Behind the Bastards - Part One: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Robert is joined by Miles Gray to discuss The Elan School.FOOTNOTES: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/style/skeletons-in-the-classroom.html https://www.darkdowneast.com/episodes/elanschool https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2000-02-15-0002150060-story.html https://books.google.com/books?id=GCv_lLRAAWMC&pg=PA371&lpg=PA371&dq=joe+ricci+Daytop&source=bl&ots=Hd3sMgUT5c&sig=ACfU3U1U1xJywjNNNcpIkCTqx6G_G9KRbw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJlISfkPzvAhVXFVkFHcsVDx0Q6AEwEnoECBMQAw#v=onepage&q=joe%20ricci%20Daytop&f=false https://www.sunjournal.com/2016/03/13/family-asks-really-happened-phil-elan-school/# https://www.sunjournal.com/2016/03/20/day-officer-smiley-helped-boy-escape-elan-school/?rel=related# https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2000/10/dominick-dunne-martha-moxley-murder-greenwich https://archive.is/ixdgd#selection-529.0-529.432 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exclusive-new-york-state-_b_38895 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ee7oq/iama_graduate_of_the_elan_school/ https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/connecticut/ctdce/3:2007cv01625/79511/33/0.pdf?ts=1232080685 CURLEY, MAURA. DUCK IN A RAINCOAT . MENUKIE PRESS /VIRGIN VOICE. Kindle Edition. https://elan.school/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I just started with atonal yelling, I guess. Oh boy, we are already behind the eight ball. Normally, I mean, this is a podcast where we talk about bad people, the worst people in all of history, and the bad things that they do. One of those bad people is me for not knowing how to start my show, despite this being my only job. To help pull me out.

I don't think that you were bad. Why would you say you were bad? You were unprofessional. Thank you, but it's your job to keep me from spiraling into collapse. You were great at being unprofessional. You were great at it. You know who's great at being professional is my guest today, Mr. Miles W. Gray. See, that's the kind of atonal shrieking that you use to start a podcast. God damn it. Why can't I do it that way? No, you did. I mean, I merely just did my own rendition of the sort of work.

You're so much more atonal though. Miles is the W and your name stands for winner. The W in my name? Yeah. Miles W. Gray. What? Where's W come from? Well, I'm just trying to set you up for success in your future political career. Oh, wow. Thank you so much.

I mean, look, we know I'm not going to be. I maybe I probably eventually would it up as a politician, but first, you know, I'm going to be a motivational speaker. Oh, yeah. We talked about this. That's how you turn it into. Yeah. Mm hmm. I will first create a fucking, you know, a gaggle of mindless stooges and just turn them into my political base. That's very appropriate, Miles, that you're talking about creating a gaggle of mindless stooges kind of a cult. Because we're talking about a cult today, but we're also talking about a school. That's a school.

Miles, how do you feel about kids? Oh, man, dude, last time it was so fucking brutal. Okay. Yeah. How do I feel about kids? I think kids are our future and we need to nurture them and protect them at all costs. Now, when you say nurture and protect, does that mean Jesus? Bring them to operate an internal police state based on violence and sexual assault in order to control their own behavior and behavior of their peers? What the fuck did you say? What?

Miles, we have fun. We do have fun. We're not going to have fun today. Today's a horrible episode. Have you ever heard of the Elan school? No. How do you spell it? Elan, like the French word, you know, Elan. No, I feel like it maybe sounds familiar. Are there ones in LA at all? Oh, good God, no. They're not any of these anywhere anymore. Oh, okay. You never know these days.

This was the kind of school that could only exist in the middle of nowhere, Maine. And if you've never been to Maine, middle of nowhere, Maine is about as middle of nowhere as you get, right? Yeah, I've been up there for hockey. Yeah, but in middle of nowhere, yeah, like that's like for people that are trying to be like, dude, get the fuck away from me. Yeah, and people who don't want too many prying eyes over the school that they're running because it's actually just a series of horrible crimes. Now, Miles. A series of horrible crimes. I think we can all agree kids are can be problematic, right? You know, their little brains are still developing. All kids are going to do shitty, harmful things to themselves and to other people because they're just kind of learning how to be functional human beings.

Pretty normal process of growing up. You're going to say things that hurt your parents. You know, you're probably going to punch your little brother or sister. You're going to do something shitty, right? Every kid does. Just part of being a kid. And it gets, you know, kind of taken up a level when you're a teenager, right? Teens lash out, say horrible things. They maybe get involved with substances that are going to be bad form. They, you know, steal a car. Kids do dumb shit, right? Yeah. Teenagers do. And I think any reasonable person or organization that's trying to, like, take care of teenagers in particular will acknowledge that, like, they're going to make mistakes because their brains aren't finished.

And so even if those mistakes are pretty serious, right, things that might normally land an adult in prison, if it's a child, you have to approach them with an added level of compassion and understanding because their brains aren't done yet. Exactly. Now, I think reasonable people can admit that some kids have behavioral issues that make them dangerous to themselves and others. I've had to work with some of those kids. I've had colleagues who got their bones broken from some of those kids. There's a necessity for specialists and even special facilities to help kids that have behavioral problems that make them a danger to be around, right? That's just a thing that is going to occur when you've got other people in the country. Now, unfortunately, Miles, this is the United States of America. And when you start with the firm is that, yeah, okay, maybe sometimes we need a special facility for troubled kids. You open the door for a whole new industry. And because capitalism is what it is, when you have an industry for taking care of troubled kids, you also have an industry that has a vested financial interest in making sure as many children as possible are placed in those facilities,

whether they need the help or not. So, see where things get off the rails here is when you attach the profit mode to dealing with kids with behavioral problems. Okay, now we need a side business, mislabeling these kids so we can turn them into customers. Yeah, we're going to start having to bribe some judges and bribe some health care workers to force more kids into our, yeah. So, the best way, if you're in the business of running a facility for troubled kids, the best way to improve your business is to convince parents, judges, the legal system and the mental health system that a wide variety of behaviors, from talking back and smoking weed to getting into fist fights at school, justify incarceration in such facilities. Like the kid I know who got sent to a facility, and it wasn't one of these facilities because he was, there was other stuff going on, but it was a facility where he was in full-time residential care. He broke his, one of his parents' arms, he broke one of my colleague's jaws, he gave me a concussion.

Like, it was like a problem, like the kid needed really dedicated help, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just, eventually the school was like, we cannot take care of this kid. Right, it's just not like, it's like he just farts at the wrong time during class. Exactly. Like, no, this is, we're talking something different. And I want to make it clear when I talk about like, yeah, I think there is a need for special facilities for certain kids. That's the kind of kids, like, so, you know, you're fucking stabbing people with like, scissors or something.

Right, I understand. You have such, yeah. And that has nothing to do with the thing you were telling me about this new business you were opening. That was like a facility for... What would you think if I was going to tell you I could turn a $10,000 investment and do $100,000 of profit, as long as you're able to get two or three judges to just shotgun some children my way? See, my idea, Miles, is what helps improve your character as an adult? Operating a rare earth mineral mine.

So what if we take troubled children and we force them to mine in order to produce the materials needed for our cell phones? The industry already works off of slavery. This is slightly better than slavery. Go on now, and how much do I need to invest now? I just need to create some Compromat for these judges. Yeah. Miles, well, I'll send you the prospectus later. I'll send you the deck later.

So the problem with this is, right, there's a need for some facility like this, but when the profit motives gets attached to it, you have these people who decide, like, there's a vested interest in convincing parents and the legal system that like, no, no, kids don't just need to be put in special facilities if they're a danger to the life and limb of other people. If they're smoking weed, that's dangerous enough. If they punched a kid in school one time, that's bad enough. Let's get him in the program. That's how it happens with all of these troubled teen facilities.

