Behind the Bastards - Soldier of Fortune: The Deadliest Magazine Ever (with David X. Cohen)

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Robert is joined live for SF Sketchfest by David X. Cohen to discuss Soldier of Fortune Magazine. 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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Microphone. It works. I didn't butcher this introduction quite as bad as I habitually am supposed to, so I apologize for that. I know that's why you all came. I'm very excited today because we have both a subject that's really fun and a guest who I love and have been a fan of since forever.

David X. Cohen was a writer on The Simpsons where he penned such episodes as itchy and scratchy and poochy, which one of the best episodes of the show ever made. He made 22 short films about Springfield and coined the word Cromulant, which then went on to be an executive producer and the head writer for Futurama, which is like a huge chunk of my childhood. I'm sure a lot of people's childhood's here. David, you want to come on out? Now, to give you all an idea about what a good sport David is, when he agreed to be in the show, I said, we have this weird thing we do with machetes and bread products. Are you okay playing? What is essentially tennis? And he said, yeah. So we'll be getting to that later. Not just, yeah, I was on the high school tennis team on a very bad team, but on the tennis team. So I'm planning to take it extremely seriously and beat you badly. It's going to be a great night. David, how are you doing today?

Very good. A little tired. We did two different Futurama related shows in the past 24 hours. Well, today I have something that is not related to Futurama. See you later. When you were a kid, did you ever read Soldier of Fortune magazine? I did not read Soldier of Fortune magazine. I read Med magazine. Is it similar? A lot of anger went into both, but probably more into Soldier of Fortune and a very specific kind of anger. So we're obviously in this place as a nation right now, where recklessly bad journalism has done a huge amount of damage to the body politic, and we're all kind of grappling with what that means. But even within the context of things like the Epoch Times and Breitbart News,

Soldier of Fortune stands out as maybe the most reckless magazine anyone ever printed. This may be a foolish question, but on behalf of the audience as well, is it still going strong? Are they printing the magazine still? I remember it from when I was a kid. Is it still going? Printing? No. It still exists. We'll cover that at the end. But it's not at its heyday. But in its heyday, I think this magazine may have directly killed more people than any other magazine. Wow. Yeah. A lot, a lot of people. Like so many more than you're going to expect. Are you ready to learn about Soldier of Fortune magazine?

I am. I'm bracing myself. Sounds pretty grim. Now, before we can talk about Soldier of Fortune, we have to talk a little bit about the man who created it, a near-legendary figure named Robert K. Brown. So that's the origin man. And then you're named after him? Yes. There were a couple of other Roberts in between me and him, so I've got an E last name. I mean, you two are the two main ones, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Robert Brown was born on November 2nd, 1932, in Monroe, Michigan. And I've been able to find vanishingly little about his early life until he entered college in 1950.

At the time, there was a draft going on, and Brown saw some sort of military service as inevitable. And so he decided he'd rather be a fighter pilot than anything, and he joined Air Force ROTC to try to make that happen. So pretty normal beginning for a kid in the 50s so far. Good start. Yeah, fine start. He wound up having some behavioral difficulties in college and was forced to transfer in 1953 to the University of Colorado, because in his words, the dean and I agreed it was best I leave Michigan State. Was this a violence-related thing, or did he have other issues? He didn't also have like me too issues or other stuff going on. I haven't heard any direct allegations. I would be utterly shocked.

So he was bed in one specific way so far. Yeah, I mean, that we know of. But it's also almost impossible that this guy didn't have something like that happen, given the rest of his background. So due to a mix of his new college's policies and his bad eyesight, Brown eventually had to accept that he was not going to become a fighter pilot. So a little bit of tragedy early on. So he joins the Marine Corps Reserve instead. But his recruiter is a guy who he goes on to call a snake oil salesman and instead convinces him to join the Army when it's time to join full-time rather than the Marine Corps, promising that he can become a special agent in the counterintelligence corps, which is not a job that he can actually have. So this was a bald-faced lie, as are most things that military recruiters tell young children. But fantasizing about platinum, blondes, and Cadillac convertibles, Brown agreed and signed on the dotted line. And by the way, has anyone seen the current round of ads for joining the military?

They're all portrayed as video games, literally like 3D graphics, and they're using classic rock songs, too. I don't know if they're also trying to get my generation to also sign it, but they really make it look really fun, I have to say. I'm excited for the next round of ads that they set to fortune at Sun. Let's just go ahead and careen into the death of irony. So, Robert Brown winds up in the Army in October of 1954, and he loves it, particularly the shooting guns part. Spoilers, this guy's kind of a big gun dude, which I know is a real surprise. Yeah, so the whole experience of basic training convinced him for the rest of his life that the draft was a really good idea that never should have been discontinued. So, some people may disagree with that. It's a strong take. Once Robert graduated from training, he was informed that the special agent job that he was promised was actually Clerk Analyst, which he considered to basically be secretary work.

He signs up to be James Bond, and he gets a job shuffling papers. That would be a good character to add to James Bond, the guy who slips the, you know, razors into the letters in the mail room or something like that. What letter of the alphabet is not claimed for a character in James Bond? M. No, we've got an M. I? E? Envelope? E. Envelope.

Yeah, we've got an E. So, yeah, Robert was profoundly bad at this job, and he failed the training course for it four times, which I'm not sure how you do that. It was the alphabet. When he was, when he did eventually finally graduate, he found the idea of doing the work itself hateful because it didn't involve shooting anybody. So, instead, he decided to go to officer candidate school in order to escape the tedium of desk work. He graduated and would later brag of two major accomplishments in this period. He received more demerits than any other member of his class, and he was the best shot with a heavy machine gun. That's good, yeah.

The guy with behavior problems is real good at shooting. So, we're on a good path so far. Feeling optimistic about this guy? So, he was, he sort of was going postal, basically, except he didn't, it was before the term existed. He kind of, he was a trendsetter in that way, I guess, right? And he found the one career. Postal worker is a bad name. Yeah, yeah.

It's very good for all of us he didn't become a postal worker. Although bad for all of us that he got into journalism. Brown's dreams of daring due in the army were initially cut short when his father died. He opted for a state-side job in Wisconsin and worked at kushy desk gigs so he could help his family. He left active service in 1957, having failed to see any action, and he spent the next few years in the army reserves. Robert had fallen in love with the idea of being a soldier, but was frustrated by the lack of violence he'd actually experienced. But then, luckily for Robert, Fidel Castro launched a rebellion against the dictatorial rule of Fulgencio Batista, providing Robert Brown with an opportunity.

