WANT TO CHANGE the world too? Come crush with us! Using the same link where you found this podcast, you’ll be able to download our handy-dandy Lemon Crush app. If you want to show support for the cause, there are instructions on how to make your own Lemon Crush honeycomb sunglasses. All you’ll need are some old eyeglass frames, black vinyl paper, a hot needle, yellow paint, and our custom honeycomb template. Blonde hair helps too, and we’ve got lots and lots of tutorials on how to either dye your hair blonde, or what sorts of wigs to buy. But the fun doesn’t stop there. In addition to access to back episodes, you’ll also get notifications on where and how to help create flash mobs for distracting authorities long enough for our crews to do their work. While you and the rest of our swarm keep everyone busy guessing where, we’ll hoist up the latest guest at a financial district near you! Together, we can the change the world!
Hello, listeners! Our guest’s sedatives are wearing off. Rise and shine, and welcome to the podcast! Did you have a good dinner last night? We don’t need to take out the gag—you can just shake your head “yes” or “no.” Lobster and broiler steak with champagne and red wine! Mmmhmmm! That was one fine last meal, sir. Listeners, if this if your first time tuning in, I would like it noted that we tried doing a last-request meal on our first episode, but ended up getting honey all over the recording equipment.
So, welcome back to the podcast. I am your hostess, Lemon Crush, and you are listening to Fine Dining with Lemon Crush! The show where we kidnap ultra-wealthy monsters, force them to reckon with the impact they’ve had on society, and then—well—stay tuned and find out! Today our is our tenth episode, and who better to dine with us than Wentworth Creel!
Mr. Creel, it might interest you to know that the chair in which you sit, wrapped in plastic, once belonged to banking magnate John Pierpont Morgan. Pretty cool, huh?
Listen, it’s normal that you’re panicking, but that chair is an antique. If you continue squirming, I’m going to have to do things to ensure that you suffer much more than you need to… There, thank you, much better.
Now, Mr. Creel, I’m sure you’re wondering the same things everyone wonders when they wake up in that chair. Who the fuck is she? Where the fuck am I? What the fuck is going on? Allow me to answer all those questions as thoroughly as I can.
First things first: That is a recorder on the desk beside me, and we are recording. I am Lemon Crush, a former forensic accountant who assisted in the capture and jailing of money launderers. However, one day I swam too close to a big fish, got raped, disgraced, framed, and jailed. In prison, the same sorts of big fish sought me out to help launder money, but I refused, and they severed my clitoris with a cigar cutter. So, after prison, I opted to become a podcasting serial killer.
As to the where: We are in a very soundproof room in the meatpacking district of Portland, Maine. I picked this locale because this building was actually a bank where all the workers were forced to work long hours and died in a fire back in 1947.
As to what is going on: Let me begin by telling everyone about you, sir. You are Wentworth Creel, a banker whose nickname in boarding school was Wendy, for which you have my deepest sympathies. You are the CEO of Creel Private Banking & Wealth Management, a financial institute. Listeners, if any of you have ever wondered who would randomly engage in shitty little acts like bleeding an already poor public via higher transaction fees at ATMs during the holidays, this is your guy. If any of you has a wallet with a credit card inside it, chances are Wendy owns majority shares of at least two of the three major lending institutes that you all use. And though never accused, you, Mr. Creel have facilitated the transfer of more dark money to leaders around the world, than any other bank in the world. Your real estate holdings include seven gold coast mansions, and even your very own private island in what’s left of the world’s drowning Maldives. As to your trespasses against society, whoa, where to start?
Are these your feet that cocked up on a young Black woman’s back during a Christmas party? Classy. No? You’re shaking your head “no?” Am I taking the photo out of context? Oh, sorry. How’s about this shot of you and a major exec connected with an American mercenary company that was taken before the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota? That’s you handing a suitcase of cash to that gentleman, yes? That’s one of the mercs who helped blow off a veteran’s arm with a hose while he stood in peaceful protest to protect Sioux land, right? Yup, that’s you. Those are your hands, your arms, and it was a $3.7 billion-dollar pipeline, right? You paid to attack veterans in peaceful protest. Getting a little red in the face there, Wendy? I haven’t even started.
