HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right. You ready?
MARCUS PARKS
I'm ready, man. I'm fucking so fucking ready.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! We are closing this shit down. I feel the heat.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel the heat. I feel the melting of the gas mask already.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's just nice to finally be here.
ED LARSON
I just wanna go to a bank and shoot some people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I'd be great at it. Is that weird?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ever since we started I've been like this actually sounds kind of fun.
ED LARSON
Yeah, these guys are smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They all get to go do that in a group. Because our buddies, we don't do jack shit if it's not about work.
MARCUS PARKS
It's true.
ED LARSON
We used to rob banks all the time!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. We need to get back to simple friendship.
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. Getting back to simple friendship is Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, no. Revolutionary Matiti. Matiti Mawinda. Yeah, that is me. I'm ready here. I'm holding my tits, ready for justice. Honestly I have ingested enough leftist ideas thanks to the SLA that I've given up on deodorant. Fucking got you! I'm supporting you, it's fine.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Yes, I have painted myself today in honor of Teko.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You guys can't see. And I just want to say thank you, Eddie, because I was doing it but the makeup was really irritating my skin. But for those of you that just listen to the audio format, know that Eddie is in full SLA makeup.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I call it.
ED LARSON
Oh absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Incognito.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. This is not blackface.
ED LARSON
Yeah no, I'm just going down to Compton, gonna go chill in a house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. He is just trying to fit in.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left Patty Hearst, she along with Teko and Yolanda Harris were in a motel room in Anaheim watching live footage of an army of police officers surrounding a yellow stucco house in Compton. Inside that house was the rest of the SLA: Gelina, Zoya, Gabi, Fahizah, Kahjoh, and their leader Cinque Mtume.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Each name dumber than the last. It isn't getting better. I do love, I was watching all of the footage, like we have a lot of the running footage. We'll show you some today of the day when the shootout happened.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it is really funny because all the cops said yeah, yeah, yeah, we were coming around here, we kind of had an inkling that maybe the SLA was in the neighborhood. But then every single person came up to us to say the white people with the guns are over there.
ED LARSON
Get them out of our neighborhood.
MARCUS PARKS
See Cin had bought his way into this house with $100 after he received a dead drop from Teko Harris saying that the cops were on the SLA's trail. And Cin had spent the entire day drinking Boones Farm and telling numerous people walking in and out of the house exactly who he and these five white people were. So when a concerned mother saw an-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is my make evidence against me juice. I tell you what, fella, what I like to do is I like to strap on five or six Boones Farms and I like to give myself out.
ED LARSON
I'm here for you.
MARCUS PARKS
So when a concerned mother saw an LAPD cruiser, she flagged them down and told them that a black guy, a white guy, and several white women were camping out in a house on 54th street and Compton Avenue, bragging about being revolutionaries and making bombs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're bragging about it? Let's show them how the LAPD develops bombs.
MARCUS PARKS
See the cops already knew that the SLA was in that neighborhood because Yolanda Harris had left behind a parking ticket when their van was ditched after the shootout at Mel's Sporting Goods. So the officer already had a photo spread of the SLA ready to go. So after the mother identified six members of the SLA as the ones hanging out in the house on 54th, the LAPD prepared for war. Before the SLA even knew what was happening, over 100 LAPD officers surrounded the house around 5 pm on May 17th, 1974. They called out 12 times over a bullhorn for the SLA to surrender, all while a slew of TV reporters speculated live from the scene as to whether or not Patty Hearst was still inside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was very exciting.
ED LARSON
Liquor stores were getting robbed left and right I'm sure with all the cops so busy.
MARCUS PARKS
But after the 12th demand, the LAPD figured enough was enough and fired canisters of tear gas into the house. A member of the SLA quickly grabbed the canister and threw it back outside. And after putting on their gas masks, the SLA loaded their guns and settled in for the final showdown that they'd always wanted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guys, we're finally gonna get killed by the police! Isn't this incredible? Amazing! I feel like I'm finally on 8H. I'm ready for my premiere, Lorne!
MARCUS PARKS
This is actual footage from the gunfight that erupted as soon as the SLA opened fire. Play it loud.
LPOTL
(audio of gunshots)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn. It is crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a huge gunfight.
MARCUS PARKS
Massive.
ED LARSON
I can't believe so many more people didn't die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. Now for over an hour the SLA fired in 30 second intervals with automatic weapons and shotguns, while the SWAT teams laid down heavy repressive fire to prevent the SLA from shooting with any accuracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I say it's always been one of my fantasies-
ED LARSON
To be killed by the police?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, no, no. I want to be celebrated by everyone. But I've always wanted to, when a tear can canister comes in, to kick it out the window. That's like one of my favorite moments from anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I've always wanted to do it.
ED LARSON
Because if you pick it up with your hand, it's super hot, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it can be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you just gotta grab your revolutionary flag and you pick it up and throw it out.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah, a little handkerchief.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now meanwhile people in the surrounding houses laid down on their floors as soon as the gunshots started to avoid stray bullets. Because this was a small house in a row of houses that were all very close together. Newsmen meanwhile were reporting from the scene and they actually felt SLA bullets whizzing by their heads. One dude was holding a camera canister and the bullet hit the fucking camera canister and bounced off and landed on his shirt sleeve.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the way it sounded too, the cops rolled up and they surrounded and they really were saying like we think Patty Hearst is inside essentially, send everybody out. Let's not go through. But the way they responded was over the fucking top.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The SLA just started fucking doing automatic gunfire as soon as they were outside. And they're not good at it.
ED LARSON
Cops get super mad when you shoot at them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like not chill with it. You know who does as well? Comedians. It's a pet peeve of mine to be shot at.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in all, the LAPD fired more rounds during their shootout with the SLA than they ever had in any assault previously done. They fired more than 9000 bullets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
The SLA however also had an incredible amount of ammunition at their disposal, an estimated 4000 bullets fired. And their ferocity forced the LAPD to bring in even more officers. Here's police scanner footage of the cops desperately calling for backup.
LPOTL
(audio of police) We're gonna need your assistance now. We need all the gas that you can round up from Parker Center or any geographical division and we need it down here code three, as fast as you can get it down. In addition to that, we need all the ammo that we've got in the safe. We're taking automatic fire front and back from this location, they're much better armed than we are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, I can already hear the demand for more audience. It's absolutely wonderful to hear that this is more hullabaloo than was inspired when I played hooker with a limp in Sweet Chariot.
MARCUS PARKS
But incredibly, even though there were over, I don't know, there was nearly 15,000 rounds fired during this gun battle, not a single person outside of the house was killed or even wounded. Now we don't really know how it happened but somehow after the gun battle had gone on for almost an hour, the yellow stucco house where the SLA made their last stand caught fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do have a theory. I got two theories is that well it's very similar to the ye old Waco scenario.
ED LARSON
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe there's something going on there. I do think possibly one thing, old house, shitty house, you throw a couple of tear gas canisters in there. It could very well spark a fire and it could blow up the whole place.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also rumors that there were gas canisters inside.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See they said that according to one of the police officers that I thought was interesting, I thought was a clue, was that they had some form of C-4, they had light chunks of explosives. So what they were doing was like they heard, apparently in the background you can hear a lot of the firefight. You hear a boom-boom, boom-boom. Which is these like essentially explosions that they're setting off. So they might have set themselves on fire.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Also like you gotta imagine you're firing thousands of rounds out of a rifle, it's gonna be very hot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
ED LARSON
And you just put that shit on a shitty carpet or a drape, it could just go up.