Now, at the same time, if it's your business to treat kids in this kind of a facility, the reality of capitalism means that your priority is never ever, not one single solitary time as a business at least, not to say that every individual who works there feels this way, but as a business, your priority is never going to be rehabilitation or education or even basic health and safety. It will always be maximizing profit. And one way to do that is to hire people who will work for less money

than such a complicated job should rightly pay. And the people who are willing to take that pay cut generally find other than financial motives for the work, like the opportunity to beat molest children. This is how the troubled teen industry works, right? It's colloquially called troubled teen facilities, the troubled teen industry. And these different facilities, they run the gamut from wilderness facilities where you're dropping kids in the woods basically, ranch-style offerings, working at a farm, military school-style things,

and institutions that are harder to easily quantify, like the Alon School, which we'll talk about in a minute. Now, when she was a teen, Paris Hilton was sent to one such institution called Provo Canyon, which I think was more kind of on the wilderness side of things. It might have been more of a ranch. But Provo Canyon is in Utah. And Utah, by the way, is like Mecca for schools that can legally abuse children. That's where most of these facilities are.

Utah makes a lot of money off of systematically abusing children for profit, which is why the legal system in Utah is set up to enable these schools. So Paris Hilton credits Provo Canyon, the school she was sent to as a teen, for, quote, the most vivid and traumatizing memories I've ever experienced in my entire life. One particular memory helped fuel what has become a side career for Paris Hilton in exposing the teen treatment industry, quote, I continually experience a nightmare where two men come into my room in the middle of the night and kidnap me.

It has caused me severe trauma, and I know it is a tentpole of this industry that has caused millions of survivors to suffer the same nightmares throughout their adult life. Now, that experience that she had of people coming into her house in the middle of the night kidnapping her, that's really common. It happens to conservatively tens of thousands of kids a year. Some numbers are 50,000. Not all of them get kidnapped, but a lot of them do. That's the standard, right?

Because you decide as a parent, I'm going to send my kid to this horrible facility where they'll be isolated and abused until they stop misbehaving. Well, I don't want to sit down and say, because I caught you with weed, I'm sending you to the woods, right? So how do you avoid that awkward conversation? You hire men to abduct your child in the dead of night. Snatch them up in the night. Yeah, absolutely. Snatch them up in the night.

Because you're already such a good parent. I mean, I'm guessing in the cases for kids who are really just normal. You're already just nailing them. Yeah, like for the normal trouble teams. That sort of people who actually need it, like you're saying a special care facility, but like, let's say just the kid is smoking with you, like, that's it. We're having people disappear him in the middle of the night, because we as parents aren't willing to have a conversation at all

that will go through all of these lengths to just avoid any form of being an adult in this situation. Like, holy shit. Yeah, it's outrageous and it's just horrific. And yeah, so there's companies that the service the company provides is like they'll send a handful of psychopaths to kidnap your child and like handcuff them or tie them up and throw them in the back of a van and drive across the country. So it's like another like industry where they're like, hey, you know, kid snatchers.

Schools have dedicated guys. But yes, there's companies that just snatch kids for profit. And their parents, it's very legal. You're like, as the parent, you sign away permission for this. So if they get pulled over by the cops, they can say, no, no, no, we're not abducting this. We are abducting this child. But the parents said, OK. Oh, no, here's the permission slip.

Here's my badge. I'm a licensed child snatcher. No, so yeah, I'm a professional child abductor officer. Like, and that's terrible bar chat, too, when you meet somebody like asking them what they do. What do you do for a living? You abduct children and the dead. There's actually a kid tied up in the back of my van right now. Yeah, he's good.

I host them off a little bit. We so fucking the front seat, though. Oh, that's OK. I just need to take your order. So it is a crime, thankfully, in 20 states to send children to gay conversion therapy. But it is perfectly legal to send your child to a treatment center for anything else a parent regards as a flaw. So gay conversion therapy is legal in a bunch of states.

It's not illegal really anywhere to send your child to a treatment center. And the treatment center doesn't have to be for like an actual problem that like, I don't know, a psychiatrist or something like, oh yeah, this kid has this serious problem that needs special treatment. Anything you're not happy with that your kid does counts, right? Because as a parent, you're the dictator of your child because children have no rights. Yeah. So effectively, not if the parent like wants to do, parents can do a lot of fucked up shit to their kids perfectly legally.

There's a lot of people who will fight in Congress for their right to abuse their children systematically because this nation was, I don't know, a large chunk of the population of this country believes that parents are the biblical sovereigns of their children should be able to do anything they want to them. It's good shit. Now, as a parent, you have the power to sign over physical control of your child to an organization, one of these teen treatment facilities. And every year, parents of around 50,000 kids do. So if you listen to our two-parter on Synanon with American hero Paul F. Tompkins,

you know that the triple teen industry got its start with that particular cult. Have you, did you listen to those episodes, Miles? No, I haven't heard that one. Synanon was a, this will be useful for people who haven't listened to it yet, although it's a pretty good two-parter. Synanon was a drug, the first drug rehab program like in the nation, like focused on like dope as opposed to alcohol. And it was based initially off Alcoholics Anonymous.

Like Sinning? S-Y-N. Oh, okay. I thought it was like Super Christian, like for Sin or Sinning Anonymous. No, it wasn't. And it was founded by this guy, Charles Deterick, who was an alcoholic and not a drug addict himself. And he became a cult leader. This thing went from like people kind of living together in this compound and like doing hard labor.

And, you know, they had all these different things that they thought would help keep you off drugs. One of them was called The Game, which was this therapeutic tool invented by Charles Deterick, where everyone would sit around in a room, all these addicts, and they would scream abuse at each other. They would just like insult each other, talk about what they hated about each other. And it was this, the idea was that like, oh, addicts need extra accountability because they're so good at lying. So you have this, you know, this regular thing where you get to like,

you get abused for like the shit things that you do. Yeah. And it's a way to blow off steam too. Yeah, right. It was, Synanon was hugely popular for a while. Judges were so enthusiastic about the practice that they started sending children who'd been caught with dope to Synanon. And because these kids, most of the people who went to Synanon and got involved, like wanted help, like were addicts.

But these kids didn't, like it generally weren't serious addicts, but also didn't want to be there. So they had to develop these really brutal rules for like punishing them and cracking down and stopping them from escaping and keeping them in line. And it became physically abusive too, and mentally abusive obviously. But that was not why Synanon got in trouble, right? Synanon eventually got in trouble because they tried to assassinate a lawyer with a rattlesnake after building their own army in California.

Oh, that one. It's quite a story, Miles. Oh, but I mean, so pass say that assassinating a lawyer with the arm. I mean, come on. So Synanon is where the troubled teen industry gets its start, right? This is the first time that judges are like, oh, we don't have to just throw these kids in prison, which is admittedly the wrong thing to do with the kid

who you've caught with weed or something. But instead they're like, we just hand them over to this weird cult, and the cult will abuse them until they don't smoke pot anymore. And this will solve our problems forever. Okay. Just freak the fuck out of them. Yeah, by the early 60s, Synanon was a bona fide phenomenon, and they'd inspired a dizzying variety of imitators

who used variations of their methods. One of these imitators was the Daytop Village in New York, which is actually the second ever drug rehab program in the United States. It was created in 1963, just five years after Synanon started. And the Daytop Village followed what they called a therapeutic community style of treatment, which is where the actual work of rehabilitation is done by other addicts counseling and holding each other accountable. This is the same thing Synanon did, and part of what they mean by that is,

again, you all sit in a room together and yell abuse at each other. Some people said this helps, but I've never been addicted to heroin. Maybe it helps. Yeah, I mean, yeah, don't knock it till you try it, I guess. Yeah, and it's worth it. Daytop Village has not been accused of the same kind of abuse as Synanon, and they never tried to build their own Marine Corps or assassinate a lawyer with a rattlesnake. A lot of problematic things about Daytop.

They didn't go as over the goddamn top as Synanon did. For our purposes, Daytop Village in New York is noteworthy because in the late 1960s, a troubled 18-year-old named Joe Ritchie was sent there. Joe would go on to create the Elan School, which might be the most abusive troubled teen institution to ever exist. But to properly tell that story, we've got to go back in time again and give Joe's backstory. So I had to talk about where the troubled teen industry starts. Let's talk about Joe a little bit here.

