Simon Mann orchestrates the "dumbest coup" in history, recruiting black soldiers for Equatorial Guinea's oil fields while promising white investors tenfold returns via the fraudulent Bight of Benin Company. Despite Mann's drunken incompetence and leaked texts alerting authorities, the plot nearly succeeded until South African intelligence tipped off dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The resulting collapse exposed a brutal disparity: white conspirators faced light sentences while black mercenaries endured torture and ruin, revealing how neo-colonial greed prioritizes profit over human life even when plans fail spectacularly. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Dictators of Equatorial Guinea00:05:35
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
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It's the part of the second two.
No, that's not how we should introduce a podcast.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
This is a podcast about terrible people, and this is part two of our series on the Wanga coup, which started out as an episode about a coup, but the first part was really just a more general description about the history of coups in Africa as both a literary tradition and as a real attempted thing, ending with the terrible story of the dictators of Equatorial Guinea.
My guest on part two, as with part one, is Bridget Todd.
Hey, Do you?
I get the fake air horns.
I love it.
They're so excited to be here.
Yeah, sadly, there's a national air horn shortage, so we're out of the real ones.
But when those come back in stock, I will force our editor to put them back in.
Please do.
I will only go on podcasts where I am introduced with an air horn.
So please, please do.
Yeah, I think it should be illegal to introduce people any other way, to be honest.
Like, can you imagine if that's how like first dates always went?
And just like anytime you're out at the bar, you're just randomly hearing like, because like two people are meeting on Tinder or something.
I love it.
My people are Caribbean, so we love a good air horn.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you do.
I would like some sort of sound effect to let me know if it's like a cute meet or if it's like this guy is or this person is horrifying.
Like, I would like to know that.
I would like some sort of sound effect to happen.
What would be your horrifying sound effect for a date?
What's the theme song of Hannity?
I'm Sean Hannity.
I eat manatees.
I think that's it.
I'm pretty sure that's basically it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That works.
So, Bridget, you are the host of a new podcast launching next month called There Are No Women on the Internet, right?
That's true.
That's mostly true.
It launches on July 7th, and it's called There Are No Girls on the Internet, but you got the broad stroke.
Oh, wait.
June is after.
Okay.
Yep.
Sorry.
Well, I got the broad strokes.
And speaking of broad strokes, let's get the broad strokes of this coup right.
Yeah, I'm a master of transition.
That was very nice.
Thank you.
So, yeah, we ended our episode talking about the dictators of Equatorial Guinea and this attempted coup that didn't turn into a coup, but did turn into a successful book, which is...
I don't even know what level of privilege that is, where you like attempt to overthrow a sovereign nation in order to make a profit and fail, but still get rich off of the book.
Like, that's, that's, like, I feel like there's another level of white privilege that's like, yeah, I don't even know how to describe that.
That's like platinum white privilege.
You only get that if, like, yeah, like, yeah, that is some, like, ultra uncut, pure white privilege.
Yeah, that's the kind of white privilege you need the Costco card to take advantage of, right?
Life at Eton and White Privilege00:04:12
Like, you got to, like, pay an extra $65.
There's a yearly subscription that you have to pay into for that.
So, yeah.
So, yes.
And now we're going to start.
So, so, we're going to go back in time again.
And now that we've explained all of these coups and mercenaries and the situation in Equatorial Guinea, we're going to go back in time to talk about another mercenary before we get back to Equatorial Guinea.
And this mercenary's name is Simon Francis Mann.
Now, Simon was born on June 26th, 1952.
His family were British as all hell.
I think they're Irish British.
So, like, British people who became part, or Irish people who like did well enough to become part of the British aristocracy and got to be a lot less Irish as a result of things.
Anyway, I don't really know.
The man family wealth came from brewing, and right around the same time Simon was born, his family sold their family business to a big company in return for a pile of cash and a seat on the board.
This meant that Simon grew up very comfortable, but it also meant that he would need to find a new career for himself when he grew up.
Taking over the family business would not be an option.
In the grand tradition of all fancy English people, his parents sent him the fuck away to spend his childhood at Eaton, which is frequently referred to as the nursery of England's gentlemen.
Eaton is probably the most prestigious high school on the planet.
Boris Johnson went there, as did David Cameron, Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and in general, about 30% of all of the famous British men who have ever lived.
Like, Eaton's where you go if you're a fancy British boy.
This is like some like very fancy British white guy shit, I feel.
Yeah, yes.
This is like, this is, this is the peak of fancy British white guy shit.
Like, it does, it doesn't get, I would say the whitest thing it is possible to be is a British person who went to Eton.
Like, that's, that's, like, like, top tier of white dude.
Like, very few of us are that white.
Now, Eaton currently costs $52,000 a year in tuition, and the cost was broadly similar when Simon went there.
Only students from age 13 to 18 are accepted, and the application process starts at age 10.
Eaton students each get their own separate room.
The 1,300 students are split up into 50-person houses where these boys are watched over by a full-time staff, supervised by what a Business Insider article I found calls a hired dame.
Hired dames.
Yeah, imagine having that on your resume.
Yeah, I was a hired dame for about four years in the 1990s.
Yeah, and they also couldn't, they couldn't just call it like an RA, like something that you're like familiar with.
It has to be a hired dame.
Poor people have RAs, Bridget.
Rich people have hired dames.
And I do think like your RA's job is just to make sure nobody burns the building down, really.
Like a hired dame, they're doing a lot more.
So like she's managing this whole staff of people who like adults.
So all these kids, when they're 13 to 18, are living alone in little apartments and having an entire staff of adults clean for them, clean their clothing, like launder their clothing, cook food for them, and like this woman whose job it is to manage all of the people who manages their lives.
Like it's this...
Kind of imagine what that does for you as a little kid growing up.
Like it's...
Yeah, I feel like it would really fuck me up to have an adult woman doing all this shit for me and I'm a little kid.
I feel like there's no way I can come out of that being well adjusted.
Yeah, I think that's probably the case with Etonians as they're known.
So after Rich Boy High School, Mann joined the military and went into officer training at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
In addition to being brewers, the men and his family had a long history of military service.
Simon graduated and followed in his father's footsteps by accepting a commission in the Royal Scots Guards.
He was good at soldiering, and after a few years, he applied to join the Special Air Service, Britain's equivalent to the Navy SEALs.
Mercenaries in Angola00:15:32
He eventually became a troop commander in the SAS and specialized in counterterrorism and intelligence gathering.
Both of those specialties will become powerfully ironic as we go along.
But for now, Simon did his three-year rotation and then returned to the regular army, where he was stationed in Northern Ireland.
He bounced around Cold War-era Europe and Central America until the early 1980s, when he grew bored of army life and retired.
Mann immediately moved to the private military sector, joining a company run by SAS founder David Sterling, who was pretty close to just being a straight-up fascist.
And in general, Mann's friends during this period were members of like a trend in British conservatism that started in the early 1970s, when the Labor Party won control of the government and right-wingers began ranting about communist infiltration.
In the early 70s, Sterling, his boss, had solicited volunteers to join what he called a strike-breaking army to destroy the unions in Britain violently.
This put him ideologically right in line with Margaret Thatcher's political mentor, Aerie Neve, who urged a right-wing coup against the Labor government.
Oddly enough, this also put Sterling and his fellows right in line with David Bowie, who openly supported an extreme right-wing government and stated in the early 70s that Britain needed a dictator.
Yeah.
Wait.
But you didn't know that about David Bowie, did you?
Wait.
We're back up.
Back up.
Yeah.
When, like, in the 70s, when unions got super powerful in England and the Labor government started winning a bunch, David Bowie wanted an extreme right-wing government in a coup and a dictator.
You know, this is like when you're presented with, like, when, you know, the idea of like problematic faves?
When you're presented with some unfavorable information about somebody that you love and you're like, I pretend I do not see it.
I feel like that's like, I'm like, blank.
Oh, shit.
Sophie with your Lakers jersey.
