HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, I wish I was Black.
ED LARSON
Oh boy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry, let me just... I'm gonna get ready for the episode. Just getting ready for the episode. Listen here, sucker! You listen here, you mother!
ED LARSON
You mother grabber!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You mother forsaker! I'm sick of you, listen here, Buster Brown! Oh I wish I was Black. I wish I was Black. God! Ugh. It's real.
MARCUS PARKS
It's real. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wish I was Black Henry Zebrowski.
MARCUS PARKS
I wish I was Black Henry Zebrowski. And I wish I was-
ED LARSON
A woman.
MARCUS PARKS
Ed Larson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all do. We all do. And we're covering the Spinner Liberation Army today. It's a real group of Spinners.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left Patty Hearst, she'd finally gotten out of the closet after 57 days in captivity at the hands of the Symbionese Liberation Army. But by cleverly manipulating the SLA into believing that she'd bought into their half-baked philosophies completely, Patty had been let out of the closet and welcomed into the ranks of the SLA and was even issued her own gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aren't we excited? That's how you know you're the best hostage of the group.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally, like all the rest of them, Patty had been given a new name for the revolution. But while some of the rest had been given pseudo African names like Teko, Fahizah, and Zoya-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically they are African names. They're just on white people.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty was named after one of Che Guevara's compatriots, an East German-born Argentinian named Tania Bunke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this comes from the idea of the... Remember there's many different types of revolutionary. We're gonna cover all of them today. There's many different types. You got the real hardcore militant ones that won't take no for an answer. You got the ones that are in it because of the hats, right, which I think actually we miss out a lot on that, a lot of guys like the hats associated with various movements.
ED LARSON
I was hoping I had a beret stashed in my house somewhere. I was gonna wear it today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next week.
ED LARSON
I can find one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I say next week we go full revolutionary because again, I'm looking at Marcus, I do feel like a 17 year old girl in a college class outside of high school that's being flirted with.
MARCUS PARKS
Unfair. I see myself as more of a Berkeley professor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, teaching a 17 year old girl that's worth a lot of money.
ED LARSON
I can't wait til you graduate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there's another stripe-
MARCUS PARKS
You're so mature! Has anyone told you how mature you are?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unfortunately you're not mature enough to get out of Algebra II.
ED LARSON
Just counting the weeks until June.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yummy yum! I can smell you ferment. But then today we're gonna get into another special type of revolutionary, the romantic revolutionary. Because that's how people view Che Guevara and Tania.
MARCUS PARKS
Very much so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that they would go and they'd fight by the pueblo and they'd fight out in-
MARCUS PARKS
The pueblo? They're in fucking South Africa. Pueblo is Southwestern United States.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS
Thousands of miles away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where revolutions happen. They're there, right? Mixing it up.
MARCUS PARKS
In the jungle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then they go back to the safe part.
MARCUS PARKS
Pueblos are in the desert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then they go to another place that is like... Because it's a scene from Braveheart when they're at the nice river. You know what I mean? Where it's the one scene where Che Guevara is there and he's just going like aye aye aye, this revolucion, it will be moy malo, won't it be Tania? And she's there washing her German hair in the river, just going like si, Che, si. One day we will be able to kiss without the sound of machine gun fire. And he's just like si, si, when we are all liberato. Like it's that style of romance.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Side note, Patty being given the name Tania, that burned both Yolanda and her husband TeKo's collective ass because Tania Bunka was a hero of Yolanda's and TeKo's wish to be named Camillo after another Cuban revolutionary had been vetoed by Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's like no, fuck you. You're Teko.
ED LARSON
It's so aggravating. She just wants to be Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's all she ever wanted to be! I wanted the number one slot! I wanted to be the ingenue! I'm supposed to be the lead! I'm fucking what's her name from Cabaret.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after Patty was given her new name, the infamous Polaroid of Patty Hearst dressed as a revolutionary aiming a gun in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag, this picture was sent to the media along with Patty's declaration that she joined the SLA. The ensuing media frenzy was understandable given the seemingly quick turnaround from kidnapping victim to compatriot. But mostly the public jumped to one of two sides. Either Patty had forsaken her country and family for radical political ideologies completely of her own free will, as it seemed many young people in America had, or she'd been brainwashed. Very few thought that Patty might be playing along just to survive. But those numbers included her father, Randy Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody liked the Hearst family. There was nobody who enjoyed... Even fellow billionaires hated the Hearst family. So there was nobody there that wanted to give them any shred of credit. I really do think that especially when it comes to Patty, everybody already had written her off as soon as it had happened. And so they saw the picture, they couldn't wrap their minds around that she might be in on this because it was a very good piece of propaganda by the SLA.
ED LARSON
It's almost like if you grow up in a castle, it's hard to relate to people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I heard? I actually forgot about this. Do you know really, I guess this is more rumor than anything of why William Randolph Hearst was so maddened by Citizen Kane. Because there was a rumor, and I forgot about this, is that Rosebud was the nickname he gave his mistress' clit. That is completely true.
ED LARSON
That's not true at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look it up. Look up the rumor.
MARCUS PARKS
The rumor. Oh the rumor is true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rosebud is Hearst's mistress' clit.
ED LARSON
I would put clitoris for this one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. If the computer doesn't know what a clit is, how am I supposed to? Continue. I'll continue to research.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the near 60 days between the kidnapping and the photo had been a hellish and strange journey for Randy Hearst and his wife Catherine. And with that Polaroid everything very suddenly got even worse. And while Patty certainly had the harder time, her family went through their own bizarre ordeals over the course of the nearly two years that Patty was in captivity. I cannot stress that enough, almost two years, over 500 days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh and so there is a rumor. There is definitely a rumor, I'm saying. It just types in, it depends on what you type. About whether or not... I said 'Hearst rosebud mistress clit'. And some say oh it's not real but some say it is.
ED LARSON
I just think that while we're doing the show you shouldn't be googling clits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why? This is my job. This is my job. This is what I'm here to do. I find the clits. I find the clits! I report the clits!
MARCUS PARKS
Well on the night that Patty was kidnapped, Randy and Catherine Hearst were in Washington DC attending the Hearst Foundation's Senate Youth Program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hope when I grow up to be a senator, I too can have sex with a gay prostitute from the money of the US government they're giving me. Thank you. Hear ye, hear ye!
MARCUS PARKS
He's gonna grow up to be a fine Republican. A fine Republican! Well they were asleep in their hotel room when the phone rang at 1:15 am. It was Anne, Patty's younger sister, and she told them that she just got off the phone with a member of the Berkeley Police Department, a guy named Sergeant Dick Burger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I bet you that didn't give him a bad attitude at all.
ED LARSON
Oh my god. Because everyone knows dicks are hot dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody knows. Sorry. Mama, why'd you do this to me?
ED LARSON
Change our name to Hotdog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My name is a lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Anne told them what Sergeant Dick Burger had just told her, that Patty was missing and Steven Weed was in the hospital. Anne hung up-
ED LARSON
Hold on, we got Burger and Weed?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Weed, dude. Eddie, just try to focus.
ED LARSON
It's like this is made for me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Try to focus on the information. Just think about the words.
ED LARSON
Fucking Weed Burger, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Focus on the information.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Anne hung up the phone and no more than 10 minutes later the FBI was already calling to say that they were coming over to Randy Hearst's home to set up shop. See while Randy Hearst was more of a family man than a businessman, he was still a Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So after Randy put in a call directly to the head of the FBI, a 35 year veteran of the bureau named Dwayne Eskridge was at Randy's house within just three hours. He'd showed up to bug all the phones and attach tape recorders to each line in case the kidnappers called.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if you could, honestly what I would ask for you to do is delete all the things I talk about. At all. It's only because no one should know the secret of rosebud.
MARCUS PARKS
Fun fact about Dwayne proving further that the Patty Hearst kidnapping is the Forrest Gump of true crime stories, Dwayne was the first person to issue a Mayday warning when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They got every... Well as we go through the story you kinda hear that Randy Hearst goes on, we'll cover this more next episode, but he goes on an adventure of all his own. And he needs some of the top police officers in American history.
ED LARSON
As he should have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. But also Randy Hearst becomes eventually the first Hearst person to ever speak to a poor person.
MARCUS PARKS
Except for Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, except for Patty. And so we'll get to his adventure next week. But yeah, it's very hilarious what he learns and he expands the Forrest Gump storyline.
ED LARSON
Also they could have made that call a little earlier.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually he got in trouble for calling it too early.
ED LARSON
Oh really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he got in trouble because they're like you didn't use the code. And he's like what fucking code? The planes are right there! Now even though Dwayne was working with out of date equipment that betrayed the public's image of the FBI as a crack team of super cops, he was still damn good at what he did and even knew all the usual suspects when it came to kidnapping cases. For example, while monitoring calls to the Hearst residents after the news broke, there was a call from a woman claiming to be Patty Hearst. But after hearing the voice, Dwayne told the agent on the line to hang up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, it's me, it's your daughter. It's Patty Hearst. (farting) Yeah, sorry, I'm sitting on a ziploc bag. I'm sorry, I'm sitting on a big inflatable cushion.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this woman was a kidnap groupie from Texas who was known to call the families of kidnap victims anytime they made the news. And Dwayne knew exactly who this was after just a couple of sentences. Unfortunately for Dwayne though, the SLA would never make a call to the Hearst residence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't have a dime.
MARCUS PARKS
Literally a dime to use to call.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, a dime.
MARCUS PARKS
They're not gonna call collect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This is a call from-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Symbionese Liberation Army.
MARCUS PARKS
Do you accept? Now within just two days of the kidnapping, news had already leaked to all the major outlets that something had happened to the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. And by that Thursday, a dozen members of the press had already set up their equipment outside Randy Hearst's home just in case this story turned out to be something big. And indeed when the first SLA communique was issued three days after Patty was kidnapped, the press presence grew from a scrum to an encampment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What does that mean?
MARCUS PARKS
It went from small to big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh okay.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you said from scrum to an encampment, it feels like we're just like I just see a bunch of hot guys in a field all licking each other's balls.
ED LARSON
Scrum is like when they fight each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eat your scrum. I thought eating your scrum was like licking a guy's assholes til you got shit all over your nose.
ED LARSON
That's how you win in rugby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't know. They should get some mints.
