Aerial View was WFMU’s first regularly-scheduled phone-in talk show. Hosted by Chris T. and on the air since 1989, the show features topical conversation, interviews and many trips down the rabbit hole. Until further notice, Aerial View is only available as a podcast, available every Tuesday morning. Subscribe to the newsletter “See You Next Tuesday!” and find tons of archives at aerialview.me.
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My guests tonight are Mark Moran of Weird NJ and Jesse P. Pollack, a contributor to same, whose new book is Death on the Devil's Teeth: The Strange Murder That Shocked Suburban New Jersey. It tells the fascinating, lost story of sixteen-year old Jeanette DePalma of Springfield, NJ and her unsolved murder. The tale encompasses witchcraft, Satanism, a possible police coverup and a serial killer on the loose.
I've told the story here before of a murder that shocked the town in which I grew (see The Big Duh, below) and, after reading The Devil's Teeth, I began wondering if every town has that one locally-notorious case of murder, solved or not.
Call 201-209-WFMU tonight between 6 and 7 PM Eastern time with the details of the murder in your town. If it happened in New Jersey it might make it into the next edition of Weird NJ!
Tom Joad organizes Uber drivers.
Last Week: The Great Gig In The Sky
Last week's show was an examination of what's been labeled the "Gig Economy." Led by companies like Uber and not quite the same as freelancing, the gig economy is more like independent contractor-ship (though an LA judge recently ruled that Uber driver are actually employees). The show included calls from a Biological Chemist doing work on his kitchen table and an actual Uber driver who pulled over to call.
I do house painting and drywall and tiling and such for cash. I make a lot less than i should but i don't report it to the feds. I hope the revenuers aren't watching this forum. I finally raised my rate for one guy i work for often - i've been charging him the same money for 4 years. You'd think i asked him for a kidney. "You can only charge what the market can bear blah blah." Meanwhile, he drives a new Lincoln MKZ he paid cash for.
Ben Walker, formerly of FMU, recently did "Instaserfs," a series of podcasts on this topic, but at the end, I felt like there was a lot more to explore. There's probably endless material to mine re: the abuse of so-called independent contractors.
NAFTA, GATT, TPP. These were going to make our lives better. Can't wait for the AI robots. Oy vey.
i'm making nothing. Moving into the dirt or a cave soon or a tree.
It's exciting to be part of the Survey Monkey economy!
i have a full-time job and I tend to resist the urge to gig, simply because its taking money away from folks who need to gig for a living... that said, gigging has always been appealing to me, except for not having a steady client base...
I juggle jobs all the time - I enjoy the variety but the instabitily and hustle can be exausting. You could work your ass off for over a year but when the tide goes out for a bit not only do you get no benis from your employers you cannot apply for the unemployment benifits that your fed taxes are going towards. Contractors get shafted all over the place.
With you on the immigrants, Chris. My Great Grandma was one, she barely spoke a word of English. But she came to this country and worked hard. I'll never complain about foreigners because of that.
You drive a car for a living, you have to be prepared to drive drunk people. You want these people driving a car themselves?
Work more. get less. Right-wing Utopia.
Would love to live somewhere cheaper but then where do I make enough money to survive? A question I've been struggling with for several years now. Such a hustle just to make a living these days.
Uber's official policy is no tipping, and supposedly sends out undercover riders to test them and drops drivers who take the bait. Lyft builds tipping into its app. Drivers like the Lyft method better.
The Big Duh
Tommy Palmese never got his goal into the Lindenhurst High School yearbook. I think he dropped out and never made it that far. He was like a lot of guys I went to high school with: not too bright, a bit of a hustler, always playing the angles. He did one thing well–he sold pot. That’s all he did. He was known as the pot connection. I knew Tommy, not well, but we used to say "hello" if we passed in the halls. I didn’t hear anything about him after I left school.
Years later, I was back visiting my mother for some holiday or another and switched on the TV to see Tommy’s parents on the local news. Seated side-by-side on a crummy couch in their sad-looking living-room, they were saying how they’d like to bury Tommy as he lived: with his head. I’m thinking All the time I knew him he had a head. How was it his parents were sobbing and asking for the return of his head–or for information leading to its recovery? Here’s how:
Tommy and this other guy set up a drug deal. They were going to sell some cocaine to some other guys at a late night rendezvous in this gas station in Farmingdale–only they didn’t have any cocaine to sell. What they planned was to rob the guys coming to buy the drugs. With a bag of faux cocaine and a shotgun, they met these guys somewhere around three in the morning.
The guy with Tommy pulls the shotgun on the other guys, to rob them. They make a run for it. Shotgun guy clobbers one of the other guys as he’s grabbing the money to leave. The shotgun goes off, hits Tommy full in the chest. Kills him.
Now the shotgun guy’s panicked. The guys with the money have fled. Shotgun guy’s left there with Tommy, who’s dead or quickly dying. He decides he has to get rid of the body. He goes hunting through the shuttered gas station and finds some kind of knife, a regular knife with a small blade, and he figures the thing to do is to make Tommy a mystery corpse. So he starts cutting off Tommy’s head. It takes hours. This guy really isn’t aware of what it means to cut someone’s head off - he’s seen too many bad horror movies where heads come off like bottle caps–and he’s making a real mess of it. There’s blood everywhere. It’s a slow, labor-intensive job but finally, around dawn, he’s through.
