The Gokhran & The Bulletproof Diamonds

Black Market Bolsheviks and the Tsar's Golden Eggs. The Gokran and the Bulletproof Diamonds. Welcome to Black Market Bolsheviks and the Tsar's Golden Eggs. Every week, we track the missing fortune of a fallen empire, the jewels, the gold, and the masterworks that vanished from the Romanov crown and quietly resurfaced in the hands of Western collectors. This is not a story about kings and queens. It's a story about money, desperation, and the people caught in between. Before we get started, a word from our opening sponsor. This episode is brought to you by AuthorSuite, a full production studio at your fingertips. Get industry-standard evaluations for your scripts and manuscripts. Know if you're ready for submission or the next step. With AuthorSuite, know your worth. Find out more or try a sample evaluation for free at authorsuite.online. That's authorsuite.online. And now, on with the show. What worth is a diamond to a sick and dying man? As much as your weight in gold means little to the executioner's bullet. Picture a windowless room in the heart of Moscow, deep inside a former government ministry building, in the winter of 1920. The air smells of cold stone, gun oil, and the faint mineral scent of old velvet trays. Armed guards stand at every corner, breath visible in the unheated air, rifles slung low against wool overcoats. On long wooden tables, under the weak glow of electric bulbs, sit mountains of imperial wealth. Diamond tiaras stacked like firewood, loose emeralds spilling from cracked leather cases, gold chalices from Orthodox cathedrals, their engravings still catching the light. And scattered among it all, small, impossibly ornate gilded eggs, each one worth more than most Russian villages would see in a generation. Outside that same building, in the streets of Moscow that winter, bread rationing had already tightened to the point that many families were surviving on watery soup and whatever black bread the state could supply. The contrast between what sat inside that vault and what didn't exist on most dinner tables just blocks away wasn't hidden or subtle. It was simply, quietly, never discussed out loud by the people responsible for either one. In March of 1920, while Russian streets outside that building were choked with snow, famine, and civil war, a secret decree was quietly signed, establishing an entity known simply as Gokhran— the State Depository of Valuables. On paper, it was a bureaucratic office assigned to log government assets. In reality, it was a heavily guarded, windowless fortress packed floor to ceiling with thousands of carats of royal diamonds, gold chalices, emerald-encrusted diadems, and 50 small, gilded masterpieces crafted by Peter Carl Fabergé. The Russian Revolution was broke. The newly formed Bolshevik government was surrounded by enemy armies, isolated by Western trade embargoes, and desperate for hard foreign currency, grain, and weapons. To survive, Vladimir Lenin and his inner circle realized they were sitting on the largest private concentration of wealth in human history. But to turn ancient imperial gold into modern foreign rifles, and more urgently, into bread, they needed someone who actually knew what it was worth. According to unverified reports that have circulated for decades but were never confirmed by any surviving Soviet paperwork, officials went to Taganka Prison in Moscow and brought out a man named Agathon Fabergé. We want to be upfront about that detail before we go any further. Agathon Fabergé, the son of the legendary court jeweler, absolutely did work with Soviet authorities to catalog the seized imperial collection after the revolution. That part is well documented. But the specific story of him being dragged out of a prison cell at gunpoint to do it is a dramatic flourish that shows up again and again in popular retellings without a verified primary source behind it. So we're going to tell it to you the way it's usually told and just ask you to hold it a little loosely. Agathon Fabergé was a master gemologist who had spent his entire life designing and pricing treasures for Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. Whether he arrived at that appraiser's table from a prison cell or simply from his own apartment under close Soviet supervision, the choice in front of him was functionally the same either way: cooperate or be treated as an enemy of the state. Agathon took the loop. Sat down at a table surrounded by armed guards and began cataloging what remained of his own family's greatest work, item by item, for a government that saw every diamond on that table as proof of exactly what had gone wrong with Russia. And that's actually worth sitting with for a moment, because it gets to something genuinely strange, and genuinely dark, at the center of this whole story. The Bolsheviks didn't just want this wealth, Publicly, at least, they despised it. Soviet propaganda of the era was explicit about this. The imperial jewels weren't framed as treasure to be admired. They were framed as evidence, physical proof of a monarchy so disconnected from its starving population that it spent decades pouring national wealth into gold eggs and diamond-crusted trinkets while peasants starved in the countryside. In the official telling, the opulence itself was presented as a root cause of Russia's collapse, not just a symptom of it. Which makes what happened next more than a little ironic, and honestly, more than a little grim. The