The Joe Rogan Experience - #1459 - Tom O'Neill

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Tom O’Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, The Village Voice and Details. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (https://amzn.to/2RGhdQM) was published by Little, Brown in the summer of 2019.

I'm ready. Okay. Tom, how are you? Good, Joe. Great to meet you. You too. I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks, and we'll tell everybody what it's called right off the bat.

It's called Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 60s. And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes. And this is what you have, I mean, you've essentially been obsessed with this for how many years did it take you to do this? Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kind of happened, but in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, I think a day to the 20th year. And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours. You were writing an article.

Let's fill people in. Yeah, the beginning was I was in between magazines and not working. And I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years. And she was at Premier Magazine at that point, which was a monthly movie magazine. And she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders, which was 1999, happened in 69. And I was like, no, thanks. Never been interested. Hasn't the story been written to death? And she said, look, once we talk about it, you're going to see Manson comes up much more often in popular culture than

you're aware of. Just trust me on that. And I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story. I go, but what about the 30th anniversary? There's no angle. And she goes, you've done it before. You'll find an angle. We had worked together a lot. And that began a spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last year in March when we turned the manuscript in. That is so crazy that it took that long. I know. I know. The magazine shut down five years later. So you never got anything printed in the magazine? Well, no.

I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too. I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three and a half months. So I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any person's life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway. So I thought I needed the money and I needed a job. And I knew that I could get into Premier Magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over. And once I had a good story there, and this would have been the first, then I'd be set. So I agreed to do it.

And long story, very long story short, after a month or two, when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them, them, I had met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs, and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence, which was just a small portion of what I ended up having in the end, he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August 99. And he started contracting me by the month. And that continued for a year and a half. All I did was report the story on Premier's dime. He lost his job. Because of you? Well, that was kind of what was whispered around the offices.

I never heard that, you know, that was ever substantiated. I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it. He went on to a career that was fine anyway. But when the new guy came in, he demanded the story right away. I mean, I understood that. And at that point, I got a book agent through a friend and my book agent got me out of my obligation to Premiere. So Premiere essentially paid for you to start your book? Yeah, a lot of money. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, and that's – I'm actually – because it was resolved not in the courts, but we all had to sign non-disclosures.

So I didn't get entirely away with it for nothing. But at that point, though, that was I think 2001 or late 2000. Then I was on my own. I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book. So that happened next and finally in 2005. And when we took the proposal out, it was book length. It was 220 pages. And my agent, who was a big shot at ICM, who was also kind of, what I would do, I would seduce people into

the story and get them as obsessed as I was. How would you do that? Like pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book. In the beginning, in the first years, just that the trial that had occurred that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi had a lot of malfeasance in it by the prosecution. I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense. I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher, who played a big part in this, and we'll probably talk about that at some point, lied on the stand, you know, suborned themselves in a murder trial. And if you commit perjury in a murder trial, you could be convicted of murder. I mean, you could be sentenced to a murder.

You could get a murder sentence too, because of that. So there was about a dozen of those, and none of them happened all at once. So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they murdered somebody. You are subject to an actual capital. You could be elected. You could be sent to the chair. Wow. And the five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial once had I been around and able to prove this in the early 70s, Vincent Bugliosi and the three people who lied on the stand in a material way, you know,

in a very important way, they all could have been tried for that perjury and sentenced to the same or given the same sentence that the people who had gotten the death sentence. Now, I told you that I just got to the 11th chapter of your book. Right. And essentially what I'm getting so far, I haven't finished the book, but what I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program where they were, explain how they did it. They infiltrated these hippie communities and they allowed Charles Manson over and over and over again to get out of jail.

They knew that he was committing all these crimes. And instead of incarcerating him- We have to be careful when we say they. Who's they? Yeah, we have to kind of break it all down. Let's break it all down. One of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson had a parole officer, his first parole officer, who kind of had given him a get out of jail free card for the first year after Manson was released from prison. This was Smith?

Roger Smith, yeah. And he was a criminologist in the Bay Area. Manson violated his parole the day that he was released in Los Angeles. And this is one of the—you'd think it's a little lie, but it's an important lie that Vince Bugliosi presented, not just at trial, but also in his book. At trial, it's much more serious. He changed the narrative. He said Manson had been given permission to travel to San Francisco from L.A. when Manson was paroled. Manson hadn't been given that permission.

He just showed up there. They originally were going to violate him, send him right back to prison. And someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco. And he was assigned to Roger Smith. let Manson stay in San Francisco, and he was assigned to Roger Smith. It took about a year and a half, but through a Freedom of Information Act process, I got his federal parole file. And those were the kind of seeds of how I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution. For the two years he was out of prison from 67 until the murders occurred in the summer of 69.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but who was Smith doing this for? Who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and to continue to monitor him? Well, that's the problem. I didn't get the whole file. And the file I got had redactions. He would report to the head office and they would give him instructions. And then he would violate those instructions and there'd be no repercussions for him or for Manson. For instance, Manson was arrested in July of 1967, three or four months after he got out of prison when he was under Roger Smith's supervision for interfering with an officer who was trying to arrest one of his first young followers, Ruth Ann Mora House, who was 15. And he was put in jail, pled out. So he got a three-day sentence, a new probation sentence as well. And all that was hidden. It's not in Bugliosi's book. The parole officer, Roger Smith, a week later wrote to the head office that Manson was doing fine.

And he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go to Mexico and work in Mexico. And the head parole office in the United States, since it's federal, wrote back and they said, that's insane. He was supposed the job that he was going to do in Mexico was surveying soil for insecticides. I mean, it had nothing to do with, and I have all these documents showing this. Who was hiring Charles Manson to survey soil? It was a company in Nevada, which disappeared a couple years later. So it was a bullshit company thing?

I believe so, yeah. What do you think they were doing down there? See, that's it. I don't like to speculate because I can't prove it. All I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only to Mexico, but to the country that Manson had been deported from in 1959. The last time he was a free man, he had violated his parole then. He was arrested in Mexico, right? He was arrested in Mexico and brought over by the federales and given over to federal custody for a drug violation and some other stuff.

So why would his parole officer send him back to this place three months after he'd been released? And how do you supervise somebody who's in another country? Can I make a summary just for people who are like, what the fuck is going on right now? Can I make a summary just for people who are like, what the fuck is going on right now? Essentially, what you're saying is that Charles Manson was a part of some sort of a program. Yes. And that through this program, they were using him and using with LSD and all the members of the family. They were turning them violent.

And why do you think they were doing this? Again, this is where I got to reel it in a little bit. I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove. What I've proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government and the law enforcement first in San Francisco that year, the person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer, Roger Smith, the federal parole officer who was giving him leniency. Roger was also doing drug research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June of 67. Manson, during that period, turned into the Manson that we're familiar with today,

you know, the monster, the embodiment of evil, as Vince Bugliosi called him, the guru who could control the minds of these followers. So he would come into the clinic to see Roger Smith. Well, he went for two reasons. It was a free clinic. It was at the height of the Summer of Love, the summer of 67. And he would come in with the women, the girls. He had about five or six followers then. And they would walk behind him. They wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them.

Any command he issued towards them, they would follow. And they became very well known around the clinic. And they were there principally for Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole appointments. And then the girls were going in for STDs and there were some pregnancies and stuff and they were getting free treatment. That was the summer that the Manson family formed. And then they left in late 67, early 68 and migrated down to Los Angeles and became this killer cult. It's crazy how quickly this all happened. It's insane how quickly it happened.

For people who don't understand, we're talking about two years. We're talking about 67, Manson is in Haight-Ashbury, 69, the Tate-LaBianca murders, and then the trial, and then everything else. Two years. Yeah. And so you brought up MKUltra. Yes. MKUltra was a government program run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Originally started as something called Bluebird in 1948, 49, morphed into Artichoke, and then in 1952 became MKUltra. It was a mind control program, a brainwashing program. The CIA was trying to learn how to

control people's behavior without their knowledge. Now, this all came out in Senate and congressional hearings in the 70s. It was exposed, but nobody knew about it until 1974 when Seymour Hersh, the New York Times reporter, reported it on the front page of the paper. So their main objective was to create what they called hypnoprogrammed assassins, people who would kill on command, popularly known as Manchurian candidates, after a book that was written in 1962 and later became a movie and then a movie again. The people would be, through drugs and hypnotism, the objective was to get people to go and commit an act of murder against their moral code and have no memory of their programming and be amnesic even of the act after the fact often. That was their main goal, but they were also trying to create couriers,

military people that they could implant messages, send them across dangerous areas where at that time it was the Vietnam War, and deliver messages and then have them wiped from their memory in case they were captured. They had all kinds of objectives. So Roger Smith was supervising Manson when he became exactly what, or he was able to do exactly what the MKUltra program had been trying to create and do for, at that point, about 15, 17 years. When it was all exposed in the 70s, and there were these hearings, first the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the church hearings, and then finally

Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye held hearings. The CIA admitted that they had done this, but no one would say exactly what they did. All the records had been destroyed when the two people who ran it, Richard Helms, who had become the director of the CIA in the 60s, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was kind of the mad scientist who had supervised all the – they had safe houses in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, where they would experiment on people that were lured into these apartments and houses that were either look like brothels or hippie communes or whatever. And the people who are working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic that was run by another Smith, which makes it a little confusing, but Dr. David Smith, who founded it. founded it. He had given an office to a scientist named Jolly West, Louis J. West, who was, when the hearings occurred in the 70s, identified as a top MKUltra researcher. He was an academic, come out of the military, had been at the University of Oklahoma, and then UCLA running the psychiatric divisions, he denied ever being involved in MKUltra. And this was one of the moments, I think it was 2001, when things really kind of shook the course of my reporting, was I learned that West had been

at the same place that Manson was in the hate in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create. And I knew actually, I'd interviewed West about seven years before for a story I did about celebrity stalkers and people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or try to kill them. And he was an expert in violence, hypnotism, brainwashing, and he was the chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point. He was dead when his name came up in the Manson story. And there wasn't a lot of, I mean, I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit,

but when I did a little research, I found out that there had been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKUltra. He always denied it. He was never prosecuted, never even investigated. He went to his grave threatening to sue anybody that said he would have anything to do with this kind of a program. Again, through another long story, but I got access to his files, which had been left at UCLA. And they had never been processed when I called. And when I made the request, it took them two or three months to process the papers. I went through them through the whole summer

looking for a needle in a haystack, and it was intuition, gut, I just thought there might be something there. And sure enough, I eventually found it. It was correspondence between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that ran MKUltra beginning in 1953, about conducting experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to have amnesia of the acts after they were programmed.

And everything that he had been accused of and denied, he did. Not only did he do it, he created the blueprint for the whole program with Gottlieb. The fact that all these kind of interesting research programs merged at the Haight, at the clinic, and then Manson came out of it with the power to do exactly what the MKUltra had been trying to create up to that point, I thought was worth investigating further. And that's why I kept going and going and going. They did a lot of crazy shit back then. Are you aware of Operation Midnight Climax?

Those were the safe houses in San Francisco. Well, that was the brothel version of it where they lured these Johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them. Yeah, George Hunter White was the head CIA guy, and he would sit behind a one-way mirror and watch the johns would be dosed with LSD. They tried aerosols or just drinks, different things, and then they would study their behaviors. Aerosols? Yeah, aerosol sprays. Really? But that would get the prostitutes too then, no? No, the prostitutes would get them in there and then they'd go to the bathroom or something or

to be in the bathroom. And again, the problem is the records are so scant because Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency. And the only reason anybody ever discovered that it existed was a whistleblower, somebody who used to work for the State Department who remembered that there were records in a warehouse, and they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in 52 until the end, the possible end in 73. And it was just financial records of where research took place, how much was spent, what kind of equipment was bought, but nothing about the content. The guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hersh to expose.

It was named John Marks. He wrote the first book about MK Alter that came out in the mid to late 70s called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And after he wrote his book, he spoke, did a little bit of a tour, and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s. And when I told him what I had, what I had found in West's files, these documents, he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington, D.C. And he told me, he said, the reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn, you know, telling me that they'd been victims of MK Alter. He goes, I couldn't go anywhere. My whole life became crazy because everybody thought that they were subject to this because nobody knew. They did these drug tests on prisoners, hospital patients, johns, hippies, people that had no idea that this was going on for 25 years.

So Marx became the authority. So he had never given an interview until he met with me. never given an interview till he met with me. And when he looked at my documents at that point, I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually because I kept going back to the files and getting more. He said it was the most unredacted, uncensored account of what the real objectives were and what was really being done. He said if I had had that, my whole book would have been different. So that's one of the problems about saying, well, how much did they do or how far did they go? There's barely any record. And that's another reason it took me 20 years, because I was trying to find out whether or not Wes had actually interacted with Manson and were the girls.

I knew he was in the same facility. I knew that everybody that worked there, because I interviewed everybody that was alive. Most of them were still alive back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I did this. They all said, oh yeah, Charlie was, you know, we knew it was Charlie and the girls. They'd come in every day or every few days to see Roger. And West was there recruiting subjects. Now West West, while he was there that summer, had opened something called what he called the Haight-Ashbury Project. And in his correspondence and papers that I found, he houses, which were disguised as bordellos and that type of thing or brothels. This was an apartment that was decked out, or as he called it, tricked out to look like a communal hippie place. He had six graduate students, and I have his letters to them before they came to work in this. He goes, grow your hair long, wear jeans, dress like hippies, and lure people in there.

So they ran that for the summer of 67. And Wes was getting people from that Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street to participate in that. Good Lord. And I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there, and they all in these diaries said, we have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here. We feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else. What does Jolly want? Why is he making us bring these people in?

Imagine doing that to graduate students, telling them to bring people in and drug them up. Imagine telling them to make an apartment. I'm sure they liked it. Because they were also, you know, encouraged to use LSD. Yeah, I'm sure. But I mean, imagine being a graduate student and this is your project on people. I mean, that sets up, even if you leave that program and go on to do legitimate work, the ethical foundations of your career are set up in such a strange way. You're manipulating people against their knowledge.

Well, they didn't know who they were doing it for. That's why they were always questioning it. So, you know, I don't know how I found one or two of them after and they were very careful talking to me. I'm sure they felt like they were going to go to jail. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. If any of these experiments or whatever was going on resulted in a death, there's no statute of limitations on murder. Right.

Right. I mean, that's one of the biggest disappointments of my book is that people like West aren't alive, you know, to answer to this. And it was really frustrating for me because, again, his name was on the front page of the New York Times in 1977 when they had the major hearings about MKUltra. And it identified him as the head of the psychiatry department at UCLA, a very prominent doctor, researcher. And he said he had nothing to do with that. He'd never used LSD on humans and he wouldn't. He said they had asked him and he said, no. I have all these letters between him and the guy who was running the program, describing how they're going to do it, hide it from his colleagues. When he started it,

he started at Lackland Air Force Base. He was running the psychiatry department at the hospital there in 1952. When he was there running that hospital, that's when he started his experiments on prisoners, human subjects, and one letter to Gottlieb, he says, eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field. Oh, Jesus.

Exactly, yeah. What does that mean? Well, if you haven't gotten through Chapter 11 yet, you haven't gotten to the Jimmy Shaver case. No, I haven't. A year after, or maybe Jamie did. A year after Wes contracted with the CIA to do these experiments, July 4th, 1954, a three-year-old girl went missing from the parking lot of a bar at about 11 or 12 at night.