Of course.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, as much as we may try to be pure, we all have someone like that.
I love Bill Shatner, and he's objectively a monster.
Yeah.
So, the talk of coups on the British right wing mostly died down in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister.
But Simon Mann's social circle in the early 80s was made up almost exclusively of folks who were unabashed supporters of violently suppressing the left.
He worked with David Sterling's company as a renta mercenary and hobnobbed with high society.
But a desk job didn't suit Mann, and he was already getting restless by the time his boss got in trouble for misusing funds donated to a charitable foundation.
Lucky for him, by this point Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the British military was suddenly involved in something interesting again.
Mann re-enlisted and joined British Army staff in Saudi Arabia.
The war didn't last long, and in its wake, Simon Mann was left more bored and restless than ever.
He got involved with an oil firm that was investing in the newly emerged oil industry in Angola.
And, as luck would have it, just as Mann started sniffing around Angola in 1992, the nation found itself in the midst of a civil war.
Now, Angola's second largest political party, UNITA, had started out as a left-wing organization supported by the People's Republic of China.
But during the 1980s, UNITA had pivoted to the hard right under the command of Jonas Savimbi.
Thanks to our old buddy Paul Manafort, it received piles and piles of money and guns from the Reagan administration during this period.
In 1992, UNITA troops overran several oil pump thingabajigs near a town called Soyo.
The Angolan army failed to retake the oil field.
Now, this was a threat to Mann's investments in the area, but more than that, it was an opportunity.
He and his business partner, an entrepreneur named Tony Buckingham, approached the government of Angola and said, Hey, we're pretty sure we could put together a mercenary army to take care of this rebel problem for you.
And Angola said yes.
It really is that easy, or at least it was in the early 90s to get your own army.
Yeah, that's cool.
Totally cool.
Like, wouldn't it be cool if you could just, like, amass your own army with that amount of ease?
What could that come about?
Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do with this whole FDA thing, but it's harder than I thought to amass your own army, to be honest.
Frustrating.
What would your army be called?
I don't know.
I think, I don't know.
Hmm.
Maybe you're right.
Maybe that's why I haven't gotten an army yet, is that I haven't figured out the branding for it.
Yeah, that's a shame.
I'll have to think about that, Bridget.
So the whole, the whole...
Yeah.
So Simon Mann and his partner Buckingham got to follow in the grand tradition established by Bob Dennard and Mike Horry.
Only unlike those men, they were helping to keep a ruler in power and actually fighting against far-right militants.
So you might call this a promising start, or at least as promising a start as any mercenary outfit can have, you know, broadly.
It doesn't end well, though.
As Adam Roberts notes, quote, Mann, however, was a little different.
He was as likely to wear a crumpled business suit as rimless spectacles, and rimless spectacles as camouflage or chest webbing.
He was an early example of a new sort of mercenary, the type familiar with company law, bank transfers, and investor agreements as with the workings of a Browning pistol.
In other words, Simon Mann was probably the first example of a modern mercenary leader, the prototype for men like Eric Prince.
So before him, mercenaries are like these really hard-bitten people, like guys who go to war in their youth and never escape it.
And like, you know, like Bob Dennard and Mike Horry, like those dudes saw heavy, heavy combat, and it just like it, they were just fucked up in a way that this was all they could do.
And all of their men were kind of the same way.
Simon Mann is someone who is perfectly capable of succeeding in the non-shooting people world and in fact has been very successful in that.
But he likes the excitement of war.
So he's like, he gets involved in this mercenary company as a business.
And he's really the first example of that.
He's the Eric Prince type, right?
Where he's a good, he's good at running a corporation, and he also just thinks it's cool to have an army.
And that's kind of the sort of dude that Mann is.
And he blazes a trail.
Yeah, I feel like that's really a dangerous recipe.
The kind of dude who thinks it's just cool to have an army.
Yeah, yeah, because he's going to use it.
You know, there's something to be said.
Like, Mike Hoare, as we talked about, was a monster.
Like, killed a ton of people.
Super racist.
But at least he got shot at a lot.
Like, he and his men, like, he didn't, he wasn't just like sitting in a boardroom while people committed murder on his behalf.
Like, he was out there.
And I guess that's something.
Simon Mann is going to be the sits in a boardroom while people get shot kind of leader.
Yeah.
So yeah, he was not really an adrenaline junkie in the traditional way.
Like he wasn't addicted to like running into combat and getting shot at directly.
He was happy staying behind the lines and basically playing, like you get the feeling that running a mercenary army for Simon Mann is like what a lot of people get out of playing real-time strategy video games.
Like that's kind of what he likes about it is it's like the stakes and stuff.
So yeah, he hires a bunch of South African and British mercenaries to fill out his army.
These are white and mostly black men who'd worked in counter-terrorism, which counter-terrorism within the South African context in this period meant that they had been supporting the apartheid government of South Africa and fighting against like Nelson Mandela and his crew.
So for the sake of having a corporate structure and all the legal permits necessary to buy guns and stuff, Mann somehow wound up in control of a private security firm called Executive Outcomes.
We'll talk about them a little bit later.
The bulk of his soldiers were veterans of the 32 Battalion, which is a veteran South African unit who'd fought in Angola before.
And they'd been fighting on the same side as Jonas Savimbi then because the apartheid government backed this far-right militia.
But since the apartheid government had fallen, you know, they just wound up on the other side fighting against these guys that they'd fought alongside before, which actually works out great because they know all their tricks.
32 Battalion had a reputation for toughness and for viciousness.
Their nickname was the Terrible Ones.
And in February of 1993, they got a chance to prove they deserve the name.
Mann's little army launched an assault to retake the oil fields of Soyuz, supported by the Angolan Air Force and Army.
The core of their force was just 25 men, but these were hardened veterans and they had the assault skills necessary to act as the tip of the spear for the undisciplined and largely amateur Angolan army.
The UNITA rebels were forced to retreat and the Angolan army established a beachhead on the Soyu oil field.
The success at Soyu earned Executive Outcomes a reputation for ferocity and competence.
The Angolan government offered Mann an $80 million contract if his firm would help them continue the war against UNITA and train the regular Angolan army.
More battles followed and Executive Outcomes expanded into a much larger force, eventually reaching more than 1,000 regular employees.
Angola even let Mann help run their air force.
In 1994, they carried out what Mann claimed was the largest combined arms attack in Africa since World War II, forcing UNITA out of the Soyu oil fields entirely.
So it seems like it's working out so far.
And the mid-90s were, in general, probably a pretty happy time for Simon Mann.
He expanded his little army into a medium-sized army, complete with planes and helicopters.
From 1993 to 1996, they fought numerous battles in Angola and other African countries.
21 Executive Outcomes men were killed in various clashes, but they racked up a much higher death toll among the rebels they fought.
UNITA was largely funded by diamond mines, and Mann's contract specified that he got a cut of any diamond mine freed by his men.
So, this is really interesting because it leads to they don't just get like a percentage of the profits.
Executive Outcomes is part of a web of companies, and it's almost impossible.
I don't think anyone has ever really done a good job of unraveling all of them.
But Simon Mann and his business partners create like multiple different companies, including a mining company that they have actually like they get a contract to run these diamond mines that they liberate with their soldiers.
And then the mining company that Simon Mann owns starts mining the diamonds, so they get money from the diamond mining.
He creates a subsidiary called Branch Energy, which does a lot of the oil extractions.
And this is where things start to get really fucking complicated.
And in fact, things have been complicated from the beginning because at this point in Africa, all of these different fucking mercenary companies and mining companies are all like it's.
It's.
It's shady fucking corporate shit, like where you you'll have like 20 different companies that are all really the same company, run by the same three or four guys, but they're different companies on paper.
Um, so like, Executive Outcomes had started as a front company for a South African war criminal so that he could evade international arms embargoes, and I don't really know how Man wound up running it.
But like Man wound up basically using this as like the face for his company, even though, like the real company actually doing most of the fighting for Executive Outcomes was another company man had founded called Sandline.
