Danny Jones Podcast - #230 - The Most Powerful Shadow Group of Spies & Assassins That Run the World | Christian Hansen & Zach Treitz

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Watch the PRE-SHOW on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Zachary Treitz & Christian Hansen are the creators of the new Netflix documentary 'American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders'. SPONSORS: https://mudwtr.com/danny - Try it now for only $29. (that's less than $1 per cup) https://www.rhone.com/danny - Upgrade your closet with Rhone and use DANNY to save 20% EPISODE LINKS: Christian IG: https://www.instagram.com/christianhitehansen Christian X: https://twitter.com/yo_christian Zach IG: https://www.instagram.com/snackery_treats Zach X: https://twitter.com/zacharytreitz FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The Wackenhut Corporation 08:48 - Making The Octopus documentary 17:03 - Christian's belief about Danny Castolaro 28:57 - Are Chris & Zach in danger? 35:02 - The mysterious man at Danny's funeral 44:24 - Cabazon indian reservation & covert ops 59:52 - Trusting sources 01:06:26 - The CIA arms dealer 01:17:42 - Howard Hughes CIA connection 01:21:10 - Zapruder film deception tactic 01:29:31 - Bob Lazar; Area 51 hand scanner 01:34:32 - Michael Riconosciuto 01:36:58 - Tom O'Neill; Chaos; MK-Ultra 01:40:26 - The PROMIS software 01:45:04 - Earl Brian 01:50:55 - Rigging of the 1980 election; October surprise 02:03:37 - $2 million Dec Vax computers 02:08:21 - How powerful was the PROMIS software? 02:13:20 - Israeli Intelligence; the Mossad 02:20:03 - Nuclear submarines 02:31:27 - Investigating intelligence is a "hall of mirrors" 02:36:04 - Chris & Zach's conclusion on Danny Casolaro 02:40:34 - The man who most likely killed Danny 02:53:57 - Backlash & criticism 03:08:15 - Maintaining sanity while making the film 03:14:03 - The future of The Octopus Investigation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, congrats on your new Netflix documentary. It is fantastic. Thank you. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Yeah. How's it doing? Millions of views?

Yeah. As far as we understand it, yeah. They don't give us too many details, but yeah, it seems to be doing well. It was in the top 10 for at least two weeks, so I think that's good for a pretty humble little show like ours. There's the top 10 in 44 countries, I think. And four in the world at one point, number two in the U.S. at one point. After Avatar, Avatar, the last Airbender, which is a tough, you know, a tough competitor. So it's a hill to climb for us.

You guys have been friends for a long time, right? Yeah. Like childhood. And how long ago did you start working on this story? I started in about 2012. And Zach started in about. 2017, but he was always sort of like a sounding board for me. You know, he was someone, when I had questions or when I had learned something really interesting, I would, you know,

tell Zach about it. So by the time he actually started, he was, he had been talking to me about it for five years. And he wasn't like totally oblivious as to what was going on. You know, he was able to hit the ground running. So what were you guys doing when, or what were you doing specifically when you started investigating this? Where you just, doing it as like a side hobby or were you working like reporting on it for a publication or how much time were you spending on it and what was your life like at that point in time my my timeline is a little bit confusing and we kind of like compress it in the show right but i basically dropped out of college when i was um after my junior year of college at western kutucky university

and moved to new york city and started shooting for the new york times as a freelance photographer I did that for about three years until I was about 25 or 26. And my little sister got cancer and I went home to Kentucky to be, you know, close to her. And basically, she's fine now. But while there, I decided to like finish my degree. Rather than, I was studying photojournalism before. And rather than finish in that, I'd already been shooting for the Times for three years. It had, you know, front pages and, you know, good, good clips from that time.

I finished with a degree in journalism writing, which was something that also interested me. And the final, sorry, I feel like I'm being so boring talking about my college. It's not boring. I fell asleep, sorry. Yeah, and I'm falling asleep, talking. No, no, no. But the final semester, we had this, we had to write a magazine-style investigative piece on the theme of the role. of money and politics.

Okay. And while I was in college, the New York Times would continue to give me assignments, you know, in Kentucky when stuff would come up. And so I was trying to figure out what I was going to write about on this theme. And the Times called and sent me to a factory in Campbellsville, Kentucky that was going to lose its military contract to make shirts for the Navy and, you know, or an underwear for the army, you know, something like something like that. that. And basically, and the reason why they were likely going to lose their contract was because this next round of bids, they were going to be competing against prison factories. And you can't really compete with basically slave labor. Wow. So that kind of turned me on to the idea of prisons. And then, you know, I'm digging into prisons. I'm like, I'll probably write something

for this class about prisons. And that led me to the white. Ackinut Corporation because they were the second largest private prison company in the U.S. and also the first. What do you mean they were a private prison company? Right. They contract with the BOP as a private corporation to, you know, they basically, they're basically running a hotel that you can't leave and they're getting paid by the day, by the bed, you know, by the, by the prisoner.

because there's so many prisoners in the United States the BOP can't you know they don't have enough facilities and these kind of private companies moved in to try to help alleviate that. So Wackenhot was paying the BOP. No, no, no, no, no. The BOP is paying Wackenhot

to imprison people for them. Okay. And they also do a lot of like, the name has, the Wackenet Corporation was a giant private security company. Started by George Wackenhow. Started by this guy, George Wackenut, who was in the FBI.

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Don't miss the third season of Euphoria, starring two-time Emmy winners in date. Now streaming on HBO and HBO Max, with new episodes every Sunday. But they had offices eventually all over the world. They did, you know, kind of like security and kind of espionage type work, but then they eventually got into this private prison. That was like a, you know, a subset of the company called... They were just always looking for new business opportunities. And the first one, I think, that they started, was an immigration prison.

It was the first private prison in America. And it was an immigration detention center. Wow. And that got, you know, George Wackenhut and his board of directors, I guess, eventually, which were all of these people. We go into it in the show, these three letter agencies, you know, heads of, former heads of three letter agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA. Weirdly, J.C. Penny is one of them. It's like, what are they doing? And so they were just, they were finding new business opportunities, private prisons.

They run a lot of, ran a lot of security for just regular office buildings. You know, I think our composer was talking about how he grew up in Florida and his, his like neighborhood or something. There was a neighborhood association or something or like the gate or whatever, had their logo on it. You've got the book, Area 51. They had the contract to guard the test-sided area 51. There's a lot of mention in Annie Jacobson's book about knucklehead stuff that Wacken Hut guards got up to on those grounds,

like crashing helicopters, I think, and this other. So the Wacken Huts, when you discovered Wacken Huts, somehow that led you to Danny Castellero? Yes, because Danny Cats. So I'm basically just pulling a lot of research materials, articles about, Wackenhut and I pulled an article that mentioned, you know, both Wackenhut and Danny Castellero. It was an article from 1993 in Spy Magazine, which was an account of Danny Castellero's death and his, what he was kind of working on that led to his death and the people he was talking to. It was written by a former NYPD detective named John Connolly. But when I find this thing, not in the magazine itself, but just on some third-party website, I read it.

You know, it mentions, you know, Wackenhod. It mentions this journalist I never heard of who died. And I thought it was, no joke, I thought it was like Iran Contra fan fiction. Like somebody kind of just made all this stuff up. They were really into Iran-Contra and they invented this journalist because it seemed so, you know, it seemed so absurd. It seemed made up. And then, you know, but I'm like, realized,

and I'd never heard of Spy Magazine because I was born in 85 and it shut down in 93 and whatever. I just didn't know about it. It turns out that looking back, it was one of the great magazines, I think, of all time. Right. And so, yeah, so that I, and that article was actually part of a trilogy.

There was like a separate piece about Wacken Hut, and there was a separate piece about what was going on in the Cabazon Reservation. And that's how it comes up in this piece about Danny. He was looking into Wackenhut and what they were doing in this joint venture with a tiny Native American tribe near Indio, California, at that time, called the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. Basically, Wacken Hut was, and the Cabezons had plans to develop biological weapons and night vision goggles and small arms for guerrilla armies in Central America. So for people that are listening who, there's probably a few of them out there who have not seen your documentary yet, can you basically give us a 40,000 foot overview, very brief description of what the story is? I'm going to let the brilliant director do it.

I'll try. It's a complicated story, but it's a fascinating. So I'll just do it quick one. Okay, actually, I want to tee it up first. When I meet people in an elevator or whatever, I say it's a elevator pitch. Yes, I say it's a murder mystery, spy thriller, documentary. And, you know, then it centers around the story of a journalist who died under mysterious circumstances in 1991, and it delves into what he was investigating. That sort of led to that point in his life where he died.

That's the elevator picture for me. I think of the story, it's almost like a sort of like Russian nesting doll kind of thing. On its very outside core, it's kind of about me seeing my. friend Christian go into this investigation as like a sort of citizen researcher, just a sort of random dude going into this story. And the story that he's going into is essentially his attempt to finish and the work and find out what happened to this journalist Danny Castellero, who died in 1991 in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, about an hour and a half outside of Washington, D.C., who had been, and his death was ruled a suicide by the authorities and his family

and friends and colleagues at the time once they found out that he had died and that they were calling it a suicide they were like, well, wait a second. You need to understand we don't think it's a suicide because of who Danny was, but mainly because of what he was looking into, which was this

dangerous story. And that dangerous story with dangerous characters was, he had started one year earlier in August of 1990 and it started essentially with him looking into this software program called Promise and how that was allegedly stolen by the Justice Department and used

his spy software. And then that led him to the source who said that he had been involved with that out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation where the stuff that Christians been talking about is going on with Wacken Hut and there were a triple homicide. This is still unsolved murder there. Other people who were around to this source of Danny's, Michael Rukonashuto, had died also in San Francisco. And then it leads him to another

other people in this world who claim that it's actually connected to all these other scandals. And so Danny's story eventually becomes that he is proposing to write a book about this whole thing that he dubs the octopus. The octopus is kind of these

interconnected, mostly intelligence-related military intelligence-related political scandal. from mainly the 1980s, but also decades before that, sort of the cast of characters who were all and usually associated with the CIA or its predecessor of the OSS,

who had this network, the Octopus is kind of in his telling, this network of intelligence operatives who have gone rogue and are responsible, sort of the hidden network behind many of the scandals of the 80s that came to surface then. which was like I ran Contra, this banking scandal, the savings and loan scandal, BCCI, which was this kind of third world, but operating globally, the first kind of global third world bank that had a private army. Another bank called Nuggenhan.

Another CIA-related bank called Nugganhan. All these different scandals, I ran Contra. and Edward Wilson, who was arming Libya, kind of maybe rogue or maybe with the CIA's approval. Yeah, all these intelligence guys, including his investigation of this software, promise, are interrelated. And he calls this network of intelligence people the octopus.

Yeah, it feels like the murder of this journalist, Danny Castellero, is just the very tip of the iceberg or like a tree that's above ground, and below that is this giant root ball of, like, government that I did not expect when I started this. Because I didn't know anything about this. I just thought this was a true crime investigation on a guy who

got whacked and tried to figure out who was behind it. But like... Allegedly That's literally like... I mean, it's woven throughout the story beautifully. But it literally seems like it's maybe 10% of the whole entire meat of the whole thing. This is a lot of

a lot of documentary series about, you know, kind of murder mystery documentary documentaries are too long. In your opinion? No, and a lot of people's opinion. They stretch it out. They stretch it out.

But this is like, it's so dense and packed and deep and layered. We just struggled to get what we got in there because there's so much stuff. What made you guys decide to make it only four parts? Netflix. Netflix did that? Yeah. Well, when we we wanted to do eight, obviously. We originally, you know, before we even pitched it to any part. It was like, well, obviously it's eight tentacles.

It's eight episodes. And then by the time we were pitching it, we pitched it as five. And then they were like, yeah, it could be four or five. And then it just took us, frankly, so long to make this thing. I think way longer than we ever wanted it to be. But it was so, and we're proud of the end product. I'm happy that we took the time to do it. But it was just absurd.

How long was the production of it from the first time you guys met with Netflix to now? Well, it's greenland in 2019. Yeah. But there was a pandemic that set us back about six months, which was actually weirdly beneficial to us because we really needed. We'd never done anything like this before. We needed the extra time to just to prep. Research, prep, call people, like figure out what the heck we were doing. So 2019, we had the meeting with them and were greenlit.

But then it was like, pandemic happened. We really started filming it in late 2020. We shot our first interview, but we had shot, you know, we had shot things over the years before that because we picked Michael up from prison in 2017. You know, so the chronology gets twisted and stuff because, you know, if we started where we started in 2017, nobody had any idea who Michael is. So it's like, well, we got to put that like a little later. And so if you're really paying attention, we're accurate, you know, pretty accurate with the dates. but like it's not it's a story with multiple chronologies from the now from 2000 from 2000s well it's Danny's chronology is 1990 to 1991 but then the book he's writing starts in about 1980

so we're also telling that that story that starts with the 1980 election and then we're telling our chronology in the 2000s it's just did you start this thing with the goal of writing a book yes okay are you still going to publish a book or no I still I've have enough research to do the book, to write the book. I want Zach to help me with it, but we also want to do more documentaries. And I don't have eight arms, you know, I'm not an octopus. I think I'm going to do another doc first. Are you guys going to do another follow-up to this?

I mean, we can't say for sure, but there's just so much stuff that we wanted to do and so many things that I feel like we've sort of like hinted at in this, that we just feel compelled to finish some of these stories and push the ball a little further. Plus there's, I mean, we, I think that we've hinted that we've gotten more stuff coming over the transom and we want to do it. But it's like, do we have plans? Do we have a contract to do it?

Absolutely not. If Netflix slams the door on my face, I'll hit up a literary agent and get, you know, going on the book, you know? Right. I've got at least two options. So at the, I was kind of shocked at the end of the documentary. It seems like you believe that, and maybe I'm wrong, that he did kill, Danny Castellarer did commit suicide.

Is that right? I do believe that. Wait, that he committed suicide? Oh, sorry. I spaced out. Hey, clip that, Steve. You asked me, do I think that Danny, no, I mean, there's a- Do you believe he committed suicide?

There's a point where I, basically, throughout this whole process, you know, you can make a really good case for murder. And a really good case for suicide. The problem is that both of the arguments are so, there's so much kind of compelling data on both sides. As a researcher, when you're looking at the stuff, you're kind of getting ping ponged back and forth between these two conclusions.

And Zach's captured and showed that feeling of, oh, maybe he did kill himself, or then maybe he got killed. You're always, you know, sometimes in one deal. you're experiencing those. There's got to be fatigue to this to spending so much time and getting the factor of getting burned out.

Yeah, we burned out. We burned out and relit the candle. Many times over. Many times. But yeah, I think like at the end, you know, we show this that there was you know, the police had said he was

alone in Martinsburg and then we showed this composite drawing that clearly he had been with someone. Basically, I mean, how I view it is like another person saw someone entering the room and so now we're like dealing with this information and um Christian this information not disinformation but there is disinformation out there as well I think Christians like how I see it his his default position right is kind of like throughout this process was was kind of like 51% and it would vary widely both of very widely on this sort of going over the edge on this either way of like 51% Christian is kind of like the I think Danny was I'm kind of like the 51% Danny committed suicide guy you're 51% he committed suicide guy you know that's kind of my

default position I'm just like inherently a skeptic of like conspiracy stuff and just like the idea that there should be such an organized it's very difficult murder to pull off cleanly where you have zero out physical evidence linking it to you know for it to be such a bloody room and right nobody having seen somebody no no bloody

footprints you know suicide note so did they analyze the handwriting from the suicide note I never heard they did

it looks like his handwriting does it yeah I mean there is also importantly a suicide note but wasn't he also missing three fingernails

and one of the biggest parts of it is his tendons were severed like how do you sever your own tendons and use your thumbs to sever the other tendon. When we interviewed the, when we interviewed the, one of the paramedics who found him, who's now a medical examiner, actually, which is interesting to me, that was his big point, right?

Is like, and we show it in the documentary is like, how do you hold a razor if your tendons are severed? Because you can't grip anything with your opposable thumbs, right? Was it an actual razor blade he used? Yeah. Okay. And so, you know, and I think that's a really good point. But we, we, we, um, He or they? Right. You're saying that right, right.

Oh, yeah. Right. Or the person. Or the person. Yeah. What's his name, Joe? Joe Coella. Uh-huh.

Potentially. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is like we would very, you know, we would go back and forth about this constantly. And I think that you see that tension, a little bit of that tension of us trying to grapple with this throughout the process. I would say that, like, for me, when I read the FBI's report on what the DOJ, FBI report on what happened. happened to Danny Castellero that was basically there were several investigations, but there was the Martinsburg police investigation, which was immediately after Danny's death.

And then there was a follow-up investigation by Jan Arino's Justice Department. And it's on a federal level. And they were reviewing the Martinsburg Police Department's thing, and then they were re-interviewing people. But when I read that thing, I found it to be a very compelling snapshot of what Danny's life was

in the year before he died. And their conclusion is that Danny committed suicide and they lay out, it's a good, you know, useful timeline of what they knew of what was at, what he was doing in Martinsburg and all that stuff. But as we show, and this is sort of like a spoiler alert, I would encourage anybody to really go on the ride of watching the movie before listening to what I'm about to say.

But once we and Christian got the documents from Martinsburg Police Department that nobody had seen in since they were created outside of the police, which had been, which we had been told repeatedly were under seal from the Department of Justice, from the federal Department of Justice. We were told, we can't fulfill this FOIA request because the DOJ says we can't. That was what they told Christian years ago. I came back to them and I said, please show me a piece of paper that says that you can't, that the DOJ has this under seal because how do they show us anything show us anything and they thought

they sort of you know would push back and then eventually in it you see it in the show that their lawyer called me a really nice guy and he said you know I can't find anything like you're welcome to see these things and so after pushing on them pretty hard and banging down the door we finally got access to that and the what I'm trying to get at is that the story the official story of what happened to Danny Castlero, according to the authorities, which is the Martin'sburg Police Department and the FBI and the DOJ, is clearly not the real story. Right. Because they suppressed a letter that said, or a witness document.

