The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime.

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On one side were the Cowboys, a band of ranchers turned criminals who had plagued the town for years. On the other four, lawmen and their names are the ones you'd recognize virgil Morgan and Wyatt Earp, alongside their good friend Doc Holliday. The resulting shootout, known today as the Gunfight at the OK. Corral, only lasted 30 seconds, but the market left on popular imagination has held on for nearly 150 years. Why? Because Americans have never stopped being fascinated with the Wild West. This July, Grimenmile presents turns its gaze westward. Join us for a trek into the unknown, the misunderstood, and the forgotten tales of America's westward expansion. So pack your assumptions and childhood love of the unexplored and get ready to make a journey. Grim and mile presents. The Wild West is available now. Subscribe on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more@grimandmild.com. Slash Presents hey, everybody.

If you've been sitting around thinking, man, I'd love to see Josh and Chuck in person, maybe late January would be great, well, then we have wonderful news for you.

That's right. We're doing our annual Pacific Northwest and Northern California tour. We are in Seattle on January 24. In Seattle. We're counting on you guys. We stepped it up to the Paramount this year, so please help us fill that beautiful theater. We are at our home away from home at Revolution Hall in Portland on the 25th, and then, as always, back at San Francisco Sketch Fest on January 26 at the Sydney Goldstein.

So here comes the info. For links and tickets and all that stuff, go to linktree SYSK and that will take you where you need to go to find a great seat. Or you can visit our website, stuffyshodnow.com that will also take you where you need to go to find a great seat. And we will see you in your great seats in January.

Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and we're just sailing along. Hopefully we're not going to stop abruptly for this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Yeah, you know, we're actually developing a robust suite of maritime disasters.

Well, there's plenty to talk about, for sure. So this is I mean, we're probably mid suite at best.

Depending on which ones you cover, we could be no pun intended, just the tip of the iceberg.

That was pretty good, though. And it's funny you bring up the iceberg, which everybody knows is associated with the Titanic. Because I have seen, according to maritime lore that I found on the internet, written by maritime lawyers, that this shipwreck, essentially that we're going to talk about is a new touchstone for the next hundred years, just like the Titanic was for the 100 or so years after it. It was just that much of a cluster. Luckily, not anywhere near as many people died. But it's not maybe not as interesting a story, but it's a pretty gosh darn tooten interesting story if you ask me.

Yeah. I mean, I think the main thing that stood out to me about the wreck of the Costa Concordia is that when you see little documentary footage and stuff like that of interviews of people, many of the passengers are remarking like, we just couldn't believe something like this is happening in 2012.

Right.

Like the fact that it's a modern disaster, allah, the Titanic, that kind of thing shouldn't be happening these days.

Yeah. And I saw somebody who compared the two described it as where the Titanic was kind of like an ironic twist of fate brought on by hubris. This was just brought on by incompetence. That's what it really boils down to.

Yeah. I mean, that's how something like this can happen in a modern age where everything is there to prevent something like this from happening.

Exactly.

But you can never count out human incompetence.

No. And you said modern age and it was pretty modern. So on the night of Friday the 13th January in 2012, not that long ago, just over a decade, that ship, the Costa Concordia, was sailing around the Mediterranean, which it normally did, I think. It was launched in 2005 by the Costa Crociere, also known as Costa Cruises line. And at the time it was the largest ship in the Mediterranean. It boasted the nicest spa, took up two full decks and it was just nice. If you look at the pictures of what it looked like when it was launched, it looks like 1998, Vegas came along and threw up in it and just shipped it out to sea.

Yeah, not like the super classy ones these days.

Right. But this one struck me as, I mean, definitely along that same line. I mean, the cruise ship has a certain look to it, no matter what they try to do.

Yeah, there's going to be brass.

This one really pulled out all the stops, as our organ playing friends sometimes say.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was sort of the pride of Italy. It was their largest cruise ship at 950 plus feet long and held almost 3800 passengers, along with just over 1000 crew members, for a total on this day, or on this launch, at least of 4229 total people, captained by Francesco Scatino, who had been he was a veteran. He had been working just for this cruise company for eleven years.

Yeah, I think he was fairly new to the Concordia but their ships were similar enough that this was not sure. Yeah, he was totally able and capable to captain a ship. You'd think?

Yeah.

So 3 hours after the Concordia set sail for its seven day cruise around the Mediterranean, which was that's just what it did. It stopped in the same place. Yeah, three hour tour. It was passing by an island off of Tuscany called Gilio, which you can't help but just think of that Ben Affleck movie.

That's what I thought of.

