So, I guess in this session here we are, instead of in the morning at 30,000 or 40,000 feet with inspiration, here we are down in the trenches in the mud struggling with real, with muddy problems and trying to do better. I also want to just take 15 seconds to, the first time I've been inside the National Library of Medicine and Physical, the actual building and I am very grateful to them because it was the introduction of Medline that, and it was brand new at UCSD in about 1992 and it was because I logged on and typed green fluorescent protein as a keyword. That fact then you had to do everything in text search mode. Without that I would never have started the work that got me to Stockholm. So it's, that's one of the little unsung activities that way back when made an awful lot of possible. Today I'm going to talk about imaging in general both at the whole body level but also at the improvement of surgery and of course as Dr. Seltzer will agree that they work together very closely and these are the people who have been involved. I do want to make a conflict of interest disclosure that we are trying to commercialize these molecules and that's the only way to get them into the clinic but that does mean that there is a potential conflict of interest. So our molecular target has been proteases in cancer at least because most cancer deaths of course occur due to metastases in distant organs rather than in primary tumors and cells have to break through normal tissue either to, and then the basement memory, either to reach the bloodstream or lymphatics and either one of those requires expression and activation of proteases to chew, to help the cancer cells chew their way through the normal tissue also to release angiogenic factors and a whole complicated series of biochemical steps to engender the tumor microenvironment and I don't have time to go through all of those. The cartoon I could even just steal from a commercial website. This activity of proteases is sufficiently known in fact the website even highlighted two of our favorite of the extracellular proteases that are involved here and matrix metalloproteinases2 and MMP9 just two members out of about a 25 member family that mediate many forms of extracellular matrix degradation and EM Sciences makes reagents for the in vitro imaging of MMP2 and 9 but the in vivo imaging in a patient is one of the unsolved challenges that we're working on. So the scientific strategy that we're following at least is based on first a little bit of known biochemistry that we had no part in discovery which is that highly positively charged peptides full of them things like arginines and lysines but particularly arginines those like to stick to the outside of the cell and if you attach a payload of that's going along for the ride covalently attached that will likewise stick to the outside of the cell and people believe that this is due to the electrostatic attraction of the plus charges from the polycadine against the negative surface charges that all cells have some of which come from phospholipids but even more come from proteoglycans and then having absorbed to the surface then some of this stuff gets endocytosed as shown here and then a fraction of what got endocytosed by the most mysterious step in this process manages to escape into the cytosol and nucleus and this is much beloved of people who work in say tissue culture which is where this mechanism has largely been confined if you want to get impermanent payloads into cells and you don't want to have to microinject them individually this is a decent way of doing so this is one of the great hopes for example of delivering si RNA that Phil Sharp had been discussing there are some people who think you don't have to go through the endocytic pathway they're mainly biophysicists who don't work on cells but rather on model systems now the polycadine can be a whole range of things the amino acids are okay there's no stereo specificity and the very simplest type of polycadine is just a row of arginine which I like because it's very simple and the payloads can be all sorts of things up to nanoparticles in size now the problem is is that this sounds great and does work fair fairly well in tissue culture if you get the conditions right but it naturally caused a great deal of excitement all the way turns out back in the early 2000s with the possibility that we could do in vivo drug delivery or macromolecule delivery in a in a live human being this way all sorts of things we would love to be able to get inside cells and reach into cellular targets with reagents that wouldn't normally cross cells but unfortunately this doesn't tends not to work and I was watched on the scientific advisory board of at least one of the companies that I helped start and watched it fail and be unable to translate this into the clinic and one of the problems is that when you first inject the stuff say into a mouse a whole mouse it sure it goes into the cells it goes into the cells of the tail vein into which you did the injection because this is nonspecific and then later some ends up in the liver probably carried by the huge amount of argument that also is in the blood circulation that competes and finally gets excreted at no point does the tumor get a sufficient loading of the of the payload that you want to deliver and if you just increase the dose hoping for to drive a small fraction or a proportion in you end up with a dead mouse so what we decided was that we needed to make a selective and our particular strategy was rather naive and the reason I emphasized electrostatics is that that's all you have to do if the plus charges love to stick to negative charges on the surface of the cell if we build in a whole bunch of negative charges on fact one-to-one with the positive charges built in the polycane that internally pacifies nullifies the plus charges they pair up probably as a hairpin and the polycane is no longer interested because it's found a nonstick backing paper onto which it already attaches itself and so it has no need to go out and buy into the cell but if we come along and cut the linker that was covalently holding these two together then the two parts can drift away from each other the affinity isn't that high and then wherever the protease activity was that cut the linker it's now like we had a local micro injection of the polycane or like we ripped off the backing paper and then this stuff immediately stuck down and then does its usual thing so we've converted a nonspecific indiscriminate loading that tends to go to the wrong place into what we hope is a tumor targeted protease targeted local delivery and indeed I wouldn't be giving you this talk except that it does seem to work and here is an example of such a peptide in which we have nine negative charges in the portion colored red nine positive charges in the portion colored blue that's nine arginines and they are diamino acids and for us lowercase is our convention for diamino acids then in the middle is a cleavable linker PLG LAG this is L amino acids natural amino acids that can be cut by MMP 2 and 9 which like to cut right between the glycine and the leucine and we this is what we inject now the tumor happens to be pre-labeled with green fluorescent protein this is something we can do in a mouse we pre-transfect the cells with GFP before we put it in it's a great pity no human tumor ever came green fluorescent glowing for us they were not prepared that way they grew spontaneously it would be very helpful to us as researchers if more and even as clinicians if more human tumors were already glowing green but sorry that's only something you can do in a mouse and that's the real weakness GFP that got me to Nobel Prize is extremely powerful when you have genetic control and it can be linked to all sorts of molecular biological events in the cell but when you are not allowed to transfect it's not actually a very good chromophore and it has no special advantage and that is the case in human beings so here this is what we can inject as into the into the vein in this case into the mouse and you see that it lights up the tumor in correspondence pretty well with the GFP which is the perfect genetic perfection of this is the gold standard this is where the tumor really is as though you can see it as well by bright field here is a control if we put in the same probe but the only thing is that we flipped over the stereochemistry of the proline dilucine and alanine in the cleavage sequence now the enzyme can't recognize it because it's the wrong stereochemistry it's unnatural amino acids and the same molecule otherwise of the same hydrophobicity and molecular weight when you inject that it it fails to light up the tumor as shown here but there is a big juicy tumor shown by the GFP now we are too thick and opaque to be directly useful in a whole body sense for fluorescence the weakness of fluorescence is that it doesn't penetrate more than maybe a millimeter or two and even into tissue and it even there it gets blurry and if you happen to have skin pigment or a little adipose tissue which all too many of us have maybe more adipose than we would like it's even worse so we need things like MRI but fortunately this is a technology that simply targets the contrast agent so we can switch the contrast agent to being saying a nanoparticle loaded with gadolinium chelates gadolinium chelates being what we use to light up a region of tissue with so-called T1 weighted MRI and it actually does seem to work so here is a mouse that has a tumor implanted in its armpit and before injection this tumor is not particularly different in grayscale here though there's a little bit of fat that and that wasn't perfectly nulled out in the fat suppression sequence but there isn't a big difference in grayscale between the tumor and the rest of the animal the four circles are a little tanning bed made out of four glass capillary filled with differing concentrations of gadolinium to serve as an internal reference now then however then we injected the animal with this nanoparticle which has six copies on average of the each pep of a peptide on its surface the same peptide I've been talking about and a bunch of gadolinium and then we would have to wait a while for the stuff to clear out of the normal tissue and let the normal tissue background go down but what's left is a tumor that is now glowing because it has successfully or the protease in there has successfully cut the green linkers and left us with these a whole bunch of these positively charged spokes sticking out that nailed this then nanoparticle into the tumor where if the normal tissue gets rid of it and once again here we have the control which is the same nanoparticle with D amino acids in the linker and though there is certainly a tumor there it does not accumulate the probe and why is this important well I think as many other speakers will echo or have echoed there is a tremendous value in early cancer detection if we catch cancers late they tend to be relatively poor in survival if we catch them early particularly when they're completely irrespectable we have a much easier time managing it in the imaging term they say in breast cancer you might have had a localized lump here in a PET scan versus here it's metastasized all over the place unfortunately the current clinical attempts are largely focused in this domain up here because this is where the patients are desperate that and will enroll in any clinical trial because they're at their end of the life and the chances that you'll mess something up when they're up I'm sorry when they're essentially fatal cases anyway it is much less danger and of course this is where the