Ep 5: Up All Night to Get lucky

Novel. Before we begin, a content warning the following episode contains difficult themes and violence.

The young and able lawyer Thomas E. Dewey appointed special prosecutor to clean out the city's racketeers.

That's the Dowey.

You have been given the most difficult task, but the opportunity of helping the people of this city.

In the late thirties, the Republican Party produces a promotional film. It opens on a man, dark slick hair and a carefully groomed and distinct mustache, talks into a heavy telephone. According to the no nonsense voiceover, this is Thomas E.

Dewey.

An office full of workers at their desks enters frame arranged in neat lines like a classroom. They're all white men in suits, their hair shiny with palmade. They're busy going through paperwork, hard at their respective tasks for the day.

Dewey's small, hand picked staff began its attack on the underworld by perroting out secret records and getting the frightened victims of the rackets to talk.

The back of a witness's head appears.

The man at the next is the man who hit my husband on the head with a pipe. The man directly behind him is the man who's threatened to beat me and cut my hands off.

This film is a re enactment of Dewey's investigation into organized crime. Watching these films, you clearly see Dewey as a man dedicated to showmanship, a man already deeply enamored with the creation of his own legacy. Unfortunately, Dewey's hypnotizing baritone can't cover his stilted acting.

The cops who did that job work day.

And night for a year.

They're entitled to a promotion, and I think they ought to happen.

Maybe it's a good thing he went into.

Law a mistakenly accumulating evidence. Dewey and his men, working with city police, begin building up that cases.

Only it wasn't just Dewey and his men responsible for the investigation. There was one person, one woman in particular, who was really the mastermind. And for just a moment so quick you may not even notice, I see her. While Dewey holds court, face always clear. She sits at a table with her back to the camera. Eunice hunting Carter Good is a seat at the table when no one acknowledges that you built the table from the teams

When you just got off the elevator, I think she would have seen a buzz of activity, but it was pretty low key. There was this air of secrecy about it. I mean there had to be. Dewey did not want people to know where they were what they were doing.

From the plain closed police officers patrolling the building's lobby to the telephone equipment secured against illegal tapping. There are tamper proof file cabinets tucked inside a bank vault. Venetian blinds keep people from spying. It's October nineteen thirty five and a special prosecution is underway. Dewey has a hand picked team of twenty attorneys plus investigators clerks, assistants, stenographers, and a select group of NYPD officers, and of course

There were a lot of people in Harlem who were like, no, I'm not going to talk to Thomas Dewey and his other nineteen white male prosecutors about this. Like I'm fine, we can handle this in our own community.

Access to that community is crucial to Dewey in these first few months of his team's investigation, because they are targeting the numbers racket and at its head the wild, reckless mobster associate of Lucky Luciano's Dutch Schultz.

Who would come in and take in control of the Harlem numbers racket. Essentially strong armed a number of black men and women in Harlem who'd run their own numbers games.

Dutch is still battling with numbers running Queen Stephanie Saint Clair. Dutch is a figurehead of Dewey's crusade against organized crime. His plan use one high profile mobster as the focus, build him up in the press as the root of all evil, then quickly take him down. Of course, that only works if Dewey gets his target and fast. Dutch is all too aware of this renewed heat on him, so Dutch creates his own plan.

Hey, we need to kill Tomus Dewey.

But someone unexpected as watching Dewey's back.

Dutch Schultz went to Lucky Luciano and said, hey, we need to get rid of him because he's trying to get rid of us.

And Lucky gives Dutch a response that will alter the course of his life.

Lucky Luciano said, no, we will not kill do it because if we do that, then they'll really be after us. Dutch Schultz did not listen. He hired a hitman.

One morning, October twenty fourth, nineteen thirty five, As Eunice weaves her way across the bustling office to get to her desk. The clanging sounds of phones ringing is even more urgent and NonStop than ever before. There is a shocking development in the mob world.

Unfortunately for dut Schultzer was Dutch Schultz who got assassinated.

Schultz's death was a huge blow for Dewey, Eunice and Dewey's investigation into Dutch Schultz has hit a sudden dead end.

