HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You think you can come to my fucking house and we're not going to fucking party?! You come to my fucking house and we're not going to play fucking baseball?!
ED LARSON
(singing) Take me out to the ball game...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to hear this fucking song, man. This fucking song, man. You have to listen to the lyrics, man.
MARCUS PARKS
The thing is about a fucking mixtape-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pop!
MARCUS PARKS
That I love about a fucking mixtape is that I can put the songs in any fucking order that I wanna fucking put them in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Crack!
MARCUS PARKS
Because then when you buy an album, when you buy a fucking album-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These fucking bands.
MARCUS PARKS
They put the songs in the fucking order that they want you to listen to them in.
ED LARSON
(singing) Motorin'!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fucking love this song!
ED LARSON
(singing) What's your price for flight?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I'm just right... This whole script.
ED LARSON
Pop!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Makes me paranoid.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) I'm finding Mister Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the script... You know when you have one of those dreams, I don't know if you've ever had one of those dreams where you're like truly either watching a crime being committed, I've had this happen, or I had a horrible dream where I watched my father kill a man, right, with his bare hands.
MARCUS PARKS
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? Fun. Good way to scar.
ED LARSON
It's good to see him get out of bed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Daddy! You're doing so well. But you know like when you wake up and you're like just thank Christ that's not real.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like thank Christ that was just an anxiety ridden scenario my brain just immersed me.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Every night.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's nice to read this script and it's one of those where like thank Christ none of these are me.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely not. None of them are any of us. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm Marcus Parks, I'm here with Henry Zebrowski and sitting in for Ben Kissel, we got Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
How you doing? What's going on? I ever tell you about the time I went to jail and I had this dream when I was in jail that aliens had taken over the world. And the only way you could tell they were an alien is if they bled red or they bled green. If they were green, they're an alien, you had to kill them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But they looked like humans, they looked like us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
So I'm going around with my friend Tucci-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure, sure.
ED LARSON
And we're going around, we're trying to find out who's an alien, who's not. We go to her mom's house, she's acting all weird. We shoot her in the head, she bleeds red.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ.
ED LARSON
And then I wake up in jail and I'm like thank god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm so glad he's on the show. Just to remind you, Mr. Kissel is taking some time away from the show to take care of his mental and physical health. And that's why we got old bear sitting in because honestly-
ED LARSON
(growling)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In terms of displacing water-
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're pretty close.
ED LARSON
Oh my god, I love salmon.
MARCUS PARKS
He's getting there.
ED LARSON
But people know me as a piggy boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I know, I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course, of course.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I prefer you as an orangutan man.
ED LARSON
Yes. Well not according to the fans of Last Podcast when I get harassed in the streets and they call me Pigman and oink at me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, again, that's our street team. Okay? How dare you come at our street team.
MARCUS PARKS
So this episode, we are on to John Holmes and the Wonderland Murders part two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dos.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left John Holmes, his freebase cocaine addiction had reached legendary heights. I feel like it doesn't take much to get to legendary heights when you're doing freebasing cocaine.
ED LARSON
Well he taught his penis how to use a lighter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like look, no hands.
MARCUS PARKS
As a result, he'd gotten himself caught up in the drug dealing game as a delivery boy for a group of murderous heroin addicts called the Wonderland Gang, so named because they lived at 8763 Wonderland Avenue. I actually drove up there a couple of nights ago. The house is demolished.
ED LARSON
Oh is it?
MARCUS PARKS
Completely replaced, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's been redone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because honestly it was a dogshit house.
ED LARSON
Did it get dirty?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that was obviously one of the worst parts. I mean when I was watching the crime scene walkthrough, I watched when they show all the bodies, one of the worst things of the whole thing was the fixtures in the home. And I was just like-
MARCUS PARKS
Bad molding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where is Jojo here? Where is Magnolia Farms in this?
MARCUS PARKS
But no, it's a very creepy narrow street to drive up there to Wonderland Avenue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Right off Laurel Canyon. It's up in the windy Hollywood Hills. It even felt strange, like I know that it's now very, very nice and very posh. But you still feel this like creeping sensation like something bad can happen up here.
ED LARSON
It's also just weird because it's a bunch of mansions and shit and it's just like this creepy apartment building in the middle of all of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever spent time on Mulholland Drive at night? You should go. I did a whole David Lynch like experience to myself. You should try it. It's freaky.
MARCUS PARKS
I actually like driving around the Hollywood Hills alone at night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Don't walk.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't. Don't walk.
MARCUS PARKS
But the Wonderland Gang wasn't John's only source for cocaine. He also fed his addiction through a lunatic nightclub owner and hard drugs dealer named Eddie Nash, who was again brilliantly and by all accounts perfectly interpreted by Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie Nash is a Murderfist character come to life. You know we cover so many different stories within true crime and like one of my favorite things is like that hidden kind of characters and all of the mishegoss. And Eddie Nash is one of my favorites of all of them because strangely he's a son of an immigrant, he's an immigrant himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's out here working hard.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And a lot of this is really about him expressing the American dream.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Eddie was a Palestinian immigrant whose real name was Adel Gharib Nasrallah and he'd arrived in Los Angeles in 1951 at the age of 22. As many do, he tried his hand at acting but earned only a small role on a TV western called The Cisco Kid that had very few gun fights but lots of bullwhips.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, come here, fucker, come here, fucker. Let me look at the screen, let me look at the screen. I don't fucking understand. Why am I over here and I'm small in there? Why the fuck? Why the living fuck am I over here and I'm this size but I'm small over there?
MARCUS PARKS
Well you'll like this Henry. As a consequence of his time on The Cisco Kid which was very whip heavy because it was a show for kids, Eddie Nash himself developed his own obsession with whips.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck yeah, dude.
ED LARSON
You gotta train.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's the only weapon you could bring to your mother's house and she thinks it's a belt.
MARCUS PARKS
But after Eddie's acting career petered out, he opened a wildly popular hot dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard called Beef's Chuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
ED LARSON
Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Straight into the hotdog business.
ED LARSON
Oh my god. Do you think he put like beef on top of the hotdogs?
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know why he called it Beef's Chuck.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Maybe just like ground beef on top, maybe chili dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've got to put beef in the name of the fucking restaurant or they're gonna think this is some kind of turkey fucking bullshit. Because I also think that hotdogs, like would you say health-wise, I think hotdogs do just about the same amount of damage as cocaine. So it's like he started in the illicit substance industry and now he really graduated.
MARCUS PARKS
God, I just fucking mentioned hotdogs once to the two of you and he immediately goes to like immediately goes to mmm. It immediately goes to you guys just fucking fantasizing about hot dogs.
ED LARSON
I had a hot dog in the movie theater last night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Disgusting. That's actually quite disgusting. You know what I've also realized when people talk about calamari, they're all like you know actually a lot of times it's like pig asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if it just turns out we as a country love pig assholes? And that's just what it is. We just like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's a lot of pig assholes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've consumed an entire bag of frozen calamari before.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But what about if it's got the little legs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love all of it.
ED LARSON
What's that? That's not pig asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. I wanna say that's like the bottom of a pig's fucking pussy.
ED LARSON
That's how you know it's real. If it's got no tiny legs-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how you know.
ED LARSON
Then it's pig asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by the mid 70s, Adel Nasrallah had become Eddie Nash. And he'd made enough on hotdogs and various other murky sources that he started buying real estate across Los Angeles. And he soon turned that real estate into a string of nightclubs that catered to all types.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got a fucking disco, I've got a roller bakery. It's fucking incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Eddie had a strip club called The Kit Kat, a bus stop joint across the street from Grauman's Chinese theater named the Seven Seas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
The first gay club in LA to allow same sex dancing and a jazz club.
ED LARSON
Fucking awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he somehow crimed his way into being woke. Like he somehow understood-
MARCUS PARKS
He saw the gap and he shot it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did. And it's just interesting because now when we've covered other serial killers especially that are in like homosexual communities, that go out, it's this part of like having to keep everything under the guise of literally a mobster had to own it-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For it to be open is part of the reason why a lot of those crimes happened and they were under prosecuted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But interestingly, Eddie also owned a club on Santa Monica Boulevard that is incredibly important to the Los Angeles punk scene and the hair metal craze of the 80s. This venue is called The Starwood and it also operated as a quaalude depot.
ED LARSON
Whoa, that makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(slo-mo) Hey man, welcome to the depot. Yeah, it's an away from home depot. Yeah, quaalude depot sounds incredible. I do know that we couldn't find them for Wolf. No one could find them.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Quaaludes don't exist anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's proof that they don't exist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well The Starwood was one of the only two places in the late 70s that would host punk shows. And in addition to launching the careers of punk legends like The Screamers, X, and the Circle Jerks, this was also where Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, and Van Halen got their start.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's crazy.
ED LARSON
So this is like your hotdog stand.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, listen to our series on The Screamers on No Dogs In Space. We go fully into The Starwood and like all the weird shit that happened at that place.
ED LARSON
Now did they have an acoustic album?
MARCUS PARKS
The Screamers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(screaming)
MARCUS PARKS
They actually have no album at all. They're the most legendary band to never record an album. All we have is demos and live performances. It's actually one of the greatest tragedies of 20th century music that no Screamers album exists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's such a Marcus music opinion, that he loves music that does not exist. It's so hipster that it literally does not materially exist.
MARCUS PARKS
No. It exists. It exists in the form of demos and they did a couple of videos. But they never went into the studio and recorded an album.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like my favorite crypt is Black Santa. Where is he?
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps because The Starwood was the least respectable of Eddie's clubs, he used it to sell quaaludes by hiding in plain sight. See when cops drove by the Starwood and saw people lining up at the box office, they assumed that they were just lining up to buy concert tickets.
ED LARSON
It's fucking genius.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely genius.
ED LARSON
It's really fucking smart.
MARCUS PARKS
The kids were lining up to buy 'ludes out of a cash box that held thousands of pills.
ED LARSON
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
All out in the open.
ED LARSON
How did this place stay open?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we'll find out why.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well it's because the cops didn't really look into The Starwood all that closely because as one cop put it, the relationship between the LAPD and Eddie Nash was quote unquote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Never antagonistic."
MARCUS PARKS
"It was never antagonistic." They didn't say it was good, they didn't say it was bad. They just said it was never antagonistic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is during a time period of, not that we're not continuing to be, but of high corruption in the LAPD.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The LAPD has been thoroughly, you know, it comes up quite a bit on our show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That they seem to be... They're not great all the time at being police officers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, I will talk with an NYPD cop before I fuck with an LAPD cop.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll agree with that.
