Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 448: Alcatraz Part I - Bird Is the Word

Episode Date: April 10, 2021

This week, we begin our three-part series in which Alcatraz will be covered at length, from the torturous conditions of the prison to the infamous escapes — both successful and failed.We're kicking off the series by talking about the types of people who ended up on Alcatraz, starting with one of its best known prisoners: Robert Stroud AKA "The Birdman of Alcatraz".Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time on the left That's when the cannibalism started What was that? Hey, you dirty finks Yeah, you dirty cut out finks. You really spend some time in the who's cow What are you even calling me that for and what's a who's cow? No, you want to meet me down in the mess? You dirty fink. Why am I a fink? Cuz you're you're lousy ways and you're still pigeon nature come down here threatening me during mess

I'm not even I'm not a man not supposed to talk four men in four men out You come down here in the who's cow try and tell me what to do. I'm the boss in this here who's cow I just want sells very steak. Well You're in luck We was here and we was here in Alcatraz. You have to eat every single bit of food That's on your plate at lunch and what a lucky boy you'd be Welcome to the last podcast on the left everyone I am Ben hanging out with Henry and of course hanging out with Marcus as well. Hi. Yeah, you dirty you dirty pimps

Whoa, that's the worst thing you could call somebody back in the day if you called somebody a dirty pimp You'd get yourself a you get yourself a little bit of a knuckle hoagie. Oh my goodness. I don't want a knuckle hoagie I just want my sells very steak Buggering old bitches. Oh my goodness. You would be absolutely Wonderful being used as a human tube in prison I mean, you know as long as I serve to purpose absolutely. All right. So why all the prison talk many you might be asking well today We are covering Alcatraz

And I'm very excited now This is going to be a three-part series in which Alcatraz will be covered at length Well, we're gonna cover everything from the torturous conditions of the prison to the infamous escapes both successful and failed But we're also gonna say upfront that this first part is gonna be pretty light on Alcatraz Island itself Okay, instead we're gonna start this series talking about the types of people who ended up on Alcatraz Starting with one of its best-known prisoners Robert Stroud aka the bird man of Alcatraz This was one of the most famous prisoners in America. This is he is a he was a pop icon

He was a part of the American tapestry. He was very famous at the time and also loved the Concept of having somebody like that kind of name in jail like the bird man of Alcatraz. It sounds like Arkham Asylum Yeah, it really does not to be confused with Coco beware. Of course the bird man of professional wrestling Well someone of a cross between Jack Unterweger and a light version of Karl Pansram Robert Stroud became an example of a reformed criminal worthy of mercy not once but twice during his 54 years of Incarceration, well, he definitely wanted to appear to be a reformed criminal worthy of mercy, right? Stroud first went into prison in 1909 and in the intervening years who become known as a bird expert

Specializing in canaries and it even published a couple of books on the subject that masqueraded as scientific studies Eventually a book was written about Stroud portraying him as somewhat of a misunderstood unfairly treated genius And by 1962 Burt Lancaster had turned in an Oscar nominated performance playing Robert Stroud in the movie based on the book Which is of course called bird man of Alcatraz and you should check it out. It's one of those pillars of classic crime movies That's what this podcast this series. I would be it's not even like, you know True crime we cover in terms of like grizzly serial killers or cults This is about to me about crime in America like crime history and bird man Alcatraz the movie Like is a classic film and you and I remember that's how I knew anything about the bird man of Alcatraz was Burt Lancaster been like

I love these canaries and just like these canaries I yearn to be free and you think that that's who he was He was like this like classy tall Handsome guy that just happened to be in jail because he lost his temper as a little boy And now he's like, you know, he's just railing against the system But what I love about what we get to cover in our series is that Robert Stroud was a fucking total ass weirdo I believe that the bird man of Alcatraz is not gonna be a normal dude I watched this movie in college because my roommate was studying film and would you believe it? He's a multi-billionaire now. No, I'm just joking

But we did I love him he's fantastic, but he was on he was on the television and my only complaint is not that many birds Also in the story there are not that many birds in the story. What are you talking about? We're gonna be talking about birds for like 30 minutes later. Oh, wow I didn't actually realize how long we were gonna be talking about There's so much burden. Yeah, I'd like to have a fucking listener Count how many times I say the word bird in the over the course of this episode. All right. I mean, huh? I'm excited I'm fine with bird talk if you're one of those people that believe birds are real, which is

And the movie portrays Stroud as a fastidious and sensitive yet rebellious inmate who fought against the system at every opportunity Particularly when injustice reared its ugly head to Stroud or the people close to them And in the end the viewer is left with a sense that Robert Stroud is a pretty good guy after all who just loves birds and his Mama and he was simply a victim of circumstance and a system that was determined to destroy the birdman Can I just say this and Marcus rather with your defense being like oh, he just loves birds and his mama I would be like pre-incarcerate him because that man is going to be a serial killer If someone tells me I just love birds and my mama KB love birds and his mom. Yes, but Kevin also was a talented writer Yes, he created television shows. He had a lot of sex with women. He did a lot of fun things

He lived what we call a full life. If you only like birds and your mother You need to seek therapy Hey, that's that's not my defense. That's just how the movie Birdman of Alcatraz portrayed him And as such the American public much like the Austrian public did with Jack undreveger They came out in support of Robert Stroud and multiple petitions and campaigns were started to get Robert Stroud released from prison However, unlike undreveger supporters who fell for undreveger's charm and good looks most people who spoke to Robert Stroud for more than five minutes unequivocally realized that he should not under any circumstance see the light of day as a free man

I will tell you what I do need to get out of this prison, but mostly it is to give me the pure freedom to murder again Oh my I do love I love you can see the protesters outside be like let him out Let him out they do the interview and they come out and they're like keep him in See the real Robert Stroud was an obvious psychopath pathologically self-centered impulsive very violent remorseless and above all highly manipulative

Now the same could be said of Jack undreveger But Stroud was different because Stroud had almost no control over what came out of his own mouth The only way I could describe is if if rush Limbaugh was an actual convicted criminal Like if he could have went to jail where he he should have had you've Robert Stroud had an album It would be the album with them, you know the no censure zone The emergency tape like over his mouth because Robert Stroud was again a bit of a weirdo And he had a lot of like hot takes for the day interesting So you're saying Robert Stroud would have won the presidential Medal of Freedom. That's a fantastic. What a great legacy we have

1961 the year before Birdman of Alcatraz was released Stroud actually told a court deciding his fate that his principal interest in being released was to finally tick names off of a murder list that he'd been keeping for years and since he was getting older He was running out of time to accomplish the task from what I've read about traffic and what's going on out in the public It's gonna take a long time to do multiple errands a day What do you mean by errands mr. Stroud kill and kill and kill again We're just gonna keep you here for a while killing fucking rape and shave and kill again Interesting. I'm writing books too though in between. I see I just watched that movie death note

And it seems like he was filling out his own version of a death note writing names into a book trying to get them a mere day Look at this weeaboo waifu we got over here talking to the anime I didn't know Robert Stroud was also a proud pedarast in the Roman tradition who preferred sex with boys He's a proud pedarast. What does that mean? He is he identified as a pedophile? Yeah, he would be a member of Nambla Okay See in the movie Birdman of Alcatraz Robert Stroud writes a book about the history of prisons in America and the mean old warden

Make sure that it never sees the light of day now in reality Robert Stroud did indeed write a 2,000 page manuscript About the US penal system But he had also Liberally peppered in graphic descriptions of gay sex with young boys Because outside of birds that was his favorite subject to write about and inside of his been inside of birds His favorite subject was having sex with boys Isn't that fun? You can see him writing this book and then just being like and a little bit of sugar to help the medicine As I write about having sex with children. Perhaps he thought it was more of a palette cleanser

Honestly, it's all about keeping it light. It's edutainment But Robert Stroud I woke I'm gonna bid a bit of a pushback because I started reading what was published of this novel Which was novel I call it tome. I don't know what the hell you'd call this. It's a book. It's just a nonfiction book It's a nonfiction book. It's called looking outward and there is supposedly a chapter that has not been published that is supposed to talk about It's more about if you have sex with boys if they're available in jail and if so everybody's high-fiving But if they're not available in jail, it's about he wrote a chapter about the which I do think was about his personal fantasies Talking about the the how much gay sex was happening in jail and how great it was How is that? How is that not exactly what I just said? Why are you looking back on that?

