Adele: The Pop Star Repurposed by the Criminal Underworld

With the release of her smash sophomore album 21, Adele became one of the most beloved pop stars of the 21st century. Her songs were the most played at karaoke bars, weddings, and funerals – not to mention a criminal element in America which sought to use Adele’s newfound fame for their nefarious purposes. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/c83125d2-8508-11ed-bd28-ff0aff7ee233/podcasts/efca2ef8-85f9-11ed-8fe3-bb208936046f/episodes/29bc673e-85fa-11ed-9d9c-cffe44583488/www.disgracelandpod.com. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. disgracelandpod.com/membership Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://mailchi.mp/doubleelvis/disgraceland-email-newsletter Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/disgracelandpod/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@disgracelandpod ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/disgracelandpod (formerly Twitter) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/groups/491024204626127/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠ https://tiktok.com/disgracelandpod See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is exactly right.

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• 1:57Jake Brennan?

  The story about Adele is a story about fear. Fear of performing onstage, fear of losing your voice, fear of dying young like two of your idols. It's also a story about con artists and concealed weapons, about Michael Corleone and Tony Montana and Dog Day Afternoons, and about how the criminal world has repeatedly tried to cash in on the universal appeal of Adele. And this is because Adele makes great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

• 2:36Jake Brennan?

  That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called "The Guns of Tottenham MK1." I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to "Grenade" by Bruno Mars. And why would I play you that specific slice of unrequited love cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on January 24, 2011. And that was the day that Adele released her sophomore album, 21. A record so impactful that it made her a new musical favorite of millions around the world. Not least of all, the felons and con artists who appropriated her fame.

• 3:21Jake Brennan?

  On this episode, felons, con artists, Corleones, dead idols, fear, and Adele. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is DisgraceLand.

• 4:06Jake Brennan?

  Sidney Lumet's classic 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon, opens on a hot summer day in New York City. Construction workers talk shit while the sweat soaks through the backs of their T-shirts. Neighborhood kids splash in a public pool. Fruit vendors, derelicts, and day traders all crowd the sidewalks while stray dogs root through the garbage in the street. But then, a car pulls up against the curb outside the first Brooklyn Savings Bank. And inside the car are three men.

• 4:43Jake Brennan?

  The driver gets out. He paces nervously on the pavement. Nearby, the bank's one security guard takes down the American flag hanging outside the bank's door. It's closing time. The driver doubles back to the car. He leans into the passenger window, speaking to the man sitting there. And the man is Sonny, played by Al Pacino. And though we can't hear what the two are talking about, we can see the very clear emotion which takes over Pacino's eyes: fear.

• 5:17Jake Brennan?

  Pacino's character is dreading what he's about to do. But there's no turning back now. There are things he needs in this life, and he has no other way of getting them, or so he thinks. He's desperate, and he has to move fast before that security guard locks the front door behind him. So he exits the car, along with his accomplice Sal, played by John Cazale. And they walk inside the bank. And Pacino carries a long white box with a bow. And no one knows that inside that box is a rifle. He anxiously looks around. And these employees, these tellers, the security guard, the manager, they're all innocent.

• 6:02Jake Brennan?

  Pacino's character means them no harm. And that's when the fear takes over.

• 6:10Jake Brennan?

  Watching this scene play out on her television in the comfort of her own home, Adele Laurie Blue Atkins, otherwise known simply as Adele, felt her pulse quicken. It didn't matter that she'd seen this film, one of her favorites, more times than she could remember. Her response was always the same. Because Dog Day Afternoon, or Al Pacino's performance in particular, tapped into a universal fear that on some level is always present within all of us, no matter the scenario. It's the most primal of human emotions. In fact, "do not be afraid" is the most common phrase found in the Bible, in one form or another. And though we've been told not to be afraid for centuries, we still are.

• 6:54Jake Brennan?