They essentially, in my view, and I don't, you know, I don't cast even blame or aspersions. It's a complicated story. Even if there's nothing pernicious going on, evil DOJ, cover up, like, it's just a complicated story. And like Christian says, if you want to conclude that Danny committed suicide, that's a solid, you know, a couple months of your life investigating it. If you want to conclude that he was murdered, it opens up so many problems because it's like what Danny was looking into, the people who was dealing with are so difficult to pin down their role, their connection to the federal government is pretty messed up. And it just creates problems, right? And it just creates problems, right? And

just creates a lot of time. You just have to go. It took Christian 12 years to do this thing, right? And, you know, you could argue we didn't get fully through everything. So it's a lot easier to say he committed suicide. And that's what they said. And so whether they were disingenuous or not, the problem is that there was,

the evidence they presented was all the evidence that supports their conclusion. Yes. And they didn't include any of the stuff that raises questions. like, oh, well, there was somebody who saw somebody else going into his room. Like, why did they hide that? Why not follow up with the woman and ask her more questions? Like, you know, it's like, or there was this somebody who gave a sketch or somebody else. You know, if your theory is, Danny went to, Danny was depressed, screwed around by all these conspiracy nuts, went to Martinsburg, had no evidence to back up this wild story that he had been fed by these con artists.

was so depressed that he had no money. He commits suicide in a bathtub in a bathtub in Martinsburg in 1991. Okay. So, and he met no one. He didn't meet anybody that weekend. Okay. Well, if you have anything that shows that he was meeting with people, it's a problem. And they didn't include that stuff.

So what I'm getting at is, you know, the official story is not the story. There were no work papers. He didn't have any research papers on him at all. He wasn't working on the story. And this note in his shoe, there's like... Oh, yeah, we never even bring that up in the show just because it's like... There's so many stuff that we just couldn't fit into the program.

But it's good to be able to come here and kind of tell all the stuff that we couldn't fit in, you know? But the note in the shoe is really weird. What's the note in the shoe? He has like a chapter outline for... Well, to tell it, like, the note in the shoe, there was a piece of paper in his shoe. that was sent off to the West Virginia State Police for,

they sent all the evidence, all the stuff that was with Danny. The physical evidence. All the physical evidence. And one of the people in the lab found just a blank piece of paper in his shoe. But this enterprising dude who we could never get access to, he would never return our calls. He's a lab technician. And he, like, does some sort of chemical analysis on it or something. And it shows that it's actually got an imprint.

on it of some of that was written on the same um legal legal pad legal paper that the suicide note was written on and it's an outline of the first chapter right of of danny's book so it's like okay he has no papers with him in martinsburg except he has he obviously is like working on this thing when he's you know it's very strange and why why is that piece of paper in his shoe it's I mean, it doesn't give us any sort of, you know, it's like, wow, that's the smoking gun, but it's just like, it's just weird. It's the sizzling data point. Yeah. It's just crazy because, I mean, the whole first 80, 90% of the documentary just like is blatantly in your face that this guy got murdered, you know, even leading up to the couple of weeks before he got, or the weeks before he died when he's getting calls, people threatening to kill him.

And he's telling his brother and telling him. people like if something happens to me it was not an accident. And then so if he's doing all this stuff and telling the story to all these people, why would you go kill yourself? Just to make some grandiose. That's what doesn't sit

well with me is that if he did kill himself, he was also conning his family into believing that he was murdered in this elaborate thing because they're Catholic and whatever. And as I've gotten to know the

Castellara family and what I've learned about Danny just that that also just does not seem kosher and I don't like that I that's a tough part for me that he would like lie to his brother and con his family as a caveat and Tony his brother says this in the documentary it's like anybody can commit suicide for any number of reasons you know it's like we're not psychologists nor are we like qualified to really weigh on in this but like I like to keep a very open mind it's like there's no there's no you know just like oh well he definitely didn't commit suicide because you know it's it's a complicated subject matter that's too complicated for us to even like have fully gone into and told his story in the thing so we keep an open mind about that you know

I just want to say that if this sort of shadow organization or shadow government of people whose job it is to assassinate people and traffic drugs and weapons across the world and do things to avoid laws if that existed in the 90s there has to be remnants or echoes of it now and that being said were you guys ever worried about the same fate

that happened to Danny? Like did you guys ever get contacted by anyone? Were you guys ever fearful? Do you guys get any calls or? There were a lot of people who said that we should be worried. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative containing four adaptogenic mushrooms. With only a fraction of the caffeine as a cup of coffee, you get energy without the jitters or the crash of coffee. And each ingredient was added for a purpose. Cacao and chai, for a hint caffeine in hot chocolate like flavor, Lyons Main to support focus,

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we should definitely either A stop immediately what we're doing or B let him mail us this plutonium tip bullet and this adapter to a like 45 millimeter

It was a He was like Like a suicide pill? No Like a stop anything in his tracks A bullet you know Yeah he was like he was like Oh look

If you're really going to go into this thing If you're really serious about it Listen, buddy, you got to be careful because when those guys come through the door, you need to be ready. And he's talking about essentially like, I don't know, intelligence assassins, probably CIA-related assassins or something that we're going to somehow come through the door and kill Christian. But he's like, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to send you a 10-millimeter, not a 9-millimeter, a 10-millimeter modified barrel that shoots these special bullets. And he's like, what's your mailing address? And Christian's like, what?

I'm not going to, I don't think that you should be mailing me gun parts to New York City, you know. I'm not going to carry around plutonium-tipped bullets in Manhattan. It's not. And he was just like, he's like, these people, ultimately, all you got to do is point and shoot because they're dumb as rocks. You know, it's like, who did this guy work for? How did you guys get in contact? But basically the story, your question, though, like, you have to be so paranoid. Yeah, paranoid, but also like a bit cavalier.

and we also believe in what we're doing, right? So, like, I don't know. It felt more important to me to, like, continue on than to chicken out, right? And then, plus, like, there weren't, we didn't really have that much heat. And what you were saying about, if there's, like, modern, leave-no-trace assassins,

like, deploying them is a really big deal. And are you deploying them over a 30-year-old case that's already so confusing? And, you know, either way, we're... Whatever. I think we did a good job with the documentary, but it's like we're still discussing. We still don't know. Yeah, everything. We don't know everything. So, you know, you're going to, you send about to some, you know, those assassins go to much bigger targets than us, you know. One would hope. You would, right?

I mean, the idea is, like, it's, some of the stuff that you guys are uncovering, it's kind of like an example would be the Kennedy assassination, right? Like everybody knows for by and large that they know what was going on. They know that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone assassin, but it's like the government doesn't really need to like come out and defend itself. All it has to do is just shut up because, I mean, there's just such a dissent and people kind of know what happened. And there's been all these declassified documents. It's kind of like already out in the ether. Like, yes, everybody knows what's going on. And the intel organizations fuel the dissent and the confusion.

That's part. We discussed that in the show. Like that's part of their modus operandi. They intentionally seed confusion into this. And make it work for it. It's almost like, I look at it almost like they just can't lose in terms of like this thing coming out. Because it's like if you believe, and I think that we show clear evidence of intelligence operations that have gone like, probably very far away from their original,

if there was ever a noble intent, you know? But like, if you look at those, it just in my mind, helps them just as much as not knowing about it because it's like, okay, well, the CIA and the intelligence community gets away with all kinds of stuff, and they look like badasses.

They look like people who can take you out for doing whatever. So it's like that helps them too. They're image. They seem one step ahead. They seem like they know they're on top of this stuff. And it says to their, enemies, you know, abroad or wherever, don't fuck with us.

You know, it's like, it's all good for them in my mind. That's kind of depressing, but that's kind of how I see it. This film, in 1993, this story was an unsolved mystery episode. Unsolved mysteries. Unsolved mysteries. In the early days, I used to, people like, what are you doing? Like, what have you been doing, Christian? I'd be like, I'm trying to solve this, you know, I'm working on an unsolved mystery.

Is that the guy with the amazing voice? It was Robert Stack. Yeah, I think that's the guy. Yeah. And then later, Dennis Farina. Yeah. In a trench coat, Robert Stack would be like walking through a park somewhere. With fog.

Yeah. So the unsolved mystery, they interview Michael Rukhaneshudo, one of the main characters. and Tony Castellero and Anne Clank who appear in our show. And Bill Hamilton. And Bill Hamilton, the founder of the company. So.

But it's the show, just to give a background, it's mainly about kind of like our first episode almost. It's like, it's mainly about the scope of the story is Danny died under mysterious circumstances in a hotel room

and he was looking into this software program. That's really what they mainly talk about. Anyways, so at the end, of the at the end of the show, the sort of cliffhanger that it ends on

is this account that people that were at Danny's funeral have of a man in military formal uniform looks high ranking, lots of medals, puts a metal on Danny's grave

before it goes... Yeah, and doesn't say anything and just kind of like approaches a grave, puts a metal on it, and you know, that medal is presumably underground in the cemetery in Fairfax or whatever.

If you're looking at the actual episode, there's usually two per thing, so it's halfway through. And Elliot Richardson. There we go. Here's the funeral scene. This is great. Is this a reenactment?

This is a reenactment. So they tell this story about there was a mystery man at the funeral who nobody knew from the family, nobody knew who this guy was, and he shows up and he lays a metal down on Danny's gray. he puts a metal down on Danny's casket and everybody's like whoa like was Danny like the implication is like was Danny actually secretly working for some sort of intelligence operation or military you know thing like was Danny's life actually much deeper and darker than we even knew about you know and so it was just sort of like this like unsolvable was the guy wearing all that military brass like that he was wearing his full uniform oh wow so So anyways, basically, at this point, you know, this is probably like 2012 or 2013, my earliest phase of doing research for the book. And basically, and also one thing that there is some writing about Danny Castellero out there.

There are two books, but they don't really go in. It's not like kind of like a traditional biography. like one of them's kind of about just kind of pulls different, you know, newspaper articles and magazine articles and kind of is a sort of like collage of kind of different secondary source material. Right. And then the other one is Sherry Seymour's book, which is like a wild book. And that's her investigation into like what was going on on the West Coast.

And there's a little bit about Danny, but it's not so, it's not a biography of Danny. So I've always found it interesting that he, He worked in computer trade publications. He published computer industry newsletters. And I thought that was interesting because a software scandal propelled him into this story. And that kind of like had never been dug into. And I thought it gave him credibility as a journalist like this guy knew about software. There weren't a lot of reporters who knew about computer software back in 1991.

So basically, I wanted to, like, kind of dig in and, like, really paint a picture of, like, what life was like leading up to him getting into the case and just writing about computers for this newsletter. Called it under the heading computer age was the publication. So I would look at the, you know, old issues of it, and there'd be, like, on the Mastead, just names of different people that work there. So I just started calling people that worked there, you know, lived in the Virginia area. They'd tell me, but what? life was like working for this news letter with Danny and they'd tell me other people that worked there to call. And so I called this guy, I guess I'll leave his name out just for whatever reason.

And it was told to me that he worked in the print shop. You know, they would print the newsletters and they'd mail them out every day or whatever. And, you know, I'm just, I'm not, I got zero expectations for this call. other than, you know, little maybe... What was Danny like? What was Danny like? What was it like working with him?

So, basically, the guy picks up the phone and he's like, I've been waiting, you know, however many years it had been at that point, 20 years for this call. And I was like, yeah? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, why? And he's like, well, I'm the guy. And I'm like, what guy?

He's like, have you seen the Unsolved Mysteries? program. I was like, uh, yeah? And he's like, I'm the guy. And I'm like,

what guy? And he's like, you know the guy in the military uniform who puts the metal on Danny's grave? And I was like, yeah? He's like, that was me.

And I was like, well, why didn't you ever come forward? There's all this question about it. He's like, look, if anybody's going to figure out what happened to Danny,

they better be able to figure out who I am. You know what I'm saying? If you can't figure out who put the metal on the grave, Like, you're definitely not going to figure out what happened to Danny because this guy, he was there, you know? That was kind of his point. And he was like, you know, you found me. Good job.

And so I was like, what's the story, dude? You tell me, why'd you do it? Right. And so basically he and Danny, after work, would, like, sit out in the parking lot of this kind of sort of business park in Virginia. And they'd have a beer after work. and they were very close friends. They didn't really hang out socially, but they hung out. They were close at work.

And Danny had told him at a certain point that he wished he was, had been in the military. He wished he'd gone to war because he wished he had gotten a medal. And that always, and this guy was like in horrible combat in Vietnam and had won many medals. and suffered from really bad PTSD that when we met with him later it was very palpable. So basically when he went to go to the funeral

that morning he remembered Danny telling him about how he wished he'd gotten a medal and he decided to put on his military formal uniform. He was retired. He obviously worked at the print shop now and he brought his best medal and he gave it to Danny. Wow.

That's pretty wild. We interviewed him. Really sweet guy. It couldn't fit it in the movie. It was like to bring that story up, we'd have to go into the old and solve mystery. We had so many timelines and things. It was like,

it doesn't get us any closer to actually solving the things we set out to solve that it just kind of sat on the cutting room floor. But I love that story. And he's such a sweet dude that I kind of, you know, I miss not being able to put that in the movie just because he's such a cool guy. But now it's a concrete exclusive. Concrete exclusive, baby.

Yeah, one of my buddies who, he used to be produced documentaries for Vice back in the day, and he put it to me best. He goes, editing, especially stories like this when you're editing, he's like, it's just deleting. Just go through and start deleting shit. And I imagine for a story that takes this long, like deleting stuff has got to be really hard.

Painful. Yeah. What was the part for you that was the hardest? to remove from the final cut. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling, and beyond,

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I mean, since it's four episodes, it's like, you know, there's so many things. I think for me, my biggest sort of, I don't know,

regret or wishes is that we had been able to get into the conclusion to the Cabazon story, which goes beyond sort of Danny's story of it

because he was really interested in the intelligence side and what was going on with Wacken Hut. But it really, and it would take us out, the reason we couldn't do it

It was so hard to keep our, once again, the chronology is going, and people would just kind of watch cuts of this and be like, okay, this is cool guys, but I simply am so lost, you know. And so we couldn't do that. We can't just lose everybody because then we've made nothing, essentially. But so this is the interesting story of, I'll just try to give an overview, but I think some of the details are important, right? So our story is about, part of our story, essentially,

too is about a guy named Dr. John Philip Nichols, white dude who had been living in Florida, but had gone all around the world doing all kinds of weird, in my mind, operations, likely intelligence related in some respect. And he brings his family, his three sons and his daughter and his wife, to the Coachella Valley, to the Cabazon Indian. reservation where he sets up as a grant he's like a grant writer federal grant writer and he becomes a tribal administrator of the small tribe and our story we take we take it from the moment you know he arrives to him starting a cigarette tax free cigarette operation to raise money tax free alcohol

operation to raise money then he opens up the first poker casino in an Indian reservation and And what we don't really, what we didn't really have time to get into was just the constant conflict of those entities and the local law enforcement. Because it was illegal what he was doing according to California and according to local officials in Indio, California, which was selling tax-free cigarettes and tax-free alcohol and doing, you know, opening a poker room. Like you're just, you're not allowed to do that without a license. Was he essentially just trying to launder money? Well, he was, they were making money Or the idea was to make money Because if you're selling cigarettes and you're not paying taxes

Tons of people are going to come in And you can do a mail-in business You can just raise funding But a lot of them just didn't work out The tribe kept on being like Where is the money going? Like you say you're making this money But we're going bankrupt every

Like the cigarette's thing went bankrupt They had all these legal And they were constantly being The poker casino was raided all the time By like the Indio And then the share I think the whatever state police law enforcement kept on raiding them shutting them down opening up they sued the state of California And

This is where like we don't get into this in the documentary at all and I wish this is an opportunity to kind of get into it It was just like that lawsuit that that sort of strife started in the early 80s And then John Philip Nichols we do mention You know there's a triple homicide that right was sort of covering up there and he was in our view, I think definitely involved with that triple homicide. And

he was never caught for that, but he was in 85, arrested for solicitation of murder. He had hired five murders and he accidentally, you know, hired it from an informant. And

and... Oh, right. In 85. And so he goes to jail. He gets arrested for for solicitation of murder. Hold on. In 85. Hold on.

85. Is that before the Cabazon thing? Triple homicide is in 81. And that it's a... Got it. Triple homicide is in June of 81. Then the Maraska, the financier for the Night Vision goggles on the Cabazon Reservation, that's six months later.

In San Francisco. Yeah. Okay. And then this is like all that story. And then he gets caught. Okay. He's arrested. He's arrested.

He's gone. You know, and it's just like a different scene. at the There was a really nice moment that I wish was in there that our editors put together there was Bobby Moses Nichols who is his son

who he interviewed for the movie tells this story he's like he's like and then I get a call from my dad and he does this interprofession he's like Bobby I'm in jail

a million dollars bail so he gets arrested for the solicitation of murder and in that when he was hiring this person to murder these like essentially drug dealers

or drug related people he also says I think this is really telling I've got more work for you in South America if this works out so it's like wait 85 like is he still active in like central and South American politics

or you know right parapolitics or whatever you want to call that assassinations or business or something it's like very strange or drugs or whatever it is anyway he goes to While he's in jail, the case, Cabazon versus the state of California is winding its way through the court system and ends up in the Supreme Court. In 80, I believe, 6, it's ruled by the Supreme Court that they were right.

The Cabazon and this nearby tribe, Morango. I think it was. I thought that either 86 or 87, but one year later is the Indian gaming. act. Okay. So I think that, I thought that was 87. I thought the verdict was 86, but essentially, but it might be 87, 88. Yeah.