And as weird as it is for a guy who's like the founder of like this weird chunk of the conservative media today, Robert Brown became a pro-Castro activist and like spent time illegally smuggling machine guns to Cuban revolutionaries and stuff. So that's cool. Carry on. So yeah, he eventually tricked his college's student newspaper into issuing him press credentials, which is one of the most important things about being a journalist, is tricking someone into issuing you credentials. So he nails the first part of the job, and he spends some time in Havana, but he doesn't see any action. And he gets repeatedly invited by people he meets in Havana to go attend these other civil wars that are brewing all throughout Latin America,

but he keeps missing out on them. So he just is, the frustration is just unbearable at this point. Yeah, yeah, always, I don't know, I'm trying to do the always a bridesmaid never a bride thing, but for brutal grinding civil insurgencies. It didn't come to me. You can work it out. So he did manage to participate as a war correspondent, though. He was hired by the AP to interview a refugee Spanish general promising to overthrow the dictator Francisco Franco.

The resulting article did well and Brown struck up a friendly acquaintanceship with the general who had helped train Castro's guerrillas, too. The general gave Brown a copy of a book called 150 Questions for a Guerrilla, a manual for how to fight an insurgent campaign. Robert Brown instantly saw dollar signs and opened a publishing company to translate the book into English and sell it in the USA. And was he a good writer? Like, was he actually competent in that? Yeah, I would say he was competent. He was good at what he was trying to do. He accomplished his goals. Maybe I should try that career. I mean, I have an idea for a magazine. Robert worked as a journalist for a little while, writing mainly for Gunn's magazine. Very august publication.

What was the magazine about? In similar publications. But as the Vietnam War kicked off for the United States in the 60s, Brown found himself drawn back to his dreams of getting shot at. That's his goal. Well, if you're getting shot at, that gives you an excuse to shoot back. So I can see why you would want to get shot at. It's every man who wants to shoot someone's dream. So Brown rejoined active duty. He became a Green Beret and he served from 1968 to 1969. He wounded badly in a mortar attack and was kicked out of the Green Berets for reasons that are never really adequately explained. But he did have a good reputation as a leader. One of his comrades, a medics said this about him decades later.

He was the kind of guy you wanted as your CO in Vietnam. He really stuck his neck out for the people he was in charge of. And he got shot in it. So yeah, Brown was a pretty good soldier. He eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel, but sadly for him at least, the Vietnam War did not end well for the United States. Brown returned home to a nation that widely considered the war he'd nearly died in to be a colossal waste of money and lives and everything it can be a waste of. It wasn't a great call. Many protesters called soldiers like him baby killers and Brown quickly recognized that he was part of a new generation of retired warrior who was increasingly isolated from mainstream American society. He'd been a kid during World War II and that had been very celebrated as a collective endeavor. And he was frustrated that like his generation of soldiers weren't getting the respect that they deserved.

So he said, I'm going to go on the internet and link up with other people like, oh, it hasn't been invented yet. You kind of spoil it because this guy does create the dark web accidentally just in magazine form. I mean, it's what it's what I would have done. I guess I'm just channeling. Yeah. So yeah, he finds himself like frustrated that he's not getting enough respect that veterans aren't getting what he sees is enough respect. Frustrated that America is on this new peacenik trend and not willing to go to war as often as he wants it to. And so like a rational sane person, he goes on vacation around several civil wars in Africa. What do you do?

So after a couple of years of living as a war tourist in places, is that that is that a real thing? I mean, I've done a little bit of that. I have, I won't name names, but I have a friend who's a disaster tourist who will go like, oh, you know, Fukushima hotel rooms in Japan are going to be really cheap next week. I thought at first you were going to say that he liked to visit the sites of terrible disasters, but he's just thrifty. Exactly. No, I mean, yeah, I've done some, I've done, I mean, I've worked in war zones and stuff and there's elements that verge on uncomfortable tourism. Like the hotels in Iraq are incredibly cheap and very nice. But yeah.

Just to tiny aside along those lines for a second, but back when we were making Futurama, we got invited to Matt Greening and I got invited to some kind of a Kurdish film festival animation. And they're like, don't worry, you'll be totally safe. We'll have 24 hour guards posted. That's nothing makes me feel less safe than knowing I need 24 hour guard posted. Oh man. Yeah. I mean, they probably would have sent you guys to Erbil. It's a nice city.

But yeah, I mean, there's AK-47s all over the, well, less than a year. I'm going to be honest. You're not going to a place with more guns. I did have the second time I flew into Iraq, I had left a single round of nine millimeter in my bag. And as we arrive at the airport in Iraq, they find it and like none of the airports that I scanned it through had found it. None of them had an issue, but they search all your stuff when you land in Iraq and they were so angry. And I kept like looking over to my photographer being like, are they really worried we're going to bring one extra bullet in Iraq? Why?

This is going to tip it. But, okay. So Robert Brown finds himself in Africa hanging out at a couple of civil wars, you know, shooting the shit with mercenaries. And he meets a couple of mercenaries who are about to go over to Oman and fight putting down an insurrection for the Sultan. And this gives him an idea. He writes to the Oman Ministry of Defense and inquires about taking a job as a mercenary there. They send him a contract. Brown had no desire to actually do this job, but he knew that there were an awful lot of glory seeking Americans who would jump at the opportunity.

So he took out ads in a series of gun magazines, reading, quote, Want to be a mercenary in the Middle East? Send five dollars. Wow. That guy's a genius. Yeah, he's fucking genius. So far, you're like, this is going completely the wrong way. I'm just more and more impressed with this guy.

He's not a dumb man. It's a great grift. So, yeah, hundreds of Americans send in five dollars for a chance to be a mercenary in the Middle East. Yeah, he basically just Xeroxed the contract. He'd mail it out to people who sent him the money. And yeah, he makes like $10,000. And it's unlikely that any of his clients actually wound up fighting an Oman. One has to assume that most men who volunteer to join a war effort based on an ad in a magazine are not particularly qualified soldiers.

But the financial success of the endeavor convinced Brown that there was a huge amount of money to be made. And he's willing to the dream of an every man's heart that he might, in the right circumstances, be a total badass. Now, this might be another dumb question, but is it legal to be a mercenary for another country if you're a U.S. citizen? Like, yeah. We go back and forth on that as a nation. It kind of depends on the war. Report your income and you're like, I'm fighting for a different country's army. That seems like you might invite scrutiny of your tax return at a minimum. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think it's one of those things like being a drug dealer.