Like it's all fucking stupidly complicated.
Um, and to make matters even more complicated, a bunch of other shady companies that we all know and love were involved too.
For so, for example, that big first deal that Executive Outcomes brokered with Angola to have their their, their fucking mercenary army liberate those diamond mines, it was brokered by DE Beers.
So like that, I know that.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, we all know DE Beers.
Yeah, this is like tail is old as time when it comes to fucking like rich ass companies, like shell companies you know, it's like this is tale's oldest time like companies where it's all like oh, these different companies with like crazy names and it's all one company, but they're actually like five companies.
All you need to know is that like, somebody is getting fucking paid and shady shit is happening right yeah, all you really need to know about this in particular is that, like Simon Mann and a handful of his friends at the top, who are all white dudes, are getting paid millions of dollars and all of the fighting and dying is being done by mercenaries, 60 or 70 percent of whom are black guys.
Um, and they're not getting paid so much.
Like it's good money for them, but it ain't Simon Man money um, because the real money is in the diamonds and the oil.
Um, the mercenaries are just a way to get at the diamonds and the oil.
Um yeah, and you'll hear a lot of like libertarian types talk about how good a job executive outcomes did here um, and they did a great job at fighting you, but they didn't really care about stabilizing Angola.
They cared about stabilizing the mines and oil fields of Angola and the roads that led those to distribution centers, which is why they didn't actually achieve any long-term security for the region.
Um so yeah, by 1995, Executive Outcomes was effectively a giant web of companies, all more or less run by Simon Mann and his buddy Buckingham, with interests in mining, oil security, air transport, and everything imaginable.
In 1995, the government of Sierra Leone went to Executive Outcomes, begging for their help in suppressing a brutal insurgent group called the RUF.
Now, the RUF had been formed by a disaffected army corporal, and they'd basically gone from fringe political armed group to violent psychopaths.
Their trademark tactic was severing the arms of their victims.
Depending on how pissed they were, RUF men would either give short sleeves, where they amputated just the hand, or long sleeves, where they took the whole arm.
So, yeah, these guys are bad, and they're kicking the shit out of the government of Sierra Leone.
And a big part of why is that they're receiving money and arms from Liberian President Charles Taylor.
And so, in short order, Sierra Leone is near collapse.
And Executive Outcomes gets hired.
They come in and they effectively change that.
They push the rebels back and focus heavily on retaking diamond mines the RUF had occupied.
This was a decent tactic, but it was also very profitable.
The Sierra Leonees government had awarded a lucrative diamond mining contract to Branch Energy, a subsidiary of Executive Outcomes.
And Executive Outcomes' war against the RUF went well enough that in 97, Sierra Leone was able to hold elections.
Now, the story that comes next is really complicated.
The site you usually hear is like, again, kind of the libertarian mercenaries are good story, which is that like Executive Outcomes comes in, they stabilize Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leone has their first independent elections that are like decent.
And then the IMF and the UN pressure the new president to sign a peace deal with the RUF that includes them forcing out executive outcomes.
And as soon as that happens, the RUF goes on the offensive again and the co-country is drawn into war.
And if, you know, these mercenaries had been allowed to keep doing their job, Sierra Leone would have stayed peaceful.
And it's the fault of the UN and the IMF.
There's certainly blame for the UN and the IMF in here, but also documents that have been released more recently show that the president of the United States actually pressured, or sorry, that the president of Sierra Leone went to the United States and was like, I want to kick these mercenaries out because I don't think they're good for the country.
Will you demand that I kick them out so that I have an excuse to say that I've like that like the international community is forcing me to force these guys out?
The Complicated Truth About Sierra Leone00:03:13
It's actually much more complicated than people who just want to make this into a pro-mercenary story want to see.
Yeah, it's fucking, it's a whole mess.
This whole story is a mess.
And if it is true that like mercenaries were good and if they'd been allowed to do their thing, Sierra Leone would have stayed in peace, then Sierra Leone probably wouldn't have had a civil war that lasted for years because mercenaries continued to be a part of the fighting in Sierra Leone for the entirety of the 90s and into the early 2000s.
And in fact, the government of Sierra Leone, after kicking Executive Outcomes out, hired Sandline International, which was a subsidiary of Executive Outcomes, to back the Nigerian army and its peacekeeping there.
And things were still bloody for years.
So it's just like a big fucking stupid mess.
But the point of the matter is that mercenaries were good at capturing mines and fighting rebels.
They were not good at actually developing a stable society in any of the countries in which they were active.
And yeah, in spite of their protestations that they helped bring peace to Africa, Executive Outcomes made the bulk of its money by getting poor countries to sign over mining rights to Branch Energy.
Yeah, in 1998, Sandline International breached a UN embargo on weapons sales to Sierra Leone.
The company also got in trouble in Papua New Guinea, and Mann was flown out of the country under shady circumstances for trying to help them put down a rebellion.
It's just a whole fucking complicated, messy story.
Now, the end of it is that by 1998, Africa was filled with countless competing mercenary firms, and nearly all of them were either based in South Africa or mainly employed South African soldiers.
And the Mandela administration got really fucking angry at this and was like, all you guys are doing is perpetuating violence in all these countries and like adding fuel to the fire and making a shitload of money for yourselves.
Fuck this.
So in 1998, South Africa passes the Foreign Military Assistance Act, which makes it illegal for South Africans to offer military aid to foreign companies.
And this means that in 1999, executive outcomes goes out of business because they can't really operate anymore.
So South Africa shuts a lot of this stuff down very effectively.
So that's good.
Yeah.
It is good.
One thing I want to say is, can we just, I know this sounds kind of silly.
Can we talk about the name executive outcomes?
Is there a more, is there a more sort of like, it's not clear what we do, but you like know it involves somebody getting rich and fucking shady business dealings name than executives outcomes?
Yeah, executive outcomes.
Yeah, it is like the name you would give a mercenary company in like a Paul Verhoeven movie.
Like that's what it's like a Robocop sounding fucking name.
Yeah.
It is.
It totally is.
Yeah.
And they are out of business by 1999.
And again, this is heralded as a tragic thing by a lot of folks.
I have somewhat different opinions.
But yeah, it is a complicated as hell story.
And the fact that like there's all these companies that are on paper, even sometimes like competing with each other, but also a lot of them are owned by the same people.
It's a big fucking mess.
Executive Outcomes: A Robocop Name00:04:48
But you know what's not a mess, Bridget?
Tell me what's not a mess.
The products and services that support this podcast.
Oh, I want to hear all about them.
Is there some avenue where I could do that?
No.
Just kidding.
That avenue is now.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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Bridget.
Selling Off the Subsidiaries00:14:49
So yeah, that's Executive Outcomes.
They're gone in 1999.
Mann and Buckingham sell off their interests and most of their subsidiary companies, and they're both super fucking rich.
We don't know how rich Mann gets.
He claims Buckingham made a lot more money.
Buckingham wound up with something like $150 million.
Simon Mann did very well for himself, though.
They're both millionaires.
And he was already rich.
So yeah, good shit.
Now, interestingly enough, the men who actually did the fighting for his companies did not get rich.
Most of Executive Outcomes soldiers were black men, veterans of 32 Battalion or Nigerian Special Forces.
Many of them were left destitute when the company folded, forced to take on menial work as security guards and live in squalor in northwest South Africa.
They had not benefited from the network of mining companies and airlines that filled man's pockets for the better part of a decade.
Simon, though, got to retire.
He competed in car races, married a much younger woman, and had several kids.
He should have been happy, but retirement didn't suit Simon Mann.
One of his friends later recalled, I've never seen anyone look so bored.
Mann's 50th birthday came and went.
He tried to make peace with the fact that his exciting youth as a war profiteer was behind him, but he just couldn't do it.
It's a sad story.
It is sad, you know.
Lots of money, younger wife.
How sad?
I mean, you know, I feel bad for the guy.
