True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 357: American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders: Director’s Cut: Part 1
Aired: 2024-02-26
Duration: 01:26:10


=== Fucking Freezing (02:24) ===

[00:00:00]  I just want to point out here that the bomb bomb at the beginning of the Netflix stuff, like the Netflix theme or whatever.
[00:00:09]  When the logo goes?
[00:00:11]  I learned from the Tucker Carlson interview with Kevin Spacey that that comes from a noise that Kevin Spacey himself makes in the hit show Frank Card's House of Cards.
[00:00:25]  He does boom boom.
[00:00:26]  I've never seen it.
[00:00:27]  And so without further ado, and as you could tell by that intro, I would like to introduce our guest today, Kevin Spacey.
[00:00:58]  Hello, Brace.
[00:01:00]  Good evening.
[00:01:01]  Because it is evening.
[00:01:02]  It is evening, and I'm fucking freezing.
[00:01:04]  Liz is so cold that I can't, I don't even have the ability to not mention it on air because I'm so fucking cold.
[00:01:11]  Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you could see Liz right now.
[00:01:13]  Actually, I would hate for you to see Liz because I would have to honor kill her.
[00:01:18]  But Liz is currently wearing some kind of warm-style jacket.
[00:01:24]  You can hear it.
[00:01:24]  You can hear it.
[00:01:25]  Make the noise.
[00:01:26]  I love the noise.
[00:01:27]  It's too, I couldn't wear it during the interview because it's too loud.
[00:01:30]  It's a loud motherfucking jacket.
[00:01:31]  You know what?
[00:01:32]  I don't care for these, for listeners for listening to me yap.
[00:01:35]  I don't care.
[00:01:36]  You get to hear this.
[00:01:37]  get to hear it.
[00:01:37]  But Liz is currently, you're doing it too, dude.
[00:01:41]  I'm mirroring.
[00:01:42]  What?
[00:01:42]  You, okay, that's your own issues too.
[00:01:45]  Well, I'm dealing with two very different.
[00:01:47]  I'm not cold.
[00:01:48]  That's because I'm cold.
[00:01:49]  I understand that's because you're cold, but I'm not saying you shouldn't be cold.
[00:01:53]  Well, I wish you weren't cold.
[00:01:56]  I feel like I'm trapped here.
[00:01:57]  No, because I feel like you're suggesting that my posture isn't, like, me crossing my arms is just because I'm cold.
[00:02:03]  Well, it is because you're cold.
[00:02:04]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  No, that's what I'm saying.
[00:02:06]  I thought you were thinking that I was crossed.
[00:02:08]  God, I'm just, well, now I'm just clearing the air.
[00:02:11]  Doing a cross-examination.
[00:02:13]  The Arctic air because it's fucking freezing.
[00:02:16]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:17]  Welcome to Tronan.
[00:02:18]  Welcome to TrueNAN.
[00:02:18]  My name is Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba.
[00:02:21]  Braz Belden.
[00:02:24]  I'm Liz.

=== Two Fellas Investigate (07:55) ===

[00:02:25]  We are, of course, joined by Producer Yanksomski.
[00:02:27]  Already said what it was, but I'll say it again.
[00:02:29]  Ms. Trunan.
[00:02:30]  And today we have a first part of a two-part couple of interviews.
[00:02:38]  Yeah.
[00:02:39]  I don't know where I was going with that.
[00:02:40]  So we are interviewing a couple of Joe Schmoes.
[00:02:44]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:02:45]  A couple of real gum shoes.
[00:02:47]  Real gum shoes.
[00:02:48]  Real life gum shoes.
[00:02:50]  Two fellas who found themselves kind of in the midst of investigating a crazy story.
[00:02:58]  And I think they got wrapped up in it and spit back out, not the same.
[00:03:03]  And you know what?
[00:03:04]  Whom among us?
[00:03:06]  Yeah, I got to say, it is, in talking to them and watching the documentary and just this is a big motherfucking project.
[00:03:16]  Yes.
[00:03:16]  And it is, I feel like that's kind of getting towards in the second episode.
[00:03:21]  I was just like, damn, you must feel insane.
[00:03:22]  Yeah, totally.
[00:03:23]  Like, put this to bed after 10 years.
[00:03:26]  Yeah.
[00:03:28]  But there is a documentary, a new documentary.
[00:03:31]  I think the first one, at least that I know, I know there was like unsolved mysteries about Danny Castellero, but about the octopus.
[00:03:41]  And the octopus is one of those things that I guess in, I don't want to say like the conspiracy world, but I'll say it, the conspiracy world is like a very, it's troubling set of allegations, I guess.
[00:03:59]  And I mean that because it has like, it's so vast and sprawling and covers so many different things that like not only is there a certain amount of difficulty in telling the story, but there's a certain amount of difficulty in understanding it itself.
[00:04:12]  I mean, you can see that we have to go through a lot just to even get the basic stuff out there that people so people can really understand what we're talking about in the most general sense.
[00:04:22]  Yeah.
[00:04:23]  I mean, it basically centers around a journalist, Danny Castellero, who finds himself trying to track down why a company got screwed by the government on a seemingly innocuous piece of software and a government contract.
[00:04:40]  And it leads him down, I guess you would say, a rabbit hole.
[00:04:43]  I mean, it really is like an Alice in Wonderland fucking story.
[00:04:46]  Yeah.
[00:04:47]  And he finds himself on the other side with his wrist slash in a bathtub under mysterious circumstances.
[00:04:53]  And everything that happens in between is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, a bunch of shady characters, a bunch of maybe real life, funny three-letter agency, you know, mercenaries, a bunch of, you know, I don't know what you say, like members of the criminal underworld and the government overworld and everything in between.
[00:05:17]  And the two Zach and Christian, who are here today talking to us from, you know, they made this movie called American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders.
[00:05:30]  I said that funny.
[00:05:33]  But they found themselves basically back in Danny's shoes investigating this story.
[00:05:38]  Yeah.
[00:05:39]  It's a weird sort of, we get into it a bit later, but a weird doubling that happens that everyone that kind of tries to get into this thing from whatever angle it is is not the same when they come out.
[00:05:50]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:52]  And it's one of those things that I was very, I mean, I was surprised that someone was doing a documentary on this because it's such a big subject and so, I mean, and I think they do a really good job of showing essentially like all of the different facets, the human facets of this case.
[00:06:14]  But it's such a sprawling conspiracy that touches on almost every deep event or facet of the deep state in the post-war era and during the Cold War.
[00:06:26]  And it's really, it's really something.
[00:06:30]  Also, just weird coincidence, I met both of these guys completely randomly.
[00:06:35]  No idea they'd been involved in this like a month and a half ago, which I think is strange.
[00:06:39]  Or was it random?
[00:06:40]  Or was it random?
[00:06:41]  I sat right next to one of them.
[00:06:43]  Who was it?
[00:06:44]  I don't know.
[00:06:45]  Who knows?
[00:06:46]  But that was always just like, what the fuck?
[00:06:49]  Anyways, the documentary comes out on the 28th on Netflix.
[00:06:54]  This is not an ad for Netflix.
[00:06:56]  Watch it however you can.
[00:06:58]  But I got to tell you, it's really good.
[00:07:00]  I really, really, really enjoyed it.
[00:07:02]  I think they did a, as somebody who has, you know, certainly a cursory knowledge of this, it really, it really does a great job of telling the story.
[00:07:22]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Rez.
[00:07:25]  We have with us here Michael, Can I Get a Bump, Bro?
[00:07:30]  And Johnny Casamigos.
[00:07:32]  That intro was rough.
[00:07:34]  Let me.
[00:07:35]  I think Johnny Casamigos was funny.
[00:07:36]  Johnny Casamigos was pretty good.
[00:07:38]  I was struggling with the other, with the other, I was trying to come up with something for Ricano Shudo.
[00:07:42]  And Can I Get a Bump, Bro, works in a sense, but it's a little too Shakespearean, I think, for much of our audience who is, frankly, probably listening to this through one of those AI language translators into Chinese.
[00:07:54]  Fellows, welcome to the studio.
[00:07:57]  We have with us here, and I have my phone out with the full title and everything, so I don't fuck this up.
[00:08:03]  The creators of American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders.
[00:08:08]  Director Zachary Traits, an independent, well, no.
[00:08:13]  Dependent.
[00:08:14]  And dependent.
[00:08:17]  Investigator and producer, I guess, Christian Hansen.
[00:08:22]  Hello.
[00:08:23]  Thank God.
[00:08:24]  Did I fuck either of your names up?
[00:08:25]  Your faces didn't.
[00:08:26]  You kind of fucked Zach's name up a little bit.
[00:08:28]  It's just tough.
[00:08:29]  It's ethnic.
[00:08:30]  So it's difficult.
[00:08:31]  I guess depending on where you're from.
[00:08:34]  Yeah, it's also a bummer because in the film that we made, somebody cold calls me and they mispronounce my name.
[00:08:41]  And so now everybody pronounces it that way, you know, automatically.
[00:08:45]  Yeah.
[00:08:46]  How do they say it?
[00:08:47]  He says, Zachary Treats, please.
[00:08:50]  Mr. Treats.
[00:08:51]  I'm used to getting that by people who don't know my name, but now it's like, I think that's now like every Christian was like, don't you want to like correct that in the movie?
[00:08:58]  And I was like, how?
[00:08:59]  Like, I put my voice in there.
[00:09:01]  Just as soon as it's trits.
[00:09:04]  It's trits.
[00:09:05]  So it's like a little German boy boy.
[00:09:07]  Treits, please.
[00:09:08]  It's like a little German boy asking for candy.
[00:09:11]  Treitz.
[00:09:11]  Treitz, please.
[00:09:12]  Treitz, please.
[00:09:14]  Fellas, welcome to the show.
[00:09:17]  First of all, I should start off with, I think by the time this episode is out, on the day this episode comes out, your film is not yet out.
[00:09:25]  I think this is coming out on the 26th.
[00:09:27]  Your flick is coming out on the 28th.
[00:09:29]  But on February 28th, all four episodes of American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders, will be on Netflix.
[00:09:39]  Right?
[00:09:39]  Yes, same time.
[00:09:42]  Your information is correct.
[00:09:44]  So just to let you listeners know, a lot of this, I feel like this will, anyone with a cursory knowledge of the octopus sprawl will definitely have a lot to dig in with these.
[00:09:56]  But I feel like anybody, even if you do, would be definitely would benefit from watching all four episodes to get a lot of what we're talking about and to put a lot of it into context, which I'm very excited to get to.
[00:10:08]  Agreed.
[00:10:09]  So wait, I have a question right off the bat, which is how long have you guys been working on this thing?
[00:10:14]  Because in the episodes, is it episodes?
[00:10:18]  I'm going to probably call it episodes and movie, just so you know.