There's that thing the IRS lets you mark that's like, I'm not going to tell you how I got this money, but here's how much money I have. But here's how many Iraqi lira I made this year. I'm going to write off a lot of ammunition. But yeah, so Robert Brown uses the 10 grand he makes scamming gun nuts to fund the creation of a new magazine, soldier of fortune. His stated goal was to rehabilitate the image of the warrior in American society. So exciting. He said this later, quote, a lot of Vietnam veterans felt they weren't given their dues, so I wanted to promote the concept of giving them recognition. We said our blood was just as red as anyone who fought in World War One or World War Two or Korea, but that wasn't the case in society at the time.

So soldier of fortune likely would have been a blip on the radar if it weren't for a particular stroke of marketing genius by Robert Brown, because he didn't just angle it as a magazine for veterans. The Russian soldier of fortune as quote, the Journal of Professional Adventurers. So it was a magazine for mercenaries. Was it filled with his own more of those ads? Still the $5, the $7, $5. Because again, just admiring. It's like, I'm getting $5 in the ad, but they're not paying me for the magazine. So it's like, if he could just invent the magazine just to run his own ad, that's also brilliant.

We'll get to that. A man who never gives up on his dream of getting other people to fight and someone else's worse. And he's, yeah. So now the problem with a magazine aimed at mercenaries is that there's not a lot of mercenaries. And a lot of them can't read. And a lot of them cannot read. Which is why you become a mercenary. Yeah, so there were like maybe a thousand or two people in the world who both spoke English and fit the definition of a mercenary.

But Brown's real target was not hard-bitten warriors. It was aging baby boomers who thought they probably could have been hard-bitten mercenaries if they hadn't gotten that girl pregnant back in 62. Here's how Mike Royco of the Chicago Tribune described the magazine's clientele in 1984. It's directed at professional mercenaries, men who will fight for pay and those that want to hire them. But since mercenaries represent only a tiny portion of the reading population, the magazine tries to broaden its appeal to include those who might be called war fans, weapons lovers, fanatic anti-comies and Walter Middy types who enjoy the vicarious thrill of reading about blood and guts. So yeah, that's the audience.

We don't know anything about that group. But he's the first person in American history to really decide to market directly to that group of people, which turns out to be a really good idea from a money standpoint. Or if you want to run for president. Or if you want to run for president. This is a very pro-Trump podcast. Aggressively so. I really offended people here.

I mean, yeah, we are in the middle of red San Francisco. I meant that in the opposite of the way most people mean that. 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 was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. It'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 heaven. 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. So the first ever issue of Soldier of Fortune featured a glossy color picture of a soldier with a rifle behind a barbed wire fence with a red sun setting in the background. The whole image was cast in a green tint as it being viewed through night vision goggles. Articles included underwater knife fighting techniques, which I am desperately curious about.

Because I can imagine a handful of people in history have had to stab someone while underwater. I'm sure it's happened, but to need to do it enough to have a technique. But sometimes you need to also defend yourself against a giant squid or something like that. It's not necessarily a human. There's a lot of stuff to stab underwater. That's a very good point. I am sorry for suggesting that people might not need to stab aquatic life. You really grasp the fundamental precept of this podcast, which is ABS. Always be stabbing. It might be like an underwater high school biology class where they're doing a dissection in the wild. Other articles included urban street survival part one, which I feel like the underwater knife fighting might help with.

And of course American mercenaries in Africa. That last article was a feature about the conflict in a little place that doesn't exist anymore called Rhodesia. What do you know about Rhodesia? Diamonds, right? I think so, probably. Turned into Zimbabwe? Yeah, exactly. Nailed it. Great. But before it turned into Zimbabwe, it was a little bit problematic because Rhodesia was a white supremacist state

that broke away from the British Empire in 1965 over the issue of whether or not black people should be able to vote. They did not take the positive attitude on that. So the 3% of the nation that was white controlled virtually all of Rhodesia's resources, and they knew that letting black people vote would change that state of affairs. Here's how soldier of fortune described the conflict. What the Brits wanted was for the blacks to get a vote, one man, one vote. Of course, that would mean the blacks would get into power. So the white Rhodesians unilaterally implemented the Universal Declaration of Independence in 1965.

I have to emphasize here, they're not framing that as a bad thing. They're being like, of course this is what happened. They were going to take all of their stuff that they stole from them. So this is Rhodesia. We're not maybe not talking about a super woke town. Now, for some reason, this pissed off a lot of people. So the vast majority of the population in Rhodesia did not support the white supremacist state that governed it. And many of these people decided to become insurgents and attempt to overthrow the government.

And because they lived their lives dominated by an incredibly oppressive colonial capitalist system, a lot of them wound up being like maybe communism's a good idea. And there were two different large groups of insurgents, one backed by the USSR and one backed by China. And in the tradition of leftist revolutionaries throughout history, they fought each other as much as they fought the people that they were fighting against. But yeah, they still managed to put enough pressure on the embattled white minority that things began to get very dire for the government of Rhodesia. Now, this racist nation's problems were compounded by the fact that basically the whole world saved South Africa

and Israel slammed Rhodesia with sanctions. As life in the tiny landlocked country grew more difficult, a large chunk of the white populace fled, mostly for South Africa. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the Rhodesian government decided to turn their national struggle into a cause celeb for the racist people in the world. Well, good for them. Yeah, that's smart. Let's crowdfund our vicious war of colonial oppression.

No one's tried it yet, so that's what they did. Now, they didn't frame it as a racist crusade. I earned 50 blood diamonds this year. That's my tax return for that. Just a sack of gore and crustaceans. They withheld five blood diamonds. So, Rhodesia was intelligent enough to you that we can't just say, we want help fighting our super racist war of racism.

