David Holthouse’s Sasquatch docuseries dives into a 1993 Mendocino County triple homicide linked to meth-fueled growers and fake Sasquatch scares to exploit labor, amid missing persons rates three times the national average. His trauma—raped at age seven by an Anchorage athlete whose crimes went unpunished—shaped his career, including undercover work with neo-Nazis in 2002, where he infiltrated hate festivals and even joined a skinhead "Aryan baby drive" group. Holthouse’s investigation into shabu demon dolls (China-to-Philippines meth labs) and Phoenix’s cartel-driven crystal trade reveals how drugs and extremism blur into violent subcultures, from rave takeovers to ideological infighting. His upcoming projects, blending PTSD and revenge narratives with true crime, expose how personal trauma fuels obsession with the darkest corners of society. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the genesis of the project really goes back to the fall of 1993. I was visiting a buddy of mine who was working on a dope farm, and he kind of...
It was harvest season, which is like a particularly dangerous time of the year up there, but he kind of got me a hall pass with the guy that owned the farm and vouched for me for me to parachute in for about a week.
And something that didn't make it in the show is that I went up there to do like a heroic mushroom trip with this guy.
So the day before, the day that the ship went down, okay?
We took about an eighth of mushrooms each and went tripping around the redwoods.
Now, that didn't make it in the show.
But that night, as we were coming down, we were in the A-frame cabin that belonged to the guy that owned the farm.
And these two dudes showed up late at night, covered in mud, like splattered with mud, soaked.
Claiming that they'd just been to a nearby dope farm where they'd seen three bodies that were torn up, like mutilated.
And these guys were freaking out.
They seemed legitimately traumatized to me.
They were exuding this energy of terror and having just seen mutilated bodies to the point where...
I was just trying to shrink into the couch where I was.
I was really not happy to be in that room at that point.
And so they were, like, their voices were going up and down in volume, but they were clearly saying that they'd just, like, seen these three bodies, and they'd seen, like, Sasquatch footprints at the murder scene.
And they knew it wasn't a rip-off, they were saying, because, you know, it was, all the weed had been harvested, but it was still there.
Like, some plants had been torn up and thrown around, right?
But the bud was still there.
Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weed, if it was a typical patch.
At one point, the guy was like, are you sure they're dead?
They were like, are you fucking not listening to us?
They were torn to pieces, man.
They're fucking dead.
And a Bigfoot killed these guys.
So, and he kind of like got him out of the farm and like sat down and was like, well, that was really fucking weird.
And we like had a laugh, you know?
But obviously that story stuck with me for the next quarter century.
And it was one that I kind of, I told it around like a ghost story around the campfire kind of thing a few times.
But then a friend of mine and a guy I collaborate with, Joshua Fay, who's the director of the series Sasquatch, We were just finishing up another project together, and he texted me out of the blue, and he'd become a fan of this podcast, Sasquatch Chronicles, right?
And he texted me, he's like, dude, if we could find some sort of true crime story wrapped up with a Sasquatch angle, like we'd really have something.
It's basically like people's reporting their Sasquatch encounters, okay?
Yeah.
And so he sent me this text out of the blue, and I hit him right back.
I was like, I might have one.
So he's like, dude, can you look into that?
So the next step was to get a hold of...
Get a hold of a buddy that was working on the farm up there.
Get a hold of anybody I could find that worked in the dope game up in northern Mendocino County.
It was near a town called Branscombe that worked in that area at that time in the dope game.
I'd be like, did you ever hear a story like this?
Because our thinking was, you know, we can't do a series if it was just me hearing that story in that cabin that one night.
But it's the kind of story where you think, like, that probably spread beyond that one cabin, right?
Those guys didn't seem like the type that they were going to keep that to themselves.
Okay?
So, you know, after drawing a lot of blanks, we finally hit this one sort of information ecosystem sub-circle up there, if you will, where people had heard that story.
And they were like, yes, three guys did get killed, but there's more to it, right?
They were like, there's a story behind that, and it doesn't really involve a Sasquatch actually killing these guys.
I mean, I don't want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn't seen it.
I mean, at that time that I was up there, this was the time of like...
DEA's Operation Greensweep, where they had, like, they'd injected a lot of narcs into the scene, so they had a lot of undercover guys.
They also had, like, these sort of paramilitary squads out there in the woods looking for patches.
Or if they found one, you know, they'd set up on these guys, like, Rambo-style for days until somebody came to work the patch and then, you know, nail them.
So there were a lot of shooters.
I mean, it was, like, armored troop carriers, like, Parading down the main streets of these little towns up there.
I knew some people in the 90s who were growing up there and It was at the time where medical marijuana was legal.
So this is a little bit after the fact is like I think medical marijuana became legal in California was it like 94 or some shit and My friend Todd was one of the first people to go to jail for medical marijuana for growing.
And one of the weird things, shout out to Todd McCormick, one of the weird things is when he went to jail, they would not let him use the phrase medical marijuana.
Because they arrested him and they brought him to court and in court, federally, medical marijuana is not recognized.
So it was just horrible.
Were you in possession of a Schedule 1 drug?
Were you growing and distributing a Schedule 1 drug?
What year was it?
96. So this was late 90s and I met quite a few people that were in that sort of circle of people who were growing and it's just like...
It was this weird sort of gray area where it was kind of legal but not legal federally so they could get busted.
And then like what happened with Todd, they got busted and you literally couldn't even bring up the phrase medical marijuana in court.
So you're just railroaded through the court system until you're sentenced and then you're sentenced for possession of a Schedule I substance.
And when you show these guys who were the cops, and you show them today, and they're kind of proud of it, and they're talking about how fun it was to bus these people, and I guess they just didn't understand what the documentary was going to be about.
And they were talking about how living like that after a while it started to heal them.
Like they started literally feeling better.
You know, I don't live like that, but I think it's better if you do.
I mean, I think we're in this weird stage as human beings where our bodies are designed to live the way people lived thousands of years ago.
Because it takes so long for your genes to change.
You know, I think there's like certain reward systems that are built into being a human being.
Like you take a dog outside.
Dogs go outside and all of a sudden they perk up, they start moving around, they hear things, they smell things, they run around, they become alive, right?
Because dogs are supposed to be outside.
It's like it's natural for them.
It perks up all of their natural reward systems and all the little bells and whistles that go off in their little doggy heads.
That's the same thing with people, man.
There's something that happens to people when we go outside.
You know, you smell nature and you go around and you see butterflies and you You see trees.
You feel better.
You feel better.
And these people that were living like that, man, part of that film, part of your series is, you know, I'm watching this and I'm like, wow, that's cool that they figured it out.
And then they got together and they really started kind of homesteading.
It was kind of lawless.
And kind of dangerous, but also there's a lot of freedom there and you see them playing guitar and all that shit and then the fucking laws change, you know?
They come down on these people and you see these cops.
I don't think those cops are bad people.
I think they're just clueless.
I just don't think they understand.
I just think they were in that cop culture.
Of like, these are bad people, these are hippies, these are the other, and they were dehumanized.
There's a lot of dark things about this series that you put together.
You know, the growing scene up there, it started in the late 60s, early 70s, and it was people looking to get off the grid, get back to the land, and they were growing dope to fund that way of life.
Growing dope wasn't priority one.
Right?
But then, with the war on drugs coming down hard, it, like, drove the price of black market weed up so high that the culture up there started to shift.
I mean, you still have those sort of back-to-the-land types that are growing weed up there that lead a really sort of positive life.
But in the 80s, when they started to get three, four, five grand a pound for weed on the East Coast for Northern California, you know, primo bud, It brought in a new element up there, and it wasn't like back to the land hippies anymore.
It started to bring in a real pretty hardcore criminal element that were drawn there by the opportunity for a quick profit.
And they're still there.
And it's like the culture up there, at least part of the equation up there, took a pretty dark turn.
Well, what happened was, like, corporations come in.
So you've got corporate, you've got, you know, McGonja being grown down around, you know, Death Valley or down around, like, Palm Desert out there in the desert in California.
Like, literally multinational corporations growing massive amounts of weed hydroponically.
And, like, they're...
And it's driven the price down.
