Original subtitles

Voiceover: A Bangkok skyscraper embroiled in a murder mystery.

This place got all the fame and attention

that its owner wanted, but for all the wrong reasons.

A grand Iraqi palace where a dictator hoarded his wealth.

It was built to impress and to intimidate.

And a site in america where legends took centre stage.

It's this space that was once filled with glory.

Decaying relics, shadows of lost worlds.

Ruins haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In Iraq, between the tigris and euphrates rivers,

history weighs heavy on the land.

It is where nebuchadnezzar ruled, where Abraham came from,

this place is the cradle of civilisation.

Yet rising above a scattering of ancient ruins,

perched on a hill is something else entirely.

Looking at the scale of this place,

you can tell that whoever built this

had a stupidly high opinion of himself.

The man who built this

became the face of lavish despotism the world over.

He decided to build himself a luxury palace, fit for an emperor.

The throne room is designed to emphasise the rulers dominion

over little old you.

The marks left by an infamous tyrant can be found everywhere.

But as Saddam Hussein amassed his vast fortune,

world leaders were preparing to bring him down.

His boastful project found itself right in the firing line.

It's been thoroughly looted, thoroughly vandalised,

and so you see graffiti everywhere, Iraqi graffiti,

but also American graffiti.

What was this building's purpose

and how did American troops come to occupy this palatial ruin?

Archaeologist Hussein falih, now knows this palace well,

but he can remember when access was highly restricted.

This level of secrecy and security reflected

the Iraqi leader it was built for.

In 1979, a new man comes to power in Iraq,

it's Saddam Hussein who comes from an impoverished background.

But he really made his Mark as an absolutely ruthless politician.

And when he seizes power,

he's intent on instantly removing any opposition whatsoever.

He soon becomes one of the worlds most feared leaders.

He, you know, kills off and overthrows

all of his opponents and thereafter he embarks on a cult of personality

to make him the essential glue holding Iraqi society together.

The dictator immediately looked to expand his territories,

fixing his attention on the oil-rich lands on the border with Iran.

He thinks, "hey, I'm gonna just lurch across the border,

take those oil receipts to kind of supercharge

my new Iraqi state and there'll be no consequences."

There's this chunk of Iran that has a lot of arabs in the population

and Saddam Hussein thinks that because they're arabs

and he's an arab, he can take over that chunk of Iran

and all of its oil and make it his own, so he tries.

But Saddam's land grab quickly turned into a nightmare.

There's trench warfare, fighting back and forth across

this disputed area, the Iranians using their much bigger population

to launch human wave attacks.

Despite us support and the ruthless use of chemical weapons,

Saddam Hussein's campaign was a disaster.

And he fails for years

a bloody murderous war between Iraq and Iran.

To mask the catastrophic failure

and to make the most of Iraqi nationalism,

Saddam ordered great building projects.

This one was called the summer palace.

While his country was in a grinding war of attrition

with hundreds of thousands of casualties,

he decided to build himself a luxury palace, fit for an emperor.

For a megalomaniac like Saddam, the location was highly symbolic.

Saddam Hussein sought to connect himself

with the babylonian rulers of old.

And the babylonian emperor nebuchadnezzar,

had a palace on this spot and so Saddam Hussein says,

"I too will have a palace on this spot."

The summer place was carefully positioned within the outer walls

of the ancient city, which Saddam wanted restored to its former glory -

last seen during the reign of the great warrior king nebuchadnezzar ii.

Saddam's grand plan was not only to restore the ancient city,

but also to overlook it, the ultimate display of strength and power.

Nothing would be allowed to stand in his way.

In 1986, Saddam orders the complete destruction of this village

and he has it blown up and in the place of the village

he builds an artificial hill and it's on this hill,

which would become known as Saddam hill,

that the palace would be built.

Construction began with workers bought in from north Africa

who were supposedly blindfolded

to avoid a security risk during the ongoing war.

The project remained top secret,

part of a wider scheme to build up the family fortune.

This is only one of over 100 such palaces scattered around Iraq

and that in this particular palace

he has all kinds of tributes to himself.

Archaeologists told Saddam that nebuchadnezzar had these bricks

with his name stamped in them.

Saddam decided that he wanted to do the same thing.