So, being a somewhat canny, they decided to frame what they were doing as a battle against communism. Prime Minister Ian Smith called his nation the ultimate bastion against communism on the African continent. Mainstream American conservatives tended to embrace this idea. William F. Buckley organized the Friends of Rhodesian Independence campaign, which worked to spread propaganda to Americans about what a neat place Rhodesia really was. But no single publication did as much to popularize the Rhodesian cause as Soldier of Fortune magazine. Starting in 1975, they ran a series of lurid articles about the American volunteers fighting in Rhodesia. Interviews with these men focused on the failures of the United States to stop communism from getting a foothold in Africa,

which was heightened after Congressional Democrats had stopped the CIA from aiding fascists in Angola against the socialist regime there. One mercenary in that first issue complained, the West isn't doing its job. The U.S. especially isn't doing its duty. If they're too scared to fight the communists, then people like me have to act independently. I consider it my duty to fight in Rhodesia. After Vietnam and Angola, we can't afford to lose any other countries. Did Robert, sorry, what's his last name again?

Brown. Brown. I knew it was something complicated. Did he go to Rhodesia? He did, okay. I mean, it was good, some good war tourism there. Okay. Yeah.

Because they've got armored vehicles, so you're pretty safe. Stuff to see. Yeah. Yeah. No, he loved him some Rhodesia. Okay, so he wasn't just riding from a distance. No, he sees a lot of war over the course of his life. Yeah.

Just, you know, always somebody who gets to leave when they get bored or scared. Yeah. Which is the best way to see war. Like, I'm going to be honest. So, while Soldier of Fortune magazine did not throw out racial slurs, the racism in its Rhodesian coverage was really obvious. At one point, a mercenary was quoted as saying, What we have here is an ideal core of white people who are able to raise the standard of living among the Africans.

Without us, conditions will decline rapidly. Now, after Vietnam, the United States had probably the highest population of unemployed combat veterans in the world. And a few of those men joined the Rhodesian fighting effort and rose to high levels in its military establishment. But most volunteers were far from hardened operators. Instead, there were folks who'd missed out on their chance to fight in Vietnam and wanted desperately to experience combat. For these men, Soldier of Fortune published a series of articles written by Major Nick Lamprecht, the chief recruiting officer for the Rhodesian Army. He provided step-by-step advice for how they could apply to join and be flown out to the country to be inducted into the army as conscripts.

Lamprecht promised that the work would be difficult but rewarding, saying, Rhodesia has many things to offer. Good Rhodesian beer, a friendly populace, and what I would describe as a free and easy, unhurried way of life. Lots of wide open spaces. It's fun to describe a friendly populace when you're trying to get people to fight a brutal anti-insurgent guy. So, for years, Soldier of Fortune ran glossy recruiting articles with full-page spreads featuring the elite Rhodesian light infantry and cello scouts locked in glorious combat. Some 400 American men were eventually induced to join the fight, mostly from Soldier of Fortune magazine articles.

That's $2,000. And as you might expect from men who join a war based on a magazine article, they were not very good at it. Most Rhodesian volunteers were people whose lives in the United States were not going super well. So, yeah, in 1979, one reporter noted, the majority found the routine too tough to last more than a few months. The desertion rate among American citizens who have joined the Rhodesian army over the past two years is estimated to run about 80%. So, the best case scenario is 80% of these guys are like, oh, this is horrible. I don't like war at all. What a mistake I've made.

But a good number of them died. John, I mean, they joined the racist army. They could have joined the army and they joined the racist army. So, of the 20% that didn't desert, a lot of them died. Oh, yeah. So, let me talk about a small percent that didn't desert and didn't die. Yeah, okay. Not a lot of long-term veterans of the Rhodesian army out there. One day to retirements.

John Allen Coey, a medic from Cleveland, Ohio, joined based on a Soldier of Fortune article and was gunned down by insurgents almost immediately after arriving in the country. Soldier of Fortune published a hagiographic article quoting him as saying this, since coming to Rhodesia, I've already heard. I don't even want to finish the quote now. Short interview. A very short interview. Finish the quote.

No, no. You know what? We're going to let that one sit. Soldier of Fortune articles on Rhodesia rarely made blatant lies. It was a lot easier to just ignore facts that didn't reinforce the narrative. In one piece they noted, the unrivaled Salu Scouts, the covert elite special force regiment of a thousand that consisted of black and white, with a majority of blacks, were credited with gathering spot-on intelligence for the regular army. Lines like that are technically true, but neglect to mention the fact

that only white people were allowed to be officers, as an army of conscripted blacks led by white volunteer soldiers. Maybe an important fact to include. I don't write for Soldier of Fortune. I'm just giving some notes. Now, I think to me you sound a little bitter. I mean, just because you couldn't get hired doesn't mean... It was my dream ever since I came by my first copy of Soldier of Fortune in that gun show.

Right next to the Wehrmacht helmets. And the other Wehrmacht helmets. Yeah, basically the picture that Soldier of Fortune liked to paint of the Rhodesian War was kind of similar to the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War here in the United States. There was this glorious lost land and this wonderful culture, and it was tragically snatched by the jaws of these people who wanted to vote. So, actual articles from real journalists who visited Rhodesia painted a very different picture of what was going on there.

And I'm going to quote now for a 1979 Washington Post article I found by an actual journalist as opposed to a guy who just likes to get shot at for fun. Quote, the first impressions are of the rural South I knew as a boy in the 1930s. Black maids and house boys earning $20 to $60 a month fetch and bow, saying master and boss, black laborers working for $12 to $20 a month plus rations, cluster and grass huts on the white farmer's land, like the Mississippi sharecroppers of their remembered past. They're like children, a housewife says.

You have to do everything for them. You have to stand over them to get anything done. It's more trouble than it's worth sometimes, but they are very happy people. It's not like South Africa. A young woman asks if we have a dishwasher, a clothes washer and a dryer. She laughs. You know what we call them here? And then she says the n-word.

Yeah, not nice people. Also, kind of wild to say you have to do everything for the people whose explicit job is to do everything for you. I'm giving notes on Rhodesia now. The Rhodesian bush war ended in 1979 when rebels succeeded in blowing up the nation's entire strategic fuel reserve. Maybe you don't keep it all in one place. Again, with the notes, but like...

At final toll, more than 1,100 Rhodesian soldiers died, along with roughly 10,000 rebels and more than 20,000 civilians. And it is unlikely that the few hundred mercenary soldier of fortune induced to join had a sizable impact on the conflict. But they did an awful lot to influence how Rhodesia has gone on to be remembered by thousands of racists around the world. You remember that soldier, a fortune article I quoted from a little earlier, the one that glossed over the fact that the nation was founded out of a desire

to stop black people from voting? Sounds familiar. Yeah. Well, that article was not written during their time of the Rhodesian bush war. It was published in 2012. Three years later, in 2015, Dillon Roof walked into a black church in Charleston and shot nine people to death. His stated goal was to provoke a race war.