He was born in Port Chester, New York in 1945 to parents who were deeply troubled. They split up, and we don't know why, but a hint as to why may come from the fact that his father, Frank, was nicknamed Bamboo because he was so good at bouncing back after getting punched in the face during the near-constant barfights he had at local bars. His nickname in town was Baker. He's like, wow, he's really good at getting the shit punched out of him. What the fuck? He's Bamboo.

Bamboo. They call him Bamboo because he's so good at getting punched. I mean, that's a weird thought. The vibe of those people who just take shots and are kind of sad, like barfight immortals, I can't imagine the energy swirling around that kind of person. I'm not surprised his marriage didn't last. He's like, yeah, I don't even know how to respond to physical stimulus, no less verbal to adjust any kind of way. That a great emotions guy.

He was a day laborer and known locally as, quote, a kingpin of barfights. He was violent, but also charming, which is probably how he snared Anne Santoro, Joe Ritchie's mother. Now, the Santoros and the Ritchies were both Italian-American families, but the Santoro family hated the Ritchie family because the Ritchie family was newer to the country and didn't speak English very well. When Anne and Frank split up, she signed over custody of her son, Joe, to her parents, Michael and Angela, and Joe was raised by his maternal grandparents and several other relatives.

So from the beginning, this kid doesn't have, you know, his mom, when she splits up with his husband, like, signs over custody to his grandparents, which is kind of an odd move as well. But this is also a period in which single motherhood is really, in some cases, like, even legally penalized. So, like, I guess it makes a degree of sense as to why this happened. The Santoro family, where Joe was raised, they were poor but proud, and they regularly attended Mass at the Holy Rosary Church.

As a young child, Joe was an altar boy. He spent time at the community center where he learned to box and play basketball. One of his friends at the time, Vic Donato, remembered him this way, quote, We called him Joe Rich. He was a good guy, but I've never seen anyone as wild. Joe was really tough. If you were nice to him, he'd be your friend. But you didn't want to mess with him. He was always looking over his shoulder, and if you did something to cross him, he'd never let you forget it. Joe Rich was sharp, knew how to survive. I used to think he had nine lives.

If he did something really wrong, he'd get out of it. Someone else would take the heat. He always had himself covered. It seems Joe Rich knew where to go. He was definitely ahead of his time. When we were involved in basketball games, he was thinking about stealing cars. I really figured he'd eventually be successful, either that or dead. Wow. That's a wild thing to say about your own friend.

He's also got a little bamboo DNA, too, to him with the nine lives. When you first said it, while we were playing basketball, I thought you were saying he was in the middle of the basketball game. He's checked out. He's like, how are we going to steal these cars? And then he gets hit in the head of the basketball. I think that's what he's saying. Come on. Sorry, man. You think about stealing cars again?

Fuck, dude, we're going to lose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Now, Miles, you know who else likes to steal cars? These advertisers? Yep. We are entirely sponsored by a ring of car thieves and chop shops. Oh, great. So if you're looking for a nice new stolen car, check out one of these sponsors. Hey, if you're looking for that catalytic converter that I took out,

check out one of these ads. I mean, look, we're podcast hosts. We're not recording. We're both actively out and about stealing the catalytic converters. Oh, just like Joe Ritchie. Well, some people are thinking about podcasts. All you and I are thinking about is how we're getting more catalytic converters out of Hondas. Yeah. That's my whole life, man.

You should have seen me, man. It was the 20s. I was podcasting, stealing catalytic converters at a Japanese impulse. I had a whole coat made at a catalytic converters. I walked down the street and people said, oh, that's the cat king of Portland. There he is, cat man. Oh, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back and we're thinking about stealing catalytic converters.

The new business for... It's the new Furby. Yeah, it's the new Furby. Look, the economy is heading for another downturn. Can you afford not to learn how to steal catalytic converters? That's all I want to know. Siphoning gas, catalytic converters. Oh yeah, you gotta know how to siphon.

Now the good thing about siphoning is the sucking skills that you use while siphoning are useful in a variety of other endeavors. Absolutely. Especially other quasi-legal endeavors you're going to have to engage in to make a living when the economy collapses. Which is unclogging toilets with a hose. I don't know what you were thinking, folks. Get your minds out of here.

Come on, don't be filthy. Don't be filthy. Picture someone sucking shit through a hose from a toilet. Where have we gone? Why did you have me back? Oh, Miles, because we got to talk about some really profound child abuse. Oh, that's right. See, I always do this.

I'm like, yeah, it's a little bit of a good time. You're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait now. Remember this show. No, I had you on once to talk about the Trump University and after that it's just been bleaker and bleaker. But you know, I like it. I like it. Yeah, that's good.

So Joe Ritchie is one of the kinds of guys we deal with from time to time on this show. He's famous enough that we have pretty good texture on his early life, but he's obscure enough that there's also a lot of unanswered questions because like you're talking about a guy like Hitler. There's like a bunch of really good biographers who have all covered his child and you can get different. You can find the answer to pretty much every factual question about his early life

and one of those books. If you read enough biography, we only have one biography of Joe Ritchie and pretty much all of my info about his early life comes from the book Duck in a Raincoat by Mara Curley. And I think it's a very good book, but there are moments like the one I'm about to quote where you know, there's a deeper story lurking. Quote, Donato said Ritchie dated his social science teacher in junior high.

A tall, dark-haired beauty just out of college. Now, that sounds like statutory rape to me. Right? What the fuck? Junior high? Yeah. Yeah. And his friends used to just like, oh, yeah, he was dating one of the teachers

and it's like, I don't like 13 year old is with someone who's maybe 14. But yeah, that's 13, 14 and 22. At least. At least. Like that's the youngest she could be is 22. This is like Doogie Hauser. And it's like, oh no, I'm 15. Yes, if Doogie Hauser was fucking him, I guess it's fine.

But I don't think that was the case. Jesus. And that's it. It's just merely like, hey, he was real cool. He was dating the teacher. He was also a fucking teacher when he was like 14. Yeah. No, that's how it just dropped.

What was going on there? I don't know. I don't know. Do you have a lot of weird abandonment issues because of the thing with his mom and older women? We could talk about that. And it seems like his friends. It was one of the stereotypic things with who she's hot.

It's cool. Right. Like I think that's the attitude the other kids had about it. Obviously this is rape. Even if it is something that he went to his grave thinking was like fine. Yeah. Like it's that doesn't make it. That's why it's statutory rape.

That's what that is. Now hearing that hearing that he had this like relationship with the teacher much older than him that he thought nothing. It apparently didn't think anything about. I can't help but wonder if like, well, he's an altar boy too. Did anything like, you know, like you can't not consider that given the prevalence of abuse in the Catholic church. And I actually did look up a comprehensive report on sexual assault allegations against

priests in the Archdiocese of New York. It's 125 pages because fuck the Catholic church. And while there are four molester priests who were stationed in Port Chester where Joe lived, the earliest left in 1944 and the others didn't start doing their thing until the late 60s, 70s and early 80s. So there's not even circumstantial evidence to suggest anything happened about this. I just wanted to let you guys know I did look into it because I wanted to say where there's no whatever the truth.

Joe grew up into a troubled adolescent. He skipped school constantly. He and his friends would regularly steal pies from a neighbor for pie fights, which is an adorable sort of child crime. Like down the sill cooling. Yeah. That's how it sounds, right? It sounds like some Andy Griffith level.

It sounds like the kind of crime you'd send Barty Fife out to deal with. Right. Exactly. It's stealing pies, barn. What's that guy like a Norman Rockwell painting of like, you know, future cult leader stealing pies for pie fights as a. Unfortunately, it didn't stay cool. Cute.

