This is

this is exactly right.

This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised. Wheeler really was at David versus Doardies Galayeth. He was an untested freshman senator who took on Washington's most cunning political operator,

and yet he essentially won. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a non-fiction author and journalism professor in Austin,

Texas. I'm also the host of the Historical True Crime Podcast, Tenfold More Wicked, and the co-host of the

podcast Buried Bones on exactly right.

I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show, and they are all excellent writers.

They've had so many great true crime stories and now we want to tell you those stories with

details that have never been published.

Tenfold War Wicked Presents, Wicked Words, is about the choices that

writers make good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories.

A man is found dead from a gunshot wound in Washington DC in 1923. He's an aide and a confidant to a powerful politician, the Attorney General of the United States.

Was his death a murder or a suicide?

Author Nathan Masters tells us the story at the center of his book, Crooked.

Well let's get into the story.

Where does it make sense to you to start with which person you've got several players

happening here?

Yeah, there are two big players but I would

actually start with somebody who's not one of them I'd start with a man

named Jess Smith who was discovered dead of a gunshot wound almost a hundred years ago to the day that we're recording this,

Memorial Day in 1923 in the attorney general's apartment, the bedroom of the attorney general of the United

...