So it's really hard to make a living growing especially legal weed up there because by the time you factor in all the permitting costs, all the zoning hassles, all the bureaucracy basically of growing legal weed, if you're a small-time operator, unless you've got sort of a boutique, what they call sun-grown, naturally grown weed that you can charge a lot for, Yeah.
harvest right so it's it's it's driven a lot of them back to the black market and competitions fierce and when the price is low like no they're not bringing in as much cash every harvest and times are hard man it's Those towns up there, it feels like the mill closed.
That's what those towns feel like now compared to the early 90s when I was up there.
He is a guy who loved the outdoors and liked to fish and hunt.
He felt like, hey, that'd be a great job.
I'd be out there in nature all the time.
And early on in his career, they started finding these creeks that had run dry, and they couldn't figure out what was going on.
And, you know, it was really fucking up the trout population.
So they had to track these creeks down and see maybe it got dammed up, maybe a farmer is using it for...
Well, they found these grow-ops that were being put in there by the cartels.
And they turned from a game warden operation where they were checking like fishing and hunting licenses to a paramilitary anti-cartel organization where they had guns and dogs and bulletproof vests.
They were in shootouts.
Wild shit.
But he said because marijuana became legal, when it became legal in California, growing it illegally was a misdemeanor.
So they grew all of their illegal weed for the rest of the country out of California in the national forests, in the parklands, and they would just go to public land and hike in many miles.
These guys are super industrious.
Many miles of hiking in with...
Fucking hoses and tubes and PVC pipes and all the fertilizer all the shit that they needed they go deep into the forest with this stuff and Super super toxic pesticides yep, and that stuff is in the weed and so people are buying weed that's infested with this toxic pesticide and Yeah, I was just on one of those farms last June.
I mean, Alaska obviously has some dense shit, like Prince of Wales and stuff like that.
When you're up in that Redwoods, the Redwoods area, fuck, that's dense.
I went to Pacific Northwest, me and my friend Duncan, we went to talk to Sasquatch Hunters up there for this sci-fi show I did back in the day, and it was real weird, man.
These people swear they saw Bigfoot.
You know, like you're talking to them and some of them seem crazy and some of them seem...
There's this one lady to this day, man.
Her story and like the way she was saying it, like she did not seem like she was lying.
You know, she really did believe that she saw something.
My take is...
There's black bears up there, and black bears walk on foot.
And sometimes, I mean, the woods are so dense, it's like, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.
Like, you can't see shit through the woods.
It's like looking, trying to look through.
So if you saw something stand up and walk through those Q-tips, and it was a bear that was walking on its hind legs, which they do all the time, and then your brain starts playing tricks on you, you would absolutely believe that there's a giant gorilla up there in the woods.
I mean, Sasquatch made a lot more sense to me after I spent time up in northern Mendocino County, like back in those woods, like off trail in the woods.
I was like, Sasquatch makes sense to me now.
This seems like a place where a Sasquatch, you know, would hang out.
Gigantopithecus absolutely existed during the same time human beings existed.
It's a bipedal hominid or bipedal ape-like creature that is somewhere between 8 and 10 feet tall.
And the way they found it, there was an anthropologist, I believe, was in an apothecary shop I want to say in like the 1920s or 1930s in China, and he found a tooth, a primate tooth, that was enormous.
And he was like, where did you get this?
And they took him to the place, and he found some other bones, and he found some jaw bones that indicated it was bipedal, I guess, bipedal animals, the way they carry their body up straight, the jaw is structured differently, or something along those lines, right?
And so they know that this thing existed and there's depictions of what it looked like next to a human being.
And this is what they think it looked like.
Go to that one in the lower left-hand corner because that's the one that's the freakiest.
They think that that was a real thing that lived alongside people.
Well, they know it was a real thing.
They absolutely have bones.
They don't have full skeleton, though.
Not yet.
But just fucking imagine.
So that thing, what's really crazy is that thing lived in Asia, right?
So like many things, including human beings, they believe came across the Bering Land Bridge.
And they think that if it did that, well, where would it wind up?
Well, it would wind up in the Pacific Northwest.
So at one point in time, it's very possible that that thing was around human beings and we have stories of this thing.
Most likely extinct.
Most, most, most likely extinct.
But they think that human beings encounter...
I think the bones that they found were 100,000 years old.
It's kind of, it's like, there's two, I had two modes of operating up there, and there's different, like there's in town, okay, and then there's on the mountain.
And on the mountain up there, it's not just a physical location, it's also like a state of mind.
And there's growers that have gone up the mountain and never come down, basically.
They very rarely come to town.
And they get kind of feral.
They definitely take on that sort of wild man kind of thing that you're talking about.
Well, the number of reported missing persons cases in northern Mendocino and Humboldt counties is the highest in the country by far, by a factor of 3x, right?
Like three times higher than the closest county.
But that's just the number of people that go missing up there and get reported.
Any crook up there will tell you that most of the murders up there are never reported to the cops.
People just disappear.
And a lot of people that get killed up there, their families, if they have families, don't really know exactly where they are.
So, there's a lot of bodies in those woods, for sure.
I think the saddest one was that young Mexican girl who was talking about her uncle.
You know, that was rough.
I mean, you know, you...
Sort of get into the fact that a lot of these folks, they go up there because it's an opportunity for them to make some money.
And they know it's dangerous.
And so this was kind of covered in the thing that this guy was aware, his family was aware that he was doing something dangerous, but for him it was an opportunity to make some money.
And the thing is, they're not even making a lot of money.
Now, the question is, was somebody stage a murder scene to make it look like Bigfoot did it?
And that, I think, maybe happened.
One of the things that made us think that we ought to show was, A, finding other people up there that had heard this story.
But B, figuring out that there's a long tradition up there of faking Bigfoot evidence in order to terrorize people, especially people that aren't from the United States.
Like there's these trimagrants.
Like trimagrants are people that are like temporary seasonal workers that like trim buds and package buds.
And a lot of them come from South America or Mexico or Europe.
And going back all the way to the 80s, like growers would use these Bigfoot footprints on stilts and stamp them around their patches.
And then like tear up trees and shit and like take the trimagrants from foreign countries out right after they'd hire them and be like, there's a violent, like aggressive Sasquatch in the area.
You don't want to leave the farm.
The point to that being, the less traffic you have on and off your farm...
Like, the lower profile you can keep, the less likely you are to get busted.
So they don't want these, like, backpacker kids from Europe or South America or wherever.
It'll be like going into town all the time, right?
So they would fake this Sasquatch shit to, like, keep them on the farm.
And you hear that, and you're like, the idea that somebody would take that to the next step and stage a triple homicide to make it look like a Sasquatch, it's like, okay, like, the leap is starting to get a little bit more manageable there.
Not just because of all the murders, but because of the way the laws have changed the way these people have to live.
You know, when you go into detail about how these hippies started packing, and they started going into the woods with rifles, and became real aware, and the hanging of the fish hooks on the Fishing line like all that shit was it's it was very disturbing to me like surprisingly so like I've watched a lot of true crime sort of documentaries and you know they're all creepy but there's something extra disturbing about this because it seemed like I These
war on drug laws and the attitude that people had taken ruined a whole culture.
It changed everything about the way these people were living, and it changed what it meant to grow marijuana up there.
You weren't...
One of the good people providing a good thing that people love and that people appreciate.
No, you're risking your fucking life to feed your kids.
And when the one guy was talking about how if you got busted, you had no money for the year.
And part of it was, you know, again, good people grow in weed for what I would call the right reasons.
They've always been up there.
They're still up there.
They have to take precautionary measures.
They tend to form their own sort of enclaves up there.
And yeah, they may have weapons, but they're not like the, you know, the meth-addled Purely profit-driven black market growers and cartel operatives that kind of came in and took over large parts of that scene.
I just want to draw that distinction because some people have the stereotype that it's all back to the land hippies and some people have the stereotype that it's all toothless meth heads that are crazed and only out for the quick buck.
Like, the best weed in the world comes from the Mananuska Valley in Alaska, Mananuska Thunderfuck.
Yeah, Mananuska Thunderfuck, best outdoor-grown weed.
Really?
Hands down, always has been, always will be.
Nobody will ever beat it.
In my opinion, Matanuska Thunderfuck.
And the Matanuska Valley was this huge, there was a huge glacier there at last Ice Age.
