Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.

Zaren.

Yes, Elizabeth Zaren, How are you?

Oh my goodness, I've been waiting for you.

You're feeling good, feeling strong.

Really I was late today, but feeling good.

I am feeling good.

I'm feeling strong.

What about you?

You're feeling strong?

You know I feel good.

It's not strong.

Maybe maybe get back in the gym or doing push up body weight exercise.

It's true.

Are you talking more like emotionally emotional?

I think just across the board, I'm feeling that glay.

For glay real.

Yeah, that's tough.

Anyway, you know, it's ridiculous.

I'm so glad you asked John Gruden.

Okay, you could say you, I could just say period.

But former the former Raiders coach of You're not your Raiders, but the Oakland now Vegas Raiders, Dave's producer D's Raiders good call, and then also the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as well.

Sure, Now he wants to share the story about Peyton Manning forty two Blue.

Now, he was known to do a call a lot of audibles at the line.

Right, So he's a quarterback, He's sitting there and he would call an audiblely like oha, oh maha, right, oh right, but he wouldn't only just say omaha when he called audibles.

According to John Gruden, who said this story, he would often like do research on the opposing players and he'd find out like their wives' names, their girlfriend's names, like whatever.

Would we would work to get in their heads.

And so he get up there and be like, Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn.

Someone's like, what the about my wife?

Cold blooded?

And I love it.

I thought you would someone be like, hey, man, that's my wife.

Brother.

So people get real mad and like and Peyton would just kind of wink and then hike the ball.

So there.

I thought that was kind of ridiculous, psychological war.

He's too blues, right, Yeah, I love that, and I think he should have just like done like street addresses children.

Yeah that was good.

But do you want to know what else is ridiculous?

Hiding behind dolls?

I don't know.

This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers.

Heis and cons it's always ninety nine percent murder free and one hundred percent ridiculous.

Damn right, you know that.

I love puzzles yeah, yeah, you definitely you do.

I love codes, yeah.

Big on cryptograms.

There's one in the San Francisco Chronicle called crypto Quip that I always used to play.

Huh.

It was like for a while that was the only reason I still had my subscription.

But I like puzzles like that, like basically all of the New York Times games.

Yes, they relax me.

I've seen you play those in the.

HV challenge me.

And they also helped me fight the crazy brain fog that I've developed.

I do that for Jeopardy to keep then to keep sharp.

Baby.

I may not be able to remember the word that I want to use during the day, but every morning as I lie in bed, I am sharp as a tex at wordle connections, strands, pips and spelling bee.

Well, you do a bunch.

I have to play them in that order.

Wow, you have to play them.

I have to anyway.

Codes.

So there's a British TV show, Bletchley Circle that I highly recommend.

It's about the World War Two code breakers working the Enigma machine, break the Nazi.

Yeah, and a bunch of gals, lady code breakers.

This lady host likes lady code breakers.

I will never get over being called the lady host, which has happened twice.

Now I've never been called the gentleman host.

So I can see what instances.

I think they were both reviews, they give your name Zarin and the lady host.

Oh really, I didn't even notice that.

Oh yeah, I have a name and it's Vagina corn Tower.

Yeah, respect name anyway.

Codes.

So this is what I planned to babble at you about to name please, a woman who used codes and a woman who broke them, and how they intersect.

Oh, I can see that.

That's like a unity of opposites.

Right, So I'm going to.

Start with this woman named velv Le Malvina Dickinson.

I'm going to need to hear that again, so I gotta say it again.

Velv Lee.

Huh, Malvina Dickinson.

That's amazing.

What a name.

Velvelee put her foot.

She was born Velvally Bleacher Wow in Sacramento, California.

Oh wow, us a sacrament A kid in eighteen ninety three.

It was a great time for Sacramento.

I actually love that place.

I love Sacramento.

That is true.

That's right.

Velveley, bright woman, super smart.

Her parents sent her off to a girl's prep school in Oakland called Snell Seminary.

Went to Oakland too, Yeah, exactly.

Like it's basically me, I know, but not Okay.

So this place, Snell Seminary was known as like one of the best, most fasttionable schools for girls on the West Coast.

And from there she went to Stanford and she walked in graduation in nineteen eighteen, but she didn't get her degree because she hadn't returned a bunch of library books.

Yes, a lot of them were like.

These Russian books.

They're all these kind of strange like.

Obscure they only had one copy of It wasn't.

Until nineteen thirty seven that she was able to get it all settled out and get her official like degree in diploma.

Damn.

Yeah, so like nineteen years it took before.

Yes, so she got the right to vote and then had to wait another decade and a half back.

She's like whatever.

So a fun fact.

Her younger brother also went to Stanford, just two years behind her, and then from there he went to Harvard Law.

And I was thinking that she must have come from like a posh Sacramento family either like agriculture mining, But I found her dad's obituary and it seems he worked at the rail yard his whole life.

Hum so kind of like one of those I saved up.

Have scrimped and saved and like sent his kids off to super nice places.

Always want the next generation to do better.

Yeah, don't want to hog the resources.

So from Stanford Velveley, she got a gig in a bank and then she got a job at the California Fruit Growers Association.

Actually a very powerful association, very big, very.

She was a bookkeeper there, was so good at her job, very personable.

And then she got another job at a produce brokerage firm and she worked there from nineteen twenty eight ten nineteen thirty five.

So while she was there, she handled a lot of the Japanese accounts and she got to know the Japanese community in San Francisco.

Oh, very cool.

Yeah, So California has always had a strong trading and cultural partner in Japan, particularly in the Bay Area.

There were a lot of farms, vineyards, and orchards owned by Japanese families in the Central Valley.

Ice farming too.

They loved it.

Yeah, And when Executive Ordered ninety sixty six was signed, sending anyone on the West coast of Japanese descent citizen or not to live in internment camps in the desert.

Most of these.

Farms went dark, oh that's right.

Yeah, And most were sized by the government for delinquent taxes, or they got taken over by squatters or just destroyed.

