Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

I'm ready okay Tom how are you good Joe great to meet you you too I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks and will tell everybody what it's called right off the bat it's called chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the secret history of the 60s and I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes and this is what you have mean you've essentially been obsessed with this for how many years would take you to do this yeah not obsessed by choice it kind of happened but in the end exactly 20 years we turned in the final manuscript I think a day to the 20th year and this wasn't a personal obsession with yours you know writing an article let's fill people in that yeah the beginning was I was in between magazines and not working and I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years and she was a premiere magazine at that point which was a monthly movie magazine and she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders which was 1999 happened in 69 and I said yeah no no thanks you know never been interested hasn't the story been written you know death and she said look once we talk about it you're gonna see Manson comes up much more often in popular culture than you're aware of just trust me on that and I think that if you look into it you'll find an interesting story I go but you know what about the 30th anniversary there's no angle and she goes you've done it before you'll find an angle we'd worked together a lot and that began to spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last last year and March when we turn the manuscript in that is so crazy that it took that long when AGGA zine shut down five years later so you never got the you never got anything printed in the magazine well no I mean that's also a little bit of a complicated story too I got an assignment to do a normal feature which is the three months three and a half months so I got it on the day after my 40th birthday which is the time in any person's life we were kind of reevaluating things anyway so I thought I needed the money and I needed a job and I knew that I could get into premiere magazine as a contributor on the masthead which meant I yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over and once I had a good story there and this would have been the first then I'd be said so I agreed to do it and long story very long story short after a month or two when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes and the official narrative in pursuing them I had met with the editor-in-chief Jim Meg's and he agreed once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence which was just you know a small portion of what I ended up having in the end he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August 99 and he started contracting me by the month and that continued for a year and a half all I did was report the story on premiers dime he lost his job because of you well that was kind of what was whispered around the offices I never heard that you know that was ever substantiate it I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it he went on to a career that was fine anyway but when the new guy came in he demanded the story right away I mean I understood that and at that point I got a book agent through a friend and my book agent got me out of my obligation to premiere so premiere essentially paid for you to start your book yeah a lot of money oh my goodness yeah and that's I'm actually because it was resolved not in the courts but we've all had to sign non-disclosure so I didn't get entirely away with it for nothing but at that point though that was I think 2001 late mm then I was on my own I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book so that happened next and finally in 2005 and when we took the proposal out it was book length it was 220 pages and my agent who was big shot at ICM who was also kind of what I would do it I was seduced people into this story and get them as I was as I was I pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book in the beginning in the first years just that the trial that had occurred that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi had a lot of malfeasance in it by the prosecution I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses including Terry Melcher who played a big part in this and will probably talk about that at some point lied on the stand you know suborn themselves in a murder trial and if you commit perjury in a murder trial you could be convicted of murder I mean you could be sentenced to a murder you could get a murder sentence too because of that so there was about a dozen of those and none of them happened all at once so if you committed perjury during a murder trial you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentence if they murdered somebody you are subject to an actual capital you could be elect you could be sent to the chair Wow and the five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial once had I been around and able to prove this in the early 70s Vincent Bugliosi and the three people who lied on the stand in a material way you know in a very important way they all could have been tried for that perjury and sentenced to the same or given the same sentence that the people who had gotten the death sentence now I told you that I just got to the 11th chapter of your book right and essentially what I'm getting so far I haven't finished a book but what I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program where they were explain how they did it they they infiltrated these hippie communities and they allowed Charles Manson over and over and over again to get out of jail they knew that he was committing all these crimes and instead of incorporating careful when we say they who's they yeah we have to kind of break it all down let's let's break it all down one of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson had a parole officer his first parole officer who kind of had given him a get-out-of-jail-free card for the first year after Manson was released in prison and it was miss Rogers Matthew yeah and he was a criminologist in the Bay Area Manson violated his parole the day that he was released in Los Angeles and this is one of the you think it's a little lie but it's an important lie that Vince Puleo see presented not just in at trial but also in his book a trial it's much more serious he changed the narrative he said Manson had been given permission to travel to San Francisco from LA when Manson was paroled Manson hadn't been given that permission he just showed up there they originally were gonna violate him set him right back to prison and someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco and he was assigned to Roger Smith it took about a year and a half but through a Freedom of Information Act process I got his federal parole file and those were the kind of seeds of how I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution for the two years he was out of prison from 67 until the murders occurred in the summer of 69 hoo hoo I'm sorry to interrupt but who was Smith doing this for who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and he can in to continue to moderate well that's the problem I didn't get the whole file and the file I got had redactions he would report to the head office and they would give him instructions and then he would violate those instructions and there'd be no repercussions for him or for Manson for instance Manson was arrested in July of 1967 three or four months after he got out of prison when he was under Roger Smith supervision for interfering with an officer who was trying to arrest one of his first young followers Ruthie amaura house who was 15 and he was put in jail pled out so he got a three-day sentence a new probation sentence as well and all that was hidden like it's not in Bulli o'seas book the the parole officer Roger Smith a week later wrote to the head office that Manson was doing fine and he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go to Mexico and work in Mexico and the head parole office in the United States since his federal wrote back and they said that's insane he was supposed the job that he was going to do in Mexico was surveying soil for insect insecticides I mean had nothing to do with and I have all these documents showing this who was hiring him Charles Manson to serve a soil it was a company and Nevada which disappeared a couple years later it was a [ __ ] company I believe so yeah how do you think they were doing down there I see that's it I don't like to speculate I can't prove it all I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only to Mexico but to the country that Manson had been deported from in 1959 the last time he was a free man he had violated his parole then he was arrested in Mexico right he was arrested in Mexico and brought over by the federales and given over to federal custody for I was a drug violation and some other stuff so why would his parole officer send him back to this place three months after he'd been released and how do you supervise somebody who's in another country can I make a summary just for people who like what the [ __ ] is going on right now essentially what you're saying is that Charles Manson was a part of some sort of a program yes and that through this program they were using him and using with LSD and all the members of the family they were turning them violent and why why do you think they were doing this again this is where I got a real it in a little I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove understand what I proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government and the law enforcement first in San Francisco that year the person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer Roger Smith a federal parole officer who was giving him llenan see Roger was also doing drug research at the haight-ashbury free medical clinic which opened in June of 67 Manson during that period turned into the Manson that were familiar with today you know the monster the embodiment of evil as Ben's bully OC called him the Guru who could control the minds of these followers so he would come into the clinic to see Roger well he went for two reasons it was a free clinic it was at the height of the Summer of Love the summer of 67 and he would come in with the women the girls here about five or six followers then and they would walk behind him they wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them any command he issued towards them they would follow and they became very well known around the clinic and they were there principally for Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole appointments and then the girls were going in for STDs and there were some pregnancies and stuff and they were getting free treatment that was you the summer that the Manson family formed and then they left in late 67 early 68 and migrated down to Los Angeles and became this killer cult it's crazy how quickly this all happened it's insane don't understand we're talking about two years we're talking about 67 Manson is in haight-ashbury 69 the tate-labianca murders and then the trial and then everything else yeah yeah and so you brought up MKULTRA yes and Kay ultra was a government program run by the Central Intelligence Agency originally started as something called Bluebird in 1948-49 morphed into artichoke and then in 1952 became MKULTRA it was a mind-control program a brainwashing program the CIA was trying to learn how to control people's behavior without their knowledge now this is all came out and Senate and congressional hearings in the 70s it was exposed but nobody knew about it until 1974 when Seymour Hersh the New York Times reporter reported on the front page of the paper so their main objective was to commit or to create what they called hypno program assassins people who would kill on command popularly known as Manchurian candidates after a book that was written 1962 and later became a movie and then a movie again the people would be through drugs and hypnotism the objective was to get people to go and commit an act of murder against their moral code and have no memory of their programming and be amnesiac even of the act after the fact often that was just one of that was a main goal but they were also trying to create couriers people you know military people that they could implant messages send them you know across dangerous areas weather or at that time it was the Vietnam War and deliver messages and then had them wiped from their memory in case they were captured they had all kinds of objectives so Roger Smith was supervising Manson when he became exactly where he was able to do exactly what the MKULTRA program have been trying to create and do for at that point about 15 17 years when it was all exposed in the 70s and there were these hearings first the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the church hearings and then finally senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel anyway held hearings the CIA admitted that they had done this but they no one would say exactly what did all the records have been destroyed when the two people who ran at Richard Helms who had become the director of the CIA in the 60s and dr. Sidney Gottlieb who was kind of the mad scientist who had supervised all that all that they had safe houses in San Francisco New York Los Angeles where they would experiment on people that were lured and into these apartments and houses that were either look like brothels or hippie communes or whatever and the people who are working at the Haight Ashbury free medical clinic that was run by another Smith which makes it a little confusing but dr. David Smith who founded it he had given an office to a scientist named jolly Wes Lewis Jay West who was when when the hearings occurred in the 70s identified as a top MKULTRA researcher he was an academic come out of the military had been at the oklahoma oklahoma university university of oklahoma sorry and then UCLA running the psychiatric divisions he denied ever being involved in MKULTRA and this was one of the moments i think it was 2001 when you know things really kind of shook the course of my reporting was I learned that West had been at the same place that Manson was in the Haight in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create and I knew actually I'd interviewed West about seven years before for our story I did about celebrity stalkers and people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or try to kill them and he was an expert in violence hypnotism brainwashing and he was a chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point he was dead when his name came up in the Manson's story and there wasn't a lot of I mean I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit but when I did a little research I found out that there have been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKULTRA he always denied it he was never prosecuted never even investigated he went to his grave threatening to sue anybody that said he would have anything to do with this kind of program again through another long story but I got access to his files which had been left at UCLA and never they had never been processed when I called and when I made the request it took him two or three months to process the papers I went through them through the whole summer looking for a needle in a haystack and it was intuition gut I just thought there might be something there and sure enough I eventually found it it was correspondence between jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb the doctor that ran MKULTRA beginning in 1953 about Kentucky inductive experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to have amnesia 'kz amnesia of the axe after they were programmed and everything that he had been accused of and denied he did not only did he do it he created the blueprint for the whole program with Godley the fact that all these kind of interesting research programs merged at The Hague at the clinic and then Manson came out of it with the power to do exactly what the MKULTRA have been trying to create for up to that point I thought was worth investigating further and that's why I kept going and going and going they did a lot of crazy [ __ ] back then are you aware of operation mid like midnight climax that those were the safe houses in San Francisco that was the brothel version yeah yeah where they they lured these jars into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them yeah George hunter white was the head CIA guy and he would sit by the two-way or one-way mirror and watch them that the John's would be dosed with LSD they tried aerosols or just drinks different things and then they would study their behaviors aerosols yeah aerosol sprays really yeah but that would get the prostitutes to them no no the prostitutes to get them in there and then they go to the bathroom or something yeah again the problem is the records are so scant because Helms Quarter gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency and the only reason anybody ever discovered that existed was a whistleblower somebody who used to work for the State Department who remembered that there were records in a warehouse and they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in 52 until the end and the possible end in 73 and it was just financial records of where research took place how much was spent what kind of equipment was bought but nothing about the content the guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hersh to expose it was named John marks he wrote the first book about MKULTRA that came out in the mid to late 70s called the search for The Manchurian Candidate and after he wrote his book he never you know he spoke did a little bit of a tour and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s and when I told him what I had what I had found in West files these documents he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington DC and he told me he said the reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn you know telling me that they'd been victims of MKULTRA he goes I couldn't go anywhere my whole life became crazy because everybody thought that they were subject to this because nobody knew they did these drug tests on prisoners hospital patients John's hippies people that had no idea that this was going on for 25 years so Marx became the authority so he had never given an interview till he met with me and when he looked at my documents at that point I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually because I kept going back to the files and getting more he said it was the most unredacted uncensored account of what the real objectives were what was really being done he'd never he said if I had had that my whole book would have been different so that's one of the problems about saying well how much did they do or how far did they go there's barely any record and that's another reason it took me 20 years because I was trying to find out whether or not Wes had actually you know active with Manson and other girls I mean I knew he was in the same facility I know that everybody that worked there because I interviewed everybody that was alive most of them were still alive back in the 90s and early 2000s when I did this they all said oh yeah Charlie was you know we knew it was Charlie and the girls they come in every day or every few days to see Roger and and Wes was there recruiting subjects now West while he was there that summer had opened something called what he called the haight-ashbury project and in his correspondence and papers that I found he called it a laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad and and just like the operation midnight safe house they call them safe houses which were disguised as birther you know bird ellos and that type of thing or brothels these this was an apartment that was decked out or as he called a tricked out to look like a communal hippie place he had six graduate students and I have his letters to them before they came to work in this he goes grow your hair long wear jeans just like hippies and lure people in there so they ran that for the summer of 67 and Wes was getting people from that Haight Ashbury free medical clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street to participate in that Lord and I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there and they all and these Diaries said we have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here we feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else what does Jolley want why is he making us bring these people in so doing that to graduate students telling them to bring people in and drug them up imagine telling them well some of them like I'm sure because they were also you know encouraged to use LSD I'm sure I mean imagine being a graduate student and this is your project on people I mean that sets up even if you leave that program and go on to do legitimate work the ethical foundations of your career are set up in such a strange way you're manipulating people against their knowledge well they didn't know who they were doing it for that's why they were always questioning it so you know I don't know how I found one or two of them after and they were very careful talking to me I'm sure that ya felt like they were gonna go to jail well that's the thing yeah if any of these experiments or whatever was going on was older than a death there's no statute of limitations on murder right right I mean that's one of the biggest disappointments of my book is that people like West aren't alive you know to answer for the to answer to this and it was really frustrating for me because again his name was on the front page of the New York Times in 1977 when they had the major hearings about MKULTRA and it identified him as the head of the psychiatry department at UCLA very prominent doctoral researcher and he said he had nothing to do with that he'd never used LSD on humans and he wouldn't he said they had asked him and he said no I have all these letters between him and the guy who was running the program describing how they're gonna do it hide it from his colleagues when he started it he started at Lackland Air Force Base he was running the psychiatry department at the hospital there in 1952 when he was there running that hospital that's when he started his experiments on prisoners human subjects and one letter to Gottlieb he says eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field oh Jesus exactly what does that mean well I if you haven't gotten it through a chapter 11 yet you haven't gotten to the Jimmy shaver case no I haven't a year after maybe Jamie did a year after Wes contracted with the CIA to do these experiments July 4th 1954 a three-year-old girl went missing from the parking lot of a bar at about 11:00 or 12:00 at night now her parents was a heat wave they couldn't sleep they went to the bar they brought their two kids they let them play in the parking lot at midnight the little girl disappeared they organized a search party about three or four hours later they went to the gravel pit and to arrow to airman had caught our two itinerant guys had called the police the local sheriff and said there's a guy here that wandered out of the brush with scratches and blood no shirt and he doesn't know how he got here or who he is the police came his name was Jimmy shaver he was an airman they did a search and they found the little girl's body not too far away and she had been raped and murdered by this guy who had no memory of doing it the guy had no history of violence he had a couple kids and he was a flight instructor at the school he'd been in the military for a number of years I think it was in his early 30s well guess who became his psychiatrist in preparation for the trial jolly West who inserted himself into the case and then extracted his memory from him using sodium pentathol where he admitted to the the murderer now in the context of what we found out West was doing and what his objectives were at that same time it raises huge questions about this was an experiment gone wrong you know that he was part of one of these experiments at Lackland Air Force Base where he was signed up during the trial it came out that he had had treatment for severe migraines experimental treatment at Lackland that's another you know a smaller sub chapter in the book but does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he was no no because nobody I mean I have all the testimony there was actually read a trial a retrial and sentencing and every time it came up it was really frustrating because he never testified so they it was either his wife or his mother who would talk about it was mostly his mother saying well all I knew was they wanted him to be involved in this two-year study to try to relieve his migraines he would have such horrible migraines he would put his head in buckets of ice water the people who described encountering him that night when he was arrested and immediately taken out of the sheriff's custody by the military police brought to Lachlan and then back to the sheriff's he was in a trance the doctors tested him for alcohol because they thought well maybe he's drunk here no I just a little bit of alcohol in his system but he wasn't drunk and after the fact they found out that he had well I mean I don't want to get into this because it's really getting into the weeds but he had hallucinate 'add that this little girl was a cousin who sexually abused him as a child and he was trying to kill her her name was Beth rainbow all this stuff came out of the trial Jolley west in 1955 sent a report to sidney gottlieb which nobody had seen and it was another document I found in his files announcing that he had learned how to develop the technology to remove true memories and replace them with false memories and a human subject without their knowledge which was one of the main goals the biggest goals of the MKULTRA program and again when the CIA when they had the hearings in the 70s the CIA said nothing was successful everything we try was a failure it was a waste of money we shouldn't have done it and not not just me but most experts think that that was a cover that they didn't want to admit that they had developed these technologies that were effective they also claimed that they had released everything they had I found the same report where West said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress so that's a crime right there you know so there's a lot of that stuff in the book so the speculation is that this guy through these experimental treatments that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKULTRA techniques and did to him and induce some sort of well this is speculation you know I'll go there okay for this the guy had no history of violence never been arrested with stellar upstanding citizen his only problem was he had these horrible headaches all of a sudden he shows up by a small girl's body who been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it a year earlier dr. West who became a psychiatrist within a week or two possibly had experiences with him before but there was no record oh when I tried to get the record from the medical center at Lackland his file his name was shaver I think it was sa 2s I was missing so where shaver would have been and the the medical records it was gone so I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any kind of experimental program now so is the speculation again it's a speculation that he did commit the crime that he was somehow another induced into committing this crime yeah and again this is speculation it's completely circumstantial the objective was to get people who would go out and do things not even necessarily killed us that was the ultimate goal but to do things against their will against their moral code right but how would they know that this child would be there how would they know no she wasn't targeted so was it just that they'd put it into his head to give something anyone yeah something clicked and went wrong so it wasn't a precise thing no I wasn't no no nobody really knew what Ellis this was the very early days of experimenting with LSD in the in the early 1950s West was one of the premier researchers in LSD but he was still new to it he had actually come out of he had first gained national attention for being one of four or five doctors who treated Korea and prisoners of war who were returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons the United States said that we don't use that that's against the Geneva codes and these guys were brainwashed by the the North Korean Chinese Soviets so when they were brought back after the war West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them what a lot of researchers believe is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they'd been brainwashed by the Koreans where they actually were telling the truth because there's a lot of evidence that's come out as recently as five six years ago that we did use these weapons in Korea double-cross yeah so is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two-bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system and had been incarcerated for what half of his life half of his life when he was released about age 32 and 67 all federal institutions - which was interesting even bully OSI pointed that out in his book first of all his mother was a prostitute she kind of she would get sent to jail for petty theft or prostitution and she'd hand him off to her parents or other people and by the time he was 10 11 12 years old he was stealing cars committing petty theft and stuff so then he was sent to you know juvenile detention centers and schools reform schools all run by the federal government and then when he committed his first crimes as an adult which was again car theft the first crimes require that but when he stole the cars he crossed state lines so then it became a federal offense and he got in prison with much more serious sentences if it's a federal offense and if it's a state and he do these long sentences back to back to back and then every time he was released he either violated parole or probation and they were actually strict with him in the 50s and early well still 60 when he finally went to prison for seven years it wasn't until 67 when he came out that all of a sudden was hands-off now what do you think happened in prison did they find him in prison well again I'll go there with you okay and I kind of lay out yeah what I do in the book is and I get criticism for this which we know was a good possibility I lay out circumstantial evidence for a case with proof of each circumstance but when you put them all together that's the hardest part is linking them finding the bridges okay what I do is show what the objectives were in either the federal government's case through MKULTRA and then other programs COINTELPRO and and chaos and the law-enforcement s-- in Los Angeles in San Francisco at the time so MKULTRA began in the in the federal prisons experiments on prisoners famously or notoriously Whitey Bulger I don't know if you heard about this but a few years ago it was revealed that Whitey Bulger had been a part of MKULTRA experimentation in the 50s when he was incarcerated and after he was convicted he was claiming that he believed that all of his violence was a product of what had happened to him in prison when he was experimented upon with LSD through these scientists so theoretically Manson was in the prime place where the experiments were occurring in prisons before he was released in 67 in federal institutions they couldn't do it in the state indeed Manson ever talk about any experiments that took place turn no no no no he he you know I actually have a his not only his federal parole file which was the hardest thing to get excited never been released from 67 to 69 but I also have the one prior to that from the 50s to the 60s and all the correspondence and he would talk about these doctors coming in to examine him and he didn't trust them and he didn't know what they were doing and this was late fifties and unfortunately he never had the first names for the doctors there were two one of them was dr. Hartman I can't remember the other one's name there was a Mortimer Hartman in Los Angeles who was one of the early psychiatrist using LSD in the 50s Carrie Carrie Carrie grant was one of his patients so theoretically he could have come out of the program or the experimentation that began there but you know I hate to even I rather and again it's hard to kind of synopsize all this without showing all the documentation and stuff of what was going on and where he was and how everything matches up but you'll see that when you get through chapter 11 okay so I wish I wish I got to it but you know rush to get to that far so 1967 he gets out of jail and he how long before he hooks up with this clinic so he got out in March of 67 the clinic opened in June of 67 so just a few months yeah well Roger Smith he was actually living in Berkeley Manson was and he got his first follower Mary Brunner and then two or three or four more and then Roger was the one who suggested that he go to the Haight to absorb the vibes he thought Manson might benefit from the love and peace vibes that were happening in the summer of love Roger Smith was his parole officer in 67 but also was his parole officer before that was that proven well no Roger Smith's yeah well his assistant you that's good you remember that gal sue Dahlia told me she was his assistant at the clinic at the haight-ashbury free medical clinic when he was running his antenna means study in in 68 she said that Roger had told her he met Manson when he was doing probation work in Illinois in the early sixties I eventually interviewed Roger several times and Roger denied that and when I went back to Gale she was shocked she's like I can't believe he's denying that that was a connection he met that's why Manson was able to leave Los Angeles he was sent to Roger Smith so Roger could be his parole officer I was never able to document that Manson had been in Illinois except for three days from in 61 excuse me in 61 he was brought from Mexico to Texas and then they brought him to Los Angeles to be violated in front of the judge there and he did spend three days at Joliet prison where Roger Smith worked but he was there a year or two later so that was one of the one of the many frustrating moments where everything made sense except for one but one very important hole which was well they weren't there at the same time at least as far as the official record shows so if Smith was a part of these experiments and if Smith was also his parole officer and did know him before he did the seven years before he got out which is when it's speculated that Manson was possibly experimented on and Smith might have been aware of the entire process of it and was supervising him upon his release yeah so that's why every time Manson got arrested which should have just locked him up they would just let him go yeah and and Smith I mean to give you a little background on Smith yes he told me he called himself he goes I was a rock Rock rib Republican from the Midwest and I came out he went to Berkeley to the school of Criminology to become a criminologist I think in 65 or 66 he was getting his master's in his PhD and his special area of study was in the big beginning gangs collected behavior and violence and then how drugs would make some of these gangs that he had people he was working with infiltrate students infiltrate to get information yeah this is in Oakland and the ghettos in like 6566 when the Panthers were forming then and 60 late 66 he decided to become a federal parole officer while he was still writing his dissertation and he got assigned to something called the San Francisco project which was an experimental program run by the federal government to see how different numbers of parole clients caseloads for parole officer were you know you know supervised it was about recidivism so if you had the lowest load was 20 clients the largest was like 50 or 60 were you able to super I mean you wouldn't think that 50 or 60 is gonna be a lot more difficult but it always wasn't so Smith joined that program where he's supposed to be paying much more attention and care to his clients because it's part of a special program called the San Francisco project and in fact he was I mean he was he was seeing Manson more than he was even officially supposed to things you know it gets even crazier after 68 he stopped being his parole officer he was actually removed and he said it was voluntarily so he could focus more on his drugs and violence research at the clinic Manson's 3 or 4 women followers got arrested in Mendocino they had lured a couple young boys into a house given them LSD there nasan had sent them out up to Mendocino to recruit people for the family the three women were four women were arrested one of the Mary Bruner had the first baby with Manson in the group and Roger Smith and his wife Carol went up to Mendocino and petitioned the court to take foster custody of the child until Mary was until her case was resolved so they were the foster parents of Manson's son I mean everything was irregular about this that actually that case is pretty interesting so Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins two women who actually killed four Manson in 1969 were given they were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors illegal drug possession and without a trial they pled out and then there was what they call the sentencing phase where a probation officer is assigned to decide whether or not they should be sent to prison or given probation supervised probation so I got access to their files Bruner's and Atkins and in the file were recommendations to the court by Roger Smith and his wife saying these are good women they shouldn't go to prison Susan Atkins who you know stab Sharon Tate is that proven because she said it and then is it proven because Tex Watson clearly was a murderer yeah yeah yeah so she had said that text did it she couldn't do it but this was later on yeah her her first accounts were that she did it and then when she testified to the grand jury she said that she didn't do it she held Sharon while Tex stabbed her right later in prison she said that she did do it then she changed again she go back and forth but she was pretty brutal and Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins were given probation instead of being sentenced partially based on Roger Smith's recommendation Roger Smith identified himself as a former parole officer you know with his expertise and he said he had known both of them for two years and which was also a lie he had only known Susan he could have known Susan for two years he knew her for about a year he did know Mary pretty well and he never disclosed that he was Manson's parole officer and Manson is identified in these same files as the person who lured these women in to crimes that they were his communal wives that they would steal for him prostitutes themselves for him and the other people that they interviewed the probation officer argued against it saying they're gonna go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue the life of crime but the judge released them now this was they were doing Charley's bidding