And it receded, and it carved out this valley, and you combine it, and the thing is, the secret ingredient of Alaska is like the sunlight in the summer.
You know, 22, 23 hours of sunlight.
So you get a really fat harvest.
You're looking at Guinness Book of World Records, like every world record, like cabbage or, you know, Whatever.
Well, as I mentioned before, I was surprised at how seriously I took the people that actually believe in Sasquatch.
Even though that's not the main thread of the show, we did think it was important to interview some Squatchers to get their opinion on whether or not it seemed plausible to them that a Sasquatch would kill three guys on a weed farm.
I was surprised by my reaction to people that believe in Bigfoot and would tell me about their encounters.
I didn't dismiss them and I didn't have an inclination to ridicule them, which is what I expected I would have going in.
To answer your question more fully, I think that I was surprised by just how dangerous a place Northern Mendocino County is.
Like, I have pushed my luck in reporting stories, you know, more than a few times over the years.
It's a dangerous place to be under any circumstances.
That place being like the backwoods of Northern Mendocino dope country, right?
But to be up there like asking questions about unsolved homicides, you have to tread pretty carefully.
And I knew from my experience in the early 90s up there that You know, there's an element of danger up there.
But it's only gotten worse, I think, to that guy Ghost Dance, his point.
Since the early 90s to now, it's only gotten more dangerous once you're sort of off the beaten path up there.
My main fear was always that I was gonna get too close to finding out the truth about The murder at the heart of the story?
Or another murder?
Because one of the things that you find out pretty quickly is you go up there trying to investigate an unsolved triple homicide.
You get on the path of several, several different unsolved triple homicides from the early 90s, right?
So my concern was always that I was going to get too close to the killer or killers, and they were going to set me up.
And they would set me up by saying, basically, here's some key information relayed through a You know, a middleman, right?
There's some key information, but you've got to come up the mountain to get it.
And they would use that to set me up.
And so I was always afraid I was going to be in a situation where I was going to be face-to-face with one of the murderers and not know it.
And walk right into a trap, right?
But there were some of those backwoods farms that I was on where it was just...
I mean, a lot of times when...
In pursuing, like, dangerous stories, there's, like, two kinds of danger.
There's the danger that you're in because you're a reporter, but there's also just the danger of, like, you just put yourself in dangerous environments.
There's a danger to anybody, no matter what they're doing.
So, like, if you're embedded with a street gang and reporting a story on a street gang, and somebody does a drive-by in one of their safe houses, and you're in that safe house, it's like they're not shooting at you because you're a reporter.
You're just there, right?
And so there was that element of danger, just being up there knocking around In Northern Mendocino County at all, it's just a dangerous place.
But to be up there, like, yeah, asking questions about unsolved, unreported murders, there were a few times where I was like, I don't know if I'm getting off this mountain this day, right?
Really?
A few times?
Two times.
There's two times where I thought maybe I'd walked into something I wasn't going to walk out of.
And one was, the last trip I made up there was in June of last year, June 2020. And a source said that there was somebody up on this one particular mountain, Iron Peak, which is where the murders supposedly took place in 1993, that had some information for me.
But I could only meet this person by going up the mountain.
And on the drive up to this location, this farm, The woman I was riding with was telling me stories about, as we're going up the road, it's like, oh, there's a body buried there.
There's a body buried there.
There's a body buried there.
There's a lot of bodies, like, along this road.
And we get to her spot, which is just like, you know, a couple trailers and some ATVs and shit.
It kind of reminded me of some Alaska spreads, actually.
And we're just kind of, like, shooting this shit before she's going to take me to meet this guy.
And she tells me this story about these, like...
Two guys that had come up from L.A. recently to make a big buy.
The deal went south somehow, and these guys got killed.
And they knew they were going to be killed long enough, like they knew they were going to be executed.
And one of the guys, like, pissed himself in terror.
And they shot him, and they buried him on her property.
And a couple days later, one of her pit bulls, because there's pit bulls running around all over the place, pit bulls everywhere up there.
One of the pit bulls went and dug up the guy's piss-soaked boot and came running back into camp with it and dropped it like dogs do.
Like, look what I found.
And she's telling me this story like it's the height of hilarity.
She and all of her friends and stuff are cackling and laughing and shit.
And I'm laughing along with them on the outside because that's what I got to do to be like I belong there or present like I belong.
But on the inside, I'm like, fuck.
It's like...
Have I pushed this too far?
I mean, I always had a Ruger Mini 30 in the trunk of my car.
I was always like, how many paces to my car?
And always making sure that I was within short sprinting distance of that.
But even so, I just felt...
And there were a couple of...
Josh Raffae, the director of the series, there were a couple of times where I always sort of relied on him as sort of my ground control.
I'd be like, this is what I'm about to do.
You know, what's our...
Get in with me on the sort of risk analysis to this.
And there were a couple times where he was like, dude, no.
Don't do it.
And I didn't.
But then late in the game...
Yeah, late in the game, though, there were a couple times where he was like, don't do it.
And I went ahead and went up there to kind of meet with the source anyway.
So it's basically like you have all these little towns like Garberville, Laytonville, Branscombe.
There are a few hundred people in the town.
And that's town.
And then from town, there's dirt roads with names that start going up in the hills, maybe...
Maybe 5, maybe 20 to 25 miles.
But then off of those dirt roads, you start having spikes of smaller, more gnarly roads and smaller, narrower roads.
Pretty quickly, you'd need to have a truck or be riding on an ATV to be navigating them at all.
And then eventually those roads narrow to paths.
And then the paths take you back to people's properties.
And there's lots of gates.
There's gates.
Once you move off the first public road onto private roads, and usually the private roads are shared between property owners, they gate them.
And one reason for that is, I mean, it's security, but it's also like the more gates you have, the more chance you have for law enforcement to fuck up their search warrant.
So if they haven't gotten the search warrant perfectly dialed and they don't have a warrant to be entering every stage of the private property...
Isn't it odd how human beings sort of adapt to the culture that's around them?
If you're around a culture of growers that are really accustomed to people being murdered and drug deals going south and a lot of hippies packing some serious weapons, you kind of get used to that.
And there was this, when I went to University of California, Santa Cruz in like late 80s, early 90s, and I did a story on this guy that was at NARC, and he was saying, that's one of the points he made that stuck with me.
He was like, you know, you got kids on the campus here, you're like smoking your Northern California, like KGB, killer green bud, right?
And you guys have no fucking idea what's going on up there.
You think it's just a bunch of utopian growers just living in peace and harmony and growing this great organic weed that they ship down to you kids here in Santa Cruz so you can enjoy yourselves.
He's like, there's as much violence associated with the weed game up there as there is the coke game in southern Florida.
That was the thing that John Norris was telling me, that I think he said somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the illegal weed that's sold in the United States, that's sold in states where it's illegal, is grown in public land in Northern California.
I mean, I think that's it right there, is that there's still places in the country where weed's illegal.
But the black market grows up there, they might switch to manufacturing meth then.
I mean, a lot of the people I met up there...
They're just fucking outlaws.
They're either outlaws and they're never going to not be outlaws.
And so they're never going to do the, like, get permits and jump through the bureaucratic hoops to grow legal weed because it's just contrary to being a fucking outlaw.
Or a lot of them, and or, a lot of them are...
Dope addicts.
They're addicted to meth and or heroin.
And growing weed on a relatively small scale is just a way to fund that way of life, you know?
When it's good, it's always a sense of relief, you know, that it's finished.
Because it's always...
It's tough to let it go, all right?
Because it's like...
I definitely come from the school, whether it's journalism or docs, it's like there's really no such thing as a finished story.
It's only a deadline.
Like, eventually somebody just takes it away from you, in my opinion.
Like, whether it's your editor or whether it's like...
You know, Hulu or Disney Corp.
Eventually, you're going to be like, give me that.
We've got to release it to the public.
For me, there's always more tinkering to do.
There's always something else to try out.
Somebody has to take it away from me, has to take the story away from me.
Once it's taken away, there's a sense of relief.
Like, okay, it's gone.
They've got it, and it's going to be released to the world, and we'll see what happens.
But I can't...
The same way I... For a long time, I couldn't read stories that I wrote in the 90s or the 2000s when I was like a gonzo print journalist because all I could see were flaws.