How about this next pic of you at The Russian Tea Room with your gut protruding after a feast? That’s you speaking to the head of a street gang in Brooklyn, yeah? Is this you at the Four Seasons talking up that gangster’s nemesis two weeks later? Yup, looks like it. There was a really bad gang war a few days later, but I bet you didn’t know anything about that, right? However, you did buy up all the bullet-riddled buildings, right? Hey, I have something special to show you. See these? Don’t look away. Let me lay them all out. Here’s thirty photos. See all these dead kids? They were caught in the crossfire and bled out. This is all you, Wendy. This is your war for their home. Look at the little hands and feet that’ll never grow up. I also have some photos of dead parents who committed suicide from grief too. See? Open your eyes, Wendy… Wendy, you better look. I will cut your fucking eyelids off, and make you look. This can go quick, or this can go slow. That’s right, stare. Shake. This is you, Wendy. This is what you ate.
Why are you here? Today, Wentworth Creel, you are going to die, and I am going to carve up your body, eat you, and hang your butchered skeleton out for the world to see! To Hell with Soylent Green! If the Crushers and I have our way, tomorrow is going to be a cornucopia of elite-man-meat delights. I have this culinary quirk about passing off human flesh as other meats as realistically as I can. After I’ve turned you into a ham sandwich, I’m going to go down to the nearest deli and take photos and compare to ensure your meat looks just right. If Burger King could use pink slime to make the public think their meat was fresh, I certainly have no qualms feeding them you. Hey-hey, it’s okay to cry. The mic can handle it, really. Besides, I know things seem bleak right now, but you have to look at the bigger picture here, Wendy.
For starters, I’ve been listening in on your calls and reading your emails for months, and I can tell you’ve always wanted to be super famous. Don’t shake your head “no,” it’s true! You weren’t satisfied with short, dry New Yorker articles, or being listed as some obscure number in the “Richest People in the World” rankings of Forbes. Fabrice Touree, Gina Rinehart. Look at all those sly foxes getting their fifteen minutes in the limelight while you sat there unnoticed! You didn’t want to get caught, but you wanted recognition. I mean, where’s your buzz, right?!
Also, we both know you give less than a shit about society, but you’re about to help it out big time. People are going to be studying you, me, the Crushers, and our podcast’s impact upon society for generations after we’re dead. We all have to die sometime. What’s another twenty or forty years when you’re immortal? Don’t believe me? Bring up the Victorian era and tell me the first name that pops into everyone’s brain isn’t Jack the Ripper! Do you know how many people are junkies for true-crime podcasts? Dahmer, Kemper, Ridgway. Did you know there’s trading cards for each of those cannibals? Cannibalizing the ultra-rich to assist society may sound crazy, but so is any new process when you think about it. In case you don’t know, the first astronauts were crash-test pilots, brave pioneers.
Your browser history shows that your most re-watched videos on YouTube are of Martin Shkreli, and I get it. You want to be famous, and you want it to come from somewhere original, and not look desperate like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. You could have done a sex tape too, but then you’d have lost your membership to the Maidstone Club, right? You couldn’t live without your Centurion subscription, right? What could be more original than this?! This way you’re famous, you die, and—technically—you never get caught! Problem solved. I could have killed you a few months ago, but I felt you deserved to be a round number, and so here you are: Guest Number Ten!
Speaking of sex tapes, you could have shot a full-fledged film, with the kinds of cameras The Weinstein Company used. Although, you’d have been arrested if anyone saw your companions, or should I say victims? Yeah, when they’re minors, they’re victims. You kept a lot of souvenirs, and, I gotta tell ya, Wendy, those were not easy to watch. The oldest, I think, was fifteen? They all looked like Traci Lords, Sable Starr, or Kahlil Gibran during his Oscar Wilde days. You know, I get that people in the upper echelons have their own affairs to stay sane through marriages of inconvenience, but Mrs. Creel kept it to men around her own age. She certainly never slept with a minor. Look at all these pictures of your hands where they shouldn’t be. Your hands, and your stomach, and your flabby ass. Keep crying, Wendy, the mic is good for it.
So … Number Ten, are you sorry for everything I showed you? Yeah? Stop shaking the chair … I have an idea. How about you put your money where our mouth is?
There’s a knock at the door! Just a second, Wendy, don’t get up, I’ll get it. Here to help us with the next part of our show are some of our very own volunteers, the Crushers. They’re bringing in laptops with secure connections. Mr. Creel, if you look on these screens coming up you will see that your accounts are being accessed. Now all we need you to do is write down your passwords. You’ll transfer the bulk of your assets to us, and we will redistribute those funds to charities. Don’t worry, your wife and family will continue to enjoy the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to. Of course, it’ll probably just be one giant mansion instead of seven, but then the world will never see these tapes, or photos, or anything else that could be used against your estate in a lawsuit. Or, you don’t do it, we torture you and release everything to the papers and then who knows how many vendettas your family, legal or otherwise, will face. Yeah? Good deal? Let me get you a pen.
