“Release the Onions!”: the Vincent Kosuga story

obsessed with these candles from this company. Oddis V I V? No, it's like V I V. Anyway, They're amazing. I'm not even getting paid for this. They should pay me, but seriously, like they're the most incredible candles. I'll write it down. I love them. So I like that. You know what else I like? Um, polka music, onion, soup, onion soup. Oh no, these things go together, and I like I like chips. Odd. Yeah, you back ended on this one totally. You slipped it in. Like. So are you familiar? Okay,

first of all, are you familiar with the Super Bowl? Uh? With the football? We just had one? Yes, Yeah, it was a huge bowl. Super Bowl for the whole globe. Everybody was yeah, okay, so people have super Bowl parties. I've talked about this. Yes, I went to length and you went to one. Did you have dips and chip? I had chips? No dip, chip and dips? Wait what? Okay, so have you ever heard of is it hell of a good dip? Let's just say it is and keep moving.

It's a brand in the store. I don't see l u V a hell of a you know, they got ranch, they got uh onion, they got them all ranch on they so they had this special thing for this is taking way too long. They had this special thing for the super Bowl. They were giving away super Bowl snack scented campbells. Why so they eate a French onion candle. And they also had like a recipe for French onion soup bites, which okay, aside from that, buttermilk ranch and

then just potato chips in here, baby, lighten it up. Onion, French onion candle. Just go cook some onions. I know what you're getting for your birthday. I know I wreak of onions all the time. So that that that that that that is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. Now it's coincidental, though, because I've got something for you that should be right up your alley. Okay, yeah, my shooter alley. Yeah, you know exactly alley. Yeah. The thing I was thinking, that's

ridiculous capitalism gonna get me right in the shooter alley. Capitalism, Yeah, that's ridiculous. I just slide past that. Capitalism is ridiculous, Elizabeth, But not like in the good fun way. You know, it's ridiculous, like in that Picasso of face way. And by that I mean it's it's recognizable, you know, but it's still distarted and exploited, and it's probably overvalued by market speculators. Right. So anyway, I'm not gonna get on a soapbox about capitalism. You know my feelings about it.

All economic models are ridiculous. Young felt that way. Well, leaving aside my college freshman opinions about capitalism, I would like to tell you about a crime of capitalism, one that is ridiculous and one that involves onions. Yeah, yeah, it's about onions. You like onions, You like onions. You like onions. What's your third favorite onion? Okay, good choice. Well, I like onions too. So now imagine if onions were suddenly like ninety dollars a bag for onions. That'd be ridiculous, right,

that would be very right. That's essentially what happened in when one man conspired to create an onion cartel so that he could have control over all of the onions in America. Yes, this is ridiculous Crime A podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, ices and cons It's always murder free and ridiculous, Elizabeth Zaren. Before we get into the onion cartel and the man with the bond villain dreams to control all the onions in America, I'd like to talk to you about a subject that's very near and

dear to my heart. No, I want to talk to you about pork belly futures. Okay, yeah, Now let me back up. Do you know what a pork belly future is? Kind of I mean, I'm not gonna lie and be like, oh, yeah, totally. And then you ask me something about like let's keep it simpler, it's like all you know what it is, it's all by cell cell by because I yell it into a phone. Yeah. And then I had another guy who's like yelling by by sell that yeah, with like a bunch of little slips of paper and perfect Yes,

I know. Okay, Well, do you know what a pork belly is? Okay? Now what is a pork belly? It's the belly of pork. Fig Yes, it's a butcher's cut of park. It's like a big layer of fat on it. Yes. Is where we get bacon? Yeah, so I figured you're familiar with like how we get bacon. You you've lived in the South exactly. Now, hogs are a huge market. Everyone around the world loves pork. We talked about chicken, but everybody loves park. Did you know how much pork we produce in a year as just as a globe?

And I'm going to tell you in millions of metric tons of so China's number one, and they produced five point four seven million metric tons of hog every year. The European unit two point three million metric tons of hog. Now US re number three, number three, number three, so we re number three one point to one million metric tons. And rounding out the top four is Brazil with three point seven million tons. I'm sorry, we are yeah point three.

Something is this when they're weighing him. Is that rude or to tutor? Is that like the bones and everything that weight? Yeah, that's like sale price. Wait, they use all of it. Let's be frank. Yeah, everything but the frank joke. That's good. No, the demand for pig has been so high and so just outsized for so long, and we were talking to centuries that eventually when we get into like capitalism era, the pork belly market was always super volatile. It just was like the prices are fluctuating,

made rise and falls. Hog farmers would make a fortune and then they lose everything. So something had to be done there, like how do we stabilize this pork belly market.

Starting in nineteen sixty one, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, that's the Dow Jones for raw materials like pork bellies and frozen orange juice and wheat futures, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, it began trading pork belly futures and that was meant to stabilize pork prices, right, But it did bring some calm to the pork market and also led to one of my favorite films, Trading Places. You like trading Places. Did you and your brother trap you guys grow watch

that growing up? I think, Yeah, what's your third favorite scene? Oh? Goodness, I don't know. You know that, like I don't really remember anything more than an hour. I know, like like an eight year all to keep asking you your third favorite? Do like that this was your third favorite hero? No? The problem that I have is that I'll know that I watched something, and then if I watch it, it like refreshes my memory. Yes, I honestly I couldn't tell you.