ED LARSON
They'll leave you out in the middle of nowhere. There's so many places to leave you here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
New York, all the space is taken.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
45 minutes from here is uninhabitable desert.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by the early 70s, Eddie Nash was considered by some to be a sort of godfather of Hollywood. And by the time John Holmes came around, Nash was rumored to have connections to both politicians and the police force. Possibly because he allegedly had important people on his side, Eddie Nash could be reckless and therefore absolutely terrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's fucking... How do you put it? He's a bit much.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's a lot. Extra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
He's extra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Too lit.
MARCUS PARKS
Besides owning the clubs, Nash was also a major coke and heroin dealer who got high on his own supply. Nash freebased 2-3 ounces of cocaine every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
ED LARSON
Really though? Like come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a lot.
ED LARSON
That's a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like each one is like a cupcake's worth of flour.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, with an ounce of cocaine you get like four hits of freebase off that.
ED LARSON
That's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not much at all.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Cause you're just fucking cooking it down to a crystal and then when you cook that crystal, it's fucking poof. As I said in the last episode, it's the least cost-effective way to do cocaine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Very willy nilly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very willy nilly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very unsustainable.
MARCUS PARKS
And he would sometimes mix the high with heroin to take the edge off because freebase cocaine is pretty fucking intense. But perhaps because Eddie often left himself so vulnerable in a state of intoxication, he was never seen without his bodyguard Gregory Diles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie Nash is such a funny character because in many ways, yeah, total unrepentant mobster, drug dealer, crazy person, murderer probably, we'll get to all that. I mean who knows? At least director of murder. But he also was like he really needed his friends. He was just this guy who loved his friends and he loved everybody in this other perverse really crazy way. And I think it's probably because if you look at, I didn't understand that freebasing, it only lasts for like 20-30 minutes at a time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so like he's going up and down.
ED LARSON
He had to do heroin in order to go to the bank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well his bodyguard Gregory Diles, he was a 300 lbs karate expert convicted felon.
ED LARSON
Yeah man.
MARCUS PARKS
He once chased a man out of one of Nash's clubs at 2:30 in the afternoon across six lanes of traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then he pulled out his .38 and emptied the fucking gun into the guy's car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know some people, they go to work because they need money. Me, I go to work because I love it. This is my life and my career. I chase him down, goddamnit, it's incredible.
ED LARSON
I'm surprised he was able to get his finger on the trigger.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually we're gonna get into how his meaty appendages actually caused problems later on.
ED LARSON
That's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we do.
MARCUS PARKS
But because Eddie Nash apparently contained multitudes, he did have a soft side. If someone he knew was in a real jam, meaning not a drug jam, Eddie would help them out with all the generosity in the world. But if you fuck with Eddie, you were more often than not as good as dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gave you a fucking favor, man. Let's just put it this way. I feel like he did this as almost a system of control in many ways.
ED LARSON
Of course. That's what all mobsters and drug dealers do. They don't do anything for you ever.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Why don't you let me help you out? Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's kind of funny because I learned that lesson as a little boy because there was mafia on my block. And I remember just like, now I understand it was all just, I can't really believe that this was kind of just the ecosystem of the neighborhood. Because my cop father and my mother would always say like you know those mafia guys, they're crazy, absolutely. But you know what? As long as you don't owe them money, as long as you just don't get involved in business, they're kind of nice. And you're like-
ED LARSON
Yeah because they build playgrounds and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then you find out like no, that's not true.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, it's all bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Did you ever like run errands for them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I told you this story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I told you about how they used to give me like... I used to go across the street, they used to give me a little bag and they were like take this over there. And then I'd come back, it was this little corner store, and I'd come back and they had a soda machine and then I thought it was so impressive that the soda was free and they click the thing and the free soda would come out. And I was just so like man, it's incredible. But yeah, I was a mule.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They were crime grooming you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like if you would have kept going, you would have ended up just fucking right, like eventually once you was trusted, it could have gone a different way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I never would have been made because I'm not fully Italian. Yeah.
ED LARSON
But they would have loved to take advantage of a cop's son.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh nothing would make them happier.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well as it went, Eddie Nash's friends were just as dangerous as Eddie. Reportedly he was friends with the godfather of the Israeli mafia. He had been linked to the death and dismemberment of two Israeli nationals at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. According to the police, the bodies were dismembered in one of the rooms and removed from the hotel in a large suitcase and a garment bag, both of which had been purchased in the lobby.
ED LARSON
It's definitely not kosher.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna have to throw out these plates too.
MARCUS PARKS
Parts of the victims, including a woman's head, were subsequently found in four dumpsters right around here in Sherman Oaks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so exciting!
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of this history is right around us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I love when things take place where I am.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's like we're in Rome.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Eddie Nash had become such a coked up weirdo by the time John Holmes came on the scene that he hardly ever left his ranch house located in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill that separates Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley.
ED LARSON
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
This house was located not five minutes from 8763 Wonderland Avenue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it kind of even kind of set the scene a little bit is that these types of homes, LA homes are interesting because they look kind of like ranch style.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I find that a lot of LA homes sort of like expand on the inside.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like when you get in-
MARCUS PARKS
To the back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like especially in this neighborhood.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it looks like a small house when you arrive and then you open up the door and it actually kind of goes back into sort of a long kind of sprawling thing. And you can kind of see how this is the beginnings of a great place for a literal mythical monster to live inside of.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Because you can really fortify them really well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Because you got one entry point.
MARCUS PARKS
Eddie's body had also taken such a beating from years of drug abuse and its consequences that by this time one of his lungs had been removed, he was missing part of a sinus cavity because of excessive cocaine use.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get outta co! Sorry, it was trying to turn into an HOV lane.
MARCUS PARKS
And he had a steel plate in his head for god knows what reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To protect my fucking brain from clouds! Guys, I'm sick of having this conversation. Let's listen to Jesse's Girl.
MARCUS PARKS
But along with Eddie's other eccentricities was a habit for collecting rare and expensive objects. Located within his home was a huge collection of jade, ivory, crystal, and silver. In addition, he owned an original Rembrandt and most of his furniture was of the highly expensive baroque antique variety.
ED LARSON
Crystal ain't worth shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not. It's not glass.
ED LARSON
It's glass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why is crystal still a thing?
ED LARSON
Oh my god. When I tried to sell my mom's Swarovskis, you should have seen the looks I got.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
No one gave a fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You bring all of your mother's precious memories to a man to sell, being like listen, I'm selling all this, we're trying to get her a gravestone and if you could possibly take one of these glass owls. And he's just like one look at it, dogshit. Throws it in the trash can. Here's two quarters. Like bounces it off your tits. Thank you. No, I don't know, Swarovski is a fucking scam.
ED LARSON
It's a scam. The whole fucking place needs to be taken down. They've had it too good for too long.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can fucking email me, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com, Mr. Swarovski. We're trying to take this down, a cease and desist.
ED LARSON
We were at the mall together, they're opening the new Swarovski store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A brand new-
ED LARSON
Who is this for?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who is this for?
ED LARSON
A new store?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what I think when we went to fucking Disneyland over the break, there were fucking Swarovskis like in Downtown Disney.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
On the way into Disneyland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's for meemoos and popoos. Yes. It's to be like (elderly voice) I brought this, I bring... You know what I mean? You bring it. It's something you leave at a tombstone.
ED LARSON
I could always tell when my dad went to the casino because there was a new Swarovski in the curio cabinet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally each one was an 'I'm sorry'.
MARCUS PARKS
But that is all to say that Eddie Nash had a pretty nice house.
ED LARSON
I'm sure.
MARCUS PARKS
At least it looked nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It looked like an old lady's house. It looked like a very dangerous grandma's house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
With a bunch of firecrackers hanging around.
MARCUS PARKS
And this was of course in great contrast to the absolute scum bucket of a house that contained the Wonderland Gang. But entering Eddie's home would no doubt have given you the same sense of danger. The only difference was that Eddie Nash was just a little classier, even though he was still out of his fucking mind.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Most of the time, true to Molina's portrayal, Eddie wore a maroon silk robe and bikini briefs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Soon that's me. Soon. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And he was almost constantly sweating from the drugs that were running through his system from the moment he was awake until the moment he passed out days later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's time for my long Christmas nap! Yeah, I've been awake since Halloween!
MARCUS PARKS
Nash was also the type of guy who want you to do drugs with him as soon as you walk in, asking anyone who came by if they wanted to freebase cocaine from what we'd now call a crack or a meth pipe. He called this playing baseball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, buddy. Hey, you wanna play baseball? You wanna go smoke some golf? Hey buddy, have you ever played inside basketball? Come on, let's go. Because you know what it is about Eddie too is that, which we kind of understand, you know what it is is that he just wanted you to have a good time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
This is what he likes and so you must like it too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he can't like freebasing cocaine as much as he wants to unless you're also freebasing cocaine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you can then all talk about literally the structures of snowflakes again together for hours and hours. I also think he was maybe in a sort of drug dealer, maybe not conscious but unconscious way of telling if someone is a cop or not.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I do think that, again, push back, let me know if anybody's worked for any sort of narc unit, I would love to know. Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean undercover cops definitely do drugs.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, they do.
ED LARSON
They have to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I don't know if they do something that extreme.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know that they'll do a bump or they'll do something else to take the hit-
ED LARSON
When it will save their fucking life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I don't know. But I feel like freebasing cocaine is a step too far for a lot of police officers.
MARCUS PARKS
It's pretty big.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Do you think he had something nicer than just tinfoil? Like do you think he had like a metal sheet or something?
MARCUS PARKS
He had a big glass ball at the end of a small pipe.
ED LARSON
Oh one of those.
MARCUS PARKS
You know the small tube, the small glass tube.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a crack pipe.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Fancy light bulb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, fancy light bulb. Yeah. And he had the butane lighter before butane lighters could be bought at head shops, I'm sure he had a special order it from somebody.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Home Depot.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know if Home Depot was around back then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I think he had to fucking find that shit.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also is it weird that I feel like drug paraphernalia in many ways was both harder and easier to get during this time period?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they had a lot of open cocaine merch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had the cocaine spoons, you had the coke spoon you could wear. Like in the movie, I remember during Wolf we all had those things that they call bullets.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a little like portable cocaine administrator that you could bring with you that you basically flipped it over, took off the top, hit the bump, and then you put it back in and it keeps your little cocaine in it all the time.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Or they had a little button on the bottom that would push it up and you'd just lift it that way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And by the time we got of age we had to deal with using our keys in a shitty bathroom in Brooklyn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Listen into the fucking Stripes. What is it called? The Strokes? The Monks? The Rippers?
