Danny Jones Podcast - #66 - MK Ultra: The CIA's Secret Quest for Mind Control | Stephen Kinzer

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling, and he’s spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times.  On this podcast we dive deep into his most recent work studying the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments, MK Ultra of the 1950s and ’60s, and the CIA’s “Poisoner and chief” Sidney Gotlieb who conducted brutal experiments with pills, powders, potions, and LSD in an attempt to control peoples minds of foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro. http://stephenkinzer.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, world. In 1999, entertainment reporter Tom O'Neill accepted a three-month assignment from a film magazine to write a story about the infamous Charles Manson-Tate La Bianca murders that changed Hollywood. Tom missed his deadline, but continued to investigate the murders, falling down a 20-year investigative rabbit hole that birthed his new book, Chaos, which is the product of those two decades of meticulous research, hundreds of interviews, and falling out with publishers. that led to financial and legal repercussions for Tom. Tom's book, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the secret history of the 60s presents his research into the background and motives of the Tate-Labianca murders committed by the Manson family in 1969.

The evidence Tom has uncovered blows massive holes in the official narrative of the Charles Manson story and exposes corruption and cover-ups and Manson's connection to the CIA's MK Ultra LSD testing and psychological warfare mind control programs. Tom's book is the holy grail of true crime. And on this episode, Tom tells some

shocking stories that had to be left out of the book. So without further ado, buckle the fuck up and enjoy this terrifying episode with Tom O'Neill. Mr. Tom O'Neill. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming out here, man. I really appreciate you being new. So your book, chaos. What a fascinating journey. This has been for you, a 20-year journey to create this thing. 20 years, it's actually came out two years ago this past week, two-year birthday. Oh, wow. I've never stopped continuing to report on the same subject. Really?

Did you think you'd be able to just kind of wash your hands of it afterwards? Well, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it entirely, but I hoped to. And I think I didn't work for like two days after it came out, and then it was just all of a sudden going right back to the open-ended stuff. And the good thing is I get lots of people that reach out to me with information once the book came out. and you get a lot of nuts too. But one out of ten is somebody with good information. A lot of people, once they saw that I was a legitimate, credible person,

then they started trusting me with stuff. So I get people from places that I would never be able to find them on my own. A lot of them are retired military, retired law enforcement. And they'll say, okay, I know a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And then I go through it. And the ones that are giving me stuff that I can substantiate, I'm going back to. and talking about doing the second book with my collaborator and publisher. Yeah, but it opened up a whole new can of worms of things that people that were coming,

that are coming to you now because of the book that you probably never would have known about with you being the one doing the outreach. And the other thing is there are people who are even more obsessed with the subjects in my book than I am, and some of them had all this backlog of information and didn't know what to do with it, and they didn't know what I was doing because I was working in a vacuum for 20 years. A lot of them sound like they never get out of their house, but they get access to documents. They do FOIA requests. A lot of it is government stuff that's really kind of buttressing what I have in here,

but it's adding to it and giving it more of a foundation. And I told my agent, or excuse me, I told my collaborator all along that I didn't want to do a second book unless I had something really explosive to add, you know, to anything that we began in the first that couldn't finish. And he said, you know, we have so much stuff we didn't put in the first book. It's the second book and it'd be pretty quick to turn around because a lot of it was already written and we just set it aside because it was already too long. But we're probably going to decide in the next couple of months, you know, how to go about it,

whether to, it's going to happen. I just know it is. I'm not going to do it alone because I can't take another 20 years. This guy, he and I became such a good team in two years. We turned around a book that I'd already been. working 18 years on. Wow. So you like my shirt?

Marilyn Manson? Yeah, you got to be careful if you're wearing a shirt like that right now because he's been canceled, I believe. Yeah, he's been canceled, officially canceled. Yeah. And you're a big fan? I've always been a big fan of Marilyn Manson. I've always been a big fan of Marilyn Manson. Yeah, since I was a little kid.

The first thing I ever saw was when he did like the MTV Music Awards or whatever. I think I was maybe 10 years old. Something like that really on. I was super intrigued and followed his music ever since. Yeah, well, I mentioned... He may have been a piece of shit person behind doors, but my opinion on it, my, you know, far away,

20,000 foot opinion on it is that if you're getting into a relationship, a romantic relationship with that guy, you kind of have to have an idea what to expect. It's not going to be normal. Yeah, yeah. Well, unfortunately, I think the visit was kind of... I mentioned earlier that he invited me up to his house

and I think it was last February. Did he really? The last... I can't even remember. out. It was well before the scandal. After your book came out. He had the book and he started reaching out to my agent to see if I would meet with him and he was so cryptic in emails that my agent didn't think it was really him. And he told his secretary to get rid of him and she was a fan. So she said, if I get on the phone with him, I'll know whether it's him or not. And she got on the

phone with him and she said it's him and he just said I would love to have him come to my house I have something to show him that I don't think he knows about or that he's ever seen before and it terrifies me to even possess it so she said he said you could call him so he and I got in the phone he didn't think it was safe to tell me what he had on the phone he wanted me to come see or hear it he was being very vague and the fact is he didn't need anything I mean I love going into unusual situations. And I wasn't a huge fan. I actually became a little bit of one when I did some homework.

But my collaborator is a musician. He's an ex-drummer, and he loved him. And he had just finished and published a book on Prince where he was working with Prince on his memoir, and then Prince died. It's actually how I got him as my collaborator, because when Prince died, their project came to a screeching halt. And then he had to wait a year or two

to figure out whether or not, He had enough material to finish the book without prints. But I told Dan, my collaborator, I said, how would you like to go with me to Marilyn Manson's? I don't know if I want to go up there alone. And he said, are you kidding me? So he got on the plane just to go up there. So we went to the castle in the hills.

And he, I don't know if he's ever going to listen to this. No, he won't. I've been trying to get him on this for years. He'll never do it. Number one, I did love the guy, but he didn't have anything. What he had was an audio tape that he thought

he had found in the house. He lived at the Tate House where the murders happened. He and Trent Reznor moved into that. Oh, they recorded an album there, right? Yeah, well, they were living there and recording an album. Right. And while they were there, he found stuff that had been, like,

left behind by the previous owner and tenants. And one of them was an audio tape of Roman Polanski's police interrogation. And I had it already, you know. And you can get it. I had it actually 20 years before when nobody had it. But in the last five or six years, it somehow got out and there are bootlegs and you can buy it online. Right. So it was difficult because Maryland was, you know, already partying. We didn't even, he said, don't come before 11 o'clock at night. So we got up to

really? And it was actually a historic night if you're a fan because it was the first time he and his guitarist who he threw out of the band a number of years before. Twiggy. Twiggy were together and they had reconciled recently, but they hadn't met yet. So he invited Twiggy over to hang out with me and Dan and him and talk about Manson. And Twig, I guess, had been through rehab and everything. They were both really sweet guys, but Twiggy was sober. And Marilyn has this amazing screening room that feels more like a harem, unsurprisingly. There's no furniture. You just sit on pillows and it's pitch black.

And there's just huge, what would have been a huge, beautiful window with a view of the valley, because he's high up in the hills, but it's all blacked up with bricks. Because I think all the windows in his house were like that. I'm not 100% sure. So we just

spent like three hours talking about the book, and he was trying to find the point in the tapes that he said, well, even if I had him, you probably don't have this. And I'm pretty sure I do, Maryland. And then I thought, well, I'm just going to humor him. I didn't mind. We were still having fun. Right. But thank God for Twiggy, because Maryland didn't have to operate any of the technical stuff. So Twiggy was going through everything. And were they as little like cassette tapes? Yeah, there were cassette tapes. And we finally, when we were done listening to them at about three or four in

the morning, let's just say there was a lot of substances offered to us. And Dan and I were on an adventure, so we accepted them. Twiggy stayed away from everything. Right. And I think he left at about three in the morning. And then the even better stuff came out because he didn't want to have to tempt Twiggy. Twiggy.

Yeah. And then at about 7 in the morning, I said to Dan, I go, because Dan's 20 years younger than me, I said, Dan, if I do any more of this stuff, I'm going to have a massive heart attack or a stroke. I go, I can't die in Marilyn Manson's house. He's got enough problems.

You know what that's happening. Oh my God. So we literally left. at 7 or 7.30 in the morning. And it was fun. I mean, the one thing I can tell you about him, since you are a fan, is he's one of the smartest guys and funniest.

I mean, he could be a stand-up comic. The problem was he was so kind of, let's say, feeling good that he slurs a lot. And he also talks under his breath, and he doesn't, he's not performative. He'll just say these off-the-wall remarks that almost make you pissing your parents. and I missed so much because he was slurring a lot.

And I thought, this guy could have a whole, like, 10 other career. I know he acts now, but, you know, he's a really intelligent guy. And, you know, he was having problems with his fiancé then. It was the night before the Oscars. And they had had a huge fight because they disagreed on what he was going to wear to the Oscar party. They weren't going to the Oscars, but they were going to the Big Benity Fair party. And he helped Dan and I help him decide what to wear. Oh, really?

Yeah, and he had already, they had been supposed to get married two or three times already, and they kept fighting him and canceling it. She was somewhere in the house. We never met her. Which one? Which women was it? She's his latest. She's a filmmaker.

I can't remember her name. She's beautiful. I mean, he and I, Dan and I, when we looked at her up the next day, she's a beautiful woman. I don't know if she's still with him or if she's made any of these allegations, but he went through all his old ex-girlfriends with us and told us stories. Really? He should have made a son in NDA, but he can trust us, you know. Right.

Yeah, he... Do you drink any absinth? He had it. Yeah. I'd not... He brought out tequila. Oh, okay. And when Dan looked at the tequila, I don't know my tequila.

He said, this is like a 300 bottle of tequila. And, of course, we're sitting on the floor because there's no furniture, and you get kind of uncomfortable. And after you drink a lot of tequila and do a lot of other stuff, you're not as mobile. And at one point, he had brought out a second bottle of it. And I knocked it over right after he opened it. And he has a shag rug. Oh, Marilyn, I'm so sorry.

I spilled a bottle. He goes, oh, man, I got cases of them in the basement. Don't worry about it. So, yeah. Oh, my fucking God. What a story. Yeah, yeah. You know, he was an open book.

We were talking about the rumors about, you know, the rib being cut out. Oh yeah, what did he say about that? He said it wasn't true. He had a scar there for something. I can't remember half of what happened that night. Luckily, Dan took notes the next day, so I call up Dan to refresh. I should have done that.

I didn't know you were a fan. That's one of the most classic rumors about him is removing the rib to suck his own dick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he had a bunch of funny, witty answers when people would ask him that in articles and stuff. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, he's incredibly intelligent and witty.

Yeah. Like on the spot. being able to just destroy people. Yeah, and he had just finished his record, which had a song, or maybe it was a title, had chaos in the title. Oh, yeah, we are chaos. Yeah, and my book's called chaos. And he's like, don't you try to sue me for plagiarism,

and I didn't steal it from you. It's a common word. I got, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. But when you're performing it, you know, hold the book up or something for your millions of fans, but I guess he's not going to tour now. Yeah, I don't know if he's doing anything. I don't think he's been in the public at all since Evan Rachel Wood

came out and said all that stuff about him. And then a couple other piled on, I think. Yeah. Yeah. But I think one of his ex-wives actually said that, yeah, like, he does do a lot of dark, demented shit. But he never did anything

that... That was Deida Vantis, I think. She's like, you know, he would never do anything as far as, like, rape somebody or, like... I think he should have stayed with her because she was the one he had the nicest things to say about when we were talking. Yeah, it was a trip.

And then he texted us. I knew he wasn't going to bed. And he had mentioned at some point that he never gets up a four or five in the afternoon. And he did text me at like 5.30 or 6 saying he just wanted to make sure we got home okay and we were fine. I'm like, wow.

I said I couldn't do that a second night in a row. But whenever you do it, after I've had a few days rest and relaxation, just let me know, I'll come back. And then a couple months later, he texted me Easter Sunday morning, so I know he hadn't gone to bed yet at like seven in the morning and just said, Happy Easter, Tom. And I have Marilyn Manson, you know, into my phone.

So I had Marilyn Manson, happy Easter Tom. Wow. Yeah. Oh, man. Man, it's kind of just so bittersweet, just his story, his life, like, you can't be that age and sustain that lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how. So, yeah, it was, he played us some new music that hadn't been released.