And Captain Scatino did something that, in retrospect, people are like, Wait, what did you do? But once you start to dig into it, you're like, apparently that's a thing. Like, cruise ships sometimes do this. It's called the sail by. He decided to do a sail by of the island of Gilio. And Gilio is a seafaring fishing island of, like, hardy sea people and then very wealthy people who like to hang out around hardy sea people.

Not many, though.

No.

1500 people total.

Right around the whole island, multiple towns. The whole population of the island was 1500. So Captain Scatino decided to do a sail by of Gilio. And a sail by is where you sail, like, preposterously close to land to do a couple of things. It thrills the passengers on board, but it also thrills the people wherever you're passing by. It's pretty neat. Like, it's just so close. And the ships always lit up very pretty and all that stuff. It's just something to see. But if you stop and think about it, it's incredibly reckless. I mean, to do the sail by, he had to deviate from his course so much that he had to turn off the tracking software, like, just turn it off so that he could maneuver the ship by hand off course that drastically.

Yeah. And you know what? I'm going to go ahead and say this is like a flyby that airplanes might do and those have resulted in accidents here and there.

I'm just going to go ahead and.

Throw it out there. That no more sail bys or flybys. Just keep all of the dangerous, heavy machinery and vehiculars. vehiculars, sure. Well, away from everything. It's always like, oh, the people love it. This would be impressive until there's an accident and it's like, oh, wait a minute. Well, people can die doing this, so let's just stop with this stuff.

Yeah. And no more car surfing like they did in Teen Wolf or Footloose. None of that stuff either.

Yeah, but the one thing, the game of chicken in Footloose, just full steam ahead with that. That's a pretty great thing to do.

Okay, so the sail by. Again, this is an enormous ship, 1000ft long, basically 114,000 tons. It's a ginormous ship. And it's passing by this tiny little island. And it was doing it for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons why Gilio used to get sail bys fairly frequently. Apparently, they'd done it just a week before was that. There is a retired captain from the Costa Cruise Line. I guess he'd been there for, like, ever and had retired and now lived on Gilio. So they would do sail bys in part to salute him.

That was one swing by and toot the horn, basically.

There was also a matridi on board named Antonello Tievelli. He was from Gilio, and he had family there. So apparently the captain was doing this as a favor or an honor to the matri d. And then thirdly, the passengers love that kind of thing too. They're just dazzled by how close the land is. Like, you could just reach out and touch it kind of thing.

Yeah. And this is later in court, what Scatina would say. Like, these were the three reasons there was and I don't super remember this for some reason, or I didn't, at least until we got to this point, which was there was an affair going on between Captain Scatino and a woman named Dominica and how do you pronounce that last name?

I'd say, Simmerton.

Simmertan or something like that. C-E-M-O-R-T-A-N. Yeah. She was Moldovan who had worked on the ship the month before, like a short term thing. Evidently had met Captain Scatino. They started this affair. She was on board she was 26 years old and was on board for this cruise as a passenger, as an unpaid passenger. Kind of like, come on, as my guest type of deal, right? Because we're having an affair. And so prosecutors would say, hey, you wanted to impress your girlfriend that you were having an affair with, so that's why you did it. And this is when it all kind of clicked. I kind of remembered all of a sudden that became a big deal in the trial and the news was kind of the public outing of this relationship and cruise ship crashes because Captain's trying to impress his young girlfriend.

Yes. And she was on the bridge at the time during this incident. And like I said, they had done a sail by the week before of Gilio. Captain Scattino did, again, to honor Antonello Tievelli, the matridi, and after that last one, he had set some crew members to the task of figuring out an even closer sail by route. This was the one they were testing out. So they had sail by Gileo before, but apparently this is a brand new, even closer route. And I guess they had gotten that retired sea captain on the phone to tell him about the sail by they were doing and found out that he wasn't even on the island. He was back on the mainland at his winter house. And as they were now you're down.

To two reasons, right?

Exactly. And as they're on the phone, captain Scatino is like, say, let me ask you a little bit about the rocks around Gilio that we're driving past right now. And I guess the captain didn't even get any kind of reply out before the line went dead. And they think that at that moment, the line hadn't actually gone dead, but that Captain Scatino had hung up because he realized that they were about to hit a rock on their port side. Port is left. The easiest way to remember that is left has four letters, and port has four letters, and they both end in T. Two great ways to remember that. Starboard right, port left.

It's just two things to remember, though. It's not that hard.

So I always have trouble with it. Do you really? Yeah.

Okay.

So they're driving by Giulio, and they're keeping away from these rocks on their starboard side, on the right side. What they didn't realize is that they're actually driving through two outcroppings of rocks. And the one on the left side, the port side. Got them.