Yeah, I mean, he has a lot of things that you might consider hallmarks of success, but he doesn't get to profit off of a war.
He doesn't get to order men into battle anymore.
Well, this is like what you were saying is like how much of the bad shit that men do is out of kind of boredom or just like wanting to like mix it up and have a little fun.
And like, you know, I do think that that like evil is definitely part of it, but I do think another part of it is like just like wanting to do something that is exciting and kind of fun, even if it kills people and like fucks up their lives.
Kind of, especially if it kills people and fucks up their lives.
Because then there's just a bonus.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Again, this is why turning Florida into just a walled-off open-air war zone is such a good business idea, I think.
And look, nobody has to wear masks there.
It's fine.
COVID-19 is going to be the least of your problem in Warada.
Yeah, Warada.
You've already got a name.
You've got a branding.
I think we've got to do this.
I think this is a fast track.
We got to get this going.
I bet Governor DeSantis could get on board with this.
So in 2003, this aging former mercenary, bored and in need of a challenge, had a fateful meeting with a fellow named Eli Khalil, a Lebanese businessman and financier with strong ties to the oil and gas industry.
Now, Khalil's eyes had recently turned towards Equatorial Guinea.
He couldn't help but notice that Exxon was paying the nation's dictator, Obi-Yong, just $3 a barrel, while nearby Nigeria got $8 a barrel for their field.
A savvier head of state could negotiate much better terms, opening up huge amounts of money to flow into the coffers of a guy like Eli Khalil.
He started talking to folks, members of parliament and the House of Lords who might be interested in funding such a venture.
In January 2003, he talked to Simon Mann for the first time.
The two met in London, and their talk quickly turned to Equatorial Guinea.
Now, Mann knew nothing about the country, but Khalil told him he was friends with an exiled Guinean politician, Severo Moto Nassa.
Now, Moto had been a mid-level politician in Equatorial Guinea and had fled for his life to avoid being murdered by the dictator Obi-Yang.
He'd wound up in Madrid, where he'd charmed the Spanish prime minister and collected a small circle of exiled fellow Guineans to him.
Moto had become the most vocal opponent of Obi-Yong's regime, and Eli Khalil later admitted to providing him with modest financial support to make his exile comfortable.
Now, we are talking about very powerful men and very serious crimes here, and I cannot tell you precisely what happened next.
A lot of this is just like, this is the likeliest way things happened because nobody who actually knows is talking, or if they're talking, they're lying.
Because again, they're talking about overthrowing a government and violating international arms embargoes.
So again, all of this is kind of me putting together from the research I've done and the research primarily Adam Roberts did, like what seems like the likeliest chain of events that actually occurred.
And from what I've read, it seems like Eli Khalil basically, on behalf of himself and other rich guys, found this mercenary who was bored and started just talking to him about all the terrible things this dictator Obi-Yang was doing to his people and also how weak the military there was and how they had this wonderful exiled opposition leader who'd be a great leader in Obi-Yong's stead and kind of let man put two and two together in his own head.
Like, yeah, you just sort of like lay out the bones of the crime, but don't suggest the crime.
And then this guy, Simon Mann, is like, what if we overthrew him?
And Eli Khalil is like, that's a great idea, Simon.
That is like how rich guy cry.
Like, that is how it happens.
Like, where it's like, you suggest it to someone who like, you suggest it, and then they think it's their idea.
That is like Taylor's oldest tie when it comes to like rich guy crimes.
If you've seen Tiger King, you know what the fuck I'm talking about.
That is how it goes down.
Yeah, this is like not like a rare story in history.
So, yeah, in his career as a mercenary, Mann had always worked before for nations.
He'd never gotten involved in the kind of skullduggery that men like Mad Mike Horry got famous for doing.
But he'd grown up reading the same kind of books as Mad Mike.
I'm sure he read King Solomon's Mind, being a British child of that era.
And he'd come into adulthood hearing the stories of mercenaries like Horry and Denard.
The idea of sailing into some horribly oppressed little African country, installing his own chosen king, and making a big pile of loot was deeply appealing to Mann.
So he started to do his own research.
And of course, he came across horror stories of Obi-Ang's cannibalism and all the terrible things that he'd done.
And he also learned that the leader was sick with cancer.
This all convinced him to fly to Spain and meet with Moto just to see what he thought of the man.
The two had a couple of conversations, and eventually Moto asks Simon straight up, will you help me take power in Equatorial Guinea?
Mann later recalled that this was the moment he realized he was getting involved with a serious game.
So Mann began reaching out to his old friends, including Greg Wales, who had worked as an accountant for Executive Outcomes.
And they did enough research to learn that Obi-Yong's army was small, usually drunk, and easy pickings for an elite team of veteran fighters.
In recent interviews, Wales too refers to the attempted coup as a game and states his belief that the government of Spain supported it from the beginning.
And again, all of like the white guys behind this, it's very common for them to talk about like, this is a game.
Because I think that's really how a lot of them see it.
Like they want to get rich off of this, but they also, it just, it's a game.
Yeah, and it's not a game, though, for the Spanish government.
They want Equatorial Guinea's oil.
And you get the feeling that you're just kind of pissed that they decolonized the country before they knew it had incredibly rich oil fields.
So there's a lot of talk about the fact that a Spanish oil and gas company would have been given access to Equatorial Guinea's rich fields.
And if this is true, it means that the Spanish government got involved as a way to stealthily recolonize part of Equatorial Guinea.
So Simon Mann began collecting soldiers, starting with a handful of trustworthy white veterans.
They tended to be executive outcomes men.
One of them, Style, had flown for Mann in Angola.
He transitioned to a peaceful and lucrative career as the private pilot for a billionaire.
So Style is, and again, he's a white guy.
He's doing incredibly well.
He's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
He's like getting to live in luxury hotels and party with a billionaire all the time.
He doesn't need the money.
But his old friend comes out to him and says, hey, do you want to fly a bunch of men into battle to help overthrow this dictator?
And Style is like, fuck yeah.
And he's like, fuck yeah, because it sounds fun.
Like, that's the reason he gives, is that it sounds like it'll be a neat time.
Yeah, this is my favorite thing about like people who do shitty things.
When they don't need the money, they just like are kind of reckless and like are up for a, up for like a good time.
Do you know?
It's like you didn't need to do this, but you're just like kind of a reckless person and you were bored.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's why you did it.
As another mercenary who was approached to the job told the author of the book, The Wangaku, quote, you can see why this is tempting.
It's fun.
It could work.
You trust the leaders.
Some of the guys did it for the kicks because life is boring.
Wow.
Exactly.
At least they're open about it.
Where it's like, hey, life is boring.
Let's mix it up.
They're very open about it.
Yeah.
It's awesome, actually.
I mean, no, it's not.
It's horrible.
But interesting.
Yeah.
So the bulk of the men who were recruited by man, the guys who were like the cannon fodder for this operation, were, of course, black soldiers.
Buffalo soldiers is the term you'll hear for these guys.
veterans of the 32 Battalion in South Africa.
And these men's stories were much sadder.
They were not doing it for fun.
Most of them lived in a place called Pomphrey, which had been the military base they'd been bunked in when they'd been in the South African military and was now an old asbestos-filled slum that they lived in with their families in horrific squalor.
Adam Roberts writes, quote, Families told of husbands and fathers who scrabbled at the chance of well-paid work.
No questions asked.
At one house, a wooden carving on the wall shows a lion eating a man with a gun.
Cecilia Chimoysia says that her father, Eduardo, fought as a buffalo soldier for the South Africans for nearly two decades.
He received a small army pension and took a job as a security guard in Pretoria, leaving his family behind.
Because there's no jobs in Pomphrey, Pomphrey is only full of humans.
There's no jobs.
He was working in Pretoria.
His contract had finished and he came home for Christmas and New Year.
When he returned to Pretoria, he met a guy at an association for people who were in battalion 32, a hostel.
Then he phoned us and said that he was going to Congo.