MARCUS PARKS
That's very true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they're all bad revolutionaries so you can hear it's like... You know how in every old movie they'd always call for, if someone got shot or like had a health emergency, you just hear like-
ED LARSON
Medic?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get me get me boiling water! It's like that thing. Where like I need boiling water!
ED LARSON
Hot-hot-hot-hot-hot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I could just see like one of them, like Kahjoh being like I am not supposed to watch the pot! I know that that's an eternal old rule of age since the beginning of time but the longer I'm on the spot, it's not boiling, Cinque! What am I supposed to do? We're all bleeding to death! Save me, Black man!
MARCUS PARKS
But even when the flames began jumping to the nearby houses, firefighters couldn't come close because the SLA continued their personal war against the LAPD even as the house burned down around them. The cops made one final plea for the SLA to come out before the house fell down on the SLA's heads but were only met with one last burst of defiant gunfire. And when the fire became too intense in the front, Cin and the others retreated to the rear of the house. They pulled up some floorboards and curled up with each other in the crawlspace. As they waited for the inevitable, the fire ignited the remainder of the ammunition, creating one last cacophony of noise from the ever verbose SLA. As far as how the SLA got a hold of so much ammunition, if anyone's thinking conspiratorially, remember they just robbed a fucking bank.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They had a lot of cash on hand to go buy ammunition. And they weren't spending money on anything else.
ED LARSON
Yeah, there were stockpiling for a long time too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were looking for it. That was like one thing I realized as they were going, they were picking up piece by piece by piece. And if they are a CIA op, they had long abandoned their leaders and were now in a free rein area.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they were not getting a steady supply of ammunition.
MARCUS PARKS
But when the fire finally reached the back of the house where the SLA was taking refuge, Fahizah tried making a run for it by sneaking out of the crawlspace in the backyard so she could move to the next house over. Gabi came out behind her but when she saw a police officer stationed behind the house, Gabi opened fire and a single returning shot hit her right between the eyes, killing her instantly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I told her to stop drawing that ironic target on her forehead. I said there's nothing ironic about it unless you're shopping at the Walmart!
MARCUS PARKS
Fahizah returned fire as well but caught two bullets in the back, severing her spine. Gelina reached out and pulled Gabi's corpse back under the crawl space beneath the flames. And together the SLA let the flames take them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just to feel like that's the dumbest way to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I'd rather get shot.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what the coroner said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He said that he had never in his life seen people behave as the SLA behaved in the face of flames. According to the coroner's report, the concentration of smoke in the lungs of Kahjoh, Gelina, Zoya, and Cin suggested that in their dying moments they were actually breathing in flames as their gas masks melted onto their faces.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look! Cin, look! I'm getting a char! Look! My dreams, they're coming true!
MARCUS PARKS
The greatest concentration of smoke however was in Cin's lungs, suggesting that he was the last to die. In his final moments, Cinque Mtume, aka Donald DeFreeze pressed a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger, ending his reign as the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I would also say straight up what he was always planning to do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But they were all planning. I think one person, one writer put it that Cin committed suicide in a sort of Hitlerian ecstasy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so, yeah. I could see the Hitlerian ecstasy which I've only approached once or twice before. And it's a special place to be. It's very confident.
ED LARSON
Good old Gabi Braun.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile back in the hotel room in Anaheim, Teko and Yolanda Harris were in hysterics as they watched their comrades die live on television. Through tears, Teko repeated over and over again that this was all his fault, which it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
And how he wished he was there and had died with them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So do we all.
ED LARSON
It's also kind of Yolanda's fault.
MARCUS PARKS
It's also, yeah-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so!
MARCUS PARKS
Oh no, no, it was a joint fuck up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yolanda however said that being killed would have served no purpose and Cin would want them to live and fight on for the cause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually the exact opposite of what Cin wanted. Cin kept saying I want you to die. He literally was saying we're all gonna die doing this. He said it many times. That was the point!
ED LARSON
It's kind of a shitty game plan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah, Eddie. Because there's no follow up. Because you don't get to see the revolution. It's not gonna happen!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The propaganda didn't make any sense because he was saying at the same time he's like yeah, this is gonna be the Symbionese nation one day. But also we're all gonna die in the making of the Symbionese nation. But we're also going to be the leaders. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If I'm seeing Blue Oyster Cult, right, and there's not a single member of Blue Oyster Cult left to see or the OG lineup, right. Like I'm not gonna go, I'm gonna find that out, I'm not gonna go, right. If you tell me this whole new country that was started by this whole group of guys, right, but none of them lived? I mean like I think that's a loss.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think if everyone's dead and there's nobody there to do, it just doesn't seem... Maybe I'm asking for too much.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I think their idea was that they would die in the revolution-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They would kick it all off.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But they would kick off the whole thing and everyone else would reap the rewards. But they all had a death wish.
ED LARSON
We all know that if you shoot at cops, you're gonna die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're not happy about it. They're gonna make sure. And if you don't die then, they're gonna just keep trying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're gonna keep trying to kill you. But also with these revolutionary leaders, I also think that they forget is that no one wants a thrift one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one wants a pre-owned revolutionary group.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They want their own.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But while Teko and Yolanda were in tears in the next room, Patty Hearst had locked herself in the bathroom in a panic. She realized that had she been there, she would have died too. Everything had played out exactly as Cin had prophesied. And from the way the authorities had cornered them to the SLA's inevitable violent deaths. But while Patty was glad that most of the SLA was dead, she suddenly realized that the only ones left were Teko and Yolanda Harris, the ones she feared and hated the most. And she knew that their revolutionary zeal would only be intensified by the deaths of their comrades. But perhaps most importantly, Patty had noticed that during the entire saga that had played out for them live on television, the cops never once called out for the SLA to release Patty Hearst. In fact her name was never mentioned at all by the police.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they weren't super careful with the invasion either.
MARCUS PARKS
Nope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At the original house.
MARCUS PARKS
So by the logic that Patty was operating upon at this point, that meant that she was indeed considered to be the common criminal that Attorney General Saxby had labeled her as. As she put it, her fear of the police outweighed her hatred for the SLA because she at least knew that as long as she kept up the act of the revolutionary, Teko and Yolanda probably wouldn't kill her. Therefore the time she would spend with the Harrises between the shootout and her eventual capture would come to be known as the missing year, where Patty would directly or indirectly be involved with jaunts across the country, multiple bombings, two bank robberies, and one more murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. This is the part in the movie where even I remember being like whoa, it's still happening?!
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was like holy shit. Yeah. Like this is why this is a four episode series.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The missing year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This missing year is obviously the main sticking point of why Patty Hearst got any jail time at all.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which I think is probably okay. I think that it was good that she got a little jail time. I'mma sum up at the end.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll talk about it later, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this does remind me of... Because Jesus had a missing year. Do you know about that? About how Jesus apparently-
ED LARSON
He had a bunch of missing years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, like 12-33.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he left and he came back. And apparently during that time period that was when he went to go invent pegging. Did you know that Jesus Christ invented pegging?