Now, her parents, it was a heat wave. They couldn't sleep. They went to the bar. They brought their two kids. They let them play in the parking lot at midnight. The little girl disappeared. They organized a search party. About three or four hours later, they went to a gravel pit. And two itinerant guys had called the local sheriff and said, there's a guy here that wandered out of the brush with scratches and blood, no shirt, and he doesn't know how he got here or who he is. The police came. His name was Jimmy Shaver.

He was an airman. They did a search and they found the little girl's body not too far away. And she had been raped and murdered by this guy who had no memory of doing it. The guy had no history of violence. He had a couple kids, and he was a flight instructor at the school. He'd been in the military for a number of years. I think he was in his early 30s. Well, guess who became his psychiatrist in preparation for the trial? Jolly West, who inserted himself into the case and then extracted his memory from him using sodium pentothal, where he admitted to the murder. Now, in the context of what we found out West was doing

and what his objectives were at that same time, it raises huge questions about this was an experiment gone wrong, that he was part of one of these experiments at Lackland Air Force Base, where he was signed up. During the trial, it came out that he had had treatment for severe migraines, experimental treatment at Lackland. That's another, you know, a smaller subchapter in the book. Does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he received? No, no, because nobody, I mean, I have all the testimony. There was actually a trial, a retrial and sentencing. And every time it came up, it was really frustrating because he never testified. So it was either his wife or his mother who would

talk about it. It was mostly his mother saying, well, all I knew was they wanted him to be involved in this two-year study to try to relieve his migraines. He would have such horrible migraines, he would put his head in buckets of ice water. The people who described encountering him that night when he was arrested and immediately taken out of the sheriff's custody by the military police and brought to Lackland and then back to the sheriffs. He was in a trance. The doctors tested him for alcohol because they thought, well, maybe he's drunk. He had no alcohol, just a little bit of alcohol in his system, but he wasn't drunk. And after the fact, they found out that he had, I mean, I don't want to get into this because it's really getting into the weeds, but he had hallucinated that this little girl was a cousin who sexually abused him

as a child and he was trying to kill her. Her name was Beth Rainboat. All this stuff came out of the trial. Jolly West in 1955 sent a report to Sidney Gottlieb, which nobody had seen, and it was another document I found in his files, announcing that he had learned how to, or developed the technology to remove true memories and replace them with false memories and a human subject without their knowledge, which was one of the main goals, the biggest goals of the MKL2 program. And again, when the CIA, when they had the hearings in the 70s, the CIA said nothing was successful. Everything we tried was a failure. It was a waste of money. We shouldn't have done it. And not just me, but most experts think that that was a cover,

that they didn't want to admit that they had developed these technologies that were effective. They also claim that they had released everything they had. I found the same report where Wes said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness, but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress. So that's a crime right there. So there's a lot of that stuff in the book. So the speculation is that this guy, through these experimental treatments, that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKUltra techniques and did that to him and induced some sort of...

Well, this is speculation. I'll go there for this. The guy had no history of violence, never been arrested, was a stellar upstanding citizen. His only problem was he had these horrible headaches. All of a sudden, he shows up by a small girl's body who'd been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it. A year earlier, Dr. West, who became a psychiatrist within a week or two, possibly had experiences with him before, but there was no record. Oh, when I tried to get the record from the medical center at Lackland,

his file, his name was Shaver, I think it was, S-A to S-I was missing. So where Shaver would have been in the medical records, it was gone. So I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any kind of experimental program there. So is the speculation, and again, this is speculation, that he did commit the crime, that he was somehow or another induced into committing this crime? Yeah. And again, this is speculation.

It's completely circumstantial. The objective was to get people who would go out and do things, not even necessarily kill. That was the ultimate goal. But to do things against their will, against their moral code. Right. But how would they know that this child would be there? How would they know? Oh, no, no, no. She wasn't targeted. So was it just that they put it into his head to go do that to anyone? Yeah. Something clicked and went wrong.

So it wasn't a precise thing. No, no, no. Nobody really knew what LSD, this was the very early days of experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s. West was one of the premier researchers in LSD, but he was still new to it. four or five doctors who treated Korean prisoners of war who were returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. The United States said that we don't use that. That's against the Geneva Codes. And these guys were brainwashed by the North Korean Chinese Soviets. So when they were brought back after the war, West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them. What a lot of researchers believe is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they'd been brainwashed by the Koreans,

where they actually were telling the truth, because there's a lot of evidence that's come out as recently as five, six years ago that we did use these weapons in Korea. Oh boy, the old double cross. Yeah. So is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system and had been incarcerated for, what, half of his life? Half of his life when he was released about age 32 and 67. All federal institutions, too, which was interesting. Even Bugliosi pointed that out in his book. First of all, his mother was a prostitute. She would get sentenced to jail for petty theft or prostitution, and she'd hand them off to her parents or other people.

And by the time he was 10, 11, 12 years old, he was stealing cars, committing petty theft and stuff. So then he was sent to juvenile detention centers and schools, reform schools, all run by the federal government. And then when he committed his first crimes as an adult, which was again, car theft, the first crimes were car theft. But when he stole the cars, he crossed state lines. So then it became a federal offense. And he got imprisoned with much more serious sentences if it's a federal offense and if it's a state. And he'd do these long sentences back to back to back. And then every time he was released, he'd either violate his parole or probation. And they were actually strict with him in the 50s and early, well, till 60, when he finally went to prison for seven years.

It wasn't until 67 when he came out that all of a sudden it was hands off. Now, what do you think happened? In prison? Did they find him in prison? Well, again, I'll go there with you. Okay. And I kind of lay out. Yeah, what I do in the book is, and I get criticism for this, which we knew was a good possibility,

is I lay out circumstantial evidence for a case with proof of each circumstance, but when you put them all together, that's the hardest part is linking them, finding the bridges. What I do is show what the objectives were of either the federal government's case through MKUltra and then other programs, COINTELPRO and CHAOS, through MKUltra and then other programs, COINTELPRO and CHAOS, and the law enforcement in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. So MKUltra began in the federal prisons experiments on prisoners. Famously or notoriously, Whitey Bulger, I don't know if you've heard about this, but a few years ago, it was revealed that Whitey Bulger had been a part of MKUltra experimentation in the 50s when he was incarcerated.

And after he was convicted, he was claiming that he believed that all of his violence was a product of what had happened to him in prison when he was experimented upon with LSD through these scientists. So theoretically, Manson was in the prime place where the experiments were occurring in prisons before he was released in 67 in federal institutions. They couldn't do it in the state. Did Manson ever talk about any experiments that took place during prison? No, no, no. Did Manson ever talk about any experiments that took place to imprison him? No. Never? No, no. I actually have not only his federal parole file, which was the hardest thing to get because it had never been released from 67 to 69, but I also have the one prior to that from the 50s to the 60s and all the correspondence.

And he would talk about these doctors coming in to examine him. And he didn't trust them and he didn't know what they were doing. And this was late fifties. And unfortunately he never had the first names for the doctors. There were two. One of them was Dr. Hartman. I can't remember the other one's name. There was a Mortimer Hartman in Los Angeles who was one of the early psychiatrists using LSD in the 50s, Cary Grant was one of his patients. So theoretically, he could have come out of the program or the experimentation that began there. But I hate to even, I rather, and again, it's hard to kind of synopsize all this without showing all the documentation and stuff of what was going on and where he was and how everything matches up.

But you'll see that when you get through Chapter 11. Okay. So I wish I got to it, but it's a rush to get to that far. So 1967, he gets out of jail. And how long before he hooks up with this clinic? So he got out in March of 67. The clinic opened in June of 67. So just a few months. Yeah. Well, Roger Smith, he was actually living in Berkeley, Manson was. And he got his first

follower, Mary Bruner, and then two or three or four more. And then Roger was the one who suggested that he go to the hate to absorb the vibes. He thought Manson might benefit from the love and peace vibes that were happening in the Summer of Love. Roger Smith was his parole officer in 67, but also was his parole officer before that. Was that proven? Well, no. Roger Smith, well, his assistant, that's good. You remember that. Gail Sedalia told me she was his parole officer before that. Was that proven? Well, no. Roger Smith, well, his assistant, that's good, you remember that, Gail Sedalia, told me, she was his assistant at the clinic, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic when he was running his amphetamine study in 68. told her he met Manson when he was doing probation work in Illinois in the early 60s. I eventually interviewed Roger several times, and Roger denied that. And when I went back to Gail, she was shocked. She's like, I can't believe he's denying that. That was a connection. That's why Manson was able to leave Los Angeles. He was sent to Roger Smith, so Roger could be his parole officer. I was never able to document that Manson had been in Illinois

except for three days in 61, or excuse me, in 60 when he was brought from Mexico to Texas, and then they brought him to Los Angeles to be violated in front of the judge there. And he did spend three days at Joliet Prison, where Roger Smith worked, but he was there a year or two later. So that was one of the many frustrating moments where everything made sense, except for one, but one very important hole, which was, well well they weren't there at the same time at least as far as the official record shows so if smith was a part of these experiments and smith was also his parole officer and did know him before he did the seven years before he got out which is when it's speculated that manson was possibly experimented on. And Smith might have been aware of the entire

process of it and was supervising him upon his release. So that's why every time Manson got arrested, which should have just locked him up, they would just let him go. Yeah. And Smith, I mean, to give you a little background on Smith, as he told me, he called himself, he goes, I was a rock rib Republican from the Midwest. And I came out, he went to Berkeley to the School of Criminology to become a criminologist, I think in 65 or 66. He was getting his master's and his PhD. And his special area of study was in the beginning, gangs, collective behavior and violence, and then how drugs would make some of these gangs that he had people he was working with infiltrate,

students infiltrate, to get information. Yeah, this was in Oakland in the ghettos in like 65, 66 when the Panthers were forming. Then in late 66, he decided to become a federal parole officer while he was still writing his dissertation. And he got assigned to something called the San Francisco Project, which was an experimental program run by the federal government to see how different numbers of parole clients, caseloads per parole officer were, you know, it was about recidivism. So if you had the lowest load was 20 clients, the largest was like 50 or 60, were you able to super, I mean, you wouldn't think that 50 or 60 is going

to be a lot more difficult, but it always wasn't. So Smith joined that program where he's supposed to be paying much more attention and care to his clients because it's part of a special program called the San Francisco Project. And in fact, he was, I mean, he was. He was seeing Manson more than he was even officially supposed to. You know, it gets even crazier. After 68, he stopped being his parole officer. He was actually removed. And he said it was voluntarily so he could focus more on his drugs and violence research at the clinic. Manson's three or four women followers got arrested in Mendocino. They had lured a couple of young boys into a house, given them LSD. Manson had sent them out up to Mendocino to recruit people for the family. The four women were arrested. One of them, Mary Bruner, had the

first baby with Manson in the group. And Roger Smith and his wife, Carol Carol went up to Mendocino and petitioned the court to take foster custody of the child until Mary was until her case was resolved so they were the foster parents of Manson's son I mean everything was irregular about this that actually that case is pretty interesting so Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins two women who actually killed for Manson in 1969, were given, they were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors, illegal drug possession. And without a trial, they pled out. was what they call the sentencing phase, where a probation officer is assigned to decide whether or not they should be sent to prison or given probation, supervised probation. So I got access to their files, Bruner's and Atkins. And in the file were recommendations to the court by Roger Smith and his wife saying, these are good women. They shouldn't go to prison.

Susan Atkins, who, you know, stabbed Sharon Tate. Is that proven? Because she said it and then she went back and forth and back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. Is it proven? Because Tex Watson clearly was a murderer, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So she had said that Tex did it. She couldn't do it. But this was later on. Yeah. Her first accounts were that she did it. She couldn't do it. But this was later on. Yeah. Her first accounts were that she did it. And then when she testified to the grand jury, she said that she didn't do it. She held Sharon while Tex stabbed her. Later in prison, she said that she did do it. Then she changed

again. She'd go back and forth. But she was pretty brutal. And Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins were given probation instead of being sentenced, partially based on Roger Smith's recommendation. Roger Smith identified himself as a former parole officer, you know, with this expertise. And he said he had known both of them for two years, which was also a lie. He had only known Susan. He could have known Susan for two years. He knew her for about a year. He did know Mary pretty well. And he never disclosed that he was Manson's parole officer. And Manson's identified in these same files as the person who lured these women into crime, that they were his communal wives, that they would steal for him,

prostitute themselves for him. And the other people that they interviewed, the probation officer argued against it, saying they're going to go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue their life of crime. But the judge released them. Now, they were doing Charlie's bidding, according to the record. What they were trying to do was recruit people into the family. Yeah. And so they would offer them drugs and sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties. And where they screwed up is they got an underage boy who was.

Freaked out. Right. And he was the son of a local sheriff. Yeah. And he ran home. And he said his legs turned into snakes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, that's when they screwed up in that situation. And that's how they got arrested that time. Yeah. And still they got released. Yeah. Which is really crazy. It's like, there's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were

arrested. And then it seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told, hey, you've got to let these guys go. This is a higher situation. It's above your pay grade. Yeah. Well, a real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file and saw that, I mean, and Helder Skelder-Bugliosi, I think,

describes two arrests that Manson got released on technicalities, you know, shoddy police work or something when he should have been violated. But what he didn't do was talk about three or four more. And if you've gotten up to chapter 10, you've seen all that stuff laid out. So when I got this record, a pretty substantial record, I took it to someone named Lewis Wachnick, who was a retired judge and a retired district attorney from the Valley out around here, Van Nuys, because I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked. Because you have to look at everything in context. Things work out differently today than they did in 2009 or 2000 when I interviewed him.

But he was there in 69 in the DA's office. I brought the documents to him and we laid them all out on his kitchen table and he's looking at them. And the poor guy was very sick with cancer and he talked like this, but I had the recorder going. And he's looking at all the documents and he's seeing this pattern of catch, release, catch, release. And he's going, chicken shit, chicken shit. This is all chicken shit. He goes, he should have gone back the first time. He goes, they wanted him out. He said he was more important to somebody out than in. He goes, you've got to find out who it was. And I go up, how do I do that? And he goes, you're not going find out who it was. And I go, how do I do that?

And he goes, you're not going to be able to. He's an informant. I go, but what should I look at? He goes, well, he was working either for local law enforcement, the federal government, the FBI, but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing. So that was important. doing. So that was important. Another turning point was a bunch of years later was when I brought similar materials to Stephen Kaye, who was Bugliosi's co-prosecutor in the case. Can I stop you for a second? So the speculation, his speculation was that Charlie was an informant.

Well, and again, an informant has many definitions. It's not just informing on crime. It also can be doing the police's bidding. Or the CIA's bidding. Or the CIA or the fbi being a part of a program right where they're allowing this and also there's speculation that the the goal was to try to diminish the anti-war movement and that this guy was a part of the hippie movement and then so now people would associate hippies with violence and drugs and murder and all this horrific stuff well i mean again this is going into the weeds but it's important i'll try to do it and i know that your podcasts are longer than most well we can keep going forever don't say that in the world you're gonna regret no i'm not gonna regret it you're

gonna regret it uh so it's been a while since I've done this. The book came out a year ago and everybody, I mean, I haven't been getting the calls I got when the book came out. So I'm a little rusty, believe it or not. You're great. This is amazing stuff. It's just hard to kind of cover all this ground without sounding nuts, without giving context. Yes, I understand. of nuts without giving context.