He left behind a manifesto titled, The Last Rhodesian. So, yeah, there's a real horrible negative long-term consequence to the myths that soldier of fortune was integral to setting up. So this is the actual death count is beginning with nine. Yeah. Well, and all those mercenaries killed. Oh, well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I want to note, too, that basically the argument that soldier of fortune would make is that, well, Robert Mugabe took over Zimbabwe after Rhodesia fell, and he was terrible, and he was. He was a monster. But that kind of neglects to mention that Mugabe wasn't a factor in politics in the region until all of his predecessors were assassinated by the Rhodesian army.

I don't know. Notes again. So, yeah, while the Rhodesian bush war was a disaster for humanity, it was a great time for Robert Brown and his writers. They got to take a lot of trips to Rhodesia, drink that good beer, drive around in armored vehicles, shoot at people who were trying to vote. It was a cool time for him and his friends. Can you shoot in AK-47 while you have a...

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, if you have the opportunity, it's almost required that you do so. Now, obviously, as you noted a little bit earlier, there are some legal questions about recruiting mercenaries to fight for a pariah state that the U.S. has under embargo. And the FBI did investigate into whether or not soldier of fortune was breaking the law by soliciting mercenaries.

But they kind of got off on a technicality because the soldiers who joined to fight Rhodesia joined to the Rhodesian army as regular troops, so they weren't legally mercenaries. So it was all fine. So that's cool. I'm just saying, if you decide to start your own soliciting mercenaries business to fight for a pariah state, keep that in mind. What you call things matters.

So, by the end of the war, soldier of fortune subscription numbers were more than 100,000 people. And they had changed the name to soldier of signed contract magazine. Signed legal contract. As long as there is a third party, we are not breaking any laws. Yeah. So, that's pretty cool. As the 1970s rolled to an end, Brown continued to send his writers off

to little wars all around the world. Six of them would ultimately die covering stories he sent them off on. But he got to go to a lot of cool places. He focused primarily on struggles between communist and anti-communist forces like the Civil War and Angola. And Brown was canny enough not to solicit mercenaries directly in the future. But he didn't need to because many of his readers were the same kind of person that he was. And this is where we enter the story of a guy named David Buffkin.

David? I mean, this is... I know. There's something weird here. The worst David and Robert had a less fruitful collaboration than us. This David was a former crop duster who decided to become a mercenary recruiter when crop dusting got boring. So, pretty normal career path. So, after 40 years of crop dusting, you're saying, when it got boring?

He decided to start putting up ads in local newspapers when soldier of fortune trying to raise 100 mercenaries to fight against communists in Angola. Now, this was maybe a bad idea on its face since the Cuban army alone had sent tens of thousands of soldiers in to fight in Angola. But 100 mercenaries, you know? It's a start. So, to make his case seem more legit, he lied and said that he'd gotten an $80,000 CIA contract.

A few dozen would-be warriors reached out to Buffkin, but as one of them later recalled, Buffkin obviously had no funds available. He operated out of motels. He had no office. Potential recruits had to pay their own travel expenses. It was definitely a shoestring operation, which is not what you want if you're being recruited to go fight in a foreign war. You want it if they're not paying for business class?

I mean, this is where the word fortune comes in. Exactly. I was promised fortune in the name. I mean, it's got to at least be like an upper-tier airline. Anyway, a few very dumb men did agree to go. One of them was former CIA officer George Bacon, who had read one of this guy's ads and soldier of fortune decided to join the war effort. He was killed almost immediately.

Daniel Gearhart, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran in financial distress, also replied, his wife told him this was a terrible idea, but Buffkin managed to convince him, and soon he found himself over in Angola. He was captured immediately without ever getting into combat. His wife and family begged Gerald Ford to do something, but resting your hopes on Gerald Ford was not anyone's other than Richard Nixon one time. That was a biggie, though.

That equaled 15 prisoners of war. Yeah, he did not come through for Gearhart, and the government of Angola decided that what he'd done was a crime against their nation, and they executed him and a bunch of other mercenaries. He and George were not the first soldier of fortune readers to die as a result of the magazine's classified ad section, and they would not be the last. And of course, the fact that human beings were dying as a result of his magazine's classified ad section

had no impact on Robert Brown whatsoever. I found a copy of the magazine from 1980, and I'd like to read you a handful of the different ads. Let's hear it. Male, 25 years old, 5'9", 135 pounds. Desire security position, any location. Excellent marksman and speaks fair German. I'm anti-social, but prefer and prefer working alone. I served in the American Army, possess no combat experience.

There's nothing unsettling about it. That guy basically had the same build as me and was billing himself as a massive security expert. I mean, he's a good marksman, and he speaks German. He is more qualified than me then, I admit. Also from Toledo, Ohio. The next ad, XCIA Attache seeks area in U.S. to fulfill purpose of pro-Western ideals and their success. Tradecraft's many cut out, sanitization, sanctification, playback, disinformation, bag jobs, false flag, legends, peeps and sounds, sneakies, sisters available.

I don't know what sisters. I have no idea what that in CIA parlance. What that means, but all of that sounds incredibly shady. Dead serious inquiries only. Con-contact micro data systems in Huntington Beach, California. So that's probably cool. Yeah. Madman's book of formulas.

How to make step-by-step goodies like knockout drops, explosives, silencers, poisons, letter bomb, and many others. A must in completing your library? I mean, how many times have you needed a letter bomb? You got a space on your shelf. You got to put something there. You might have a lot more space on your shelf. And the last one I'm going to read right now. Wanted, patriots, especially veterans who see the coming national crises and desire to be prepared.

Right for free information to Christian Patriots Defense League or Citizens Emergency Defense System, Flora, Illinois, or call, gives a phone number, day or night. Attend weekend freedom festivals and conferences in June and September on a 55-acre estate. So that's good. Act now, time is short. The first, the earlier ones, now these are just individuals posting their services. Do we have, do we know what the outcomes of any of these? None of these.

We'll get into some of the outcomes. Some of the, I mean, are they looking to be hit men or like, what is that? Yes? Okay. Yeah. So the slogan for soldier of fortune displayed in vibrant color on a poster in their Boulder, Colorado office was, killing is our business and business is good. This is good branding, but it is not strictly accurate.