Literally difficult to imagine just how much of a like, oh crap moment they had because they were building their whole case on taking down Schultz.

Dewey needs a new public enemy number one, and it has to be someone even more high profile than Dutch. Because Dewey has wasted a lot of time and money on the Dutch false start. He needs results and soon. There is, of course, only one person who really fits the bill as Dutch's replacement.

The new unofficial boss of bosses.

There is a new muck shot from that heroin in a hat box drug dealing charge a few decades ago that Dewey pens on the courtboard in that fourteenth floor office.

Dewey coughed out a prosecution against Charles Lucky Luciano. That would garner a great deal of publicity, even in a jaded city.

Like New York. But what about Eunice, a rookie prosecutor who's been selected for her a special knowledge about Harlem and Dutch Schultz. What does she bring to the table now?

Thomas Dewey needs to figure out something to do with her. He puts her on sort of this dead end project, a.

Beat no one particularly wants.

Carter is primarily tasked with talking to every member of the New York community who comes in and has a complete about prostitution.

And it turns out one thing New Yorkers want to talk about is prostitution.

It's really easy to say this is sexism or this is racism. But I also think that Dewey knew that they needed a woman to talk to people average regular New Yorkers who walk into the office every single day complaining about disorderly houses, as they're often referred to at the time period. I do think that Dewey respected her enough to know, Hey, you know this stuff, Let's see if you can make anything out of it. And she did.

During the fall and into winter of nineteen thirty five, when citizens entered the Woolworth Building they received directions to. Unice is listening to these complaints and the resultant paperwork, supposed to be gruntwork for unis, something to keep her precious little black female mind occupied while the big boys

She hears about Louis Wiener. Everyone pretty much knew this guy was a booker for the Brothels.

Eunice recognizes this name from her time at the Women's Court. Other familiar names keep appearing.

People talk about Abe carp who is one of these attorneys who she remembers from her time on Women's Court.

This is a lawyer whose name appeared to be all over the booking forms of the sex workers who managed to avoid successful prosecution.

Carter starts piecing together all this information in.

The women's courts where they prosecute prostitution cases, Eunice Carter had seen a pattern of corruption that led her to believe that the world of New York prostitution had been infiltrated by the mob.

Uni suspects. She's onto something, but she needs more proof. The caared colleagues down the hall might be able to get away with hunches and wild goose chases, but she knows she needs irrefutable evidence. She heads to the Women's Court archives to try to tie together more threads.

Her Forte was going through documents and patient so when she was in the Women's Court, in the prosecutor's office, many of the cases involved prostitution, and so she's going through these records, she's processing them.

She's also reading through her old caseload when she was at the Women's court and trying to figure out how many times certain names come up, how many times certain alibis come up? How many times does she see the exact same monetary figures being discussed.

She just starts every once in a while finding the name of an attorney that isn't expensive attorney. There's two or three of these. After going through hundreds of these, she must have gotten to the point where she's thinking, there's no way these prostitutes could afford these attorneys. She brings this up to another person on the team, What do you think of this? I think she was thinking,

Unice keeps listening to the citizen complaints as they roll in. She keeps squinting through chicken scratch and blurring ink. Everything was handwritten or types on a typewriter then no pocket sized devices with screens you can double tap to zoom in. Unice is probably way down with file folders of complaints, pens,

Painstaking, painstaking work.

But slowly the beginnings of a promising case have begun to develop.

She brought that suspicion to Thomas Dewey and said, this is an area where maybe we can focus our investigation.

She probably knows every response Dewey's team could use to discredit her idea to focus on VIIs It's just a bunch of crazies, just a bunch of women. How can we trust these prostitutes who are probably just trying to get lesser charges. This is small time stuff compared to the big mob guys. But she knows differently. Some men need cameras and a spotlight to fail up in life, and some women need the trust of their fellow citizens

We're not going to charge you with murder, even though Luciano murdered a lot of people, not even tax evasion. We don't have the numbers, but we can go after prostitution.

Dewey was initially very skeptical.

Dewey says, no, come on, First of all, the mob's not involved in prostitution. And second, Dewey, very public relations minded, said I'm not going after a bunch of poor, penniless prostitutes in a mob case.