He had a music video that hadn't been released. And Dan got to talk to him about music, which made him, you know, so happy. Yeah. But I'm older school. I'm like, before Maryland, my music was Patty Smith. Right, right. The Ramones and stuff like that. Yeah, well, his obsession was with, you know, those days with, you know, just the American obsession with, you know,

and the combination of someone like Charles Manson and his story being a serial killer, he was just as equally, you know, such a part of American culture as Marilyn Monroe was. And that mixed with like the Kennedy, the Kennedy assassination and all the obsession around that. And just, it's just fascinating how obsessed people are with true crime and these kind of cultural, iconic American stories. Definitely. So, so what, what do you, what is the next book going to be? As the next book, how could you possibly expand on everything that you went through over the past 20 years to create this book?

Believe it or not, it wouldn't be that difficult. First of all, for your listeners, if they don't know anything about the book, I don't want it to be oversold. It doesn't answer the biggest questions it raises. Basically, that's why it took so long. I kept looking for a smoking gun to prove the thesis is. There's more than one in here. And my agent kept telling me after like the first five or six years, you've got enough stuff.

You don't have to prove everything. You definitely completely blow apart the official versions of the Manson murders, the reason for the murders, the fact that there were more people involved in the commission of them and the manipulation of Manson. That's huge. That's enough. I was never satisfied because I always felt like I was, you know, one day away going on and on and on.

Yeah. That's what keeps you going, right? Yeah, for better or worse. So what I've gotten since the book came out is I've gotten a lot more substantiation. It's like building a pyramid and I'm almost at the top. And I'm thinking, I told Dan, my collaborator a week or two ago, I said, I think if I can get a few more things in the next month, then I can just, I can stop and we can go. and start on it. If not, I do think we have enough anyway, even if I don't get it, but I'll still want a little more time. We didn't write anything about the Sahan case in the book,

the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination occurred about a year and a month before the tape murders in Los Angeles, and the same cops, same attorneys, same players. And I uncovered a lot of new and pretty compelling information, proving that Sir Ham was a Manchering candidate, somebody who was programmed to be in the pantry. Believe me, I'm not the first one to do that. A lot of really respected writers and authors have been trying to get this case reopened for years. I have some new information, but we couldn't link it to the main psychiatrist in our book, who we alleged manipulated Manson.

He was a good candidate, but I said without linking it, it would have been two or three whole chapters that wouldn't have stayed on our narrative through line in the book. So when we do the new book, I think I will be able to link it. And that's one thing, for instance, that'll be in the new book. And also the Jones Town case, you know, with Jim Jones and the mass suicides and Guyana. All this stuff happened in the Patty Hearst kidnapping. So it's basically just kind of undoing, unraveling a lot of stuff that are pretty much, landmark historic crimes in the United States that occurred in the 60s and I try to stop in the 70s

that were presented to us by media, you know, a media that was complicit with the government and the CIA to cover up truth and realities of how many of these things were provoked. How frustrating is it knowing that there is evidence out there that basically would give you the answers to all this book? Like the, what is it? The guy, Tex Watson, there's those recordings of him. There's tapes that are somewhere that you just can't get your hands on. But it must be so frustrating to know they're there and they exist.

Yeah. That actually, the book kind of ends with me trying to get those tapes. And I won't spoil the story, but that was incredibly frustrating. I hope that comes through in the book because I help, number one, I discovered these tapes existed, that they were in a safe in an attorney's closet in Texas that he had kept since November. of 1969 and it was what he had told me were 20 hours of audio tape of text Watson Manson's kind of right-hand man who did most of the killing and all the murders you know Manson was absent from the murder scenes right the second night of the La Bianca murders he

tied them up and then told the others what to do but left before the murders happened so text before anyone knew who he was who the Manson family was they weren't in the papers yet. Only the police, considered them suspects, had been detained. He had fled home to his little town in Texas where he was from, and the LAPD wanted to interview him as a suspect. So they called up his cousin, who was a lawyer in the small town that he lived in, and the, I'm sure, excuse me, he was the sheriff of that town, and the cousin agreed to take his nephew, or uncle, nephew into custody, while the two LAPD cops came down. And he called the lawyer Bill Boyd,

and Bill Boyd came over and said, I'll represent him. And he said, what are these guys coming down here to talk to you about? He said, I have no idea. He goes, well, something happened in Los Angeles. And he said, it beats me. So the two cops came down and sat down with a lawyer, tax his parents and his uncle, the sheriff. And they said, where were you on the night of August 8, 1916?

August 9, 1969. And the others put it together. And someone said, are you talking about the Sharon Tate murder? And he said, I never knew her had nothing to do with that. So Bill Boyd said the others, can I have a few moments alone with them? And they said, yeah, so they left. And then he said to tax, he said, Charles was his real name. He said, Charles, this is pretty serious allegations.

I want you to think about it. and then answer as honestly as you can these detectives questions. And I'll represent you and make sure you don't go to the death penalty. Because he already knew he could tell that he was getting caught up in some lies. So they left Tex alone for an hour or two and then Bill went back to see Charles and again alone, just one-on-one. He said, you know what these men are here for and he goes, you know that girl Sharon Tate, that actress that they mentioned, he goes, yeah, he goes, I killed her.

And he said, okay, I'm going to tell them you're not talking to them, but that I'm going to represent you. So he said, you're done with my client. You can come back, you know, with a subpoena or whatever, but right now he's my client, and I don't want him answering any questions. So then he went and recorded Charles for two days, just telling everything about how he met Manson, what other people were around. and I called him this lawyer in 2008, I think, to interview him,

and he made the mistake during the interview of telling me, you know, I have these tapes that nobody's ever heard, and they were before anything had been written in the newspaper, so they're probably like the purest account of what really happened. Charles was so honest, and he just talked for about 20 hours, and he said he even described other murders that the police had never learned about. the minute he said that I thought number one

he's implicating his former client who's always your client and other murders and number two he's never going to let me hear those tapes so when I said so you're talking about murders that the police hadn't discovered and he said yeah other murders

and then all of a sudden he realized that he was saying and goes not that Charles had committed but that Charles was aware the others had done and I said well who were they He goes, well, I haven't listened to them in, I guess I know it was like 40 years. He goes, I know there were a couple bikers they killed, and I was already looking into these missing bikers who had been last seen with the group in Death Valley. And I said, Mr. Boy, is there any chance I could come down and listen to the tapes?

And then he got really nervous, because then all of a sudden he's realizing he violated his confidentiality. He said, well, you know, I couldn't do anything without Charles' permission. But I'll ask him, and then that was it. He wouldn't take my phone calls. His secretary would always say, oh, he had no time to see him. He's traveling. And after like three months of blowing me off,

I told the secretary to tell him I was going to write to Charles in prison, tell him what he said and ask for an interview. And she had just told me he was in China on business. So she said, I'll tell him. And she hung up, and the phone rang a minute later. And my caller ID said McKinney, Texas. And it was him on the phone. Don't you dare write to my client.

if you say that I said all that all deny it. God damn it. And I said, but you said it all on audio tape. He said, I didn't give you permission to tape me. I said, not only did you give me permission, you did it on tape. God damn it. So he died two months later of a heart attack on a treadmill at about age 68 or 7, I think. I hope that I had nothing to do with it.

Oh, you definitely did. Long story short, the tapes went into, his firm had gone bankrupt. So they went to the bankruptcy court, and for about two years, I tried to get the court to release the tapes to me rather than put them up for auction or destroy them or whatever they were going to do. And again, it's a very long story, but I'll keep it short. The trustee in charge of them ended up contacting the deputy DA in Los Angeles, who knew what I was doing and really wanted the tapes too and was kind of advising me. And I said, if you don't think I'm legit, you can get in touch with him.

So she did. And then, of course, stupidly, I was naive enough to think that that wouldn't ruin my chances. But sure enough, Patrick Secura arranged to get the tapes from her. And he had always promised me that the minute, if he got them first, I would sit down with him and listen to them for the first time. Who was Patrick? He was the deputy DA who was in charge of all the parole hearings of the Manson family. So he started, he called me up really excited. He said he can't believe it.

They're going to release the tapes to me. But we can't let the press know because if the press finds out and text finds out, he's going to stop it. But somebody down there in Texas found out, oh, no, the trustee told Watson's current attorney because she had to. I don't know why Patrick thought that wasn't going to happen. So then Watson immediately went to court to stop the tapes from being released. and then there was a two or three year process from the county court to state court to state supreme court where they finally decided that the tapes should be released and then the LAPD and the DA's office got them and then they wouldn't talk to me anymore and to this day they're sitting in a vault because I believe those tapes tell the truth about why things happen how they really happened and who was behind the scenes manipulating Manson

wow so that Austin can you hit the power button on the AC real quick um What camera? Okay. Oh yeah, scoot to your right a little bit, Tom. Just hit it down to like 75. So, this may be a stupid question, but Texas is in prison for life. So he does get parole hearings. Okay.

He has four children that he's had in prison. He got married, and until the late 70s, prisoners were allowed, even convicted murderers on death row. were allowed to have conjugal visits. Sharon Tate's mother, Doris Tate, when she found out that Watson had had his first child, she spent, I think, 10 years lobbying the legislature, the state legislature of California.

She became a political activist, and she finally got them to write a bill saying no more conjugal visits for prisoners in California. So because of the late Doris Tate, prisoners can't get late in prison anymore. Oh, wow. Yeah. But he managed to have four.

kids before she prevailed and they're now grown up one of them is in the marines the wife he had them with divorced him and i think he's remarried to a new new woman that's so weird how women love to marry people on death row yeah yeah bruce davis another convicted mans and family member is married you might recall the year or two before charlie died he was engaged to this young woman that really looked a lot like susan hackens star yeah who is interesting now she is now the lover of oh shoot I forgot his name

he's an actor and he was a Manson obsessive there was a movie called Buffalo 66 Vincent can I look at yeah yeah sure because this is fascinating and it's never been reported before to my knowledge yeah

she was engaged to Manson living outside of the prison walls in Corker Rim with a guy named Grey Wolf who was Manson's communication man on the outside. Like when I interviewed Manson, I had to go through Grey Wolf. To get to Manson, everything had to come through him. So Grey Wolf was

an old hippie in like his 70s. Starr was living with him and visiting Manson every weekend that she could. Wow. They were this close to getting married. And then Manson found out that she was fucking Grey Wolf. Oh. So he ended his relationship

with her and his relationship with Gray Wolf. who had literally devoted his life to making sure Manson had money, got his mail. Any interview that Manson did had to be approved by Grey Wolf. And a friend of Manson's who I kept in touch was said that Charlie cried himself to sleep every night after found out he had been betrayed by both Star and Greywolf. And I thought, you know, she couldn't get laid with Charlie,

so she was maybe thinking of Manson when she slept with this guy who looked a lot like him, same age, but maybe a foot taller. I would imagine a guy like Manson would have already been able to cope with that idea by that point, having spent his whole life in prison. Of course. Like having you not thought of that scenario already? And I mean, when he was Manson, he was sleeping with five women a day. There was nothing about monogamy in their lifestyle. But, you know, I guess when you're an older guy and it's done to you, maybe.

And the girl, star, she was much younger. Yeah, yeah. She was like in her 20s or something. Yeah, and she shaved her head. She did the swastika on her forehead. I can't remember if it was scratched in or maybe tattooed or something. The actor's name is Vincent Gallo, and he was kind of an underground indie actor, but I'll show you a picture. Pull him up on the screen, Austin.

This guy? That guy, yeah. No, yeah, yeah. Huh. He looks kind of like a freak. He was a Calvin Klein model. He used to live around the corner from me in Little Italy and Manhattan in the 70s and 80s. Oh, really?

Yeah. And he did a lot of really good movies. He directed a couple. He moved out here. He does character parts and some films. And he's obsessed with Manson. Yeah. So I think he got to know Grey Wolf and they were interested in, he would buy stuff at auction, you know,

Manson's paintings and things like that. and somehow Star got in the mix so as soon as Grey Wolf threw Star out my sources told me that she moved out to Malibu and he took her in and they became lovers and now they're in New Mexico or Arizona or something

Wow that's wild Yeah yeah That's totally wild A lot of soap opera drama even to this day So you met Manson face to face? No no You never got in the same room Unfortunately when I interviewed him in two

2000, he was what they call it in the hole in solitary confinement. He wasn't allowed to have visitors. He was only allowed out of his cell for an hour a day. And he was allowed to make phone calls one night a week. So during the period that I had finally set up the interviews, I couldn't go in. And you always want to face somebody. And it's really frustrating, especially with a guy like him that plays so many games. So we talked on the phone two or three nights.

one of my claims of fame is the first time I spoke to him, I went to premiere the magazine who had commissioned the article because my editor didn't want them having my home phone number. So she's like, you have to do it at the offices. I don't want them to know how to find you. And I'm like, if they want to find me, they're going to find me. But I agree to do it. Who's they?