MARCUS PARKS
All of them. But after taking a hit from Eddie's freebase pipe, you might be invited to partake in one of Eddie's favorite pastimes, Russian roulette.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is also real, dude.
ED LARSON
Wow, wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Although partaking usually meant you just watched Eddie do it to himself while all of you were out of your fucking minds high.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In many ways, well yeah, you should be glad it's not you. But that's kind of almost worse. You do a bunch of drugs and you just watch the guy who owns the house and he's just being like (singing) la, la, la, la, la la. He's like skipping around the house and then click. And then he does the 'you should see your fucking faces, man.' You're all fucking freaked out.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what's so incredible about the Eddie Nash part in Boogie Nights. Because they distill everything that is Eddie Nash into like six minutes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just like should I do it? Should I do it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Should I do it?
MARCUS PARKS
And then no, no, no, no, no, no. And then he fucking just moves on to the next thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You fucking guys. Cause he's like laughing that them being like you guys are all fucking scared and shit, that's hilarious.
ED LARSON
He's a showman. You come to Eddie's house, you get a show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a comedian.
ED LARSON
There's fireworks, there's gunplay. Whips.
MARCUS PARKS
Eddie however would involve new guests in a game that they didn't even know they were playing. When a new girl, guy, or whoever was brought to Eddie's place, he'd sometimes make them go to a room and sit on a couch. Before them strewn across a coffee table were literal piles of cocaine and jewelry in addition to large wads of cash. In front of them was a large mirror. That mirror was of course two way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here you go, I'm gonna leave you with my kids. I'm gonna go powder my nose.
MARCUS PARKS
Once the new guest was sat down, Eddie would watch from the other side of the glass for hours waiting to see what they took if anything.
ED LARSON
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
And that was his way of assessing the guest. But thankfully there was no penalty if you took anything, you were just asked to leave.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey buddy, that's fucking rude.
ED LARSON
I mean before he shuts the door, just be like do you mind if I do some coke? Like just ask.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I passed the test.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as how Eddie and John Holmes hooked up, they met at one of Nash's nightclubs, The Seven Seas, which is now a souvenir shop called the Hollywoodland Experience located across the street from Grauman's Chinese Theater.
ED LARSON
I bought an Oscar of Best Piggy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that real?
ED LARSON
No, no. But they have all the Oscars there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Best Grandpa, stuff like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Best Piggy. Merch, there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as the story goes, John was at the Seven Seas to obtain information on a porno shoot in San Francisco from someone that one of our sources, 'The Devil and John Holmes', called the Lavender Hill Mob. Now the only Lavender Hill Mob we could find was a gay activist group from the mid 80s that did a lot of good work. So I think the writer was just trying to distastefully and kind of cheekily suggest that John was there to meet a gay porn producer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He very well, yeah. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. John did a lot of gay of gay porn.
ED LARSON
That's how they used to describe it like back in like, what was it, the Maltese Falcon. When Peter Lorre played that gay character. They couldn't call him gay but they always said he smelled like lavender.
MARCUS PARKS
Right, right, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was code.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the Lavender Hill Mob was also a movie from the 40s. It was all kinds of lavender going around. But yeah, that is to say he was definitely there for gay porn. But anyway-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or as my mom used to say, happy and lighthearted.
MARCUS PARKS
By the way, the producer never showed up. But while John was waiting, he was recognized by Eddie Nash who was of course a big fan of John's work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're the cock guy! That's the cock guy! Oh my god! It's the fucking cock guy! Oh my god. Let me just ask, let me ask. How are your balls? Come on, everyone asks about the cock. Not to step on any toes.
MARCUS PARKS
Naturally, Eddie liked showing off John at his clubs and Eddie also supplied John with free cocaine in exchange for introductions to porn actresses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes John would even pimp out his underage girlfriend Dawn to Eddie, telling him that Dawn was his niece from Oregon. She's in town. He would say-
ED LARSON
Doesn't make it better.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No, god no. Because John had this weird thing where-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If only Eddie was like actually that makes some sense. Yeah, of course you are.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, a niece from Oregon. Oh yeah, of course, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He would tell Eddie Nash that Dawn was like yeah, she's in nursing school, she's visiting here from Oregon. Yeah, you can have her. But at the same time, John would also talk to Eddie Nash about it, like my precious Dawn, my precious Dawn. So there was a weird disconnect in John Holmes' brain and when it came to Dawn and pimping her out essentially. Not essentially.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Explicitly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Explicitly pimping her out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, explicitly pimping her out. He pimped her out to a multitude, multiple people.
ED LARSON
She's like one of the few people in his life that was actually good to him.
MARCUS PARKS
She was the only person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good to him. She was a hostage.
MARCUS PARKS
Well his first wife-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was his hostage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And his first wife took care of them, yeah, exactly. No, John Holmes is not a nice guy.
ED LARSON
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. By this time she's like 17.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now John Holmes would later refer to Eddie Nash as evil incarnate again and again. But he also said that he and Nash called each other, they were brothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure, sure, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Always brothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what happens when you do hours and hours of freebasing with each other. You get overly familiar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. It's again the scene in Boogie Nights with Heather Graham and Julianne Moore in the room doing cocaine together for hours upon hours and they're like let's go for a walk. I don't want to leave this room! I don't either! Like it's that shit, you know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing about John Holmes and Eddie Nash is it seemed like John Holmes was Eddie Nash's friend just so long as Nash's psychotic behavior didn't splash over to John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had kind of a fun idea of a friend.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For a second.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, for a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But in reality, very bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Not in the long term. Now since John Holmes was close with both the Wonderland Gang and Eddie Nash, he began working as a middleman between the two dealers. This of course was the connection that set the events in motion that would result in the Wonderland Massacre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this is what we talked about last week. Do you remember the theme of this entire series is that freebasing cocaine for days and days and years on end will eventually affect your decision making process.
MARCUS PARKS
It will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is not a sober idea.
MARCUS PARKS
No. You don't really think things through.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See when it came to purchasing drugs, Eddie would take most anything valuable in exchange for cocaine or heroin. He would take gold, jewelry, guns, whatever. And as it happened, the Wonderland Gang had just come into possession of three extremely valuable and unique antique handguns valued at $75,000. That's $75,000 in 1981 money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but this is not shit you could take to like a normal like fencing operation. This is like Antique Roadshow shit. This is like Smithsonian shit.
MARCUS PARKS
This is auction shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's what Eddie knew. He knew that these guns were so unique that if he even tried to resell them, if the cops caught wind, they're coming straight for Eddie Nash and his whole fucking operation falls apart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But at this point, the Wonderland Gang was critically low on heroin. They therefore pushed John to make a plea to Eddie because Eddie had a soft spot for John Holmes. Nash agreed to hold the guns. He kind of did a favor for John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, never. It's never a favor.
ED LARSON
It's too late at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He agreed to hold the guns and some gold for seven days while advancing the Wonderland Gang $1000 for heroin so they could sell the heroin to make money to buy more heroin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is the Nigerian prince scam. That is the same thing. Being like you don't worry, that's as good as money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as I'm sure all of you listeners are right now, John Holmes was somewhat confused by this nonsensical deal. But from what I can tell, it seems like it's kind of a pawn shop situation, right.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like Eddie holds onto the guns as collateral and then once the Wonderland Gang pays back the grand after they sell the heroin, then they get the guns back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ed, do you feel like when you were... Because you did light weed stuff, businessing.
ED LARSON
I sold weed in Tallahassee, Florida. Everyone went to jail already. We can talk about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now did you ever barter?
ED LARSON
Barter? No. But like you'd get in situations where people would give you weed or whatever and they'd want you to be in debt to them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Because that's when they can really milk it and they can fucking bring up how much you owe and they want to give it to a junkie who's gonna do it because then they could just milk the guy for all of time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god.
ED LARSON
And so it's good business to do that, you know?
MARCUS PARKS
Well actually Eddie did not want to really do it because he didn't want to get into business with heroin addicts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
That was his rule-
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Was that he didn't want to get into business with heroin addicts because heroin addicts could kill you for a fix.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what it is? He's like literally on a fucking roof like dangling back and forth, playing basketball on the rim of the building. Just being like the thing about heroin addicts is that honestly they're unreliable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Well the one guy we had to deal with that was unreliable, he also dealt coke, and he would often try to pay for his weed in coke. And we'd be like no, we don't need that much coke, we need the money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The coke is not helping.
ED LARSON
But I was the only one that could actually get a good deal out of this guy because his name was X, so I think that's what I'm allowed to say. And X used to be the weed guy for George Clinton.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
ED LARSON
And then he got mad because I gave the whole P-Funk guys a better price and so they left X and he started coming to me. And then one time he was being really shady, like pretending to be George's son and shit. He was being real super shady. So I was like hey, you know, this is my gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ. And then you started doing sketch comedy.
ED LARSON
Yeah. In the middle of all of this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
In the middle of...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
ED LARSON
That's how I met you fuckers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know. Yeah, you were my weed dealer first. Then roommate. And then comedy partner.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. But you know, you show him the gun, you unload it, you hand it to him be like look, this is my gun. And then whenever he comes over, whenever you get the shady guys coming over, you put the weed in a different place. Like you keep it in your underwear drawer, when he comes over, you pull it out from the fridge.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
ED LARSON
You know, stuff like that, you know. But it's a slippery slope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
ED LARSON
No matter what, for all that shit, it's never if you get caught its wet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Of course.
ED LARSON
And like we were doing great and we were doing better than anyone in Tallahassee but it all came crashing down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
ED LARSON
In a much more friendly way than this. But I could see where when you are dealing with large sums of money and crazy people, like Eddie Nash types you stay away from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never get to the top dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Eddie Nash wasn't even close to the top dog.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was still even just a minor boss in all of this fucking shit. That was just his fun times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was a business owner.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Of multiple businesses.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean really drug dealing was like his hobby.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what he did for the passion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He probably washed a lot of money for a lot of people with all those businesses.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh of course, yeah.
ED LARSON
Especially with that punk rock venue. I mean I bet it made on the books, I bet it made like $100,000 a month.
MARCUS PARKS
I bet. It had to have, yeah. It had to have. Now of course the whole guns for cash for heroin and then selling the heroin and giving the cash back, that's not at all what happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead of selling the heroin, the Wonderland Gang did the heroin.
ED LARSON
Oh fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
And once that was gone, they started robbing people to continue feeding their habit little by little, saving none of the money for Eddie Nash. Now days turned into weeks with no repayment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, it's just feel the tension, just feel it.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that none of it came from Eddie Nash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I know. He like forgot.