Yes, I understand. In 1967, the federal government started, the FBI started a program called COINTELPRO. In San Francisco, they opened their first office the same time Manson arrived there. The CIA started a program like MKUltra, illegal. I mean, MKUltra was illegal because they were violating people's human rights by giving them drugs without their knowledge or consent. But they were also operating on American soil, domestic soil, which is against the law in the United States. The CIA is not allowed to operate here. They started a new program called Chaos.

Same thing. They began in San Francisco in the summer of 67, authorized by Richard Helms, who was by then the director of the CIA. He had come up since 52, working under Allen Dulles and then John McComb. And he was the one who supervised Gottlieb and NK Ultra. So Chaos and COINTELPRO each had the same objectives, which were to neutralize what they believe was revolutionaries that were going to create a civil war in America, the left wing, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and the hippie movement who kind of embraced it all. And this all began in the early 60s with Ronald Reagan had become the governor of California. And J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the free speech movement,

which began in the early 60s in Berkeley, had been infiltrated by communists from Russia and China. And they were trying to create divisiveness within the United States to start a revolution. So Hoover started COINTELPRO, and Reagan was involved with that as the governor. And then Helms started CHAOS, and both of them had informants who were trained. They had something called the Hoover Academy, where they had training programs to turn agents into hippies, just like Jolly West with his graduate students. They grew their hair long, they learned the lingo, and then they went and tried to insinuate

themselves with left-wing groups, African-Americans with the Panthers. COINTELPRO would pit rival groups against each other, and the ultimate goal was to get them to kill each other. And the ultimate goal was to get them to kill each other. And COINTELPRO was exposed in 1972, one or two, after a bunch of kind of radical people raided a warehouse in Pennsylvania, where they knew, in Media, Pennsylvania, not far from where I was raised, where they knew that the FBI stored records. And then they released it to the public, and it was the record of this operation. And the documents were astonishing because they weren't redacted, because they were stolen and then released. There are documents celebrating the murder of one.

The Panthers became really paranoid by 67, 68. There were all kinds of inner power struggles. And they correctly thought that they had been infiltrated. And some of them killed other Panthers because they thought they were informants. But they also had a rivalry with different groups like in Los Angeles, the U.S. Slave, which was a militant group. in Los Angeles, the U.S. Slaves, which was a militant group. And the COINTELPRO operatives would let the U.S. slaves think they were about to be attacked by the Panthers and vice versa. And then there'd be a shootout.

And when COINTELPRO was exposed in the 70s and resulted in more hearings, investigations, they admitted to being responsible for instigating, I think, 20 or 30 killings by their operatives. Chaos, on the other hand, there's minimal records of chaos. All we knew was it existed from 67, probably till Helms left the CIA in 73. And that their objective was, we knew that they were doing surveillance., we knew that they were doing surveillance, and we knew that they were doing wiretapping and infiltrating groups. But as far as beyond that, they can't even name a chaos agent. Nobody's ever been exposed because everything was destroyed when Helms left the record. So these groups were trying to incite violence. Now we get to the motive of the official narrative of the Manson murder, or the Tela Bianca murders, which is what

the prosecutor, Vince Bugliosi, presented at trial, which was the famous Helterskelter motive. In a nutshell, Manson believed that there was going to be a race war, and he wanted to incite this race war because he had convinced his followers that through messages he received from the Beatles' White Album, from their lyrics, from biblical Old Testament prophecies, that he had been told that he was gonna be the savior of the world. And once the race war started, he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert. And when the race war ended, with the blacks winning,

the blacks would be framed for murders, the Manson family would emerge and repopulate the planet with their perfect offspring and dominate the blacks. This was Vince Bugliosi's narrative or? There was talk of that. There was a philosophy of Helter Skelter

at the Spahn Ranch where they lived in 68 and 69 that Manson would discuss. But whether or not it was the motive for the murders, I raise serious questions about that in the book. And Manson would discuss it in that way, that there was going to be a race war, and that they would emerge, and then their offspring? Yeah, yeah. Except for the fact that what's questioned—so the way Bugliosi was able to convict Manson, Manson wasn't at the Tate house when the murders happened. Watson to the house, the former house of Terry Melcher. They didn't know who lived there,

but just to kill everybody. And as Manson allegedly said, leave something witchy. He wanted it to look like blacks had killed these, all he knew was they were wealthy, beautiful whites. And he wanted to ignite the race war because if the Panthers got blamed for these murders, then the police would crack down on them. They'd revolt. The revolution would happen. It would spread across the whole world. And then when it was over and the blacks had prevailed, they were too dumb, Manson believed, to be able to run the world.

That's when he would come out with his followers of their hole in the desert and take over the planet. Now, Bugliosi said in interviews that I didn't have until after he and I stopped speaking, which was when he started threatening me with lawsuits and other things in about 2006, 2007, I discovered two or three interviews he gave in the early 70s where he was asked if he believed that Manson really believed this craziness. And Bugliosi said, I don't think Charlie believed in it. He got his followers to, but he never believed in that. He was too smart. He was a calm man. What the interviewers didn't ask him in the follow-up was, well, if he didn't believe it, why did he send his followers to kill these people the first night at the Tate House, the second night in Los Villas as,

you know, upper middle-class couple, the LaBiancas, then, you know, what was the motive? And that's one of my biggest regrets is that I slipped and they were kind of obscure. One was a penthouse interview. The other was a regional newspaper. But that I didn't have them. I thought I had done all the research. I thought I read every interview he'd ever given. But I didn't have it at hand to say, all right, Vince, I get that because I don't think Manson believed it either. Then what was the motive for the murders? Why were they sent there to kill? And that's what the book explores. So do you think Bugliosi was operating with the knowledge that Manson was a part of these programs? Oh, that's the big question.

Yeah. Again, I lay it out in the book. So I interviewed Bugliosi. He was the first, not the first, but one of the first interviews I did when it was a magazine assignment. He invited me to his house in Pasadena. So it was April of 99. We spent literally six hours together. He was so kind and generous with his time.

I thought I scored. I had the prosecutor. He hadn't given interviews. He always gave interviews about this, but he hadn't for a number of years. He agreed to do it for whatever reason. And during the course of that interview, I arrived at his house, went into his kitchen. His wife gave me Italian cookies, coffee and lemonade. Then he and I went out to lunch in the valley somewhere. He showed me some of the sites connected to the murders.

Then we went back to the house and talked till sunset. And towards the end of the six hours, I did realize that even though he was talking nonstop and I'm recording everything, he hadn't given me anything new or different. I mean, I had just finished Helter Skelter. I read it for the first time because I'd never been interested in the case till I got the assignment. So I did what we call the Hail Mary pass in journalism, which is you ask someone if there's anything they could tell you off the record, not for attribution, that will help them to get something fresh. Because I was still searching for an angle. This was the first month of reporting. And Vince kind of thought a minute. And he goes, turn it off, turn it off.

So I turned off the recorder. And I could tell he was debating. But then he told me something, which I'm not sure if, I don't think I reveal it till the last chapter. It was off the record, it was salacious, pretty shocking. In the larger picture, it doesn't change anything really, but it showed me that he had a very different account of something very important in the narrative. And I took that away and I thought, wow, I'm going to. What did he say? Well, first, let me explain. It was off the record.

Right. In 2005, when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell and he started threatening me with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher trying to get them to stop the book. He wrote about what he told me and he claimed that I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this. But once he put that in a letter, the lawyers at the publisher said, well, it's not on the record anymore because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he sues you, which he said he was about to do. Not off the record, you mean? Yeah. They said now it's on the record. I mean, he's violated his agreement with you. So what he

told me was that famously a videotape was taken from the Tate house by the police, excuse me, the first day after the murders. They found it hidden up in a loft. Videotaping, home videotaping was relatively new at that point. Not a lot of people had cameras, but Roman Polanski did. And in Helter Skelter, Vince says in the book that the police took the tape, viewed it, and it was just Sharon and Roman making love and returned it to the loft. Roman was in London at the time of the murders. He came back immediately and then about a week later he went up to the house and one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft

and he never even knew that they took it, allegedly. That's a story. Found it and took it. Vince told me originally off the record that the tape wasn't of Roman and Sharon making love it was Sharon being forced to have sex with two men against her wishes and he said Roman was the one who was making it because you could hear him in the background you know if you read the boy you've read those chapters Roman did a lot of bad stuff to Sharon

yeah he seemed like a terrible person he's pretty bad well what do you when you hear what he did the reason why you can never come back to the country you go well okay it makes sense it makes sense yeah it's not that surprising he's a monster yeah yeah I mean monster that's really good at making movies yeah yeah which we're not going to see anymore because the last one he made, which was supposed to be one of his best, they're not going to release it in the United States. But once I had that, that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down because I'm like, well, if this was different in the official narrative, what else might they have changed? So Vince and I were talking on the phone about every week for two months. He was so accessible. So I'd be interviewing people. And one of the first things after that, that I found was the perjuries by Terry Melcher on the stand. I found, I got access to two separate

files and found that Melcher, Doris Day's son, record producer, young boy wonder, who lived in the house with his girlfriend, Candy Bergen, on Cielo up until January 1st of 69, then moved to Malibu, and Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February. Melcher was the part of the motive for why the house was picked. And again, this is getting into the weeds, but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition. Manson sent his followers up there to instill fear in Melcher by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them. I don't believe that. That's the official narrative.

I don't believe that that's the official narrative. But Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson. One music with the possibility of recording them. And he didn't think they were talented enough and told Charlie that in so many words. And then again, this is the official narrative. That's when Manson kind of spiraled and went crazy because he'd been rejected by Terry Melcher. So he decided it was time for Helter Skelter, the race war. And again, a lot of these things don't add up when you step back. Well, why didn't he kill Terry Melcher at the house in Malibu? Because he knew where he had moved to. Why did he just go to this other place and kill strangers? Maybe Terry wouldn't connect it, all that. The bottom line was Terry on the stand, and in all the official accounts of this case, of which there are many, not just Helter Skelter but lots of books, his relationship with Manson ended in May of 69.

He said he never saw him again. When the murders happened at his former house, it never occurred to him it had anything to do with him or that Manson did it. I stopped believing that a month or two in. And then I found these documents showing that Melcher actually had gone to see Manson twice at the Spahn Ranch after the murders. And then once all the way out at Death Valley, where they had the Barker Ranch, where they were hiding when they were finally captured in the fall of 69. Once I could document that, that changed the whole, I mean, it didn't change, but impacted the motive. I mean, Melcher was a principal witness, again, because Charlie wasn't at the

Tate house. Bugliosi had to convict him of conspiracy, in other words, ordering people to go up there and kill. And he had to have a reason for that house. So Terry provided it by saying, yes, I did go out there and try to record them. And then eventually in the question, it came out. But I never had anything to do with them again. I had no idea. I never saw him or heard from him. The motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher because Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star.

Right. So this is what Bugliosi was using. But it didn't make any sense. Right. Because Melcher saw him after the murder several times. Yeah, and not only, even if it didn't make sense, you're right,

and that's why I think, well, I think you could get away with anything then because the antics of the family at the trial and everybody was so horrified by what was going on, nobody was looking at this critically and questioning stuff because every day, you know, Manson and the girls were getting thrown out of the courtroom for screaming, for singing, for dancing, for mocking the proceedings. So all this stayed under the radar.

But once I could prove that Melcher lied and then two or three more, then I knew that I had to question the entire narrative. So Bugliosi started monitoring my interviewing. This is all laid out in the beginning of the book. So by the fall of the first year of 99, I got a call from one of my sources, Rudy Altabelli, who was another important witness. He was the man who owned the house where the murders happened. He was traveling. He was traveling actually in Europe with Sharon, who had come back about three weeks before to have her baby. And Rudy had told me from the very beginning, he was very close to Terry, Dennis Wilson, and the third guy, Greg Jacobson.

Greg Jacobson was another important witness who lied throughout all of his testimony in the trial to fit a narrative that Vince needed. Rudy had told me that Vince called him, or excuse me, Terry called him and said, what are you telling this O'Neill? No one was supposed to know about that. Vince promised me it would never come out. So at that point, I knew that I was onto something even bigger. And then I got a call from Vince and he left a message on the machine saying he wanted to talk to me. It was important. So I called him back and he said, you know, I'm hearing, I can't remember who told me. And that was another little game of his. He would never, it's like Trump saying, this guy said to me, or one of my friends, or they say,

Vince said, someone told me, I heard that you're questioning my tactics and my choices at the trial. Is that true? You know, Tom, what's going on here? I go, well, you know, I'm looking at stuff, Vince, and you know where this was going. I mean, I know we haven't talked, at that point, we hadn't talked for about six weeks, I think. He goes, well, I want you to assure me that I'll be given the opportunity to answer any of these questions. He goes, because what might appear irregular to you as a layperson can be easily explained by me. I said, well, of course, Vince.

I'll definitely swing back around to you before. He goes, and I thought this was going to be out in August. And we were in like October, I think. I go, yeah, yeah, I got an extension. He goes, well, they're also saying it's a book and that you lied, that it's not a magazine. So I go, oh, no, no, I'm still getting paid by Premier because I was at that point. And I had no idea it was going to be a book because we were still in the first six, seven months. So at that point, we stopped talking, Vince and I. And it wasn't until 2005 when I got my book deal

that I went back to him with these questions. And I thought, hoped naively that I would get him to break down and say, yes, this was all a CIA operation. I was up. Oh God, that was stupid of me. But you know, I thought, what else can he say when I put all this in front of him? But you know, um, as he must've been really freaked out by how deep you got into this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, you've read the prologue to the book where we open in that scene in his kitchen where he's screaming and cursing at me and saying he's going to hurt me like I've never been hurt before. And he's going to sue me for hundreds of millions of dollars. It's crazy. Well, when you get to the end of the book, you'll see the outcome of that day and what happened when he's begging me. He's saying he'll give me a quote on the cover of my book if I don't publish this stuff.

And then when I wouldn't agree to anything, then the lawsuit threats started happening. So I naively, I didn't think he was going to break down and say I was working for someone else. I had no choice. But instead, he was evasive, threatening, screaming, denying. He had two recorders. I had two recorders. He went off the record every two minutes. So we'd have to turn off all the recorders.

And Vince was not turning his. I'm like, Vince, you didn't turn yours back. Oh, no, you didn't turn it off. Wait. No, that's my record. No, this is yours. So one minute, he's screaming and cursing at me me going, do you have any idea how I will fuck you if you fucking put this in your book?

And then the recorders go back on, but sometimes they were already on because we couldn't keep up with all the off the records. Then when I got home that night, so I walk out of the house six hours, exactly almost six hours, just like the first time six years earlier, he's grabbing me by the arm.

He goes, this isn't quid pro quo. This isn't quid pro quo. But if you don't put this ridiculous nonsense in, he goes, you know, a blurb from Vince Bullio. He always referred to himself in the third person. A blurb from Vince Bullio. See, on the cover of this book, you have no idea what that does. And I rarely do it.

I'm very selective. I get asked 10, 20 times a day. I mean, the man's ego is, you'll see that in the book. Then I get home that night. There's messages. Call me, call me. And he called me, I think it's a week, week and a half, almost every day. The next morning, a few days later, trying to, he would bully me.

And then he'd say, no, no, you know, look at what this is going to do to my family, my kids, all that. Went on and on and on. You had to be very excited by that, knowing that there's no reason for that guy to react like that unless you had him. I know. I know. And then— He knew. Yeah.