same government publicly denouncing those jewels as a symbol of everything wrong with the old regime was, at that exact same moment, watching its own people starve to death by the millions, and doing far too little, too slowly, to stop it. We need to actually sit inside that timeline for a minute because it's not a footnote. It's the entire moral weight of this story. In the summer of 1921, just months after Gokhran's vaults began filling with Romanov diamonds, catastrophic drought struck the Volga River region. Crops failed across an area home to tens of millions of people. Civil war had already gutted transportation networks, seed stocks, and farm labor. What followed was one of the worst famines in modern European history. Historians estimate that between 1921 and 1922, roughly 5 million people died of starvation and related disease along the Volga and in the Urals. Entire villages emptied out. Reports from the region, some from Western journalists, some from the Soviet Union's own internal records, describe people stripping bark from trees to eat, boiling leather harnesses for broth, and in the most desperate, well-documented cases, resorting to cannibalism to survive the winter. Refugee columns stretched for miles along the roads leading out of the worst-hit provinces. Families walking with nothing, children too weak to cry, heading toward any town rumored to still have grain— most of those rumors false. Local officials in some districts stopped issuing accurate mortality reports entirely, either overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the dead or unwilling to put numbers that damning into writing where Moscow might see them. That is not a detail we're including for shock value. It's in serious academic histories of the period, and it matters here specifically because of what was happening at the exact same time, in the exact same country, under the exact same government. While the Volga starved, Gokhran officials in Moscow were carefully wrapping diamond tiaras in tissue paper for shipment to Amsterdam. While mothers in Samara boiled grass to feed their children, Soviet couriers were boarding trains with false-bottom diplomatic pouches full of unmounted gemstones, headed for exchanges that would convert them into hard currency the state desperately needed— currency that was supposed to buy the very grain those mothers needed. And to be fair to history, some of it did. The Soviet government did use part of the proceeds from these liquidations to purchase foreign grain. American humanitarian relief, organized separately by Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration, eventually fed an estimated 10 million people at the height of the crisis, one of the largest famine relief operations in history up to that point. But the timeline doesn't line up cleanly into a redemption story, and we're not going to pretend it does. Grain shipments were delayed by Civil War chaos, by corrupt regional officials skimming relief supplies for themselves, and by a Soviet bureaucracy that was, by its own internal admission, catastrophically slow to mobilize domestic resources even as it kept shipping diamonds abroad. The American Relief Administration's own field workers, writing home from the Volga region in 1922, described arriving in towns where the local Soviet had already reported zero remaining deaths from starvation, only to find mass graves being dug within sight of the train station. The gap between what Moscow was reporting and what relief workers were actually finding on the ground was, by multiple independent accounts, enormous. Herbert Hoover himself, who ran the relief effort, was hardly a friend to the Bolsheviks. He was a committed anti-communist who nonetheless insisted on feeding millions of people in a country whose government he despised, on the simple principle that starving children don't belong to any political ideology. His organization ultimately operated over 19,000 feeding stations across Soviet Russia, at its peak feeding more people in a single day than most nations' entire populations. And that overlap— an American capitalist organization feeding Russian children, while American capitalist collectors simultaneously bought that same government's stolen jewelry— was not lost on contemporary observers. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran the stories side by side, sometimes on the very same page, Famine relief appeals next to auction house advertisements for Romanov diamonds. There's a phrase that gets used a lot when historians describe how governing elites relate to famine: distance. Not physical distance necessarily, though Moscow is genuinely far from the Volga steppe. Psychological distance. The people making decisions about jewels and foreign currency in a heated government building in Moscow were in every way that matters several steps removed from the people dying in the same country at the same time because of choices being made in rooms like that one. That distance is really what this whole episode is about. Blood may be shed and bread may run out, while somewhere else entirely, champagne still flows. Let's take a quick break, and then let's follow that champagne all the way to New York. Devon Drakes was supposed to be a financial genius, until one harmless laundering scheme spirals into something far bigger. When a fake investment fund accidentally goes public, tens of millions flood in overnight. Now Devin has to make the illusion real or lose everything. His