So, so they say actually Cabazon versus like the Cabazon's are right. Like they have tribal sovereignty. They are allowed to operate this gaming, you know, what they call gaming, poker, bingo, all this stuff on their own land. And they can make money off of it. And that ruling is a huge deal in tribal, you know, in American. tribal relations because it's for them for it's a precedent for all of all of Native American gaming why we have like nationwide why we legally have um you know the whatever casinos all over the country that are legally allowed to operate which I think has this kind of to my you know when

I didn't know anything about this head has this kind of like like Native American casinos like what's really going on there like it can't be good if it's game gambling, you know? It's like, that's kind of my like stupid, ignorant perspective on things before I went into this. But if you really talk to Native Americans that we've talked to, it's such a big deal because it's the first time that they have money that is not like grants. You know, this is not being doled out to them in some sort of like recompense for like the horrors that the American government for 400 years of broken treaties. It's an it gives them the ability to be financially independent. employ their own tribe members and make money without just relying on some handout. Some treaty that gets broken. That's a handout from the federal government. It's really important.

And it comes from our story. It comes from John. The tribal members have get profit sharing. It's in they get, it provides college, education, healthcare, all that stuff. Housing. So that was the lawsuit that set the president for this to happen nationwide. California. Yeah.

And it was John Philip Nichols, our controversial, one of our controversial main characters, this crazy documentary. It's his vision. He's responsible for it. I mean, probably other people had the theory. Yeah, yeah. He's kind of like, was the guy that threw the bowling ball down the aisle. And tribe members obviously were involved in this thing, but it was just kind of, it's just complicated because such a difficult to pin down morally difficult to pin down dude. started Native American gaming in some respect.

You can kind of kick it back to him. So what was the reason he picked an Indian reservation to test out all these weapons and military? Right. It goes back to the same reason that that exists, which is tribal sovereignty. You can't fire automatic weapons in California without the right kind of permits.

It's a way to not have to deal with state laws. So the laws are different on that piece of law? Tell them the shrimp story. What's the shrimp story? I'll give you the shrimp story. But just the sort of overview is like, you know, whenever you're manufacturing arms, you have to have, you know, what's called like eulas and things like that,

end user license certificates. In user certificates. Things like that are designed for people to be able to trace where arms came from and where they're going and make sure they're not, quote, unquote, ending up in like the wrong hands or whatever. Right. And so this was, I think, according to John Nichols, the tribal sovereignty was almost like they were their own country. The silencers weren't shipped from California or even the U.S.

The silencers came from this sovereign tribe that is within a nation within a nation. Right, right. Way to stay in the shadows, basically. Easy to get the injunership certificates if you're printing them yourself at the local office. So we were, you know, we called tons and tons and tons of people. But one of the people we found sort of through our research was this arms manufacturer who was going to do business with John Philip Nichols. We found some like paperwork with his name on it. And we called him up.

And he was like really nice. It was surprisingly open. And we were driving around California just looking for me. And this guy, he's like, oh yeah. I remember that guy. John Nichols. Really strange guy. You know, he wanted me to manufacture silencers.

So he brought me into the tribal office there. And we're sitting in there and he was like, how many phone books, how many phone books would you need to be able to test this thing? He's like, right here? And he's like, how many phone books would the bullet, you know, not be able to penetrate? He's like, I don't know what it's five or something like that, right? So he calls

John Philip Nichols Calls the secretary And it's like Get us five phone books They bring it in And she's like Okay anything else He's like no

He's like leave the door open And so this guy We're talking to Tell us a story about Sitting in the office And shooting these phone books Right there And then John Nichols

Calls the secretary He's like Hey you know Cynthia Whatever her name is Right Come in here And she's

He's like Did you hear anything? And she's like Hear any what? No She's like What does that smell It's the gunpowder.

And so he's like, oh, pretty good silencers. And then I was like, well, so what happened with the deal? You know, he's like, well, he wanted to pay me in shrimp. And we're like, oh, what? Who wanted to pay in shrimp? John Nichols wanted to pay him in shrimp. And he's like, he's like, this guy is so bizarre. You know, he's like, you know, he's just up to his eyeballs and CIA stuff,

but you'd never be able to like pin it down. But he's telling me that he wants to ship all these small. arms over to the Philippines. And he's like, they, you know, fighting this sort of like war of independence, right? That was a kind of Reagan era initiative. And he's like, but they don't have any money. What they do have a lot of is shrimp. So they're going to, we're going to take the guns.

We're going to put them on only federal roads. Like they're going to go from the reservation only on federal roads to the shipping port. So they never have to cross. into technically into California where they can get seized and they're going to be put on boats taken over to the Philippines and then the Philippine

whoever is on the receiving end is going to send back boatfuls of shrimp and he's like I deal in money I don't deal in shrimp you know no deal no deal but it was just like whoa this guy I almost

like look at John Philip Nichols in a certain respect as like Have a photo of this guy, Steve? You ever read Catch 22? There's the Milo Mindenberger character who's basically a war profiteer who keeps on he keeps on hustling new ways to find money in the war in the military industrial complex, which is at the time World War II in that book. And he's like he buys all this like surplus cotton. And then he's like and then he doesn't know what to do with all the cotton because he bought too much of cotton. And so he starts like integrating it into the food.

You know, it's like it's just endless ways to find money within the military. Yeah, it's like mobsters, right? And he had monsters who are in business with the military. He had mob connections when we go into. And there's more that we didn't even get into the show. One of his sons, his son Mark, who recently passed away, his godfather on his birth certificate was one of the top Milwaukee heads of of one of the Milwaukee crime families. Oh, that's nice.

Where John Nichols lived and raised his family first. And he was tied in with, like, Jimmy Huffa. Yeah. And he was up high with Jimhers. And doing, because the Teamsters, they had some, he got in trouble for something he was doing with the Teamsters, and he ended up with a federal warrant. And that sent him off to South America.

It's all very. This all gets, like, so crazy. But, yeah, basically, it's like, John Nichols, We were talking to Bobby about this. It's like he's a mob CIA grant writing social worker psychologist, question mark, slash like Doctor of Divinity allegedly. He had like a mail-in doctorate for being a religious leader when he was doing stuff in Chile in South America. And then later on all over the world, really. Yeah, he looks like he'd be a good cult leader.

And that was the amazing thing really for us is like we got. got audio recordings of him talking in his own words about what he's up to. And it's like... No non-law enforcement person had ever heard them before. How did you guys get that? We're not going to tell you or anybody else. But we just don't want to give up any sources. Plus, like, Christian and I are...

I mean, I'm new to this world. I've never done anything investigative journalism-wise. Like, I just get really weird. You got an anonymous source? You keep them that way. We keep them anonymous. Just an anonymous source. Yeah.

Sources, actually. Yeah. But what we're very proud of, and I don't think that we really made it as clear as it could have been in the show, is like being able to hear John Nichols in his own words talking about all this crazy stuff. And we don't make a big deal about it in the film. You just like kind of like, you just see in the world and you hear this stuff. All these recordings you're talking about right now, they're in the film.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you hear John Hill. When you hear him talking about Michael and how valuable he is, Michael Rekonishudo, you hear him talking about Philip Arthur Thompson, and how great of a guy he is, and how the FBI has a close relationship with him. And it's like, oh, yeah, the serial killer slash, like, terrorist, rapist, whatever. Oh, great guy.

It's just, for me, it's really special and really amazing to hear it in his own words. So while he's, like, saying, like, yeah, and I'm a psychiatrist. I'm a psychiatric social worker for Mike. I'm just helping Mike out. It's like, by manufacturing weapons with him, like, what are you, where's the help start? How do you guys, this is a question I asked Annie Jacobs, this is very relevant to you guys, because you guys are talking to the same kinds of people.

You're in the same exact world. How do you discern whether somebody is trying to spin a web or like spin a story with you and try to point you in a different direction than give you the truth? This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Rhone. If you're a fan of this podcast, you're already aware that I am one of the most stylish,

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are always wrinkled, not with Rhone. So if you want to support this podcast, check out Rone today. It's Rone.com slash Danny, and you can get 20% off your entire order. It's spelled R-H-O-N-E-D-A-N-N-Y for 20% off. It's linked below. Now back to the show. I think that's an interesting question. I mean, one thing is that there is, at least for me, any kind of person that I would seek out to talk to, I would be asking them, you know, ideally their first-hand account of this series of events that we're focused on in this film, right? So there are names, dates, you know, and there's this like kind of like inherent logic to what really happened because A, effects B, effects C. And, you know, there's a chronology of actual events that I'm very familiar with. So if someone is telling me a story and their logic is flawed or their dates are wrong, like wildly wrong, or the names, the associations don't match with like what. you know, three other people, you know, sat.

Right. If someone asked the three of us, what happened today? We should all have a similar, and it's obviously filmed, but if it wasn't filmed, we'd all have a similar account of what happened, right? Right. It's hard to describe, but, you know, it's like someone that's just, like, mouthing off, and didn't know anything, you can tell fairly soon. But there's some pretty

Corroboration There's some slippery characters In our thing And we gave them The other problem is that Some of this sort of misdirection That I think some of our characters Gave us and Danny and various people

Look into it That's also kind of part of the story Right It's part of Danny's story If he's dealing with people Who are giving him misinformation It's kind of part of our story Because we do a very like

Firsthand There's a subjective layer to this whole thing, which is just this is what it feels like to go into this story if you're a guy like Christian or eventually a guy like me or anybody who kind of walks into it blind without a lot of, you know, without a

motive or some sort of like dog in the fight, you know. But also the people that we talk to aren't I mean, maybe there's exceptions but they're not usually completely out of left field. We'll find their name in some sort of deposition or some sort of police report or some

things somewhere we're not just like pick calling random numbers in the phone book and be like do you know anything about the Maraska murder you know a lot of them are telling us some people told us stuff that was like you could plainly tell was not true or a version of the truth

that's not true but but there's value in knowing that like that was what was being fed to Danny or it's being fed to us it's like well what's the motivation behind them because they oftentimes think they don't even know what we think is definitely not true they think it is true you know they don't mean to be lying or to see but they misunderstand themselves in some cases.

So I guess that's what I think is like kind of differentiates this documentary movie show, whatever you want to call it, from other maybe like more like straight-laced journalism. It's like we're interested in the misdirection. We're interested in here like because there's a story behind it. And so when you deal with some of these people, it's fascinated to watch them work and watch them tell you the story and see where it goes with it. And I think that we get into that, especially with Sherry, when you sort of see this misdirection that she's experiencing with the JFK tape and all that stuff.

That was wild. Yeah. That is very similar to what she talks about in Area 51. I don't know if you're, I'm sure you guys talked about earlier, but in Area 51. Talking about the amazing ending? Well, no, no, no. I'm talking about when they were doing test flights on the first jet propelled airplanes at Groom Lake, they would send the CIA pilots when they would go up.

They would bring gorilla masks in the cockpit with them. So when they got into a visual distance of a commercial airplane, they'd put the gorilla mask on to basically discredit whoever told the story. I saw a jet plane, but there was a monkey flying it. So, yeah, that's very similar to kind of what I think Sherry's view of what happened with Robert Binnichols and the JFK tapes, plural, that she was shown. So, yeah, explain to people what happened at the end of that. And we haven't introduced that guy.

Robert Bucke's. Right, right, yeah. Also, I want to say, like, I didn't mean to seem like such a, conceited jerk when I was saying that like oh we're not going to tell you who the like who where we got those I sounded like I was like a little conceded with it but it's like I just mean that like we just can't tell

about where the sources are I didn't mean to sound like I was holding it over you or something like that I'm so special but so the the Robert Booth Nichols is was a why don't you tell who Rauru Nichols is because he's a friend of Mike's originally it's also

interesting like it's important to keep in mind that when Danny was talking to these people, he didn't know what they looked like, he'd never heard of them before, and pretty much very few people had. They're obscure, underworld,

literal underworld characters. That goes for Michael Rekonishuto, and that goes for Robert Booth Nichols. You know, these are just, until Danny eventually meets them face to face, these are voices on the other end of a phone that he's having late-night conversations with and he's frantically taking notes and they talk you know in the case of

Robert Ruth Nichols they talk for hours you know and and Roberts out in California so Daniel Danny will call him at like midnight and you know you see on his phone bills that they talk until three in the morning and then Danny wakes up and you know or Bill calls Danny at 6 a.m. Bill Hamilton you know Danny's just like getting like pulled he's not you know sleeping he's getting pulled in all directions and he's just it's just important to paint the picture that nobody knows who this guy Robert Ruth Nichols is at this point in time he's like

for us he's like this icon in the octopus lore for Christian to me he's like this iconic dude you know who's like got all this like oozing mystery and stuff like that and he looks very like the Clark Gable thing going on he's like the ultimate bad guy yeah well yeah

or like a James Bondish kind of either depending on your side of a villain or or hero, right? Yeah. So, so then... And he's, like, he's cryptic and seems all-knowing and travels the world and it's unclear what he does

for a living. He's tall and handsome and... Tough. Tough and scary. Right. And, I mean, the way he's entered... I mean, he was out at Cabazon. He had this patent for basically, like, basically like a Mac10 submachine gun

that he was working. Peddling. Yeah, peddling to the Cabazon Wackenut Joint Venture to... Interestingly, he had a license in California at the time to manufacture automatic weapons, which is not like, I don't think, talking to people who also have that license that we've talked to, not an easy thing to get necessarily in California, even at that time. So he's like a... And he had a criminal record.

On paper, he's an arms dealer. That's his sort of like baseline, right? But he'd also But he also like didn't really sell It was called the G77 We could never really find records of him actually Successfully selling the G77 Maybe he did but

Are there pictures of this G77 online? We have them in the show Oh yeah okay You see the you see some Pictures from a I mean it would take you It would take a lot of like I can't even At the time code would it be a gun right

Yeah it's a gun I don't think you'll Google Mac 10 It looks like a Mac 10. Oh, okay. I don't think it's not like a pop, you know. Was it that thing with the silencer on it? Yeah, there's black and white.

It's similar to that. Okay. We talked to an arms dealer and we were like, have you heard of the G77? He's like, send me a picture. He's like, ah, there's a lot of people trying to make these like Mac 10 ripoffs. Like that was a big popular thing at the time. They always jam.

Like, you can't count on these things. Right. But Bob was, Robert with Nichols was ostensibly selling those out at Cabazon. They did a weapons test. It was under his license that they were able to really actually do the weapons test

that we show in the thing. But he met Michael and Reconasuto. Michael Rekosito and John Philip Nichols. Mike Riccano Shuto we should mention is like, I don't think we ever set this up. He's Danny Source that says, I'm the one who

put the back door into the promise software. the Danny's sort of original story about promise. And I did it out at Cabazon. Sorry for anyone watching this. Oh, my God. People that are so fucking lost by now. I met someone at a party recently who had listened to a podcast that we did.

We did a two part on this podcast called True Anon. And she's a fan of the show. And she was like, I listened to it. I had no idea what you guys were talking about. Then I watched the show. I loved it. In hindsight, the podcast, made more sense.

So, Robert Nichols meets Mike Recona Shuto out at Cabazon. And then Danny started talking to Robert with Nichols later on. You know, this is, it's two different timelines. Cabazon stuff is happening in the early 80s.

Danny's talking to these people in the early 90s, right? About what they've been up to for the last 10 years. And what Bob Nichols has been up for the last 10 years since Cabazon is like real hard to pin down and very strange. Really? When did he die?

He studied banking in Switzerland. He had dodged the draft and ended up in Honolulu. Honolulu. He, like, got under the mentorship of this guy named Harold Akimoto, who was involved in gambling. According to an FBI document that we have was connected to the Yakuza Japanese organized crime. Not sure. His son said, certainly not, but, you know, who knows? you never want to admit your dad's in the yakuza

yeah and I haven't seen Harold's back tats I'm not sure oh yeah the guza are all super tatted up right yeah so who knows he

at this mentor of Robert Nichols at least was a family and that seems to be his like entrance into Robert Ruth Nichols grew up his dad was a very sort of I think like a

doctor to the stars I mean, he's a very prestigious Hollywood doctor. They grew up in the Hollywood Hills. He has, you know, three siblings, and the parents were kind of like socialites, and the kids had Porsches when they were in teenagers. Rich kids. Yeah, and like kind of unsupervised. And how did he get into this arms business?

Through his, I think through his kind of intelligence. And what he claimed was that essentially that in Hawaii when he went there to dodge the draft and then he got caught for dodging the Vietnam draft and that the judge in his case This is the story, right? And that's his story. It's hard to say because it's like where's this stuff coming from?

And it's like if Bob's saying it, I don't know if you can believe it, but is that the judge in that case introduced him to someone in the CIA who said like, look kid, you could do this. some, you could do some work for us, like, or intelligence at least. I don't, I don't know if he had said specifically CIA, but it was like, it started off small with like little errands, like, I want you to just go up to this person and find out

this piece of information from them at a bar, at this restaurant, at the hotel, you know, and that it grew from there. And he's not, he doesn't have the badge, he can't, he doesn't have the lanyard, he can't go into Langley or, you know what I'm saying? He's not a staffer. He's like, a agent. That's CIG is that he's a freelance, like covert operative. That's his sort of story.

We do know that he was at that time involved in some kind of organized crime. But he's also in business with this guy, Bob Mayhew, who is both a critical liaison between U.S. intelligence and organized crime, specifically in their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, you know, using the mob in Cuba to, you know, And this guy, Bob Mayhew, was kind of like coordinating with organized crime in those efforts in Havana. And he was in business. E. Howard Hunt was a big part of that too, right? Yeah. E. Howard Hunt was the guy who was in charge of that anti-Castro hit team or those paramilitary guys.