So a year later—not a year later. He said, when we finally—he goes, at the very last phone call, which was a week and a half later, he goes, so you're really going to go ahead and do with this? Go ahead with this. I go, Vince, I'm going to report what I have. I go, if you want. Oh, at this point, the magazine deal had ended. I had sold the book. So he knew I had a publisher.

I told him who it was. And he asked for my editor's name there. He said, because I will be sending them a letter. He goes, I will work on this letter for hours. It's going to be a complete rebuttal of everything you argued, all of your arguments, all your points, it's going to ruin you. They're going to cancel your deal because they're not stupid. So he wrote the letter, they got it. And I think it was June or July after February of that year, 2005. And I got a call from my editor. He said, you got to talk to our attorneys.

He goes, we have a letter from Vince. I go, well, I told you it was coming. He goes, it's insane. It's 34 pages, single space with 50 pages of attachments. And he goes, I've never seen anything like this. So he said, talk to the attorney. So they sent me over to the attorney. And he said, my first question, I'd never met the guy before. He goes, my first question for you, O'Neill, is, is he suffering from dementia? He goes, I was a law student during the trial. And he goes, I follow that trial every

day in the paper. I've read Helter Skelter. He was brilliant. He goes, I can't believe the person that wrote this letter wrote that book. So maybe you were dealing with somebody who was impaired. I said, he's mentally ill. And I have a lot of proof of that in the book. It's not dementia. I go, he's finishing his magnum opus, a 20-year effort to write a book rebutting the critics of the Warren Commission about the Kennedy assassination. I go, he's got a book coming out, a tour. And sure enough, he wrote, I think, two or three more books after that. I go, he's just, I caught him. He goes, all of his arguments don't make sense. He's contradicting himself. The letter goes off in a direction that it sounds like it's written by a madman.

And I go, is it going to inhibit us? He goes, oh, no, we're opening the champagne here. I mean, he wouldn't write a letter like this unless you got him. Yeah. Well, that's what makes sense. 50 pages of attachments. That was the first letter. Then about six months later, another letter. I think there were four total. I quote some of them

in the book. It was nuts. And unfortunately, he passed away in 2015 or 16. And I get a lot of criticism. I mean, you get it from all. How old was he when he died? I think 74 or 75. It was cancer. I knew he was sick off and on for a couple of years. But I've been accused by my critics of not publishing the book until he died because of these threats of law. No. I wanted him to be alive. I wanted him to be accountable and have to answer to all this.

The reason I didn't publish it when I was going to publish it was Penguin, my publisher, canceled my deal in 2011 and then sued me for a return of the advance, which crippled. I couldn't. Why did they do that? Well, the book was due originally in 2008. And then I'm not good with the deadlines. Figure that out. Well, it's a great book, even if it took you 20 years to write it. Yeah.

No, I mean, they extended it. And then in 2011, they lost their patience. And it was a surprise because I knew that the editor and the publisher of Penguin Press, The Imprint, who are very serious publishers, very well known, I knew or I thought that the editor and the publisher of Penguin Press, The Imprint, who are very serious publishers, very well known, I knew or I thought that they believed in me and understood why it was still taking long.

So when I got the call, it was devastating. And then even worse was a year later, my agent got served with papers and they took me to court. Well, it never got to court, it was resolved, But they sued me for my advance, which was substantial. And I'm not allowed to say anything except that it was resolved because there's non-disclosures. But let's just say you've helped. I mean, you putting me on here and the advance stuff has helped the sales. I'm still not making money because I owe a lot of people money.

So that was crushing and it held up the book because we couldn't take it out and try to resell it until it was resolved. It took about a year and a half to two years to resolve the lawsuit. Luckily, I got a pro bono lawyer. I was busted broke. lawyer. I was busted, broke. And then once we resolved the lawsuit, it was about 2016, 17, then we could take it out. But we weren't sure we were going to be able to sell it because it had this bad history trailing me. So from 2011 to 2016, it's in limbo. Well, it is, except I worked just as hard every single day. Wow. And then I was involved with a director, and I kind of hint in the book who it is, but I don't think it's a secret. Errol Morris, do you know who he is?

No. He did Thin Blue Line. Oh, okay. Yeah. He's won an Academy Award for a documentary he made about Robert McNamara. So they want to make a book about the eternity. No, no, no. So Errol Morris, I think you had a son on Hamilton Morris?

Yes. Oh, that's his son? Yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah, yeah. Well, Hamilton, he wasn't officially part of this project, but he came to the shoots. Errol approached me. He actually is a writer for Penguin Press, an author there.

He writes books, too. Not too often, but occasionally. And he knew about my book because they had asked him at one point if he wanted to collaborate on it with me when I was struggling with it. And he said, no, no, I want to make a movie about it. And they said, well, it's not a movie. It's a book, maybe after. So when my deal got canceled and I was in limbo, I thought, well, I can go to Errol now. I'd never met him or spoken to him, but I sent him an email, got his email address. And he called me like the next day and he goes, are you kidding me?

He goes, I've always, he goes, I was fat because he had got my proposal. He said, I was so fascinated by this story and I've always wanted to do something on both Manson and MKUltra. So it took about six months of legal stuff because since my book was still owned by Penguin, but the suit was happening and he helped this process. He got them to allow him to work with me on what became and was going to be a Netflix series. He shot a teaser. So he spent two days, and this was 2014, with me. One day at my bungalow where he wired it with like 15 cameras on remote cables in the ceilings and then interviewed me all day at the house at my house and going through all my files and everything and then the next day his crew took like half of my apartment to a sound

stage in the valley somewhere and recreated my apartment. But then he used all his magical tricks. Like he had a camera 200 feet in the air, zoom down and spin. It was beautiful what he ended up cutting and putting together. And then in 2015, he changed what he wanted to do with the documentary. It was going to be a six hour series. He had sold it. And I had never signed the final contracts because I said, Errol, you got to give me a clearer picture of what this is. Well, at one point, he decided he wanted to do the story of Frank Olson with my story and Frank Olson's son, Eric's pursuit of his father's possible murder by the CIA in 1954 because of what he had found out about the Korean Pao biological stuff.

That became Wormwood, which I don't know if you saw. It was a Netflix series about two years ago. It's the last thing. No, Errol. It's the second to last thing Errol did. It was his first six-part series. That happened because I backed out when, you know, I didn't like the direction it was going. So Errol and I fell out over that.

We're still friends. And he gave me some pictures for the middle of the book from the shoot. And he did just Frank Olson and Eric's pursuit of it. So that took up like a year and a half of working with him and his people to develop it. And then it all stopped. And I actually walked away from money that would have really helped me. But I was willing to give him control,

but I didn't like where it was going. And I had already invested 16 years of my life at that point. And I just thought, I can't do this. I still need this to be my vision, not somebody else's. And he was pretty upset and pissed off. But he made another good series that evolved out of my project. And at that point, it was about 2015, 2016, I just kept reporting and working to get the lawsuit resolved.

And then as soon as it did, my agent took it out. And he said, before I take out this new proposal, I got a collaborator, Dan Peipenbring, young, had started working with Prince on Prince's memoir. And then Prince died in the middle of it. Prince died in the middle of it. And because once Prince was dead, all this stuff had to be settled with his estate. Dan had like a year of not doing anything. So our agents were at the same agency. They put us together. And at first I was apprehensive because he was like 29 and he wasn't even alive when this happened. I thought, what is this kid going to know about this case and all of this stuff that COINTELPRO, KS, MKL, I'm going to have to teach him so much. That's going to take a year. But when I met him and I saw the writing

he had done before, I'm like, this guy is perfect. And he was. So we turned it out in a year. Well, we took it out and Sloan, my agent, said, we've got to send it to Penguin first because we still have that resolution that hasn't been resolved. I mean, it's all agreed to, but we have to finish what we have to do. So they need to know about it. They saw the new proposal and made us an offer for the book. That's hilarious. I know.

After suing me and trying to, I mean, doing everything to ruin my life, they made the first offer and it matched the publisher we went with, Little Brown. They made the first offer and it matched the publisher we went with, Little Brown. And I said, gosh, I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about this. Don't get in trouble. Yeah. Let's just say, I said, if they just give me a little bit more than Little Brown's offering, I'll go with them because it was the same people and they knew everything. I wouldn't have to educate Little. And they wouldn't. And then Little – and they wouldn't.

And then I said, screw you guys. I'm going to go to Little Brown, and I'm really happy with what Little Brown did. Well, that's a crazy route to get a book out. Yeah. I mean, what did it feel like when you got this? Like in your hand, it's on the bookshelves. It must have been like you gave birth. Yeah.

Like a giant baby. Yeah. I don't want to be overdramatic, but I kind of spent 20 years of my life doing nothing but investigating this and trying to bring it to fruition. to bring it to fruition. And there were so many setbacks and so many times that I was broke and my reporting had hit a wall and I found out I'd wasted three months pursuing one angle that ended up not holding up.

But at some point I thought, what else can I do now in good faith knowing that all this stuff I've done up to this point is in the gutter, you know, in the garbage? I can't let that happen. And I knew I had really important discoveries. I mean, my problem was putting them all together in a cohesive way with a final answer. And my agent had started telling me around the mid-2000s, you know, you don't have to have resolution. You don't have to have resolution. You don't have to

have a perfect beginning, middle, and end. You've got so much important stuff that you've uncovered about not just the murders and the trial and the corruption in Los Angeles, but the federal government, the Jolly West, MK Alter, COINTELPRO, all of this stuff. He goes, just put all that out there, you know, and I never really believed that. And when I finally said, well, I'll do this the rest of my life and have nothing, when I made that kind of decision and then took on this den, my collaborator, and we literally turned it around in a year, it was like a dream. And then when the book was – when I first got the galleys at my house

and then the hardcover, you know, a few months later at my shitty apartment in Mid-City, I just, I couldn't believe it. And I thought, all right, now I can get run over by a bus. I don't care because there's a document. It's out there now. I don't care what happens to me. And it's kind of given me, it gave me a freedom because now that I've done it and it's, you know, on bookshelves or wherever, I can go on with my life.

I had hoped to go on with my life without ever having to think about this again. But then, of course, after you get calls, you get emails from people who have information. There's so much stuff we had to leave out of the book. It's pretty long. It's a lot longer than they originally gave us. And then I was telling you a few days ago, they were only going to give me 10 pages of end notes, you know, where you show all your sources at the back of the book. And I fought for more and I got 60. And, you know, that's the most important part of the book because it shows every single document, where to get it, where I found it. I, you know, add a little bit more of information about why, you know, why it's important. With all that out there now, it's like, I feel like I don't ever,

I don't really need to do anything ever again. I want to, I don't know. I mean, the guy, they, oh no, that was Jamie. I was telling telling there's a guy adapting it for amazon studios uh so it could become a film who knows what's going to happen especially for a series on amazon like a series no no we want it i wanted a limited no not it's scripted i wanted a documentary too you're right the thing about a film is this is such a long story i would hate to see them butcher it will you do have friends at Amazon? Will you please call them? No, I don't know anybody. By the way, they're not going to listen to me. Why would they listen to me?

Well, you're pretty good at what you do. If they're going to butcher it, they're going to butcher it. Yeah, no, I mean, I wanted it to be a limited series. That's the way to go, I feel. Yeah, and when we made the deal with them, they actually bought it before the book was written. They got a copy of the proposal that we had submitted to a couple of the publishers with non-disclosures. They somehow got it, Amazon, and made us an offer.

And this was when I was really, really broke in 2017. I mean, I got a little advance from Little Brown, but let's just say a lot of that had to go to some other people that I owed money to. little advance from Little Brown, but let's just say a lot of that had to go to some other people that I owed money to. So my agent basically said, you know, bottom line is Amazon is going to do a great job, whatever they do with it. And we can't get them to commit to limited series or feature, and they're leaning towards the feature. If you want to say, I'll only do it if it's a limited series, you're risking losing it it I would say go for it and then hopefully when they get this massive book they'll say oh it has to be a limited series

they didn't so they're really still trying to do it in a film Amazon please the guy who's doing it so he came to spend a week with me about in October before he began writing and he's an established guy smart good done a lot of films and he's like oh my god now i know why it took

you 20 years how am i gonna fit this into two hours he can't make a series well that's what i said to him i go well you go to him you know they trust you well maybe they'll hear this and maybe they'll listen because i think this can be a spectator and i'll help get put this together put it on amazon i'll have people in here i'll promote it because i think this is amazing this this story is crazy yeah it's crazy and i think it's also a really important part of human history imagine if the whistleblower had not come forward and we didn't know about mk ultra and and all those documents didn't get – they didn't find the warehouse where the documents were. Just imagine.

Oh, yeah. We never would have known about it. This would be lost, like Kaiser So Say. Nobody in the program has ever come out and talked about it. I mean I went to a couple of guys who are still alive, wouldn't talk to me. Of course. I mean they always fall back on – we signed an oath with the agency. Right. If we talk to you without permission and they're not going to give us permission, we could go to prison. Just imagine what life must

have been like for them knowing that this is what they were doing to people. Oh, yeah. It's so that's such a strange way to also these people are agents for the federal government. I mean, what kind of precedent does this establish? Well, most of the people doing the research were subcontracted researchers at, you know, medical personnel at prisons. And in the case of Jolly West, he was first in the Air Force and then he was in university settings. And Jolly was, you know, once he got to University of Oklahoma, he was experimenting on patients. And in one of his letters to Gottlieb asking for more funding, he's saying working with psychiatric patients actually benefits us because people can't,

I'm not quoting directly here, but he was making the argument that their weird behavior wouldn't be noticed by anybody at the hospitals because they're psychiatric patients. So these people are getting LSD, which is a pretty powerful drug, and other drugs he was using. And he was hypnotizing them in many of his experiments without their knowledge and their psychiatric patients. I mean, it's worse than Nazis. Your mind is the next most important thing besides your soul, and they're tampering with it. One of Jolly's colleagues, a guy who actually took over the department when Jolly, in 69, came out to UCLA from Oklahoma, said to me, because again, I would do this with people, I would show them all the documents. And he said he always – Wes was one of his best friends.

He'd known him for, I think, 45 years when Wes died in 99. But he said to me, Jolly, it doesn't surprise me that he would have done this. This is the Jack Ruby stuff, which I guess you haven't gotten to yet. Jolly was Jack Ruby's psychiatrist oh jesus it's a hole that makes sense too right yeah jack well uh actually i won't spoil it for you the photo of jack ruby out in the hallway i did i was impressed yeah yeah well you're gonna get to about 30 or 40 pages on jack ruby and jolly west i'll just i don't want to spoil it for you or for the listeners if they haven't read the book yet, but Jolly West inserted himself into the Ruby case after Ruby was convicted of shooting and killing Oswald in the spring of 64. Before

he was going to testify to the Warren Commission, he had never told, he had never testified at his trial about why he killed Oswald. His defense argument was that he had epilepsy and he had had an epileptic fit and shot him and was amnesic of the shooting. Holy shit. Yeah. And that fits right into the narrative like a shit. Yeah, so. And that fits right into the narrative like a key.