Forget it.

Eunice does not forget it. This is not the first time her hard work has been dismissed. If she accepted a no every time someone questioned her, she wouldn't have even made it to Dewey's team in the first place. Ambition doesn't believe in rejection. That's just a detour. Eunice knows she's onto something, so she keeps working the leads and keeps finding undeniable patterns.

She goes back to her friend on the team and said, there's got to be something here. I just think there is.

Murray Gerfine is one of Yunus's colleagues. Maybe he's a work friend. As a Jewish Man, he probably also knows what it's like to have to prove himself constantly, and maybe Eunice realizes she'll need the support of at least one man to get Dewey to listen to her. Two outsiders, one black woman, one Jewish man working together are better than one, and, as too many working women know, sometimes you have to get a man to repeat exactly what you've just said to get other men to listen.

The two of them persuaded Dewey. I mean, they had to go back to Dewey a couple times, and Dewey finally said, Okay, maybe there's something here.

But Dewey wants even more evidence, because even if sex work is connected to the mob, how does that help tie it to their specific high profile investigation. Well, Eunice has an answer for that too.

She gets his permission to start wire tapping to piece together who these people are, what they know, who works for whom, and try to figure out who is.

At the top.

Because Luciano, unlike those more high profile flamboyant Irish and Jewish mobsters of that era, he was surrounded by this cone of silence.

But this isn't a case of tapping a few phones of a few gangsters. This is going to require extensive wire tapping, and in nineteen thirties New York that means something a little more complicated than calling up a phone company with a warrant.

Dewey ordered Eunice Carter and another man on the team, Murray Gurfind to essentially create a list of dozens of people that they wanted to wire tap, and.

Then they have to physically get hardware onto all these people's phone lines across New York. Sometimes detectives pay or strong arm telephone repairman to go into buildings and play small microphones into mouthpieces, or replace old phones with newer ones with Mike's already installed.

They wiretapped incredibly liberally.

They kick off by wiretapping the bookers and bondsman's offices of New York, but soon they're intercepting calls from offices of mob members too. If there's a phone there, it's not safe.

Wire tapping laws in the nineteen twenties and thirties were still very much up in the air, and in New York wiretapping laws are a lot looser than in most of the rest of the country. They took a lot of connections through these telephone conversations, thousands of hours of wiretaps that Unice Carter and the rest of the team had to sift through in order to do this.

And as they do, Unice and the team discover more evidence that unice is suspicions might be correct.

New York prostitution was in the process of being organized by organized crime.

They're able to tie sex work to the.

Mob one man named Little Baby Pattillo and one man named Tommy the Bull Pinocchio.

You might recognize that last name as one of the Mott Street Boys.

The suspicion was Little Davy and Tommy the Bull were working for Lucky Luciano, that there was a sole cadrey of middlemen who were running prostitution and victimizing the prostitutes and the madams in New York City.

Unis may have felt like they were right on the edge of the big breakthrough. Here are direct links to the team's big target, Lucky Luciano.

What she realized is that the gangsters were very vulnerable on this. Not only was prostitution illegal, but the whole story of prostitution was fairly brutal and it had such tabloid qualities to it.

After months of building all of this up, they finally talk Dewey into a raid.

The team begins planning in operation that will go down in history. This isn't going to be the usual kind of raid cops running into a single location and arresting a handful of people. No, this is something much bigger.

There's so much going on. It is madness. It is chaos.

On the night of February first, nineteen thirty six, Eunice Carter arrives yet again on the fourteenth floor of the Woolworth Building. She may have been used to all the commotion on the floor, but nothing could prepare her for the scene she sees that night.

Literally, there would have been people just all over floors, benches, private rooms, not private rooms, everyone just sort of working feverishly. No one's got a laptop. In nineteen thirty six, twenty stenographers are working around the clock with their giant legal pads and their pencils, with their little notebooks. You've got people who've brought their typewriters in with them, feverishly taking notes of their statements through the night and the early morning.

It is chaos for once. The office is also full of other women, eighty eight of them in total, most of them sex work madams.