=== Gary Webb's Legacy (15:01) ===

[00:10:20]  I do the same thing.
[00:10:21]  Okay, so in the movie that's broken in episodes, it seems like it's spanning about 10 years, but it's a little unclear.
[00:10:29]  Of our time.
[00:10:29]  Of your time.
[00:10:30]  Right.
[00:10:30]  Like, how long did this whole project take?
[00:10:32]  Well, Christian started it.
[00:10:33]  Yeah, I started first in about like 2011 or 2012.
[00:10:38]  And then, and I was working doing research for what I was hoping would be a book project.
[00:10:45]  Interesting.
[00:10:46]  And meanwhile, Zach was making an independent film that was set during the Civil War.
[00:10:53]  And then we decided, I don't know, in about 2017, like Zach had decided to join me in this process, in this adventure.
[00:11:07]  I mean, it wasn't even, I don't even know if it was a decision.
[00:11:09]  It was just like Christian would talk to me about this story.
[00:11:12]  I didn't know anything about it, you know, starting whenever he started.
[00:11:17]  His quest into it got more and more esoteric and strange and kind of worrisome, you know, him just stand up like late nights.
[00:11:26]  You know, you go over to his house.
[00:11:27]  He's like, I've been up for like two days.
[00:11:28]  And it's like, yeah, you look like it.
[00:11:30]  This is horrible.
[00:11:31]  Talking about our friends with, you know, me, our friends, his sisters, the family.
[00:11:35]  You know, it got to be the point sometimes, and I hate to like put, you know, Christian's, I think, in a better place now, but we were just like, man, I'm worried about him.
[00:11:46]  And everybody's like, yeah, we are.
[00:11:48]  Like, is there, is it intervention?
[00:11:49]  Like, what do we do?
[00:11:51]  And, you know, he kind of, that came and went.
[00:11:54]  I think the most intense parts of it came and went in those first five years.
[00:11:58]  Yeah.
[00:11:59]  And then 2015 was like the most intense.
[00:12:03]  What do you mean?
[00:12:04]  Just like, I was kind of withdrawal from society, you know, talking a lot about PDFs, like Liz said.
[00:12:15]  And I mean, I was so kind of like lost and on my own that I kind of not even like kind of overtly wanted some sort of assassin or some sort of like sign that like I was onto something and all of this was real because I was just, is it, it was something, it was so tangible yet intangible.
[00:12:40]  And I was going, looking into such dangerous stuff and so many people who had died and it was getting more and more obscure and more and more personal.
[00:12:51]  And yeah, I just remember like, you know, I was living in Red Hook at that time and just like hoping that like, you know, someone would, someone would pop in and shut it down.
[00:13:03]  You were hoping that someone would shoot you on the subject.
[00:13:05]  Yeah.
[00:13:06]  And you're like, wait, we don't need an intervention.
[00:13:08]  We need to make a movie.
[00:13:10]  This is the perfect opportunity.
[00:13:11]  So we just decided to scare him one night.
[00:13:14]  I do think that like there is something.
[00:13:16]  Can I just say his opinion on that, I think, has changed.
[00:13:19]  So if for any fans out there, future fans, his opinion on that desire has changed.
[00:13:24]  So don't do it to help.
[00:13:26]  You want to kill me.
[00:13:28]  I love being alive.
[00:13:29]  We're loving life.
[00:13:30]  I didn't mean to cut you off, but no, I think that there is something that's very specific about this story that drives people crazy.
[00:13:38]  And I know that we want to talk about that.
[00:13:39]  And that's a big part of, I mean, that comes into play in the series, obviously, and is like a big kind of part of the narrative.
[00:13:47]  But maybe in order to get into that, we should kind of back up and give as much of a kind of outline, overview, a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a change.
[00:13:59]  I think a little cheat.
[00:14:00]  What are we talking about?
[00:14:02]  What are we talking about?
[00:14:02]  Maybe it's not like, what is the octopus?
[00:14:04]  Maybe we should start with Danny Castellero and work our way backwards and forwards.
[00:14:10]  Yeah, and every single race.
[00:14:12]  Yeah, and try to keep, I think it's important to try to keep it in a timeline so people can understand what we're bouncing around.
[00:14:18]  There's like multiple layers of different stories that are interconnected with different timelines, including our own timeline.
[00:14:25]  So we'll try to like constantly while we were making the show, it was a matter of like, how do you make this make sense?
[00:14:33]  And we will try to do that in an even more limited form of audio.
[00:14:37]  Now.
[00:14:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:38]  Believe me, I'm familiar with, and especially because there are two people in the documentary and two people in the story with the same last name.
[00:14:46]  Believe me, that has been one of our biggest struggles.
[00:14:49]  If we ever do an episode with two people with the same last name, forget it.
[00:14:53]  Try three.
[00:14:54]  Try three.
[00:14:55]  Try three rabbis.
[00:14:56]  Try three.
[00:14:56]  Oh, my God.
[00:14:58]  Then we have, so there's two people with different, the same last name.
[00:15:03]  And then the son of the guy with the other name has the same first name as the other guy with the same last name.
[00:15:10]  Bobby Nichols.
[00:15:11]  Bobby and Robert.
[00:15:12]  Robert Nichols.
[00:15:13]  And not just that, because of the nature of this story, you start to question whether or not that's intentional, right?
[00:15:19]  You start to question, is this, am I being fucked with?
[00:15:22]  There's a lot of patterns.
[00:15:24]  There's a lot of cosmic level.
[00:15:25]  Yes.
[00:15:26]  Or even intentionally by bad actors.
[00:15:29]  Okay.
[00:15:30]  I mean, just want to throw a pin in.
[00:15:33]  There's the Philip Arthur Thompson story.
[00:15:34]  We found out there were two Philip Arthur Thompsons.
[00:15:36]  Yeah.
[00:15:36]  Jeez.
[00:15:36]  Possibly one of them was named Philip Althon, Alan Thompson.
[00:15:39]  They were murderous.
[00:15:39]  And they're both possible murders.
[00:15:41]  It was very strange.
[00:15:42]  Very strange.
[00:15:43]  So I would say I think some of our listeners might be familiar with Danny Castellero's name in the same sort of way.
[00:15:49]  I feel like him and Gary Webb are two of the journalists that people think of like dying under mysterious circumstances while looking into or having looked into something that intelligence agencies would rather they haven't.
[00:16:02]  And I feel like Gary Webb, there's been a lot of attention pay.
[00:16:06]  I mean, there's been movies and books and documentaries and all this kind of stuff.
[00:16:12]  Danny Castellero, less so, although also pretty prominent.
[00:16:15]  So I think, yeah, let's start with doing a little timeline of his death.
[00:16:20]  So maybe life.
[00:16:21]  Yeah.
[00:16:21]  In life.
[00:16:22]  Danny Castellero was born in Northern Virginia, like basically DC, in McLean, Virginia.
[00:16:31]  And sorry.
[00:16:36]  In 1990, he started researching this book project that started out being about stolen computer software.
[00:16:47]  And just to really make it all very briefly, he started in August 1990.
[00:16:52]  And in August 1991, he told several close friends that he was going to West Virginia, this town, Martinsburg, West Virginia, which is about an hour and a half drive from Northern Virginia,
[00:17:04]  to meet a source that he was both excited about and scared of that was going to help him tie up this research project that had morphed since the initial question that he had about the stolen software into like this interconnected web of arms deals and espionage and lies and weird shady characters that he'd become very close with and He is seen.
[00:17:34]  We have reports of him waiting around for someone.
[00:17:37]  There's also blocks of time that we haven't been able to account for based on the police records from his final days.
[00:17:46]  And then on Saturday morning, early in the morning, he wrote a very brief note that said, To my loved ones, please forgive me for what I've done, most especially my son.
[00:17:58]  I know deep down in my heart, God will let me in.
[00:18:01]  And then that's a paraphrase.
[00:18:03]  I think that's roughly what I'm saying.
[00:18:05]  It's not exactly what.
[00:18:08]  And then he committed suicide.
[00:18:12]  Or did he died?
[00:18:14]  I mean, he died in the bathroom, in the bathtub.
[00:18:20]  And two weeks before that, he had told his brother that if an accident happens, don't believe it.
[00:18:26]  All kinds of, I mean, we'll get into it, but there's it's a very odd set of circumstances.
[00:18:32]  I mean, Gary Webb is his story is also important and sad.
[00:18:38]  And I think Gary Webb almost certainly did commit suicide.
[00:18:42]  Yeah, that seems to be a consensus among a lot of people.
[00:18:44]  You know, there were two bullet holes in the head, but one was in the cheek.
[00:18:47]  Yeah.
[00:18:48]  And, you know, but it's also interesting that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post actively destroyed him and picked his story up.
[00:19:00]  But rather than taking a really good piece of journalism and running with it and expanding on it, they used unnamed CIA sources to debunk him.
[00:19:10]  And they picked apart his personal life.
[00:19:12]  And it was awful.
[00:19:14]  And they destroyed, his career was destroyed by his colleagues unnecessarily.
[00:19:19]  And yeah, I think he might have committed suicide.
[00:19:22]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:23]  His career was murdered by unnamed sources from the CIA.
[00:19:27]  Whereas, you know, Danny lives, Danny was reporting on similar stuff.
[00:19:31]  Danny and him talked, right?
[00:19:33]  No, Danny and Gary Webb didn't talk, but Danny is a footnote.
[00:19:37]  Danny's mentioned in Gary Webb's book, Dark Alliance.
[00:19:41]  Right.
[00:19:42]  But whereas Danny's death was ruled a suicide by the local police, and then two days later, they got in touch with his family.
[00:19:54]  And that sort of like, why is there a two-day gap?
[00:19:57]  Created some suspicion around it, what was happening in that time.
[00:20:00]  And then the family said, well, okay, suicide, but, you know, you got to understand what our brother, what Danny was working on to really know whether it was a suicide or something else happened because he was dealing with a lot of dangerous people and dangerous stories.
[00:20:17]  He'd be threats.
[00:20:19]  And we'd like you to look into this.
[00:20:22]  And that kind of set up this media firestorm, I guess, that descended on Martinsburg and that whole DC area.
[00:20:31]  It became a national news story about what happened to Danny?
[00:20:33]  Was he murdered?
[00:20:34]  All this stuff.
[00:20:36]  And then as those things tend to happen, I mean, there was an investigation by the local police.
[00:20:41]  They said it was indeed a suicide.
[00:20:44]  The family pushed harder.
[00:20:46]  A few years later, there was an FBI investigation, DOJ FBI investigation that re-examined the Martinsburg stuff.
[00:20:53]  They said that the evidence was that he had committed suicide.
[00:20:58]  And there were a few other sort of congressional and other independent investigations.
[00:21:04]  But essentially, for the last 30 years, there's been this question and almost, I guess, a mushrooming in the kind of conspiracy industrial complex about like, well, obviously this is a cover-up from the government.
[00:21:19]  And Danny was on to like the secret powers underneath how the world works.
[00:21:25]  And he was definitely assassinated.
[00:21:27]  And the official story has always been like, guys, get it together.
[00:21:31]  He was broke.
[00:21:33]  He was at the end of his rope.
[00:21:35]  There was no story there.
[00:21:37]  He committed suicide, except it, you know?
[00:21:41]  And so.
[00:21:42]  But then there's a question of what happened to him.
[00:21:45]  But I was also intrigued by the question of, okay, so what was he working on?
[00:21:49]  And in the articles that I found about him, it would name-checked different major scandals from the 1980s.
[00:21:59]  The October surprise, which is the, whatever, it's the rigging of the 1980 election between Carter and Reagan.
[00:22:06]  There's the Iran-Contra scandal and savings a loan crisis, all these different 1980s scandals, which I, as a CE student, didn't know that much about.
[00:22:21]  Also, they're not taught that much.
[00:22:23]  Yeah, no one teaches about the savings.
[00:22:25]  But I mean, and obviously the Inslaw case.
[00:22:32]  And so I was very curious what he was looking into.
[00:22:37]  And it all seemed really interesting to me.
[00:22:40]  So I was both wanting to figure out what happened to him and then also figure out what it was exactly he was looking into and try to figure out.
[00:22:52]  And no one had done that before.
[00:22:54]  And he did leave behind a lot of notes and scribbles and book proposals.
[00:22:59]  And the notes have phone numbers of people's names and companies and all this stuff.
[00:23:06]  So I just started familiarizing myself with milieu of 1980s conspiracy and political scandals and got familiar with the characters involved.
[00:23:18]  Very important one is a guy named William Casey, who is the CIA director for Runnel Reagan.
[00:23:24]  And yeah, I mean, we base, I mean, and it's just like this long, became a 10-year or longer and kind of continuing process of mapping out this whole story, you know, both the story he was writing and the, you know, what happened to him when he died and why.
[00:23:45]  Well, let's talk a little bit about, as much as we can, the story he was writing.
[00:23:49]  You mentioned the Inslaw case.
[00:23:50]  Maybe we should start there because that's kind of when Danny's, you know, introduction into all of this begins, right?
[00:23:59]  He's working at, what was the name of the computer age?
[00:24:01]  The computer world.
[00:24:05]  Computer age.
[00:24:06]  Computer age.
[00:24:07]  It was like a little trade publication.
[00:24:09]  Right.
[00:24:10]  And I want to correct the record.
[00:24:12]  Wikipedia quotes a Vanity Fair article by Ron Rosenbaum that says that he was a dabbler in journalism.
[00:24:20]  And that's incorrect.
[00:24:22]  I mean, working for a trade publication is journalism.
[00:24:25]  You do have to develop sources.
[00:24:26]  True.
[00:24:27]  You do have to break stories.
[00:24:29]  And you're actually more familiar with your particular area of interest than a Ron Rosenbaum who's writing about a mysterious death in Martinsburg, The Skull and Bones, or whatever.
[00:24:42]  Ron Rosenbaum has been driven a little bit crazy by, you know, and we're not like sitting there.
[00:24:48]  No, he just attacked Ron Rosenbaum.
[00:24:53]  In the piece, he goes on on a limb saying that basically Danny conned his family into believing that he was into believing that his death was a suicide made, designed by Danny to look like a murder so that his Catholic family could deal with the loss of him.
[00:25:12]  That's the contention he goes out on.
[00:25:14]  Which is the same contention that the FBI lands on, which I find strange.
[00:25:19]  As a journalist, that's a big limb to go out on.