I mean, I know it's like Dana Roydon and Edine Murphy. Jimmie Lee Curtis. I don't even remember her. Do you remember the gorilla like where they remember the blackface scene or blackface? Yes, okay, I don't remember some part of it. For those who have never seen the film, Trading Places, about these dudes, the Duke brothers, Randolph and Mortimer Duke.

Their super old money. They have like seats on the down jone exchange, and the Duke brothers they have a commodities brokerage firm, which is what we're talking about now, may bide cell raw materials that become the products we all by. Now, the two brothers getting a spirit of debate about nature versus nurture. So they decide they will test their theory with a bet, and so they pick rich person Dana Right a poor person Eddie Murphy and

they have them switch places and then see what will happen. Right, So they do this. They decided to ruin these two bands live and they make Eddie Murphy rich. They make dannack Royd poor and he's just like he hits the skids hard. And they just they determined that wealth is not about merit. It really is about rather who you know, wealth is about access as it he doesn't. It's nurture

not nature. Right anyway, Dana Chary, Eddie Murphy, they decided to get revenge on the Duke brothers for ruining their lives. So what do they do. They use frozen orange juice futures. Okay yeah, yeah, remember okay, So they're active subterfuge. They have this agent, guy Meeks, who has he has the crop YOUELD reports. So they get the crop UELD report, they switch it out, they give it to the Duke brothers. The Duke brothers going, they tell their agents on the

stock market, Bye bye bye Cell Cell Cell right. So they go in there and they have their marching orders and they're going to try to drive up orange juice to a fixed price. Right, So the Duke Brothers attempt to corner them our market. Now, being super wealthy, they can do this, and they do it all on margin. Though, this is where they make a mistake. You know what

margin is. It's where you use someone else's money to buy a stock and then when the price, when the when the time to actually purchase it comes, do you have to pay for whatever the price is set at that time, so you can say a little bit of a fluctuation. You do not know necessarily what the price will be. So they buy this on margin. They got all these orange juice futures, contracts, markets open, Duke Brothers buying a ton and then trading pauses crop, your report

comes out. Everybody's like, oh no, the Duke brothers, what they were told is the opposite. So now everybody's trying to drop their orange juice prices. The market response orange usee prices drop at great and Murphy. They have bought futures on the short so now they can because they have promised to buy orange juice, they have to start buying to fulfill their orders. And they do this, and that that they do is they buy everybody who wants

to sell oranges except from the Duke brothers. So now they have these prices they are contractually obligated to buy. It bankrupts them. This is the power of the futures market because you're basically saying tomorrow, I will buy this these orange juices from this orange juice from you, but whatever the prices tomorrow today, and you lock it in, and that's supposed to stabilize the market. Some people make these bets. Well that's what the Duke brothers ended up.

How they end up going belly up, much like say a pork belly. Now, to bring it all back around to park belly, futures farming has gone industrial, right, we all know this. It's agri business is big business. But that means they can lower the prices of the cost to bring a hog to market. That's been really helpful to also stabilize the pork product market. Right. This also means hog farmers can leverage their size to control prices, and this is pretty much how you get price stability. Right.

This killed off the pork belly futures market. So two thousand eleven, Chicago mercantile exchanss like, forget this, We're not doing it anymore. The agri business basically made it no longer necessary. Right. This also happened to be coincidentally one year after Congress looked into the fixing of pork billy futures. So you know, it was that a little bit of congressional testimony. And by the way, trading places was cited in congressional testimony to help the sound help the cores

men and women understand futures. It's not just us good teaching tools. It is I'm telling you, Eddie Murphy, if you want to get people's attention and hold it, Eddie Murphy exactly, throwing some dan A right if you really just like, you know, it got some Canadians anyway. It turns out this whole thing I'm telling you this all applies to the onion futures market. Have you ever heard of onion futures? No, I've not. Well, turns out you

can get onion futures. You can buy onions before they come to market, which are also now no longer traded on the Chicago mercantilers. They get rid of those two Oh yeah, and uh there this case. So there isn't a classic eighties movie to explain it, so we'll have to rely on me, you know, just good. Yeah, but it's the great Onion Scam of nineteen fifty five and just imagine trading places like stuff happening. Right You ready for the story of Vincent Cassuga and the Onion Cartel.

Never been more ready. Okay, this story takes place in one of my favorite places, Chicago. Chicago's amazing, dude, it really is, like I legit love Chicago. I love it. There's so much green space for a big city. Oh yeah, it's a lot of the Midwestern cities because they're built in the nineteenth century before cars. They have a much better layout, plan, gener structure. Everything is just a lot cool. I've been finding that it was Indianapolis recently. I was like,

this is a damn cooling. I mean, not like popping off, but I mean like I like the building anyway. Chicago's dope. In her book The Futures, author Emily Lambert was writing all about the economics, and she was explaining the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and so forth. She shared why Chicago and onions are so naturally intertwined. Do you know anything about this? No? I didn't either, So Lambert writes, and I quote, onions

were faded to trade in Chicago. The name of the city was derived from chicaqua, the Native American word for a stinky wild leak plant that grew around the river. Chicago is basically a swamp. Before people got there and the conditions, people were like, oh, we don't camp there, Like that's it's right by the lake. It's just rats and onions. Nobody goes there, right. So now this chicaqua, this is one. This was the Miami or the Miami

tribes word for the area. But other people, other indigenous tribes in the area, they had their own term for it. But yet all of them seem to basically want to point out that this place is stinky as hell. Returning to a Lambert, she says, quote Chicaqua is the Miami Tribes name for the region on which the city and campus sits, and is said to be associated in the naming of Chicago. It refers to the marshy environment where wild leaks, garlic, and onions grow, giving the area a

strong and pungent fragrance. Other tribes of the region referred to the area as the place of onions, and legends of a great skunk who devoured humans and covered the land and its pungent spray. So it's like if you had a hell of a good candle yes, and it smelled like skunk. But you know what, though, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get on onions. Onions are amazing. I love onions. I'm all about like the album Family, This fertile ground. Where is where our onion conspiracy takes place?