Well, this gets better. So West inserts himself. Pull that microphone out towards your face. Oh, sorry. It's all right. So what. You're getting to this. Yeah, yeah, move. So West inserts himself into the case,

gets a sign through his connections to Ruby's new lawyer, Hubert Winston Smith, who's a whole other kettle of fish. But anyway, goes to the Dallas County Jail in, I think it was April of 64, to examine Ruby in preparation for not the Warren Commission testimony, which he was giving in a couple of months before his next trial, because he had gotten an appeal for a psychiatric review. And West, who had told Sidney Gottlieb in these early letters from the 50s,

that part of his experiments were inducing insanity in a person without their awareness. West goes to examine Ruby, emerges from the county jail, and there's press waiting for him. Ruby emerges from the county jail and there's press waiting for him. And he announces that within the preceding 48 hours, Ruby had had a psychotic break that was irrevocable. He couldn't return to sanity. He had audio and visual hallucinations. During the exam, he said Ruby hid under a table because he thought there were people in the room trying to kill him, told Wes that he could hear children's screams outside his jail cell, Jewish children, as they were boiled alive. And Wes said he's completely insane. That was the day. I mean, there was no evidence of Ruby being mentally ill prior to Wes's exam.

Wes was alone with him in the cell and then treated him for with Gerald Ford, who was in Congress and on the commission, and Arlen Specter, the young Arlen Specter, who was an investigator for the Warren Commission, who eventually came up with the magic bullet theory. He called it the magic bullet conclusion. magic bullet conclusion. Anyway, the three of them put Ruby under oath and Ruby babbled, was incoherent, grabbed Arnold Specter, who was like him, Jewish, and he said, don't you know they're killing Jews? And they've killed my brother and cut off his legs. I hear them being tortured outside. They couldn't use anything. West, that was one of his objectives in his NKL2 research was to make people induce insanity without a person's awareness. Was there any contact with Jack Ruby before he killed Oswald? Again, that was one of the things I can't tell you how hard. Oh, you mean Weston Ruby?

Yes, anyone. Anyone that could have done something to get Oswald to kill Ruby. No, Ruby to kill Oswald. Ruby to kill Oswald. Ruby, yeah. Ruby had a lot of connections to organized crime and federal. He was part of, which later emerged, the anti-Castro Cuban effort to overthrow Fidel Castro, which was run, it was Operation Mongoose, by the CIA. It was an illegal assassination program.

Ruby denied being in it, but that he was working with these people who were suspected of being involved in the assassination if there was a conspiracy. And he had never admitted that to anyone. It's only in West's file. And West withheld that. So let's break that down. withheld that. So let's break that down. So for people that don't know the primary theory of who was responsible if there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And one of the thoughts was that it had to do with some sort of a CIA operation to overthrow Castro. Yeah. Well, there was. So the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. There was no

conspiracy. Alan Dulles, the former head of the CIA who was fired by John F. Kennedy, was second in command to Judge Warren and the commission. Richard Helms, who was actually Jolly West's employer for MKUltra, was the liaison between the CIA and the commission. So Helms knew that Ruby, who they call their most important witness in their investigation, the Warren Commission investigation, because he was the one who silenced the killer. There could be no trial for Oswald because he was dead. was dead. So they tried to learn everything they could about Ruby to see if he had had any meetings with Oswald Pryor or if he had connections beyond the superficial ones to organize crime. Was there something deeper? The commission, which I believe was a joke from the beginning, it was set to determine. I mean, they said in the beginning their objective

was to prove that Oswald acted alone. They came up with that conclusion, but after the first Senate intelligence hearings in the early 70s that exposed MKUltra, Chaos, COINTELPRO, primarily the Frank Church hearings, they found out that Dulles and Helms and others had lied about the CIA's involvement with Oswald and with their own agents who had had these peripheral, we don't know if they were peripheral or not, but definitely encounters with Oswald. They withheld all that. So the House voted to have what they call the House Select Committee on Assassinations that began in 77. In 78, they released their report, which they concluded there was a probable conspiracy to kill Kennedy, that Oswald didn't act alone. And, you know, there's lots of books about that. And in their findings, and then later the head of the committee, Robert Blakely, wrote a book where he said that that Ruby had acted on behalf of the conspiracy to silence Oswald.

That he had stalked him, premeditated the murder, and that the whole thing was part of keeping the secret. So was West a part of that? You know, again, I can't prove it. I wanted to find out if West had had any encounter or any, you know, interaction with Ruby prior to Ruby committing the murder. Couldn't find that. And that's the kind of thing that maybe there's no evidence. Maybe it happened, but there's no evidence.

But I wasn't going to put it in the book. And I exhausted every resource I had. Because that one has always been so puzzling for me. Because here's this guy that's not connected to the murder, allegedly, and then steps forward and shoots Oswald in front of everybody, sentencing himself. I mean, like, there's no doubt about it. You're the guy who did it.

Everyone saw it. You're going to go to jail forever. Why would you do that? Well, the first report, which was fabricated by his first lawyer, who admitted this years and years later, he told Ruby to say he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to come to Dallas for a trial of Oswald. Yeah. That was made up.

Made no sense. And then Melvin Belli was assigned to the case. I mean, Ruby fired like three lawyers in the first couple of weeks. Then Melvin Belli took over and took it to trial. And his argument was that he had had an epileptic fit and didn't know what he was doing. And when he was grabbed by the cops after he shot Oswald, he said, hey, I'm Jack Ruby. What am I doing here? What are you doing to me? Don't you know who I am? Because he knew all the cops.

My argument in my book is it's important. My most important finding is that a CIA-contracted agent or researcher for mind control became the most important witness to the Warren Commission. He became that witness's doctor right before he testified and told his story. I go, that should have been disclosed, obviously, to the commission. But they're not going to say it because it's a secret program. And then he goes crazy. And then he goes crazy. I got told by a couple of the people who were, nobody on the commission would talk to me that was alive when I started pursuing them. Gerald Ford wouldn't talk to me. Arlen Specter, I think I mentioned that to you before. There's

an interesting, I approached Arlen Specter, who was running for re-election, this was 2002, and told him I had new information. And he had always maintained, you know, he made a lot of money off of his books about justice and the magic, you know, defending his magic bullet theory. He always said, if anybody comes to me with new evidence, I'll look at it with an open mind. So I had sent him a persuasive letter. Well, his people, they finally said, all right,

if you have these documents showing that this doctor who treated Ruby, you know, and within the 24 hours he lost his mind, Spector will look at them and then decide if he'll talk to you, fax them to us. And at that point, that was 2002, I had lost the magazine story and I didn't have a book deal. So I was operating entirely on my own. I said, I can't send this stuff to you because it's my smoking gun, the letters between Gottlieb and West describing all the experiments. So finally, Spector agreed to talk to me on the phone for a few minutes, and it was amazing. He called me from the Senate floor while they were waiting to vote on whether or not they were going to invade Iraq. This was 2002.

Oh, shit. So we were only supposed to talk for a few minutes, and when I explained what I had and what it showed West had been involved with at the time he treated Ruby, he said, well, if you're not going to send the stuff to me, I don't know. I need to see it. And I go, well, I can't send it to you. And he said, well, you want to meet me? Because I told him I was in Philadelphia visiting my folks. And he was from Philadelphia, too.

He says, I'm there on the weekend. I'll meet you Saturday. I have a squash game at the Wyndham Hotel. Meet me there. Christ, squash. So we had a meeting set up for like three days later, and this is something I'm always second-guessing about. I made a decision.

I don't think I ever really got paranoid during this, but Spector had been a long-term senator. He was running for reelection and it was the first time in his career that the polls were against him, that his opponent was, they were predicting that Spector was going to lose. He had also defended this magic bullet theory forever. I mean, more people knew him for the Kennedy assassination than anything else. I thought, so if I do meet with him and I show him these documents, maybe it was grandiose to me too. I thought he's going to go, oh my God, I need to be part of their exposure. Because if he didn't and walked away from it, I thought they were important enough

that he would know that once they were publicized and he had the opportunity to say, we need to look into this and didn't, he would look bad. So then I thought, well, maybe he's going to... Two things. He's either going to use it to get publicity, have a press conference and help him in his reelection, or he's going to use it to be the hero of it and run with it before I've published a book. And then I'll just be a footnote, you know, to all this because he took it. So I canceled the meeting the morning of. I called up his press secretary and his cell phone, like the three phones I had for him. And I said, you have to tell Senator Specter.

I am so sorry, but there's an emergency. I've got to go back to Los Angeles. I actually was scheduled to go the day after on Sunday. So it was a lie. And I didn't talk to anyone. I just left the message. And I said, I'm so sorry, but obviously I've worked so hard to get this meeting. It's embarrassing, but I have to go back.

get this meeting. It's embarrassing, but I have to go back. So I left my parents' place to go to the post office because I had been there for three months. I was actually writing the first version of the proposal at their place to get away from my friends and all the distractions in LA. And I was only going for like 15 minutes. I go, mom, if that press secretary calls, I told them I was leaving. So tell him that I just went to the airport and I apologize. And she goes, well, I can't lie to a press secretary. I go, well, you got to. So I go to the post office and I come home 15 minutes later. And she's like as white as a ghost.

I go, what? And she goes, Senator Specter called. I go, you mean the press secretary? She goes, no, he called himself. He wanted to know what happened, why you changed your mind and why you were canceling. And I had to lie to him. And I don't lie. I go, but I lied to the senator. You know, he was a big deal in Pennsylvania back then. And so I don't know if that was a mistake on my part. I think, you know, 2020 hindsight, I should have done it and taken my chances i did knows what he would have done i

know that's a very powerful man and if he thought that he was in danger yeah you could have fucking driven off a cliff i never i mean i really didn't try to think like that through all those years i thought like that when it comes to arlen specter i mean do you know how deep that guy had to be in on that to come up with that wacky magic bullet theory? That theory is so bad. The fact that that actually gets debated and the fact that it never gets brought up that there were more bullet fragments in Connolly's body than there were missing from that bullet.

Yeah. And the fact that anyone who knows anything about guns. Right. Anyone who's ever shot a gun has seen what a bullet when a bullet shatters bone what it looks like would look at that fucking bullet and think that bullet went through two human beings right right and the fact that the reason why they had to make up this theory in the first place was because a guy was hit by a ricochet on the underpass you know the whole story behind that well here's what i did i tried not to lose myself any more than i had to in each compartmentalized

area i was going into so with the kennedy assassination i just did a superficial because like manson i was never interested in anything so-called conspiracies yeah i'd never cared about kennedy or the john f kennedy assassination but once I found out that West was connected to Ruby, and again, that was a moment that I was like, oh, no. I mean, first it was West and the CIA. And then I'm like, and Ruby? How can I not look at the Kennedy assassination? So I kept my focus narrowly just on Ruby, Oswald, West, Spectre. I looked a little bit at the magic bullet and agree with you, but I never did a deep dive into a lot of that stuff. Well, they had to come up with that theory because there was a guy who was hit under

the underpass. He was hit. By a fragment? No, a bullet hit the curb and a piece of the curb hit him. So he had been injured and they recovered that bullet and they realized that that had been a shot that had hit that area. And so then they had to attribute all of those wounds to one bullet. So they had different bullets.

They had the bullet that was the headshot. They had the bullet that hit the curb. And then all the other injuries had to be attributed to one bullet. Yeah. Not only that, there's a different description of the frontal shot. There's a shot when Kennedy, you see Kennedy grabbing his neck. Right. Well, in the hospital in Dallas, it's described as a frontal shot.

When they fly the corpse to Bethesda, Maryland, they describe it as a trach hole. Yeah, I've read some of that. There's so much fuckery involved. There's so much about the missing brain. Yes. And then on top of that, that Bugliosi writes a book. I know. To justify the findings of the Warren Commission.

There's a great book called Best Evidence by David Lifton. And that book got me down a dark road when I was in my 20s. That's what got me really freaked out about conspiracy theories in the first place. Because I always thought that conspiracy theories were for dull minded people that didn't spend much time thinking or reading, you know, they just like, they like to think that there was a bunch of people just controlling

everything. Well, I was the same way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then you find out about MK ultra and operation midnight climax and all this different shit.

You go, well, this is real. This is definitely real. Yeah. Like what? And then it makes sense. Like there's video footage of, I. You go, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is real? This is definitely real? Yeah. Like, what? And then it makes sense. Like, there's video footage of, I believe it's, I think it's British soldiers,

where they dosed them up with acid and sent them out into this field. Have you ever seen that video footage? I have not seen that. See if you can find that, Jamie. There's video footage of soldiers on acid, and this is, like, archived footage of black and white. They did experiments on these soldiers in the 1950s. Yeah.

They had been doing it for a while. I mean, once Hoffman had figured out how to make LSD and they realized what it could do to people, they didn't know. Here it is. Watch this. Following footage from a 1964 experiment testing the effects of LSD on British Marines. You can see it. You don't have to turn around, too. It's on this screen right here.

So this is in, what did it say, 1962? Is that what it said? 64. December of 64. There it is. December of 64. So these guys are all wandering around on acid. Jesus.

And so they dose them up, and then they send these poor fuckers out in the field, and they're just freaking out. They don't know what's going on. Where'd you find this? Oh, this is online. Yeah. Yeah, it's on YouTube. Yeah. But look at these guys just laughing and giggling, these soldiers lying on the ground, laughing hysterically, covering their eyes.

And it's all archived footage. Wow. I don't want you to play it now but is there volume or is it all silent uh there's probably a little volume yeah yeah don't remember any volume but look they're climbing trees and shit jesus yeah so this is archived footage yeah right this is they knew what they were doing to these people and then they filmed them and this is what they got from imperial war museum in london original footage.

Well, if we have films like that from our government, you're not going to see them. Of course. If they weren't destroyed, they're locked up. I mean, that was another big eye opener for what's kept from us. At one point in 2011, I had a researcher at the Washington Post, a woman there who has been there for years. I could get myself in trouble for this, too. I won't say her name. But anyway, she's very well known, and she's their intelligence researcher. She works with all of the reporters at the Post on intelligence stories, national security stories. And she had someone at the CIA in their information department who would confirm

or deny stuff with her. And she said, I completely trust these people. I've been working with them for 10 years. I'll ask them about Jolly West and see what they have on them. And I said, all right, before you ask them, don't tell them, because she had the documents, I'd share them with her. Don't tell them what I have proving that he was part of MKUltra. Just say you're working with an author on a book who wants to know whether they're – because I had already done a request, and we can neither confirm nor deny. And she said they'll tell me the truth.

They're not going to give me a neither confirm or deny. We'll just say we have something, and we can't tell you if we can or we have nothing. But we'll get the truth to see what they have. So a week later she lets me know, and she said, they said there's nothing. He never participated in the program. There's no record. And I go, well, I don't want to say her name. I go, well, I don't think you should be using them anymore because they're not reliable. And you know that because you've seen the documents. So she had to rethink that. I don't know what she did after. Well, that's the way they can embed themselves with reporters by letting these reporters think,

I'm your friend. Look, I'll tell you the truth. Okay. It's a complicated world. We're out there trying to keep people safe. And sometimes we've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. But don't worry. I'll let you know. I mean, I'm your friend. Don't worry. If there's some wackiness, I'll tell you. Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah. And then I said to her, ask about, oh, Reeve Woodson. We haven't even discussed Reeve Woodson. He's the guy that claimed he had infiltrated the Manson family.

Oh, you haven't gotten to that chapter yet? No, no, no, no. Is that after 11? How many chapters are there 13 including the epilogue yeah yeah hell of a book um yeah i mean there were a lot of uh spooky people in and around the spawn ranch and in and around the family and this one guy rave whitson who um was a spook and unfortunately was dead by the time I started reporting. For people who don't know, spook is CIA.

Yeah. Yeah. Some people don't know what that means. Yeah. I didn't know what it meant before I started all this. I don't, I mean, maybe if I thought about it, but I wasn't interested. It's a strange terminology. I know.