Henry just wanted to fantasize it in his own it wasn't just about the young boys It was also just about grizzled men. So it wasn't just about the young boys Do you want to read this description of one young boy that was in that book? No, this is I don't know This is from this book. He wrote many things about Just a quick toss up here who had more fun in prison Stroud or Richard Speck? Richard Speck made it a vacation. He brought the vacation to him But Henry why don't you go ahead and just read one of these descriptions of Robert Robert? So one of Robert South's descriptions of a young boy. Yeah, do it in a very good character. So no one can confuse it

Come here. Come here now, but not gonna be his name is Bert Latton Kester. I was playing for him in the movie a Little blonde weevie hair dimpled cheek darling that had not yet had his first shave sweet enough to hang on the Christmas tree And I'm the Christmas tree and Santa Claus That's oh my goodness So this book is called looking outward, but I thought the point of prison was to look inward He got mad that it was he was forced to look inward because especially when they changed the Uh, he had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in Alcatraz, and then they boarded it up Oh, well in addition to that he also wrote numerous short stories about gay incest

Including one story about two brothers aged nine and fifteen who engaged in a bout of passionate Morning sex and I will say I told Natalie because I just wanted to get some examples of gay incest titles of erotica Because I wanted to see if any of them were like what Robert Stroud wrote and I told Natalie It is look books incest gay right here under this this title right here, and these are some of my favorite titles of one The ambassadors Let your heart decide The carnivorous lamb is one that was that sound really really intense

The legend of the ditto twins Oh my speaking of limba ditto heads Yeah, of course, that's a whole fucking you know, of course, that's a whole genre. I mean do not prefer us that do not Say of course Incest porn in the up via book form was a regular genre. We never pitched it You look at porn hub, what do you see you see step-sister you see all this step-sister stuff You really think there's not going to be step-brother porn. Hmm. Hmm. I don't believe we had the word step in there. Did we? Well even on top of all that Stroud was also

Physically disgusting completely contrary to the fastidious gentleman portrayed in the movie now Robert Stroud did in fact care for an Unusually large number of birds during his prison term but because all of those birds were kept in his prison cell his environment and his Person were both covered in bird shit from the constant defecating of hundreds of birds I will say he is very it's very similar to kind of what went on with rock Terrio, I mean not in terms of the savagery, but in terms of Outsider medicine is what he performed like it was veterinary work done by somebody who has no training whatsoever Who just made up his own inner folklore of how to care for birds? And so it's strange. It's like what remember Wesley Willis of course

Rock-and-roll McDonald's of course. It's him, but if he was a veterinarian Interesting RIP very talented artist. Mm-hmm But to this day people are still falling for the Birdman of Alcatraz story because it wasn't just the movie that portrayed him this way It was the book as well a book that presented itself as nonfiction presented a completely fictionalized version of Robert Stroud the top review of the book on Amazon is a Testimony from a reader who read it five years ago, and they said they often cried while reading it Inspired both by Stroud's love of birds and his inner strength. Hmm as I read it. I could almost smell bird shit It was so written so perfectly

They leave the bird shit out completely. I mean, I mean, that's a thing The reason behind this continuation of sympathy for Stroud is that every single one of the Inconvenient facts about Stroud from the pedorasty to the psychopathic behavior This was all left out of the book and the movie and in some cases was just like specifically changed To make Stroud sound better. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you could see the red pencil come in when they're like Well, that's cut some of this out. Let's cut this whole section about the ditto twins out The entire book should be just about how he's surrounded by bird shit Can you imagine the amount of dookie in that in that cell? Oh?

Well, it's also this book was put out in 1955 so, you know the American reading public is not necessarily going to go for the gritty details like we like today They were ready like the real shit. They weren't ready in 1955. Yeah, because they didn't have motherless When you were growing up on the internet, they didn't have fuck fucking rotten. What was it? Yeah, yeah, they didn't have that growing up. So run run. They just had the war They did say they had the real wars and the real abuse that was happening at home run.com by the way the forefront of exposing some of the Criminality of the second Iraq war. Wow. Mm-hmm. Very good. Well as it's put in our highly recommended source today That's Birdman the many faces of Robert Stroud by Jolene babyack

People were not petitioning for the release of Robert Stroud They were petitioning for the release of Bert Lancaster's portrayal of Robert Stroud, of course And of course, it's very interesting. Babyack is obviously the daughter of Kathy If you think about that because you know Kathy's last name is Ack It's not her last name. Oh, I actually don't know where last name is. I want to say Kathy's last name is Hitler Wouldn't that be fun if that there was an inside joke with the illustrator the whole time like Kathy Hitler and then you always cross it out, right? Yeah, it's funny Well, in fact the portrayal of the movie was so out of character when compared to the real Stroud that former inmates of Alcatraz

Harden criminals all thought that Bert Lancaster should have apologized for portraying such a sinister character in a positive light Yes, yes, I did kill a family of eight, but your performance sucked A concerning Robert's early life Stroud was born in Seattle in 1890 but his parents Frank and Elizabeth weren't married when Elizabeth became pregnant upon the discovery of the pregnancy Frank and alcoholic immediately Abandoned an abortion and so began Robert Stroud's life off to on a good step Everybody's happy. All right Eventually Frank and Elizabeth did get married and they predictably entered into a long abusive

dysfunctional relationship with Robert right in the middle now at first Frank simply ignored his son But as he got older Frank Actively hated his son Robert and refused to even pick the kid up and it does have long-reaching effects. Of course You don't give physical Comfort and physical affection to a child. We thought the best example was a Kenefer Bianchi, you know that we talked about in the Hillside Stranglers episode remember We talked about the monkey in the Terry cloth. Yes, that whole thing Oh, well once Robert reached school age Frank threatened intimidated punished manipulated and beat his firstborn son

But in 1898 Elizabeth gave birth to Robert's brother Marcus and Marcus soon became Frank's favorite Everybody Marcus is everybody's favorite Don't even get me going on all this jealousy. I have for Marcus Marcus is just everyone's favorite son Yeah, just the other day. I was like, I wish I worked 80 hours a week Now this might tell you a little bit about childrearing because while Robert turned to crime around puberty Marcus Stroud eventually became a vaudevillian stage magician called the great Marcus Underfathering meets overfathering You want to you want to strike something right in the middle where they just become a plumber or doctor

Nice job, you know But Robert he always liked talking shit on his little brother He said that if he was in Marcus's shoes, he'd have made a million dollars Oh, well, you know, we'll get into a talk about a lot of people you would maybe call a self-made person Robert Stroud Did take his own education in his hands And if anybody was going to figure out a way to charm because think about how much little boys Think about how many little boys a magician has access to if he was able to have Performed was making his penis. I'm not even gonna say the joke

You could imagine if how would he make his penis disappear around a series of children I can I don't want to imagine finish the joke yourselves everybody As far as Robert's father Frank went he disappeared to California in 1909 abandoning his family and he died from either a cerebral hemorrhage or simple starvation Sometime around the dawn of the Great Depression. Oh cool. It's a sad man's death. Yes, it is I'm concerning Robert's behavior in school He was impatient angry and egocentric and he constantly talked about how much smarter He was than the other students and the teachers But he could never quite manage to prove how much smarter he was than everyone else

I'll tell you what I can do. I'll tell you what I can do. I can go over there and I can tell you Fuck you Are we talking about the kid who grew up to be the magician or the guy who grew up to be the prisoner We're talking about the guy who grew up to be the birdman. Oh, okay. No the great Marcus was doing just fine He had love from a family like he loves him and they chose him and he did very well And you you have to I don't know what a magician's fueled by because I actually really I love magic But I thought a magician would be way more fueled by spite and rage than anything else Well, it's not like well, that's the thing. I don't think his upbringing was great

He just didn't get physically beat like Robert Strow did that he still grew up in a pretty fucked-up environment It's it's the same type of environment that you know produces two people such as yourselves Well, I remember that my father every time every time he was not sparing the rod He would say I'm gonna beat the magician out of you and he did but of course we landed on sort of comedian broadcaster Well as such Robert Stroud quit school at the age of 13 and was soon arrested for larceny by 14 Robert Stroud was a full-on pimp and as a result spent his first of many stretches in various jails and prisons I could tell you one thing or year girls are we gonna do here? I'm gonna teach you the ism I'm gonna treat you the street ways girl, but I'm also going to talk about how Arnold's got a football shape head

And I absolutely love watching it I love being a 14 year old pimp I need someone to get me cigarettes though I've been drinking so much grape juice today. Yeah, I'm gonna piss my pants. Oh my goodness people aged faster I guess back then by 1907 though Robert Stroud decided he'd had enough of Seattle So he took a train to Alaska because as he put it Alaska had none of the social bonds that existed in the lower 48 That's why people go to Alaska still to this day Yeah, you know, there's just a pleasant family in Alaska. Just being like can anyone good come here?