MARCUS PARKS
Well winnebagos and TV trucks lined the streets and the press was in such a state of constant frenzy that journalists nailed portable telephones to trees so they could call in stories as fast as possible. Meanwhile authorities were also pumping Steven Weed for information because he was in the hospital for five days because of the brutal assault he'd suffered during the kidnapping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, there must have been like nine of them, dude. They came from every direction. They came from the ceiling, man. Listen, if you could just top my IV off with some tank, man. Okay dude? I'm fucking dying here, dude. It's harsh, it's harsh as hell in here, man, without my fucking stuff. Tripping out here, man. I think I'm getting sick. Could you die of weed withdrawal, man? Give me a TV, dude. Is the price right? Do we know?
MARCUS PARKS
Well from Steven's description of a paramilitary-style assault perpetrated by a mix of Black and white assailants along with the neighbors descriptions of a well coordinated escape, the police and the FBI were collectively having a bit of an 'oh fuck' moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Because right at the gate it seems like oh man, we're dealing with an elite paramilitary group that is... We might actually have a problem here.
MARCUS PARKS
Big problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See along with the testimonies, police noticed that the kidnapping shared a similar MO that had been present at a murder that had occurred just a few months before. See the bullets recovered at Patty's apartment building had a distinct scent of almonds, indicating that they had been packed with cyanide prior to being loaded in the gun which is fucking stupid because if you get hit, it's not gonna... The fucking powder is gonna burn away all the fucking cyanide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't understand where they even got the idea of cyanide bullets. Because what they did was that they drilled a hole into each individual bullet and filled it with cyanide themselves. Which is again not smart.
ED LARSON
It makes the bullet worse for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't do anything. It destroys the integrity of the bullet. And it also is like what are we doing here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Also just use the cyanide as cyanide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would require you becoming a master poisoner.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Master poisoners are hard.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You can't just put cyanide on a pizza?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No dude, you put antifreeze in Gatorade.
MARCUS PARKS
Well those same type of idiotic cyanide bullets had been recovered from the body of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster the previous November. So before the sun even came up on the day after the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, authorities were reasonably sure that the people responsible were the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Only a specific kind of idiot would do this.
MARCUS PARKS
Today's episode will therefore be devoted entirely to the SLA's almost accidental formation, including the people who made up its ranks and the crimes they committed on the way to kidnapping Patty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we put together a large amount of sources just to track this story. Because what we've realized is that not a lot of people have fully tracked the actual formation of the SLA. And then we realized oh, the Jeffrey Toobin book is all from the perspective of the people inside of the SLA.
MARCUS PARKS
Mostly, I mean-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's telling their side of the story.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean we did find some of our sources because like Carolina did a hell of a lot of work in finding these disparate sources.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They all have their own books.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And like reading all these books and helping me put it all together. But yeah. Willie Wolfe had a book about him. Camilla Hall, there was a book about her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. There was just the formation of the SLA, 'The Life and Death of the SLA' is the book-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, there were two books on the SLA that were written in the 70s but had gone out of print.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And we got all of them. We got all of them!
MARCUS PARKS
Even fucking Camilla Hall had a book about her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Like it's incredible. So we put together this entire... Special fucking huge thanks you to Carolina for helping us put all of this shit together for the story that we have today, a story that really hasn't been told in 50 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean there's a bunch of different... Not our way. Not our fucking way, dude.
ED LARSON
How were you able to determine like what was bullshit and what was not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't.
MARCUS PARKS
Well you can't but you can cross-reference.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And you can see like if it shows up a couple of times in each book, if the same thing shows up in two different books, then you can kind of see like okay, that's probably closer to the truth.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You can look at like the character of these people and you can kind of surmise-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus, don't you dare give these people the tools to properly research things. All right? We can't allow these people to know how to do this on their own because it needs to come from us. But what we do here is we do try to match up what everybody says about the same fucking thing as much as we can.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you find out there is literally no such thing as objective truth.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's very difficult in a story like this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. The only one who tells the truth is me. That's how you know it's an objective view, because I'm saying it. Otherwise...
MARCUS PARKS
Oh and if you want more of this fantastic research, go ahead and check out No Dogs in Space. We're back!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
With Can part one. If you really wanna get some top notch research, especially if you particularly enjoyed our Armin Meiwes series because it's about Germany, baby. It's all about krautrock.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ja!
ED LARSON
And you're in it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, man. I've been in Germany for like a year, me and Carolina both. It's been awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see you in the office everyday so.
ED LARSON
Yeah. He's not in Germany, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Metaphorically we're in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like the Epcot version of Germany.
ED LARSON
Which I like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the people that made up the SLA weren't all that different from a lot of the radicals that were banging around Oakland and Berkeley in the early to mid 70s. There were a lot of white people talking about violent revolution but very few were willing to take it to the next level.
ED LARSON
Dude, and I'll tell you what, I was looking at some footage of people like rioting back in the 70s and 60s vs now.
MARCUS PARKS
Woof.
ED LARSON
Do you know that they would like go in like wearing like football helmets and shit. They were ready to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well now they know how to protest better than ever because all the kids are being taught how to avoid and obstruct school shooters. So they're actually using those skills against the police.
ED LARSON
It's pretty awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is very interesting.
ED LARSON
Militarize the children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They become the child... That's the child military. Which we should think about because they won't see it coming. We dress up a bunch of military officers as little orphans and we drop them a bunch of places and everyone thinks they're like oh well let's help these lost children. And then the kids go like welcome to America! Just fucking light all these guys up. That'd be fucking awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
ED LARSON
Henry's turning into Idi Amin.
MARCUS PARKS
Has anyone ever thought about using kids as soldiers? I can't believe I'm just now coming up with this idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm saying everybody loves reboots.
MARCUS PARKS
Well honestly I don't think it's likely that anyone in the SLA would have become as violent as they did had they not found someone to be violent for. Just like how I doubt Susan Atkins would have found herself writing the word pig in the house of a murdered pregnant woman using said pregnant woman's blood had it not been for Charles Manson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if she had Facebook then, I definitely could have seen her writing the word pig on a pregnant woman's Facebook wall.
MARCUS PARKS
You got me on that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You got me hard. But the difference between the Manson family and the Symbionese Liberation Army is that while Manson shaped his followers into what he wanted them to be, the members of the SLA shaped their leader into who they wanted to follow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Reading this much material from the inside of the SLA, you can really see a disparate group of idiots come together and kind of create the perfect idiot evil soup for the SLA to be itself. They really do all throw stuff in together.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. See these were people who had no real direction in life but still wanted to do some good in this world. Or at least their idea of being good because no bad guy in politics ever thinks of themselves as the bad guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's why the best villains we have, even now we talk about like in fiction our favorite villains are the ones that have like a purpose, right. Like they believe that they're strong of purpose. No one starts off as a villain, no one grows up wanting to be a junkie.
ED LARSON
I think Mengele knew he was a villain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling) Like little laughter being like (German accent) oof, Mengele, this one's fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
But these people needed a purpose. But as we'll see, the SLA's political philosophy demanded that a non white person lead the revolution. But once they found that person, the revolution could commence. But the story of how this loose confederation of activists, some acquaintances, some close friends, some ex-lovers, this all starts in the unlikeliest of places with the unlikeliest of people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me.
MARCUS PARKS
This story starts in prison with Willie Wolfe, aka Kahjoh. Although Willie Wolfe was not himself a prisoner, nor was he a prison guard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I wish I could have been. That's all I wanted to be.
MARCUS PARKS
Kahjoh was just some dumb college kid. And by dumb college kid I mean like he was very intelligent but he had zero fucking common sense.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I went to go see that Dave Matthews Band and honestly the rhythms are a lot for me. I went to see, I saw it, I was like this is too much, I have to leave. And I had to sit with my white noise machine in my SUV for several hours just to come down.
ED LARSON
Can we get rid of the violin already?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds like a woman screaming and I hate that!
MARCUS PARKS
Well Willie Wolfe was about the whitest kid you could imagine. He came from Connecticut, he was a Yale legacy, and he'd been both a varsity swimmer and the editor of his school newspaper at a fancy ass Massachusetts prep school.
ED LARSON
So he was sick of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. He's going honestly guys, I've done being white at the top that I can do it. All right? I was the number one white in my whole family. And now it's time for me to be so good at being white I can make myself Black.
MARCUS PARKS
But after a gap year in Europe, Willie enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley where he quickly found that the revolutionary ideas of people like Che Guevara, his eventual hero, were highly appealing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact Willie came to be such a Che fan boy that he began dressing like Che, wearing a beret, smoking big dumb cigars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(coughing) You guys want any maduros? (coughing) You guys like plantains? I do too. A little sweet for me though.
MARCUS PARKS
Willie Wolfe, also like many young radicals, became heavily involved in protesting for the rights of Black people in America. But let's be clear that this isn't why we're making fun of these people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's just the slippery slope that led them to where they were. But it's not because of their actual beautiful leanings.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea of fighting for Black people is nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there were plenty of whites who valiantly fought and in some cases died for the rights of others. But while Willie would die, he was in no way valiant. Now upon arrival at Berkeley-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all of us. That's just how I feel about each one of us.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll all die but we are not valiant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now upon arrival at Berkeley, Willie soon found his way to a loosely organized commune called the Peking Man House. This commune was so named partly as a tongue in cheek reference to Maoist politics and partly as a nod to the egg roll cart the residents ran on the Berkeley campus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus, what's the difference between Maoism and Marxism?
MARCUS PARKS
What is the difference between Maoism and Marxism?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it's letters. I've learned more about dialectical materialism and various things inside... I actually want to say thank you to some of the people send me very good emails. Understanding some stuff where how like dialectical materialism is about the idea that societies are driven by actions, not ideas like a lot of people thought. And I do think that but luckily what's great is that the SLA was wrong about all of it. So I actually then didn't have to know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They were just big on rhetoric and yes, but then everything that they believed eventually was wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't do it right.
MARCUS PARKS
They did everything wrong. Now the people who lived at Peking Man House were actually serious revolutionaries who were associated with the largest, most radical activist group in northern California at the time, Venceremos, which means overcome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, cool.
ED LARSON
That happens sometimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Julie's been out of town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you overcome. Nothing's like that third, just being like now I'm just disgusting. What am I even jerking off to? Just jerked off to like an old picture of Nancy Pelosi just because it was there, just to do it.