Not all though.

Yeah, I really have to recommend and urge you read the Smithsonian magazine article called During World War Two, this farmer risked everything to help as Japanese American neighbors.

It's a long title by Jake Whitney, Like, honestly, I want everyone to read this article.

It's about a man named Bob Fletcher, who was a UC Davis alum.

Look at this, and I promise you'll get emotional reading it.

It lays out what that time was like for farming families, and it's important to know what happened, and it's a good reminder of what happens when people decide to do the right thing, even if it's not the easy thing.

Yes, saying that, yes, so I want to believe that Valvelee at least had that opportunity to do the right thing.

But I can tell you she did not take it if it was indeed on offer.

So she's dealing with all of these kind of families, these farming famis, families and you know, the buyers and people in Japan.

So the produce brokerage business where she worked was owned by this guy, Lee Dickinson, and he would soon become her third husband.

Yeah, she'd already had two goes, right, Finicky.

Yeah.

And so because of all their Japanese clients, Velvelee and her husband were really active in the Japan America Society in San Francisco.

So she joined the japan American Society in nineteen thirty one and she was a member until nineteen thirty five when she couldn't afford the.

Duke right, right, because she changes jobs.

Correct.

So luckily she had friends at the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco, and an attache at the consulate paid her dues from nineteen thirty six onward.

Yeah, So she went to a lot of parties at the consulate and it was there that she would like rub shoulders with Japanese diplomats and high level government officials, members of the Japanese Navy.

And then she in turned through parties at her house and invited the consulate crowd over and then it all came to a stop.

Lee Dickinson produced brokerage company went under in nineteen thirty seven.

So the couple picked up stakes and moved to New York City, Okay, and Velvelet got a job as a sales clerk in Bloomingdale's doll department.

And this would prove to be a very pivotal moment.

For her going into the doll business.

Yeah, she's got a friend in the doll business.

Costume dolls were a big deal then, all right, it was all the rage.

It was the la boo boos.

You can be costume.

You mean those dolls are like the fancy dolls were that you put on the outfit, put them on like a shell.

Yes, like yeah, And so there were like porcelain dolls with little fine outfits and you could change their clothes, but in a discrete manner.

I think as haunted dolls very much.

So.

So there were local clubs and like specialty dealers, and then all these avid hobbyists to just collect.

And also the doll making, the dressmakers for the dolls right over.

And in that circle you could count Velvelet among this group.

She is up in there.

So with the name like Velvely Malvina, I mean, how you get into doll making.

She got bigger in the doll scene, and she eventually opened her own doll shop right across the street from her house.

Okay, and she got mentioned in the New York Times.

She displayed her dolls at antique shows.

She built up this customer base through word of mouth.

She put ads in magazines like House and Garden, and then she had all this written correspondence, like she and all these doll folks would write to each other.

Right.

So the December nineteen thirty nine Vogue issue put one of her dolls in their buying guide quote, in the doll collection of Velveley Dickinson, there are two wonderfully aromatic kinds of dolls.

One species is made of cedar wood, cleverly carved and jointed by Tennessee mountaineers.

You can have man or woman, But for once we liked the woman best.

Don't report us to the New Yorker if we say that the woman looks chic in her black and white Gingham costume.

She does around.

Six dollars each doll.

WI.

I love that they call them.

Species is made of cedar wood species of.

Doll, and normally we like the male dolls better than the female dolls.

I did not see that.

I had no idea.

I thought only like manic, like you know, like Charlie McCarthy's style.

Like no, apparently like Ventri.

An aromatic doll.

Yeah, one that has got a good little aroma to it.

So yeah.

One of one of her best customers was a young Eunice Kennedy, whoa yeah JFK's sister.

Yeah.

Someone gave her a Dominican nun doll from Velveley's shop as a gift, and she was like hooked.

She's like, I need more dolls.

That's a hell of a sentence, a Dominican nun doll from Velvete.

I know, It's like have you had a stroke.

So in New York, Velvely she hooked back up with the Japanese community there.

Okay, So she.

Went to the Niphon Club and the japan Institute.

She buttied up to the Japanese Console General.

She met with Ichiro Yoka Yama, who was Thepanese naval attache from Washington, d C.

Okay, that's all a little weird.

But maybe that's just me.

She likes the culture she does, and she lived large.

She wore gorgeous clothes and was like this total audio file.

She bought records like crazy, and if she she would whatever it came out, she wanted it, and she'd send the maid down to get it, and then the maid, if she listened to it didn't like it, she'd make the maid return it.

She's like, please, don't keep sending me back there to return these.

Yeah, you sent me back yesterday with the new Jack T.

Guarden and now they're like mad at me.

She also went back and forth to California a lot.

Was the doll business that profitable.

I mean, I'm kind of like projecting from now back then, and I just don't know if it's all pops.

But she also she appeared to be getting cash on the side.

Ah so according to Smithsonian Magazine, this article by David Sears quote a November twenty sixth, nineteen forty one visit to seven eighteen Madison by quote, well dressed Japanese may have held the key to Velvil.

These suspect prosperity, as recounted in a nineteen forty four edition of Saint Louis Sunday morning, the Japanese visitor quote darted through the door and handed a small compact bundle to the proprietor.

I may not be able to come again, he said.

The proprietor replied that they might meet again, perhaps in Honolulu.

No, no, the Japanese exclaimed, not Honolulu.

Yikes to know what's going on?

Oh yikes.

So then came the letters.

So between January and June of nineteen forty two, a series of suspicious letters were sent to Argentina.

So January forty two, so after December forty one is okay, recent, but don't go to Honolulu whatever you do.

So these letters to Argentina, they caught the eye of the US government, and you know, they were concerned about Argentina's like dabbling in fascism.

Connections to the fascist Europeans.

Correct.

So the letters they were all addressed to Signor Inez Lopez di Molinali in Buenos Aires, and one was sent from Seattle, another from San Francisco, New York, Portland, Oregon, and then another from Oakland, California.