=== Danny's Inslaw Odyssey (11:03) ===

[00:25:22]  And he also was friends with Danny.
[00:25:23]  And it's just like, I could never, I would never go on that limb.
[00:25:26]  And leaving out Quare.
[00:25:28]  He knew about Quare.
[00:25:28]  Quair was around back then.
[00:25:30]  Yeah.
[00:25:30]  So he paints him as a hack and a kook.
[00:25:33]  And he also does a good, it's a good piece, you know.
[00:25:37]  Yeah, I read it.
[00:25:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:38]  He has amazing quotes from people at the time.
[00:25:40]  It's just the conclusion is really strange.
[00:25:43]  I guess for me, it's like just that one little conclusion of, and we're getting ahead of ourselves maybe a little bit here, but just while we're on the topic, it's like, okay, so he made it look like it was a suicide, made it look like a murder.
[00:25:57]  Why did he write the note?
[00:25:58]  Yeah, why would he write it?
[00:26:00]  The police thought it was a suicide.
[00:26:02]  He kind of missed the mark on that because like the officials thought it was a suicide.
[00:26:07]  Nobody was afraid of it.
[00:26:08]  Yeah, he was so good at it that he just Because it really does, you know, once you look into it, once you look at the actual scene, which we eventually did, like, yeah, it looks like if you don't know anything, it looks like a suicide.
[00:26:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:21]  He's not doing a great job of making it look like a sort of well, he paints Danny in that piece too, as like very willing to believe everything everyone tells him, which I gather isn't exactly the case,
[00:26:35]  but it's sort of like a that maybe because of that article or whatever, but that's like sort of how Danny Castellero was seen by a lot of people as somebody who was just like overly accepting of these narratives that were spun by inarguable con men.
[00:26:52]  But it's interesting because it is very like, yeah, it's sort of, it is a, I think, I mean, I think listeners should read the piece.
[00:27:00]  You can look it up.
[00:27:01]  It's called The Strange Death of Danny Castellero.
[00:27:05]  And it's well written.
[00:27:07]  I mean, it's well written.
[00:27:08]  It's well written.
[00:27:08]  And it's got a lot of amazing quotes from the time, from the people who were talking to Danny, from his friends that we relied on.
[00:27:15]  It's just there's some stuff in there that's weird.
[00:27:17]  But like we were mentioning, Danny got into this via the Inslaw case.
[00:27:24]  And Inslaw is something that we've actually talked about a bit on this podcast before and the promise software.
[00:27:31]  I think it's been kind of a while since we talked about it, but this was a pretty major scandal that happened a good deal before Danny's suicide.
[00:27:39]  Like this was not something.
[00:27:41]  I mean, it was still ongoing.
[00:27:42]  I think I went on to like 2005 or something like that.
[00:27:45]  But the bulk of it being like real news came about in the 1980s.
[00:27:52]  And it's funny because you guys have this sort of like archival footage, I guess, of an Inslaw ad for Promise.
[00:28:00]  Yeah, we have a lot of their promotional materials and stuff that you see in the thing.
[00:28:08]  The Insula, I mean, the Insula Affair, as it's come to be called, is like its own 30-part series.
[00:28:18]  If you really want to go into it, it's like such a Byzantine.
[00:28:20]  Each one of the things that we went into is such a Byzantine rabbit hole, for lack of a better word.
[00:28:26]  But I think it does bear just like a quick explanation, maybe, just to blaze through a little context, right?
[00:28:33]  Of what it is that Danny, you know, so should I just like take a take a quick stab at this, just like the high points, right?
[00:28:40]  So you've got this company started by a guy named Bill Hamilton, who was a former NSA operative who had spent time in Vietnam in the 1970s, 70s, early 70s, or late 60s, early 70s.
[00:28:58]  He was in the NSA for 70 years either way.
[00:29:01]  He got out, he responded to a bid to create software for the Justice Department to essentially digitize the Justice Department's files, create a management system, which he eventually called PROMIS Prosecutors Information Management System that would, you know, do what we, you know, now seems pretty obvious.
[00:29:20]  It's like take all this paper stuff, put it digital, you can search names, you can search, you know, cases, you can, you know, you can find that this defendant is actually this same guy as this defendant.
[00:29:30]  Oh my gosh, there's a pattern, there's a crime spree.
[00:29:32]  You know, one of the pilot projects was in Washington, D.C., and they found that 10% of detectives closed cases.
[00:29:42]  Like closed 90% of the cases.
[00:29:43]  90% of the cases.
[00:29:45]  It's called the super cop study.
[00:29:46]  It became a big, it was a research.
[00:29:48]  Promise also was a major research tool for law enforcement at that time, the first computer research thing.
[00:29:53]  And the super cop study came out and it was like, oh, wow, like we, this changes how we deal with law enforcement, how we deal with it.
[00:30:00]  There's like a major, major step in like massive computing like management systems that then ends up, as we'll talk about, not just in other countries, but like being deployed in not just in the Justice Department, but commercially, like in hospitals where you would manage medical records or in university systems where you would manage personnel files or whatever, whatever it is.
[00:30:24]  It was just this sort of like massive architecture for file management and networking that was completely searchable through whatever sort of like keyword and strings that you kind of put in there and you know tags and whatever, whatever, right?
[00:30:39]  Yeah, and the people who made it, I mean, it was a small company in Washington, D.C. Bill, his wife Nancy was also involved, a small group, and it kind of grew and grew as it became more popular.
[00:30:50]  And it got to the point where, and it was largely funded originally, it was a nonprofit that was funded by grants from the, what's called the LEAA, the Law Enforcement Administration.
[00:31:01]  Whatever.
[00:31:02]  I don't need to get into every acronym.
[00:31:04]  This is like the acronyms.
[00:31:05]  This story is the acronym soup.
[00:31:08]  We don't have to do every single one.
[00:31:10]  But so, but essentially by the late 70s, they took the company private because the grants were drying up, and they signed a contract with the Justice Department to do an initial look at putting Promise into, what was it, 10, 20 offices, 20 offices, eventually pilot program to eventually modernize essentially the entire Justice Department.
[00:31:37]  So potentially worth like millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, you know?
[00:31:42]  If not more.
[00:31:44]  Yeah, maybe.
[00:31:44]  I mean, it just depends on who you ask.
[00:31:46]  But it's worth a lot of money.
[00:31:48]  It's a huge job.
[00:31:50]  And they are stoked because they have the federal government paying them to make their software.
[00:31:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:57]  You know, to deploy it.
[00:31:58]  Government contracts.
[00:31:59]  That's your dream.
[00:32:00]  And it just happens to be the same time that the Reagan administration is coming into power in D.C.
[00:32:09]  And that kind of plays large, looms large over the rest of the story.
[00:32:14]  And so the people who are in the Justice Department and the new administration, they sign a contract to, it's worth, what, $6.8 million is the original contract to do this pilot program.
[00:32:26]  And then just kind of months later, they're having problems with the Justice Department saying that like, oh, you guys aren't delivering, whatever.
[00:32:34]  And that over the next year or two leads to the Justice Department withholding payments.
[00:32:40]  Insula is driven into bankruptcy because they can't pay.
[00:32:44]  You know, their almost only major contract is not paying them.
[00:32:49]  And they then sue the Justice Department in bankruptcy court, saying that the Justice Department has been, you know, withholding payments and has driven them into bankruptcy.
[00:33:00]  And that starts this kind of crazy legal odyssey for them.
[00:33:05]  When they have Elliot Richardson, who's a hero of Watergate, the former Attorney General, representing them, and the former president of the DC bar, Charles Work, who's in the film, also representing them.
[00:33:18]  And they win their first case.
[00:33:22]  And the bankruptcy court judge rules that the Justice Department stole their software using trickery, fraud, and deceit.
[00:33:30]  And it was pretty clear that the software did get stolen and that something horribly wrong had happened.
[00:33:37]  That the Justice Department was using the software and not paying for it.
[00:33:40]  That's just basically it.
[00:33:41]  Without any understanding of why.
[00:33:44]  Yeah, no, but yeah, Bill Hamilton, the founder and creator of the software, had no idea why.
[00:33:51]  And he was constantly coming up with explanations.
[00:33:54]  Like one of the guys working on the contract team for the DOJ was someone that he had fired.
[00:33:59]  Like maybe it was that.
[00:34:00]  Maybe it was just a vendetta.
[00:34:02]  But then those answers sort of didn't really end up panning out.
[00:34:07]  And he keeps digging into it.
[00:34:10]  And as they go through the appeals process, he gets deeper into figuring out that there's like an espionage angle involved in the theft of the software that becomes more and more clear.
[00:34:26]  So yeah, so essentially the next nine or 10 years, they're fighting this back and forth with the Justice Department.
[00:34:34]  The Justice Department keeps on appealing.
[00:34:37]  And eventually Insula kind of, the decision is reversed on a technical basis, and they're kind of left at square one.
[00:34:44]  And they're like, pretty screwed.
[00:34:46]  Because it's like they don't have any money.
[00:34:49]  They've spent years trying to fight this thing.
[00:34:52]  And they keep on sort of hearing whispers of like, there's something else going on here.
[00:34:56]  And their central question is like, this is such a small amount of money for the government to pay them.
[00:35:01]  Why won't they just pay it up, move on with our lives, and like, you know, we'll find some other clients, you know?
[00:35:10]  And that's around the time that Danny Castellero, I think, enters the story, right?
[00:35:14]  It's 1990.
[00:35:15]  Danny, another trade publication journalist and consultant who knows Bill Hamilton approaches Danny and says, you should talk to this guy, like see if you can help him figure out what's going on.
[00:35:30]  It might be a good story if you figure it out.
[00:35:33]  So Danny goes into D.C. and meets with Bill and Nancy Hamilton.
[00:35:38]  They explain, you know, kind of what's going on.
[00:35:41]  And they also tell him about this telephone call they'd had a few months earlier with a guy named Michael Rocanasciuto, who got in touch with them, says that he's sort of a, does freelance work for the intelligence community, names all these intelligence bigwigs that he knows.
[00:36:07]  And basically Bill and Nancy wrote down this two-hour long meandering phone call and then spent the next several months leading up to them meeting Danny, doing their own sort of fact-checking on this memo, and basically, you know, at that meeting, gave it to Danny.