Yeah. These are called the skull rocks, seole. And they're all over the place, and you can't necessarily see them all sticking out of the, you know, the last moment. Basically. He orders a course correction. Scatino does. The helmsman at the time was an Indonesian man named Jacob Rusley Bin and went the wrong way because there was a language issue. Put a pin in that because that'll come back up later in court. And the stern collided at 945, and the timeline is pretty important here. So 09:45 P.m. Is when they first make contact and tear a 174 foot gash in the port side of that ship.

Yeah.

Later on, as we'll see in court, there were experts that basically said, hey, listen, there was no course correction at that point, that would have mattered. They were just too close.

Yeah.

So it wasn't the fact that this guy went the wrong way. It's not like all Jacob Ben's fault. So that would come out later. But immediately, 174 foot tear in the side of the ship is an immediate disaster as far as how much water this thing is taking on. Very fast.

Yeah. And I mean, just to put it in sports terms, that's like half the length of a soccer pitch or an American football field. Like, that's a really long tear, and it was really deep, and it ran so hard into the rocks. Chuck, an 80 ton boulder became embedded in that tear in the ship and was there for forever. Permanently. Apparently, they later on removed it and are using it as part of a memorial. But it was this huge boulder. It was a huge tear, and it also was in a terrible place. It hit some watertight compartments, tore clean into them. So now these watertight compartments are starting to take on water. Not good for any ship. But one of those compartments was also the engine room. And in very short order, the engine room started to flood, and they lost power very quickly. It was very clear right at the outset that they had a huge problem going on.

Yeah. And when you say lost power, like, they lost electricity, but they also lost engine power. The engine was off, the rudder wasn't operable. All the lights went out. So now they're in the dark. They can't do anything engine wise to try and pry themselves off or anything like that. Scatino did it seem like? Do a fairly decent job steering it, I guess gliding it in, just steering it on inertia or whatever, toward the port side to at least get it a little closer, which they say might have helped save some lives, but it caused the ship to tip even more. And that was a big factor in how many people ended up dying, was the fact that this boat started, it turned on its side, basically. Not completely on its side. What was the degree in the end?

70 degrees. Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty close to 90.

Yeah. I mean, zero degrees is upright, 90 degrees is completely on its side. This ended up listing to 70 degrees. So yeah. For all intents and purposes, if you were on that ship, it was basically on its side, right?

Yeah.

And the idea that Scatino managed to navigate the ship so the ship was still it was still moving, they just didn't have any power. It was moving under momentum when the power went out. And the scary thing was, Chuck, it was starting to head out to sea with 174 foot gash in the side, taking on water, and had it kept going out to sea, it would have sunk and possibly a lot more people died.

Yeah, for sure.

The bone of contention is whether Scatino did anything or not. Some maritime experts later on said he didn't do a thing. That rudder got stuck in the perfect position and managed to angle it toward yes, it did 180 degree turn, thanks to the wind and the rudder, and miraculously turned around and came back to land rather than deep water where it kind of wedged itself against the rocks. He probably didn't have anything to do with it, although he tried to claim that, because they're, like that probably saved lives.

Well, I will say this. If Scatino said it was me that did it, then I'm immediately inclined to not believe it.

That is a good rule of thumb with this guy.

Yeah. Shall we take a break?

Yeah, we should.

All right. That's a good setup. This cruise ship is taking on water. It's listing with everyone on board, and we're going to come back and tell you what happened right after this.

Stuff you should know, Josh and Shuck, stuff you should know.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask, who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president?

My dad.

Bob JFK.

Screwed us at the Bay of Pigs.

And then he screwed us after the Cuban missile crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee, who was being trained for a specific operation, then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, so remember, I said to pay attention to the timeline. This thing again hits those rocks at 09:45 p.m.. What I would do if I was a captain and I know nothing about captaining a cruise ship or anything larger than a pontoon boat.

You don't?

No. I would have immediately called for help, but that didn't happen. Scatino did not call for help immediately. I think he knew that he had really screwed up and I'm not sure if he immediately knew just how bad things were. I would say that the listing of the boat would have been a real key indicator that it's much worse than anyone could have imagined.

He also got word almost immediately that the engine room was flooding.

Yeah. So he knew how bad it was pretty quickly. The reason that the authorities on land even knew this was happening is because they're right there off the shore. So people on the ship are calling to shore and people on land see this happening and they're like, hey, this cruise ship is there are only 1500 people. But it was a big thing and I imagine it made tons of noise. They talked about the sound of the scraping like how loud it was and how scary sounding it was. So the long and short of it is search and Rescue called them at 10:00 p.m.. 15 minutes later and Scatino kind of downplayed it a little bit.