solution starts a white powder empire built on deception and chaos. Black Monday: The White Powder Fund. Every empire starts with a brilliant lie. Thrillers, picture books, podcasts, and small business and side hustle help. Pen of Tales Publications is the place to find your interest. Great reads, storytelling, listening to your next favorite audiobook. And now podcasts too! Find it at penoftales.xyz. That's penoftales.xyz. And now back to the show. To understand where the Gokhran Vault inventory actually came from in the first place, before it was ever available to sell, we have to go back further, to the night of July 17th, 1918, to the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. When the Romanov family was forced down into that cellar by Yurovsky's secret police detachment, The executioners expected the killing to take seconds, but when the firing squad opened fire, something happened that none of them were prepared for. Bullets bounced off the Grand Duchesses. The guards saw sparks ricocheting off the young women's torsos and for a horrifying moment believed they were witnessing something supernatural. What the guards didn't know yet was that in the weeks leading up to their execution, Tsarina Alexandra and her daughters had secretly sewn over 18 pounds of high-grade diamonds, pearls, rubies, and emeralds directly into the lining of their corsets and undergarments. They had turned their inner garments into makeshift armor made of diamonds, not for any mystical reason but as a practical, desperate contingency. If the family was ever exiled or forced to flee, that hidden fortune could fund an escape or simply keep them alive somewhere far from Russia. It's worth imagining for a moment what that actually looked like in practice. 4 young women confined to a few small rooms for months, spending their evenings hunched over needle and thread by lamplight, sewing loose stones one at a time into the seams of their own underclothes, working in near silence so the guards posted outside their door wouldn't hear the specific telltale rhythm of what they were doing. It was slow, painstaking, and it had to be done in complete secrecy, inside a house where every movement was already being watched. Once the guards realized what was actually stopping the bullets, they used bayonets to tear open the bloodstained corsets, gathering handfuls of loose, high-grade diamonds off the dirt floor by lantern light, according to surviving accounts from members of the execution squad themselves. Some of those same accounts describe the guards, moments earlier terrified they'd witnessed something supernatural, quickly shifting into something closer to a scramble, several of them reportedly pocketing loose stones for themselves before the scene was even fully secured. The very first instance of a pattern that would repeat itself, in various forms, throughout this entire story. Those corset diamonds were washed, packed into wooden trunks and shipped under armed guard to Moscow. They became the founding inventory of Gokhran, the literal seed money for a bankrupt revolutionary government, quite possibly still stained with the blood of the people who'd sown them in only weeks earlier. But having billions of dollars in stolen royal jewels sitting in a vault in Moscow doesn't actually help a starving government. No legitimate bank in Paris, London, or New York would touch stolen Romanov property openly, not without laundering it first. In 1921, the Western powers imposed a strict blockade on Soviet Russia. Trading in what was openly called bloody Bolshevik gold was effectively illegal under international law and social convention alike. So the Soviet regime built an underground logistics pipeline instead. The first leg ran through Finland and Estonia. Soviet couriers, carrying diplomatic passports that granted them immunity from customs searches, boarded trains out of Petrograd with pouches that were supposed to contain nothing but embassy paperwork. Inside those pouches were unmounted diamonds, gold snuffboxes, and small Fabergé miniatures, pried loose from their original settings specifically so they couldn't be visually matched back to any known imperial piece. Once across the border in Reval, modern-day Tallinn, the jewels reached covert black market brokers who specialized in unsetting large stones. Melting down imperial gold into unmarked bars, and recutting famous gems so their origin couldn't be traced. From Tallinn, the laundered diamonds flowed straight into the diamond exchanges of Amsterdam and Antwerp, converted cleanly into British pounds, French francs, and American dollars, no questions asked by the exchanges that processed them. It's worth pausing on how porous this system actually was, because the corruption wasn't only happening at the border. Internal Soviet audits from the period, the ones that survive, describe persistent theft inside Gokhran itself. Guards, appraisers, and mid-level officials skimming loose stones, substituting paste replicas for genuine gems, and quietly building private fortunes out of a collection that was supposed to belong entirely to a starving state. In other words, the same institution built to convert royal excess into relief for the Russian people became, almost immediately, a site of exactly the kind of private enrichment it claimed to be dismantling. The corruption didn't respect the Revolution's own stated ideals any more than the Romanovs had. One of the more striking documented cases involved a senior