647: LaDonna
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
When she was a kid, Laudana Powell would go to Easter parties at her mom's work. It was great because her mom worked at JFK Airport in New York City. Laudana and her brothers and sisters and cousins would gather Easter eggs, out of a parking lot by the tarmac, near what's now the American Airlines terminal. Planes were taking off and landing right overhead, they liked that. A bunch of her family works at JFK. Her mom makes airplane meals, but there's also her uncle, two aunts, three cousins, and her sister. Everybody has a role. They feed the passengers, they deliver their bags, they clean up the planes after them, and when she was 20, Laudana found her role. She'd keep the airport safe. She got a job with TSA. She scanned bags and laptops. She took it seriously. Like, she would picture the pipeline that runs below the airport, carrying millions of gallons of jet fuel, blowing up if there were any kind of bomb. Like, if the bomb goes off in this airport, what happens to everyone here, everyone that I care about, that we don't commit and do our job properly here. It's like, I used to have this terrible dream of a woman walking up to me and, like, pressing, igniting a bomb. Every time I would go to sleep and have this dream all the time. So when I came to work, I was always, like, very adamant on staring at the X-ray machine. After a few years of TSA, she moved to a different job. This went out on the tarmac with private security firm that works at the airport. A firm that eventually became part of Allied Universal, which is a huge company, the largest security firm in North America, with 150,000 employees all across the country. At JFK, Allied guards screened the vehicles and the airplane catering trucks and all the other stuff that's down there on the runway. Ladonna was excited to work for them. She went through training and then was assigned to shadow a more senior guard. My first day in the field was not great. I was put with this guy. He was an older white guy, and he was very nice to me, but very mean to the people we were screening going on to the runway, because a lot of the duty-free trucks come through that load the planes with food for first class, and he was saying the nastiest things to them. Quick warning that we've unbeeped the curse words here in the podcast. If you prefer a beeped version of our show, maybe you're listening with kids, it's at our website. He was saying all types of things. He's like, "Hurry the fuck up. Move the fuck on. Get out of his fucking face." He would try to get free things, so he would, like, threaten them. Like, "Oh, I'm not going to let you through if you don't give me free food," and they would give him water and juices and stuff. So it was like, he was extorting them, basically. Yeah. He kept telling me he was a Russian badass. That's what he kept saying. He's like, "I'm a Russian badass," and he had a baseball cap flip backwards. Like, we're supposed to wear it forward, and he flipped it backwards, and he opened his shirt, and he was like, "I'm a Russian bad boy. You know I'm a badass, right?" And I was like, "I have no idea who you are."
Transcription truncated.