None of them made it to Signora Inez Lopez de Molinali returned to send her on each one.

Oh yeah.

And the women who sent the letters, well, when they were interviewed by the FBI, they swore they hadn't sent them and had no idea who Signora Inez Lopez de Molinali was or what the letters could be about.

They the FBI found out because these women were getting these letters returned to them.

They all said they'd open them up and their signatures were on the letters.

The women who send the letter, I didn't.

Send this, but I assigned it.

They said the signatures on the letters looked like theirs, and that the letters contained correct information about their personal lives that would be freaking, and their interest in dolls, so the.

Letters less freaky.

The letter from Portland talked about a quote wonderful doll hospital.

The doll hospital dolls, and.

Said the writer had left her three quote old English dolls for repairs.

The letter also talked about fishnets and balloons.

The letter sent from New York was supposed to be penned by a woman from Springfield, Illinois, talked about dolls and had the words destroyed your like your in all caps, and further in the same sentence, talked about a mister Shaw who was sick but would be back to work soon.

And then the letter also talked about her sick nephew with a quote malignant tumor on the brain.

And the supposed writer did have a nephew with a mortal brain issue.

Really, but she wasn't even in New York when the letter was mailed, so she turned it over to local postal authorities, who then passed it on to the FBI.

And in turn, each of these women did the same thing.

They get this letter, They're like, oh, what is this?

Postal authorities?

FBI.

In another letter, the writer said that she was sending a doll in a quote hula skirt to a doll hospital in Seattle.

Let me read you the letter, My most gracious friend, please forgive my delay in writing to thank you for your kindness in sending my family the beautiful Christmas gifts.

The girls were especially pleased.

I have been so very busy these days.

This is the first time I've been over to Seattle for weeks.

I came over today to meet my son who's here from Portland on business, and to get my little granddaughter's doll repaired.

I must tell you this amusing story.

The wife of an important business associate gave her an old German bisk doll dressed in a hula grass skirt.

It is a cheap hoard thing.

I do not like it, and I wish we did not have to have it about well.

I broke this awful doll last month.

Now the person who gave the doll is coming to visit us very soon.

I walked all over Seattle to get someone to repair it.

No one at home could or would try the task.

Now I expect all the damages to be repaired by the first week in February.

In the meanwhile, I hope and pray the important gentleman's wife will not come to visit us until after that date.

I do hope you can read my typing.

I'm trying to learn so I can be able to type records for the Red Cross.

Please accept love and remembrances.

I got to disagree.

I don't find that a very amusing story.

No, not realist and so like the Oakland Letter, which was purportedly penned by a lady from Colorado Springs, Oh talked about seven small dolls that she was going to try to make look as if they were quote seven real Chinese dolls.

Making up a family consisting of a father, grandmother, grandfather, mother, and three kids.

This was big to the FBI because several warships had come into San Francisco Bay for repairs just before the letter was written and mailed.

So the supposed author of that letter not only gave the letter to the FBI, she also pointed them in the direction of Velvelee Dickinson.

Really, she thought about it and.

She realized, you know, Velvelee probably used my information to get back at me because the woman had purchased dolls from Valvealle but couldn't pay for them right away.

Uh huh, I mean you shouldn't be buying dolls in to the side.

I mean it's like not live within your dollmians.

Right anyway, So then the FBI asked the other women who got the return letters, did you know Velvelee do you think you know she could be the one behind them?

And they all were like, yeah, we she has documents with my signatures on them, and we've all written letters back and forth about dolls, but also like chatted about you know, idle chit chat about our lives.

The doll correspond and at least two of them had mixed it up with Velveley about prices or payments for dolls.

So now the FBI they set their sights on valve Lee.

Let's stop here for a bit.

I have to go brush the hair of all the members of my creepy doll collection.

I have them arranged on the day bed in the guest bedroom, their sleepy eyes and rosy cheeks staring out at me in dusty contempt.

I just want to know where you got all those deaf leopard dolls.

It's very rare in Velvely's estate.

Zaren Yo, Elizabeth.

Hi, I'm sorry.

I'm still thinking about that one armed deaf leopard drummer doll that you have.

It's it's incredible.

It's a keepsake.

Yeah, I ordered it on late night TV.

It's beautiful thing.

Velvely, Velvely.

It was hard not to type Velveta as I was putting together this outline.

Anyway, The FBI, by.

The way, like names like that.

I mean the poetry that named Velvelee and then Malvina.

Also, I mean, I know some really beautiful old names like that.

They just fallout.

I mean, Velvely, is it it's interesting?

I like it?

Yeah, double v's Yeah, you don't exactly.

It has like a poetry to it.

Now, is in like one hundred years time, are people going to go back and be like, you know, Brakenzie mckayley, the L, E, I, G.

H on everything?

Or they it was so beautiful, why don't maybe use that?

Who knows?

Because they're all named like Deltron three thousand.

Yes, that's a circle of life.

Sorry, apologies, Okay.

FBI people were pointing to Velvelee when it came to the letters, so the FBI turned to its lab for confirmation.

So the lab looked at all five letters and they confirmed that the signatures on the letters were fake.

They were good forgeries, but forgeries nonetheless.

And then the experts determined that they were prepared from original signatures in the possession of the forger.

And then they also determined that the typewriter for each letter was different.

However, they figured that it was the same person typing each letter based on the typing characteristics.

How can they sense, Well, I'm guessing that.

It's something like if the ease are struck especially hard or like facing you know, that would be my guess.

I know.

How you can pick which typewriter is because of the position of the letters, and like you know, they the way typewriters work, the letters are not in the hitting the same spot or the same depth into the paper.

Do you do, like maybe they do a reverse indent and that's kind of odd and exactly yeah, those little kind of things.

But I mean, I was wondering how they would know it's the same type ist.

That's bizarre, I know.

So I think that's what I'm saying.

I think if you hit certain keys really hard, sure that it's going to always bleed through.

Like like when you play piano, some people play the same notes louder and you go.