according to the the record what they were trying to do was recruit people into the family yeah and so they would offer them drugs and and and that sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties and where they screwed up is they got an underage boy who was break out right and he was the son of oh sure yeah legs turned into snakes yeah that's really screwed up in that situation and that's how they got arrest at that time yeah and still they got released yeah which is really crazy it's like there's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were arrested and then it seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told hey you got to let these guys go yeah there's this as a higher the situation is above your paygrade yeah well a real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file and saw that I mean in Heller skeller bully OC I think describes two arrests that Manson got released on technicalities you know shoddy police work or something when he should have been violated but what he didn't do was talk about three or four more and if you've gotten up to chapter 10 you've seen all that stuff later yeah so when I got this record a pretty substantial record I took it to someone in Lewis walk Nick who was a retired judge and retired district attorney from the valley out around here Van Nuys because I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked because you have to look at everything in context things work at differently today than they did in 2009 or 2001 I interviewed him but he was there in 69 in the DA's office I brought the documents to him and we laid them all out on his kitchen table and he's looking at them and the poor guy was very sick with cancer and he talked like this but I had the recorder going and he's looking at all the documents and he's seeing this pattern of catch release catch release and he's gone chicken [ __ ] chicken [ __ ] this is all chicken [ __ ] he goes he shouldn't he should have gone back the first time he goes they wanted him out he said he was more important to somebody out than in he goes you've got to find out who it was and I go up how do I do that and he goes you're not gonna be able to that's he's an informant I go but who should i what should I look at he goes well he was working either for local law enforcement the federal government the FBI but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing so that was important another turning point was a bunch of years later was when I brought similar materials to Stephen Kay who was Bulli aussies co prosecutor in the case I stopped you for a second so the speculation his speculation was that Charlie was an informant well and again an informant has many definitions it's not just informing on crime it also can be doing the police's bidding that's what we're the CIA's been with the CIA or the FBI being a part of a program right where they're allowing this and also there's speculation that the the goal was to try to diminish the anti-war movement and that this guy was a part of the hippie movement and then so now people would associate hippies with violence and drugs and murder and all this well I mean this is going into the but I'll try to do it I know that your podcasts are longer than most well we can keep going forever so it's been a while since I've done this the book came out a year ago and everybody I mean I haven't been getting the calls I got when the book came out so I'm a little rusty believe it or not you're great this is some amazing stuff it's just hard to kind of cover all these loose ground without sound and nuts without giving context yes I understand in 1967 the federal government started the FBI started a program called COINTELPRO in San Francisco the hope and the first office the same time Manson arrived there the CIA started a program like MKULTRA illegal I mean I'm Kaila was illegal because they were violating people's human rights by giving them drugs without their knowledge or cousin sent but they were also operating on American soil domestic soil which is against the law in the United States are not allowed to the CIA is not allowed to operate here they opened something they started a new program called Kaos same thing they speak an in San Francisco in the summer of 67 authorized by Richard Helms who was by then the director of the CIA he had come up since 52 working under Allen Dulles and then John McComb and he was the one who supervised Gottlieb and MKULTRA so chaos in COINTELPRO each had the same objectives which were to neutralize what they believe was a revolution the revolutionaries that were gonna create a civil war in America at the left-wing the anti-war movement the Black Panthers and the hippie movement who kind of embraced it all and this all began in the early 60s with Ronald Reagan had become the Governor of California and J Edgar Hoover was convinced that the free speech movement which began in the early 60s in Berkeley had been infiltrated by communists from Russia and China and they were trying to create divisive miss within the United States to start a revolution so Hoover started COINTELPRO and Reagan was involved with that as the governor and then Helms started chaos and both of them had informants who were trained they had something called the Hoover Academy where they had training programs to turn agents into hippies just like Joey West with his graduate students they grew their hair long they learned the lingo and then they went and tried to insinuate themselves with with left-wing groups african-americans with the Panthers COINTELPRO would hit rival groups against each other and the ultimate goal was to get them to kill each other and COINTELPRO was exposed in 1972 one or two after a bunch of kind of radical people raided a warehouse in Pennsylvania where they media Pennsylvania not far from where I was raised where they knew that the FBI stored records and then they released it to the public and it was the record of this operation and the documents were astonishing because they weren't redacted because they were stolen and then released there are documents celebrating the murder of one mutant the panthers became really paranoid by 67 68 there were all kinds of inner power struggles and they thought they thought that they were correctly thought that they had been infiltrated and they suspect and they were some of them killed other Panthers because they thought they were informants but they also had a rivalry with different groups like in the Los Angeles the u.s. slaves which was a militant group and the COINTELPRO operatives would let the us slaves think they were about to be attacked by the Panthers and vice-versa and then there'd be a shootout and when Cohen trouble was Pearl was exposed in the 70s and resulted in more hearings investigations they admitted to being responsible for instigator I think 20 or 30 killings by their operatives chaos on the other hand there's minimal records of casts all we knew was it existed from 67 probably till Helms left the CIA and 73 and that their objective was we knew that they were doing surveillance and we knew that they were doing wiretapping and infiltrating groups but as far as beyond that you can't they can't even name a Kaos agent nobody has ever been exposed because everything was destroyed when Helms left the record so these groups were trying to incite violence now we get to the motive of of the official narrative of the Manson murders are the tale Avianca murders which is what the prosecutor events Bulli OSI presented at trial which was the famous helter skelter motive in a nutshell Manson believed that there was going to be a race war and he wanted to incite this race war because he had convinced his followers that through messages he received from the Beatles White Album from their lyrics from biblical Old Testament prophecies that he had been told that he was going to be the savior of the world and once a race were started he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert and when the race war ended with the blacks winning the blacks will be framed for four murders they would the Manson family would emerge and repopulate the planet with their perfect opt offspring and dominate the blacks this was Vince Bugliosi well he heard him or there was talk of that there was a philosophy of helter skelter at the spawn ranch with where they lived in 68 and 69 that Manson would discuss but whether or not it was the motive for the murders is I raised serious questions about that and look man said would discuss it in that way that there was going to be a race war and that they would emerge and then their offspring yeah yeah except for the fact that what's question so the way boolie OSI was able to convict Manson Manson wasn't at the Tate house when the murders happen he had in the official story dispatched Susan Atkins Patricia KRENWINKEL Leslie Kasabian and Tex Watson to the house the former house of Terry Melcher they didn't know who lived there but just to kill everybody and has Manson allegedly said leave something witchy he wanted it to look like blacks had killed these all he knew was they were wealthy beautiful whites and he wanted to ignite the race war because if the Panthers got blamed for these murders then the police would crack down on them they revolt the revolution what happened it would be a plea it would spread across the whole world and then when it was over and the blacks had prevailed they were too dumb Manson believed to be able to run the world that's when he would come out with his followers of their whole in the desert and take over the planet now Julio see said in interviews that I didn't have until after he and I stopped speaking which was when he started threatening me with lawsuits and other things in the in the about 2006 seven I discovered two or three interviews he gave in the early 70s where he was asked if he believed that Manson really believed this craziness and Bruno's he said I don't think Charlie believed he got his followers too but he never believed in that he was too smart he was a conman what the interviewers didn't ask him in the follow-up was well if he didn't believe it why did he send his followers to kill these people the first night at the Tate house the second night in Las Villas as the you know upper middle class couple the law Bianca's then you know what was the motive and that's one of my biggest regrets is that I slipped and they were kind of obscure one was a penthouse interview the other was a regional newspaper but that I didn't have them I thought I had done all the research I thought I read every interview he'd ever given but I didn't have it at hand to say all right then I get that because I don't think Manson believed it either then what was the motive for the murders why were they sent there to kill and that's what the book explores so do you think Bugliosi was operating with the knowledge that Manson was a part of these programs oh that's the big question yeah yeah again I I lay it out in the book so I interview bully oh so he was the first not the first one of the first interviews I did when I was a magazine assignment he invited me to his house in Pasadena so it was April of 99 we spent literally six hours together he was so kind and generous with his time I thought I scored I had the prosecutor he hadn't given interviews he always gave interviews about this but he hadn't for a number of years he agreed to do it for whatever reason and during the course of that interview you know we arrived at his house went to in into his kitchen his wife gave me Italian cookies with coffee and lemonade then he and I went out to lunch in the valley somewhere he showed me some of the sights connected to the murders then we went back to the house and talked till sunset and towards the end of the six hours I did realize that even though he was talking non-stop and I'm recording everything he hadn't given me anything new or different I mean I just finished helter skelter I read it for the first time because I'd never been interested in the case till I got the assignment so I did what we call the Hail Mary pass in journalism which is you ask someone if there's anything they could tell you off the record and offer attribution that will help them to get something fresh because I was still searching for an angle this is the first month of reporting and then kind of thought a minute and then goes turn it off turn it off so I turned off the recorder and he did I could tell he was debating but then he told me something which I'm not sure if I don't think I revealed it till the last chapter it's off the record was salacious pretty shocking in the larger picture it doesn't change anything really but it showed me that he had a very different account of something very important in the narrative and I took that away and I thought wow I'm gonna what'd he say well first let me explain it it was off the record right in 2005 when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell and he started threatening me and with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher trying to get them to stop the book he wrote about what he told me and he claimed that I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this but once he put that in a letter the lawyers at the publisher said well it's not on the record anymore because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he Sue's you which he said he was about to do not off the record you mean yeah they said now it's on the rack right I mean he is he's violated his agreement with you so what he told me was that famously an audio to our videotape was taken from the Tate house by the police excuse me the first day after the murders they found it hidden up in the loft videotape videotaping home video taking was relatively new at that point not a lot of people had cameras but Roman Polanski did and in helter skelter Vince says in the book that the police took the tape viewed it and it was just Sheeran and Roman making love and returned it to the law Roman was in London at the time of the murders he came back immediately and then about a week later he went up to the house and one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft and he never even knew that they took it allegedly that that's story found it and took it Vince told me originally off the record that the tape wasn't of Roman and Sheeran making love it was Sharon being forced to have sex with two men against her wishes and he said Roman was the one who was making because you could hear him in the background you know if you read the bull you've read those chapters Roman did a lot of bad stuff to Sharon yeah he seemed like a terrible person he's pretty bad well what do you when you hear what he did well the reason why I can never come back to the country you go well okay it makes sense it makes sense yeah it's not that surprising it's a monster yeah yeah I mean monster that's really good at making movies yeah yeah which we're not gonna see any more because the last one he made which was supposed to be one of his best they're not gonna release it in the United States but once I had that that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down because I'm like well if this was different in the official narrative what else might they have changed so Vince and I were talking on the phone about every week for two months he was so accessible so I'd be interviewing people and one of the first things after that that I found was the perjuries by Terry Melcher on the stand I found I got access to two separate files and found that Melcher door stays on record producer a young boy wander who lived in the house with his girlfriend candy Bergen and Cielo up until January 1st of 69 then moved to Malibu and Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February Melchior was the part of the motive for why the house was picked and again this is getting into the weeds but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition Manson sent his followers up there to instill fear and Meltzer by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them I don't believe that that's the official narrative but Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson one at beach boy drummers Dennis will - there I think and then no one there and then - when he went to the spawn ranch in April and May of 69 - listen to them play music with the possible possibility of recording them and he didn't think they were talented enough and told Charlie that in so many words and then again this is the official narrative that's when Manson kind of spiraled and went crazy because he'd been rejected by Terry Melcher so he decided it was time for helter skelter the race war and again a lot of these things don't add up when you step back well why didn't he kill Terry Melcher at the house in Malibu because he knew where he had moved - why'd he just go to this other place and kill strangers maybe Terry wouldn't connected all that the bottom line was Terry on the stand and all the official accounts of this case of which there are many not just helter skelter but lots of books his relationship with Manson ended in May of 69 he said he never saw him again when the murders happened at his former house it never occurred to him it had anything to do with him or that Manson did it I stopped believing that a month or two in and then I found these documents showing that Meltzer actually had gone to see Manson twice at the spawn ranch after the murders and then once all the way out at death valley where they had the Barker ranch where they were hiding when they were finally captured and in the fall of 69 once I could document that that changed the whole I mean it didn't change but impacted the mode I mean Meltzer was a principal witness again because Charlie wasn't at the Tate house Manson had our bully oh she had a convicted of conspiracy in other words ordering people to go up there and kill and he had to have a reason for that house so Terry provided it by saying yes I did go out there and try to record them and then eventually in the question it came out but I never had anything to do with them again I had no idea I never saw him or heard from the motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher because Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star right so this is what Billy owes he was using but it didn't make any sense right because Melcher saw him after the murder several times yeah and not only even if it made it didn't make sense you're right and that's why I think well I think if we get away with anything then because the antics of the family at the trial and everybody was so horrified by what was going on nobody was looking at this critically in questioning stuff cuz everyday you know Manson and the girls were getting thrown out of the courtroom for screaming for singing for dancing for mocking the proceedings so all this stayed under the radar but once I could prove that melter lied and then two or three more then I knew that I had to question the entire narrative so Julio see started monitoring my interviewing this is all laid out in the beginning of the book so by the fall of the first year of 99 I got a call from one of my sources Rudy Alta belly it was another important witness he was the man who owned the house where the murders happened he was traveling he was traveling actually in Europe with Sharon who had come back about sharing tape about three weeks before to have her baby and Rudy had told me from the very beginning he was very close to Terry Dennis Wilson and the third guy Greg Jacobson Greg Jacobson was another important witness who lied and throughout the whole all of his testimony in the trial to fit a narrative the fence needed Rudy had told me that Vince called him excuse me Terry called