STATELINE, Nev. – When filmmakers Brian Lazarte and James Lee Hernandez finished their latest projects, McMillions$, the story of a fraud ring that rigged the results of the McDonald’s Monopoly game, and The Big Conn, a series about Eric C. Conn, a Kentucky lawyer who defrauded the US government of over $550 million through the Social Security program, everyone they knew was sending them stories of weird, quirky crimes. 

“Unfortunately, not all of them are a 90-minute documentary or a documentary series or anything like that. But they still were great stories,” Hernandez said. 

The Emmy-nominated filmmakers started working with Apple and played around with the idea of doing an anthology podcast series where they could take each of the stories submitted to them and spend an hour talking about each one. From this, “Scamtown” was born. 

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“Scamtown,” an Apple Original podcast, is an 11-part series narrated by Hernandez and Lazarte. It dives into the world of scams, heists, hustles and even forbidden love. 

“It felt like such a natural fit for us and it was really exciting because usually doing a documentary or a series takes like two years to do, and it was awesome to do 11 stories in one year,” Hernandez said. 

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Hernandez and Lazarte scoured the internet for old crime stories and started to develop their catalog. They started with about 23 stories and narrowed it down to the 11 they thought fit the podcast the best. 

“They kind of had that great mixed bag of humor, tragedy, there’s arson, there are scams, there’s deception — it pretty much included all the flavors of comedic crime stories that tackled that moral ambiguity line that we are so drawn to. They all kind of have a similarity, but they all bring something unique and different,” Lazarte said. 

The first two episodes were released on August 26 and feature a story familiar to those in the Lake Tahoe area: the Harvey’s Casino bomb.

Hernandez first heard the story of the Harvey’s Casino bomb when he was at a high school basketball tournament in Lake Tahoe. When they were getting into making this podcast, he brought the Harvey’s story to Apple and the team and they loved it. 

“(The story) has so much of what we love. We’re following this investigation into what’s going on and there’s literally a ticking clock. Will the bomb go off? How big of a bomb is it? It’s the most complex bomb the FBI has ever seen, still to today, and all of these pieces, and then how it’s resolved, all of it was just so right up our alley,” Hernandez said. 

When Hernandez first brought the story up, Lazarte said he did not know much about it. 

“There was a moment where it’s like ‘Oh, did the bomb even go off?’ and I think that level of curiosity for the listener as they’re going through this particular episode is… incredibly fascinating,” Lazarte said. “I think there are tons of surprises. The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that there were people betting on whether or not the bomb was going to go off or not.”

Featured in the Harvey’s Casino episode, which is the second episode of the series, is former Special Agent, Bill Jonkey, an investigator on the case. 

“He just provided such a great deal of insight into all the little mechanics and everything that they went through, not only in general but also specific to this case. We found so much of it to be incredibly fascinating,” Lazarte said. 

Hernandez highlighted that there are some two-sided challenges when digging into the facts of these crime cases and presenting them to the listeners. 

“When you look at Special Agent Bill Jonkey or the FBI agents in general, they do so much work and they’re doing so much to protect our civil liberties every day but they don’t really get to talk about it,” Hernandez said. “Once in a while, they’ll have a what, what they all refer to as a career case. And for Bill Jonkey, this was a career case where they’re excited to be able to talk about these things because it’s so difficult to investigate something like this.”

“On the other side of that it’s always really difficult when you’re dealing with the criminal side, because for a lot of people, this is the worst thing, or one of the top three worst things that’s ever happened to them. Sometimes they’re still in prison and it’s hard to get a hold of them, so it is always a constant struggle back and forth between those things,” Hernandez said. 

According to Hernandez, finding that balance is a challenge, but is part of what makes their job as investigators fun. 

“This isn’t necessarily like some gotcha documentary. We’re just going to show a 360-degree view of a story and understand that sometimes people just make bad choices,” he said. 

Also featured in the podcast are some Tahoe locals. Lazarte and Hernandez talked to a woman who was preparing for her wedding when she had to run out of the casino. They also talked to people that were dealers in the casino at the time. 

“It’s fascinating to think about, ‘What if you were in that scenario? What would you do?’ It feels very much like you’re there, living in the moment, rather than us just giving you a history lesson on what happened. And that’s something we really focus on with all of our storytelling, specifically with this series, is we’re living this through the characters’ eyes,” Hernandez said. 

The first two episodes of “Scamtown” are available now wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will debut weekly on Mondays.