ED LARSON
You know what? Now that you say it, I feel like I've heard it before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Father McMahon was telling me about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Crazy, right?
ED LARSON
He was like do you want to be like Jesus?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All the fathers knew, yeah. Very strange. And then he died by the ultimate pegging.
MARCUS PARKS
Now we're well aware that people are skeptical about Patty's claims that she was not a full- fledged member of the SLA, especially after she rescued Teko and Yolanda at Mel's Sporting Goods. But Patty's claims about her state of mind can be backed up by psychological studies involving American prisoners of war. See if you'll remember from our-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, POWs are worth something!
MARCUS PARKS
See if you'll remember from our MK Ultra series, American authorities were baffled by the fact that so many American servicemen were not only cooperating with communist forces during the Korean War but they were still spouting communist propaganda even after they'd come home. Pilots were coming back saying like yeah, I'd gone over to Korea and I'd engaged in chemical warfare. I dropped bombs over Korea that had killed hundreds of thousands of people. It never happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it didn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
At all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just believed it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now that phenomenon had been partially responsible for the creation of the MK Ultra program because American authorities were convinced that this wild change of belief in their soldiers had been achieved through advanced Soviet psychological torture techniques.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because how could you turn against America? We've got John Wayne, licorice.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got...
MARCUS PARKS
Licorice is more of a Swedish thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're right. Grand Canyon. You can't be mad at the Grand Canyon.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't defect against tits.
ED LARSON
I mean who cares if all your friends got killed around you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I mean you just can't defect. But they really did think that it required a superhuman, an entire new method of destroying the human brain and putting it back together. But it's actually kind of weirdly easy to fuck up the human.
ED LARSON
She was violently kidnapped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing. Let's get into it. In reality this phenomenon concerning the soldiers, it was a result of a fairly simple form of torture that was extremely similar to what Patty endured at the hands of the SLA. And as a bonus was later used as a handbook for the psychopaths at Guantanamo Bay during the early days of the Iraq War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're always learning. Again, it's a good lesson. Never stop learning. Always be a student.
MARCUS PARKS
See in 1957, a sociologist named Albert Biderman developed a table that illustrated the methods used to break hardened American soldiers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's called tits, wieners, balls. Show them tits, they can't get at the tits, get angry, right? They fight against their ropes trying to get at the tits because they're soldiers, right, desperate for tits. Number one. Two, fuck up their wiener real bad. Balls, hit them with a hammer as well.
ED LARSON
Maybe a little fire. Now you seem to have forgotten the asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see the asshole, you may be surprised, is that eventually the more you torture the asshole, the more they begin to enjoy it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this guy called his chart Biderman's Chart of Coercion. And at the core of his theory were the three Ds: dependency, debility, and dread. During the Korean War, Korean and Chinese interrogators had used isolation, threats, monopolization of perception, degradation, and occasional indulgences on American POWs to change their perception of reality. These were many of the same techniques that the SLA had used on Patty. In addition to that, they'd also used so-called thought reform tactics used in Maoist China that were designed to break down a person's worldview and remake it into what their interrogators wanted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really not that hard.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because if you're in a group dynamic already and you're trying to make it in a group dynamic... So like when you're a prisoner, we talk about make it, meaning survive. Meaning you were trying to get out of this scenario. It's not about being a good soldier, it's not about being a good American. It's about being an alive human being. And so somebody like this, it's kind of crazy just how quickly if you want everybody to fit in in a little circle, once everybody starts digging in on everybody's purity of thought-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's actually an extremely easy way to get somebody to fall in line.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And I don't like to get too serious about it but you see it with battered women all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
They start like taking up the ideals of the person who's battering them.
MARCUS PARKS
It's extremely interesting you bring that up, Biderman's Chart of Coercion is actually also applied to domestic violence victims. Well chief among these tactics were the criticism/self- criticism sessions, also called struggle sessions which were modeled after Maoist re-education campaigns. In these hours long sessions, members of the SLA would heavily criticize a member, then that member would have to heavily criticize themselves. Patty Hearst in particular endured the worst of these sessions day after day, week after week, month after month, until her view of reality and her view of herself completely changed. So by the time of the shootout, 104 days after she'd been kidnapped, Patty believed that the authorities were going to shoot her down like a dog just like they'd done with the rest of the SLA. And she fully believed that even if she did make it past the authorities, her family no longer wanted her back. Furthermore, Patty believed that if Teko and Yolanda Harris caught her trying to escape, they would undoubtedly kill her. So her view of reality especially after the shootout was that her only chance of survival would be to go along with whatever the Harrises said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it really tracks and I think that if she was in that house, she would have been very much so killed by the police. I think that she would have ran from a burning building. Personally I think that she probably would have left if she wasn't been immediately shot as she was running away.
ED LARSON
Well we saw that she... Who was the one who got shot in the head?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gabi.
MARCUS PARKS
Gabi, yeah.
ED LARSON
Gabi, she didn't get shot until she fired. Right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was her job to get shot in the head. It always was.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, I mean they may have had... I mean I'm sure they did have instructions like take every woman alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like men, who gives a shit? But take every woman alive because one of them might be Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's bad PR.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Patty's family meanwhile were devastated by the shootout in Compton because they had no idea if their daughter was one of the five charred corpses being hauled out from underneath the ruins of the house where the SLA had made their final stand. But as the Hearsts watched the news reports from the wreckage on that first night, who else should they see on their screen but Steven fucking Weed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Coincidentally Weed had been in southern California when the shootout began, visiting a friend in San Diego. As soon as he heard the news about the shootout, he hopped in a car and sped north to the scene of the crime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If there's smoke, there's weed!
MARCUS PARKS
But as Steve asked police on the scene if Patty's body was one of the five found-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me look! This is cool, I've never seen one of these.
MARCUS PARKS
A reporter stuck a microphone in his face on live TV and asked him what he felt at this moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, so first of all big ups to all y'all hanging out here in the heat. Big ups. Hope we got water, hope everybody's got some buddies and stuff hanging out. I just want to kind of put it out there, DJ Babe Vigoda is gonna be doing an after after thing after this shit. So we're all gonna be meeting up at Scrunch if you guys wanna come out. But honestly this whole shit's a fucking bummer.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And her dad sucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Her dad's a fucking bitch. And I'm telling it now, dude! Come for me, Randy!
MARCUS PARKS
Speaking of which, on TV he actually didn't respond. But I can only imagine what the Hearsts felt at that moment considering how they'd already pegged Weed as a camera hog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I could cut to the actual video which is like the microphone going to his face and him just going like... You know like that look of stoned and not knowing what to do.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact Randy Hearst's final opinion on Steven Weed can be summed up in a quote we found in one of our sources. Quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can see why Patty would join the SLA. It must be exciting for her to go to bed every night with three rifles and sleeping with hand grenades and getting up planning the next day's action. It's a hell of a lot better than getting up every morning and having to look at Steven Weed. Randolph Apperson Hearst, 1974. That is a real quote from him.
ED LARSON
You're so cheeky, Randy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes. And as I remember, I went down there and I spoke to several revolutionaries and I was almost changed. It's absolutely incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the shootout, Teko, Yolanda, and Patty returned to San Francisco and laid low because the Los Angeles district attorney had announced that the three of them were wanted on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery, assault to commit murder, and a dozen other charges all stemming from what happened at Mel's. Because remember after Mel's they kidnapped two people, they stole cars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. There was a whole rundown.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a whole Bonnie and Clyde sequence.