When he was 15, Joe went joyriding with some of his friends. You have to assume they were drunk, but we're not. We don't know that. Sure. They crashed and he was flung from the car. Seat belts were just a fever dream in 1960. And he spent months in the hospital and then more months in physical therapy. He had to learn how to walk again.

Like. Wow. Which is like a level of injury severity is like you have to relearn how to walk. Like, yeah, it's a bad accident. I got scrambled a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I got, I got a little bit. Yeah. Scrambled is a good word for it. Some of Joe's family later told Mara Curley that this accident was a negative turning point in his life, possibly because he was given a lot of drugs while he was recovering and he got addicted to the drugs. There's debate over this. That would make sense.

Right. A lot of people's painkiller addiction starts because they are in some sort of horrible accident where they get painkillers. Now, about a year after he got out of the hospital, his family sent him to a residential treatment facility for difficult boys called PINS or persons in need of treatment. So, and again, we don't have, we don't have as much texture about why as I would like to have, but it seems like he recovers from this and his parents decide he needs to go to a facility.

It may have been just because like, oh, he's been joyriding. He was like stealing cars or whatever with his friends. They were joyriding. This is clearly a problem. Once he recovers, let's send him to a treatment facility. That may have been. As soon as he recovers from a horrific car wreck that rendered him unable to walk that he had to relearn again, then let's just send him away.

Yeah. Questionable parenting, I would say. At that point, are his parents, you're saying his parents are his maternal grandparents? No, his parents are his grandparents. Yeah. So, not his parents. But they're the ones who raise him. So, he stays in this treatment facility for two years and then returns to high school

in 1963 where he stayed until he left without graduating in 1966 at age 21. So, he's in high school at age 21, which sounds like a nightmare. Gee, shit, what? Which also shouldn't be allowed. Wait, what's the, what's the, how, wait, how does the time work? He was 15 when he got in the car wreck? Yeah, 15, and then he's like 17 or 18 when he gets back from the treatment program. And then he stays in high school for three more years.

Oh, so he was like starting sophomore year at like 18 or something? I think so. Oh, he got, what a, that's a weird vibe to get. That's a weird vibe. Especially since at 14, he's fucking a teacher and then at 21, he's still in the school. Yeah. Like, that's real real. He's like hungover and then they're like, well, what, it's not illegal.

And you're like, oh, you're right. Now, this is, this is a school in the 60s. So, I have to assume all of the kids were drunk 100% of the time. Right, right. As were the teachers. As were the teachers. God willing. And everyone was chain smoking.

So, it's less weird than it would be today. Right. So, the same year, the 1966 when he leaves high school. So, he leaves, he doesn't leave high school because he's like, I'm done with school. He leaves because he hijacks a mail truck or at least tries to rob it. The details around the crime are a little bit uncertain. But as best as I can determine, it seems like he and his lawyer decided to claim that he'd done it because he was a heroin addict and was desperate for money.

Some sources, some of his friends, well, some of, sorry, not his friends. Some sources, like usually when you find his life reported on in articles, they'll say he was a heroin addict. And that's why he robs this mail truck and gets sent to the facility he's sent to. That's not what Mara Curley, his only biographer, thinks. And she doesn't think that because people she talked to who were friends of Joe Richie's during this period of time, don't think he was a heroin addict. Like he did a little bit of heroin, but he wasn't like a hardcore addict.

He wasn't like, he was robbing shit, but he wasn't robbing shit because his heroin addiction was so bad. That's what some of his friends will say. Because he'd like the thrill of the robbery, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wanted shit. I don't know. I didn't know the guy.

But this was a really good time in American history to try to go to a judge and say, hey, I did it because I'm a drug addict and I need to go to a treatment facility rather than prison, because as we just talked about, Synanon was at the peak of its fame in the late 60s. And so it had just become popular for judges to send people to programs like this rather than sending them to prison. Straight to Joe. It's funny how we went first from like this full circle of being like, yeah, and like we want to have some little bit of compassion, even though it's tied to some really fucked

up organization to mass incarceration that people can be like, yeah, let's do some rehabilitation before incarceration again. Okay. Okay, we're back there again. Yeah. So it's not the wrong thing from the judge's point of view, I guess it's also possible that he lied about the addiction because it's a lot better to go to one of these facilities and fuck right now.

Now, whatever the truth, Joe goes to the day top village in New York and he thrives there. He's really good at the game, these sessions that he participates in with other addicts where you're like telling each other about your faults and flaws and stuff. He's really good. He's very good at it. Yeah. Like there's like a record rankings. It's like, have you seen Joe in the game?

It's a social thing. So everyone is supposed to take turns kind of picking an individual and like talking about the things they don't like about that person. That's like kind of how it goes. Some people are good at directing those sort of group conversations. They're good at controlling them. They're good at getting other people to gang up on someone. They're good at avoiding being the focus of negative attention themselves.

And this is a thing that's been observed by psychologists and stuff about sociopaths in particular are very good at group therapy. Like they're good at manipulating people. It's what they do. And so they know how to take advantage of these places and kind of one of the dangers and this is, we talked about this in the Synanon episode and I found a study on this. It's been noted that a number of cults have come out of different alcoholics anonymous groups.

And this is not like me shitting on AA. I know people who swear by it. But it's a problem that has been noted with AA is that sometimes these kind of group therapy sessions, individuals within them gain a level of mental control over other people and they turn into cults. It's happened a handful of times. And so the Synanon started. Oh, right.

So it's like it's the material for star formation is present, a cult formation is present. And if with the right ingredients, it may lead to potentially. And it can happen. Which is more, this is again less of a flaw in AA and more of just like this is how people work. AA, this is one of the things they're vulnerable to because of the, you know, other things. Churches are vulnerable to this thing too, right? We're not shitting on AA here.

But it's a known quantity in these kinds of organizations and Joe is very good at that. That's what I mean when I say that he was good at the game. He's right, right, right. Impulating people in this way. I was being stupid and acting as if they were like the game all started or something. And they're like, Richie is killing it. He brought up for his, you know, his paternal abandonment issues. It's fantastic.

He's like, I do kind of now want like football announcers like covering therapy. Oh, we just talked about the fact that his dad used to hit him. Oh, he went there. He went there. You didn't think he was going to go there this early on. And I think he's going to counter with something about his mother's inability to say that she loved him. Yep.

Okay. Yeah. Oh my God. He just brought up the time he left the gate open and the dog got out and was hit by a car. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. She's bringing out pictures of the sister.

She's bringing out pictures of the sister. We have not seen this in a long time. Richie usually doesn't use props. Netflix just emailed me. They're giving us $42 million to make this show. Great. An algorithm just deemed it so. Thank you, Netflix algorithm.

So yeah, I guess this is what we're, this is, Sophie, let's cancel the show for the day. Yeah, great. Yeah, well. I'm pretty sure that eventually they're going to be like, this is what we're thinking, Robert. We're noticing how big Pokemon is and how big your podcast is. What about behind the bastards, Mon, where it's, you got to catch them all.

Okay. And it's this anime series and it's a little bit of everything. Huh? What do you think about that? Huh? Sold. Yeah. The algorithm says it's going to be a fucking hit.

I mean, look, I'll do anything for enough money to buy an armored vehicle. Yeah. Now there's new merch for you. Got to, just all your bastard, Mon, got to catch them all. Got to catch all of the route clearance vehicles. So he's really good. He goes to day top. He's really good at the game.

He learns, he starts, this is really when he learns like that he has a gift for actually kind of like manipulating people. And at first he's doing in such a way that he's trying to like, I think, I don't know, I don't know how much he sees it this way, but other people see it as like he's helping them deal with their addiction issues, right? Like they don't see it as like, oh, he's doing cult leadership. They see it as like, oh, this kid is charismatic and understands people and is good at getting them to see their own flaws and their faults and like help them work through and process

their addiction. So he gets a lot of praise within day top and pretty soon he becomes like their most prominent member. He's giving speeches and raising funds for the organization and becomes their number one fundraiser. So he's like going outside of the group to like raise money for them and other and to talk about like how good they are at like stopping people from being addicted and stuff. And he later recalled that previously, quote, I done the therapy bit, but this blew my mind.