  You, me, Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and Adele. In 2011, Adele became a once-in-a-generation phenomenon with the release of her sophomore album, 21. It entered the Billboard album chart at number one, where it stayed for 24 weeks, breaking the record set by Prince's Purple Rain some 27 years prior. Now while the album was at number one, three of its singles, "Rolling in the Deep," "Set Fire to the Rain," and "Someone Like You," simultaneously topped the Hot 100. The first time that had happened since the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack way back in 1977.

• 7:35Jake Brennan?

  The album 21 has since become the longest-charting album by any female artist, breaking the record held by Carole King's 1971 album Tapestry. To date, Adele's 21 has shipped 17 million copies, by far the most of any album released this century. And at the time of 21's initial release, you could not escape Adele. Her songs were the most requested songs at karaoke bars. They were the most played at funerals. If you got scared to get onto a plane, one survey showed that Adele's songs were voted the best to calm your nerves. And if you couldn't sleep, another survey showed that those same songs could cure insomnia.

• 8:22Jake Brennan?

  In Leeds, England, a seven-year-old girl miraculously woke from a week-long coma when "Rolling in the Deep" came on the radio. Adele's voice is there in life and in death, deep down in her subconscious, which makes sense because Beyoncé once told her, "When I listen to you, I feel like I'm listening to God." Adele has one hell of a voice, like three dusty Springfields all at once, a voice which Amanda Petrasich, writing in The New Yorker, once called "perfectly imperfect and able to betray its host's frailty and by extension, her humanity."

• 9:03Jake Brennan?

  But Adele's universal appeal is more than the sound of her voice. She is also incredibly relatable, and I'm not just talking about in her songs of heartbreak, defiance, and empowerment. Adele has downright rejected the trappings of celebrity, as she put it in her own words. "I don't want to be some skinny mini with my tits out." And she said this with a speaking voice that is the exact opposite of her perfectly imperfect singing voice. Her thick Cockney accent comically emphasizes some of her favorite words like "fuck" and "cunt," many of which she repeated over and over again in between songs while performing

• 9:42Jake Brennan?

  at Glastonbury, after being sternly warned by festival organizers to not do so. But this is who she is. Adele speaks like a character in a Guy Ritchie film. And Ritchie's characters, like Adele's beloved Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, are singular characters in their own right, and they all share one common bond with the rest of us: fear. 2007, London. Nineteen-year-old Adele clenched her fists into a ball and drew her arm back and clocked her boyfriend in the face with a stiff right hook.

• 10:21Jake Brennan?

  Everyone knocking back pints inside the pub, they were stunned, not least of which was the boyfriend, who was now reeling in pain and confusion. Adele, on the other hand, was not confused, nor was she concerned with keeping up appearances among a room full of buzz twenty-somethings. She was seething over a relationship which had quickly deteriorated into a living hell. She was catching unwanted attention from the pub's bouncers, and now, she was running. Her feet slammed rhythmically on the sidewalk of Tottenham Court Road. She was sure the bouncers were hot on her trail. Any minute they'd catch up to her and hold her till the cops came. She assaulted a man in front of a crowd.

• 11:03Jake Brennan?

  Not that the guy wasn't an asshole and didn't have it coming, because he was, and he did. But there was no reality in which Adele didn't punch him. She'd grown up tough, raised by a single mother, first in Tottenham, a London neighborhood with a high rate of poverty, gang violence, and crime, and then in Brixton, the place the Clash once told you about, that when they kick at your front door, how are you gonna come? Adele was gonna come with a fist to the face, and some weren't so lucky, like Avril Johnson, sister of reggae star Tippa Eri, who was murdered inside her Brixton home in front of her children the same year that Adele and her mother moved to town.

• 11:45Jake Brennan?

  The gangs of Adele's childhood would give her the idea for the song title "Rolling in the Deep." To roll deep, to roll with a crew, with people who have your back in your time of need, was a necessity of London's criminal underworld. Tonight, however, Adele had no crew, just herself, hauling ass down a London street in the dark. And she soon realized that no one was chasing her after all. No bouncers from the pub, no soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. She was the one doing the chasing, although she was chasing nothing, just the ground beneath her feet. The events of that night became the inspiration for "Chasing Pavements",

• 12:27Jake Brennan?