And now enough time has gone by that I can look back at those stories and sort of enjoy them and read them for what they are, like most people experience them.
But the same...
Docs that I'm involved in making, I can't watch them because all I see are flaws, frankly.
All I see is like, ah, if we just had a little more time.
Well, there was also some pretty heavy moments in the documentary, the series, where you talk about yourself, and you talk about your own experiences as a child being raped, which is unexpected and very intense.
How difficult was that to sort of express on camera?
But it was relevant to this show because it came up to your earlier point about the sort of topics, what a dark world it was up there.
So it's like, why am I drawn to those kinds of stories?
And why have I spent so much of my professional life steeping myself in Dark worlds, criminal subcultures, right?
So that was why that particular part of my life story, I think, was actually relevant to this series.
But to answer your question, how difficult was it?
Not very difficult.
It was difficult for me to go public with that story for the first time, which was in 2004. I mean, I'd lived with it as a secret pretty much my entire life.
But the decision to write about it That was a very difficult decision, a very difficult thing to do.
But since then, I've gotten pretty comfortable talking about it publicly.
He was a juvenile when it happened, and also, like, the statute of limitations, it happened in Alaska, the statute of limitations expired, and also, you know, it's my word against his, you know, at that point.
I mean, so, I have since gone to the police and filed an official police report, um...
I mean, I withheld his name in the first piece that I published, and I let him know, because I met with him in person as part of the reporting, if you will, of that piece.
What was that like?
It was a pretty uncomfortable conversation, you know?
It was a pretty uncomfortable conversation, because I'd been following the fucking guy for months, like, planning to kill him.
He was, he was at the, when it happened, he was in his late teens, was still a juvenile though, so 16, 17. So he was a bit in his early 40s when I was stalking him.
And, you know, he said that, you know, that he'd been sexually assaulted when he was a kid, which is one of the most infuriating things to me when child molesters, or let's call them what they are, men who rape children, when they put that or let's call them what they are, men who rape children, when they put that out there as an excuse or a rationalization or a reason for their behavior
But he apologized, he said that it happened to him when he was a kid, and he swore that it had only happened with me, that I was the only person that he'd raped when that person was a child, right?
Like, repeatedly.
And I had been going back and forth on naming him in that essay, and his telling me that I was the only one, in the end, I decided not to name him.
Like, up to when, again, to that point of they have to take the story away from me, it was like we were just like an hour from the print deadline, and I still didn't know whether I was going to name him.
And my editor, Patti Calhoun at The Westward, she was like, just go block yourself in a room for 30 minutes, write both endings, and then we just got to pick one, man.
Just go with whichever one feels right.
So I wrote one ending that ended with his name, and one ending that ended with how the essay actually ends, which is not naming him and him just sort of disappearing into the crowd on the mall.
And went with that one.
That one felt right.
It felt like a better ending.
And it also, it kind of spoke to a point that I want to make, which is that they could be anybody, you know?
And I also wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I had two moments when I was a child where I dodged a bullet.
I never got raped, but I got close twice.
One time when I was somewhere...
I was in San Francisco.
I lived there between 7 and 11, so I think it was like 7 or 8 years old.
I was...
I was really into monsters.
I was really into monster books and monster movies and stuff like that and I was at a library and I was looking at these books and this guy came up to me and I was just I was so young and naive and he was like do you like monster books?
I said yeah yeah I love monster books and he said Come out to my car.
I've got a lot of monster books.
So I was like, okay.
So I started walking with him, and the librarian started screaming, Joseph, you get away from that man!
And she goes, you get out of here!
And she yells at him.
She goes, he just got out of prison!
And I just remember crying.
Just screaming and crying or just I was paralyzed with fear and and the guy ran he ran away you know and that was his thing he would pick up kids and I just I remember forever after that just feeling so vulnerable feeling so scared I It just changed how I thought about people.
Because up until that point, people, you know, adults had always been like, nice to me.
We'd go fishing a couple days a week after school.
And then one day I was at this pond that was this kind of remote spot.
It was off the beaten path.
And he was drunk.
And I remember him telling me that he loved me.
And then I remember being real weirded out because he was drunk and I was fishing and he was just standing there and standing next to me and I was like, yeah, I like you too or something, you know.
I don't remember the exact words.
But I remember him saying, you know, there can't really be love without sex.
And then I reeled in the line, and I had a knife in my pocket, and I held onto the knife, and I told him, get the fuck away from me.
And he's like, you know, I think you're overreacting, you're misreading me.
I said, get the fuck away from me.
Because I'd remember that time when I was a kid, it just came right back to me again.
I just assumed, here's this guy, and he's a big guy, too.
I remember him telling me that he was a teacher and he got fired for being a teacher and he gave some weird excuse for why he got fired mentoring kids or something like that.
I'm assuming he probably raped a kid or something or at least had an inappropriate relationship with a kid.
I hear stories like yours and as a parent, it just makes my blood boil.
My heart starts beating.
I just see red.
I get so angry.
It just makes me so furious and also so confused.
As to how human beings can become that.
And as you said, a guy who is a victim of that very same horrific act himself when he's young then becomes the perpetrator when he gets older.
And that is real common for whatever reason.
It's almost like a vampire that infects you and you become a vampire.
I mean, I had this whole, when I was a teenager, I had this whole plan about how I was going to commit.
If I had started to look at little kids, like I wanted to be a predator and predate on them, I was going to kill myself.
I had this whole plan.
I did a lot of climbing at the time.
I even had the couloir and this one mountain picked out.
That I was going to be able to stage my own death and it would look like an accident because I wouldn't want my parents to know that I'd killed myself because I was starting to have the desire to rape kids.
Yes, it is common, but it's also dangerous for kids who have been raped, especially boys, to think that it's like they've been bitten by a werewolf or a vampire.
It's only a matter of time before it's going to happen to you because Although it's common, it doesn't happen in most cases, right?
Most men who were raped when they were boys do not grow up to then rape children.
So that's a fallacy.
At the time that I was growing up in the 80s, it was like that was the common wisdom.
Like, this is one of the causes of this behavior.
And so I spent my teen years like, fuck, when is this going to happen to me?
And then finally I realized, oh, it's not happening, so it would have happened by now.
In some ways, that was as bad as the actual experience of being raped.
And plus, he was the son of family friends, so I saw him.
You know, all the time.
He tried to get me again, like, several times.
That's why when he told me that I was the only one, I, like, I should have, like, not believed him at the time.
I mean, I later found out he was lying.
That he lied to me.
But, because other people that had been raped by him approached me years later.
But, um...
So I had to navigate.
I spent a good chunk of my childhood until he went off to college.
And he was a star athlete in Anchorage, kind of a small town at the time.
He was like a local athlete, celebrity, kind of cool guy, right?
Somebody that I really looked up to before he raped me.
And so I spent a good chunk of my childhood, like, having to be in proximity with him, you know, and having to, like, keep myself safe and having to, like, maneuver situations so that he wouldn't be able to get me alone in fear.
Basically, it's like, spent a lot of time in fear.
And the other thing is that other survivors, especially male survivors, told me this.
It's like, once you've been raped as a kid, it's like...
To other pedophiles, it's like a sign has been hung around your neck for some reason.
They can fucking sniff it out, man.
And I don't know how they do it, but they do.
And then you're just targeted even more than other kids.
They just sense some sort of wound in you, and they target you.
And so I was targeted by other pedophiles in youth sports or fathers of friends of mine.
It was just kind of a constant thing.
Fuck.
And it fucking twists you up because on the one hand, I'm like, adults are telling me that the world is essentially a good place.
But yet I know from firsthand experience that one of these adults or like a big kid, you know, some of them were adults, he was a big kid, can just like rip off the mask and there's a monster there.
So it was, it really, yeah, it's, I try not to like, Go back and think like what my life would have been like had that not happened because now that I'm 50, life's turned out pretty fucking great.
But I went through some dark shit because of that.
I guess also what I was trying to say is I was drawn to like breaking the law or breaking the rules even when I was a kid.
I was just like this is bullshit because you're telling me there's rules and there's laws but your rules and your laws are coming from the same place where you're assuring me as a child that the world is essentially good and that adults are looking out for me and I know that's bullshit.