Shotgun guy cuts off Tommy’s hands for good measure and puts the head and the hands in one garbage bag and the torso in another. He throws both bags in his trunk and drives down to the bay, to the end of a dock, and he chucks the bag with the torso in the water. Then he drives a few miles to another dock, fills the head and hands bag with stones and throws that one in the water. Then he drives home.
A few days later the bag with the torso surfaces and washes up on shore. The cops come down and they open the bag and everyone is shocked to see this headless, handless torso fall out. Who is it? Who can this be? Will the identity of this bloated corpse ever be known? Will this remain a mystery forever?
They never said in the news accounts who the cop was–the genius–who reached in Tommy Palmese’s back pocket and pulled out a sopping wet wallet stuffed with ID but I always imagined him letting out a big "Duh!" Like that wouldn’t be the biggest "Duh!" in the whole world. They must’ve wet their pants over that one down at the precinct house.
When Tommy’s head and hands surfaced and washed ashore several days later no ID was required. His parents collected the parts and had a lovely, open casket funeral. I did not attend.
OVER THE AIR: Every Tuesday night, 6 PM Eastern time on WFMU in the metro NY/NJ area at 91.1 FM and on WMFU at 90.1 in the lower Catskills, Hudson Valley, western New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania.
ON THE WEB: Streaming audio in several formats is available at wfmu.org.ON DEMAND ARCHIVES: The Aerial View Archive page features archives going back to nearly the beginning of the show in RealAudio and MP3 format.PODCAST: Aerial View is available on iTunes as a podcast.WFMU MOBILE: Listen live via the mobile app or browse the archives. Get the iOS app here and the Android version here. Amazon Kindle users can use the TuneIn Radio app. Info for other platforms, including Blackberry, etc. can be found here.
AUDIOBOOM: Hear Aerial View and easily share it on social media here. Mobile apps are here.
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Aerial View was WFMU’s first regularly-scheduled phone-in talk show. Hosted by Chris T. and on the air since 1989, the show features topical conversation, interviews and many trips down the rabbit hole. Until further notice, Aerial View is only available as a podcast, available every Tuesday morning. Subscribe to the newsletter “See You Next Tuesday!” and find tons of archives at aerialview.me. (Visit homepage.)
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Call 201-209-WFMU tonight between 6 and 7 PM Eastern time with the details of the murder in your town. If it happened in New Jersey it might make it into the next edition of Weird NJ!
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Years later, I was back visiting my mother for some holiday or another and switched on the TV to see Tommy’s parents on the local news. Seated side-by-side on a crummy couch in their sad-looking living-room, they were saying how they’d like to bury Tommy as he lived: with his head. I’m thinking All the time I knew him he had a head. How was it his parents were sobbing and asking for the return of his head–or for information leading to its recovery? Here’s how:
Tommy and this other guy set up a drug deal. They were going to sell some cocaine to some other guys at a late night rendezvous in this gas station in Farmingdale–only they didn’t have any cocaine to sell. What they planned was to rob the guys coming to buy the drugs. With a bag of faux cocaine and a shotgun, they met these guys somewhere around three in the morning.
The guy with Tommy pulls the shotgun on the other guys, to rob them. They make a run for it. Shotgun guy clobbers one of the other guys as he’s grabbing the money to leave. The shotgun goes off, hits Tommy full in the chest. Kills him.
Now the shotgun guy’s panicked. The guys with the money have fled. Shotgun guy’s left there with Tommy, who’s dead or quickly dying. He decides he has to get rid of the body. He goes hunting through the shuttered gas station and finds some kind of knife, a regular knife with a small blade, and he figures the thing to do is to make Tommy a mystery corpse. So he starts cutting off Tommy’s head. It takes hours. This guy really isn’t aware of what it means to cut someone’s head off - he’s seen too many bad horror movies where heads come off like bottle caps–and he’s making a real mess of it. There’s blood everywhere. It’s a slow, labor-intensive job but finally, around dawn, he’s through.
Shotgun guy cuts off Tommy’s hands for good measure and puts the head and the hands in one garbage bag and the torso in another. He throws both bags in his trunk and drives down to the bay, to the end of a dock, and he chucks the bag with the torso in the water. Then he drives a few miles to another dock, fills the head and hands bag with stones and throws that one in the water. Then he drives home.
A few days later the bag with the torso surfaces and washes up on shore. The cops come down and they open the bag and everyone is shocked to see this headless, handless torso fall out. Who is it? Who can this be? Will the identity of this bloated corpse ever be known? Will this remain a mystery forever?
They never said in the news accounts who the cop was–the genius–who reached in Tommy Palmese’s back pocket and pulled out a sopping wet wallet stuffed with ID but I always imagined him letting out a big "Duh!" Like that wouldn’t be the biggest "Duh!" in the whole world. They must’ve wet their pants over that one down at the precinct house.
When Tommy’s head and hands surfaced and washed ashore several days later no ID was required. His parents collected the parts and had a lovely, open casket funeral. I did not attend.
ON THE WEB: Streaming audio in several formats is available at wfmu.org.
ON DEMAND ARCHIVES: The Aerial View Archive page features archives going back to nearly the beginning of the show in RealAudio and MP3 format.
PODCAST: Aerial View is available on iTunes as a podcast.
WFMU MOBILE: Listen live via the mobile app or browse the archives. Get the iOS app here and the Android version here. Amazon Kindle users can use the TuneIn Radio app. Info for other platforms, including Blackberry, etc. can be found here.
AUDIOBOOM: Hear Aerial View and easily share it on social media here. Mobile apps are here.
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