him and said what are you telling this O'Neil no one was supposed to know about that Vince promised me it would never come out so at that point I knew that I was onto something even even bigger and then I got a call from Vince and he left a message on my machine saying he wanted to talk to me it was important so I called him back and he said you know I'm hearing I I can't remember who told me and that was another little game of his he would never be like Trump saying this guy said to me or one of my friends or they say Vince said someone told me I heard that you're questioning my tactics and my choices at the trial is that true you know Tom what's what's going on here I go well you know I'm looking at stuff Manson you know you knew where this was going I mean I know we haven't taught it's that point we hadn't talked for about six weeks I think he goes well I want you to assure me that all be given the opportunity to answer any of these questions he goes because what might appear irregular to you as a lay person can be easily explained by me I said well of course fence I'll definitely swing back around to you before because and I thought this was gonna be out in August and we were in like October I think oh yeah yeah I got it extension goes well they're also saying you're doing it's a book and that you lie that it's not a magazine sorry I don't know I'm still getting paid by premiere because it was at that point and I had no idea it was gonna be a book because we're still in the first six seven months so at that point I we stopped talking Vince and I and it wasn't until 2005 when I got my book deal that I went back to him with these questions and I thought hoped naively that I would get him to break down and say yes this was all a CIA operation I was option oh god no that was stupid but you know I thought what else can he say when I put all this in front of him but you know as he must have been really freaked out by how deep you got into this yeah yeah well again you've read the prologue to the book where we open in that scene in his kitchen where he's screaming and cursing at me and saying he's gonna hurt me like I've never been hurt before and he's gonna sue me for a hundred hundreds of millions of dollars it's crazy well when you got to the end of the book you'll see the outcome of that day and what happened when he's begging me he's saying he'll give me a quote on the cover of my book if I don't publish this stuff and and then when I wouldn't agree to anything then the lawsuit threats started happening so I naively I didn't think he was gonna break down and say I was working for someone else I had no choice right but instead he was evasive threatening screaming denying he had two recorders I had two recorders he's he went off the record every two minutes so we'd have to turn off all the recorders and Vince was not turning his I'm like Vince you didn't turn yours back oh no you didn't turn it off wait and no that's my record now this is yours so woman and he's screaming and cursing at me going do you have any idea how [ __ ] you if you [ __ ] put this in your book and then the recorders go back on but sometimes it they were already on because we couldn't keep up with all the off-the-record geez then when I got home that night so I walk out of the house 6 hours exactly almost 6 hours just like the first time 6 years earlier he's grabbing me by the arm goes this isn't quid pro quo this isn't quid pro quo but if you don't put this ridiculous nonsense in he goes you know a blurb from Vince bull he always referred to himself in the third person of blur from Vince Pouliot Jie on the cover of this book you have no idea what that doesn't I rarely do it I'm very selective I get asked 10 20 times a day I mean the man's egos you'll see that in the book then I get home that night there's messages call me call me and he called me I think it's a week week and a half almost every day the next morning a few days later trying to he would bully me and then he'd say no no look what this is gonna do to my family my kids had to be very excited by that knowing that like this is oh yeah there's no there's no reason for that guy to react like unless you had him I know I know and then he knew yeah so a year lake up not a year later he said when we finally he goes at the very the very last phone call which was a week and a half later he goes so you're really gonna go ahead and do with this go ahead with a cycle Vince I'm gonna report what I have I go if you want Oh at this point I had lost the magazine deal had ended I had sold the book so I he knew I had a publisher I told him who it was and he asked for my editors name there he said because I will be sending them a letter he goes I will work on this letter for hours it's gonna be a complete rebuttal of everything you argued all of your arguments all your points it's gonna ruin you they're gonna cancel your deal because they're not stupid so he wrote the letter they got it and I think it was June or July after February of that that year 2005 and I got a call from my editor he said you got to talk to our attorneys he goes we have a letter from Vince I go well I told you it was coming he goes it's insane it's 34 pages single-spaced with 50 pages of attachments and it goes I've never seen anything like this so he said talk talk to the attorney so they sent me over to the attorney and he said my first question I'd never met the guy before he goes my first question for you O'Neil is is he suffering from dementia he goes I was a law student during the trial and he goes I followed that trial every day in the paper I've read helter skelter he was brilliant he goes I can't believe the person that wrote this letter wrote that book so maybe you were dealing with somebody who was impaired I said he's mentally ill and I have a lot of proof of that in the book it's not dementia I go he's finishing his magnum opus a 20-year effort to write a book rebutting the critics of the Warren Commission about the Kennedy assassination I always got a book coming out a tour and sure enough you know he wrote I think two or three more books after that I go he's just I caught him he goes all of his arguments don't make sense he's contradicting himself the letter goes off in the directions that it sounds like it's written by a madman and I go I was gonna inhibit us he goes oh no we're cell we're opening the champagne here you I mean he wouldn't write a letter like this unless you got him fifty pages of attachment that was the first letter then about six months later another letter I think there were four total I quote some of them in the book it was nuts and unfortunately he passed away in 2015 or 16 and I get a lot of criticism I mean get it from all over seeing when he died I think seventy four or five it was cancer I know he was sick off and on for a couple years but I've been accused by my critics of not publishing the book until he died because of these threats and no I wanted him to be alive I wanted him to be accountable and have to answer to all this the reason I didn't publish it when I was going to publish it was penguin my publisher cancelled my deal and 2011 and then sued me for a return of the advance which crippled I couldn't do that well the book was due originally in 2008 and then I'm not good with the deadline figure that out well it's a great book even if it took you 20 years to write it ya know I mean they they extended it and then in 2011 they lost their patience and it was a surprise because I knew that the editor and the publisher of penguin press the imprint who are very serious you know publishers very well known I knew I thought that they believed in me and understood why it was still taking long so when I got the call it was devastating and then even worse as a year later my agent got served with papers and they took me to court what never got to court it was resolved but they sued me for my advance which was substantial and I'm not allowed to say anything except that it was resolved because there's non-disclosures but let's just say you've had I mean you putting me on here and the advance stuff you get this help the sales I'm still not making money because I owe a lot of people money so that was crushing and it held up the book because we couldn't take it out and try to resell it until it was resolved it took about a year and a half or two years to resolve the lawsuit I luckily I got a pro bono lawyer I was busted broke and then once we resolved the lawsuit was about 2016-17 then we could take it out but we weren't sure where we were gonna be able to sell it because it had this bad history trailing me so from 2011 to 2016 it's in limbo well it is except I worked just as hard every single day and then I was involved with a director and I kind of hint in the book who it is but I mean it's I don't think it's a secret Errol Morris you know who he is no he did thin blue line okay yeah he's won an Academy Award for a documentary Robert McNamara so they want to make a book about the drone oh so Errol Errol Morris I think you had a son on Hamilton Morris oh that's a song yeah yeah yeah yeah well Hamilton was he wasn't officially part of this project but he came to the shoots Errol approached me he actually is a writer for penguin press an author there he writes books too not too often but occasionally and he knew about my book because they had asked him at one point if he wanted to collaborate on it with me when it was when I was struggling with it and he said no no I want to make a movie about it and they said well it's not a movie it's a book maybe after so what my deal got cancelled and I was in limbo I thought well I can go to Errol now I'd never met him or spoken to him but I sent him an email got his email address and he called me like the next day and he goes are you kidding me he goes I've always I was fat because I got my proposal he said I was so fascinated by the story and I've always wanted to do something on both Manson and MKULTRA so it took about six months of legal stuff because since my book was still owned by penguin but the suit was happening and he helped this process he got them to allow him to work with me on what became and was gonna be a Netflix series he sold it he shot at what he called a teaser so he spent two days and this was 2014 with me one day at my bungalow where he wired it with like 15 cameras on remote cables and the ceilings and then interviewed me all day at the house at my house and going through all my files and everything and then the next day his crew took like half of my apartment to a soundstage in the valley somewhere and recreated my apartment but then he used all his magical tricks like he had a camera 200 feet in the air it's zoomed down and spin it was beautiful what he ended up cutting and putting together and then in 2015 he changed what he wanted to do with the documentary it was going to be a six-hour series he had sold it and I had never signed the final contracts because I said at all you got to give me a clearer picture of what this is well at one point he decided he wanted to do story of Frank Olsen with my story and Frankel's and sons Eric's pursuit of his father's possible murder by the CIA in 1954 because of what he had found out about the Korean pal biological stuff that became wormwood which I don't know if you saw it was a Netflix series about two years ago it's the last thing I know Errol it's the second to last thing Errol did it was his first six-part series that happened because I backed out when you know I I didn't like the direction it was going so Errol and I fell out over that we're still friends and he gave me some pictures for the middle of the book from from the shoot and he did just just Frank Olson and Eric's pursuit of it so that took up like a year and a half of working with him and his people to develop it and and then it all stopped and I actually walked away from money that would have really helped me but I you know I was willing to give him control but I didn't like where it was going and I had already invested 16 years of my life at that point and I just thought I can't I can't do this you know I still need this to be my vision and not somebody else's and he was pretty upset and pissed off but he he meant another good series that you know evolved out of my project and and at that point it was about to 1516 I just kept reporting and working to get the lawsuit resolved and then as soon as it did my agent took took it out and he said before I take out this new proposal I got a collaborator Dan pipe and bring Young had started working with prints on Prince's memoir and then Prince died in the middle of it and because once Prince was dead all this stuff had to be settled with his estate Dan had like a year of not doing anything so our agents were the same agency they put us together and at first I was apprehensive because he was like 29 he won't even alive when this happened I thought what this is kid gonna know about this case and all of this stuff that COINTELPRO care and killed him enough to teach him so much that's gonna take a year but the when I met him and I saw the writing he had done before I'm like this guy is perfect and he was so we turned it out in a year well we took it out and Sloane my agent said we've got a senator to penguin first because we still have that resolution that hasn't been resolved I mean it's it's all agreed to but we have to finish what we have to do so they need to know about it they saw the new proposal and made us an offer for the book that now hilarious I know after suing me and trying to I mean doing everything to ruin my life they made the first offer and it matched the the publisher we went with little brown and I said oh gosh I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say get in trouble yeah let's just say I I said if they just get me a little bit more than little Browns offering I'll go with them because it was the same people and they knew everything I wouldn't have to educate a little and they wouldn't and then I said oh you guys got a little brown I'm really happy with what little brown did well that's a crazy route to get a book out yeah I mean what it was it what did it feel like when you got this like in your hand it's on the bookshelves I must have been like you gave birth yeah like a giant baby yeah I don't want to be overdramatic but I kind of spent 20 years of my life doing nothing but investigating this and trying to bring it to fruition and there were so many setbacks and so many times that I was broke and my reporting had hit a wall and I found out I'd wasted three months pursuing one angle that ended up not holding up but at some point I thought what else can I do now in good faith knowing that all this stuff I've done up to this point is in the gutter you know in the garbage I can't let that happen and I knew I had really important discoveries I mean my problem was putting them all together in a cohesive way with a final answer and my agents are telling me around to that in the mid-2000s you know you don't have to have resolution you don't have to have a perfect beginning middle and end you've got so much important stuff that you've uncovered about not just the murders and the trial and the corruption in Los Angeles but the federal government Jolley West MKULTRA : tell for all of this stuff he goes just put all that out there you know and and I never really believed that and when I finally said well I can't I'll do this the rest of my life and have nothing when I made that kind of decision and then took on this dan my collaborator and we literally turned it around in a year it was like a dream you know and then when the book was for when I first got the galleys at my house and then the hardcover you know a few months later at my shitty apartment in mid-city that I just I couldn't believe it and I thought right now I can get run over by a bus I don't care cuz there's a document it's out there now I don't care what happens to me and it's kind of giving me it gave me a freedom because now that I've done it and it's you know on bookshelves or wherever I can go on with my life I had hoped to go on with my life without ever having to think about this again but then of course after you get calls you get emails from people who have information there's so much stuff we had to leave out of the book it's pretty long it's a lot longer than they originally gave us and then I was telling you a few days ago they were only gonna give me ten pages of endnotes you know that where you show all your sources at the back of the book and I thought four more and I got sixty and you know that's the most important part of the book because it shows every single document where to get it where I found it I you know add a little bit more of information about why you know why it's important with all that out there now it's like I feel like I don't ever I don't really need to do anything ever again I want to I don't know I mean the guy they know that was Jamie I was telling there's a guy adapting it for Amazon Studios so it could become a film who knows what's going to happen especially or a series on Amazon see now we wanted I wanted a limit none of us it's scripted I wanted a documentary - you're right I think about a film is this is such a long story I would hate to see them butcher it well you do have friends at Amazon when you don't know anybody no no that's you're pretty good at what you do but they're gonna butcher it they're gonna butcher it yeah no I mean I wanted it to be a limited series that's the way to go yeah yeah and when we made the deal with them they actually bought it before the book was written they got a copy of the proposal that we had submitted to a couple of the publishers with non-disclosures they somehow got it Amazon and made us an offer and this was when I was really really broke in 2017 before I mean I got a little advanced from Little Brown but let's just say a lot of that had to go to some other people that I owed money to so my agent basically said you know bottom line is Amazon's going to do a great job whatever they do with it and we can't get them to commit to limited series or feature and they're leaning towards the feature if you want to say I'll only do it if it's a limited series you're risking losing it I would say go for it and then hopefully when they get this massive book they'll say oh it has to be a limited series mmm they didn't you know and the gospel they're really still trying to do it if a feature yeah Amazon please yeah the guy who's doing it so he came to spend a week with me about in October before he began writing and he's an established guy smart good done a lot of films and he's like oh my god now I know why it took you 20 years how am I gonna fit this into two hours yeah make us see I you well that's what I said to him I go will you go to them you know they trust you they'll hear this and maybe they'll listen because I think this can be aspect and I'll help you get put this together put it on Amazon I have people in here I'll promote it I think this is amazing this this story is crazy yeah it's crazy and I think it's also a really important part of human history imagine if The Whistleblower had not come forward and we didn't know about mko and and and all those documents didn't get but they didn't find the warehouse for the document just imagine oh yeah we never would have known a boss like nobody say nobody in the program has ever come out and and talked about it I mean I went to a couple of guys who are still alive wouldn't talk to me of course I mean they always fall back on you know we signed an oath with the agency right if we talk to you without permission and they're not gonna give us permission we could go to prison just imagine what life must have been like