Yes, our baker was a murderer. Yes, sir Our governor was a psychopath, but please just normal people come to Alaska Sorry, we think you're gonna need a 14 year old pimp And I'm gonna slap you with the back of my hand But also I'm gonna ask you to please go into that store and reach the high I need you to reach the high shelf Because I need some of that bakers bakers glue Yes, that's right Now according to Stroud

He did try going straight for just a bit by running a restaurant and shacking up with a woman named Kate Doolaney in June Oh, man, you could do a lot at 14 years old. I guess But from what he claimed every what by this point. He's like 17, but he's still 18 Okay, they're growing up fast growing up very fast Well, but from what he claimed everything fell apart in 1909 when Stroud was just 19 years old That year Robert and Kate became friends with a 23 year old Russian bartender named FKF Dahmer known to his friends as Charlie. Yeah, cuz FKF is a hard name to say Like that's hard to say. How do they stumble on FKF Dahmer and they're like, we'll call you Charlie

What about Fred? I just say it's a blackout drunk nickname that you give somebody and it sticks Okay, fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. What's your name? Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Charlie. There we go. It sticks Well one night Stroud Kate Doolaney and Charlie Dahmer were having a little drink when Charlie got a little too handsy with Stroud's girl According to what Stroud told his biographer Charlie Dahmer had given Kate Doolaney a black eye and Kate had begged Robert to kill The Russian bartender when Stroud said that his mother always told him that if a woman was good enough to sleep with She's good enough to protect so Stroud took a pistol and blew Charlie's brains out See my mom always said every time you say can't replace it with won't that's a good idea Henry Thomas you eat yourself into the grave

You want your feet me mom Oh, that's I mean she didn't say it like it was a negative and every single time I didn't finish where I was eating You went oh, you didn't like it Don't even get me going on the finish your plate rules that we grew up with that was deeply traumatizing Well the version given in burb man of alcatraz like that obviously paints Robert Stroud as kind of a hero He's coming to a woman's aid. He maybe handles it a little badly, but he's still doing the wrong thing for the right reasons Okay, but according to actual records concerning the crime Stroud was actually Kate Delaney's pimp and Charlie Dahmer owed Stroud

$10 for services rendered now in Alaskan money. That's like at least 15 clams. That's 15 clams. It's over 17 Caribou heights. Oh my god about 13 salmon No matter what the motivation though The fact is that on January 18th 1909 Stroud walked into Dahmer's shack with a gun But I'm gonna need to do though here there Dahmer's gonna need to lay down flat because it's the only way I can shoot you Because he's a kid This is really just like a little rascal's triple X like this is And they weren't particularly good kids either

Honestly, if him and panzerham had met up as boys America would have been on fire. It would have been like the legion of doom the road warriors It would have been the greatest tag team in the history of the world Well, we'll actually get into panzerham and stroud later on in this episode because they do cross paths Now Dahmer was laying down when stroud entered So stroud fired a bullet that entered Dahmer's head above the left ear and exited through Dahmer's abdomen Stroud then walked into a police station and simply said I shot a man No, I thought that was called the presidential. It is one of the weirdest ways

I've heard a man get shot to death where he put So the man was sleeping horizontal and then he put the the gun Like the long way and it's just such a weird way to shoot somebody instead of shoot them Just through the front like I would shoot a guy through the forehead when I do this I would shoot a guy in the forehead right and because that's simple the idea of lining up The gun on this on the horizontal of the head to shoot it out through the top. It's such a weird idea Yeah Well, one of the arguments that was made at his trial was that

Stroud pistol whipped charlie Dahmer and then when he did that the gun went off and it went ping-pang-pong And then went straight into his head and they pay magic bullet. They actually have the magic bullet theory. Wow. That's that's amazing No, stroud it seems like he did try to get out of the charges But when kate delaney actually testified against shroud to escape a prostitution arrest Stroud subsequently played guilty to manslaughter A stroud was only sentenced to 12 years for the murder of charlie Dahmer But within a relatively short period of time He would begin a pattern of actions that would keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Wow

His first prison was the us penitentiary at mcneill island in washington Which was only the third federal prison built in this country here stroud spent 15 hours a day in a cell four feet wide nine feet long and Seven and a half feet high and I tell you what back then we liked it. That's how we liked it We didn't like walking around and you got to keep itself. I'll tell you what I wouldn't even accept the cell That's unless it's about three feet wide four sure One foot high like a coffin. Yeah, I'm talking more like a shoebox

I actually really would prefer to crawl up. It's like I've got some pair of air maxes I love that. So marcus. You mentioned there's three federal prisons at this time. So I guess this this is before we franchised This is before we realized like we're not in the restaurant business. We're in the land business Yeah, we're not in the prison business. We're in the prisoner business So you motherfuckers get those prisoners in as many prisons as possible interesting looking outward has a Fantastic run-up of the history of federal prisons. I don't know what is legit and what it's not but it's fascinating I did it's a very enjoyable read Yeah

Now later on in his life stroud would recall his early years at mcneil island with an almost nostalgic tone He said that while it was certainly an old dungeon type prison It was still a place where a man served his time And that was that and he counted all sorts of dips fences hopheads moochers and yags among his friends That's also what looking outward has is the beautiful breakdowns of his classes of criminal Like who lives in jail and who doesn't live in jail and who's good in jail and who's not may I ask What's a dip? What would be what would be that would that be the person that brings the case so or is that someone who has A as a cleft asshole like what is that? Why are you this is my gas smart?

This is looking it up. My guess is a dip is someone that is addicted to opium like it. It's a it's like a junky old school That's a hop head hop head. It's an old school junkie or like to me hop heads old school method dip Is old school like morphium? I got no I I can't find like the old timey prison I would imagine a dip is like a pickpocket or a thief or something like that because you're dipping in Ah, or like a burglar or something like that I heard it's a guy that could suck dick underwater That could also be the good point of a dip or a guy who lays horizontal on the table Has a little bit of dookie and then people can just kind of dip your chip in there

I don't know what people are eating and I don't even know what I'm talking right now Well at McNeil convicts moved in lockstep using a system affectionately called nuts to butts That was his other his other book. Oh, I love nuts to butts It was all about car repair interestingly enough and the men who fuck while repairing cars And everyone except the wealthy prisoners and the snitches Did hard labor by breaking rocks or working the various industrial jobs available All the snitches and the wealthy people they all worked in the tailor shop Okay

Silence was also the standard at McNeil as it would later be at Alcatraz Convicts could whisper to each other But most of them learned how to either talk out of the side of their mouths or use hand signals Lest they receive the displeasure of the guards. You're telling me to go fuck myself No, you're telling you want me to go fuck myself in front of you. Okay. That's fantastic. I watched a Fantastic prisoner doc. I'm forgetting on the name now, but it was about solitary confinement And uh people in the man was telling the story in solitary. He said he did not hear a word for 20 years Uh, we'll get into that with Robert Stroud. Which is just unbelievable. It's just very scary the amount of time

He also spent in solitary. It makes you something different. Yes, it does As far as the displeasure of the guards went they carried either police billy clubs or short buckshot filled leather sacks But just as it was in our carl pans ram series McNeil also had torture rooms for more specific thrashings I was also reading about how uh various institutions for reformation houses for the young at the time The big thing to brag about is if you could get yourself an electric spanking machine Which was a not it far. It sounds kind of fun. It sounds very, um Rickety. Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like the new like robin thick song

Electric spanking machines and people are like, I don't know. It doesn't sound good Well prisoners were spanked with knotted boards. They were fitted with 12 pound balls and chains Which you know that actually 12 pounds is not too bad because I remember from the carl pans ram series He used to have to carry around a 50 pound ball and chain. They were in his prison. They called it earning the baby Oh, my god, you'll remember correctly. And of course you guys are carrying around a couple of ball and chains yourself. You married baskets Single life, where are my dogs? Where are my dogs? You can just see albert fish knocking on the door of this torture chamber just be like, may I come back in?