Oh, I know, yeah, yeah, exactly heavy handed, Bob.

Also, they had to decode these letters.

I mean, they weren't Cipher's, but the language is in code.

So enter Elizabeth Smith Friedman.

Okay, Elizabeth Smith Free.

She spells her name E L I Z E eh special, so Elizabeth Smith Friedman.

She is one of the most important yet long overlooked figures in American intelligence history.

Now just out of curiosity, the last name Friedman is often a black American's name.

Is she r Ied?

Okay, yeah, not Freed.

I was just very really surprised if.

Yeah, that's why we've never heard of her.

Yeah, Friedman Fried Okay.

So she was born in eighteen ninety two and Huntington, Indiana, and she was the youngest of nine children in a Quaker family and her dad was a farmer, strict disciplinarian.

Her mom was a school teacher who just really like imbued in all the kids this love of learning and you've got to just pursue as much education as possible respect to that.

Yeah, So she went to Hillsdale College in Michigan.

She graduated in nineteen fifteen.

She had a major in English literature, but she also had this strong background in languages and classical studies, and she was fascinated by language structure and patterns, especially those in the works of Shakespeare.

And so in nineteen sixteen, a year after graduating, she visited Chicago and it was there that she met George Fabian And he was the super rich textile magnet and like crazy eccentric, and he rolled around in this limo.

He spent money like it was nothing.

He also he ran this private research facility called Riverbank Laboratories, and that was located in Geneva, Illinois, and he was fascinated with the theory that Francis Bacon had secretly authored all of Shakespeare's plays.

Oh right, yes.

And so he has all this money.

That's his big hobby, this interest.

So he starts in institute, the Riverbank Laboratories Energy, right, and so he chats with Elizabeth and he offered her a job on the spot to assist in finding hidden ciphers in Shakespearean texts that might claim.

That's so much fun.

And she's like, yeah, I'll take it, Like what a job off her from their Yeah, and it's everything she loves.

So at Riverbank she met William F.

Friedman, a geneticist who was also working for Fabian.

The two collaborated on code breaking techniques and then they also fell in love.

Oh and they got married in nineteen seventeen.

So this whole Shakespeare Bacon thing was total pseudoscience, obviously, But in the course of establishing Riverbank, it became the first American facility dedicated to cryptoanalysis.

Really yeah, So during World War One it was one of the few places in the US that was equipped to handle military code breaking for the government.

That's so crazy.

And it goes from Sir Francis Bacon Shakespeare to like for the war exactly now.

Both Elizabeth and William they trained military officers and they broke enemy codes on behalf of the Army Signal Corps during World War One, the Freedman's Together, they worked to decipher coded messages between German ages and their American contacts, and they demonstrated that code breaking could be this like rigorous scientific discipline, not just like guesswork and intuition.

They developed early methods for of frequency analysis, statistical approaches to like substitution ciphers, and then they laid the groundwork basically for modern cryptology.

These two, their reports became foundational materials for all of like the crypto.

Units to come, okay, okay.

In the twenties, Elizabeth started working independently from her husband.

She joined the US Coast Guard, and that was to combat rum running and smuggling during Prohibition the US codes too oh yeah, so yeah, and when it began, well goes even further than that.

Prohibition starts in nineteen twenty under the Volstead Act, bootlegging and maritime smuggling surged across the US coastlines.

As we've discussed here before, so the Coast Guard suddenly found itself responsible for intercepting thouands of these liquor laden ships, but also radio communications to coordinate movements and evade capsule.

Current meeting off in the over to unload their cargo in the open ocean.

Correct and the agency had no code breakers.

So in nineteen twenty five, Elizabeth was asked to examine intercepted radio messages that were suspected of containing criminal codes, and she quickly recognized, okay, these are just complex substitution and transposition ciphers, well beyond the skills of most law enforcement agents, but for her it's cakewalk.

So she was soon formally hired as a special cryptanalyst for the US Coast Guard, and her team received hundreds of intercepted radio logs every single week, and so they worked.

They sat there with like like doing everything by hand, pencil paper, sitting by lamplight.

She decrypted over twelve thousand messages in less than a decade, just constant churning them out, and her analysis exposed like this huge, huge international structure of all these smuggling cartels, and then also brought in like the use of shell companies, false manifest coded invoices, so she was able to crack codes beyond just like meet me at this coordinate at this time, it was like further communications about who was higher up and.

The Capone's bookkeeper style.

Yeah, and she discovered that criminal groups oftentimes reused encryption keys or followed like these predictable linguistic habits, and that's how she got her entry point for decryption.

She did wind up.

She worked on Capone stuff.

Yeah, that's a very famous example of like a coded record keeping, coded communication.

Right.

He was very smart and cunning, so it was like probably be a bit fun challenge for something like her was.

She was on it.

There was the I'm Alone case in nineteen thirty one.

This was a Canadian vessel accused of running alcohol and it got sunk by the coastguard in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh wow, I was thinking the other way, be like by Detroit.

Yeah.

No, her cryptanalysis proved the ships Canadian registry was fraudulent and that it was operating under American ownership, and so that saved us from like crazy diplomatic backlashure.

She also helped dismantle smuggling rings link to like I said, organized crime families, Chicago, New York.

Her messages connected radio operators directly to the financial backers in all of these cases, so prohibition gets repealed.

She continues doing work for the Treasury Department and the Customs Service.

She tracked narcotic smuggling, currency fraud, illegal immigration networks.

She had this little small office still at the Coastguard, but it became the center of what would evolve into permanent cryptanalytic branch within US law enforcement.

All comes out of the Coastguard.

So by the early thirties, she had testified as an expert in all these federal trials against smugglers.

Anytime they brought her in, her testimony was so decisive that defense attorneys sometimes would find out she was going to testify and like be like, you got.

To plead out take the deal.

Yeah, don't if we go to court like your TOAs you're going.

To get embarrassed.

Yeah.

The headlines alone, Yeah.

And she was known for how smart brilliant she was.