=== Native American Reservation Security (03:07) ===

[00:36:26]  And that was sort of the roadmap that he used to dive into this project.
[00:36:35]  And one of the contentions that Michael Ricanasciuto had told Bill was that he put a back door into the software on a Native American reservation in the Coachella Valley near Indio, California, which is where they have the Coachella Music Festival now.
[00:36:56]  And that it was through a joint venture partnership between this tiny tribe and the Wackenhut Corporation, which was a huge security company that was founded by an ex-FBI guy, and the board of directors was just like a who's who of intelligence from like every different fucking agency.
[00:37:25]  William Casey was outside council leading, like right up before Ronald Reagan was elected and he became head of CIA.
[00:37:32]  Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter, former employee at Wackenhut.
[00:37:36]  It's a long and distinguished list.
[00:37:39]  A very long and distinguished list.
[00:37:40]  Also, apparently operating in Belgium.
[00:37:43]  And they do a lot of different things.
[00:37:45]  I mean, it's important to note, like, they do anything from being the first private prison company in America.
[00:37:54]  They do like office building front security guys who don't have a gun, you know, just like check your ID or whatever in the building.
[00:38:05]  That was their kind of bread and butter.
[00:38:06]  But they also were running security for Area 51.
[00:38:11]  They ran security for a lot of the nuclear facilities of the United States and were a worldwide security company.
[00:38:19]  They just have a lot of contracts.
[00:38:23]  And they just have a lot of different hands in a lot of different places, mainly just like wherever they can find money in the security industry, they go.
[00:38:31]  But when you have, you know, the former leaders of the, you know, former and future leaders of the CIA, NSA, FBI, whatever, all on your board, they have offices all over the world access to a lot of fun opportunities.
[00:38:45]  And I think that maybe we don't even explain this outright in our show, but it's kind of like the movie and Danny's story is a lot about what happens when you take what used to be government intelligence and military operations and privatize them.
[00:39:05]  And the fun, weird secrecy that can happen when you, it's like the public-private partnership of the intelligence community.
[00:39:14]  Because that comes out, I mean, you mentioned Cabazon, and that comes out very much there because what we see is like, you know, this tribe, this very, it's like 25 people in it, right?
[00:39:25]  There were 27 members, depending on what time you're talking about, 27 members.
[00:39:29]  Only nine of them are adults at the time of adult age, 11, 9.

