Pushkin.

I'm Reevesweidermann, and I wrote The Battle of Fishkill for New York Magazine, and it's the story of the week.

Every time my wife and I would drive from Manhattan to our hometown of Husick Falls, New York, we pass by this town of Fishkill, and sometimes I'd look out the window and wonder do we need gas?

I now know I should have wondered many many more things about Fishkill.

Writing is hard.

Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to be Jon stand So it turns on a mike.

Maybe the twitdles enough because a journalist Trand has got in that jewel jibes.

Single story.

Just listen, people speak.

Conversation Film with information is the story.

Over a decade ago, a man from the Bronx had a dream.

That dream was to build an I hoop in a town called Fishkill, New York.

This dream led him to find his true calling, the one that brought him even more joy than giving people Rudy two d fresh and fruities, one that has cost him millions of dollars, all of which he says were well spent.

That calling was revenge.

Reeves Widemann wrote about the epic battle to build an I hoop in Fishkill for New York magazine.

How'd you find this story?

Someone happened to be visiting family in Fishkill, New York, and was driving down the street and saw these signs that we're talking about some kind of weird conspiracy that was unfolding.

The one thing I remember being on the sign was it said learned the Truth, like it was something out of the X Files kind of.

And and so this person had just kind of read some stories I'd written and sent it along as something they thought might make for a fun story.

Wow, So who put these signs up?

The man who put these signs up is a guy whose name is Dominic Broccoli.

That's his real name.

That is his real given birth name.

Great name.

He is a character who lives up to his name in many ways.

Comes from an Italian family, as you might be able to guess.

His family owned a restaurant, popular Italian restaurant in the Bronx for decades.

He shut it down after his father died, business had changed and opened an eye hop.

Proceeded to open a number of eye hops.

And does that make you a lot of money?

Because Dominic rich for his eye hops.

As he told it to me, he's doing very well for himself, so much so that it allowed him to fund this effort to build another IHOP in the town of Fishkill, about ninety minutes north of New York City.

The one in Fishkill was meant to be his fifth and his largest and most elaborate.

Yet the fifth, much like the ninth Symphony, is always the hardest.

That's true.

So where's the problem start.

Initially, it's just a real estate play with a cousin of his.

He actually bought this property back in the eighties just as an investment.

But eventually he decided, I'm going to put in a strip mall here.

The problem starts in two thousand and seven.

And the backdrop here is that Fishkill and much of kind of Hudson Valley, New York, is steeped in Revolutionary War history.

Is there a Battle of Fishkill?

There was no Battle of Fishkill.

What there was in Fishkill was the Fishkill supply Depot, which is one of these sort of artifacts of history that was incredibly important and also a little bit boring to look back on.

Yeah, I got bored when you said supply depot, I'll be completely honest.

Yeah, I mean that's kind of the end of it, and it sort of tells you most of what you need to know.

It was a place where when George Washington's troops needed muskets or rations or whatever, they would get them from there.

So that's the backdrop.

If you go to Fishkill now, it's like any town in America.

There's chain restaurants, there's hotels, there's a Sam's Club.

There's a big gap distribution warehouse for the clothing company and built on top of where this supply depot used to be.

It's just a new kind of a supply depot.

It's got the gap and Sam's Club.

Yeah, it's got everything the modern America needs.

There's long been a rumor in town that there might be a mass grave somewhere in Fishkill of Revolutionary War.

Soldiers, you mean, like a cemetery.

A cemetery, And there's a couple of reasons to think that.

One, there's reports from the Battle of White Plains, which was a major battle in the Revolutionary War, and how tons of bodies were brought to Fishkill, And if you read certain historical texts, there was reason to think one possible place for the cemetery was Dominic BROCCOLI's property.

So in two thousand and seven, the state of New York has a Historic Preservation office and they asked Dominic to do a study and to actually dig into the ground and see what was there.

They went through with the dig, hired in a team of archaeologists led by a guy named Bill Sandy, and they spent about a month digging a couple of large trenches on Dominic's property, found some artifacts, and eventually, sort of towards the end of that month, they found what appeared to be a row of graves.