She was yet so modest.

Yeah, and she had this like crazy deep respect from law enforcement.

But and no one in the public knew who she was.

And she ironic because she's really good at unmasking.

People, right, you know, yeah, and so, And the thing is is a lot of people didn't know because her work was classified.

So it's like you can't talk about.

It, of course.

And also it's probably for her like her you know, her life interest if people don't know who she is, because then these mobsters can't just go and find here.

And I don't know how long it extends out, because I know, like in the UK with all the Bletchley folks, it was decades later that they couldn't even say where they worked.

She was like to the seventies.

Yeah, they couldn't discuss it, and so you know, you couldn't even say that you worked there.

You just had to be vague or whatever or have a cover.

So when World War Two broke out in Europe, the US Coast Guard was transferred to Navy authority and Elizabeth she started receiving intercepted message from the Office of Naval Intelligence ONI and the FBI concerning espionage in the Western Hemisphere.

That's where she got assigned.

So the Germany's military intelligence and State Telegraph Service were using encrypted short of radio to communicate with German agents in Latin America, and these spies.

They were gathering all this information about like shipping, coastal defenses, military movements and all that stuff that like Berlin wanted it for submarine warfare, right, Yeah, So her Elizabeth unit was tasked with breaking access ciphers and identifying Nazi spy networks in countries like Brazil, Chile.

Argentina, not Mexico.

No, but this is.

Where she intersects back with valve Lee.

And we're going to come back to Vealvelee in a second, but I want to keep up with Elizabeth here, please.

So the German network in South America was coordinated through this real complex system of all these ciphered messages radio relays, and the main German agent in the region was Johannes Siegfried Becker, who was known as Sargo Sargo Sargo.

He oversaw intelligence cells in fifteen different countries.

It sounds like something you buy it from Ikia.

Or it's like a like a sandwich spread in another country.

Oh yeah, totally as yeah, exactly.

He's responsible for fifteen countries all of their intelligence cells.

That's a lot.

Yeah, And so he would transmit all of this data back to Germany using like Enigma, like encryptions.

So between nineteen forty and nineteen forty four, she's still got this little tiny Coastguard team and they're working secretly under a code name.

They're intercepting and decrypting thousands of messages from Becker's agents.

And she identified not only the message content, but the operators, call signs, transmission schedules, signal locations.

She took them down.

She basically mapped the German intelligence infrastructure across the hemisphere.

Oh my god, this is so crazy.

Right, So her code cracking pushed the US and allied governments to pressure Latin American countries to arrest these German agents, like, you know, shut down the radio stations.

You got to cut their influence, like join up, get on our side.

The most significant operation was the dismantling of Operation Bolivar German, these principal spy network in South America.

I So, nineteen forty four, thanks pretty much to her decryptions, the entire network gets rolled up, dozens of German and local collaborators get arrested, their communications channels totally wiped out, and her reports were sent directly to the White House, FBI, and British intelligence.

And so you know, we associate the Enigma machine, the decoding machine with the British.

At Bletchley Park, Elizabeth's team successfully broke simplified Enigma variants used by the German agents abroad.

Okay, so she didn't have the full Enigma machine, but the communications correct.

Yeah, her achievements were classified until the nineties.

The nineties and Jay Edgar Hoover, he would go around like, yeah, the FBI broke the spy codes, but like she was totally eliminated from the record.

Really, yeah, she was not put on there, and it wasn't until much later after her death.

But then they started going back and like putting her name on things recognizing it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so she never got her flowers.

No she didn't, so we present them to her.

Now, so Velveley's letters right back to Velvele.

Elizabeth and her crew determined that an open code was used for the letters, and they're probably like, this is stupid.

This is the dumbest code I've ever seen.

Like it's super obvious.

Because are just distracted by the dolls.

Don't be distracted.

So they're sharing information on the military, especially the ships of the Navy.

The code referred to locations conditions, repair stats, and a lot of it had to do with the boats damaged at Pearl Harbor.

So, according to FBI records, Elizabeth's team quote concluded that the three old English dolls left at a quote wonderful doll hospital for repairs might well mean three warships being repaired at the West Coast Naval Shipyard.

Fishnets meant submarine nets, and balloons referred to defense installations.

I was kind of obvious and about that, mister Shaw, remember, yes, in early nineteen forty two, the Japanese had to figure out how badly they'd rocked the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and so they also wanted to know how far had we knocked him out, Like were boats being repaired?

If so, how fast were they doing this?

The destroyer Shaw had its bow blown off in this huge explosion at Pearl Harbor, and it arrived in San Francisco about two weeks before the letter was sent, So just reporting out on the Shaw getting repaired.

According to The New York Times, that letter about the Hulaskirt was determined to be a clear reference to a ship struck at Pearl Harbor, which, of course they said, quote This letter had been written a few days after the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga left Puget Sound for San Diego.

Still, another letter was turned over to the FBI by a Spokane, Washington woman, this one carrying a Seattle Washington postmark.

The letter referred to a quote German bisk doll dressed in a hula grass skirt, which was reported to be in Seattle for repairs scheduled for completion by the first week in February.

A check by the FBI with naval authorities verified the conclusion that the doll referred to a warship which had been damaged at Pearl Harbor.

The vessel was in Puget Sound Navy Yard for repairs at the time the letter was written.

I figured they wanted to know about those aircraft carriers because that's some of the early battle.

Of the Pacific exactly Exactly, so FBI agents they start digging into Velvele's life.

She'd been pretty consistently getting loans from banks and business associates in New York all the way up to like nineteen forty one.

She was struggling, but by early nineteen forty three she was known for prance and around town.

She had like huge wads one hundred dollars bills on her for real, Yeah, and they tracked it down.

Four of the bills that she used in payments were traced by the FBI to Japanese official sources which had received the money before the war.

So we were tracking money that the Japanese were using before the war.

By serial number.

We knew the money they were getting.