Saddam Hussein fills this palace

with paintings and murals

in which he is ruling the ancient world

in his chariot being pulled by horses

as though he, Saddam Hussein,

is the reincarnation of these great rulers of old.

Every brick used in the restoration of Babylon,

the construction of his palace,

he has uppercase s, lower case d uppercase h, inscribed in the brick,

Saddam Hussein.

While Saddam tried to evoke great glories of the past,

construction dragged on into the mid-1990s and was only completed

after both the Iran-Iraq war and first Gulf war,

which had cost the country dearly, were ended.

Yet little of this fantasy world remains.

The inside of the palace has been stripped bare,

the walls covered in graffiti.

It speaks to the arrival of an outside force.

Well, Saddam was a real Houdini.

He escaped being deposed by the Americans, er,

after the persian Gulf war in 1990, 1991,

goes on through the 1990s

pretending that he more or less won the, the war in 1991.

But then after 9/11 refuses to confirm or deny his nuclear program

and assured the United States that he won't sponsor terrorism.

Time was up for Iraq's Houdini.

Barely had the dust settled after the shocking attack on the twin towers

before George w bush began plotting to succeed

where his father had failed a decade earlier.

Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.

Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict

commenced at a time of our choosing.

In 2003, we invaded Iraq,

specifically in order to depose Saddam Hussein from power.

When the Americans attacked Iraq they moved very quickly,

the so-called 'thunder run' toward the capital.

First they take out all the air defences and all the aircraft

and they completely blind and disarm Saddam's military.

They chase Saddam out of the capital into hiding and

then they fan out across the country occupying key points like Babylon.

On April the 8th 2003, units from the 101st airborne division

stormed across the euphrates and launched an attack.

As they approached they encountered gun fire.

Members of Saddam's elite republican guard were entrenched in the palace

and put up fierce resistance.

After a few days of intense close-quarter fighting,

Saddam's great monument to his new Iraqi empire

fell into American hands.

And us troops who went in to this palace and the 100 others

that us forces liberated in the course of the Iraq war,

were just stunned by the decadence, the luxury,

the magnificence of the furnishings, the chandeliers, the furniture.

In the chaos that followed the initial invasion,

the palace was looted and vandalised until it was made a us military base.

2,000 troops moved in to camp Babylon.

The coalition forces do not always treat

Saddam Hussein's palaces with respect.

There is a bit of graffiti,

there are some fittings that might have been detached

and are now trophies on somebody's desk.

But Saddam was still on the run

and he had just withdrawn a fortune from the central Iraqi bank.

A billion dollars to fund his escape and the planned Iraqi fight back.

But he was fighting a losing battle and soon the game was up.

They find Saddam in December of 2003 hiding in a hole in the ground

and they turn him over to the Iraqis who then execute him.

It was a brief, but unpleasant operation

to topple Saddam Hussein from power.

The Iraq war started sharp and then ran on for a very long time

even after Saddam Hussein was dead.

The palace was formally handed over to the Iraqi ministry of culture

in 2005 and it looks set for a brighter future.

The Iraqi government made a big Grant to the local community to

fix up the palace and use it as a cultural centre,

but the money was misspent or purloined and it,

the work was never done so it remains as essentially,

a neglected ruin.

Hussein falih still has hope that rather than being associated with

a ruthless despot, it can complement the world heritage site at its feet.

Treasury and homeland security agents continue to chase down

Saddam's family fortune and freeze his assets. But the hunt goes on.

In Byron, Georgia, are the remains of a once iconic sporting arena.

Some places are good at concealing what they are,

this is not one of those places, this is obviously a race track.

And it's not just a simple horse track or a simple local track.

This is big, this is a half-mile circuit

that has these concrete stands that is something permanent.

This place looks like it belongs in a post-apocalyptic movie,

this is a monument to americana, but now it is completely overgrown.

Graffiti-littered terraces and smashed floodlights

overlook a track that's clearly a far cry from its glory days.

You can see faded the name of the race track there on the side

and you know that this has been something special.

There's at least a dozen hall of famers that raced here.

It's at this raceway that Richard petty is going to

break the speed record.

But while famous racers blessed this track,

others were chasing their fortunes underground.

Just outside the track there are thick woodland,

it's the perfect place to hide something.

People are still talking about it to this day, 50 something years later.

This is going to be a huge bust.

It's still known as 'the mystery beneath turn three'.

