Now available in its entirety exclusively on the Audacy app, “My Fugitive” tells the story about Emmy Award-winning documentarian Nina Gilden Seavey as she uncovers the mystery behind the FBI’s assault on America’s youth during the Vietnam War.
Offering thousands of true crime, news, sports, political podcasts and more, Audacy features favorites of even the most avid podcast listeners, and you can listen to “My Fugitive” on Audacy before you can hear it anywhere else.
From Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios, the podcast dives into the story of Howard Mechanic, a fugitive who went on the run when accused of burning down an Air Force building in St. Louis. It also reveals an interesting tie to the investigation of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Seavey, who is the daughter of famed St. Louis civil rights lawyer Louis Gilden who represented Mechanic, explains how her personal tie to the ongoings of the time led to her investigation of the story. “My interest in this story has always been both personal and professional,” she explains.
“As a professional, I am a documentarian and I tell stories...On a personal level - and one we delve deeply into in the series - is my close relationship with my father who was a civil rights attorney in St. Louis. It was his client, Howard Mechanic, who was arrested, convicted, and went on the run for nearly 30 years.
“Howard became a fixture in our family just by his absence for the rest of my father’s life. The question of ‘whatever happened to Howard Mechanic’ became a kind of moniker in our family and was passed down from my father to me,” she continued.
But the fleeing of Mechanic led Seavey to uncover details of the time and the government’s attempt to cover them up. “It was Howard’s flight that took me on this journey to what I ultimately uncovered - a Cold War spy ring, a conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the government’s attempts to cover it all up,” she said.
The learnings from the stories of “My Fugitive” can be applied to the climate of 2020, and Seavey wants to highlight those moments. “When we look at what we, as a society, do to our civil liberties in the name of national security, there are a lot of trade-offs that we make; necessary but frequently difficult tradeoffs,” she explains.
And the story continues to unfold beyond the four walls of the podcast series. “There is still much to be known,” Seavey says. “In our series, we go into what we might eventually find out - when and if more government files are declassified and released. We have some good clues as to what those documents might hold, and we share those insights with our audience.”
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