Gokran appraiser, found years into the operation to have been quietly substituting high-quality paste replicas for genuine stones in pieces slated for storage rather than immediate sale. Banking on the fact that no one was likely to double-check an item the state had no current plans to sell. He was eventually caught, tried, and executed, one of several such internal purges that swept through the agency staff over the following decade as Soviet authorities grew increasingly paranoid about exactly how much of their own treasury was quietly leaking into private hands. Meanwhile, scattered across Paris, Berlin, and London, Tens of thousands of White Russian émigrés, aristocrats and commoners alike who had fled the revolution and civil war with whatever they could carry, were watching all of this unfold from a distance of their own, a distance made entirely of exile and powerlessness rather than geography or rank. Many of these émigré families had lost relatives in the same purges and firing squads that filled Gokran's vaults in the first place. Now they were reading newspaper advertisements for department store sales of jewelry that had in some literal traceable cases once belonged to their own murdered relatives, jewelry they had no legal standing whatsoever to reclaim, no government willing to advocate for them, and no money to compete with American millionaires for pieces of their own family history. Some organized informal protest committees. A few wrote furious letters to Western newspapers pointing out exactly whose blood had likely paid for the diamonds being modeled by department store staff under electric chandeliers. Almost none of it changed a single sale. The jewels kept moving, the money kept flowing into Soviet coffers, and the people with the most legitimate claim to any of it were left standing entirely outside a transaction happening, quite literally, over their heads. Meanwhile, in London and New York, a very different kind of debate was unfolding— not about theft, but about conscience. As word got out about where these jewels were actually coming from, some Western newspapers and church leaders began publicly asking whether it was morally defensible to buy what they called blood jewels. Treasure extracted from a massacre by a government actively presiding over a famine. The objection never gained much real traction. Auction houses and department stores generally sidestepped the question entirely by simply not advertising provenance too specifically. Treasures of the former Russian Imperial Court sounded distinguished and vaguely tragic. Executed teenagers' smuggled diamonds did not. A little linguistic distance turned out to be just as effective as geographic distance at letting buyers feel comfortable. Let's take a short break, and then let's meet the man who turned this entire underground pipeline into a legitimate, headline-grabbing American business. Have you spent months, maybe years, on your manuscript? But is it ready? AuthorSuite takes the guessing away. Get a fast, industry-standard score and grade and recommendation, plus tips to improve it. Scripts, books, stories— no more $800 analysis, no weeks of waiting, no worries, because AuthorSuite is affordable, fast, and you'll know if it's ready. Try the free demo and see for yourself. Find out more at authorsuite.online. That's authorsuite.online. Critics have called Plight: Amare Dumasuni by Don Swan II relentless and unforgiving. The Soviet Union is collapsing, and the Russian mob moves westward, building an empire of crime and human trafficking. Special Agent Dumisuni is assigned his next case, and what starts as routine becomes a relentless hunt for killers, traffickers, and crime bosses who won't go down without a fight. But can he find the missing before it's too late? From Pen of Tales Publications, available at penoftales.xyz. That's penoftales.xyz. And Amazon. Soon in audiobook. And now back to the show. As word spread through the global art world that the Soviet government was quietly liquidating imperial treasures, Western tycoons and art dealers started flying into Moscow like vultures circling a carcass. Among them was an American businessman named Armand Hammer, a young, ambitious capitalist who managed to secure personal meetings with Vladimir Lenin himself. Hammer's path into Russia was itself born out of the same famine we've been describing. He arrived in 1921, officially, as part of a family medical relief mission— his father had trained as a physician, and the elder Hammer had strong sympathies with early American communist organizing. Armand traveled east ostensibly to help coordinate famine relief and study epidemic typhus conditions firsthand. What he found instead was opportunity. Touring famine-stricken regions gave Hammer a front-row view of just how desperate the Soviet government actually was for hard currency and foreign trade partners. And he pivoted almost immediately from relief work into private enterprise, negotiating one of the very first foreign business concessions granted by the young Soviet state—an asbestos mining operation—within months of his arrival. From there, the relationship deepened quickly. Hammer understood something the Soviets needed badly: that while European governments were hesitant to touch stolen state property, Wealthy American collectors cared far more about prestige and provenance than about the politics behind how a piece had left Russia. Hammer struck a deal with the Kremlin. He would supply grain