For Tim Thornton, owner of the middle Georgia raceway,

what is more vivid in the memory,

is the Saturday night races held here in the 1960s.

As a high school kid, it was very special to come down here

and have what I call the big boys of Nascar race on a Saturday night.

It was the golden age of Nascar

and this was a regular venue on the circuit.

Some of the biggest names in stock car racing came here,

Richard petty, the king, the Alison brothers, David Pearson,

I could go on and on, that was really special for us.

Nascar you know, started in this part of the country.

The atmosphere on race night was electric.

These stands would be packed, at that time

there was also grandstands across on the other side of the track.

I believe these stands held about 6,800 people and probably 2,000

or 3,000 in the infield, so there might be 10,000 people out here.

So the population of Byron was less than 1,000,

so that was huge and of course a lot of cheering, a lot of noise.

There's the smell of gasoline,

the roar of the crowd, the screaming of the engines.

It is excitement piled on excitement, turbo-charged

with even more excitement.

You can smell the rubber and the gasoline

and the cotton candy and the hotdogs.

And they dropped the green flag.

And then your hair blows with the wind as they go past,

it's just an incredible feeling.

Based on a simple formula, Nascar is all about maximising speed.

But it is also a contact sport.

This is your original American motorsport,

40 cars duelling it out on a half mile or mile track.

Bumping other cars is part of the game.

It's called 'trading paint'.

But it's a more complex sport than it's often given credit for.

It's a lot of science and a lot of technology, er,

that goes into that race, really sophisticated.

It has an incredible amount of skill,

dexterity and the margin of error is really small.

You lose focus for just a split second

and you can hit the wall at over 200 miles per hour.

To ensure drivers could maintain such high speeds,

Nascar developed its distinctive feature: The raised banks.

The land around here is very flat

so they excavated the Georgia red Clay that we have

and built these turns and compacted the dirt.

This is about an 18-degree bank.

For this size half-mile track that's very steep.

This is the original asphalt

and even though there's a few cracks in it and, well,

grass growing up, it's still very much intact.

The only way to keep these cars from literally going airborne

is to angle the turns so these cars aren't just

driving around curves - they are just halfway flying around them.

These steep banks saw Richard petty known as the king,

make racing history.

So one of my most vivid memories about being here seeing the king,

Richard petty, race on a number of occasions and he,

he won more races than anybody else out here.

He won an even 200 races and he holds several records

including the Daytona 500 record.

He is a god among Nascar fans.

It was here at middle Georgia that Richard petty sets the record

for the average speed on the half-mile track.

Over 82 miles per hour and this is going to put the track on the map.

But this wasn't the only thing that would bring fame to Byron, Georgia.

National headlines would soon feature the name of this track,

but for a very different reason.

So the police learned that,

that there's something afoot at the racetrack.

On September 23rd 1967,

race night, the FBI arrived to investigate.

And it was no accident that they decided to raid the track

in the middle of a race when the stands were packed.

The police were there for maximum publicity.

They were there to make a scene.

So there's something really amazing that happened back here

on the back side of the track.

People were still talking about it to this day,

50-something years later.

With engines roaring trackside,

federal agents begin searching the nearby woods.

The only remaining clue to the mystery beneath turn 3

is a strange crater.

Behind me here is the drivers' entrance,

kind of back entrance if you will.

The cars and the trailers would come in and out here.

The builders, when they designed the track,

were very forward-thinking in a naughty way.

They had a ticket booth right back in here, it had a false floor in it.

The police get there and they find a trap door, they open it

and realise they've just stumbled upon the largest

illegal distillery of moonshine in the whole state of Georgia.

Descending down a 35-foot shaft, they entered a tunnel system

that a federal agent described as

one of the most cleverly run moonshine operations he'd ever seen.

A long tunnel contained a cooker tank, gas and fermenting tanks

with electric lighting and electric exhaust system.

An estimated 80 gallons of moonshine whiskey was produced here every day.

When the race ended and the crowds had left,

jugs of the whiskey were loaded into the race car haulers

and smuggled away in the dead of night.

Making moonshine is a risky business.

It is very flammable

and you could potentially make dangerous by-products.

It can be done wrong and kill you or blind you, er,

but there's all different varieties of it.

Discovering a moonshine distillery under a Nascar track

is not as strange as it may seem.

You know, Nascar and a moonshine operation are

not such an odd combination when you think about it.