  Adele's second single from her debut album, 19, named for the age she was when she made it.

• 12:35Jake Brennan?

  The song was an unexpected success, leading to numerous Grammy nominations and a performance on Saturday Night Live. Only years earlier, Adele had been a student at London's Brit School, the same performing arts high school attended by one of her many inspirations, Amy Winehouse. From there, it was a blur. Her songs went up on MySpace, multiple record labels emailed, a record deal with XL Records soon followed, and suddenly Adele was doing what she dreamed about doing since she was a kid. But it didn't come easy. From the jump, Adele was afraid. For one, she had terrible stage fright. Projectile vomiting prior to a show was not uncommon.

• 13:18Jake Brennan?

  In Amsterdam, she once tried to escape out of a fire exit just so she could avoid facing the crowd she was to perform in front of. And as she became more famous, however, the fear evolved. In 2011, the year of 21, the year she released what would become the biggest album of the 21st century, she was afraid of something much more profound. She worried that the more famous she got, the more out of touch she would become. And thus, her life experiences would no longer be the life experiences of her audience. She feared she would no longer be relatable. And that wasn't all. Two things happened that year in quick succession.

• 14:03Jake Brennan?

  The first led to the fear that she would never be able to sing again. But the second, that had her fearing for her own life.

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• 15:40Jake Brennan?

  Al Pacino made it look easy. Sitting there in his brown college boy jacket, getting comfortable in the black leather chair, beginning to understand the true nature of his character, Michael Corleone. He wasn't a loudmouth or a hothead like his brother Sonny, played by Jimmy Khan. And he wasn't as transparent as Corleone's family attorney, Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall. But as Khan and Duvall paced the dimly lit room, mahogany tables, hardwood floors, and arguing about what to do with this dirty cop, McCluskey, protector of the narcotics man who had put their pops in the hospital, Pacino was slowly, methodically turning.

• 16:23Jake Brennan?

  He was the dark horse, the silent type, the one you never saw coming. Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, was getting ready to push past his own fears, such as, what would happen to him if he joined the family business? How would it change him? And what would he have to do? And there was only one way to find out, only one way through. Fear was not an option. Fear was the mind killer.

• 16:51Jake Brennan?

  From a couch across the room facing the television set, Adele leaned in. The pivotal scene from one of her favorite films, The Godfather, played out on the screen. Pacino was so good, so tough. He was her guy. And the way he was able to subtly show how his character conquered his fears was truly inspiring. These crime films that Adele loved, the crime films that were universally loved, they served more than one purpose. They were a source of comfort when Adele wanted to curl up and shut out the world and escape into great storytelling. And that's something we can all relate to.

• 17:31Jake Brennan?

  But there was something else as well, these movies, especially when it came to scenes like this. In these films, these performances could give you the strength and the tools to overpower fear before the world with its teeth and its insatiable appetite overpowered you.

• 17:52Jake Brennan?

  July 23rd, 2011. Andrew Morris, Amy Winehouse's bodyguard, checked in on his employer at around 10:00 in the morning. He found her laying on her bed, unconscious, at her home in Camden, North London. She'd been up late the night before, drinking, and it wasn't unusual for Amy to be passed out till midday. So Morris let her sleep it off. Five hours later, however, at 3:00 in the afternoon, he decided to check in on her again. And there she was, still on the bed, still unconscious, still in the same exact position as before. This now struck Morris as odd. He ran to her side. She wasn't breathing.

• 18:36Jake Brennan?

  She had no pulse. Morris picked up the phone and called for an ambulance. Shortly thereafter, Amy Winehouse would be declared dead. She was 27 years old.

• 18:49Jake Brennan?