Manson and the people that are on the outside of prison. Okay, his crew outside of prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went to their offices, and, you know, it was nighttime, like nine or ten o'clock. And all of a sudden it occurred to me it was Valentine's Day. And I'm like, wow, this is tragic. My Valentine's Day is a date with Charlie Manson.

So when he answered the phone, or when he got on the phone, he called me. And I go, hey, Charlie, how are you doing? He goes, real good, man. How are you? And I go, great. I go, happy Valentine's Day. He goes, oh, thanks, man.

Same to you. Charles Manson was your Valentine. Yeah. And Marilyn Manson texted you on Easter. Yeah. I was at a wedding in London about 15 years ago, and there was this very old man. there and we had a competition to see who had the greatest brush with evil he won mine was the

manson thing happy valentine's day charlie he was a jewish man who when he was about seven or eight years old um was playing with some friends and the furor out of hitler was surveying this little community he lived in that was they had already been partitioned off the jews and he said to um this little boy who was like seven or eight your cute little boy, would you like an ice cream cone? And he said, yeah, so Hitler bought him an ice cream cone. What? So at the wedding, they had a vote to decide who had the best brush with evil,

and they decided that getting an ice cream cone from the out of Hitler was scarier than Manson saying, Happy Valentine's Day. Jesus. Yeah, I would say it trumps the Manson Valentine's Day. Holy shit. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's backtrack a little bit. Tell, explain to people who don't already know, how did this whole thing start for you?

Like, how did this whole journey start with you just being, you weren't initially interested in this story at all? You just kind of like came, stumbled across this job. I didn't even want it, yeah. I was freelancing. You know, I'd moved out to L.A. for what I thought was going to be two years. Sublet my place in New York was going to go back the following, like six months later. My editor, who I'd written with at another magazine that we had all left, it was called Us magazine. It's still around.

It used to be an entertainment magazine that was mostly about motion pictures, music, and TV. and Jan Wenner, who owned it in Rolling Stone, had decided to make it much more tabloidy. Reality TV was just starting, and he wanted us to do stories about the Kardashians or reality people. So all of us at the magazine let our contracts go and quit, and they all went to Premier Magazine, all the people who I worked for. So she said, you should come over with us,

but you've got to do one great piece here. And she said the Manson, the anniversary of the Tate La Bianca murderer, coming up in August. This was March. And she said, do a story on it. I'm like a story on what. And she goes, read the book. You'll find an angle. I go, come on, Leslie. I go, number one, I've never read the book. Hasn't it been written to death. And I didn't say that, you know, to be funny. I didn't realize until after I said it. And I just said, there's nothing about that that interests me. And she said, well, it's what I got for you right now. And I know you need the money because I hadn't worked for a few months.

and she said here's something i'll tell you now that i put his name into your head you're going to realize that you hear him reference sometimes every day she said i hear he's always you know compared to the most evil person in the world described as a metaphor for evil popular culture news and sure enough all of a sudden i'm seeing his name in newspapers just as a descriptive like an adjective or something so i agreed to do it and uh it was supposed to be a three-month job and I read Helter Skelter and I circled stuff or noted stuff that seemed a little bit, you know, something that I thought could be explored a little more. And there were lots of stuff Bouliosi, who was the author, Vince Boulosie and also the prosecutor who convicted the

Ments and Family group in the trial in 70 and 71. There was a lot of stuff I could kind of go along with, but I'm like, Leslie, this is so amorphous. I don't know how. And she said, once you start, you'll find an angle you always do. I've been working with her for like 15 years in the magazine business, and she was always my editor, and we thought alike. And she was great. So she said, if you can't find anything else, just find out how it changed kind of the culture of Hollywood.

Because, you know, that's when everybody started retreating from public places, stars, you know, putting walls up, buying guard dogs. They didn't feel safe in their homes anymore. That didn't interest me either. but I thought, all right, I need the money. But what I did was I read Helter Skelter, and then I interviewed Vince Bouliosi first, spent about six hours at his house.

He was very generous with me, talked and talked and talked, said a couple things that are too complicated to explain in an interview. It would take like a half hour, but if you read the book, it takes chapters, and it's not to the very end,

you realize why it's so important. A couple lies he told me. But after that, he basically told me everything, I'd already read him, he'd said to other interviewers for years and years. I thought, why don't I reach out to people who've never talked about the case, principal witnesses? Because at the time, people really were frightened of the Manson family members on the outside.

So the prosecution witnesses, the guy that owned the Tate La Bianca, the guy that owned the Tate House that rented it to him, has always been pursued by journalists because he's never talked about his pivotal part in all this. Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, who also was connected to Manson. Right. So with the passage of time, I thought maybe they won't be as frightened. You know, maybe people who wouldn't talk will.

So first, actually, I reached out to people like Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski's crowd. You know, they were very close friends to dozens of Hollywood people, but most close to Robert Evans, a producer, Ali McGraw. Michelle Phillips, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papa's, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim, none of them would talk to me. No one would talk to me. And it started getting really frustrating. And then I went to the witnesses, people who actually were lesser known

except in the Hollywood industry. And I got a couple to agree to talk to me. And I realized it wasn't that they were less scared, but nothing had really happened to them since then. A lot of them, their lives went off the rails, being associated with this, especially this one guy, Rudy, who owned the house where the murders happened, and he was a principal prosecution witness for Boliosi. He had to testify about Manson having this visit to the house before the murders to establish that Manson knew where

these people lived and how to get into the property. And Rudy had lost his life savings. He had owned that house, kind of became a drug addict, went through everything, had to sell the house to Trent Reznor of the 9-inch Nails and was living in a shitty, like, garage apartment in Van Nyes. What year did you sell the house to Trent Resner? I think it was, I think he owned it for 20 years after the murders. So that would be 79, 89, maybe around then. And he had a longtime business partner, who was his lover.

That guy had died. and he was being kept alive and his bills were paid by an interesting group of his former clients. He was a talent manager. Dick Van Dyke, Jack Nicholson, Jimmy Darren, who was kind of a pop singer-actor, and Sally Kellerman. So they would give him allowance because they all felt so sorry for him. So I started trying to get him to talk to me, and first he wanted me to pay him, and you're not allowed to pay people. I said, I'll just take you out to a really nice meal.

That's the best I can do. So we went to the famous Muso and Frank restaurant, which if you saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's where Al Pacino's character has his first big dinner with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a classic Hollywood movie location restaurant. So that turned into weekly dinners for about two or three years. Weekly for two or three years.

I mean, because he was lonely. Right. After the very first dinner, when he was driving home, he said he was chased off the road, got in a car accident, was almost killed. He thought that it was because he talked to me. Everything did happen. He did have an accident. Somebody hit him and ran.

He did have to go to the hospital. I tried not to get paranoid. Nobody ever did again. He got notes and stuff from people telling him to stop talking to me. But the point being, he didn't have enough money to buy another car. So then I had to drive out there to Van Nuys from Venice, which is he always wanted to go about five or six o'clock. So that meant a two-hour drive with rush hour traffic. Then he always wanted to go out at swank places in Hollywood.

So that's another rush hour traffic could be 45 minutes. We'd get to a restaurant and he wouldn't order food for two hours because he wanted to have all his martinis or gin and tonics. And the next thing you know, he's grabbing the waiter's asses. He was a real character, and he got away with it. But, and then I'd have to, on the way home, stop at the supermarket at midnight. And I didn't pay for his groceries, but walk with him through the store, and it took forever. So it was like an eight-hour investment. And I had to drive all the way back to Venice.

But he was giving me information. And that's how you get it. You know, you have to really kind of embed yourself into people's confidence and lives. Right. And he was the first, and then there was, like, domino. Because people knew he was talking to me, more people talked to me. But it doesn't happen overnight. So that's when the story changed and evolved into something that wasn't going to be a magazine story anymore.

My editor-in-chief of Premier became obsessed with what I was finding. So he kept extending my deadline. He said, we don't need to do it for the anniversary. This is too important. So I think they paid me for a year and a half, a monthly, salary just to report the story, then that editor-in-chief got fired. And I went to my editor who worked under him, and I said, please tell me Jim didn't get fired because of all the money that he had spent like $150,000, not just on my salary, but on my expenses for dinners and stuff.

And I would phone to London to interview people. She said it didn't help. So a new editor was hired and I got a call the next day from that him. He said, sounds like you got a really exciting story there. I hope so. He goes, well, I'm really going to be proud to publish it and I'm slating it for the issue after the next. I can't finish it. Jim would have told you. He goes, no, no, Jim's not here anymore. He goes, you've got to have it in. So at that point, I got a book agent. And I didn't want to put out what I had because there were so many loose ends. And I thought once I put out the most important stuff, you know, the LA Times, maybe I was grandiose, New York Times, they're going to put their teams on this and they're going to get good. They're going to finish it,

right? Yeah. So my agent got me out of my contract with a caveat that I had to reimburse, blah, blah, blah. So definitely the right thing to do. Yeah, yeah. So at that point, well, sometimes I wonder, because the next thing I knew, you know, I didn't sell the book for another five years. In 2005, I sold the proposal. But I got, enormous, it was going to go to auction. So the publisher Penguin Press gave me what's called a preemptive bid, which is higher than they'd normally pay. But for, I think it was 48 hours,

nobody else could try to make a deal with me. And if I didn't take their offer in 48 hours, and they would withdraw, then it would go to auction. Okay. So I said, yes, my agent said they're really the best publisher in the business. You know, they do like presidential memoirs, and their boutique and powerful, and just publishing with them

is going to give your crazy conspiracy book complete legitimacy. So I did, and they gave an advance that was like record-breaking for somebody who had never written a book before. I'd just been a magazine journalist, and that looked like it was going to be a real happy ending. But then they got impatient in 2011,

and long story short, they canceled the deal, and worse, they then sued me for a return of the advance, which had been spent by me on all my reporting. So from 2012 to about 14 or 15, everything was frozen. I couldn't go out and try to sell the book until the lawsuit was resolved. I had to get a pro bono lawyer. So I just kept reporting as if I was going to have something. How are you paying your bills?

I was living, barring money and living off of what little was left from the advance but I lived very frugally. I mean, I've done it in New York for years. I was a struggling journalist. I drove a horse and carriage in Central Park for eight years. I knew how to hustle. Okay.

But I didn't have any real full-time job during that period because I worked seven days a week researching. So once the lawsuit was resolved in 2016, I think, or 15, I got Dan as a collaborator, and we revised my book proposal. The original book proposal was book length. It was 220 pages.

In fact, when Ann and Scott, the two people at Penguin Press bought it, they said, you know, you've written the book. All you have to do is fill in some of the gut. This is the guts. Just fill in some of the stuff. And I'm like, easier said than done. They're still reporting.

So once I got this wonder kid, and only because Prince died. If Prince hadn't died, he would have been working with Prince for three more years. Prince died and all of a sudden his agent said to my agent, you know, I heard you're looking for someone. Dan would be perfect for this. He can't pick up the Prince thing for at least two years

until that estate has figured out because they were all fighting over whatever Prince, you know, his money, his future projects. So Dan had like two years off and he and I turned it out in two years. And it came out literally. We turned in the final draft. I mean, after all the edits and notes from the publisher, the day before what would have been the 20th anniversary of the magazine assignment. So it was literally 20 solid years.

That's incredible, man. That's incredible. But I don't advise anybody to do that. It took off 40 years in my life. It was brutal. I mean, you keep thinking it's going to end and it doesn't. The scariest thing is if the book had never come out. Yeah.

That would have been, I would have been the tragic figure. who, you know, spent his whole life writing a book and then never publishing his book. So, I mean, now I feel like if I got run over by a bus today, that's fine. Yeah. This is still here. Right. Right. You hit the, you achieved your goal.

You got it out. Yeah. And you can wash your hands. But you're still, you're still, you know, obviously going to put out more. Yeah. And it's not going to take 20 years this time. So, okay, what was the guy's name who owned the house? The house.

Who sold the Trent Resner? Rudy Altabelli. Rudy. And he's like, you tell you. interesting story about him that just happened recently. So Quentin Tarantino released his movie, you know, a few months after my book came out, once upon a time in Hollywood. And I think it was his most successful movie box office-wise to date. And I had two mutual friends of his, and one of them is one of his producers and his longtime first AD, and the other one was an

ex-girlfriend, who's one of his only ex-girlfriends who remained friends with him. So both of them gave him a copy of my book, an advanced copy that I had signed months before my book came out and months before his movie came out. And they said, we're not going to give it to him unless we read it first. We know you,

we love you, but we want to make sure it's something that he'd like because everybody wants you to give something to Quentin. So they did, and you know, he never read it. And I wasn't surprised because he's about to release one of the biggest

movies of his career. Right. A lot of publicity. So about a year after, like last fall, I think it was, I got a call from one of our mutual friends and he said, can Clinton call you now? I'm going to go, excuse me, I needed him like two years ago, but sure. I go, why? He goes, he's obsessed with your book.