During the era of prohibition,

a thriving smuggling business sprang up.

The police of course, are going to try to crack down on this, er,

so what happened is the smugglers, or bootleggers as they were known,

would take ordinary looking cars and they would modify them.

And so you have this idea of you know, the old thunder road, right,

where they take their stock cars, their everyday cars, they soup up

the motors, er, they build spaces in them to carry as much

of this highly flammable alcohol as they can, so that they can

outrace the sheriffs, outrace the police, the FBI whoever.

They even developed special moves that they would use

to try to escape the police.

If you've ever seen a car going down a straightaway and then someone, er,

pulls the emergency brake to make the car spin around on its axis

180 degrees so they can immediately start going

in the opposite direction, that's called a 'bootlegger reverse'.

Well, one day two of these bootleggers put their modified cars

down side-by-side to see which one was the fastest and bam!

A new form of racing was born.

The early days of racing was these bootleggers getting together,

bootlegger's the guy that hauls the moonshine,

they would get together and race out in the field,

and race on the mountain roads, that kind of thing,

and that was kind of the, the beginning of stock car racing.

So this idea of the moonshine distillery

being found under a Nascar track,

really ties the past to the present and the future of the motorsport.

Yet evidence of the moonshine operation is all but gone.

Traditionally, when the feds would raid a still

they would use dynamite, blow up the still.

They didn't want to blow it up,

'cause they would have damaged or destroyed the racetrack,

so they took heavy equipment

and just totally crushed it and, and buried it.

The sheriffs did a real thorough job of destroying this.

They just decimated it completely to the point that today,

all that you can find is a hole in the ground

and the only thing we really know about it is old photographs.

The track owner was charged

with running the illegal moonshine operation,

but small town, small county - he was actually acquitted.

That was pretty controversial.

Despite the scandal,

the following season kicked off as planned at middle, Georgia.

But with Nascar moving to bigger stadiums,

the owners went looking for new forms of revenue.

One of these drew crowds

the size of which Byron, Georgia had never seen before.

The owners of the track decided to do something big, er,

to try to attract attention to, to the area.

On July 4th 1970, the racetrack was taken over

by the Atlanta international pop festival.

I worked at the pop festival.

I was still a high school kid and they put me er, probably

300 feet from the stage. I finally laid down and went to sleep beside

my popsicle truck and woke up and there's Jimi Hendrix

playing, erm, star spangled banner

with fireworks going off and here I am, just looking straight up at it.

When Jimi Hendrix played here, he drew a crowd of over 300,000,

which is probably the largest audience in america

that Jimi Hendrix ever played to.

It became known as the Woodstock of the south,

but Hendrix sadly died of a suspected drug overdose just 10 weeks later.

America is a place that is in love with the idea of, of cars, er,

and it's also in love with the idea of rebellion,

so I don't think we should be surprised at all that,

you know, racing came out of bootlegging

and then Jimi Hendrix played on a Nascar racetrack.

In a funny way they all fit together really well.

Amateur races continued alongside music events

until a 1984 concert sealed its fate.

Very big brawl and fight broke out, a lot of arrest.

At that point the county said, "no more" and shut it down.

With no clear future,

this abandoned piece of americana is cherished for its unique past.

It means an awful lot to people in the area and race fans,

I suppose worldwide, really a special place.

In the centre of Thailand's capital city of Bangkok,

an infamous ghost tower reaches into the sky.

This is a sight that you can't miss.

A huge derelict skyscraper leaning out over a buzzing Metropolis.

Even in its state of disrepair,

you can see that this was a pretty wild piece of architecture.

It looks grand, but as you get closer you see that

it's just a skeleton and there's this eerie haunted feeling about it.

Inside the building is a minefield of, of hazards.

You have gaping holes in some sections,

you've got windows with no glass in them, open stairwells.

It's right in the heart of this buzzing Metropolis,

but when you're inside, you feel incredibly alone.

This is one of the tallest buildings in the city

and the view from the top where the balconies extend,

is absolutely spectacular, but without any railings,

venturing out there would be foolhardy.

Its continued abandonment with nothing but vines and trees

occupying the vast shell, is baffling.

Here you have a luxury tower in the middle of a thriving booming city.

The real estate it sits on must be incredibly valuable,

why in the world has no-one stepped in

to either tear it down, or complete it?