MARCUS PARKS
He'd forgotten about it, $1000 means nothing to him.
ED LARSON
Nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Like nothing at all.
ED LARSON
That's an hour of coke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And in a drug-fueled chain of conversation, the Wonderland Gang convinced themselves that Eddie Nash had sold their guns and was keeping all the cash. Like they had somehow created a situation in which they were the wronged ones, they were the victims here.
ED LARSON
Yes. Always.
MARCUS PARKS
Now John Holmes communicated the Wonderland Gang's anger back to Eddie but Eddie Nash wasn't worried, he didn't care about any of it. He didn't care about the threats. He said they don't even know where I live. Unless of course you were to tell them where I live, John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(uneasy laughter)
ED LARSON
What? No! I didn't even think about it! I'm your buddy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where John Holmes enters into his professional snitch stage.
ED LARSON
Well he snitched before, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he'd been snitching for a while but this is when he turned-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The big leagues. The big leagues.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. When snitching turns to murdering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And as you may have already guessed, that's exactly what happened. Now there's some debate as to why John Holmes gave up Eddie Nash's location to the Wonderland Gang. But according to one source, John had taken a cocaine delivery for himself and freebased it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking good lord.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I just...
MARCUS PARKS
What did he think was gonna happen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have a coffee. Is there a coffee? Some Tylenol? I don't know, man. I know it only lasts for a period of time but it's like, because you know it's all like you're doing it and it feels good for a second and you're like ah. And then that feeling, even thinking about this puts a pit in my stomach.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of like it's all gone, the cocaine you were just about to bring. And then the 15 minutes of you being high is over. And that feeling of just oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do I do now? And then you just constant scramble for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this caused a problem with Wonderland Gang members Billy DeVerell and Ronnie Launius who were, if you'll remember, both murderers and desperate drug addicts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're just as crazy. His home team is just as crazy as the other guy he's running all this for.
ED LARSON
Yeah but one has a yacht and the other one's got a rowboat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after beating John as a precursor to something much worse, Ronnie told John that he had to quote unquote "make this right". And John, being the coward that he was, immediately thought about his friend Eddie Nash, the Wonderland Gang's increasing vendetta, and all the valuables contained within Eddie's house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, no, no, no. It should have been the last thought. I would have been like small business loan! We do a GoFundMe!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You know like some part of him was thinking maybe Eddie would just fucking kill these people too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what? That's actually, I bet you at some point-
MARCUS PARKS
I hadn't even thought about that but yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe I'll just feed them to this guy, I'll feed them to Eddie.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie will make short work of these guys, like you can't beat Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the other hand, John also needed the money because he'd just made that documentary Exhausted and he hadn't paid the editors yet. And unless he paid the editors, it's that fucking scene in Boogie Nights. We need the tapes to take tot the record company so we can get the deal! And then we'll come back and we'll pay you for the tapes! But we cant pay for the tapes until we get the record deal!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I am sweating. This whole thing is so fucking nerve wracking.
MARCUS PARKS
So John agreed to give up Eddie Nash's location under the condition that he would get a cut and nobody would get hurt. And so on the evening of June 28, 1981, the Wonderland Gang gathered around their breakfast nook to study blueprints of Eddie Nash's house that John either procured from the city or drew up himself from memory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they're fucking Ocean's Eleven.
ED LARSON
I'm gonna go ahead and guess he drew them up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, okay, okay. Let me see if I remember, see if I remember. Okay, I know there's a door.
And I know there's a couch. And I know there's a lot of cocaine. Like you could just see them all just kind of going back and forth and just being like you know what we need? We need a small guy that could fit in a tiny elevator.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are you talking about, buddy?
MARCUS PARKS
By this point, John had extensive knowledge of not only the layout of the house itself but where all of Eddie Nash's valuables and weapons were stored, namely they were in the goddamn safe in the goddamn bedroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's good.
ED LARSON
It's good. Good Thomas Jane.
MARCUS PARKS
But if you'll remember... Whatever happened to him?
ED LARSON
He does little things here and there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Apparently he's a jerk.
ED LARSON
Oh. Who would have figured?
MARCUS PARKS
But if you'll remember, Eddie Nash also had a massive karate expert bodyguard around him at all times, Gregory Diles.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while Diles wasn't always armed, he did keep a sawed off shotgun in his bedroom at Nash's place. He lived there.
ED LARSON
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
He was always around.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But to make up for the presence of Gregory Diles, the Wonderland Gang added another guy to the crew, an ex-con named David Lind was gonna be the one with the gun covering Eddie and Diles while Ronnie and Billy would ransack the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see again, we don't want to help the audience commit crimes. But if you are going to, like let's say if you want to do a big mass heist.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My thing I would say is use other people that have just as much to lose as you that aren't brand new.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't bring in just some extra guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they knew him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they knew him but let's just say like... I still feel like he was extra.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But I mean who are you gonna use? John? You can't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess you can't, I guess.
ED LARSON
Just use a chick.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Bring a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly that would help.
MARCUS PARKS
So the first plan that the Wonderland Gang came up with was to send John to the front door. Then once Nash's door was open, the Wonderland Gang would just bum rush and take control immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
Classic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So your plan was get him?
MARCUS PARKS
Get him!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is of course fucking stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And would likely end in a shootout with multiple fatalities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Instead John suggested that he'd go over there to party and unlock the back door so the gang could take Nash by surprise in the early morning hours. This was the plan agreed upon. So John was sent to Eddie's house that night at midnight. They're like fuck it, we got the plan, we're doing it right now. They gave him $400 to buy drugs and then John smoked those drugs at Nash's place over the following six hours.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I really feel like he should have been sitting in meditation, thinking about what he needed to do here, centering himself, taking some time for John. But instead, I can't believe how irresponsible he's being the night before the heist.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Doing drugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doing drugs.
ED LARSON
You never do the drugs at the dealer's house. You do the dealer's drugs at the dealer's house and you take your drugs that you bought and you do them at home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie Nash was a little bit smarter than that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well I mean-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a drug restaurant.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah. Well that's what you do the first, I don't know, two dozen times you come to Eddie's house.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
and then after that Eddie starts to get wise to your game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Because he'd just kick people in and out. You eventually you were not allowed to come in. You'd be able to party for a while but that's also what was kind of weird about it was that he was oddly... Not forgiving, but he was oddly just being like what we said before, he wouldn't just immediately shoot you in the head.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is kind of nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I hung out with a coke dealer once who like... Even just hanging out with that guy, like there was a limit. Where like we went over to his place-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We started doing coke and then at one point he was like hey guys, just gotta be honest with you. You gotta start paying now. He's like we can keep hanging out, I like hanging out with you guys. Y'all are fun. But like you gotta start paying for your cocaine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay. And we did.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's called fiscal responsibility.
MARCUS PARKS
And that was the last time I ever did cocaine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why? Because it was going to start costing you money?
ED LARSON
That was also my cocaine rule. I'm not paying for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a good rule. Now I paid for it that night, it was just such a weird, scuzzy, scummy night.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And it wasn't even like in New York, it was in Lubbock.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was such a weird, scummy, scuzzy, awful, awful night that after that I was like you know what? I don't need to be in this scene no more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just so glad.
ED LARSON
It's so crazy what you just end up in with drugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Like in Tallahassee I had to deal with this guy named Z and he was selling coke. We go over to his house, he throws two fucking phone books on the floor and then shoots them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's his game.
ED LARSON
And it's like you live on the second floor!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was his game, he was having fun. He was trying to relax, I think.
MARCUS PARKS
Now John claimed that he felt a bit of remorse over the plan while he was partying with Eddie Nash that night. And he claimed that he tried warning Eddie that the Wonderland Gang was coming for him. But since Eddie was on day 10 by John's estimate of a no sleep binge, he didn't really process what John was telling him.
ED LARSON
He wanted Eddie to kill these motherfuckers.
MARCUS PARKS
Or he never said anything.
ED LARSON
That's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
This is all recanting from... I forget that this all probably lies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Everything from John Holmes' mouth-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is probably a lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll deeper unpack it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And so when all the coke that John had bought was smoked out of existence, John excused himself to go to the bathroom. But instead he unlocked the sliding glass door in the back bedroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if his body was in the bathroom but his cock unlocked the door? Just snaking around, being like-
ED LARSON
Why is my door covered in piss?
MARCUS PARKS
Don't say it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Go, be swift now. Go. Fly, you fools!
MARCUS PARKS
Well John left just as the sun was coming up and arrived back at the Wonderland house to tell the gang it's fucking time to go, boys. Problem was though the Wonderland Gang was heroin addicts. So they'd spent all night doing heroin and they'd all nodded off.
ED LARSON
Wrong drug.
MARCUS PARKS
It took John two hours to wake them up. But once they did rise and shine, they sent John back to Eddie's house to make sure that the back door was still unlocked, following behind him in a shitty Ford Granada that was supposed to be the getaway car. And so after John snuck around to the back to confirm that the door was still unlocked, he yelled, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(echoing) "It's time! Go get them, boys!"
ED LARSON
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
Anything. Bark like a dog. Anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(echoing) It's time to rob Eddie Nash now!
MARCUS PARKS
And that's him, that's what he said he did. (echoing) It's time! Soon after, the gang entered the house and found Eddie and his bodyguard Gregory Diles in the living room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're in love. Gregory Diles and Eddie Nash were like in love with each other in many ways.
MARCUS PARKS
I think they had a very comfortable domestic situation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they were like kind of a married couple. Gregory Diles would like make him breakfast and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they'd hang out and they'd eat on the veranda and have a nice time.
ED LARSON
It's like living with a friendly karate bear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what it is, Gregory? There's just something about your gut that comforts me. I just love being near you and goddamnit if you weren't my wife, I'd treat you like one.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd describe him as more like a nurse who's willing to kill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I wish. That's all I want.
MARCUS PARKS
Well unfortunately for Diles though, when the Wonderland Gang rushed in, he was carrying a little tray. It didn't say what was on the tray, it was either drugs or it might have been Eddie's breakfast.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. You know he had nice stuff, like a nice silver platter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With a little flower in a vase on it and a waffle with a smiley face drawn in fucking cocaine on it. Just being like that's how he likes it, a nice friendly waffle. Eddie, wake up, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Eddie was of course caught unawares on his couch wearing only blue bikini briefs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh. That's my father's entire uniform for my entire childhood.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I remember how many times he had to be told, especially if my sister's friends were coming over, that he had to put pants on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Same here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oddly enough-
ED LARSON
My father also only wore underwear but we just let him do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. What are you gonna do?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What are you gonna do? Oddly enough, the Wonderland Gang entered pretending to be the police, flashing a stolen San Francisco police badge while shouting freeze! Police! You're under arrest!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hold it right there, mister!