Yeah. Spook. Well, it's like a ghost. You know, you don't see them. There's no trace, no record. And this guy, that's how he lived. And I had found out about him in my reporting. First, I got to his attorney and then to some of his close friends. He lived in Los Angeles and then he worked for, but his wife and daughter who were in Sweden and other people who said it was the CIA. He told before he died and a couple of years before his death, three or four of his closest friends, including his attorney, that he had worked on an operation. And he wouldn't tell them who, but he had infiltrated the Manson family prior to the murders,

and his dying regret was he could have prevented them but didn't. He also said that he was at the crime scene after the killers had left but before the police had arrived, which was like a four- or five-hour window. And I was able to confirm, not that he was there those five hours, but that he was missing and that the police set up a watch at his father's house, who he was living with,

to try to figure out what was going on. He ended up helping Colonel Tate, Sharon Tate's father, who left his job in military intelligence to help the police in the investigation. He even dressed up like a hippie, right? He dressed up like a hippie and so did Reeve. And Reeve was a really hardcore right-wing guy. I mean, he was racist and his daughter sent me pictures of him. And she said once he died, in fact, this is how serious this guy was.

Reeve divorced his wife, who was a Swedish model. First, he sent her and his infant daughter back to Sweden from the United States in 61 because he thought there was going to be nuclear war. And then in the mid-60s, he told his wife he had a divorcer and he couldn't have any relationship with his daughter because his daughter was his only vulnerability because of the work he did. That would be how they heard, even if they lived all the way in Sweden. So the daughter, Liza, who I've never met, but we started talking on the phone and she started sending me materials, didn't meet him until a couple years before his death. He reached out to her, said, I couldn't have any relationship with you because of my work, but I want to do that now.

So he flew her to Los Angeles, introduced her to all of his friends. And after he died, she went to his apartment and went through his things and found a picture of him dressed up as a hippie. It's in the book. And I mean, it's hard to tell, but it's in a parking lot. And the cars are all like late 60s models. So again, this is one of the parts of the book where I work so hard to try to prove a definite link. I interviewed probably 12 or 13 Manson family members, and I'd show them that picture. And they'd say he looked like any number of guys that came in and out of there. They'd come for a day to screw us, the women would say. Charlie would bring guys in, and we didn't know if they were the ones who were providing drugs or who they were.

But, yeah, maybe or maybe not, you know. And they were all high most of the time too. You got to think that Charlie's ability to constantly get out of jail also must have added to his delusions of grandeur. Yeah. Because he felt like he was above the law because he really kind of was.

Yeah, when the sheriffs would go into the Spahn Ranch, he would threaten, he'd say, I've got guys in the hills with guns pointed at you. Yeah. And the sheriffs would go into the spawn ranch, he would threaten that he'd say, I've got guys in the hills with guns pointed at you. And that's all in the book. And I've got the document in the notes. And he would give everyone acid and then either take a very low dose himself or pretend. So do you think that this was something, obviously we're in speculation again, but something that he learned how to do from Smith? That's the question. What David Smith and Roger Smith were looking at was personality change, lasting effects of LSD on the personality. And especially David did something, he called it the psychedelic syndrome. He did this study. He was the one who ran the

clinic and it basically gave Jolly the one who ran the clinic, and it basically gave Jolly West an office at the clinic to recruit people in the summer of 67. And then Roger, he gave him office space there to conduct what he called the Amphetamine Research Project in 68 and 69, at the period that he was still, you know, he was, they called him the friendly fed in the hate, because everybody knew he was a, you know, he was, they called him the friendly fed in the hate because everybody knew he was a federal government person, but he grew his hair longer and grew a mustache to try to blend in. But everybody thought he was a narc and I guess he was. But David's line of work after his mice research, which people can read about in the book, and mice and violence, was trying to figure out why some people were more susceptible to LSD and having a personality

change. They would screen people that this was volunteer testing, allegedly, for personality traits. They were trying to find out whether people have precipitating factors in their subconscious. They were actually doing chromosomal studies, too, taking blood and seeing how the LSD affect the chromosomes, and why some people would, after one trip, have a complete ideological change. They would go from being normal teenagers or 20-year-olds to all of a sudden believing in mystical stuff and losing the ego and all the kind of stuff that Manson was trying to find when he was attracting followers, who were more susceptible, who were more suggestible.

And that was the research that they were doing at the clinic at the time. Another finding in the book, and I wasn't the first one to find it, but I found more evidence of it. The clinic famously opened. It was nonprofit. And it was funded by the government. And David Smith admitted that. He took funds.

And that's one of the reasons he told me he gave Jolly an office there was Jolly was well known in the research community. He knew that Jolly an office there was Jolly was well known in the research community. He knew that Jolly would attract government funding, but they were only supposed to be a service to runaway kids and hippies and people who couldn't afford healthcare. They weren't supposed to be doing research. They weren't supposed to be doing experiments, but they were the entire time. So it was sold as a nonprofit healthcare facility when it was actually a research center for the federal government. And this is interesting, and people might think I'm crazy,

but it raises questions. My book came out in June, last June of 2019. The clinic was open from June of 67. It closed in September of last year, I think it was. It shut its doors for the first time in 50, no, 52 years. Three months after your book came out. My book came out, yeah. Oh, geez.

And that's one of the biggest disappointments of the book is, you know, because I couldn't answer the question, the largest questions I could only present, you know, a case for why it sure looked like it might have happened this way, that way, the other way. I was hoping that it would be kind of a call to action, you know, that other people would pick up the ball and run with it, you know. And again, maybe it was my naivety, my grandiosity. Hold on a second, man. It took you 20 years. Why are you on a rush for these people to take up the ball? I wanted some serious journalists, especially in the cities where these things took place. I mean, I exposed some pretty serious corruption in the DA's office in 1969 until the OJ trial, the biggest trial in the history of the United States,

you know, the one that got more coverage than any other trial until OJ. And I can prove that it was fixed from the very beginning when they switched the lawyers and, and planted evidence and perjury and stuff like that. They put a former prosecutor in charge of Sharon Tate or excuse me, of charge of Susan Atkins. Yeah. Without her. Yeah. And they fired her defense, her legally appointed attorney. Former prosecutor in charge of Sharon Tate, or excuse me, of charge of Susan Atkins. Susan Atkins, yeah.

And they fired her, her legally appointed attorney. And brought in someone who would play ball. Yeah. And I have the documents. And they went to a judge who was complicit, who agreed to this. And I found all these documents in a file that I wasn't supposed to have access to at the sheriff's office. But I got in the back door through some of the retired guys that got sick of me bugging them for information. But I thought somebody from the LA Times would do a

follow-up, just go to verify, confirm, or refute my allegations. The LA Times gave the book a pretty good review, but no stories. I thought there'd be news stories. Maybe I was stupid. Maybe now. Maybe now. Maybe now. San Francisco. I mean, there hasn't been a story on, you know. The fact that the clinic closed three months after your book came out. And David Smith is still alive. Roger Smith's still alive.

What about Jack? Where are they? I don't want to say where Roger is. Have you talked to either one of them since? No. That was the other thing. We were sure we were going to get lawsuits. You know, Little Brown was braced for it. I mean, when Buleosi, he was already dead when I sold it to them, so they weren't so much worried about his family. Although his family, they did say, you know, we could be sued by his family because they own Helter Skelter.

And they could argue that you diminished the value of Helter Skelter, which I hope I did. And I'd love to have that argument in court. Not a word, but there are a dozen principal people in that book, many of them not public figures like Roger Smith. David Smith to an extent is because he became very well known. Not one of them has either threatened a lawsuit, contacted me, the publisher. I defamed a lot of people. And I think, again, thank God I've got the 60 pages of notes because I think they know they can't argue the points that I'm making. Everything I have exposed is documented. That's why I was so careful about not putting speculation in the book, about not putting stuff in there that I hadn't substantiated or corroborated. Well, I don't think the book made a big enough splash for them. Help me, man.

We're helping you right now, man. Thank you. Thank you. That's what I think. I mean, if I had a guess, also the fact that they can't refute any of the facts, it's probably better to just let it die. And in today's news cycle, things go in and out in a period of days. Like who killed Epstein? He didn't kill himself. Yeah. Right. Boom. Gone.

No one cares anymore. COVID-19. Oh, Jesus. Is it from a lab? It might have been. Oh, and it ends. It just keeps going on and on and on. No one's going to think about who killed Charles Manson today.

We're worried about quarantining and social distancing. Tarantino's movie came out and there were a, and there's tons of press on the family members. Where are they now, this or that? And again, maybe I was just stupid thinking my book. It sold okay. I got a lot of good reviews, a lot of good response. But it didn't do what I wanted it to do, which was to make a change. It didn't have enough publicity, Tom.

I didn't know about it. I didn't hear about it until Greg. Greg told me about it with wild eyes. Greg Fitzsimmons, I should say, my good friend, introduced, and your good friend introduced me to the thing. And Greg is not a person who pitches things to me. So when he pitched it to me, and he pitched it to me full-throated, I was like, whoa. He's like, dude, it's fucking crazy. And then I got into it. For the record, best guy in the world, Fitz. I love whoa. He's like, dude, it's fucking crazy. And then I got into it.

For the record, best guy in the world fits. I love him. I love that guy. He's at the end of the book, but he's pissed off because I didn't name him. I just talk, I identify him as a neighbor who came and consoled me at a really bad point and gave me some good advice. So when you get to the end of the book and I'm, the neighbor comes by walking his two little stupid dogs and asked me to ask me if I want to come along and he gave me I mean he's younger than I am and he gave me like a dad pep talk about hanging in there he's great I love the guy he's the best yeah um when the book came out

and no one did try to sue you or no one did come after you, were you concerned that maybe it hadn't gotten the push that you felt like the subject deserved? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was happy because I've never published a book before, and they had a team assigned to it at the publishers. And, you know, we got a lot of publicity, but we didn't get news-making get news making publicity i think part of the problem tom is that it's a deep book yeah it's dense you got to get into it to really piece all like yeah there's a couple of times where i had to go back

over things and like try to piece it together and like yeah there's there's a lot going on and a lot of people to follow i know i know we were going to put a character list up at the front. That's great. Listen, it's worth doing. Yeah. Yeah. The juice is worth the squeeze. Yeah.

You know, when you get to the, I mean, where I'm at, just beginning chapter 11, you're just like, holy fucking shit. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, it was frustrating. And again, I mean, the bottom line for me was I'm just so happy it's out there in the public realm because that would have been, I can't imagine dying with this either being sent into a dumpster somewhere, nobody seeing this stuff because I think a lot of it is important. Well, you were pregnant for 20 years. That's what it was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't have any kids, so that's a good analogy. You gave birth. Yeah. 20 years. That's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't have any kids, so that's a good analogy. He gave birth. So let me ask you this. What is the speculation in terms of Bugliosi's connection? Was he given a narrative? Do you think that they somehow learned? Yeah, I want to answer that. Yeah. So this is, all right, I'll start without the speculative part, something I can prove. He was compromised when he was given this case in 1969. It's in the book.

He, gosh, I mean, he has family out there, but they know about this. He was involved in a couple cases, the first one before the trial, that are crazy. I mean, when you see the stuff that happened between him and I, you know, all those years later, it makes sense when you see what he was like before he became famous. So in 1965, he had his first child, Vincent Bugliosi Jr. He decided that he wasn't the father, that the milkman was the father. And back in those days, you're too young to know, people used to deliver milk to homes. Yeah, I remember hearing about it. Yeah. So he believed that the milkman was a father.

He was an up-and-coming deputy district attorney in Los Angeles. And for about, I think, 12 or 16 months, he stalked his milkman, trying to get him to take a blood test to prove that he fathered his wife's child. Jesus Christ. It got so bad that they had to, they stopped letting their kids take the bus home from school. They had two young kids. They didn't know who he was. He wouldn't tell them who he was. All he would say was, I was on, the milkman had left

the job a month after his wife found out she was pregnant, Vince's wife. Vince, in his delirium, decided that he was fired because he had gotten, you know, clients or people he delivered milk to pregnant. So he was writing them anonymous letters following the kids. I actually, this is one thing I did here. I heard from the little girl who's now a grown woman, read about this in my book and she sent me a letter and she goes, you only got half of it. He said, he terrorized us. He said, my father, she said, my father, the milkman had a nervous breakdown. She said, he came to my school and picked me up. And he took me to a toy store, bought all these toys for me, whatever I wanted, brought me to the house. And he had a driver. And he left me at the end of the driveway. My mom came

out. And I was so happy. I was five or six years old. I had all these gifts. And she goes, get into the house. Get into the house. So what happened was Vince got caught. I mean, he eventually was stalking them. He sent his wife to the house to beg the milkman's wife to get her husband to do a paternity test. And I've got all this from all these civil depositions when the milkman sued him later. So Vince, the milkman eventually got his brother-in-law to follow Vince from one of his stakeouts. Vince would put the car outside the house.

He sent them letters like they changed their phone number. He goes, oh, I noticed you changed your phone number. That wasn't nice. I mean, nuts. So the milkman followed Vince, or his brother-in-law, got your phone number. That wasn't nice. I mean, nuts. So the milkman followed Vince, or his brother-in-law did, got the plate number, found out who he was and that he was at the DA's office, called his personal attorney, and the personal attorney called Vince, and they had a meeting between Vince, the milkman, the milkman's wife, and Mrs. Bugliosi. And Vince admitted that

he had been stalking them because he thought it was his wife. He had used DA's investigators calling this guy a material witness in a murder case to follow him, get private information on. So Vince said he would pay them $100 and never do it again. And the milkman said, we don't want your money. Just never bother it again. And the milkman said, we don't want your money. Just never bother us again. So that was all about the end of 68, early 69. The DA's office knew about this. He should have been fired immediately. Instead, he gets the biggest case at that point in the history of

Los Angeles, the Tate-LaBianca trial. This is where we get speculative. You have a guy like Vince, who's compromised. He'll do what the hires up tell him to do. And if you read in the book, Evel Younger was a district attorney at the time. He was a shady guy who'd been in the OSS, which was the predecessor to the CIA, trained in espionage. I won't say too much. It's in the book. That's where we get speculative. If Vince was answering for something, the explanation is because he didn't go into this case clean. He had to do what he was told. That makes all the sense in the world.

Yeah. After the Tate-LaBianca convictions in 74, Helter Skelter came out, the book. And to this day, it's the bestselling true crime book of all time. And it's a wonderfully written book. I mean, I could take you page by page and show you stuff that's completely fabricated and made up and that contradicts the real record. but bestseller. And that same year, Vince was going to run for district attorney. And the milkman and his wife had never told anyone, I guess, outside of their family what had happened four or five years before. But when they saw that Vince was trying to be the most powerful law enforcement person in the city of Los Angeles, they went to his opponent

and said, you need to know this. This man cannot get this job. So they told the opponent, and they had a press conference. So the milkman and his wife went public. Vince responded by having his own press conference and telling the reporters, here's what happened. The milkman, we believe, stole $300 in cash from our kitchen table when he was on the route. So I was just doing a personal investigation. And the reporter said, well, did you hire, I mean, did you contact the Pasadena police? He goes, no, no, I just wanted to do it on my own. And then as other people pointed out later, he was doing this, this was 65, he was doing it through the end of 68. The statute of limitations on theft, burglary,

robbery is three years. Even if he found out that he had stolen the $3, they wouldn't have been able to prosecute it. So the whole thing was a lie. Vince lied to the media. So then he lost that election. Then he ran again after Helter Skelter came out for attorney general of California. At that point, the milkman and the wife were going to go public again and say, hey, we have even more to tell about this, which I think is what the daughter wants to tell me. She actually hasn't gotten in touch with me after the first email. I said, I want to hear what you have. And she said she has all these documents. But then a woman named Virginia Cardwell said she was going to go public too.