What was interesting to me, if you read the last mafioso, which is a biography of just this kind of mafia hitman, he makes the point, which I think is, you know, who knows if it's true or not, but it's, interesting idea is like that the mob guy who was kind of who was tasked with by Bomb Mayhew with assassinating the plan to assassinate Castro was actually just ripping off the CIA and he was just hustling that like that he that he that they'd never even bothered to hire anybody in Cuba he would just come back to the CIA and like any mafia scheme he was he was a he was a scam artist right that's what a essentially like most of the mob operations, the scam. Yes.

So he was scamming the CIA and they can't, you know, they obviously don't have the agents to be able to disprove whatever he's coming back with. So he's like, oh, another boat was knocked out and we got to get more money because the operation failed. And he's just sitting there in like Vegas or whatever and not doing anything, you know, and just taking the money, which is that's a whole other layer of what is really going on with the CIA, Bob Mayhew, who was a former FBI agent. and the mob.

It's like, that reminds me of a totally unrelated story. I got to get it on Waxo. So I met this dude in Kentucky and his grandfather gave him a deathbed confession. He had been in the Navy.

And so this is what this dude's deathbed confession was. Amelia Earhart, I'm hearing a plane so it's cool. Amelia Earhart's plane went down and the U.S. Navy did this in the immediate aftermath did this big search to try to find her. But what this guy told his grandson

was that they weren't looking for her at all. They didn't even try. They were using that as an excuse to do whatever, intelligence, spying, naval ops, you know. Where did they think that her plane went down? In the Pacific? I know nothing about it. Right, me neither.

Anyways, it's just like somebody that listens to this show who's investigating the Amelia. Airhart case should try to run that thing. Yeah. Because that's a common thing. I mean, the gladio operation was sort of similar, right? Wasn't it like they had like a cover story?

I don't know. Anyway. Remind me what was gladio again? That's where we get the thing that we often, the Christian would often get it with FOIA requests, right? Which is we can neither confirm nor deny. No, no, that's not Glomar. Sorry, sorry.

I was seeing a Glomar. I'm so sorry. The Glomar. The Glamar Explorer. Gladiotio is the European relationship with the intelligence relationship with the organized crime and terrorism during and after World War II

sorry I'm so sorry yeah yeah yeah glomar was the glomar disclosure people are going to be like that guy has no idea what he's talking about the glomar is where we get the we can neither confirm nor to die which has a Bob Mayhew connection because it was Howard Hughes who

Bob Mayhew the FBI guy was Howard Hughes's right hand man Howard Hughes was the person that was tasked with building a Submer. No, no, a Soviet... Howard Hughes is something that I... That's a whole thing.

Danny Sheehan introduced me to the connection with Howard Hughes and Reagan. I think before Reagan was president. And how Howard Hughes was really one of the key players in setting up the assassination teams to take out Castro. Oh, right. That's Bon Mayhew is his right-hand man who I think was actually the one doing it. Okay, got it. Steve, is your mic on? Checkety, checkety.

I don't know, it's sort of muted. I think I can hear, I can hear breathing. I think, I don't know if it's your mic or... It might be one of our... No, I don't think it was your mic, because your mic's not that loud. I don't know what that was. Maybe it's the CIA agent in the other room.

Oh, yeah, it's you through your nose. You're in loud nose breather. That's better than being a mouth breather. You got partial. A loud nose breather. A Soviet submarine had sunk. in the Pacific, you know, well off the coast, you know, of California. And the U.S. government knows that it's there.

The Soviets don't know that the U.S. government knows that it's there. And the U.S. government knows. But also it's like kind of like, well, you know, it's sank and it's at the bottom of the ocean. So it's impossible to extract it and bring it back. It's like so far deep. It's so far underwater. There's nooks on it, right? There's nooks on it.

There's secrets on it. There's encryption on it. It's like everything you want is on this sub. So the CIA enlists Howard Hughes to build this massive ship that has a basically a bay that opens underwater. And it's called the Glomar, right? It's called the Glomar Explorer.

Can you pull this up? Glomar. And a claw machine claw, basically, that can go down and grab the submarine and bring it all the way back up and bring it into the ship. Okay, go to that one down there, the bottom left, the colored one. Oh, there you go. Is that like a... Glomar Explorer. And so, you know, it's this huge ship.

It's this massively expensive project. So eventually, you know, Jack Anderson, whatever, reporters are like asking the CA. we heard that you guys are building this giant ship to pull this nuclear and they basically would say we can either confirm nor deny the existence of this giant ship or this operation or whatever but that's where that's called the glomar disclosure when they tell you

from then on out when you get FOIA requests that they don't want to fulfill but they don't want to lie and say like you know we we we don't have it but like years later it's going to turn out they did have it it's that language we can neither conform nor nor denied the existence of X, Y, Z, these records, whatever. Right. And so we got that, Christian got that a fair amount, especially when you start talking about people like

Philip Arthur Thompson or, you know, it was. I don't think we ever even finished, like, who Bob Nichols is, but does it even matter? We wanted to tell some story. So Bob Nichols, yeah, I think Robert Booth. I'm sorry, Robert Booth Nichols. The reason we got on to his story, I wanted you guys to basically explain who he was

because there was a, we were talking about the strategic deception in the Kennedy video. Oh, right. That is why you're good at this job. You can meander and get us back. That is a real skill. I got to take that ship and pull you back out. We're in good hands here.

So Bob is somebody who had been in business with Michael after Cabazon. You know, met him in Cabazon. Michael, his business partner, Paul Marasca, was viciously murdered. And he attributes that murder to John Philip Nichols, his old guy. And he goes with, it sucks because there's some. so many Nichols in this story, right? Robert Booth Nichols, John Philip Nichols. Robert Booth Nichols is a completely different person who was also at Cabazon when John

Philip Nichols, the guy who we've been talking about with the cigarette business, the gambling business. They're not related. They're not related. So Robert Booth Nichols essentially, I think basically told Mike, like, you've got to get out of Cabazon because you're going to be next. Like your business part was assassinated. Come with me.

and we'll get into business together. And so they start a company, basically, Meridian, that was them and some other people. And they get up some stuff. They have a falling out while in Australia or something. And by the time Danny comes on the scene in 1990, 1991, Michael, Rekyllisito, and Bob Nichols hate each other. And when Mike goes to jail,

we can, while Danny's working on this thing, he says it's retaliation for him coming forward about this whole story. And he's basically talking to, he's talking to Danny, Bob's talking to Danny. They're using Danny as like a go-between. Yeah, that's Bob on the right there.

They're using Danny as a go-between to find out kind of what the other person's revealing about the other person. And Bob is, it just has this like, like we said, just like this seeming, seeming connection to the Intel world, to organize crime, to the secrets of the universe of how the intelligence world, he seems to be a kind of like low to middle level operative who can show Danny. He's like, I look at him as like he's like his Virgil going into the ninth circle of hell, you know, taking Dante in and showing him around, right? Right.

And so the story that he tells is sort of his own personal experience. But he's a three months after Danny died, this woman, it sounds so confusing, this woman Sherry Seymour, who we interviewed. Yes. Who wrote a book sort of about parts of our story. She picked up on Danny's trail because she was on the West Coast. She was interested in sort of drug operations that were related to the federal government. government. And she gets a call, I think on like New Year's Day or New Year's Eve from Robert Booth Nichols. And he's like, they eventually arrange a meeting. And she goes over to his house.

And she said it might have been a safe house? He had a couple places in, in the L.A. area. He had a place in Marina del Rey, his like apartment. And then he had another apartment-ish, condo-ish thing in Sherman Oaks. Okay. And so she goes over there. Ellen, his wife is there. He also had a place in Italy. He had a place in Honolulu.

Balling for a guy who has never paid taxes and has no discernible means of income. Who flies first class everywhere, stays in the four seasons when he's not going to one of his villas. Wow. Like pretty cool little life he's got going on for himself. Tax-free. So she goes over there. she's asking, you know, what happened to that guy, Danny, who died just a few months ago that you were talking to, you know, and he's super cagey about it. And he says, he says all kinds of stuff about like, well, like, nobody who, who.

No journalist has done enough work. Yeah, nobody, no journalist has done enough research to know the answer to that story. To answer that question. But he shows her, towards the end of their conversation, he shows her a tape. He puts on this tape and it's of a version of the Zuprooter film that she's never seen before. You know, nobody has seen before, quote unquote, that is what he calls the real Zabruder film. And she tells the story of the movie. It shows the driver turning around and shooting JFK in the head.

And then she's looking at this and she's just like, what is going on here? Like, is this real? What is happening? Right. And then he's like, yeah, it's the real one. Let me show you the tape that you've seen in the media. And this is a time, you know, in 1982, there's no YouTube. It's hard to access these videos.

I mean, the Zupruder film itself wasn't even shown on television for more than a decade, I think, after it was taken. It was shown on the Heraldo show, actually. We beat our heads against the while trying to find a decent resolution version. It's crazy. It's really hard to find. Yeah, it's crazy. It's really hard to find a high-res Zepruder film. Like a nice film scan.

It's for the most famous piece of film ever created. Why is that? It must have to do with, I mean, the ownership is now with the Sixth floor museum. And they have like a version that's online, but maybe they just have never bothered to like nicely digitize it and do like a nice high-res thing. You can see it on their website, but it's pretty low-res. And so so he plays her the quote-unquote really. version. Right. And he's like pauses it midway through. I mean, we tell

the story in the thing, but yeah, I'll try to be quick. He pauses it midway through and he's like, look at this tree, this tree that you're looking at there. There's, there's, and she says like half of the trunk is, or half of the tree's gone. He's like, that's the one you're seeing in the media. It's the one that's been altered. The one I'm showing

you with the guy shooting, with the driver shooting him, that's the real one. You've been fed this doctor tape. He says that it's like, his contention is that the what he's telling her is that the original role of film had been spliced and that very quick turnaround and shoot was cut out excised from it.

That's his contention. Which is why he claims half of the tree was missing. In the doctoring process that it wasn't like well done. Yeah, right. When they re-splice it together. Which doesn't even actually make sense. Right, because if you watch the Zepruder film online right now, the whole tree is there, right?

Yeah, and that's not how film works. Right. If you're just cutting out Frams. Right, exactly. But if we're painting, you know, you can imagine there's some sort of like superimposition going on or whatever technology level level of that. They had some sort of CGI back then. Well, they did it with the moon landing. Yeah, exactly.

I'm joking. So the story, the takeaway that Sherry has, which I think is the important moral of the story. Because some people, I think, see this scene and they're just like, damn, these guys have the real Zapruder film. Right, they're missing it. That is not our contention in any way whatsoever. It is to give you this feeling and make you want to go online and watch the original one. And be like, what the fuck is going on here? Are we let a curse on this show?

Yeah, YouTube. Okay. Or Spotify or whatever. So what the hell is going on here and put your brain into this world where you just don't, that was the hope was in editing that scene together in the way that Shary tells the story, is to give you this sort of unsettling feeling that you don't not know what reality is. is that you've lost touch with the truth. And that

like the guerrilla mask that you were talking about in the plane. Right. Like Shiri says if, you know, she'll report on this meeting she had with rubber with Nichols and say at the end, I saw the reals of Prudor for him, you guys won't believe it.

And she looks like an idiot whack job. Yeah, and she's done. She's journalistically toast. Yeah. I think it could have been the same thing with, I don't know if you're familiar with the Bob Lazar story. Oh, yeah. He's the guy who was contracted to go out to Area 51 or S4 and back engineering. Do you know that story very well? Yeah.

There's like a part of it where one of the things that were really kind of profound that he brought to light in the 80s was this like hand scanner. Yes. Okay. That I knew about that hand scanner because that was in, that was Wacken Hut manufactured that. What? Yeah. And so in their annual reports that I found their annual, Danny Castellero had. these like full color, Wackenut annual reports that I got from Danny's archives.

And there you have these like, you know, kind of like, you know, very annual report, well lit, you know, photographs of like women putting their hands on this like, at the time very advanced technology. It was like a bone density scanner in the fingers. Yeah. Can you pull that up? There's photos of it online, Steve. Just type in area. Really, we have good versions of it, you know. Area 51 hand scanners from this, from this, from this annual report. They also used that same scanner

in close encounters of the third count or fourth kind. Anyways, Bob Lazar. So, yeah, anyways, so in his story, that's it right there on the top left, right?

Yeah, that's it, yeah. So Wackenha made that. Yeah, or at least like bought the company that made it. They were marketing it. Yeah. So allegedly, in his story, he claims he was...

And they never worked. Apparently, totally crap. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's even better. Yeah. Yeah, so allegedly in his story, he was contracted to go out to S4 and try to do back engineering on these flying saucers or whatever. And he claims when he was, like, leaving the first day he went out there to look at this stuff, they purposely walked him by a window that was open where he looked in the window and he saw a little alien being with like guys standing over it.

So my interpretation of that is that was the same thing that was going on with that to Zupruder film. It's smart. Bob Lazar, okay, Robert Booth... I've never contacted Bob Lazar, but Robert Booth Nichols claims to be friends with Bob Lazar. Oh, really? Yeah. And then after the David Grush congressional hearings last summer, I revisited Bob Lazar because those hearings were so bizarre. Lazarian, Lazare-esque.

Lazarian, that's a good word. And so I just kind of quickly revisited what Bob Lazar's claims are. And the one that I think is so cool is that he said there were like five or six different crafts that he was working on. But the one he said he was working on was found in an archaeological dig. And I was just like, wow, that's, I mean, who knows? But that's just like a beautiful thought that like, you know, this spacecraft is found in an archaeological dig. archaeological day. I just love the like the drama of that.

The like X-Files episode. Yeah, what that does to my imagination. Yeah, it's interesting too when you hear. What does it say about time travel? Right. Yeah. A lot of people think that aliens are humans in the future. The saucer technology never changes. Is that because it's the pinnacle of technology

or because they are jumping around our timeline? The saucer technology never changed? But they always look like saucers. There's like pictures of them in you know, saucer pictures. Here's a fed from the federal government, the images of like, here's what the flying saucers look like so that they won't pay attention to the drone and stealth, like, weapons programs that are going on. My theory, crazy theory, sorry, rang that up. My theory is that all of that stuff in the drones and the tic-tacks that all the military pilots are filming is just to keep our attention off of, you know, spending $5 million on these Columbia-class nuclear submarines that we're building and all this other crazy shit that we're building.

We sure do, like, spending money on... Yeah, we do, don't we? expensive military toys in this country, don't we? Yeah, that, uh, something that has not ended since World War II. That's for sure. But on this, like, topic of conspiracy stuff, Zach and I haven't, we've really only studied this like case. Right.

You know, I, I can't speak for, with authority on pretty much anything outside of, um, these specific cases, which they're, they are numerous and kind of interlocking. and sprawling, but from like 1980 to like 1995, I'm like, I don't know. I can't speak with authority on literally anything either, so. That's why you asked the question. That's right. So one of the main characters in the show that we haven't really talked about yet, who is a recurring theory, he's one of the, I would say, the main figures in the whole story.

And really important is Michael O'Conna Shudo. Yeah. Can you explain who is Michael Rikonashudo and give me a little backstory into like how you discovered him in the first place and what your relationship with is and with him is now? Yeah. And that also like I could tag onto that like how Robert Boothnichols enters the picture as well for Danny and for Bill Hamilton. So Michael Rukonashuto is a child prodigy. child science prodigy from the Pacific Northwest

who when he was 16 or when he was very young he rewired his neighborhood's telephone system and undercut mob bell phone system and kind of like everyone in his neighborhood didn't have to pay their phone bill for a while

because he had kind of like rejiggered there's an article about that in the Tacoma News Tribune he had won science fairs And then he went down to Stanford when he was 16 to work on lasers with the soon-to-be Nobel laureate for lasers. This guy, Dr. Arthur Shala. And then he studied, he went to this all-boys school called the Woodside Priory in the Portola Valley, which is one of the most wealthy and prestigious areas in the whole United States. and it's also very close to LaHonda

where Ken Kese's fun in games were happening concurrently with the Hells Angels and LSD and The Grateful Dead And so then Michael graduates from high school

He says that they would hitchhike Over to La Honda But I'm not sure I don't know if You know, Ken Kesee Would film a lot of stuff Maybe he It would be cool to find Michael

you know, as a teenage Michael like with the Hell's Angels at his crazy parties in La Honda but anyways Michael, we do know that Michael ends up in California in San Francisco in the in the 60s during the

hippie movement, the hate ashoree movement interesting and he's connected to this theater this avant-garde theater and dance venue called the straight theater which is right on

hate Nashville Barry. Sorry to interrupt, but did Tom O'Neill ever come across him in his research? Yes. Yeah. Really? Yeah. We found out about Tom O'Neill's book when we were sort of in the early

stages-ish of kind of interviewing people for the movie. And we contacted him through circuitous means. No, we're super fans of Tom O'Neill and Zach's girlfriend made

t-shirts. Like bootleg fan shirts. Which had the cover the cover of his first edition of Chaos on it. Oh, what did he send you, Susan to assist? That's how you met him? No, and then on the back it had his

dust jacket portrait. And then my girlfriend at the time tagged I was wearing the shirt and she took a photo of me and posted it on Instagram and tagged Tom and he wrote to her like, what is going on here? Where did you get these shoes? He wasn't mad, but he was stoked. Yeah, and then he just

thought that there were these kids in New York that were obsessed with his book and he didn't know anything about us and so then when i was in los angeles later i i i messaged him i was like i'm the guy with the shirt like i'd like to give you one um which was actually my one so now i don't have one anymore um and so i gave him and i met him for um lunch at this diner in los angeles oh really and gave him the shirt and then i told him what i was up to and we ended up talking for three hours i mean the time just like flew by we didn't even know how much time it passed. And then the meter made was trying to give me a ticket because like whatever that was, you know, long since the, you know, meter had long since run out.

