Pushkin.

Sometime in the early 80s, Arios Speed Wagon's airplane made an unannounced middle of the night landing.

This is my friend Kyle McLaughlin, the star of Twin Peaks.

And he's telling me about how he discovered a real life Twin Peaks in rural North Carolina,

not far from where he filmed Blue Velvet.

What was on the plane was copious amounts of drugs coming in from South America. Supposedly Pablo Escobar

went looking for other spots, quiet, out of the way places to bring in his cocaine.

My name is Joshua Davis, and I'm an investigative reporter. Kyle and I talk all the time about the strange things we come across,

but nothing was quite as strange as what we found in Barnumtown, North Carolina.

There's crooked cops, brother against brother. Everyone's got a story to tell, but does the truth even exist?

Welcome to Barnumtown.

Barnumtown is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode of Cautionary Tales was made in association with HBO and their new series The Regime.

You can stream the Regime now on Max and you can find more episodes of this show,

Cautionery Tales, wherever you get your podcasts.

On the 1st of March 2014, the BBC journalist John Simpson hailed a taxi with his cameraman in Ukraine.

The BBC had told them to go to Crimea, the southern peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea.

Something, it seemed, was happening there. Nobody quite knew what.

Simpson was a veteran of foreign affairs. He had dodged Chinese bullets in Tiananmen Square and American

bombs in Baghdad. He'd smuggled himself into war-torn Afghanistan wearing a burqa. If anyone could make sense of events in Crimea, he could.

As the taxi approached the thin strip of land that connects the Crimean Peninsula to the rest of Ukraine.

The driver had to stop.

...