Yeah. At first he was probably like, Let it ring, just let it ring.

They'll go however, because this is modern times and one of the great things about something like this happening in modern times is you have recordings of phone calls and stuff that you can go to. You can't know. It's not like the Titanic days when you could lie about something and maybe get away with know. So they recorded this call between crisis coordinator Roberto Ferrarini from Costa Cruz's and Skatino where he finally admits I've made a mess and practically the whole ship is flooding. Yet still at 1010. This is almost 30 minutes later, the Coast Guard is calling again and they finally learn that it's taking on water almost a half hour later.

Yeah, because the guy he admitted it to, like you said, he worked for Costa Cruises. He's like the guy you call when everything has just hit the fan. And so the first call, they were like, no, just tell him it's a blackout. And that's what they told the Coast Guard. It wasn't for till that second call where they're like yeah, we're taking it on water. Why don't you send us a tugboat? One tugboat. That's all they requested. Luckily, people on shore had gotten word that there was something weird going on and they started to move down. Eyeballs yeah, basically, they started to move down toward the wreck and it became immediately clear that there was a huge problem. The ship was starting to tilt. It was way closer to land than it should be. Apparently, it came to rest 1000ft from land. That's how close it was.

It looked even closer. When you see the wreck footage, for.

Sure, like it's really close to land and that there were plenty of people on board. So they started rushing to the accident scene in boats and eventually by helicopters and calling in the people they needed. And again, the ship is not asking for this stuff. Other people are being like, you guys need this stuff. We're coming. Because Scatino was trying to downplay it to save his reputation, and the crisis coordinator was trying to save the company's reputation.

Yeah. So rescue boats finally arrive at 1040. This is almost 55 minutes later. Almost an hour after this thing hits these rocks, you finally get rescue boats, and Scatino finally gives the order to abandon ship. Some people had already taken upon themselves to get the lifeboats going because the writing was on the wall, and then something happened that is really hard to believe that, A, he did it, and B, he thought he could get away with it. But at 1120, Skatino abandoned ship. The captain of the ship. The captain is the oath. Well, I don't know if they take an oath, but they probably do. Let's just say it's, at least figurative.

The oath of the captain is supposed.

To go down with the ship and be like, the last person off. They're in charge. They're the ones that are supposed to make sure everything is as least chaotic as it can be. And Scatino skied adels at 1120, and in court later, he basically got laughed at, said that he had fallen off the ship and landed in a lifeboat.

Yeah. And they're like, well, why didn't you get back off? He's like, I don't know. I didn't want to.

Yeah, I was in there.

Yeah. They remarked that when he made it to land that he wasn't even wet, but just to get across how badly he abandoned the ship. He said abandoned ship at eleven and was off within 20 minutes himself. The local authorities didn't mark the evacuation as complete until about 05:00 A.m.. Yeah, he abandoned almost everybody on that ship just left. And what's crazy is his crew, like, the higher up crew left with him. They didn't leave anyone in charge. There was a total power vacuum, and there was a really big problem, too, that they had. So at the time, under maritime law, if you had a cruise ship within 24 hours of departing, you had to run through your emergency evacuation drill with the passengers and the crew. Have you ever been on a cruise ship?

I've been on one cruise, and it's a total buzzkill. But the very first thing you do is to gather everyone in this huge room and go over all that stuff.

Yes.

You got to pass muster.

It's the last thing you want to do when you first get on a cruise ship. But before I guess they kind of acknowledged that and said, just sometime within the first 24 hours after the Costa Concordia. They're like, you have to do that before you even set sail.

Now before you have your first rum punch.

Exactly. They hadn't even done that yet. So not only did the passengers not know what was going on, not only was there literally no one in charge, but much of the crew was reported to have basically been throwing elbows to get on lifeboats themselves. Ones that were stepping up and trying to lower lifeboats clearly didn't know how to do it. Apparently, there was a retired sailor who was on board as a passenger who basically shoved one of the crew members out of the way to lower the lifeboat himself because the crew member was so incompetent at it. So from top to bottom, from captain to passenger, no one essentially knew what to do. They just knew that this ship was tilting at some really scary angles and water was starting to come up, and all of a sudden, what used to be the walls were now the floor. What used to be the other wall is now the ceiling. And what used to be the floor and the ceiling are now walls. That's how much the ship had tilted. I can keep going. I could tell you, like, the carpeting went from the floor to the wall.

If you keep going, this ship's going to be upright again. They needed you there just to explain things.

That brass, the railing you used as a handrail, you could dangle from it. It's at the ceiling.

Fireman's pole.