In other words, he done therapy before, but therapy didn't give him the chance to like manipulate a bunch of people. Oh, he really likes manipulating a bunch of people. Yeah. It's like an all you can manipulate buffet in there. I can't believe that's exactly the case. So he's happy at day top. This is an influential moment for him, but he doesn't agree with all of their therapy

for one thing that they all had to shave their heads, which was something that's sending on dead. And he thought that was weird. He also butted heads with the administrators when they told him he wasn't ready to graduate and eventually he ran away from the program. I think they wanted to keep him there because he was so good at raising money, right? Right. I'm so sorry.

You want to give that guy up? Now, at the time, like right around when he runs away from day top, he starts dating a woman named Sherry in New York. Now, Sherry was working at a travel agency and she fell for Joe in part because she was that her parents were alcoholics and he understood the issues she faced as a child of alcoholics. He understands abuse or not abuse, but drug abuse really well, right? He's just been counseling people. He's actually able to like talk with like, obviously that's a thing that would like draw

you to someone. You have this horrible experience. He understands it. It makes sense why they get together. When Richie left day top, he moves right in with Sherry and her roommate and at first she says things were great. He cleaned the house. He would bring her little gifts.

He successfully wooed her so well that she canceled her plans to move to New York City and train as a stewardess. The two were engaged to be married, but early on, there were unsettling signs about the man that he might really be, quote, and this is from Duck in a Raincoat. Richie sued Sherry's insurance company for injuries he said he sustained during a minor traffic accident. Sherry had run a stoplight and hadn't thought he was even injured, but her insurance company settled the claim.

Richie used the money to buy her an engagement ring. So he shoes her insurance company in order to get money to buy her a ring. Oh my God. Wow. This guy, yeah, this is some 4D scumbag shit for sure. That's kind of a sign. This guy might be a little bit, that's a little slimy. Yeah.

But hey, the ring's beautiful. I mean, it's an insurance company, right? If that is the only, I wouldn't judge a guy for that necessarily because like, yeah, get whatever money you can. No, no, but the thinking involved is clearly that someone's like, I find ways to extract things with very little effort and I don't care how underhanded it is. Yeah. That's what this says about him.

Now, Sherry seems to have been fined about this, but this bit of insurance fraud would prove to be the beginning of a fairly long career in insurance fraud. The two were married in December of 1969. They were both 24. Richie needed a job and since his only real life experience was either crimes or manipulating institutions, he decided to get a job working at the kind of place he'd been sent as a kid. He heard about a pilot program being launched for drug addicts in Connecticut.

It was called DARTEC and it was one of the first programs to include both medical professionals and former addicts working side by side to counsel people, which seemed like a much better idea than the Synanon method of addicts mentally abusing other addicts to keep them sober. The founder of the program, Dr. Donald Pett, hired Joe Richie after a phone interview because he seemed persuasive, quote, Joe had a very unusual way of getting many of the street people to follow him. He often got people to rally around him, kind of see things his way, do his bidding. Again, some cult leader shit, you know, wow, the street people, is that what they said?

Yeah. Yeah. They're talking about homeless people there. Now, one of the other staff members at DARTEC introduced Richie to a Massachusetts psychiatrist named Gerald Davidson. The two weren't coworkers long before Richie and Sherry moved again to another job at a drug counseling center called Survival Inc. But Joe clearly made an impact on Dr. Davidson, one that was out of step with his actual skill

in treating addiction. Evidence for this is that Joe brought three DARTEC staff members with him to Survival Inc. and all three of them were fired soon after because they were caught using drugs while working as drug abuse counselors. Wow. So, he may not be good at anything but manipulating people in reality. Yeah. Now, Joe is the one who fired them and he made a statement to the press saying their behavior

was unacceptable. And it seems like the incident had an impact on him. Not long after that in 1971, the couple decided to open a therapeutic community of their own. Joe reached out to Dr. Davidson, who he'd worked with briefly and because he was a smooth son of a bitch, convinced the older man to be their business partner in starting a new facility. Because Dr. Davidson is a psychiatrist and he has money, you know? You got to love it.

And you got a license probably too, right? Yeah. He's got some licenses. There's a lot of reasons it's a good call. Now, Miles, you know what's an even better call than convincing a psychiatrist to fund your child abuse company program? This seminar we're given on how to unload catalytic converters on Craigslist using ambiguous language.

Right, Miles. That's right. And pick up Miles and I's new book, The Catalytic Converter Driven Life, which is all about how stealing catalytic converters can... Can welcome converts. What a good cult this is going to be. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and, you know what, they were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. We're back. Oh, I'm just fondling a couple of cats and catalytic converters, that is. That's what we call it around here. That's what we call it around here in the in the in the Verder biz. So by 1971, which is when Joe decides to start his own facility, Synanon was a full-on cult, but public awareness of that fact was not high. People were aware that drug abuse rehabilitation centers could save addicts and such facilities

had exploded in popularity. Now at the time, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all had very stringent laws about what kind of professional qualifications you had to have to work in such a place, right? And the states have like, consider it basically a hospital. If you're trying, if you're saying I want to open a residential treatment facility for addicts, you have to like have medical, serious medical credentials in order to work there.

What if I just really want to do it? How about that? Well, then you move to Maine. Then you do what Joe Richie and Sarah and Sherry do, which is you move to Maine because Maine does not give a fuck about anything. Now, at the beginning, the program was owned by Dr. Davidson and another man, David Goldberg, who actually had the money necessary to start the business. The Richies used their money to lease a former summer camp in Naples, Maine, which they turned

into their facility. From the beginning, Dr. Davidson's role in all of this was to be a doctor, right? Not to actually do medicine, but to be a doctor who was professionally associated with the organization. Right. He could put his name on advertising material and they can use it to claim that their facility has a basis in clinical therapy. And since Dr. Davidson was the associate director of the drug clinic at Boston City Hospital,

he had a lot of professional weight to throw around, but again, he's never there. He's not actually doing anything. He's giving money. He's like funding this, but like, yeah. So from the start, it was agreed that Dr. Davidson would not work on site. He would stay in Massachusetts working at a hospital and using his position as a psychiatrist to refer patients to the new business he'd started, which is not at all a conflict of interest.

Okay. It's fucking rad. All American. Oh, it's so good. So good. Oh, yeah. You need some help. You know, actually, I know this place.

Actually. Oh, yeah. It's out in Maine. You know? Yeah. It's run by this guy who has no qualifications other than being a guy. But hey, he really wants to do it. He really wants to do it.

Yeah. He's motivated. He's got heart. No expertise though. All heart, no expertise. So Richie and his wife were supervisors working for free room and board and a cut of the profits. But when one of their other partners, a guy who invested with a doctor was caught embezzling, Richie and his wife bought their way into a full partnership by selling $8,000 worth

of stocks that Sherry had inherited from her grandma. So Richie becomes a partner because of money that his wife has, right? Now, the early years of this business are hard. The Richies were very poor and by all accounts, Joe was obsessed with getting rich. From the beginning, the Alon School, as they came to call it, was not about helping people. It was about making Joe Richie a fortune. Still, it does seem to have started as, I don't know, somewhat genuine. It doesn't seem to have initially been horribly toxic, at least within the standards of the

industry. And I'm going to quote from Duck in a Raincoat again. They lived on the top floor of the rustic building in Naples with residents on the second floor. Everybody shared the ground level. They seldom had any private time, never went out to eat or to the movies. Very activities centered around the therapeutic community and making lots of money. Sherry said her husband would often lie awake in bed thinking aloud about how they were

going to make their first $100,000. Becoming rich was definitely an obsession that seemed to drive Joe, recalled an early staff member at Alon. Money was extremely important to him and when he was earning $10,000 a year and driving an old old's mobile, it represented the power to be somebody important who would be accepted by everyone around him and that meant a lot. So from beginning, his motivation here is to get rich off this, not necessarily to determine any new method of actually helping people.