As the years went by, soldier of fortune made less and less of its money directly soliciting killers, which is a legally dicey enterprise and more money just allowing random murderers to advertise through their classified ad section. Wow. Yeah. So it is just like Facebook. It's a little more ethical than Facebook, but yes, essentially. You know, you can say this for soldier of fortune. It didn't start any genocides.

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 was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. 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. Yeah, so a lot of very sketchy individuals started putting in ads in Soldier of Fortune's Classified section.

One of them was a Knoxville, Tennessee nightclub operator and former prison guard named Richard Michael Savage, which is the name you'd expect for the story I'm about to tell. So he places an ad saying, gun for hire, 37 year old professional mercenary desires jobs, Vietnam veteran, discreet and very private, bodyguard, courier, and other special skills, all jobs considered. Now he would claim in court later that he received 30 to 40 calls a week after placing this ad in the June 1985 issue of the magazine. One person wanted him to recruit a small army to raid a gold mine in Alaska. So that's cool, yeah. Another floated a plot to steal an army payroll in South America, and people were at magazine reported in 1986,

quote, yet another wanted to raid Nicaragua and promised to supply guns, camouflage, clothing, rubber boats, and $50,000 for each mercenary when the raid was completed. Savage was enthusiastic about every harebrained scheme he heard, but ultimately was persuaded to concentrate on murder. So if the collars sounded discreet, Savage would ask for a round trip airline ticket and $1,000. The two would meet face to face, then feel each other out in a minute of death until each was certain of the other's credentials. And in a way, Robert Brown had succeeded in creating a primitive version of the dark web. But while every hitman on the dark web is just an FBI agent, the men who advertised in Soldier of Fortune were actually willing to commit murder on strangers. Savage took a job to kill a guy named Richard Braun, a man in Atlanta.

He and two triggermen, who he also recruited through Soldier of Fortune magazine, ambushed Braun and his teenage son with a Mac 11. They killed Braun and wounded his boy. Four months after this, Savage was hired to kill Anita Spearman of Palm Beach, Florida. He subcontracted this hit-out to yet another Soldier of Fortune reader, a guy named Dutre. Dutre and Savage were paid $20,000 to the hit by Spearman's husband, who was also a big fan of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Another hitman was Texas trucker John Hearn. In 1984, he ran an ad in four issues of the magazine, looking for high-risk assessments, U.S. or overseas.

So many people called Hearn that he had to hire an answering service to handle all the demands. Ninety percent of his callers wanted him to commit some kind of crime, ranging from bombings and jail breaks to simple assault. He received three to five contract murder requests every single day, which says a lot about the readers of Soldier of Fortune. A random dude in the magazines willing to kill people, I got people, I won't kill. In February 1985, Hearn took on the job of murdering Sandra Black. Her husband paid him $10,000 to shoot his wife to death. Are you noticing a pattern here? Yeah. A few months later, when he was hired by another Soldier of Fortune reader to kill two other people,

and then he was caught shortly after that, he was tried and he insisted that he never would have gotten started as a hitman if it weren't for Soldier of Fortune magazine. And normally, I'm hesitant when people blame a magazine for me. But might be a point here. Richard Savage was also caught by the law, and he too squealed on Soldier of Fortune magazine, and a deluge of news coverage hit the magazine. Robert Brown denied any responsibility for the deaths. He ordered his executive editor to make this statement. We're as culpable as any newspaper, which accepts an ad from a used car salesman and doesn't go check on the condition of the brakes. What are you going to do? These are analogous situations.

Still, Brown was wise enough. Sometimes you do see the card as it comes fully loaded. That's similar. That was pretty bad, sorry. Now, Brown was wise enough to stop running ads for murderers in 1986, mainly because of the legal complications. But if he felt any guilt over all of the deaths, he did not show it, describing his career this way in a 1986 editorial. For the last decade, I've hunted terrorists with the Rhodesian-African rifles and fired up a Russian Fort in Afghanistan with a Mujahideen. Between firefights, takeovers, and insurgencies, I managed to put out a magazine. He's a pretty cool guy.

He also managed to get sued by Richard Brown's sons for his role in their father's murder. They were awarded $4.3 million in civil judgments, which were upheld by a U.S. Court of Appeals in 1992. The New York Times wrote this about the case. The Eleventh Circuit panel said, however, that while the advertisement in the Texas case was facially innocuous and ambiguous in its message, Mr. Savage's advertisement clearly conveyed that he was ready, willing, and able to use his gun to commit crimes. When the list of legitimate jobs, i.e. bodyguard and courier, is followed by other special skills and all jobs considered, the implication is clear that the advertiser would consider illegal jobs, the panel said. The publisher could recognize the offer of criminal activity as readily and as its readers obviously did.

So, the court makes a good call. And Brown wound up settling with the Braun family for $200,000, which is not enough. When he was interviewed about this later in 2016, he said this, they really tried the magazine, not the cases. Two guys meet through the magazine, they have a friendly relationship for six months. They don't talk about anything illegal, but then six months later they agree to commit this horrendous crime. Well, if they meet at a bar and six months later they say, let's rob a bank. Should the bartender be held liable? It was total crap. Which gives me an idea for a bar I want to start.

All jobs considered. It's another, and again, you'll be able to enjoy the dual pleasures of life. There aren't any drive, drink and shoot bars. Oh, the tri-pleasures. We could combine the elegance of a Texas drive-thru liquor store with the elegance of drunkenly shooting at the landscape in Texas. This is really... Oh, I'm so drunk I missed the landscape.

I hit that guy whose name you gave me. I feel like we'd make more than $200,000 before they finally got us. So, from that point on, Soldier of Fortune's classified ad section turned to slightly more licent fare. They sold mail order brides, bounty hunter training manuals, secrets of the ninja lessons, Nazi surplus gear, machine guns, silencers and sniper rifles. Soldier of Fortune also did a brisk business in selling the kinds of t-shirts that are all too common and randomly generated Facebook ads today. Shirts with slogans like, happiness is a confirmed kill.

There are a few social problems that cannot be solved by the proper application of high explosives. And the ever popular, kill them all and let God sort them out. Yes. This is the kind of stuff I actually do think of when you say Soldier of Fortune. All those products they used to crank out. That's much more something I remember than the actual magazine. That's one of the real, this is where a lot of that gets started. I think some of these phrases had existed before, but no one had thought,

what if we just sell t-shirts with this written on it to dangerous people? Going back to Iraq, there's a lot of random mercenaries you encounter in your bill. And there was this, I was buying carpets with my photographer and one of the guys we see, like standing in the middle of the bazaar, is just like this tall white guy in his early 20s with a beard and a t-shirt that has written in red letters, I'm just here for the violence. I was like, don't wear the shirt here, man. Come on, dude. So, Soldier of Fortune also contributed to the birth of the needlessly aggressive sticker industry.

