Part 1: The Empire Builders

01/10/23 • 31 min

Meet the Easterdays – ranching royalty rooted in the Columbia Basin in southeast Washington state. But behind the well-known family name hides a dark secret, concealed in spreadsheets and bum invoices, that’s eating away at their vast empire.

Correction, 4:25 p.m., 2/27/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated when the Ice Age megafloods occurred. Most of the Missoula floods happened between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, and some may have occurred as long as a million years ago.

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Support the show: https://kuow.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Introducing Ghost Herd, coming January 10

It started as an American success story. The Easterday family took a couple hundred acres of farmland in Eastern Washington and grew it into a farming and ranching empire worth millions. Then, it all came crashing down.

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Next Episode

Part 2: The Swindle

Cowboy Cody Easterday lies big, creating a “ghost herd” of 265,000 cattle that only exist on paper and bringing in hundreds of millions of investment dollars from companies including a meat-packing giant. It’s fraud on a massive scale. We examine how he carried it out.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.