I have a receipt to come back in. I have a gift certificate Well, they also had water slowly dripped down their throats They were chained to bars while standing up for hours at a time Or they were blasted in the face with a hose until they passed out And if anyone got hurt during these punishments or if anyone got hurt at all It was the convicts who performed the medical procedures on each other. Oh my goodness or so robert stroud claims I don't think it's that far from the truth. I think it's I think it's part I think it's about halfway through

I do believe that if an inmate had a toothache the tooth was pulled using forceps made in the prison blacksmith shop I think I would rather go to dr. Satan from house of a thousand corpses. Oh, yeah in this prison hospital That's actually why I think his books actually they were clamped down upon besides just the rampant depictions of gay sex part of it had to do with They thought that it would cause a lot of Doubt in the federal prison system because he didn't talk about all of the shit right that happened to him while in prison

And so they didn't not let it go for no reason No, and I watch a lot of youtube personalities who have been in prison and sadly not that much has changed Not really the only thing I don't really believe is when stroud claimed that he had an operation done on the tendons in his hands Buy a fellow inmate Without aesthetic without anesthetic or uh narcotics. I sounds like it's probably a thing. He literally asked for yeah maybe Well while stroud had entered prison as an illiterate He was a quick study and within a few years

Stroud had somehow come across a book by who else but a cultist madame Helena Blavatsky Yeah, stroud was soon a devoted Theosophist he's an interesting cat in this way because the theosophy that he he reason why he got way into theosophy said he Had this immediate impulse of like my body is caught But I want my brain to be free right and theosophy spoke directly to that where he He said that he could try he was trying to train himself to astral project To leave the prison and go have sex with boys on the next plane Oh god, you were so close to making it something good

It almost sounded like something in in like some marvel universe But uh, then it turns into disgusting content But robert wasn't really a good student I mean he lacked discipline and he skipped over whatever he didn't want to learn Which is something I can't really blame him for when it comes to studying theosophy. It's a lot. It's a lot Really robert just learned enough theosophy to dominate other people in arguments And if you challenged his theosophical beliefs robert stroud became very angry and very dangerous Very quickly now. I also wonder if it's if it's just prison in general that makes you extra aggressive

Or it just kind of revealed who he really was robert stroud Would escalate to physical violence at the drop of a hat he and he was a very tall man He was actually a very big man and he would fuck like he would drop bows All the time. I thought robert stroud was like my size. No, I read it 140. I thought he was very tall I believe he was about six three. Hmm. That's what they were saying. Let me find out That's what they were saying on the wikipedia. Let me know wikipedia entry It's interesting though because you talk about how he jumped to anger and violence in prison. That's a rational response That's sort of what you have to do to survive. So it wasn't like he was acting irrational for the circumstance

You kind of just have to do that. Yeah, that's I think there that's what I was kind of saying It's like is it just the environment where if you don't fight if you don't show that you are willing to fight and take it To the empty right you get rolled. Yes. I think the fact that he shot a man in the head because he owed him $10 Shows you that he's a little bit more of like just kind of a Short-fused type of character. Yes, and then he's also a wackadoo and the fact that he is impenetra- he's Penetratingly honest because that's what he kept saying. He's like he couldn't live with like his nothing He couldn't live with this crime. It's almost he had to tell people immediately like I did this crime

Like he walked him just walking into a police station being like I shot a man I go to jail for this and they're like, okay. It sounds like you want it. Well, that's interesting Now as far as the first incident that got robert stroud's prison sentence extended goes The story in birdman of alcatraz paints it as an almost robin hood type situation in which a man sees injustice And bucks the system for the benefit of others According to birdman of alcatraz Stroud was working in the kitchen two years into his 12-year sentence when he began sneaking food out to his cellmate Just to be a nice guy

Another prisoner snitched and a terrible set of circumstances led to stroud stabbing the inmate multiple times with a shift I mean just let the guy take a little food out of the damn That's the movie a kitchen that that is the movie. That's the movie according to the trial Which sounds a hell of a lot in this situation sounds a hell of a lot more plausible Stroud was working with an orderly named adolf henry to sell morphine to other prisoners And adolf snitched on stroud after he quote-unquote got sore about something which resulted in stabbing I see and yet another version is that stroud thought he was going to be transferred to another prison and wanted to attempt an escape So he asked adolf for drugs to use his quote knockout drops against the us marshals in charge of the transfer

Which again snitch then stab because they very often use the they would flip prisoners all the time Which I actually think is highly common still like the idea of you pit them against each other You make sure that you give a lot of allowances to people that were snitches Which is how people got jobs like the high-profile jobs in these prisons at the time especially I don't know as much now, but it's like that's how they got the kitchen jobs Which was like the sweet job to get or something like the tailor job, which was a soft job I mean of course nowadays Protective custody is solitary confinement and oftentimes the a snitch will go into that situation

Which is a fate similar to the people who commit atrocities in prison Mm-hmm But no matter the real motivation the end result was that robert stroud stabbed adolf henry with a shank Seven times in the back shoulder upper arm and buttocks all while chasing him down a hallway You can see that scene play out right in front of your eyes Thankfully though stroud was unsuccessful in the murder attempt, which he later said was his only point of regret Because there's the other thing about stroud is that he never had remorse for anything he ever did I mean it was straight psychopathic personality where you know

You know everything is everyone else's fault. I stabbed that guy because he snitched on me So therefore it is his fault that he got stabbed. Oh, yeah, and he's of the pansoram school of the I wish the whole world had a neck so I could wrap my hands around it I really think that robert stroud because of the lack of affection Maybe a little bit and also his natural chemistry He viewed the world as a very harsh Place where you kill or be killed and so he knew that you have to essentially You have to be willing to quote-unquote defend yourself

Which I think a lot of times he would do preliminary Offensives against people that he said was defensive and that would that would allow him But you had to go all the way in order for it to count. Yeah, absolutely a little bit So it seems like his nature was was a little violent a little bit of nurture would have gone a long way Yeah Well for the crime stroud was sentenced to six more months in prison and was transferred to the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas in 1912 Yeah

And leavenworth was it would it eventually became like kind of the it was the last stop for dangerous prisoners Before they got sent to alcatraz. Okay Now as far as privileges at leavenworth went they actually had quite a few more than what stroud was used to in mcneil The warden at the time was thomas morgan and he allowed lady singers Tango dancers and pianists to entertain while convicts were actually allowed to publish their own newspaper Man, I would love to read the opinion section. Absolutely I'm sure there was a lot a lot of accurate descriptions about the loaf How horrible it was to eat every gd day

But despite the privileges stroud hated warden morgan immediately upon arrival calling him a cheap Grafton's psalm singing hypocrite whom stroud was planning to kill the first chance he got Stroud also hated john pricel the captain of the guards and wrote that he once quote saved the captain's life By not stabbing him with a 10 inch length of sharpened steel when pricel threatened him with a blackjack That's huge. Can I get some fucking credit for not killing you today? I mean, I get some credit Where is my credit for not killing all three of you guys over some period of time? We should we should give him credit. We have to actually thank him for good job. Thank you. Way to go You're so welcome guys. I just don't want it. And now as you see me put my knife back

Now i'm gonna stop licking my gun drop the bullets out of my magnum Now stroud did get in trouble a few times in the beginning for talking and laughing And he was thrown in a solitary confinement for making a hacksaw blade as well as possessing a hammer and chisel I don't know why you're mad. These are all just implements for me to hurt people and escape I don't really understand why everyone's so upset because this is a man's natural inclination to hurt no escape Very true But for the most part stroud continued studying and he began painting and even got good enough at painting Where a portrait he painted of the queen of prussia ended up hanging in the public library at sabitha, kansas

Uh, let's not talk too much. I think I have a painting up at the library in palm harbor florida However stroud's streak of good behavior ended in 1916 with a visit from his little brother the great marcus Cuz i'm it's me brother always ready for a little trixie Oh, yeah, i guess the god, guess the god, guess the god Well, this man is stabbing me in the belly for trixies You know, I I believe in massive prison reform, you know that but the one thing if I was a warden, I would demand No magicians They can make a I saw an elephant disappear when I was a kid and that wasn't a camera trick that really happened

Make the whole prison disappear kazoo kazee. Uh, I have a chisel off my ass Oh my god, who let the magician in here with the gaping butt Now the great marcus had dropped by the prison for a surprise visit Always but he even turned away because it was a non-visiting day Back to my magic castle. I go Really, I'm annoyed with your interpretation of magicians But in the book in the movie the great marcus is switched with robert stroud's mother Because robert stroud's mother tends to tug on the heartstrings a little more than a magician running a long overdue errant

No one wants a magician to visit That's true. I saw the look at harrison ford's face when he'd had to deal with david blaine And he was like get the get the fuck out of my house But you do have to deal with it Now stroud didn't hear that his brother had been denied entry until the next day But stroud who was prone to violent undeserved bouts of anger. He decided to even the score Carrying a five inch blade in his pocket Stroud walked up to a guard named andrew turner and started talking which was a big no-no in leavenworth

Not supposed to talk to the guards at all. Hey there turner. Did you see that new flick over there? Or did you see that movie? I didn't I don't know what we I can even talk to you about honestly. Have you ever been in this l for a long time Uh, I uh, I love that new movie Uh streetcar named desire turns out um Streetcar is not even named asire. There's not even a streetcar in there Well, no one heard most of the conversation, but suddenly everyone heard stroud say quote. What are you gonna do?