ED LARSON
You can go ahead and say attempted murder when you fired the gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Assault to commit murder.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But after every other contact in Yolanda's revolutionary address book in San Francisco rejected them, the person who eventually helped and would form the foundation of the Symbionese Liberation Army mark two was the person at the very bottom of Yolanda's revolutionary contact list. Her name was Kathy Soliah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like I know this person. You know the person that's like (whispering) I could call Sylvia. It's the very last, it's like you don't want them involved at all, this person's a problem.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pain in the ass.
ED LARSON
We can get into the club but is it worth him talking to me all night?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Kathy was a close friend of the now deceased SLA member Gelina Atwood. They'd worked as scantily clad waitresses by day before the revolution but by night they were both serious actors. Remember she was in that boring fucking play. Was it Gumby Galunga?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, not Gumby Galumba. It was called like-
MARCUS PARKS
Horace Applebottom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was one of those, being like take the vase when you leave! Like old shows. It's like Why DO Tigers Wear Paper Neckties.
MARCUS PARKS
Kathy however had been considered too flaky to be trusted with underground activities. She wanted to be in it so bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Say it again that she was considered too flaky to be a member of an underground revolutionary group. Which I believe is the political equivalent of actionized flakes. Right? Isn't the idea that you don't fit into normal society? Like she couldn't show up to enough things on time to be a terrorist.
ED LARSON
I think she might have wanted to live.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing is that Kathy who was often described as an intense character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By boring people!
MARCUS PARKS
She'd always been disappointed that Gelina had never invited her to join the SLA. And she'd been crushed when the group had gone underground without her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You were always trying to destroy me. Yeah, I'll help you now.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Kathy had been reported as being a prominent speaker at a memorial rally for the slain members of the SLA-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Each one of them was my friend. And here's why this is about me.
MARCUS PARKS
Teko and Yolanda decided that they really had no other choice but to go with yet another drama kid. So after meeting at a drive-in movie theater that was showing a softcore porno called Teacher's Pet, Kathy told the SLA that a man named Jack Scott might be able to help them escape the post shootout heat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could probably call Jack. That's what you want. Who knew that the teacher's pet would indeed be a young woman? You'd assume it would be some kind of hermit crab.
ED LARSON
I was hoping it would be a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shut up, white man.
MARCUS PARKS
Jack Scott was a so-called radical sports writer who had written a number of books about Black athletes getting ripped off in organized sports.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, this has been going on fucking forever.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just like the same shit.
MARCUS PARKS
And Kathy said that Jack ran a sort of underground railroad for political fugitives. In fact Jack, who was also white, he openly compared himself to Harriet Tubman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at my babushka.
MARCUS PARKS
So Kathy said if anyone was gonna get Patty and the Harrises out of San Francisco safe, it was gonna be Jack Scott.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't run what you'd call an underground railroad, it's more of a downstairs choo choo train. It's a little bit more fun, it's a little bit more relaxing. Serving hot cocoa going all the way to the North Pole.
ED LARSON
I call it the tubway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The tubway. That should have been it since the beginning. It should have been the tubway.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Jack had just rented a farmhouse in Pennsylvania so he could write another book. So after he agreed to help the surviving SLA members, he came up with a plan to take them east to the farmhouse and say that they were his research assistants. Additionally they'd even have a babysitter of sorts on the farm who could run errands. Now Patty and the Harrises were obviously too recognizable to fly. So Jack arranged for them to be driven out to the east coast disguised as joggers. Because as Jack put it, no one would expect joggers of being revolutionaries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And no one would expect joggers to drive. Like what's the point of dressing them as joggers to sit inside of a car and be driven?
ED LARSON
I would have said park ranger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A couple of clowns! Honestly you could have put them in full clown makeup. No one would have said anything.
ED LARSON
If anything they would have said look at those clowns!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, if you're stopping for a fucking pit stop between Scottsdale and Amarillo, like people are gonna notice the people decked out in Adidas from head to toe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they're just sitting there doing them standing up on the... Trying to keep their pulse rate going. Just jogging through, just jogging.
MARCUS PARKS
Once they arrived at the farmhouse in Pennsylvania, they found that the so-called babysitter that Jack had promised was another revolutionary fugitive named Wendy Yoshimura. Wendy had been born in a Japanese internment camp during WWII and her family had moved to the ruins of Hiroshima after the war before returning to California 10 years later.
ED LARSON
So she loved America.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. That's what I was about to say is like her getting radicalized, not a big jump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Really wasn't a big jump. She joined a group called the Revolutionary Army with her boyfriend, a guy named Willie Brandt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of Willies in this story.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of Willies in this story. And also the interesting thing at this time is that the leader of Germany at this time during the whole when Germany was dealing with their own white terrorist problem, the Baader-Meinhof group, his name was also Willy Brandt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
ED LARSON
Good thing he didn't get in trouble for this.
MARCUS PARKS
But much like the SLA, the Revolutionary Army was not an army at all. In fact it was pretty much just Wendy Yoshimura, Willie Brandt, and a guy named Mike Bortin. But even so, Wendy said that their group bombed banks, nuclear laboratories, police cars, and other political targets throughout the early 70s. By her estimation, they were responsible for at least 40 bombings over a two year period. These bombings however were designed to be symbolic and no one was ever hurt or killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Were they on a stand up tour? Like what do they mean it was symbolic?
MARCUS PARKS
It was symbolic. Think of it like Fight Club, they're Fight Club.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what are they exploding?
MARCUS PARKS
They're just setting off bombs in front of police stations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But just in front of them?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's the same thing The Weather Underground did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but they killed themselves.
ED LARSON
That was an accident!
MARCUS PARKS
That was accident. But no, it was the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If they're just blowing up bombs on the street, it could be for any other business on the street. What if you're fighting UPS?
MARCUS PARKS
You know what it's for. You're being obtuse. But Willie Brandt, the leader of the Revolutionary Army, he had stored his explosives in a rented garage in Berkeley. And when Brandt, Mike Bortin, and another friend went there to get more material, the cops were waiting. Wendy heard about the arrest on a police scanner, so she called Willie's friend Jack Scott. And Jack Scott sent her to the same rented farmhouse in Pennsylvania where he sent the surviving members of the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it sounds like you're gonna have to take the downstairs choo choo.
ED LARSON
And remember when you leave, strip the beds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you can go ahead and you put them in the washing machine please.
ED LARSON
Fill the dishwasher.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Turn off all the lights and also you can pay my taxes. I've left a couple of forms out that you can fill. That'd be great.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as we know however, Wendy and the SLA were the only people that Jack Scott, the supposed white Harriet Tubman, ever saved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I'm ever gonna call him.
MARCUS PARKS
White Harriet Tubman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
White Tub!
MARCUS PARKS
Now Patty, Teko, Yolanda, and Wendy Yoshimura were soon moved to a one bedroom farmhouse, formerly a creamery, where they spent a tedious summer bickering, fighting, talking, and sitting around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just yeah, this is why again in the movie, it's boring.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it was a theory that our friend Mike Lawrence told me about long ago is that the movie always sucks when it goes to the farm.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As soon as fucking... Remember Looper?