for them knowing that this is what they were doing to people oh yeah so that's such a strange way to it also these people are agents for the federal government I mean what kind of precedent does this establish well most of the people doing the research were subcontracted researchers at the prison you know medical personnel at prisons and in the case of jolly West he was first in the Air Force and then he was in university settings and jolly was you know once he got to University of Oklahoma he was experimenting on patients and in one of his letters to Godley asking for more funding he's saying working with psychiatric patients actually benefits us because people can't I'm not quoting directly here but he's he was making the argument that their weird behavior wouldn't be noticed by anybody and the hospitals because their psychiatric patients so these people are getting LSD which is a pretty powerful drug and other drugs he was using and he was hypnotizing them in some of many of his experiments without without their knowledge and their psychiatric patients I mean it's worse than Nazis your mind is you know the next most important thing besides your soul and they're tampering with it you know one of Charlie's colleagues the guy who actually took over the department when jolly in 69 came out to UCLA from Oklahoma said to me because I again I would do this with people I would show them all the documents and he said he always says West was one of his best friends he'd known of her I think 45 years when West died in 99 he said but he said to me Charlie it doesn't surprise me that he would have done this this is the Jack Ruby's stuff which I guess you haven't gotten to yet jolly was Jack Ruby's psychiatrist no Jesus it's a hole that makes sense too right yeah Jack well actually I won't spoil it remote of Jack Ruby on all good I was impressed yeah yeah well you're gonna get to about 30 or 40 pages on Jack Ruby and jolly West I'll just I don't want to spoil it for you or for the listeners if they haven't read the book yet but jolly West inserted himself into the Ruby case after ruby was convicted of shooting and killing Oswald in the spring of 64 before he was going to testify to the Warren Commission he had never told he had never testified at his trial about why he killed Oswald his defense argument was that he had epilepsy and he had had an epileptic fit and shot him and was amnesiac of the the shooting holy [ __ ] yeah so that fits right into the narrative look at key well this gets better so West insert sample that microphone out towards your face I'm sorry that's right so what just yeah so West and search himself into the case gets a sign through his connections to Ruby's new lawyer you Burt Winston Smith who was a whole other kettle of fish but anyway goes to the Dallas County Jail in I think was April of 64 to examine Ruby in preparation for not the Warren Commission testimony which he was giving in a couple months before his next trial because he had gotten a nude or an appeal for a psychiatric review and West who had told Sidney Gottlieb in in these early letters from the 50s that part of his experiments were inducing insanity and a person without their awareness West goes to examine Ruby emerges from the county jail and there's press waiting for him and he announces that within the preceding 48 hours groobie had had a psychotic break that was irrevocable pol it couldn't he couldn't return to sanity he had audio and visual hallucinations during the exam he said Ruby hid under a table because he thought there were people in the room trying to kill him told West he could hear children screams outside his jail cell as Jewish children as they were boiled alive and Wes said he's completely insane that was the day I mean there was no evidence of Ruby being mentally ill prior to West's exam Wes was along with him in the cell and then treated him for about six months when Ruby finally gave his testimony the Warren Commission so Earl Warren Chief Justice Warren who was head of the Commission flew down to Dallas with Joel Ford who was in Congress and on the Commission and Arlen Specter the young royal inspector who was an investigator for the Warren Commission who eventually came up with the Magic Bullet theory he called it the Magic Bullet conclusion anyway the three of them you know put ruby under oath and ruby babble was incoherent grabbed Arlen Specter who was like him Jewish and he said don't you know they're killing Jews and I and they've killed my brother and cut off his legs I heard them being tortured outside my so they couldn't use anything last that was one of his objectives in his encounter research was to make people induce insanity without a person's awareness was there any contact with Jack Ruby before he killed that Walt again that was one of the things I can't tell you how hard you know oh you mean blast Laurel do you mean western movie anyone anyone that could have done something to get out yeah to kill Ruby no Ruby to kill Ruby yeah Ruby had a lot of connections to organized crime and federal he was part of which later emerged the anti-castro Cuban effort to overthrow Fidel Castro which was run it was Operation Mongoose by the CIA it was an illegal assassination program Rubi deny being in and that's in the book I found out that again through West papers that I got access to Ruby admitted never that he stalked and killed Oswald on the orders of anyone but that he was working with these people who were suspected of being involved in the assassination if there was a conspiracy and he had never admitted that to anyone it's only in West's file and Wes withheld that so let's break that down so for people that don't know the the the primary theory of who was responsible if there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and one of the thoughts was that it had to do with some sort of CIA operation to overthrow Castro yeah well there was so the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone there was no conspiracy Allen Dulles Dulles the former head of the CIA who was fired by John F Kennedy was second-in-command to judge Warren and the Commission Richard Helms who was actually jolly West's employer for MKULTRA was the liaison between the CIA and the Commission so Helms knew that Ruby who they called their most important witness in their investigation the Warren Commission investigation because he was the one who silenced the killer there could be no trial for Oswalt because he was dead so they tried to learn everything they could about Ruby to see if he had had any meetings with Oswald prior or if he had connections beyond the superficial ones to organized crime was there something deeper the Commission which I believe was you know a joke from the beginning it was set to determine I mean they said in the beginning their objective was to prove that Oswald acted alone they came up with that conclusion but after the first intelligence Senate Intelligence hearings in the in the early 70s that exposed MKULTRA Kaos : tell Pro primarily the the Frank church hearings they found out that Dulles and Helms and others had lied about the CIA's involvement with Oswald and with their own agents who had had these peripheral we don't know if they were periphery or not but definitely encounters with Oswald they withheld all that so the House voted to have what they call the House Select Committee on assassinations that began in 77 in 78 they released their report which they concluded there was a probable conspiracy to kill Kennedy that Oswald didn't act alone and you know it's there's lots of books about that yeah and in their findings and then later the to the head of the committee uh Robert Blakely wrote a book where he said that that Ruby had acted on behalf of the conspiracy to silence Oswald that he had stalked him premeditated the murder and that the whole thing was part of keeping the secret so was West a part of that you know again I can't prove it I wanted to find out if West it had any encounter or any you know interaction with Ruby prior to Ruby committing the murder couldn't find that and that's the kind of thing that maybe there's no evidence maybe it happened but there's no evidence but I wasn't going to put it in the book and I exhausted every resource I had you know because that that one has always been so puzzling for me because here's this guy that's not connected to the murder allegedly and then steps forward and shoots Oswald in front of everybody yeah sentencing himself I mean like there was no doubt about it you're the guy who did it everyone saw it you're gonna go to jail forever why would you do that well the first report which was fabricated by his first lawyer who admitted this years and years later he told Ruby to say he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to come to Dallas for a trial of Oswald yeah that was made up and then Melvin belli was assigned to the case was I mean we we fired like three lawyers in the first couple weeks then no Melvin belli I took over and took it to trial and his argument was that he had had an epileptic fit and didn't know what he was doing and when he was grabbed by the cops after he shot Oswald he said hey I'm Jack Ruby what am I doing here what are you doing to me don't you know who I am because he knew all the cops my argument in my book is it's important my most important finding is that a CIA contracted agent or researcher for mind control became the most important witness to the Warren Commission he became that witness's doctor right before he testified and told his story ago that should have been disclosed obviously to the Commission but they're not gonna say because it's a secret program right and then he goes crazy and then he goes crazy I got told by a couple of the people who were nobody on the Commission would talk to me that was alive when I started pursuing them Joel Ford wouldn't talk to me Arlen Specter I think I mentioned that to you before there's an interesting I approached Arlen Specter who was running for re-election this was 2002 and told him I had new information and he had all he had always maintained you know he would he he made a lot of money off of his books about justice and hittin the magic you know defending his magic bully Bullet theory he always said if anybody comes to me with new evidence I'll look at it with an open mind so I had sent him a persuasive letter while his people they finally said all right if you have these documents showing that this doctor who treated Ruby you know and within the 24 hours he lost his mind Specter will look at them and then decide if he'll talk to you fax him to us and at that point that was 2002 I'd lost the magazine story and I didn't have a book deal so I wasn't operating entirely on I said I can't send this stuff to you because it's my smoking gun the letters between gottlieben and Wes describing all the experiments so finally Spector agreed to talk to me on the phone for a few minutes and it was amazing he called me from the Senate floor while they were waiting to vote on whether or not they were gonna invade Iraq this was 2002 oh [ __ ] so we were only supposed to talk for a few minutes and when I explained what I had and what it showed West had you know been involved with at the time he treated Ruby he said well if you're not gonna send this stuff to me I don't know you know I need to see it and I go well I can't send it to you and he said we want to meet me because I told him I was in Philadelphia visiting my folks and he was from Philadelphia too he says I'm there in the weekend I'll meet you Saturday I have a squash game at the Wyndham Hotel meet me there Christ squash so we had a meeting set up for like three days later and this is something I'm always second-guessing about I made a decision I don't think I got to I don't think I've ever really got paranoid doing this but Specter had been a long-term senator he was running for re-election and it was the first time in his career but the polls were against him that his opponent was they were predicting that he was going to Spector was gonna lose he had also you know defended this Magic Bullet theory forever I mean more people knew him for the Kennedy assassination than anything else I thought so if I do meet with him and I show him these documents maybe it was grandiose of me to I thought he's gonna go oh my god I need to be part of their you know exposure because if he didn't and walked away from it I thought they were important enough that he would know that that would you know once they were publicized and he had the opportunity to say hey we need to look into this and didn't he would look bad so then I thought well maybe he's gonna two things he's either gonna use it for to get publicity have a press conference and help him in his reelection or he's going to use it to be the hero of it and run with it before I published a book and then I'll just be a footnote you know to all this because he took it so I cancelled the meeting the morning up I called up his press secretary and his cell phone like the three phones I had for him I said you have to tell senator Specter I am so sorry but there's an emergency I've got to go back to Los Angeles I actually was scheduled to go the day after on Sunday so it was a lie and I didn't talk to anyone I just left the message and I said I'm so sorry but I obviously I've worked so hard to get this meaning it's embarrassing but I have to go back so I left my parents place to go to the post office cuz I had been there for three months I was actually writing the first version of the proposal at their place to get away from my friends and you know all the distractions in LA and I was only gone for like 15 minutes I go mama if that press secretary calls I told them I was leaving so tell him that I'm I just went to the airport and I and I apologize I can't lie to a press secretary I'm I got to so I go the post office and I come home 15 minutes later and she's like as white as a ghost I go what she goes senator Specter called I go see me in the press secretary because no he called himself he wanted to know what happened why you changed your mind and why you were cancelling and I had to lie Don I don't lie I go but I lied to the senator and you know he was a big deal in Pennsylvania back then and so I don't know if that was a mistake on my part I think you know 20/20 hindsight I should have done it and taken my chances I did close what would have done I know that's a very powerful man and if he thought that he was in danger yeah I could have [ __ ] driven off a cliff I never I mean I really didn't try to think like that through all those years I thought like that when it comes to Arlen Specter I mean do you know how deep that guy had to be in on that to come up with that whack I imagine without fear he's so bad the fact that that actually gets debated and the fact that never gets brought up that there were more bullet fragments in Connolly's body than there were missing from that bullet yeah and the fact that anyone who knows anything about guns right any anyone who's ever shot a gun is seen with a bullet with a bullet shatters bone and what it looks like would look at that [ __ ] bullet and think that bullet went through two human beings right right and the fact that the reason why they had to make up this theory in the first place was because a guy was hit by a ricochet on the underpass yeah I know the whole story behind that well here's what I did I tried not to lose myself any more than I had to in each compartmentalized area I was going into so with the Kennedy assassination I just did a superficial cause like Manson I was never interested in any thing so-called conspiracies yeah I never cared about Kennedy or the John F Kennedy assassination but once I found out that West was connected to Ruby and again that was a moment that I was like oh no I mean first it was West in the CIA and then I'm like and Ruby how can I not look at the Kennedy assassination so I kept my focus narrowly just on Ruby Oswald West Specter I looked a little bit of the Magic Bullet and agree with you but I never did a deep dive and a lot of that stuff well they had to come up with that theory because there was a guy who was hid under the underpass mm-hmm he was hit by a Friday no bullet hit the curb and it the piece of the curb hit him so he had been injured they recovered that bullet and they realized that that had been a shot that had hit that area and so then they had to attribute all of those wounds to one bullet right so they had different bullets they had the bullet that was the head shot they had the bullet that hit the curb and then all the other injuries had to be attributed to one bullet yeah not only that there's a different description of the frontal shot there's a shot when Kennedy you see Kennedy grabbing his neck right well in the hospital in Dallas it's described as a frontal shot when they fly the corpse to Bethesda Maryland they describe it as a trach hole yeah I've read some of that yeah so much for so much about the missing brain yes then on top of that the bully OC writes a book I know to justify the findings of the Warren Commission there's a great book called best evidence by David liftin that book got me down a dark road when I was in my 20s that's what got me really freaked out about conspiracy theories in the first place because I I would always thought that conspiracy theories were for dull minded people that didn't spend much time thinking or reading you know they just like they like to think that there was a bunch of people just controlling everything why well then you find out about MKULTRA and operation midnight climax and all this different [ __ ] yeah but this is real this is definitely real like what and then it makes sense like there's video footage of I believe it's uh I think it's ain't British soldiers where they dosed them up with acid and sent them out into this field have you ever seen that video I have not seen that see if you can find that Jamie there's video footage of soldiers on acid and this is like archived footage of black and white they did experiments on these soldiers in the 1950s yeah they'd been doing it for a while once Hoffman had figured out how to make LSD and they realized what it could do to people they they didn't know what here it is watches falling from 1964 experiment testing the effects of LSD on British Marines you could see it on you don't have to turn around to it's on this screen right here so this is in what did it say 1962 so it says before 64 there is December of 64 so these guys are all wandering around on acid and so they they dose them up and then they send these poor [ __ ] out in the field and they're just freaking out and they don't know what's going on where'd you find this oh this is online yeah yeah you could it's on it's on YouTube oh but look at these guys just laughing battling these soldiers lying on the ground laughing hysterically covering their eyes and it's all archive footage Wow I don't want you to play it now but is there volume or is it all silent do you don't remember any volume go look they're climbing trees and sherry yeah so this is archived footage yeah right this is they knew what they were doing to these people and then they filmed them and this is what they got from Imperial War Museum in London original footage well if we have films like that from our you're not gonna see him of course they were if they weren't destroyed they're locked up I mean that was another big eye-opener for what's kept from us at one point in 2011 I had a researcher at The Washington Post a woman there who has been there for years I could get myself in trouble for this - I won't say her name but anyway she's very well-known and she's their intelligence researcher she works with all