Shoot me And with that turner reached for his club and at the same time stroud reached for his knife Hmm tragically though stroud was Much faster and with lightning quick speed and precision. He plunged the blade Directly into turner's heart killing him in less than a minute rosebud was He spoiled that movie for me. I didn't get a chance to see it Turner was pronounced dead on the scene and stroud was sent to solitary And to further dispel the myth of the sensitive bird man stroud seemed almost proud of what he'd done

And writing about the murder in a letter to his father. This is what he wrote The guard took sick and died all of a sudden. He died of heart trouble I guess you'd call it a puncture of the heart Anyways, there was a knife hole in it This guy is the original writer for mad magazine That is just very good. Was he well respected by the fellow inmates? I think he was a pain in the ass. He was a pain in the ass or everyone's like, okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

He wasn't like considered dangerous or anything like that. He was just he was very obnoxious He was a loudmouth and he would get angry very very very quickly. Yeah, man. He stabbed two people in jail He did worse crimes in jail than he did outside of jail So there's something I feel like when you're around this dude I would like to think that most people in prison are just trying to serve their time and get the fuck out of there And they don't want to deal with somebody who takes everything to a fucking 11 every single time Even though it feels like there's a lot more of those individuals in prison Then this is I mean then even in an audition room, which is the second most of that instant

Where those people you don't know what an actor will do I would never want to meet a prison lifer in prison and I would never want to meet a professional background Actor in an audition because they will kill you to be in the background of of it's scary rock They will murder you The since stroud had killed the guard in front of so many people His lawyer figured his only chance was to plead not guilty by reason of insanity So to make stroud sound as crazy as possible His lawyer instructed him to go on the stand and try his best to explain

Theosophy so he had to do what I had to do during the hpb episodes No, theosophy still isn't widely known and if I'm being honest I'd have a hard time explaining theosophy right now Despite the fact that we did a three-part series on madame blavatsky just last summer So suffice to say when stroud was asked to explain it to a jury in 1916 he came off sounding like an absolute fucking lunatic I don't know if you're already for the truth. It's too real for you to understand too real for to be read I don't think you can handle it because you're should just about to get blown right open. You're not real bro

All right When asked what influences were on his mind at that moment concerning theosophy Stroud said and this is a direct quote. He said wait, do you mean at this moment? At this moment sir at this moment on the stand as you are thinking and talking to us Just what influences are on it right now this moment Because I have notes You know what sir? I believe that you need to express yourself in a way that you believe Makes this belief real to us. All right. Well, yes for it the master of agura

There is a theory masters that exist in the high plane of existence and very seldom manifest themselves on the physical plane But they take vast part in the affairs of the physical plane and their services are for the betterment of mankind You just cut to one juror from sonoma a white lady grabbing her crystals crying And the defense attorney is just like we got one That's all we needed was one And that's why I have sex with little boys God dammit! In addition to that the lawyer also had a psychiatrist testify that Stroud was a part of a quote degenerative class that suffered from moral insanity

And another psychiatrist declared that Stroud's testicles being of course soft and atrophied with pronounced veins Were the real source of his mental troubles. Look how weak my balls are Look how weak and gray my balls are and you can tell how did that man have a chance in this life This was an actual medical doctor who blamed all of the murders out of his balls I dare you to see my future in my balls. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I think that's why I do so well because of how high and pink my balls are I mean, it's not only given this diagnosis. He had to actually feel Robert Stroud's balls to give this diagnosis All right. All right. Okay. Let me do all right. Let me just let me get one look at this testicular bag here This is test give testicular luggage. Okay. Well, yes, it is very these are sad

These are definitely thinner than the skin is thinner than I'd like and the ball The essential ball niche of it is smaller than I'd like they might as well call in Sylvester Stallone's mom and have her do a Butthole reading. What is that? That is not medical science. It's fun, though That it was in a court. I guess wait Sylvester Stallone's mom She does the butthole readings. She did it's butthole readings. She does it's called ass. It's it's not astrology But it's literally like rumpology. It's called rumpology rumpology. She literally does it. Check it out next time I remember next time you're on the internet. I remember a way back from a page seven back when I used to do page seven I do remember a rumpology episode. Now you're coming back to me

She can tell a lot by the the curvature of your buttock and also just how brown the inside of your butthole is She'll tell you how long you're gonna live. Yeah. That's that's interesting I guess it says more about how well you wipe or how much you poop or you know, that's all I know I could just see like her opening your butt cheeks to look at your butthole and just like seeing like the end War like the final war will war three I don't know. I think Marcus's asshole is like one of those bleeding statues in central america where they just would work miracles It could be stigmatic. Yeah, you know the stink out of the butthole Yeah, you know when my asshole starts bleeding a political figure will be assassinated

Oh my god, did you get that thing bleeding every day, please? I'm joking. I'm joking I'm not Now, of course, none of these arguments even came close to working So robert stroud was sentenced to death for the murder of a prison guard It is however at this point in stroud's life that his mother came back into the picture in a big way I knew his balls were too small. They came out of me He came up balls first. Oh Oh, that would be painful. Oh my gosh

Well, she started a campaign to get her son's death sentence commuted and she even wrote to president woodrow wilson To argue that there was a long streak of insanity in their family So therefore execution was a cruel punishment for such a person as her son She actually went straight to mrs. Wilson his wife and she was like as a mother to a mother Will you please save my son's life and this is back in the day when I guess this shit could work I mean it worked. I mean recently look at uh kim kim car kim Kardashian. Mm-hmm In her aunt out of prison. Yeah, and I guess it happened with uh, karla fey tucker when George first commuted her death sentence Yeah, it's amazing

Sometimes you realize that you just have a connection to the governor's office and it really could just work like that almost like it's all completely arbitrary And all about having just a small connection to power. Yeah, it's like you get on the phone in the dmv And you're like just change my address on the computer So they don't do it you have to fill out all these forms and be like just change the address On the computer. You're actually just gonna have to stop screaming, sir You have all of the power in the computer just a civil servant. All you have to do is delete the address And put in my new address. That's where they put henry on speakerphone and they all get around and laugh as they're on mute

Yes, Travis, can we please name this episode? What's the deal with the dmv? Don't worry. Don't bust it. We have to save it for the live show Do any gas pumps work in this country? I am nailing it No, it seems as if robert stroud's master manipulations were probably learned from his mother Because when she wrote to president wilson's wife She made sure to say that she'd paid for all of her son's defense with nothing more than her needlework And it would be a shame if all that went to waste cut to her with like 25 tie girls all doing the needlework for her in true american fashion

And so president wilson signed an order commuting stroud's death sentence and stroud was given life in prison instead However, stroud had still killed a prison guard. So instead of just life in prison robert stroud was sentenced to life in solitary confinement at the age of 27 so woodrow wilson literally was like we'll commute the death sentence and we'll give him something far far worse A life buried Basically in a tomb. Yeah, and I wonder if they thought in some ways that it protects you from the guards But at the same time I feel like then all you have is guards. Yeah, no, it was just punishment I mean really what it was is that you know woodrow wilson

He signed the order and then he went back to I don't know fuck around with the league of nations or something And since he had forgotten all about it the judge said all right It's cool. So I don't get to kill him solitary confinement and by that point fucking woodrow wilson had long since moved on Now segregation at leavenworth was just as bad as it was anywhere else The cells were dingy and poorly lit and any man in isolation was denied a job And cafeteria privileges and there were certainly no more lady singers for anyone Unless a guy had got put on a mop head as a wig and danced around. Well, that could be a good performance as well No, but it's here in the segregation wing of leavenworth penitentiary that the bird man of alcatraz was born

Even though at first he was the bird man of leavenworth. Okay from what robert straub claimed He was out in the yard in 1920 when he found a couple of baby swallows who had fallen out of their nest Now the book bird man of alcatraz and the movie wants you to believe that straub saved them out of the goodness of his heart But most likely he was just looking for something to fucking do So straub somehow smuggled the sparrows into his cell and raised them himself That's cute as hell. I'm actually gonna you know, this is the point of all the series where I say good for him Good for him because even if he did do it for selfish reasons those little swallows are happy. Yeah, maybe not at all I mean

Not that I realized that he actually kind of abducted them from a beautiful outside world and put them into a cell But nonetheless, no now straub knew absolutely nothing about birds But when one bird died and straub procured some dirt from a guard for the other bird to eat The second bird almost miraculously recovered Yeah, because he the bird was just like pecking at the ground at this concrete looking for dirt I don't know how this works. It's kind of like how dogs eat grass. I don't know why I know that I don't know or something. I think but how does the dog know? I just know. Yep. Dogs just know Well extrapolating from this Stroud deduced that soil was vital to the bird's health