Now in this land where the great skunk devours people and leaves the land shrouded in skunky aroma, Chicago is where we're gonna meet our anti hero. You're ready to meet Vincent Cassuga. He was a farmer from New York. He was in place called Pine Island. It's a small town down by the New Jersey border. Kasuga had a big spread, about five thousand acres of a black dirt farm.

And black dirt is like really fertile, rich earth. So he was growing celery, carrots and onions and lots of onions and so so that you can picture him because Suga was not a big man. He stood about five feet four. He comes from Eastern European roots and he was born in America the nineteen fifteen. He started farming in the US and the thirties. His farm was productive, profitable. He's very good at it. Two of his biggest clients the U. S. Army and Campbell Suit. So everybody was

eating his onions now. Because Suga had a scrappy side to him. He was a little bit of a totjof spark plug of a man. Dude was driven by will. He was just like about it. And he always kept a revolver on him and a billy club making case got the revolver away from him, make a billy club. I think he would like the billy clubs. The intro. Yeah, that's like a this off. I just I didn't have

a Chile. Those things will not okay. Now, my dude, Cossuga, Now you know, he's the kind of guy who shoots first and asked for forgiveness later, just like all good Catholics, you know. But and all truth he did contain multitudes. He was a devout Catholic. The dude, I might say devout Catholic. He donated millions to the Catholic Church, so much that the Vatican invited him out to Rome to have private audiences with the Pope. He got the whole v I p pass. Yeah, not one pope, three popes.

He had private on three popes. Not only that, he got a ride up and down in the Pope's private paper elevator, which I didn't even know that was a thing. Apparently they got this like little cart that you shoved up and down anything. It's all gold, oh you know it. You know, a deep red carpet, gold everything. No, perhaps it was his resolute faith. I don't know, but something gave Cossuga the strength to go on when others would turn back. You know, it's like that. There was one

time he crashed his plane, so he owned his own plane. Yeah, he was flying a friend home to us. We go in New York, somewhere up in there among the clouds. He's like, you know, how to change my mind, I'm gonna go to Pine Island. So he starts to go on two extra miles. That's really testing. Your fuel tank did not pass the test. Plane runs out of gas in the air. He has to ditch it, he crashes and totally walks away from the crash. So he's and

he's hospitalized for weeks. He had to wear a full body cast, and then when he was like done, he just checked himself out of the hospital and went back to farming. Because that's amazing because usually you're here, Oh he crashed his plane. Yeah, not this area. So in the nineteen thirties, he gets involved in the stock market, and that's what will bring us to all of the criminality.

But first a little break for some commercials and some capitalism, and then we'll be back with the commercial involving onion. Oh yeah, alright, Elizabeth, Okay, Elizabeth. So we're in the nineteen thirties. Vincent Kasuga has just gotten involved in the stock market. He's like, I'm doing well as a farmer. I'm going to invest now. Admittedly, this was not the thinking of most people at the time, because there was a little thing called Black Tuesday that wiped out most

of the stock market. Everyone else is like, to hell with the stock market. That is legalized gambling. Not Kissuga. He's like, that's legalized gambling exactly. So he decides to get involved, and he's like, I think I can make a fortune there, and he was wrong. He goes into the thirties, he loses everything. His first pray about he and his wife nearly had to like hawk the farm that he was betting on wheat futures, and then the prices shifted as a telling you boom. He lost it

all on margin calls. He goes to tell his wife, and his wife's like, that's it, You're out, and he's like, okay, okay, baby, I promise no more trade and wheat futures, wheat futures. Yeah, you have to open all the other but not ever again, babe. So that she should have like made him be a little more specific, because, like I said, a few years later, he's out there and he's deep in the futures market. He was flying to Chicago every week so he could go trade. He lives in New York, He's got his

bone pilots. On Monday morning, why is Chicago hangs out trade for like three or four days. Thursday flies back and does she think he's out like plowing the field. I don't know. She didn't tell me all if you need me, yeah, I don't know. Then she hears the places like called dirt it. I'll tell you that. Vance No, I think that. I think she had to be aware of it. Yeah, so you know, anyway gets back. Isn't

it worth fun to imagine she had no idea? Oh yeah, she's just in there, like you know, making let's have peanut butter brittle and just on her own, just having some me time, listening to her stories, living your best life. So dope to the guild, all of mom happy, mother's little helpers. He's got a fistful helpers. Okay. Anyway, so dude, he gets good at trading. Cassuga starts not losing out everything and his wife's money and all of everything on

the futures market. So he starts making bank. He starts getting really good at He starts buying Cadillacs for his brokers. That's how good he's getting at it. Multiple brokers, multiple Cadillacs. Not just like Steve got your catalect, more like Steve, Gary Lionel and Anton gil got y'all got covered you two, Joaquin, But there's one there's this one story about him. But it's like I was reading and I'm like, what a jerk. So anyway, I think, guy, he's he's giving cars to

