Original subtitles

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

If we had benefited from our own resources,

we'd have 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.

A secret facility in Latvia designed with malicious intent.

It's possible that they received images of the Apollo mission

before the American public.

And an Italian wonderland born of one man's vision

that defies logical explanation.

With the planes outside and all of this stuff inside,

it feels like some sort of fever dream.

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 centre holds the key.

Walking in, you find yourself in a big entrance room or lobby.

Intricate mosaics cover the floors,

and ornate plasterwork 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 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 this, 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 one.

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 why this was the place to be.

In the early 20th century,

Pawhuska was one of the wealthiest towns in America.

This was becoming 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 in these streets.

What drew people here

was the discovery of a valuable commodity...

..oil.

It led into the, you know, the free-flowing money,

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'd come and stay.

This is the Duncan Hotel.

It was named after and financed 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 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 agreed 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 2% 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 got somebody that's your guardian, and you're young

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

Bad things are going to happen.

It's believed that these guardians swindled their clients

out of millions.

That money is ours, but it got 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.

Descendants of Wakinyan, a local tribesmen,

attest that his oil wealth was funnelled

by his government-appointed guardian into the hotel,

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 of 1981, a fire broke out.

The inferno sealed the fate of the Duncan Hotel.

In 2011, after a ten 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 focussed on the future.

Bad things happen, yes,

but the better thing to do is to move forward.

TALEE SPEAKS OSAGE

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

And 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 storey buildings.

It's a pretty nondescript structure.

It's very institutional in 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 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.

MAN SPEAKS CAMBODIAN

The search for answers inspired Voeun Vandet

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

The structure that stands here today was originally built in 1962,

it was the Preah Ponhea Yat high school

and the Tuol Sleng primary school,

so these were classrooms.

Yet nationalised 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.

WEAPON FIRE

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.

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 3 to 4 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 had to leave everything behind.

Anyone who was thought to pose a threat to this revolution

was rounded up in these specially designed detention centres.

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.

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.

They would deprive them of sleep, deprive them of food,

beat them with sticks wrapped with barbed wire.

Many of them would just make up information to make the pain stop.

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.

Norng Chan Phal was nine-years-old in December 1978,

when the Khmer Rouge summoned his father to the capital.

On arrival,

Chan Phal's mother was interrogated in front of her children.

The next day, the siblings were moved to a different part of the compound.

At that 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 neighbours,

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 discover this S-21 prison complex,

and it's said that the way they discovered it

is they smelled rotting bodies.

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

They only lived because they hid

when the Khmer troops abandoned the prison.

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.

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 Two,

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.

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.

When I saw first time, I was amazed.

This was one of the top secret places in the Baltic states.

In the city there was living 2,000 people from the Soviet Union.

The motive for its 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 man-made satellite of Sputnik,

which orbited the Earth, sending down a beeping radio signal.

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 ten years after Sputnik,

more than 800 satellites had been launched by both sides.

They've become part of our way of life

and they've 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.

The purpose was to obtain information data

sent by enemy satellites

to NATO observation points in Western Europe or in USA.

The information was going directly to Moscow.

All the equipment here was state-of-the-art for its day.

In Soviet times they use most, most advanced systems they could get.

So this one used for, to turning like this 360 degrees around.

And here you can change elevation movement.

With this one...it's like this for zero degrees to 90 degrees.

They follow to track towards the satellite

and the operator was sitting here,

put degrees elevation and then they intercept the signals.

The Soviets, desperate for any leverage against the West,

operated this site around the clock.

They have the daily schedule

because satellites flying around the Earth all the time.

They follow the one satellite and then changed to another.

And they worked 24 hours per day.

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.

There was four residential buildings

which was given to officers and their families.

There was a medical centre,

barracks for 500 soldiers, kindergarten and school.

There was everything for quite a good life.

Over the next decade,

Moscow's spymasters 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.

ANNOUNCER:Ten, nine, ignition sequence start.

ROCKETS ROAR

And there's this story that they intercepted in 1969,

the signals from USA Apollo mission on the moon.

NEIL ARMSTRONG:One small step for man...

..one giant leap for mankind.

It's possible that they received images of Apollo mission

before the American public.

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's 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.

At Irbene, all the radio operators 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 ten 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 years!"

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.

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 potential American ally.

When the Latvian officials arrived,

they were pretty horrified to discover

that Russian security services were destroying everything they could.

The cables, like this,

this is examples,

there are nails in the cables, and there was a lot of them.

And they are pouring acid inside the generators

and electricity motors.

The Latvian scientists didn't give up.

The former Soviet technology

provided the perfect opportunity for the newly independent nation

to establish its own centre for space study.

It was really a big job.

We put new systems.

Everything was changed.

We use for astrophysics,

uh, radio astronomy and space science.

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 aeroplanes.

It just doesn't make any sense because there's nothing nearby

that should have big aeroplanes 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 one who failed to consider

the consequences of his ambition.

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

Luigi Stecca is the man responsible for this surreal complex.

HE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

The inspiration came to him while working at a nursing home

in the early 1990s.

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 combined the romance of air travel with food and art.

From the very start, it was a huge financial gamble.

The cost alone of buying and transporting the planes

was in the region of £80,000.

Luigi then needed to arrange a police escort

to get them back safely.

But he wasn't done yet.

For his new venture,

Luigi 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 Judgement,

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

In total, that's around £3 million of borrowed money.

The pressure was on to make the business a success.

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

You have aeroplanes 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.

The money was pouring in

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

The rich and famous, politicians, athletes,

they all came to see this restaurant.

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.

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.

Over the next decade,

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

Now, local businessman Gianluca Bertin

has big plans to bring it back to life.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Subtitles by Red Bee Media