From critically acclaimed podcast studios Pineapple Street and Wondery comes a new 8-part series called Will Be Wild that shines a light on the human stories left out of the headlines. It goes deep into the lives of people who took part in that day. People who saw it coming. And people who fear that January 6th was just the beginning of something, not the end. 

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Thirty years ago, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, a car accident set off four days of unrest. Two people died. Dozens were injured. Hundreds were arrested. In this Pineapple Street Studios series, journalist Collier Meyerson explores what came to be known as the “Crown Heights Riot.” It’s a story about immigration, New York City’s first Black mayor, the rise of Rudy Giuliani, and the Lubavitch Jewish and Caribbean-American communities sitting at the center of it all. To Meyerson, the Crown Heights Riot can help us unlock and understand so many of our modern dilemmas: from police violence and racism to the persistence of antisemitism. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The House Select Committee on Assassinations picks up where Church left off. Nearly four decades after those hearings, Nina visits Robert Blakey, HSCA's Chief Counsel, to try to understand why the FBI never looked into a conspiracy to kill King. Blakey tells her, 'I've been waiting 40 years for someone to ask me these questions.' The answers go back to St. Louis, and the COINTELPRO operations against Nina's father's clients, including Howard Mechanic.

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After 11 months in prison, Howard is granted a pardon. But Nina has more questions. How is Howard's story connected to the other threads she has pulled? We go back to 1975, and the Church Committee's suspiciously truncated investigation into the possible conspiracy to kill Dr. King.

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Howard goes underground and emerges as Gary Tredway. He gets married. There are dangerously close calls, but he gets away with it for decades -- until a reporter uncovers the truth.

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Howard and others are arrested by the FBI and put on trial by the feds. For reasons neither Nina’s father nor his clients understand, St. Louis is the only place in America where student protestors are facing federal charges -- and the verdict is too much for Howard to bear.

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 In this episode, we return to St. Louis. Nina learns about the FBI's harassment of her father's clients, Percy Green and Jane Sauer, whose left-leaning groups were targets of COINTELPRO. Howard Mechanic and the student activists at Washington University are also on the FBI's radar, and there are informants among them.

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The shadow of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI looms over this story: from surveillance of left-leaning student protestors to harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We learn about Hoover's anti-communist fervor, and how that led to decades of FBI abuses. We also meet Stanley Levison, a communist sympathizer whose friendship with King is considered by Hoover to be a threat to American security.

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While Nina searches for Howard Mechanic, she discovers the story of another fugitive from Missouri: James Earl Ray. In 1967, Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary and went on to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Why didn’t the FBI follow all the leads in investigating the possibility of a St.Louis-based conspiracy to kill King?

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Our story begins in St. Louis, where host Nina Gilden Seavey recounts how the FBI surveilled her family in the 1970s to keep an eye on her father, Louis Gilden, a civil rights attorney at the time. We also learn about Howard Mechanic, one of Gilden’s clients, who was a student at Washington University. After an ROTC building was burned to the ground during a campus protest, Mechanic becomes a prime target of the investigation. What made St. Louis such a hotspot for FBI activity? 

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