=== Robert Maxwell Anecdote (14:20) ===

[00:39:33]  Oh my God.
[00:39:35]  Which was, yeah, and it was a tract of, it was essentially a tract of land.
[00:39:40]  Not everybody lived on the reservation.
[00:39:42]  It was a tract of land of a band of the, you know, a band, a subset of the Kuiah tribe out there and near Palm Springs.
[00:39:53]  And, you know, it was basically just a big piece of desert, you know, from all accounts of the people we've talked to and the research we've done.
[00:40:02]  You know, no running water, all that stuff.
[00:40:04]  And you get a guy, I mean, should we just jump into John Philip Nichols?
[00:40:08]  I mean, are we there?
[00:40:10]  Are we ready for that?
[00:40:11]  I do want to just put a real quick, just real quick, I want to put just a fine point on Promise before we move on from that because it might seem to our listeners that don't know anything about this story that it seems absurd that something as like you use the word Byzantine,
[00:40:28]  and this story is extremely Byzantine, but something as confusing and tangled as this entire kind of network or web that Danny kind of gets into could kick off from like a stole, like stole, like why is the DOJ stealing software?
[00:40:45]  And that that whole thing is a lot of people.
[00:40:45]  I think that's really important.
[00:40:46]  That's the whole thing.
[00:40:47]  I just want to point out that like Promise was both the like first of its kind and a kind of continuation of like kind of intelligence computing technology that had been sort of ongoing since, I guess you would say the post-World War, right?
[00:41:06]  But that what Promise, you know, the opportunity that the DOJ had, or perhaps people in other three-letter agencies had, where they could take this software is in selling it to a multitude of both public and private institutions, whether that be governments, banks, you know, other intelligent insurance companies all over the world, right?
[00:41:37]  Can I just like throw one additional layer of like kind of perspective on this that I like to throw in here just as a caveat that's important to me, I guess, and hopefully it's whatever.
[00:41:47]  It's important to me.
[00:41:48]  It's just like kind of putting the perspective of who's saying these things, you know, like that it's it's it's an allegation that's out there.
[00:41:55]  And it's a point that sort of Bill Hamilton and the people around him are saying that these things happen to Promise, that it was sold around the world.
[00:42:04]  And I just like to put in like who's saying what because this story involves so many different perspectives.
[00:42:09]  And sometimes I get a little bit lost in this sort of like throwing objective reality when the reality can become a little bit more subjective and a little bit, it's just important to know who's saying what, right?
[00:42:20]  But so let's just like dig in a little past Rakana Schudo.
[00:42:24]  Rakana Shudo's not the only one who's saying that this is spy software, right?
[00:42:28]  And what is the spy software of Promise?
[00:42:30]  Let's just throw this little explainer on here, which is like at the same time, around the same time that he's meeting Michael, he's also getting people like a guy named Ari Ben Menashi.
[00:42:44]  Like Bill has hired private investigators, lawyers, all these people with their feelers out there saying, what the hell is the Justice Department doing with our software?
[00:42:52]  Why is it being stolen through trickery, fraud, and deceit, which is what the ruling was in the bankruptcy court?
[00:42:57]  Like, what are they doing with it?
[00:42:58]  Why won't they pay us?
[00:43:00]  Like, what's going on?
[00:43:01]  And all of the things that come back from people like Michael Rakana Sciudo or this former Israeli intelligence officer, Ari Ben Menashi, are like, it's spy software.
[00:43:13]  It's being used around the world to, it's been reprogrammed and it's being used around the world.
[00:43:19]  Multiple agencies and other intelligence agencies of other countries, other companies in other countries have Promise.
[00:43:27]  And it's just like 190 countries or some insane number, or whatever it is, 80 countries, 100 countries, 150.
[00:43:34]  I forgot what the total number is, but it's out there and it's being used with a back door.
[00:43:41]  And that back door allowed the U.S. or in another case, Israel, to look into how it was being used.
[00:43:50]  That is the allegation.
[00:43:51]  That allegation is like, and the theory behind that is, which is, I mean, if it was basically copied and being resold, that would make a lot of sense to do that, right?
[00:44:00]  I mean, that's a logical theory.
[00:44:02]  It's a logical theory.
[00:44:03]  And I think that you can pretty much be sure that any similar software that's being sold today would probably have a very sane kind of thing.
[00:44:09]  Well, we know that it was from the Snowden leaks.
[00:44:11]  We know that for Zanzibar, which is very much a very much a continuation of or development out of, you could assume, the promise software.
[00:44:22]  Same theory.
[00:44:23]  Was also being used to kind of in a similar fashion, right?
[00:44:27]  So we think of it as like the sort of the beginning of a story that we just entered into with Snowden, like in the middle.
[00:44:36]  If you want to look at it through this lens, it's the beginning of the digital surveillance age, right?
[00:44:42]  And that's, and I just think it's important to say that that's to throw in who's saying that stuff because it gets a little bit more complicated with all this stuff.
[00:44:50]  With anything national security related, it's very difficult to find documents.
[00:44:54]  There are no receipts of sales, but you've got a lot of, I think, and I'd love to talk about them, amazing documents and audio tapes and first-hand accounts of this whole story that we told that have never been heard by anybody before.
[00:45:07]  It's people in their own words saying what happened for a lot of this stuff.
[00:45:10]  But when it's really like the computer national security stuff, very hard to find receipts.
[00:45:16]  Well, then that's always been the difficulty with the promise story because it also is wrapped up, just like a lot of the stuff that is sort of the tentacles off of the octopus, with a lot of, I guess you could almost say personal narratives of people.
[00:45:29]  I mean, you mentioned Ari Ben Menache, right?
[00:45:30]  Ari Ben Menashe is a real guy, and he does have real crazy, actual, legitimate connections.
[00:45:39]  He actually just had his car insurance reinstated by the government of Canada after it was revoked because of his unsavory connections.
[00:45:47]  And he was in like Arms World.
[00:45:49]  His house was firebombed a few years ago.
[00:45:51]  Exactly.
[00:45:51]  Yeah.
[00:45:53]  He was selling free Ari Ben Menashe socks to raise money for some obscure legal defense that he was.
[00:45:59]  He was also, I mean, let's throw a few more things in there because he's got a really strange resume.
[00:46:04]  He was like kind of a PR flack at some point.
[00:46:08]  Still is.
[00:46:10]  I think he might.
[00:46:11]  It was various kind of uns like his whole, and also this is so much of it.
[00:46:15]  And this is, again, like, it's funny because a lot of the guys you talk to have the same kind of thing where like they do have connections, but they also try to make them seem more villainous, maybe than they really even are, because it increases their mystique in some way.
[00:46:29]  And so like with Menache, it's hard to tell how much of it is, like, but it does really exist in some form.
[00:46:37]  I know that he was like, he's friends with whatever sort of generic Central Asian dictators that there are and like, you know, various just, let's say, people who somewhat autocratic heads of state.
[00:46:50]  And he sort of functions as like a connection point for whatever business interests and also kind of like lobbying interests in the West that they have.
[00:46:59]  And this has led him to kind of get into a lot of hot water with diaspora groups and also just various governments.
[00:47:07]  We should also point out that he was perhaps the first person to come out of the intelligence community, the Israeli intelligence community, and reveal that Iran-Contra was happening.
[00:47:19]  Yeah.
[00:47:19]  He broke his legitimate, you know, newsworthy tone of time magazine first.
[00:47:25]  They didn't take it.
[00:47:26]  And then he, and then so Iran-Contra was actually broke in a Lebanese newspaper, I believe.
[00:47:34]  It's like a magazine.
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:36]  Well, he, and, and, and, lest we forget too, he is also the source of the claim, I believe he is, although I haven't read the book in a minute, but I believe he's the source of the claim that Robert Maxwell was involved, Ghelaine Maxwell's father was involved in the selling of the promised software with the back door in it to not only Jordan, which is one of the more famous allegations that it was of the countries it was sold to, but also Bulgaria and the former USSR.
[00:48:04]  So that he was essentially like hawking that Robert Maxwell, sort of this, this, this media tycoon in England, was hawking a stolen copy of Inslaw's software behind the Iron Curtain.
[00:48:16]  For Israeli interests.
[00:48:17]  For Israeli interests, yeah.
[00:48:19]  And did you see the movie Tetris that came out last year?
[00:48:22]  No, but I know that Robert Maxwell.
[00:48:24]  Robert Maxwell and his son are characters.
[00:48:26]  So it's like, I thought it was interesting because there's this story about him, you know, selling this one stolen software.
[00:48:32]  Then there's another story of him getting Tetris out of the USSR.
[00:48:38]  And this is so off topic, but the Robert Maxwell thing is really funny because I have this weird theory that he was doing a lot of strange stuff with like higher echelons of the Bulgarian Communist Party and like funding money out, especially towards the end.
[00:48:49]  And it's interesting because he wrote all of these, at least one, I shouldn't say all of these, but at least one, like from him, introduction to a book of speeches by the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party that he put out under, I think, Pergamon Press.
[00:49:06]  So strange, but he had all these weird connections with Bulgaria that I think are really unexamined part of that.
[00:49:12]  Anyways, I'm interrupting.
[00:49:13]  I just want to correct my, it's like, I think I was thinking of Lumumba because of that book just came out about his assassination and the CIA.
[00:49:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:49:20]  That was time period is way off from that.
[00:49:22]  But it's totally off.
[00:49:23]  But it was Mugabe.
[00:49:24]  Sorry.
[00:49:24]  Robert Mugabe.
[00:49:25]  Yeah, with the hat.
[00:49:26]  And Aerie was like his kind of publicity flack.
[00:49:30]  He's on the internet kind of defending what's going on.
[00:49:33]  It's like, what are you doing?
[00:49:34]  He's incredible.
[00:49:36]  Dream guest for the show.
[00:49:37]  So you guys, so we should, we should move on, I think, for the interest of time from Promise a little bit.
[00:49:43]  It's covered in the fucking documentary.
[00:49:44]  So there's so that there's us, right?
[00:49:46]  Yeah.
[00:49:47]  We're also kind of characters in the, and we're actually at a good point in bringing us into it because we started talking about the Wackenhut Corporation.
[00:49:56]  Yeah.
[00:49:56]  And a lot of people asked me how I got into this story.
[00:50:00]  And it's, I was researching the private prison industry.
[00:50:04]  Uh-huh.
[00:50:05]  Trying to get in on it.
[00:50:06]  Yeah.
[00:50:08]  I started why my investments were doing so well.
[00:50:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:13]  And no, I mean, yeah, I was just, I was trying to write about it.
[00:50:18]  You're a journalist.
[00:50:19]  Yeah.
[00:50:19]  Trying to find a fresh angle on it.
[00:50:21]  It's an interesting topic.
[00:50:23]  Also, it would like regularly make me actually cry.
[00:50:26]  The research I was doing is horrendous.
[00:50:29]  Yeah.
[00:50:30]  And I also found that like the piece that I would have written is just it exists.
[00:50:35]  You know, that's.
[00:50:36]  And what more can you say?
[00:50:37]  Because you can come up with all these examples of all these horrible things, but they're getting paid by, it's like a hotel for people that don't want to be there.
[00:50:46]  And they're lobbying to make things more illegal.
[00:50:50]  Yeah.
[00:50:51]  Drugs and they, oh, they love immigration.
[00:50:55]  Oh, like ICE contracts and shit like that.
[00:50:57]  That was their first private prison was for an immigration detention center.
[00:51:00]  And the amount of lobbying that they do to make things more illegal.
[00:51:04]  And the diming they do in the fucking prisons with the phone call shit too, and like taking away the typewriters.
[00:51:09]  And it's so insane.
[00:51:10]  And then just, then you have people in the prisons, and then it affects their whole family.
[00:51:14]  You know, it's awful.
[00:51:16]  Okay.
[00:51:17]  So anyways, I realized that, oh, so I would be talking to criminal justice experts, and they would always be talking about this company, Wackenhut.
[00:51:29]  But when I entered the story, Wackenhut Corrections, their private prison concern, had changed its name to GeoGroup.
[00:51:35]  And so I was like, what is this Wackenhut everybody's always talking about?
[00:51:38]  And so I just started looking into Wackenhut and I got kind of obsessed with it.
[00:51:43]  As we mentioned, it's weird past in the 80s.
[00:51:46]  And that's how I, because Danny was looking into Wackenhut, that's how I found an article about, I stumbled on an article about Danny Kesslero.
[00:51:55]  And that just, I went on from there, you know, not really expecting it to take this long.
[00:52:03]  But yeah, that's kind of how I got into it.
[00:52:06]  So through that, through looking at Danny Castello, that does bring us to the Capazon Indian Reservation.
[00:52:12]  Because, you know, like we mentioned earlier, the allegation is that Wackenhutt, this sort of private intelligence, I think they're called private intelligence groups, but I guess they do private security too.
[00:52:24]  So whatever.
[00:52:25]  They have a conglomerate.
[00:52:29]  They are alleged to be making, manufacturing, testing weapons on this reservation.
[00:52:39]  I do have documentation that there were major plans to do biological, to make, to manufacture biological weapons and to manufacture automatic submachine guns.
[00:52:55]  Which is crazy because there's nothing on this land, right?
[00:52:57]  Like there isn't like there's like very few houses.
[00:53:00]  It's a desert out there.
[00:53:01]  I mean, it's Indio from 40 years ago, right?
[00:53:04]  Early 80s, late 70s, early 80s.
[00:53:07]  They were trying to build facilities out there.
[00:53:09]  It's got an aquifer underneath, but there's no running water because they haven't developed the infrastructure in that area.
[00:53:16]  So, yeah, I think like Wackenhutt even, we could start with, I feel like we should start with, you know, we talked about Michael Ricanoshudo tells Danny that he's done this software stuff out on this reservation, right?
[00:53:27]  And it's like, well, why, why there, right?
[00:53:30]  So could I just like toss us into the reservation?
[00:53:33]  Toss us into the res.
[00:53:35]  And I think I want to do that through the guy who he says is running this whole operation, a guy named Dr. John Philip Nichols, who is very important in Michael's life, very important in the Cabazon story, and very important for U.S. history in a weird way, especially Native American rights.