money is and what is horrible to the health care system about treating at this stage compared to that stage is precisely what drives drug development the prospect of large profits and relatively easy clinic trials so this is the way we are now and obviously some other speakers have mentioned in the long run the nation has to do better and we have to begin to focus a little bit more on this area even if that isn't quite but it currently is the favorite area a particular area that we are interested in is also detecting metastatic lymph nodes partly because that's a sort of a low hanging fruit in clinical practice we understand that this is one of the more difficult decisions a surgeon has to make on the spot how many lymph nodes do you take out and for us it also has the advantage of a sort of a yes or no answer each lymph node is either positive or negative whereas the boundaries of the primary tumor are sometimes a little bit vague depending on what your criteria are are what I showed you before were primary big fat primary tumors and more recently in unpublished work we've now been able to see metastatic lymph nodes that are even a fraction of a certainly less than a millimeter or so in size in a mouse model of course this is a primary tumor in the ear which is draining and this case has been allowed to go to invade this lymph node we didn't know it at the time we did the MRI first and then subsequently verified it with an independent pathologist who had not been able to see the MRI and we then compare results on the other side here not lit up is the normal lymph node that is not draining here so we think we're having some promise toward finding metastatic lymph nodes by by MRI but the next advantage of this sort of imaging is that the nanoparticles can actually also carry fluorescent dyes as well as the MRI gadolinium reagent and therefore we can begin to do fluorescence guided surgery and I'll show you a little bit of this in what's coming up here is a big fat tumor visible by MRI and then that's an axial scan here we laid the animal on its back opened it up and sure enough there's the big tumor big fat juicy xenograft in this case and you can see the fluorescence my colleague Dr. Nguyen who is the practicing surgeon cut this out but she didn't use white light she only used white light the traditional surgical mode we sewed up the animal again and put it back in the MRI scanner you can see a big hole where the tumor used to be but also unfortunately up in this sort of armpit region some suspicious extra white dots that we thought were a bit not not quite kosher and indeed after we did his sack sack the animal and did the histology they were indeed nests of cancer cells whereas in this case Dr. Nguyen used the fluorescence that she could see to guide her in a very crude original apparatus just sort of a dissecting microscope with filters and we managed to get a much cleaner MRI and this could be confirmed by some actual survival studies where without any surgery in these two different types of one a melanoma and another a breast cancer model both syngenic so they had the full tumor microenvironment if you didn't operate the animals would be dead in two or three weeks because this is quite an aggressive both are aggressive models with the help of white light surgery we get the red survival curves you can occasionally save the one animal out of many but with the fluorescence guided surgery even with crude equipment we were able to increase the survival to a significant extent though not not yet perfection and I'd like to show you a little bit of what this looks like in now somewhat more sophisticated imaging equipment but this is still nothing like what you know people at Nibib are really proud of and all this really heavy multi-modality stuff this is still very very simple minded but I think it makes the point here is a tumor in the ear can you see where the boundaries of the tumor are I think you might find it a little difficult in fact if I hadn't told you that there was a tumor you might not know it this is one of the classic models but in a moment this is the white light viewed if surgeons have been resorting to for thousands of years now in a moment I'm going to switch the illumination and I've stopped it here this is the fluorescence mode we're now looking at the deep red fluorescence of the sci-fi dye attached to the poly-arginine motif and it is retained in the tumor because that's where the proteases are that cut off the poly anion the polyglutamate region and now you can nicely see I hope the boundary of the tumor right it's actually rather hard to do surgery in this mode because you can't see anything else you can't see your instruments you can't see the blood vessels the rest of the ear so we do a very dumb and simple minded thing which we actually the idea I think may have been published first by John Franjione at Brigham which is to a false color this monochrome image in your favorite color that doesn't normally appear in an animal we picked in the following case I think a light blue and then you superimpose it in real time on top of the white light image and therefore you can get to see the both to both so the surgeon chooses with a foot pedal which view to see sometimes you don't want the distraction of the fluorescence so you have the white light sometimes you want just fluorescence alone and then sometimes in this case this is the overlay and every time you press the foot pedal using a foot so your hands are free you get the next view so here we can see the fluorescence into the lymph nodes in the neck of the animal it's only been shaved it's pretty blurry because of course the diffusing effect of the skin and in a moment Dr. Nguyen will start opening up the skin and there she has done so and now we can see pretty clearly that this is the heavily inflamed lymph node there may be a small amount of involvement in this one and these guys are clear no ear was out here and it's not visible in this particular view but right now here in real time the surgeon knows cut me out and without having to resort to sentinel node detection which is only telling you anatomically which node is downstream and we actually in this case from the anatomy we already know so but it doesn't tell you whether there are metastatic cells in them or not okay so even that though it seemed to give us quite a bit of improvement was not good enough so in our latest attempts what we've done is add an extra dye called size 7 on the polyglutamate end and that's all we've done but now we could get fluorescence resonance energy transfer between the sci-5 and sci-7 and that's surprisingly efficient in the case when the probe is not yet cut this is before cleavage but then after we cleave it then of course the two halves drift apart and a familiar story to any of you who've ever done molecular imaging at the microscopy level then you lose the fluorescence resonance energy transfer between the sci-5 and sci-7 it's an independent spectroscopic instantaneous measure of cleavage and the sci-5 goes up eight fold and the sci-7 goes down about five fold it's a 40 fold change in ratio and we love ratios because ratios cancel out all sorts of imaging artifacts including thickness of tissue absolute concentration of dye quality of illumination a sensitivity of the camera and so on and it focuses just on the biochemical activity and so here we can show you that we are even better now looking at lymph nodes but immediately after injection still nothing there isn't time for anything to have developed the enzyme hasn't had time to work but say two hours after injection now even through the skin and it's blurring with this fret system we can not only see the primary tumor as this red which is the pseudo color for the high sci-5 to sci-7 ratio or a lot of cleavage we can even see the lymph nodes through the skin surrounded by lots of other white bright dots and so on that if you were just looking at any one intensity they could fool you very badly but only when you take the ratio of sci-5 to sci-7 and coded in color and do the spectral comparison you see that the primary tumor and the lymph node are privileged even here you could barely even see the primary tumor mainly because it was in the shadow of most of the animal the the fiber optic beam illumination wasn't hitting it quite right we can confirm that the probes are responding really to mmp2 and 9 the previous control i showed you was just changing them to dmino changing the substrate to dmino acid is really not a very incisive control because any enzyme would probably be confused by switching from l to dmino acids but here genetically we have knocked out mmp2 and 9 here is the wild type animal even just 45 minutes after injection there are two tumors lit up but if we have removed genetically knocked down 2 and 9 together in the tumor and in the host then the tumor does not light up and that is telling us that effectively in these mice the dominant biochemical activity has to be something dependent on 2 and 9 we've even now been able to see metastases on top of the liver this used to be the worst possible problem for us because the liver has this wonderful ability to take up peptides and in general cleave them because it's so full of enzymes but now we can actually see the tumors on top of the liver these are breast cancer breast metastases and the gfp here is marking the tumors to serve as our reference are gold standard and if you look at say the sci-fi image it doesn't really look very much like the gfp and there's lots of blotches that i'm pointing to with arrows that are really really bright in the sci-fi image and don't are not really tumor because they don't have gfp in them as reflecting the reference standard but when you after you do the sci-fi to sci-7 ratio and cancel them out they're bright but they're in the wrong ratio and the ones with the correct ratio indeed pretty much match with the gfp not perfection but they shouldn't be absolutely perfect because gfp and sci-fi sci-7 have very different penetration depths and finally with all of that we feel that we've raised our specificity and sensitivity which wasn't perfect before we had a lot of overlap when we were just doing intensity measurements between say cancer and normal there was a statistical difference in the means but there was a lot of individual overlap in the populations hence the sensitivity and specificity were not perfect but now that we've switched to ratioing you can get what seems to be absolute criteria where you can draw separation lines that clearly distinguish the population and at least on very preliminary inadequate admittedly numbers of tests we can get 100 specificity and sensitivity how well this will hold up when we go into people probably not as well but it's a good place to start from and it certainly made us like the chance of doing ratioing and we've tested this type of system with many many of these substrates not all in the most raciometric mode but here i think are about 11 human tumors and six mouse tumors and the point is that basically every tumor type we've tried has been positive and this is one of the virtues of the system these enzymes are so ubiquitous that unlike your typical antibody marker or so on which will work on some fraction of tumors of one anatomical site this seems to be relatively more universal it may be even almost too universal but that's a point of discussion okay so we think that it's worth improving surgery and because nearly all patients with solid tumors start up with surgery so it deserves to be improved and nybib is relatively unique and liking to do this when i talk to my colleagues in cancer biology or go to cancer