He finally got to read the one I gave him, and he has a million questions. And, you know, if Quentin Tarantino has a million questions, that means it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he called me from Israel where he was living. Is he saying Israel? Well, I just read an interview with him a couple days ago. I knew he was there and I didn't know why. I knew he had married an Israeli woman and had a baby there.

But when the pandemic hit, they wouldn't let him back in. So he got, I guess. Hopefully he's not still there now. He was on Jimmy Kimmel a couple nights ago. Okay. But he was there during a lot of that. And the interview I read said, I think he was in Tel Aviv. he didn't say anything about, you know, bombing violence or anything.

He just said how much he loved it there. Yeah. So he and his wife and kid have now moved back, I think, in the last month or two. But so he started calling me. And it wasn't just because he had a million questions, but it was because he was doing the novelization of the movie where he's adding, fleshing out characters, adding scenes, and he'd always wanted to write a paperback book,

kind of like a pulpy paperback book. that comes out Tuesday. And he, talking about Rudy Altebellion, like our second or third conversation, like Rudy, how did you ever get Rudy to talk to? That's amazing. He goes, damn it, you know,

I've got his character in the book. I didn't have him in the movie. But I have to, you know, fake his name, you know, or he goes, or do you think if you reached out to Rudy and asked, would he take like a quarter million dollars from me to let me use his name in the book and promise not to sue me

Quentin Rudy's been dead for 10 years so you're kidding me you just saved me a quarter million dollars and you know I'm still in debt hundreds of thousands of dollars right and I'm like Quentin give it to me where I should have said give me the cash and I'll deliver it to Rudy for you. Oh yeah you definitely should have done that

so the book comes out Tuesday and I'm hoping You're the name of it? It's the same name as the title of the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yeah Yeah, yeah. So I think he was on Jimmy Kimmel a night or two ago, and I was flying, so I didn't see it, but I read the recap of the interview.

But I'm hoping, you know, for the in-depth interviews, you know, if he was telling me the truth, he said, oh, my God, he goes, I thought I knew this, and I didn't know anything about this character, that character. I'm hoping he'll mention the book because all the Quentin fans then might be interested in get the book. Right. Yeah, so we'll not.

But it's already, you know, it's going to be a bestseller. because it's a Quentin Tarantino book. It's the first one he's ever written. And he keeps saying, I didn't just turn the novel into a script. He goes, it's like a whole fresh take, new characters, much more about the Manson family, the murders, all this stuff.

Because there was literally barely anything about it in the movie. Yeah, yeah. He released a trailer, the publisher released a trailer last week that he put together for the book. So it's like a two-minute trailer, and he has scenes in the trailer that are in the book, but they were cut from the movie.

So there is a scene between the Manson character at the house looking for Terry Melcher. And they don't show who he's talking to, but in real life it would have been Rudy Altebelly. So the guy who owned the house, he went up there looking for him. So I'll know a lot when the book comes out Tuesday. I hope he gives me an acknowledgement if I saved him a quarter million dollars. Oh, right? Yeah, he definitely needs to put your name in there, shut you out somewhere. Yeah, yeah.

Fucking Quentin. so Rudy so when you talk to Rudy I mean that what was it about Rudy that opened what did he tell you that opened pandora's box for you it began very slowly he started telling me that he had suffered more than anybody else who was associated with the victim Sharon and the void forchaikovacowski Abigail you know they were all his friends too he lived in the house behind the main house so Rudy owned this beautiful property at the top of Cello Drive. It was like a French-designed country house. One story with like beautiful views everywhere. There was a pool and then there was a guest house. So he lived in the guest house, bought the house, I think, on the 40s. And he, among the tenants who stayed there were Catherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Carrie Grant, and then Terry

Melcher, who's the son of Doris Day, he was a music producer. He moved in there in 65, moved out in January of 69. And they all rented from Rudy. And Rudy always stayed in the backhouse because that's all he needed. But he only rented to people he thought he'd party with. He was a huge partier. He was one of the first out gay guys in Hollywood who flamboyant, didn't care what people thought.

Real character. And when Roman and Sharon moved in, he and Sharon became very, very close. Sharon Tate. So they moved in in February of 69. And then in March, the two of them went to Europe, him to do script notes and fixing on the day of the Dolphin, which he was going to direct in London. And Sharon went to make a devil movie called The 13 Chairs in Italy.

And then they came back. Sharon came back in July. And Rudy never came back. He went over with Sharon. He flew over there. He wasn't her manager, it was just her best friend, so they flew together, and then he went off with an actress named Olivia Hussie, who was in Romeo and Juliet, which was this big sensational in 1969 movie. So his relationship with Roman and Sharon and Terry Melcher was really important to what became the line of inquiry I was doing. Did people in Hollywood have relationships with Manson that were concealed by either Hollywood, the machine, the publicity machine, or law enforcement?

And Rudy started kind of telling me, yeah. So he'd get drunk. I'd usually drive him home, and he'd always want me to come into a shitty little apartment for one more nightcap. And that's when he'd start talking. And he'd had a few drinks, and he goes, you know what, Terry went on, he had a great career, produced all these bands. He was still alive then. Romans never suffered for this. He was the only one who lost their house, lost their reputation,

because people thought he had a relationship with the family, you know, even law enforcement. They eventually said he didn't, a relationship with the Manson family. That was another reason for them to come up there. He was just bitter and angry. And he said if the truth ever came out about Roman and them and Terry and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys

and some other people, He goes, nobody would believe it, but it's true, and I could tell you. And so he ended up, started telling me how to prove that the district attorney, Boliosi, had covered up the much more involved relationship with Terry Melcher, for instance, and then government people who were involved with Manson. And it's hard to say if people haven't read the book, and I don't want to give too much away, because part of the fond of the book is you think it's gotten pretty crazy and it's over, And then like next couple of pages, it's like, no, what?

It's even crazier. So the official narrative of Manson is that from a young kid, his mom was a prostitute. Yeah. And he was just involved in a bunch of petty crimes throughout his life, and out of prison. And he kept getting out of prison. And then eventually there was one point where he went in for seven years, and then he came out different.

In 67. And he immediately violated his parole. He was paroled to Los Angeles. Without permission, he went up to San Francisco to the Bay Area, turned up at the parole office and said, I want a parole officer up here. They looked him up and they said, you're not allowed to be here.

You've got to go back to L.A. They wrote to L.A. L.A. demanded he come back. He didn't. And then all of a sudden something happened, which I can't find the paper record of. The reason I have the records I do have is I did Freedom of Information requests

to the Bureau of Prisons. And I got a part of his parole record for the time he was supervised from his release until the murders, which paints a whole different picture. He got assigned to a parole officer in San Francisco named Roger Smith, who was a criminology student at Berkeley and also a drug researcher and working out of the Haydashbury Free Medical Clinic,

and that's where things get really crazy. Now, was he connected to Sidney Gottlieb? Not that I know of, but Jolly West, who was a psychiatrist, who went to leave of absence from the University of Oklahoma to study the explosion of the Summer of Love in 67, he somehow anticipated that like six months before. He went to the hate. He opened what he called a hippie pad,

a laboratory described as a disguise as a hippie pad where they put up posters, and he had grad students. He told them in January, grow your hair long, I want you to staff this hippie pad, and we're going to study the young kids that are going to invade the hate in the summer. He knew this all in advance, and there's a whole reason that I won't get into here about how he knew it, because it was, well, it was basically engineered by a bunch of these people to happen in government. And Jolly West had been working in the CIA's M.K. Alter program since 1953,

which was a program that their ultimate goal was to learn how to create programs, assassins, people who would kill without recollection or of not only the killing, also their programming. And that was what this guy's specialty was. He was a very well-known psychiatrist. And in the 70s, 75, this information about this secret program, M.K. Ultra came out because a State Department person who found the records, what was left of the records, blew the whistle. there were congressional hearings. He was identified as one of the CIA researchers

who gave drugs to prisoners, to people in fake apartments to study them in the hate in New York and a couple other cities. And he was fingered, but he denied it, and he was never investigated. At that point, by 69, or after 69, he went to Los Angeles to UCLA and became the head of the psychiatry department there

until he retired and then died. The year I started this book, it was the year he died. Oh, wow. And he was actually murdered by his son. What? Well, he was dying of cancer, as was his wife. And the son had, they were, his wife was a doctor too. They had a family plan that if they ever became terminally ill,

that the son would give them administered lethal drugs to them. So nobody knew it at the time. But after both of them were dead, and I think, The son waited a number of years. There's no statute of limitation on murder, but for this kind of thing, I'm not sure why, but he did publish a book in early 2000s. So they died, and both they died like six months apart. His parents were killed by the son, and that was 1990s. And the son published a book in about 2011 called The Last Good Night, where he describes the planning and the killing of Jolly West and his wife, Catherine, by lethal drug.

administration. Where is he now? You want to know that's weird. So the son wouldn't talk to me. Before he wrote the book, he said, I will never talk about my father. It's too dangerous. He had too many secrets. I couldn't get him to talk to me. Then the book comes out in 2012 or 13 where he talks about the rumors of his father being CIA, but he doesn't say anything more. It's mostly about just the human family drama of what it's like to have to be talked in. to it by both your parents and then to actually carry it out for them. He got a lot of press. He was on Good Morning America, you know, all the talk shows.

So when the book came out, I thought, well, now he's gone public. I'll try him again. But I waited a year or two and found out he had died in the previous year or two. And he would have only been about 55. I can't find any record of where he died, how he died. He has two sisters, neither of them would talk to me. One's in Europe and one's in New York. I beg them to let me interview them.

So I don't know what happened to him. Whoa. Yeah, I just found a death notice, you know, an ancestry, and no record of him at any of his old addresses. That's so weird. Yeah, yeah. So he didn't get any trouble for killing his parents, even though they wanted him to kill them?

He didn't, yeah. I mean, I have the book, and somebody asked me recently how he got away with it. And I think it was something technical, like he enabled them to inject it themselves. He gave them everything. You know, he did all the concoction, but he didn't do the injection. Something like that, or so he said, who knows, he did it to a way, you know, he had lawyers advising him. And there was definitely a risk of him getting charged. But I think it would have only been as an accessory.

And maybe it was that, that if it's only an accessory after a, certain number of years they can't charge you rather than the actual murder. I'm not sure that's a good question, though. Wow, what a crazy thing. So Jolly West was working at the Hayd Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which serviced the community in the summer of 67. It was built to take care of the needs of all these runaways, and it was open by a guy named David Smith.

This gets confusing. David Smith allowed Jolly to recruit subjects for his studies of hippies and LSD around the corner in his... Hippie pad, laboratory disguised as a hippie pad. And Roger Smith, who was the parole officer of Manson, had Manson come to the Hayd Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where he was working on his own drug research and doing his parole. And it was during those pivotal two or three months.

Manson got out in March of 67. He was just an ex-con. He'd been in prison half his life. He was 32, I think it was 17 years in and out of federal institutions. For dumb stuff. Stealing cars, robbing grocery stores. Yeah, he was never in a county jail, except waiting for, you know, federal trials. Yeah, silly stuff.

Stealing a car and then taking it across the state line, which makes it federal. The last thing he went to prison for was stealing an envelope from the mail, which made it a federal offense. So if that had been stealing, there was a check for $37 that he cashed, if he had just stolen that check and cashed it, it would have been a local thing. he probably wouldn't have even gotten jail time. But since he took it from a mailbox, he got a 10-year sentence. And we're going to go into that more in the second book about, it looks like they wanted him in these federal places for all those years. And even Bouliosi admits in the book why every single time he committed a petty crime.

You know, stealing car is not that serious. It happens all the time. But he always happened to go across the state line, maybe just for a few hours, and then come right back. He said it was weird. Bulliosi admitted it. Well, I found evidence that there were, he didn't go of his own volition.

He had no reason to go to the next state. Because they were doing this research in prisons. Wow. So I think, well, I don't want to say it now because I haven't proven any of this part yet, but I'm building a case now that this all began when he was still in prison. They're experimenting with him.

Have you ever met a guy named? Have you ever heard of Stephen Kinzer? Yeah, he wrote the Sidney Gottlie book. Right, right. Yeah, I talked to him about that. And the way he explains MK Ultra is just fascinating how it's basically, you know, he had to go to different countries, went to Germany just because he was violating the human rights. Like the stuff he was doing, he had a license to kill from the government. Like he was destroying people.