his broker's right, there's supposed to be gifts. He's riding around one time and uh, well, I'll just put it to this way quote from a book he said. He presented a broker name Nate Wertheimer, who was at one point a chairman of the Murk that's the Mercantile Exchange, with a big, fancy Cadillac. Fifteen minutes later, they were driving down Michigan Avenue when Kassuga, in the backseat, put his dirty feet on the ceiling of the car. We're finmer told him to take his feet off the ceiling

of his car. Your car, Kassuga asked, and then stuck his feet through the canvas ceiling. That's like the Charlie Murphy story about Rick James and the white couch is. But at the same time, it's like, he just gave you your couch, Nie Murphy, but he just he just gave you a car. But you want to get it detailed afterwards. Yeah, I think they're both jerks. I mean, I don't know what everyone everyone's jerk in the start

in life. Everyone life, you're going to broaden it just going all throwing the net wide, all right, you leave my sister out of here. Sorry. Anyway, back to kiss the dude. He like, as I'm trying to convey, he's willful, he's controlling, and he's gonna do what he's gonna do. Be it his you know, it doesn't matter you're his wife or his broker. To hell with you. So if you just keeping things, you know, like modern, have you

bought eggs lately? I have? Have you seen the prices? Yeah, yikes, they're coming back down, but bikes, So, like you may be wondering what the hell egg producers, like, why did eggs suddenly go up in price? Right? They jumped up by six over the course of the last year. A dozen of grade at large Grade E eggs was a dollar seventy nine. A year ago they were four five. Oh yeah, I know, we're yeah, we're screwed on that. But yeah, across the country, the averages are bitter about this.

So anyway, as you pointed out, egg prices started to fall, they've already fallen about fifty percent back down. Wasn't that because of avians? I've seen arguments on both sides. One, I've seen that avian flu wiped out sixty million birds, right, and so obviously then you have the supply and demand issue. Uh. And I also heard that I think it was what the U. S d A was telling home farmers not to have chickens because they were worried that that's the

whole pandemic chicken thing. I don't think that affected the market anyway, but yeah, but a lot of people I know were like, oh, I got chickens, Like you want to buy eggs from meat when? Oh interesting you and your but I mean black market egg people. Oh yeah. Well, after those fifty or sixty million chickets were destroyed or whatever it was, the prices started to fall right. Well, ultimately, what you notice is it's about still supply and demand.

You know, there is still an economic theory at work underneath all of this, which is supply controls demand, demand control supply. Do you have this interaction? Right? Last time I went to the store, they were eleven? Don't are you kidding me? Ding? Wow? That's insane? Well, my du kasuga right, he's like inspired by these types of crazy price sikes. He's like, you know, what to hell with these? Like,

you know, oh, I'm gonna get futures. He's like, what if I could like kind of control the price and by either controlling supplier demand. Well, I don't know enough people to control demand. I can control supply though. He starts getting into it right. So his first time he practices, he makes a trading places style bet. He goes out

and he makes a weather bet. He says, okay, he purchased a bunch of onion futures, and he bets on the price to rise, and then to guarantee that the price rises, he goes down to the local weather bureau and he bribes them to put out a fake weather service issuing a frost warning. So the price goes up because the frost warning. But the mercury it never fell. There was no frost. It never went below fifty degrees, so onion surplus was there. The market was like boom.

He made a bunch on on that, right, He's like, oh, that was a good score. I bet I can go bigger because that was not enough for so market manipulation was one thing. But he's like, what if I could totally control the market, and what if I didn't have to rely on lies and false crop reports or weather reports. He's like, what if someone could do that? Like control the market. That would be a huge fortune. And nobody will look for onions. So if someone did that, that

person would be a master scammer. And he's like that person hits up his business partner, Sam Segull, and he's like, Yo, Seegull, I got I got I got a new score. And he's like, oh, hit me with it. He lays it out for him. He's like, oh, bet, I'm down. Let's do this. So the two of them they start basically setting up everything they'll need to control the onion market of America. On New York exactly. This dude has a

nephew who's still alive, Harvey paffen Roff. He was talking to NPR about this and he recalled what he knew of his uncle's onion hoarding. So Harvey paffen Roth said, well, he was building it was a big shed of corrugated aluminum, I mean huge, and he had a conveyor in there and he was filling it with onions. So he was stock buying all the onions from his farm in the

trading pits of Chicago. Vincent, his business partner Sam Siegel, bought up all the available futures contracts for onions by the winner of nineteen fifty five, they had done the impossible. You may be wondering, Elizabeth, what is the impossible, Elizabeth? What is the impossible? Great question, Elizabeth. According to prof he owned all of the longs in the futures market, and he owned all of the onions in the United States. So basically he had cornered the market. He owned all

the onions in the United States. That's let's say he buys onions from farmers and California, from California to New York to Texas, Minnesota, everywhere, Vidalia, the walla wall is, everywhere that they had good sweet onions, red onions, white onions. He was like, send them my wet you know it,

pearl onions. So they start stockpiling them and effectively they'd start taking them off the markets, and now the supply starts going down, down, down, because onions, like apples, can last for a while on the marketing called storage in particular, so it doesn't take kasukan seagull long. They end up, as I said, controlling about of the onions in the Chicago market, which represents most of the United States agricultural products. Right, So what does this mean in real terms, what do

you mean? Like they owned the onions right well to control the market. If they control they can run the price up for the onions, which is what he did. So he starts to drive the price up as he dwindles the supply, right, says, less and less onions going to markets. He's holding them away from the market. I have like six for you. That means like in the fifties, if you had French onions soup you were eating sue this. Oh yeah, you're pretty much only some good trick to

suit this. So, now that he has the onion market pretty much controlled, he starts buying up onion futures and that's going to guarantee his huge paid eight down the line. So he also now to do that, he'll need to control all the other onion growers in America. So this is what he sets to do next. So November and December fifty Kasuga calls a meeting of his new de facto onion syndicate right, and he brings together with this consortion with growers and wholesalers, distributors, and he tells them

the plan. He informs that he wants to buy onions from all of them, right, and he'll set the price. He's like McDonald's with potatoes. He's like, this is the price. He's like, I'm I'm paying a dollar six d a bag. And they're like okay. And these are big time onion guys, right, so they can get prices. They feel they can set prices too. But they didn't buy onions by the bag.