MARCUS PARKS
See Venceremos was a merger of two groups who were splinter groups of other groups that had splintered off from the splintering of the Students for a Democratic Society whose 30,000 members had splintered in 1969 when everything was falling apart. Got it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
ED LARSON
Got it. They wanted to teach the Ninja Turtles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Perfect. Again, he's getting some of the words.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But splintering aside, Venceremos was an organization of mostly white people that prided itself on street fights with the police. And they were not a group that shied away from using guns or at least shied away from owning guns.
ED LARSON
Man, street fight, it's such a different time man.
MARCUS PARKS
Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Street fights with the police? And they're still a group?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because now it's actually more so... Sadly we kind of see it on the other side, it kind of reminds me a little bit of kind of what the Proud Boys do in a way where they go to just fight people.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, Venceremos was willing to use violence to achieve their goals. But the kicker with Venceremos was that even though they were predominantly white, their creed demanded that the white members of the left should submit to dominant Black and minority leadership. This idea would become essential to the ethos of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it does make sense. The idea is for white people to use their privilege and their natural protections and use it to kind of safely harbor people of color within the movement and move them forward and have it about using that privilege to do it. But they were focused on it. And Kahjoh... Kaju?
MARCUS PARKS
Kaju.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Kaju-
MARCUS PARKS
Let's just say Willie Wolfe for now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Willie.
MARCUS PARKS
Willie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Willie was not that.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's like it's okay to march in a Black Lives Matter march but not to speak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we sit there and hold space.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the spring of 1972, Venceremos was, you guessed it, starting to splinter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard to keep them together.
MARCUS PARKS
Because there were disagreements on whether they should focus on mass organization or straight up terrorism. One of the people debating all this, leaning heavily towards terrorism, was Willie Wolfe, aka Kahjoh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll come from everywhere! We'll come from the montagnas, we'll come from the junglos, we'll come from everywhere and they won't see us coming no matter what they think. Right, boys? Come on! Let's get them!
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Now at this point Willie Wolfe was still enrolled at UC Berkeley and was wanting to do a school project on Black men in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I do one on Black men in prison? Excuse me, teacher! Teacher, teacher! I want to do one on Black men in prison! No but it is philosophical. It was a good thing.
MARCUS PARKS
So a resident at Peking, in one of those casual suggestions in history that end up being extremely consequential, he suggested that Willie Wolfe attend one of the cultural nights that were being held at Vacaville Prison. Now Vacaville was a prison that often seemed more like a hospital or at least that's how it was in the 70s. The warden was a psychiatrist and most of the inmates were there on good behavior assignments. This was a prison with a little more freedom for people who do favors, which is why Vacaville is where Ed Kemper still rests his head every night at the age of 75.
ED LARSON
That's a big head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could smell the brill cream.
MARCUS PARKS
Fucking three quarters of a century with old bumblebutt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's loving it in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But when Willie Wolfe started going to Vacaville, Ed Kemper had not yet arrived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sad.
MARCUS PARKS
He was still about a year away. Now Willie Wolfe found his way into Vacaville through a teaching assistant in the Afro-American division of Berkeley's ethnic studies department, a guy named Colton Westbrook. He was signing up tutors for a new self-help educational program held in the prison library. Westbrook was working with a Black inmate group called the Black Cultural Association, the BCA, which was founded to help Black prisoners deal with the unique problems that confronted them inside and outside of prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like a friendlier environment for guys who didn't necessarily fit into any of the various associations that run prison yards.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Vacaville is also a different type of place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's still there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They still have the fucking, what was it? The AN, Aryan Nation, they have that, they have different groups, like they have various gangs essentially, prison gangs. Like normally you try to fit into one. But then the BCA was kind of created as a prisoner-led educational system to kind of basically keep their noses clean.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To help them kind of find more intellectual pursuits that will help them outside of prison.
ED LARSON
But it just seems like a place where you're not gonna get your ass kicked on a daily basis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the idea. It's like for people who want to learn. I actually think it's a fantastic idea and I think more and more prisons who can do stuff like that, it would be great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Vacaville also it was much more possible there because if you fucked up in Vacaville, like if you caused any disturbance, you were gone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like if you fucked up, if you got into a fight, you're fucking out.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But still prison gangs are gonna form no matter what you do.
ED LARSON
Oh of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the BCA was not a particularly militant or radical organization. It was mostly about rehabilitation, with the idea of returning a more responsible person to the community by establishing communication between inmates and Black communities on the outside. In addition, they held twice weekly tutoring sessions to help educate inmates. On the cultural side of things, meetings opened with a clenched fist salute to the flag of the Republic of New Africa and a chant in Swahili.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, this is exciting.
MARCUS PARKS
But the stylistic touches weren't really the point of the BCA. The BCA was about self- improvement. But those ritual trappings were fascinating to white visitors like Willie Wolfe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like I'm in White Men Can't Jump. I love this. This is real! This is very, very real!
MARCUS PARKS
After attending his first meeting with the BCA as an observer, Willie found a culture that would fascinate him for the rest of his short life. He soon became one of the guys who tutored BCA members. And before long, White Willie was bringing the intense ideas of Venceremos to BCA members.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, all right. So first of all, so happy to meet you. Love meeting a prison, that's been honestly, it's a big deal for me. But I'm gonna say right now the first thing you should have done when you met me, fella, punch me in the face. Because I'm the problem. Right, guy? It's me. So come on. First up! All right, right here. Some sweet chin music, come on. Come on, hit me! Get me!
ED LARSON
Can I hold your pocket?
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, these prisoners were also using Willie for their own purposes. And in fact he was like a mascot, he was a fool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They used him as a tool. Like he was the first one and they're all like oh this guy will get us anything we want.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he'll bring it over here. And I don't feel like everybody in the BCA was trying to like milk other people for shit.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just what happens. You're in prison. That guy can get me stuff outside of prison and he's going to and he's super excited to do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But while most people rejected the ideas that Willie Wolfe was bringing in, one in particular was very interested in what Willie had to say. That member was Donald DeFreeze, whom the world would come to know as Cinque Mtume, aka Cin, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Now one thing that Cin did share with Charles Manson was that they were both lifelong criminals. Starting in his teenage years with breaking into parking meters and stealing cars, Cin would spend much of his life either in jail, on probation, or on the run. And much of his crimes would involve weapon possession. In 1964 for example, Cin was hitchhiking along the San Bernardino freeway but was arrested after police found a sharpened butter knife, a sawed off rifle, and a tear gas pencil bomb in his suitcase.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was the one thing about him that I found interesting. If you read the book 'The Life and Death of the SLA', he does kind of start off like how do you put it? Life never went right for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was always kind of messed up and kind of involved in various criminal associations. But the worst part honestly was his fascination with bombs and that he did have a immediate fascination with bombs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're like I feel like the cops will work with many things but not bombs.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Especially when you're just so willy nilly with them, they're just in your pocket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're just out in a bag, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing. Three years later, he ran a red light on a bicycle and when he was searched, cops found a homemade bomb in his pocket as well as a second bomb and a pistol in the bike's basket. His story was that he just found all this shit and was trying to sell all of it to help out his family.
ED LARSON
Oh I'm just trying to sell these bombs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
It's no big deal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, these bombs aren't for me.
ED LARSON
They're for sale!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're for my customers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, no. I'm distributing bombs, that's it. I'm like a dealer for bombs. But that's not illegal, I never saw that anywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the bombs and the gun got him three years probation but six months later, Cin was arrested for his first violent crime. After paying a sex worker $10, Cin engaged in her services, then pulled out a pistol, demanding the money he just paid her in addition to everything else she had.
ED LARSON
Rude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bad guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Cin was banking on this woman not going to the cops but she immediately went to the cops. And when the authorities caught up to Cin, they found both the pistol which was stolen and a cache of more stolen weapons in the trunk of his car. That's when Cin turned snitch and led police to an accomplice who had 200 stolen guns in his possession. It's rumored that Cin remained an informant because he did not go to jail for robbing the sex worker, nor did he do time for the veritable crime spree that immediately followed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My take is that he was absolutely a police informant.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that that followed him to jail.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the only thing that makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Otherwise they would have just beat him to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well yes. I think that he flipped and I think that he again, unlike his hero George Jackson, Cinque was very morally weak.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Between 1968-1969 Cin was arrested for burglary, he kidnapped a rabbi and demanded a $5000 ransom from his synagogue, he was caught on top of a bank with two pistols, an eight inch dagger, and a hand grenade.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just hanging out! Just enjoying myself, it's a nice sunny day.
MARCUS PARKS
And he was wounded in a gun battle outside of a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might have been the one right around here.
MARCUS PARKS
It might have been that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I bet you.
ED LARSON
The Bank of America over here had that big shooting in the 80s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I feel like that's exactly what we're talking about.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is 1968.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa! There had to have been multiple.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what finally sent Cin to prison was when he pistol-whipped a Hawaiian tourist and stole a check from her purse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm angry even thinking about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Then got arrested when he tried cashing the check.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leave our tourists alone.
ED LARSON
Yeah, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Taking everything into account, Cin was given five years to life. But since he was probably an informant, he was sent to the relatively cushy Vacaville Prison at the age of 30. So he's about 8-10 years older than most of the rest of the people. Like he's the oldest person in the SLA.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And remember that because remember I do feel like... Why did this form? These kids, they are like... I know you object to the term kids because legally they are adults but they're college kids.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They really don't know their ass from their elbow. They're deeply ensconced in reading which makes a lot of sense and they're very, very inspired. When they go to meet Cinque, you gotta remember what we looked... I think about that sometimes too. Natalie was looking at a picture of her at 30 years old yesterday and I looked at it and I was like oh when you were a baby. She's like yep, at 30. And I was just like holy shit. I'm like at that point. I'm at that point where the 10 year gap is real.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A 30 year old to a 20 year old looks like a fucking... Like you're on Mount Rushmore.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Cin was a model prisoner at Vacaville because you had to be to stay there. And he soon became active in the Black Cultural Association, the BCA, where Willie Wolfe thought he'd finally found his in to Black culture. Now just like a lot of guys in the BCA did and as all members of the SLA would later do, Donald DeFreeze changed his name and took 'Cinque' from the man who led the revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad. After shortening Cinque to Cin for his day to day, he began giving lecture-type speeches during the Friday night meetings of the BCA. And when it came time to elect a new chairman, Cin volunteered himself as a candidate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now just a little bit, a couple of dynamics here. Cinque also when he started coming through, one of the identities he tried for a while was like a pastor. So he went through various identities coming up. So we know that he was in search of a place that he belonged.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And when he got to jail, he first started and he kind of sent the lay of the land. And then he started hearing the, what do you call? Like the theory about like leftist concepts. And he had a real hard time digesting Marx, like a lot of people do. But then when he found George Jackson he was like oh this is kind of like a simplified thing. Like it's more simplified, it's direct, it's passion. 'Blood in my Eye' is a beautiful book.