ED LARSON
Ignore my track marks, I'm a cop!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Police officer, no uniform here.
MARCUS PARKS
That really didn't seem all that necessary because David Lind, the new guy in the group, he was holding a massively imposing .357 magnum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get in the goddamn bedroom.
MARCUS PARKS
Goddamn bedroom. Now Nash was brought to his knees immediately while Diles was made to lay on the floor so he could be handcuffed. He was so massive however that they couldn't get the handcuffs to fit.
ED LARSON
There we go!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Too fat to arrest.
ED LARSON
God, I love this. What a hero.
MARCUS PARKS
This comedy of errors continued when Billy DeVerell went to help but tripped and fell into David Lind. And David Lind, who probably didn't have the best trigger discipline, accidentally fired the gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus.
ED LARSON
Oh Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the bodyguard wasn't technically shot but the .357 was held close enough to his body and the discharge was so powerful that it caused powder burns that were deep enough to cause bleeding.
ED LARSON
Damn!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you know he's there being like I'm shot, boss! I'm shot, boss! And it has to feel like you're all just total insanity.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Finally though the gang got the handcuffs over the meaty wrists of Gregory Diles. Then they threw a rug over his head so he couldn't see what was happening. I don't know why. I don't know why they're like...
ED LARSON
Quick, get the rug! Throw it over his head!
MARCUS PARKS
He's already in HANDCUFFS.
ED LARSON
All right, next!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In many, many ways, bodyguards are like canaries. If we just put it, listen to me, listen. This isn't the heroin. He will go to sleep.
ED LARSON
(snoring)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? I fucking knew they'd use his one weapon against him!
MARCUS PARKS
Well with the bodyguard out of the picture, they took Nash to his bedroom and told him that they wanted the goddamn code to the goddamn safe. Now Nash refused at first but when the barrel of the gun was forced into his mouth, he fucking broke. He started sobbing and he told them immediately what the code was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now for a bunch of drug addicts, the haul contained in the safe was incredible. Inside were two massive Ziploc bags of cocaine-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
A ton of jewelry, a pile of cash, and thousands of quaaludes in a cash box that was no doubt bound for The Starwood box office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know if I saw that amount and I was about to rob somebody, I feel like just the amount alone would be like oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this might be too much.
ED LARSON
But you've already started. It's already going.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's some advice to our listeners. If you find yourself in this scenario, leave half.
MARCUS PARKS
Leave half?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just leave some.
ED LARSON
You think so? I say just move to Cleveland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well in Cleveland they're gonna find you. He's going to find you no matter what, so let's say leave half and maybe he won't be as mad.
ED LARSON
It doesn't... No, you still die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You still die. They're already dead at this point.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You just take it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
further searching the house, they found a laboratory vial full of heroin in Eddie's dresser, Gregory's shotgun in his bedroom, and of course the antique guns that had started this fucking mess in the first place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you touch my fucking muskets!
MARCUS PARKS
Still not happy though, Ronnie Launius, who if you'll remember had 30 possible unsolved homicides under his belt when he died, he held a hunting knife to Gregory's throat, demanding to know where the rest of the heroin was. But even as Ronnie began to draw blood, Gregory refused to tell him, possibly because there was no more fucking heroin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Or a rug over his head. You take a rug off my head, I'll tell you everything you want to know. It's a trick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a trick.
MARCUS PARKS
It was at this point though that the rest of them told Ronnie that they had more than enough. So they escaped to their shitty Ford Granada which took them back to the Wonderland house five minutes away. Five minutes away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Job done.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Base. I'm back at base.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's start our day.
MARCUS PARKS
The whole thing was over and done with by 10 AM. And of course John Holmes was waiting back at the Wonderland house almost giddy with excitement to see what the haul was and therefore how big his cut was gonna be. See the agreement beforehand was that the three guys who went in to pull off the robbery would take 25% each, while John and the driver would split the last quarter.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Pretty standard for a robbery. Predictably though, the Wonderland Gang ignored John when they returned and walked right past him to the back bedroom to take stock of the loot. This had of course been a last minute change to the plan because between the house and the getaway car, the three robbers decided to short both John and the getaway driver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Classless. Utterly. Where's the respect?
MARCUS PARKS
No respect for the game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is this a goddamn... It's a blunder squad. Like these guys are all... I mean the one relief that we have about this whole grizzly scene is that all of these guys are unrepentant moron criminals. Like this is one of these, just the constant fuckery between each other. It's so funny, even John Holmes would even like believe that they would all be cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's an inability to kind of learn here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To kind of absorb a lesson.
MARCUS PARKS
There really is. And that's the thing is that nobody-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's freebasing cocaine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it's really hurting a lot of the being present in the moment.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he kind of skipped through all the dotted I's and crossed the T's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm a broad strokes guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well nobody at Wonderland liked or respected John anymore. I mean he'd gone from being a hip pornstar in the beginning, then he was just a big dick party trick, John, show them your dick. And by the time of the robbery, he was seen as a pathetic thief and a drug addict who'd sell out his friend at the first sign of trouble.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean he just did.
MARCUS PARKS
He did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just did it with Eddie Nash. All he's ever done.
MARCUS PARKS
He's gonna do it to you, that's the thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In all, they'd come away with 8 lbs of cocaine, 8 lbs, 5000 quaaludes, a kilo of China white heroin, $10,000 in cash, and jewelry worth $150,000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ.
ED LARSON
Good lord.
MARCUS PARKS
And out of all that, they gave John Holmes $3000 and a little pinky ring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he wouldn't know either way, he wouldn't even know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well no. Yeah, he knew. He said there was way more at Eddie Nash's house than that. And when he complained, they punched him in the stomach and beat him with a walking stick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As he deserved.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As he deserved.
ED LARSON
Do you think that it's possible they could have beat him with his own penis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually think Eddie will do that later on.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Eddie Nash didn't immediately figure out that John Holmes had been the facilitator in the robbery. Since John had been the middleman between Nash and the Wonderland Gang, Eddie didn't know what the Wonderland Gang looked like. So he didn't even know that it was the Wonderland Gang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look for long hair! Shitty, dumb shoes! Bad shirts! I don't fucking know.
MARCUS PARKS
He'd probably also forgotten that John had told him just a few hours earlier that the Wonderland Gang was coming for him. But that's if John actually did mention it as he claims he did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It shows that he didn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I really do believe that Eddie Nash would remember distinctly-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That he was told that the Wonderland Gang was coming for him. I feel like after all that happened, he'd wake up and be like oh yeah, that's right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah but you're also on so much drugs you just think it's like the fucking Walrus that eats all the oysters and Tweedledee Tweedledum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not dealing with these fucking card people! You mean to tell me there's walking playing cards up there?! I hate gambling.
MARCUS PARKS
Two days later though, I mean this is just the dumbest shit, this is the fucking dumbest shit, John Holmes ran into Gregory Diles at the liquor store.
ED LARSON
What?
MARCUS PARKS
And immediately Diles noticed that John was wearing one of Eddie Nash's very distinctive stolen rings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It probably had like an E and an N in diamonds on it.
MARCUS PARKS
It didn't take him but a second to put two and two together.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just boom, bam, there it is. And from the liquor store, Gregory Diles walked into Eddie Nash's house dragging John Holmes by his stupid white boy afro in the midst of a party. And since Eddie was known to kill anyone who crossed him, John figured that this was his last night alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, just bringing it into this house. You open up this house, you're like this is it.
ED LARSON
He made it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh of course.
ED LARSON
He was fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was fine.
ED LARSON
Why are you wearing the ring?
MARCUS PARKS
Why wear the ring?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because well let's just say I don't think it was gonna be for long.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think he was going to be fined for very long because there's many theories of what went down in this last couple, this little section of John Holmes' life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think we'll get there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well this party, it wasn't up to Eddie's usual standards because he'd just had 8 lbs of coke stolen from him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry, guys, we had a bit of a supply line issue today. You know, like he's talking like it's the beginning of COVID.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So he hired an illusionist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just shooting at his feet. Quit fucking lying to me!
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, everyone was agitated while they were waiting for more coke to show up. Eddie had sent out a couple of cronies. And then the man responsible for the agitation just got literally dragged in the door.
ED LARSON
Damn.
MARCUS PARKS
One of those agitated people though, interestingly enough, was a man named Scott Thorson. Thorson was the live-in lover of Liberace and had been so since he was a teenager. As it was described, Thorson, who was nicknamed Boober by Liberace, was the famous singer's lover, pet, and son all rolled into one.
ED LARSON
Matt Damon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Matt Damon.
MARCUS PARKS
Matt Damon, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Matt Damon in the movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because Liberace was famously in the closet. Because my mom, I always remember it was like because Barry Manilow was very similar, where Liberace was always kind of painted as a man who just loved his mother.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he loved his mother so much that he could never have room in his life for a wife. And I remember my mom talking about Barry Manilow, she's like you know what it is about Barry Manilow is that he's a bachelor and he writes these love songs because it's just so hard for him to just find a woman to settle down with. Because how could he choose?
MARCUS PARKS
When did your mama have these conversations with you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Over and over again. This is her, as we listen to Barry Manilow, she's like you know Barry Manilow, he needs a wife. You can hear it in his songs. Just pontificating. She was in love with him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, my mom was a Johnny Mathis woman.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Johnny Mathis, yeah, he's a strapping guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he's a strapping guy. Liberace, the only guy who was in the closet and the closet had a chandelier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good material.
ED LARSON
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
It's great material. Great material.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
ED LARSON
It's unusable except for this moment.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by 1981, Liberace and Thorson's relationship had gone beyond the realm of the bizarre. See a few years earlier, Liberace had ordered Thorson to get cosmetic surgery because Liberace was aging and Liberace wanted to preserve his own face on Thorson's face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been trying to get Natalie to let me do this procedure to Wendy. Just again because I am aging.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's face facts, all right. I went and I got a facial for the first time. I've never had one of those before. And the woman, the first thing, she came down, she's mushing my fucking meat around. And she's like I can't help but notice I see you're losing elasticity. And I was like I'm gonna fucking snap. Literally yes, you're right. I am going to snap. And then it's true though. But yeah, so one day Wendy will look like me.
MARCUS PARKS
That's terrifying.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Well you know, also comforting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Shaving her. Completely shaving it.