She came out and said, excuse me, after Vince told the world that the milkman had stolen $300 for him, the milkman and his wife filed a civil suit against Vince and Gail, his wife, because Gail also publicly said with Vince in an interview that that's a truth. It was all about this petty theft. They sued them for defamation and they settled and Vince paid them, I think it was $12,000 in cash and $100 bills. And, you know, part of the agreement was they weren't allowed to talk about it. They couldn't say they'd gotten any money and he would only give it in cash so they couldn't trace it to him. I ended up getting all the documents. It took a long time, but I got them. Then when they went public again, when he was running for attorney general, they were subject to, you know, being in violation of that. But they said he can't, you know, then we'll tell everything

he doesn't want to tell. He lied under oath and deposition. So did his wife about the stalking. So in 73, Vince had an affair with a woman named Virginia Cardwell. Virginia Cardwell was Catholic. She got pregnant. She told Vince that she was pregnant with his child. And Vince said she had to get an abortion. And she said, I can't get an abortion. I'm a Catholic. She was a single mother. He said he would set it up. He had a doctor. It was still illegal then. And he gave her the money to pay the doctor. And then he called her and she said she had gotten the abortion, everything was fine. Then he called the doctor. Violating HIPAA rules, the doctor said, actually, I've never heard from this woman. I didn't give her the procedure. So Vince went to her house

and beat the hell out of her. And I've got all those depositions too. According to her story to the police, because she reported it, he dragged her across the floor by the hair, sat in her and punched her and punched her again in the face, told her she had to get an abortion. She miscarried after that episode. She went to the Santa Monica police as soon as he left and reported it. And nobody would have known about it, but reporters saw it on the police wire service or whatever. So the next day, it was on the front page of all the LA papers that Vince Bugliosi had been accused of battery of a woman who said that he wanted her to have an abortion and she wouldn't. So Vince went to the police, told them she was lying. She was a client that he had had one phone consultation with, never met her face to face.

And she was trying to embarrass him because he wanted her to pay him $200 or $300. He defamed her like he did the milkman. He made up a story. And worse this time, he told that to the police. This was in their investigation of the battery. He lied to the police that it had not happened. But here's what happened. The next day, after the newspapers reported it and Vince said it was a lie. And he told the police that. Vince went back to her apartment with his secretary and a typewriter. And he held her hostage. I know this sounds crazy.

It's in the book at the end. Held her hostage for, I think, three or four hours, begging her and then bullying her. And he might have hit her then, too. I can't remember. To go to the police and say that she had made the whole story up. His secretary was there because once he got her to agree to it, do it, she wrote up, backdated the bill for the money and had Virginia sign it. Oh my God. So Virginia finally agreed to go to the police. He said, look, you're going to be charged with

filing a false report, which is a felony. Well, it's a misdemeanor, but it could go to a felony. But I can take care of all that. I've got the connections to the DA's office in Santa Monica, which he did, and he did take care of it. So she called up the Santa Monica Police Department to say she was coming in to report that she had made the story up because she was angry about this money. And the cops said right away, he knew that something was wrong in the tremor of her voice. He said, we'll come get you.

And Vince was on the other line and she going, no, no, no. He's saying, no, no, no, they can't come here. So she said, no, no, no, I'm coming. And they said, okay, we'll see you when you get here. And then they dispatched two cops to her apartment. Now, this had never been public before I found it. It did become public about what happened. Vince got away with denying it.

The cop that went to see what was going on and to get her, a guy named Michael Landis, he was retired in Santa Monica. I got his name from the reports. He said, oh, yeah, Vince was at the house. He wouldn't let us in. He said he and his partner, Robert Steinberg, were there and she's cowering behind them crying. And we got her out of the house, brought her to the station, and she told the story that it was fake. And he said, but we saw him there. She goes, you have no idea how dangerous he is. I made it up. Please.

It was a false report. So she got charged. The next day's papers reported that this woman had come out and admitted that the whole thing was made up. Nobody said anything because the cops didn't talk to the reporters about Vince being at the house. Oh, my God. And Vince, you know, he prevailed. He won. Then when he ran for attorney general of California in 76, Virginia Cardwell went public and then Vince said, told the same lie about her. He had never seen her face to face. She was trying to get two or three hundred dollars from him for a phone call or not pay the money for a phone consultation.

He lost the attorney general's race when she went public, and again, with the milkman and mistress. Then she sued Vince, same thing. He lied in the depositions, and then when he got caught with the other people who could show that they'd been together and there was a history of they'd had an affair for like six months, he resolved it and paid her a substantial amount of money to go away. substantial amount of money to go away. So this was the kind of person who, when I told Vince, I was writing about this in my book, he's like, well, number one, I can't talk about either of those cases because they were resolved and there's non-disclosures. And I go, well, Vince, you know, that's not true because, I mean, number one, Virginia's dead. She had died. So she can't sue you. And she went public and so did the Weisels, the milkman and the mistress. And I wouldn't, you know, I'm not interested in your assorted, you know, personal life. But it's relevant because I'm arguing that you committed crimes in the prosecution of the Manson family, suborned perjury, hid evidence, you know, manipulated the defense by planning an attorney. So if I'm going to, you know, try to make this case and everyone's not going to believe it because you're Vince

Bugliosi, you know, this prominent prosecutor author, well, I have to show that there's a pattern in this behavior, not only that you're lying under oath in the depositions in these two cases before you settle, but you also lied to the police in the Cardwell case and you lied to the papers in both. If I have that in my book, then people will be more prone to believe that you do the same thing in the Tate-Lyle-Bianca trial that you would break rules to win your convictions. Did he have a ghostwriter for Helter Skelter? No, he had a collaborator, Kurt Gentry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that makes sense. So yeah. And I called him. He sounds like an insane person. Insane person would probably not be able to make such a coherent book.

I know. He had every book he wrote, he had collaborators. So the milkman's wife in her deposition said that when Gail, Vince's wife, came to her house and knocked on her door and said, please do this. My husband's making me crazy. We know that he's – the milkman isn't the father of my boy, but just do it to make him stop. And the milkman's wife said, we don't want to have anything to do with you people. Just leave us alone and go away. And she goes, you don't understand. My husband is mentally ill. He goes, he'll never stop this. There's nothing I can do to get him to stop. At the end of our six hours, I don't remember if I put it in the book. I might not have. He said to me, you know, Gail thinks I have some psychiatric issues and she's been trying to get me to go to a doctor forever.

So, you know, I'm not saying that this is a reason some of this stuff might have happened. But I do, you know, I don't even know why he would tell me that. But, yeah, so I think that he was able to be manipulated because of these vulnerabilities. Because he was so compromised. Yeah. Yeah. It completely makes sense. Yeah.

It completely makes sense. Holy shit. He had a family, a whole other secret family, a daughter and a mistress for the next 30 years. I interviewed the mistress. I didn't put it in the book. I didn't think it was necessary. I guess now I'm telling it. But it actually got reported after he died because the mistress had told a few other people. I'd known about her for years and I knew he had a daughter who was, you know, at the time of Vince's death, she was in her 30s, I think.

Now, to go back to the Manson killings, what was the motive to hit that house? If it wasn't to Doris Day's son, what was his name again? Terry Melcher. If it wasn't to scare Terry Melcher, what was the motive? Like, why did they kill Sharon Tate and the people in that house? Here's why it took so long to finish the book, to write the book. I have conflicting theories. You know, in the first couple chapters, I lay out the evidence that it was a drug deal gone wrong.

Right. It involved Billy Doyle and Charles Taco and these guys who were dealing drugs out of the house with Wojciech Frykowski, you know, one of the victims, Polanski's friend and possibly allegedly J.C. well, wait a minute. What did it mean that Manson had this immunity? And why would Terry Melcher lie on the stand? I mean, why not say he saw Manson after? Yeah, it undermines the argument, but I thought that Bugliosi could have... I mean, Manson and the followers did everything they could to get themselves convicted at trial. They didn't put on a defense. They carved X's in their foreheads, shaved their heads. The girls skipped and laughed

in and out of the courtrooms every day. When they finally testified during the death penalty phase, Susan Atkins, then she said that she stabbed Sharon Tate. Do you think they were dosing them before the trial? I can't go there. I mean, it makes sense if they're laughing and dancing. Well, if we're going to speculate again, I believe that one of the other objectives was personality change, using drugs, hypnosis, et cetera, and making it fix, making it stick.

These doctors were trying to learn why some people, do they have precipitating personality factors that made them more vulnerable to using LSD once or a few times, and all of a sudden just losing all sense of reality. Not everyone had that experience, but some did. And that research began in 1962 in Los Angeles. There's a whole chapter, there's a few chapters, but there's a whole chapter that we left out of the book. And if we do do a follow-up, it'll be in there about another guy who's not even named in the book, who was one of these LSD researchers. And you're interested in hyperbolic chambers and all that stuff? Hyperbolic? Chambers or?

You mean sensory deprivation? Yeah. Oh, that's- Yeah. I have one. Yeah. Okay. It's not a hyperbolic chamber. Okay. All right. Well, this was-'s not a hyperbolic chamber okay all right well this was a hyperbolic how did i know hyperbaric is that the same hyperbolic that's a the increased oxygen yeah yeah recovery yeah injuries yeah well so there was a group it's a

fascinating it would have been a fascinating chapter there was a group of people uh artists uh educators and but they were all kind of like beatniks and stuff, that lived on Topanga Beach in this community of abandoned fisherman shacks that had been there when the PCH went up in like the 30s and 40s. There was this whole community of homes, mostly ramshackle homes, that were inaccessible except by one road, I think Topanga Canyon Road. So a bunch of people migrated there who wanted to – they were almost like communally living. And there were, I think, about 30 of them. And they renovated them.

And they were beautiful little places. They all got destroyed when they turned that into a park in the, I think, early 70s or mid-70s. But one of the guys there, Paul Rowan, was Angeles who got LSD from Sandoz for his patients. But there was a group of these people that lived there. And one of them was named Perry Bivens. And he was a diver. And he was a trust fund medical student, a lot of money. And he built a hyperbolic chamber and put gases in it.

His objective was to try to learn a way to dive. They were all deep sea divers. Well, a bunch of these guys dived to the depths that people hadn't dove to before by learning how to deprive their brains of oxygen for longer and longer times. They got access to LSD. They were the first ones, supposedly civilians in the United States have access to LSD, you know, not through military or CIA experiments as early as 1954, 55. And then by the early 60s, everybody who knew, knew where to get LSD from this community. And Tex Watson moved there, who was the main killer in 68, and lived among these guys who were doing this early research into mostly the one guy, Paul Rowan, personality change. guy paul rowan personality change um it's i mean it's so complicated about why it's important that watson was with this community um prior to joining manson and what happened to him as far as his

personality changed even before he met manson which was the summer of 68 but i guess i'll save that for the next chapter so the whole so they the motive though to get back to the motive yeah for the official motive was a double i mean bulliosi said in his closing arguments that uh the the main motive was to ignite helter skelter race war the sub motive was to instill fear in terrycher because he had rejected Manson. So you're saying, well, then if it wasn't those, then what was it? Right. All right. If you look at the COO COINTELPRO objectives, which was to diminish the, you know, to neutralize left wing movement, to make them look horrible, evil, bad. And this is what drugs are going to do to your kids.

The kind of outcome that these murders had was to make the hippies the boogeyman. I mean, the biggest boogeyman in United States history, I don't know forever, but at least until the 70s, became Charlie Manson. And when Manson and his family were identified as suspects the first week of December 69, I mean, it was like earth-shaking because all of a sudden, nobody knew who had committed the murders, that the case was open from August till 1st of December. You have photos on the front page of every paper in the world of these hippie women, nursing children living communally who are accused of these horrible, brutal slayings.

And the argument was, and what the reporters were reporting was they had gone crazy on LSD and free love and the hippie ethic. And that was the same thing Chaos and CoINTELPRO were trying to do. They were trying to damage the youth revolution, the youth movement. Why do you think they targeted that house, though? So J. Edgar Hoover, when he had the COINTELPRO operation, he wrote a memo, no, excuse me, an L.A. agent wrote a memo to Hoover saying what we have to do, this is when they were mostly battling the Panther, I mean, trying to neutralize the Panthers in L.A., was go after the whites, the elite whites, the Hollywood whites who were supporting the Panthers. There was something called the White Panther Party that began in LA, 67 or 68. Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Cass Elliott. Those three were actually under surveillance by the FBI. They were part of this group, Donald Sutherland,

and they were basically a support, Leonard Bernstein. They supported the Panthers. They raised money. So in this one memo, which I think it was the winter of 68, I got the date in the book, said that what we have to make the whites think is that when the revolution finally happens, when the blacks rise up, they'll be lined up with everybody else and slaughtered. So if you look at that memo, that was part of their operation, which was to – they did it by sending letters, making the whites scared. I hate to speculate, but I think people will draw that conclusion if you read the book, that this could have been a chaos or COINTELPRO operation to turn the world, the nation, the culture against hippies, the left wing, the Black Panthers. And they picked that house because it was high profile, because Sharon Tate was in it? Well, not because Sharon Tate was there. Her and Polanski, and that's one thing that Tarantino, I don't think he showed the parties at the house. They were like the social center of Hollywood.

It wasn't just the movie people. It was the music people. Terry Melcher and Candy Bergen lived there for two years before. That was a party house. Everybody went in and out of there. It kind of represented the elite of movies, music, Hollywood, white people. So that would have been a very high profile place to hit. Target, yeah.

Because all the people in that community, in the Hollywood community, would then also be aware that that was a spot that they had been to. All these high profile people had been there. Yeah. It's like Joan Didion wrote in her book, The White Album, that the morning she learned about the murders and she knew most of the victims, she goes, it occurred. She goes, I knew that the 60s had ended. They were over. I mean, there was also Altamont and I mean, not a whole lot else, but that was like a cultural watershed moment. But the LaBianca killings were fairly random.

Yeah. And that's a regret I have. That house was just up for sale, you know. Yeah. Just really recently. I heard. That house was just up for sale, you know. Yeah. Just really recently. I heard. Really cheap. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, they changed the number on the street. Still though. Yeah. Yeah. Not this yellow house. I know. The LaBianca house on Waverly Drive.

Yeah. I just feel this. Yeah. Oddly enough, when I knew it was for sale, I was like, I was really interested. Not to buy it, but I was like, wow, that's crazy. Imagine someone buying the house where the killings took place. But it was so long ago. It wouldn't be that creepy for some weird reason.

You know, the house on the other side is the former convent that Katy Perry's been fighting in court with the nuns or the church to buy. This has been going on for a couple of years. I don't know if it's been- She's trying to buy a convent? Yeah, yeah. Why? It's a big, beautiful home

that had been turned into a convent, like a retirement home for nuns. And when the church really hit hard times financially, they told the nuns they were gonna have to leave there because they were selling it. So the church, I think, sold it to Katy Perry. And then some of the nuns hired a lawyer because they didn't want to leave. I mean, I didn't look too closely at it, but I just know that the whole thing is in dispute. That's hilarious. And that's on the other side of the

LaBianca house. Oh, wow. So the whole area is haunted. So did they target the LaBianca house for any reason? All right. So the book is about 500 pages long. I didn't put anything in there about the LaBianca case and what I learned. We also withheld our chapters on the RFK assassination, Sarhan. Jesus Christ. That's all connected too? It's 20 years of reporting, yeah.