And many of these women have been arrested in the middle of a transaction, and so some of them are wearing coats, and some of them are not wearing coats, and some of them have on thousand dollars furs.

As Eunice stands in that room, absorbing the chaos, I wonder if she can tell that this case will be the one she'd be remembered for. I wonder if she felt proud of herself, if she thought she'd finally be recognized for her hard work. All of that night's madness starts at precisely eight fifty five PM.

This is coordinated to the minute.

One hundred and sixty plain clothes policemen from across New York gathered together in Manhattan. The cops are divided so that they're working with colleagues they've never worked with before.

One would be on West fifty seventh Street, one would be on each It's thirty six. I mean they would just all over the place.

They're split into teams of two and three. Each team is given an envelope.

With their dress audit, and exactly five minutes of nine, they all opened their envelopes and read the instructions inside.

These instructions dispatch the cops to top secret locations across the city, like something out of a modern day reality game show. None of them know what they're getting into until they open the envelope.

The instructions said, go to this address and arrest everybody inside and bring them to the Woolworth Building.

The police look at each other. This is clearly an operation like no other.

They want to make sure that when they are arresting, they are not just taking women out of brothels. They want women across the city caught in the act.

At nine pm, cops set off. Once they reach their locations, they start kicking down doors as they pour up stoops and staircases and into apartment buildings across New York. They emerge with men, but mostly women, in handcuffs. It's quickly apparent the element of surprise has been a success.

Best we can tell, they do wind up arresting about one hundred and ten people. Those individuals are later detained. The other like twenty or so are mostly John's. They couldn't care less. These guys are not going to help them get to Luciano, so they let them go.

Eighty eight arrests all together. It was a pretty wild night, even for a city like New York.

And now back at the Woolworth Building, as Eunice and Dewey survey the scene before them, they're already contemplating the next mammoth task ahead.

The idea was they were going to arrest the madams and the prostitutes and hold them as material witnesses and force them to give testimony against the middle management types Patio and Pinocchio, and ultimately force them to flip and implicate Lucky. Luciana was the head of prostitution in New York.

Getting sex workers to snitch is no small feat because they've become used to a specific type of mob protection from law enforcement.

The women were used to being arrested. They all had been arrested dozens of times, so they assumed it was business as usual. They weren't going to cooperate. They wouldn't give their real names. They were blowing the prosecutors off.

A fair chunk of their earnings goes to the Mob for occasions just like this. That had been the promise of the mob's move into sex work. You pay us, we'll protect you, will bail you out, We'll set you up with some of the best representation the justice system has to offer. The women wait and wait and wait. No one seems to be coming.

The men who normally got them out were no longer there, and they realized, oh, something difference going on.

That's because the night before there had been another round of secret.

Arrests sixteen men on January thirty first, nineteen thirty six.

The operation had been very discreet, and now as minutes turned to hours in the holding cells, the mob guaranteed bookers and lawyers who usually come to bail out the women are a no show, and the women realize nobody is coming to help this time. So a new chapter of Unice's work begins, because now she and the rest of Dewey's team have to figure out how much these women know and how they might be connected to Lucky Luciano.

The prostitution racket is so tricky because there's women who are both madams and prostitutes, and then also wives of bookers. Maybe they have a relationship with Luciano, but maybe they don't have a relationship with Luciano.

The longer it takes to get their ducks in a row, the more time the mob has to regroup, reorganize, and hide.

People like Unice Carter start personally interviewing these women almost immediately. She is working around the clock.

Those in custody don't get any sleep that night either, which may have been a deliberate ploy.

They were doing everything they can to just get as much information as quickly as possible.

Intentional sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture today. Unis probably justifies this part of the operation as for the greater good or even just for a personal win. Could she have done anything about it anyway once the ball was rolling In the end, these considerations don't matter because none of the sex workers talk.

So what happened was do we called a special judge to come down to the Woolworth Building on Sunday and he arranged all eighty seven prostitutes and madams as material witnesses on bonds ranging from ten thousand dollars to twenty five thousand dollars and today's dollars, ten thousand dollars is like one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Okay, no way these women could have come up with what amounts to one hundred and eighty thousand dollars each to get out

For months, for months without conviction are even a try. After the raids on the brothels, as the days stretch into weeks and into months, Unice essentially starts working her way into the minds of these women. She's now at the center of the investigation, talking constantly to the women and eventually establishing relationships with them. Some of these women become cooperating witnesses.