=== Danny's Global Adventures (08:14) ===

[00:53:54]  And in Danny's life.
[00:53:56]  And potentially in Danny's life.
[00:53:58]  But so his story, and we interviewed his son, one of his sons, Bobby Richardson.
[00:54:04]  Incredible interview, by the way.
[00:54:05]  Thank you.
[00:54:05]  Incredible hair.
[00:54:06]  He's a sweet guy.
[00:54:08]  Very California dude.
[00:54:09]  Yeah.
[00:54:09]  Yeah.
[00:54:11]  Very California.
[00:54:11]  Or very like, I wouldn't even speak California, but just like Southwesty kind of.
[00:54:17]  He's like a guitarist, you know, and part of the story, he was a young guy.
[00:54:22]  He was in his 20s when his dad moved out and brought his whole family out.
[00:54:28]  He and his two brothers and his sisters.
[00:54:31]  They moved all over the world.
[00:54:33]  They moved all over the world for the last like 40 years or whatever.
[00:54:36]  I mean, well, him for the last 20 years, but he had been moving all over the world for the last 40 years, and they land in this tiny desert reservation in Southern California.
[00:54:47]  And I think Dr. John Philip Nichols, his father, Bobby's father, just a little explanation about him from what we could find.
[00:54:53]  You know, we had amazing access to, Bobby gave us his archive.
[00:54:56]  We found other archival materials from a lot of different places where we actually got to hear things in John Nichols' own words, which have never been heard before outside of a law enforcement setting.
[00:55:08]  And putting together this tapestry of a guy who really doesn't have, there's not a lot of public information out there was one of the key kind of challenges for us, like understanding how this dude, John Philip Nichols, ends up at this reservation.
[00:55:23]  And it's like he starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 50s as like the brewing industry.
[00:55:31]  Then he winds up in DC through the Truckers Union, working with Jimmy Hoffa's people.
[00:55:37]  Oh, he was Teamster.
[00:55:39]  Yeah, he was Teamster.
[00:55:40]  And he was doing favors for Jimmy Hoffa that got him a federal warrant.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:48]  All right.
[00:55:48]  But that also, the fact that I didn't realize that for some reason, but that puts some of the later stuff into perspective as well.
[00:55:54]  Yeah.
[00:55:55]  And he, you know, we kind of blaze through this.
[00:55:58]  There's so much story in the movie, but I think now's an opportunity to just mention a couple things.
[00:56:03]  Like he's sitting under the treasury building when he's arrested, right?
[00:56:07]  And he, and then like somehow he gets out of that situation and he he and his entire family moved to Brazil in the late 50s.
[00:56:17]  I mean, I was going to say 58, I think.
[00:56:18]  Yeah.
[00:56:19]  58, 59.
[00:56:20]  If you know anything about Brazil, then you know what I mean.
[00:56:21]  And then what's going on then?
[00:56:23]  Yeah, what's happening right then?
[00:56:24]  Well, it's like what we found when we were putting together his timeline is that he has this uncanny ability to be in countries, especially in Central and South America, right before they have, you know, a anti-communist revolution.
[00:56:42]  He just has amazing timing.
[00:56:44]  Because you mentioned Brazil, right?
[00:56:47]  But he was also in Chile.
[00:56:49]  Well, and so Brazil first, and then and then, and then he's, and then suddenly he's in, in Chile right before.
[00:56:55]  And his story, and we don't even really dive into what he was doing in Chile.
[00:56:59]  It's absolutely fascinating what he's doing there, which is like ostensibly in Brazil.
[00:57:05]  Okay, first off, in Brazil, let me just throw this out there.
[00:57:07]  He's working for a Coca-Cola bottling manufacturing company.
[00:57:13]  You know, it's just like some seriously like most CIA gang kind of corporate job, but it's like, oh yeah, like you know a lot about like, it's like, well, I was in a brewing industry.
[00:57:23]  It's like, okay.
[00:57:24]  I've seen a bunch of funny Arbuckle movies.
[00:57:25]  And he's working for, he's working for this consulting company called Anderson Clayton, which was down there.
[00:57:33]  And it's one, we actually had a Brazilian assistant editor, and we had John Nichols' business card from the time that Bobby gave us.
[00:57:43]  And it says like, Anderson Clayton, CIA.
[00:57:46]  And I was like, our SSI, I was like, translate, what does this mean?
[00:57:52]  He's like, oh, that means like, that's what we would say incorporated.
[00:57:56]  I was like, I was like, what?
[00:57:57]  No.
[00:57:58]  No.
[00:57:59]  in Portuguese it was just really now now um now So, yeah, he's there.
[00:58:07]  There's a revolution in Brazil.
[00:58:09]  He's out of there by the time the revolution happens.
[00:58:11]  And he's in.
[00:58:12]  Coup.
[00:58:12]  Yeah.
[00:58:13]  Sorry.
[00:58:13]  Coup.
[00:58:14]  There's, sorry.
[00:58:15]  Coup.
[00:58:17]  Then, which was a largely bloodless, quick coup, but it was an anti-communist.
[00:58:21]  Military, anti-communist.
[00:58:23]  And then in Chile, he's working with this company.
[00:58:27]  Was it Church World Services?
[00:58:29]  Yes, Church World Service.
[00:58:30]  Great name.
[00:58:31]  And you can find this book called Chile and Vedado, which is about CIA and intelligence operations.
[00:58:38]  It's basically about American meddling in English.
[00:58:43]  It's only in Spanish.
[00:58:44]  And there's a whole chapter on John Nichols and what he's doing down there with this church world services.
[00:58:50]  And he's down there organizing the evangelical movement, basically taking rural people and trying to, you know, in a largely Catholic country and bringing out this evangelical movement,
[00:59:06]  trying to grow their numbers of evangelicals into a voting group, you know, people who you can convince that maybe that communism is not for them and that they should vote against it, right?
[00:59:22]  Yeah, which is work from the Teamsters who knew how to organize.
[00:59:26]  Well, it's funny too, because, you know, that's the Teamsters that immediately reminded me of Chile because the, first of all, the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO in general had their hands in a lot of these coups and that sort of like social democratic anti-communism, psychotic fucking bloodthirsty shit was all over.
[00:59:46]  And the Solidarity Centers and all that.
[00:59:48]  But in Chile, especially, the truckers were brought over to the side of reaction.
[00:59:53]  And like this big trucker strike was a big reason why Allende got, well, yeah, why they've been helping making the economy scream and all that.
[01:00:03]  Yeah, and I think that there's so much ripe territory for this, especially the Chile stuff.
[01:00:09]  And in John Philip Nichols, his relationship there to these people.
[01:00:12]  We heard stories that we couldn't put in, just kind of like anecdotal stories that we couldn't fully verify about what was like him.
[01:00:20]  There's a story later on of him being at some like hotel or country club in Palm Springs.
[01:00:26]  This is totally specious.
[01:00:27]  Like, do not put any real fact, real, like, this cannot be verified, right?
[01:00:32]  But it's that one of the Cabazon members is sitting there with John Nichols at this country club and Henry Kissinger in Palm Springs.
[01:00:38]  And Henry Kissinger walks in in the 80s and just walks past the table and just says, hi, John, and then walks past, you know?
[01:00:46]  And it's like, well, that would be interesting.
[01:00:50]  It would make a lot of sense is what it would be.
[01:00:53]  That you have these kind of a dude like John Nichols who's going in being a religious leader, even though he seems to have, you know, he has like a mail-in degree as a doctorate of religion, but he doesn't seem to have a real, necessarily a really real religious connection.
[01:01:09]  But he's a very smart, cunning dude with a problem with the federal government that he's perhaps trying to work off with this like jail deal or whatever he was dealing with with the federal government.
[01:01:22]  And he's organizing all these people.
[01:01:25]  And then lo and behold, Allende is elected.
[01:01:29]  John Philip Nichols leaves.
[01:01:31]  And shortly after, there's a coup in Chile.
[01:01:36]  And he moves on.
[01:01:48]  There's a great scene where his son is basically outlining all of the places that they move to.
[01:01:57]  And it's so overwhelming and obvious that he's hopping from, let's say, incident to incident and hotspot to hotspot that it's almost like, I mean, it's almost like funny.

=== Something's Going On (04:14) ===

[01:02:08]  It's so ridiculous that obviously there's something going on.
[01:02:12]  There's something going on.
[01:02:14]  There's definitely something going on.
[01:02:17]  And I think that like the difference between maybe what I think the strength of us and Christian and me, especially Christian working on this, and say like what the Washington Post or New York Times or whatever would do with a story like this, not that they would ever do anything with a story like this, but just sort of like we're allowed, we allow ourselves to speculate a little bit and to try to extrapolate things and try to establish connections that like you just,
[01:02:44]  there is no kind of like smoking gun with some of this stuff.
[01:02:47]  It just doesn't exist.
[01:02:48]  But just because there isn't doesn't mean that that didn't happen and that you shouldn't theorize about it or wonder about it.
[01:02:54]  Because if you're limiting yourself to the absolute like written record, you're actually losing a lot of information, I think, along the way.
[01:03:02]  And I know that sounds a little bit squishy, but it's a subtle and weird point, but I think it's worth making.
[01:03:08]  When you were talking to his son, because that interview, there's several very arresting and literally genuinely no pun intended, arresting interviews in the documentary.
[01:03:19]  When you're talking to his son, you get the impression that the viewer rather gets the impression that he really does love his dad.
[01:03:27]  And he views his dad as this like, he looks up to him, and especially it seems like involving a lot of the native stuff.
[01:03:34]  But he also kind of has this like, but like there's some things about his dad that he has his own suspicions of.
[01:03:40]  For sure.
[01:03:41]  Yeah.
[01:03:42]  I mean, the reason he, we showed up at his house.
[01:03:46]  So you just called me.
[01:03:48]  We just knocked on the door.
[01:03:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:03:50]  He's so friendly.
[01:03:51]  He's sweet.
[01:03:52]  I really like that a lot.
[01:03:53]  Yeah.
[01:03:54]  Also, just to set that up, like we were, this process for us was, we made a lot, a ton of phone calls, but often we would just show up because we knew that we would get one chance with somebody.
[01:04:05]  And it's, in my mind, a lot harder to slam the door than it is to hang up the phone.
[01:04:11]  Yeah.
[01:04:11]  Or because you slam the door and the person's still right there.
[01:04:15]  And so for us.
[01:04:16]  They got to come to the door.
[01:04:17]  Who is this person?
[01:04:19]  Who is this person standing outside?
[01:04:20]  These two funky fresh white boys up the door.
[01:04:22]  And we're, yeah, and for us, I think, as people who are not, you know, we're kind of naive in this world.
[01:04:29]  Like, Christian, Christian has a background in photo journalism, I should say.
[01:04:32]  He worked for the New York Times for years.
[01:04:34]  I have a background in fictional filmmaking, you know.
[01:04:37]  So I'm used to doors being slammed in my face, but it's usually about like, can I shoot here?
[01:04:41]  You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:43]  We are naive in this world of like investigative journalism.
[01:04:47]  And making a documentary or making a four-part documentary series was beyond our normal sphere of knowledge.
[01:04:54]  But anyways, Bobby.
[01:04:56]  But we would show up on these doors with people like Bobby and we'd be like, I have no idea what we're about to experience.
[01:05:01]  Because in our mind, it's like Bobby's dad is a very dangerous skinny.
[01:05:06]  Bobby had gone to prison for embezzling money from the Cabazon Casino.
[01:05:11]  Oh, Bobby did.
[01:05:12]  He went to a Wackenhut prison.
[01:05:14]  I'm not, it's in the paper.
[01:05:15]  So that's later after all this story, like he ironically ended up in a Wagner Hutt.
[01:05:20]  So we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.
[01:05:22]  But basically, he was really sweet.
[01:05:24]  And he wanted to know if he basically was going to help us help him figure out who his dad was.
[01:05:33]  Interesting.
[01:05:34]  You know, maybe if I give you whatever data I've got, maybe if you mix it up with whatever you guys have come up with, like maybe together, you know, with all of that, we'll figure out what was really going on.
[01:05:47]  Because he's a really smart guy, and he knows that as we, as you guys picked up on, there's something more to the story.
[01:05:56]  Yeah.
[01:05:57]  Well, certainly his dad got in some trouble later.
[01:05:59]  Yeah.
[01:06:00]  Yeah.
[01:06:01]  Well, I mean, you know, one of the reasons that Casalero starts looking into Cabazon is because there's this murder.
[01:06:09]  There's this execution style murder, which listen, I got to tell you, the phrase execution style gets thrown a lot around a lot when you're talking about murders.
[01:06:19]  But this is pretty execution style.
[01:06:21]  Two people sitting down.

=== Triple Homicide Murder (09:32) ===

[01:06:22]  It's a triple homicide.
[01:06:23]  Triple homicide.
[01:06:24]  Shot in the head with a 357 Magnum, which is a, I don't know if you've ever shot one of those before, but that is just some kick to that motherfucker.
[01:06:31]  So it's also a little confusing to me how everyone was just still seated for all three other shows.
[01:06:35]  Three people.
[01:06:36]  Because that is a, I've shot one several times.
[01:06:40]  And that's Fred, the person who was killed for that.
[01:06:43]  The main target of that hit, presumably.
[01:06:47]  Yeah.
[01:06:47]  He had a gun in his waistband, like, you know, when he died.
[01:06:52]  Yeah.
[01:06:56]  So, right.
[01:06:58]  Danny starts looking into Cabazon because Michael says that there was all this going on out there, this Wackenhut Corporation, this weapons testing, and Danny.
[01:07:07]  And then all run by John Nichols.
[01:07:09]  Briefly, Danny is like, forgets all about promise.
[01:07:12]  As far as I can tell from looking at his design, he's just like pitching a story just about Cabazon.
[01:07:19]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  And that murder, by the way, is unsolved.
[01:07:22]  That murder is unsolved.
[01:07:23]  To stay unsolved, those murders, that incident.
[01:07:27]  Triple homicide.
[01:07:28]  Right.
[01:07:29]  So, yeah, basically, when Wackenhott was gearing up and John Nichols was gearing up as tribal administrator, Fred Alvarez, one of the tribal members, started questioning what was going on.
[01:07:44]  He assumed that John was skimming money from the casino because there was a lot of projects happening, but a lot of investment, but nothing was going back to the tribal members who were co-owners of everything that happened and should be involved in the profit sharing, which is how it goes now.
[01:08:02]  My first girlfriend ever got a bunch of money from a tribal casino in California.
[01:08:07]  Yeah.
[01:08:08]  You mean gambling or off the top?
[01:08:10]  Off the top.
[01:08:10]  She was skimming it.
[01:08:11]  No, but no, like it's a big thing with some tribes.
[01:08:15]  You get paid like the, like often a lot of these tribes.
[01:08:17]  An annuity or whatever.
[01:08:18]  Yeah, you get paid an annuity.
[01:08:19]  And like a lot of tribes, especially like, because Indian casinos are a fairly new invention or a fairly new, you know, it's a new thing.
[01:08:29]  And it's just important to maybe we'll just throw it out here now.
[01:08:32]  And we don't dive into this in the series.
[01:08:33]  I hate to keep on saying that, but like this story is the reason why your first girlfriend had that money, essentially.
[01:08:41]  Because Dr. John Philip Nichols moved in with his family to this place, started a poker casino and bingo parlor in the early 80s, the first Native American poker room, started fighting the local government, state government.
[01:08:55]  They took that all the way to the Supreme Court, the Cabazon versus the state of California in 1986 and 1987.
[01:09:04]  And this is almost like entirely outside of our timeline, but like that case sets up what we have now, the Indian Gaming Act, which makes gambling, you know, tribal gaming legal and them able to make money and gave for these tribes the first real kind of financial independence that wasn't a subsidy from the government.
[01:09:28]  And it's known, you know, the Cabazon versus California is a huge case in Native American law that's had a lot of benefits for a lot of people.
[01:09:36]  And it comes out of this lawsuit coming from his fight for essentially his idea, his theory that you can do anything on a Native American reservation.
[01:09:48]  It's a sovereign country.
[01:09:49]  It's hard, I may be forced to get it.
[01:09:50]  And that's how he gets into this idea of, well, what else can we do out here?
[01:09:55]  Well, I have a question about that because from my understanding of his, the way he operates is that John Nichols.
[01:10:02]  Yes.
[01:10:03]  He's got his feet in and out of all sorts of, you know, whether it's agencies, organizations, corporations, whatever, whatever, organized crime, which is what I want to talk about, because who would be very interested In getting in on the gambling racket, the people who make a lot of money in the gambling racket organize crime.
[01:10:24]  So one of the very interesting documents we got from Bobby was his recently deceased brother, Mark's birth certificate.
[01:10:34]  And so this is even years before the Cabazon reservation, back in the Milwaukee days.
[01:10:40]  And listed as his godfather on his birth certificate is one of the heads of the Milwaukee, one of the crime families.
[01:10:49]  Oh, wow.
[01:10:50]  Yeah.
[01:10:51]  Yeah.
[01:10:51]  So the, well, I mean, obviously, but the Teamsters thing.
[01:10:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:55]  And like, that's the thing is, too.
[01:10:56]  Like, like, you know, you know.
[01:10:58]  I hope we never try to make like a movie with Teamsters on it because we're going to have some problems.
[01:11:01]  Well, hopefully maybe TD, I mean, the Hoffa's kind of out on that.
[01:11:05]  I saw the Irishman.
[01:11:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:11:08]  And Teamsters certainly worked on that film.
[01:11:12]  Including Teamsters who are probably part of Jimmy Hoffa's son's political cock.
[01:11:17]  Whatever.
[01:11:18]  Very weird to think about.
[01:11:19]  His son Bobby contends that later on when John Nichols went to prison for something else, that the FBI pulled him out and asked him about Hoffa's disappearance.
[01:11:28]  Interesting.
[01:11:29]  Yeah.
[01:11:29]  He joined the Teamsters gang in prison.
[01:11:32]  It's yeah.
[01:11:33]  And so like there's this sort of mob style hit, which is another thing.
[01:11:37]  And mob guys, mob-connected guys had been brought in to run the casino.
[01:11:44]  And as Bobby says so eloquently in the show, in our show, well, who else are you going to get to run a card room?
[01:11:51]  I mean, who knows how to run a card room better than these guys?
[01:11:53]  That's true.
[01:11:54]  I would say now times have changed a little bit.
[01:11:56]  Look into the Chinese.
[01:11:58]  Been to Oaks Card Club in Oakland.
[01:12:01]  Pretty good at it.
[01:12:02]  Solid operation.
[01:12:03]  Solid operation.
[01:12:03]  They did actually, there was a crazy machine gun style robbery there like a decade ago.
[01:12:10]  I think there's footage of.
[01:12:11]  Anyways, like this, but this murder connects to a murder in San Francisco.
[01:12:18]  That's correct.
[01:12:18]  Yeah.
[01:12:19]  And it's so hard to talk about this stuff because on maybe an audio forum, you're lucky you did a podcast, or excuse me, a documentary because there are so many different tendrils of this octopus, I guess, that Casalero also starts looking into.
[01:12:38]  He starts looking into this murder in San Francisco of Michael Rocanasciuto's former business partner.
[01:12:45]  Who's also a financier of the weapons development, the night vision goggles that they're developing.
[01:12:51]  I mentioned biological weapons and machine guns.
[01:12:53]  I forgot to mention night vision goggles that they were planning on manufacturing on the reservation.
[01:12:58]  Yes.
[01:13:00]  And Michael's not only there, you know, after essentially after the triple homicide in the desert of Fred Alvarez, who was trying to get, as soon as I get John Nichols kicked out of the reservation, that paves the way for all these intelligence-connected people to come in and Michael Rocanashuto to come into the reservation.
[01:13:17]  Under, I should mention also the care of Dr. John Philip Nichols, who is not only running the reservation as a tribal administrator in the poker room and the bingo party, all that stuff.
[01:13:30]  I mean, bingo parlour was actually a couple years later, but all that stuff, but he's actually what he calls himself as a social psychologist who is there to help Michael with all of his own problems in his life and to get a security clearance in order to do all this work for Wackenhutt, to do all this weapons manufacturing plans for Wackenhutt.
[01:13:51]  We have invoices of money that, a lot of money, that Michael's father is paying John Philip Nichols to psychoanalyze Michael or whatever, help him get on the straight and narrow.
[01:14:08]  The straight and narrow being doing weapons research and stuff like that.
[01:14:14]  And it really is a portrait, I think importantly, just to, I know we've got to get to San Francisco, but it's an important portrait of like the early Reagan years when it's like there are Central American, communism is essentially the boogeyman of this entire state.
[01:14:29]  Yes, the Cold War and communism is the boogeyman.
[01:14:32]  And there's all these proxy wars that we're fighting.
[01:14:35]  And it's like, well, what can we do?
[01:14:37]  You know, in the administration, we've got, well, we could, you know, hire people like John Philip Nichols and Wackenhutt to manufacture low-cost arms to send down to these places.
[01:14:48]  And we will defeat the Russians as they try to creep, you know, the communist Russian creep into America.
[01:14:55]  And I think an important part to note, too, like that, I'm not sure this means anything, but it means something in some way is that like, you know, they're talking about manufacturing all this stuff, night vision goggles, biological warfare, your submachine guns, and having them tested and having some of these weapons tests done by Contra generals.
[01:15:14]  Yeah, they should.
[01:15:16]  Which is really wild on this reservation.
[01:15:19]  Well, a big part of the force of the Contras actually fighting were these like native tribes there.
[01:15:26]  And like there was this sort of like, there was this strange strain of like pro-Contra activism in America at the time when it was like the Like we must support like the native Contras, like the Indian Contras who are sort of fighting, like comparing the struggle of the Native Americans, particularly in the early part of the country's history, with the struggle of the Contras.
[01:15:51]  I think they were also compared to George Washington.