And most of the accounts of the black men who, again, are the majority of the fighting effort here are the same.
They're offered jobs that paid more than their current work and offer maybe the possibility of an escape from poverty while still being a pittance of what Eli Khalil and Simon Mann plan to make in the operation.
Quote, friends recruited each other.
Cousins urged relatives to join, hoping to bring more wages into the family.
The signs of misery in Pomfrey, broken windows, sandy streets strewn with litter, all help explain the readiness of men to board a plane for an ill-defined military job.
Many of the foot soldiers and their families later claimed ignorance of the coup plot.
Perhaps they were not told, at least not early on.
And there's a good chance that most of these men up until like the day they were supposed to carry out this coup didn't really know what they were being brought in for.
So recruiting these black soldiers, who were again expected to do almost all of the fighting and killing, was basically an afterthought for Simon Mann.
He devoted most of his pre-coup efforts to recruiting rich white guys to provide funding for the whole escapade.
He did this by throwing a series of fancy parties at his Johannesburg home.
According to an attendee at one of these parties, interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph, quote, it was a casual conversation at a drinks potty around a swimming pool about a security project at an African mine.
Yeah.
First of all, I love this accent you're doing.
Can I say that?
Also, this sounds terrible and they did terrible things.
This Johannesburg pool party sounds kind of lit.
I'm not going to lie.
I mean, yeah.
I have gone drinking at parties that are heavily mercenary attended a couple of times.
Are they lit?
You drink a lot.
Yeah, you drink a lot with private military contractors.
Although the drunkest people at the party were the UN.
They actually, like, fucking parked illegally and we were going to get the party busted.
And we had to, like, find the drunken UN guys and steal their keys to move the Land Rover.
It was fucking night.
Wait, why is this not a podcast episode you're doing?
I wouldn't hear this whole story.
It's a fun tale.
You could get up to some shit in Iraq.
Yeah.
So, yeah, so he hosts these pool parties where he talks to people.
They're just having drinks and he's like, oh, yes, we're having a project at a mine.
You know, it'll be a quick profit if you're willing to invest some money.
And then, you know, most people are, you know, as soon as he mentions that the project is in Equatorial Guinea, most reasonable people are like, oh, fuck no.
I have no interest in getting involved in business in that company.
Like, it's way in that country.
It's way too unstable.
But the people who are interested, Mann then has, like, private one-on-one conversations with.
And he asks them to put up $100,000 in seed money and promises them a million-dollar return inside of 10 weeks.
Now, I'm not an investment guru, but I know some people who are good at investments.
And one thing they'll all say is that if anyone is offering you returns like that, really returns in excess of like 5, 10, maybe 15%, like that's good.
If someone's offering you a 10 times return in 10 weeks, that's a scam.
They're either going to steal your money or they're committing some sort of horrible crime.
And this is the horrible crime type thing, right?
Like...
Yeah, somebody, yeah.
So either somebody's getting scammed or there's a terrible fucking like illegal thing going on for sure.
It's either heroin or a coup, right?
Like if they're not just going to take your money and run, it's heroin or a coup.
Yeah.
So a number of people invested, but a much larger number wound up spreading rumors around town about the coup that man was planning.
Because again, he tries to stay secret about this, but he's bad at it.
And he just starts like telling anyone who says, yeah, I might invest money.
Like, yes, we're going to overthrow this government.
So like he's simultaneously, these black soldiers that they're expecting to do the fighting don't know what they're getting involved in.
And like every random white dude that Simon Mann gets drunk at hears about his plan to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.
It's so funny.
Like this actually reminds me of when we were at that, when we were talking about like Nazis, how I was so surprised by how many of them had like were taken down by personal messiness.
Oh, yeah.
It's like funny to me that you think you would be someone like a dictator or like someone who is committed to spreading awfulness and like shittiness in the world.
And then you get taken down by your own messiness.
Giving People a Recipe for Coup00:07:46
Like again, you got drunk and told everybody.
Like that is such a that really tells you all you need to know, don't you think?
That is what separates the bad people who are terrible but ultimately just foot soldiers to the really danger.
The really dangerous people are people like Eli Khalil.
Like the guy at the top of all this who is smart enough to be like, this Simon guy is going to try to do this and he's going to be incompetent and messy.
But as long as I like steer clear just enough that I can't be legally tied to him, this might work out.
If it does, I make a bunch of money.
If it doesn't, I'm out, what, you know, 100 grand or two?
He's the one gathering most of the funds anyway.
Like those are the people you have to fucking watch out for is the Eli Khalils.
Like the Simon Manns fuck up a bunch of shit, but they're usually too dumb to get most of what they want because they're just, they're messy.
Yeah.
And Simon Mann is messy.
Listen, if you're going to be, if you're going to be involved in like dirty shit, don't get drunk and tell everybody.
That's like a number one rule.
Yeah, like if you're going to be a dealer, don't smoke your own stash.
And if you're going to plot coups, stay sober until the coup's done.
That's what fucking Bob Denard did, right?
They brought the champagne.
They didn't drink the champagne before the coup.
Mike Horry and his men did, and they got into an airport gunfight.
Drinking, getting wasted before the coup means an airport gunfight.
Getting wasted after the coup means a fun evening.
Like, it's not hard.
I almost feel like you're like giving people the recipe to like launch a successful coup.
Get drunk after.
Those Venezuelan guys who got busted, they were on a boat.
You know, they were getting drunk on that boat.
They were probably so lit.
Yeah, of course.
Fucking idiots.
And of course, it was like most of the actual dying was done by like these local Venezuelans who just wanted to be freed by a shitty dictator.
These white guys wanted to be heroes.
It's fucking bullshit.
It's so frustrating.
I don't know.
Maybe they'll suffer real penalties for what they did because fuck those guys.
Like, it's such bullshit.
It's always such bullshit.
So Mann was not secretive about what he was proposing to do.
Obviously, he slipped up constantly in the drinking parties.
And while a small number of people invested, a much larger number of the people that he talked to wound up just spreading rumors around town that Simon Mann was planning a coup.
South African intelligence found out about it almost instantly and wrote out multiple different reports about the budding coup in the months before it was attempted.
So like South African authorities like right away know what's going on.
Now, it's likely that Simon Mann himself was well aware that the gist of his plan was known to local authorities and he doesn't seem to have cared much.
There's debate as to why, but the likeliest explanation is that he just didn't think anyone would bother to stop him.
He thought that Obiyang was such a bad dictator and international law was so lax that nothing would happen.
And he had good reason to think this.
His partner Wales had reached out to an American lobbyist, Joe Sala, who advised them that a four-day program of introductions to U.S. officials could be arranged for Moto, the guy they wanted to put in place as the new dictator, for just 40 grand.
And we don't know exactly what kind of deal Wales worked out with Salah for Moto, but the two talked regularly for months.
And when Mann purchased a former Coast Guard Boeing 727 for the United States to use in his coup, the whole process of buying this former military aircraft and shipping it to South Africa went really smoothly, like weirdly smoothly.
And there's no hard evidence, but there's a lot of people who think that someone, if not the U.S. government at the top level, people in the U.S. government knew about this budding coup and wanted to kind of help it along a little bit by letting them get access to this plane more easily.
Again, there's a good chance that people at the top did know that George Bush was like, yeah, fuck it, let's see what happens.
Who knows?
Yeah.
I honestly wouldn't put it past him.
Like, that does sound like something he would do.
And it also might have been due to the Spanish government asking the U.S. government to help things out here, because Spain, again, had a massive financial interest in this.
The Spanish government did, because they wanted to get access to Equatorial Guinea's oil.
And Spain had backed the U.S. in the invasion of Iraq, which was a like the Spanish leadership had backed the U.S. in the invasion of Iraq, which was a very politically dicey decision, to say the least.
And there's suspicions that basically the Prime Minister of Spain was like, look, George W. Bush, like, when you wanted to go to war, we helped you out.