And then Tom's like, whoa, I can't be sitting here all day. I've got stuff to do. I've got to go. And I'm like, I've got to go too. But, you know, this is amazing. I was, you know. But so that's how we met first met Tom. But one of the reasons why that lunch was so compelling was because we had, we knew the same people. Like, we, the sort of farther reaches of our investigation connected to the farther reaches of parts of his investigation. Like he had, he had a file on Michael Rekona Shuto in his files. He had a file on Earl Brian in his files. He actually called Earl Brian before he died.

So it's really funny how it kind of reaches, just like, just barely touches on the chaos world. And I think touches on it ultimately probably a lot. Yeah, more than touches. I mean, it's very intertwined. But so, yeah, in essence, like, here's how I like to think about Mike. It's like, I think of him, if you look at sort of the stuff you got busted for, as like the connection between the 60, a prism through which to see the transition from the 60s, late 60s, LSD scene in San Francisco, Hayd Ashbury, the freak scene,

to the harder seven. 70s and early 80s, emphetamines takeover, essentially. And potentially, if you want to go there, the relationship between the federal government and those drugs. Well, yeah, because the mass importation of those drugs. The H. H.A.S.Berry Clinic was doing studies on amphetamines and LSD simultaneously, which is interesting. So, Mike told me that he went to the Free Medical Clinic, you know, the Hade-Ashbury Medical Clinic, Got it. Said they knew a lot of the people there. Okay. So flash forward to 1990, Bill Hamilton is trying to figure out.

He's successfully won. Bill Hamilton, we should just say, is the founder of this company called Insla. Insla. That developed the promise software, the starting place for Danny. We haven't even explained what the promise software is. We're doing this backwards, essentially. But that's fine. I just want to put it out there

just very concretely. This is where Danny Castellaro, the journalist that Christian became so interested who died in the bathtub in 1981. He started his investigation looking into a piece of software called the Promise Software, which had been allegedly stolen

by the Justice Department and used to do, nobody knew at the time what happened to this piece of software that was developed for the DOJ and a court had ruled that had been stolen by the DOJ. And so, and Bill Hamilton's in charge

of that company, enter Mike Rukonishuto. Right. Well, basically, Bill Hamilton is trying to figure. He tracks down Michael Rukonishuto as someone who knows what happened to his software. He knows that the Justice Department stole it, but what he can't figure out is why. And he hopes that Michael Rekonishito can help flesh out that question of why. And basically, Mike, he gets a hold of him through some former FBI agents.

and is able to track him down, and eventually Michael calls Bill. And Bill also is former NSA, and he also had done contract work with the CIA. Just to add a little more spice. That's nice. Some podcasters that says that we didn't mention that in the movie, but we do mention the movie.

We definitely mentioned in the movie. Anyways, so. That's neither here nor there. Well, it's in the movie. So basically Michael has this two hour long phone call with Bill And he says that the promise You know the first thing he says is like

He just describes what the Wackenhut Corporation is He's like it's this like you know giant you know Security Company And I was the director of research on the Cabazon Wagon Hut joint venture in the Coachella Valley And one of our projects was to and modify the purloined in-slaught software promise

and install a secret back door in it, which would then be sold through front companies to intelligence agencies and police stations and corporations all around the world so that all of that data that would then be tracked by those institutions could be like pulled... Accessed by...

...and pulled into... to like a master global database that has no national restriction. They were using it as basically by the US government. And then also by Israel because apparently there were two channels happening. Anyways, Michael's

the other informants talk about the Israeli aspect. Michael's talking about the American channel of this backdoor software. Right. And so basically they have this long conversation and Bill

then makes like this like memo like just so we can like keep track of like had this call with Michael on this date April 1990 like da-da-da-da and then it's like this probably like 13-page memo of like all of these points that Michael made in this call and basically Bill on his own he's a great researcher in his own right just starts going going through line by line trying to fact check these wild claims at this guy on the other end of the phone somewhere in rural Washington has told him. And so he finds this guy

named Peter Zikoski through this journalist who wrote about the savings of loan scandal who used to be in business with John Philip Nichols and he's like, oh, you know, if you really want to know what was going on with Mike and all this stuff, you should talk to this guy, Robert Booth Nichols. So that's how like

then Robert Booth Nichols enters the picture and he he calls Bill one day out of the blue. So now Bill's talking to these two guys and then when Danny comes along a few months later Bill gives Danny this like that's that a copy of that memo that from Mike from that first call with Mike

and then eventually like gives him Robert Booth Nichols's phone number and like and then so Danny's like kind of off to the races like dealing with these these two guys and so one of the other claims that Michael makes is that the way that the

the promise This software gets to the reservation is through the rigging of the 1980 presidential election, which was a critical player, and it was this guy, Earl Brian, who was an American businessman and physician and friend of Ronald Reagan. Earl Brian was. Earl Brian was a physician who had been in Reagan's cabinet when he was governor of California. When Reagan was governor of California, Oh, Brian was this kind of wonder kind of wonder kind young neurosurgeon, who it's just come fresh from a couple years serving in Vietnam. I'd love to know more about that. And then lands in his cabinet as like the health and human, whatever the California Health and Human Services, like secretary.

And like a young, young, he was like, I think the youngest secretary in California at that time. He was this just like brilliant guy. Not from California, though. He was from the South. And then after, like, he had started founding, like, tech companies and health care companies, basically. And he was basically a part of the company that was a competitor to Inslau, right? Right. He started a sort of umbrella of companies.

Was it all under Hadron? Hadron was, like, an infotech company. Infotech, I think. Info technology was, like, maybe the umbrella company. And he owned, we don't even truly get into all of his little things. It's pretty interesting, though. He bought... Financial News Network.

Financial News Network... UPI. Which eventually became CNBC. Financial News Network was a cable... A fledgling cable business news station. UPI, which was the major competitor to the AP at the time, United Press International. It's like... Newswire service.

A newswire service that was probably the biggest or second biggest at the time. competing with AP. Still around. Kind of. Like a skeleton of it. News companies are kind of still around. And Hadron, which was a competitor to

Inslaw. And Bill claimed that Hadron had tried to before he really understood what was going on with the Department of Justice sabotaging his contract. They tried to buy him. He tried to buy him and then threatened said something to the effect of we have ways of making you sell the promise software. And Bill,

Bill claims he's like, what is, I didn't even like realize it at the time, but looking back on it, I'm realizing, oh, we have ways of making you sell. It means Earl Bryan's homies with Reagan and they're going to, they're going to bankrupt us and steal the software. So Earl Brian is, I just want to mention it, because we might just move on from him. It's really, we never talk about it in the show, but eventually he goes to jail in the 90s after Danny died. He went to jail because he was doing stock manipulation with financial crimes with all these companies. And he bankrupted. I think he bankrupted, right? FNN.

Eventually F&N got, the reason it's CNBC now is because he was messing around with him. And he lost control of the company because he went to jail for that. And he went to jail for that and the UPI stock fraud. There's also an epic scene that didn't make the show where, you know, Anne Clink, Danny's best friend, works at CNBC as a... She works at FN. She's an executive producer works, you know, for this news station. Yeah, we didn't talk about that. This was like yet another, like, whole thing we'd have to explain.

But like, it was really interesting that Anne and some people in this kind of like octopus conspiracy universe are like, well, Anne Clink worked for Earl Brian. Like what does she have to do with Danny's death? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, dude, he's the boss who sits out. Like, you know, it's like if you work for Facebook, I mean, the equivalent is essentially, maybe it's not this scale,

but it's like Facebook, you're like an engineer at Facebook and somebody's like, well, what did Mark Zuckerberg tell you yesterday? It's like, dude, I've never met Mark. You know, like, you don't have a relationship necessarily with like the boss, boss, boss guy. But, you know, Danny is looking. into Earl Brian in the

summer, I'm not sure whether it was the summer of 1990. It was probably, if it was like maybe late summer in 1990 or 1991 and the company picnic is going down.

And Danny's like, and you got to invite me. You got to invite me. Because Earl Brian is going to be there at this company picnic in rural Virginia or something like that. And they end up playing volleyball against each other.

Oh, wow. And basically, I mean, Earl Brian is way out of shape. He's a big, and this guy, really heavy set, kind of seemingly out of shape guy,

but he plays a lot of tennis, and he's got a mad volleyball game. And he just schools Danny. Really? Yeah. In volleyball. The volleyball version of dunking on him. Wow.

So she told us this great story. You know, it'd be cool if it was in the movie, but it doesn't really take us anywhere, but it's just an amazing image of Danny thinking like, I've got him, I'm going to get Earl Brian, like, I'm going to get to the bottom of it, and I'm going to do it. My entry is like playing volleyball

against him, and he just gets like shamed, you know, by how badass Earl Brian apparently is in volleyball. And Danny was in a slot. She was a Golden Gloves boxer. Like, he's an athletic dude. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. So Earl Brian had founded all these

all these, like, tech companies, basically. And I think it had a lot of government contracts or whatever. And he had sold computers and technology to Iran, and to the point where he had learned Farsi. And that's sort of like what taught... That's how Michael ties him to... Brings him to the table, you know,

how he's said to have been involved in these negotiations to keep the U.S. hostages in Iran until after the election. Oh, right, right. Because he's homies with Ronald Reagan. Reagan. This is the, this is the Michael's story. He's homies with Ronald,

Earl Brown is homies with Ronald Reagan. And he's going to deliver $40 million to the Ayatollah to keep the hostages in Iran so that Reagan, so that Reagan looks like. Jimmy Carter can't. Jimmy Carter looks weak. Reagan looks like a badass.

And what ends up happening, I mean, this is why it ties so neatly to the history lesson is that, of course, Ronald Reagan wins the election, and within an hour, 30 minutes, whatever, of his inauguration speech, the hostages are on a plane going back to America. And it's like, wow, like Reagan won, and he got the hostages back. It definitely happens. And also his campaign manager is William Casey, who's this OSS super spy mastermind, wily, motherfucker. Wasn't he ahead of the CIA? For Reagan.

For Reagan. After he does this secret squirrel mission in Iran to get the governor of California to become the president. Wow. He's then made the... But this, just to be clear, this is, we've kind of like, that's not necessarily even Michael's story. It's not Michael's story. This is Christians. I don't think Michael really went to Iran.

I don't, he needs the onus is on Michael to come forward with some passport, photographs, some documentation that shows that he was, he and Earl Brian went to Iran and helped do this deal. Regardless of that, I think it definitely did happen. That the hostages were kept until after the election intentionally to benefit the Republicans. Right. If you look at what we ended up doing, I mean, we did a lot more research on October Surprise than ended up in the movie. And we talked to several people who had some relationship to it or had investigated it. And then, of course, last year, the New York Times came out with this piece. saying that, you know, somebody, what's his name?

Peter Baker, the New York Times came with this piece saying somebody in Texas had admitted that he was, that he had been there for negotiations between that Texas congressman, and that the Iran, that the October Surprise really did happen that way, which is interesting because if you look at the people who really went into the October surprise, like investigation on the journalistic side, guys like Robert Perry, they didn't. have that story. They had other stories about William Casey's shenanigans. And what seems like to me might be the true picture of what happened

is that William Casey, like any smart spy, had a bunch of things going on. Many different sort of wheels within wheels and many different plans at foot. And one of them worked out. You know, like maybe one of them worked out. And if you have a lot of different things, it also creates an echo chamber where it's like,

wait, how could that be happening at the same time this is happening? And how is, you know, it's like, well, maybe they're actually all happening. Just because multiple things seem like they are mutually exclusive, doesn't mean that they are, I guess, is my one way. At the time Iran was fighting a war with Iraq. And what Iran needed were parts for planes. You know, they had a bunch of planes that didn't have tires.

American made planes. Yeah. After the revolution in 1979, America stopped giving them parts. And they needed bombs and guns. And, you know, okay, so say the October Surprise Day. didn't happen, but right around the time that those meetings would have happened, the guns started flowing to Iran. And they didn't stop. You know, I think that there's like the Iran-Contra, like, I think the limited hangout version of Iran-Contra is like, they pick an arbitrary point in time for that scandal to start.

But it really started, especially if the October surprise happened, which I do. believe it did. It started then. That's when the relationship the relationship and the arms traffic. Which it's a perfect mirror, or not an imperfect, but a pre-close mirror to what happened with that Iran Contra six years later, which

is that there was another hostage crisis and we were using weapons to negotiate for hostages. And it's like, well, how did we get that idea? Like maybe, you know, the easy answer would be that we got that idea from ourselves when we did it.

If you're the Reagan administration. Anyway, William Casey, just to put a little button on that, he becomes the CIA director. He, when called to testify in front of the Iran-Contra hearings, he, the day before he's supposed to testify, dies. Just so inconveniently for people who want to find out the truth if he was going to tell the truth. Bill Casey?

Yeah. And one other little octopus tentacle to throw in there. is that he was outside counsel before all this to Wackenhut. He was a lawyer before that to Wacken Hut. So it's like when you think, Wacken Hut is this, it's like this boogeyman, right? But it's like has this funny name.

But you really look into him and they was, they was up to some bad, bad stuff. They also had, didn't they have the largest private rep repository of, of surveillance and other information on American citizens. Yeah, yeah, they got that from the House of Americans Activities Committee. Yeah, I think there's actually like 26 feet or something ridiculous of information on people. Illegal.

Surveillance. I believe sitting in the NYU Library, because they got the Wacken Hut files from some, like other. They got those Wack and Hut files from something. Anyway. After they digitized them and put them on their promise. You really want to get contemporary. And Danny somehow got access to... You're talking about yourself?

Yeah. Myself back in 1990 when I was three years old. He somehow got access to the checks that were written by the Kuwait Royal Family for like Adnan Kishoggi. Yeah, I mean, those had been around. We have like CBS Nightly News. reports that show those same checks and reports on them. The Khashoggi stuff, you know, a lot of the Iran-Contra stuff that Danny was looking into had happened in hearings a couple years earlier than that. What was interesting was that...

Who was the guy from Oregon? Brinneke? Yeah, he got those checks from Brinkeke. Ah, okay. And so what Danny was doing, I think it was like, well, what was Danny doing that's so special? It's like what he was doing was looking at Iran-Contra and then looking at the implosion of, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the bank we talked about

that was connected to Howard and Contra. Right, which was the implosion to that bank was happening in 1991, right when Danny's doing this, and he's looking at the savings and loan crisis, he's looking at all these things, and he's like, oh my gosh,

all these people in Wackenut, they're all actually literally connected. They all know each other or are part of the same things. And maybe the savings and loan scandal is really, you know, part of an intelligence operation or it's like,

popping up in that little place and it's popping up here and it's popping up here and it's popping up here and it's about essentially how money and power are moving around the world through intelligence networks of these like kind of dudes and if you want to get deep deep into it as like our editor eric really got into is like it's where um their expulsion from the CIA after the church after the various like church hearing church committee hearings and things like that in the 70s, you know, Stansfield Turner comes into the CIA during Under Carter and he's

like, everybody's got to go. He like cleans out, cleans out. 30% or some huge amount of the CIA gets kicked out because it's like you guys have been up to so much bad stuff, like so much illegal stuff. Like, we got a clean house here.

But now you have these spies. They've got a particular set of skills that don't adapt that well to civilian life. they got contacts all over the world. Right. And they've done things like Operation and I'll try to get it right this time. Gladio, things like that where you're, you know, these guys, when you're working in the CIA,

what is your in your operations? What are you doing? You're generally going to other countries and committing crimes. Like SB and Hush in those countries is a crime. And the way you're doing it is often sometimes, at least working with criminals. And so Danny's idea, Castellero, is that these guys are all the intersection between like a bunch of disaffected pissed off spies who were kicked out of the administration under Carter. And it fits nicely because it's like, well, you do have William Casey, who's an ex-O-SS officer as Reagan's campaign manager with George H.W. Bush as the vice presidential candidate who was the CIA.

director. It's like them coming in as under Reagan's cabinet under Reagan's administration and potentially engineering the return of or the the ascendancy of Reagan over Carter is basically it. You could see it as the world's biggest fuck you to Stanseville Turner and Jimmy Carter of being like, oh, you're kicking us out. Well, guess who's back, baby? And we're taking over. There's a way you can you can actually see that that sort of thing where all these dudes and Irene Contra kind of becomes an exponent of that. I'm sorry if I'm just droning on here, but Iran Conchre becomes an exponent of that

because it's former intelligence and military intelligence people who are working with the current administration, the Reagan administration. They set up a private supply network. To do a private supply network. It's if you want to see it in a related way, it's about the privatization of military intelligence, you know?

And whenever Reagan's like, you know, saying things like, you know, the worst words, the worst sentence in English language is, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. It's like, well, that's a really convenient viewpoint for somebody who's working with a lot of people who are about to make a shit ton of money off of like military intelligence under your administration.

That's what Iran contra was. Right. That's what, you know, all this stuff is. So one thing that we haven't really explained, that I'm kind of a little bit fuzzy on is what was so special about the promise software that made all these different nations around the world want to buy it? And I understand the logic of selling it to all these nations and creating a backdoor. So that was created by Michael Wakano Shuto, right?

Allegedly. Allegedly. We always have to throw the A word in that. I understand using that selling the software to everybody. creating a backdoor so you could go in there and gather all the information that they have. But how did the Promise software help them on the Cabazon reservation, and specifically with the arm sales? Well, that's problematic because, I mean, we've got done,

we did a lot of reporting about what sort of the facilities, The weapons development facilities, we have the blueprints. They never got built. They did build a casino. But the tank ammunition shell plant that they wanted to build and the chemical and biological weapons manufacturing facilities that they wanted to build, they never got built because probably because John Philip Nichols was hiring all these murders and Wackenhot got spooked and pulled out.