=== Shrimp, Octopus Head, and Wild Tales (10:15) ===

[01:15:54]  Everyone gets compared to it.
[01:15:55]  Yeah.
[01:15:56]  You know what I mean?
[01:15:57]  Found out recently, couldn't bust a nut, but that's really off topic.
[01:16:01]  No, that's okay because it's important to note that prior to Reagan coming into power, Stansfield Turner, the CIA director for Jimmy Carter, had cleaned house of the CIA.
[01:16:15]  Like, I think maybe two-thirds of freelance agents, you know, and operatives and case officers were laid off.
[01:16:25]  So now you have just out in the world, all of these people with a very specific set of skills and no job.
[01:16:31]  Meanwhile, there's all these secret wars gearing up.
[01:16:34]  You know, it's kind of like insanely perfect timing.
[01:16:36]  Yeah, yeah, very reminiscent.
[01:16:38]  Well, and a lot of reasons the secret wars are gearing up is because there are all of these people looking for freelance skins, right?
[01:16:43]  Like it's dialectic.
[01:16:44]  It's not just, you know, very reminiscent of 2003 Iraq and depathification.
[01:16:50]  But so you guys, from what I understand, also had, you bought a significant amount of arms for this.
[01:16:57]  Yeah, so we were trying, we came into this whole story as customers.
[01:17:01]  Yeah, yeah, of course.
[01:17:02]  Of course.
[01:17:02]  And we were looking for good deals.
[01:17:03]  Trying to write hair in.
[01:17:05]  Yeah, wheel and deal.
[01:17:06]  So, you know, we have like, you see, we have tons of documents from all different kinds of sources that we found, some of which we just don't really, a lot of people who worked on this don't know where we got this stuff from because we wanted to keep that secret from everybody involved.
[01:17:20]  There's very few people who know where we got everything from, essentially just Christian and I.
[01:17:25]  But so we would just find invoices and random things.
[01:17:31]  And so we started just calling people who were out there who were working with these intelligence operatives and stuff like that.
[01:17:38]  So we call like there were papers that we got.
[01:17:42]  There are invoices that are unredacted with names and amounts.
[01:17:46]  Yes, some of these guys are still alive.
[01:17:48]  So we would just call them up and try to meet them.
[01:17:50]  There was this one guy who was an arms dealer who we know had had potentially done some work with John Nichols out there.
[01:17:57]  We call him up.
[01:17:59]  We found that invoice later.
[01:18:00]  We actually learned about him because we called a journalist who told us about another journalist.
[01:18:04]  Oh, yeah.
[01:18:04]  He met a guy.
[01:18:05]  And so he's like, oh, you got to call him.
[01:18:07]  I don't know if he'll talk to you.
[01:18:09]  Like, he's a real curmudgeon, but call him up.
[01:18:13]  See what he says.
[01:18:13]  And we call him up.
[01:18:14]  We're just driving around.
[01:18:15]  A lot of this was just us driving around and just like knocking on doors, like I said, and calling people randomly and just praying that they would pick up.
[01:18:22]  And so we call this guy and we're like, do you remember Dr. John Philip Nichols?
[01:18:28]  And he's like, oh man, that guy.
[01:18:32]  Yeah, of course.
[01:18:33]  Like, I was out there.
[01:18:34]  He came, he brought me in.
[01:18:37]  I used to manufacture weapons, right?
[01:18:40]  That's my job.
[01:18:41]  And he brought me in because he wanted me to make silencers for him.
[01:18:45]  So I go into the office there at the tribal office and he's saying, how good are your silencers?
[01:18:52]  And I said, pretty good.
[01:18:53]  He's like, all right, well, why don't we, he's like, calls the secretary.
[01:18:59]  He's like, bring us in some phone books.
[01:19:00]  He's like, how many phone books do you need?
[01:19:01]  He's like, oh, to shoot through, I don't know, five, ten phone books.
[01:19:05]  Bring in 10 phone books.
[01:19:07]  Brings in 10 phone books.
[01:19:08]  And in the office, in the tribal office, he pulls out the silencer, the nine millimeter, and he's like, keep the door open.
[01:19:16]  Shoots this phone book, then brings the secretary in.
[01:19:20]  He's like, Martha, whatever her name is.
[01:19:23]  Did you hear anything in here?
[01:19:25]  And she's like, no.
[01:19:27]  What's that smell?
[01:19:28]  You know, it's like, the gunpowder smell.
[01:19:30]  And he's like, pretty good.
[01:19:31]  You know, John Nichols is like, all right, we like the product.
[01:19:34]  So this guy also, he brands himself.
[01:19:38]  He tells it, yes, he is a gun manufacturer, but he also says that he's a gunfighter.
[01:19:43]  Oh, God.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:45]  Right.
[01:19:45]  And so, and, and, you know, winking very aggressively that, you know, he's not in the CIA, you know, what I mean?
[01:19:52]  Or says that he was.
[01:19:54]  Does the age match up to Vietnam or like?
[01:19:58]  I think most of his work was in Central and South America.
[01:20:01]  Okay.
[01:20:02]  But.
[01:20:02]  But he is a contractor is what he was saying.
[01:20:06]  But he did not end up manufacturing stuff with John Nichols because he said that he was like, but he wanted to pay me in shrimp.
[01:20:16]  And we're like, what?
[01:20:18]  And he's like, John Nichols was such a hustler.
[01:20:21]  He wanted, you know, he's like, I didn't want to get involved with this guy.
[01:20:24]  You know, you know, he's just dripping with agency connections because, you know, he's introducing me to people like the jackal, you know.
[01:20:31]  And I, you know, you don't know the jackal unless you know somebody in the agency.
[01:20:35]  You know, it's like, it's like, what?
[01:20:37]  Like Carlos the jackal?
[01:20:38]  That's what he was saying, you know, that he had arranged a meeting with it.
[01:20:41]  And so he's like, he tells us that John Nichols was going, he was like, I want to sell all this stuff, all these like submachine guns and things over to the Philippines.
[01:20:53]  Okay.
[01:20:54]  We're going to do like small arms to the Philippines.
[01:20:56]  They don't have a lot of money, but they do have shrimp.
[01:20:59]  Pan-fry, deep-fry, stir-fry.
[01:21:01]  And so they were going to— You know what?
[01:21:03]  Facts.
[01:21:04]  And he's like—he's like—so he was designing a way for us to set up a manufacturing facility, carry it out on—it could only touch federal roads by the time these guns got to the shipping port on the coast.
[01:21:19]  Couldn't touch state land because that's why they were doing it is the state of California, they couldn't have any state laws touched.
[01:21:26]  And then we would put it on boats and they would bring us shrimp in return.
[01:21:30]  He's like, you know, what am I going to do with all that shrimp?
[01:21:32]  You know, like, I can't do this shrimp.
[01:21:34]  And so we just met up with this dude.
[01:21:36]  We go to his like, he's like a boutique arms manufacturer.
[01:21:41]  He does a lot of like law enforcement, whatever.
[01:21:43]  He says he no longer works with the CIA because those guys are, or he calls them the, he calls them the Christians in action.
[01:21:48]  He said the same thing about Hollywood.
[01:21:50]  Yeah, he said those guys are assholes.
[01:21:51]  They tried to kill him, all this stuff.
[01:21:54]  But we go into this place.
[01:21:56]  There's a McLaren sports car.
[01:21:59]  It's like you could eat off the floor.
[01:22:00]  And it's like, it's where he makes.
[01:22:02]  McLaren?
[01:22:02]  Yeah, just in the shop.
[01:22:04]  And it's sitting there is this like McLaren sports car and just like this incredible toolbat.
[01:22:10]  And we're just like, you know, it's like 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.
[01:22:13]  And we called him an hour earlier and just drove to this place.
[01:22:17]  He was like, yeah, come meet me there.
[01:22:19]  And we're just sitting in there.
[01:22:20]  And after a while talking to him, we're just like, I was just like, dude, what makes you think that we're not, you know, CIA intelligence operators?
[01:22:31]  And he's just, he's like, I'm not worried about you guys.
[01:22:36]  That's so disrespectful.
[01:22:37]  I know.
[01:22:38]  I was like, well, buddy, we could, you know, I could be, I could, I mean, this guy was a major major.
[01:22:45]  Did he say that he's a sociopath?
[01:22:46]  Yeah, he told us straight up.
[01:22:48]  He was just like the kind of work I do.
[01:22:49]  He's like, I'm what you call a sociopath.
[01:22:52]  Ah, interesting.
[01:22:53]  And we're like, oh, okay.
[01:22:55]  And he's like, as long as you know that's who you are, you can do a lot of amazing things in life.
[01:23:00]  I was like, okay, sure.
[01:23:02]  Yeah, I think a lot of characters in this.
[01:23:04]  Did he show you anything?
[01:23:07]  Essentially, what we got on.
[01:23:08]  Yeah, he showed you a lot of fun.
[01:23:09]  There's a lot of shit ton of weapons around.
[01:23:11]  He's basically retired now.
[01:23:13]  But basically what the West Coast part of this story is that we got onto that I became excited about when Christian was talking to me about it is a group of extremely intelligent, likely, I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, likely sociopathic people who are committing crimes with the government, sometimes maybe for the government, often for organized crime, and also just freelance for themselves.
[01:23:41]  We were asking the arms dealer, that guy, about another character that we can talk about.
[01:23:45]  And he was like, we were saying he was committing murders in the United States.
[01:23:49]  He's like, oh, yeah, doing work on the side, huh?
[01:23:52]  Can't do that.
[01:23:53]  It's like, oh, man, you know, this is just, it's kind of an accepted, weird, strange world that we started looking into of all these brilliant guys who were doing, to my morals, very bad things.
[01:24:20]  I want to mention something that we didn't talk about in the interview because that would be – I feel like that would put her on the spot.
[01:24:27]  But Liz has had in Google Meets an octopus thing on her head.
[01:24:33]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:33]  It's my anti-Semitic, autistic sleep-stuffed animal hat.
[01:24:40]  For several months, Liz has had a filter on her, since Greta Thunberg was called out by, I believe, German media for having her autistic octopus toy or whatever it is.
[01:24:55]  Liz has had this filter on no matter who we're meeting with.
[01:25:00]  And I really just got to say, I admire that in a way that I've admired few things throughout my life.
[01:25:05]  I, yeah, we were in a meeting just yesterday, and I didn't realize until literally we were hanging up that I had this octopus on my head.
[01:25:14]  Do you not see yourself in it?
[01:25:16]  No, I, well, first of all, I'm not sitting there looking at myself.
[01:25:19]  Oh, I make mine, the whole thing.
[01:25:21]  Yeah.
[01:25:21]  That's, you guys should change your behavior.
[01:25:25]  Fine, I'll put a shirt back on.
[01:25:29]  No, I don't know.
[01:25:30]  I just like forgot.
[01:25:31]  I didn't look at it.
[01:25:31]  I like it.
[01:25:32]  It makes you non-threatening.
[01:25:34]  I think it's, you know, I like that it's kind of askew.
[01:25:38]  It's got a little attitude.
[01:25:40]  It's like, it's a little off to the side.
[01:25:42]  You know, it's got a little like.
[01:25:43]  Yeah.
[01:25:44]  It's like a flapper hat or something.
[01:25:45]  Yeah.
[01:25:46]  It's, yeah, showing some things.
[01:25:49]  Well, we have a part two of this coming out later this week.
[01:25:54]  Are you getting to even way crazier?
[01:25:57]  It gets way crazier.
[01:25:58]  Yeah.
[01:25:59]  Kind of a marathon couple episodes.
[01:26:00]  We just, yeah.
[01:26:01]  Anyways, yeah.
[01:26:03]  My name is Bryce.
[01:26:04]  I'm Liz.
[01:26:05]  We're joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called Trinon.
[01:26:09]  We'll see you next time.