They buy him by the train car, right. So that's nine hundred sixty dollars per train cars what he's saying essentially, right, So in this one train car, that's about six hundred fifty pound bags of onions. So there was another VISal when his deal that he presented to these guys, he's like, okay, you all have to agree not to bring any onions to market before the end of the trading season, which is in March. So that's the future trading season. So that means until at least the end of the March

of the next year. He has all these gathered men make their promise that they will allow him to buy up all their onions, so they're still making money, but then control the prices will drive up prices and then they can release them back onto the market. Everybody wins blah blah blah. Right, so what are people supposed to do for French onion soup for Christmas? New Year's Eve

blom and onions. They're they're they're they're doing it for the next year for fifty six people have un till March, right, yeah, so they're basically you're gonna have the huge surplus come out because right now all the harvest stuff everybody's called, well, they're they're basically living off the onions from earlier. Okay, so you wouldn't notice it until like Easter. That's when

you're exactly eastern good. Okay, when you when your family is sitting down for your Easter brunch at the outback steakhouse, you're like, the blooming onion is fifty dollars anyway, So so well they're doing this. Chicago Mercantile Exchange is getting rumors that there's a fluctuation onion prices start, people starting to notice it, and there's like the supplies dwindling, prices

are going up. Kassuga tells the growers, we've got this market under control, if you boys want to cooperate now, He's like basically telling we got it on lock, do not mess this up and try to go out there and make money right now because the prices are going up and everyone's like, okay, now, if you want to do some trading places money on your onions, which is what Cassuga wants to do, you buy futures contracts, right, So you tell an onion buyer, I'll make a contract

with you come September, I'll sell the bag onions for three dollars. Right, And if the price is four dollars for a bag of onions, you now lose a dollar on every bag because it's going up. The prices down to two dollars, you make a dollar on every bag on right. So that but if you can drive the price down, you can guarantee that you make your money. That's Kassuga's plan, right, He's gonna drive the price down,

even though right now he's driving it up. Right. So the onion cartels is not particularly enthused about all Kassuga's market eploys are. They're pretty decent guys, but he had them leverage because they're like, well, if he does this, I'll lose it. He could work this against me, so they're feared is turned against them. So now they let

him set the prices for the market. So Kasuga warns in the onion car tell members that if any of them choose not to go along with his market moves, well then he and seagull Quote would dump the onions on the market and decimate prices. Everybody's terrified, so this is gonna be a big tissue. So they're forced to play Kasuga's game. Everyone's going along with it, and they now have to purchase roughly all of the car loads that they can, and they're just putting them into cold storage.

They end up controlling eight and a half million pounds of onions. Oh my god, the onion guys exactly. So they start they just start stockpiling onions and warehouses, worrying about like how they smell going home to their wives, and prices keep climbing. The money there, there's just still making money. I can smell the Ksuga. So the Kasuga's onion car power, it's pan off big time right on. Prices continue. They're up to four dollars a bag, and

remember he started a dollar. So they're all happy with this. But they're all cooperating under the standing the agreement would remain secret if anybody speaks about it, this smoky back room deal, they'll all be busted. Right, This is totally illegal what they're doing. So the idea was to keep a secret. Now that's the idea, not the reality, right, right. So the thing about someone like Vince Kasugas, they never

know when enough is enough because there's never enough. As long as there is more for them, they want them more to right. So he would should have been happy making his long daddy money off market manipulations. But no, he wants to drive the price of onions up and then he wants to drive it back down. That's gonna take a lot of coordinated effort. So he pulls a double cross on the onion cartel because he's like, look, these guys are gonna be a problem for me, and

there's too many. He crossed the onion cartel. He only needed the onion cartel to help him drive the prices up. Is he he doesn't need their help to drop the prices down? Is he the el Choppo of the onion chop, the el chopped onions? So once he hasn't all the it's like purchasing stockpiled they're redundant. The other one I haven't thought this through, because they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna help roll in this together. What are you doing now he's got your onions. So he decides it's gonna

be soon time to release the onions. So New Year's Eve, the Onion Car tells, they told you controls nine gay percent of the onions and they are all in cold storage around Chicago. So Becasuga starts working the other deal, he starts deciding how he's going to short the price of onions. So he contacts a few people that he trusts in the Onion Car tell and he decides, like some angry god of gravity, this is how I'm gonna make the prices plummet. And they're like, okay, well we'll

lay it on me. So, because he had one other problem that all the onion growers no onions rot. This can only go for so long. They're doing it over the winter, so that really helps him because these onions are basically frozen in box cars in Chicago. But it's gonna get cold. It's like stop being cold in March when exactly right, and you don't want like train cars sitting in mud with stinking onions, right, So the onions.