ED LARSON
What are you talking about? You're hairy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in order to get this procedure to put Liberace's face on his face, Thorson had to lose 30 lbs. So a crooked doctor prescribed Thorson a cocktail of drugs that included pharmaceutical cocaine. The procedure was kind of a success but Thorson was left hopelessly addicted as a result. And as it just so happened, when the bodyguard burst into Nash's house with Holmes, Eddie was in the bedroom freebasing with Scott Thorson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you guys met Liberace's pet?
MARCUS PARKS
Well by the time Nash exited his room, Holmes had been sat down in a chair to await his fate. Now Eddie Nash alternated between screaming and sobbing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're fucking me up here, man! You're just fucking me up! I trusted you, my friend!
ED LARSON
I love you!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(kissing sounds) I will fucking kill you. It's a great party.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is all in the middle of a party.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in a party.
MARCUS PARKS
It's in the middle of a party.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Nash was so out of control that he pulled out his own .357 and he smacked John in the mouth with a barrel, he busted his lip. Searching John's pockets, Nash then found John's pocket address book and began flipping through pages and naming John's family members, threatening to hunt down and kill every single one of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just need to find out how much it takes to build a fucking crucifix. I will... Oh, is this Nana? Is this Aunt fucking Nancy? Just like god, wow.
ED LARSON
Just ripping pages out, just being like dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dead!
ED LARSON
Dead. That's very fucking intense, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It really was. Like yeah, who's this in Montana? Dead. This woman in Utah? Oh, that's your fucking mother? Dead. It's fucking incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of pressure.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's like the movie scene.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is when it gets weird. He started like manically making phone calls to like old friends, business associates, even ex-girlfriends. He's switching from English to French to Arabic. He's telling everyone that he's holding the king of pornography, John Holmes, captive at his house. And Nash was telling people like Holmes fucked me over, if you want to come see the show, swing on by.
ED LARSON
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
He's here. Now John claims that for 14 hours, Eddie, Gregory, and even more bodyguards tortured him in a room just off the entryway as his hands were bound by electrical tape and blood poured out of his mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love this whole scene because it's just out of the movie Society.
MARCUS PARKS
By John's estimate, 60-70 people paraded by as all this was happening and not a one of them, even the people he knew, waved hello.
ED LARSON
No one said hi?
MARCUS PARKS
No one said hi. No one said hello.
ED LARSON
How you doing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
John?
MARCUS PARKS
John, hello.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hello. Hi.
ED LARSON
Nash got your tongue?
MARCUS PARKS
Here however is where things get murky. John of course gave up the Wonderland Gang. But after the torture was over, John claimed that Eddie gave him a direct order to return to Wonderland Avenue, saying quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bring me their eyeballs in a bag.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a pretty good line.
ED LARSON
That's pretty good.
MARCUS PARKS
Had John accomplished this, Eddie said, all would be forgiving.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's okay! It's just like that! That's it!
MARCUS PARKS
That's all you gotta do!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all you gotta do!
MARCUS PARKS
That however is not what John told his wife Sharon. That's what John said in his autobiography. Now Sharon hadn't seen John for about three months by this point. But at 3:30 AM on July 2nd, the night of the Wonderland Murders, John Holmes showed up on her doorstep with his clothes ripped and his entire body covered in blood. Now John claimed at first that he'd been in a car accident. But when Sharon tried administering first aid, because if you'll remember she was a nurse, she found that he had no cuts or abrasions. This also refutes John's story that he was tortured.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was more of like a theoretical car accident. You know what I mean? A philosophical car accident.
MARCUS PARKS
Most likely John gave up the Wonderland before he and Diles even left the fucking liquor store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is our theory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that when he saw Diles and Diles was like is that Eddie's ring? He's like the Wonderland Gang is at 8673... Just immediately doing that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they're right there. Honestly I bet you they're asleep right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they went back to the house and then he was just... I do think that some of the scene with Eddie Nash did happen. I do think like him ranting and raving.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There being a bunch of people there. Scott Thorson technically backs it up, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Scott Thorson does back that up at least.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. He did go there but the idea of a parade of torturers, that the only way that John Holmes' will could ever have been bent to ever... How could he possibly snitch on his best friends? Those are my friends, my compatriots, my comrades.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Also pistol whipped by a .357, a skinny guy like that. He's out. Right there, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like getting hit with a police baton.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's done right there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well as Sharon later told it, John told her that he told Nash where the Wonderland Gang lived and how to get there. He just told her, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
I'll drive you down the street. 5 minutes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wouldn't believe how fast we got you back to our house after robbing you.
ED LARSON
Honestly take a bike.
MARCUS PARKS
Nash then sent John with three men over to the Wonderland house to get revenge and retrieve Eddie's loot. According to John, as one of Eddie's guys held a gun to John's head to make him watch, the other two made sure that the revenge murders were as brutal as possible by beating all but one person in the Wonderland house to death with steel pipes. The only one who survived did so only by the grace of god and still had such severe brain damage that she could never testify as to what happened that night.
ED LARSON
Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That whole scene, it's really fucked up.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you watch, there's a whole walkthrough of the crime scene, these guys got like...
ED LARSON
It's horrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's more than a hit. It's absolutely-
MARCUS PARKS
It's a message.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's utter revenge.
ED LARSON
To everybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
To the entire city.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. The Wonderland Gang had been so thoroughly beaten that the steel pipes' threading had been imprinted on their skin and even on their bones.
ED LARSON
Damn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On their bones!
MARCUS PARKS
On their bones! Their faces were completely unrecognizable and their heads had been bashed in with such fury that chunks of brain were stuck to the ceiling. There was so much blood that homicide detectives later described it as appearing as if someone had taken buckets of the stuff and thrown it all over the walls and carpets. The only evidence linking the crime to anyone was of course a bloody palm print left by John Holmes-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ.
ED LARSON
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
In the room where Ronnie Launius' body was found.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey look at this, Detective Martinez. I see this kind of line in the carpet here, I'm pretty certain that's a cock trail.
MARCUS PARKS
Holmes however told an entirely different story in his autobiography.
ED LARSON
No way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No way.
MARCUS PARKS
He said that Eddie Nash forced him to return to the Wonderland house after the murders to set him up for the massacre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
John claims that he did what he was told and walked through the crime scene. And indeed his account of the crime scene in his autobiography is incredibly graphic. He said that a trail of blood led from the door to the master bedroom. And John claimed that when he walked in, a long shape was twisted in the sheets. The body was intact but the head was split open and the face was pulverized into a mush.
ED LARSON
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
Based on the clothes and hair, John recognized that the body belonged to Ronnie Launius.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My best friend.
MARCUS PARKS
My Ronnie!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was my Ronnie.
ED LARSON
We'll never find out if he killed those 30 people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe he committed suicide like this.
MARCUS PARKS
John then walked up the stairs where he found the owner of the home, Joy Miller, lying on the ground in the housecoat she always wore. This was the only thing that identified her because her face, as John put it, looked like it had gone through a shredder. As far as Billy DeVerell went, it appeared to John as if his brains had literally exploded. That's how hard he'd been hit. Nothing remained of anyone's head, this is how John wrote it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He said everyone's head was just slime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
ED LARSON
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
He estimated everyone had been struck 40-50 times but I don't know what forensics John Holmes is pulling on to come to that number.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I actually believe him in this situation because he's not creative enough to like give a metaphor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He didn't get a creative fiction doctorate.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So you think it was Giles that did this probably?
MARCUS PARKS
Diles.
ED LARSON
Diles, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. You're thinking of J. Geils Band.
ED LARSON
Yes. Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He always is.
MARCUS PARKS
Most likely, yeah. Most likely it was Gregory Diles and like two other guys.
ED LARSON
Two other guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Cause Nash had guys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Cause honestly also I wonder if... Gregory, I don't want you to get your hands dirty in all this, all right? You're my friend.
ED LARSON
They put a rug over my head!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I know, okay? But you're my very, very mean butler, best friend, and husband. Okay? So we need to hold this together.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's also, Henry brought up this possibility too is that it's possible that they may have made John Holmes kill one of these guys or at least bash him in the face a few times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My theory is that at one point because he had a bloody handprint on a bed, right? And what it looked like was that he was bracing himself to probably strike something.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like literally it was a weight bearing thing, he was over a bed, over one of the victims.
MARCUS PARKS
Ronnie Launius.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Ronnie Launius. So I think that what they did was that at some point they were like now you're gonna take a swing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were probably all already dead.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's like now you're gonna do it, so now you directly are involved in this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Or they just grabbed his fucking hand and put it in the blood and put it on the wall and said we're leaving.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly. To frame you, literally being like we're gonna put this all on fucking you. We're gonna make it look like you are a serial killer and that you fucking had a freebasing breakdown and you killed all of your buddies in a scheme of your own.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. Now it was an open secret amongst the LAPD vice squad that John Holmes was running drugs for the Wonderland Gang. But if you'll remember, John was protected because he'd been an informant for the pornography squad. Even after the murders though, John's contact was still reluctant to give him up, even though it had been years since he'd provided any information. It soon became obvious however that John was no longer the high rolling snitch that he once was. And see, the bodies were found by, of course, a guy who's coming to mow the lawn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These poor guys. It's always that.
MARCUS PARKS
It's always that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a jogger.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always somebody who's literally getting too old for this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That shouldn't have to be pulled into one last traumatic crime scene for the rest of their lives.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he just looked in the window and saw a bunch of dead bodies and a bunch of blood. And they're trying to figure out, okay, like what connections do we have? Okay, this is the Wonderland Gang and one of them is like so I think I know a guy who runs drugs for these people. And that person ended up being John Holmes. So his contact tracked him down and handed him over to the two detectives in charge of what was now being called the Four on the Floor Murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, these cops fucking love this shit. Bob Souza and Tom Lange, they love this fucking shit.
ED LARSON
It's so uncreative.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Four on the Floor Murders?
ED LARSON
Yeah. You walk in, there's four people on the floor and... Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I believe these are the same cops that wrote, let me make sure, 'Malice in Wonderland'. That were just so...
ED LARSON
Didn't one of them work with Fuhrman? Am I wrong?
MARCUS PARKS
Tom Lange.
ED LARSON
Tom Lange, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Tom Lange.
ED LARSON
So he worked on this and OJ.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Tom Lange was, yeah, one of the biggest detectives in the OJ case, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's what's his putz, Tom Lange...
ED LARSON
That's fucking crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
How nuts is that, man?
