Cold trails, hard records, racing shadows.
The Sneak uses reporter-led narration, taped interviews, and document-chasing to reconstruct cases where public stories never fully settled. Its recent seasons move from NASCAR’s early-1980s drug-smuggling orbit and Mario Rossi’s disappearance to previews of missing-person and sexual-assault investigations.
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The Sneak is built for true-crime listeners who prefer reporting over performance. Its tone is steady. Its cases are messy. The series follows unresolved or contested stories by moving through interviews, family recollections, public records, and the kind of small lead that only matters after someone keeps pushing on it. Season three centers on Mario Rossi, described in the excerpts as a legendary race car owner and engine builder. His disappearance is framed through a family story that began with news of a supposed plane crash in 1983. From there, the season widens into NASCAR’s early-1980s underworld. Black Thursday becomes a key backdrop: the day the FBI made 70 arrests and exposed a $300 million drug-smuggling ring that had reached into racing. The show connects that history to figures around Rossi, including Gary Ballew, Billy Harvey, Pee Wee Griffin, and other racing-world names. It does not treat those connections as proof by themselves. It keeps asking what can be confirmed. That caution is part of the appeal. The reporting team follows a first name, a possible last name, a LinkedIn result, a phone call, and an anonymous racing source known as NASCAR Man. Some scenes are almost procedural. Others are intimate, especially when the Rossi family describes years of uncertainty and the strange hold Mario’s story still has in garages and memory. The feed also includes introductions to related investigative projects, including reporting on untested rape kits and the disappearance of Alexis Patterson. Those excerpts show the same house style: calm narration, named sources, careful context, and a willingness to pause on difficult testimony. The Sneak can be heavy. It involves violence, missing people, sexual assault reporting, suicide references, and drug-smuggling history. But it generally avoids sensationalism. Its strongest moments come when a fact pattern shifts, a source hesitates, or an old rumor becomes something a reporter can finally test.
Made for: For listeners who want true crime with reporting discipline: timelines, source work, interviews, and unresolved questions handled without theatrical excess. It suits fans of sports-adjacent crime, missing-person investigations, and slow-burn document trails.
What sets it apart: The Sneak stands out by placing a disappearance inside the specific culture and history of NASCAR, including Black Thursday and racing’s bootlegging roots. It balances family testimony, industry lore, and reporter process instead of relying only on mystery-box suspense.
Season 3: The Disappearance of Mario Rossi - Set against the backdrop of NASCAR’s drug smuggling scandal in the early 1980’s, this season of The Sneak tells the story of the disappearance of one of the sport’s most brilliant engineers, a mystery that haunts racing to this day. The hosts will set out to finally answer the question: What really happened to Mario Rossi? Season 2: Murders at Whiskey Creek - We follow world champion surfer Jack Roland Murphy as he pulls off the biggest jewel heist in American history. Things turn deadly as he is implicated in two murders afterwa...
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Patient reporting connects Mario Rossi's disappearance to family testimony, guarded racing sources, and the unresolved history surrounding NASCAR.
The Sneak builds its investigation of Mario Rossi's disappearance from family memories, racing history, and questions that have lingered since 1983.
A vanished racing engineer pulls you from NASCAR lore into a family mystery.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A recorded stationhouse interview opens into the larger machinery behind untested rape kits.
This episode centers Emily Zabalos's rape allegation and the stationhouse follow-up that arrives a month later. Its best stretch is the audio-video interview, where a detective pushes for a minute-by-minute account and Emily tries to answer in real time, with the pressure of the…
A tense follow-up that keeps the reporting steady as Gary turns suspicious.
Final Resting stays with the fallout from Gary Blue's interview, and the phone call after it does most of the heavy lifting. The episode is strongest when it keeps things plain: Gary says he has already told what he knows, then grows wary and starts treating the reporter like a…
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.
The search for Betty moves from a first name to a possible last name, then into dead ends, a long call with Bruce Atkinson, and a steady narrowing of the leads.
The Sneak stays close to the reporting process: Betty starts as a first name, then possibly becomes Farrier, and the search keeps running into dead ends before a long call with Bruce Atkinson changes the shape of the inquiry.
A measured true-crime account that turns a family tragedy into something still felt.
This episode pulls Bill Rossi back to 1983, when a family call sends him to his grandmother's house and into the news that his father, Mario Rossi, was killed in a plane crash. The story has a calm, reported cadence that suits it well.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
A murder rumor in rural Alabama unravels into a clockmaker's suicide and estate feud.
Emily Zabalos sits in a windowless room.
This introductory episode launches Season 4 of Unsolved, a true crime podcast from USA Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, focused on the 2002 disappearance of seven-year-old Alexis Patterson in Milwaukee.
This episode opens with a warning about explicit language and violence.
Black Thursday hangs over Mario Rossi's disappearance.
Betty becomes the hinge.
Bill Rossi gets the call in 1983.