They've been stored and there's like, you know, just car train car loads everywhere that you can imagine in the train yards, just filled with onions. So they realize some of them are starting to turn, so they they take the train cars and they move them out of Chicago and they send part of them to Iowa, and then

they have the people in Iowa repurpose them. So they take the onions and clean them up and rebag them, and you shoot and sell the ones that are sailable and then dish the other ones, and then they bring them back. The people in Chicago see more trainloads of onions coming and they're like, oh my god, there's even more onions. So the price goes down further. Onions. I bet you they took the mushy onions and made them into those reconstituted onion rings. Yeah, I think you're probably right.

They net them. They're all mushy onions. Oh yeah, the onion rings are all it's wasted onions like baby people. So they've got hundreds of box cars now sitting all around Chicago. The only thing left for Cassuga to do now is is to screw his partners in the onion cartel and and work post side. It's against the middle, the middle being him. So after this little break, I'll tell you how he's going to screw the Onion cartel,

screw him. Okay, so Elizabeth, last we left the story, Chicago was swamped with onions, just just rife with them, right, just onions in every train, heard, every box card. It's just there's nowhere for hobos to. People are walking down the street and they reach in their pocket for their keys, on falls out. So because you guys, I tell you he just needs a couple more weeks for his plan to hold together, and then he's going to screw his cartel members and then short the price and be the

only one to make big. But he does need a couple of them to help him out, because you know, he's feeling a little guilty and he's like, look, you guys, help me, like I like a couple of years. One of the co conspirators, this dude named Dave Slinger. So he contacts his boy, David Slinger, and he's like, hey, this is the plan. So Slinger tells us the other half of the phone call, and he tells us this in congressional testimony. So going from his congressional testimony. Along

about the twentieth of January, I had onions. I had my Indians all hedged, and I got rid of all of them, and I went on a ski trip and broke my leg and I was confined to the hospital in Walsaw. And along about the first February, I received a call from Mr Cassuga and he wanted me to call William Garring and suggest to him that we go short the market. I was completely dumbfounded because I thought

they were on the long side of the market. I do not know exactly what was said after he made that suggestion, but I was left with the impression that he had reversed his position, that he was shorting the market, and possibly his conscience was bothering him, and he wanted Gearing also to get in on the short side. I told him that I didn't think that. I thought that they were going to reverse their position and go short the market. The group should be called together and should

do it together. Now. Mr Cassuga answered that that would never do it, would wreck the market in a matter of minutes and would go down to fifty cents. That the only way to do it was to control it somewhat and only one person knows about it. I said, all right, I will call William Garring, and so I called him, and William Garring absolutely wouldn't have anything to do with it. He said, I won't do anything less all the group backs together. Don't think i'd call him

Mr Cassuga back. I believe that was the last conversation I had with him until some time in the summer. Doesn't that sound the congressional testimony. I don't even know the dude. I talked to him one time that if you like how they're like, if we're gonna short this, we're gonna short this together. Ex fact, they're screwing them together. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound together. So it turns out everyone was not as greedy as Cassuga was,

so he basically miscalculate it. He's like, yeah, we're all green heads guys, right, They're like, oh no, like no, we're onion buddies, and you're a bad guy exactly, because is like, well that's on y'all. I got God in a and a gun. I ain't gonna let that stop me. So come March, when the new trading season kicks off for the futures. Kassuga went ahead with his plan. He was like, well, I told him, they know what's happened.

So he hadn't worked out so hard to control all of the onions in America to miss out on a huge profit. So he and Siegel, they decided time to release the Strategic Reserve of onions. It immediately wreaked havoc on the market. On February one, totally, god, you caught that ninety six, the price of a March future for a fifty pound bag of onions was a dollar to

a dollar twenty five. That's on February one, right, Kasuga releases the Strategic Reserve of onions, and then on March tewod the price for a fifty pound bag was forty four cents. On March five, I'm sorry, it was about fifty cents. I'm March fifth and it falls to forty four cents and stays there. By March fifteenth, they had fallen to ten cents ten cents for a bag. He got up to four dollars to ten cents, and dollar

six was about what market price should be. He going around all the stores and where the price tag is he puts a little sticker of him pointing that says I did that. It's like the Cossuga special. But this was the lowest price ever recorded in the Chicago merke for fifty pounds onions. That's onions soup for everybody. Coincidentally, this was just in time for Cossuga's future contracts to

come do. That means the onions that he promised people to buy at whatever the price was March he was they were now worth a fraction of the price of what anybody would expect. So he comes in and has to buy up all the onions and he just turns him over to the market. He makes a fortune, so huge profits for Cossuga, none for the onion cartel except for you know, his buddy Siegell And uh yeah. So now the price for about go onions fell so low it fell below the cost of the bag. The onions

were sold bad. A fifty pound bag of onions cost twenty cents the bag. It was the fifty pounds of onions inside ten cents. So people were keeping the bag because it was more valuable. Like here it is dumped the onions right. Consia's former partners in the onion cartel. They lose fortunes, right because they're all holding up all they're waiting to sell their onions. They you know, so whatever they had not given him. So most of the

onion growers of America they also lose their shirts. They had been buoyed by the artificial prices, thinking all, this is gonna be a great season, so they're thinking of taking out loans, doing stuff. Then the prices suddenly drops into like a one week time So now that when the market craters, everyone's got all these worthless onions. A fifty pound bag of you know, that's now we're ten cents. That's about a four thousand percent fall in value. I