and industrial machinery to the Soviet Union, and in exchange, the Bolsheviks gave him privileged access to purchase crates of Romanov heirlooms, imperial porcelain, Orthodox gold icons, and Fabergé Easter eggs at wholesale liquidation prices. Hammer shipped these treasures back to the United States and staged sensational public sales inside high-end department stores like Lord& Taylor and Marshall Fields. Newspaper advertisements invited well-dressed shoppers to view genuine Romanov treasures, dukes and diadems, alongside the stores' regular spring fashion lines. The staging was deliberately theatrical. Display cases were dressed with reproduction Romanov portraits and small printed placards describing each piece's supposed royal provenance. Most of it accurate, some of it quietly embellished to heighten the romance. Formally dressed sales staff, sometimes billed in advertisements as former White Russian nobility themselves, walked the floor answering questions about court life at the Winter Palace. American millionaires lined up to buy authenticated Romanov jewels directly off velvet display trays, sipping complimentary champagne poured by department store staff hired specifically for the occasion. The same jewels that, just months earlier, Soviet officials had publicly denounced as symbols of everything the revolution was fighting against, and that in some documented cases had been pulled from the corsets of executed teenagers. Hammer himself would later claim, in interviews and memoirs written decades afterward, that he saw himself as rescuing these treasures, preserving irreplaceable art that would otherwise have been melted down for scrap value by a government that didn't understand what it actually had. It's a version of events that conveniently sidesteps how much personal profit he made along the way, and how little of that profit ever made its way back towards the famine that had first brought him to Russia. There is no clean way to describe that particular juxtaposition, so we're not going to try to soften it. In the same handful of years, in the same global economy, some people were eating tree bark to survive a famine while others were sipping champagne under department store chandeliers. Admiring the exact fortune that famine's own government had extracted from a massacre to keep itself solvent. But Hammer wasn't the only player working that market. A quieter, more institutional syndicate of British and American dealers was already assembling for something far bigger— a public sale that would put the full scale of this liquidation on open, unapologetic display, at a world-famous auction house, with no velvet curtain to hide behind at all. Let's take one more break before we close tonight's file. Discover Playing with Chalk, your next intriguing true crime fiction podcast. It's been 20 years since Detective Lena Hansen's first case, and she never forgot it. It was also her first cold case as well. A new case just went red hot when Detective Hansen walks a crime scene that mimics that first case long ago, and the eerie feeling this has been done before. She's intent on not letting this serial killer get away again, but it starts with a chalk outline and no body. Knowing a body will soon appear if she doesn't find the clues first. Playing with Chalk, your next crime fiction addiction. Available where you listen to your favorite podcasts. Are you an author looking to elevate your manuscripts? AuthorSuite provides end-to-end publishing tools designed specifically for indie writers. From layout design to digital distribution, simplify your path to becoming a published author. Learn more at authorsuite.online. That is authorsuite.online. And now back to the show. Before we get there, it's time for the verdict. Somewhere in tonight's episode, we planted one detail that wasn't quite true. Not a lie big enough to change the story, just small enough to slip past you if you were listening the way most people listen to the news. Early on, we mentioned that Soviet couriers carrying diplomatic pouches out of Petrograd were specifically instructed to pry gemstones loose from their settings so they couldn't be visually matched back to known Imperial pieces. That specific operational detail, the instruction itself, isn't something we can actually source. We invented it to make the smuggling network feel more procedural and deliberate than the historical record actually supports. Before we close the file, quickly, here's why that worked on you. 2 things got that detail past you. First, the illusory truth effect, a real, well-documented finding. A detail said with confidence gets treated as more likely true just for being stated plainly. Whether or not there's any evidence behind it. We didn't argue for it. We just said it matter-of-factly right alongside everything else that really happened. Second, narrative transportation. You were already deep inside a smuggling pipeline— diplomatic pouches, false papers, unmarked border crossings. A small procedural detail about prying stows loose didn't ask you to question anything. It just fit the world you were already picturing. Illusory truth got it in the door. Narrative transportation kept the door open. That's the planting half of this. The harder half is what happens after a correction, and it's called belief perseverance. A belief tends to survive being disproven because by the time the correction arrives, it's often already stitched into a memory, a story you told someone, or a feeling you