Don’t Let Me See You In The Whirl | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Anthony Sanders: I have always taken it as the ultimate compliment when you getting someone
from a daily or big weekly to tell you that they wished that they could write the style
that The Whirl does, by eliminating words like accused, alleged, and just go to supposition,
maybe he was supposed to have done it, anyway. I take that as a real compliment.
Phoebe Judge: The Evening Whirl is an African-American owned crime newspaper in St. Louis. It's come out every week for 78 years. This is Anthony Sanders,
the owner. I flew to St. Louis to meet Anthony. He suggested we meet at his favorite lunch place,
Culpeppers. We talked about the city and how newspapers are changing, but mostly we talked
about how he thinks and writes about crime. And, as he said, crime stories in The Whirl don't often
include words like "accused" or "alleged." Anthony Sanders: And we call it Whirl-esque
type of writing where we go right to the nature of whatever the story is. [Music comes in.] It's almost a conviction
before conviction. We say right away that you the killer, let you prove that you're
not. Let me be honest with you, if it's going to bring some well respected persons into the story
then we will use the word accused or alleged. Phoebe Judge: But most of the time it's just...
Anthony Sanders: It's just straight. Wanted killer, not alleged or accused killer, just wanted killer, ABC. Phoebe Judge: Right at the top of every edition of
The Whirl it reads, "There is power in naming and power in shaming." Not only does The Whirl want
to embarrass people who break the law, they do it in a rather playful way with lots of alliteration
and puns and exclamation points, "Lunchroom lady bopped in face. Bungling bandit bagged
and booked," and, "Don't call me a slobber, I'm a real bank robber." For Anthony, this wordplay is
one of the greatest parts of working on a story. Anthony Sanders: As it starts to come together,
it's like, I guess, a chef or say a cook, maybe, more than a chef, a good old-fashioned
pot of greens, if you will. As you know you got the greens and the fat back or whatever,
but it's the other little spices that you add that's going to make those greens either memorable
one way or the other. [Music fades out.] Phoebe Judge: Homicide detectives are called H-men and even get nicknames. Charles "Knuckles"
Johnson, Detective Jeff Stone is "Stone Heart," and Detective Tom Carroll is "Pac-Man" because he
"gobbles up bad guys." And here's the thing. In The Whirl, the police are always the good guys.
Each week the paper gets information from the police department, and sometimes the
department gets information from the paper. Anthony Sanders: And I'll put this out there. I
think the St. Louis Police Department as well as St. Louis County Police Department does
themselves a lot of harm when they have suspect information, they crack crime — a homicide,
and they don't share it, especially a photograph. People just do not read words. They look at
the words and read the pictures. Phoebe Judge: So, you think that they need to be putting out more information? Anthony Sanders: Yes. Mm-hmm. These guys monitor
this newspaper. They read it. Their friends read it. And anybody that may be associated
with it reads it. [Music comes in.] Now, if you're going to solve a crime, you need to put that on blast, as we would say, to let people
know. Criminals are seeing other criminals they know that have committed homicides on the street.
It's just emboldening them to do it themselves. Phoebe Judge: According to FBI data from September,
St. Louis now has the highest murder rate per capita in the country. The murder rate has increased more than 60% since 2000, and Anthony says The
Whirl reports on every single one. Anthony Sanders: There is no homicide that we do not report on. Phoebe Judge: No homicide
doesn't make it into The Whirl? Anthony Sanders: That's right, and I'll say that emphatically because we have been accused of not printing certain murders, and especially those
involving Caucasians. I think it's ludicrous, but people think that that happens. It doesn't.
Phoebe Judge: In an era of real-time fact checking, when journalists are terrified
of wrongly assigning blame, not to mention being sued, Anthony Sanders just doesn't care. This is
how The Whirl has always done it. As they say, "If that's too much for you, pick up The Times and
read the theater reviews." But The Evening Whirl has always been criticized, sometimes extremely,
all the way back to its very first editions in 1938. Anthony's predecessor, the paper's founder,
