Robert Wagner

It just kind of pointed to the idea that he was involved with people he shouldn't have been involved with, and he was handling money with no oversight, and that it all just seemed really, really dicey to people.

And in the wake of all of these accusations, Mayor Wagner, whose father incidentally had been one of the sponsors of the housing bill that included Title I, did two things.

So first, the mayor started asking questions about Louis I. Pokras, who was involved in the slum clearance project in Harlem as a corporate sponsor.

Like basically his capital investment program was buying in to do the redevelopment so that they could then make money and collect rents.

And then on July 8th, it was reported that Delaware's Republican Senator John J. Williams had asked federal housing officials to ban Pokras from any such projects due to his organized crime connections.

Mayor Wagner at that point had already stated publicly that Pokras would never be permitted to sponsor the redevelopment that he was currently working on or any New York development going forward.

Additionally, the mayor banned the city from working with an architect that Moses really liked to work with.

That was Melvin E. Kessler.

I- we'd never wanna see him out of jail.

I would argue we probably don't even wanna see Robert Wagner out of jail, although Wagner's story is not dissimilar to Jamie Vlassakis' in terms of victimization in childhood.

Um, but he was older when all of this happened, so there's definitely a sense that Vlassakis was a child, was a minor-

Yeah

Bunting almost certainly endured sexual abuse as a child.

It was never formally investigated, but he told people that that was the case, um, and it seems likely that that was the case.

Robert Wagner absolutely was sexually abused as a boy and then abused continually by Barry Lane, who became one of the victims and was also involved in, you know, helping after the fact with one of the murders.

And James Vlassakis endured the most horrific abuse of all, and so he was very susceptible to John Bunting and shared his thoughts of revenge to some extent.

He recruited the rest of the group.

His right-hand man, Robert Wagner, was known as The Muscle; Mark Haydon, who became his cover-up guy; and James Vlassakis.

His mother was dating Bunting, and over time, he was gradually drawn into helping with the murders.

The group's murderous rampage was brought to an end in 1999, and all of the men were given lengthy prison sentences.

But what we know about everybody that he did that to, the people that he manipulated into taking part in murder with him, the people that he manipulated into covering it up, or the people that he preyed on, we know that they were all vulnerable in some way.

They'd either had terrible lives and needed someone, or they had intellectual disabilities, or they had some other form of difficulty that made them easier for him to manipulate and easier for him to prey on.

Let's talk about that more specifically because two of the men he befriended, Mark Haydon and Robert Wagner, he went on to offend with.

Let's start with Wagner.

One of them was indeed Elizabeth Hayden.

From there, the investigation moved quickly, and within weeks police had arrested John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and Elizabeth Hayden's husband, Mark Hayden.

Days later, they arrested 19-year-old James Vlassakis.

Bunting was the leader of the gang.

So this is, it's clearly, you know, unfortunate that Snowtown is how these killings have become known, because that's where the bodies were found, and that's where the last murder took place, but the reality is a lot of this happened in other places well before that.

And the, the epicenter of this really is the northern suburbs of Adelaide, so a suburb called Salisbury North and the surrounding areas, and that's where Bunting came to be.

That's where he came to know Robert Wagner.

That's where he came to know Mark Hayden, and that's where he came to be in a relationship with the mother of James Vlassakis.

Vlassakis later took part in the murders of three other men, including his stepbrother.

Robert Wagner was also involved in the murders, while a fourth man, Mark Haydon, was convicted of helping to dispose of the bodies.

The Snowtown murders made headlines around the world due to their gruesome nature.

The dismembered bodies were found in 44-gallon plastic barrels.

Extraordinary.

The erosion of our Second Amendment right, the right to bear arms, and the deep change in the Democratic Party, the old Democratic Party, the party of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democrat Party of Ed Koch, the Democratic Party of Robert Wagner.

That Democrat Party no longer exists.

I don't believe that a white male or a Catholic can win a statewide Democrat primary.

So John decides to take classes at like a local trade school so he can get into it.

And this ends up like changing his life because this is where he would meet two of his new best friends, Robert Wagner and Mark Hayden.

I should have brought my whiteboard in for this.

Okay, so let's start with Robert Wagner.

So same shit, man, troubled childhood, horrible home life.

He also had learning disabilities and sadly never like learned to read or write.