Right. Right. And even if it wasn't toxic at first, it seems like he probably felt some kind of momentum beginning with his ability to grift and manipulate. Yeah. And when I say, I don't know that it was toxic at first because we don't have a lot of detail about the early times of the school. Now, from the, at the beginning, most of the money that they made was put right back into

the business, but it gradually started to make a major profit because they started drawing in and Joe would actually go out and like recruit people to join the facility, particularly troubled teens from wealthy families. So they would like Joe and Dr. Davidson would go out and like talk to rich parents whose kids had like, were in legal trouble, had like serious problems with addiction. Like because Davidson is a psychiatrist, he knows which rich parents have are paying able to pay for serious health for their kids and Joe will go out and like, because Joe's good at convincing people of things, will convince them to send their kid over to a lawn and

pay $1,200 a month for treatment in 1970s money. You know, that's a lot of cash. So the Naples facility relocated to the former Potter Academy, a landmark in the town of Sabago and another secondary site was established in Waterford, Maine. So they expand very quickly because going after rich kids is good business. Throughout the mid 1970s, Joe Richie expanded his methods from, you know, he started off just kind of ripping off the day top school in Synanon to building something new. And this happens gradually.

We don't know the exact timeframe in which this occurs, but it happens, you know, in the early years of the facility. So initially all the therapy you have these group talk sessions based off the game, you have various forms of labor, people are asked to like do physical labor outdoors as part of like they're, they're kind of like a punishment in a lot of cases. And Richie designed a lawns culture around a series of work crews. Each member started as a worker and was assigned a job in the kitchen, the business office, the communications office or on the grounds based on what was considered to be their weakest

area. So you get a job doing grunt level labor and what everything you're worst at. In the 1979 article for corrections magazine, Dr. Davidson claimed this was quote, to teach them to function under adversity and learn to accept failure. Now from worker, which everyone starts as a worker, you move up to ramrod or foreman, which is like full, you know, in charge of a small group of workers. After that you move up to department head and then up to coordinator. Joe felt that structure and communal living were both necessary in order to treat addicts.

But while he was experimenting with new ways to counsel drug addiction, he was also experimenting with insurance fraud. So in January of 1974, a fire destroyed his academy at Sabago. Thankfully, no one was there at the time. Davidson and Richie were in Chicago recruiting residents. The building's owner told the press that he didn't have much insurance, but Richie bragged that the Alon School itself was quote, adequately insured due to the extensive remodeling his residents had done to the building.

But there was no evidence that his residents had remodeled anything because the building had burned down, but he was able to successfully argue that this increased the insurance value of the property, and he makes a lot of money off of the building that gets conveniently burned down. Oh yeah, don't worry about that. Don't worry about the no insurance, you know, because I'm looking at about probably four or five, six hundred thousand dollars with the remodel work that I didn't share anyway. So it's all good.

It's all the insurance covered. It's really fine. It's fine. No problem. I think that the fire was a turning point for Richie and the Alon School. They purchased a new permanent location in Poland, Spring, Maine, with seven large buildings that would each act as separate communities within the increasingly complex society Joe Richie was building.

Now, at this point, I haven't given a lot of detail about what happened at Alon because we don't really know about the early seventies all that much. It seems fair to say that early on there was little to differentiate Alon from other programs based off of Synanon and Daytop. They practiced the game, which tended to be regularly scheduled therapy sessions. And yeah, the idea like so it seems like they're kind of doing the same thing, 71, 72, 73. At some point though, it starts to change and it changes in part because Alon is very centralized from the beginning.

There's this strict hierarchy, these different jobs everybody has and you move up or down if your behavior is bad. That seems to be kind of everything else is spawned from this idea. So one of the first things that Joe develops that's different from what other facilities has done is he takes the game and he changes it into something different. So the game, two or three times a week in these other communities, everyone sits down to play the game, right? And that's the way the game works.

Joe replaces it with something called a general meeting. And rather than being a regular scheduled part of the week, a general meeting was unpredictable. Instead of it being a thing everyone does together, it's often an unpleasant thing that everyone does it together. A general meeting is something that's done to you. If your behavior is bad, Joe or one of the other supervisors will call the general fucking meeting against you. And it's usually done because Joe or a supervisor decides this person has done something bad.

So in the game, every individual pretty much is going to get called out for some sort of bad behavior, right? You go around the circle and everybody spends some time getting shit-talked basically, right? A general meeting isn't like that. Basically one person is getting yelled at and they're getting yelled at by everybody. Wow. So it's just like, all right, feeding frenzy, here we go, just for this person. The term that we used for this was get your feelings off, right?

So everyone's calling us like, get your feelings off on him. How has he hurt you basically? How is his behavior? He fucked up at this thing. How did it affect you negatively? And obviously you can't not say something. I found one recording of audio that is purported to have been recorded secretly during the late 1990s of a general meeting at a lawn school.

And a lawn graduates have said, some people argue that maybe this was staged, but either way they say, this is accurate to how it sounds. So here is a general meeting at the lawn school. So here is a general meeting at the lawn school. So here is a general meeting at the lawn school. So the game is, it's kind of debatable as to how therapeutically useful it was, a lot of criticisms of the game. This is just abuse.

Like, I mean, the game was pretty abusive in a lot of cases, but like, this is just pure abuse. That's just straight screening. Yeah, you can argue, even though there's abusive elements to the game going around in a circle, everybody like there's elements of that that could be helpful. This is just, this is just abuse. Yeah. Just a screaming meat grinder.

And like also that what the fuck the person's inhalations to or like so labor and I'm like this points that former students will make is that you learn how to yell in a specific way unique to the lawn school because of the way in which you are trained to yell at people and abuse people. There's like a specific cadence, specific kinds of terms that you use. You know, like the exhaust on a Harley Davidson, man, you know the sound, you can tell when it's in a lawn scream. Yeah.

I mean, that's, yeah, that's what former mates will say. So one of the difficulties in preparing this episode is that the system of abuse that Joe Richie crafted for a lawn was extremely complicated in a way what he built over the first few years was like an engine designed to be self perpetuating and maintaining. We don't have a good data on the order in which it all came together. But we do have bits and pieces of that story. One of these comes from a 1971 interview with Dr. Davidson from News and World Report in which he claimed quote, therapeutic communities largely are run by ex addicts who have become

extremely sanctimonious like all converted heathens. They shave their patients heads, make them wear diapers, hang degrading signs on them, things like that. In our therapeutic community, we do not do this. Our approach is to build self esteem and regard for others. Now, this is a lie. At least it runs counter to what we know a lawn was doing in this same period of time, but also Dr. Davidson was never there.

So maybe he was just didn't know that same year. Joe Richie did an interview with a local TV news station where he claimed that the goal of a lawn was to instill self reliance, self respect and a capacity for love quote. We tailor the program to fit the individual, not the individual to fit the program. This was also not in line with what we know was going on at a lawn, but it was consistent with Joe Richie's desire to market his school to the parents of rich kids. In the early years, he did a lot of direct sales to these parents and he would even offer to fly his private plane out to them to pick kids up.

He called a lawn the Rolls Royce of Adolescent Treatment Centers. So again, can't tell you how this all came together exactly, but I can tell you that by 1979, when General, when Corrections Magazine did a profile on the a lawn school, it had already developed a number of unsettling characteristics, including an internal secret police force quote. There are no clinical offices at a lawn, no 50 minutes. See you next week couch sessions, six days and nights a week. Each lawn residence is a hotbed of raw supercharged emotion.