of the reporters at the post on intelligence stories national security stories and she had someone at the CIA in their information department who would confirm or deny stuff with her and she said I completely trust these people I've been working with them for 10 years I'll ask them about jolly West and see what they have on them and I said all right before you ask them don't tell them because she had the documents I'd share them with her don't tell them what I have proving that he was part of the MKULTRA just say you're working with an author on a book who wants to know whether they're because I already done a request and I got a we can neither confirm nor deny yeah and she said they don't they'll tell me the truth like they're not gonna give me another confirm or deny we'll just say we have something and we can't tell you if we can or we have nothing but we'll get the truth to see what they have so a week later she lets me know and she said they said there's nothing he never participated in the program there's no record and I go well I don't want to say her name I go well I don't think he should be using them anymore because they're not reliable and you know that because you've seen the documents so she had to rethink that I don't know you know what she did after well that's that's the way they can embed themselves with reporters by letting these yeah I'm your friend look I'll tell you the truth right okay this is it's a complicated world we're out there I'm gonna keep people safe sometimes we got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet right don't worry I'll let you know I mean I'm your friend yeah don't worry if there's some wackiness yeah yeah yeah that's hilarious yeah and then I said to her ask about reef Woodson we haven't even discussed Reed Woodson he's the guy that claimed he had infiltrated the Manson we haven't gone to that chapter no no no is that after 11:00 well how many chapters are there 13 including the epilogue yeah yeah yeah I mean there were a lot of spooky people in and around the spawn ranch and in and around the family and this one guy rave whitson who was a spook and unfortunately was dead by the time I started referring people don't know spook is CIA yeah yeah people don't know what that means yeah I I didn't know what it meant before I saw all this I don't know I mean maybe if I thought about it but I wasn't interested strange terminology I know you know well it's like a ghost you don't say them there's no trace no record and this guy that's how he lived and I had found out about him in my reporting first I got to his attorney and then to some of his close friends he lived in Los Angeles and then he disappear for months doing undercover work and he said we never he wouldn't even tell us who he worked for but his wife and daughter who were in sweden's and other people who said it was the CIA he told before he died in the couple years before his death three or four of his closest friends including his attorney that he had worked on an operation and he wouldn't tell them who but he had infiltrated the Manson Family prior to the murders and it was that his dying regret was he could have prevented them but didn't he also said that he was at the crime scene after the killers had left but before the police had arrived which was like a four or five hour window and I was able to confirm not that he was there in those five hours but that he was missing and that the police set up a watch at his father's house who he was living with to try to figure out what was going on he ended up helping Colonel Tate Sharon Tate's father who left his job in military intelligence to help the police and the investigation he even dressed up like a hippie right he dressed up like a hippie and so to Reeve and rave was a really hardcore right-wing guy I mean he was a racist and his daughter sent me pictures of him and she said once he dies in fact this is how serious this guy was he divorced his wife who was a Swedish model first he sent her and his infant daughter back to Sweden from the United States in 61 because he thought there was going to be nuclear war and then in the mid-60s he told his wife he had a divorce er and he couldn't have any relationship with his daughter because his daughter was his only vulnerability because of the work he did that would be how they heard even if they lived all the way in Sweden so the daughter Liza who I've never met but we started talking on the phone and she started sending me materials didn't meet him until a couple years before his death he reached out to her said I couldn't have any relationship with you because of my work but I want to do that now so he flew her to Los Angeles introduced her to all of his friends and after he died she went to his apartment and went through his things and found a picture of him dressed up as a hippie it's in the book and and I mean it's hard to tell but it's in a parking lot and the cars are all like late sixties models so again this is one of the parts of the book where I worked so hard to try to prove a definite link I interview probably 12 or 13 months and family members and I'd show them that picture and they'd say he looked like any number of guys that that came in and out of there they come for a day to screw us the women would say Charlie would bring guys in and we didn't know if they were the ones were providing drugs or who they were but yeah maybe or maybe not you know and they were all high most of the time too you got to think that Charlie's ability to constantly get out of jail also must have added to his delusions of grandeur because he felt like he was above the law because he really kind of was yeah when the sheriff's were going with the spawn ranch he was threatened he say I've got guy in the hills with guns pointed at you yeah and that's on the book and I've got the document in the notes he would give he would give everyone acid and then he either take a very low dose himself or none or ten yeah so do you think that this was something misleading speculation again but something that he learned how to do from Smith that's the question what what David Smith and Roger Smith were looking at was personality change lasting effects of LSD on the personality and especially David did something he called it the psychedelic syndrome he did this study he was one who ran the clinic and it basically gave Jolly Weston office at the clinic to recruit people in the summer of 67 and then Roger he gave him office space there to conduct what he called the amphetamine research project in 68 and 69 at the period that he was still you know he was they call him the friendly fed in the Haight because everybody knew he was a federal government person but he grew his hair longer and grew a mustache to try to blend in but everybody thought he was a narc and I guess he was but David's line of work after his mice research which people can read about in the book and and mice and violence was trying to figure out why some people were more susceptible to LSD and having a personality change they were doing they would screen people that this was volunteer testing allegedly for personality traits they were trying to find out whether people have precipitating factors in their subconscious they were actually doing chromosomal studies to taking blood and seeing how the LSD affected chromosomes and why some people would after one trip have a complete ideological change they would go from being you know normal teenagers or twenty year old so all of a sudden believing in mystical stuff and losing the ego and all the kind of stuff that Manson was trying to find when he attracting followers who were more susceptible who were more suggestible and that was a research that they were doing at the clinic at the time another finding in the book and I wasn't the first one to find it but I found more evidence of it the clinic famously opened it was nonprofit and it was funded by the government and and David Smith admitted that he took funds and that's one of the reasons he gave he told me he gave Jolley an office there was jolly was well known in the research community he knew that jolly would attract government funding but they were only supposed to be a service to runaway kids and hippies and people who couldn't afford health care they weren't supposed to be doing research they weren't supposed to be doing experiments but they were the entire time so it was it was sold as a non-profit health care facility when it was actually a Research Center for federal government and this is interesting and this could you you know people might think I'm crazy but it raises questions my book came out in June last June of 2019 the clinic was open from June of 67 they closed in September of last year I think it was it shut its doors for the first time in 50 No fifty-two years three months after your book came out yeah and that's one of the biggest disappointments of the book is you know because I couldn't answer the question the bit the largest questions I could only present you know a case for why it sure looked like it might have happened this way that way the other way I was hoping that it would be kind of a call to action you know that other people would pick up the ball and run with it you know and again maybe it was my naivety my grandiosity the second man it took you 20 years no not on a rush for these people to take up the ball I wanted some serious journalists yes especially in the cities where these things took place I mean I exposed some pretty serious corruption in the DA's office in 1969 and one of the until the OJ trial the biggest trial in the history of the United States you know the one that got more coverage than any other trial and Oh Jay and I can prove that it was fixed from the very beginning when they switched the lawyers and planted evidence and perjury and stuff like that a former prosecutor in charge of Sharon Tate of charge of actions yet without her yeah and they fired her legally appointed attorney so how did someone who would play ball yeah yeah and I have the documents and they went to a judge who was complicit who agreed to this and I found all these documents in a file that I wasn't supposed to have access to at the sheriff's office but I got in the back door so through some of the retired guys that got sick of me bugging them for information but I thought somebody from the LA Times would do it you know a follow up you know just go to verify confirm or refute my allegations they gave me a pretty galley Times gave the book a pretty good review but I know stories I thought there'd be news stories maybe I was stupid maybe now maybe San Francisco I mean there hasn't been a story on you know that the clinic closed three months after David Smith is still alive Roger Smith still alive what about where are they I don't want to say where I've exhausted either one of them else since that was the other thing we were sure we were gonna get lawsuits you know little brown was brace for it I mean when bully OC he was already dead when I sold it to them so they weren't so much worried about his family although his family they did say you know we could be sued by his family because they owned helter skelter and they could argue that you diminish the value of helter skelter which I hope I did and I'd love to have that argument in court hmm not a word but there are you know a dozen principal people in that book many of them not public figures like Roger Smith David Smith to an extent is because he became very well-known not one of them has either threatened a lawsuit contacted me the publisher I defamed a lot of people and I think again thank god I've got the 60 pages of notes because I think they know they can argue the points that I'm making everything I have exposed is documented that's why I was so careful about not putting speculation in the book about not putting stuff in there that I hadn't substantiated or corroborated well I don't think the book made a big enough splash for them help me man we're helping y'all thank you thank you that's what I think you mean if I had a gas also the fact that they can't refute any of the facts yeah it's probably better to just let it die and in today's new cycle things go in and out in the period of days like who killed Epstein he didn't kill himself Yeah right boom gone no one cares anymore kovat 19 from a lab but might have been intense it just keeps going on and on and on no one's gonna think about who killed Charles Manson today we're worried about quarantine Ian yeah I mean that little distance Tarantino's movie came out and there were ton there's tons of press up on the family members were they know this or that and again I maybe I was just stupid thinking my book it's all okay you know I got a lot of good reviews a lot of good response but it didn't do what I wanted it to do which was to make a change you don't have enough publicity Tom I didn't know about it I didn't hear about until Greg Greg told me about it with Wild Eyes Greg Fitzsimmons I should say my good friend introduced and your good friend introduced me to the thing and Greg is not a person who pitches things to me so when he pitched it to me yeah pitch to me full throated I was like wow he's like dude it's [ __ ] crazy yeah and then I got into it further records best guy in the world fits he's at the end of the book but he's pissed off because I didn't name him I just talk identify him as a neighbor who came and consoled me at a really bad point and gave me some good advice so when you get to the end of the book and I'm the neighbor comes by walking his two little stupid dogs and asked me if I want to come along and he gave me I mean he's younger than I am and he gave me like a dad pep talk about hanging in there he's great I love he's the best when the book came out and no one did try to sue you or no one did come after you were you concerned that maybe it hadn't gotten the push that you felt like the subject deserved yeah yeah I mean I was happy because I've never published before and they had a team assigned to it at the publishers and you know we got I mean we got a lot of publicity but we didn't get news making publicity I think part of the problem tom is that it's a deep book yeah it's dense you got to get into it to really peace like yeah there's a couple of times where I had to go back over things and like try to piece it together and like yeah there's a lot going on and a lot of people to follow I know I know we were gonna put a character list up at the front that's great listen it's worth doing yeah yeah yeah the juice is worth the squeeze yeah when you get to the I mean where I'm at it's just beginning chapter 11 you're just like holy [ __ ] [ __ ] yeah yeah it's yeah it was frustrating and again I mean the bottom line for me was I'm just so happy it's out there in the public realm because that would have been I can't imagine dying with this either being sent into a dumpster somewhere nobody's seeing this stuff because I think a lot of it is important well you were pregnant for twenty years so now let me ask you this what what is the speculation in terms of Bulli o'seas connection was he given a narrative was did did you do you think that they all right I'll start without the speck of something I can prove okay he was compromised when he was given this case in 1969 it's in the book he gosh I mean he has family out there but they know about this he was involved in a couple cases the first one before the trial that are crazy I mean when you see the stuff that happened between him and I you know all those years later it makes sense when you see what he was like before he became famous so in 1965 he had his first child Vincent Bugliosi jr. he decided that he wasn't the father that the milkman was a father and back in those days you're too young to know people used to deliver milk to a home yeah I remember hearing about it yeah so he believed that the milkman was a father he was a up-and-coming this deputy district attorney in Los Angeles and for about I think twelve or sixteen months he stalked his milkman trying to get him to take a blood test to prove that he fathered his wife's child Jesus Christ it got so bad that they had to they stopped letting their kids take the bus home from school they had two young kids they didn't know who he was he wouldn't tell them who he was all he would say was I was on the Glee a milkman had left the job a month after his wife found out she was pregnant Vince's wife Vince and his delirium decided that he was fired because he had gotten you know clients by people he delivered milk to pregnant so he was writing them anonymous letters following the kids I actually this is one thing I did hear I heard from the little girl sent who's now grown woman read about this in my book and she sent me a letter and she goes you only got half of it he said he terrorized us he said my father she said my father's initely had a nervous breakdown she said he came to my school and picked me up this is and and he took me to a toy store bought all these toys for me whatever I wanted brought me to the house and he had a driver and he left me at the end of the driveway my mom came out and I was like so happy I was like five or six years old I had all these gifts and she goes get into the house get into the house so what happened was Vince got caught I mean he eventually was stalking them he sent his wife to the house to beg the milk man's wife to get her husband to do a paternity test and I've got all this from all these civil depositions when it came when the milkman sued him later so Vince the the milkman eventually got his brother-in-law to follow men's from one of his stakeouts Vince would put the car outside the house he sent them letters like they changed their phone number he goes I noticed you change your phone number that wasn't nice I mean nuts so the the milkman followed Vince his brother and like they got the plate number found out who he was and that he was at the DA's office called his personal attorney and the personal attorney called Vance and they had a meeting between Vince the milkman and the milk man's wife and mrs. bully OC and then admitted that he had been stalking them because he thought it was his wife he had used DA's investigators calling this guy a material witness in a murder case to follow him get information information on the so Vince said he would pay them a hundred dollars and never do it again and the milkman said we don't want your money just never bother us again so that was all about the end of 68 early 69 the DA's office knew about this he should have been fired immediately instead he gets the biggest case at that point in the history of Los Angeles the tate-labianca trial this is where we got speculative you have a guy like Vince who's compromised he'll do what the hires up tell him to do and if you read in the book every honor was a district attorney at the time he was a shady guy who'd been in the OSS which was the predecessor to the CIA trained in espionage I won't say too much it's in the book that's where we get speculative offense was answering for something the explanation is because he didn't go into this case clean he had to do what he was told yeah after the tate-labianca convictions and 74 helter skelter came out the book and to this day it's the best-selling true crime book of all time and it's a wonderfully written book I mean I could take your page by page and show you stuff that's completely fabricated and made up and that contradicts the real record but you know bestseller and that same year Vince was gonna run for District Attorney and the milkman and his wife had never told anyone I guess outside of their family what had happened four or five years before but when they saw that Vince was trying to be the most powerful