  It would be months before an official inquest would find that Amy Winehouse died from misadventure caused by high alcohol consumption, but misadventure wasn't the only thing that killed Amy Winehouse. Adele, for one, was well aware of this fact. News of Amy's death hit Adele particularly hard. She was sad, and she was pissed, and she was, as she put it, offended. Amy had gone to the Brits school just like Adele. She was the reason Adele began to play guitar in the first place, the reason why Adele found the courage to write and sing her own songs. And now, ironically, Amy was gone, in the exact same year that Adele was breaking records

• 19:33Jake Brennan?

  and dominating the charts with her album 21. The reason that Adele was offended by Amy's death was because the public had done their part to do her in. Amy's drinking, her drug use, her erratic behavior, it all played out in slow motion in the pages of the press and in posts on social media, like a car wreck that everyone pumped the brakes to watch as they passed by. If the public hadn't been given such intimate, always-on access to every single choice Amy Winehouse made, every mistake, if there wasn't this collective need to watch a celebrity struggle and to comment on it, to share it, to retweet it, well, it begged the question, would Amy still be alive?

• 20:18Jake Brennan?

  It was impossible for Adele not to imagine that she was next, that fame and fame were nothing but a pattern in search of the next tragic figure to fit their mold. Paris. The massive world tour for 21 had just begun when Adele felt something in her throat pop. She ended the show that night more than a little concerned. She'd been singing for nearly a decade, since she was 14 years old, and had never experienced anything like this before. She hopped a plane to London, where the next day, her doctor told her it was acute laryngitis, and she needed rest. Two weeks later, she resumed the tour,

• 21:01Jake Brennan?

  which eventually made its way to the United States. And then it happened again, only this time, it wasn't laryngitis. This time, a blood vessel on her vocal cord burst. She gave it another couple of weeks, and let the hemorrhage heal, and then went back at it. But it kept happening. Her voice, that incredible voice, it kept giving out. The media and the internet took notice and sharpened their knives. She was a smoker, she was a drinker, she was a loud talker and even a loud cackler. We've seen this one before. It's Amy 2.0. Just another wildly talented British singer running her god-given instrument ragged.

• 21:46Jake Brennan?

  Adele wasn't listening to what was being said about her online. Instead, she was listening to the advice of other singers who had gone through similar problems. Veterans like Roger Daltrey, Steven Tyler, and Elton John, even younger singers like John Mayer, all of whom had undergone cutting-edge throat surgery to salvage their voices and keep their jobs. And so, on November 3rd, 2011, coincidentally, the same week that 21 returned to the number-one spot on the Billboard album chart, Adele canceled all performances and went under the knife at Mass General Hospital in Boston. Actually, it was a laser, not a knife, which the world-renowned throat surgeon Steven Zaitel

• 22:29Jake Brennan?

  used to remove a polyp that had been plaguing Adele's vocal cord. And then, for months after, Adele's future was uncertain. For five weeks, she was unable to talk. Five long weeks in which she wondered what her voice would sound like when it returned. What if she would never be able to sing like she used to? What if she couldn't sing at all? But every inkling of self-doubt melted away months later, on February 12, 2012, when Adele made her long-awaited return to performing at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles. Not only did she take home seven awards that night, including Album of the Year, but

• 23:11Jake Brennan?

  she performed "Rolling in the Deep," and she killed it. Her post-surgery voice was not only strong, it had actually gained some upper range. It was like the Adele everyone already knew, only better. But despite her rousing performance and all her trophies, Adele was upstaged that night by tragedy. The prize of fame, which Amy Winehouse had so sorely paid the previous year, was now hanging over the Staples Center like a ghost. The Beverly Hilton Hotel, Suite 434. The portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando hanging on the walls surveyed the room in silence.

• 23:56Jake Brennan?