ED LARSON
What a horrible... You can't solve shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He can't do anything. These guys are so too, this whole book 'Malice in Wonderland' is all just like again, it's the same guys that were like it's called 'Malice in Wonderland'.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is reflecting on Alice in Wonderland because also the name Wonderland. And it's all about how things were unfair, they were unfairly treated and how... You know, the city, that's the problem. The city held our hands-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we couldn't do our job. Cause all we wanna do is bust heads.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course. Now all this had occurred just before Independence Day. And right before the murders landed in their laps, of course these two horrible detectives, they joked like there's probably gonna be a fucking triple ax murder in the Hollywood Hills just to fuck up our fucking weekend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it did.
ED LARSON
Yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
Fucked up their weekend real bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh good.
MARCUS PARKS
They were now in charge of the biggest LA homicide case since the Manson murders. This thing blew up.
ED LARSON
Of course!
MARCUS PARKS
Now once John was brought into custody, he said that he was ready to lay out every illegal connection he knew about in the entire pornography industry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I once met a guy from a bodega who was selling milk at $4 when it was supposed to be nationally priced to $2. What else do you need to know? What else can I... Who else can I flip on?
ED LARSON
Wasn't pornography legal at this point?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is legal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's legal at this point.
ED LARSON
So he's got nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well no but it's still also like run by the mob in a lot of cases.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like not in every case but it's a lot of mob money that's rolling through pornography. And he said he had information on mafia connections, money laundering operations in New York, Chicago, and Miami, mob related arsons. He said he knew of a former Chicago hitman who had retired to oversee porn productions in Los Angeles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just anybody who wasn't nailed down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The only thing that Holmes refused to talk about though was the Wonderland Massacre itself. And since everything else sounded like bullshit and there wasn't enough to charge John with the murders, they let him go. But as Detective Lange drove John to North Hollywood to pick up his impounded Malibu, Lange looked at him and asked him point blank, off the record, if Eddie Nash was the one who did it. And John just said yeah, Nash did it. And he said so with such sincerity that Detective Lange believed him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I feel like in the end they already knew.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They knew.
MARCUS PARKS
They knew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They know what's going on here. And they needed his words so they could go fucking get the search warrant and go figure out all the bullshit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But it was one thing to say it to Lange and another to say it on the record. Definitely another to say it to a grand jury and definitely a different thing to testify to the fact at trial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
John had no intention of sticking out his neck while Nash and his goons no doubt knew that John was talking to the police. But in what I think is the ballsiest move I think I've ever heard anyone make, John went back to Eddie's house-
ED LARSON
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Immediately after being arrested by the police, to ask for $1000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know, it just takes... Dick's too big. We brought this up last episode.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dick's too fucking big.
MARCUS PARKS
It's too big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is no reason for this level of confidence.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is no fucking reason for him to think that he is remotely correct. And I guess it's the audacity, the straight audacity. They're all like literally-
ED LARSON
It was so crazy, they were like sure?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
Kinda.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean Gregory Diles of course immediately dropped down to his knees, put a gun to his head. Eddie asked why shouldn't I blow your fucking brains out right now for talking to the cops? But John bluffed. He said I'm supposed to meet somebody, they know I'm here, I'm already late. If you kill me, they know that it's you who did it. And so fucking Eddie said fine, come back in an hour and look in the fucking mailbox. So John came back in an hour and in the mailbox, 500 bucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's too nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Too nice.
ED LARSON
He's too nice.
MARCUS PARKS
For old times sake.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's definitely one of those things for old times sake.
ED LARSON
Mr. Romantic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I guess actually in many ways, truly-
MARCUS PARKS
He is. He really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also wonder if it's too far for John. John's fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As far as Eddie is concerned, John's fucked. We planted him at the scene, everybody knows. At this point like I'm actually fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I'm only tangentially connected by you, a freebasing moron that is like talking to all these people. I got here to this point of success in America by not being a fucking moron.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'm faced with one. So yeah, I'll give you fucking $500 because I've already fucked you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this is already done.
MARCUS PARKS
And not only that but John was asking for this money so he could leave town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
He's like man, just give me the money, you'll never see me again, No one will ever see me again. I'll never testify, The cops will never find me, so on and so forth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blah, blah, blah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And John used the money to skip the state of California with Dawn. Unfortunately Dawn's still in the picture at this point.
ED LARSON
Jesus!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. At this point, she had left and come back. It's a fucking horrible relationship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But that immediately put John on the FBI's '10 Most Wanted List' in regards to questioning over a quadruple homicide. Eventually the cops tracked John to a shitty motel in Miami and when he opened the door, he was still half pretending to be Johnny Wadd. He said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been expecting you. Shithead.
MARCUS PARKS
What a fucking asshole.
ED LARSON
To the cops?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, to the cops.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah. Technically that's what David Berkowitz said. How'd it take so long?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he said what took you so long?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What took you so long?
MARCUS PARKS
Now John was tried for the Wonderland Murders but the only evidence against him was the bloody handprint above Ronnie's bed. They had to try to convict someone and John was all they had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But all the bloody handprint proved was that John was at the scene of the murder either during or after the act. And that was actually the argument they made. It's like yeah, he was there but why aren't the real perpetrators here? Why isn't Eddie Nash here? John was there, yeah. And yeah, he made some mistakes. He's not the best person. I wouldn't be friends with John Curtis Holmes! Neither would you! But does that make him a murderer?
ED LARSON
That's a great public defender. I imagine it was a public defender.
MARCUS PARKS
Definitely a public defender.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It actually turned out, for a long time, because we can't find the name of the guy, it turned out that the public defender was just his dick.
ED LARSON
In a suit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In a full suit.
MARCUS PARKS
In a suit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he had a log book.
MARCUS PARKS
Put a little afro on him. Yeah. Just like his own little afro, it's fun.
ED LARSON
Yeah, just always with an O face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh! I too am surprised by these actions by John Holmes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well based on this reasoning and the paltry amount of evidence, Holmes was found not guilty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not guilty.
MARCUS PARKS
Not guilty. But even though his entire defense was Eddie Nash did it, Holmes refused to testify before a grand jury to that fact because he believed that his life and the lives of his family members would be in danger if he did so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a credible belief.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually though, Eddie Nash was arrested on drug charges. In fact he had three raids upon his house, every time turned up massive amounts of drugs, money, weapons. But Eddie was rich enough where he paid his bail every time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
What finally kept him in jail though were charges of racketeering, arson, and insurance fraud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Insurance fraud is where they definitely get you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That is where they get you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always, always. Tax evasion. Any of that.
ED LARSON
You think he made like an insurance claim on the raid?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a business.
MARCUS PARKS
Assets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a business move.
MARCUS PARKS
During Eddie's drug trial, his lawyer actually tried claiming that the million dollars worth of coke in Eddie's house, it's not drug trafficking, that's for personal use.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a problem, okay? This is the whole thing, man. You're just arriving here in a whole fucking thing, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I mean honestly, you hang out with him for a day and you could be convinced.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
He buys in bulk. Even during that trial, Eddie would sneak out to his car to freebase.
ED LARSON
Damn!
MARCUS PARKS
And then he'd take some quaaludes to calm himself down and then he'd go back to his trial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what it really is? It's the rat race. I am sick of it. Just the idea of going into court high on cocaine and then I guesses slowed down by a quaalude in the middle of all of this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just altered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just where you can completely I guess ignore everything that's going on and just stare at the fucking table for the next six hours.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah because you say anything you're fucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
So you might as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you have to kind of put yourself into an inholding position.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's what they say, most defendants are given tranquilizers during the trial so they won't react to anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'd want some fucking xanax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Eventually Eddie Nash was sentenced to eight years in prison for the drug charges, the racketeering, arson, all that shit. But after just two, his sentence was reduced and he was released as time served because he had a sinus tumor that needed to be removed. As the judge put it, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I wouldn't want to be operated on in San Quentin." Yes, it's terrible. Eddie, I love you. I need you to be doing well because honestly if you're not doing well, I'm not doing well.
MARCUS PARKS
Eddie Nash however completely turned his life around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He never returned to crime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least he wasn't caught for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. At least he said he was reformed. Yeah, he was never caught again. Yeah. But he was also completely broke because his fortune had been wiped out by his daughter of all people who scammed him out of millions of dollars through this huge... I can't even get into it. It's a fucking massive scam all on its own. But Eddie eked out an existence for the time being.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. It comes around.
ED LARSON
What happened to the Diles?
MARCUS PARKS
Diles, we'll get to Diles in a second.
ED LARSON
Okay, cool. Sorry, I don't wanna jump the gun.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's fine. As far as Holmes went though, he served 11 months on an earlier theft charge plus 110 days for contempt for refusing to testify against Eddie Nash. The theft charge was he had stolen a computer typewriter worth $8000 and then a cop found it in his car and he told the cop that he found it in a dumpster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy is a... I just think he's not right.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
He didn't even probably know it was a computer.
MARCUS PARKS
No, yeah. Absolutely not. Com-pu-ter?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Computer.
MARCUS PARKS
Well John Holmes was finally released in the early 80s with $100 and a Volkswagen Beetle that was given to him by his lawyer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a good lawyer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. John used that Beetle to drive directly to the home of one of his old porn producers, Bill Amerson. Bill Amerson was actually the guy on whom the character of Jack Horner in Boogie Nights was based on, the character played by Burt Reynolds.
ED LARSON
Is that that big fat guy?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's that big fat guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that big fat guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well John had worked with Bill quite a bit since John's introduction into the porn business in 1969. But they'd of course fallen out when John's drug habit blew up everything. But in the years since John had completely dropped out of the business, Bill Amerson had formed a production company called John Holmes Productions without John's knowledge or consent. Because porn performers were paid day rates, no matter how famous they were. They had no ownership over their work, their image, anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was no big deals.
MARCUS PARKS
No. No, no, no. But in a scene reminiscent to the conclusion of Boogie Nights, Bill still had a room waiting for John Holmes in his own house and therefore brought him back into the industry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should have just... God. Just go buy a grocery store, go someplace else.
ED LARSON
Imagine trying to explain that to your wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm back in, baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's John again. It's like yay.
MARCUS PARKS
John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay, John. Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Great. Yeah. And he's fresh off an acquittal on a murder charge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, incredible. And he's like sweating a lot and he's coughing a lot. He doesn't look too good.
MARCUS PARKS
Now because the Wonderland Murders had been such a big news story, John Holmes had officially become a mainstream celebrity. So he used his notoriety as fuel to power a comeback right as the video cassette boom truly set pornography on the path to becoming a $12 billion industry. That's how much porn makes today. By 1983, John Holmes was actually sober. He stayed sober for the rest of his life and he'd moved in with a 19 year old porn actress named Misty Dawn whom he'd met while filming a porno called Flesh Pond.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Which I'm sure was of the fine 'fuck her in the ass' variety.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. From Boogie Nights.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Eventually John and Misty would marry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw. Yeah, exactly. You remember our audience. You can find love.