biology talks 98 or 99 percent of anybody who thinks that you learn something out of something new we learn about the molecular basis of cancer it's assumed that the only way you translate it into the clinic is through making a drug all we hear about small molecules antibodies over and over again nobody thinks that surgery or radiation therapy which are the actual mainstays of clinical cures nobody thinks of them as intellectual enough you know surgeons are just dexterous right literally with their fingers however i would point out that if you can catch the tumor early enough to completely cut it out the result is an immediate cure relatively low cost compared to the lifetime of medication on the wonderful designer drugs that don't kill the cancer and merely give it time to become resistant and one thing a tumor can never become resistant to is being literally chopped out and dropped them from out high i do not care what else it has it how apoptosis resistant is how much like cancer stem cells it is whatever it's gone of course we that's why we really need the early detection to catch the cancer when it's still circumscribed and of course if we fail in all of this and catch it too late maybe one day we will also be able to target chemotherapy by the same technology now one of the big issues that prevents us from cut doing a better job in surgery turns out i gather to be cutting nerves nerves are actually the structure that is most dangerous to cut as a naïve layperson i used to think it was blood vessels you know that if you cut a blood vessel all this blood would come spurting out but the surgeons assure me that nowadays with coterie and all sorts of things they don't move that many patients simply due to loss of blood but if you cut a nerve if it grows back at all which is far from guaranteed it will be very slow and in the meantime you have a loss of sensation if it's a sensory nerve or paralysis or loss of motor function if it's a motor nerve and the current techniques are not very good and they're mostly not very visual i had never realized that this was a problem until a clinician point my colleague Dr. Nguyen pointed this out to me and so we said okay well let's just try to find molecules that like to bind a peripheral nerve in distinction through other tissues so we just did phage display a very standard biochemical technique against that dissected out nerves versus other tissues found peptides and here's an example of one of the sequences in a 12 amino acid library i do not know why ntqtla k8 you know you can read it why that should bind to nerve but it does seem to when you attach fluorophores we can inject the labeled peptide recent the size not made by phage anymore and it lights up the nerve and the contrast lasts for a couple hours it labels both motor and sensory nerve the nerve does not have to be physiologically active and our probes seems to have absolutely no biological effect on the nerve and i'd like to show you what that looks like here again is a mouse the flank in this case and there is once again a tumor in there can you see the boundaries i hope you'll admit that it's fairly tough until we turn on the fluorescence and there's the fluorescence and now you can see the boundaries of the primary tumor it shades off gradually because the tumor is getting thinner and thinner but there's no doubt where it is that's fluorescence only and this is our favorite overlay mode and today we chose to make the tumor bright green not because it has gfp but again green is something that we don't normally have so Dr. Nguyen has taken off the skin and starting to cut away and the sciatic is being revealed here and at this stage anybody can see what the sciatic is and in there i'm going to stop it you remember that this is the tumor mass this is the sciatic and it looks like it's just beginning to branch here and that if you were going to try to preserve the sciatic nerve you would carefully dissect along its margins and separate it from this big great big glop which is the tumor right well that turns out to be a bit wrong here's an even better view at a slightly later stage do you see the beautiful one branch of the sciatic and there's the other but in a moment now i switched to the fluorescence of the nerve highlighting peptide this is today in a different this is a different wavelength and this is just fluorescence at this level but there's the nerve you see but the nerve has been diverted from its normal anatomical course by the growth of the tumor and it now dives in here and if you were carefully dissecting along here from the previous view you would have just transected the main branch of the sciatic nerve and left that animal paralyzed now when we highlight it in overlay mode it becomes pretty obvious and i hope you can see again in white light how invisible it is and how valuable it is to actually see where you're going so this is the value of imaging in real time during surgery we hope an example of it in a place that is actually even more clinically relevant as in prostate surgery the cavernousal nerves are non-myelinated nerves that run right beneath the prostate under a layer of fat and they're very difficult to see in fact their anatomical course and the ability of any surgeon to avoid them was only discovered a few decades ago by someone who's still alive and has won many awards for that discovery i didn't ever think there was any part of gross anatomy that could still be discovered in the 20th century but sure enough there is and this is an amounts that has far less fat than a male human male and you cannot see the nerves but when we turn on the nerve highlighting peptide we can see through the fat down to the level as long as it's not too much we can see through some layer of that and see the course of the nerves and the urologists are fairly excited by the prospect that they will now be able to see what they need to avoid in order to preserve erectile function which may be not life you know essential or life threatening but somehow men seem to be attached to that just to point out that we're not totally limited to cancer for reasons of brevity i have focused on cancer today but all you have to do is change the amino acid sequence it previously i was showing PLG LAG if we change the DPRSFL it turns out now to be a pretty selective substrate for thrombin and we can watch thrombin activity in vivo and here we can light up atherosclerotic plaques which have thrombin activity as it is known in the plaque and so this is a view of the carotid and in a mouse the carotid is somewhat visible to the trained eye it's harder you can't see through the carotid in a human being because it's more opaque but even with the blood coursing through it we can see the fluorescence that marks what turns out and can be proven by subsequent histology to be aggressive thrombotic plaques of mostly filling the lumen and we think this will be helpful in surgery at least to help the surgeon avoid accidentally bumping it which could cause a stroke if you were operating nearby or if you were trying to put in a stent it's always helpful to see exactly where it is in real time not just by previous static CT images or occasional MR images where you get one view every 15 minutes but to see it in real time millisecond by millisecond as you manipulate the tissue and this is ever more important i might say as we move toward robotic surgery because that all that wonderful stuff that Dr. Pugh was showing us about the importance of touch is sort of lost at least in current robotic surgery that's the great downside is that it does currently gives you no haptic feedback so we're ever more dependent on plain old vision so in summary we have a mechanism for delivering cleavage activated contrast agents and if there's enzymatic amplification which was necessary to get the MRI sensitivity the nerve homing peptide is a completely separate technology but happens to be nicely complimentary we think i don't want to pretend that any of these is perfect we're trying to improve both systems and i gave you a little hint of that you know one can be semi-rational and try to make these things better we think in earliest clinical application will be an image guided surgery precisely because we offer a little bit extra to the already trained clinician who can ignore things if we tell for you that this signal is a false positive and will consistently be a false positive you learn to ignore that early detection will be a little harder and drug delivery will be the most challenging though we are finally making some headway at last on that application too which i'm well aware of is by far the one that will make me most popular amongst cancer biologists because again they still think that this is the only thing you want to work on and this has taught us how important is to work in vivo and really with clinicians to have them tell us what's important and not just ourselves as basic scientists trying to imagine what we think will be useful so with that i've already talked too long i can leave this up in case there are questions for what i would have as a long-term dream we all have to have dreams in unrealistic thank you very much time for maybe one question for dr shen yes please that is the job of the biotech company because again i don't think we are qualified in and as a university lab to push it through the fda they have just started doing it they have so far tested it 30 times the in the imaging docents and what it mainly does is it does turn initially the whole mouse turned slightly bluish from the sci-fi visibly through the skin the urine is intensely aqua colored because that's the left the normal stuff being excreted so far no sign of tox but they're they have to go to 100 fold and they have to scale up a little more so it's looking good but you never know obviously we're at a very very early stage and many many things that have looked good at this stage we all know didn't don't make it we know that horrible attrition rate and i we may know be no exception so let's not get our hopes too high uh we have lots of academic publications on this some of what i showed you is not yet published in the company i'm afraid has not published anything but that's nature of companies thank you roger welcome to the uh imaging community