And so began Robert Stroud's decades of anecdotal bird research Now that sparrow flew away or it died. It's unclear what happened to the sparrow But Stroud managed a lucky break concerning more birds when it came to prison supervision start counting birds now Okay, I think I'm on six. I think we said birds six times or seven times By 1920 the warden of Leavenworth was a former reporter named Billy Biddle who had a flair and a respect for showmanship He was informed of Stroud's bird talents And he approved Stroud's ownership of a solitary canary and the construction of a canary cage Do you think that this is just PR that this type of thing? I that's what I always weird being like

Why did these guys like want like character prisoners? I think it's boredom partly Yeah, it's like and I in prison I think it seems like prison in like 1920 wasn't quite as hellish as prison is now That it's definitely got to the time period. I don't know like this Up and down, right? I think it was a different kind of hellish Different yeah, yeah, because they still had group spankings and you get sprayed in the hose of the mouth until you fall asleep But that's we we don't necessarily do that now, but we will put you in solitary confinement, right? I don't know There's some pretty horrific tales coming out from the modern prison system

Well, this is in years like years of like somewhat prison reform Like remember during our Carl Panzerham series like Panzerham was on a fucking softball team Yeah, that's right. They let him out. I think when he let him out for the day and then let him come back Yeah, there were people in the prison system that were all about reform at this time in this time and place and like in Billy Biddle I think it was one of those people, but I think he also just liked having somebody around who did something fun You know, it breaks up the day. You mentioned Billy Biddle is a journalist. What did he cover like competitive corn eating? What does Billy Biddle cover like what is his beat? It sounds like it gnome racing. Yeah gnome racing And then we killed all the gnomes and I have no more beat time to get into the prisons system

I don't run. I just have sex with whatever. I can get my little hands Terry, get out of here Terry You're problematic Terry Well, I mean and it was a bit of PR on Billy Biddle's part because when Biddle gave tours of the prison He always ended the tour with a stop at Stroud cell Because then Stroud could show visitors all the little bird tricks that he taught the birds And that tended to give visitors the impression that maybe prison wasn't so bad after all Is prison Latin for human zoo?

Why like this just if you're in prison, you're like, I guess I guess at least someone's visiting you No, they have this here. This is Terry Johnson. He can suck his own dick He's the human question mark Well by 1922 the entire prison staff had become fascinated by Stroud's birds And the more fascinated they became the more birds Stroud got And eventually Stroud was given alcohol and a blow torch to cook bird food And he began experimenting with different formulas of bird seed which he then sold to various bird journals But he's just making shit up

Yeah, it's all it's free. Let's call it freestyle science He thinks the bird seed if they eat it or if they die and then people are like, do they die? And he's just like not all the way All right, we'll take five bags of it Geez they gave him a blow torch He gave him a lot of shit and I feel like there there is a little bit of the chasing the positive validation In one area where he is happy that he is serving some quote-unquote function, but also He is a there's a selfish tinge to it as well

Because he's getting all of these extra privileges because he does this cute thing with birds Okay Stroud then began breeding different types of birds and selling them through mail order He bred the red hooded siskin. He bred the fancy pedigreed glook roller You know, it's nice about birds. They always stay young Even when they're old, they look young and tight. That is true But with so many birds came so many bird droppings A Stroud cell was soon filled with hundreds of birds

And every inch of Stroud's being was permeated with the smell of bird shit combined with Robert Stroud's two-pack-a-day smoking habit I got I got I was walking under the bridge in you know, William's bird Brooklyn on Metropolitan Avenue on on my way to Skinny Dennis If that's open, please support that bar Um and a bird shat on me and I just had to throw the shirt away. Oh, yeah It smells like ammonia and poison. Yeah There was actually so much bird shit that the birds started getting sick and dying from bacterial overgrowth So the birds were looking at him being like you disgusting animal dude. You gotta clean this up It became almost like of like he was hoarding birds

Interesting. Yeah. So Stroud consulted a book from 1869 called canary birds to see if he could find a solution In this book well and the thing that I wonder about Robert Stroud is that you know, we all we are talking about like Oh, there's so much bird shit here Where was he gonna put the bird shit? It's not like he could just throw it out of the cell or it's not like the guards We're willing to like haul away mounds and mounds of bird shit every single day It's well as we know from ace bench as we know from ace venture a guado He could make a cool little he could honestly sculpt with it He could yeah, yeah, he can make little things at a guado space, but you know what I think or guano, I think

Guano Um straight up. He's in solitary. So I don't think he uh You'll be surprised the smells you can get used to so there's no window. Oh, I can't even imagine So he's in solitary dealing with all of these birds I think uh what we'll get to is that he has so few human eyes on him at any given time So you kind of just adjust to whatever your disgusting level of bird is of course Well in the book canary birds author mary wood gave some of the

dumbest possible cures Half guesses like giving canary sponge cakes soaked in sherry to prevent disease And she also uh, and she also suggested a diet of spiders Mixed with drinking water marinated by rusty nails. I what is even happening? What are we feeding these canaries? In another off kilter cure She advised that when the gland that secretes oil into a bird's feathers You know the the thing that you know protects their feathers when it rains if that gets clogged One should pry it open with a needle and apply sugar and unsalted butter. What are we doing making cookies?

This however does kill the bird Yeah, it seems very torturous these uh, well, she admitted that it killed the bird You know she said it she said it kills the bird the next molting season But why then what's the point you're just killing the bird? You get the bird for a little longer because it dies when it gets clogged up But if you want if you want to extend the bird's life by torturing the bird that is an option Okay, good So finding nothing of use there Stroud consulted a book from 1888 called canaries and cage birds

Which recommended rock candy for a lost singing voice and when all else failed Opium usually cured whatever was ale in the canary. You just get the bird highest fuck. Yeah, honestly, it probably would work I mean, it does help a lot of things. Yeah, it can kill you though Well bereft of any sort of literature that might help him Stroud lost 100 of his 160 birds to a disease called Septic fever and he performed autopsies on each dead bird using nothing But his hands to pry open the corpses. Let me just get in there. I gotta they gotta stop childproofing these canaries So he's living like Michael Myers from Halloween But if he wasn't into making masks but was into doing autopsies on birds and the guards would just walk by and be like

another perfect reformed prisoner Prisoner that's how they are you saying they gave it gave him quote-unquote something to do and it was this curiosity And I guess eventually you just get used to the smell Maybe I'm jumping ahead here, but did he discover anything of use when it comes to birds? That's what I'm about to get into All right Yeah, since Stroud had nothing to do but spend all his time focusing on canaries He developed his own bird medicines. He had Stroud specific Stroud's avian antiseptic Stroud salts number one and Stroud's effervescent bird salts

What? What is it? What is a bird salt? I don't know what a bird salt is It's salt you give a bird you put bird you put salt in the bird's Water or you should have just food Again, just he should have made little trinkets out of the bird shit. This is bird-ejuice. I'm looking up. This is just nicotine vape Oh my god, this is all right. All of this is bird salts is apparently a he fave brand of nicotine vape. Well, that's fantastic Now Robert Stroud was certainly no scientist But amazingly he did accidentally create bird medicine that functioned as a basic antiseptic in a time when neither

Antiseptics nor antibiotics were fully understood. So some of his medicines did produce results Okay, and as a result Stroud was able to create an entire business selling birds bird medicine and bird feed All from his cell in the segregation wing at Leavenworth prison. Wow between 1928 and 1931 Stroud received over 100 letters from fellow bird lovers and was even given unlimited writing privileges and his own typewriter By Stroud's claims. He had anywhere from 400 to a thousand dollars worth of birds in his cell at any given time And over the course of a year Stroud made by his claims around $8,000 a year with his burgeoning bird business. Oh my into and that's 1920 money and today's money

That's about a hundred thousand dollars. Oh, holy crap. He's making that from solitary. Yeah. He says or so he said, okay Hey, however, I mean at the very least he made I would imagine he made a couple thousand dollars a year doing bird business It's phenomenal. He's making this bird money. Yes However, the changing socio-political landscape of America would have a direct impact on Stroud's venture Right when it was becoming a great success. I am so sorry guys, but I totally missed an opportunity for a fun pun Okay, that's not chicken scratch That's not even a pun. Is that a pun? No, that's like a reader's digest commentary on Robert Stroud Well, because he made so much money during the year with the birds. That's not chicken scratch

That's a gas punch working America. That's a pun. No, that's kind of a pun. I don't know. I don't think it is I don't think it's technically a pun. I think it's a it's a commentary. I Well, if we have it Well, if we have any uh comedy professors out there who would like Oh, and we would like to tell us. We really do. You imagine teaching teaching comedy Oh, what a garbage thing If you want to be funny, just go and see if people laugh when you're on stage and then work until they do Oh, yeah, or or be a lawyer