So you had him on the podcast? Yeah. How to go? It was great. Maybe it was you guys. Somebody asked me if I would go on a podcast with him. And I said. Yes, yes, it was.

Yeah. I wanted to have you guys both on together. And I said, you know, I said, I don't think he'd do it. My book, his book is very straightforward. You know, he's a New York Times bestselling author. It's not academic, but it's very sober, you know. It is, yeah. I don't think he'd want to be in my category.

Yeah, he kind of shut down a little bit when I started to ask him about Charles Manson. Yeah, of course, yeah. I'd love to sit down and ask him why Louis Jolly West isn't even in his index in his book. And this guy, my book was already out before his book. And nobody wants to take somebody else's findings. Even you would obviously acknowledge them. But I have the documents. I show that he was Gottlieb's first psychiatric partner

when he was at the Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. I have all the letters that I found that West accidentally left in his archive at UCLA where they're page after page after page describing what kind of experiments they're going to do. They're all illegal on patients. and West says we can hide it from the other doctors on these wards because the patients are already suffering from mental illness.

So what I do to them is just going to look like another one of their, but it's going to be with my drugs and hypnosis. And Gottlieb's like, well, you have to double, you know, all the ways they're going to hide their correspondence. Gottlieb had an alias. He wanted Wes to have an alias, but West didn't want one because he thought that would draw attention if anybody caught that.

So he did that for, from 53 to at least, least 67, 68. I've got a paper record of him corresponding with Gottlieb. And nobody had, has the unredacted record like I do. Like everything got, uh, Kinzer saw. Here's a little bit of my sour grapes. Yeah. With stuff he got through other people's Freedom of Information Act requests, and it's all redacted. Because I read his book, he doesn't have new information in there from documents. He's got, he's got a lot of great stuff in there that fills them gaps. But for him to completely ignore the scientists that John Marks, John Marks is the whistleblower who was a State Department official who found these financial records for MK Ultra, went to Congress, told them

about it, caused a congressional investigation, Seymour Hirsch, the famous investigative journalist, worked with Marx and he wrote the first big stories in 1974 or five on this horrifying program that our government did since the early 50s where they were testing. drug on people without their awareness, making them human guinea pigs, and some of these people died, you know, committed suicide or had massive nervous breakdowns. So I was, I didn't think Kinzer was, if he hadn't even mentioned my findings, I knew that he didn't want to have anything to do with my book. Why would he, what would be his reasoning of ignoring the stuff about West?

Do you want to know what other people tell me? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I don't, I'm fascinated by it. Do you know what a limited hangout is? What's a limited hangout? A limited hangout is when an agency uses a media person to release more information than they've released before because it's coming out anyway or is about to come out to try to keep people from suspecting even worse. So people accuse him of being, actually, I would love to have him see this. podcast and reach out to me and tell me he's going to sue me or something. So people I know who are serious researchers think he's paid by the CIA as a

really? It's called a limited hangout guy. Wow. So because people would question it if it came directly to the government agency. There's not a lot of new information in his book. So there's only been a couple really good books about MK Alter. They were all written in the 70s. John Marks, who was a whistleblower, wrote the very first book.

It's called The Search for the Manchuring candidate. Seymour Hirsch wrote about it in a couple books. A guy named Optin and Lifton, I think, their names. They wrote a book called The Mind Manipulators in the late 70s. And nobody really wrote a book just about MK Ultra until Kinzer did. And I think his book came out like six months after mine or something. I think that, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's not substantiated in this. Unless you read it cover to cover,

it sounds crazy, you know? Right. And that's why, I mean, I don't want to, I know that I was on Rogan, and Rogan's audiences in audible, you know, they listen to books. And I'm so glad that people are buying the book much more since I've been on a show, but almost all of them buy the audiobooks. And I listen to audiobooks now, but if you do the audio, you're not seeing all the sourcing.

Hold it up a little higher so we can see it on the, yeah. I think it's 60, 70 pages of end notes. And I don't know if you're an author, but what? What author's doing the end notes is we cheat by adding more information than you really should because it doesn't fit in here. You don't want to stop the reader with like where this came from. Right. It disrupts the flow.

Yeah, it disrupts the flow. So you put it in the end notes, but then what you do is you give a little more that you had to cut out of the main narrative because it gets too detailed. So some of my end notes are like a half a page long. And there's just so much information in the end notes. I'm more proud of the end notes half the time. Really? Yeah, yeah, wow.

So, yeah, so people that get the, they also, you don't get the pictures, right, in the audio book? No, you don't get the pictures either. It's just people, I mean, nobody has the, with all the, you know, media on your phone and everything these days, as people don't have time to do anything. I know. I can't blame them. I'm the same way. You know, who has time to sit down in front of a book for hours on the end? So this is Rudy in the guest house having a party, and that's Candice Bergen.

And this is like 1966. Rudy Altebelli and then this is him when I would go see him in his apartment I took that picture of him

and he had like 20 cats. Wow. Yeah. That's incredible. So What? Yeah, yeah. You hold it up by your face.

There you go. And you can just point to it that way. The camera can see it right there. This is Rudy with his kitten. Yep. He took care of like 20. stray cats and had three crippled dogs and got mugged in his neighborhood like once a month. And then when Rudy lived in the guest house in the 60s, whoever was in the main house became,

especially the women would be like his pet. So Candice Berger and he were very close. She was Terry Melcher's girlfriend. So that's a party he's having with Karen or Terrence or Candice in the guest house. That's Candice and Terry Melcher. But yeah, if you guys didn't get the, if you only get the audio book, look what you're missing? No, I'm going to order. I'm going to order the hard cover. That's a picture of me when I was young when I started the damn thing and didn't go white until my threats.

Wow, man, look at your computer. Oh, yeah. The computer really tells it all. I know. And the one at the bottom is me more recently in my office with a... Okay. Oh, my God. What a bookshelf that is.

That's incredible. Yeah, another thing about MK Ultra is they, like all the studies they did on the same thing. the prisoners like whitey bulger yeah apparently like what's the story with him and mk ultra well the government admitted after he died that's when it came out i can't remember who i think it was a journalist or something or maybe it was during his trial i thought he was like openly talking about it yeah he was talking about but nobody would believe it but during his trial i think it was his lawyers were able to get his prison records and somebody sent them to me recently uh where they have the dates that he's given LSD.

And this was all in the 50s, you know, before. Manson was in prison, but in the 50s, he was still a kid. He didn't, well, he got out of prison in 67 to 32, so 57 he would have been 22. He was in the same prisons that were treating people like Bulger experimentally with LSD. So one of the jurors who convicted Whitey Bulger reached out to me when my book came out, and she's gotten a lot of national attention. She didn't know. There was a little bit of mention it in the trial,

but the judge wouldn't let too much of it in. After he was convicted, he started writing her and telling her all about the experiments. And she is a very good reporter. She's not a journalist, but she lives in Boston. And she started looking into it, working with researchers, and found out that it was much more extensive

than anybody ever knew and could have been the reason he became such a violent sociopath. It was when he was very young. Yeah. And then when he said he became a notorious killer after. And then the entire time being protected by the government, he was a federal informant, you know. And well, with two agents who,

the FBI denies it anybody, but the agents knew that he was in, that they were rogue agents that were paying him to get information and provoking him. stuff. So she wanted me to write a book with her. And I just said, I can't do something just on Whitey, but keep coming to me with your information. So we've been sharing information since, and I haven't talked to her for a few months, so I don't know if she found another author. But yeah, Whitey Bulger had what happened to, I believe, Manson in prison on paper. I don't have a record yet like she got, but I'm working with some people now trying to get records from when he was in prison,

and they won't release them because they say they're medical records. but he's a convicted, dead, notorious criminal. So I actually have a lot of work to do it. I have to find out how they got the medical records of Whitey. I think it was because Whitey was alive and Whitey shared them and he had access to his own records. But I don't think I'm ever going to get the rest of the records

from, if you read in the book, it took me like two years to get the records I did get from the Bureau of Prisons about Manson. And it trial, when he was convicted, his defense attorney was trying to get his prison record, and they wouldn't release it to him. And this was during the death penalty phase of the trial. And when I talked to experts about that,

they said anything should be allowed to be introduced when somebody's life is at stake. So the state was arguing for Manson and the others to be executed. Irving Canerrick, the defense attorney, wanted to show that Manson had always been a docile prisoner had never been badly behaved in prison, never been violent. And he couldn't believe that the government, that U.S. government wouldn't release the record. And he screamed and hollered. And since the trial was such a circus, and Irving Kinnair was pretty crazy too, nobody took him seriously.

And it wasn't, I talk about it in my book, the Attorney General in 1971, John Mitchell, who ended up going to prison himself for being part of, Nixon's cabinet and part of the plumbers and stuff, you know, in the mid to late 70s, he sent a representative of the Department of Justice who worked beneath him to argue to the judge against releasing Manson's file. I can't find evidence of that happening any other case in the history, but I believe that's just like the Watson tapes. There's secrets in there about what was going on with Manson's head and what they were doing

to it that they're never going to share. Wow. So the record I got was, I think, 70 pages out of probably 300 or 400. They described it. One of the, Canerrick got somebody to describe what the parole record looked like. And I think they said it was like two phone books thick. And I got like that much. So who was his parole officer before he went in for the seven years?

Well, that was interesting. The parole officer who violated him in 19. So he got convicted for the stealing the letter in the mailbox. Yeah, the mailbox. Yeah. And that was a 10-year sentence. And he was released, I think, after two years on parole. And then within a month or two, he didn't show up for a parole hearing.

Not a parole hearing. An appointment with his parole officer. they immediately violated him, sent federal marshals to Texas, who went into Mexico where they had information that he was in Mexico. The Mexicans turned him over to the marshals at the border of Laredo, Texas. They don't do that for these small-time criminals. And then they brought him back to L.A., and then he was sent to do the next eight years of his prison sentence,

which would have taken him, I think, to 69 or 70. But then they decided to release him two years early in 67. so you could go and do what he did. What the hell? What's so ironic, and I mentioned this in the book, he got sent back to prison from missing one appointment, one meeting, you know, you're supposed to go either once a week or once a month. Roger Smith, when he was his parole officer,

he wouldn't show up for meetings. And then when he was down in L.A. for months at a time, and he was never violated. He was getting arrested for rape, for drug possession, for pimping during 67 to 60s. charges dropped every time. In my book, I have a scene where I take this record that I had gotten, what few pages they released to me,

you know, the prisons, to this retired district attorney named Louis Watnik in Van Nuys. Is he the judge? He was a judge, yeah. Right, okay. So he had been a DA, and then he became a judge, and I think it was Van Nuys. And then he retired, and he was sick and dying,

and he's like on an oxygen machine. So he's raspy, but I had a tape recorder. And he's going through my documents. And he actually, Manson had come before him when he was a judge on some petty charge. And he said, I dismissed him on that case. I remember because there was no evidence. But it was something like breaking into a car or something. But he remembered very well.

But then he was looking. He said, I had no idea. And he said, there's something. This is chicken shit. This is all chicken shit. Yeah. And I'm like, what's chicken shit? He goes, well, you know, obviously people make mistakes.

were a bureaucratic system. But this is like almost every other week he's getting picked up, taken in, booked, and then released without charges. All of these are violations of his parole. He should have been sent back 10 different times on this stuff you're showing me, but he also should have been prosecuted on half of these things. And they just dropped the charge, dropped the charge, who goes, somebody wanted him out.

He was more valuable to people outside than inside. somebody worked to keep him out on the street. Like he was an informant? So what I said? You mean like an informant? He goes, well, people confuse what an informant is. An informant doesn't just provide information. Sometimes, and there's a history of it,

they can provoke other criminals to commit crimes. They can conspire with them and then walk away. And then the police know what's going to happen right before it happens. They can be much more proactive. So he said, to me, he goes, you got to find out who he was working for. I go, how am I going to find out? I don't know, you're the journalist. And I go, well, who do you think it was?

He goes, well, I'd start with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office, then go to the LAPD. He goes, they're not going to tell you, but that's what you should look at. And I go, is that? He goes, no, DEA, FBI. He didn't say the CIA. But he said it could have been any number of agencies who he was either sharing information, was sharing something with, and they wanted it to keep going. But there's no way, this is an anomaly like just a couple of mistakes.

He goes, this is a pattern. There's no way we would have missed this. And what was important about him was he, you know, he was in law enforcement, you know, from the prosecution side and then as a judge during that same period. So, you know, a lot of times if I show it to somebody now, they'd say, well, of course you should have been picked up. We have computers, but you didn't. So he was important because he knew exactly how they shared information, how it came in. And even Roger Smith's relationship with Manson, his parole officer for the first year, while he became Charlie Manson.