So Bill Sandy dug into one of the graves, hit bone, found a skull and said, okay, this is it.

We finally found the cemetery.

In his words, he thought, this is going to be a national monument tomorrow case closes.

Are people excited?

Like?

Are historians or journalists excited about this?

At the time, the discovery was covered in The New York Times.

Chuck Schumer Senator Chuck Schumer a year or two later, showed up in Fishkill part of a campaign.

He was at the time looking to expand this program that preserves military sites and what really led to a lot of the attention was another archaeologist did what's called a ground penetrating radar study, which is basically pushing a thing that looks kind of like a lawnmower across the ground and it gets readings from what's underneath.

And that's sounds fake.

This sounds like those guys on the beach looking for metal.

I think it's only a little bit more advanced than that.

And the report that came back included a line that said something roughly to the effect of, we found some three hundred more anomalies as they called them, that appeared to be like the graves.

Oh so, at that point, Dominic BROCCOLI's property, which was going to be a strip mall, was suddenly being called New York's Valley Forge and being described as possibly the largest cemetery of Revolutionary War soldiers anywhere in the country.

Okay, so what's the plan?

Is the government going to buy it from him?

Chuck Schumer had showed up on this notion that the federal government might be able to step in by the property turn it into a national park of some kind.

The problem is, the American Battlefield Protection Program, as it is called, has the word battlefield in it.

And it should.

The more I think about this, I'm not going to go visit what was formerly a cemetery and it's not a cemetery anymore.

This sounds like a crap.

This doesn't sound like an interesting place to visit.

That has always been kind of the uphill battle.

And so the group of people that were trying to convince you that you're wrong was a group that sort of formed after the body was found, and they called themselves the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, and they basically came up with a plan to try to turn this site into some thing like Jamestown where there's kind of this working archaeological dig.

No one's building another Jamestown.

Yeah, So the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot had this very grand vision for what this was going to become.

And I would say, in some ways it's fair to say that it was naive to think that it would become this big, huge, massive tourist attraction.

Who are these people who are into the idea of building a new Williamsburg without peanut soup.

It's a weird that's the only reason they got r Yeah, it's.

A weird sort of local mishmash of people.

Is that a way of saying old people?

I think they would push back on that characterization, but I think by and large that's fair to say.

The group was made up largely of the kinds of people who show up to town board meetings to complain about X, Y or z.

Another faction of people who were sort of Revolutionary War re enactors.

Who's running this group the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

The president of the Friends is a guy named Lance Ashworth is a West Point graduate and an FBI agent, like real, actual FBI agent.

He was involved in, you know, catching an Israeli spy in New Jersey back in the two thousands.

Does he look like an FBI agent?

Yeah, classically, you know, burly guy, shaved head.

Where Dominic is incredibly outgoing and all over the place.

Lance is very straightforward and kind of buy the book.

So he's running it with kind of this support crew of Bill, Sandy, the archaeologists and these re enactors.

Okay, so what does Broccoli do once these people get together and try and save this land.

At first, he tries to work with them.

He's kind of like, well, okay, maybe I'm not gonna be able to build my strip mall.

So these guys can buy the property, then good luck to them.

So he gives them a chance to buy it.

We're talking probably a couple million dollars to buy this property.

They can't come up with the money, and so it's sort of back to the drawing board, and Dominic sort of offered this chance.

Well, I could give you this small part of the property where we found the graves, and you could just keep that.

But the friends their position was, we think there's bodies everywhere.

We think this whole thing should be a park, not just the half acre you want to give us.

The negotiation kind of falls apart at that point.

So it seems a good compromise is that there'd be some area where the cemetery actually was, that's some kind of historical site.

But then you get your sweet sweet eye hop in the property without the graves.

It's not going to work.

That's the best of all worlds.

But what starts to happen is Dominic starts taking a look at other parts of the property and does some more digs to kind of see what's under there.

And he does another dig and they find half a dozen more spots that seem like graves.

They find some bones, So.

He keeps looking for a spot for an eye hoop, and they keeps.

Kind of thinking.

He keeps thinking, Okay, if I dig over here and I show there's nothing there, then that's somewhere I can build and maybe the rest of it'll be fine.

But he keeps finding bones, keeps finding.

Some more things, and then eventually he talks to one of his archaeologists about that initial study that showed that there were some three hundred bodies buried on the property, and this other archaeologist points out that the report just said they were anomalies, not graves, and anomalies, in archaeologists speak, could be any number of things.

It could be it just means that there's something under the ground.

It might be a boulder, it might be a tree stump, it might be like a rodent burrow.

Wait, so all like the New York Times story like there might be wrong.

There may not be three hundred soldiers buried under there.

Yes, So Dominic once he found that out, he had another team of archaeologists dig into some of the places where the anomalies were found, and in every single case they didn't find anything, which was very surprising, shocking to the person who had conducted the study.

They said it they almost never, you never get it that wrong.

And then what made Dominic even more suspicious was that in a couple of the places, it seemed that the dirt under the ground had been recently disturbed thereway, implying what what Dominic came to believe is that the friends of the fishkill supply depot were planting bones that they were hoping Dominic would find in an effort to make it seem like there were hundreds and hundreds of Revolutionary war soldiers, when in fact, in Dominic's conception, these were just bones that had been buried yesterday.

Wait, so the accusation is that the FBI agent who runs this group to save this area might have been grabbing bones, burying them from some late at night from somewhere.

FBI guys can get bones anywhere, and they burying them late at night in the ground in order to save this piece of land and not turn it into an ie hop.

Yes, wow, okay, And what are the other tactics the friends are using besides possibly bearing fake bones in order to win this battle?

So they were trying to push this kind of promotional campaign pr campaign.

And they had a connection to a local community college and there was a class there and I think sort of video production, and got a couple of students in the class to make a video but basically about the history of the depot, largely from the friend's perspective, telling the story of why it's important to preserve this property.

Propaganda.

Yeah, that's I think a fair way to put it.

Much like the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware.

Yeah, there's a giant piece of propaganda.

Yeah, exactly.

So Lance Ashworth, the head of the Friends, started working with his community college class along with another member, a guy named Alec Crosby who had joined joined the Friends.

And Alec Krasby was an unusual figure in that he was young relatively, he was in his thirties, and he just kind of always seemed to be available to help the Friends with stuff, and so he jumped in with Lance to help with this community college project.

And Lance had told the kids do not go to the property.

If you do, the landowners gonna call the police on you.

But while Lance is away, Alec Crosby tells the kids, let's go let's go over and visit the property.

Let's go get some b roll.

The kids show up and within a few minutes there's a Mexican restaurant across the street called the Maya Cafe, and within a few minutes, Dominic Broccoli walks out of my A Cafe just happens to be there at the same time that these kids are there, walks over, tells them come on over to the Maya Cafe.

Let's have some drinks and I'll show you my presentation about why I think the friends are lying about what's on the property and why you should believe me and not them.

That's a great pivot.

Instead of arresting them, just try and convince them.

That's brilliant.

I know, soft carrot, there's a stick.

And so Lance greets this his terrible news when Alec tells him.

And because they stop making this documentary, he wins them over.

It kind of created this tension in the group.

Two of them were like, whatever this is, I just need to graduate and get this done.

Let's just make this thing.

And then you had two kids who were like, no, there is actually a conspiracy going on.

Let's fight.

Let's get to the bottom of this and so sort of tore the group apart.

When we come back, the friends of Fishkill Supply Depot will start to wonder if something fishy is going on.

But first our advertisers have an incredible offer on some fake eighteenth century skeleton bones and boison berry syrup.

Okay, so these community college kids go onto Dominic BROCCOLI's property despite being warned to shoot some of this video.

But he sees them from this Mexican restaurant and then walks over and offers to buy them drinks, which seems a little too convenient, right, It was a.

Little unusual, like, why, of all days was Dominic Broccoli there at the precise exact time that these kids are there.

He is just at this cafe with a presentation ready to go.

Like on his laptop, open, lengthy presentation, just like ready to go and spend a couple hours with some college kids.

When he's a guy who lives in the Bronx doesn't even live there.

Pretty strange.

And so by this point, let you know, Lance emails the friends in this kind of spy thriller way to just say, keep things to yourself.

Spies are at play once again in Fishkill.

Just like the Revolutionary War, just like the revolution they were when there was a Hercules Mulligan.

Yeah, exactly.

There there were actual spies in Fishkill, and in fact, there was a very famous spy named Enoch Crosby, who is an American spy based in Fishkill.

Well the same name as Crosby, as the young guy in Friends.

You are starting to piece together what it took the friends along time to piece together.

Well, it helps I write your story.

Which is the fact that Alec Crosby was not Ali Crosby.

He was, in fact a spy, a private investigator whose real name is Ian Bondi, hired by Dominic Broccoli to infiltrate the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, dig up dirt, all in an effort to scuttle their plans.

Wait how long is Ian Bondi spending on this spy mission?

Years years of his life.

Yeah, I think he'd got other assignments.

But for about three years he was regularly going to meetings of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot under an assumed name.

Is this the craziest job that guy's ever had?

He did tell me at one point about like having to like sit in someone's backyard to see if aliens were landing.

So that's stranger, but I think this was you know, as he said, he lived in the area, and this kind of became an all consuming thing where his even his friends and family started calling him by his assumed name name by Ala Crosby.

And then he said that he had girlfriends who didn't know his name.

I can't believe, to save a possible I hoop, you would date women under a fake name.

That's a devotion to craft.

Yeah.

The one time he told me that he felt really nervous was there was a moment when Lance had brought one of his colleagues from the FBI to one of the meetings, and so suddenly Ian described himself as sitting there like between two FBI agents in his own fit of paranoia.

When the meeting was over, he said, he rolled up his sleeves and just wiped down the table to in case they were onto him and thinking of snacking his fingerprints.

So the group's run by an FBI agent.

How does an FBI agent get fooled by like a spy who's normally getting hired to make sure that aliens don't appear in your backyard.

I think Lance did defend himself, and I think reasonably so.

When you start running volunteer organization dedicated to historic preservation and you don't think that you're going to be infiltrated by a paid spy.

You must get made fun of so badly at FBI headquarters that you've been fooled by.

Dominic Broccoli is like amateur spy.

I don't think it was a great look for him.

Okay, what else did this spy find out for Dominic Brocoli.

The main thing he was there to do was just collect information.

So Alic Crosby was showing up to all these events with a recorder in his pocket.

He was all wired up.

He was wired up, and they were just trying to catch the Friends in a lot of cases just talking shit about Dominic.

One of the sort of best examples was they were at this event and this woman who was served for a time as the vice president of the Friends, was joking with a group of people that Dominic Broccoli had connections in the cement and stone business, which she then elaborated on by saying begins with an m ends with an a.

Oh, this is an anti Italian American slur.

It does seem so basically, and without much evidence, the friends were trying to connect Dominic to the mob.

Dominic then turned around with this and in a few other cases sued members of the friends for defamation.

And he had by this point had started giving them all nicknames.

This woman's name the friends.

All the friends got nicknames.

This woman.

Her name was Barbara, and so he started referring to her as Barbara the bigot.

Nice Lance Ashworth, for all of his supposed exaggeration about what might be on the property, was now sir Lance lies a lot.

This is very Trumpian.

Well I thought so too, as Dominic told me, this is just how people talk in the Bronx.

Is they give dads from the Bronx.

My dad doesn't give people weird nicknames.

And Trump's from queens, so you know.

But anyway, the last nickname was for a guy named Marty Bister, and the nickname Dominic gave him was bone burying Bister.

And the reason for that, yeah, it's a little too too many syllables.

What it happened to lead to that nickname is that Alec Crosby had been at a meeting and recorded Marty Bister saying to another member of the friends, were you there when we buried the bones?

What?

Yeah?

And you know when Dominic hered that, he said, this is it.

This is the evidence I've been seeking that all along, they in fact had buried bones on my property.

So he freaks out, Sue's Marty Bister and the friends.

This is the moment when Alec Crosby's identity is revealed, because he has to reveal himself through this lawsuit, and it suddenly enters the debate as a possibility that maybe the friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot actually did bury human bones on the property.

Do you think they buried bones?

I don't, but I have talked to people I would consider to be reasonable and sober minded in Fishkill who are not willing to rule it out.

So it's not insane that it's possible.

It's insane.

It would be insane to have done this.

It's almost impossibly far fetched, and if true, would be such a stupid thing to do that it's hard.

You did endanger your FBI career, You go to jail.

Yeah, it's just for a Revolutionary War re enactment site.

It seems like a lot.

But Dominic Braccley is convinced of this, and does.

The local government get involved at any point?

Are they sty out of us?

Yeah?

Well, part of this is when you develop a piece of property, you have to get a bunch of approvals.

So this development very much came up at endless town hall meetings as Dominic tried to pursue various approvals.

In his mind, very much the local government was out to get him.

The sort of most concrete example took Luice in twenty nineteen during an election for town supervisor, which is basically mayor.

Candidate's basically ran on an anti Continental Commons platform.

Their platform was just against his strip mall.

It was that big a thing in this town.

I believe it was one of his you know, five got like five things, and this is one of them.

But that guy won in November.

In December, there was set to be a meeting where Dominic was getting his final approval that would more or less clear the path for him to go forward.

But at this meeting, and it was before the new supervisor was supposed to take over, At this meeting, just coincidentally, one person was sick, one person's wife was sick, one person resigned, and then someone else got stuck with a flat tire in Westchester, like five minutes before the meeting, so they couldn't hold the meeting.

The approval gets pushed into the new mayor's term, and he more or less successfully for several years, just pushed off this approval several years.

How long does this whole thing last?

Is this like longer than the Revolutionary War itself?

We have past the market which George Washington was finally successful.

The bones were found in two thousand and seven.

It's twenty twenty three.

Dominic has not started building anything.

He still says that he intends to and plans to.

At this stage, it's difficult to imagine anything happening other than it staying in this kind of stalemate where it seems destined to exist.

How much is Dominic Broccoli spending on this project?

Is it ever going to make it back in eye hop money?

He claims it's in the seven figures, that it's over a million dollars, and I think into the millions of dollars at this point.

And he has said to me now that it's not about the money for him anymore.

It's about getting revenge.

But at this point between the lawyers and the archaeologist and his paid spy.

It's hard to imagine him, ever like fully making it back.

So there's no imminent eye hoop in Fishkill.

If I had a nickel for every time Dominic told me he was about to put a shovel in the ground, I'd be as rich as he is from his eye hops.

I have a feeling this fight will be with us for a while.

We'll just have to see whether the iap itself actually gets built.

Reeves Wideman, you wrote the Battle of Fishkill for New York Magazine, and you are a true American.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Happy to be of service to my fellow countryman.

I was at the Metropolitan Museum in New York last week.

I tell you this only to let you know how cultured I am.

I also saw jazz at the Vanguard, which has even less to do with the point I'm trying to make.

I saw the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware.

It is huge, like picture the biggest wall of your house and then double it, and the frame's even more ridiculous.

Gold everywhere, an eagle on the top, cannon's on the bottom.

In the painting.

There's just all these shivering rowers, struggling and pushing chunks of ice out of the boat's way, and Washington is just standing on this boat looking like he's about to deliver an aria.

It's just overt propaganda, and we're still using the same propaganda to sell this country's story to ourselves and to me.

That story is that we should be allowed to build I hops whenever and wherever we want.

I mean, isn't that what Washington fought for.

At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein?

Maybe you'll take a naper poker round online.

Our show today was produced by Kate mccauliffe and Nishavenka.

It was edited by Lydia Jean Kot.

Our engineer is a Mandy Kate Wang, and our executive producer is Catherine Giraudou.

Our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer Lauren Salasnik.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Joel Stein and this is Story of the Week.

Dominic in his conception of building his I hop, he was going to lean into the Revolutionary War history and he was going to have the weight staff at this at this I hoop wearing like tricorn hats and bonnets.

That's so yeah, that's.

A compromise for me.

I'm taking that as a win.

If one bowl of peanut soup with your pancakes and that's that'll do it all I need.

Yeah,