MARCUS PARKS
And we'll get to 'Blood in my Eye' here in a second.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. But this was like all right, I'll get into this. But imagine this. You show up at the BCA. These are guys that have been in jail, a lot of them for years.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They've been running this BCA thing for a long time. DeFreeze rolls up and he's immediately like y'all have been waiting for me. Just being like you guys don't know what you got here. The guys showed up, everybody be ready for Cinque. And he starts to go like get really, really involved but he's doing the classic Anders Breivik style I can't just be a member of this group.
MARCUS PARKS
I have to be the leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have to be the leader.
MARCUS PARKS
Now from what we can tell, it's during these elections that Willie Wolfe first became aware of Cin. Because in Willie's journals he jotted down that one of the candidates was a con named DeFreeze. That's Cin's real last name. Cin however not only lost the election but came in third.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the second loser.
MARCUS PARKS
This was partly because Cin rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, not least the Black women visitors who also attended BCA meetings. They were just fucking creeped out by Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because he was an extremely abusive man to every woman that was in his life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Also I know that you're like taking on the name of this great person but like Cin is like a bad thing to call yourself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well a lot of people would... Well it's also cool because it's the opposite of what you do.
MARCUS PARKS
But like any sore loser, Cin actually threatened to sue the BCA-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the outgoing chairman had spread the rumor that Cin was a snitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He definitely was a snitch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm pretty certain that he was.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm almost positive. I mean he was definitely a snitch when he turned over that guy that had the 200 guns.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's just say it don't stop. Like once it works for you once-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you kind of are in a situation where now unfortunately... Then the cops, what's fun about them is they catch you in a trap too.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So now you're sort of also kind of forced to stay an informant. And so yeah, he's fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup.
ED LARSON
He admitted to selling bombs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And the only other person we know who admits to sell bombs is EddieTunes at eddietunes.com.
ED LARSON
Eddietunes.com. That's right, baby, that's right. I'll write a joke about nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the compromise to avoid the so-called lawsuit, Cin was given his own discussion group called Unisight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
Which would bizarrely focus its study on the dynamics of the Black family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even though he was a fucking absentee father and just an all around bad person.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The first outsiders Cin asked to join his group was the very white Willie Wolfe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You got it, mister!
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you need? Where do I tie the durag? Oh, I'm sorry, is that offensive? I'm extremely sorry! Oh god, I wish I was Black so that I'd know! I just wanna know!
ED LARSON
Can I touch your hair?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you know that rosebud was Hearst's mistress' clit? I just wanna tell you fun things.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Willie, he had just begun to bring in other young white revolutionaries to Vacaville prison to quote unquote "tutor" Black inmates. These would be the members of the SLA. The first white brought to Vacaville was Willie's friend from the Peking Man House, Russ Little, who had come to be known in the SLA as Osi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everybody put your hands together! We got Osi in the house!
ED LARSON
Hi!
MARCUS PARKS
Like most of the white members of the SLA , 8.5 out of 10, Russ Little came from a boring middle class background and found his identity in radical left wing politics. That was pretty much every single one of these people-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Is that they made radical left wing politics their entire identity.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, of course. Because again, it's really exciting, a lot of it's very, very interesting and compelling and I think that it does open your mind and they're also very young.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And also it's 1972, 1973.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very fresh.
ED LARSON
It's very popular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very.
MARCUS PARKS
It's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but that's the thing is that this=
ED LARSON
And stinky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, man.
MARCUS PARKS
This is when it gets dirty. Because in 1969, a lot of the legitimate groups like fall apart and then once you get into the 70s it starts getting a lot more violent, it starts getting a lot stranger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Serious.
MARCUS PARKS
And it starts getting a lot more serious.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So it really is, like it's dangerous to be into this shit in 1972-1975.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, cool and sexy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
And it's weird because they're so liberal but yet they're also like down with the Hells Angels.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because they don't understand.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But although Russ Little... Well that's the thing. I think they just didn't stay late enough at the Hells Angels parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once it got to like 11 pm.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you get that feeling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, like ooh, I think it might be time to go.
MARCUS PARKS
But although Russ Little was already radicalized by the time he arrived in California from Florida, he became even more so while living at Peking Man House and soon became laser focused on the plight of prisoners thanks to Willie Wolfe. See it was their belief that all prisoners were inherently political prisoners and that every prisoner in the system, no matter what the crime, was a potential soldier and the revolution to come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think it's really about that. It's a potential soldier.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I do think that there were many people in the prison system. As now, we know that it's now a politicized environment and it's always been.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I mean we worked with the Last Prisoner Project-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
With our weed for forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're still working with them, we're still an ally with them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, Eddie's done a lot of shit with prisons.
ED LARSON
That's right, I love them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I do believe... He loves them! Because again the walkouts, just go to the mess hall. They're right there, he gets to go back.
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah. Any prisoner, child molester, that's a fucking soldier. Bestiality, there's your soldier.
ED LARSON
How long could you really go away for bestiality?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, long enough to join a cult in jai.
ED LARSON
Asking for a friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so tragic bus!
MARCUS PARKS
Well these ideas were discussed in talks that Willie Wolfe would give at Peking House inbetween screenings of anti-war films. These films were supplied by his roommate and an actual Black guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know one! Here he is, he's right here!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
We have to live together.
MARCUS PARKS
His name was Chris Thompson. But one night Chris screened a propaganda film from Hanoi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These fucking nerds, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're just watching propaganda films and they're like this is amazing. Which I do understand.
ED LARSON
This was like you at Contact in the Desert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know all these people.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the climax featured a Vietnamese woman shooting down an American bomber single- handedly after her baby was blown to bits by American bombs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Excellent.
MARCUS PARKS
The whole room erupted into cheers as the plane went down. But the loudest voice belonged to Chris Thompson's casual girlfriend. Her name was Patricia Soltysik, aka Mizmoon, aka Zoya. In less than a year, she would cofound the Symbionese Liberation Army while holed up in her apartment with Donald DeFreeze, aka Cinque Mtume.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, man. Zoya is the scary one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Patty Hearst described Mizmoon as difficult to know and even more difficult to like once you knew her. And everything she did was aimed at her personal goal of proving that women could be just as horrible and violent as men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Awesome!
MARCUS PARKS
By 1972 she dropped out of Berkeley completely, telling her friends that no one is free until everyone is free. Wherever there is injustice, you will find her. Wherever there is suffering, she'll be there! Wherever liberty is threatened, you'll find Mizmoon! Now Mizmoon was a pet name given to her by her ex-girlfriend Camilla Hall, who would one day be known in the SLA as Gabi. And also she legally changed her name to Mizmoon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She did. To be difficult.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Now it's one word, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, one word.
ED LARSON
It's not Ms. Moon.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's Mizmoon. M-I-Z-M-O-O-N.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Ms. Moon sounds like the lady who runs the bodega.
MARCUS PARKS
But while Mizmoon was bisexual, Camilla was gay. And the only time she knew happiness was when she was living as an openly gay woman with Mizmoon in Berkeley. Now their relationship eventually ended but even though Camilla did believe in revolution and justice and everything that went with it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All that horseshit.
MARCUS PARKS
She chose to join the SLA simply because that was the only way to stay close to Mizmoon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
This inability to let go would only lead to more misery and eventually a horrible death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think a lot of people could learn from that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Let go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In relationships. Let go.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't hold onto a revolutionary. All right? They're choosing the revolution. They're not choosing you, they're not choosing the cat and the U-Haul. They're not choosing... You can't go with them to the revolution. You can't change a revolution into a Subaru nation. Revolution is not leading that.
ED LARSON
There's plenty of fish in the sea. And that's not a bad joke about vaginas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're disgusting. You're a bad person.
ED LARSON
I said it's not. It's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're a bad man and you're not an ally!
MARCUS PARKS
Now Mizmoon was introduced to another friend of Willie Wolfe's named Nancy Ling Perry, who had come to be known as Fahizah in the SLA. Nancy was working part time at an orange juice stand called Fruity Rudy's on Telegraph Avenue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Telegraph is sort of the St. Mark's place of Berkeley. You got a lot of stands, a lot of booths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Willie Wolfe was selling homemade bread in the booth next to Fruity Rudy's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guess what color? White as all hell. Yeah, that's one thing we're keeping white.
MARCUS PARKS
The two talked and found they had common interests. But Nancy's background was much rougher than the other members of the SLA. While she'd grown up in Orange County as a straight A cheerleader, she turned Maoist when she attended Berkeley and she subsequently married a Black jazz musician.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But even after the marriage fell apart, Nancy would hold on to certain affectations, like she'd call everyone brother and she'd talk in a Black accent. Her accent however was pretty good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because if you'll remember, Nancy was the only person in the SLA that Patty Hearst thought was actually Black besides Cin before the blindfold came off. But during her dark times before the SLA, Nancy worked as a Blackjack dealer in a gentleman's club where she wore a see- through blouse while the waitresses went fully topless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
ED LARSON
So she was in charge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
She had a couple of people under her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, I'm the one with the gauze. All right?
MARCUS PARKS
She soon fell into drug abuse and high-risk sex work. But after meeting Willie Wolfe, Nancy found her purpose again and was eventually reborn as Fahizah. Now Nancy and Mizmoon became fast friends and they were soon going together to the Chabot gun range. It's spelled C- H-A-B-O-T, have no idea how it's pronounced.
ED LARSON
I'm sure they're still in business.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. It's in Oakland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in Oakland.