When the house is functioning, working at therapy, the expeditors are at work, keeping a written record of negative behavior. They have a lot of status like a secret police force says one resident. They take attendance all the time and book incidents like if you talk back or fight. Each book is a strange collection of names or narratives, attention seekers, goobers, manipulators, non-relators. At 11.10 today, Diane was called out for obnoxious behavior. Incidents are collected, reviewed and dealt with appropriately and appropriately usually

means severely. You're not dealing with your feelings at all, screams a diminutive girl to a massive boy in a lawn seven. He has talked back to a coordinator. Why don't you grow some guts and brains instead of just balls you block head. Just as quickly as it began, the confrontation is over. Both peacefully shuffle off to work again. You have these people keeping track of everyone writing down in a notebook every bad thing

they do so that there can be a meeting at some point in the day where you yell at this person over it. Like where every single piece of behavior you do is being monitored at all times. This is true of everybody, including the people who are giving out punishment. They're also always being monitored. So anyone, if you have status, you can lose it for bad behavior. And if you don't have status, you can report people who might be above you and get them in trouble.

Like it's this whole, it's an engine of abuse. Right. And it's not necessarily like, when you said internal police force, I thought like they're ordaining people to be these niches, but it's just the ecosystem operates in such that it self-polices to be able to gotcha each other at the generals. That's part of it. There is, this is a position, expediter is a job. There's just always kids with notebooks taking down what everyone does at all times.

But then can you come for an expediter? Yeah. I mean, you would have meetings throughout, like once a day you're going to be like called into a room with kids above you and to talk about your bad behavior. And you're also generally asked if you saw anyone else doing anything. And you also have these slips of paper that you can write down a bad behavior you saw from someone else and put it in a little like, basically like a note box and it, those get read and people get punished for that stuff too.

Like a snitch suggestion box? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So all of this stuff, like again, the whole goal here is to create, is to make the kids lock each other down so much that no one can misbehave, that the program runs just based on all of these kids trying to either get back at each other or avoid punishment themselves. And any way to do that is to punish other people.

Like live in some like panopticon where they always feel like they're also, they can never hide either. Yes. That's a huge part of it. Now in Synanon, people who broke major rules were given haircuts, which was initially just like addressing down, but was turned into literal haircuts. Like eventually they would start shaving your head for bad behavior. In Synanon, the haircuts were metaphorical, but somehow much more abusive than forcibly

shaving someone bald. Haircuts were basically lesser general meetings. They could take the form of a blast where one person would scream at you for bad behavior, or a round robin where a dozen people would do it, or a 21 gun salute which involved two dozen people berating you. These lesser reprimands were called for by kids against other kids rather than being doled out by any kind of administrator. In 1979, when Corrections magazine covered Elan, so-called experts touted this as one

of the things that made Elan revolutionary. That article quoted the headmaster of a Montessori school who claimed, It works. The kids disciplined themselves with haircuts. The result is that there are no discipline problems in school. It would be more accurate to say that Elan successfully transformed most discipline problems into institutionally supported abuse, because the only way to have any kind of control over your life at Elan was to play along and raise through the ranks, at which point you would

be able to give haircuts or eventually call general meetings. The system was built to encourage kids to join it in order to dish out the abuse they'd had to suffer for months, and to suffer less abuse themselves. Elan punishments included signs, which listed the perpetrator's supposed sins. And again, Davidson had said, This is one of the things that makes us different from other. We don't hang signs from people's necks. They totally did.

Signs were forced to make signs themselves, but the wording was created by the students who were punishing them and by employees of the school. I found one example online and I'm going to, Miles, you want to read the sign that young woman's care is holding around her neck? Okay, this is my name is Phyllis Cohen. I behave like an emotional cripple. I consistently seek people's attention and try to get them to prove they care about me. I play games and continually usurp people's emotions in order to make myself feel special.

Please confront me because if I don't change this attitude, we'll always, I don't know, it says we'll always something the scared and lonely. What the fuck? It's pretty bad shit. So this is someone they're like, okay, this, okay, we figured you out. You're an emotional cripple. You have to wear this around your neck, yeah, then this sign is massive. It's got to be what?

Two and a half, three feet. It's a fucking, yeah. It's like a sign for a poster board. It's bigger than her almost. Yeah. Also like, like, why is it like colorful too? Like there's like an added level of blur to it. Well, she had to make it.

Somebody gave wrote that down for her. I don't think it's handwritten. I think those are like cut stickers or something or stickers or cutouts or stickers. Yeah. But it's like rainbow. Yeah. Unnecessary flare for such an abusive sign though also. Yeah.

They had a lot of flare. They had the whole school. One of the things you would have to do constantly is like write posters and stuff that they would put up everywhere. So there's always these posters with like batshit motivational slogans over all the walls. It's just the worst place in the world. Stop being an emotional cripple. Fuck face.

Fuck you. But it's like a rainbow and like a pot of gold. Yeah. I kind of want one of those actually from my own office. So I'm going to quote from that corrections magazine right up again, Miles. Where's your sign? Get that sign on or I will break it over your head. Barks Mark, the staff member running the general meeting at Alon five or at Alon four in Parson

ville in Parson field. Alon four is the residence for the toughest of the tough. It is the only locked facility for over a week now. Alon four has been in a tight house. All privileges suspended because of a poor house attitude. Mark zeros in on a few offenders as 60 pairs of cold eyes look on in the cafeteria. Paulson, get up here. He screams at a 13 year old with a toastle of brown hair.

You know why you're up here, don't you? Well, after this morning, you're never going to not do your homework again. You're going to want to be dead. Where is your dunce cap? Get him a dunce cap that will touch the ceiling. He says. And again, they would get like give these people like dunce caps as big as their bodies and stuff.

Like they would make people wear costumes. They made one kid dress up as Jesus, I think it was like a horse. They like chained his feet to a ball and like dressed him up as an animal. Like it would get fucked up. Damn. Yeah. And that's and you're saying this is in corrections magazine where they're like, yeah, look, check out the work they're doing here.

It's actually pretty critical to be honest. Oh, okay. I was making sure like the spotlight wasn't like, you know, like this is just a magazine for like statistic. It's not as critical as it should have been maybe, but it was 1979. They didn't know. I don't know. We'll see.

They could have been more critical, but it's like not positive. Like it. Right. Right. So just to read corrections magazine were like, this sounds right, but like I thought it was a pretty dark portrayal of this facility. Yeah. No, for sure.

It's you just never know, like considering the audience are like, wow, did you see that right up? I loved it. At one point the article discusses encounter sessions and these are a result of one of the weird programs Joe Ritchie developed for his school over the years. In encounter sessions, students are so students are required every day to write little fill out slips of paper admitting their guilt, which is like every day you have to write what rules you violated during the day that you didn't get caught for.

And then you would have to come in and talk to a group of your fellow students and a staff member about the different things that you've done that you weren't supposed to. So fucked up confessional. Yeah. And when I'm talking about rule breaking miles, I'm not talking about like, well, it's horrifying actually. I'm going to read you a brief non-comprehensive list of the different guilt and guilt is called you have guilt.

Right. Like that's the term they would use it. Like have you done something bad talking too loudly, talking too quietly, talking to someone without authorization, talking to a non-strength while being non-strength. So eventually one of the, this is one of the, they keep adding like different sort of rule, like different sort of classifications. So it's sort of like workers or Ramrods and eventually they add in strength or non-strength. So all of the low ranking students are non-strength.

And all of the, once you reach a certain point, your strength and then there's high strength. And so certain jobs only open up when you become strength or high strength. When you're low strength, you can't talk to anyone else who's low strength. You can only talk to high strength people or listen to high strength people. So you can get in trouble for listening to someone who's also low rank. It's this weird, there's a lot of weird shit with the system. Yeah, so in these rules, like who's defining like what's too quiet and what's too loud and what's too much and what's too little, like what, what are the, is there like some

kind of like ranking system? No, no, no. All subjective? Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Talking too much, not talking enough. Talking about subjects that are not a lawn related.

This is called being loose sex. And this doesn't just mean talking about sex. This means looking at someone of the opposite gender. So they would make you write down and confess if you were attracted to anyone else in the school. And then if you did that, they would bring it up, they would call everyone together and say, Hey, so and so thinks Susie is hot. Like, like Susie, you don't think he's hot, right?