She knew how smart women could be.

She knew how much knowledge of their own that they had that other people wouldn't have, and that is really what made her so valuable both to starting the investigation and continuing the investigation.

Unice knows from firsthand experience how often women are overlooked in rooms with men, how men will talk and share secrets as if women are just pieces of furniture, and yet she's exploiting that knowledge for her boss, a man who wouldn't take her seriously until she had another man to back up all the horror work she'd put into this case.

Many of the women were in pretty bad shape when they were picked up. A lot of these girls were drug addicts.

Certainly, in the first three or four hours, this is less of a concern.

But as those hours stretch into day's the withdrawal symptoms become agonizing.

They were strung out, they were addicts.

They would have to suffer a cold turkey cure on the floor of a jail cell.

They held that over their heads.

All right, you want a hospital, sweetheart, or you want a jail cell.

Which is it.

If you want a hospital, we can do that for you, but you got to talk.

Finally, the women start telling Yunis what she wants to hear, including a very specific name.

So now it was.

Time to find out how many times they had heard Charlie Lucky referred.

To in conversation. That was what they built their casaw.

So while these revelations were being recorded, a case was being built against Charles Lucky Luciano.

But if Eunice and Dewey think they'll be seeing Lucky in handcuffs anytime soon. They're out of luck. Lucky is nowhere to be found. The train from New York to Hot Springs, Arkansas, takes thirty five hours at a minimum. As you arrive in town, one of the first things you notice, despite the lingering hold of winter nineteen thirty six, it's just how many people there are out in the streets.

Just packed with people, constantly packed with people year round. You'd walk from the train station, which is about four blocks from here to the National Park, and you'd walk down Central Avenue, where there were twenty two hotels, a lot of casinos. All the bath houses are open, either doing baths or as bed and breakfasts. There's a brewery where they brew beer from the thermal water. Even during prohibition, because we had a hell of a moonshine industry.

Here, this small town is booming.

The New York Times called it America's first resort because people could come here. They could fish, they could swim, they could hike and drink, they could gamble. Prostitution industry grew here. It was a man's world back then.

In nineteen thirty six. Hot Springs, Arkansas is a must see destination for a particular type of traveler.

One hundred thousand people coming here to take bats. That was really the main attraction, even for the mob to begin with.

That's right, Hot Springs isn't just a spa town. It's a mafia town.

There were a lot of underworld characters that were cooling off in Hot Springs.

What a brochure slogan that is. They're everywhere in the bars, brothels, and casinos or just casually strolling down main Street and their unmistakable wide pinstripes and double lapels. But the people of Hot Springs don't seem to mind them.

If you need to take somemar and r off of what you've been doing and you don't want to get killed doing it, you come to Hot Springs. Nobody bothered them. Everybody talked to them. Hey, you're lucky at Luciano, how are you? I mean, they were gentlemen, they were dressed nice, they had a lot of money, they were super polite, big tippers. You know, who's going to start trouble with the mob? You know in the middle of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

You know, the old Rolling Stones lyric every cop is a criminal. That was especially true in the nineteen thirties and in Hot Spring, Arkansas, because it was known as a cooling off area where if they paid enough money, they could be protected, and.

The club of infamous gangsters taking advantage of this gets an update in March nineteen thirty six when Lucky Luciano also starts calling the town home. Ever since those February raids on brothels across Manhattan. Feeling the net closing in, he swaps the murky waters of New York for the healing waters of Hot Springs. During that spring of nineteen thirty six, two unfortunate New York burglars break the Hot Springs etiquette, and so.

The Hot Springs police farmer called a couple of New York cops to come down and pick up a couple of New York burglars who they captured here.

While they were here.

They were walking around like everybody else, and they spotted Luciana walking on the promenade and they said, Lucky, the Holy East Coast is looking for you.

He said what for?

