Welcome To Varnamtown! Available now!

0:00Parler tout français. Hablas español. Parle italiano.

0:31Right now at babbel.com slash wandery. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash wandery. Rules and restrictions may apply.

0:43Huge news, Wayfair shoppers. You still have time to score up to 70 % off everything home at Wayfair. Ship fast and easy, just in time for the holidays. Shop Wayfair Cyber Week now through December 7th at wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. You may have heard of the sex cult NXIVM and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Allison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Rubamed, and in my new podcast, I talk to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member, and what she thinks of it all now.

1:18How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison, after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover, is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Kyle, tell me what you know about the connection between REO Speedwagon, the super band from the 70s and 80s, and Pablo Escobar, the drug kingpin.

1:48Well, sometime in the early 80s, REO Speedwagon's airplane made an unannounced middle-of-the-night landing. This is my friend Kyle McLaughlin, the star of Twin Peaks. And he's telling me about how he discovered a real-life Twin Peaks in rural North Carolina, not far from where he filmed Blue Velvet. What was on the plane was copious amounts of drugs coming in from South America. Supposedly, Pablo Escobar went looking for other spots, quiet, out-of-the-way places to bring in his cocaine. Okay, hold on. You're saying that a town of 300 people en masse did a deal with Pablo Escobar? Yes, that's what I heard.

2:28My name is Joshua Davis, and I'm an investigative reporter. Kyle and I talk all the time about the strange things we come across. But nothing was quite as strange as what we found in Varnumtown, North Carolina. Here we are. We've arrived. It looks like a carnival horror show. One hundred percent. It's like you don't want to walk in there. And there's a giant bus that says the Crackhead Express. It was pretty much remote, Farham Town was. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was always sort of laid back till old this other stuff started coming in here. Well, when you've seen a house go up, you think they sure have got a lot of money.

3:10Where's it coming from? This is the biggest smuggling operation on the East Coast. There ain't nothing you can do about it. And you fixing to get in serious trouble coming down here. The road is starting to deteriorate and there's a dead end here. This is a little scary actually. This thing here where the road just ends, there's a barricade. I had so much money between you and me, I didn't know what to do. First time I ever met Pablo Escobar, I seen like body parts, tongues. And those tongues was people that talked too much. and then I looked over there, ears, human ears in jars. They were people that heard too much.

3:54It made a big difference in the way people looked at one another. It changed the entire community.

4:07In this season of Varnum Town, we're going to encounter giant plastic sharks, A huge replica town that's almost as big as the town itself. We'll meet DEA agents, the future governor of North Carolina, and a woman who did her laundry with cocaine instead of laundry detergent. There's crooked cops, brother against brother. Everyone's got a story to tell, but does the truth even exist? Welcome to Varnumtown.