While you write those passwords down, let me just say the Crushers and I have always been pretty good at hiding things. Not to toot our own horn, but even though we have nine cannibal kills on record, between security teams, bodyguards, and the occasional Secret Service agent, the Crushers are actually in the upper hundreds. People are going to be finding Easter eggs of the people who protected guys like you for years.
How else can we make Episode 10 special? Well, so far, the news has been saying I lust after human flesh. Here on Episode 10, I will let you all in on a little secret: I hate meat. I always have. No fat-shaming intended, Wendy, but you are at least a hundred pounds heavier than you should be. Most money-laundering bankers taste godawful, and all the fear and acids you’re secreting right this instant are going to make you taste even worse later on. Every bite of you I take will be bitter and sour, and trigger my gag reflex.
So why do I do it? Aside from the shock value of the media reporting the discovery of your bloody skeleton dangling from a streetlamp or telephone wire in front of some stock market or big banks across America? It’s because if we want to change things, we need to step outside our comfort zones. Every great pioneer who’s ever achieved anything has done so taking the road less traveled.
There are always individuals like you whether it’s feudalism, socialism, or communism. Beneath all these “isms” lies an ugly truth: It’s not any one human system that lends itself to systemic corruption; it’s that humans are systemically corrupt. And what do we have today? Capitalism. A system where humanity is so weak, it basically just gave up and said, let’s just try to let greed regulate itself. And for a while I guess that worked, but now we have stagflation instead of stagnation because you big fishies figured out how to corrupt different branches of government. So how do you get humans to change? I think the answer is ever-changing, but today, I say eat the rich. Cannibalism is just another “ism” too.
Are those all the passwords, Wendy? You swear on Pharma Bro that those are all the passwords? All right, Crushers, please verify them.
The funny thing is that a lot of listeners think when I’m saying, “eat the rich,” that I’m saying we should eat anyone who has a bigger house, and that is simply not true. A silly goose living scandal to scandal while trying to keep one mansion heated is not rich. Richer than others? Sure. Mr. Creel, you own seven mansions, correct? Six always stand empty. You employ hundreds of staff. Do you know how much food goes bad in your refrigerators? Dump trucks, Wendy. You think Joe Coffee out on the road cutting his emissions will fix the planet? No. Unless we’re talking about a corrupt member of the Upper One Percent, it’s just another meaningless murder. Plus, their kids inherit everything, anyway. Being woke, progressive, alt-right, it’s all noise. A meaningless tug-of-war, and as the playwright and philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, once said, “When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.”
Did you know that comedian, George Carlin, used to joke that if we executed white-collar criminals, crime would begin to rapidly drop? Everyone laughed, but you know what’s been happening since I started eating big bankers, Wendy? I call it the Lemon Crush trickle-down effect. As the blood trickles down, there’s less sex trafficking, reductions in gang violence, and people have been saving money. So even violent crime from hunger has been dropping. You know what else? It only takes a few rich people inheriting your job to get the message. After someone finds the second or third bloody skeleton, the next person in your position doesn’t want to misbehave. Because they know we’ll find them, and they’ll die. Of course, newspapers and moralists will voice their disgust at the cost of this new world. Some people want us to feel bad about eating you, but how long have you and your friends been eating us? The way I see it it’s like PETA and de-beaked chickens. When everyone is well fed, mostly everyone will turn a blind eye. You know it’s true. Now your friends order escorts and ask them to age-play younger, dark money is going dark, and even ATM fees have been dropping at banks. Today, Xe Services LLC, formerly Blackwater, won’t even take contracts if a client is too rich.
Progress, Wendy, and what we’re doing today—I say “we” because we’re doing this together. Yes, “we.” We are going to make the world a better place. Because I want the world to know that this is how you fix the world. This is how you fix today’s corruption. Crushers, are the passwords verified? Fantastic.
Guess what, Wendy? Now it’s your turn to speak! Yes, you, Wentworth Creel. Guest Number Ten. I am going to ungag you, and let you have your say. But, before I do, remember—screaming won’t work; I am totally gonna kill you. And—as you have repeatedly bellowed at your employees in the past—your time is precious. I have a little lemon-shaped egg timer here, and I am turning it to fifteen minutes.
I’ve been monopolizing this recording with my advertising, motives and reasoning, but I want to give you something Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson never gave their victims—fifteen minutes. That’s right! Nine hundred seconds of the-time-that-flies to record whatever you want for yourself, your family, your friends, your enemies, your coworkers, the world—whatever! I want you think of these as your fifteen minutes. Oh, but before you start, do you want it in the heart or the head?