A Couple of Very Hard Men

April 22, 2021·25 min·2 clips

Four days after the Daytona 500, the FBI arrested 70 people in a $300 million drug ring that infiltrated NASCAR, just before engineer Mario Rossi vanished.

Black Thursday comes first. The recap drops the FBI's 70 arrests into a $300 million drug smuggling case that had reached NASCAR. The timing is ugly: Thursday, February 18th, 1982, only four days after that year's Daytona 500. Then the racing names start stacking up. Gary Ballew and Billy Harvey were two of the bigger ones, partly because both had raced in that same Daytona 500 days earlier. Pee Wee Griffin shows up too. From there, the episode pulls those names toward Mario Rossi, then toward Rossi's disappearance less than a year later. Tina Rossi Grimes sees the pattern and says the friends and racing figures who went to jail made the timing feel too neat to brush aside. The reporting runs into a wall with Waltrip, who is described as someone unlikely to make the Black Thursday story easy. Michelle then calls another source: NASCAR Man, the anonymous Racing Reference writer who accepts the unofficial NASCAR historian label. He keeps his identity hidden to protect his work covering the sport and his day job. The interview starts at the beginning, with Michelle asking about NASCAR's bootlegging roots. NASCAR Man says the prohibition story is probably mostly true. Around the sponsor copy and credits, the thread is still clear: racing history, drug arrests, and Rossi's unresolved disappearance keep rubbing against each other.

As heard by us

A careful NASCAR crime story that turns Black Thursday into a trail of memory and motive.

This episode uses Black Thursday to open up NASCAR's bootlegging roots, its polished public face, and the people who moved between those worlds. It works best when it stays close to the reporting.

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Why you'd press play

Play it if you want NASCAR history that turns into a true-crime investigation.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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