Welcome back into the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein along with my co-host my partner in crime the dr Jimmy Buccellato. Hi everyone. Hey now and behind the glass is our producer Ben the superstar the MVP of 2022 Benny Agusta Too nice. Nice Scott. So I'm really really really jacked about this episode. I've been hunting down our guests over the last month and finally was able to It's like when you go out fishing and and you bag that big that big trophy fish and I'm so excited to bring on a Hall of Famer a an icon in law enforcement in the in the state of Oklahoma and one of the more Decorated detectives in the history of the Tulsa police department Mike Hough. Thank you for joining us You are your reputation precedes you Well, thank you for the nice words I'm just made it to the finish line. So that's all I wanted to do Took me about 37 years to get there, but I got there Well, we're gonna talk about one of the highlights of your career and just I'm gonna give everyone a quick You know minute to two-minute primer which with me maybe means four or five minutes But I'll try to be quick and then we're gonna throw it to Mike and we're gonna just deep dive this thing. So we're gonna talk about the night that the 1981 gangland slaying of Roger Wheeler You know Dare I say the most infamous murder in Oklahoma history There haven't I'm guessing had never been before or since a organized crime related Mob hit that went down in Oklahoma Roger Wheeler was one of the most prominent businessmen in Tulsa multi-millionaire an Owner of a professional sports league It was called world highlight and for people that you're probably in their 40s or Older might remember in the 1980s early 90s on ESPN World highlight had a television deal and there was a lot of highlight being Produced and shown on on television and then there was the opening of Miami Vice the iconic cop TV show and NBC would would have highlight in their opening credits and We can talk about what that game is in a second, but Roger Wheeler was the owner of world highlight he traced his roots back to South Boston and When he purchased world highlight and I believe 1978 He was unaware that the Irish mafia the Irish mob the Winter Hill gang from Boston Whitey Bulger's group had infiltrated had already infiltrated the administration and the security force and the accounting department at world highlight and they were stealing from a Vending and parking contracts that world highlight had in Connecticut It was a big sport when it was when it was in its heyday It was a really big sport in New England and in Florida were the really the two hot spots and Roger Wheeler discovered that he was being fleeced by these South Boston mob guys that he had not let in the front door the they had been let in the front door before he'd even Owned the company, but when he made it known that he was gonna clean house The South Boston Winter Hill gang got nervous because they saw a big stream of of illegal income Coming to a conclusion. They put out a hit on Wheeler. They gave the hit to a prolific South Boston hitman named Johnny Mardirano and Johnny Mardirano in May of 1981 traveled to Tulsa did a couple days of Recon and then went to southern hills country club one of the most historic Famous golf clubs country clubs in the United States just had I believe just had the u.s. Open recently Or one of the majors was there recently and Roger Wheeler was a member of southern hills and had just finished his Weekly for some I believe it was a Wednesday and when he came into the parking lot to go home. He was murdered by Johnny Mardirano and because of the corruption in the Boston FBI that we learned about years later with whitey bulger being this ruthless organized crime lord that was also a Confidential informant for the FBI What we're going to hear about from mike is this very heroic tale of trying to solve A epic murder case while being undermined by forces in law enforcement When you when you're running a local investigation In Oklahoma and you need to get help from the federal authorities in massachusetts And you're being told you're crazy And to look look in the other direction. You don't know what you're talking about And mike hoff saw this thing to the end from day one He was the first detective on the scene when this happened on may 27 1981 And then he eventually closed down this case in the early 2000s after Johnny Mardirano Flipped and we were able to finally put to bed This this this great unsolved mystery or this former unsolved mystery that just transfixed so many people for 30 years Mike, thank you so much for joining us Yes, sir So mike, let's take let's just take you back to that day.  I mean we'd never been there.   You'd been a detective at that point for a year um, it's about what four five o'clock and you get a phone call I was uh Actually sitting there waiting for a phone call Uh from the hospital I had shot a guy a couple weeks before a a murder suspect and He was in icu and I started off each shift Call in the hospital And seeing if he's still alive So we did that and then we decided that We need to Do the most important thing in the shift and that was make it out for dinner so that phone call from southern hills Interrupted our dinner plans and uh We made our way out there uh And having no idea, you know what had happened. We thought maybe it was uh A kitchen help or a groundskeeper A dispute or something and so as we got there it was uh um Put to us that Mr. Wheeler walked out to his car from the clubhouse Uh a guy walked up open his door shotting between the eyes and That guy and a driver um drove out of the parking lot So that was the start of our day So there were eyewitnesses to there were there were several eyewitnesses, right? There were 13 eyewitnesses Most of them were up in an area Where the swim swimming pool was so they were really focused On that area of the parking lot, but we did have some witnesses uh a couple of them got partial tag numbers of a the getaway car and uh So we had something to work with at that time At what point did you realize this was a professional hit and this wasn't just You know a domestic dispute or an argument between employees like that this was a contract hit Well, you know a hit has a lot of things it could be a hit with uh Say a personal dispute mr. Wheeler had A lot of business dealings. Uh, he wasn't necessarily You know A great Leader in the business world. I mean he always was looking for a better Deal And so we thought maybe that to be a business dispute Maybe it had some personal aspect to it so We thought he was targeted for the murder but We had no idea that The mob would be behind this That took a while to get there talk a little bit about roger wheeler the man uh He made his fortune he came from uh Boston to oklahoma. I believe in the 40s and made his fortune in uh oil and then eventually of audio electronics Yes, he uh, he grew up, uh, you know Pardon me. He grew up in uh, boston from uh, you know Not a wealthy family. I think his father was a Uh printer at the christian science monitor, uh, which is located in boston And uh, so he went to the navy Um in world war two Came back Uh, I don't know where he went to college off off hand right now but uh He met his wife who was from tansas And so they got married. They wound up moving to tossa And You know, he became a wheel in in tossa. I mean he he really was Turning over deals right and left telex corporation which was An employer about 5 000 people mr wheeler was CEO chairman the board He also had side investments with oil and gas He owned a beautiful ranch south of tossa Um You know, he had uh, he had made about 50 million dollars turn them over an investment. Uh, that was uh, uh, a pipe Company and at that time Oil was uh Turned on an upswing in okuma and so that uh investment with the pipe Crave is a 15 million dollar profit And so with that 50 million He started reaching out looking for investments And he was led to this investment Uh by the first rate to boston And uh, so he uh, it was like it was like a business associate of his Or someone that he knew I don't know if it was some childhood or not That was a big shot at the first bank of boston and unbeknownst to wheeler The hadn't this guy kind of let some of the roosters into the henhouse Yes, that's a great word So mr wheeler was kind of a patsy in this deal. He was led to this investment Um, organized crime had its hooks in it. Uh before mr wheeler got there The first bank of boston was uh, you know Involving themselves in it. I mean you couldn't figure out who you see when you really needed a program to figure out who the players were So the banker was Compromised from the beginning. He was the banker had some ties in into southeast and in winter hill I believe so he knew that that that highlight was a compromise was a yeah And so let's also let people know what exactly highlight is So again, I if you're all if you're a little bit older You probably have some memories of it. If you're under 40 right now, you probably have no idea What highlight is so maybe explain what that is mike Highlight is this very fast-moving game And there's at least two people playing on a highlight port and uh They're they have these uh baskets On their arm. They're called uh, believe sestas and uh They sling this very hard ball Uh with those sestas it gets going well over 100 miles an hour and the ball Pilata Uh hits a granite wall uh slide plan hand handball or racquetball And uh that granite wall Will propel the ball back and the other guy Uh gets the ball and throws a new play kill Uh one or the other Uh doesn't make that return pro And so It's kind of like a cross between high speed handball and racquetball The it was uh from from my research It was uh invented in an area in europe between spain and france And uh hundreds it ended up in miami as it started in new england Or okay these um I'm not sure what the region is called but people from that region They ended up coming to New england and to hartford connecticut and boston and i think in the 20s or 30s And yes, eventually it's expands to to miami and and parts of all really all up and down the florida coast And uh, I think the the the thing we should emphasize for people that are trying to wrap their head around What it is and why would it be of interest to people like roger wheeler or the the winter hill gang um is because there it was a sport that was It was a vehicle for betting. I mean all sports are to an extent sure especially now in an era where betting is legalized but If you can just picture a time in america where that wasn't the case and that uh, this was an entire sport that really You know their viewership and their Uh fan base was 90 percent Based on the wagering that was going on there was really no It wasn't a recreational sport like nationwide. It was right. It was geared to but there's a lot of betting a lot of money going Flowing in and out the whole time mike was describing that all i'm thinking about is the miami vices And I can hear the music I can hear the yon hammer music and the and the women in the bathing suits I remember that So talk a little bit about the fact that So when when he when he buys into world highlight He is encountered by a man named paul rico who was the head of security who has a former big-time fbi agent Uh in boston and had been the guy that had recruited whitey bulger in the first place and rico retires from being A dirty a dirty fbi agent and becomes the head of security at world highlight as a point man for these Southy gangsters, but mike what I want you to talk to is at I think people because Because wheeler was someone that was known as a as a tough guy and as a guy that liked to surround him a lot of His businesses he would hire retired fbi agents That they I think their idea was that he would hit it off with rico Or maybe be seduced by rico And in fact him and rico started to butt heads really quickly Yes, he really was Attracted to this business because of the retired fbi agents That were involved there and of course we until was the point man form and You know It was in a time when you couldn't google Everything.  