It got too hot because John Philip Nichols just couldn't help but kill people. And speaking of got too hot, I mean, in order to run those Vax computers that the Promise software ran on these DEC Vax mini computers there, I don't think they could fit. They could fit in this room. They would take up a huge portion of this room, but you need... Like vacuum tube computers? Yeah, they're... They play...

We show them in the film. They play like this... They run on this magnetic tape. It's after the vacuum. The real, the real. The real. The real computers. Yeah, yeah.

And you basically, you need to, like, kind of raise floors. You can look at the deck Vax. DEC Vax. 11780. You know, basically, there were some dusty old, there was a card room, and there were some trailers out on this reservation. Look at these, you know, look at this room where they're running these. Or type in 1170. 11 slash 780

Deck Vax 11780 After Vax At the after Vax Or even that's fine Yeah 1170 It's suggested right there Boom We actually found a working

One of these And filmed it Which was sick In our recreations We can't find any evidence That A These machines were on the reservation Or B

That they could have even supported That's a great sales Envelope right there That one that says Skip Walter It just looks cool. I like their sales marketing stuff. And even Bill, as he went through fact-checking that stuff that Michael had initially told him

and talking to all these people and networking with all these people initially, he was able to corroborate everything Mike said about Cavazahn, Wagon, Wagon, and Hot, and all these murders. Stuff that's actually like much more incriminating and crazy, but he couldn't get nailed down. the promise story being out there, which doesn't mean, I mean, we remain pretty open to it. It also, there's also other sort of stories about other avenues through Israel and all kinds of other things that promise was hacked by those guys. But the story about Michael specifically doing it at Cabazon, we've never been able to, like, nail that one down.

Danny said many times throughout his notes, possession of a secret is no guarantee of it's truth. I think that's a really important. You know, people tell you, just because someone tells you in confidence or whatever tells you this secret and this thing, it doesn't mean it's true. Right. Right. And I think some people might say, well, like,

well, then what are you guys doing here? Like, what's your documentary about? Like, if you don't think some of this stuff is true. It's like, well, what we found was that that might have been, you know, true or not, there was this weapons, like, exploration thing going on out there.

there was a series of unsolved homicides that I think Christian does a pretty good job of laying out what actually happened and that they were for people working with intelligence agencies. And all the other stuff that Danny was onto turned out to be pretty right on about how these intelligence networks work. And people like, you know, how people like Robert Wood Nichols and Michael O'Connor, the stuff that they were involved with that was true was equally, I would say not more chilling and strange and bizarre than just like what was going on with promise at Cabazon. I think it's a really interesting open question of like, well, then what's the point of Michael saying all this stuff about promising Cabazon and why would he bother?

And, you know, we don't truly get into like the wise and wherefores of that. But I guess in answers to your question, like, so there's a Mike Rekhanesudor promise thing. but I think it is important to kind of like lay out Bill's vision and maybe not even Michael's vision of why promise, right? What would it? Because he's not, Michael's not the only one. Like Ari bin Manashi, another slightly slippery character, Israeli spy. We mentioned him in the show.

He has a whole other take on on what's going on with related, but other take on what's going on with promise and Israeli intelligence and the sort of worldwide distribution of promise, right? And it's related. It's essentially that promise, here's like the kind of canonical story, right? Promise was developed to organize information files for the Justice Department. This is true, right? It was a database. It's a database. In an era when there's not that many similar programs, right, you know, sort of early to mid-computing

when you're using giant $2 million machines, like the deck Vax, right? But that's like early 80s. By the time this is happening, promise is a pretty powerful, very powerful, according to some, definitely Bill Hamilton, like 500,000 lines of code that can,

that what's special about it is, it can organize all this information, but it can sort the information and it can like find patterns within information. Right. So you're looking for, if you're in the criminal system, you're looking for what, like, you're sorting the basics of, like, the judge on the case is the same.

And here's this defendant who's the same. But then you can track other cases and be like, oh, there's a pattern of crime here. Here's how this, these criminals actually involved with all these other crimes. And here's the, here's like the kind of information network and promise is good at sorting that. And they used to- Its early findings found that 10% of police detectives in D.C. closed 100% or 90% of the cases that were closed in that. So basically, like, 90% of the detectors weren't able to take their cases from arrest to conviction. Only 10% of the DC detectives were able to do that.

And that was just, that was unclear until they were able to. a take hard data. It's called the super cop study. It's like data mining. So promise outside of even our documentary, we don't really get into the details on this, but it was a powerful research tool. Right. In addition to its work for the Justice Department, I think Charles Work, who we interviewed, who was one of the kind of, I don't know, godfathers of this project who brought Bill into the Justice Department to do it, wanted to do research so they could make the criminal, you know, ostensibly make the criminal justice system more just or more effective.

Effective. Yeah. And find out patterns in law enforcement that would be better for victims for, you know, closing cases and things like that. And so they had these pretty cool big papers that were written from research done on these massive databases of promise information. So then it's like, okay, well, then how does that comment, how do you get to go from that to a global surveillance network, right?

Well, the idea at least is, according to people like Airy or microchondishudo and other people, is, well, it's just a, you know, it's just a matter of what information you're throwing in there. So if you're throwing in as a comparison, say instead of legal cases, you're throwing in the phone bills and the water bills and the utility bills of, people in Palestine you could sort those names

or you know or Jordan or whatever it was you could sort those names and find out oh this person has like a spike in their water bill for like the last two weeks maybe that means that more people

are staying there maybe that means there's unreported people staying in there there's some sort of like operation going on in like an insurgent you know, in their minds like insurgent, essentially military campaign, right? That's happening within the population. So you can find patterns just depends on what you're looking for. And those can be very, you know, valuable.

The sort of next layer is then, so say you are Israel and you sell that to Jordan and you're finding out, you're seeing that you're then tapping into Jordan's information. They're tracking this information, and then you're pulling that information out, and you're sorting it against what's going on in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, whatever, and you're seeing even bigger picture. Keeping tabs on what's going on.

So ARI's point that he says in interviews that we have is that this was like... He's the Mossad spy? He was IDF. IDF, okay. But Israeli intelligence operative, that they dis... I mean, man, we should tell his story.

It's like there's so many amazing sort of like things that we didn't even get into. Like he was, he was separately one of the reasons that we know about Iran-Contra. He leaked the first article about Iran-Contra was an article that was based on information that he leaked. So it's like to a Lebanese news magazine, I think. Right. So, you know, years later he was arrested in 1990 or 80. or something like that for selling like C-130s that were

illegally being sold and he gets arrested and tried in Manhattan. He gets a public defender. Israel disavows him, says that he has nothing to do with IDF for Israeli intelligence and then he gets a bunch of

letterhead and stuff that shows oh yeah he is working for Israeli intelligence. They're like, oh, well he's just a low level translator. Then he gets his passport and it's like like as thick as the Bible full of like travel to North Korea, travel to like Peru to like visit the shining path.

You know, it's like a low level translator who's going to like 90 countries in this thing. And so he actually argued his way out with a public defender argued his way out of federal charges got off not guilty for illegal

arms ship. These aren't illegally shipping these C-130s. And he's so annoyed. starts telling anyone who will listen everything he knows about everything he knows. Right. Is his story. And so his point is that Promise Software was

this like better than cheaper and better than satellites for gathering information on whatever Israeli intelligence wanted to know about in the early 80, early to mid 80s. And the story of how it got to Israel

from basically Inslau or the DOJ was that this guy, Dr. Bin Orr, who is an emissary from the Ministry of Justice in Israel, comes to... This is Bill Hamilton's perspective. This is Bill Hamilton's story. The president of Insla, I'm just throwing that out there. Comes to Inslaa and basically wants like a show and tell.

I hear you got this new DOJ supporting, you know, prosecution software. Like, let's... Maybe we want it over in Israel. It's in early 80s. This is before all the problems, all the lawsuits and all that stuff. So he comes to kick the tires on insla and promise. And basically they, you know, spend whatever the day together. And the guy leaves.

He leaves and Bill never hears from him again at the Ministry of Justice. And then through the course of, I think there's lawsuits against the Department of Justice, I believe somehow they get a document that shows that. that the Justice Department did actually give Dr. Ben or a copy of promise that he took back with him to Israel. But then somehow Bill figures out that Dr. Bin or... Well, Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general, who's now Bill's lawyer fighting against the Department of Justice, does this, like, photographic lineup or something. Or something. Where he's like showing people in in Slough, like, pictures of people you might know.

And one of them is a picture that Bill's like, I know that guy. that's Dr. Benjamin Orr. He came and looked at our software years ago. And Elliot Richardson is like, that's not Dr. Benjamin Orr. That's a guy named Rafi Itan, who's a legendary Israeli Mossad spy, who was part of the operation to, was in charge of the operation to get Eichmann out of Argentina when they, like brought him back for trial, the Nazi, back for trial. He was called Rafi the stinker in Israeli. intelligence because he had been some operation early on that he had done

he had like go through the sewers or something and he got this moniker I think he was like a little dude who according to the people who knew him was just a hard nose right wing like tough as nails you know we got his number from one of our friends in Israel

and like you know we were a little bit We basically wanted to like really button up our knowledge. Supposedly late, like years later, supposedly Rafa Eton claimed that the seizure and implementation of this, basically this Israeli promised software operation, spy, you know, signals intelligence operation was like the greatest achievement that of Israeli intelligence during his tenure. He told this to a journalist named Gordon Thomas. Who has a lot of just basic factual inaccuracies in his book. So it makes me wonder like what we're... What's really going on?

Because it's not vet. It's like, you know, he says Danny Hedler died in 1990. It's just sloppy. You just as you're kind of skimming through, you're just like, that's wrong. That's wrong. Right. So you start to doubt. It's like, so did, is it true that Rafiatan took you aside and like said like don't turn the cameras off?

And let's let me tell you my greatest achievement, which happens. It's like the only time that Rafi tells this to any journalist, like is my theft of the promise software? It's like, what is even going? What is true? What is not? And that's part of the reason. I think another one is just condensing so much. That's part of the reason.

None of that, the Rafi Iton story did not end up in our documentary because it was just became too much of like, wait, what is real? What is not? Like we have no way of verifying this. But we did. We got himself on the responsibility. from our friend in Israel for screwing us up. We took like

too long. We didn't call him and then he died like two months after we got his cell number. Felt so stupid. We just didn't expect him to die. Brutal.

Yeah. Now how did this all connect to? You're getting that look on your face that I recognize a lot from dinner parties before we would turn the, before we made this movie when it'd be like

hour six of telling in this story and people are like, right, wait, so it's like, people are still interested, but they're just like, wait, what's going on? So, but I want to know how it got implemented in these nuclear submarines. Well, that's the sort of like Norma DG Asinto story. Right, and Cy Hirsch.

And Seymour Hirsch. Okay. I mean, it's all through Bill Hampton, essentially, it is telling these stories. Because there was the lady in the documentary that you guys interviewed her in front of her door. There's like, I can tell the longer version of the, story, but I basically, like,

one of my closest friends was dating Cy Hirsch, a legendary investigative reporter, was dating his son. They were living at his apartment in New York. Wow. And so I was like, dude, you've got to give me size email. You've got to give it to me. And so

she did, and I basically started trying to verify if, like, the story that Bill told me was true. And he was, I mean, he was an interesting person to communicate. So I was an interesting person to communicate with. And his point, his ultimate point was, I never ended up writing about its law. So I only talk about stuff that I printed. You know, I don't talk about stuff that I didn't

speculative. I don't, you know, because that way it's like that, if it makes it into the New Yorker or the New York Times, it's real. It's fact checked. It's real. He'll talk about it. Right. He doesn't, he just, as a policy, doesn't talk about, even though he pitched it to, according to Bill, he pitched it to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic. And the Washington Post, right? No, I don't think those are the three. The Washington Post story is different. That's a Bob Woodward's story.

Oh, right, right, right, right, sorry. But anyways, I was trying to get him to confirm anything about the Insla case, and he basically said the threshold is too high, you know, on Insla on this story. I was like, what is that me? What does that mean? What does that mean? And I never, I don't know what he meant by that. I mean, one speculates that the idea is like,

it's such a classified and intensely guarded secret that, like, you can't open that box that's inside of the intelligence community and find out the answers cleanly. So, but circling back a little bit, one of Enslah's clients was this insurance company called Etna Life and Casualty. Right. Because they had, just really quickly, they had stopped selling to the federal government after the federal government built them out of $7 million worth of contract. It was going to be the largest contract in the Department of Justice history, eventually when it was like a several hundred million dollar contract that it was supposed to grow into.

And so they started selling it to private companies. I just wanted to throw out that. Yeah. It's like they continued on even though the DOJ had kind of like screwed them out of all this money. And so, like, by the 90s or late 80s, they're working with Edna and this woman. And, you know, they have this, like, promise users group where different clients could kind of all convene together for, like, kind of like a breakout session where they talk about, you know, whatever, maybe bugs or new software updates or, you know, I'm not sure exactly what they would talk about the promise users group meetings, but I could only imagine probably about software. And, you know, afterward, they had kind of, like, built this relationship with Norma because she was kind of, like, really good at explaining how to use the software to new clients.

And I think they would kind of, like, pull her aside and, like, help. Because from, like, the perspective of, like, a, I don't know, a lay person, she could kind of, like, really help people learn how to engage with this tech. And they liked each other. And she asked after one of these users group, meetings, you know, what's going on with your case? And Bill had recently met Michael Rikonishuto. And he's like, I don't know. I mean, I met this guy. He said that this software, our software is all over the world now with a secret back door and in it. It's part of this

massive spy operation. And the CIA is involved in the, you know, the Department of Defense and the NSA. And she's like, hmm, well, I could probably hope. help you with the CIA aspect. This is a story that Bill told me in 2013. And he said and so then it's like Bill's like, oh, you can.

You can help me with the CIA part? She's like, and I need to read it. This is a story that Bill told me in 2013. She said, according to Bill, that her husband was a clandestine services operative for the CIA for many years. So she basically could run it up the chain with him and see.

Bill allowed me to tape this conversation. Have it on tape. So, you know, I wanted to find and so then basically the story is that she calls Bill and she's like, I got this, I got the finally, I've got the information.

What I don't have are documents to prove it, but what I do have is the story, basically. Like, obviously paraphrasing, but I don't want to talk about this over the phone. come to our office in McLean, Virginia, and like, we'll get into it and I'll explain.

McLean, just fun little facts also where the CIA is located. It's just such a, like, the whole story is in this like CIA Spook, Northern Virginia Intelligence Universe, where Danny lives. Danny was born in McLean. Danny McHessler was born in McLean, Virginia. Just his neighbor was,

um, Jesus Angleton, John Hesus Angleton. Danny's neighbor? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God, dude. Like as a child, you know, like you'd see him like mowing the grass or whatever. I mean, I don't know that detail specifically. All I know is that.

So she says, okay, the, you know, it has this whole story about. James Angleton. That's an amazing. His son lives right on the street from here. Or his grandson, maybe. And your name's Danny. Oh, my God. James is Angleton.

And you kind of look like him. Like who? Danny. I thought you were the one that looked like Danny. I guess we both kind of look like him. Anyways. I'm kind of swimming in this story because like... There's so many different offshoots. It's basically a day in the life of production of us trying to tell the story.

It's just like interconnected story. She says that the software is on these nuclear subs, that the joint chiefs of staff, like are the only people that have, you know, access to the information. It's on nuclear subs It's all I think the idea Just to like kind of

Why would it be on nuclear subs? I think the idea And I'm Oh I It was to like It was so it's this Data tracking Analytics

Data mining type software Right And so if it was taking Soviet sonar And like Pings And it was able to like Somehow Triangulate

Where underwater you know, subsar. That's the theory. That's sort of the theory. I have an anecdote that I love about submarines. I was, you know. This is like our eighth.

I'm sorry. Submarines are fun to talk about. I was photographing this like actually was a mob wedding in Long Island. And I, you know, funded my early years of research on this by working as a photographer, usually for the New York Times, but I would do the occasional wedding. That's embarrassed I am to say, to admit that. I've been there. I think we've all been there. So basically I meet this guy at the wedding.

We're like standing to the side. We're talking. And he's like, I was like, well, you know, what do you do? And he's like, well, I'm in the Navy. For the CIA. And I was like, well, what do you do in the Navy? And he's like, well, I'm a submarine commander. And I was like, oh, cool.

So what are you guys doing down there? Like, what's going on down there? And he's like, you know, very disdainful, like, looks at me. And he's like, dude. Dude, if I could just tell you at a wedding what I do, I wouldn't have to do it underwater. You're right about that. Oh, my God, that's so fucking funny, man.

It's so true. So they're using promise and playing with the Vax computers, I guess, but no, I don't know. The submarine shit is wild, especially if you think about, like, nuclear war and deterrence and like where all the submarines go. In Annie's new book, Nuclear War, she has some this declassified, uh, submarine highway lanes. Whoa. In her book that you can see, I could, you can't find it anywhere online, but it shows you the basically the submarine highways for China and Russia. And they literally come within like a hundred miles of the east coast of the U.S., like right off the coast of Florida and

Carolina and then all the way up the West Coast right off the coast of Los Angeles and like they huge circles throughout the ocean everywhere. Submarines are literally nuclear submarines are literally littered throughout the oceans. It's pretty bizarre when you think about it. Bing! Bing! So then, so that's the Norma story and for years I'm like, well like, you know, her husband, I gotta talk to her band, I gotta talk to her husband, I gotta talk to her husband, I gotta talk to her husband, he confirmed all this stuff about promise.