Exactly. And the other really scary thing about it, aside from that, you're lucky if you're in a deck that's just like that. There's also corridors that go from one side of the ship to the other. Those are now vertical shafts. I saw it put there was a really elevator shafts. Yeah, essentially, that you could fall into and all of a sudden you're falling to the other side of the ship. It was like the Poseidon Adventure. Halfway.

It's like whatever TV show you were watching all of a sudden was almost upside down.

You would have to dangle from the floor, which is now the ceiling, to watch the TV appropriately.

That's right. So after midnight, the Coast Guard captain there, Gregorio DeFalco, called Scatino. And again, these are recorded phone calls, which is great. And at that point, Scatino is in that lifeboat. And there was a very dramatic conversation that they had, which was played later on, where DeFalco says, you got to return to that vessel, pal. You're the captain and you oversee this evacuation. It's chaos, and you should be up there in charge. And he became sort of a local folk hero in Italy. And there was a line that he had, which Livia helped us with this. So she puts it kind of nicely. A PG translation is get back on the board, damn it. And this was printed on T shirts, and it was sold in Italy. It became a very big part of the trial. Scatino didn't do it. He was like, no, not going back on by 1240. So this is almost. 3 hours later, there were 25 patrol boats, 14 merchant vessels, and those helicopters on the scene. And I think by this time, the ship was listed so severely that they'd lost, like, all of the port side lifeboats. They couldn't even launch those.

So you're dealing now with half the lifeboats as well.

Yeah, the floors, now walls. But the reason why you couldn't do the lifeboats, Chuck, is because on the port side, rather than being the side of the ship that was now skyward, that was like the top of the ship. How are you going to lower a lifeboat like that? You can't do it. Luckily, they got apparently 23 of the 26 lifeboats launched before it just became impossible to launch the last three, which.

Should be enough for all the people, right?

It should have been, and I think it was, but the whole thing was done. So disorderly people were shuffled from one place to another.

Yeah, of course.

And 32 people ended up dying. And most of them, I should say most of the drowning deaths apparently occurred around the same moment. And that is so the ship was listed at 20 degrees. You can work with that, but your dishes are sliding off of your tables and stuff like that. Nothing you want to really deal with, but you can manage. And it started to list. It made it to about 50 degrees. Now, it's a real problem, I think, about then they couldn't launch any of the boats, but then from 50 degrees, it started to list to 70 degrees, where it's almost completely on its side. And that happened quickly enough that people who had been on the starboard side and said, no lifeboat is full, go to the port side, were actually caught in between the two inside interior rooms. And now, all of a sudden, water is coming up from the walls and the floor, and you're trapped inside a room that you can't swim out of. And I guess I think, like eleven or 16 people died that way, just getting caught when the ship listed and the water started to come up, and it happened almost all at once.

So you can make a really good case that had they not delayed this rescue, had they initially called for help immediately, they probably would have gotten everybody off of that ship before it listed to 70 degrees, and all those people who drowned in the center of the ship almost certainly would have lived.

Yeah, absolutely. We talked about all of the upper tier crew getting off on the lifeboats with the captain that left, and Olivia helped us with this, and she found some pretty great examples of heroes of this situation that left, and some of them actually did rescue people that left musicians and waiters and bartenders to help. These are not crew members that are trained to run the cruise ship. These are people serving you food and drinks or playing the drums. There was a drummer, giuseppe Girolamo. He was 30 years old. He had a spot on that last lifeboat, but he gave it up for a family with two kids. He perished. A bartender named Erica Fani. Soria Molina gave up her life jacket to an elderly man. And know, once this thing is moving around and, like, the currents around something, like know, before it's stationary are vast. And I imagine once it even is stationary, just all the transfer of air and a vacuum of water being sucked in, it's very perilous water that you're getting into. So a lot of these people died by jumping in the water to try to swim to shore, but they were just kind of sucked under and kept there.

Yeah. And they may have made it had they kept their life jackets, but for one reason or another, they gave their life jackets away to save other people. So, yeah, that was extraordinarily sad. And there was a lot of valiant efforts, including from people who survived, too. One of the heroes of the story was the deputy mayor of Gilio Porto, I think the main town. Yeah. He was the one who basically filled that power vacuum. He went and was working side by side with, I think, the chief navigator, a guy named Simone Kanessa, who was the one who was ordered to lie to the Coast Guard when they first called. Those two worked to get, like, a couple of hundred people off of the ship that were stuck on it when it listed to 70 degrees. And they were doing things like they found an aluminum ladder, Chuck, and you basically had to climb it to get to the railing of one of the decks, because, again, it's at 70 degrees. And don't get me started about what's a wall and what's a floor, but they were basically using this ladder in the exact opposite direction that you normally would.