What's your place else? Go to another go to another place Whatever you want to do Well, concerning that social political landscape as we all know the prohibition of alcohol in the 20s created an entirely new extraordinarily violent criminal class unlike anything the modern world had ever seen The problem is that not only were there more people being arrested But that the people being arrested were more violent and more likely to attempt escape So to deal with them the government created the fbi and the bureau of prisons We really should do the history of the fbi at some point because we have we already have plans to do a bunch of prohibition era

Uh criminals we're going to be doing that but I do like Robert Stroud in looking outward talks about the The transition from the outlaw days from jesse james to the prohibition times and it is very interesting to talk about those two classes of maniacs about the idea of like essentially the Uh old west style multiple murderers. There were essentially people that just never stopped fighting the civil war And then they just took it forward into the next generation into 2021 And then the prohibition era criminal was like super villains that started popping up everywhere Yeah, I can't wait to cover that because you know women's suffrage goes into prohibition

It's so much and this is the one thing I'll say that might be hashtag brave or something But when it comes to the hoover building the hurt we can take his name off of everything I think that man was such a scumbag I just hate that we have any kind of honor to him whatsoever like what what an asshole You know, it's funny is that hoover actually claimed to have bought a canary from robert stroud Uh, and hoover claimed that uh, he that stroud had actually taken a sparrow and painted it yellow and sold it to him But jager sure was also a notorious liar. Yeah, yeah Well to prevent these criminals that were coming into the prison system to prevent them from making any money while in prison

And to ensure their communication with the outside world was at a minimum The director of the bureau of prisons forbade prisoners from engaging in outside business ventures Now most prisoners didn't really care But it had a huge effect on robert stroud and it had a huge effect on robert stroud's mother Because robert stroud's mother had come to depend on all this new bird money that was suddenly flying around Now that my friend is a pun. That's not chicken scratch So stroud's mother started giving interviews to newspapers Presenting her son robert as the mildest most tenderhearted of all of her children

And he just happened to have murdered two men in cold blood over relatively trivial arguments My my son is so innocent. He's so innocent. He's able to really connect at the level Of the young boy. He likes to have sex with my other sons a professional liar And he carried out and he may carry birds around in his deck But oftentimes they get sick and die robert tries to make them better While all my other son does is put birds in hats There you go. The only way that robert is a better son than her other son is because that son is a magician. Yep Furthermore she again brought up the long history of insanity in her family

And she claimed that the birds were the only thing keeping her son robert sane and taking away those birds Amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Would you take away the seashell bra from the mermaid? Would you take away the octopus from the starfish's home where the octopus serves as a maid? No, we would not ma'am. No, no, no So the story started picking up steam and it eventually reached a reporter named Della Jones And Della Jones soon became infatuated with the bird man of leavenworth. There's just something about this bird man Something about him. Something about how he's the only man who won't grab it man. I don't know why. Oh, isn't that nice? Before long articles written on robert's behalf with Della's byline began appearing in bird magazines

Like roller canary journal and bird world if you hit the front page of the roller canary journal That's like some of the biggest that's all eyes of the bird industry. They fucking follow that That's the variety of the canary roller. I think roller canary is a type of canary That's the variety of the roller canary world. That's cool However, when one read these articles it became apparent that most of the content had been written by robert stroud Because while Della Jones was a trained reporter The articles were full of aggressive run-on sentences and plenty of emotional blackmail I'll tell you what the reason why you got to keep looking at these birds and you got to be around these birds

Because each bird I take care of it's one less boy. I have to murder. Okay. Thank you so much So she plagiarized this prisoner's work, but didn't edit it. She didn't put periods. That's all she had to do Well, I think it was mostly just like yeah, just put this out. No do it exactly how I wrote it How it's exactly how I wrote it. That's how I want it out there. He's in solitary confinement. So when she changes everything He's not going to be able to do too much. Mm-hmm. Well, she was also infatuated with him and and when I say infatuated with him I mean romantically infatuated with him. He's covered in more shit than a roman statue He's surrounded by birds and he's in prison for double murder. Yeah, dude. He's selling birds Selling birds it shows that all women really want is a man with a job

That's all they care about. That's how low the standards are. All right Well in those articles Stroud is painted as a good son who is only trying to do the right thing to financially support his mother And prison officials were nothing more than cruel-hearted bastards who are trying to starve his poor mother to death But even though it all started in bird magazines the story gained traction and full page articles began appearing in newspapers all over kansas and missoura Letters thereafter poured into leavenworth congress and the white house followed by petitions Signed by thousands of people saying let the man have the birds Wow, of course Woodrow Wilson wasn't concerned about the massive disparity of wealth or race Uh, he was mostly reading rolling canary. He just that was what was on his front desk every day kept showing up

Yeah, we were about to get into some pretty big wars and things maybe some preemptive actions would have been good But this is like that. This is I think by this time we're getting into Hoover land We're getting I think we're around Hoover times. We're getting into a little bit of maybe coolage We might even be in Roosevelt by this point. Um, yeah by this point Yeah, by this time like Woodrow Wilson was already long dead from a stroke Also, Kelvin Coolidge with the name like that you would think he would be a lot like more awesome because it's a cool man Kelvin Coolidge is like the coolest dude in school Did he who's the one who died of the flu? Oh, that was Henry uh, uh, Harrison. I believe William Henry Harrison

Yeah, 1930s in or something like that 30 days. He died in 30 days. Yeah greatest president ever and Calvin Coolidge, he died of uh, dropping the empty elevator shaft. Yes. Yes. That is correct. Yes Well, eventually public officials simply got tired of having to answer all these stupid fucking bird questions So they made an addendum to the rule that said that prisoners could have businesses If the warden said it was okay Okay, and of course Robert Stroud was the only person in the entire prison system that was granted this exception Really? Yeah. Now. Well the the rule was made specifically for him. It was so he could so this was a positive Rule for him. This is a fucking home run for him. Wow

Now for Leavenworth Stroud was a huge PR victory So they returned his business and gave him an additional cell to house as our head researcher Joel put it Stroud's expanding bird empire. Wow Emboldened by the good press and all the support from the bird community Stroud began work on his first book Published in 1933 under the title diseases of canaries. Stroud's first book has gone down in true crime lore As one of those factoids you might see uh on one of those like did you know meme pages? Okay, did you know that you know criminal Robert Stroud uh actually discovered a lot of diseases about birds and so on and so forth

and the legend perpetrated mostly by bird man of alcatraz and the legend that is still in circulation today Is that Stroud wrote one of the first expansive books on avian disease? And he furthered the cause of bird science using nothing more than what he was able to teach himself Which I wouldn't recommend. I think you should go to veterinary school Yeah, I'd say maybe you should learn about I you know because I've you know, we've had wendy for four years I don't know anything about dogs. No, no The truth however is that diseases of canaries was mostly plagiarized from existing bird books And his original work was functionally useless because every experiment he'd done had been done in a dank shit covered prison cell

With his bare hands Prison materials But even so publishing a book gave Stroud a bit of an ego and by the mid 1930s He'd abandoned Della Jones who was by then inexplicably claiming to be Stroud's wife even though they'd never gotten married She in turn abandoned journalism and disappeared before dying in the 1960s of stomach cancer Oh my god, so she had a pretty long life. She did. Wow So by the age of 45 Robert Stroud had become a bit of a Leavenworth eccentric He was known to be an accomplished painter, but he was mostly known for his pungent odor and his quote

Nutty gingivitis breath Oh I never want to hear a breath described as nutty. It's not a wine. You're not a sommelier of the throat That is disgusting Just that kind of like butler breath Oh a butler has very good breath. I mean he's got proper mints. Absolutely Well on a pretty regular basis Stroud could be found in his cell Fully nude and covered in bird shit with colorful canaries perched on his head and shoulders

While he hunched over a microscope amongst homemade bird cages stacked floor to ceiling The truth is again, remember he's still in solitary confinement Even though he does have like some vague connections to the outside world He can do it over letters, but no one can come and see him So he is really losing touch because now he's 20 years of being Alone and so he is losing touch with any sort of humanity and in in his own way He's no longer. It's I it's really weird how I think a person's Behavior really comes down to being observed absolutely people talk about during quote unquote quarantine being like

I don't even have pants on but if you're in solitary confinement at some point Does it matter if you have clothes on no, of course it doesn't and are you really a human if other humans aren't Recognizing you as a human. That's a very good point True by a lot by a biological question because I know I'm I know who I'm hanging out with you. Oh, yeah, we know But truthfully don't these birds have a lot of pathogens. He's covered in bird shit Didn't he get sick could do we need to study this man's DNA? How could he live surrounded by bird shit and not like die of the flu or anything? They think this is for avian experts out there side stories