I mean Research on Good and bad things was just a very time-consuming if not impossible situation so He just felt good about the fbi agents Being there, but uh shortly thereafter He didn't think the The money was what it was Explained to him that it would be and he kept questioning rico and also the the Executive manager of old hotline guy named dick tonovan And uh, he wasn't getting very good answers from them So he was worried about that and they weren't very forthcoming And so this just started the bad relationship He also got a letter at that time Uh anonymous letter said I wouldn't buy this if you know if I were you there's things going on behind the scenes that You know you wouldn't approve of so That's really interesting Well, I think the irony is interesting the way that uh might just laid it out There's an irony there that the people that were trying to dupe him thought the uh that Because he was comfortable with retired fbi agents working in his past companies That the draw to this well. Hey look we have all these retired fbi agents that are keeping things nice and safe On the open up we have this, you know, paul rico who was at the time not known as a dirty fbi agent he was known as A kind of a superstar fbi agent in in the uh, you know, at least from a public perspective And the idea was to lure him in thinking. Hey, this is all Nice and buttoned up when in reality it was the exact opposite. These were compromise A former federal law enforcement. Do we know who would have sent that letter just out of curiosity? Like yeah, we were able we were able to trace that We tried to trace that and we couldn't ever figure it out I believe obviously it was someone on the inside But we don't know who that may have been I mean, that's a real solid for someone to do to give him a heads up on that if he would have taken that seriously He might be alive Be alive today, you know, but that was uh interesting that someone tried to forewarn him like So as we get into the way as we get into the early 80s He makes it clear That he's gonna that well first of all, he hires his own private investigation firm And starts investigating The security force that he has on warped. I like right, Mike Well, he was Trying to gather information on He decided that Maybe geographically If he got rid of uh, Hartford Uh in new england, maybe this would kind of cut the tie with any potential boston organized crime So he put the the sale in progress of Hartford and that sale actually Finalized in march of 1981 and Uh, you know, that was That was a reason for him to say that he was gonna Kind of call the staff some thinking that if he got enough staff that he would find uh, the the link between organized crime and The problem and uh His loss of revenue So he started uh making those noises and in january of 1981 um of boston thug named bryan halloween was approached by uh By uh whitey bulger and his partner steve fleamy And also a guy named john callahan Who was the former president of world highlight before we were Made the purchase and they said hey If this goes through we're due to lose a million dollars a year. Uh, we want uh We were taken out and we want it done in tosa because we'll never solve it there So brian halloween thought about it for a while And he said We and i wanted to go all the way to calsa You know I don't want to get caught up with the boston accent in calsa and uh You know feel good about this so they gave him You know a few thousand bucks And he declined it went on down the road So he didn't have any further involvement But on may 27th of 81 So roger wheeler was going to his car after around the gulf and like I said It was johnnie margarano that opened the car door shutting between the eyes shut the door and Walked to the getaway car where they drove out of southern hills and into rush hour traffic and uh You know that was it so You know that was the start of a long odyssey of an investigation uh You know we tried to play by the rules. We tried to get along with the fbi We Tried to share information turned out and shared too much They played with us like a You know a cat played with a mouse and uh You know I look back and I say, you know If there was a google if there was If there were cell phones If so, you know, we just had pagers at the time And so it was really hard and difficult to try to Connect with people You know all around the country and Uh, you know that information seemed like everything was a dead end and so We were looking at Some leads that we got in over the first couple days Which really turned out to be a very interesting lead We know if in a different direction of organized crime and we met with Epi agents in Tulsa, no homo city and they were going to handle the The organized crime angle on east coast But was there a point when they were thinking maybe Dixie mafia had something to do with us That was the lead that we got on We we got a a tip we we put out a artist drawing And this artist An indian artist that was in law enforcement at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Was he just drew wonderful suspect pictures and Over the years I saw so many times Looked like a picture And it was a drawing, you know, you can see the guy the real bad guy and see what what this Investigator drew and think man. He just drew this off this picture So we got that we put that up to the news media and immediately We got a call and said hey, it looks like this guy named pat early and Pat early was a guy in the Dixie mafia and He was a he had the reputation to Really You know pull this off. He was a killer. He was a Bomber, he you know, he he had his finger and everything and He would know the people that he could go to for To be hidden out, you know in the Oklahoma area So we thought he was a very logical suspect. So we we focused on him along with the alcohol tobacco and firearms and the Oklahoma bureau of narcotics and in Oklahoma City and You know the story of pat early he worked for a guy that Smuggled drugs just as a hobby. I mean he would outfit Plains to To smuggle those drugs and You know pat early was kind of his bodyguard and forcer Whatever you want to call it pat early would take on a buzz saw so We tried to Figure out how we're going to approach that pat We got an undercover guy into pat and He was trying to arrange a large quantity of Narcotics and that never really materialized pat was so So leery of anything new to him But one of the stories about pat this this guy that That would smuggle drugs. He had a water well drilling company that was Located in libya And he was of value to the cia and so He and pat were in libya uh on a Some sort of company situation And one of the people they were dealing with Told them.  I mean it's going to take me everywhere And it really did And that's not it like we were talking about the The fact that in 1981, you know communication just In life is different If i'm sure it's Uh, you know a 180 from where it was, uh With law enforcement between the early 80s and now But that's not accounting for the subterfuge That you were also encountering So let's talk about when you finally get on to the fact that this could have come from organized crime in boston And you start heading in that direction, but jimmy wants to add Yeah, I just want to before we do that though, um if you could just um first of all I'm not surprised that A drug dealer was connected to someone who's a cia asset, right? That does not surprise me at all We've had episodes where we've touched up on that, but can you guys um Just unpack a little bit the dixie mafia. I think our audience might not know I think that's an interesting case study, but the the dixie mafia isn't really what it sounds like It's not like la cosa nostra where you have this very um intertwined interconnected group of 26 families that are operating around the country with a Governing body in the hierarchy, right the dixie mafia was like a loosely very very loosely In some cases not connected at all But if there were connections the connections were very loose and it just it just was a kind of a catchall for any organized crime groups that were operating in southern The regions that had no la cosa nostra. So they were able to kind of operate unfettered But they were in the same stuff like prostitution and drugs, uh, and they were usually gambling extortion Basically hillbilly gangsters cornbread mafia.  Um, and i'll tell you something. I haven't shared with many people but My uncle was a uh a bootlegger and He was a really powerful bootlegger and uh corrupted I believe up to the governor of the state of oklahoma and he corrupted a district attorney and But I probably you know As all this is going on i'm just a kid growing up and My dad didn't know about it per se. My mom didn't really know about it Uh, so I would I would go over to their house. They had a really nice house and um, I learned to ride a bicycle and The Dixie mafia was hanging out at my aunt and uncle's house So I met some of these guys. I don't know if I met early Uh, but I met some Dixie mafia guys And uh, you know, it's just a kid uh But uh You know, they were Part of the crew Uh, they flew from Tulsa To mcnary county, Tennessee uh And they killed Beef from pusser's wife They shot beef from pusser up and uh They they flew back and um over the years Uh, when that happened, I don't know This was before I came on the police department when that happened But my partner in homicide uh, dick bishop He ran into beef from pusser because beef from pusser had a A crust if you will uh So he could investigate his wife's murder And it brought him to Tulsa very frequently and so That's that's what happened to him Let's let's just let pusser was a sheriff walking tall. Let's let's just drop a couple pop culture You know tidbits that that have sprinkled on our conversation. So, uh, beef from pusser Who we just referenced was the kind of the it was a sheriff that was the basis of the movie walking tall Joe don baker played him in the 70s and then one of my favorite movies that the rock has ever been in Was a remake of of walking tall. I think was one of the rock's first movies. Um, so that's kind of uh, You know art imitating life, uh, you know in terms of dixie mafia stuff, but we also About five ten minutes ago talked about brian halloran and how the roger wheeler murder was, um Coordinated so if you remember the movie for people that are listening if they've seen or remember the movie black mass With johnny depp playing whitey bulger. There is Both a scene depicting roger wheeler's A murder at southern hills, but there's also a character played by actor, uh, peter sarsgard who plays brian halloran and And then I want to tie this back into when you Realize that the dixie mafia Angle is not the right angle to be going after and you kind of turn your attention to to south boston or what's going on in massachusetts but haloran being recruited to Possibly be the hitter in this And the fact that whitey bulger Is cooperating with the fbi secretly and is being fed information The information was going both ways so brian halloran By being asked to commit the wheeler murder even though he turned it down He is exposed when all this wheeler stuff starts to pop up and As mike knows and then I want to turn it over to mike You know halloran got killed Because the fbi was protecting whitey bulger. They told whitey.  I of 1981 we were summoned if you will to um Massachusetts and we met with the The director of the state police colonel old donban who was a legend and It was a very cryptic meeting he said uh, that there might be some boston guys involved And uh, he gave us some names I don't know whitey bulger's name Was in it initially But he opened the door and we developed this association with the state police And it turns out that uh, brian howlin Had a brother that was a state trooper And so some of this information is coming from brian to his brother To the head of state police. How did the guy do that? Wow yeah, and It got very confusing of who you could talk to and who you couldn't talk to And uh, who knew about it? Who was kept secret from it? So it was uh, it was really A frustrating sometimes scary And uh, you know for a guy from oklahoma Kind of stepping into this world of organized crime You know, I have always had a interest in it But you know, I never thought I would Experience it so up close and personal and have so much on the line Whether it be Safe wise Whether it be reputation wise Uh, because these guys played for keeps Every switch way. I mean they were they didn't like it. They crashed your reputation Uh, you know, they'd set you up I mean there were things that went on in this case that I look back today And I say no, I can't believe that I made it through this case and uh, you know, I really only Only did I mean I was Really thinking about trying to uh promote and get away from this case. I mean I Chief of police and Trying to promise me that that I'd have a a good chance to Make some good promotions and I said, oh, all I ever wanted to do is be a home side detective And so I didn't take those up, but um Sometimes I kind of wish I did when I'm looking at my pension but uh Anyway, it just really was uh In an eye opener for me. So when you went to Hang up on that. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Mike. I wanted to ask you about something that I think you encountered in boston And and I want you to speak to it or correct me if i'm speaking uh out of school But wasn't there a situation where it was either this trip to boston or another trip to boston where They brought bolder and flemy Into the fbi office or the state police office And there was like a two-minute conversation like hey guys We want to know if you had anything to do with the roger wheeler murder and they were both like nope Sorry, nothing to see here. They're like, all right. Sorry you guys can go home And then they came back to you guys are like, yeah, we asked them and they said no so you there's nothing to see here Well, that's exactly true. Although we weren't there when that happened, uh, or we would have uh You know caught the guys on the way out of the building or something. They sat uh, flemy and bolger Down in the room together And he said hey, did you guys do this and they said no and that was it. I mean truly that was it and You know, that's not why you do things and you know, I don't know why they um Thought they could keep that secret promise, but they tried to For a while. I mean not all fbi agents Involved for were bad But some of them stumped and uh You know other guys that didn't agree with them would kind of give me a phone call here or there and say You know, hey watch out this guy's on there. Sorry. Wow stuff like that. Wow Well, he's talking about promotions and it's like well, what's the motive in addition to john connelly who was the the main Corrupted fbi agent who grew up with or grew up in the same neighborhood as bolger and eventually became his mole In the government, but you know, he was getting bolger was giving him some things but besides that con and talking about promotions connelly and his unit or whatever used bolger and flemmy To make cases against the italian mafia in boston jerry and julio the raymond patriarca that larry zanino that whole crew and And wiped those wiped all those guys out by the by the mid 80s And connelly was looked at as a as a hero a gang buster and got and got promotions Based on bolger and flemmy helping them bring down the italians, but in return Bolger and flemmy got all that territory that the italians Left when they went to prison. Yeah, that was the whole point Yeah, so and mike did you have any direct dealings with connelly? Did you ever talk to him about this investigation? Oh, yeah, I did connelly also bragged i mean just outright bragged that In order to bring down the italians that In quote his irish would be okay so That's that's where that went and you know from a guy that has irish roots and You know, my family came in from from dublin To boston You know, I really felt something unique here Just history and in whatever and see it just perverted into You know, this guy's getting away with murder or this guy rigged the lottery or You know things like that and i'm thinking how in the hell could I be Caught up in this thing and do I want to get off this? merry-go-round or not It actually was my my last conversation with my with my dad in the early 80s You know, I talked to him about hey, I think i'm smack dab in the middle of of Some fbi corruption and a lot of things going on and You know I just didn't I didn't think I could win This deal. I mean, I really I looked at it.  I mean, was it always an open active case or Was there a point where they kind of put it to bed? But you were still tasked with being if there was you know any breaking news It's going to go to mic or any breaking tips It's going to go to mic was there ever a point when the the the case was actually put like on the back burner Or was it always on the front burner? Well, for me it was always on the front burner I don't think the police department really Was keeping track of all I was doing I pretty much Kept it to myself made reports If anybody asked but You know your eyes could glaze over looking at all my reports and so You know it stayed on the front burner Pat early was there for About a year we spent a lot of time in oakland city and He finally got popped on a small drug charge And so I was there The next morning or maybe later that night and You know pat early He didn't Having good thoughts at all about the police He had Had already made up his mind. He wasn't going to talk and So I just sat down started talking to him and You know I mentioned who my uncle was and He recalled him and I mean that alone didn't Didn't make him talk but He got him thinking about me and and whatever I asked him if you ever remember the kid over at my uncle's house when they were hanging out there on occasion and You know he didn't say for sure he did but He didn't tell me to get out of the room. He didn't lawyer up and so sat and talked to him and You know the one interesting thing I mean sure he's gonna He's gonna deny that had anything to do with it I by this time I didn't think he did but He said something interesting he said All I heard was that the first bank of boston was behind this. Wow So It didn't really soak in at that time You know the information is just Coming in like crazy. So, you know You got so many pieces of malusia and he couldn't quite Figure out where they fit in the puzzle That's interesting that Oh, sorry that I was just going to say it's interesting that the Dixie mafia was already hearing gossip in the underworld That they would that that would already make its way to them Even though they had nothing to do with it. No, no skin in the game. That's really intriguing Especially that deep not just like all these irish guys and but like The bank so you keeping tabs on what's going on in boston through the 80s into the 90s when balder eventually Uh gets indicted and goes on the run. So what's going on between? Yeah, between let's say the After the case is super hot Uh and then as the as the decade goes on what's what's your position? Well, this is a long story. Sorry, but uh in may of 1982 Brian howlin gets gunned down in boston Human and kid named michael donahue Donahue's dad was a sergeant on the boston police department and he Had just decided to give brian home a ride home from this bar. Yeah wrong place Yeah, that I didn't know yeah wrong place wrong time. Yeah, right on the water in south boston. Yeah, that I knew. Yeah, yes and so You know the car drove up gunned him down All this stuff and so it was probably Three or four days after that Before we even got word of that murder because again that communication just You know hadn't hadn't caught up and so we decided at that time to Go to boston we went to boston Nobody wanted to help us except the state police and and these guys the connecticut state police Who had investigated? Wheeler Purchase of the Hartford phone pump and those guys were great. They were just so smart and You know, they taught me so much so We kind of formed an alliance and you know, we got with the city of boston and PD and we're working with them and so we all had a kind of a confat and That's where the first really real revelation that the fbi is involved in this thing and These guys had the history on paul rico Uh, they had the history of how paul rico connected to Winterhill and You know, this is something that upset us so much because The fbi and The department of justice Had howling and he was talking about armler and they didn't call us and so wow then howling gets killed and uh So we went up there and we we made a A few enemies by letting them know that You know, this is our case not theirs You know, somebody gets prosecuted for murder. It's in paulson not in boston and So that was the case so As as that died down and we started trying to make a plan We made a plan to Try to bring John calahen in and turn him into a A source of information because Howling was a little bit further out from the spoke and Calhoun calhoun was right at kind of the middle of it and so we thought he's the next guy So Myself and A mess to stay trooper and a couple guys from connective state police and in my partner We went to A prosecutor he was the head of the organized crime strike force in new england. His name was jeremiah selvin and um I was surprised that We were unannounced He left into his office and we started Talking to him confronted him about Brian howling he said it was his decision To cut brian howling loose without talking to us and You know, we kind of had some words over that He uh We also told him that We needed his help and I mean, you know, when you go into a A federal prosecutor you think you're really talking to somebody that Is doing the right thing and We told him we needed help to To bring john calhoun in and give him a deal If he was involved in this murder conspiracy and so He didn't give us any indication that he would but he didn't tell us outright. No, so We went looking for calhoun and You know, this guy was out on town Every day and night in boston so We had to travel to a bunch of different bars to try to find it and we didn't find him and So There was the article in the newspaper up there The town leaked like a seah and it was crazy. Everybody was talking in bean town Yes, and somebody Um Leaked I think it was the globe The detectives in Tulsa Were trying to serve calhoun with a grand jury subpoena, which was not true We just want to talk to and So we looked and looked a lot Spent first four more days there Couldn't find him came back to Tulsa and He was literally I mean, I almost stepped in the door of my front Front door of my house and the phone was ringing And I picked it up and somebody asked Hey, is this detective Micah? I said yeah and He said hey, this is a detective hammer smith I'll never forget his name From metro day police department in florida So you're looking for john calhoun And I said yeah, I've been looking all week for him And he said well, we got him Down here and I thought oh great. We're gonna Change clothes, repack the bags and head back to to miami we said He's in the trunk of a car at the airport There was a diamond chest Wow and All this is crashing in on this just just get the audience understand or the the listeners understand this So halloween is murdered in may Callahan is murdered in I think the first week of august last week of july So this is all happening in the same two months. Yeah, which is a year after wheeler. Yeah was killed Yes 1982 So between halloween's murder and The first august we had made a couple trips to boston and You know, we really just I don't want to say we'd given up, you know in august, but I was scared that the city of tulsa was going to give up for us Because There's a lot of money floating around On these trips and stuff, you know, I mean it just wasn't in the budget to To chase a mob hit all over the country It was kind of expensive But I think everybody got their eyes opened up when they heard Heard the story about a solvent Here's some comments that he didn't let halloween talk to us and halloween winds up dead and then we tell him that We want to talk to call him and