Selling door stickers labeled, is there life after death? Trespass here and find out. Never mind the dog, beware of owner. And bumper stickers like, the only way you'll get my gun is to pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Well, putting stickers over that, now I'm really mad. That is not right. One of the things that's funny about that last one, one of the best scenes in the original Red Dawn movie is like when the Russians invade, you see the back of this guy's truck that says, the only way you'll get my gun is if you pry it from my cold, dead hands,

and then he's lying dead behind the truck because the Russian army shot him to death. And ironically enough, I forget what his first name is, Milch, the guy who wrote Red Dawn, was like the focus of a massive feature article in Soldier of Fortune where he showed that he had no understanding of the irony of that scene. So, Soldier of Fortune continued to play host to a series of classic articles for the modern man who's pretty sure he could have been Conan the Barbarian if a few cards had landed differently. And I think the single best example of this magazine's content is the classic article,

Secrets of Modern Battle Acts fighting. It was by Jeff Cooper on dry land. With any artist's nose, you have to branch out, you know. You start teaching people how to knife fight an alligator, but eventually... You don't use that type of battle axe in a high humidity situation. A battle axe underwater? Are you mad? The article opens with the author announcing that, for reasons that are never made clear, he has won an award that just happens to be a hand forged Norse battle axe.

Being the kind of man who writes for Soldier of Fortune, Jeff Cooper decided that he desperately needed to know how to kill people with this axe. Unfortunately, the only manuals he could find on the matter were written in old Norse and did not contain much in the way of details as to how to have an axe fight. There was a famous one I had written by Gary Gygax. I think a lot of death could have been averted if some of these guys could have just been given Dungeons and Dragons books. This is the healthy way to deal with these impulses.

So, Jeff gets his axe, realizes there's no good books on how to fight with axes, and he and a friend decide to spend the afternoon inventing a modern science of battle axe fighting by jabbing vaguely at hay bales in an empty field. David, I want you to take a look at one of the insert pages from this. How would you describe those pictures? It looks like a man viciously attacking a bale of hay. And to the point that he's drooling with pleasure. He's wearing the kind of hat that everyone's grandfather wears

when they move permanently to Florida. You know it's not a fair battle when your hat doesn't fall off during the battle. I'll pass this out in a little bit when I get past this paragraph. This is worth seeing. One shot wasn't enough. They had to show six almost identical shots. If you want to know how to fuck up a bale of hay with a Norse axe, there's no better place to go. There really are no other sources.

So, this new business was safer than soliciting hitmen and mercenaries. Unless you were standing inside of a bale of hay. A lot of kids playing hide-and-go-seek were tragically... It didn't wind up alright for everybody. I found the needle. So, Robert Brown was not satisfied, though, with having a safe, profitable magazine filled with ridiculous axe fighting articles. No, he still was desperately addicted to war tourism.

And the primary purpose of Soldier of Fortune magazine throughout its entire run was to enable his habit. Throughout the mid-1980s, Robert Brown and his magazine got increasingly involved in the El Salvadorian Civil War. He visited for the first time in 1983 and spent several happy days fighting alongside a cadre of mercenaries and military fighters backing Roberto de Albacen. De Albacen was, in the words of the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, a pathological killer who bragged about the need to exterminate

200,000 to 300,000 people in his own country. So Robert Brown's like, this is my dude. I'm gonna hand this out. Pass it around. So, De Albacen ran death squads, which often massacred women and children, and a huge number of priests. And Robert Brown was only too happy to help with this. By 1984, he claimed to have sent more than 100 mercenaries into the tiny country.

He also claimed that his readers had donated more than 4 million in supplies for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. When he was criticized over the fact that his magazine was actively enabling death squads in several nations, Brown wrote this, we're not content just to tell the story. To the best of our ability, we also help equip, aid, and train the world's anti-communist freedom fighters. We make no apologies about this, or for our virulent, anti-tyrant, anti-communist editorial stance. Now, does this tie into the Iran-Contra stuff in any way?

No. That was the people who were actually accomplishing crazy crooked stuff, but successfully for a little while, right? Yeah, he was like the tourist version of all the north. And not legally committing treason, I guess. And he didn't get a Fox News, although he did wind up as one of the board members of the NRA, so they're not totally different people. So tragically, and this is really going to hurt a lot of people's feelings,

Brown's second planned trip to go fight Nel Salvador was canceled when one of his own mercenaries shot him on accident in the lake. It happens to the best of us. Yeah, we've all been there. Now, I'm going to read a quote from the Chicago Tribune describing what happened. Colonel Brown and his kitchen table buddies were talking about a flight-tell Salvador that Brown was to make the next day. Brown, who was a captain in Vietnam, claims to be helping train the Salvadoran army

on an unofficial basis. He says he's making them tougher and more disciplined. As the evening wore on towards midnight, one of Brown's buddies, who writes for Soldier of Fortune, took out an automatic pistol he was carrying and showed it to Brown. Brown's buddy talked about his pistol's heft, the trigger action, and the other qualities that please gun lovers. He pulled the trigger. Being a gun expert, he knew it was empty.

That was sarcasm on the author's part. When Brown's buddy pulled the trigger, there was a loud explosion. He stood there for a moment with his mouth wide open. Then he looked at his hand and saw a hole. He had shot a hole through his hand. Brown looked down at his leg. His leg hurt. He saw blood running out of his calf.

The bullet, after blowing a hole in the buddy's hand, had blown a hole in Robert's or in Brown's leg. The owner of the gun was right. It did pack a wallop. Brown looked down at his bleeding leg. Then he looked at his buddy and said, You stupid son of a bitch, you shot me and now I can't go to El Salvador. Can I ask a question about his rank?

Because it referred to him as Colonel in the first sentence. But he immediately said he served as captain. So what's the Colonel from? I mean, that was after his time actually doing anything in Vietnam. But he was really... Yeah, he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. But it's not uncommon for people to get like a bump when they leave, especially if you've done shady things that they want to get you out of the service for.