And he told him compulsory prostitution, and he just laughed. He said I can't believe that, but anyway, I appreciate you telling me.

So.

Of course, the policeman that spotted him here, when he got back to New York with his prisoner, he said, you know, I saw a Lucky Luciano down there. They said what he said, Yeah, he's walking down the promenade and he's fixing to go take a bath.

So that up you know who Thomas Dewey back in New York, who was waiting to complete his mission.

He got on the phones and he started calling and send the telegrams and raising hell, arrest Lucky and bring him back to New York.

Unfortunately, for Dewey, it isn't quite that simple. He's paid his fees to the cops.

They were more interested in protecting Luccello than they were in cooperating with Dewey.

After several days, the governor of Arkansas calls Hot Springs and kicks the sheriff into action. The sheriff brings Lucky in on a traffic violation.

They were forced to go pick him up. They spent a few hours over at the Garland County jail. He had an open door policy at the jail. You can come and go if you want to go get some sandwiches or something, that's fine.

But his lawyers in Hot Springs get in touch with his lawyers up in New York, and before long Lucky gets a bailed out.

Arkansas really wasn't going to make a mood take him anywhere.

So the governor intervenes again, this time with a little more aggression.

A governor in Arkansas sent twenty armed state troopers to Hot Springs to take Luciannol physically from Hot Springs to Little Rock.

From there, he's extradited back to New York with an armed escort. After all the hullabaloo, no one wants to be the one accused of letting Lucky Luciano get away. The train line back to New York is uneventful. The cops keep Lucky handcuffed between them at all times. When he arrives in New.

York, Junice Carter was there ready for him.

On April eighth, nineteen thirty six, Lucky's indicted for ninety counts of compulsory prostitution. The judge sets his bond at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At the time, it's the largest bond in New York history.

That's about almost eight million in today's dollars.

Lucky doesn't pay it. So while sitting in his jail cell he has the chance to read his arrest warrant, he notices a significant detail. Lucky isn't going to be tried alone. Twelve of his associates are being indicted alongside him.

Having everybody tried unto one indictment. That was called the joins Ohlua. That was pretty revolutionary for its time, and it was a sneaky trick that prosecutors used to lump all these defendants onto one category.

Behind the scenes, Dewey has been lobbying for a new law. As they'd built the case against Lucky, he realized how hard it would be to link the mob's top bosses to the actions of their lieutenants and middlemen, and so he's been trying to find a way to get them all in court together back him up. They put the law into effect at breakneck speed.

That law actually passed like days before the Luciano trial.

The rules of the game have changed. Find one guilty, and you find them all guilty. This law is a big deal, a huge deal. In fact, it's a precursor to the Rico Law or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. The Rico Law is still in use today and has been used against all kinds of people and companies, from John Gottie to Donald Trump to Shean fashion company.

The guilt of innocence of one was the same as the guilt or innocence of another.

It becomes known as the Dewey Law. Dewey is determined not to let Lucky slip through the cracks of the judicial system, even if it means he has to seal them himself.

At that point, he knew he was toast.

After months of painstaking work of morally dubious evidence, collection, of office politics, and lobbying, Unice's master plan is about to bring New York's most powerful gangster into the courtroom. Will it pay off? Lucky and Eunice were set on different trajectories the minute they arrived in New York in nineteen oh six, and now, with Thomas Dewey between them.

Their lives intersect in a courtroom for one month in nineteen thirty six.

That's coming up on episode six of The Godmother. You've been listening to.

I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of journalism at Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including one of Eunice Hunting Carter.

I am Claire White, and I am the director of Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.

My name is doctor Clarissa Myriek Harris, and I am a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an emerathus Professor of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Why my name is Ellen Olson.

I research and I write books about women who were involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.

My name is Chuck Greeves. Before becoming a writer, I spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer. My fourth novel was basically a fictionalization of the famous nineteen thirty six vice trial, in which Luckily China was prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.

I'm Debbie aple Gate.

I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler, Icon of the jazz age.

Robert Raines, author of Hot Springs from Capone to Costello, Executive director of the Gaigster Museum of America, located in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid. Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zianna Yusuf. Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is Zianna Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is