The tracking And think about it, this is pre computer tracking all by hand, and so not only is that just so overwhelming when you think about how quickly the FBI was getting the people and all of this tracking now all of the technology they have, like, forget about it.

There's no privacy, there's no secrecy.

Oh yeah, no, I always imagine I live in a fishbowl exactly.

And so's okay.

So they've been tracking this money from before the war.

In early forty two, she and her husband went on trips up and down the Pacific coast and they hit up the same cities which the four other led has been mailed from.

Okay, and they stayed in hotels that had a common amenity typewriters for guests to use in their rooms, and the FBI goes out and they seized the typewriters at each location, and then they were able to link them to the coded letters.

The labs were able to connect them.

So it's looking like curtains for old Velvele.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of dead to right, right.

So let's take a break and we get back.

We're gonna see what Jay Edgar's boys have up their sleeves.

Zaren Zaren.

By the way, I am loving this one.

This is so fun and I loved also that without us communicating at all, we both picked World War two era stories this week.

Isn't that crazy.

It's just so bizarre.

It's that, you know, we sink up like our cycles, sink a lot like that.

Thank you, Thank you for sharing seeing part.

Thank you for opening your heart.

The FBI, right, they got all they need to bust Velvely Dickinson, and they aren't busting her for white collar crime.

She's a spy during wartime.

This is big dogs, Yes they do.

This is dangerous stuff.

Zaren, closure eyes.

I want you to picture It's January nineteen forty four and you're a bank teller in New York City.

It's wartime, and some days it feels like the world may even be ending.

The whole world is at war, with fronts in Europe, the East, Africa, you name it.

Your two brothers are serving, one in Europe, the other out in the Pacific.

Every day you think of them, you worry about them.

Your sister moved out west and she's working in a shipbuilding for facility.

You never thought you'd see the day.

Everything feels so uncertain, but you don't allow yourself to get overwhelmed or defeated.

Gotta get hot, the posters say, you need to be strong for the boys out there fighting.

There's no question we're the good guys.

You think.

If you're fighting fascists and fighting Nazis.

You're the good guy.

You always want to be anti fascist.

That's the American way.

That's how you love this country, you think to yourself.

Just then a woman approaches your counter.

Her face is pinched and she's tiny, like a bird, couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds or so.

She's wearing a nice winter coat and smart glasses.

She seems to be in her fifties, but you don't know.

Some people are aging so quickly.

With the way things are.

She asks to access her safe deposit box.

You tell her you can help her with that, and you go to get the manager.

As you walk from behind the counter and cross the floor to the manager's desk, you spot three men in suits standing near the door.

They're fit, and their suits are sharp.

They don't exactly fit in, and you can't think of why.

Remember your friend Judy, she was seeing a guy.

He dressed just like that, clean cut and honorable.

He was a g man in the FBI.

You tell the manager there's a customer wishing to access her safe deposit box.

He nods, unlocks his desk drawer, pulls he ring of keys out, and then locks the drawer again.

He stands and asks which customer.

You point to the tiny woman waiting at your counter.

He strides over and you follow sneaking another look at the men by the door.

They're whispering to each other now, and you would swear you saw your manager look over and give them a slight nod.

Your manager approaches the customer and you circle back around the counter to your station.

You look up and see the men by the door dash over to your manager and the customer.

FBI don't move, one yells, a lady across the lobby shrieks.

You knew it.

Judy is going to love this story.

Velvet Dickenson.

You're under arrest.

The customer spins around to face the agents and then leaps at them like a spider monk.

One of them grabs her is large hands, ripping the tiny upper arm.

She lifts her legs up and begins to kick at the agents.

She's spitting and swearing, and it's just the oddest thing you've ever seen.

She manages to rip one of her arms from the agent holding onto her and takes his wipe.

At another agent with her fingernails, she draws blood across his cheek.

You can see the anger rising in his face.

He wants to smack her, but he's a gentleman.

Gentlemen don't hit ladies.

Besides, she's so tiny it would be humiliating for him to take down a small woman like that.

An agent is able to wrestle her into some handcuffs, and more agents appear and drag her away.

You dash to the washroom to get the injured agent a cool wet rag for his cheek.

While you're gone, your manager lets the agents into the vault to look at the customer's safe deposit box.

When you get back, they're all standing around the empty box.

One agent whistles and he flips through a huge stack of cash.

You hand the injured agent to towel and return to your station.

Maybe the world really is falling apart.

So she's like it got the size and body type of a bird, but the heart of a house cat has been pissed off.

Fought them.

She fought them like crazy when they picked.

Up that's nuts, the cawing and.

She went crazy.

So but I mean, think about it what she's up against.

She knows she gets busted.

This isn't like you were saying.

This is so you can be hung for it.

But I mean, like that's probably not the time.

Maybe I don't know, You're probably not gonna get bail, but like, how are you going to fight your way out of it?

Like a three men in a store.

She's a frightened animal, Yeah, totally.

You know, that's like when animals get scared and you think, I swear to God, like you're not going to get out of this.

She's not thinking.

That was just pure fight or flight.

A friend of mine had a cat one time who I had my skateboard over at their house, and the cat got their hand or their paw behind the wheel, stuck between the board and the wheel of the skateboard, and so it then tries to pull away and the skateboard it almost hits it.

And then I see this.

I tried to go help the cat and it freaks out.

Yeah, I walked away looking like I'd gone through a paper shredder.

That's what I got withal We got the cat free.

But that was about what I'm imagining.

And yeah, so there's no thinking going on.

It's just pure instinct to like fight and escape.

But to that money they found in the box, right, yeah, fifteen nine hundred forty dollars, two thirds of it was Federal reserve notes that could be traced to the Japanese consulate.

Well, and then and so it did you do a little conversion.

For you, sez Elizabeth nine hundred.

Forty dollars is worth close to three hundred thousand dollars today, bud So.

When she was interviewed, Valvelet told agents that the money in the safe deposit box was from insurance companies.

She had a savings account and then the doll business.