law enforcement person in the city of Los Angeles they went to his opponent and said you need to know this this man cannot get this job so they told the opponent and they had a press conference so the milkman and his wife went public Vince responded by having his own press conference and telling the reporters here's here's what happened the milkman we believe stole $300 in cash from our kitchen table when he was on the route so I was just doing a personal investigation and the reporter said well did you hire I mean did you contact the Pasadena Police goes no no I just wanted to do it on my own and then as other people pointed out later he was doing this this was 65 he was doing through the end of 68 the statute of limitations on SAFF burglary robbery is three years it would heat even if he found out that he had so on the three dollars they would have been able to prosecute it so the whole thing was alive Vince lied to the media and he lost so then he lost that election then he ran again after helter skelter came out for attorney general of California at that point the milkman and the wife were gonna go public again and say hey we have even more to tell about the solutions I think is what the daughter wants to tell me she actually hasn't gotten in touch with me after the first email I said I want to hear what you have and see she said she's all these documents but then a woman named Virginia Cardwell said she was going to go public - she came out and said excuse me after Vincent told the world that the milkman had stolen three hundred dollars for him the milkman and his wife filed a civil suit against Vince Angle his wife because Gail also publicly said with fence in an interview that that's a truth that was all about this petty theft they sued them for defamation and they settled and thence paid them I think it was 12 thousand dollars in cash and hundred-dollar bills and you know part of the agreement was they weren't allowed to talk about it they couldn't say they'd gotten any money and he would only give it in cash so they couldn't trace it to him I ended up getting all the documents it took a long time but I got them then when they went public again when he was running for attorney general they were subject to you know being in violation of that but they said he can't you know then we'll tell everything he doesn't want to tell he lied under oath and deposition so did his wife about the stalking so in 73 Vince had an affair with a woman named Virginia card well Virginia Cardwell was Catholic she got pregnant she told Vince that she was pregnant with his child and then said she had to get an abortion and she said I can't get an abortion on the Catholic she was a single mother he said he would set it up he had a doctor it was still illegal then and he gave her the money to pay the doctor and then he called her and she said she had gotten the abortion everything was fine then he called the doctor violating HIPAA rules the doctor said actually I've never heard from this woman I didn't give her the procedure so Vince went to her house and beat the hell out of her and I've got all those depositions too he just according to her story to the police because she reported it he dragged her across the hair about the floor by the hair sat in her and punched her and punched her again in the face told her she had to get an abortion she miscarried after that episode she went she went to the Santa Monica police as soon as he left and reported it and nobody would have known about it but reporter saw it on the you know the police wire service or whatever so the next day it was on the front page of all the LA papers that Vince Bugliosi had been accused of battery of a woman who said that he wanted her to have an abortion and she wouldn't so Vince went to the police told them she was lying she was a client that he had had one phone consultation with never met her face to face and she was trying to embarrass him because he wanted her to pay him two or three hundred dollars he defamed her like he did the milkman he made up a story and worse this time he told that to the police this was in their investigation of the battery he lied to the police that it had not happened but here's what happened the next day after the newspapers reported it and then said it was a lie and he told the police that Vince went back to her apartment with his secretary and a typewriter and he held her a hostage I know this sounds crazy it's in the book at the end held her hostage for I think three or four hours begging her and then bullying her and he might have hit her then - I can't remember to go to the police and say that she had made the whole story up his secretary was there because once he got her to agree to do it she wrote up backdated bill the bill for the money and had Virginia sign it oh my god so Virginia finally agreed to go to the police he said look you're gonna be charged with filing a false report which is a felony well it's a misdemeanor but it could go to a felony and you but I can take care of all that I've got the connections to the DA's office in Santa Monica which he did and he did take care of it so she called up the Santa Monica Police Department to say she was coming in to report that she had made the story up because she was angry about this money and the cop said right away he knew that something was wrong in the tremor of her voice he said we'll come get you and Vince was on the other line and she no no no he's saying no no no they can't come here so she said no no I'm coming and they said okay we'll see you when you get here and then they dispatched two cops to her apartment now this had never been public before I found it it did become public about what happened Vince got away with denying it the cop that went to see what was going on and to get her guy named Michael Landis he was retired in Santa Monica I got his name from the reports he said oh yeah Vince was at the house he wouldn't let us in he said he and his partner Robert Steinberg was and she's cowering behind them crying and we got her out of the house brought her to the station and she told the the the story that it was faked and he said but we saw him there she goes you have no idea how dangerous he is I didn't I made it up please it was a false report so she got charged the next day's papers reported that this woman had come out and admitted that the whole thing was made up nobody said anything because the cops didn't talk to the reporters about Vince being at the house and thence you know he prevailed he won then when he ran for attorney general of California in 76 Virginia Cardwell went public and then then said told the same lie about her he had never seen her face to face she was trying to get two or three hundred dollars from him for a phone call or not pay the money for a phone consultation he lost the Attorney General's race when she went public and again with the milkman and mistress then she sued Vince same thing he lied in the depositions and then when he got caught with the car the other people who could show that they'd been together and there was a history if they had had an affair for like six months he resolved it and paid her a substantial amount of money to go away so this was the kind of person who when I told Vince I was writing about this in my book well he's like well number one I can't talk about either of those cases because they were resolved and there's non-disclosures and I go with Vince you know that's not true because I mean number one Virginia's dad she had died so she can't sue you and she went public and so did the wise Elle's that the milkman and the mistress and I wouldn't you know I'm not interested in your sordid you know personal life but it's relevant because I'm arguing that you committed crimes in the prosecution of the Manson Family suborn perjury hid evidence you know manipulated the defense by planning an attorney so if I'm gonna you know try to make this case and everyone's not going to believe it because you're Vince Pouliot see you know this prominent prosecutor author well I have to show that there's a pattern in this behavior not only that you're lying under oath and the depositions in these two case before you settle but you also lied to the police in the in the Cardwell case and you lied to the papers and both if I have that in my book then people will be more prone to believe that you do the same thing in in the tate-labianca trial that you would you know break rules to when your convictions did he have a ghostwriter for helter-skelter no he had a collaborator Kurt Gentry yeah yeah okay so that makes sense so yeah and I sounds like an insane person insane person would probably not be able to make such a coherent book I know he had every bookie Rodya collaborators he so the milk man's wife in her deposition said that when Gail Vince's wife came to her house and knocked on her door and said please do this my husband's making me crazy we know that he's your help man isn't the father of my my boy but just do it to make him stop and the milk man's wife said we're not we don't want have anything to do with you people just leave us alone and go away and she goes you don't understand my husband is mentally ill he goes he'll never stop this high there's nothing I can do to get him to stop at the end of our six hours I don't remember if I put it in the book I might not have he said to me you know Gail thinks I have some psychiatric issues and she's been trying to get me to go to a doctor forever so you know I'm not saying that this is a reason some of this stuff might have happened but I do you know I don't even know why he would tell me that but yeah so I think that he was able to be manipulated because of these long because it was so compromised yeah yeah make sense yeah holy [ __ ] he had a family a whole hunter secret family daughter and a mistress for the next thirty years I interviewed the mistress I didn't put it in the book you know I didn't think it was necessary I guess now I'm telling it but it actually got reported after he died because the mistress had told a few other people I'd known about her for years and I knew he had a daughter who was you know at the time of Vincent's death she was in her 30s I think now to go back to the Manson killings what was the motive to hit that house if it wasn't to Doris Day son was his name again Terry Melcher if it wasn't to scare Terry Melcher what was the motive like why did they kill Sharon Tate and the people in that house here's why it took so long to finish the book to write the book I have conflicting theories you know in the first couple chapters I lay out the evidence that it was a drug deal gone wrong right it involved Billy Doyle and Charles taco and these guys who were dealing drugs out of the house with void check for Kowski you know one of the victims Polanski's friend and possibly allegedly Jay Sebring the hairdresser I lay out that case and then we bleed into the next part where wait a minute what did it mean that Manson had this immunity and why would Terry Melcher lie on the stand I mean why not say he saw Manson after yet undermines the argument but I thought that bully OC could have I mean Manson and the followers did everything they could get themselves convicted at trial they didn't put on a defense you know they'd carve X's in their forehead shaved their heads the girls skipped and laughed in and out of the courtrooms every day when they finally testified during the death penalty phase Susan Atkins just then she said that she stabbed Sharon Tate and you think they were dosing them before the trial I can't go there I mean it makes sense if there's laughing and dancing well my if we're gonna speculate again I believe that when other objectives was personality changed using drugs that noses etc and making it fix making it stick these doctors were trying to learn why some people do they have precipitating personality factors that made them more vulnerable to using LSD once or a few times and all of a sudden just losing all sense of reality not everyone had that experience but some did and that research began in 1962 in Los Angeles there's a whole chapter there's a few chapters but there's a whole chapter that we left out in the book and we'll if we do do a follow-up it'll be in there about another guy who's not even named in the book who was one of these LSD researchers and you're interested in hyperbolic chambers and all that stuff hyperbolic chambers are you mean sensory deprivation yeah oh that's yeah I have one yeah okay it's not a hyperbolic chamber okay all right well this was a hyperbolic barrack is that the same Urbach that's a increased oxygen yeah yeah cover yeah injuries yeah well so there was a group it's a fascinating it would have been a fascinating chapter there was a group of people artists educators and but they were all kind of like beatniks and stuff that lived on Topanga Beach in this community that of abandoned fisherman shacks that had been there when the PCH went up in like the 30s and 40s there was this whole community of homes mostly ramshackle homes that were inaccessible except by one road I think Topanga Canyon Road so a bunch of people like migrated there who wanted to they were almost like community living and there were I think about 30 of them and they renovated them and there were beautiful little places they all got destroyed when they turned that into a park in the I think early 70s or mid 70s but one of the guys there Paul Rowan was an LSD researcher at UCLA doing the same kind of research wes was doing but as early as 62 but unofficially he and I don't know if you know Oscar Jenna ger was he was one of the first doctors psychiatrists in Los Angeles who got LSD from Sandoz for his patients but there was a group of these people that lived there and one of them was named Perry Bivens and he was a diver and he was a trust fund medical student a lot of money and he built a hyperbolic chamber and put gases in it his objective was to try to learn a way to die they were all deep-sea divers a bunch of these guys dive to the deaths that people hadn't dov - before by learning how to deprive the the brains of oxygen for longer and longer times they got access to LSD they were the first ones supposedly civilians in the United States have access to LSD you know not through military or CIA experiments as early as 1954 55 and then by the early 60s everybody who knew knew where to get LSD from this this community and Tex Watson moved there who was the main killer and 68 and lived among these guys who were doing this early research into mostly the one guy Paul Rowland personality change it's I mean it's so complicated about why it's important that Watson was with this community prior to joining Manson and what happened to him as far as his personality changed even before he met Manson which was the summer 68 but I guess I'll save that for the next chapter so the whole so the the motive though to get back to the yeah the official motive was a double I mean bully Ozzie said in his closing arguments that the the main motives to ignite helter skelter race war the sub motive was to instill fear in Terry Melcher because he had rejected Manson right so you're saying well then if it wasn't those than what was right all right if you look at the coho COINTELPRO objectives which was to diminish the you know to neutralize left-wing movement to make them look horrible evil bad and this is what drugs are going to do your kids the kind of outcome that this this these murders had was to make the hippies the boogeyman I mean the biggest boogeyman in the United States history I don't know forever but at least until the 70s became Charlie Manson and when Manson was and his family were identified as suspects the first week of December 69 I mean it was like earth-shaking because all of a sudden nobody knew who had come into the murders that the case was open from August till first of December you have photos on the front page of every paper in the world of these hippie women you know nursing children living communally who are accused of these horrible brutal slayings and the argument was and what the reporters were reporting was they had gone crazy on LSD and free love and and and that hippie ethic and that was same thing chaos and Cohen Chopra were trying to do they were trying to damage the youth revolution the youth why do you think they targeted that house though so J Edgar Hoover when he had the COINTELPRO operations he wrote him a no excuse me in LA agent wrote a memo to Hoover saying what we have to do this is when they were mostly battling the panther I mean trying to neutralize the Panthers in LA was go after the whites the elite whites the Hollywood whites who were supporting the Panthers there was something called a white panther party that began in LA 67 or 68 Jane Fonda Warren Beatty Cass Elliot those three were actually under surveillance by the FBI they were part of this group Donald Sutherland and they were basically a support Leonard Bernstein they supported the Panthers they raised money so in this one memo which I think it was the winter of 68 it's I got the date in the book said that what we have to make the whites think is that when the revolution finally happens when the blacks rise up they'll be lined up with everybody else and slaughtered so if you look at that memo that was part of their operation which was to they did it by inference sending letters making you know the whites care and so that I hate to speculate but I think people will draw that conclusion if you read the book that this could have been a chaos or COINTELPRO operation to turn you know the world the nation the culture against hippies the left-wing the Black Panthers and they picked that house because it was high-profile because Sharon Tate well I mean it actually when not kosher and Tate was there well her and Polanski and that's one thing that Tarantino I don't think he showed that the parties at the house they were like the social center of Hollywood it wasn't just the movie people it was the music people Terry Melcher and candy Bergen lived there for two years before that was a party house everybody went in and out of there kind of represented the elite of movies music Hollywood you know white people so that would have been a very high-profile place to target yeah because all the people in that community in the Hollywood community would then also be aware that that was a spot that they had been to yeah all these high-profile people had been there yeah it's like Joan Didion wrote in her book The White Album that the morning she learned about the murders and she knew most of the victims she goes it occurred she goes I knew that the sixties had ended they were over I mean there was also Altamont and I mean not a whole lot else but that was like a cultural watershed moment but the LaBianca killings were fairly random yeah and that's a regret I have the house was just up for sale you know yeah just really recently I heard really cheap yeah yeah I mean they changed the number on the still oh yeah yeah not not this yellow house I know yeah oddly enough I knew it was for sales like I was really interested not to buy it but I was like wow that's crazy like imagine someone buying the house where that the killings took place but it was so long ago yeah it wouldn't be that creepy you know the house on the other side is the former convent that Katy Perry's been fighting in court with the nuns of the church to buy this has been going on for a couple years I don't know it's been shot by a convent yeah yeah it's alright it's a big beautiful home that had been turned into a convent like a retirement home and when the church really hit hard times financially they told the nuns day we're gonna have to leave there because they