MARCUS PARKS
And they went there to learn their way around a weapon for when the inevitable revolution came. There they met a Vietnam veteran named Joe Remiro who took the name Bo when he joined the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really feel like they needed to really pull this all together. And I think what would have made them successful is the music of Sia. Because I think these women need to feel strong enough in order to put it all together, man.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Even her hair is bringing black and white together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Wow. That's a Sa joke, very specific. Eddietunes.com. That's a very specific joke.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Joe had truly been in the shit in Vietnam. He'd been a member of one of the war's long range reconnaissance units. These are the guys who went behind enemy lines to try and out Viet Cong the Viet Cong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And let me tell you something, man. It's fucking hard to do. I'm not enjoying out Viet Conging the Viet Cong. I really honestly kind of wish we weren't and we did this traditional with muskets and trenches. Cause this sucks. There's a lot of bugs.
MARCUS PARKS
As a result, Joe Remiro was riddled with PTSD when he got back and he joined an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was legit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But at the same time, he thought that an armed revolution in America was inevitable and the left was gonna need an organized military. So he began giving classes on how to use weapons at the Chabot gun range for anyone who was willing to learn. And soon after Nancy Ling Perry and Mizmoon started attending, Russ Little and Willie Wolfe were acting as Joe Remiro's assistants during these paramilitary classes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it really was Willie Wolfe's like group cuckism that drove this whole thing. He really was just like I just want to help everybody. I want everybody to just feel like they're part of a fun army. We're in an army together!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well they said that Willie Wolfe was very affable and you just kind of wanted to hang around, like he was just a friendly guy to be around.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's the Lionel Richie of the SLA, bringing them all together.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now all while Willie Wolfe was I think unknowingly collecting this motley crew-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't know that he was doing that.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No idea at all. Many of them were traveling to Vacaville under the guise of tutoring but really they were smuggling revolutionary literature to prisoners.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also drugs and alcohol and money.
ED LARSON
Yeah, the stuff that makes it all worth it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Chief among their texts was the book 'Blood in my Eye' which was a series of letters written by a prominent member of the Black Panther Party named George Jackson. Of course he wrote these before he was killed in a prison break at San Quentin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
George Jackson is legit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
His death was actually what inspired the Attica Prison riots.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Which also kicked off the prison abolition movement, the prison reform movement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
George Jackson is a very important person in 20th century American history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And this book would be more or less the foundational text of the SLA. See it was George Jackson's view that the only way to affect change in America was through violent revolution against both the state and the corporations that propped up the American fascist regime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's the idea, you're trying to take the mode of production, right. You're trying to take the means of production. That's the idea. And the people who have the means of production are the state and the corporatocracy that runs the country.
MARCUS PARKS
Jackson also claimed that the sheer number of prisoners in America could provide the infrastructure of the revolutionary armies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it makes a lot of sense because he kept saying again, like the main issue, kind of what communists and communist thought is kind of really talking about is there's so many people that are not in charge underneath the people that are in charge. And it's kind of crazy that you got one guard for every 1000 criminals or 1000 prisoners in this thing. And you just gotta get them all together to fight against the top.
ED LARSON
Yeah. The problem though with an army-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's more of us than them always.
ED LARSON
Made of prisoners is they're in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you gotta break them out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well there was also many people in the revolution that were like so any of you guys got money to buy a tank? Anybody got a nuclear weapon?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm not quite sure but I think like George Jackson, it was a kind of a thought exercise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a concept.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a concept. You're not literally supposed to do this shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well unless you do do it. And then when you do do it, you have to do it right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It certainly didn't work in Attica.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Well it also wasn't a coincidence that George Jackson had quite a few choice words to say about the families that ran America, which included the Rockefellers and who else but the descendants of William Randolph Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't want them to know-
MARCUS PARKS
That rosebud is the name of the clit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. About the chocolate starfish. I don't want anybody to know about my favorite little starfish in the world. Oh my little brown-eyed, brown-eyed wonder.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at this point, this group had coalesced around Willie Wolfe simply because he was affable but there was nobody on the outside who could be their leader. By their own ethos, they could not be part of a group that was led by a white person and Joe Remiro didn't count because he was only half Mexican. That all changed however when Cin escaped from prison in the easiest prison break I've ever heard of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is, can I tell why I think again points to why he's a prison informant and what he knew? So he was talking throughout the prison. And for a while, as he read George Jackson, he was like yes, I want to be George Jackson. This guy means a lot to me. And he says that essentially like one of the terms, one of the kind of thoughts that they have is that like essentially getting let out on bail, you might as well crawl out of jail on your belly. Like that's what he said. It was like the idea that that means you gave in.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gave in to the system going back.
ED LARSON
And you're probably going back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this idea that you played along, you played along and you should always be obstructing the system. And what he realized is like I don't wanna be in jail anymore. I never wanna be in jail and I feel like there's stuff out there. So during this time period he's building these contacts with the BCA and they're like kind of talking about him and he's kind of floating this concept of what if I'm not here no more? Right? What if I'm not in this jail? And so what he started doing, that's why he was on his best behavior is because he knew that when he got the detail, there was one work detail that took them outside of the prison gates. And so he spent all of his time... And I think he only even knew about that job because he was an informant.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he talked about and he got the job because he was an informant.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe.
MARCUS PARKS
We don't know if he was an informant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just my read.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure. Well on December 11, 1972, Cin was transferred from Vacaville to Soledad Prison and was reclassified as a minimum security prisoner. That meant that he could be entrusted with jobs that had more freedom and as a result, he'd been assigned to work on the boiler in the CO training school outside of the main prison walls. So while the guard was taking the second shift worker back to the prison so Cin could start the graveyard shift, Cin simply walked out of an unlocked door and climbed a chain link fence to freedom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boom, done, out.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the guard-
ED LARSON
No razor wire or nothing?
MARCUS PARKS
Nah. I mean that's the thing, they're outside the main walls.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're in the safe area.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now the guard almost lazily sounded the alarm because this happened a lot and the prisoners were usually picked up within a day or so. But before Cin could be recaptured, he talked a Mexican family into giving him a change of clothes and subsequently caught a ride to the Bay Area. Once he arrived in Oakland, Cin found a young Black radical who'd served as an outside coordinator for the BCA at Vacaville. Now there are different accounts of this story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. Because this is like one of those. This is one of those times in history where there's some versions of this story where Cinque was this Che Guevara-like leader where this was like a big deal. And then there are also some of these which we believe in, that there's a little bit more hesitancy.
MARCUS PARKS
The only people who thought that Cin was the Che Guevara type leader was the people in the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The SLA. Yes.
ED LARSON
And Toobin!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Jeffrey Toobin. Literally and Jeffrey Toobin.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, Jeffrey Toobin also slit Cinque's throat every chance he can.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he just liked all the rest of them?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he likes Bill Harris because Bill Harris talked to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. If he could have talked to Cinque, he would have loved Cinque.
ED LARSON
Racist! Jeffrey Toobin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that there was a lot. So this guy is an example of a guy that was a connect to DeFreeze while he was inside of jail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was super happy and super intense and they got n really intense conversations about how the revolution was gonna fucking go down and all this kind of shit when he got out, right. And then he gets out and he shows up at your house and you're like whoa, buddy! Oh you're here at my house. And he's like yeah, revolution time! And he says like-
MARCUS PARKS
I've got a wife and kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't do that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This guy, this dude had a wife and three kids. So there's no way Cin's gonna stay with him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He's like oh shit, you broke out of jail and you're here at my home?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But he was willing to drive Cin around town to find someone to take him in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dump him on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. The only problem was that this friend needed gas money. So he asked another friend if he could borrow some cash. But when that friend found out the money was for Cin and this friend just happened to know Cin, she said fuck no, I'm not giving a fucking dime to that shithead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And finally Mayfield talked her into lending him $20 but she made sure that he knew that she was doing it for him, not for Cin.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you owe me this money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. But as Cin was driven around the Bay Area with his address book, telling his friend how he was gonna quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I'm gonna get our brothers and sisters, we're gonna get them together!"
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Door after door was slammed in Cin's face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, my brothers and sisters. Come on, everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
By the end of the night after Cin had worked his way through every Black person he knew in the Bay Area, he finally said take me to the white people's house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really true. All of his actual Black friends were all like no!
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
I'm not going to fucking prison for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, dude! Like yeah, I want a revolution but you're now... Do you have any idea how much... Honestly it's like how much heat is on you is gonna fuck us up.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's not only that but everyone thought Cin was crazy. They were like he doesn't know what he's talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He doesn't read the theory. He couldn't understand theory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He doesn't know what he's talking about, he's fucking unpredictable. Like get this fucker out of here.
ED LARSON
I'm also gonna go ahead and guess that he's stinky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How dare you?
MARCUS PARKS
And that was how Cin showed up unannounced at Peking House, looking for Willie Wolfe and Russ Little.
ED LARSON
I'm just here peeking.
MARCUS PARKS
Now everyone else at the commune was extremely nervous about Cin being there but to deny him sanctuary would be to go against their revolutionary principles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were like how do we get this Black man out of here?
MARCUS PARKS
The compromise was that Cin could hide in the basement. Now sources vary as to whether Cin was down there for a day or a week. But what got him kicked out was when he came up from the basement during a house party dressed fly as fuck but acting like he wasn't a dangerous fugitive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looked cool.
ED LARSON
I'm guessing a week. If he did that the first day, that'd be wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Also they'd be stupid for throwing a party knowing you have a fugitive in the basement.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I don't know, man, it's college. Like man, we can't cancel the fucking party tonight. We've been planning this shit for a week. I've been giving out flyers!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude, we got all three kegs.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a result, the majority of Peking House decided that hiding Cin was too risky of a venture. So after scouting around, Russ Little found that Mizmoon was more than willing to take Cin into her apartment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The two soon became lovers and it was obvious to Willie and everyone else that their leader had finally arrived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh goody gee, I could just... It's gonna go now, yay!
ED LARSON
But I thought Mizmoon was banging the other chick.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, they broke up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Cin of course was all too happy to accept this role.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh okay, I'll be in charge. Yeah, he just knew immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is kind of one of those things we talk about with cults. Does the cult find the guy, does the guy pull it all together? Cinque, when he got Unisight, he realized how much he enjoyed telling people what to do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then when this happened and he found this group of extremely pliable human beings... I mean this was probably one of the happiest days of his life.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure.