  Trays of uneaten food, opened bottles of champagne, the remaining contents now warm and flat. In the bathroom, prescription bottles of Xanax and muscle relaxers on the counter. Next to them, a spoon for cocaine. And there, in the bathtub, submerged, under six inches of water, the body of 48-year-old Whitney Houston. Whitney never made it to the Grammys that night. She didn't even make it to the pre-party thrown by her mentor, Arista Records founder Clive Davis, the day before the Grammys. It was on that day that a combination of cocaine, prescription drugs, and heart disease contributed

• 24:40Jake Brennan?

  to Whitney Houston's sudden death. The Grammy Awards became a more solemn affair. The bright victories were tinted with a touch of darkness. And Adele's incredible performance took on greater meaning. Rolling in the deep wasn't just a kiss-off to an ex. It was a kiss-off to the mold. The press, the public. They weren't gonna run her into the ground like they did Whitney or Amy. Soon, Adele would give birth to her son, who she had with her boyfriend at the time, an investment banker turned charity CEO named Simon Konecki. And she had a family to protect. So she shifted into Pacino mode.

• 25:25Jake Brennan?

  Imagine if you will, Adele, sitting in that black leather chair, in that dimly-lit room, with its mahogany tables and hardwood floors. And just like Al Pacino, just like Michael Corleone, Adele pushed through the fear. She locked down her private life. She locked herself in her house so that the paparazzi couldn't reach her. And she became her own unreliable narrator. She did this by feeding little lies to those in her inner circle on purpose. In order to see who was talking to the press. It's a gangster move. And the gangster knows that if she tells one person a lie, and that lie ends up in

• 26:08Jake Brennan?

  the papers, then that gangster knows exactly who betrayed her. And so then Adele would unceremoniously cut them loose from her life. It wasn't easy watching someone you thought you trusted go off behind your back like that. But it made it a lot easier to let them go, knowing that by doing so, you added one more additional layer of protection. More protection than Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston had.

• 26:38Jake Brennan?

  But the more those layers of protection were applied, the harder it was to be in the outside world. The less relatable Adele feared she would become. And that was the fear, that was it. That fear remained after all these years as one of Adele's greatest fears, that she would become unrelatable. The grandiose houses, the multiple awards, the money, the fame. Adele was a long way from the mean streets of Tottenham, and she knew it. The challenge now was to remain relatable with those streets, with any street, anywhere in the world. And after four years of working on new music, after much anticipation from her fans,

• 27:22Jake Brennan?

  after the smashing success of "21", Adele returned at last with a song that was so authentic and so relatable that it was downright criminal.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

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• 28:51Jake Brennan?

  Okay, this next line, it's just begging me to do a cheap Tony Montana from Scarface impersonation, but I'm not gonna do that, okay? Just picture, picture Al Pacino as Tony Montana, and he's sitting there, and he gives you the line, "You wanna fuck with me? Okay, you cockroaches." And I'll picture Tony Montana, high on cocaine, and sweating through his black suit. With trembling hands, he's hastily assembling his grenade launcher inside his office suite. His bugged-out eyes, they're alternating between the weapon's intricate design and a series of closed-circuit television sets.

• 29:33Jake Brennan?

  And they play out a disturbing scene, these TVs. It's armed men, they've invaded Tony's mansion, and they're coming up the blood-red staircase, where they're now waiting on the other side of the door. And that door, that door is the only thing separating Tony Montana between life in here and death out there. And so he says, "You wanna play games? Okay." Tony's now facing the door, in a battle stance, with his knees bent. The fear, it's inverted. He was fear now. Tony Montana, he's holding the grenade launcher in his very capable hands, slung down low,

• 30:18Jake Brennan?

  at hip level, and he's ready to fire off at anyone who dares step inside his private residence. And with a roar, he shouts, you guys know the line, "Say hello to my little friend." Watching this all unfold on the television, Adele let loose a laugh as explosive as one of Tony Montana's grenades as she watched Al Pacino as the Cuban drug lord in Brian De Palma's film Scarface. It was 2015, and Adele was doing what she did every time she was overwhelmed in what she called a tsunami of emotions. She was binging her favorite crime films, something to soothe the anxiety surrounding

• 31:03Jake Brennan?

  the impending release of her third studio album, 25. The process to follow up the smash hit 21 had been a labored one, beset with writer's block and crushing doubts. Though when Adele began to collaborate with producer Greg Kirsten, known at the time for his work with Sia, Kelly Clarkson, and Lily Allen, among others, the creative floodgates opened. Writing the perfect Adele song, however, proved harder than it had been before. The music had to feel as authentic and direct as it had in the past. A full six months passed between when Adele and Kirsten wrote the verses for 25's lead single "Hello," and when they wrote its cathartic chorus.