But then in another interview, she told him the money actually came from her late husband, like he'd passed away at this point, and she said she found the money hidden in her husband's bed at the time of his death.

She said that he hadn't told her where it came from, but she thought it might have come from the Japanese consulate in New York City.

February eleventh, nineteen forty four, she gets indicted by the Federal Grand Jury in the Southern District of New York for violation of the censorship statutes.

Okay, and that could get her like ten years in prison, ten thousand.

Dollars, fine, Yeah, she's lucky.

Well, that was her first arraignment, and there she's described by The New York Times as having a quote tense, defiant manner and that she quote demanded who are all these people?

When she found FBI men and reporters present in the courtroom, And then she pleaded not guilty.

She got held in lieu of twenty five thousand dollars bail.

But it sheeels like she's doing this not just for the money, but like she wants Japan to win.

It makes me think that she really cared about the cause yeah.

Yeah, I mean she was so deep into the society of it, I suppose she got swayed.

Yeah, the press were there and she yelled no photographs, and the judge was like, you know, okay, fine, no photographs.

Oh really yeah, But then she turned the judge She's like, can I bring my record player in my albums to my cell She's like, no, you may not.

Dam can I get my ones in twos?

So the FBI they continued the investigation and then they had another indictment May fifth, nineteen forty four, this time on charges of violating the Espionage Statutes, the Registration Act of nineteen seventeen, and the censorship statutes.

So she again pleads not guilty.

They continued that twenty five thousand dollars bail.

Now both of the espionage counts carried the death penalty.

I was going to say, yeah, that's what she's dancing or.

Prison terms up to thirty years, so it's no wonder sheet on scratch.

Her trial was originally set for June sixth, nineteen forty four, who and it was postponed because of the excitement surrounding the D Day invasion of Europe.

So by July twenty eighth, though things are cooling out, she gets described by the press as the war's number one woman's spy.

She got woman's not lady spy, and she so she accepted a plea deal.

She's like, fine, well, no, never, So they dropped the espionage count if she would plead guilty to the censorship violations and she had to furnish information in her possession concerning Japanese intelligence activities.

Okay, she's more valuable alive, right.

Well then, also because the government was willing to deal because there was some question about whether her claims were true that it was her husband who was the actual spy.

Yeah, with him gone, like, who's to say?

And so the real big question that was why did the letters get bounced back to their phony senders.

I'm well, it seems that the Japanese, unknown to Valvelee deactivated the address in Buenos Aires that was used to receive these espionage reports.

But she didn't know.

She just kept sending them, Oh yeah, addresses, right, or she didn't receive a message from them being like stop sending him.

This is like how I learned.

I just lost a Gmail account, so I didn't checked in and for two years, and Gmail's like, yeah, that's a I hope you don't want anything because you can't open that anymore.

Oh really, Oh yeah, no, that's what happens.

Like if you don't open a Gmail account for two years, apparently this is the new policy.

Yeah, they just tell you it's deactivated.

I'm willing to bet that they sent me another prior email.

I ignored that, and then now they sent me the email that I did open, which is like, I hope you didn't have anything in there because you can't open it.

We've deleted it.

It's gone, it's unrecoverable.

That's what you haven't looked at it for two years.

You don't need it.

No, this isn't clothing.

This it is Oh no, I was bummed, but anyway, whatever.

So she told the FBI that the code to be used in the letters and the twenty five grand, one hundred dollars bills had been passed to her husband by that naval attache ittrro Yokoyama.

Yeah, and then it all went down in the doll store.

She's like, that's the scene of a crime.

The problem was that the FBI investigation discovered that Velva Lee like she knew Ichiro Yoka Yama really well.

Her husband had no idea who he was, never met him.

That's going to say how hard wud that be to prove?

Probably not hard.

And so they also unearthed medical records that showed that her husband was not of sound mind and body when the payment was supposed to have been made.

Oh, so that there's no way he could have coordinated it.

He couldn't have showed up.

He was like fully in dementia at this point.

And then they also spoke with the nurse and the maid employed in their house that were caring for mister Dickinson, and they both swore up and down there was no money hidden anywhere near or in his bed, Like we made the bed all the time, it was nothing there.

So she got sentence on August fourteenth, nineteen forty four.

She wore a black dress and hat and she these like white knit gloves, and this point she's down to like just under ninety pounds.

She's so tiny.

She cried and she begged and she pleaded for mercy from the court.

She's like, I'm not a Japanese agent.

It saw my husband's phone and I have no idea what those letters even mean as the judges like, too bad.

She got the maximum sentence ten years in prison, ten thousand dollars.

Fine, So they sent her to the reformatory for women Alderson, West Virginia.

You know who else was up in there?

I don't know.

Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, two other traders.

I was gonna say Tokyo.

I didn't think she had been caught by that as.

Sally vel v Lee.

She got paroled in nineteen fifty one.

She went back to New York.

She got a job at Catholic Charities under the name Catherine Dickinson.

And I'll give you one guess who gave her the job.

One guess who gave her the job?

Oh?

Is it Friedman Eunice Kennedy.

Oh, my goodness, of course with the Dolls Catholic.

So remember they'd met back in the early Doll days.

They ran into each other at the prison when Eunice was there to research how to help female prisoners transition back into society after release.

And then they hit it off all over again, and Valvelee even went to Unice's wedding to Sergeant Schreiver in nineteen fifty three.

Crazy she gave him a monogrammed stationary set from Tiffany's It's not wild crazy.

So later on she's like two degrees of separation from Arnold Schwarzenega Yes, because he was married to driver daughter of sergeanty Nice.

She Valvely moved to Cape cod to work as Unice's administrative assistant and then and Unice called her a quote remarkable secretary, like just took her to so September of nineteen sixty Yeah, September of sixty three.

Unice tried to get her a job at the US Pavilion in the nineteen sixty four World's Fair in New York City, And I don't know if she was able to pull that off.

But Velvelee did ask Unice, quote, will a special clearance be necessary?

I'm certain you realize why I asked this question of you, Like, she's not getting there anything sensitive.