think I think it's four thousand percent. I'm not a commodities brooke. I don't know these things. But whatever it was, no one was prepared for it, no one but Vincent CoA. So this raised an interesting question, which is what do you do with all the excess onions that are now suddenly everywhere, like onions are essentially worthless and just plaguing Chicago. They're just everywhere. There's loading docks, train yards, produced warehouses jam packed with onions. The onion farmers in the area

are just giving up, dude. There was this cat up in Hollandale, Minnesota who was so disgusted with the state of onion markets he plowed under his whole field just in protest. He destroyed the whole crop, like the hell with this, like made a big scene and stink about it. He's like, I'm not wasting my time on some worthless onions. But still if you're not, If you can't plow under, what do you do? You go to bird's eye and you say, freeze them. Well, there's millions of metric tons

of useless onions that are on the market in Chicago. Elizabeth, to sort through this, I'd like you to do me a favorite. Close your eyes and picture it. You are the head nun in charge of a Catholic orphanage on the South side of Chicago. As the mother's superior, you could send one of the novices out to get groceries and around errands, but you like to keep a spirit of human so at the orphanage you insist everyone takes a turn getting the groceries and running errand today is

your turn. You head out into the Chicago streets a stiff cold breeze rushes past you. You clutch your bags to your side to brace against the winter winds. After a short johnt you catch a street car and head to the local market. At your local market, you discover something odd is happening. The green grocer is standing outside the store. Next to him is a pyramidal pile of bags of onions, and he's practically begging people to buy

a bag. When you pass them, he shouts, hey, sister, if you buy a dozen eggs, will throwing a bag of onions for free for the kids. If he knows you've got the orphanage. The same is you already have all the eggs and onions you need, you bottom ahead of time because you know the kids are gonna want them. You're like, oh, these prices are amazing. After you do your shopping, you plan to head down to the cobbler to check on some shoes that you had a novice

drop off. You want the kids to have some fresh sold shoes when they put their winter shoes away at the end of the season. Spring is arriving fast. It's mid March, and you can practically smell the coming blossom. You think to yourself. The poet Pablo and Neruda would be beside himself, I think, and with onions. So as you walk past the gas station, you hear the owner of the station calling out to people like a carnival barker. He shouts, you fill up your tank, I'll throw one

a freight bag onions. Like, shake your head and wonder if you missed a new bulletin what's up with all the onions? As you watch some kids throwing them into the Chicago River just like Duncan. Later on, on your way back home, you top on the street car. You pass by where the stockyards run off to the distance, and you see a flatbed truck loaded down with onions. It's backs into a feed lot. The stockyard guys begin to toss the bags of onions into the hog pens, right,

but they're careful to keep the bags. The bags are baptable. But there that's the most valuable part of this operation. And you wonder if this onion diet will result in a more savory hand. Probably. I mean, think about all the hogs that eat like wild like the acorns and stuff. Oh yeah in France. Yeah, so you're about that life,

you know, you're like, that's gonna be some delicious asshog. Yep, I'm just like licking my lips looking at them pigs and their own films, which you're also wondering, where are all these onions coming from? Chicago is getting back to its roots? So how much was all this market manipulation worth to Cassuga? Now these guys all of Chicago, right,

he make how much did he make? Well, all told said and done, he pocketed about eight point five million from his great onion scams, and that's about nine million off of onion future. Now when you make that kind of money off of market manipulation, and there's evidence of what you did because you called together an onion cartel and you decided to betray those same men and bankrupt some of them buddies. Yeah, well, some of them are going to sue you. That's just what they're kind of do,

which is what happened to Kassuga. But if you can believe it, Cassuga is like, the hell with that, I'm suing you for breaking breach of contrast to everybody. So Kasuga's lawsuit is going. Oh, he winds his way through the courts. The lower courts affirm cassuga side of the lawsuit, the defendant appeals, the case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has to decide

the onion futures case. In a nineteen nine the Supreme Court, here's the Cassuga onion cartel lawsuit, and in January they sided in favor of Cassuga. That's just some good capitalism. So but that's not the end of the story, because before the Supreme Court decided to take Cassugas back in the in the cartel lawsuit, a future American president got mixed up in the onion mess. Can you guess which one? I'll give you a hint, Michigan. I don't give another hint.

Not Nixon, Enter future president Gerald Ford, the congressman at the time from Michigan. We always forget about for I did, and it's right there for again, and yeah, you know, we're just always gabbing about that. And it's like every time I walk into the headquarters or read our stitching bitch sitting there, I'm like, let's just list the presidents and then you go and then we forget. We skipped,

we're missing we skip poke again. Now forward. He's like from a place where there's a ton of onion farmers, and he's a young congressman, so he's gonna do the business of the people. So Forod gets in there and he's got all these angry Michigan onion farmers on his line, and he's like, damn it, you can't bankrupt and nearly bust all these good farmers. And so he goes after Kassuga the market manipulations. He goes to Florida Congress. He drops some fresh legislation. He's like, look at this, and

it's there. It is the Onion Futures Act. It's gonna be a bill he proposes to protect onion growers from the greed heads like Vincent Kasuga, the congressman forward. He puts to forward his bill to make all these type of market antics illegal. And the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. Yeah, I know, he made us look bad. He busted a lot of people. But that's anti capitalism. So they fight against it. They're like, they file a

lawsuit trying to block it. They alleged that this will restrict free trade. So it's the same line you always hear, which was total horse pucky. But anyway, the Onion Future Is Act. It made a lot of good market sense, and so the bill gets brought to the floor, it gets voted on, it passes presidents, and Howard signs it into law. And the onion farmers were like, yeah, we like ike. Yeah, well, I mean it's like you have

that we like well, you know, because it's anyway. They they say, it's going to get in the way of free trade. Suga is getting in the way. He is free trade. That's what free trade looks like. The Onion Future Is Acting makes it illegal to sell a futures contract on a load of onions anywhere in America. Right, So that same yere N six, the Commodities Exchange Authority, it brings an action against Cassuga and his business partner Siegel.