Now I want to overthrow a dictator and take some oil.
Like, let's get some quid pro quo going up in this bitch.
So, yeah, you know, you can't, I can't say enough.
This is 2003 and 2004.
Like, yeah.
So, um, Wales was responsible for also putting together most of the non-military aspects of the scheme.
He set the day of the actual event for a Thursday or a Friday, because those were the days that most ministers would be in the capital in Malabo and Equatorial Guinea.
The coup plotters would then have the weekend to consolidate their power and reopen the country on Monday.
So, that's kind of what was the goal.
It's like, we overthrew the government on Friday, we like worked through the weekend, and then by Monday, we got the whole new country set up.
I mean, I like the way they think.
It sounds very efficient in the way they laid out the plan.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That's scans.
So, he had plans to get the national press, such as it was, in line and put together, quote, impressive plans for social, political, medical, and economic improvements for the general populace that he was going to have Moto announce on the Monday he took power.
Now, none of these plans would actually be implemented, but that would get, like, just talking about it would get the world off of their backs long enough to suck Equatorial Guinea dry.
And I'm going to quote now from the book, The Wonga Coup.
Quote, By the turn of the year, Wales's ideas, and presumably man's, had expanded to something grander in Equatorial Guinea.
He proposed forming a company controlled by Mann and his closest plotters to run Equatorial Guinea with Moto as a puppet leader.
The English accountant had long liked to dream up plans and models for how to run failing countries.
He says he has written other proposals for other companies modeled on the old buccaneering firms that underwrote British imperial expansion in India and Africa.
He thinks Somalia and Gabon should be run by boards of directors, not by governments or warlords.
So he wrote a lengthy document, the Bight of Benin Company document, describing how such men, such a company could take power and run the oil-rich West African state.
Johan Smith believes the document shows how the coup plot was pure neo-colonialism to put Moto in place so they can remove him at any time.
Simon would have been the president's security advisor and his company, the Bight of Benin Company, would have controlled it all.
So yeah, that's the plan.
That like, that's fucked up.
It's super fucked up.
Yeah, it's real bad.
You shouldn't do that.
You shouldn't do that at all.
By the way, the name the Wonga coup comes from a letter that I believe it was Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher's son, was one of the backers of this plan.
And he got in legal trouble for it eventually.
And again, the exact dimensions to which he was involved aren't known.
It kind of looks like he just gave them some money, knowing vaguely that they were going to fuck up some shit in Africa and maybe make a lot of money.
But yeah, so Margaret Thatcher's kid, like Simon Mann writes him a letter when he needs more money and refers to the money that he needs as Wonga, which is like upper-class rich British kids slang for cash.
Like it's what Etonian boys called cat, like some wonga, a wood of the wonga, whatever.
Fucking bullshit, fancy rich British kid stupid term.
I hope that you do, I hope that you do your like rich British kid accent a hundred more times in this episode.
It'll make me very happy.
I'll do my best.
Can you do that voice to call to an ad brick?
Rich British Kid Accents00:04:31
Just wondering.
Oh, God, yes.
All right.
All right.
Roy, speaking of colonialism and wonga, speaking of wonga, help get this show somewhere.
I went Australian right away.
Like I immediately like veered into Australia territory.
I didn't want to say anything, but it's very Australian.
I know, I know, I know, I know.
I could do a pretty good Irish accent.
Yeah, do it Irish.
Go to an ad break Irish.
Hoy, Fayette and Begora.
Why don't you check out these ads now?
Give this man a raise.
Oh my God.
No, that was so good.
This is not even.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.
The Undoing of Many00:13:51
Really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hoity, toity, tiddly-tome.
We're back from the odd brick.
It's the Irish Behind the Bastards episode.
That really is like, I guess that's it.
I don't know what kind of colonialism it is when you try to make fun of rich British people, but you're bad at the accent, so you just make fun of another colonialized oppressed people, the Irish, instead.
Yeah, so you're like, I wanted to make fun of them, but now the Irish are getting pulled into it somehow.
I don't know.
I'm so sorry, Ireland.
You didn't deserve that.
You're a wonderful country.
So, the Bite of Benin company document shows the plotters fretting that oil firms may not play ball after the coup.
They were worried that, like, basically that some of these international companies would be like, you illegally overthrew a government and maybe we don't want to do business with you, which is weird because it means that these coup plotters had way more faith in the morality of oil company executives than anyone on earth ever has.
Yeah.
So they were worried about this because if oil revenues stopped flowing, you know, there was no point in taking control of Equatorial Giddy, which again shows that they did not care about overthrowing this dictator.
But they knew that there were regular direct flights between Malabo and Houston because, you know, there was a lot of American interest in Equatorial Guinea.
And they didn't want to piss off the United States because if they messed with the oil interests at all and like damaged the business interest of any of these companies actively mining Equatorial Guinea, that would get the Marines in.
Like that was like literally like the writing they wrote is like this is what gets the Marines in.
So they had to assure the American government early on and that was something they like wrote into their plan.
They figured that like the best way to do this was to offer lucrative jobs to American private security firms.
And they decided that like one way to do this was to offer the Military Professional Resources Incorporated MPRI company the job of guarding the new president once the government was overthrown.
So they like are immediately thinking, how do we bribe the U.S. into not stopping us from doing this?
Yeah, the Bight of Benin Company document is proof positive against any claims that humanitarian concerns were a factor in the coup.
Under its strictures, the coup plotters would have total control over the new president's schedule and what contracts he was allowed to sign.
The plotters were well aware of the fact that Equatorial Guinea's first dictator, Macius, had initially been a figurehead for the Spanish government.
They would not allow this to happen again.
The document itself notes, quote, The two most potent general threats are, one, as it is potentially a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behavior, disloyalty, rampant individual greed, irrational behavior, kids in toy shop style, backstabbing, bum fucking, and similar ungentlemanly activities.
Two, if the result is not seen by the outside world as noticeably better than the current situation, our position there and in anything other than the very short term will be hard to sustain, and our involvement will be more likely to be the subject of unfavorable scrutiny.
So that's really fucking the wording on this is fascinating to me.
Like, because there's so number one, they call it a game again, but also because there's going to be so much money at stake, we should expect everyone to act badly.
Like, we have to assume everyone's going to be a piece of shit that's involved in this plan that we're cooking up.
Yeah, everyone's going to act like a child in a toy store.
And then also, I do think referring to it as a game really shows you like what they were thinking that they like don't understand the sort of stakes.
Yeah, they don't.
And it's just like, this is StarCraft for rich people.
Like, that's what this is.
It's like, yeah, it's, it's fucking wild.
So the biggest issue facing the plotters was the problem of acquiring weaponry.
And a lot is said stereotypically about how easy it is to acquire guns in Africa, but that's actually not as true as people think.
For one thing, there's fewer firearms in the entire African continent than in the United States.
Probably a lot fewer, because the U.S. has roughly half of all the world's guns.
In South Africa, probably the most heavily armed nation on the continent, roughly 10 out of 100 people own a gun.
In the United States, there are 116 firearms for every human being.
That's just private guns, too, by the way.
Now, there are places in Africa where you can buy an AK-47 for cheap, generally places that have just finished having civil wars or coups or whatever.
But that's not the case everywhere.
And just being able to buy an AK-47 doesn't mean you can actually get access to high-quality arms.
Coup plotters needed not just random street AKs.
They needed good, reliable guns.
And they needed things other than AK-47s.
They needed hand grenades, heavy machine guns, mortars, mortar ammunition, and rocket launchers.
All of this shit is necessary if you're going to overthrow even a small modern government.
And that stuff's hard to fucking get, especially in the quantities that you need.
Man eventually worked at a deal with an arms manufacturer, Zimbabwe Defense Industries, ZDI.
Now, he had no end-user certificate, which is what you need to arm a large group of people without breaking international law, but he did have bribe money.
ZDI didn't want to just deliver weapons to Mann and his army in their own country, though, because they legally couldn't ship them to him.