Many of the local Thais think it's cursed.

Now superstition and folklore is very popular in Thai culture,

but not every story about the ghost tower

is just myth and superstition.

This place got all the fame and attention that its owner wanted,

but for all the wrong reasons.

In the 1990s, Thailand was undergoing economic growth on an

unprecedented scale. Nowhere more so than in its capital, Bangkok.

Its skyline was studded with construction cranes

and its buildings were surging skywards.

And this building was going to be at the gleaming centre

of this incredible economic surge.

This project was the brainchild of an architect and developer

named rangsan torsuwan, who was this extravagant famous designer.

His buildings were designed to appeal to Asia's richest people,

who would want a luxury apartment at a prestige address.

For rangsan torsuwan, this was more than just a design though,

he owned the company that was building it.

And the costs were staggering,

with multiple big investors putting up the money.

He named the building the sathorn unique tower.

And what he had planned was hugely ambitious.

When constructed started in 1990, sathorn unique was earmarked to be

one of the most luxurious tower buildings in all of Bangkok

and you were going to have some 659 luxury flats

and dozens of retail spaces.

There was going to be a ballroom and a jewellers.

Pansit torsuwan is rangsan's son.

He was just a teenager when the work on the tower began.

To make it a success,

he had a very specific architectural design in mind.

Hundreds of families and investors bought into this dream.

The stone balconies jut out, it looks grand.

I mean you can imagine, you know,

spending an opulent holiday in there,

or holding a high-powered meeting.

The shell went up quickly and this building was clearly going to be

everything it had promised.

But there was a twist on the horizon that was so far-fetched

you could barely write it,

and at the heart of it all was the founder mr rangsan torsuwan.

The sathorn unique tower's progress

to becoming the most luxurious high-rise in Thailand

was bought to a sudden and spectacular halt.

It was a dramatic moment

that sent shockwaves rippling through the country.

With his father in prison, pansit made it his mission

to discover the truth, but time wasn't on his side.

Nor were those in power.

Thailand politics at the time were really byzantine,

with all kinds of rivalries and plots and accusations,

so this was a case where a prominent figure was caught up,

whether truthfully or not, in a giant political scandal.

The longer pansit's father was locked up,

the worse the consequences were for the family and their business.

Some investors started pulling out, banks stopped lending.

Who wants to risk their money on a project

whose leader and designer is in jail?

The whole success of this project depended on what happened

to mr rangsan and for months the building stood semi complete,

its future rested on the fate of one man.

Even though rangsan had been released,

the investigations against him were ongoing.

This was a real rocky time for the funding of sathorn unique,

but it didn't necessarily kill the project.

He managed to scrape together just enough funds

to keep it going and they might have weathered this crisis,

but there was another disaster looming on the horizon.

This disaster was about to engulf the whole of Thailand.

In 1997, the economies of south east Asia

went in to a terrible economic collapse.

Banks didn't have money to lend, stock markets collapsed,

unemployment shot up, this was an enormous crisis for,

for the countries as a whole, but especially for developers

who were over-extended.

Many of the building projects came to a crashing halt,

including this 49-storey tower.

Rangsan desperately searched for new investors.

But before long his past came back to haunt him.

In 2008, he was once again charged

and this time convicted of attempted murder.

That conviction was actually overturned,

er, by an appeals court two years later in 2010,

but with rangsan's complicated personal history,

investors were really reluctant to sink their money into

one of his projects and this really spelled the end

for any hopes of completion of the sathorn unique tower.

This, er, wonderful dream was going to die.

Today the responsibility for the tower lies with his son.

But it seems the challenges of completing it are just too big.

It took a fortune to build and it will take a fortune to finish it.

There's another reason this site is unlikely to ever get developed.

Many of the local Thais think it's cursed.

There's even a rumour going around

that the tower is built on a former burial site.

Today the tower stands as a dark shadow

on the increasingly glittering skyline,

but it isn't as quiet here as its owners would like.

It's now become somewhat of a YouTube sensation,

attracting daredevil urban explorers from around the world.

The family tries to keep people out, but somehow people keep managing

to break into this tower and shoot their videos

for that moment of fame, taking enormous risks in the process.

And with neither development nor demolition any closer,

the sathorn unique tower seems set to remain

as one of the world's most prominent temples to urban decay.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV