I am Ryan McKnight.

I'm Kara Santa Maria.

I am Christopher Smith.

Hi, I'm Andrew Torres.

This is Naked Mormonism.

The Serial Mormon History Podcast. What makes somebody a serial criminal?

I'm not talking about, you know, John Harvey Kellogg, who invented, you know, pressed corn flakes that everybody eats for breakfast and then also convinced generations of Christians to mutilate

the penises of their babies for generations. I'm talking about a different kind of serial criminal.

Serial criminals operate patternistically. If a serial thief, they hit similar places in similar

ways. A serial murderer usually targets specific people and has a specific method of

killing their victims. Serial criminals commit their crimes in a series by developing a system

with which they're comfortable to continue to commit those crimes for as long as possible.

Career criminals can be serial criminals, but not all serial criminals are career criminals.

The object of our focus was both.

Whether treasure digging in New York or stealing people's businesses and printing money in

Kirtland, waging war against the state of Missouri, or inciting insurrection in Illinois,

Joseph Smith was a career criminal.

He was also a serial criminal.

From an early age, he was able to identify marks and exploit them through deliberate fraud. It happened in a serial fashion, and it enabled him to do some incredibly illegal and abusive

things, and it enabled him to grow a following of six people to 16,000 people,

to bleed them dry of every resource they had, even to the point of giving up their lives for his

cause. And he became an exalted figure, a god among humans. He wielded complete and total

...