So that's what I mean about something essential got kind of Well, most adults are looking out for you.
When you think about human beings, it's almost like they want, you know, when some people, that's not the expression, you know, the expression, hurt people hurt people.
You know, when someone has had their life destroyed, like sometimes they want to destroy other people's lives.
So yes, to get back to your original question, yes, I can draw...
Now at 50, I can draw a direct line between being raped when I was seven years old and the type of journalism that I started to practice Really in my late teens.
The first time I went undercover as a skinhead was in 2002. And I was right kind of in the thick of about a 15 year run of gonzo journalism right where I where my specialty was full immersion in a subculture whether it's like staying up for three days with with tweakers or like embedding with street gangs living on the street with gutter punks you know hopping freight trains
and shit whatever like I would just like participant observer but fully participating whatever I was reporting on and so there was a there was a hate crimes investigator for I probably shouldn't name the organization.
For a major civil rights organization in the U.S. And she contacted the paper that I worked for.
She had this idea of helping to train a reporter to go undercover as a skinhead.
And she hadn't been getting any traction because she called up most publications and they were like, no, we don't have anybody that wants to do that.
But she called the Westward, the weekly paper in Denver I worked for, and ran this idea.
And the editor was like, yeah, we got a guy.
So they put me in touch with her and she trained me On how to dress, walk, talk, you know, steep myself in the ideology and pass as a neo-Nazi skinhead in advance of this event that was coming up in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest, which was like the first major semi-underground neo-Nazi gathering in Colorado in quite a while.
And so I went undercover as a skinhead at that gathering, fully expecting that this was just going to be a one-off.
I was going to pose as a skinhead, I was going to report this story, and then I was going to be done with it.
But once I got behind that curtain and saw how well-organized, well-financed, and...
Agenda-driven.
That movement was and is.
I was like, holy shit.
I was like, people have no idea how pervasive this is.
And so then I started doing more stories.
I worked for a chain of papers at the time.
They had papers in, I think, about a dozen cities.
And so whenever there was going to be a neo-Nazi gathering in one of the cities, I would kind of like parachute in and do my skinhead thing and report a story.
But I started to become more ideologically driven with it.
with it, where I was like trying to like raise awareness of the stuff that really, to my perception, people have only really gained, that's only really gained sort of widespread public awareness just in the recent years about how pervasive like right wing domestic terrorism, neo-Nazi movement, whatever you want to call it, is in the that's only really gained sort of widespread public awareness just in And so I did that for a couple of years.
And then there was this organization based in Alabama that I will name, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And they called me up and they're like, hey, why don't you just come do this full time?
They were getting shut down wherever they were trying to have their concert that day.
Because it was basically...
There was a hate rock concert, skinhead bands from all over the country playing.
And then there was a conference that was kind of in the...
The side rooms, right?
But just to see the recruiting that was going on, just talking with people there and getting tips from them about other events that were going on or chapters of different organizations in different places around the country where they were from, seeing how mobile they were, seeing that they had dough.
Like, it wasn't what I was expecting a neo-Nazi skinhead gathering to be.
Yes, there were like a bunch of like drunk knucklehead guys throwing Sieg Heil's and like moshing with their shirts off.
That was going on.
But the more adult neo-Nazis that were there, like trying to move the skinheads into a more sort of lower profile stealth mode neo-Nazism.
And what they were preaching was like, look, we need to get elected.
We need to get elected to school boards.
We need to get elected to zoning commissions.
We need to get elected to county sheriff's Like, that's how we're going to eventually get our hands on the levers of power in this country.
It's like, grow some hair, put on a suit, and get elected.
And when I saw that, I was like, this is, these people are fucking serious.
This isn't just like kids that took a wrong turn at the Renaissance Fair, you know?
This is like really serious white national, you know...
So once social media started to come on, then it's as much about maintaining and curating your online presence as it is showing up at the physical events.
It's available online, but it's banned in most European countries.
And so skinhead groups or neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., a lot of their funding comes from selling this stuff on the black market in Europe.
Like it's produced here.
In the U.S., it's like Europe treats it like it's child porn.
It's like banned, like super banned.
But here in the U.S., because the First Amendment is perfectly legal to make this stuff.
So they make it and they burn CDs or whatever.
When I got into this in the early aughts, it was all CDs.
And so they would smuggle CDs into Europe and sell them, and that would finance the neo-Nazi movement here in the U.S. So you start going to these places.
One thing I did, this is funny, one thing I did, the second one, the second gathering I went to is there's this organization called the Women for Aryan Unity.
And they're like, basically they are an Aryan baby drive, but they're also like a matchmaking service.
And so the second one of these that I went to was in Arizona, and I was getting some heat.
I showed up a little early, and guys were sober, and there wasn't too many, and they didn't really recognize me.
And so I went over to the Women for Arian Unity booth and started chatting them up.
And they immediately assessed, I mean, told them I was a fishing guy and everything, but they assessed, like, this guy's reasonably well-spoken, reasonably, like, good-looking, like, tall, seems to have his shit together, has a job, you know?
And so they were, like, bringing over all these skinhead chicks to, like, introduce me to them.
A lot of them were, like two of them were truckers and then they were trying to get me to go with them into their like truck and like consummate the deal, you know.
I talked to them, because I wrote a story and it came out.
And I talked to them after, and I was like, you guys, they called me.
And they were kind of like complimentary.
They were like, we knew you weren't right, but we knew you weren't a cop, you know?
And they actually thought that I treated them sort of fairly in the piece that I'd written.
I was like, are you guys, do we have a problem?
They're like, no, we don't have a problem.
And I actually, they helped me out because I asked them, I was like, what was it?
And they're like, you know what, dude?
It could tell that you were in your late 20s or early 30s and you didn't have any ink.
I didn't have any tattoos.
You know, all these guys have tattoos.
And so I was like, if I'm going to keep doing this, I've got to get a tattoo.
So I went and got away.
I got an Othala rune, which is like, at the time, it was a pretty subtle white power symbol.
It's not like a swastika.
At the time, and you get it in a position where it's like a short-sleeved shirt just barely covers it.
And so then if you want to throw up a flag, we call it throwing up a flag, you just kind of do this, like you're maybe stretching your shoulder, and it brings the shirt sleeve down and reveals the tattoo.
So if you see somebody that you want to throw up a flag to, you go like that, and then they see it.
And I'll come over and talk to you.
This is not obviously at a white power gathering.
This is in public or at some sort of mainstream political rally.
But the problem is that when that Unite the Right shit went down in Charlottesville, There was this neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement, and they had changed their symbol from a Swazi, from a swastika, to the Othala rune.
And so when these guys were marching in 2016 in Charlottesville, I'm looking at the same thing I got on my right arm, like, on their banners.
For some reason, I haven't gotten it taken off or covered up, even though I don't do this shit anymore.
After Charlottesville...
I came out of retirement one time and I went undercover at a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it wasn't a neo-Nazi rally.
It was supposed to be a bunch of neo-Nazis defending a Civil War statue.
And I showed up, and it basically turned out to be, like, a couple yahoos in, like, Confederate reenactment Civil War uniforms, some Klan guys, a couple neo-Nazis skinheads from Portland, and, like, me on one side of the street.
And on the other side of the street, like, 4,000 anti-racist demonstrators, including what looked to be, like, the entire University of Tennessee football team, like, hurling invective at us for, like, two hours.
And after the rally, I was trying to...
They shut down all the downtown Knoxville, and I was trying to get back to my hotel.
And I kept running into, like...
And protesters, including some big dudes who were from the football team, because I later talked to them, and they were like, there's the long-haired Nazi.
Get him, because my hair was long now.
Because I've been in character.
I've been shouting at him for hours as a neo-Nazi.
I finally got in a jam where I realized, because I kept running across them, and they kept recognizing me.
And so I got out a phone, and I pulled up, I had my driver's license, and I pulled up one of my articles that I'd written for the Southern Poverty Law Center on my phone.
And the next time they confronted me, I was just like, give me 10 seconds.
This is me.
I was undercover, guys.
This is the kind of stuff that I write.
And then they were like, not only like, okay, you're cool, but they like walked me back to like remaining six blocks to my hotel.
And another link back to, like, the childhood sexual assault is, like, when I was being raped, I disassociated, right?