He came out of prison. He was panhandling, playing guitar in the Bay Area, gets hooked up with Roger, and within a couple months has this following of women. women, you know, the first six months, I think he had anywhere from four or five to ten women that were following him all over the Bay Area, going to the clinic. He would leave the women with the doctors to get tested, you know, for VD and get some of them were pregnant, get pregnancy attention. And he'd go in and meet with Roger for his parole hearings. And everybody, you know, they described it to me. I'm not the first one to report it. They said the women would follow Manson and they never stood beside him. They always had to be behind him.

They wouldn't spoke unless he spoke to them first. They would pick things up for him. They were like slaves. How did he become this guru in a few months? How did he develop the skill to all of a sudden have these people do whatever he said? And then within two years, do whatever he said, including go kill some strangers in the house that you've never been to before except for texts. Right. And do it with as much brutality as imaginable.

and then come back and not even be remorseful about it. So that's the kind of thing that, you know, the book shows what was basically withheld from the public, and that's what Bouliosi did. You know, he wrote the best-selling true crime book of all time. Helter Skelter Skelter, yeah. To this day, you can probably go into any bookstore. Yeah, even if you Google, like Charles Manson documentary or a book, there's also a documentary called Helter Skelter.

Well, no, there's two scripted movies. Oh, okay, so the movie. The first one that was made in 70, the book came out in 74, I think, and then the first TV movie, it was a two-night movie, which they didn't do back then. It was like a big event, I think was 76. And to that, at that point, it was a highest rated TV movie in the history of television. It took one and two spot, I think, number one, or no, number one was the second part, and number two was the first. then he remade it in the early 2000s.

He updated, I mean, it was the exact same story, but it was new actors, you know. Biliosi's narrative. Boliolioli's narrative again, yeah. And then, you know, in my book, they'll see, it opens with our confrontation, my confrontation with Vince in his kitchen where he's threatening me and trying to stop the book and writing to my publisher and calling me at all hours of the night. Now, obviously, your first meeting with Bouliosi was very pleasant. Yeah, so the first time I went over there, and this was what was interesting, too.

And for people listening who aren't familiar, we will remind you, Boliosi was the prosecutor, right, on Manson's trial. Boliosi was an unknown prosecutor in 1969, and he was given a career-making case. You know, this was the highest-profile murders in the history of California. the craziest case. And not only did he know it was his ticket out of the DA's office, and he wanted to run for president and or be a famous author.

Not only did he know it was his ticket out, he got a book contract and hired an author to sit in the front row of the trial every day for a year and a half, which today would get you disbar, but back then they didn't have the bar association didn't have rules about it because nobody did it until he did it. People never knew he did it until I reported it in my book because Kurt Gentry, his co-author, told me, well, the cops told me, you know, who were at the courthouse every day. You know, he had a damn author in there.

He was playing for his reading audience. He didn't care about justice. He was making it as sensational as possible. And Kurt Gentry told me that's the truth. He said, I had a spot in the press thing that Vince reserved for me. And he would be pissed if I wasn't there every single day. So, yeah. So he wrote the book and it became the bestselling book of all time.

Is it still the bestselling book of all time? True crime, yes. True crime book of all time. Well, you know, I say that in my book and Little Brown's like, we have to fact check that. And they said, you know what, we're not going to fact check it. We know it's likely, but we can't get records from all the way back to 75. Right. But we do know that it's sold millions and millions and millions of copies.

I think it's sold like 18 million or something over it. It's always reprinted. So it launched his career, and he left the DA's office right after, and he wanted to run for, he did want to be president. So he was famous. He was on talk shows, interviewed by everybody in the world, and he ran for the District Attorney of Los Angeles. And a few months before the race, he was the Democratic nominee,

and he would have won, except a couple came out and went public. Herb and Rose Wazel. This is the craziest story. It's all the book. Herb Wazel was a milkman in Pasadena in 1964, and the Bouliosi's were on his route. Vince had his first child, Vince Boliosi Jr. in 65, I think it was. Within a year of the baby's birth, Vince decided that it wasn't his child,

that it was the milkman's child. So he started stalking the milkman's child. So he started stalking the milkman and harassing him. And the milkman didn't know who was accusing him of being the father of one of his clients or customers' child, except that it was a man who had eyes everywhere. What he didn't know was Vince was using investigators for the DA's office to trail him and report on him. And he told the investigators that he was a witness in a murder case, lied to his own office to get info.

Because he was just paranoid about, did he actually believe this guy was the real father? Was he just? He did. And he so much so that he picked up the kids at school. And when the parents found that out, they said to the kids, you can't ride the bus home anymore.

He intercepted them on the way to the bus, picked them up. The daughter told me this story. She caught in touch with me after the book came out. Scoot this way just a little bit. Scoot to you. Scoot to you. You're right just a little bit.

Yeah, you're just getting out of frame. There you go. The daughter wrote me an email after, and I wrote about a lot of this, but what I'm telling you now, I didn't. I knew that the parents thought he was going to do something with the kids because he talked about when they got out of school. He would write these anonymous letters to them. I have one or two of them on my Instagram page because I post stuff about it.

Yeah. And they're threatening letters, saying, you know, implying that he's going to hurt their kids. The daughter wrote me after, and she goes, you got everything in your book about what he did to our family is right, but you didn't get a lot of other stuff, which I'll share with you. And I'm like, what kind of stuff? And she goes, well, for instance, he picked me up at school, took me to a toy store, I told me I could buy whatever I wanted, brought me home, left me on the sidewalk with this pile of toys. I was five years old. My mother comes to the door, and Vince waves

to her and drives away. And she said, my mother just burst into tears because he had already been, You know, they knew that there was this man who was a danger to their kids, and he was sending them a message. I can win your kids over if I want. This is while he's a deputy DA prior to getting a sign of trial. This guy's a psychotic piece of shit. Yeah, and then what happened was the milkman finally hired someone to tell Vince because he would sit in front of their house and watch them.

So Vince knew he was being tailed and he was about to be exposed, but he didn't think the milkman would go public. And the milkman wasn't going to go public. He just wanted him to stop. So Vince sent his wife, Gail, to the door, to insist to the other wife to talk her husband into taking a blood test. So Gail goes to the door, Rose answers,

and this is all in the depositions that came out later, and she said, my husband is mentally ill. That child is his child, but he won't believe me in the only way, to get him to stop this is for you to get your husband to take a blood test. And she goes, I absolutely won't do it. And we are going to sue you for everything as soon as we find out who your husband is because they still didn't know his name. So I think it was that day or the next day. They did get Vince's plate number. They found out who he was. They contacted the DA's office.

No, they contacted. First they found out that Vince had a private lawyer. So they called him. lawyer arranged for a meeting between the couple and Vince and his wife and then submitted everything. He said, I'm sorry. He goes, I thought he made my wife pregnant and I wanted to know whether this is my baby or not. What's wrong with that? And they're like, you've been sending us threatening letters. You park outside our house. You picked up all this stuff. So the lied to your own, your own office and told him it was murder. They were searching them for murder. So the lawyer said, Vince, You can't do that anymore. And if the DA's office didn't know about it, he said they're going to find out about it.

So I'm going to have to tell them because it's better coming from us than you. You have to pay them a financial settlement and promise you'll never follow them. So Vince offered them $200 in cash and the Wise-El said, we don't want your money. We want your word that you will never bother us again. And he didn't. A year later, the Tate Labiazza murders happened, and the DA's office knows about this history of Vince,

and they give him the biggest, highest profile job in Los Angeles. You'll see it in the book, I believe they needed somebody that they could control as a DA who would break the rules, and Vince was a compromise. Someone they had leverage on. So this story didn't become public until he ran for District Attorney of Los Angeles, after the Manson convictions, after he left the DA's office,

he runs for the DA. And the Weisels never wanted to go public with this, but they thought, that's the most powerful law enforcement person in the city. He's insane. Look what he did to us. So they went to his opponent and said, we have a story to tell. And the opponent said, well, you tell the public that.

And they said, absolutely. So they stood on a stage. There was a press conference. And they told what I just told you. actually I might have told you more than they told because they didn't I don't think they knew about the DA's investigators until they actually had the civil suit so Vince responded with his own press conference and he told the media here's what happened that man was our milkman in 1964 and he stole $200 from our kitchen table when I was at work and my wife was upstairs he delivered the milk and he stole $200 I was investigating him for the theft of $200. Now, the press didn't ask these questions,

but he basically called him a thief. The lawyer for the wise elves didn't say it then, but he told the reporters later. Number one, that story can't be true because Vince wouldn't have been investigating him in

1966, whatever the date was, the statute of limitation on home robbery or whatever was two years. So he was saying he was investigating him for a $200 theft more than two years after. Right. Right. He said, I called the Pasadena Police Department. Why didn't he ask them to investigate it? They have no record of this theft being reported. So we're going to sue him for liable. And then it went to court and Vince paid them a fortune. And the agreement was they could never go public. He admitted to telling the lies. Wow.

Then Vince lost the election, and then two years later he runs for Attorney General of California, even bigger position. And a woman comes to his opponent named Virginia Carwell, and she said he shouldn't be the attorney general. He beat the shit out of me, held me captive, made me lie to the police. She had gotten pregnant with his baby. And he gave her, I think, $300 to get an abortion and called the doctor. And the doctor said she never even showed. I mean, the doctor's not supposed to say anything, but since it's been.

HIPAA. Yeah. The doctor said she didn't come in for an abortion. He went to her house and she said, I'm Catholic. I'm not getting, aborting that baby. He beat the shit out of her for like four hours. She went to the Santa Monica Police Department. I had the photographs, you know, black and blue everywhere.

She had a miscarriage. And then. After he beat her? Yeah, yeah. And then that night, someone saw it on that. of the journalists that one of the papers saw it on the ticker or whatever you know they see everything that comes in and out of the police station bulliosi accused of assault and kidnapping uh by a woman so um the next day it was in the l-a times at los angeles herald that this famous prosecutor

had beaten up this woman and uh and this is before he ran for attorney general he was writing the book at that point uh helter skilter and um then went back to her how with his secretary, held her captive for four or five hours until she agreed to go to the police and say she filed a fake report. So the secretary typed up a receipt and the story they came up with was that Virginia who had recently gone through a divorce had consulted with Vents about custody payments. Her ex-husband wasn't paying for the five-year-old kid, who was in the house when all this stuff happened and had never had a sexual relationship with him.

He'd never been to her house. And so she was going to go to the police station and they called her up because they wanted her to come back in from more questioning and Vince was in the house with her and so was his secretary. I was like, no, I do not. And she said, what, you want me to come?

Okay, you're going to send a car? I'll say, oh, no, I'm fine. I can go. They knew something was funny, so they sent the cops anyway, and Vince was still there. He wouldn't let them in the house. And I interviewed the cop who came to try to get her out of the house. He eventually did. Then what happened was the police interviewed Vince, and he lied to them.

He said, she's in love with me, she's stalking me, and it's just over a $200 bill. Again, with the $200. $300, yeah. So then she still told the story to the police that she had made it all up because she was angry at him for charging her because she was terrified of him. And it wasn't until a couple days. And the papers reported that she was crazy and she was charged. You know, we're filing a false report. Vince was vindicated.

And then a couple days later, her brother said, she told her brother and he said, no, we're hiring a lawyer. You can't let this go on address. so they quietly filed a lawsuit against him. He admitted to everything, paid her, I think, $10,000 or something. And then a year later runs for Attorney General, and she did the same thing the Wise-Els did. They violated their NDA, and she violated hers, and she knew he'd call her a liar,

but she knew he couldn't sue her because he'd have to answer the questions. So he lost the race again because of that question. because everyone believed her and not him. Right. So he was a monster, you know. Wow. And that was the end of his political aspirations. But he did write probably 15 bestselling books for the next 20 or 30 years until he died.

Now, when you guys got into that heated argument, like the last couple exchanges before you published the book. Yeah. What parts of the story was he pushing back on the most? Like what was the, what was the, the biggest part was Terry Melcher because Terry Melcher, he called one of his most important witnesses. Because if it weren't for Terry Melcher, Manson never would have known that this house existed. So Terry Melcher had met Manson through Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy drummer at Dennis Wilson's house. The official story was he met him once and then later agreed. Oh, and then Dennis drove Terry.

home with Manson in the back seat and Manson saw the house and saw where Terry lived. And the official version is Manson knew Terry didn't live there anymore. The Tate House. The Tate House. But he wanted to kill whoever lived there to send a message to Melcher and then to the world that Helter Skelter was happening and he wanted it to look like the blacks. And it was crazy. This is all Vince made most of this up.