Elpo LP otl a gmail.com if you know anything about fucking birds or what it means my my guess is that if you raise a bird From egg to bird It doesn't have a chance to pick up the bacteria It would need to make those diseases, but I don't have no idea. It just seems like he would be sick all the time I mean, I'm just talking about this from because I watched animal hoarders of course. They are very sick Yes, yeah, or it could be that a bird that's bred for domestic for being a domestic animal has less of a chance of carrying those sorts of things Side stories LP otl a gmail.com I just think it's fascinating or maybe he was sick the whole time and we just don't know

Well strad was also allowed fresh food and he had an extraordinary supply of chemicals disinfectants And insecticides making him by far the prisoner with the most privileges ever given in leavenworth penitentiary You know what he has all the accoutrements of dr. Gasoline Chemicals disinfects it and disinfectants and insecticides We'll be meeting in the squared circle me, my partner, niece and ultima, the Polish slinky The strad soon began work on his second book But unlike diseases of canaries the second book was not professionally edited and as a result was quite a bit more patronizing pompous aggressive and rambling and it was often

wildly inappropriate for a book on birds that dude man. He's bringing a new energy to the bird environment He's like this is Robert Stroud uncut. I guess so For example, he wrote this in the book years of work study the lives of literally thousands of birds Almost every line every word is splattered with sweat and blood for every truth. I have outlined you I have blundered my way through a hundred errors I have killed birds when it was almost as hard as killing one's own children Oh, I've had birds die in my hand when their death brought me greater sadness than I have ever felt

over the passing of a member of my own species You know He has a heart, but it's also like you killed three people. He has no love. Well, just that weird show or that it's that weird Quality where he has no love for anything part of humanity But he loves these fucking birds. I mean, honestly, it's a it's a testament to the uh to the animal, isn't it? Yeah, aren't they the most humanizing creature of all birds don't know what they're doing But that's probably what I don't know if they're your friends But that also that makes them 100 innocent, but a dog or a cat knows that it's your friend

Yeah, cats do not know they're your friends. Cats have no god cats have no masters cats do not care You were just yeah, you're just a food conveyance Exactly. Now much of Stroud's knowledge published in his second book Sounded good in the 1930s But when it's read today, it's obvious that Stroud had all the insight of a medieval doctor Performing medicine based on anecdotal evidence and his own feelings. Yeah, he's like mangola, but for birds I wonder birds could all communicate to each other where they're like, oh god, where are you going? Are you going to Stroud's cell? Oh, fuck. You got to get out of there, buddy. You got to get the hell out of there

I mean start seeing if you can give you blue eyes if he had the political power and uh And and whatever the time of of mangola. He probably would have been similar to someone like that But for birds, but for birds, yeah Oh, I think you would have gone to people though if he was around. Oh, he would have just straight up killed people He was trying to fix them Stroud didn't understand basic scientific or medical facts And everything was colored by the fact that the birds were almost drowning in their own excrement When he studied the bodies of dead birds

He confused decomposition with the effects of the disease he was studying But still presented everything as fact. In other words, while one doesn't necessarily need to go to school to study writing Art history or even mathematics Biology does tend to be one of those things in which a guiding hand is helpful. Well, you need a book Yeah, you need some biology books, which I'm certain he had but also at the time it sounds like all the stuff He had was like super old-timey in this time period. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, you just need you need someone to guide your hand and go. No, no, no, no That's that seems like it's working, but it's it's not working at all

No, I mean we're like 30 years out removed from bloodletting, right? Yeah, like we're still like medicine Even if he had the most up-to-date book it would still probably be kind of bonkers I mean, it was definitely in a time when the the third psychiatrist that they brought in for Stroud's trial like maybe like 20 years earlier was a phrenologist Like they feel the bumps on your head to see if they can tell by the shape of your skull if you're crazy or not Yeah, yeah, and I also wonder if I'm starting to actually think I don't think these prisons actually cared about the birds I don't think they did either. I don't think they cared about that thing You're gonna get upset about saying it just sounds like that the birds were just kind of like a side thing. I agree

But even though Stroud had no idea what he was doing or what he was talking about He was still highly respected in the bird world because Robert Stroud made birding cool Like it's like yeah, man. No, you want to fucking talk shit about me about my canaries We got a criminal that's all about birds and it's super fucking rad, man Okay, you know who is the closest person to this? Mike Tyson with his love of pigeons. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's a good point Well by the 40s Robert Stroud had over 2,000 names in his prison correspondence file. Wow. Wow

And at times Stroud would even share his cell block with some of the more infamous prisoners of the early 20th century Ma Barker gang member Alvin Karpus nicknamed old creepy new Stroud personally And Stroud claimed to have heard Carl Pansram singing a song about his own asshole called Oh, how I love my round eye the night before Wow You just see Van Morrison on the outside with the cup just be like round eye brown eye perfect You're all gonna learn that song faster. I'm gonna start kicking you trumpets

And that was the night before Pansram was executed at Leavenworth That is like, you know that painting that they have of like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe all the sitting at the diner together Just that with them all on one cell block like just knowing like here imagining hearing The one of the most dangerous men to ever live Carl Pansram just singing a weird alperity song to his own butthole Man, you just it's just another day for you, man Wow However national circumstances would once again have a direct effect on Stroud's tiny bird kingdom And everything was about to fall apart for Robert Stroud

So in the united states entered world war two quite a few prison guards quit their jobs to join the armed forces as such Leavenworth no longer had the manpower to cater to robert stroud or to his birding habits And at the same time Stroud had accidentally fucked himself over Because over the 30 some odd years he'd been incarcerated He'd become a high profile prisoner And when world war two broke out and the prison system suffered many of america's most high profile prisoners Were sent to where else but alcatraz island

And that's where we'll pick back up for part two with a short history of alcatraz and the conclusion to robert stroud story Wow, it'll be it's very interesting because that's the truth, right? It's like, you know When you get yourself to a level where you start to get cancelled for your old tweets Where if you just get he built himself up to a point where he was too big To like he was a supervillain like he became a very well known prisoner very well known criminal And so we had to go to the top of the criminal pyramid, which was at alcatraz the inescapable island Oh my gosh. I can't wait to get to part two of this series

Absolutely, we can smell I can smell the bird shit now. I can smell the bird shit next week Yeah, we're talking a little bit. We're covering a little the history of alcatraz We'll be covering robert stroud and then in our third episode of the series We'll be talking about which is I want to say the we're in action story We're like an action movie territory with the escape from alcatraz We'll be talking about how difficult it was to get off the rack and what the rack was like on a day-to-day basis And I wonder if we'll come to the conclusion of if those who escaped survived or not survived I like you realize they did but I don't know if they did because it seems like the waters are rough

We'll be talking about it. All right. And so one announcement I'd like to make if you're still fucking listening What an announcement I'd like to make is that I'd like you to go ahead if you like LP and deep dives dune or someplace underneath I would love for you to go and on spotify for dune go and click the follow button It's free. It just helps us boost our numbers and it's you know, we got the Swedes looking down from the ascended masters are looking down They want to look at it. Um, but also whites. Yes, and this song plays underneath We would just love for you to support the show We're getting such good feedback on it and that's on anywhere you get your podcasts

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Grundy county and uh, I'm I'm gonna tell you this I'm not bathing for three weeks out from the show I want to be ready for Grundy county I'm so excited. I am so excited We really are so happy. So happy. We can't wait to see you all and hope everyone is safe Hope everyone's doing well out there. Uh, hang on in there if you're going through a hard time Um, I know we I just I just randomly saw a tweet of a gentleman I believe it was bam bam on twitter who lost his wife recently

So her hearts are with you. We know how hard that can be to lose a loved one so hanging in there and uh, the uh, the one thing that all of our lost loved ones want for us is to continue to be happy and successful So remember that unless they're yearning for revenge unless they come back from the grave and they kill you in which case Okay, well, we got to figure out and then we have to look inside. Um, all right everyone hail yourselves. Hail Satan Hail again. Don't forget Beastie Boys part two is out this week. Check it out. Bye. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Check it out Magus dilation Check it out. That's my hip hop. That is so good. Check check check it out. Check it out. Wow. You're so good I'm sorry. I can't fill the space that dmx has left behind

Oh, he's still around. No, he's not. He died. He died this morning. He did pass. It's very very sad. Yeah Okay, uh, r.i.p. dmx. Yeah, this is the memory of dmx is serious the series. Yeah Bye This show is made possible by listeners like you thanks to our ad sponsors You can support our shows by supporting them for more shows like the one you just listened to go to last podcast network.com