Episode 553: Another Atavist Two-Headed Monster! Berber Verpoest and Alessio Perrone

"We hit some roadblocks. We thought when we started working on this story we were going to have a huge amount of material, and then as we moved along, we realized we were working with fragments and with shards, and some people were not going to be available. Some people had died. Some court records that we thought we were going to be able to pull were not available, and so it it was a four year grind really, and so the fact that it was two of us together made it a lot a lot easier," says Alessio Perrone, co-author of The Rise and Fall of a Supercop for The Atavist. Today we have yet another co-bylined set of dudes, which is really skewing my gender balance of the show, but that’ll all balance out. It’s the third co-bylined set of dudes I’ve had this year, two by the atavist, and it’s Berber Verpoest and Alessio Perrone and they wrote The Rise and Fall of a Supercop for the Atavist. Willy Van Mechelen was one of the most celebrated police officers in Belgian history, responsible for solving infamous kidnappings, robbery and murders. Then Antwerp' s lucrative drug trade came calling. Breaking bad much? Visit magazine.atavist.com to read this thrilling story. Alessio Perrone is a writer and editor whose work has been published by the Guardian, Time, Slate, and Wired, among others. He’s based in Milan, Italy. Berber Verpoest’s journalism and documentaries have appeared through VRT, Vice, AJ+, NOP 1, and Al Arabiya, among others. He’s based out of Belgium. Wild story of the super cop who breaks bad. In this episode we learn: How they worked together on this piece How they find hard to track down people Working together in the cloud And being dogged about getting that crucial interview up to the last moment