• 31:47Jake Brennan?

  But their patience paid off, as did the patience of Adele's fans. Because when the song "Hello" was released in October of 2015, the world, starved for new Adele material for years, ate it up. And the single went to number one in 102 countries, setting an iTunes record. Its videos set a record on YouTube as well, where it amassed 50 million views in just 48 hours. Once again, audiences connected with Adele. And audiences could relate to Adele because she was offering a different side of herself, which in turn gave listeners the opportunity to recognize the same different side in themselves.

• 32:31Jake Brennan?

  "Hello" wasn't just another kiss-off to an ex or a rally cry to stay strong in the face of great adversity. It was a ballad about forgiveness and about moving on. It was about closure and about growing up. It was the definition of a universal hit. And it hit everyone, everywhere, all at once.

• 32:55Jake Brennan?

  November 9th, 2015, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 6:40 PM. The police squad car tore down Railroad Street, coming to a dramatic stop outside an apartment complex in the 900 block. Two officers emerged from the car, the pulsing blue lights illuminating their every movement as dust crept in. They led with their service weapons, creeping swiftly with purpose towards the apartment building's front door. Kidnapping in progress, that was the call they'd received from dispatch. Something about someone being dragged against their will inside. The cops did their sweep. The coast was clear. The door was unlocked. And they were inside. There, halfway up the stairs. Two men,

• 33:39Jake Brennan?

  arms twisted and bent like a mall pretzel. And they wrestled, they struggled. And then the cops saw it. The perp was pressing the muzzle of a handgun into the other guy's abdomen. And the cops were yelling now, "Drop it, on your knees! I said on your fucking knees!" The perp froze, dropped the piece. And seconds later, he was in police custody, riding in the back of the squad car on his way to county jail.

• 34:04Jake Brennan?

  Twenty-one-year-old Brian Earl Taylor had multiple felony warrants and was out on parole when he was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment and carrying a concealed weapon. Allegedly, he had been in the process of forcing the other man in the stairwell to take him to his apartment, where he planned to rob him. At the time of the arrest, Adele's "Hello" was the number-one song in the country. It was like air or water, gas station clerks, retail store workers, bank tellers, gym rats, dental hygienists. It didn't matter who you were or what you did, you heard that song, and you heard it often. Even the perps heard it. And we know this because four months later,

• 34:47Jake Brennan?

  at his sentencing in March of 2012, when it came time to plead his case, Brian Earl Taylor didn't just ask for forgiveness for what he'd done, he sang it.

• 35:00Jake Brennan?

  Brian Earl Taylor sang a personalized version of Adele's "Hello" to the judge on the day of his sentencing. And I gotta think that the thought process here was that he, the criminal, was hoping to find some common ground with the judge, with the law, and that common ground being Adele. The common ground of the biggest song in the world, the common ground of Adele's universal relatability. Relatable or not, Adele couldn't help with Brian Earl Taylor's plight that day. He was sentenced to up to 17 years in prison. It was then that Brian was driven to change. He worked in the prison system's palliative care program, helping other inmates who were sick or dying.

• 35:42Jake Brennan?

  He taught himself piano on the prison's keyboard and began to write his own songs. And in the fall of 2019, after serving a little over seven years of his sentence, Brian Earl Taylor was released on parole. It was only then that he revealed to the press when he had heard "Hello" for the first time, and what inspired him to sing it to the judge. He was locked up, awaiting trial, sent to solitary after getting into it with another inmate. That's when he heard Adele's voice. He was alone and afraid when "Hello" wafted in from somewhere. And it was then that something clicked for Brian Earl Taylor. He could feel the fear that had driven his young criminal life start to fade away,

• 36:27Jake Brennan?

  and in its place, something else was taking root. Call it hope, call it wisdom, call it clarity, whatever it was, Adele could relate.