I, like, have a clear memory of being like, this is...
I didn't know what was going on.
I was like, this is tremendously painful and terrifying.
So I'm just going to leave my body.
And I remember kind of floating up around the room, you know, almost like a near-death experience.
I'm like, oh, there I am down in that waterbed with that terrible thing happening to me, but I'm up here and I'm okay.
And...
I don't know if this is going to make sense, but I can sort of tap into that in a way in situations that a quote-unquote normal person might find terrifying.
I can just like remove myself from the fear of it a little bit.
Hmm and be able to Pass I guess because one of the things they're gonna like somebody's gonna look for is like Do you does it seem like you belong in this situation?
Right or does it seem like you're scared because if you're scared then you don't belong here That's what's craziest right your childhood experiences horrific act put in you this like switch we could hit the the anger outsider switch and Right.
Well, that makes sense, though, because you kind of had been around enough criminals and bad people that you kind of knew the world.
Right.
If you take a guy who's like a nerd and you put him in Mendocino around these savages that are out there growing weed and murdering people and using backhoes to shove them into the earth, they'd stand out.
The organization and the financial backing of these people, like, there's this thing like...
There's this weird thing that happens simultaneously where people want to call everything and everyone racist to the point where it's like you're ruining the word because there's real racism.
Those skinhead people and many more like them and Nazis and there's real ones.
When you call everybody a Nazi, you fuck it up because there's ones like you're encountering that actually are real.
If you're slightly above average intelligence and you're fairly well organized and you can gather a little bit of dough, you can become a major fucking player in this movement.
In the same way that if you're in a punk band and you're not getting anywhere, if you change your lyrics to white power lyrics, you're going to go from being a floundering punk band to having a worldwide fan base in the space of about three months.
If you can play your instruments reasonably competently and that's the ideology you put out, Because the standards really kind of aren't that high.
So by the same token, the point is that I think a lot of people are drawn to the power.
They see it as a way that they can easily amass power and control over other people.
Because the followers are waiting in that movement.
They're always there.
They're always waiting for different leaders to pop up and sort of amass power within it.
Yeah, you know how political grifters, like someone will be a Republican their whole life and then they'll see an opening and then they'll go, you know what, I'm going to be progressive.
And they'll be like aggressively progressive and then shit all over Republicans or vice versa.
You know how there's people that do that and you go...
I think you're just latching on to a thing.
You found a movement.
And I think the comparison to Renaissance Fair is brilliant.
I went to Renaissance Fair only once, but I had a great moment.
I was with my kids, and they were young.
I thought it would be a fun thing to take them, you know, silly thing.
But there's this one lady who would not play along with the other ladies.
The other ladies were talking, and we just had...
I forget what we were doing.
We were waiting for something.
I think my kid was getting her face painted or something.
And this lady was complaining about her husband not taking his medication.
You know, some people just, they just want to be themselves in this thing.
Like, Mark won't take his medication.
I fucking tell him, you know, you got high blood pressure, you need to take your medication, and this lady is in character.
She won't break character.
The other lady, what does Thao talk about with this medication?
The one lady was just being this, like, fucking complaining Karen, and this other lady was like, hey, bitch, I'm all in on this I live in the 1400s shit, so get the fuck out of here with your medication shit.
But it's such a weird dance that they're doing, right?
It's like they don't like whatever.
They don't like their station in life or maybe they just like drama.
They like dressing up.
They like theater.
And so they like putting on this stuff and pretending they're a blacksmith or whatever the fuck it is.
It's like these guys are doing that but in a way more intense way.
They're going all in and they found a group of people that they can...
That's the thing about humans.
We fucking, we seek tribes.
And whether it's a tribe of, you know, growers up in the middle of the mountains that have all agreed that it's okay to murder people, that try to steal your crop, or whether it's a bunch of people that just decide because you got beat up by a Mexican guy.
When you're 15 that, you know, the white power movement is valid and we need to purify the race and then you're about a bunch of other people that are like really hardcore and committed to this and you feel like a brotherhood in this weird fucking crazy way of thinking.
It's like a fucking virus that gets into people's brains and it just overrides the operating system.
But it finds a place where it's like, oh, here's the tribal place.
Let's take over this tribal place.
Because people have this desire to be accepted by their tribe.
They have this weird desire to be in a group of people that's intensely committed to them.
There's this tribe part that you could tap into with good and bad.
I had this thing for a while that I was watching a lot of like radical Islam videos.
Like these Islamicists that would talk to all these people and they would say like wild shit, and I don't even know these videos are still available on YouTube, but they would talk about death to apostates, death to homosexuals,
and I got down this rabbit hole because someone sent me this video saying that here's these guys that are speaking to these people in this other country and they're They're trying to say that it's not radical Islam.
This is just Islam.
But they're saying these things that a lot of people equate with radical Islam.
And I'm watching these guys say these things and I'm like, I'm recognizing why this is so intoxicating.
Because the guy was talking about all these other religions.
And he's like, the difference between all these other religions and Islam is that Islam is the truth.
That's the way he said it.
And everybody's like, yes, yes, yes.
And they're all in on this.
And it's like there's something attractive about someone who has this incredible confidence about this idea.
And all these other people agree to it vehemently, right?
It's weird, these little traps, these little switches that can go off in the brain where they can become attached to anything or any person or any ideology.
Yeah, just saying that you felt connected to these guys while you're locking arm in arm, dancing and singing to horrible fucking lyrics.
It's kind of crazy.
Did it feel, was part of you, like, going, this is, like, you know where they really did a great job of exposing that was American History X? That's a great movie.
It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon with clawed feet, a mane of fire, and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk.
Holy shit.
Transparent, the size of a child's fist.
Looks like a tiny ice carving or a statuette of glass.
It is neither.
In fact, it's 25 grams, a little less than one ounce, of nearly 100% pure, crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride known on the streets of Asia as shabu.
Wow.
Certainly manufactured in a clandestine laboratory in China, then shipped to the Philippines.
And these guys that were doing this stuff, did they have normal lives and they would occasionally go off the rails and do meth or were they just meth till they die?
And then methamphetamine, more potent and easier to make, was developed in Japan in 1919. Crystalline powder was soluble in water, making it the perfect candidate for injection.
Methamphetamine went into wide use during World War II when both sides used to keep the troops awake.
High doses were given to Japanese kamikaze pilots for the suicide missions.
Yeah, there it is.
Methamphetamine abuse by injection reached epidemic proportions when supplies stored for military use became available to the Japanese public.
What scares the shit out of me, and I'm sure you know journalists, journalists like Adderall.
The thing about amphetamines, though, is it doesn't make you a better writer, but it does make you a more productive one.
So people think they can become Philip K. Dick or something by taking speed, and then they look at what they produce the next day, and it's like, you know, it's as if...
For me, it works for me in terms of being more productive.
It's like a loving, nice drug that alleviates anxiety and insecurities.
And it has great promise.
Like MAPS is using it for PTSD for soldiers.
And there's...
Ongoing studies that seem to hold great promise in helping people alleviate some really traumatic moments from their past So there's like it's a it's a weird drug and that it's probably better if it's legal and regulated and if people figure out some sort of a way to keep it To keep it pure, where you know what you're actually getting.
And then there's also some pharmaceutical or some supplemental strategies to re-boost your serotonin after you're off of it.
There's this, what is that shit called?
The stuff that's in new mood.
What is that stuff called?
5 HTTP right?
Is that what it is?
It's tryptophan.
I forget the ingredients.
But there's stuff that you can...
Jamie will pull it up.
I haven't taken it in a long time.
There's stuff that you can take that actually allows your body, the precursors for serotonin, allows your body to...
And then tryptophan converts to 5-HTP so you get like two versions of it and then you take it while you're tripping.
So that like as your body depletes it because you're on this wild high because of the drug, this stuff forces your body to start reboosting it.
And then I know a lot of people who have depression, who suffer from low serotonin.
Like my friend Neil Brennan was taking that stuff for a while.
Just as a supplement and he found that it helped him a lot.
So there's ways that they could do this where they could maybe administer it in a way that you know people don't abuse it or they're less likely to abuse it but make sure that it's pure because part of the problem is when people are buying this stuff you're getting it laced with like fentanyl and all sorts of other shit and that's what's killing people.