MARCUS PARKS
Looper!
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Looper was incredible until they went to the farm. Fucking Looper. The Avengers. Walking Dead season two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like fucking if you are a screenwriter, stay away from the farm!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know you want everyone to talk and that's how you get exposition going but any other location.
MARCUS PARKS
Any other location.
ED LARSON
I mean when they went to the farm in Logan, that was pretty cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But that was... Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was the beginning of the movie. It's when they go to-
ED LARSON
It was in the middle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's when they go to the farm in the third act.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's when you're like I'm gonna die here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So now we're in the second act and they were briefly on the farm. Now since Teko had become the general field marshal of the SLA now that Cin was dead, he continued their regimen of calisthenics and combat drills. He even tried bossing Wendy Yoshimura around, criticizing both her taste in books and her lack of get up and go when it came to training for the revolution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because maybe you don't understand what the Black man's gotta go through in this country, Wendy! Not like me, old Teko.
MARCUS PARKS
Well his argument actually was that he would tell her like since you're not white, you have more of a responsibility, that you need to be one of those third world leaders that comes in and leads people and you're just sitting here like you're on vacation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I need to start saying this to random people I see. I like that idea. You're not white, you need to lead the revolution!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's gonna work out fucking great for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Excuse me, ma'am. I know you're not white! I need you to take over!
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though, Wendy told Teko that she didn't care that he was the head of the SLA because she wasn't in the SLA. She didn't wanna be in the SLA and she was only there taking care of them because she was keeping a promise to Jack Scott.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wendy's very cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Wendy's cool as shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, she's a badass. She's kind of my favorite so far.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, she's like genuinely, you could just see her like smoking and just going I'm not in the SLA, I don't want to be in the SLA.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's just like (stuttering).
MARCUS PARKS
But a big part of why the remaining members of the SLA were sequestered on the farm was so a book could be written about the history of the SLA and their philosophy. And before long, Jack Scott arrived with an old radical friend from his Berkeley days to help write that book. Now this unattractive, overweight man with long stringy hair did have a PhD from an ivy league university. But his biggest claim to fame was that while he was doing academic study in London, he'd been arrested for taking a shit on a picture of Queen Elizabeth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, I showed them all the power of intellectual protest.
ED LARSON
I'm gonna change the color of her pearl necklace.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. See I made it a bunch of brown rounds. I was promptly removed.
MARCUS PARKS
But despite this ignoble distinction, this man was tapped to write the story of the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he's the right man for the job.
MARCUS PARKS
All of this would be told in question and answer form. But the big hitch in the story came when the SLA tried rationalizing the techniques they'd used to convert Patty into a revolutionary. The writer was shocked when he was told that Patty had been locked in the closet for two months. But Teko tried explaining it away by saying yeah but it was a big closet.
ED LARSON
It certainly was not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it specifically wasn't.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it was very, very small.
ED LARSON
Slightly bigger than a pantry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Furthermore when it came time for Patty to answer her questions, she did so in a flat, obviously depressed tone. She's just trying to make it through the fucking day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you know when you're trying to not answer questions. You know when you're like in the middle of a fight with a loved one but then you ask just normal sort of practical question and you have to answer it? But you've been just fighting but then you have to go like oh well the dog's gotta go to the grooming at 11:30! You know what I mean? It's like that style.
ED LARSON
Yeah but also she should just be at spring break. Like I imagine she's horribly depressed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she's 20.
MARCUS PARKS
No, she is. She's horribly depressed. She's 90 lbs. She goes entire days without talking to anybody when she's on the farm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
These tapes in their original form never saw the light of day. And Patty believed that her obviously diminished capacity was why Teko never allowed the writer to take the tapes with him. Well the way she put it, anyone who heard the tapes would have a hard time believing that Patty was sincere when she talked about how she had been proud to participate in the Hibernia Bank robbery or that she had not been kidnapped but had been rescued from her bourgeois life by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I find it interesting that Teko didn't make her run it over and over again like Cinque. You can kind of see the passion's gone. Not for lack of trying but you could just see that was like... What Cinque would have done was that he would have drilled her and made her do it again and again and again. And you can kind of just be like Teko, just be like you didn't do any of this right!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
None of this is right!
ED LARSON
I can't believe we're longing for the days of Cinque.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But Teko also didn't like how he sounded, quite possibly because he didn't sound like much of a revolutionary, meaning he didn't sound Black. Remember Teko's from fucking Indiana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the more interviews that Teko, Yolanda, and Patty did, the more Teko came to believe that their host Jack Scott was more interested in publishing the SLA book than in actually helping the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are you talking about, my brother? There's no possible way. All right now, just sit down now, I have some chitlins a-stirrin' and I got some greens a-bubblin'.
MARCUS PARKS
Giving into paranoia, Teko had formulated a scenario in which Jack Scott would turn in the SLA anonymously. Then after the inevitable shootout in which Teko, Yolanda, and Patty would die, Jack could then take the tapes and publish the SLA book himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a great idea.
MARCUS PARKS
So Teko decided that Jack Scott and his wife Micki both had to die. Teko's plan was to wait until Jack and Micki Scott were at the farm by themselves. Then he would take them for a walk in the woods, murder them, and bury their bodies where they fell. But perhaps sensing something was amiss, Jack and Micki never again showed up to the farm together. Teko declared that there was too much incriminating evidence on those tapes against the three of them should they ever be arrested, so he was going to transcribe the tapes himself and give the transcripts over once he believed it was safe to do so.
ED LARSON
Yeah because there was no other evidence at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Perhaps not so coincidentally, Jack and Micki soon announced that everyone's time on the farm was over because the Scotts were moving to Portland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we're moving upstairs. Let's go, everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
So wearing the same jogging clothes they'd worn to escape east, Patty and the Harrises were driven back west.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Specifically don't run. All right? I don't want you to appear parched. But I find this interesting because it's very similar to how Patty sort of ghosted her way out where it's like they realized all of this was going to shit. The writing was so hard on the wall.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Teko was like just so bad at this. He's just bad at being a villain. And so he probably openly seemed so extremely suspicious. And then once he took the tapes, they're like all right, now this is all...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're a lost cause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But since the Bay Area was still too hot, the remaining members of the SLA decided to settle in nearby Sacramento where they would recruit members for the second iteration of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're coming back! It's a reboot!
MARCUS PARKS
Now once team Teko returned from California, they got back in contact with the woman who had introduced them to Jack Scott, Kathy Soliah, and it was Kathy Soliah who would basically replenish the ranks of the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I knew you'd come crawling back to me.
MARCUS PARKS
See Kathy came from a close knit family and her little sister Josephine did pretty much whatever her big sister did. And their brother Steve wasn't much different. Therefore all three Soliah siblings joined the SLA and Kathy also brought along her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore. Now Kathy and the rest of the new recruits thought that the SLA had focused too much on action and not enough on fundamentals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Finally someone's saying fucking something about the reading! No one has said anything this whole fucking time! And now the left wing shit which is all about the reading, it has finally arrived.
ED LARSON
Also none of these guys got African names.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not yet!