then call him winds up dead and You know, this is just We just didn't really know what We knew we were in the middle of a hurricane But It's a crossfire hurricane You were getting it from all sides because the fbi in boston was feeding winter hill and whitey bulger Information directly from intelligence files and who was informing on what? Now was there pressure from that did we either have family? I mean, are you is there like local pressure to solve this case? I mean, what's the what's the atmosphere like in tulsa during all of this? well telex is one of the biggest employers in tulsa and it really supported Thousands more jobs than just the company itself. I mean a lot of uh, you know contractors things like that So everybody was concerned about this they expected this to be solved The family Not so much other than One of the sons david wheeler Who had Been sent to miami to run a computer program To try to figure out where the money was going and So david had a real bird's eye view of what's going on there and he absolutely um Didn't care for paul rico. He thought paul rico was behind this paul rico is the person that actually informed him of his dad's death To pull back the Tulsa And at this time You know, this was when we were so tied up on the dixie mafia and the fbi had suggested And our brass agreed that they would handle the East coast organized calm angle or more high life So in that The fbi agent said he would use David wheeler as his source to get him information at at high life And uh, he's lucky he didn't get killed At that point. David wheeler's lucky. He didn't end up dead. That's what I mean Yes, absolutely And mic was agreed to that finish up mic. Sorry Oh, we agreed to that. We had no idea what we're agreeing to I mean, we expected everybody is honest everybody's you know you're gonna Tried to solve this case that wasn't that So let's draw the line now as we as we come to a close here I could I could have this conversation for two hours. I love it. Yeah, and we're gonna bring you back on at some point mic for for a uh, I want to do it episode now, I really do for an encore Appearance because you're you've just been great. This is the exact type of perspective and insight We want to give our listeners and viewers, you know going straight to the source and mic Like we said he was there at ground zero and then he saw up through to the very end 30 years later And that's where I want to bring us to uh, so the the the links that you can make between wheeler may of 81 uh Halloran may of 82 Callahan august of 82 all gangland style murders tied to world highlight ordered by Whitey bulger at the top of the winter hill gang, but Carried out all three of these murders carried out by john martirano now whitey was with him on the Halloran hit but martirano A single handedly killed wheeler With bulger killed Halloran and then down in florida killed Callahan who I from from my research again tells me that Callahan and martirano were like best friends And uh And martirano did not kill Halloran That was whitey and another guy. Okay, so martirano was not at that hit. No, okay. I stand correct But so but he but he definitely killed Callahan Yes, and then 1995 Bulger's reign comes to an end a couple years before that, uh, john connelly who had been his primary mole and the fbi had retired Bulger's indicted in 95 along with flemmy along with johnnie martirano um bulger goes on the run And is missing for the next 16 years but flemmy and and martirano Uh Go into custody a lot quicker and they both end up cooperating and This does martirano's cooperation solve this case for you? Oh, it helped but there are so many pieces pieces of the puzzle that You know, it was more than just uh saying hey, I did it. Uh, it's over. Um, you know in In the 80s We had kind of thought we're uh at a Not a dead end, but nothing much was happening in the late 80s and I got approached by a reality Uh tv show and at that time They didn't exist the very first one was called unsolved mysteries and so We got permission to do that and They reenacted it and I also put up a couple Pictures of persons of interest one of them was uh martirano and uh so That very first show had a viewership of Excoordinary Numbers that was the first unsolved mysteries ever That was the pilot for unsolved mysteries in 1987 robert stack, right? The first episode of unsolved mysteries. Uh, mike is referring to and was the wheeler case. They featured the wheeler case. That's cool Yeah, actually it was raymond burr Oh, it was raymond burr. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah pre-bop stack. Yes. He remembers everything. Pre-bop. Mike remembers everything So anyway, um You know years later after uh martirano is in test day and i i meet up with him and um He said he was on vacation in hawaii. Here's a hitman on vacation in hawaii and he's he's sitting on her bed putting on his shoes and uh Unsolved mysteries is showing and he said i looked up I I saw my picture on tv and you saying that you wanted to talk to me and uh He said i knew right then i was going to meet you and he said he spoiled my vacation so i got a heck of a lot of that and so as Things are are coming to a head with uh bulger and flaming and all this stuff and and they're um The state police and massachusetts are putting that together They have somebody That they're kind of talking to that says hey I don't know What this guy's naming and i can't remember what his name is uh, but it was on a rerun of unsolved mysteries and uh, some talked out in somewhere Said he wanted to talk to him And I know he's hooked in with these guys, but I don't know what his name is and so They researched unsolved mysteries And they figured out oh, they're talking about margarano. So through this guy They were able to arrest margarano. So our decision to to do unsolved mysteries brought margarano into fold and uh So I felt real good about that and and wasn't it the case that Once people started to realize like it as the 90s start to come to a close And now we're you know five years removed from whitey being off the streets You're going on 30 years removed from the wheeler case But you had a number of organized crime figures From new england sitting behind bars And I'm glad you pointed out that uh margarano was only caught because of unsolved mysteries In uh in a segment about roger wheeler, which eventually brings margarano into custody based on a tip but Uh and he starts singing right away right but what i'm saying is There are a number of guys that were linked up with whitey in one way or the other or linked up with winter hill One way the other both irish and italian because this included margarano and included cadillac frank salami who was the the the boston italian mafia boss in the 90s who was a uh aligned connected to the irish with southy and winter hill But you had a number of guys that while they're in prison Going over their case documents Come to the conclusion that this whole time I've been in bed with a confidential informant Aka whitey and all of these guys. I'm pretty sure Line up at the prosecutor's door to cut deals because they feel so Uh, you know So wronged by whitey and it and it really had nothing to do with um Brain and none of these guys see that they broke an oath. They're like an oath was broken against me right Yes, that's true and uh, it didn't happen uh very quick. It took over a year or so to To negotiate with margarano because he had so many Bodies attached to him so many different jurisdictions Everybody had to sign off on this and everybody's family had to sign off on if margarano just kept this mouth set He would have been a free man in a couple of years So margarano was he was killing guys for the italians too, right? Wasn't he on both both sides because his brother was his brother became a capo for uh, for solemn Okay, yes He was he dated all the way back to the 60s and the irish mob wars But I do think he was taking some contracts from angelo in the 70s. Yeah Uh, I think the another point I want to make Is so the the fbi made this conscious decision basically to trade The italians for the irish, but if you look at the the Records or you look at the stats And you're talking about homicides that you can tie to each organization it's There were not I mean there were murders in the italian mafia. I'm not saying there weren't but let's say that you go from 1970 to 1995 weighty boulder was responsible for probably triple the amount of murders Uh, then the italians were there's a lot more blood thirsty Yeah, he was evil and uh, so did you get to meet with you got to meet with johnny margarano? Oh, yeah several times You know, I even uh I was in boston after he Was released from jail and We sat at a bar together and and had drinks and talked about it. Wow and You know, he's not No way not a friend At all.  What I think how does it speak to or look look how it speaks to the constitution of of a guy like mike huff and the people that were uh a part of his team in tulsa and the resilience and the you know the the You want to talk about keeping an oath? I mean, this is the definition of keeping an oath the oath that he made as a as a police officer to to protect and serve Uh, this is you know, this was the ultimate You know 30 years fighting an uphill battle that even without the fact that People that should have been on your team were actually pretending to be on your team When in fact we're on the other team if you just take that away It's an uphill battle, but you add that you know into Uh the situation and it's you know, you've you've climbed mount olympus You know you you have Reach the pinnacle and and we just we tip we tip our hat to you and this has been an amazing conversation Well, thank you so much for having me, but I gotta tell you This is about one third of this story. I know I I know and I'm I'm angry that we couldn't spend another couple hours talking about this Well, give me a call back. Yeah, thank you. Mike, but before we uh, uh sign off just Take us Like through the maybe the last decade you when did you retire from? Just a real quick is when did you retire from the force? I retired uh 2011 30 years to the day after we were Got killed so you know back in um The mid 90s. I think it was Hell, I can't remember the exact day but we got Marta on no and we got flimmy on board and the two of them Gave us the puzzle pieces to get to paul rico who was The middle man paul rico worked for wheeler. Uh, he was the connection to bolger We called jack from south boston Uh on all his notes back and forth. We found on his desk and um we We finally got the da to uh file charges and rica was indicted and he died under indictment right no for He he did um he We arrested him and uh treat them with respect and um took him to jail and uh The jail at uh dade county is like a third world's country and uh We we brought him in there. He looked like he was uh Grift to kill and here was a guy that had a a goiter hanging from his neck Puss dripping out of it and um We go so what's that mean because you're not going to leave me here. Are you? I said, well, you're not taking me home You know, that was uh The next to the last time I saw him. He had some sort of altercation in the dade county jail and um We didn't know if he was breaking it or what But we finally got uh the approval for an air ambulance to transporting uh from Miami to Tulsa, you know, of course with a a deputy uh tax guiding and uh, so I met him at the airport and uh You know, we talked about it and uh He got subset at me he crapped his pants Who?  Oh, yeah So you're still I mean even though you're retired you're still dabbling in in law enforcement well, I The sheriff who used to work for me in homicide As soon as he got elected he said hey, could you look at some cold cases for me? He had about 35 uh, so I went out and started recruiting people I got Friends of mine that were in the FBI a tfda at tpd and we all volunteer our time and You know something to do keeps sell the bars Well, we'll The society owes you a debt my friend. We owe you a debt here at the og Podcast Mike. Thank you so much. This has been this has exceeded expectations And I had pretty high expectations for this interview. So Mike you you hit it out of the ballpark We'll call me back. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. So this is uh, well, we'll see you next week Well, we'll have more uh, you know hard-hitting content like we bring you every week with guests like Mike Hough last week we had Retired atf agnacio estaban and we're going to keep on bringing you the the best guests that are possible on both sides of the law Keep breaking down all the the most pressing gangland news Available and keep giving you all the great content that you expect from the og podcast I'm scott burnstein for jimmy butchilato and our producer ben. We are out