don't want to have been wrong about. Evidence alone doesn't automatically undo that. So illusory truth and narrative transportation get a false detail in. Belief perseverance is why it doesn't always leave, even when you show someone the door. We're not telling you which of your own beliefs that applies to. That's not the point, and it's not our call. Just notice the shape next time something lands a little too neatly. That's the whole trick, and now you know it. When you follow the money from a basement in Yekaterinburg to a vault in Moscow to a famine-stricken village on the Volga, to a department store display case in Manhattan, a clear, uncomfortable pattern emerges. The destruction of a dynasty became the seed capital for an international black market, run in part by the very people who'd publicly condemned the wealth as a moral crime, while their own people starved in numbers that dwarfed anything the Romanovs themselves were ever accused of causing. Master craftsmen like Agathon Fabergé, whatever the exact circumstances of his cooperation, were made to price their own life's work so it could be smuggled across borders in diplomatic pouches. Western industrialists quietly built personal fortunes on it. And somewhere in between, largely unrecorded and mostly unnamed, millions of people simply starved, several steps removed from every single decision being made about the treasure that was supposed to help them. That's the real inheritance of this story, not a curse on a dynasty. A distance carefully maintained between the rooms where wealth changes hands and the places where its absence is actually felt. It's a distance that, if we're honest, hasn't gone anywhere in the century since. Every major humanitarian crisis since has had its own version of this exact split-screen: desperate need on one side of a border or a headline, quiet, private profit continuing uninterrupted on the other, connected by nothing more than a shared moment in time that almost nobody involved ever has to actually look at directly. And it's worth remembering, before we close the file, that the diamonds themselves never actually saved anyone in this story. 18 pounds of them sewn into 4 young women's corsets didn't stop a single bullet that mattered, it just meant the guards needed bayonets instead. Your exact weight in gold means just as little to an executioner's bullet as it does to the man pulling the trigger. And a few hundred miles away, in a Volga village, what worth is a diamond to a sick and dying man? Boiling bark for his children with a fever he can't shake. A fortune that could have bought grain instead sat untouched in a Moscow vault, and it meant exactly as little to him as it did to the girl the bullet found anyway. The gold was never the thing that was actually going to save anyone. It only ever mattered to the people far enough away from the dying to still be doing the math. One last thread before we close tonight's file. Agathon Fabergé, the man who spent years pricing his own family's confiscated life's work for a government he had every reason to fear, didn't stay in Russia forever. In 1927, 7 years after he first began working for Gokhran in whatever circumstances actually brought him there, Agathon fled across the frozen Gulf of Finland on foot, at night, reportedly carrying almost nothing with him. He resettled in Finland, where he lived out the rest of his life far from the vaults, the appraisal tables, and the government that had once made his continued survival contingent on correctly pricing diamonds that had, in some cases, been sewn into the underclothes of people he may well have known personally. He never became wealthy from any of it. The man who spent years determining the exact monetary value of an empire's entire treasury died, by most accounts, in comparatively modest circumstances, a footnote in his own family story, largely overshadowed by his father's name on every piece he'd once been forced to catalog. It's worth ending on that, honestly, because it cuts against the grain of everything else in this episode. Everyone else in this story—the smugglers, the department store showmen, the corrupt appraisers skimming stones for themselves—found some way to profit from the wreckage of an empire. Agathon Fabergé, arguably closer to that wreckage than almost anyone else alive, simply survived it, and then walked away with nothing but his own name. Next time, on Black Market Bolsheviks and the Tsar's Golden Eggs, we step inside the 1927 Christie's auction in London, where exiled White Russian aristocrats stood outside and watched their own family diadems sold under the hammer. Just a quick note, this podcast was created with AuthorSuite. Script evaluations, text-to-speech conversion, MP3 creation, and much more. AuthorSuite, your full production studio in one place. Find out more at authorsuite.online. That's authorsuite.online. And now back to our show. Until the next Paper Trail, I'm Julian. And I'm Alina. Thank you for listening. A $200 million lingerie empire. A 23-year secret. One press conference that changes everything. Birthday Suit, a narrative dramedy. Because her birthday suit made her famous and lingerie built her empire. The story of Amanda Nightingale, aka Emma Angel's porn past, challenges her CEO future. Binge-ready episodes out now. Birthday Suit, a narrative dramedy. Listen to this and other great audio drama podcasts by Don Swan II, available where you listen to your favorite audio drama podcast experience.