was a man named Ben Thomas, and when he was criticized, he famously replied, "The
Whirl has preached purity and condemned crime. Those who don't like it can kiss our behind."
The very first editions of The Whirl covered nightlife and celebrity gossip in St. Louis's Black community. This was during the Jim Crow era, when the daily
newspapers wouldn't hire Black reporters and rarely covered Black neighborhoods.
[Music ends.] Most mainstream papers in America wouldn't even run African Americans' obituaries. And one day Ben Thomas came across a scoop he couldn't turn down.
There was a rumor that a couple of high school teachers had been molesting their
students. Nobody was reporting on it. Ben got ahold of the police records and ran the story.
He had to reprint that edition three times, and The Whirl has been a crime newspaper ever since.
[Music comes in.] I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In the Ben Thomas era, the writing was even more playful. A lot of crimes were written up as jokey
little poems. For example, about a man on his way to prison for selling heroin: "I will sit and lick
my toes and blow snot from my nose. Where I'll end up in life, only God knows." I asked Anthony where
the name 'Evening Whirl' comes from. He said he didn't know. He thinks of 'Whirl' as in kicking
up dust, which is certainly appropriate. But then when we were researching the story,
we came across the phrase in a Mark Twain novel. The novel is called The Gilded Age,
and the line reads, "Both chatted away in high spirits and made the evening whirl along in the
most mirthful manner." Missouri was Mark Twain's boyhood home, and given what we
know about Ben Thomas' literary interest, maybe this is how the paper got its name.
Ben Thomas retired in 1995, and Anthony Sanders, who'd been helping out since he was 18 years old,
took it over. [Music fades out.] Anthony says he can't write poems like Ben, but he still brings plenty of his own personality to the
reporting, once writing that a murder victim was "in a flying casket to hell." And since Anthony
took over, he's increased the paper's readership from 4,000 to almost 55,000. The paper has
done so well that he's even hired a reporter. Anthony Sanders: Well, it had to take its lumps,
but perseverance overruled. What happened is that we had to do some of the things
that we know that will help strengthen the paper. We started picking up some of the
internet lingo and incorporating that into it. That helped a little bit, because we were
told that we were going to go the way of the dodo. But nevertheless, I mean, here we are.
Phoebe Judge: Do you have a favorite issue? Anthony Sanders: No, I haven't done it yet.
Phoebe Judge: It just hasn't happened...? Anthony Sanders: I'm never, ever satisfied
with what happens after it's printed. Sundays, I could be on cloud nine, but by Monday morning,
I'm getting ready for the next one. Phoebe Judge: Anthony lays out each edition
of the paper in his house, working through the night on Sundays to get it to the printer on
time. Then on Monday mornings, he picks them up and personally delivers the papers to stores.
He took me along on the route. His first stop is always a BP at the corner of Jefferson and Clark
Avenues. The woman behind the counter said she remembers reading The Whirl when she was a kid,
back when it was 50 cents. Now it's $1.50. Cashier: Well, it's a popular paper. We have...
What shall I say, residential criminals? I don't know. Phoebe Judge: Do you have
people who come in and ask for it? Cashier: Yeah. All the time. I mean, it sells just as much as The Post. Yeah. It gives us the daily news constant,
what's going on in the neighborhood, the area, who did the most stupidest stuff for the week.
Phoebe Judge: Do you ever have anyone who's come in and says to you, "Wait, do you have
The Evening Whirl yet? Is it here yet?" Cashier: Yeah, "I might be in the paper."
Yeah. I've had people sign the paper, their signatures because their picture's on there. Yeah. Phoebe Judge: So, they come in here to say,
"Oh, boy. Did I make it?" Cashier: Yeah, they do. I mean, we get quite a few people that come in and want to know if they made the week news.
Phoebe Judge: This is one of the many contradictions about the paper. It's openly pro-police, a self-described crime-fighting newspaper,
and yet the men and women written up in the pages of The Whirl often see it as a badge of honor.
Anthony Sanders: And what we have found is that they — perpetrators will have these papers. I mean, I've had that told to me so many times in criminal cases,
where a lot of times it's been someone police had been actively looking at for years and they have
