# John D. Rockefeller Sr. The Man Who Bought the Story

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-08-05T04:00:04+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story--73450166
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73450166/dh_rock_final.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story
Duration seconds: 4209

## Resource

In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, and finally closed a manhunt that had run for seven years. The man in the picture had died there two years earlier under the name Doctor William Levingston. He had a wife in Illinois and a wife he had never divorced back in New York, and the son he walked away from was John Davison Rockefeller, the richest man in the world. This is part one of a two-part series, and it covers the father and the son who spent seventy years being his opposite in every visible way and identical to him in the one way that made him rich. We start with Devil Bill, the traveling con man who kept his mistress under his wife's roof, fathered children by both women in the same two years, sold cancer cures for twenty-five dollars a consultation, and was indicted for rape in Cayuga County in 1849 before running ahead of the sheriff. Then we follow his second son from a ten-cent account book called Ledger A to the Cleveland Massacre, where the fear of a secret railroad scheme emptied twenty-two of twenty-six refineries into his hands in six weeks.Along the way there is the drawback, the contract clause that made a competitor pay his own executioner every time he shipped a barrel. There is the war Rockefeller declared on the largest railroad in America and won in nine months. There is the paid informant network inside the freight offices that the Interstate Commerce Commission found still running twenty-eight years after it was exposed. There is the sabotage trial in Buffalo that most accounts get wrong, and I explain exactly how, including the part where Rockefeller stood up in that courtroom and shook his fist at the plaintiff. There are the Merritt b…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/john-d-rockefeller-sr-the-man-who-bought-the-story.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.