ED LARSON
Well he finally found someone to follow him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now whether they knew it or not, the Symbionese Liberation Army was quite an apt name for what was going down here. Stupidly, the word 'symbionese' was the group's attempt at turning the word 'symbiosis' into an adjective. There's already a word for that, it's symbiotic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Symbiotic. Yep. You don't have to make up 'symbionese' which again sounds like... I guess when I first heard that word I always kind of assumed that it was like some fake country.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Or a language.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I was like was there an African nation called Symbia that I'd never heard of?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I thought, yeah. No, very confusing.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no, it's very stupid. But the name was perfect.
ED LARSON
They're all going to Berkeley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You can't fucking find a real word?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just, oh man. It's too much confidence in one room.
MARCUS PARKS
But either way, the name was perfect but not in the way they thought. See Cin found that in Berkeley all these white kids would listen to whatever he had to say and would do whatever he wanted them to do simply because he was Black. That's the only credential he needed. In return, the white kids finally got to be revolutionaries while still following their principles that a white person cannot lead them. And Cin reinforced that by repeatedly telling them that he was doing them a favor by training them to be Black revolutionaries even though they were all white. Now the SLA didn't really get going until May of 1973 when Mizmoon, Nancy Ling Perry, and Cin started putting together the SLA's goals and codes of war down on paper, as well as their constitution and their ever important logo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
About their seven-headed cobra symbol which admittedly is the only cool thing about the SLA, they wrote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"The Symbionese Liberation Army has selected the seven-headed Cobra as our emblem because we realize that an army is a mass that needs unity in order to become a fighting force. It is a revolutionary unit of all people against a common oppressor. And with the venom of our seven heads, we will destroy the fascist insect who preys upon the life of the people."
ED LARSON
See I imagine a seven-headed cobra would just die a horrible death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. How do they eat enough? How many dicks does it have?
MARCUS PARKS
Now the SLA did try to reach out to other Black community and revolutionary groups but they were turned down again and again when these groups reviewed the SLA's ultra radical proposals, which always involved violence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Most of these groups just saw Cin as fucking crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, it's the truth which is he was a bad salesman for the group.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he couldn't understand that yes, this concept of the escaped prisoner leading the revolutionary group, it makes a lot of sense in a novel, it makes a lot of sense in concept. But the heat that it begins with makes it almost impossible to get off the ground. And I think there's a lot of these guys are saying is like it's not even just that, it's you're the wrong guy right now.
ED LARSON
It's not practical.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not the guy.
ED LARSON
You need to make speeches and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we don't need... Technically we need another Malcolm X. That's not you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps because they were rejected, the SLA went full sour grapes and decided that they just hated the Black Panthers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They hate the Black Panthers!
MARCUS PARKS
Because they believed that the Panthers had sold out and given up their guns to embrace social activities the SLA saw as counterrevolutionary. Free breakfast programs, education, community outreach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dumb stuff.
ED LARSON
But they did that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's dumb, Eddie.
ED LARSON
When they kidnapped Patty Hearst, they made Randy Hearst do that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They tried to get food going.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To try to get it all back because of how much they had already fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well additionally the SLA thought that other violent revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground, those are the guys that had carried out numerous bombings by 1973, they thought that the Weather Underground were phony revolutionaries because the only fatalities incurred during the Weather Underground's many bombings was when two of their members accidentally blew themselves up in their Greenwich Village apartment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like revolutionaries who don't blow themselves up.
ED LARSON
But isn't it like kind of good to not blow up people-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
When they blow up the places?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they wanted death, they wanted chaos.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the SLA, they want people to die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They think that the only way that the revolution is gonna work is if people are killed mercilessly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the thing is they also sort of believe this idea of a kickoff event. Like that's what we're leaning towards, this idea that we will spark the revolution. Which is very similar to Charles Manson's view of like our actions are gonna start the race war that's gonna bring the next era. Like that's what he thought. Like we're gonna do a bunch of stuff and it's just gonna kick off and then everybody's gonna be so happy with me, as Cinque.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna be the leader, everyone's gonna love me.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by this point the SLA had taken on three more recruits who had all moved together from Indiana to California in 1972. These were the theater kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, every revolutionary group needs them.
MARCUS PARKS
Bill Harris, aka Teko.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can call me Mr. Teko.
MARCUS PARKS
His wife Emily Harris, aka Yolanda.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some people call me Yolanda but some people don't call me late for dinner. Everybody!
MARCUS PARKS
And there was the most theatrical of all, Angela Atwood, aka Gelina.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me? Are you talking to me? Yes, I'll join your army. Let's go, boys! (hums intro to Feel Like A Woman by Shania Twain) Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Now Angela and her husband Gary Atwood, they were Indiana University's star drama couple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But instead of going to Los Angeles after graduation-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, don't waste your talents on LA.
MARCUS PARKS
Angela and Gary went to San Francisco because Gary, who was reportedly the talented one, he got a job at a small theater in Berkeley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm doing this amazing production where it is normally for... It's very, very hyper specific. It's for one person at a time. What they do is they face this wall and I place my bare buttocks against a hole in this wall. And then the audience in a way of kind of, it's an immersion, it's an immersion experience. They stick their erect penis through the hole in the wall and I buck ever so violently against the hole until they cum inside of me. And that's how you know the show is over.
MARCUS PARKS
Neither Gary nor Angela made a living acting. But Angela did win the leading role in a production of a play called Hedda Gabler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very fancy old school play.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Well yeah, you're a theater major.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Hedda Gabler is like one of those. It's like one of the classics. I forget a lot of these fucking bullshits. Like Do Tigers Wear Neckties?
ED LARSON
You know what? That description is still more than we know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. It's fucking horsehit. Hedda Gabler is dumb, man. I hate that fucking shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this production of Hedda Gabler was produced by the Company Theater of Berkeley. And at this production Angela made friends and she was soon taking a night course in radical politics at UC. As Angela got more involved in women's lib and Marxism, Gary from Indiana was no longer doing it for her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what about my gape show?
MARCUS PARKS
So she left him in August of 1973.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's simply not enough, Gary. I need more.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometime after, she began dating Russ Little of the SLA. Russ Little introduced her to Joe Remiro and Willie Wolfe. And Angela soon found that she too wanted to be on the front lines of the coming revolution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! And I'll know all the words and I'll know all the steps.
ED LARSON
Man, Gary really dodged a bullet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He's watching the news two years later and being like whew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh man. Wow. Thank god I stuck to distributing child pornography.
ED LARSON
All right, zip-zap-zop everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what they all did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
But Angela was not the only transplant from Indiana. Soon after she and Gary moved to Berkeley, they were followed by their drama club friends Bill and Emily Harris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, these two.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Bill was another Vietnam vet like Joe Remiro. But despite all the bluster Bill displayed on that horrendous CNN documentary, the first thing he says is "my first day in Vietnam I saw a man get tortured to death." He never even unholstered his fucking gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think what he meant was like the guy couldn't get his uniform on, right or whatever. He was just like I'm just so fat. Just give me a minute. He's like no bro, you fucking look exactly like you should.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In my eyes, you're perfect.
ED LARSON
You're not gonna see someone get tortured to death on your first day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
That's like two years in. You're in a prison camp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, where is it happening, at the mess hall?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is it happening where everybody's hanging out hwere Jimi Hendrix is playing on the radio and they're all smoking weed out of fucking rifles and shit?
ED LARSON
McCain saw that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
No, this guy's on the base.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
No, the reason why he never saw combat is because he tore a ligament playing a game of touch football.
ED LARSON
In Vietnam?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In Vietnam!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the best way to get out of Vietnam, dude.
ED LARSON
You know everyone was so fucking jealous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because he's just like oh my fucking taint! I ripped my fucking taint! And they're all like oh yeah? And he's like look at my ripped taint!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't go in the jungle!
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. And he paints himself as a big tough motherfucker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he is not. He was shipped out to Okinawa after just six months in Vietnam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got to go to a blue zone?
ED LARSON
Yeah, he just went to the beach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got to go to this beautiful island nation?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He spent much of the rest of his time in service staffing the officer's club. After that he was stationed at Camp Lejeune.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
ED LARSON
No!
MARCUS PARKS
And according to the terms of the class action lawsuit-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He may in fact be entitled to compensation.
MARCUS PARKS
He may be!
ED LARSON
Good for him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Maybe it hurt his attitude.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at this time... Oh the bad water hurt his attitude? That's what happened to him. Maybe that is, it's the Camp Lejeune water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might be.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe that made him an asshole. Now at this time the SLA was split between two groups, above ground and underground. Bill and Emily Harris, as well as Camilla Hall and Angela Atwood, they were still working day jobs and living amongst the people. Nancy Ling Perry, Mizmoon, and Russ Little however, they had secluded themselves with Cin in a white middle class suburb in the East Bay in a house they called the Liberated Zone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. It's so funny because no matter what they do, it sounds like fucking right wing podcasts.
ED LARSON
Also you don't have to name everything.
MARCUS PARKS
You really do-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that is a left wing thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a very left wing thing, everything's got names and everything's got broke down. Everything needs organizations and groups and all that shit.
MARCUS PARKS
I bet they argued for six hours-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
About the name.
MARCUS PARKS
What they were gonna call it.
ED LARSON
Oh my god, I hate when I'm on a group text chain and people keep changing the name of our group.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody cares!
ED LARSON
We don't need a name! We don't!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get a job! Go someplace else!
MARCUS PARKS
But now that they had the name, the logo, a little safehouse, and the codes of war, the SLA decided that they weren't gonna be all talk nor would they stoop to community service like the Black Panthers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because we all know how much of a pussy the Black Panthers are. Sarcasm.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead Cin felt that they needed to act and act violently.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah!
MARCUS PARKS
Dude you just came fucking a millimeter away from punching me in the face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real close. Real close.
ED LARSON
But that's the story of working with Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He's fucking whizzed my nose like 10 times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I do it on purpose.
MARCUS PARKS
The people who found themselves in their crosshairs was Oakland superintendent of schools Marcus Foster and his deputy Robert Blackburn. Now Foster had proposed a plan for student IDs in schools that were experiencing particularly bad problems with violence and vandalism. This is so they could keep out nonstudent criminals and drug dealers. Additionally Foster had suggested they place security guards at these same schools. Now Willie Wolfe was at the meeting where all this was proposed and he reported what Foster had said back to Cin. And Cin immediately he became incensed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you remember he believed in the conspiracy theory view of this. He thought they meant the kids were being tracked and they were gonna let police in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And tell everybody police were like teaching classes and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And that they would fingerprint all the kids and put them into a huge database.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was like the first step towards like a police state.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
So they decided that the public unveiling of the Symbionese Liberation Army would be the murder of Marcus Foster. They believed that this was gonna be the only way to stop the ID program and the occupation of the schools by the pigs. And they also believed without evidence that both Foster and his deputy were CIA agents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sounds like somebody's talking about themselves. There is a whole conspiracy theory about the CIA forming and doing all of this stuff. Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's Operation Chaos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's all that kind of stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not. No, no, no, these are all just fucking morons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sounds like something with a CIA vibe, I would say.