You think he's fucking hideous. Yeah. And like they would do that in front of the whole school, like you have to admit that you have a crush on someone so they can make fun of you about it in front of everyone else. It's quite literally like the nightmare you have as a junior high kid. Yeah. Yeah.

That's exactly. And the nightmare is the whole school comes around and goes and they make the person who is a crush on you tell you that they think you're disgusting. Oh my. Yeah. It's really bad. Right. Fuck.

You could get in trouble for looking at someone of the opposite sex, but you could also get in trouble for avoiding looking at someone of the opposite sex because that clearly means you have a crush on them. How does that matter? I don't. It's so fucking good. Yeah, you could get in trouble for basically anything. Right.

Yeah. My looking outside. Yeah. You can't be looking outside, but you can. But also the next one is looking at the floor. Yeah. You have to be like constant state of observation. Yeah.

Constant state of observation. Always looking at your fellow inmates. Yeah. Robert, what does being sideways mean? Okay. When you slip too much lean. That's what I was thinking. I think it just basically means like not following some sort of like not not being on the program.

Right. Like the whole thing. The only thing you're supposed to talk about with each other is the program is like either what a disaster your life would be without it, how it saved your life or like how someone else needs to do a better job of following the program. Anything else is being loose, right? And you're not, you're not supposed to be doing that shit. Every day.

Oh, God. Yeah. The rest of these are, I think these are worse than the first couple of ones you read to be honest. Which ones? Having negative body language, reacting to insults, slouching or yawning, looking. Not falling asleep or sleeping for too long. Yep.

So you can't be a person. No, they keep you sleep deprived and they don't feed you enough because that's a great way to have a cold work. Just break somebody. It just says, it just says drawing. Yeah. You can't draw. I'd be done at this place.

Can't read books either. What? What? Or write? Is it a school? Yeah. Okay, whatever. Yeah, go on.

I mean, it's a fucked up nightmare. We'll talk a little bit about the kind of school. You do eventually, if you get to a high enough rank, there's a library and you can even read books if you get to a high enough rank, which you get to by abusing your fellow students and maintaining this order. So again, that's part of the like, after a couple of months of fighting back, you're so fucking desperate to have a single like privilege that lets you feel like a person that you will destroy the people around you to get that thing.

Right, right, right. And yeah, you just made it a gladiator ring. Yeah, exactly. For just the slightest bit of stimulation that isn't total abuse. It's cool and good, Miles. Cool and good. Every day inmates would participate in encounter groups. These were smaller, more focused versions of the game where three to four higher ranked

inmates would sit down with a worker or ramrod and discuss their flaws. In 1979, the author of that corrections magazine article claims some sessions focused on building up the self-esteem of inmates and having peers discuss their good qualities. This seems to have occurred at some periods, and I've even found former Alon students who will say that there were specific employees who were decent people. Most of the accounts I found do not report that building up self-esteem was as common a task for encounter groups as the opposite, which is breaking down people's self-conception of themselves.

This was evident even in 1979. Quote, encounters can run for 10 minutes. They can also go on for half a day. There are other, less frequent group sessions whose purpose is to build up self-esteem rather than tear it down. Tears often flow in these sessions, where residents talk about their good qualities. It is moving to watch. Tears flow in encounter sessions, too.

You want a knife, Bruce? You want to kill yourself? Asks L.S. matter of factly. Bruce's lower lip is quivering. Someone get me a knife. There is a rattle of a drawer, and someone hands Alice a silver blade. Here, Bruce. Kill yourself.

Bruce whimpers. He cannot shout as the others do. No, I don't want to change. I don't know why. I just don't want to change. His eyes redden. Alice ceases the chance to toughen this newcomer. Let me rip your stomach out for a second, okay, Bruce?

You don't think anyone likes you, do you? That's because you don't think you're worth being liked, she turns to the group. How many people feel that Bruce has an insatiable desire to be loved, but won't let that be because he hates himself. Six hands grow up. If you're crying now, Bruce, you should be. If you aren't crying now, Bruce, you should be. He is.

It's just like... What the fuck? Yeah. ...fucking mind game shit. Yeah. Absolute torture. And again, Alice is just like another kid, right? Right, right, right, yeah.

Doing this to like beat... Yeah. Physical abuse was also... And you're just like, yeah. That's so weird. You're just sort of nurturing these same fucked up skills within everyone, and it's just becoming this like a petri dish of dysfunction that you're just watching all the bacteria like replicate and grow and...

Jesus. Yeah, I mean, at past a certain point, all of the staff pretty much are people who went to a lawn as kids because like they can't do anything else, you know? Physical abuse was also extremely common in a land. At its lowest levels, it involved spankings, administered by other students via ping-pong paddle. Illustrators and employees were not supposed to partake in corporal punishment, although whether or not they did is something that seems to have varied from person to person

over time during the decades the school operated. Now, I was spanked in school, and when I say students were given spankings, depending on your background, that may not sound too horrible, right? At a lawn, spankings were administered the way therapy was. In groups, sometimes as many as a dozen students would spank a single person, taking turns until the child's buttocks was bruised and often bleeding. I found one account from an a lawn alumnus, Gregory Coleman, who actually gave this account during the murder trial of another former a lawn student.

At the time he gave the statement, Coleman was in maximum security prison for criminal trespassing, which might be a hint as to how well the program really worked, but that's a story for another day. And you're saying he was testifying at the murder trial of another a lawn student? Yeah, he sure was. Holy shit. Now, back in the 70s, Gregory had been sent to a lawn for stealing a TV. He was one of many students who participated in the mass paddling of a female student.

Decades later, he could not remember what she'd done to earn the punishment. Here is how his testimony on that was described in a federal court document. She was paddled so violently with opened hands in a wooden mallet that she had to be taken to the hospital. Coleman nonchalantly testified that the assault was so horrific that she went into shock and lost the ability to retain her bowel movements. Pretty bad stuff, Miles. Oh, fucking, in the beginning, I was like, oh, yeah, man, this dude is just a grifter

sure. Insurance. And then I'm like, yeah, here we go. Now we're getting to the bastard part as I turn away because I can't even focus on. Yeah. That's just so. Yeah. From it's like, it's not enough with all the psychological shit.

And now we're talking about creating, you know, generations of kids who probably needed actual, you know, professional help that was more centered around their humanity rather than some dude getting off on creating like the thunderdome of abuse. Yeah, it's a lot. So Miles, how are you? How are you feeling today? After all this good, I'm sweating. Sexy.

Yeah. So the just I'm just trying to focus on my catalytic converters. I'm not going to laugh right now. The only thing I got going on is a positive for me. Catalytic converters don't abuse kids, you know, they would never spank a child. All they do is get stolen by us in order to make profit. And that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful, Miles.

We saw them for 15 roses on Craigslist. All right. Well, we're going to talk more about a lawn school in part two, including its most notorious therapy, the ring, but that's going to have to wait till Thursday. Oh, Miles, you are not going to have a good time. Yeah, it's real bad, buddy. I don't like take these fucking like WWE event names that like, you know, haircut ring a general like, like, okay, well, it's all right.

If it helps, it's a lot worse than the WWE. No. Okay. Yeah. That's true, I guess. That doesn't help me. Yeah. Well, that's the episode, Miles, you got any fluggables to plug?

420 Day Fiancé, you know, if you like, if you like, nicey, nice stuff where I just get high and talk about trash reality TV, like 90 Day Fiancé, check out 420 Day Fiancé. Also Sophia Alexandra, somebody you have here on the time. That's my co-host. So that's where we do that in Daily Psych Guys. Yeah. Check out 420 Day. Check it out.

Check out 420 Day and check out catalytic converters by crawling up underneath a Toyota Prius with a set of bolt cutters and just start cutting, just start cutting until you get the good shit. There you go. Cutting for gold. Mm-hmm. That's how it works, baby. All right.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

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