The complain alleges that the two men had conspired quote with a group of other persons connected with growing up or trading onions and actions allegedly designed to increase or to prevent a decrease in the price on the mercantile exchange. Basically, they conspired against everybody because Soga being the plane crashing, market manipulating spark plug of a man you know who's cool with the and Ability club. He's like, I'll fight

you all. So he goes and he hires a fanciast lawyer, and he fights the case, all of the cases, any cases, right, And he cites the uncertainty of whether he says, this is the nature of farming. Crops fail. What are you looking at me for? I think this is my fault. Sometimes crops are bountiful, sometimes they're not. All I did was make big money on market dynamics. He even says, and I quote, if it's against the law and make money in the United States, then I'm guilty. WHOA I

told you guys, he's got back bumped. So yes, sir, I would say, you are, you are guilty. But he you know, since he's now stolen essentially ninety millions or siney something million dollars about ninety four from small farmers and other distributors and wholesalers, you know, this is like stealing toilet paper from Walgreen. So the cops don't go after him. No, nothing happened to this dude. He doesn't

go to jail. True to the nature of justice in America, and according to the American law and Ordercausuga is able to essentially steal ninety four million dollars from small farmers and all these other people, and all us to do is just hire some lawyers to fight a couple of cases in court, goes at the Supreme Court and they're like, yeah, give him the big thumbs up, and nothing happens. The Commodities Exchange Authority they bring a lawsuit against Cassuga. They're like, well,

maybe our lawsuit will work. Nope. C A loses in court to court ruled that c A what had failed to show Kassuga attempted to manipulate upward prices of November futures on the Chicago American Dollar Exchange and prices of Bunion cash. Blah blah blah, what how they had receipts had to do like, you know, get anybody to say it. Everyone knew what he did. It has been an open secret, but they couldn't prove it in the courts, Like we don't care. If that's the facts, you gotta prove it,

Like this sucks. But Kassuga is like, yeah, that's why I pay for the good lawyers, and so he has to pay. Eventually, a very small price for this injustice, he loses his license to trade commodities for a whole ten months, slap on the wrist concent and then he has to pay a modest fine. And that was that. He never spended hand jail, never had any real consequences. He pulls off the biggest scam in American farming history and is padded on the back by the Supreme Court. Then,

in America, the message has always been the same. If you're gonna steal, steal big. It's just the thing, right And by the way, the Gerald Ford Onion Futures Act, that's still a law, and it gets cited as precedent law. In two thousand and ten, motion picture box office receipts were added to the Onion Futures Act, making it illegal to speculate on future box office earning because people are

starting to do that. Yeah. And then in the next year, two thousand and eleven, that's when the Chicago Mercan Dogs Change stopped selling pork billy futures because they're like, look, we just want to get off this whole yeah. Yeah, so you know, but it's not illegal to sell a pork belly future. It is illegal to sell an onion future all thanks to Vincent Cassuga. Right so, and also you know Gerald Ford, So thank you Gerald Ford. Well, he's gotta gotta fun to me. It's always funny. Gerald Ford.

The dude pardon Nicks. And he fell down the steps of Air Force one a bunch, and he made onion futures illegal. That's quite a legacy, just I'm telling you, Kick Rocks Coolidge. All right, Well, one final interesting twist for you, because Suga went back to futures trading after all this once he got his license back after the ten months in the like you know, the penalty box, and he primarily focused on pork belly futures and potatoes at that point and eventually went back to farming and

commodities broken. But he also did something kind of fun in the sixties. He built an inn in Pine Island, New York. He named his place the Jolly Onion in just to screw with people. And then he was the chef of the restaurant and he ran the spot for years and he even had like, you know, like a really great sweet onion soup recipe that they still sell. So he sold the restaurant. The restaurants still open. So if you're out there in Pine Island you want to

go check in hit the tastes like scams. What is your ridiculous takeaway? My ridiculous take boy, thank you for asking the first time so quickly. I don't have one. Okay, so what's your ridiculous take Okay? Now my ridiculous takeaways the same thing as from the beginning. Capitalism is some bow. My ridiculous takeaway is God, I love French onion soup. That's ridiculousulous. Well, you know, thanks for listening. This was the Vincent Kassuga onion scam. You know, folks, you can

find us online at Twitter, in Instagram. If you want to bother, you to connect with us, you know, maybe like get cozy and comfortable and talk about life. Hit us up. You can also email us share with us anything of your thoughts, your feelings, your observations. We're here for you, folks. That's all we got for you. Thanks

for listening. Ridiculos dryings listed by Elizabeth Dunton and Zarin Burnett, producing did by by davea Onion Cousting researches by Marissa Walla Walla Sweet Onion Brown and Andrea song Sharp and Tears in My Eyes From All of the Onions. Our theme songs by Thomas Onion chut Lee and Travis Spring Onion Dotton. Executive produces are Ben A Fresh Bowling of Fresh Onion Soup and No Gotta Get the Onion Rings at the Varsity Brown Quiet Say It One More Time.

We Dequeous Crew. Ridiculous Crime is a production of I Heart Radio. Four more podcasts to my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.