I mean, and the Sarhan assassination of Robert Kennedy, it was same cops investigated it, same district attorney's office prosecuted it. Oh, fuck. And if you want to take a deep dive into that, you know, Sarhan's amnesia of how we ended up in the pantry that night jesus christ i actually filmed an episode of fear factor at that hotel oh yeah the hotel's being used now for that and i walked through that pantry yeah you know you can walk through the very area i was there too

there you know it's torn down now they made it a public school i mean they built a public school but there was a crucifix carved into the floor, the cement floor, where Robert Kennedy fell. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I think I remember that somehow. Yeah. So the stuff we kept out about RFK, that'll be in the next book if we do it. But there's incredible parallels.

Oh, you're doing another book, Tom. I don't want to because I don't have 20 more years to live, man. I know one thing. I wouldn't do it without my collaborator because he speeds it up. Oh, good. Yeah. You get it done in four. You've got so much information already, right?

Yeah. So the LaBianca killings will be- So the LaBianca killings, again, this is stuff that Vince kept out. And again, the reason the book's so hard to write is one theory would conflict with another. Right. The reason the book's so hard to write is one theory would conflict with another. So if the Tates were killed for, you know, chaos, co-intel, pro, high profile, neutralize the left, or a drug deal gone wrong, what about the LaBiancas? that lived in Los Villas, and thence wrote in the book that they were randomly targeted because Manson had been to the house next door quite a bit when someone named Harold True lived there and knew the layout and supposedly went to kill Harold True first, got to Harold True's house, which was empty, and then went next door, tied up the LaBianca couple, left the house,

and sent Tex Watson and Patricia Crenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten in to kill them. What Vince wrote about what the investigators found out was that Lino, the father, had gambling debts. He also had embezzled $200,000 from his family company. And the original investigation, the two teams were separate. The LAPD assigned two different units, one to the Tate murders, which was much larger, and one to the LaBianca. And they announced within a couple days that even though the crime scenes were similar, same weapon, multiple stab wounds, blood writing on the walls. Pig.

Pig, yeah. They didn't think they were connected. They thought that somebody had done a copycat of the first night's murders to throw off investigators. I make an argument in the book that I think the police knew exactly who did both murders from very right away. It'll be too long to get into here, but all the evidence that I accumulated is in there. And I'm not the first one to say that. But so then why were the LaBiancas killed?

You know, what Vince kept out of the book was not only was, you know, Lino in debt to his family, but he had a meeting on August 9th with his family that they had told him he had to come in, his two brothers-in-law and his mother, who operated the Gateway shop. It was called Gateway Markets. They had a string of supermarkets. It was pretty well to do, except that Lino kept stealing all the money. They had a meeting on August 9th where they were going to make him sign over all his shares, leave the family business. And on August 9th, he didn't show up.

He went with his wife and their boat to a lake where their daughter was visiting a friend. So the daughter and her friend could water ski, didn't even call the family to say he wasn't showing up, came back that night and was killed with his wife. Vince kept that important meeting out. He also kept the depth and the degree of Lino's deaths out. And this isn't in my book. We didn't have enough room. I mentioned them because it's an important part, but I don't talk about what I found out and why it was important. There's a much better case that Lino was targeted.

The argument would be, well, who would ever hire Manson to kill someone? Well, Manson wasn't as dumb as he seemed, and they needed money. This is where I don't want to speculate. And again, it's not even a chapter in the book, so I can't really show you what I've got except to tell you. One other argument that Vince made for why he thought the LaBiancas were killed by the Manson family. I mean, they were actually right with their first theory. It was a copy of the night before to throw off investigators, but it was the same killers.

The police were wrong when they thought it was two separate killers, which I don't think they did. He said we could never establish a connection between the two groups of victims. So there was the Hollywood set at Benedict Canyon, Cielo Drive, and then there was Lino and his wife across town in Los Villas. And we worked so hard

to try to determine if they knew each other or had any encounter, thus tying them together. And we couldn't. That was a lie. Lino got his haircut from Jay Sebring, the victim.

He was in Jay Sebring's appointment book. That's in the police reports that I got access to like my first or second year when I begged, persuaded a cop to let me come go through his files in Palm Springs. So he very well might have been to that house too, the Cielo Drive house. Yeah, yeah. So he might have been a part of that social circle.

I don't know about the social circle, but he could have, you know, who knew? Jay Sebring was a very high profile hairdresser. He was, yeah. And it was very expensive. It was very exclusive. Yeah, he charged, I mean, it was expensive back then. I think it was just $20, but most men got their haircut for like a buck or two back then. Yeah, it was an exclusive.

And he was a hairdresser to the stars. He was Sharon's ex-boyfriend who was still supposedly in love with her. Roman stole her from him. And he was with Sharon, you know, the last night of her life. Yeah, I mean, there's other stuff that didn't end up in the book for space reasons. And also one of the most important things I found out. And this goes to your question about why this house or why that house. That's not in the book, but I've talked about it before.

And I found this out too late to get in the book. I was able to confirm it. The night before Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger were killed in Cielo Drive, the four of them had dinner at Jay's house down at the bottom of Benedict Canyon. That's all on the official story. Jay had them to dinner. Amos's butler made them steaks and they ate them in Jay's bedroom. So the four people were in the bedroom. This is August 7th, the night before the murders. What's not in the official version, but I found in the police reports, is Jay had gotten cable TV, which, again, a lot of my critics said there was no cable TV in 1969 in Los Angeles. There was.

It cost a lot of money. Only a few people had it, but you had it. Jay, Sharon, Abigail, and Wojciech had their ice cream dessert served by Amos, the butler. He went back downstairs. They were going to watch the movie. Wojciech had their ice cream dessert served by Amos, the butler. He went back downstairs. They were going to watch the movie. And then all of a sudden there was a power surge. And the lights went really, really bright and dimmed.

And they lost the cable. So Jay called Paul Greenwald. Paul Greenwald was a law student whose father was Jay's attorney. And he was an electrician. That's how he supported himself going through law school. And he had done all the wiring for Jay. So he called Paul Greenwald. And this was a Thursday night at like 9 o'clock.

And he said, can you come over here? We're trying to watch a movie. And the cable went out. And I don't know. There was a surge. So Paul said, I can't. I got a date. I've been trying to get this date for months. I can't know, there was a surge. So Paul said, I can't. I got a date. I've been trying to get this date for months. I can't blow her off.

And Jay's like, OK, that's all right. We'll do something else. So in the official narrative, nobody reported the surge or losing the cable. But in the official narrative, Jay stayed there. Sharon and Voychek and Abigail, I think, went to the Dazia Club. And then Sharon was there for a half hour and somebody took her home. And then Jay went to the club. What I found out from a police interview with Paul Greenwald, the kid who was called to ask,

he told this to the police and then he confirmed it to me 30, 40 years later when I found him and interviewed him. He said, I went to the house either Sunday or Monday after the murders because my father sent me there to get a suit for Jay to be buried in. He goes, I got to the house and I wanted to see what had happened to the wires since I had put all the wires in. And I did a circle of the house and I found the wires cut. He goes, I picked them up and I looked at them and there were like four cables and three were, he goes, these were deliberately cut. I goes, I picked them up and I looked at them and there were like four cables and three were, he goes, these were deliberately cut. I could tell by the gradation and the angle.

And he told the police that. He said, so the night before they were killed, somebody cut the wires and it couldn't have been a gardener because it was nine o'clock at night. And he said from what Jay had told him about the power surge, like all the floodlights got really bright and then dimmed. He goes, that's what happens when you do, I don't

know anything about electricity. The police didn't follow up on it, or if they did, I couldn't find a record. And I found Elvin Greenwald and I said, you know, your police report, which I have, A police report, which I have, completely upends the prosecution's argument that these people were random because Tex Watson, the next night, cut the wires at the Tate house, the phone wires, and a different location had the house wires cut by somebody who might have gotten spooked by the surge or something. They weren't random. They were being targeted. So that raises questions about – that undermines the randomness of it, that they were strangers to their killers. But there's no conclusive thing that you can point to that says this is the reason why they were targeted.

Nope. Wow. God damn. Yeah. What a book. What a journey you've been on, man. I'm very happy for you. Thanks.

I'm happy that you did it. I mean, it has to feel like an amazing accomplishment after all those years to finally have this book. Yeah, yeah. And again, I mean, more than anything in the world, you haven't gotten to the end of the book. There's a murder in there that I think the Manson family committed that was covered up by the law enforcement because it would have screwed up the prosecution. I want that looked into. it would have screwed up the prosecution. I want that looked into. There's also at the end of the book, there are these Tex Watson audio tapes that I found out about in 2008 when Watson turned himself in when he was alerted in Texas. He was at his parents' house. The police called the local

sheriff who was Tex's cousin and his parents and said he's wanted for questioning in these unsolved tape murders. This was November 29th. Nobody had been identified publicly as suspects. The police were just starting to figure out that these people had killed their victims. So two LAPD flew down to Texas. Watson was brought into the station, questioned by the LAPD, put under arrest. They had to extradite him so that the sheriff there, Tex's cousin, put him in a cell. The family called up a lawyer, Bill Boyd, who had actually represented Tex on a college case when he stole a typewriter from a college in a prank. Boyd told me in an interview in 2008 that that day he had Tex tell him the whole story, or Charles as he called him, about how he met Manson, why the murders were committed,

how they happened. He said he spoke to me for 20 hours and he goes, I've got all those audio tapes in a safe in my office. He told me this in 2008. He said he also described other murders that the family had committed that hadn't been connected to them. So right away, in 2008, I'm working on it that long, I thought, other murders, that's important to me. But more important, did he tell his attorney why the murders really happened, why they picked those houses. This was the first account that was recorded. The next one was Susan Atkins. About a week later, after she had gotten

her new attorney that the prosecution planted, they audiotaped her telling her version, which became the official version. So Watson's would predate that by a week. And when I found out that they were in that safe and he's telling me this on the phone, I thought, well, he can't play that to me because that would violate Watson's attorney client privilege. But I thought, I have to ask. So I said, is there any chance, Mr. Boyd, I could come down and listen to those tapes? And he said, that's when he realized he shouldn't have told me. He said, oh, well,

I couldn't do that without Charles Watson, Charles' permission. I go, are you still in touch with me? He goes, I write to him every now and then. He writes me. He didn't represent him at trial after he was extradited. And I said, would you please ask? So that began three or four months of me pestering him. He would never take the phone call. And then finally, after four months, I called up and his secretary said, oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Boy's in China on business today. And I said, well, you have to tell him I'm not going to wait anymore.

I'm going to write to Charles and tell him what he told me. I go, if there's other bodies, I mean, I didn't let them know that I was more interested in the motive story, but I said, if there's, and I was interested in this too, I go, if there's other bodies or victims out there who have never been connected or even, we don't even know if the remains were uncovered because there's a lot of evidence that there might've been people killed out in the desert and buried there. I go, I need to know that. And she said, okay, I'll tell him. My phone rang like literally 30 seconds after I hung it up. And I had caller ID and it was from his Texas office. He goes, this is Bill Boyd. You cannot call Charles and tell him I told you that. I said, Mr. Boyd, you haven't called me back for four months. He goes, well, I'm telling you now you can't do that.

I go, well, are you going to get his permission? He goes, yeah, you now you can't do that i go well are you gonna you know get his permission he goes yeah you just have to be patient i go i can't wait anymore he says if you do that and you tell him all than i ever telling you i said it's all on tape i taped that call he goes you didn't have permission to tape that call i go yeah you gave me permission at the beginning and that's on tape too it goes god damn it you journalists and he hung up on me you journalists yeah he lumped in with all of them you know he said my wife's his wife was a tv anchor he goes my wife's i know how you people work i go you gave me permission it's on the audio tape wow so uh he died six months later on the treadmill

oh my god i'll be thinking about you. And his firm went bankrupt. And then it wasn't until two or three years later, and it's all in there, the back story. But I finally went to try to get the tapes again and found out he had died, found out that the tapes were in the possession of the trustee who was waiting for the bankruptcy to be resolved. And it took me three or four months of back and forth to try to get them to release the tapes to me. And I made an argument for why they weren't protected anymore. Again, long story short, I was sharing information with the deputy DA in Los Angeles, who I thought was friendly. He was until he wasn't. And he was handling all the parole hearings of the Manson family, a guy named Pat Secura. The woman who was in charge of the tapes, the trustee said, if Secura calls me and tells me that it's OK for me to release them to you and explains how it's not a violation, I'll do it. I said, I'll ask him.

So I asked him. He said, absolutely. I want to talk to her. And I said do it. I said, I'll ask him. So I asked him, he said, absolutely. I want to talk to her. And I said, great. A day later, I get a call from Sakura. He goes, you're not going to believe it. She's releasing the tapes to us. I go, you? He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry. I'll let you hear them when we get them. I knew right then I had lost any kind of control. And sure enough, number one, the trustee had to notify Watson's new attorney. Watson put up a fight in court. And you can read about it in the LA Times. I reported on that for about a year.

For about a year, it went from the local court to the state Supreme Court, where the judge finally ruled that the LAPD should have the tapes. They sent two officers down to get the tapes in 2013. They came back, and then nobody at the DA's office would talk to me anymore. The promise that had been made that I would be the first one to listen to them reneged. Those tapes, a million journalists have made Freedom of Information Act requests for them. They won't release them. They're locked up. Leslie Van Houten's attorney wants them. He thinks it'll help her at her parole hearings because he thinks there's information on there to show that she's been telling the truth all these years. He's gone

to the state Supreme Court through other courts. They've locked them down. It's 20 hours, first account of how and why these murders occurred, and they're not releasing them. I think it's because the truth is on there. Holy shit. Yeah. What is that truth? I don't know. Maybe, I mean,

yeah, you've got a wide audience. Maybe other people will come forward. I would just be happy if some paper like the time, LA times, New York times, Washington post assigned some reporters just to go through my reporting and see if I've made shit up or if it all plays out and then does a little bit of additional reporting.

A lot of these people are dying. They're getting old, but a lot of them are still alive and they could be interviewed. Well, I hope they do, Tom. And anybody, go get this. Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, the secret history of the 60s, Tom O'Neill. It's amazing. Tom. Let me say one more thing.

Yes, please. If people want to see the actual documents, I have an Instagram and a Facebook page where I've put them up. There's also excerpts of my interviews with Bugliosi, Manson, some of the really important stuff where I put the audio tapes up. So what you can't get in the book or even in the footnotes, you can see online. If you just Google my name, Manson, and Instagram or Facebook. There it is right there. I'm asking. Yeah, yeah, that's the Instagram one.

Chaos Charles Manson. Yeah, and if you scroll down, there's tons of that stuff. Thank you so much, Joey. My pleasure. Are we allowed to shake hands? Yeah, yeah, we can shake hands. We got tested right before this. I know.

It's a requirement for coming in this room. Yes, I'm happy that you don't have it. I know. Thanks for letting me know that. I mean, it was a distraction for not being nervous about this, worried about my test results. Well, we got it, and we got the book, and I really appreciate you, man. That was really, really a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed it.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. All right, bye, everybody. Ah. Fitz appreciate it. Bye, everybody. Ah. Fitz told me. ... ...

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