Signal Booster: Joe Livernois Uncovers Hidden History

A founding editor of Voices of Monterey Bay launches a new podcast, “Where the Bodies Are Buried.”

PUBLISHED NOV 2, 2021 12:00 A.M.
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Joe Livernois’ first installment in “Where the Bodies Are Buried” chronicles an incident in Moss Landing during Prohibition.

Joe Livernois’ first installment in “Where the Bodies Are Buried” chronicles an incident in Moss Landing during Prohibition.   Carol M. Highsmith   Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs, Library of Congress

“Behind every great fortune is a great crime” is the way people remember Balzac’s analysis of how a person becomes very rich—novelist Mario Puzo used it as the epigraph of The Godfather, to sum up the rise of the Corleones. But the actual line in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot expands on the thought: the original crime is forgotten, or lost, and that’s because the perp carried it out so perfectly that it was never discovered. Joe Livernois, a founding editor of the incisive online publication Voices of Monterey Bay, is launching a subscription-only web-series titled Where the Bodies Are Buried. It’s his venture into both local history and true crime, commencing with the story of a double death at the Hotel Del Monte (for 62 years one of the biggest, poshest resorts in the hemisphere). He also researches an incident in 1925 when machine guns disturbed the foggy coastal hamlet of Moss Landing during Prohibition, when the tiny harbor was a dropoff point for murderous rum-runners.

Read more on VoicesOfMontereyBay.org: “Battle of Moss Landing

Subscribe to the podcast on Patreon.com.

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