I mean, that's the thing. I got to find her. I got to find her. And there are four or five Norma D.G. Asinto's in the United States. And I called all of them. None of them would call me back, so I don't know which one's which. But I make kind of like an educated guess

and I choose this one in South Carolina. I think we say in the show, it's Conway, South Carolina. It's basically Myrtle Beach. And so now we have funding, right? And so we're doing your baby board? No, I didn't. But we know

It's one thing There's a giant road trip already Like going up and down the East Coast interviewing people And we're like, well, let's stop in there. Netflix is paying for our gas And our hotels and everything. So we're, you know,

like it's hard to do this research When you're not funded, right? It's a lot. It costs a lot of money to do like An investigation. Of course. So So anyways,

so we go, we pull up at her house. and we ask her, you know, her version of the story because we've only ever heard it from Bill. And it's like similar but different. She didn't learn it from her husband. She learned it at the bowling alley. And I'm like, I'm like still like on board.

I'm like, okay, okay, so it's just everything's the same except for one change. And that's that the spies weren't her husband, but they're at the bowling alley. I'm on board. I'm tracking along. And Zach's like, whoa, no, no, no, dude. dude, you're getting played or we're getting played or like she was getting played.

Like, you know, that was something is going on here and it is not the same story that Christian was told. Like that was sort of. Yeah, that's a really inconvenient thing that plagues a lot of journalists, right? When you spend so much time researching something and then you find something that just doesn't fit that like kind of fucks up everything that you've been. The lattice work. It fucks up like the direction you've been going the whole time. People like to just either dismiss it at a convenience or if it proved their story, they'll, obviously use it to reinforce.

Yeah, it totally kind of, for me, I guess, being in that moment and just having, maybe it was this having such high expectations because we felt like we had done the work and gotten Norma and we were there on the porch and we were just so stoked and we're, you know, we're always

looking for, this whole story is like a story about addiction. It's the story of being addicted to the feeling of like grabbing that next vine and like, oh, if I get this next thing, like we've got it. We've got the story. We've got promise. It's in the submarines.

That will then prove all this other stuff true. And instead it's like a freaking shovel. And we just are like digging ourselves deeper into like a hole that we do not understand. You know? And this is one of those moments where it was like, I simply do not understand what's going on here. Where like Bill who had was such an encyclopedia and a font of knowledge for Christian, his story. is simply incompatible with the details of what Norma's saying, you know. And how her story plays out of finding out this information in a bowling alley and her saying that her husband...

She also had been deposed in 1996 and said essentially the same thing she told us about the bowling alley and everything. Oh, really? But we didn't know that. We didn't know that. She told us... Del didn't mention that to me in 2013. Huh. So it's like, what's going on?

Is she getting played? Is Bill getting played? Are we getting played? Like who is playing who? And it's one of these things where we show his response that we finally elicited from him. I mean, at the very end, which is he's, I can't remember the exact text of it, but something like, I don't know if Norma never claimed that her husband was CIA. Other people told me that. and I believe that her source was was valuable and was reliable or something to that effect.

You see sort of the exact quote, I think, in the show that he emailed us. But it's just one of those, we had to, I felt like we had to include it. Of course, in the show, because it just, I don't think it discounts. I don't think it ruins like our story, you know what I mean? it just deepens it in terms of the mental gymnastics that you have to go through to understand. It's almost kind of emblematic of the octopus. It's like every time you think you've got something cornered, there's a new angle that's there to throw you off. And I think that Danny probably experienced that, not specifically with the normal story,

but Danny experienced that constantly. We've experienced it constantly where you have stories, you have amazing stories from Michael that we find out are true. And then you have stories that are impossible to verify. and it's like, what is real? And there's mundane stories that we're told that we assume are true because they're so boring. And it turns out there are lies. So to me, it's emblematic. I think that the frustration is important to understand in the story.

It's emblematic of this hall of mirrors that what it's like to go into these things. And to me, as a layman, really, I think it's emblematic of intelligence, of, of intelligence or criminal operations where it's so important to see that you're being played or see that you are never allowed to really hit hard ground. And that all of these like characters, whether they even know it or not, many of them are there to seem to be there to throw you off of the scent. And you're always sort of grasping for like, I know there's something going on. I know X, Y, and Z, but I can't get the full, you can never get the full picture.

and I think other intelligence-related stories like how Rob Reiner talks about in his JFK podcast. You see the same pattern play out over and over in these intelligence-related operations where it's a cover story on top of a cover story on top of a cover story.

And even some of the players who are telling these stories don't know what's true and what's not. Didn't Angleton go out the wilderness of mirrors? Yeah, that's... Tanny's neighbor. Yeah, you can't make that up.

What made you decide to end the documentary the way you did with you basically like saying I think you said towards the end of it like the one thing I know is that Danny Racano Shuto is the only person that could have killed Danny Rekano Shuddo No, but Danny Cassilero

But that's the false ending. That's the sort of ending before the ending. I think that we wanted it, it's our, we sort of did it in that way because it shows a process that we went through many times with that that happened in this time. most apparent, which is like grappling with the fact that like on one, you know, the whole

documentary we talk about many reasons why it seems like Danny might have been murdered. But then you have to come to grips with the fact that maybe he was played and maybe he was in a position where he killed himself. I mean, that's, you have to grapple with that. You have to take that on. And that moment of bottoming out, I think after we learned the norm of the thing and after we, talked to certain people, people like Doug Vaughn, who was an investigative journalist, and they explained to you, like, Doug's position is that Danny killed himself.

Like, we don't go into that in the story, but he's like, I think that Danny did kill himself. Even though he may have been on to all this stuff, I think he killed himself. You know, it's like, well, Doug's a really smart guy. He wrote the piece for the Village Voice, which is, I think, the best piece about Danny Kessler, as investigation. So anyway, that's the fault. We made that the sort of like ending before the ending because we really wanted to land hard on that feeling of what it feels like. And it happened to us multiple times.

That was just one of them where you're just like, oh man, is this all kind of like for nothing? But it's like either way the story killed him. That's how Doug Vaughn ended his piece in The Village Voice. And it's a smart way to look at it. The story killed him. The story killed him. If he wasn't looking into the story. If he wasn't...

The characters in the story themselves, like the story, his obsession... Going into this wilderness... That was why he died. The story is why he died. Right. And it's a good story. I guess that's almost the...

For me, like the... We start with this kind of like either or. Like, if Danny killed himself, then... And this is how the FBI phrases it, too. It's like if Danny killed himself, then he must have been conned and been on to nothing. And then it's like, and if Danny was murdered, then he must have been onto something. And he found something he shouldn't have that's important and dangerous, right?

Right. And what we found, I think, by the end, was that you can actually separate those out. And that even if Danny did kill himself, it does not discount. It does not mean the other thing, right? Which is the FBI's point. Like, Danny didn't really find anything. It's like, no. We have three and a half episodes where we show all the.

crazy stuff that Danny did find and all these connections that he found and all these amazing characters and scary characters dangerous people that he met and was talking to those were real so even if he did kill himself

you get where I'm going with this and then the actual ending that we go into I mean this is whatever spoiler alert but the actual ending is more about what it feels like which happened many times if we just show one instance of the when you get sucked right back in,

when you're like, I think I'm done. Like, I think I can walk away. Sherry talks about the feeling of like, you decide. Sherry's the journalist who met with Robert Nichols. You decide when it's over because this is almost, it's a game and it never ends. Like it's an ongoing thing that never ends. And she talks about the feeling of addiction

and the feeling of like you never know when to put it down. And then we show, you know, I think Christian multiple times over his life, but we showed kind of what the process is of when you're kind of what she calls deprogramming when you're trying to get out of it. But as happened to us many times, you see it here, it's like you get one call and it's really hard to like not answer the phone and get that rush back of like maybe if we just have this lead, maybe if we just get this information, the whole door opens and you get all, you get the window into the full octopus and you get. and you get you solve it you solve everything the guy Joseph I don't know how to say quay are Quayar so Danny met with him at a bar like the night before he was murdered is that right? No they met they met they met by chance met by chance and it was it was a couple

months I think before months okay it was it was towards the end of his investigation but it was it was it wasn't like the day before he died and was that guy Coer was he seen near the hotel where Danny was during that 24-hour, 48-hour period? That's the question. I can tell you that his name was floated to the Martinsburg Police many times. I've got it in their notes, they never can spell it right. They have really tough time with spelling over there at Martinsburg Police Department. And I think spelling is important.

You're trying to look in databases for people. But sorry. Do I sound like a jerk? No, it's funny. It's funny. Okay. So this, but they don't, no, I don't have any record of them calling him, interviewing him, checking him out, bringing, going, getting a photo of him from the driver's license for the DMV or from the military or whatever. And like, canvassing, has anyone seen this man?

We do have that, that sketch. And we have a guy that kind of matches his description that a number. Another hotel guest was seen entering the room. We have Quayar threatening Danny's friend Lynn Knowles to stop asking questions after Danny's death about what habit of Danny and what was Joe's involvement. Seems like a weird response if you're asking somebody like, hey, he said something it's business, right? Yeah. Yeah. What Danny was investigating was a business.

And if you care about your kids and your own life, just drink some hot cocoa and stop asking questions. It just seems like a odd response. And when he also told Tony at some point, like, I think he floated it that like, oh, I'll help the family investigate, whatever happened, but didn't, you know, did attend the funeral. Who attended the funeral? Queer. Really? Yeah. We had, man, we spent so much time.

We had a tape that was kind of a pool videography tape. They allowed one camera into the funeral and then disseminated it because there was so much news interest at that time. Man, Christian scrubbed that tape so much trying to. to find Quayar in the footage. It would have been incredible to find it. But, you know, smart enough guy to either got lucky or was smart enough to stay away from the camera. And then additionally, is the story true that he died on a Saturday and they didn't tell the family until Monday? Danny Casillero.

Yeah. Correct. Why would they have waited so long? Well, that was one of the other. They did. but his ID was in the room. It's not like they had to like identify who he was. Right.

The initial thing was, I mean, that was one of the number one red flags for the family. It just was like he died two days ago and you've embalmed the body. Like what about an autopsy? And they're like, well, you know,

what, you guys aren't open on Saturday? You're going to be until Monday to jump. But it's also like there's like very few casilleros in the United States and I'm pretty sure they're all related. and they all know each other. You can call any of them and you find out who to talk to. But that was like an initial thing of like what is going on here,

some sort of conspiracy, what's happening here? The mundane truth of it. Basically, they called the Fairfax, Danny lived in Fairfax County. So Martinsburg called Fairfax to send an officer to personally notify the family. So that officer drives to, and Danny is a single man. who lives alone. This officer drives to Danny Castellero's home and leaves a business card,

please call me, this is important, here's my number. And nobody calls him because nobody lives there anymore. God, dude. But there's other Castellaros in Fairfax, you know. When did he leave the card? On Saturday. Okay.

Yeah. So it's just kind of like a bad police work, comedy of errors, tragedy of errors kind of situation for that. And the people, the guy who you said wrote the article for the village voice who believes that he was killed himself, how does that guy, how does he rationalize the fingernails missing and the tendons being severed and the blood everywhere? I think that he is. So, but he also, he's solved the Lepenka bombing. You know, you talk to Danny Sheehan.

that's the case that that is that that Danny brought forth with the with the with the ended up being like the same contra contra Martha honey avergan case yeah but I just want to say Christian knows more about this but like I just want to say like I think that Doug leaves open the possibility of anything but his default position maybe kind of like mine is just like in the absence of evidence of of of a murder you have to go with what seems to be the evidence which like there's a note and he killed himself. Like that's how he sort of looks at it. Am I right?

Yeah, because he's going based, basing it on the physical evidence. No forced entry. Unfortunately, the physical evidence is sort of controlled by the Martinsberg police or what they want to leak out. We, another Nichols, we, basically a family friend or kind of a family acquaintance. Like the medical examiner from Louisville, where we're from, this name's also Nichols. No relation. Yeah, no relation.

We gave him all of the medical forensic files for him to study. And then we had a meeting with him and we went through it all. And he said, and this guy's like, I mean, he founded the medical examiner's office in the 70s. and he's like one of the top guys. Has he seen people that had committed suicide by cutting their own wrists? I think he's seen everything, you know, under the sun. But basically what he doesn't...

What he said, he was just like, oh, what are you got here, boys, is suicide. Yeah. But the thing is, here's the thing that nobody talks about in medical examiner offices. Well, let me give one more thing before you because I know where your punchline is. But the other thing that he said is,

The other thing he said, he's like, well, Dr. Frost, the medical examiner of West Virginia, who did the autopsy, he's like he's not doing you a lot of favors here. Like, there's not a lot of details in the medical examiner's report that would really show everything that you would need to know to understand this case. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. And it's kind of like a slightly cursory examination. Yeah, he wasn't like, this is the most beautifully laid out pathology report I've ever seen, boys. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'm going to teach you.

There's a lot of information. Yeah. Yeah. No, but the thing is that's sort of like, you know, once you're like a total weirdo freak like me, there are leave no trace hitman. It's a job that people do. Right. And the medical examiner doesn't count that in, you know.

I mean, I guess they would go insane every single case. But what? Did someone repel through the window? Right. You know, fly in. and like, you know, did like Ethan from Mission Impossible do it? You know, you know. Right.

I forgot what I was going somewhere with that. Yeah, no. What I would be interested in finding out was like there's got to be a way to find, like, some sort of record of a history of people who have committed suicide by slashing their own wrists and what it looks like, right? Like, how deep are the cuts? Do they typically do eight cuts? They typically cut the tendons?

in our kind of cursory research on that stuff. I mean, it's, there's everything under the sign. Also, the fingernail issue that you bring up. Yeah, do you always? Danny was a nail biter. And his nails were in the water for so long. You got to, you got to, you got to,

gives the skin and the tissue gets like kind of waterlogged and soggy. I don't know. How long, though? For hours? Yeah, I mean, he's found around 12.30 p.m. And they said that the time at death was somewhere around. You know, they couldn't place exactly, but I think it was like 9 to 9.30 a.m. You sit in a bath with living tissue, the beating heart for an hour and you're like all soggy, you know.

Like just getting like a real roundtable about this right here, you know, which I think is a good opportunity. Like one thing that we don't go into in the show, because we're really intent on. Of course, we wanted to find out what happened to Danny, but we're really into also explaining Danny's story that he was on to. So nobody's ever really encapsulated it, I think, in the way that we did. And so what we don't do is kind of like your traditional true crime thing, where you go into like, here's like, all the forensic evidence of every single thing. You know, we're not forensic pathologist, and it would have just,

it would have been impossible to do it within the four episodes time that we had. And it would have stopped it down to a point where we're not telling a story anymore. we're just basically doing like a different thing. It's a different thing and that's a cool thing and maybe we'll do something like that in the future. But I would just, there's a couple interesting things that like the theory of the Martin'sburg police is that this guy, Danny Castellero,

spent the entire weekend, or we, he's got there Thursday, he dies Saturday morning, drinking. You know, just like drinking himself to death in some ways. You know, just like he's drinking wine, he's drinking beer, blah blah and he's like you know obviously in their mind wasted because he's so pissed off that he never got anywhere with this story and he

kills himself in this kind of desperate weekend but the problem is like there's no there's hardly any trace of alcohol in his there's no trace of alcohol in his blood and there's hardly any in his urine but there's like beer cans in the room there's beer cans there's a half a wine bottle

next to the bathtub, you know, it's like... Right. But there's also shoe string, there's like a shoe string on his body that came from shoes from his apartment or from his house. Well, you put that into the other category of like, oh, he planned on it.

There's all kinds of different, like, conflicting. Totally. Right. But, but, yeah, to me that... Well, he never locked his door. The thing that, to me, is like, yeah, it's just like,

if your theory is that he was drinking the whole weekend and it got wasted and killed himself. Like, you know, your heart stops beating when you kill yourself. And your liver stops processing alcohol. So one would think that there would be some kind of alcohol in your system if you're wasted when you're killing yourself. He also weirdly was last seen at the Sheets coffee shop, which is a block from the Sheridan, where he died, at midnight buying a, a cup of coffee which is like a...

Yeah, you don't typically mix coffee with booze. Yeah, and then he died they think eight hours later. Yeah, it's... So what was going on? Right, yeah. He goes to the...

He goes to the Sheets coffee shop at midnight. There's two women there. One's behind the counter and another's a customer who's just a friend of the lady behind the counter and he orders coffee.

He has to wait for them to brew it because they didn't have any. so he just, she's... Because it's midnight. Yeah, it's midnight. So he just hangs out there for like 10 minutes or whatever. And she's just like, yeah, he seemed like nice guy. Like we just kind of chatted up.

Wow. You know, just like shot the shit for a few minutes. And then she gave him the coffee for free because she was like he had to wait. So I gave it to him for free. Just to be nice. And then he walks back, presumably walks back to the Sheridan and to drink his coffee. Where he then becomes so distraught that he can't even write a full suicide. side note and sign it.

And he has a fear of blood, which we don't even get into in the show. And he had a fear of needles and blood, which I also do. And so I really empathized with his, with what, with his supposed suicide, because I was like, I have that same fear.

There's no way I would go out that way. No way. I would do anything else. And I, you know, obviously don't want to die. I like life. Yeah, make that very clear.

But I, I wouldn't, Yeah, I wouldn't, no, no, no fucking way what I cut myself ever, you know. Right. Because I hate my, I hate, blood is really cool when it's inside the body. What sort of backlash, if any, have you guys gotten from the documentary since it's come out, since it's been out? Have you gotten any? We expected, I think that we were expecting a lot more, you know, especially from like, I don't know what we thought would happen, but we really, I, I don't know, I don't.

I always worried about like this thing comes out and like people are after us or or it's a flop because it's too confusing or people seem to love it you know but but so and and I also make. Royce you pulled up and I imagine that it was a pretty good popular hit well you just missed the helicopter too no Zach had to go around to open the back door because it didn't the handle is broken on my side so sorry oh okay of the Uber. Yeah. So, and I think I make a point of not reading too much of our press because I find even the positive stuff

like slightly depressing because I'm like, that wasn't the point I was trying to make there. It's like I'm such a critic, I guess. Right. But someone said don't read reviews. You know, it's kind of like a mantra you hear about people that make films. And I don't.