Yeah, we understand, Velvele, We remember.

So not much is known about her life after that.

There are reports that she died in nineteen eighty, but nothing is to where or how.

Nothing in the papers culture where the nineteen eighty is coming from?

Zaren, what's your ridiculous takeaway?

Oh?

I mean the units Kennedy part.

But that's kind of a recency effect.

But that's just wild that it comes full circle and she's like, hey, I've been doing this Halfway House stuff, transition stuff and veil Vale.

We always hit it off.

Remember the doll stuff we.

Used to get back into The dolls were great.

I'd like to make you my living doll that I get to play with.

Save this is crazy, but mostly I'm still hung up on doll hospital.

Like, I know, I got it wrong when you were talking about it, because I was imagining like a you know where they play that it's a hospital and they're moving their dolls around, but actually it's just like where you repair broken dolls.

All of doll culture is so weird to me change and I'm not being judgmental in the least.

I mean, like, rock on, do your doll thing, but like I'm imagining people like making all the outfits.

And then like you're talking to somebody who has had ventriloquist dolls and has had like like sock puppets and like little wooden headed puppets that I would talk to my sister on road trips with Like, so I'm nobody to sit here and back like, I can't believe they got dolls.

You know, I'm not being like that, but it's just I'm just astounded by how humans, humanity, we will find something we love and turn it into its own little world.

I mean, it's a huge world where you can have like all the doll stuff.

Everything were humans but for the dolls.

Yeah, we we fixate on things and then turn it into a cottage industry.

Yeah, in terms like fill it in like a whole world.

You know, it's just like a different level of the whole world.

I'm trying to have little doll car mechanics and like little doll matchmaking services.

Anyway, Elizabeth, what is your to goes takeaway?

I was thinking during this about not obviously having lived through World War Two, but like thinking about life goes on and everything continues and people are traveling and working and doing all these things.

But I will always remember asking my grandmother about it.

You know, she was a young woman then.

Oh, and she told me something that this has always stuck with me is that we were never sure if the world was going to end.

Was this when it was in like the most tenuous moments, And to have that kind of hanging over your head and then how you handle those things.

And I think that subsequent generations we have this view of it from the movies and from TV of what, yeah, what it was like, Yeah, and you know all this kind of bravery and stuff, but you had to have incredible bravery and sacrifice just in your day to day of what that must have felt like.

And then you think too of like, here's vel Vale.

She's connected to this Japanese community, and we have two Japanese communities in California at that time.

So you have the diplomats in San Francisco who are working against odds to the place where they are, and then you have all these Japanese Americans, some of them you know, know from Japan, like immigrated in their lifetime and didn't speak English, but bulk of them likes exactly and here.

So she has this affinity for the culture.

Well, which which group are you gonna associate with?

You have someone like Bob Fletcher who wound up saving farms because he these were his neighbors and he loved them like he loved all of his neighbors.

Valva Lee.

She goes and betrays people, but yet those were her friends.

Did she really how did she did she feel she was really betraying anything.

Like believe was the hero, not the villain of her own story.

So she's thinking she's saving this great culture, these great people, the honorable thing.

Wait, their dollmaking has got to be amazing.

And they did, the Japanese know how to make it doll.

But like the was it driven primarily by the money?

And you look back at her family that you know, her parents scrimped and saved and sent her brother and like, so what was the story there?

I don't know.

You want to know so much more about these people.

But I kept thinking about we have a vision in our lives about pastimes based solely on media, you know, like you were talking about Betty Grable and you see her paintings on the side of the plane, and you see World War two movies for the most part, until we get to more realistic ones later on, about come on.

Boys, let's do it in there.

And it's terrifying what they're doing.

Yes, and it's a monumental feat and it's something that we can need to continue to acknowledge as absolutely breathtaking an incredible inhuman endeavor.

But I always try and think about what was it actually like in those.

Times day to day level?

Yeah, yeah, M a cup of coffee and wondering will tomorrow would all go right?

Right?

And do you buy into all the bad news you hear?

Do you buy into the propaganda good news?

Like somewhere in the middle?

Howe?

And also how do you not just reject everything or become like some hedonist because the world's ending, you know what I mean?

Like I'm gonna get mine.

And while I came exactly exactly so it's complex.

Times weren't simple then they were just as complex as now.

I would like to talk back after that.

That would be delectable, David, Oh my god, did I led jet herd?

Dudes?

Alex here, longtime listener, and I was just listening the other day to the episode that you did where you referred to Penelope from Criminal Minds?

And I feel you on the outfits.

But what I think is more ridiculous is why she had to wear those in the first place, which is because when she arrived on the set, they literally had no clothes in her size.

Oh her wear her own clothes?

Are you kidding me?

I had no idea that's that boo.

That well, first of all those are your own clothes, that's what you show up.

But aside from.

That, well, yeah, Alex, thank you for let I love behind the scenes.

That's wild.

I'm going to always defend her.

Because it doesn't fit in with anything else anyone wears on that show.

I thought it was some writer's idea of.

Like that's what I thought of, like, oh, she's this zany hacker.

No, instead, she's left behind by the industry.

Fantastic God, thank you for that.

That's it for today.

You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com.

We're also at Ridiculous Crime on both Blue Sky and Instagram and on YouTube at Ridiculous Crime Pod.

Email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com, leave a talk back on the iHeart app.

If you have any other cool, behind the scenes knowledge about Criminal Minds or any other show, please please leave it reach out.

Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dudman Zarin Burnette, produced and edited by Antiques Roadshow's resident doll expert.

Day of Coustin, starring Annalise Rutger as Judith.

Research is by committed anti fascists Marissa Brown and Jabbari Davis.

The theme song is by Eunice Kennedy, Shriver's pool Boys Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton.

Post wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred.

Guest hair and makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre.

Executive producers are fbi Ovaltine, Secret Code Ring Task Force members Ben Bollen and Noel Brown.

Gus Quime Say It One More Times Crime.

Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts.

My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,