Hello all you dirty rats fans. We've put together two Christmas packages with books and t-shirts to order go to how we car show dot com and click on store. See you later.

This podcast contains content that may be considered unsuitable for children listener discretion is advised.

It was the afternoon of May 27th 1981. President Ronald Reagan was recuperating from being shot by John Hinckley a few weeks earlier.

Larry Bird was leading the Boston Celtics to yet another NBA championship.

And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a 25 year old police detective named Mike Huff was responding to a call about a shooting at a most unlikely location at the most exclusive golf club in the city, if not the state.

I have been a detective in Tulsa for just over a year. We got to call and I was working the robbery homicide evening shift and came on basically three to 11 hours. So we had really just got to work. Actually, I think it was for the midnight I was working and we've got to work and we were kind of going over what we got assigned for that day and making sure we were able to get to the hospital.

We had a plan for dinner as always and when the call went out of the shooting at Southern Hills Country Club, which was really unique because I'd never been there and I never heard a police call go out there.

And so we knew it was going to be an odd night, well on the next three decades.

Little did Huff suspect at the time, but he was headed to the scene of an organized crime hit planned out of Boston by Whitey Bulger.

The victim was Roger Wheeler, a multi-millionaire, a Massachusetts native who had become one of the richest men in Tulsa, CEO of Telax, a major electronics company, one of the city's largest employers.

But Wheeler also owned a company called World Highly. Highly, a squash-like sport played not with rackets, but with handheld baskets.

The main attraction of the sport is that you can bet on it. Gangsters Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmey and their crew had been skimming World Highly's parking receipts in Connecticut.

$10,000 a week.

They wanted to steal more in other states, but Wheeler had figured out he was being robbed, so he had to be eliminated.

As they arrived at the murder scene, Detective Huff and his fellow Tulsa cops had no knowledge of any of this.

They had no idea what they were walking into.

In fact, Huff assumed the killing most likely involved some of the country club's kitchen workers, or the golf course maintenance crew, perhaps a crime of passion or a drunken brawl.

The sorts of murders Huff was more familiar with. Surely none of the affluent country club set at Southern Hills could be involved in a daylight shooting in cold blood.

Well, you know, as we're going up there, where we're thinking maybe there was a dispute between some sort of, you know, staff, because they employ hundreds of people, often groundskeepers to kitchen help and so forth.

So it was a real alarming situation to see that, you know, this man was obviously very well off sitting in a Cadillac.

You know, I could see a very expensive watch on his wrist, and you know, so I, you know, I just didn't have a clue because back in the day before social media, it's very hard to kind of figure out what's going on around you.

And for myself, I was a young kid. I'd just been on the police department five or six years. I promoted into the job of being a homicide detective.

...