MARCUS PARKS
No, they didn't. Well they got like code names but they were just regular because they weren't... Actually SLA mark two, like they're not great but they're not the fucking morons that SLA mark one was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they became more of a genuine, they were trying to become more of like a quote unquote "genuine ultra left political group" and then it just was too late.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean they said that more people hadn't rallied to the SLA's cause because their propaganda and philosophy didn't make any goddamn sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Mostly the new members took issue with the idea that only a Black or so-called third world person could lead them, saying we're all white and there's nothing we can do to deny it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if we find magic beans? A goose! A goose, it gives wishes! A genie in a lamp. Anything but to be this horrid, horrid white.
ED LARSON
I mean Teko's from Indiana. That's like the third world.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll only agree with that because the roads almost killed me when I had long COVID.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The roads were so bad that I almost died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's close.
MARCUS PARKS
But pretty soon the talk ended when they started running out of money again because the take from the Hibernia job had burned up with the rest of the SLA in Compton. So another bank heist was planned to replenish the SLA's funds. But the OG members of the SLA were not in charge of planning this robbery. See with these new members, Teko had a bit of a rival for leadership. This rival was the aforementioned Mike Bortin.
ED LARSON
Could have been a bag of pennies as far as I'm concerned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, seriously.
MARCUS PARKS
Bortin was a muscular, tough redhead with two chipped front teeth and a large tattoo of a dragon on one of his arms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) I'll tell you the truth, I asked for a salamander. But they made it like this. Come for me, Teko, and see what the dragon can show you.
MARCUS PARKS
Well if you'll remember, Mike Bortin would have been the guy who was arrested with Wendy Yoshimura's boyfriend in the garage full of explosives. So Bortin had actually done time. He even had a prison tattoo. He had a clenched fist on his chest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) All that's missing is the cock on the top and the balls at the bottom. Now with Mike Bortin too, it's not a fetish for prisoners but they definitely respect him more because he's already committed crimes.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing, since Mike had actually been in prison, he technically had been more quote unquote "oppressed" than Teko Harris. So he actually had a better acclaim to leadership than Teko did. Bortin however had no interest in leading the new SLA, although he did enjoy taunting Teko about how he was technically more qualified.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) Do you know that red hair is more rare and more considered a minority than brown? Shut up! Shut up, you ginger-headed tow-headed freak. You're the freak.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I don't know how well Mike would have done leading the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not well.
MARCUS PARKS
But he was certainly a talented criminal because the bank robbery he led could not have gone smoother. It lasted just under two minutes, they came away with almost $4000, and nobody said shit about it being an SLA job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was a whole new crew!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they didn't claim it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they didn't want to claim it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
MARCUS PARKS
They were like no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We just need money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we just need money. There are more important things than going into a bank and just scaring people. That shit doesn't make any sense. All it does is bring heat on you and it doesn't accomplish anything.
ED LARSON
Yeah, god forbid we give up our location again.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Marcus, you mean to tell me that they left their revolutionary ideals behind?
MARCUS PARKS
Quite possibly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't.
ED LARSON
It's like they're not even wishing they were Black anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after the heist, more conflicts arose between Mike Bortin and Teko because Teko was trying to run the new SLA like Cin had run the original group. Problem was Teko was a little bitch and everyone knew it. Plus he didn't have the blind loyalty the original SLA had given Cin just because Cin was Black.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like I'm Black!
MARCUS PARKS
Even so, Teko tried controlling the personal lives of SLA members and held a special meeting to call out Mike Bortin's LSD consumption because drugs were forbidden in the SLA. Mike however said that one of his life's greatest pleasures was dropping acid and running 10-15 miles on the beach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) That's fucking ungovernable for me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He said that he wasn't going to give that up for anyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) That's what I do. That's Mike. Okay? If you take that away from Mike, you might as well take my clenched cock tattoo away from me and my sumptuous rose of ginger hair. All right? I'm Mike. I drop acid and I run on the beach, okay? I don't know what I'd do for the rest of the 12 hours that I'm tripping balls but for the first two hours of it, I'm running on a beach.
MARCUS PARKS
Well finally a compromise was reached in which Mike promised that he wouldn't drop acid in the safehouse. But later Mike told Patty that during his entire argument with Teko about dropping acid-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) Guess what?
MARCUS PARKS
He was on acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) I'm on acid right now. This fucking guy is trying to tell me to not be on acid anymore and I'm on more acid than I am normally. I ran the beach this morning and I took more acid just to sit on the couch.
ED LARSON
That's like Lawrence Taylor with crack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is me, I'm LT. I need crack.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while the first heist with the new SLA had just been about the money, the Harrises, Teko and Yolanda, they'd argued that their next action at Crocker National Bank in a suburb outside of Sacramento should be a full scale SLA operation. As Yolanda put it, a bank robbery was needed to show the continued strength of the SLA. All of the new members of course said that this was a fucking bad idea because it just brought more heat. But Yolanda argued long and hard as Yolanda often did. And eventually she won. The next discussion was about who would lead the assault team.
ED LARSON
Imagine being so annoying that you talk people into robbing a bank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're like fine! All right, let's go. All right. Give me a gun. Where's the bank? I'll shoot somebody. Shut the fuck up.
MARCUS PARKS
The next discussion was about who would lead the assault team. And most everyone voted for Mike Bortin because the last heist had been so smooth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) That's what I do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) I'm on acid, I agree to rob a bank.
ED LARSON
(lisping) I mean I'm not on acid right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) Not right now, never in the safehouse.
ED LARSON
(lisping) Winking, I'm winking at you. Did I say i was winking? Whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) I'm actually on acid and crack. I'm on both.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps because Yolanda was feeling insecure about new members taking over, she demanded the position of assault team leader, saying that it was sexist to think that a woman couldn't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(moaning)
ED LARSON
It's not a woman, it's you!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's you, Yolanda!
MARCUS PARKS
No one was saying that a woman couldn't do it. No one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would have voted for Michelle Obama.
MARCUS PARKS
But Yolanda argued and yelled and basically wore everyone down until they finally said fuck, fine! You can lead the team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
The job's yours, Yolanda. Good luck!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're gonna be happy with it.
MARCUS PARKS
But because Yolanda Harris was in charge, the SLA would leave Crocker National Bank with cash but it would come at the cost of a senseless murder that fell completely on Yolanda's head. Now the set up for the Crocker robbery was pretty much the same as the Hibernia robbery where Patty had publicly declared herself to be a member of the SLA. This time however Patty was on the outside team as one of the switch car drivers who would calmly carry away the assault team after the robbery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it should be said, Patty Hearst was distanced by the crew as they were going through these various bank robberies because they were trying to keep her from being recognized. So she was never where the cameras were.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So at this point now she's been kind of... Which is also why I can see she stayed in because this is a much easier job.
MARCUS PARKS
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a thing that she could handle. It's driving a car, it's not operating a gun, it's not shooting anybody.
ED LARSON
Yeah, if she had to fight someone in the bank, she's 90 lbs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well she might or god knows what she would do. But this is just her driving.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not only that but when these new members of the SLA came about, like they finally treated her like a human.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like when she was on the farm with Teko, like Teko had given her four black eyes.