It's not the MDMA that's killing people necessarily as much, I mean maybe it does, but not as much as the stuff that's laced with other shit because it's illegal.
It starts in the summer of 1997. And there were these hackers that were some of the best sources that I had.
There were these hackers and this group called the National Security Anarchists.
Anyway, they would send me information.
And one of them sent me a tip that there was a mafia hitman I'm going to get to the ecstasy, trust me.
Who was hanging out at this coffee shop near the Arizona State University campus called the Gold Bar Coffee Shop every Friday night.
And he was like signing autographs and this hacker had found this information on like a goth bulletin board on campus, like online bulletin board.
And he sent it to me.
He was like, you might want to check this out.
So I went and staked out the coffee house the next Friday night.
And I walk in and there are all these like goth chicks We're good to go.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
So, I'm thinking, like, at this time, Gravano was in witness protection.
It was just a few years after he'd ratted out John Gotti.
This is like, he was the highest-ranking, you know this guy, highest-ranking mob informant turncoat ever, right?
So I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be a good story, because there's some, somebody has convinced these goth chicks that he's Sammy the Bull Gravano, you know, because there's no fucking way.
And this...
Silver Lexus pulls in the parking lot of the coffee shop.
Owner of the coffee shop runs over to this piano.
It's in the lobby, starts playing the theme of The Godfather.
And in walks this guy, and I'm like, that is Sammy the Bull Gravano, like, without a doubt.
Like, that's fucking him.
And Sammy the Bull Gravano proceeds to go over and, like, sign these chicks' books and hold court for about an hour while he's drinking his double espresso, telling stories about, like, the mob and shit, okay?
And I know it was three weeks because I was going there and I was like, when are we going to pull the trigger?
When am I going to be like, Mr. Gravano, let me introduce myself.
My name is David Holthaus.
I'm a journalist.
I know, you know, I would really like to do a story about the fact that you're living in Phoenix.
What kind of terms can we come to so I can tell this story?
I waited one week too long.
Week number four, he's not there.
Five, six, seven, he's not there.
Ghost, gone.
Okay?
I was like, fuck.
It still, to me, is the story that got away.
I waited one week too long.
All right?
So this is like...
This is the time in my life where I was like having the rave scene too.
It's the summer of 97. That summer...
These guys from New York that were in their 20s like showed up kind of in the rave culture and they were like they had thick like Brooklyn accents and they stood out because they would wear like they were kind of trying to dress like ravers but we gave them the nickname the shiny shirt mafia because they would wear just these like gold and silver lame shirts and finally somebody's like dude that's not the shirts you want to wear let me take you to like a proper rape clothing store and thing but it's the rave scene everybody's accepted And they,
you know, they were going to warehouse parties and stuff and doing ecstasy, and they were just like part of the scene.
A few months after that, raves started to get robbed.
It took, it was like, looking back, it's a wonder it took so long for us to get robbed.
But these guys came in, guns, masks, took the gate, like, you know, probably 10 grand in cash at the gate, and they knew who was selling the ecstasy, and they took the pills and the cash.
Three raves got hit on the same night.
Then, ecstasy dealers started to get robbed.
One guy got kidnapped and held for ransom.
Like, this shit's going on.
Everyone's like...
Everyone who's...
Again, we...
You know, we thought of ourselves as party promoters, okay?
But really, we were ecstasy traffickers, but we were soft targets, man.
One guy gets taken up, gets nabbed, and taken up into the Superstition Mountains outside Phoenix.
And he says that he was shown a grave.
And these guys told him, like, here's the deal.
You can go in that hole tonight, or you can go back and tell all your little friends that you're only buying ecstasy from us from now on.
Okay?
And so he comes back with this message.
Meanwhile, these guys in the shiny shirt mafia, they're still going to raves and shit.
You know?
We haven't put it together.
So, everybody starts buying their ecstasy from a single source.
Ecstasy is not great, to your earlier point, but it's like the price per pill is such that everybody's making more money, the violence stops, the robberies stop, all the hassles stop.
1999, I get off a plane at Sky Harbor Airport, and there's front page news.
Sam and the Abro Gravano busted for running Ecstasy Ring.
And I open it up, and there's the news story.
At first, I'm like, God damn it.
You know, again, that story I missed, right?
And in there is a picture of Sam and the Bull's son and his son's friends.
And it's those fucking guys from New York.
I've never told this story, by the way.
The part about the coffee house and playing chess with Sam and the Bull, I wrote about that.
But for obvious reasons, I didn't write about being an ecstasy trafficker.
Okay?
So, I can't prove it, but I know what happened.
And what happened is, at a certain point...
Sammy the Bull Gravano's son told his dad about what they were doing, ripping off parties, robbing drug dealers and everything.
And Sammy the Bull Gravano said, you fucking knucklehead, instead of terrorizing these guys and extorting money from them, just take over their entire operation.
Because what Sammy the Bull Gravano got caught for was trafficking ecstasy in Arizona.
That's what he got popped for and went back to prison for.
Imagine if you're one of those guys that's in jail for the rest of your life for cannabis, and you hear this story about Sammy the Bull, murdered people, got into witness protection, got out, signing autographs, starts running ecstasy, gets out...
When I was in New York, I used to go to this pool hall and it was a really interesting mix of people but a lot of gambling addicts and weirdos and a lot of ex-cons and criminals and shit.
And this one guy who was this ex-con used to play no board chess with this kid.
Who was this young Jewish kid who was hanging around the pool hall.
He got kind of obsessed with the culture of gambling.
But he was a chess master, like a legit chess master.
So this guy was in his 40s with gray hair, his criminal with fucking missing teeth and shit.
Would play no-board chess with this young kid who's like 16 years old.
They would sit there and say the moves in their head.
Like, say the moves out loud.
The two of them would keep track of it.
It was wild.
It was wild.
It was wild to see.
Because you're watching something like, are these guys, is this a made-up language?
Like, what are they doing here?
Is this real?
Because I don't know how to play.
I mean, I know how to play chess, but I don't know how to play chess, really.
And this guy is a legitimate, I don't know if you know who Hicks and Gracie is, but he's a revered master, like a yogi, and like super exceptional jiu-jitsu player.
But he would talk about checkmate, and that's how a lot of guys talk about it.
That it is like, it's like you're trying to, this guy's trying to keep up a rhythm with you.
You're trying to get his back, he's trying to counter, and he's trying...
And there's all this stuff going on.
You have to understand where the right place to be and the wrong place to be is.
So it's not nearly as much brute strength and athleticism as people think.
It plays a part, particularly because you have to be in shape to keep up while you're rolling.
Right.
You have to be able to keep these movements going because if someone is as good as you but in better shape, they can push a higher pace.
And even though you understand where to be, your body can't respond properly because you're not in shape.
Other than that, it's really all about an understanding of the movements, and then it's about this deep well of knowledge that you have to have at a certain level, you know, at a level of a Marcelo Garcia that we were talking about before.
It's a deep, deep, deep well of knowledge.
You don't realize it until you start doing it.
So, like, one of my best friends, Eddie Bravo, who's a jiu-jitsu instructor, and he always says, like, the best guys are like nerd assassins.
Like these super smart guys who like you and if you met them like you would never believe in a million years Right these guys are like until you looked at their ears their ears are all fucked up You know they're all cauliflower ear, but so many of them are just these really sort of thoughtful Thinking people who are just obsessed with these ideas that that that in comping encompasses jujitsu and Yeah.
I think Stuart Cooper, he has a documentary on jiu-jitsu.
I'm sure there's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's interesting.
There's one thing on YouTube that's really interesting.
It's about this one team, and their gym's called Daisy Fresh.
And what it is is, I think they're in Illinois.
And I saw one of them compete two weekends ago in Austin.
They have this thing called Who's Number One?
It's a thing on flow grappling.
It's a professional jiu-jitsu competition that they have once a month in Austin.
They stream it live.
It's really cool.
And this one guy...
How do I say his last name?
Yeah, what is that young man's name?
Andrew...
I don't want to fuck up his last name this is the Daisy this is the Daisy Fresh team and And anyway, what this Daisy Fresh team is, it's a laundromat called Daisy Fresh.