MARCUS PARKS
You can find love. Now it seemed like John's life was turning around but in the mid 80s, John Holmes contracted HIV right when the disease was starting to become known to the mainstream media. Now the company that John worked for had actually instituted a testing policy that everyone agreed to. This is actually much to the company's surprise because some porn actors at the time were refusing to be tested because they said it violated their civil rights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord.
MARCUS PARKS
And as it was, even those who got tested used fake names. John Holmes for example tested under the name... Guess the name.
ED LARSON
Peter North.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be incredible. That's how you do it. That's how you bury something.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. John Holmes is fine but I heard that Peter... Maybe we should be giving his work to John Holmes. No, Karl Marx.
ED LARSON
Oh great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
That kinda rules.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what's a good porn name though honestly? George Washington. We need to get that back in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, George Washingstone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
George Washingstone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Did you ever hear about Rickey Henderson, his fake name?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
ED LARSON
Whenever he would like check into a hotel. Because Rickey Henderson is very full of himself, a lot of cocaine.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course, yeah. Always talks about himself in the third person.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But whenever he checked into a hotel, his fake name was Richard Pryor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's very funny.
ED LARSON
Because he thought that no one knew who Richard Pryor was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Now John tested negative the first time he took an HIV test but he soon after started showing signs of infection. His ears began to bleed.
ED LARSON
What?
MARCUS PARKS
Which his doctors somehow blamed on John's years in the army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it turns out he was always allergic to tanks.
MARCUS PARKS
And his penis-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the problem really. It's a mortar, it's a mortar fever.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And his penis would break out into a rash and bleed if he had sex long enough.
ED LARSON
Ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ. God.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though, when everything in his body started falling apart, John tested again and came up positive, making John Holmes the first well-known person in the porn industry to be diagnosed with HIV. They say he was the first in the industry diagnosed with HIV but I am sure he was not the first. He was just the first they knew about.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he was the first that didn't go missing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they made him the first for the story itself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the porn industry did not make him the first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well according to Holmes' widow though, she believed that someone in the secret service injected John with an AIDS needle during a trip to Washington DC on the direct orders of Ronald Reagan in a bid to help destroy the porn industry from the inside out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know, honestly I would agree but it wasn't Ronald. It was Nancy. She's the one who does this. She's the one who had been doing that.
MARCUS PARKS
She had access to the needles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She made up AIDS. She invented it at the White House. Her, the CIA, John Kennedy who didn't die.
MARCUS PARKS
But regardless, and arguably John's most cowardly move yet, his company released a statement that his bad health was caused by colon cancer. He kept performing in films with full knowledge that he had HIV. He made 12 more movies.
ED LARSON
I heard about this, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
No, what a lunatic. It might be the worst thing he did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I don't know. It's between that and trafficking and the 15 year old girl.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's between those two things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really just kind of neck and neck.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the way he figured it, and he actually wrote this in his book as a defense, if his fellow performers didn't get AIDS from him, they were likely to get it from somebody else.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That doesn't make any...
MARCUS PARKS
Well he figured if he had it then everybody had it.
ED LARSON
It's very nihilistic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very selfish.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's just fucking justifying your own actions. But incredibly, to the best of my knowledge, maybe you know different, nobody in the industry contracted HIV from John Holmes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
ED LARSON
Come on.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean nobody came forward at the very least.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one came forward. No one has said that this was directly connected to it. But we don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
And he did have scenes with some, while he was positive, he had some scenes with Traci Lords.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, very famous people. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Very, very famous people. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Man, that's so crazy. Now do you think he got it from the gay porn?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I don't know.
ED LARSON
Do you think he got it from the straight porn?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
Actually no one knows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one knows.
MARCUS PARKS
It's kind of a mystery as to where he got it. But most likely yeah, the gay porn. The Private Life of John Holmes is probably where he got it.
ED LARSON
And we really think he was sober at this point too?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean by all accounts he was pretty sober.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, his wife said he was fine. You know what I mean? At that point.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even more insane than that is the fact that the porn industry completely denied the cause of John's death from AIDS related complications when it finally happened in a VA hospital in 1988.
ED LARSON
See, it was such a dirty fucking business, they probably just disappeared you.
MARCUS PARKS
If you had HIV?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or you walked away from it yourself. And they basically said get the living fuck out of here. It was a very cruel time for this.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But as John was laying on that deathbed, he was visited one last time by Detective Lange because Lange was still trying to get Eddie Nash for the Wonderland Murders. See, Boober, Scott Thorson-
ED LARSON
Love that name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Boober! Boober! Come here, Boober! It's again, pet.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he's a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's a little dog that looks like Liberace.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Terrifying.
ED LARSON
Is he still around?
MARCUS PARKS
Scott Thorson? I believe... He has to be dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I think he might still be alive.
ED LARSON
I feel like-
MARCUS PARKS
64 years young.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow!
ED LARSON
Yep, he's still doing it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My dear Scott.
ED LARSON
God, he should go on tour! Well he doesn't know how to play the piano. Get one of those ghost pianos!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can definitely identify a piano. That's a piano, that's a conga drum. Thanks, Scott.
MARCUS PARKS
Scott Thorson had made a deal with the police to testify in exchange for clemency on a drug charge. You'll remember Thorson was freebasing with Eddie Nash when Holmes was brought into Nash's house by his hair. And Thorson claimed that Eddie's bodyguard, Gregory Diles, was sent to the Wonderland house with John Holmes to get revenge. In this scenario, John probably covered the Wonderland Gang with the magnum while Gregory Diles beat them to death one by one. Or Diles met more of Nash's men at the scene. Either way, Diles and Holmes went to Wonderland together.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But of course John refused to get involved even at the end of his life. And he died a month after detective Lange's plea. Just before dying though, John made one last request to his wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was it to get a priest to come and help me with my way to heaven?
MARCUS PARKS
No. It was not that. He asked her to view his naked body right before it was rolled into the cremation chamber just so she could make sure that nobody had cut off his dick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is real.
MARCUS PARKS
And kept it for themselves.
ED LARSON
It sounds like it was about to fall off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Apparently, and this is corroborated by both Dawn and Sharon, John had a lifelong fear of someone cutting off his cock after his death as a keepsake, sideshow, or medical curiosity. Like they did with Rasputin's penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They thought they did.
MARCUS PARKS
Well thought they did. Yeah.
ED LARSON
I was gonna say they should have gave it its own coffin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That would be incredible. Its own tombstone! That was the only part of him that was successful. His penis was the only thing that worked in any way, shape, or form in his life.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the only thing that made people happy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Everything else was awful. But nobody touched the thing. And after the cremation, John's ashes were scattered out over the ocean. As far as Eddie Nash went, he and Gregory Diles were both tried in 1988 for the Wonderland Murders based on Scott Thorson's testimony, just six months after John's death. Both men however were found not guilty, which technically makes the Wonderland Murders an open case to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's one of the only cases we've ever covered that has a fucking... No, this is an unsolved case technically even though we kind of know what's going on.
MARCUS PARKS
Technically. We definitely know what happened.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this whole fucking story is just so fucking... I'm so glad it's again, I'm so glad it's not me.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what the fucking, the detective, what is it, Lange. He said like yeah, people fucking always act like these Wonderland Murders, it's like some fucking big mystery like it's aliens or Bigfoot or some shit like that. We know who fucking did it. We know fucking did it! It was fucking Eddie Nash! He's so mad about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually I was looking at some of this evidence, what if it's the Loch Ness Monster? Get outta here, Detective Creepy!
ED LARSON
Imagine the size of Diles' gloves that he wore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. They were baseball mitts.
ED LARSON
Yeah, garbage pans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Garbage pans. Well thank you so much, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you so much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you for doing this shit. Thank you guys so much for listening. This has been it, we did it. John Holmes and the Wonderland Murders. We're coming back next week with another fucking true crime series which we're super excited about.
MARCUS PARKS
More like historical true crime but like recent history. We're going back to the 70s for this shit. Can't fucking wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
This has been something that we've been waiting to do for a long time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah. Very excited for it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anything else?
ED LARSON
Murderfist show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right. Will you please come check out Murderfist? We are in Los Angeles, Dynasty Typewriter, September 22nd and 23rd. Right now I believe the 23rd has still got tickets.
ED LARSON
The 22nd has got tickets, the 23rd sold out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just check it out, Dynasty typewriter, Los Angeles. 20 years in the making.
ED LARSON
20 fucking years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna see a bunch of dudes that are not used to fucking slam dancing anymore doing that. Literally we have to all stretch and we gotta really take care of ourselves leading up to it.
ED LARSON
My poor knees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah. You want me to do the worm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do.
ED LARSON
I don't think it's gonna happen but I might try it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't want you to.
ED LARSON
It is the last sketch maybe. So maybe even if I hurt myself, the show is over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we'll just call the show.
MARCUS PARKS
The show's over but life continues.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but it's a dumb shadow of a life.
MARCUS PARKS
We still want you around. No Dogs In Space, Amon Düül II Part 2 is out this week. We continue on our series in experimental rock. We're gonna be talking about one of the fucking coolest, heaviest, hardest psychedelic albums ever put out, Yeti. Eddie, you gotta fucking listen to Yeti.
ED LARSON
Please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you'll love it.
MARCUS PARKS
You're gonna love it. You're gonna love Yeti.
ED LARSON
I love all things YETI.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
The coolers, the fucking everything.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course check out the No Dogs In Space livestream every other Monday on twitch. tv/lastpodcastnetwork.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And check out all our new programming, we got it all over. We're gonna have stuff next week. Tears of a Clown is coming back, Good Pud, we're doing a bunch of stuff, we're really excited.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course The Brighter Side.
ED LARSON
The Brighter Side!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
The Brighter Side, one of the greatest podcasts about positivity you'll ever fucking hear. It's better than Michelle Obama's fucking positivity podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I like this.
ED LARSON
I'll tell you this, this bitch comes for my gig?! I'm the positivity podcast guy, Michelle Obama tries to step in my fucking ring!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a good way to end.
ED LARSON
She's going down!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm really happy.
MARCUS PARKS
This is perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm always glad we end with a good old fashioned anti Michelle Obama scream.
MARCUS PARKS
It's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's great. All right.
ED LARSON
The Brighter Side with Amber Nelson. Please check it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Bye everybody.
ED LARSON
Bye!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
ED LARSON
Hail yourselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. Sure, wow, yeah. Sure, you can do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I'd like you to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye!
ED LARSON
Bye!