Like, I didn't read any of the reviews. But people have mentioned certain things that they've read to me. It seems like it's mostly been positive. There's like been one negative review of somebody who wanted it to be a little bit more like cut into bite-sized chunks for them to digest it. And it's like, dude.

It's like the hardest story to tell that I can imagine. Just pay attention. Watch it twice. It's actually, the headline on that one was, new Netflix documentary, sheds little light on, you know,

whatever the castler case. It's little light. Dude, we shed. People have got their brain. melted, you know, they, we showed a lot of fucking light on this story.

I, yeah, it's like, I guess anything that has a even a remotely, like even intentionally, slightly ambiguous ending, I don't think it's ambiguous, so I think it's showing something of a more deeper reality of what this is like, this story is like, is just like, oh no,

like they didn't find anything. It's like, dude, we've, we didn't find anything. We've, we've got the tapes of these guys talking about murders that are completely unsolved that we give like a very logical and well-researched theory on what actually happened. We go into never before seeing stuff about a serial killer who's working for the FBI. You know, it's like that nobody has ever heard of. Rarely has he been mentioned outside of this show. There's almost no articles about him, no information, not very much information about him, publicly available.

we picked up Michael Rukhanes shootout from prison. Sorry, we get like, I get really like, I rate when I started thinking about people being like, well, but what did you,

where'd you land on this thing? It's like, you didn't even know anything about this case before we made this four hour thing. Exactly. We put our lives into this thing. And I feel like we came up with a ton of stuff. And I'm sorry if a few things are ambiguous,

but that's, you have to grapple with that. Life is ambiguous. The intelligence community is extremely ambiguous. Criminal community is extremely ambiguous. And you need to be able to, to grapple with that. Well, it's kind of like the ending of Tom's book, right? Tom didn't have a conclusion at the end of his book. He just kind of like just documents the whole journey and basically like unravels the whole ball of yarn and exposes everything that was a part of it. Things that

nobody knew about like from the probation officers and all the operations that were tied to it. And like at the end of it, there's no conclusion. But you can't be mad at it because it's a fucking incredible. Right. I think there is a conclusion, but it's a conclusion that like, for his book, which is like it's a conclusion of like you need to extrapolate on this and like sometime he wanted to tie Manson directly to the MK Ultra. That was his whole point

right and it's like well he did a damn good job of getting as close as you can and showing the inter, whether it was a direct connection there's an interconnected nature to it and like illustrating you know how Operation Chaos and MK Ultra functioned so you can

kind of like make you know logical conclusions and you know maybe I'm just ignorant but his stuff about Jolly West just I didn't know anything about and learning just the fact of his existence and how he existed and what happened with killing the elephant

shit killing the elephant you know and I think certain people probably knew that story before Tom did this book. It's like double life of like coming in and being this like lauded psychology expert but then all through hypnosis and memory expert like but Tom Tom

it's like you have to give him all credit in the world for the simple fact of connecting him with Sid Seamer or whatever it's called and his like code name right Oh right right right not Sid Seamer That's his code name I think No Sid Seamer is another

Sorry oh shit Sid Seamer's Sorry sorry sorry what's it Sydney Gottlie But he's under a code name In the thing SG is the initials that he uses In their correspondence yeah right Sorry right there's so many SIDS so many nickels so many different things

Anyway, I know that there's been like Some people sent us some article That's like critical of us For all this stuff But it's like I skimmed it It's full of like complete untruths And it was just like spelling errors Christians obsessed with spelling errors

It's sloppy journalism We've spelled things wrong But we have the graciousness to correct our misspellings And like you know But just makes allegations about us about us being CIA mouthpieces?

It's like, it's, I don't know. What do you, how do you even respond to that? It's like, how do you, Steve,

let me pull up my, like, the conclusion of the article that we were looking at. Oh, yeah, the cam article. The conclusion of that was, was fantastic.

Yeah, basically that article basically concludes that you guys are, uh, peddling the CIA narrative of conspiracy theories by labeling the show conspiracy,

American conspiracy. What was the end of it? Yeah, go back to the very bottom. Oh, shit. There's that great. There's me in a picture where I'm... Ah, where to go. I think it's the very...

Oh, yeah, yeah, I blew it up. There it is. American conspiracy. The Octopus murders effectively serves as the agenda of the CIA and continuing a cover-up. I guess I almost said as much. Massive crimes surrounding the theft of the promise software and trying to discourage further investigation into the crimes of the Octopus.

I don't understand how anybody can draw that conclusion from... I mean, I said earlier, I guess, that we effectively serve the agenda of the CIA by saying that whatever makes the CIA seem badass helps their thing, but we don't help their cover up, nor do we help. I don't know. It's like, how do you respond to this? Two paragraphs above saying Robert Altman, not one of my favorite directors of cinema, but Robert A. Altman, who has worked at this bank, BCCI, a lot of people have seen Robert Altman on their star map,

and I think that's some sort of... We're talking about a different Robert Altman. We love Nashville. Okay. So, Robert Wright Altman had reluctantly agreed to meet Castellero, who was threatening to give the checks from the Kuwait Royal Family to purchase tow missiles. Okay.

This is saying that this guy that worked at, actually its first American bank, not BCCI, was reluctantly agreed to... Where did they learn that information? That's based on what Let me click the link Let's click the link Let's see where we learn about how he reluctantly agreed to meet Gessler

This article is full of conjecture Okay so it's going to go to another article On the same exact website That's SEO man That's how you climb the search engines Go to it? Can you go to the other article? It wouldn't load So I don't know if it's bro

It works I don't know It's then a self-reinforcing I haven't even looked at this, but I'm just assuming that it's probably going to be... It's by the same article. The same journal. And so it's going to be circular. It's what's called a tautology, right?

A circular argument. And so it's like, I don't even know how to respond to something like this because there's no way to prove it like a negative of this. It's like, I don't know, dude. Like, do we help the cover up? I don't think so. Do we bring new information to light that whoever wrote this had never known before? Absolutely. It's like, what's your point?

Like, we're helping. we're discouraging research? Like, in what universe are we discouraging more research? I think this article also says that the meeting that we had in Conway, South Carolina, it quotes someone saying that that meeting was

staged in the film. It was just like, it quotes a guy from Australia who, like, I've talked to on the phone a few times, but like never about that. And, okay, so you can quote like a monkey,

you know, about something I mean how do you I sound like I'm okay who no why

why why why does he know they also didn't ask us for comment so how is that fair journal

I knew if we like started going into this I was going to start getting like so heated and so annoyed but it's just it's just

so annoying every footnote of this article goes back to this Peter Osborne guy he's in Australia oh that's the

Australian guy yeah he that's Oh, I think that's a picture of him. There he is. I don't know. It's hard for us to divine what's in Peter Osborne's mind

and why he thinks that what he thinks in this article, which I have to be honest, I just haven't actually fully read. But the things that we've discussed, like, it's just, they're just not true. It's hard to argue with things that are just simply not true. And we also, like, he was one of the guys who spent, like, he spent the most time investigating this case, right?

He spent, like, 30 years or something. I gave him a lot of material. in 2016 of Danny's notes He's like the expert on the case But he was like You know you've done a great thing By going to the archive

That had all of Danny's notes And copying them It's like what took you so long dude It's like the first thing I did I tried to just Learn about the investigative Kessler case The first thing you do

It's like Go to the archive and get his notes And read those right How much collaboration Did you guys have on the research Even in your early days, I'm sure you learned about him. In the early days, there was like an email chain where this guy, Gordon Seville and his partner at the time, Peter, who they've since had a falling out, and then Bill Hamilton, and then this other, like, pretty awesome kind of FOIA expert named Emma Best. We all just kind of like exchanged information over email for, you know, a few years.

And then it got a little kooky, and Emma left and I left. Or whatever, it died down or whatever. There was, I'm not sure exactly what happened. Hmm. But it was mostly Emma, Emma's foias and the documents that I got, you know, stayed side. Because the other guys were, one guy was in Australia, and the other guy was in Canada, and they didn't come here, and all the files were here. Right.

But we gave them, you know, all this stuff. And we put it on our past. Well, what happened really was that Christian had gone to, when we show it in the movie, Christian had gone to the Missouri Archive, captured pictures of all of Danny's notes, and then gave them to Emma, who then, I think without Christian's permission, but it wasn't a big deal, I guess, but put those all on Archive.org. And so, and that's years and years ago, and you can go to Archive.org. I think anybody, it's funny, like, anybody who knew about this case before we released this documentary, a lot of them would have seen documents of Danny's notes on Archive.org, I think, and doesn't realize, like, they actually kind of come from Christian doing the work. And Emma, it was me.

And Emma posting them. And you see his name, like, she put his name. She put my Twitter handle under all the stuff that I contributed. Yeah. Oh, it was nice. So Christian Many of the Danny notes It actually got me in trouble later

I had to go back Because you know The versions that you'll see on Archive.org are like Really janky And like Because I was just like I wasn't photographing them to put them in a film I was just photographing him to have them

Right right And so I'm just like running through boxes You know it takes five days And there's like they just look like crap And the color balance is bad And the resolution is bad And so basically I had to go back with a good camera and good lighting to get good versions of all of them for the film. Because we highlight, we show Danny's handwritten notes throughout the whole movie and we've got to zoom in on them and have them look clean and not pixelated.

So I just did another week back, you know, photographing them all over again. but they almost didn't let me come because they looked me up and they were like dude you put this all you broke our rules like you signed something when you came here saying that like this is for research purposes only and you put it on the internet

like what do you think and they were like really pissed and I had to like someone else leaked it wasn't me and you know eventually just went to the castle wrung it up the ladder and it was like it was a copy it was where they're worried about copyright claim but I was like let's this

the copyright the Tony Casselow has the copyright of Danny Kesslero's original writing and he allowed us to use the writing. So there's not, yeah. There's no copyright concern anymore. This is a real entry into the minuscule process-oriented parts of us making this documentary. If you're interested, how has working on this documentary changed your outlook on the world? or like even like your outlook on the media

or anything you see in the news or just even living your daily life. Well you can like, you know, you can do research and you can do deep research. And I kind of have this sort of like, I feel like I don't know about anything that I haven't researched deeply. So I basically don't know about anything except this case.

And yeah, it's made me more skeptical. I mean, all this stuff about like, subterfuge and deception and like you know the various cover ups and I didn't used to care about any of this stuff I mean I'm sure it's very similar for you

the people that you've talked to you know in these long intimate conversations and all the research you've done on all these kind of like out there topics like things aren't as they seemed you know when we were in third grade and we assume the way the world was it's not really like that you know once you start like

digging it's it's weird I mean, the way you put it in the documentary, that scene where you talked about, it's like the monster hiding under the bed is real. And you even show this crazy, fucking creepy monster hiding under a bed. That was an octopus. That was an octopus. We just went full nature show on it, which we'd been wanting to do. But what about you, Zach? How has it changed you?

Or has it? I'm just the same old dude. We talk about MK Ultra all the time. Yeah, you know, more, I feel like since Christian had been working on this for 12 years, like I watched it, him change, you know, especially in the early years when we weren't really filming much. That was kind of scary for a little while just to see like, oh God, like, is Christian losing it? And then is like, oh my gosh, is he dealing with, like, people who he shouldn't be dealing with? Like, just multiple levels of freaked outness once you're on the outside of this. looking in. And then for me,

it's a shorter time period of me really engaging with this. And I just simply would not have cared. I just wouldn't have known about a lot of this stuff without Christian, you know? And so it's like a tight timeframe tighter time frame for me.

And I don't know if it makes life any easier. Just being like so skeptical about any narrative you're being fed. But I guess it also is like By the end of the edit, I was so, I was so tired. And I was kind of like another part of like checked out in this. Just, you know, the last few weeks, I was just exhausted.

And Zach is like got even better sources than me now. And he's on the phone late at night. And he's also like, he's the captain of this like post-production ship. And figuring out how all the pieces go together and help working with the composer and working with the edit and dealing with the executives and the partners and everything. I'm just kind of and the poor guy then he's like just like on the phone like for hours on end

late into the night like talking to like these news sources that he came up with who ended up giving us some amazing materials of the last minute and like you know but bless his heart he was like you know he's he pretends like he's not he's so deep into it I mean I would imagine that this coming out

would also have make a lot of other important information or sources kind of like emerge. In the course of this three or whatever, however long conversation, I've probably gotten five to eight DMs about other conspiracies or related conspiracies

like people are like coming out of the woodwork. Please only message me if you have actionable intel. Please keep it succinct. I mean like directly relating to this. I would imagine that people would come out of the woodwork that would like potentially be a huge help to.

It's been tough because we thought, A, that we would get a little break releasing the show. We knew that we would do some press and try to get the show out there. And then we thought maybe like a little vacation. Like a little, you know, there's been years that we've been doing it.

It was supposed to only be like a year and a half. And that hasn't happened. It doesn't feel like it's going to happen anytime soon because, yeah, as soon as, I mean, I guess we should have guessed this, but as soon as it came out, yes, people started telling us stuff and some of it,

some of it is at least worth researching and seeing if these people are telling a real story because it's damn interesting. And it's that same process I was describing earlier where it's like what names are they mentioning and what's the chronology and like what are stuff that we know that's not in the film that like, you know what I'm saying? It's like what do you know and how importantly, how do you know it? Right. Now it gets even harder too because now you just have got people. You must assume that somebody either people want to fuck with us because it's fun for them. Or you could assume the even worse idea, which is the more sinister idea, which is that what if people are actively feeding us disinformation because of what we've uncovered, not just to like be internet weirdos, but to actually mess with us. Makes it, oh, God.

For me, it just starts to just get into this like crazy mind, like game theory. sort of territory where you're like, wait, what is real? Like, how do we even go about figuring this out? But ultimately, it's like, I guess it is the classic thing. We have to be, we had to be skeptical of every single story before and after. Well, what are you guys going to do next? I mean, do you guys have any plans to, if you guys did go back at this story, do you have an idea of what angle you would take or where you would go with it?

Or what are you guys plans? There's a lot of. stuff that we couldn't fit in. And stuff I know we covered, we talked about with you that like would have been nice, but we probably wouldn't do a film on. Like, I don't think we'd do the follow up on. I don't know if we could do the follow up on Cabot. There's a ton of story.

We probably wouldn't go back into Cabazon. I'm not sure if we can go to Cabazon. I'm not sure if there's enough. But we will probably, I would like to go back to San Francisco and, you know, narratively. Yeah, there's stories that are like, there's little hints of things that I think maybe if we developed, characters and stuff that you might see for a second. or that we go into like one part of their story that actually have a huge other backstory

that's like worth an episode or worth half an episode. There's also like the idea of like what if, yeah, there's entire stories connected to Danny's story that we didn't cover. There's also all like in episode three, we talk about like the octopus. There's like the BCCI,

the Nugan Hand, savings and loan. Like Wilson Terpal. Like we in our film we only do two arms of the, like we only really dig. We don't do a deep, deep dive. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, those are all amazing, on their own, amazing stories that could be, we could put, use this sort of template of filmmaking that we've kind of, that we're using. And it would just, it would pop.

It would be below people's minds. And we, it would be, it would be amazing. But there's so many areas to go. It's so little time. Right. Yeah. I think that it's like, we just. designed this to be a self-contained

thing. And this idea of like, oh, did you leave the ending open? No, like we left the ending on a feeling that I think is important. As a conclusion, the problem is that I think I was talking about

somebody with it. It's like we're actually making a nature show. Like, we're showing how an ecosystem works. And there's kind of no beginning and no end to an ecosystem. Right. And there's questions that we have that are unresolved, of course. But then there's just like the rest of the nature program of all the other little creatures inside of the aquarium. David Attenborough DVD number two.

Yeah. So there's, but I think that we wouldn't want to do it unless we felt strongly that it would be just as good, if not better, than what we've done before. You know, I don't want to just like pursue stuff because it's like, oh, well, now you've got like a brand and you can like keep on like doing all this stuff. Season one, season two, season two. Yeah, it's like we, I have, I have zero desire to like brand it as such unless it's like, man, you guys, much like the octopus, it's like you start and you think you've got something cool and then you find something that's like even bigger and bolder that you can come out with that like people haven't seen before. That would be dope. Mm-hmm. Do you guys have to deal with people trying to spy on your phones and spy on your fucking emails and I don't know.

I don't even know. You never had to even think about it? I think about it all the time. I have no qualification for being able to suss that out. Really? You sleep with a gun under your pillow? All the time. Don't let anybody forget it.

And we're a good, good freaking shot to... Plutonian bullets? Kentucky boys. We actually did get the plutonium bullets. Yeah. We shouldn't have said we didn't. We did. And we have a variety of home alone like traps surrounding any residents we've ever...

Micro machines, paint can. Pink cans, the third pink cans. It's Homeland 2. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Well, thank you guys for doing this, man. Thank you so much, dude.

This has been fun to talk to you. Incredible. Other than watching your documentary on Netflix, you know, Only fans, Twitter. Only Octopus. Yo underscore Christian on Twitter. I haven't really embraced Twitter that much yet.

And I usually use Instagram. I'm Christian Hayd Hansen there. and we should have done like a sort of like place where it's really just octopus content or something like that but we were so busy just trying to finish the dang thing that we didn't like get super organized on the social media front I want to model my account after Tom O'Neill's where there's like continued stuff that didn't that hit the cutting room floor yeah that you know we could start putting out on our social media yeah there's a lot of stuff that would be cool to just show exactly decided to go public he was private for a really long time.

Who? Zach. I just like, I don't want to advertise it, but it's creepy out. I just find the social media and the internet to be a generally scary world.

It is. Definitely. It's a wilderness. Talking about a wilderness and mirrors. Well, thank you guys again. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You guys got to catch a flight.

Goodbye, world. Goodbye. Thanks so much for having us.