MARCUS PARKS
But in both these assumptions the SLA was dead wrong. Soon after that October meeting attended by Willie Wolfe, Foster walked back the proposals after the community opposed them. And Foster had always been opposed to armed security in schools. He just wanted guys around to help out.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have violence in the schools, I'm trying to figure out what the fuck to do.
ED LARSON
Yes. Meanwhile today every school has a cop with a gun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, with an assault rifle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. No, Marcus Foster was a good man legitimately trying to do his best at an extraordinarily difficult job.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The SLA of course, they never noticed the update, they never saw the walk back. And they continued on with their plan in the hopes that it would rally every revolutionary group around their cause. The effect of course was the exact opposite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Now if you'll remember, one of the reasons why the SLA had kidnapped Patty Hearst was because they wanted to trade her for the two comrades who'd been arrested for the murder of Marcus Foster. Those comrades were Russ Little and Joe Remiro. But as it went down that fateful night, neither Remiro nor Little pulled the many triggers that killed Oakland superintendent.
ED LARSON
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. On November 6th, 1973 at 7 pm, Marcus Foster and Robert Blackburn had just attended a city council meeting and were walking to their cars to attend another meeting. These are hard working motherfuckers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, that sucks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. They were approached by three people. The assailants were Cin, Nancy Ling Perry, and Mizmoon. Cin had a 12 gauge shotgun, Nancy Ling Perry had a .380 automatic pistol, and Mizmoon had a .38 special.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tell me, are you ready to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
MARCUS PARKS
Nancy fired first and hit Foster in the leg. She was followed by Cin who fired two shots which hit Robert Blackburn in the back. Finally Mizmoon walked up to Foster and fired bullet after bullet into his body, then fired the final shot into the back of his neck. They then fled to the getaway car and that was where Joe Remiro and Russ Little were waiting. In all, Foster had been shot eight times, any one of which would have been fatal. And while the SLA fled, Blackburn staggered towards the nearest doorway and collapsed just inside the Board of Education building. But he did survive. That means that Cin did not kill anybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
The murderer was Mizmoon and Nancy Ling.
ED LARSON
Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dude. And Mizmoon, I mean again this is what she's gonna use for the rest of her time. Because Zoya is the real scary one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Also they were proved in that moment that the cyanide bullets don't work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very, very stupid. It's extremely, extremely stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Blackburn got hit with shotgun pellets.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Didn't they like read about the cyanide bullets somewhere?
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I looked that up and I remember seeing somewhere why they did that. I mean I know it's dumb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and it doesn't work, no.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I've heard of this kind of stuff from... People always talk about the cyanide bullets and the guys who dip bullets and shit and stuff like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think it's mostly just to tell your friends.
MARCUS PARKS
Well upon inspecting the bullets, the cops smelled the distinct aroma of almonds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait, let me see this. (slurping) No, let me try it some more. (slurping) Throwing the bullet around. Yeah, that's cyanide. (groaning in agony)
MARCUS PARKS
The bullets had been packed with cyanide, which would as we know become a calling card for the Symbionese Liberation Army. Now later Nancy Ling Perry would justify the murder by saying that Robert Blackburn had immediately ducked into a crouch and tried to escape by running in a zigzag pattern which she said had proved his CIA training.
ED LARSON
Ha! This proves that you've learned how to escape from an alligator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here we go. This comes from Clint John. "The answer depends on multiple factors, primarily type, purity, and amount of cyanide delivered per bullet. I once utilized a 1/8 drill bit to enlarge the cavity of 22 CCI Stingers to accept the payload of pure potassium cyanide because I was 15 and I thought I was a ninja. I never tested them on anything but the amount was very small, almost insignificant." Look at this long thing. "At the very least if it does not kill you within the hour, it will induce necrosis and turn the wound septic. Other poisons are more effective." Continue.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this justification of him being a CIA agent was necessary because besides Cin, the SLA wasn't feeling all that great about murdering Marcus Foster once the reviews, so to speak, started rolling in. After the SLA wrote a document and sent it to a radio station taking credit for the murder, they were immediately condemned by literally everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And this is the action, this is like an example of they thought they were gonna do this and the revolution was gonna start.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just thought that this was just gonna kick it all off and then it was gonna be blood in the streets. And then he was real bad at it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you don't start a pro Black revolution by killing a successful Black man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
MARCUS PARKS
Several sources also said that more than one prisoner at Vacaville told Willie that Cin had to go because he'd gone too far and fucked up too badly. Seemingly torn as to what to do, and this is just a rumor, it's said that Willie allegedly fled California and went back to his parents' house in Pennsylvania for a few weeks. But even though he probably felt guilty, when his father
brought up the Marcus Foster murder and said it was an ugly thing, Willie still felt like he had to defend it. And he told his father hey, maybe Foster deserved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever.
MARCUS PARKS
Likewise when Mizmoon's brother brought up the murder, she told him that Foster was quote "in it with the pigs".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the school superintendent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like yeah...
MARCUS PARKS
But whether or not they truly felt bad, they had to double down because Cin was doubling down. And by their own principles, Cin was the commander and could not be questioned. Now after the murder of Marcus Foster and the fallout that ensued, the SLA got a new safehouse in the San Francisco suburb of Concord, 20 miles away from Berkeley. This would be the first official SLA base of operations and it was here that they began to plan their next actions while continuously performing their training exercises.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We watched the scene right before we started recording from Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst and we didn't know... We're gonna watch it. I wanna watch it now.
ED LARSON
I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they do the scene of them running around going like pew, pew! It's crazy. It's so funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, this Patty Hearst movie looks insane. I mean it's got William Forsythe in blackface.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, going like I'm gonna get you, sucker! I'm gonna get you, sucker!
MARCUS PARKS
And when it came to ideas as to what to do next, Bill Harris actually came up with the idea to hijack food trucks to give out food to the people, which as we know is an idea that would later be repurposed as a ransom demand. But after none of them could figure out how exactly they could distribute stolen food from a stolen truck and not get caught, Cin decided that their next operation should be the kidnapping of someone important.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea to kidnap came from George Jackson too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Then he did it wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they made a list-
ED LARSON
Can I ask a question? Did all the food go bad?
MARCUS PARKS
They didn't ever actually hijack the truck.
ED LARSON
Oh they didn't hijack it.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They just sat around talking about it.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Because that's what they did is they talked and talked and talked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a lot of meetings.
ED LARSON
Sorry. The chef in me got so mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they made a list of two dozen names that included local bankers, corporate executives, and correctional facility officials. This document was labeled Western Regional Unit 10, in what seems to be one of the first examples of the SLA pretending to be larger than they actually were. And they're just pretending with themselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think there was a little fake it until you make it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was kind of this idea that like we are the vanguard.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're going to inspire everyone.
MARCUS PARKS
And I think they're always trying to like puff themselves up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Puff themselves up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
And it's Anders Breivik again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But on December 19th, 1973, the San Francisco Examiner announced the engagement of the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst to a Mr. Steven Weed. Now the article plainly stated that Patty Hearst went to UC Berkeley. So Bill Harris, he just went to the fucking UC administration building and looked up her address in the student directory.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Well these are things that get corrected over time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It really was as simple as that. And after checking out her apartment and seeing that her kidnapping would be extremely simple, they all agreed that the kidnapping of a Hearst heir would give them the perfect victim on every level, from the ease of the crime to the symbolic nature of capturing someone whose family was name-checked in 'Blood in my Eye'. But as far as how Little and Remiro got arrested, they were looking for the SLA safehouse one night but got lost in the neighborhood. Their problem was that they were driving a van that matched the description of a vehicle suspected in a string of local burglaries. So when a patrolman named David Duge noticed the van driving in circles around the neighborhood, he pulled them over. And after finding Remiro and Little suspicious, Duge asked them to step out of the car. And that's when Remiro opened fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's when you say oh no, officer, I'm so sorry, officer, we should move. Oh I didn't know, we'll be on the lookout for those bad boys! You know what I mean? That's why you don't gotta get arrested.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he asked him to step out of the car because he wanted to pat them down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course!
MARCUS PARKS
And they were armed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They're also... Dirty hippies get treated horribly by the police at this time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I get it, I get it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying if you're trying to sort of like make the revolution go in the beginning and you need all the crew, you can't just pop off randomly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Also just know where your fucking safehouse is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's super crucial.
MARCUS PARKS
Remiro and Duge got into a small gunfight. But when Duge retreated to his car to call for backup, Remiro ran away on foot while Russ Little took off in the van. But since Little was still lost, he ended up circling back to Duge just after backup arrived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What in the living fuck? Am I in a Twilight Zone episode? I can't get away from the situation!
ED LARSON
Nightmare on Elm Street IV.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What the fuck, man? It's just what a moron. Also San Francisco is extremely, this whole area is very confusing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Little was boxed in and when cops searched the van they found hundreds of freshly printed leaflets featuring the Symbionese Liberation Army's seven-headed cobra symbol. Remiro meanwhile spent all night trying to find the safehouse but was caught hiding between two homes at 5:30 am. Tragically for him, he was only two blocks away from the rest of the SLA. He almost found it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So stupid.
ED LARSON
And the address is on the flyer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Even worse was that Remiro was found with one of the guns used to murder Marcus Foster. So Remiro and Little were charged with Foster's murder even though they were just the getaway drivers during the crime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, we need more and different guns.
ED LARSON
I like barely killed him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I was just kind of hearing them kill him.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the SLA heard about Remiro and Little's arrest within hours. And since Romero had been arrested so close to the safehouse, they decided that they would burn it to the ground with everything inside to destroy all evidence that the SLA was even there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll be like ghosts in the night! No one's gonna know we're here. No one's gonna know anything about the SLA ever! Secret organization.