were selling it so they the church I think sold it to Katy Perry and then some of the nuns hired a lawyer because they didn't want to leave I can't I mean I didn't look too closely at it but I just know that the whole thing is in dispute that's a layer and that's on the other side of the LaBianca house oh wow so the whole area is haunted so did they did they target the LaBianca house for any reason all right so the book is about 500 page long 500 pages long I didn't put anything in there about the LaBianca case and what I learned we also you know withheld our chapters on the RFK assassination so hand you know connected to its 20 years of reporting out I mean and the Sirhan assassination of Robert Kennedy it was same cops investigated it same district attorney's office prosecuted it and if you want to take a deep dive into that you know Rohan's amnesia of how we ended up in the pantry's oh Jesus Christ I actually filmed an episode of fear factor at that hotel hotels being used now for that and I walked through that pantry yeah yeah you can very area I was there too there you know it's torn down now they made it a public school I mean they built a public school but there was a crucifix carved into the floor the cement floor where Robert Kennedy Robert Kennedy fell oh Jesus yeah so um I think I remember that somehow yeah so the stuff we kept out about RFK that'll be in the next book if we do it but there's incredible power you're doing another book Tom I don't want to be Tom have 20 more years 11 I know one thing I wouldn't do it without my collaborator because he speeds it up good yeah you get it done in four you've got so much information already right yeah so the LaBianca killings or the LaBianca killings again this is stuff the vents kept out and again the reason the books so hard to write is one theory would conflict with another right so if the Tate's were killed for you know chaos COINTELPRO high-profile neutralized the left or a drug deal gone wrong what about the lobby ancas well the lobby ancas were an upper-middle class couple that lived in Las Villas and thence wrote in the book that they were randomly targeted because Manson had been to the house next door quite a bit when someone named Harold true lived there and knew the layout and supposedly went to kill Harold true first got to Harold Truths house which was empty and then went next door tied up the LaBianca couple left the house and set texts and texts Watson and Patricia KRENWINKEL and Leslie Van Houten in to kill them what Vince wrote about what the investigators found out was that Lee know the father had gambling debts he also had embezzled two hundred thousand dollars from his family company and the original investigation the two teens were separate the LAPD assigned two different units one did the tape murders which was much larger and wonder the LaBianca and they announced within a couple days that even though the crime scenes were similar you know same weapon multiple stab wounds blood writing on the wall he pig they didn't think they were connected they thought that somebody had done a copycat of the first night's murders to throw off investigators I make an argument in the book that I think the police knew exactly who did both murders from very right away it'll be too long to get into here but all the evidence that I accumulated is in there and I'm not the first one to say that but so then why were the law Bianca's killed you know what Vince kept out of the book was not only was you know we know in debt to his family but he had a meeting on August 9th with his family that they had told him he had to come in his two brothers in law and his mother who operated the gateway shop it was called gateway markets they had upon a string of supermarkets it was pretty well-to-do except that we know kept stealing all the money they had a meeting on August 9th where they were gonna make them sign over all his shares leave the family business and on August 9th he didn't show up he went with his wife and their boat to a lake where their daughter was visiting a friend so the daughter and her friend could water-ski didn't even call the family to say he wasn't showing up came back that night and was killed with his wife Vince kept that important meaning out he also kept the depth in the degree of of Lino's deaths out so and this isn't in my book we didn't have enough room I you know I'd mentioned them you know because it's an important part but I don't talk about what I found out and why it was important there's a much better case that that Lina was targeted you know the argument would be well who would ever hire Manson to kill someone well you know Manson wasn't as dumb as he seemed you know then they needed money this is why I don't want to speculate and again it's not even a chapter in the book so I can't really show you what I've got except to tell you one other you know argument that Vince made for why he thought the lobby ancas were killed by the Manson Family I mean they were actually right with their first theory it was a copy of the night before to throw off investigators but it was the same killers the police were wrong when they thought it was two separate killers which I don't think they did is he said we could never establish a connection between the two groups of victims so there were as the Hollywood set Benedict Canyon Cielo Drive and then there was lino and his wife across town in Las Villas and we worked so hard to try to determine if they knew each other I heard any encountered the stying them together and we couldn't that was a lie lino got his hair cut from Jay Sebring the victim he was in JC brings appointment book that's in the police reports that I got access to like my first or second year when I begged it persuaded a cop to let me come go through his files and Palm Springs so he very well have been to that house to the Cielo Drive house yeah yeah so they weren't they knew that social circle I don't know about the social circle but he could have you know who knew I'm Jay Sebring was a very high-profile hairdresser he was and it was very expensive it was very expensive yeah he charged I mean it was expensive back then I think it was just $20 but most men got their hair cut for like a buck or two back then yeah it was an exclusives and he was a hairdresser to the stars he was Sharon's ex-boyfriend who was still supposedly in love with her Romans stole her from him and he was with Sharon you know the last night of her life yeah I mean there's other stuff that didn't end up in the book for space reasons and also one of the most important things I found out and this goes to your question about why this house or why that house that's not in the book but I've talked about it before and I found this out too late to get in the book I was able to confirm it it's the night before Sharon Tate Jay Sebring voytek frykowski and abigail folger were killed in Cielo Drive the four of them had dinner at Jay's house down at the bottom of Benedict Canyon that's all on the official story Jay had them to dinner a mice's Butler made them steaks and they ate them in Jays bedroom so the four people were in the bedroom this is August 7th the night before the murders what's not in the official version but I found in the police reports is Jay had gotten cable TV which again a lot of my critics said there was no cable TV in 1969 in Los Angeles there was it cost a lot of money only a few people had it but you had it Jay Sharon Abigail and boychik had their ice cream dessert served by a meanness the butler he went back downstairs they were gonna watch the movie and then all of a sudden there was a pop whoops sorry a power surge and the lights went really really bright and dimmed and they lost the cable so Jay called Paul green wall Paul green wall was a law student whose father was Jays attorney and he and he was an electrician that's how he supported himself going through law school and he had done all the wiring for Jay so he called Paul Greenwald and this was a Thursday night at like nine o'clock and he said can you come over here we're trying to watch a movie and the cable went out and I don't know there was a surge so Paul said I can't I got a date I've been trying to get this day for months I can't blow her off and Jay is like okay that's alright we'll do something else so in the official narrative nobody reported the surge or losing the cable but in the official narrative Jay stayed there Sharon and voice check and gap Abigail I think went to the daisya club and then Sharon was there for a half hour and somebody took her home and then Jay went to the club what I found out from a police interview of Paul Greenwald the kid who was called to ask he told this to the police and then he confirmed it to me 3040 years later when I found him and interviewed him he said I went to the house either Sunday or Monday after the murders because my father sent me there to get a suit for Jay to be buried in because I got to the house and I wanted to see what had happened to the wire since I put all the wires in and I did a circle of the house and I found the wires cut he goes I picked them up and I looked at them and there were like four cables and three work because these were deliberately cut I could tell by the gradation and and the angle and he told the police that he said so the night before they were killed somebody cut the wires and it couldn't have been a gardener because it was 9 o'clock at night and he said from what Jay had told him about the power so just like all the full lights got really bright and then dimmed because that's what happens when you dude I don't know anything about electricity the police didn't follow up on it or if they did I couldn't find a record and I found a link between wall and I said you know your police report which I have completely up ends the prosecution's argument that these people were random because Tex Watson the next night cut the wires at the Tate house the phone wires and then they went into the house and killed everybody so unless it's a coincidence that 24 hours before the same for people at a different location had the house wires cut by somebody who might have gotten spooked by the surge or something they weren't random they were being targeted so that raises you know questions about that undermines the the the the randomness of it that they were strangers through their killers but there's no conclusive thing that you can point to that says this is the reason why they were targeted no yeah what a book what a journey man yeah I'm very happy for you thanks I'm happy that you you did it I mean that's it has to feel like an amazing accomplishment after all those years yeah I only have this book yeah yeah and again I mean I more than anything in the world even gotten to the end of the book there is a murderer in there that I think the Manson family committed that was covered up by the law enforcement cuz it screwed up it would have screwed up the prosecution I want that looked into there's also at the end of the book there are these texts watts and audio tapes that I found out about in 2008 when Watson turned himself in when he found he was alerted and in Texas he was at his parents house there they called the police called the local sheriff who was Texas cousin and his parents and said he's wanted for questioning in these unsolved tape murders and this was November 29th nobody had been identified publicly as suspects the police were just starting to figure out that these people had killed their victims so to LAPD flew down to Texas Watson was brought into the station questioned by the LAPD put under arrest they had to extradite him so that the sheriff their Texas cousin put him in a Cell the family called up a lawyer Bill Boyd who had actually represented Tex on a college case when he stole a typewriter from a college and a prank Bill Boyd told me in an interview in 2008 that that day he had Tex tell him the whole story or Charles as he called him about how he met Manson why the murders were committed how they happened he said he spoke to me for 20 hours and he goes I've got all those audio tapes in a safe in my office he told me this in 2008 he said he also described other murders that the family had committed that hadn't been connected to them so right away when you know I'm in 2009 I'm working on it that long I thought other murders that's important to me but more important did he tell his attorney why the murders really happened you know why they picked those houses you know this was the first account that was recorded the next one was Susan Atkins about a week later after she had gotten her new attorney that the prosecution planted they audio taped her telling her version which became the official version so Watsons would predate that by a week and when I found out that they were in that safe and he's telling me this on the phone I thought why he he can't play that to me because that would violate Watson's attorney-client privilege but I thought I have to ask so I said is there any chance mr. Boyd I could come down and listen to those tapes and he said that's when he realized he shouldn't have told him he said oh well I I couldn't do that without Charles Watson Charles permission like oh he's still in touch with me go so I write to him every now and then he writes me he didn't represent him at trial after he was extradited and I said would you please ask so that began three or four months of me pestering him he would never take the phone call and then finally after four months I called up in his secretary said I'm sorry mr. Boies in China on business today and I said well you have to tell him I'm not gonna wait anymore I'm gonna write to Charles and tell him what he told me I go if there's other bodies I mean I didn't let them know that I was more interested in the motive story but I said if there's and I was interested in this too I go if there's other bodies or victims out there who have never been on connected or even I only know if the remains were uncovered because there's a lot of evidence that there might have been people killed out in the desert and buried there I go I need to know that and she said okay I'll tell him my phone rang like literally 30 seconds after I hung it up and I had call her idea that was from his Texas office goes this is Bill Boyd you cannot call Charles and tell him I told you that I said mr. Boyd you haven't called me back for four months it goes what I'm telling you now you can't do that I go well are you gonna you know get his permission he goes yeah you just have to be patient I go I can't wait anymore he says if you do that and you tell him Alton I ever telling you I said it's all on tape I taped that call because you didn't have permission to tape that call go yeah you gave me permission at the beginning and that's on tape - it goes god damn it you journalists and he hung up on me you journalists lumped in with all of them you know he said my wife said you're his wife was a TV he does my wife said I know how you people work I go you gave me permission it's on the audiotape so he died six months later on the treadmill oh my god thinking about you and his his firm went bankrupt and then it was until two or three years later and it's all in there the back story but I finally went to try to get the tapes again and found out he had died found out that the tapes were in the possession of the trustee who was you know waiting for the bankruptcy to be of all resolved and it took me three four months of back and forth and to try to get them to release the tapes to me and I made an argument for why they weren't protected anymore again long story short I was sharing information with the deputy da in Los Angeles who I thought was friendly he was until he wasn't and he was handling all the parole hearings of the Manson Family a guy named Pat Sakura the woman who was in charge of the tapes the trustee said if secure calls me and tells me that it's okay for me to release them to you and explains how it's not a violation I'll do it I said Alaskan so I asked me said absolutely I want to talk to her and I said great a day later I get a call from secure because you're not gonna believe it she's releasing the tapes to us I go you he goes yeah yeah don't worry I'll let you hear him when we get him she asked I knew right then I had lost any kind of control and sure enough number one the trustee had to notify Watson's new attorney Watson put up a fight in court and it's in you can read about in the other times I reported on that for about a year for about a year it went from the local court to the state Supreme Court with a judge finally ruled that the LAPD should have the tapes they sent two officers down to get the tapes in 2013 they came back and then nobody at the DA's office would talk to me anymore the promise that had been made that I would be the first one to listen to them reneged those tapes a million journalists have made Freedom of Information Act requests for them they won't release them they're locked up Leslie Manhattan's attorney wants them he thinks it'll help her at her parole hearings because he thinks there's information on there to show that she's been telling the truth all these years he's gone to the state Supreme Court through other courts they blocked them down it's 20 hours first account of how and why these murders occurred and they're not releasing them I think it's because the truth is on there oh is that true I mean yeah you've got a wide audience maybe other people will come forward I would just be happy if some paper like the time LA Times the New York Times Washington Post assigned some reporters just to go through my reporting and see if I've made [ __ ] up or if it all plays out and then does a little bit of additional reporting a lot of these people are dying you know they're getting all but a lot of them are still alive and they could be interviewed well I hope they do Tom anybody go get this chaos Charles Manson the CIA the secret history the 60s Tom O'Neill it's amazing Tom let me say one more thing please if people want to see the actual documents I have an Instagram and a Facebook page where I put them up there's also excerpts of my interviews with bully Ossie Manson okay some of the really important stuff where I put the audiotapes up so what you can't get in the book or even in the footnotes you can see online if you just google my name Manson and Instagram or Facebook there it is right there yeah yeah that's you Charles Mann and if you scroll down tons of that stuff thank you so much okay let's shake hands yeah yeah we shake hands ooh you got we got tested right before this I know it's a requirement for coming in this room yes I know thanks for letting me know that I mean I was so it was a distraction for not being nervous about this worried about my test results well we got it and we got the book and a really appreciate you man that was really really a lot of fun I really really enjoyed it thank you very much I appreciate it all right bye everybody fits told me [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 3,670,948

Rating: 4.841661 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, JRE #1459, 1459, Tom O'Neill, Chaos, Joe Rogan, Charles Manson, Tate LaBianca, Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi

Id: J36xPWBLcG8

Length: 175min 4sec (10504 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/other_tanner]

Is it actually good and do they talk about Chaos? Even though I have jack shit to do, I need to know before I click on a 3 hour video with Joe Rogan

[u/frozenrussian]

I prefer the Joe Gondor Experience

[u/freewheelinCW]

One of the best JRE eps ever

[u/armoredcake]

Why are we posting this again

[u/machukellow]

this book was fucking incredible. Excited to watch this now