So to handle all these logistical hurdles, Mann and the other plotters set up an incredibly complex and stupid scheme.
The short of it is that they bought a bunch of extra guns from ZDI to have delivered for rebels that they knew in the Congo.
And they were going to have these rebels attack and take an airstrip from the government of the Congo.
The ZDI plane would then fly into the Congo, land at that airstrip, and unload a bunch of guns to pay the rebels and to give Mann's army, which they would then fly into Zambia to give to their fighters.
So, like, we're already over-complicating things, right?
Like, every other complication is another way for things to fail.
Like, this is like, we haven't even, like, the steps before we even land an army in fucking Equatorial Guinea are such a fucking mess.
Like, this is clearly a bad idea.
So, man's forward team would meet with these rebels and then fly to Zambia, where the bulk of the mercenaries would be waiting.
They'd load up their arms and then fly to Equatorial Guinea to carry out their coup.
A separate group of mercenaries guarding future President Moto would land by boat supported by a small squadron of Spanish frigates, which would be there to secure naval supremacy.
Now, in war, as in life, simple plans are always better than complicated ones.
And Mann's convoluted coup scheme collapsed before it really got started.
The Congolese rebels failed to capture the airstrip and probably never even tried to assault it.
The ZDI plane had no place to land, so it flew back to Harare.
The Spanish frigate sailed off when it became clear that no coup was going to occur.
And in general, the whole scheme died, fizzled.
And in fact, even the plane that the man's advance team flew from the Congo to Zambia, like it hit a bird in mid-flight and had to be emergency repaired.
It just falls apart fucking immediately.
And most of Mann's army just spends the week getting drunk in fancy hotels.
So not a great first try.
Not a great first try, but isn't it fun to get drunk in fancy hotels?
It is.
It is.
And a lot of the guys who were getting drunk in those hotels would go on to wish that they just stayed in the hotels getting drunk.
Yeah, imagine if that's all they did, where they were just like, oh, I just stayed, I just went to this hotel, got drunk, and then I like stayed there and went home.
Coups are awesome.
So after this inauspicious cluster fuck, several of the coup's early backers backed out, wisely deciding that man and his fellow mercenaries were a lot worse at overthrowing corrupt regimes than they'd been at propping them up.
But Simon Mann had the coup plotting equivalent of blue balls, and he was not the kind of man who was going to let a little thing like rank failure stop him.
He committed to trying again and started pounding the ground in search of yet more funding.
This was not an easy process.
And in interviews, Mann's friends noted that he was visibly uneasy by late February 2004.
Quote, he looked under huge emotional pressure, recalls one who saw him regularly.
Matters were not helped by Amanda, his free-spending wife.
On one occasion, he lost it.
He threw the phone 10 meters at a wall and it smashed into a thousand bits, says somebody who worked in his office.
The reason?
On top of the stress of finding cash for his coup, he had to provide ever more dollars to his wife.
Man could afford it in the longer term, but he lacked ready cash.
His wife and children, used to luxury, were running up bills just as he needed every dollar.
And it's a whole nother level of self-absorbed when you're angry at your wife and kids for spending money, not because you don't have it, because you need it to overthrow a sovereign nation to steal its oil.
It's like, baby, don't you understand?
I need this money for the coup.
I need this for the coup.
That's my coup bucks.
She's like, fuck you.
I'm getting a facial.
Yeah.
This is like normal, like, middle-class guys who are the kind of man Simon Mann is when they get old, like spend too much money buying like a shitty convertible.
Simon launches a coup.
That's really what is going on here.
Yeah, it's like, are you going to buy a like midlife crisis car or execute a coup?
Whichever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the two.
So, yeah, he starts to get desperate, right?
Because he's having trouble raising enough money.
And like all desperate men, he cuts corners.
And the fact that he was cutting corners in his attempt at a second attempt at a coup is embodied nowhere better than the story of how Mann planned to collect his Zimbabwean weapons the second time around.
Rather than set up a drop in another country, he just decided to fly his 727 loaded with mercenaries into Zimbabwe and pick up the guns there.
Now, these guns were being bought illegally, and the mercenaries were also illegal.
So, this introduced a number of wrinkles into the plan.
Now, Mann and his soldiers were going to be landing in another sovereign nation and buying illegal weapons, which is a whole new list of people you have to bribe.
Like, smuggling an army all the way across Africa is not an easy thing to do.
So, but man decides, fuck it, we'll figure it out.
On March 4th, a small advanced team flew into Equatorial Guinea's capital.
Their role would be to set things up for when the full army arrived.
Unfortunately for them, Obi-Yong and his government were well aware of what was about to happen.
For one thing, the South African government had warned them in detail that Simon Mann was planning a coup.
For another thing, before the first coup attempt, Mann had sent an advanced team into Equatorial Guinea.
They'd gotten drunk in one of the capital's few restaurants and talked openly about their plans to overthrow the government.
So, there's a number of reasons that Obi-Yong knows what's about to happen again.
Like, getting drunk and like getting drunk and talky.
If you're planning a coup, if you're out there listening and you're planning a coup, don't get drunk and talky.
Drink after Bridget and I will have a lot more coup advice in our new podcast, How to Coup, which launches on the iHeart Network this August.
You can find out wherever you get your podcast.
How to coup yeah, if you're stockpiling FALs and 308 ammo in hopes of overthrowing, I don't know, Uruguay, don't do it until you listen to our podcast because we're gonna have a lot of advice for you.
Oh, we should call it the ABCs for always be coupon.
Always be cooing, ABC.
You gotta be learning your ABCs, you know, if you're gonna carry out a coup.
Including D, don't drink.
Um, yeah, that really is the number one lesson I've gotten.
That is like the undoing of so many people in this story.
It's like getting honestly, like, these are horrible, horrible people.
I want to make it very clear they're terrible.
Fuck them all.
But I kind of been there where you like have a plan, you have a few drinks, you're feeling good, you start talking.
Like, I don't know how it happens.
Oh, we could call our podcast Get a Coup.
Oh, that's good, dude.
Yeah, that's a good one.
That's a good one.
It's gonna be a great show.
Gonna be a great show.
We'll have to have Simon Mann on.
You're so good at naming things, Robert.
Thank you.
Very proud.
So, when the point team flew in on March 4th, Obi-Yong was ready.
And still, the coup plotters and the advanced team member Nick Detroit took steps to try to conceal the fact that they were about to execute a coup.
So, Nick Detroit is like the head of the advanced team that lands in Equatorial Guinea ahead of the second attempt.
And as soon as he lands, he gets the impression that the government might be aware that they're about to carry out a coup.
And his response to this is to send out a bunch of text messages on his phone, which he was sure was bugged, stating, Hey, guys, we're canceling the coup.
Not because he was canceling the coup, but because he caught that we thought that would throw the government off of their trail.
I kind of love that as a response.
Smart people here.
So, just as the Spanish government hoped a successful coup would allow them to profit from Equatorial Guinea's oil, South Africa felt that stopping the coup would help them profit off Equatorial Guinea's oil.
So, in addition to warning Obi-Yong, South Africa put in a call to Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe.
Now, when they were like, hey, a bunch of mercenaries led by a British guy are going to be picking up illegal arms at your airport.
Maybe do something about it.
Torture and Incarceration00:12:46
And Mugabe didn't really care that much about Equatorial Guinea's sovereignty, but he was, above all else, terrified of Britain, which is the most reasonable thing about Robert Mugabe.
And he and many of it in his government were worried that their old colonial oppressor was plotting a coup against Zimbabwe.
So when they hear that a British mercenary is about to land in their country and pick up a pile of guns, they're not worried about Equatorial Guinea.
They're worried that he's going to try to overthrow his own country.
So to make a very long and dumb story short, Mann lands in Harare with the bulk of his army, and they all get arrested before they can even so much as pick up their guns.
His advance team is also arrested in Equatorial Guinea.
Both groups of mercenaries are thrown into horrible prisons and tortured.