They bought this laundromat and converted it into a jiu-jitsu academy.
And these guys live in this jiu-jitsu academy.
They have like blow-up mattresses and shit, and they train like 24-7.
And they're a team of fucking savage nerd psychos who live in this place.
And it still says Daisy Fresh on the outside.
So people will show up thinking they're going to get their laundry done, and they see all these guys, and this is the inside of the place.
Look, they're sleeping on these mattresses, and they have jugs of water that they're drinking.
It's like this weird, crazy, primitive environment with wrestling mats, but they're producing world-class grapplers.
It's a fascinating documentary series that's available on YouTube.
And you see them going over techniques and talking about these techniques.
And it's kind of similar to the way you see in the Queen's Gambit, people talking about chess moves.
So it's just another thing, like people go down a hole, a rabbit hole, and what it really is is them trying to figure out a game.
And this game is jujitsu, and with some people it's chess, with some people it's a video game or whatever it is, but that's what they're doing, you know?
There was a guy who was playing online, and I think he was from Indonesia.
And he was playing online and his score jumped up way too fast and someone decided this guy was a cheater and so they red flagged him and banned him and then that person got a bunch of hate from all these other people like no that's my relative and he just hasn't played in a long time but he used to be a professional player and the reason why it takes him a long time to do the moves is because he's got an old phone and his phone just doesn't process very well.
And so they convinced this person to let this guy have a match.
And so this guy had a match against this woman who was a real master.
And they did it online.
And he fell apart.
Instead of being like at 90% accuracy, like a really elite chess player, he was making all these mistakes and he got trounced by this girl.
So everybody realized like, oh...
The guy who said he was cheating was correct.
He really was cheating.
But in the process, more than a million people watched it streamed.
So it was the most watched chess game of all time because of the controversy about it.
Because this guy used to be, or they thought this guy was, they thought he was cheating, and he was.
Turns out he was.
But it became, because of the controversy, this huge event.
Which makes you think, like, it's weird, right?
Like, this is it.
Cheating controversy results in most watched chess stream in history.
So that guy on the left is full of shit.
And they caught him because, like, it's, you know, it's like jujitsu.
It's very similar in that if you pretend you're a black belt and you roll with a black belt, That black belt will say, yeah, man, you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
This is fake.
You could just go buy a black belt and pretend.
Maybe you're an athletic guy.
And people have done that before.
And there's a bunch of videos online, on YouTube in particular, of fake black belts getting exposed at gyms.
Because you just can't fake that.
And also people know where you got it from.
They'll say, where'd you get your black belt from?
And you'd be like, Pedro Sauer.
And like, hmm, that's interesting because my cousin's from Pedro Sauer's academy and he's never heard of you.
And then, because there's only, you know, every elite instructor, you know, even the best instructors ever, maybe they have a hundred black belts.
When Stalking the Boogeyman, that essay about my childhood trauma, was adapted as a play, I was like...
I kind of got in there and rewrote some scenes and was like, I got kind of a knack for this.
I get this medium.
I grew up going to theater in Alaska.
My parents took me to theater a lot.
But the thing I really found out is that...
I really enjoyed being part of a collaborative team effort in a creative pursuit.
The type of journalism I did, pretty lonely pursuit.
Every once in a while, I pair up with a photographer, but for the most part, just out there on my own, you know, reporting.
And the play, which was an off-Broadway production, and just working with the actors and the director and the set designers and everything, hey, I actually like working with other people, and they're smart, creative people.
So I'm sort of drawn to that.
Same reason I like making docs.
Docs are a team effort.
I think the play...
A good buddy of mine who was on your show recently, Tiller Russell.
We were shooting with Tarzan, like the Russian mobster that's in the movie.
We were shooting with him in Moscow, and this DEA guy had told us, like, Assume your hotel room is bugged.
But we got to the hotel.
We're staying at the Four Seasons in Moscow.
That was the whole scene.
And we weren't cautious about what we were saying in our hotel room.
So we were talking about the movie.
We were just like, this is bullshit.
These rooms aren't bugged.
But in the lobby of the hotel, and every hotel in that area is so close to Red Square.
There's these guys that are...
There's this secret police force that's especially in that part of Moscow.
Then they're Chechens, and you can spot them.
They're wearing these ill-fitting suits, and they have big beards, and they're always sitting in the lobby wearing newspapers and shit.
And after the second of three days of interviews, Tiller and I and Tarzan, the Russian mob guy that was buying a sub for the cartel, right?
We left the hotel and we went to walk around and talk and stuff.
And I noticed that the Chechens have left the lobby and are now following us.
And so we're texting with one of the producers and we're like, because every day we've been sending the footage by FedEx, we thought, back to L.A. And then we had a copy with us in the hotel room safe.
So we're texting the producer and we're like, that footage is gone, right?
And he's like, yes.
And the other footage is in the safe in the hotel room.
And then we get back to the hotel and it turns out that actually none of it had left the hotel.
And so then we just panicked because all of our interview footage is there in Moscow with us.
And we just fucking raced to the airport and got the fuck out of there.
Yeah, it was...
The Chechen guys had left the lobby and were following us.
He doesn't have a birth certificate because his family, his mom gave birth to him in the woods, and they convinced him until he was 12 years old that he was a wizard.
His parents were crazy.
So he tried to travel outside the country.
He can't get a passport because he doesn't have a birth certificate.
It's a wild story.
He talks about it in this documentary series.
Brilliant kid.
Amazing at jujitsu.
I mean, just amazing.
I watched him compete and win a couple weekends ago.
That's neither here nor there.
I just wanted to amend that because I felt bad because I couldn't quite replace his name.
There's a couple stories that I wrote that I never felt like I cracked them.
Back to that earlier point early on today about never feeling like the story's finished.
And the director that I worked with on Sasquatch, Joshua Faye and I, he and I are trying to put together also like Going back and reinvestigating a story I wrote about unsolved murders, basically.
Another unsolved murder that I wrote about in Denver in the early 2000s.
So I'm hoping to go back and kind of get a second bite of that apple, too.
No, it was a drug dealer who was murdered in Denver in 2002, and I wrote about his murder at the time, and, you know, kind of got a few leads on whodunit, but just kind of ran out of time and had to move on to the next story.
And so it's, like, similar to Sasquatch, it could be going back and, like, investigating the crime.
The key difference here is that actually, like, there was for sure there was an actual murder in a body.
But also kind of an autobiographical story that will probably get into the stalking the boogeyman, stalking the guy that raped me kind of thing.
Because at the same time I was investigating this murder, I was plotting a murder that I was plotting to commit.
Yeah, because it was, you know, I get asked a lot, like, would you have actually done it?
And I think so, because it was, I freaked out.
I mean, now I know, like, I have PTSD. Ecstasy has been hugely helpful to me with treating PTSD. But it was the first kind of full-blown PTSD episode I had was when I found out that I'd just moved to Denver and that this fucking guy lived there.
I'd lost track of where he was living, right?
So I just flipped out, like nightmares, flashbacks, adrenaline surges, panic attacks, all of it.
I was just a mess.
But as soon as I kind of isolated his proximity to me as the cause, I was like, okay, and I'm going to eliminate that cause.
I got calmer.
And the more I started to plot it, I, like, calmed down more to where it was, like, the plotting and the planning and the following and everything.
It was like, that's what I needed to do to kind of keep myself calm.
And it felt good in the sense that I didn't feel as bad as I did.
And it felt...
I described it as, like, feeling like a kind of...
But it wasn't a pleasant calm.
It was like a void.
It was like an absence of feeling.
It's like the same way that outer space is calm.
You know, that's like the space that I was sort of operating in, the mind space I was operating in.
So to give that up was hard, but I found that I achieved the same effect by then writing the story and plotting the story and how am I going to write that?
But I have moral qualms about it because I know that that sick fuck, Ramirez, would have loved the fact that there was a Netflix series made about him and his crime spree.
And it's more about the cops that caught him.
And we did do a really good job of...
Giving victims and surviving family members of victims their say, and not just treating the victims as abstract names and ages, which most serial killer shows do, and showing the real human impact of what he did.
But even so, he would have loved it.
He would have loved seeing his face on billboards around L.A., and when they came out with the marketing campaign, I was like, ah, God, fuck.