And when you would get up to the top of the ladder, you had to climb over the deck railing, and now you're on the port side hull of the ship, and you had to scoot down tens and tens of feet using a rope ladder and then jump the last three to 5ft onto a waiting rescue boat. And, like, 110 people managed to survive by using this exit that Knessa and the deputy mayor managed to organize. Yeah.

I mean, to drive it home. This deputy mayor, who know, probably just easing in for a late dinner on his cozy island as Scatino is bailing off this ship. This guy is getting aboard the ship. He was the first one from that island to get out there and say, I'm getting on board that ship to help people as the captain has bailed in a lifeboat.

Yeah, it's a really unbelievable point out for sure. They may have even passed one another.

Yeah. So you said 32 people died. 150 people were injured. 65, very seriously injured. We're talking partial paralysis. There was one case of blindness, amputations, obviously a lot of people that suffered from PTSD afterward. It took to 06:00 a.m the next morning for everyone to be evacuated that was still alive. As we'll see, there were, very sadly, some bodies that they would find in the months as far as, like, recovery of the dead goes during the operation to save this or not save the ship, but to save the environment from this ship, basically.

Yeah. That was a huge thing. So they went from rescuing people to recovering remains, to preventing a maritime environmental catastrophe of unparalleled proportions from happening. Because this ship had 2600, I think, tons of fuel and oil and hydraulic lubricants and all sorts of stuff that would love to get back in the water yeah. On board. And it was just waiting. All that ship had to do is start to crack up. And it was laying against some rocks at a 70 degree angle. No one knew how much pressure it was having exerted in the middle. Was it going to break in half at the rock? Like the rock is going to be a fulcrum? They had no idea. They just knew that they needed to get that oil out of that ship as fast as possible. So that was also one of the one things they were doing while they were simultaneously searching for remains.

Yeah. So not only the fuel, and we should point out that this is Gilio's inside the Pelagos Sanctuary, the largest marine wildlife park in the Mediterranean. Just an amazing place. And you've got this oil, and then you have everything on the ship, all kinds of plastics, all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of nasty stuff, all kinds of food. Apparently, the food spoilage like they were right in the middle of dinner service. So not only all the food that they were serving for dinner, which for a cruise ship, if you've ever been to a dinner service, it's just more food than you can ever imagine, basically. But all the food, the freezers are bursting. All the food that's on the ship, it's at the very beginning of this cruise, so it's fully stocked. And so that was an environmental disaster attracting all kinds of sea life, making the runoff effect of that is you have people who make their living fishing on this tiny island, like many, many people do that, and all of a sudden their industry is wrecked for a while. Because this ship, to make a long story short, ended up laying there for about two and a half years, and it was an environmental disaster.

And that Nova documentary sent me. Nova did it's 53 minutes long, and it's what was it called? Sunken.

Sunken ship rescue.

If you have a PBS subscription, it is worth your time to watch the documentary on the salvage operation on this thing, because it is unbelievable what humans can think of. The ingenuity of humans to take an unprecedented situation like this and figure out how to safely get that boat out of there was just I've never seen anything like it.

Well, let's talk about a couple more things before the salvage. We'll take a break and then come back and talk some salvage. How about that?

Let's do it.

So in addition to the food that they're having to float past, the divers who are looking for remains, and apparently also they found three people alive who were trapped after the evacuation was complete. One was the ship's purser who had fallen into a restaurant because it was sideways, and he was trapped there for 36 hours. And then another was a Korean couple who were on their honeymoon who got trapped in their cabin. So there was like, wow, we found some live people. It really made them redouble their diving efforts. And it was really dangerous diving through this stuff. Like, there's bedsheets that you could get wrapped up in as a diver. There were knives floating around coming towards you, just tons of debris chandeliers, like, hanging over you that could just drop at any minute. It was a bad jam as far as diving goes. And there's some really amazing footage of divers swimming through the wreckage that the Italian police posted that you can go see. I would strongly recommend going to check that out. But as they're doing all this, they finally, I think, cleared everybody but two people. There were two bodies that they just were like, we can't find them right now.

We need to get this salvage operation underway. And they started to do that.

All right, you want to take the break now?

Yeah, I feel like yeah.

We'll be right back, everybody.

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I think September 2013 almost jeez. This was January 2012. So more than a year, almost two years after the wreck, the boat's just been laying there on its side in the water. 500 people came together to get this thing upright again. And that was just a crazy idea because other people are like, no, we're going to have to just demolish this thing in the water with explosives. There's nothing we can do. And some people are like, no, we can float it again. And they did. They managed to figure out a way using a technique called turnbuckling that got the ship back upright.