been committing crimes continuously. And they know who they are, but they just trying to get enough
information to get warrants issued. You know what I mean? When they do, they go in the house,
and there's Whirls all over the place, but they've been chronologicalizing their escapades.
[Music comes in.] Phoebe Judge: One of the most persistent criticisms of The Evening Whirl is that it's a Black-owned
newspaper that exploits African Americans in order to sell copies. The St. Louis chapter of the NAACP
attempted a boycott of the paper in the mid-'80s. James DeClue, the president of the chapter,
called The Whirl "the dirtiest, lousiest evidence of lies about a people I've ever seen." I asked
Anthony what he thinks about this criticism. Anthony Sanders: I have had a lot of,
I guess you'd say, talks with myself about this, and it's a question that I always ask myself.
Would I be a reader of The Whirl? I happen to be knowing the paper, but I've been a part of it for
so long, I guess, it's like, "Duh, you've been with the paper almost 60 years or 50 years and
you only 68 years old. So how much of a choice did you have?" But once again, I stand on it, and I've
said that several times to several of our people that always question that. But I'm very, very
loyal to it, and I'm very passionate about it. Phoebe Judge: Whether or not you agree with
Anthony, The Evening Whirl is a piece of history. It's being preserved at Washington University's
library in St. Louis. That was our last stop for the day. The librarian who greeted us says
students come in every week to study the paper and its representations of race, drugs, and guns.
And right now, there's a campus project called "Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis." In spite of the salacious and often offensive writing, some of the only surviving historical
documentation of gay African Americans in St. Louis is in The Whirl. This says, "Lesbian mob queen faces the music." Anthony Sanders: Where you see that? Oh,
up there? Phoebe Judge: Can you just... "Lesbian mob queen faces music." [Music fades out.]
Anthony Sanders: It says, "The entire city wanted to look at the woman who smashed last week's
Whirl headline story. She so magnificently conducted her stable of women in the Stroll
and the successful robber of a couple who was passing through the Stroll area and thought
the girls were in trouble and stopped. But to their sorrow, Diane, 26, taught her protegees
to hold onto their money when investigated by police by inserting it in their vaginas.
And that is what they did." [Music comes in.] Phoebe Judge: Oh, my gosh. Anthony Sanders: Yeah.
Phoebe Judge: The Whirl has never pretended to be something that it's not. In an edition from 1978, Ben Thomas wrote, "The city wonders who it will be. Just take it easy.
You will see. Guns will roar and rip like hell, and how The Evening Whirl will sell." Anthony
says that somewhere over the past 78 years, The Whirl has become shorthand, a way of saying,
"Be good." So, when friends say goodbye they'll joke, "Don't let me see you in The Whirl."
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Since 1938, a weekly African-American owned newspaper called The Evening Whirl has covered crime in St. Louis with a style all its own, using alliteration and rhyme, and often omitting the usual crime-reporting words like “accused” or “alleged.” The paper has been widely criticized for its casual approach to fact-checking and sensational writing style. But the paper’s owner, Anthony Sanders, who has been helping out with it since he was 18 years old, doesn’t have any plans to change it. As the pages of The Whirl have said: “If that’s too much for you, pick up the Times and read the theatre reviews.”

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 56 originally published 12/2/2016 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-56-dont-let-me-see-you-in-the-whirl

Brief Summary

Anthony Sanders discusses The Evening Whirl's unique crime reporting style and its historical significance in St. Louis.

Key points

The Whirl's Unique Style. The Evening Whirl eliminates words like 'accused' and 'alleged' in its crime reporting.
A History of Controversy. The Whirl has faced criticism for its portrayal of crime and its subjects.
Preserving History. The Evening Whirl is being preserved at Washington University's library, documenting race and crime.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

There is power in naming and power in shaming.

Anthony Sanders on The Whirl's approach to crime reporting.

1:38WatchDec 2, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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