• 37:09Jake Brennan?

  Justin Jackson walked out of prison and into the warm Florida sunshine.

• 37:15Jake Brennan?

  After two long years, he was a free man. But was he a changed man? And did he regret the things he'd done? When it came to regret, there was the whole getting caught of it all, and you always regretted that because it was so ballsy what he'd done, and he'd almost pulled it off. Pretending to be a member of Madonna's entourage, sweet-talking a boutique in New York to lend him $2.4 million in jewelry for a photo shoot. Air quotes around lend and photo shoot. There was no photo shoot, and there was no lending, and there was no Madonna, not really. There was just Justin Jackson and over $2 million worth of Swiss luxury jewelry weighing heavy in his thieving hands.

• 38:00Jake Brennan?

  And the Florida pawn shop may have paid pennies on the dollar for this stuff, but when you're talking millions of dollars, that's a lot of fucking pennies. So that question again: Was he a changed man? Nah. He was merely a man with a strengthened resolve and the desire to get it right the next time. But a fresh scam needed a fresh celebrity and a fresh mark. This time, the mark wouldn't be high-end jewelry, it would be high-end sneakers. Sneakers with serious resale value. The sneakers of NBA players. And the celebrity through which he could work this scam had to be god-tier. Someone who commanded respect and awe from just about anyone. In 2017,

• 38:45Jake Brennan?

  as Justin Jackson put his new scam in place, that celebrity was Adele.

• 38:51Jake Brennan?

  Justin Jackson created an email address that appeared to belong to Adele's manager, Jonathan Dickens. He then began to email the representatives of NBA players, offering tickets to Adele's concerts in exchange for their sneakers, which he said would be donated to a charity auction. Of course, just like there had been no Madonna and no photo shoot, there was no Adele and there was no charity auction and there were no concert tickets. But not everyone that Justin Jackson contacted could easily sniff that out. Paul George, Victor Oladipo, and Richard Hamilton were among the pro-ball players who actually sent their sneakers as requested. This mild success made Jackson greedy. He wanted to attend the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival in Miami, where Kendrick Lamar was

• 39:35Jake Brennan?

  headlining, but he didn't want to pay for it. And why should he, when he could pretend to be Adele's manager and get tickets for free? When festival organizers received a suspicious email from someone claiming to be Adele's manager, the red flags immediately went up. They contacted Miami-Dade PD, who in turn contacted the fake Jonathan Dickens, Justin Jackson, posing as the festival's production manager. A meetup was set in downtown Miami. And in May of 2017, days before the Rolling Loud festival, Justin Jackson and his wife, Angel Lee, rolled into Bayfront Park thinking they were really pulling it off, only to be immediately arrested and charged with over a dozen felonies, including grand theft,

• 40:20Jake Brennan?

  identity theft, and organizing a scheme to defraud.

• 40:27Jake Brennan?

  Adele's songs are one-of-a-kind currency. Her identity is another kind, and her manager's identity is yet another. My point is, even those in Adele's orbit have value on the black market. And Justin Jackson's brazen but ultimately dumb crime was the criminal world's proof of and cosine on Adele's cultural value.

• 40:50Jake Brennan?

  Once "Hello" hit, Adele was no longer relatable. She was exploitable. Thus, the counterfeit Adele was born. But scammers, moles in her inner circle, or felons who sang her songs in court, none of these had anything to do with her divorce from Simon Konecki. The two had married shortly after the birth of their son. But the end of that marriage came just a year or so later. There was nothing as dramatic as an Adele lyric that had led them to this point. It was simply the organic path that their union had taken. They would remain close friends and continue to co-parent their son. And of course, Adele wanted to keep the whole thing on the down-low like she always did.

• 41:31Jake Brennan?

  And the paparazzi had come to understand that, like her beloved Michael Corleone, Adele controlled what the world saw of her. No one had even seen a picture of her wedding. And when photos of her son were taken in secret and then sold, she sued and won five figures in damages. It's like Tony Montana said, "You wanna fuck with me? Okay, you cockroaches." But there was no keeping the divorce a secret. On Good Friday, 2019, news of Adele's divorce got out. It was all over the internet. Memed on social media, everywhere you turned, Adele's personal life was suddenly under a microscope. The fear was creeping back in.

• 42:13Jake Brennan?

  Fear that the public would do her dirty like they did Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston. Fear that her life would begin to spin out of control from this point forward. Fear of all the moments she'd have alone, missing those can't-miss milestones now that her son was splitting time between her and Simon. So she did what she always did when fear reared its ugly head. She crawled into her bed and turned on the television. The screen flickered to life. The Sopranos was halfway through an old episode, Season 2. Tony and the boys in the back room at the bar da bing, shooting Dirty Pool. And there's Big Pussy, already a snitch for the feds, but no one can prove it just yet.

• 42:57Jake Brennan?

  Fewer still want to believe it. "Hey, Sil," Pussy says to Silvio Dante, played with gusto and grease by little Steven Van Zandt. "I've been gone a long time. Let me hear it." Sill's mouth contorts like it's preparing to crush gravel. His head bobs slightly. He gestures sharply with his hand and he does his best Pacino. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Two years later, in 2021, Adele was pulled back in, back into the spotlight, back onto the charts, back to her original fear of performing onstage in order to promote her

• 43:42Jake Brennan?

  fourth album, 30. These are fears that will never go away. You can't outrun them. You can't kill them. But Adele turned them into songs everyone else could relate to and in turn helped her survive a tabloid fate of disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is DisgraceLand.

• 44:20Jake Brennan?

  All right, everybody. Thanks for checking out this episode on Adele. Listen, Adele's sophomore album, 21, it sold something like 17 million copies. 17 million, meaning that, I don't know, everybody's got a copy of this album, but I don't. And curious, which blockbuster albums that are beloved by millions of people that sold, you know, tons of records, do you not own? That this might not do anything for you. "Nirvana's Nevermind," "Happy Road" by The Beatles, albums I love, by the way. Let me know, 617-906-6638. Voicemail and text. Hit me up at DisgraceLandPod on the socials. Make sure you get automatic downloads turned on on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode of DisgraceLand.

• 45:04Jake Brennan?

  Here comes some credits. Disgrace Land was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network, and iHeart Podcasts. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgrace Land All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com/membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgrace Land ad-free. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @disgracelandpod and on YouTube at youtube.com/atdisgracelandpod. Rockerola.

• 45:51Speaker 07

  He's a bad, bad man.

• 45:55Jake Brennan?

  Hey guys, time to dust off your detective skills while unwinding in the Caribbean on Virgin Voyages' second true crime voyage. It's back by popular demand. This five-night, adults-only escape set sail March 20th, 2027, to Grand Turk in the Beach Club at Bimini. The difference between this year and last will be that I will be on the cruise this year, along with Zeph, and he and I will be taping a live version of Disgrace Land, along with podcast hosts from Exactly Right's Buried Bones, Podcast of the Year Award winners, Wisecrack, and other fan favorites. Get on this cruise with us, guys, and enjoy live podcast recordings, behind-the-scenes storytelling, exclusive meet-and-greets, and immersive

• 46:37Jake Brennan?

  true crime programming throughout this one-of-a-kind voyage. Head over to www.virginvoyages.com/truecrime to secure your spot.

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• 47:16Speaker 03

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed ZOLAR, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  ZOLAR 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking ZOLAR, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to ZOLAR. ZOLAR may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. ZOLAR should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. ZOLAR is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about ZOLAR. This is an advertisement for ZOLAR

• 48:13Speaker 02

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.