The race war. The race war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Explain that for people who heard. Well, Manson did talk about a race war that he said was coming, and he called it Helter Skelter named after the Beatles song that had come out in the White album, I think, in the winter of 69,

like January of 69 or 69 or something. And he did talk about it and prophesize it, but he never, the only people that said he wanted to ignite it by committing these murders before were three form, or Manson family members who bulliose, let's say, manhandled into saying that. You know, there was a truth that he would talk about it, but not that the murders happened for this. So Terry, you know, it was really difficult to convict Manson of the tape murders

because he wasn't in the house when they happened. It wasn't as hard to get him for La Bianca because at least he was in the house, accessory. but Vince had to show that Manson knew the house was there, knew what kind of people lived there, maybe not who they were, and then ordered these people to go and kill. So Terry had to get up and testify about, yes, Manson had seen my house, and then Terry said, it was part of the official version, he went out to the Spawn Ranch twice to audition Manson in June before the murders, and then he said he wasn't talented, I didn't tell him that. I just said he'd be better as a TV documentary, and then I never saw him again.

But what I found when I got access to sheriff's files, because of a cop who I think he felt sorry for me, retired cop called another retired cop at the barracks and said, let this guy in the back door, because his job was to be the security guy at the archive. So I was there the whole summer of, I think, 2000 going through the entire Manson file. And I found all these smoking guns about the fact that Melcher, Rudy had already told me that Melcher had Manson's, one of his followers, Dean Morehouse, living with him in the house. And the girls were up there and Manson was up there all the time. In the Tate House?

In the Tate House? With Terry Melcher before Roman and Sharon moved in. Okay. And that Rudy said he told Melcher they had to leave because they scared him. And I got cooperation of that from other people. But then what I found in the files was that Terry went out to see the family right out. after the murders happened. And there's an eyewitness account in the police report.

A guy named Paul Watkins said that Terry fell to his knees and he was crying and begging forgiveness to Manson and that Manson said they all had to die, all the pigs had to die. Now the frustrating thing for me is the sheriff who took the report was dead, so I couldn't ask him what that meant. These are notes, so I didn't have a tape recording.

And it's like shorthand, They all had to die. Terry falls to knees, crying, begging for forgiveness from Charlie, first week of September, 1969, so like a month after the murders. Paul Watkins, who told the police this, who was one of the acolytes of Manson, was dead, so I couldn't ask him. Paul Watkins was one of his followers? He's the one who told the police's story. About Terry falling to his knees?

Yeah, and then Terry denied that the story was true. Right. So I couldn't verify it from anybody else except that report. Then I found other eyewitness reports of Melcher going all the way to Barker Ranch in Death Valley to have another meeting with Manson. And this was like two weeks after the spawn ranch won. And, you know, that's a substantial trip. It's like six hours to get out to where they were hidden in the valley at that point. I mean in Death Valley at that point.

and there were two or three different family members who talk about Terry coming, going off in the car with Manson, and the two or three family members who told the police that admitted it wouldn't talk to me. And then Terry denied it. And the cop that took it was also dead, or I couldn't find him. So I found out that Terry's relationship was significantly different than he said under oath. He said he barely knew Manson. He met him once at Wilson's and then twice at Spawn Ranch. And it was all about music, you know, maybe producing him.

So the fact that as Stephen K. who was Boliosi's co-prosecutor in the trial said to me when I showed him these documents. Stephen K. who was Buleosi's... Co-prosecute. He was an assistant DA who helped Buleosi prosecute. Question his people. First, he said, you will never be able to convince me that Terry Melcher had anything but a fleeting acquaintance with Manson because I'd already told him what I found and I said now I want to

show you the documents I had like three meetings with them in his office because he was on the DA's office and he said you'll never convince me of this he goes I knew Terry I he goes I I cross-examined him on the stand not only at the main trial but at the Watson trial right then I showed him the documents and I described it in the book he's he's shaking his head and he's I can't I don't know what to think about this anymore he said I've been going to these parole hearings for 30 years at that point. Every time a Manson family member to parole hearing, he had to go represent the state

and he had to go through the official story, usually two hours. How the person who was on parole met the Manson family, what they did in the murders, everything. And he had this blueprint story that he told again and he goes, now I don't know what to

think about this anymore. And clearly this is Vince's handwriting. He had taken these interviews from these people. This changes everything. He said, and more frighteningly, if Vince lied about this, what else did he lie about? So

that's why, for instance, that revelation about Terry was really, really important. And that's why when I took the stuff that I talked to Stephen to Terry's house, I'm like one of the two people he's ever talked to about these murders. He gave one interview in the 70s. He released

a solo album of himself singing. And then he agreed to talk to me in I think 2001 and it was only because he knew that I had something on him. So I went to, he had just moved down from Carmel where he had lived with his mom, Doris Day, hadn't recorded music for like years, but had decided to do Kokomo with the Beach Boys, which I think is the worst Beach Boys song ever, but it was their best-selling song of all time. And then work with Lou Adler again, who had produced all his early stuff. He was getting back into the music business after being retired for like 10 years.

years so he got a penhouse on ocean drive in Santa Monica and he says don't go to my apartment and just go right up to the roof I'm like oh fuck I go off to the you know have to go through the dormant the dormant said yeah he said don't go to his apartment just take the elevator to the roof but I got to the roof and it was you know there's a pool okay there's an outdoor but he was the only one up there it was a 4th of July like three in the afternoon it was weird there wasn't a single other person on this beautiful roof but it wasn't I thought I thought at first. I'm not going to be on a bare roof.

So he was there and a big bottle of wine and from about three in the afternoon and he's already wasted. And I knew his drug. I don't know how to pronounce it, D-L-A-L-A-D-L-A-N or something like that. His what? The drugs that he like to take.

It's like Xanax, but it's called... Kalanapin? No, no, it begins the D. D-I-L-U-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I- can never pronounce it. So he's stoned and high and he's got sunglasses on. He looked like Jim Morrison from the photos I'd seen because he used to be a blonde, young, good-looking guy.

He was bloated, and his hair was long, and he had these aviator glasses on, and he's slurring, and I sat down with him for like an hour or two on tape, showed him the same documents I had shown Stephen. Wouldn't even look at them. So I'm reading them to him. He goes, that's shit.

People just trying to be famous. They're always trying to, I go, Terry, this is serious. I mean, you perjured yourself in a capital case, meaning you lied and gave testimony that resulted in people getting the death penalty. All seven of them got death penalties, but the Supreme Court overthrew the death penalties in the early 70s saying it was unconstitutional for anybody, so they suspended the death sentences, and that's the only reason none of them were killed by the end of the 70s. They all got their sentences commuted to life in prison with possibility of parole.

Right. But for you to perjure yourself in a death penalty case, you can be susceptible to the same penalty. So it's found out that you lied in a death penalty case. You can get the death penalty if your testimony convicted and sent somebody. I think if they got executed. So it's a serious charge. And I go, it's not, and again, it's not like one little lie or fib, but everything you said about Manson and how you knew him, where you met him, who else you have them living with you in that house and they asked him you know he was on the stand

for like three or four hours did you ever meet this person no no no no i go you like almost every word that came out of your mouth was a lie so finally he's like who sent you why are you doing this who wants to fuck with me i go i'm a journalist he goes listen here's what here's what i offer you nobody has i've never written my memoir i've been asked so many times to write about my mother my life producing the mamas and the papas, the beach boys, my mother's records, about her life with Sammy Davis

She was part of the rap pack, Frank Sinatra, all those guys. I could tell you stories that would shock the world. We would have a bestseller. You want to do it with me? I'm like, Terry, you know what this sounds like? I said, number one,

why would I trust any of your stories when you lied about this? But number two, you're trying to buy me off. Right. And he said, yeah, it'd be a much more. He says, nobody's going to believe this bullshit. I'll give you my book. We'll do it.

Let's do it. I can tell you're good. I go, no, sorry. Then he said, okay. He goes, I have lawyers. And he starts naming these lawyers. And I heard of some of them who will crush you if you try to publish this. I will crush you.

And he said, in fact, right now, I'm going to take your briefcase and throw it off the roof. And I'm like, Terry, you know I have copies at home. I wouldn't have been stupid. Yeah, so that's, you know, there's a lot more of it in there. But that was, yeah, I mean, the same thing with Vince. He was calling me and threatening me. And when I was at his house saying, recorders off, we turn the recorders off. He goes, I will hurt you like you've never been hurt in your life.

And I said, what does that mean, Vince? He goes, you interpret it whatever way you want, but I will hurt you like you have never been hurt in your life. I go, is that mean you're going to beat me up like Virginia Cardwell? You know, are you going to stalk me? like the milk man. You know, it's crazy. Austin, can you tell them to quiet down? Um, okay, so the reason,

you want to the water? Yeah, I have a, well you do a sparkling water? Awesome, will you grab a bottle of water from the fridge out there? Thanks, man. Um, okay, so. When I go off into the weeds, just go like this. No, no, no, you're good.

I love it. Sometimes they get too deep. I love it. I'm just right now, I'm having trouble understanding how, okay, I understand the evidence that you found throws off the official story and it throws off

the helter-skelter narrative. The fact that Terry Melcher met with Manson in the weeks following the murders. How is that significant? Right, right. Like obviously it's significant because it changes the whole story.

It shows that their shit was covered up, ship was false, but what is like the smoking? It's just that, I mean, it opens the door to the possibility like, were these people killed because of something Terry had done? Why would Terry be begging forgiveness? Thank you. Forgiveness for what? Why did, the most important thing is just that the prosecution withheld this.

For instance, when I showed this stuff to Paul Fitzgerald, who was probably the sanest of the defense attorneys, he was Leslie's attorney. No, Patricia Cremonkles. And as Bouliosi said in the book, The Smartest and the Best, we were having lunch at a dim sum place in Chinatown, and he starts pounding his hand on the table. He goes, this is amazing.

He goes, I've been interviewed a thousand times about this. This is probably like 2001 or two. He goes, this would have gotten the case thrown out. This principal witness lied under oath and then scripted the lies. He goes, everything at that trial, just like Stephen Kay said, now is questionable because he lied with his own witness and he knew the witness was lying.

He goes, he would have been arrested for that, disbarred automatically and he would have been charged. So, you know, other stuff I found out, this isn't in the book, but that makes the whole helter-skelter thing fall apart, is I found out that there was an attempt on the lives of the same four people, Sharon, Voychek, Abigail Folger, and Jay Sebring. The night before, at Jay Sebring's house, he lived down the canyon from, Sharon lived at the top of Cello. Jay lived in a castle on Easton that was a famous, they thought, haunted castle because this film director, Paul, I forgot what his name was, was murdered there

by probably his wife, who was a famous 1930s starlet, but the studio protected it, it made it look like a suicide. Jay lived in this house, had wild parties there, had secret doors, was into S&M, had drugs. Well, the night before they were all murdered, he had dinner for Sharon and Vuechak and Abby, Givie and him.

And while they were having, when they finished dinner, he had installed cable TV. Now, when I first read this in a police report, that's how I found out about it, because it's not in the popular literature, was in the police files. I thought they didn't have cable TV in 1969, but then I looked it up, talked to experts,

and they said they started introducing cable TV in the mid-60s. The public didn't have it. You had to have a fortune, but you could subscribe, and only some very wealthy people had it. Jay had cable, and they were going to watch a movie after dinner in his bedroom. And then all of a sudden there was, according to the police report, from an electrician who was, he had installed all of the wiring for Jay's house. His father was Jay's lawyer.

He was a law school student, Paul Greenwald, and Paul went to the Sebring House three days after the murder because his lawyer, who was Jay's lawyer, said, go get a suit for Jay to be buried. It was probably two days after. And when he was there, he told the police that the night before the murders, Jay had called him because the cable had gone out. And he went to the back of the house when he went to get the suit two days after.

And, you know, the police were guarding the house, and they interviewed him only because he came there. And they said, what are you doing here? And he said, well, I think you should know this. When I went to the back of the house, the lines had been cut. And I could tell by the gradation that they were deliberately cut because they were all sliced in the same direction. There were like four lines and two of them were cut. And he said it couldn't have happened. It couldn't have been a gardening accident because it was 9 o'clock at night.

There wouldn't have been gardeners there. It wasn't an animal that chewed through it. But it seemed significant that the night before those same four people died at the Tate House, somebody cut the wires at Jay's house. Now, if you know the tape murder scene, the first thing they did was TX climbed the pole and cut the phone wires, just the foam wires, not the lights, to the house, so nobody could call out. So Paul Greenwald, I found him when I found this report, and he said, oh, yeah, I remember following that, I mean telling them that like it happened yesterday. Clearly, someone tried to kill them the night before.