ED LARSON
Oh really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, he had been extremely abusive towards her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Deeply abusive, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But these people were treating her like a human. They were friendly and they were just like oh hey, Patty, what's up?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it was more normal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because now she is locked in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She did shoot out to save them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But as Patty waited nervously near a funeral home in a Volkswagen van for the assault team to show up post robbery, she saw the stolen Firebird that had been used as the getaway car roar past her, going way too fast. She pulled out and followed them and when they stopped, the assault team piled into her van and screamed go, go, go, go, go!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the first one was basically Ocean's Eleven. It went off perfectly. The last one went off well. This is very much Reservoir Dogs.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like when they get back in, they're all like fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!
MARCUS PARKS
(groaning)
ED LARSON
I'm fucking dying over here, man!
MARCUS PARKS
(groaning) Sorry, it's just the noise that Harvey Keitel makes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's so good in it. (moaning) He's great in it.
MARCUS PARKS
See as opposed to the jubilation everyone had felt after the last robbery, the new SLA had settled into a miserable nervous funk as Patty drove them back to the safehouse. The only person who was stone-faced was Yolanda, even though Yolanda had been the one who'd fucked up just about as bad as she possibly could have. Well as soon as Yolanda walked into the door of the bank, she'd shot and killed a woman immediately. From how Yolanda later told it, she had told the woman to move but the woman wasn't moving fast enough for Yolanda's liking. So Yolanda thrust her shotgun forward. But since the safety wasn't on, the gun went off and the woman stood there for an instant after being shot before she melted to the floor. Her name was Myrna Lee Opsahl, mother to four teenage children, and she'd only been at the bank that day to deposit the collection from her church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So like all the innocent things.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's like she was a community leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Her husband was a surgeon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was like you killed like the worst possible person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like the nicest person in the bank.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You definitely killed, yeah, the nicest person in the bank. What was worse for the SLA though was that Yolanda had also come very close to shooting an SLA member, Kathy Soliah's boyfriend Jim Kilgore. Kilgore was on his way to his assigned position in the bank when the gun went off. And had Myrna not been in the way, Kilgore would have been killed instead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Kilgore is a name you very rarely see anymore. It's like Kurt Vonnegut.
ED LARSON
I was gonna say how much I love the name Kilgore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Kilgore is an incredible name.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Apocalypse Now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. General Kilgore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kurt Vonnegut.
MARCUS PARKS
Kilgore Trout.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yolanda Harris however, she shrugged off the entire murder, saying that her victim, she was a bourgeois pig anyway so what the fuck did it matter? At that point, Kathy Soliah told Patty that she thought that Yolanda must be insane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She is! She's extremely dangerous.
MARCUS PARKS
True.
ED LARSON
I'mma go ahead and say they're all insane.
MARCUS PARKS
And Teko was also unbothered by Myrna Opsahl's murder, saying that if it hadn't been for good old Myrna who'd taken all the buckshot, one of their comrades would be dead right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love how much time he got in the CNN documentary. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the guy.
MARCUS PARKS
This is the guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just remember that. Every single time. This is the guy that is the lead of Jeffrey 'Pulling a Toobin' Toobin's fucking entire documentary series.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's how shitty Toobin is, he wants to hang with Teko.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He likes Teko.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he does. No, this guy gets so, so much fucking camera time. Three episodes. I only made it three episodes. Maybe they give push back at the end of it but they sure as fuck don't in the first three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In the beginning.
MARCUS PARKS
Teko was also excited that all of them were now implicated in a gas chamber offense. They could all be executed together now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the ultimate rush, getting killed by cops sitting in a chair! That's awesome. I don't even have to go. I ate breakfast on them! That's free breakfast, free death.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was concluded that he too was probably out of his mind. But while nobody in the bank ended up saying anything about this being an SLA action, I think after the murder, they kind of decided to not fucking denounce anything. The news still described the heist as being an SLA style robbery because it was just like Hibernia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like in LA, once you become a type, that's incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
It is. So with the modern equivalent of almost $100,000 in their possession from the heist, the new SLA left Sacramento and returned to the place where it all began, San Francisco.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
San Francisco. And they took that $100,000 and they started a computer company. A little fruit based company you might know as Watermelon which was a computer that didn't make it unfortunately.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the murder of Myrna Opsahl, the SLA, like so many groups before them, it began to splinter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well now it's just too fucking hot for any sort of activity.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once they got to the Bay... Well that's not quite true. There's still quite a bit of activity to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Once they got to the Bay Area, the SLA split into three separate safehouses. And while Mike Bortin, Jim Kilgore, and Steve Soliah went back to their pre revolutionary job of painting houses, the women began a feminist study group so they could work out the true role of women in the revolution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, they just left robbing banks. They just went and robbed a bunch of banks and then were like ah, well-
ED LARSON
Book club.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's go back.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they're like we need to go back to the drawing board. We've done a lot of action, we need to fucking get our philosophy straight here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I agree.
MARCUS PARKS
Teko Harris couldn't help but insert himself into their discussions. He said that no matter how hard he struggled against it, he was inherently racist and sexist because of his white middle class upbringing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
MARCUS PARKS
Quite suddenly though, seemingly without prompting, Teko took the conversation into a discussion about his sexuality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I'm doing a lot of things to be hip, to be with it, to dig it righteous and to sock it to me. And it's just been extremely difficult.
MARCUS PARKS
He said that it was sad but true that he'd always been uptight about having sex with a man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Specifically he said in a voice that had a wistful, far away quality that he was sad that he could never bring himself to specifically make love to Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just know I couldn't satisfy him, he had a big old hanging dong and I know that if I struggled or cried or whatever, I know he wouldn't have liked it. And I just, oh god, I wish I could have been gay.
ED LARSON
So was Cinque fucking Kahjoh?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. He wasn't. No, Teko said that he could sleep in the same bed as Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always could. I never had a problem with it. I loved his snoring, I loved his snuffling. I loved that he'd get up to pee.
MARCUS PARKS
He could fall asleep with his arms around Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because just to protect and be near him, he was so warm and he was so nice.
ED LARSON
So hammered he didn't notice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He smelt like Ripple.
MARCUS PARKS
But he just could not bring himself to make love with Cin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just wasn't, I think it was all him saying no was like the big thing. Because I feel like... And I'm not blaming Cin.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm blaming me, look at me. White. But I'm looking at him and I just know that if I just could have...
ED LARSON
I could have just grew pussy lips around my butt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So difficult.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this, Teko believed, was a major failing in his revolutionary evolution. The fact that he could never bring himself to make love to Cin. Now after the shock of Myrna Opsahl's murder wore off, the new SLA returned to action with a series of bombings. And luckily for them, they had just been joined by an explosives enthusiast, for Wendy Yoshimura had returned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, cool.
MARCUS PARKS
See Wendy had been in San Francisco since Jack Scott had kicked everyone out of the farmhouse, having refused to join the SLA in Sacramento. But when the FBI found and raided the farmhouse, Wendy's picture was plastered all over the news. And even though she despised Teko, she went into hiding with the SLA and taught them how to make bombs. Now their first target was the mission district police station in San Francisco, which had been bombed so often by radicals since the 60s that it had been reinforced with bulletproof windows and had basically been transformed into a fortress. But even though Wendy Yoshimura was the closest thing the new SLA had to an explosives expert, Teko insisted on assembling the bombs used in SLA actions himself. And he of course fucked it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he doesn't know what he's doing.