MARCUS PARKS
Except for all the communiques and all the shit that we send out.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Except for the widely public ways we've been asking for attention. Nobody's gonna know anything about us!
MARCUS PARKS
Well to do so, they soaked the house in gasoline and connected a fuse to a line of gunpowder. The fuse was lit and Nancy, Mizmoon, and Cin hauled ass out of there in Willie Wolfe's 1967 Oldsmobile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But guess what they didn't live in? A Looney Tunes cartoon. And you don't just sit. Like that doesn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like the idea of a long line of gunpowder like leading to the explosion. This thing is called wind.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But while there was an initial blast from the gunpowder, the fire didn't catch and in trying to destroy the evidence, the SLA led police directly and immediately to the place where all the evidence was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I can't find any evidence. Where does this line of gunpowder lead to? All right, it leads right to just like an open box and they just open the box and like here's all the fucking shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. Inside they found several typewriters, a mimeograph machine, half a dozen types of ammo, gas masks, bandoliers, stolen license plates, and three BB guns. They also... I don't know what the fuck they had, I guess the BB guns are so they-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To fake.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To fake having guns.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They also found boxes of SLA documents and notebooks filled with Nancy Ling Perry's and Joe Remiro's musings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wouldn't it be amazing if I could kiss Kotter? Mr and Mrs Kotter.
ED LARSON
The gas didn't catch?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! It's extremely difficult. Gasoline actually takes a lot of heat to spark.
MARCUS PARKS
But most importantly, authorities found an incredible amount of evidence that the SLA was planning a kidnapping. In trying to find the perfect target, the SLA had consulted 'The Who's Who in American Industry', 'The Who's Who in Business and Finance'-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need a who's who!
MARCUS PARKS
And 'The Watchdogs of Wall Street'. These are all books stolen from the local library where Mizmoon was working as a janitor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The local library is the most socialist thing around, let's steal from the local library! It's the most socialist thing that exists! You could write it under a fake name when they ask you!
ED LARSON
Also you probably would have been better off burning the books than burning down the house.
MARCUS PARKS
The cops also found papers detailing schedules for surveillance duty on certain targets. One of those targets was John Countryman, former chairman of the board for the Del Monte Corporation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you come for my corn kernels!
ED LARSON
Fruit, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's corn!
MARCUS PARKS
No, fruit. Fruit guys are-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, it's very bad. Yes, yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Very bad. South America, banana republics, all of that type of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they're very bad.
ED LARSON
I'm Bob Dole.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not fruit.
MARCUS PARKS
Not fruit man.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. He's just got grip.
MARCUS PARKS
See Angela Atwood had been assigned to surveil John Countryman's house while Nancy Ling Perry was actually working on a communique for his kidnapping. They were gonna totally fucking kidnap this guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna get him, we're gonna get him good.
MARCUS PARKS
But the plan fell apart when they discovered that John Countryman had died in 1972.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well we need to get current.
ED LARSON
We're here for John Countryman! Where is he?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just turns out 'The Who's Who in American Industry' is all from like 1958. Like fuck! How are we supposed to... We need to kidnap Walt Disney! Ah fuck!
ED LARSON
Just them pacing around an urn, trying to get information out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the list that included John Countryman as well as the vice presidents of Wells Fargo and the Bank of America, that list had the name of Marcus Foster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, we got one.
MARCUS PARKS
Written next to that name was the word 'executed'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of like when you write, you have a to-do list but you include all the things you've already done so you can feel like you've already done them. You know what I mean?
ED LARSON
You like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't but I've heard that if you write a thing down that you've already done on the to-do list just so you could strike it out.
ED LARSON
I write a real easy thing up top.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Like something like make breakfast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Live.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But were they worried they were gonna forget they killed this man?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just think it should be like, again, it's about paperwork. And you see and him, we're actually making some progress here because this one we executed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It really is, it's about ceremony, it's about symbolism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because again they're also saying that these are the logs for our... We're making war, we're an army. These are logs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this is gonna be important, it's gonna carry through history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We're making history here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And we want people to know what the Symbionese Liberation Army was doing at all times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stood for. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But just after Marcus Foster's name was who else but Patty Hearst. Written next to her name were the words 'arrest warrant issued'. This was mid January, weeks before Patty Hearst was kidnapped. Nobody bothered to warn anybody on the list that they were potential targets. And as a result, just a few months later, William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter would find herself in the lobby of the Hibernia Bank with a gun, announcing to everyone present that her name was Patty Hearst and she was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
ED LARSON
I mean Tania. Shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck! I'm Tania!
MARCUS PARKS
But after the arrest of Joe Remiro and Russ Little, every above ground member of the SLA quit their jobs and went underground with everyone else. And at Bill Harris's insistence, Willie Wolfe returned from his family's home in Pennsylvania to rejoin the group he'd accidentally put together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'll always blame you both for not making me Black!
MARCUS PARKS
And on the night Willie returned, as they all sat on the floor of their new safehouse on their sleeping bags like it was a goddamn slumber party, Cin ceremoniously decided to make a permanent change. Here's how that scene went according to the book 'An American Journey: The Short Life of Willie Wolfe':
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Beginning tonight-"
MARCUS PARKS
"Cinque said."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"We'll use our revolutionary names only. So y'all know me, I'm Cinque."
MARCUS PARKS
"Then he nodded at Mizmoon, who said-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"And I'm Zoya."
MARCUS PARKS
"And at Nancy who said-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"And I'm Fahizah."
MARCUS PARKS
"Next came Bill Harris who said-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Teko, that's me."
MARCUS PARKS
"And Emily who said-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Yolanda."
MARCUS PARKS
"And Angela who said-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Call me Gelina."
MARCUS PARKS
"Which left only Willie, who said with a bow-"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"And I am Kahjoh." "Kahjoh?"
MARCUS PARKS
"Said Fahizah."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Where did you find that?" "It's a central American Indian word." "What does it mean?" "Unconquerable!"
MARCUS PARKS
And it's with our return to where we left the story in part one that we'll continue the Odyssey of Patty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's unconquerable.
MARCUS PARKS
Starting with the crime that made this the biggest true crime story of the decade, the robbery at Hibernia Bank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't care what anybody says, I'm the strongest, Blackest man I wanna be.
ED LARSON
It was amazing, you did such an amazing job, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Such a good job.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a joint effort between me and Carolina.
ED LARSON
Both of you did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's so much information but I feel dumber knowing it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Welcome to our entire lives. Now next week we are gonna give each other Swahili names. But that will be for next week and we can't continue forward unless we do have proper revolutionary names by next week.
MARCUS PARKS
All right. I'll think about it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we have to think about it. I'm already looking right now.
MARCUS PARKS
I wanna be Luke Skywalker.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! It has to be Swahili. Right now I'm looking at Tai which means 'eagle'. And then there's also... I like that one. Ooh yeah.
ED LARSON
What's testicles?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's look it up. Testicles in Swahili. Korodani.
MARCUS PARKS
Korodani.
ED LARSON
Korodani. Can I be Korodani?
MARCUS PARKS
Actually that sounds super cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does, yeah. Korodani.
ED LARSON
I'm Korodani, bro! You watch out, superintendents!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. No more school for them! And I'm gonna be Matiti.
ED LARSON
Matiti?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is Swahili for breasts.
ED LARSON
Oh great. Well that's where it comes from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess so. I don't think so actually.
ED LARSON
It's just a coincidence?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll be Uso Wa Mifupa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What does that mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Skeleton face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Very specific.
ED LARSON
That's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I'm very glad that we'll be together, Korodani. And me, Matiti, and you-
MARCUS PARKS
Uso Wa Mifupa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is great.
ED LARSON
Uso Wa Mifupa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is really good.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is really good.
ED LARSON
I've been wanting to rename myself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For a long time. Let's just work on this, let's workshop this, we'll come back.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I might go back to Luke Skywalker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You might. Honestly but make it Swahili.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just gonna say Luke Skywalker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right. We'll talk about it. Patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft. You're gonna wanna see our bodies flop around. You can do that if you give us money. Go to TikTok and also Instagram @LPontheleft. You can see all of our social media content and I know you are addicted to it. You wanna go to twitch.tv/lpntv, you're gonna watch all the streams. Very good. On YouTube, go look at the YouTube, it's on there. We got a lot of good stuff. New Gud Pudcast is out. We got the UK store. If you're in the UK and you want our bullshit-
MARCUS PARKS
Our merch. You can finally buy it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can do it now. It's easy to do. Lastpodcastontheleft.com. But in England. So you do it there. And you will like it.
ED LARSON
Also come to our shows in London.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have a lot of shit, come check us out.
ED LARSON
Cadogan Hall and Hackney Empire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we're gonna bring stuff, obviously we'll bring merch when we're there.
ED LARSON
But buy it now so you can get hammered and not bring it home with you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't worry, they're gonna get hammered. I'm not worried about that. And I would like to say sadly rest in peace, Doug Sackman. He was a friend of the show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a very good friend of mine and he passed away this weekend. And it really... I don't wanna do a lot of these.
ED LARSON
Yeah. It seems like since I've joined the show, is this the third one?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's been a couple of these. Yeah, I think it's because it's our age.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun. But I just wanna say we are gonna miss him and it's an extremely sad time for me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But hey-
ED LARSON
Shoutout Kabuki Man, we love you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. RIP Sergeant Kabuki Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kabuki Man. Honestly fucking hit up your buddies. That's what that means. All right? Well that's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And also No Dogs... I mean shit, I need to do this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh so, oh Mr. Plugs. Oh Mr. He Spent Months Working On His Show.
MARCUS PARKS
You didn't let me do it here.
ED LARSON
And we have the DC show too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we got the DC show too.
ED LARSON
The revolution is coming, DC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're both bastards.
MARCUS PARKS
You didn't really wait until-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How dare you both do this?
MARCUS PARKS
You needed to wait until after the plugs for the memorial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Check out the new No Dogs in Space!
ED LARSON
Doug would want this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, he would.
MARCUS PARKS
We're doing it on Can! We're doing it on the band Can.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come see us in DC, Doug would have wanted this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Incredible band out of Germany, Can, you know their albums Tago Mago, you know the song Vitamin C. We're gonna get into their entire journey through the world of experimental music into music legends. It's super fucking cool. We're really proud of this series. So yeah, please go and check it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do it. Bye! Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail George Jackson.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Why not, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah