CRIMETOWN Behind the scenes with the creators of the smash hit podcast By Tony Pacitti
Hosts Zac Stuart-Pontier (left) and Marc Smerling
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hen Crimetown (CrimetownShow.com) debuted last November, it was an instant podcast phenomenon, a gripping saga of crime and corruption that made the story of Rhode Island’s cops, robbers and rogues a weekly must-listen event. Hot off the success of their HBO documentary series The Jinx, creators and hosts Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier proved that truth is always going to be stranger than fiction. While in town for a couple of sold-out Crimetown Live appearances, we caught up with Marc and Zac on Federal Hill (obviously) to talk about why they followed up their HBO series with a podcast about organized crime and, of course, Buddy Cianci. So why did you guys choose Providence to kick off Crimetown? Marc: I have family up here through a prior marriage, but I had no idea about Providence other than [that] it was a city between Boston and New York. When I started coming here regularly for family reasons, I really started to understand the weird nature of relationships in Rhode Island, which are very close. You would go to these family picnics and there would be part of the family that’s kind of connected, and then there’s part of the family that are Rhodes scholars. I was fascinated, and my father-in-law introduced me to Buddy. I got to meet him between going to journalism school at Syracuse at Newhouse and graduate school for film at USC. It was a very vulnerable stage – he was in this tortured place. It was right before DeLeo [ED: Buddy assaulted contractor Raymond DeLeo with a fireplace log for having an affair with his wife] because I remember soon after I read about this thing with the fireplace log. So he was brooding at the end of the bar at the Biltmore Hotel over a drink and a cigarette, but when I came over he lit up and we talked for a while. He was a very charismatic guy.
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PROVIDENCE MONTHLY | September 2017
Then when I read that article, I was like, “This is kind of Providence.” Then when he got reelected, it was “Oh, that is Providence.” Zac: We were finishing up The Jinx. The podcast world was kind of blowing up and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do next. I knew Alex Blumberg [ED: Gimlet Media’s CEO, affectionately referred to as “The Podfather” at the end of each Crimetown episode] from my hometown and we had kept in touch over the years, so everything kind of came together. Alex said we should do something crime-related as a podcast and Marc knew about the Providence story, so we started to do interviews. The first interview we did was with [drug trafficker] Charles Kennedy. Marc: [The late Providence Journal reporter] Bill Malinowski was our original contact through a law enforcement person who I knew from years ago. Bill was really helpful. He took me to the courthouse, showed me how to work the system to get trial papers. He was really great. Did you have any concerns about these characters opening up to you? Marc: I think we had an advantage because we were outsiders and because we had come off of Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated [projects]. We had an outside credibility that for some reason… you know how Rhode Island is. This made it feel like it wasn’t going to come back at people. They thought, “We can talk to these guys because we’ve never seen them before.” I would have assumed that it would be the opposite because of that insular nature of Rhode Islanders,
especially the types of people you were talking to. Zac: It still took a long time to develop trust, but I think the outside nature of our approach as journalists was valuable. These are characters that are real people, and a lot of people that write about this are very judgmental. We tried to not say anything one way or the other about their choices, just present their lives. That really appealed to people. With your backgrounds in television and film, what motivated the transition to a podcast? Zac: We were finishing up a project that was super longterm and very expensive. A podcast was something that Marc and I could do together. Marc: This seemed like the best way to create a story where we wouldn’t have people yelling at us about budget and time – we could just do it. We wanted to do something that was about crime, but expansive. Providence was always the story cooking in the back of my mind, this tapestry of corruption in a town where it’s very understandable in a way because of the close connections and the loss of industrial might of the city during the century. We wanted to do something bigger. Try pitching that. “What I want to do is a very intricate study of a city and crime” and people will be like, “Okay, get the next guy in here.” Especially when the city you’re presenting isn’t a New York or an LA. Marc: We got a lot of “it’s too provincial.” But the financial commitment, to Alex’s credit, was not that big in the beginning and Alex was basically like, “I’ll bet on the guys.” Because we heard that: it’s too provincial,