Crime history with legal teeth.
Criminal Records Podcast follows the odd machinery behind crime and punishment, from mob taxation problems to censorship by mail. Its episodes pair researched legal history with sharp banter and a taste for cases where authority gets weird fast.
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Criminal Records Podcast looks at the long, messy record of people breaking laws, inventing laws, dodging laws, and misunderstanding laws with enormous confidence. Its sweet spot is the case that sounds ridiculous until the legal machinery around it becomes the real story. Recent episodes follow Mickey Cohen through organized crime, taxes, subpoenas, Las Vegas money, and the fragile theater of legitimacy. They also track the Sovereign Citizens movement from extremist roots into a grab bag of invented legal doctrines, financial conspiracies, and courtroom fantasy. The show can spend time on Imperial Chinese trade administration, then pivot to a Cold War defection that depends on fishing rights, shipboard procedure, and slow government communication. It is funny. It is also more careful than the jokes might suggest. The hosts keep returning to the systems that make strange cases possible: postal enforcement, censorship law, tax protest movements, diplomatic protocol, court authority, and trade regulation. That makes the show more than a parade of odd criminals. It is a study of how institutions behave when people press against their edges. The banter is brisk and often cutting, but the history stays legible. Darker subjects are handled with clear moral footing, especially when episodes touch racism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, neo-Nazi influence, or state power used against marginalized people. The show has a strong appetite for legal language gone wrong. It notices when official-sounding words become camouflage for confusion, fraud, or wishful thinking. It also enjoys the texture of history: flamboyant gangsters, overreaching censors, tiny secessionist states, exhausted officials, and schemes that collapse under their own paperwork. Listeners do not need to follow the catalog in order. Each case stands on its own, though returning listeners get a steady rhythm of research, exasperation, and punch lines. Criminal Records Podcast is best for people who want history with teeth, legal context without stiffness, and true-crime stories that care less about shock than about how the rules were made.
Made for: For listeners who like true crime, legal oddities, and historical cases explained with wit rather than solemnity. It especially suits people who enjoy bureaucracy, fringe movements, censorship fights, organized crime history, and international-law tangles.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating strange crimes as entry points into legal systems, not just sensational stories. Its mix of research, skepticism, and fast banter makes obscure rules feel consequential and absurd at the same time.
Criminal Records Podcast is a history show exploring the weird history of crime and punishment, from the earliest recorded murder case to the origins of laws that are in effect today. Join hosts Isaac Meyer and Demetria Spinrad on a wild journey through criminal justice systems all over the world.You can listen to our episodes in any order, but we recommend starting with our most recent cases and working your way back through our catalogue. We've learned a lot about audio editing and structuring hour-long episodes since we first started in 2018!
A man wants to run a German government as transportation minister; your legal skepticism has found company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp, darkly funny look at sovereign-citizen logic finding new reach online.
Criminal Records Podcast tracks the Sovereign Citizens Movement as its legal theories move out of the 1990s and into Web 1.0, where fringe paperwork logic finds a wider place to travel.
A clear, grim account of the ideology behind sovereign citizens and the legal myths used to defend it.
Sovereign Citizens, part 1 traces the American movement from neo-Nazi roots into the tax-protester arguments and legal folklore that helped define sovereign citizen thinking.
A wheat quota dispute becomes a strange sovereignty bid under the Queen.
A wheat quota fight turns into a sovereignty gambit in this PlayNext review of the Hutt River principality story. Leonard Casely pushes back against West Australia's limits by arguing for a new state inside Australia, while still placing it under the Queen and the British…
Landmark trials, retold objection by objection.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Criminal Records Podcast's Mickey Cohen episode follows Demetrius Spinrat and Isaac Meyer through Cohen's rise after Bugsy Siegel's death, his Los Angeles rackets, and his claim that he "took over from Benny right away on instructions from the people back east." The episode ties Cohen to a Brentwood mansion at 514 Marino Drive, front businesses at 8804 Sunset Boulevard, and money flowing through real estate, oil, and gambling.