And I asked him for more detail than was in the report. And he goes, well, what's interesting is the lights were on in the house. They only lost cable. They didn't know what they were doing. You know, they were trying to cut the, they thought it was a foam wire and it was a cable. cable, they'd never seen it before, but they cut, they hit another wire, and he said that causes a surge of electricity. So every light in the house would have blazed and he had lots of, yeah, just for like a second. And then they couldn't watch cable. So Jay called, and this is in the police

report, Jay called Greenwald at 9 o'clock, said, I have Sharon and Gibby and Voie checkover, and we've lost cable, we don't know what happened, can you come over and look at the wires? and Greenwald said, I finally got this girl to go out with me who have been trying to get to go out for three months. It's nine o'clock. I've got to be at her house in like five minutes. Please.

And Jay said, all, I forget it. We'll go to the Daisy, which is what they did. They went to the club. Wow. The very next night, Watson cuts the correct wire at the Tade House about, well, a couple hours later it was about 1130. They go in and slaughter those same four people

and then Steve Parenthood, who happened to be in the back house, visiting. So if this is all true, and it is, you know, I have the contemporaneous report that the Greenwall gave in August 12 when you went to get the suit, that means that the whole argument that Bouliosi made that these people were strangers to their killers, that they picked people they didn't know, just that they knew had to represent Hollywood and glamour because Manson knew Terry used to live there. So that meant that whoever there was, now was likely in show business, it meant, no, they were stalking and targeting.

Specific people. At least one of those four people, maybe two of those four people, maybe all four, Boliosi kept all that out of the book. And again, the only reason I found it was because I got access to, after I got into the sheriff's files, then I got an LAPD cop who had caught, he was a sergeant who was in charge of the Tate murder investigation, and he had copied the entire file. I heard about him through collectors.

He was selling it for $200,000. And he was the only one who had the whole file. Holy shit. And he wouldn't consider letting me look at it for free. I flew out to Sun Valley, Idaho. And this is when Bruce Willis and Demi Moore were still married. This cop who had retired, lived in a mansion next door to Bruce and DeMe at a beautiful millionaire's mansion.

He was a really corrupt cop. Holy shit. So I spent two days there, went to the house twice. He had a great story. He had married a homicide detective, a woman. He and her left their spouses in the middle of the night and ran off together and got married. And they were still married all these years later. So I got drunk with them for two days.

They were both alcoholics. I'll do whatever I have to do. I'll shoot heroin if it's going to get me. Man, you've had a lot of fun escapades with your subjects. So at the end of two days, he agreed to read from some of the stuff he had on these principal witnesses. Long story short, that was like 2001, I think. It took me until 2008. They relocated from Utah to Palm Springs, Palm Desert.

bought a beautiful house that used to belong to Russ Meyer, this famous pornographer, who made all these 60s pornography films, and they lived there then. So I started visiting him there about once a year, and finally I broke him down. Really? And he said, here's the deal, I want to write my own book.

He said, if you organize all I've got, he had like two or three boxes, you know, alphabetize it, index it, put it in an organized way. He said you can copy whatever you want. So I spent a week there in his garage taking everything, copying almost all of it, if not all of it, and then putting it in hanging files in these boxes with labels and everything. Except every day at lunchtime, he'd come out, time to go to lunchtime.

Oh, God, so they'd take me to this little steakhouse every day. And they didn't like it if I didn't have a martini with them. And they didn't like it if I didn't have two martinis. so we get rip-orne drunk at lunch and then go back to the garage and I try to keep working and he'd keep drinking and just sitting there in a folding chair

telling me stories and Elsa his wife would stumble out and go would you leave that fucking kid alone he's got to work and I go I was staying at a friend's house but it was a week of that and I got everything and that's where I found that report about the wires

oh my God but that's why it takes 20 years it took me seven or eight years to get him to finally let me look at it. And that was probably 10 visits to him. One in Utah and then nine in Palm Springs until I won him over. He died a couple years ago and then she died last year. And I know that the son, I shouldn't even be saying this on this.

I don't care. The son is a cop now and he has the files. And I've always been worried that he's going to sell him. I guess it doesn't matter now because I took the best stuff, but there's another box of stuff there. I'm not going to say because I don't want to publicize. I'll tell you after the show. Okay.

But it's really, really important that he wouldn't let me look at then. And the son has it now. Whoa. Yeah. This is just kind of to give you the overview of why an investigation like this doesn't happen like it does on TV. Right. Yeah. Have you ever considered doing any sort of like docu series on it or anything like that?

Has anyone approached you about that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean. Especially since you've done the Joe Rogan thing, that probably blew it out of the water. Yeah, it sure did. But before Rogan, actually before the book came out, I told you that my first publisher sued me and everything stopped as far as me being, and my agent said, he goes, frankly, you're getting sued by the biggest publisher in the business, the most

respected. That's why we went with them. I might never be able to sell this book again, even if we resolve the suit and settle. He goes, you've got a black mark against you because you couldn't deliver that book. I'm like, thanks, Sloane. He goes, I just want you to know the truth. So I actually reached out to, I don't know if you know who Errol Morris is. Errol Morris. Isn't that Hamilton Morris's dad? He knows Hamilton, yeah. Hamilton. I don't know much about his dad, but I've heard the name. Well, his dad is a lot more famous than Hamilton. But Hamilton has got his following. I know Hamilton now. Oh, yeah. Earl made his first movie that kind of broke him out was the thin blue line.

about a wrongly convicted killer in Texas that got the guy out of prison. And it kind of changed documentary filmmaking back in the, it was probably the mid-80s, just phenomenal technique, everything he did. So every movie since then has been a big story. He won the Oscar in, I think, 2005 or six for a movie called The Fog of War, where he got the Secretary of State McNamara, Bob McNamara, who prolonged the Vietnam War by lying about it under President Johnson, never admitted before that they knew we were going to lose the war,

that they had reduced the number of casualties. They basically lied to keep the war going. Errol got McNamara on camera to admit about all these lies and break down and cry when he was like 90 years old, and it won him an Oscar for Best Documentary. So his last film was about Timothy Leary and his girlfriend. and it came out on Showtime last year. So in 2015, I reached out to him

because when Penguin was still working with me, they thought he would be a good match for me as a collaborator because he also wrote books. And I said, I'd love to work with Arrow Moors because I'm a huge fan. So they sent him my proposal, and Earl said, I'm not going to write a book with this guy. I want to make a movie about him.

And they said, no, no, we've got a book. We'll get back to you when we're done the book. So it occurred to me when I was desperate and broke, and when my agent said we might never be able to sell the book, I said, I'm going to go see if Arrow wants to make the movie now. And I had his email address. I'd never met him or spoke to him, but I had it on a bunch of things from the agencies.

So I just emailed him out of the blue, and he called me that day. Again, long story short, he and I worked together for a year. So he came out to my place in Venice with a crew and shot for three days, I think. they wired my whole bungalow with cameras. There were like 15 cameras on remote tracks. And then they went in an empty bungalow across the lot.

And they had like 10 computer guys with these massive screens controlling the cameras. Yeah. They'd be tracking across my ceiling. And then it's just Errol and I in the bungalow. One other woman who was pulling focus on one camera that you couldn't use remotely. And then like a crew of 20 or 30 people on the whole property. And then we went to a sound stage and they moved half of my apartment to the sound stage, like my desk, my chair, all those books you saw in that picture, which is a nightmare.

Because you guys, we have to put them back exactly where they are. They promised, but of course they didn't. Then they recreated my apartment on the sound stage in Hollywood. And then they had a camera like 50, 60, 100 feet in the air, swirling down, like when I'm going through my stuff. And then he has smoke and all his, he does a lot of weird. beautiful stuff. So he sold it to Netflix,

and it was going to be a series about me and the book, and it was going to be six hours. And right after he sold it, but before I signed the contract with Netflix, he changed the focus, and there was another guy who he decided he wanted to combine our stories. This became a series called Warmwood.

It was on Netflix about four years ago, and it's about a guy named Eric Olson, whose father was murdered by the CIA in 1950, thrown off a building at the Statler Hilton in New York City because he was going to be a MK Ultra whistleblower. And to this day, the government only admits that it used him in an experiment, but that he committed suicide. But what Eric, the son, who's 70-something now, has spent his life

trying to show that he was murdered, got enough evidence together that Errol believes him and most people do. So Errol did, wanted to combine, blend our stories of Eric, chasing his and me chasing mine. I said, oh, that's not what I signed up for. Yeah. You know, and my book isn't written. If my book were written, maybe, but, you know, right now you're the author of this story.

I'm not going to give it up to you if I'm sharing it with a whole other story. No. You've dedicated way too much to this. So I walked out on it. And I, you know, I would have made significant money and I was getting evicted from my apartment, not for not paying it because they were demolishing it. And I was fighting that. It was the lowest time in my life.

But, you know, I walked away. He was furious. There was nothing he can do because my contract gave me an out until I signed the deal with. The first deal I signed with him was just to work with him and nobody else until he sold it. And when he sold it, because he invested a quarter million dollars to shoot all this with his own money, until he sold it, I would work with him. But then as soon as he sold it, it would be my last chance to quit if I didn't like the direction. it was going in. So I quit.

And it was a tough decision, and he hated me. And then he ended up just doing Eric's story, which is like, wait, that's what I wanted. And it was called Wormwood. It was a big success. You can see it on Netflix. He used real actors for the first time in a documentary. So he blended documentary with scripted. So Amazon Studios optioned this. They got a hold of the proposal that Dan and I, my original proposal was 220 pages, and we shrunk it down to about, I think, 30 when we decided to take it out after the lawsuit was resolved in 2017. So we sold it to Little Brown. They published it, but before we'd written it, somebody got a hold of the proposal,

even though it was under NDA, brought it to Amazon, and Amazon came to us with an offer to option it. So that meant that they, for 18 months, could develop it, even though there was no book, but just own it until the book came out. And I didn't want to do that because they wouldn't say whether they were going to do a limited series or a feature film. Right.

I knew it was going to be scripted. I preferred documentary, but I knew scripted was much more money and I'm a lot of debt because my resolution with Penguins. The books out, fuck it, script it gave me the money. But it would be a million times better if it was an actual, a proper documentary.

That's where this is going and it might be a happy ending. So what happened was my agent said you can't get them to commit to one or the other. You have to hope that when they get the book, they'll see it could only be a limited series. And I said, how much are they going to give me? And he said that. He goes, you know that if they give you that, then you and Dan can write the book full time. At that point, I had started driving Uber, which is horrible. Oh, no.

He's like, all you can do is the book, and you need to do it and get it done in two years or less. So I took the money. they renewed the option when the book came out and hired a screenwriter. He finished his feature-length script, not limited series, pulled his hair out. He told me, he goes, now I know why I took you 20 years. And I don't know how to condense this at two hours, but that's what my assignment is.

So he turned it in in November to Amazon. And, you know, he did a good job, but it just doesn't reflect the book. It just jumps across. so Amazon pulled the plug, and they didn't say it was because they didn't like his book. I don't know if this is true or not, but they said it's because they're pulling away from movies with white middle-aged protagonists, that they want to do people of color and women protagonists.

Really? It was the whole Me Too thing and all that. Wow. Yeah. I don't think that's true. I think they were trying to make him feel good. I don't know, but whatever they pulled the plug. Right.

I go, I don't know if you're mad at me or not. You know, I hadn't spoken to over five years, but just so you know it's available again, because I wasn't allowed to do a documentary while they own the script. Right. So, Errol and I are, oh, I'm not supposed to be talking about this. I don't care. He wouldn't care. We're negotiating now to do, uh, uh, Netflix has already said they'll do it. Oh, that's amazing. We're going back to start. Fuck yes, dude. But I, you know, I don't get my hopes up anymore. No, not with that industry, man. You can't. It's just full of letdowns. I've, I've used to be a part

that world. Really? Yeah, I pitched many TV projects and had my heartbroken too many times, which has got me to the podcasting YouTube world. Which you probably love. Yeah, it's amazing. It's so much fun. I love it.

No one to answer to. Well, when we're off camera, it doesn't even have to be today. I want to ask you because I've also been thinking, obviously, about doing something like this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming in.

Everybody, the book is called Chaos. It's a beautiful book. It's a masterpiece. Thank you. And I'll link it below. Great, thanks. Yeah. I appreciate it, Tom.

Hopefully we can do this again once your documentary is out. Or your alleged possible. Possible. Possible. Possible documentaries out. Yeah. Cool. Or the next book in 40, 20 years.

Or the next book. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that as well. Not 20 years. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. It's fun. Thank you. Thank you, Tom.

Okay. I appreciate it. Great. Goodbye, world.