Original subtitles

An Oklahoma town so rich, it inspired a Hollywood movie.

We have benefited from our own resources.

We've been like Kuwaitis or Qataris,

but somehow, it all went out the door.

In Cambodia, a place of learning

that was turned into a chamber of horrors.

For the survivors,

it's really important to continue to tell their stories.

And this secret Latvian facility

designed with malicious intent.

Decaying relics...

Ruins of lost worlds...

Sites haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In the sleepy town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma,

is the relic of a time when greed and treachery ravaged a community.

There must be at most a few thousand people living here.

But the buildings are pretty grand.

Why would all of this be here in such a small town?

A distinctive ruin at its center holds the key.

Walking in, you find yourself

in a big entrance room or lobby.

Intricate mosaics cover the floors,

and ornate plaster work decorates the walls and ceilings.

Other spaces look like they might have been apartments.

Some are stripped bare,

while others still have desks or bed frames inside.

This must have been some kind of hotel or a boarding house maybe.

Its opulence has now faded.

But in its day, this was one of the most prestigious buildings in the area.

There was clearly a lot of money

being made and spent around town.

But where did it all come from?

This building is linked to one of the biggest booms in economic history.

But everything you see was most likely paid for with stolen money.

It's because of what this land had to offer.

Soon, it would all be soaked in blood.

I always tell people there's ghosts here.

And when I say that, it's the ghost of our past, our history.

Scott Trotter has a passion for old buildings.

Since 2021, he's been working hard to preserve this site.

This was where everybody came,

all the wealthy, famous, infamous.

They stayed here.

This was the most luxurious hotel anywhere in the area.

There was a good reason this was the place to be.

In the early 20th century, Pawhuska was one of the wealthiest towns in America.

This was becoming this, like this new little New York

here on the prairie, every shop you can imagine.

Every car that they were making at that time was being sold on these streets.

What drew people here was the discovery of a valuable commodity,

oil.

It led into the, you know, the free flow of money

and that black gold flowing through the streets here in the 1920s.

News of this boom quickly spread around the country,

and outsiders flocked here, looking to get a piece of the action.

We had all these oil moguls and all these bigwigs.

This is the place they came to stay.

This is the Duncan Hotel.

It was named after and financed by

by two entrepreneurial brothers lured to Pawhuska

by the financial opportunities it offered.

The hotel first opened in 1910.

Everybody was coming to this town to start businesses

and put in stores, and that's why they spared no expense

to build this place because they knew they were going to fill it.

In the mid-1920s, business was booming so much in Pawhuska

that the Duncan brothers decided to build an expansion onto their hotel.

These are some of the most expensive pieces of porcelain

top of its line and at that time.

This was the best of the best.

But everything at the Duncan may have been built on a lie.

One that has its origins

when the rightful owners of this area first acquired the territory.

Talee Redcorn is a member of the Osage Nation.

They signed their first treaty with the United States in 1808.

And then in the 1870s, we moved from Kansas,

had a treaty,

and moved into Oklahoma.

Current Osage Reservation.

Part of the reason this land was available is because white settlers saw this region

as being less desirable than other parts of the state.

That's because only around two percent of the land

was suitable for growing crops.

Little did they know,

there was a vast reservoir of wealth just beneath the ground.

Oil really impacted the lives of the Osage,

and it brought a lot of money.

Some estimates put it around $240 million.

Which is like billions of dollars in today's money.

We were per capita, the richest folks on this planet at that time.

Suddenly, you've got luxury car dealerships,

you know, high end boutiques.

Fancy hotels, like the Duncan popping up.

The entire town was transformed.

But for the Osage,

the discovery of oil was both a blessing and a curse.

When the scale of wealth became clear, Congress passes a law.

They say that basically anyone who is half Osage or more

has to have a court appointed guardian to look after them.

The guardians were chosen

from local white businessmen and lawyers

who were given almost complete control of their Osage ward's money.

You've got a somebody that's your guardian and you're young

and they're not looking out for your best interests.

Bad things are gonna happen.

It's believed that these guardians swindled their clients

out of millions.

That money is ours.

But it's all out of our control and out of our people.

We like to say we built Ponca City,

Bartlesville and Tulsa on Osage oil.

It's also said that a lot of the buildings in Pawhuska

were actually built with stolen Osage money,

and it seems the Duncan Hotel was no exception.

If you follow the money, you'll get the answers you're looking for.

2 In Oklahoma, are the remains

of a once opulent hotel with suspicious origins.

It's believed that in the early 1900s,

this building was illicitly constructed using funds

that belonged to the Osage Nation.

Descendants of Wakon Iron, a local tribesman,

attest that his oil wealth

was funneled by his government appointed guardian

into this structure without his knowledge.

Once construction was complete,

he was told that the venture he had invested in had gone bust

and all the money was gone.

So all the glamour and high end amenities

of the Duncan are perhaps the product

of the widespread theft of Osage wealth.

I've heard story after story

where the families were destroyed.

It was just a movement of resources

away from the Osage and into someone else's hands.

This tragic story would be repeated across the Osage Nation.

So if you've seen the Martin Scorsese movie,

Killers of the Flower Moon,

it's showing the horrifying lengths people would go to

to get their hands on all of that money.

While the film shows the two main characters being caught

and brought to justice,

this wasn't the case of everyone suspected of being involved.

This brutal period became known as the Reign of Terror.

It's estimated that hundreds were killed

and millions of dollars were stolen.

My great grandfather, his name was Raymond Redcorn.

Possibly he was murdered.

It's really impacted my family.

The wealth that maybe other Osages experienced,

we didn't really have because of this tragedy.

It would take many years for the sheer scale

of the Osage betrayal to be widely acknowledged.

For much of that time, the Duncan continued to operate,

its fortunes still tied to the oil industry.

But in December 1981, a fire broke out.

The inferno sealed the fate of the Duncan Hotel.

In 2011, after a 10-year legal battle,

the federal government paid out $380 million to the Osage.

The truth is, they are likely owed much more.

Regardless, Talee is focused on the future.

Bad things happen, yes,

but the better thing to do is to move forward.

We're very appreciative to what God's given us,

so, that's what's important to me,

especially when I get older.

In Cambodia's capital is a seemingly ordinary structure

that served as the site of a betrayal so shocking,

it still haunts the country.

In the middle of a busy block

are a collection of rectangular three story buildings.

It's a pretty nondescript structure,

a very institutional appearance.

It doesn't look fancy.

There are some grassy areas, perhaps for recreation,

which suggests that the site may have had a civic purpose.

But what exactly was it for?

Off each of the breezy corridors

are a number of different sized empty rooms.

The walls are bare and the floor is tiled.

If you I imagine that there were maybe desks in here.

Perhaps this was a classroom.

But if this were a place of learning,

there are certain features harder to explain.

One of the buildings is covered with barbed wire

from top to bottom,

and the interior is lined

with what can only be described as cells.

And there are hundreds of them.

Inside these walls, some of the greatest crimes

against humanity of the 20th century

were perpetrated by a regime which basically pledged

to wipe out all opposition.

I visited this place for the first time in 2015,

when I was a third year college student.

The experience left me feeling sorrowful and full of questions.

The search for answers inspired Voeun Vandet

to return to this complex as a custodian of its history.

I was curious as to how a place that was

meant to impart knowledge and education

turned into a site which inflicted

great pain on the Cambodian people.

The structure that stands here today

was originally built in 1962.

It was the Prey Ponhea Yat High School

and the Tuol Sleng Primary School.

So, these were classrooms.

Yet, nationalized education was a new concept for the nation,

established once Cambodia gained freedom

from French colonial rule in 1953.

Previously, only around 50,000 Cambodians

received formal elementary schooling.

Before long, it was around a million.

For over a decade,

this was simply a place where children came to learn, play and be safe.

But soon, even education itself

was considered a crime and punishable by death.

But the transformation didn't happen overnight.

By the early 1950s, as the Cold War escalated,

China and North Vietnam fell to communist regimes.

The ideology also began to take root in Cambodia.

In the early 1960s, a small group of Cambodians

led by Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot,

formed the Communist Party of Kampuchea,

later known as the Khmer Rouge.

They wanted a radical communist revolution

that would erase all Western influences

and set up a solely agrarian society.

At first, they were small in number

and posed very little threat.

But when a right wing pro US military coup

toppled the head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970,

the Khmer Rouge began to attract increasing support.

Civil war erupted, and over the next five years,

Pol Pot's forces gradually took greater control of the countryside.

He now had the numbers to launch

an all-out assault on Cambodia's capital.

On April 17th 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers

entered Phnom Penh,

and many people came to celebrate their victory.

It seemed that after five years of fighting, the war was finally over.

In reality, something far worse was to come.

After only a few hours,

Khmer Rouge troops started firing into the air.

This was the beginning of the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh.

About three or four million lived in the cities.

This big urban population in cities like Phnom Penh

was marched into the countryside and converted into peasants.

In the space of 24 hours,

they'd leave everything behind.

Anyone who was thought to pose a threat to this revolution

was rounded up in these specially designed detention centers.

There were 189 of these sites across the country.

This was the most notorious.

Its name was Security Prison 21.

On arrival, after being measured and photographed,

the prisoners were stripped and shackled to the floor

in a cell barely big enough to sit down in.

They were made to sit.

There was a metal stick put across their legs

and they were locked into the chain like this.

It was commonplace for the prisoners

to be interrogated and tortured three times a day.

They were forced to give detailed biographies of their lives.

Often, this information was then used to round up other people.

The brutality of the Khmer Rouge is absolutely shocking.

If you were a lawyer, doctor or teacher,

that was enough to get you arrested and killed.

But as time went on,

the Khmer Rouge became increasingly paranoid

and began to turn on its own members, even children.

When I was arrested and sent to this place, I was nine years old.

2 In Cambodia, is a former school that was turned into a death camp

under the Khmer Rouge regime.

Anyone deemed a threat to the revolution

was rounded up and incarcerated,

including their own comrades.

Norng Chan Phal was nine years old in December 1978,

when the Khmer Rouge summoned his father,

a regime supporter to the capital.

Eight days later, they came to our family

and informed us that we would be reunited with him in Phnom Penh.

We thought our father would come to get us,

but we didn't see our father at all.

We didn't know we were being sent to jail.

We were so scared and shocked.

On arrival, Chan Phal's mother

was interrogated in front of her children.

When my mother gave a wrong answer a few times,

she would be tortured.

I ran and hugged her when I saw the situation.

At that time,

they used a gun to hit her when she refused to answer

and I tried to cover her, but I was hit in my back.

The next day, the siblings were moved

to a different part of the compound.

My mother hugged me.

She was in tears and very upset.

But she didn't explain what was happening.

The last time I saw her,

she was standing holding a window frame and looking at us.

I looked at her a few times and she disappeared from the window.

At the time, Chan Phal and his brother

were not aware that their mother was likely killed that same day.

Neither did they know that outside the prison walls,

Pol Pot's grip on power was weakening.

Ultimately, it wasn't the Khmer Rouge's violence

against their own people that toppled the regime.

It was the fact they started a war against their neighbors,

Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.

The goal was to take back territory

that had once been a part of the Khmer Empire centuries ago.

In late December 1978,

Vietnam launched a full scale invasion of Cambodia,

sending tanks and thousands of troops across the border.

Khmer Rouge fighters made a chaotic retreat.

By early January 1979,

Vietnamese forces closed in on Phnom Penh.

They found a city that was practically deserted.

And they discovered this S-21 prison complex.

And it said that the way they discovered is, they smelled rotting bodies.

At least 18,063 people were sent here, but only 12 survived.

Eight adults and four children.

Norng Chan Phal and his brother were two of those children.

They only lived because they hid

when the Khmer troops abandoned the prison.

I came outside and saw two Vietnamese soldiers

the person holding the AK gun was pointing it at me

and asking, "Are you Pol Pot's child?"

I told him that I wasn't Pol Pot's child.

We were then taken to the hospital

to recover from our health issues.

And afterwards, we were placed in an orphanage.

By the time Pol Pot is deposed,

it's estimated that he's basically murdered about

1.5 to 3 million of his people.

At the very least, a quarter of his own population.

The newly installed moderate communist government

chose to leave S-21 and to open it as a museum of genocide.

Pol Pot died before he could be brought to answer for his crimes.

S-21 exists as a prescient reminder

of the human capacity to inflict unspeakable cruelty.

For the lucky few that did survive,

telling their story has become a way of fighting back.

I was left speechless when I first visited Tuol Sleng.

It brought back all the memories

and I couldn't hold back my tears.

However, as I started working closely with this place,

I shared my story with visitors and I began to feel better.

Tuol Sleng is no longer a prison to me.

In western Latvia are the remnants of a forbidden site

that for many years officially never existed.

We're about two miles from the coast in an area of dense forest.

But then you see the very distinct type of housing

that we saw after World War II.

It's not elegant, but it got the job done.

They seem out of place.

Why would these apartment blocks

be thrown up in the middle of nowhere?

Inside, they've been gutted.

But there's a few kind of clues here and there as to their former life.

A little bit of wallpaper, a family living room, a kitchen.

While little remains to help piece together

a picture of who was here,

the question of why they were here is soon answered.

Beyond the buildings rising above the trees,

you see these enormous antennas.

These things look like something

you might use to search for signals from alien life.

But what are they doing here in the middle of Latvia?

When the world stood on the precipice of global conflict,

this site held the key to humanity's survival

and destruction.

The stakes in the Cold War are so high.

If there is a way to defend yourselves with technology, you use it.

2 What for two decades,

most Latvians didn't know this covert site existed

because it never appeared on any maps.

In 2013, Arnis Berzins

came to work as a technical specialist at this remote facility.

The motive for the site's construction was simple.

To gain the upper hand in the Cold War by any means necessary.

As the conflict intensified,

the methods became increasingly clandestine.

Instead of direct confrontation with kinetic weapons,

the confrontation in the Cold War is at a remove.

It's technology versus technology.

And the Soviets especially, were obsessed

with projecting an image of competence and success.

A pivotal moment in the race

for technological superiority came in 1957,

when the battlefield shifted to a new frontier.

The Soviets had sent up the first manmade satellite,

a Sputnik, which orbited the earth,

sending down a beeping radio signal.

And this was a huge deal because for the first time,

messages could be sent and received between spacecraft and Earth.

In the US, people were completely freaked out by this.

They had no idea the Soviets were so advanced.

Less than a year later, in 1958,

NASA was created to help combat the threat.

The space race was on and our world would never be the same again.

Within the 10 years after Sputnik,

more than 800 satellites had been launched by both sides.

They become part of our way of life,

and they become part of our way of war.

Whoever could communicate the fastest

would have a huge advantage in any conflict,

especially in this nuclear age,

when a devastating war might unfold in just a few minutes.

But with the right equipment,

these new communication lines could be vulnerable to interception.

That's exactly where this place came in.

The US Military had bases all over Western Europe,

and this facility was right on their doorstep.

This is the secret Soviet town

of Irbene codenamed Little Star.

In the late 1960s, its first radio telescope began operating.

Its mission had one goal.

To build, operate and keep all of this running,

it required a vast amount of manpower.

You need scientists to actually capture the results

of your spying.

You need engineers to repair it.

You've got to build a place for them to live.

Over the next decade,

Moscow's spy masters ordered two more antennae to be installed,

each one bigger than the last,

enabling the Soviets to eavesdrop on one of America's most iconic moments.

Ten, nine...

Ignition sequence starts.

One small step for man.

One giant leap for mankind.

But the true purpose of this complex was far more sinister.

It was intended to give the Soviets an edge

over America if nuclear war erupted.

In the late 1970s, it looked like that moment had come

when a US ally in Europe identified what they thought

was a deployed Russian missile.

This news shocked the Soviets

because they knew they hadn't launched any weapons.

It said that they picked up

some sort of panicked messages from Sweden

that said that the Swedish technicians

had picked up a sign of a Soviet nuclear attack.

If news of the alleged attack reached the US,

the Soviets knew the outcome

was mutually assured destruction.

All the radio operators at Irbene could do

was inform their superiors and wait.

They were listening in with bated breath

until the Swedish radio signals reported

that it was not anything to worry about,

but actually, just like a large flock of birds.

This anecdote sounds kind of funny,

but it shows it was entirely possible

for a devastating nuclear war to begin just on a mistake like that.

For the next 10 years,

workers at Irbene continued to listen in on America and its allies.

Yet, it appeared the secret base

wasn't as secret as the Soviets thought.

In the 1980s, listeners at the station recall getting a message

from the United States that said, "Dear Soviet spies,

Happy New Year's."

As it turned out,

this was the very least of the communist regime's problems.

By the late 1980s, the whole Soviet system was starting to crumble.

They were bankrupting themselves with projects like this.

2 In Latvia is the ruin of a former Soviet base.

It operated in secret until the late 1980s,

when cracks in the Iron Curtain began to appear.

The first pieces to fall are the Baltic republics

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,

they all declare independence from the Soviet Union.

But the Russians weren't really keen

on handing over a working spy station to a potential enemy.

A a potential American ally.

When the Latvian officials arrived,

they were pretty horrified to discover that Russian security services

were destroying everything they could.

The Latvian scientists didn't give up.

The former Soviet technology

provided the perfect opportunity

for the newly independent nation to establish its own center

for space studies.

This place that was built as part of a Cold War military

and espionage operation,

today, is engaged in cooperative, peaceful research

and communication around the world.

In northern Italy, 50 miles from Venice,

lies an unlikely field of dreams.

We're in an area that's a patchwork

of long, straight fields, little country houses.

It's very, very idyllic.

But then, slap bang in the middle of this very ordinary scene,

there's something completely extraordinary.

There are these two giant, rusting old airplanes,

and it just doesn't make any sense

because there's nothing nearby that should have big airplanes right there,

so you just have to ask the question,

"Why are they here?"

Inside the control tower, the plot thickens.

There's what looks like a professional oven.

Now, I've not been inside many control towers,

but that doesn't seem normal to me.

In an adjacent building, things get even stranger.

It appears to be some sort of Renaissance villa

and everywhere you look, there's some pretty iconic artwork.

It is so bizarre to have these two vastly different things,

planes and Renaissance art, all in one compound.

Everything seen here was the brainchild

of an entrepreneur with a wild vision.

But who failed to consider the consequences of his ambitions.

Almost as soon as the doors opened, it was forced into a tailspin.

Luigi Stecca is the man responsible for this surreal complex.

I created this myself in every little detail.

My life is in this place.

The inspiration came to him while working

at a nursing home in the early 1990s.

The elderly people used to say to me, "Luigi,

what I wouldn't give to go on a plane."

They would also talk to him about how they always dreamed

of going to Florence and Rome,

seeing the great Renaissance Masters' work.

So, Luigi thinks to himself,

maybe I can create a place to bring these two things together.

And if I can make some money off the back of it, too, then why not?

In 1998, Luigi decided to turn his dream into a reality.

This is the Michelangelo Da Vinci restaurant,

a curious passion project

that combines the love of air travel with food and art.

The restaurant was a hit from the beginning,

but very quickly, local bureaucrats decided they needed their piece.

2 In Villarmarzana, Italy, is a bizarre flight of fancy.

The creator, Luigi Stecca, pulled out all of the stops to bring his dream to life.

The cost alone of buying and transporting the planes

was in the region of $100,000.

I searched until I found the planes.

I found one in Cingoli in the Marche and one in Porto Recanati.

He then needed to arrange a police escort

to get them back safely.

Then once here, we put the planes down on the ground.

And then we started reassembling the wings using cranes.

But Luigi wasn't done yet.

For his new venture,

he wanted to recreate in perfect detail some of the world's finest artworks.

This isn't a caricature of the Renaissance.

These are real paintings. They look good.

You've got Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam and The Last Judgment,

the original of which sits above the altar in the Sistine Chapel.

All in, everything cost me 10 billion lira.

In total, that's around $4 million of borrowed money.

The pressure was on to make the business a success.

In the summer of 2000, the restaurant opened its doors.

It was truly exciting to see this room full of people,

and the tables turning over.

It would have been 2,000 to 3,000 people.

All of this filled me with joy,

you have airplanes attached

to a fake control tower in the middle of nowhere.

It's just wild that this place was so popular.

One reason was that Luigi had a secret weapon

to keep customers coming back for more.

The restaurant became famous for its oval shaped pizzas,

which apparently was the only place in Italy

you could get them at the time.

I won the European Pizza Championship.

My strength was the quality of the pizza dough.

The secret is not to use tap water.

But it's not just about that.

I have personal secrets. I can't say more.

The money was pouring in

and it looked like Luigi's ambitious risk was paying off.

I felt proud and happy.

These are experiences that one needs to have to believe they are possible.

There was a constant stream of people lining up to get a table here,

but it also caught the attention of the wrong kind of people.

After a few months of being open,

local authorities came knocking at the door,

but they didn't come for the pizza.

The government comes after Luigi claiming that he didn't get

any building permits or the correct ones

to build the Michelangelo Da Vinci.

They were angry at me for the planes,

what they called illegal constructions.

They said I had built illegally here.

The government demanded that the restaurant be brought up to code.

But they also demanded that Luigi pay

a massive fine for breaking the rules

which at the time was over half a million dollars.

Luigi was on the verge of bankruptcy

and faced losing his beloved business.

His only option was to fight back.

He spends literally years fighting this,

he goes back and forth with the authorities.

They say he has to bring his buildings up to code.

He says he will.

But there was one thing

that government officials wouldn't budge on,

and that was that he would have to pay the massive fine.

Luigi remained defiant.

But in 2015, the judge ordered him to pay up,

although, by that time,

the Michelangelo Da Vinci restaurant

had already been forced to close for good.

Only I know how much I suffered.

I cried under the planes here on my own.

I cried.

Over the next decade,

Luigi's labor of love became the target of vandals.

Now, local businessman Gianluca Bertin

has big plans to bring it back to life.

I came here for the first time three years ago,

and I fell in love with it.

Right then, I knew I wanted to buy it.

What we're doing now are small adjustments to fix the external part.

It's a very demanding job, but we expect to open in the spring of 2025.