Would you keep your biggest mistake a secret?

My dad, Phil Stanford, turned the dumbest thing he did into a hit podcast.

Did I ever tell you how I used to summer at the Versace Mansion on Miami Beach? It’s true, sort of. This is a picture of me and S in front of the Versace Mansion, which is now a boutique hotel and restaurant.

The time that I summered at the Versace Mansion — I love how awful that sounds — was back when my brother and I lived in a tiny, remote town in rural Washington state during the school years. In the summers, we’d go to wherever our Dad had set up shop — San Francisco, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Miami. One summer, when I was about 11 years old, he lived on South Beach. Of course, this was still back when grocery stores printed signs in English, Spanish, and Yiddish. This was back before Miami Vice and The Birdcage had given Miami Beach its supermodel makeover. In fact, this was back before the Versace Mansion was the Versace Mansion at all. Back then, the Mediterranean Revival building was Christopher Columbus Apartments.

It’s entirely fitting that Dad ended up in an apartment building named for an explorer who got lost in his search for something that didn’t exist only to become undeservedly credited for discovering something that he had no idea was even there in the first place. Because as smart and accomplished as Dad is, Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America is analogous to his time as a private investigator in Miami Beach.

Wait, stop right there. You did it, didn’t you? Listen, we’ve got to get something straight. Boundaries need to be established. You probably just read that paragraph about how Dad was a private eye in Miami Beach in the early ‘80s and thought, “Oooh, cool!” You probably imagined intrigue and international criminals and drugs and corruption and adventure and romance. I know you did because that’s what Dad was thinking when he ended up in Miami Beach after walking away from mainstream journalism in DC to explore stories about criminals.

If we’re going to get anywhere, we need to put “oh, cool!” aside and get one thing straight: This is not a story about how cool my Dad is. I mean, he’s very cool. As a columnist, he helped bring the Happy Face Killer to justice. In writing a book about a notorious 1960 lover’s lane double murder in Oregon, he not only uncovered that the men who served time for the murder were wrongfully convicted, he also figured out that the real culprit was a probable serial killer who had a hook for a hand. You know that urban legend of the man with a hook? Yeah, my Dad discovered that might have been real. Dude’s name was Edward Edwards. Also, he was right and everybody else — the Governor and his own newspaper, included — was wrong about the biggest murder investigation in Oregon history, which was the subject of his first hit podcast, Murder in Oregon. Oh yeah, right; he also figured out what really happened at the Watergate.

My Dad, Phil Stanford, is empirically cool. But this is not a story about that. Do we have that straight? OK, then. We can proceed.

It was actually the story about how he ended up with his little, brown Toyota pickup truck. He said he had been working as a private investigator for an agency that was a front for a money laundering operation for a drug smuggler. Apparently one time the drug smuggler had buried a bunch of cash in the ground. When he dug it up, mold had grown on it, so they had to launder the money in washing machines in the back of the P.I. agency. Dad was working at a literal front for laundering drug money.

The drug smuggler was having a bit of trouble with federal prosecutors on account of all the drug smuggling, but he had a great defense in that he was really doing this for the CIA. Admittedly, that’s not funny, but this is: The smuggler thought that because Dad had moved down to Miami from DC and ended up in his fraudulent P.I. agency, that he must be from the CIA sent to keep tabs on him. The smuggler reasoned that this made a lot more sense than what was actually the case, and that was that my dad was having what they used to call a midlife crisis and thought this sounded like fun.

To prove his case, the smuggler asked Dad to interview the witnesses, but my Dad’s Mercury Capri had died, so the smuggler peeled off a stack of $100 bills and told Dad to buy some wheels. He bought that Toyota pickup and drove it all over South Florida, interviewing the people who could corroborate the smuggler’s story that he was doing this all with the cooperation of the CIA.

“Trouble was, they all turned up dead after I talked to them,” Dad told me, sounding genuinely mystified. “I guess I should feel lucky I made it out alive.”

I offered that they had no reason to kill anyone who had so little awareness of his situation that he kept leading government assassins to smuggler’s witnesses. Eventually, if not inevitably, the smuggler died when a small plane he was piloting mysteriously exploded. Suddenly unemployed, dad loaded up the pickup with his futon and drove out to Portland where he would soon become genuinely cool and, more pertinent to my selfish interests, remain alive and unexploded.

That is the version I’ve been hearing for the last couple of decades as he tried to make sense of it. Immediately, I liked the story as a comedy. He kept trying to tell it cool. The story I’m telling you now is not the story he told me then. It’s not a story about My Dad the Fool. Someone new has picked up the story and is retelling it so that I can hear it with an entirely new perspective.

Writer and producer Lauren Bright Pacheco doesn’t get enough credit for turning Dad’s career into a series of podcast hits. First came Murder in Oregon, which is still way up there on Apple’s true crime podcast rankings years after its release. And now comes Murder in Miami, which recently ranked as high as 47th in the world. To put that in perspective, Apple has 2.5 million podcasts. At the present, only 450,000 are active and producing new material. Among only the active podcasts in the entire world, Murder in Miami ranked in the top 0.01%. The story about how Dad unwittingly went to work as a private investigator for a front for a drug money laundering operation and was mistaken for a CIA agent is a big, big hit.

This isn’t a story about Dad’s late-career adventures in podcasting, because as it turns out he was less unwitting than I had known. Apparently not only did he know that the PI agency he was working for was a front for a drug smuggler, but that there was only a job opening to begin with because the private investigator who had the job before him had turned up murdered in the Everglades. Didn’t it cross his mind, asked Pacheco, that the same thing could happen to him?

“If I did I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it,” he said. “It was a place I really didn’t want to go, I guess.”

“But didn’t you think it was odd that here you were, working for a private investigation firm, and they didn’t seem too interested in figuring out who killed one of their employees, or why? I mean, did you ever stop to think that you could end up dead, too?” asked Pacheco.

Dad laughed, and it sounded like he was starting to get the joke. “I was at a place in my life where I really didn’t care about this,” he said.

“So it didn’t concern you at all that your new place of employment seemed caught up in sketchy, dangerous, drug-related activities?”

“Uh, no,” said Dad. “And to tell the truth, I actually thought it was kinda cool. Just what I was looking for when I came to Miami. But I’ve got to say, even at the time, dumb as I was, I was at least smart enough to know that there are some things you don’t ask questions about,” said Dad.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Dad talks about how his abrupt departure from big-time journalism, where he regularly scored cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, coincided with his divorce. When he talks about losing his career as an establishment journalist at the top of his profession, his voice doesn’t contain even a shadow of regret or loss. But in his brief mentions of the divorce, you can hear his pain as he speaks of losing his family. That’s how he put it, he lost his family, but he never to my knowledge tried to get back together with my Mom. The family he felt he lost was my brother and I. He actually thought we were lost to him.

This is the story of how I, at 52, finally heard what my Dad went through at 38, the same age I, a father of two sons, also got divorced. I told him that he had never lost us. When I split from their mother, it never crossed my mind that I would lose my sons because I hadn’t lost my Dad when he got divorced. He called every Sunday. We spent Christmases and summers with him. He never missed a child support payment, and he had some lean years. In fact, we spent more time together after the divorce because Mom wasn’t around to do Mom things. It was just us guys, and my divorced Dad created a model that I would replicate after my own divorce.

But in Murder in Miami, I heard a man who thought he had lost his sons, and a man who thinks he’s lost that might foolishly put himself in dangerous spots, telling himself that he’s doing it for the paycheck or because he “thought it was kinda cool.” A man who thinks he’s lost his sons probably wouldn’t care too much if he turned up dead in the Everglades.

It’s a strange thing to listen to a glamorized, popular version of your Dad’s life and realize you’re listening to a story about heartbreak and grief. And though he had not lost us, his grief was not optional. Apparently we have to go through grief to get to acceptance, and if you try to skip it, grief will wait for you to come back around.

A man who thinks he’s lost his sons wouldn’t care too much if he turned up in the Everglades.

The problem with telling yourself a story of loss is that you can believe it. And if you believe that you’re lost, then buddy, you are as lost as a traveling man who wakes up in a strange hotel room. You reach for light switches that could be thousands of miles away. You panic when you bump into furniture that wasn’t in the home you used to live in. You feel real terror when you convince yourself that you’re lost.

But then you find a lamp. I was 8 years old when my folks split up. For the next decade, I only saw him on holidays, summers, and special occasions like graduation. And there was not a single day in which he was not my Dad. I never even thought to question his role in my life. There were a great many things I questioned about him— mostly involving his absent-minded singing and how he did so while cutting his hair every day in the mirror — but puzzling over him only reinforced his general dadness in my life. The Versace Mansion isn’t even the Versace Mansion any more, but he never stopped being my Dad. It never even occurred to me.

This is not unique to my family, of course, and not all bonds survive. I know a lot of you are dealing with divorce, or thinking about it. Your kids aren’t contrasting your parental performance with an alternate universe in which you don’t screw up. They don’t measure the strength of their attachment to you by a hypothetical Sliding Doors life in which you never got divorced. There are dads out there who are complete jerks who never send birthday cards, and you know what their kids call them when they’re cussing them out? Dad.

Besides, kids love you even when you’re being stupid, like pretending to be a CIA plant while working at a fake PI agency that was a front for a CIA-backed drug smuggling operation. Even then, Dad. Even then you were my Dad, doing some extraordinarily dumb things.

But that thing about laundering drug money in washing machines because it had gotten moldy? That’s still hilarious.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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