This 2014 Dodge Challenger SRT 392 edition is stock number 11852Z. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, near New and used Challenger and sports car headquarters. This 2014 Dodge Challenger has the 6.4 liter V8 Hemi motor. It has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off. Super low miles on this car, and it is 100% ready to go. Redline 3 coat pearl is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p, 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone or television, turn them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality and condition of the car before seeing it in person. And if you'd like to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the lower right hand part of the screen is a gold subscribe button, click that and then click the bell notifications to get updates every time we do a video of one of our amazing pieces of inventory here at Summit Auto. Comes with the 20 inch painted and polished aluminum rims, has the Brembo brakes, and it has Goodyear Eagle F124545ZR20 tires. These tires have just about all the tread left on them. There are only 3000 some miles on this car, so very, very low mileage on the car. And it shows in the condition of the vehicle, HID headlamps, factory fog lights, front bumper and lower valance are in excellent shape. No dense dings or scuffs. The hood is in very nice condition as well. All those stickers are very high gloss over the top and just a really nice car all the way around. The passenger side front fender, no denser dings on there and the passenger side rim no scuffs or scrapes. Now I'm going to show you this red line pearl coat, it's got a little bit of metal flake in it, so when it's in the sunlight it really sparkles, so really cool paint on this car. And as you go down this side of the car, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and remember like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the car, hear the car and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here, so when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises. And you can make a smart buying decision from the comfort of your own home. And if you're in the market for a Challenger SRT8 2014 this is the one, especially if you like the red line pearl. Back tires just as much tread as the front tires and this back rim is in really nice shape as well. Rear quarter no dents or dings and as you come around to the back, notice it does have the back up parking sensors, the chrome tipped dual rear exhaust, the trunk lid and spoiler are in excellent shape as well. Inside the trunk, very nice and clean, those seats do fold down for extra storage. This is where your inflator kit and battery are. Very very nice and clean. This car was owned in Georgia most of its life and as you go down the driver's side just as clean as that passenger's side, no dents or dings on the rear quarter and for full disclosure this back rim is in excellent shape as well. Door looks really good on the edges, didn't see any dents or dings on the body line and it does have the heated power mirrors.   Latch child safety system, very very nice and clean, factory floor mats in the back as well, auto headlamps, power windows, power locks, power mirrors and you do get that suede insert on the door as well. I'll hop inside here and turn the ignition on, everything. See this car only has 3184 miles, you get the white faced instrument cluster, super low miles on this car, very very very nice. Leather wrap steering wheel, there's no scuffs, no scrapes, get that kind of bulleted side grip there. Bluetooth and information center controls, cruise controls on the right and it does have the flat bottom steering wheel right there. Comes with the 430N radio, so you get AMFM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here. It also has the factory navigation system on it and you can store music and pictures on here and there's 28 gigabits worth of storage space. You can also put CDs in here and it will play DVDs if you're stopped, I believe. Dash is very nice and clean and it does come with the six speed manual transmission. You also have your heated seats and heated steering wheel buttons, sport mode and your stability control keyless entry right here that's in really nice shape, passenger side floor mat and seat are absolutely perfect and those come with the power sunroof and the headliner is in really nice shape as well. You get map lights up there, home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems and your auto dimming mirror. We're going to start it up and then we'll take a quick listen at the exhaust and then check out under the hood. No check engine lights or anything like that. Sounds really good. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you've been able to tell just how clean this car is all the way around inside and out. Under the hood we have the 6.4 liter 392 V8 Hemi motor and Chebet is very clean runs very smooth. Once again this car has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this car is 100% ready to go. There are those HID headlamps, the fog lamps, everything's working good there. And I would highly recommend this car from a quality and condition standpoint. I don't think you're going to find many that are cleaner than this one. So thanks for checking out the video. Happy buying and we look forward to helping you with this super clean 2014 Challenger if you want to see more pictures of this car or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SCVs, minivans, Wranglers, Challengers, Chargers, Mustangs, GT500s, Corvettes, Camaros, you name it. We've got to go to that website right there at summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com and if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact any second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left. The link to more Dodge Challenger videos like this one in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those, check us out and we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean 2014 Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 in red line 3 coat pearl. Thanks again for checking out the video remember to like, subscribe, click the bell notifications to check out videos like this every single day. Thanks again.


Hi and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. Question says, the area of an equilateral triangle ABC is 17320.5 cm2. With vertex of triangle as center, a circle is drawn with radius equal to the half the length of the sites of triangle. Find the area of the shaded region. This is the given figure 12.28. First of all, let us understand that area of equilateral triangle is equal to root 3 upon 4 multiplied by site square and area of sector is equal to theta upon 360 multiplied by pi r square where theta is the angle of sector in degrees and r is the radius of the circle. Now we will use these formulas as our key idea to solve the given question. Let us now start with the solution. We are given that triangle ABC is equilateral triangle and these three are sectors. Now we have to find area of this shaded region. So if we subtract area of these three sectors from area of triangle ABC, then we get area of shaded region. Now we are given that area of triangle ABC is equal to 17320.5 cm2. Now we know radius of each circle is equal to half the length of the site of the triangle. Now we will find out site of the triangle first. From key idea we know area of equilateral triangle is equal to root 3 upon 4 multiplied by site square. Now let us assume that each site of equilateral triangle ABC is equal to x cm. Now we can substitute x for site in this formula and we get root 3 upon 4 x square is equal to 17320.5 cm2. Now multiplying both sides by 4 upon root 3 we get x square is equal to 17320.5 multiplied by 4 upon root 3. Now substituting value of root 3 given in the question in this expression we get x square is equal to 17320.5 multiplied by 4 upon 1.73205. We are given root 3 is equal to 1.73205. So simplifying further we get 173205 upon 10 multiplied by 4 0 0 0 0 upon 173205. This term will get cancelled by this term and 0 will cancel 0 and we get x square is equal to 40000. Now taking square root on both the sides we get x is equal to 20000. So we get x is equal to 200 cm or we can say each side of equilateral triangle ABC is equal to 200 cm. Now we know radius of each circle is equal to half the length of the side of the equilateral triangle ABC. So we get radius of circle that is r is equal to 200 upon 2 cm which is further equal to 100 cm. Now we have to find area of these 3 sectors. We know radius of the circle is equal to 100 cm. Now we will find out angle of the sectors. Now we know this is the equilateral triangle and in equilateral triangle all angles are equal. So by angles and property of triangle we get each of the angle of this triangle is equal to 60 degrees. So we can write angle A is equal to angle B is equal to angle C is equal to 60 degrees. Now we get angle of each sector is equal to 60 degrees. Also we know area of a sector is equal to theta upon 360 multiplied by pi r square where theta is the angle of the sector in degrees and r is the radius of the circle. We will find area of a given sector. We know theta is equal to 60 degrees and r is equal to 100 cm. So we get area of a given sector is equal to 60 upon 360 multiplied by pi multiplied by square of 100 cm square. Now we will substitute value of pi given in the question that is 3.14. So we get area of a given sector is equal to 60 upon 360 multiplied by 3.14 multiplied by 100 multiplied by 100 cm square. Now we can find area of 3 similar sectors by multiplying this expression by 3. So we can write area of 3 given sectors is equal to 3 multiplied by 60 upon 360 multiplied by 3.14 multiplied by 100 multiplied by 100 cm square. Now simplifying this expression we get 15700 cm square is equal to area of 3 given sectors. Now we can find area of the shaded region by subtracting area of these 3 sectors from area of equilateral triangle ABC. So we get area of shaded region is equal to area of equilateral triangle ABC minus area of 3 sectors. Now substituting corresponding value of area of equilateral triangle ABC and area of 3 given sectors, we get 17320.5 minus 15700 cm square is equal to area of shaded region. Now this is further equal to 1620.5 cm square. So we get area of the shaded region is equal to 1620.5 cm square. So this is our required answer. This completes the session. Hope you understood the solution. Take care and have a nice day.