One man dies under torture in each country.
Now, in Zimbabwe, Mann and his mercenaries are all tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison.
Most of the grunts got a year with no time served for the six months they'd already been incarcerated pre-trial.
So all these poor black guys just get no money and are in jail for 18 months.
Yeah.
Most of the white men got 16 month sentences.
They all get fined $2,000 each, which comes to about 30 cents.
So at least the fine isn't too much.
But yeah.
Mann himself was sentenced to seven years and forfeited both the plane he bought and $180,000 in cash.
He also missed the birth of his seventh child, which happened the same month that he was sentenced.
This was a mild penalty compared to the suffering experienced by the families of the black soldiers man had led into this stupid disaster, because man's family, at least, was still rich.
According to the Wanga coup, quote, Viviana Chimucci, wife of Eduardo, who's one of the men, was desperate.
We depend on people who have pity and on the churches.
We get food parcels, she explains.
Her daughter Cecilia says, We heard the sentence of my father on the radio.
We were surprised.
They told us he would come out now.
Tears appear in her eyes.
She blames Mann and the financiers.
Those people put us into trouble.
We're suffering because they put our father into problems.
She wants man punished.
I'm happy not to give him seven years, no, to give him the death penalty.
He deserves it.
Wow.
Those are some powerful words.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And at the end of the day, like, yeah, man and his fellow white guys, they all do suffer.
Like, they spend time in a really shitty prison, and a couple of them get tortured.
But the fucking, these, these poor black dudes who probably didn't even really know what they were being paid to do in detail suffer the worst.
And all of the white guys, when they do get out of prison, have a, are rich still.
And all of these black guys, their families are poorer than ever.
It's, it's some bullshit.
It's so sad.
Like, what you've just described, I feel like is such a blueprint for so many things where white guys go into this and they come out of it and they're fine.
And then the people that kind of like go along with it, who are more often than not black, just have nothing.
And it just, it's makes me, it's, it's, it's very upsetting.
And I think it's like a common thing when we talk about stories like this.
Yes, it is by far the normal way for this shit to go.
So, man and his fellow whites had enough money to pay bribes that made their lives behind bars easier.
Zimbabwean prison is never comfortable, but they were able to secure themselves enough food to stay relatively healthy as well as a few luxuries.
The same was not true for the black men that they'd planned to lead in the battle.
Those men spent their year behind bars on the edge of starvation.
When they were freed, they found themselves in debt, nursing criminal records and tarred by their toxic affiliations to one of the most disastrous coups in history.
Simon Mann, however, was extradited to Equatorial Guinea after four years in a Zimbabwean prison.
And it is widely believed that he was traded by Zimbabwe for oil.
He went on to spend another 18 months in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison.
Before his extradition, President Obiang had promised to personally sodomize and skin alive the mercenary.
But he didn't actually, yeah, he didn't really do that.
It was bad, though.
Man was tortured horribly and locked in solitary confinement.
He was beaten and starved.
I'm not going to say he suffered a fair punishment, but he was punished.
Like, he has, he spends like years in unspeakable misery and torment.
So, you know, at least there's that.
Yeah.
During his time incarcerated, he was allowed to speak to journalists, provided he tell them that he was being treated very well.
And you can find interviews from him in like the mid-aughts where he's talking about, like, no, I haven't been tortured.
Everything's good here.
When he got out of prison in 2010, he started being like, Yeah, I was absolutely tortured.
And he's probably not lying.
Like, he almost certainly was tortured.
But yeah, one of these interviews I found from before he was released through The Independent has a very choice quote for Mr. Mann: You go tiger shooting, but you don't expect the tiger to win.
Oof.
Yikes.
Yeah.
He was pardoned by President Obi-Yang in 2009.
And in 2010, he gave an interview to The Guardian where he revealed the details of his torture and provided this quote: I didn't go there to make lots of money and sit on my own and say, Hey, I'm a rich man.
I did it for my family to improve their lives.
I made the wrong choices.
I am very sorry about that for the pain and grief I brought my family, especially my daughter, who was 10 when I was incarcerated.
Which is like, number one, it clearly doesn't give a shit about any of the soldiers that he put in danger through as a result of this.
He doesn't even mention them.
Doesn't even mention them.
And also, like, you were rich already.
Your family could have lived a comfortable life and you never needed to work again.
You wanted them to be like, own their own islands rich.
That's why you did this.
Oh, my gosh.
This could be a whole other behind the bastards episode of like people who have tons of money who just get this obsession with the money where you could have done, you could have, whatever like shitty, illegal, horrible thing you did, you could have not done that and lived a comfortable life.
Like, what is this obsession with lived a life?
Yeah.
We have to be private island rich.
And I don't, I don't even think it was really that.
I honestly don't think it.
I think the money was an incentive, but I think more than anything, man wanted the excitement and he wanted this to be able to brag about.
Like he wanted to be able, like this would be the feather in his cap as a mercenary.
All these other mercenaries, like Mike Horry and Bob Denard, they had led coups.
Like they had helped overthrow governments.
He had never gotten to do that and he wanted to.
You know?
It's fucked up.
It goes back.
Yeah.
If you had to say, how many people out there doing horrible things do you think are doing it for bragging rights?
If you had to say, 60, 70%, one way or the other.
That's a very high percentage.
Yeah.
You know, you don't, you know, speaking of Tiger King, that guy who was the inspiration for Scarface, that's clearly a guy who was just in it for the money because he doesn't seem to have any desire to brag about it.
Like he just wanted to fucking he got rich, he did his time, he got out and he bought a fucking farm in the middle of nowhere.
I can respect that, even if you do awful things to get the money.
But most of them want everyone to know how cool they are.
So fucked up.
It's like worse to me.
I don't know.
I find it like more.
Yeah, it's like, it's like more like, I can't understand it.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
So more recently, in like a couple of weeks ago, fucking Simon Mann was interviewed by the Daily Mail about the coronavirus epidemic of all things.
And the Daily Mail being a giant piece of shit, they were basically like, hey, you spent a bunch of time in solitary confinement.
What's your advice for people going through quarantine?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
The dumbest idea for a fucking article I can conceive of.
But man's quote is really funny.
Quote, you have to make your world the people and the place of your confinement and stop constantly thinking at this time we should be doing this or that and the kids should be going back to school.
Those thoughts are the ones that hurt you.
Which I don't know, maybe is good advice.
I kind of refuse to acknowledge this guy as being capable of giving good advice, so fuck it.
Yeah, fuck him.
I don't want to hear his advice.
He honestly, like, this is this is how I, where I'm at.
That same advice could be given by somebody else.
And I'd be like, oh, good advice, good advice.
It's given by him.
And I'm like, fuck him.
Terrible advice.
Yeah.
Fucking terrible advice.
Well.
That's podcast.
Yeah, that's it.
You want to know what would be good advice right now?
Robert advising people to go listen to Bridget's new podcast.
Oh, yes.
I can tell you all about it.
Oh, please.
Please do.
Thank you, Sophie.
My new podcast is called There Are No Girls on the Internet.
It drops on iHeartRadio on July 7th.
And it's all about exploring the intersections of gender, technology, and the internet.
You know, it's a culture show that really asks, how have women and other marginalized voices shaped the experience of being online?
And we really have shaped it.
So please check it out.
Question mark?
Do it.
No question mark.
Exclamation point.
Do it.
It's a requirement of joining our cult.
Yep.
Yep.
So that's the episode.
Go, I don't know, overthrow a sovereign nation.
Give it a shot.
Just stay sober.
But stay sober.
Yeah.
If you're going to drink, do it after.
Don't do it during.
And if you're going to drink, like, keep your mouth shut.
Like, don't get mouthy.
Don't drink and coup and don't text and coup.
All of the rules for driving apply to coups.
Yeah.
That's the lesson.
All of the.
That was good.
I like that.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
These people are so dumb.
All right.
All right, cool.
Well, that's the esipode.
Yay.
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