Meyer Mickey Cohen, born September 4, 1914, is the focus of Criminal Records Podcast's two-part look at a West Coast mob figure.
Criminal Records Podcast's "Sovereign Citizens, part 2" tracks how the movement moved from Posse Comitatus roots into Web 1.0, and Brian Slater's thesis counted federal filings rising from 11 in 2006 to 142 in 2015.
Criminal Records Podcast's "Sovereign Citizens, part 1" traces sovereign-citizen ideology from late-1960s white nationalism into American legal conspiracy culture.
Leonard Casely's Western Australian wheat quota was 1,647 bushels for 18,500 acres, and he argued the numbers made the farm impossible to run.
Criminal Records Podcast examines the James Flint incident through Qing-era rules that concentrated Western trade in Canton and required foreign merchants to work through Chinese hong merchant groups.
Criminal Records Podcast examines how a 1970 dispute over New England fishing rights led Lithuanian Soviet sailor Simas Kudirka to request political asylum aboard the U.S.
Criminal Records Podcast’s “ONE Magazine” follows Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer through the Mattachine Society’s creation of One Magazine and its role in early gay political organizing.
Criminal Records Podcast examines the American obscenity history surrounding James Joyce's Ulysses, focusing on its serialization in The Little Review.
Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer examine dog-napping rings in nineteenth-century London and the staged-seizure scams of James Clegg.
Criminal Records Podcast hosts Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer trace Britain's move from the Bloody Code toward prison reform after the 1832 Reform Act and the loss of convict transportation to America in 1775.
Criminal Records Podcast hosts Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer trace abortion law in Japan from the 984 Ishinho medical text through the 1907 Criminal Code.
Criminal Records Podcast examines the Yakuza's roots in Tokugawa-era peddler associations and illegal gambling networks.
Criminal Records Podcast's “The Bloody Code” corrects an earlier impression that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British capital statutes were routinely applied across all listed crimes.
Criminal Records Podcast: Emma Goldman, part 2 follows Goldman after prison as she combines nursing and midwifery with highly attended anarchist lecture tours.
Criminal Records Podcast begins its two-part account of Emma Goldman with her June 27, 1869 birth into an Orthodox Jewish Lithuanian family under Russian rule.
Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer examine the first three seasons of Babylon, Berlin, a detective series set in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Criminal Records Podcast examines Christopher W.
Criminal Records Podcast hosts Demetrius Binrad and Isaac Meyer trace the Reichsbürger movement’s claim that the Federal Republic of Germany is not legitimate.
Criminal Records Podcast examines the Stone of Destiny, a 336-pound Scottish sandstone block whose importance comes from coronation ceremonies rather than unusual carving.
Criminal Records Podcast’s “The Osaka Incident of 1827, part 2” examines how Toyoda Mitsugi’s divination circle became associated with secret Christianity in Kyoto and Osaka.
Criminal Records Podcast examines the Osaka Inquisition Incident of 1827, centered on the diviner Toyoda Mitsugi and her disciples in Osaka and Kyoto.
Criminal Records Podcast’s “Lie Detector Tests” examines how societies have tried to separate truth from lies, beginning with divine judgment, trial by ordeal, torture, and drugging suspects.
Criminal Records Podcast: James Reavis, Part 2 follows James Revis as he invents Carmelita, a supposed Peralta heiress, to strengthen his claim over Arizona land he does not own.
Criminal Records Podcast’s “James Reavis, Part 1” follows James Addison Rivas’s attempt to claim 12.5 million acres in Arizona through forged Spanish land-grant documents.
This episode explores the famous gang case of the five men of Naniwa in late feudal Japan.
This episode explores Section 28, a British law that was never successfully prosecuted, and its relevance to modern 'don't say gay' laws.
This episode is a bonus Patreon segment where the hosts discuss period pieces and their intentions, framed as a vacation announcement.
The hosts banter about hockey season and introduce a hockey-related crime story.