working ever thought that Samosa would kill him. They spoke to each other, they saw each other at social affairs. They needed each other. Tomorrow needed Simosa to be the bad guy. Simosa needed Chamur to be the opposition. As long as it looked like a dictator allowed opposition voices to be heard through newspaper and some radio stations, it made him look less iron fisted dictator. So neither one of them feared their lives from the other.

Not exactly sculpatory evidence, but if it wasn't Samosa, who else had a motive to murder Tomorrow?

He is being vocal in the press and in his own speeches about Samosa, but also families that are in the larger circle of the samosas his word, critiquing those families and pointing out the crimes or the errors, or the violence or the corruption of those families is viewed as a personal attack for Tomoto. It was like identifying the cancer that needed to be removed. And so of course the Samosa's overall, the whole family, the in laws, and then the key kind of acted families that were

We owned everything car dealerships, banks, restaurants, shops. Poor people didn't own anything.

You know.

There's a funny story of Tomosa driving in the countryside and he says to his driver, Oh, that's really a pretty ranch. Who owns that? And the driver turns around he says, your excellency, you own it.

Dan.

Rather doing a piece for sixty minutes, ask Someamosa about as many holdings general.

I've been told that your wealth is in the neighborhood of five hundred million dollars and the list is very long of Sosa interested you and your family owned You own the National Airline? No, we're a shareholders of it. You're a major shareholder in the airline. Yes, you own the National shipping line. Yes, I founded that, including your own port Port Tomoso. Also, we founded that the leading television station, Yes, radio station. You own a newspaper. Yes,

And you still we could go on and on.

He owned everything, and he made sure that all his friends were taken care of too.

The wealthy elite had a lot to lose if Samosa lost power, and Cookie's family was a part of that. Could the motive just be money? I guess it's always money, But what about big business? Nicaragua exported sugar, beef, bananas, but most of that was owned by Someimosa and his friends. The Nicaraguaan government did arrest for suspects, saying they were hired by an American whose plasma exporting business was under fire by Chamorro's newspaper Loprenza. Of course Simosa had a

There's a famous line from Franklin Roosevelt about the first Tomosa, the President Samosa's father, FDR referring to Samosa, he's the son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. All the Somosas were bound to the US. President Simosa went to West Point, all of them US educated. Obviously investments in this country. At this point, the US is still backing the Nicaragua dictatorship.

Like we backed to O Salvador and Honduras.

And well, correct fighting communism.

In the presence of Cuba, right there.

Maybe were communists.

Yeah, who makes that Domino theory viable? Viable?

Yes?

And I think you got the Allende and Chile and you know, all these different movements that were put down ruthlessly and viciously.

At this point, we haven't discounted any of our suspects. They all have motive, they all have opportunity. They all wanted him dead. Is this like Julius Caesar where they all put a knife in his back? Are they all fucking guilty? Wait a second, I forgot about someone.

The second generation. Simosa had a son, and he was next in line to become president one day. He was this flashy military kid. He might have gone to West Point as well. He was hanging around with mercenaries. There were famous American mercenaries that were coming to Nicaragua. Mike the Mercenary, Bob the Mercenary. These were bad people. They would wear the bullets across here like Pancho Villa. And by this time the mercenaries are drying in tanks in

That's right, Cookie parties with mercenaries. Where were they from?

US? Just anywhere mercenary needed a job, he could come.

The US mercenaries killed Pedro.

We don't know who exactly did. We suspect that it was Mike the Mercenary, but it was on the orders of Samosa the third He had Pedro Woking Chamorrow assassinated.

I don't know if Cookie's right about this, but it sure makes a better story.

Of course, we later found out his father was furious with him. Why did you do this because that kind of stuff just didn't happen to rich people in Nicaragua. Sure it happened behind the scenes to poor people and revolutionaries and criminals, but that kind of stuff didn't.

Happen in the end. I actually don't think who or it ends up being the important question. The result of it is what's really important, which is there's this massive reporting in the US about this beloved hero of press, freedom and democracy, ped jaquin Chimoto being assassinated in this country led by a violent military dictator. So that's the way the coverage is being presented. And then four every

This is how the Washington Post summed it up. At a crucial moment. The Chamorro murder has dramatized for foreigners the lawlessness and political tension long known to Nicaraguan's The Samosa family has tried to run the politics and economy of the country as its personal preserve, cleverly co opting support and brutally destroying opponents. Whether the transition to the post Simosa arrow will be violent or peaceful cannot be told.

The assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro changed everything. It lit a flame under the long simmering revolution. The Santa de Nisas were back in business in a big way. That people who came out in the streets united in opposition to Simosa. It was the beginning of the end of a dictator. It made headlines around the world. Cookie didn't know it yet, but her life was about to change.

Next time on Journalista, Pablo gave me half a pound of cocaine for the wedding, so I brought my girlfriend from New Orleans, flew her in and we spent the whole day before and the whole day of grinding it up. We started off with one graand bottles and realized quickly that's likely to be enough, So we went and got two gram bottles, filled up one hundred of them. When the people arrived at the door, that's what they were given with a bow on it. You know, this is your party.

Favor The Journalist of podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood narrated by Steven Step. Produced by Sean J. Donnelly. Executive producers Jason Waggensback, Roy Laughlin, and Ellen k. iHeart Executive producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Step. Music by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Steven Tanti.