Par buckling.

Par buckling. It's like turnbuckling but for giant ships.

Yeah. I think initially the reason it took almost two years is they were coming up with a plan to do this right. So, like, when they hit the ground running in September 2013, initially they were going to try and cut it into pieces, which is a method that's been used before, but they were like, there's no way we can do that without causing more environmental mess. And that's the kind of thing, when something like this happens these days, the environment takes precedent and you have to do it in such a way that, like you said, you don't blow it up and you don't cut it into pieces and wreck the local environment. So they had to figure it out. I suggest watching that documentary. It's amazing. They ended up building these huge platforms underwater that the boat would sit on once they rolled it back upright. But the whole rolling it upright process was fraught with peril of the boat breaking apart. No one knew what exerting that kind of pressure to kind of pull this thing back over these huge steel cables would take. So it's amazing. There were a lot of very tense moments, but they did manage to get this thing upright and floating and towed it away with tugboats.

Yeah, it was an engineering marvel. Apparently they had lasers and microphones and everything on all over the ship to make sure it wasn't settling or moving at any point. Still.

Well, it had become part of the rock over that time too, which was a very tense moment in the Nova special because when it was go time, that's when they realized it was like it is now attached to the seabed in places. And they were like, we don't know what's going to happen, and it dislodged and it actually worked out. But it was very tenuous there for a little while.

So they got it upright and after that, apparently, it opened up parts of the ship to exploration that hadn't been available before. It was just too dangerous. And they found the remains of the second to last missing victim, maria Grazia Tricarici. She was celebrating her 50th birthday with a friend and her daughter when she died. She and her friend died, her daughter survived. And there was just one last person to be found after that and they didn't find him. His name was Russell Rubello. He was another hero who gave away his life jacket to save someone else.

He was a waiter, I think, right?

He was a waiter and he was organizing people to get out of there. He was helping people get off of the ship and died as a result. And once they floated the ship and towed it back to Genoa for recycling, they were just turning it into scrap, 144,000 tons of scrap. The people doing that project found the remains of Russell Rubello in a cabin behind some furniture on the 8th deck. He had just been trapped there the whole time that the boat was underwater. And they found him after it was in the shipyard and dry dock.

Yeah. Obviously the legal fallout from this was pretty broad. Scatino was dubbed Captain Coward by the media in Italy. And on January 15, actually two days after the prosecutor came forward confirming the events, as we have detailed, two days after that, they placed Scatino under house arrest. Obviously, that audio with DeFalco was released. Very damning evidence. And then July 2013, that crisis coordinator Ferrarini, who was on the phone with Scatino, four members of the crew pled guilty. They took a plea bargain, basically, where they pled guilty to manslaughter, got sentences from one and a half years to close to three years, including Jacob Rusley Ben, who was the helmsman, who steered the wrong way. And Scattino says, oh, this plea deal sounds like a pretty good thing, I'd like to get in on that. And they're, oh, no, no, there's no plea deal for you. You're going to go to full trial on a manslaughter charge causing the wreck and abandoning ship. And they opened it up into a 1000 seat court theater, basically in Tuscany so people could go and watch this play out in person.

It was a huge international spectacle.

The trial almost two years, basically 19 months.

It's pretty rare that somebody who's roundly vilified isn't in some way, like, being unfairly vilified. But Scatino is one of those rare people where he totally deserved every bit of scorn and disdain that was heaped upon him and is still heaped upon him. He was a national embarrassment for Italy, but just an international snake as far as everybody else was concerned. And from what I can tell, I'm like, surely there's something this guy did that was like, oh, actually, he did this. No, it does not exist. Which is you just don't run into that very often.

Yeah. He was sentenced to 16 years. He appealed. That appeal was upheld in May 2017, and he is currently serving that sentence. There are people, and I'm glad Livia pointed this out. I don't think anyone, like you said, is defending Scatino. But there was more scorn heaped upon Costa Cruises as a whole because they pointed out things know, I said, put a pin in the fact that there was a language barrier between the helmsmen about which way to steer. They're like that shouldn't happen. There shouldn't be a language barrier between who's steering the ship and the captain of the ship. You got to work that out. There were safety and evacuation procedures that were basically either not known or ignored.

Right.

And that falls on the company to some degree, for sure. And then there were a few technical things. There were some, I believe, watertight doors that were left open. They were either malfunctioning or the crew just didn't shut them because it reduced the amount of work to unseal those doors and made their workflow easier. So there were a few things that popped up. The fact that the company even said, sell buys are fine, we do it. It's something that we all do and it's fine. All these things popped up to put Costa Cruises and hold their feet to the fire. So they ended up offering a payout of €11,000 to anyone who was on board, plus, obviously, reimbursing them for the trip and any costs related to traveling for the trip as long as you give up the right to sue.

Yeah. And they settled with italy itself for a 1 million euro fine, which kept them out of criminal lawsuits or criminal charges. As a company, they just basically shoved Scatino forward and said, here, everybody have Adam. And again, rightfully so. But the company didn't take the kind of responsibility that it should have, like you were describing. And they got off easy. I mean, a couple million in settlements. I mean, they really skin Flinted, the people who were affected by this. But that's not to say they got off scot free as far as finances go.

Yeah.

The salvage operation itself cost $1.2 billion. That's twice the amount it costs to build the ship in the first place.

Plus, they lost the half a billion dollar ship.

Right.

So you're close to $2 billion.

Exactly. So Scatino's little sail by cost that company $2 billion. It cost the world 32 lives and some serious injuries as a result. And, of course, the area around Gilio Island is probably never going to be the same again, or won't be for a really long time. But there was an interesting little postscript because somebody else lost out on this deal, too. You may or may not feel bad for them, but the Calabrian mafia a few years ago came out that the Italian police were recording their conversations and found out that the Calabrian mafia had had a bunch of cocaine aboard the Costa Concordia. And it's not clear if it was still there or if somebody swam aboard and got it or what the deal was, but it was never like the salvage crew was never like we found the cocaine.

Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah. And we should also mention, too, during the salvage operation, remarkably, only one person died, considering how dangerous the work was. They were doing these industrial divers, and one of them, there was a Spanish diver who died February 1, 2014, trying to salvage this thing and help the environment out.

Pretty nuts.

Yeah.

There was one other quote that DeFalco had that wasn't quite as touted in the media, but I thought was pretty BA. You ready? That's a spicy meatball, DeFalco said to Scatino on that famous phone call. Perhaps you saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you pay.

Oh, yeah. That's a good one.

He got him too. Wow. So that's it for the Costa Concordia. And if you heard all this and you're like, this is really interesting stuff, there's a lot of stuff out there for you to go check out.

Totally. That nova doc. It's well worth 50 minutes.

Yeah. I mean, that alone is worth it. What was it? It's a sunken ship rescue. It's a terrible title. It's really hard to get in there. Also, there's a really great Vanity Fair article called Another Night to Remember. I don't remember who wrote it, but they described the people involved as, like, ruggedly handsome, receding hairline. Just Vanity Fair kind of little interesting details, too, but it's really coherent. And well written and really in depth.

Yeah, for sure. It's Vanity Fair, baby.

That's right.

That's what they do.

Yep. And since Chuck said it's Vanity Fair, baby, that means it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this hello from a grateful doc, because that's what Doc Twilling says.

Doc twilling sounds like a little House in the Prairie character.

Soda pop will clear that right up. Hey, guys. My name is Chris. I'm a physician from Michigan who's been listening for many years. Initially, I started listening to get through medical school in those long days, and it was a relief to learn about something other than medicine. I recently started listening to the selects on pain scales which inspired me to write in. As a physician, I'm constantly assessing pain severity to both help make diagnoses and monitor progress as the patients heal. Most of the ideas you discuss are part of an average workday for me. However, you taught me some new ideas, including the concept that elderly patients may express their pain differently, like they may use words like soreness instead of pain to describe their discomfort. I was intrigued by this and researched the idea further, and I'm happy to say I now use this approach to better treat pain in my older adult patients. I love that Dr. Chris here researched further and he wasn't just like Josh and Chuck said it.

That's right.

Let's barrel ahead.

Yeah.

That means Dr. Twilling, doc Twilling is doing the right thing.

He's a sharp tech.

That's right. You guys do a great job of taking complicated subjects and making it easier for everyone to understand the explanations for medical shows you give, such as on addiction, diabetes, and high blood pressure, help me frame my own explanations to my patients. Communicating complicated topics in a way anyone can understand remains a challenge. But I feel I'm getting better every day through listening to how you both do it.

Man how about that? Yeah. We're saving lives here, chuck in a so.

Doc Twilling, Chris Twilling says if you ever come to the Midwest, I'd love to come see you. So put this on the books, doc Twilling. If we come through Michigan or anywhere else you can get to, you are on the guest list. Just send us an email from this very email that you sent and remind us a couple of weeks before the show.

Very nice. Good thinking, Chuck. If you want to be like Doc Twilling and get in touch with us and let us know how we're affecting lives, saving lives, that kind of thing, we love to hear that kind of stuff. You can send us an email. The stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com stuff you should know is.

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