There's a lot of questions about what he actually... So he may have had some dirt on somebody else. Yeah, something like that. Or they just really wanted him gone because he was an embarrassment. It's hard to say. Hard to say. So, as the 1980s wore on and the Cold War neared its end, so too did the business of soliciting mercenary fighters to crush socialist up movements.

Being a far-right crypto-fascist, Robert Brown transitioned seamlessly from demonizing left-wing movements around the world and towards attacking the U.S. government. As the Cold War ended, Soldier of Fortune became one of the prime sources fueling the American militia movement. In April 1995, it did a cover story on the Michigan militia, the largest such patriot group in the country. That same month, Soldier of Fortune's subscriber and former Michigan militia member Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb outside the Murr Building in Oklahoma City,

killing 168 people and injuring 700. When McVeigh was caught, his car was searched. The police found a photocopy of an underground far-right zine titled The Resister. 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Croft described it as a political warfare journal, describing the U.S. government as a deadly enemy that needed to be crushed with lethal force. Its publisher, Stephen Berry, was a former Special Forces man who went on to work for the National Alliance, at the time the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States.

Now, the FBI obviously wanted to track down how this copy of The Resister had wound up in Timothy McVeigh's hands. By reading the fact signature, they were able to trace it back to Soldier of Fortune's offices. It turns out Robert Brown had sent 900 free copies of this zine to Soldier of Fortune subscribers as part of a promotional offer. It's like a tote bag. It's like, you know, the NPR gives you a little bag. Soldier of Fortune gives you this Nazi guide to murdering people.

Truck bombs. Yeah. Pretty cool, right? Yeah. I mean, it's a value for the other 899 people. Like, that's a collector's item. I have had it. How many times can I walk out from one interview?

So, now, the Bureau obviously wanted to know if Stephen Berry, Nazi, had any ties to Robert Brown. So they leaked Berry false intel and watched as, surely enough, it appeared in the next issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine. So that's cool. He's friends with some Nazis. Good stuff. Now, obviously, of course, there were legal consequences for this, right?

No, nothing happened. Brown did regularly find himself under investigation and was often sued, but he always managed to stay in business and just shy of committing any felonies. After the Oklahoma City bombing and the Patriot movement got too toxic, but once the 90s ended, Soldier of Fortune pivoted yet again by focusing on the dangers of immigrants and Muslim extremists. In 2003, Soldier of Fortune published a two-part series on a group called Ranch Rescue, a border vigilante militia that later pistol-whipped and set Rottweilers

on immigrants in Arizona and Texas. Yeah, he's the guy I've been reading about for the last 12 pages. He's piece of shit. In October of 2009, Soldier of Fortune did a feature on Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, writing, yeah, his tough stance on illegal immigration is what he is getting beat up for by liberals promoting illegal immigration. They neglected to mention that dozens of prisoners had died in Arpaio's jails,

often from being illegally restrained and boiled to death in 145 degree cells. Under Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office paid out more than $140 million in wrongful death suits, which again didn't make into the Soldier of Fortune article. Shockingly, Robert Brown was not an instant fan of the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. When interviewed about it in 2016, he expressed his belief that the man was a buffoon and would hand the election to Hillary Clinton. He has kept his mouth mostly shut about Trump since then, often involving himself, though, in internal NRA politics.

He was once the organization's vice chairman, and he regularly speaks out about... If you're interested in who to vote for for the NRA board, maybe check out this guy's opinion. He seems to have good judgment. Soldier of Fortune stopped publishing a physical magazine in 2016. The digital media crash, you know? It hit us all... well, physical media crash. Brown had to lay off almost all of his staff and go digital.

The periodical is still online and still just as racist as ever, although it's increasing irrelevance has made it less dangerous. In late 2019, the online edition of the magazine republished that 2012 article about Rhodesia. Whatever else you can say about Robert K. Brown, he's not a quitter, although he really should be. And that's the story. He's still alive. So, David, you convinced me.

You convinced me. For the first 90% of the interview, I was impressed, but by the end, I admit, the scale tilted a little bit. The center of gravity just got enough in favor of bastard. So that's cool. It's way worse than I expected. It's kind of amazing. When you said it killed a bunch of people,

I didn't see the 900 people truck bomb coming still. Yeah, I mean, a lot of things played into that, but Soldier of Fortune didn't help. So, I mean, they looked like they could use investors. And a new writing team, you know? Well, Futurum is up the air. That's why I brought you here. One of my favorite quotes from Brown in the modern day

from a year ago is him being like, I still think I have one more left in me. Good Lord. So, David, that's been the episode, but of course, we can't conclude a live show without doing something reckless with machetes. You know? I have not explained to you why we do this

because I don't know how to. You write jokes for a living. I never had a running joke that went on way longer than you could have possibly anticipated to the point where you can no longer explain how it started. No, we haven't, and bite my shiny middle ass. Now, I want to make a couple of safety notes. Safety is always very important.

So, these are, I have only brought to the show, the dullest and rustiest knives that I own. Well, now you're glad it's Dolan Rusty. That's, remember that, Dolan Rusty, safe and trusty. That's the knife rule. Now, I think what we're going to do is we're going to play as a quick little round of tennis and then we're going to hand some bagels out into the crowd

and you guys are going to basically act as like a living skeet machine to, oh God, you brought a bag of them. Jesus. I told you it got out of hand. Now, as I said, I played tennis. I don't know what we're doing. What are the rules of this sport? I don't know the rules of tennis. Alright, let's start.

I'm going to toss a bag of bagels underhanded towards you. A whole bag? Yeah, a whole bag. A whole bag of the bag. And you try to hit it as hard as you can and then I'll say love serving love. I don't know what that means. Don't explain it.

Am I trying to slice it or? Yeah, you just want to hit the thing I throw with the sharp it, with the dull sharp it. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not trying to hit it this way back to you. Topspin love. You do whatever you want, but it's most fun to just like really tear into that bag.

Okay, that's what I'm going to do. Alright. Always be stab, ABS. Again, always be stabbing. And again, because safety is incredibly important here. We're not starting with the bagels. We're starting with ultimate burger buns. Because you don't want to, you don't want to like,

you know, you got to calibrate. I feel like basic human decency compels me to put a stop to this before we cause too much of a mess. Oh my God, that was the stupidest and most fun thing I've done in a long time. I'm talking about the interview part of the... Alright, that's the fucking episode. Have a good night, drive home safe.

Thank you so much, David. Really appreciate it. My deepest apologies to the stage crew. 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 Podcasts, 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 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? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.