MARCUS PARKS
No. He packed the bombs meant for the police station so tight that there wasn't enough oxygen left to ignite the gunpowder. And when the news reported that a dud bomb had been found, Mike Bortin dropped by Teko's safehouse the next day just to make fun of him for failing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(lisping) Yeah, just so you know, I'm just coming over. Yeah, totally found the safehouse. Super easy to do. I'm better than you, I'll fuck your fucking girlfriend, I'll fuck your father. I'll fucking rob nine banks before I go to sleep, all right? Peace! Back out. Couldn't give a shit, I'mma go paint something. I'm done! I'm like the best criminal you've ever met!
MARCUS PARKS
The next bomb however, planted on a police car, that was successful. That one did go off and they did send out a communique after. They didn't use the SLA name but they did stupidly use the very specific and recognizable SLA motto.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because it's long.
MARCUS PARKS
Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people. Who else is gonna say that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know!
ED LARSON
Also what's the point of a bombing if you're not gonna claim responsibility?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly. Also we gotta give some credit to the fact that bombs are hard to make.
MARCUS PARKS
They're very difficult to make, yeah.
ED LARSON
I like Wendy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. She's fun. Wendy's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. She's fascinating. She really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She is. She reminds me of the lady in the... SHe's like the performance artist in the Beetlejuice crew when they come up from New York to the house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like she reminds me of her, just like cool and mysterious.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually the other Patty Hearst movie is from Wendy Yoshimura's point of view and it's about their time on the farm together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I haven't watched it yet but it's out there. But with this fucking motto out in the open, death of the fascist insect who preys upon the life of the people, with that, everyone now knew that the SLA was back in town. Now more bombings followed, including simultaneous bombings in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But their final attempt ended with the new SLA driving around LA, arguing about where they were gonna put their last two bombs. Finally they put one bomb under a parked police car and attached another bomb to a garbage can next to another cruiser across the street. And that bomb was set to go off when the cruiser drove away. It was basically a little string was attached to it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like an old fashioned grenade.
MARCUS PARKS
I always associate that with Viet Cong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, me too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well leaving on a high, the new SLA rushed back to their motel to watch the news, which is undoubtedly gonna report on a successful SLA action. But as it turned out, when the first car drove off, the garbage can bomb just fell over. It was actually so badly built that when it was found and identified, a couple of kids were kicking it around the street.
ED LARSON
Oh Jesus fucking Christ.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. It's amazing. And that's where, remember the whistler? The whistling like-
MARCUS PARKS
Oh the football?
ED LARSON
Oh the Nerf ball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's where this comes from. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The second bomb was found soon after and diffused and Teko was once again humiliated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just don't understand what I'm doing!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay? Just let it blow up! Just let it blow up and everybody see it! Okay? At least say oh how scary it could have been, talking about how it could have been, what it could have done!
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the failure of the Los Angeles campaign, the new SLA completely fell apart. Besides the fact that many of them hated each other for reasons ranging from romantic jealousy to plain personal distaste, the group was still stuck on the subject of Black leadership. See Teko called the SLA together one day and said, fucking great news, everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great news, everyone.
MARCUS PARKS
I found a Black guy. His name is Doc Holiday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's not a doctor, it's his full fun name, it's like a nickname.
MARCUS PARKS
He was the head of the Black Guerilla Family at San Quentin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool, right? Cool, cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And he's just about to be paroled after serving 14 years for murder and robbery. He's perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna scoop him. We're gonna scoop him. Can I keep him? Can I keep him? Can I take him? I promise to take care of him. I'll feed him. I'll wash him.
MARCUS PARKS
Now everyone except Yolanda rejected this idea, although I don't think Patty really said anything one way or another. At this point she's just sort of there. This dissent however caused Yolanda to lament the days when the SLA was a true army, back when Cin was in charge. At that point Jim Kilgore snapped and loudly asked what the fuck the SLA had ever accomplished. He said you killed a Black man, you kidnapped a teenage girl, and you robbed a bank. And what the fuck did that amount to?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could just see everybody in the room is going like (gasp).
ED LARSON
(whispering) We really haven't done much, have we?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yolanda too. I'm scared of Yolanda.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And with that, Teko took his ball and went home. He disbanded the new SLA and said that he and Yolanda were gonna find a Black guy. We're gonna go find a Black guy to lead us!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right!
MARCUS PARKS
And anyone that's opposed to that can get the fuck out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will find a Black man to take me into an ice cream store, I will find a Black man to take me to the mall. I will find a Black man to take me down to the fucking DMV to help me get my license because I know I need a Black man to take me everywhere. All right? So I'll see all of you in hell. White hell.
ED LARSON
Patty's just like does this mean I can leave?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is this whole scenario over then?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We'll get to that here in a second. But the thing is that the Harrises, they did finally make contact with Doc Holiday but they found him in Golden Gate Park lying in a bush, stoned out of his fucking mind.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bro, I was just like trying to vibe.
MARCUS PARKS
And even then, after the Harrises said like okay, let's meet at a motel later on tonight, we got a proposal for you, Doc Holliday listened to them and said fuck no, I'm not doing that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So be in charge? Let me just say this, okay. Honestly I know a lot of people are going to come out here, I do understand it's hard to say. Management's hard. And if you're gonna run a group, it's hard. It's a lot of responsibility.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not just that but these are the two people that were in the SLA. This guy was the head of the Black Guerilla Family. Like he actually had a fucking, he had something behind him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And the SLA were at this point known as the people who kidnapped Patty Hearst and then got fucking murdered by the police in a massive shootout.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they're now known as the white Black revolutionary group. And so this guy, and so they come to him, they're like huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Huh?
MARCUS PARKS
You wanna? You wanna? Yeah? And he's like fuck you, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely not. Now by this point Patty Hearst had effectively split off from Teko and Yolanda at long last. After the disaster with Doc Holiday, she moved into an apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, Jim Kilgore, and Steve Soliah. Her and Wendy like became friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This sounds like a cool group.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As opposed to the Harrises, these people actually treated Patty like she was a human. And she may or may not have been dating Steve Soliah. It's unclear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She did sort of, not use men but men helped her. Patty Hearst-
ED LARSON
She liked her Steves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's young, she liked her Steves. She loves Steves. Patty Hearst is young and I think what a lot of what people kind of pour judgment on her and her behavior is actually very just kind of typical young person behavior. She fell in love with people and also used, essentially, she had to use her sexuality to defend herself in many ways.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh I think that's taking it too far. I don't think she was like dating Steve Soliah because she was using her sexuality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm talking about Kahjoh.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh Kahjoh. Yeah, Kahjoh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm talking about Kahjoh.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's a whole different thing, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She faked a relationship with Kahjoh-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Within the SLA in order to survive.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a whole different thing, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is something where you can start to see kind of just how incredible the human brain is that you can go through all this kind of stuff and still date. Like you can go through all these things and still be like Steve's cute. That's amazing.
MARCUS PARKS
But what is clear here is that it was the Soliah family that would finally lead the FBI to Patty Hearst. Now the FBI were aware of Kathy Soliah because she had made that speech at the memorial service after the original SLA was killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's me and why this is about me.
MARCUS PARKS
After tracking her down, the FBI put all the Soliah siblings under surveillance where they discovered the Soliahs frequented two addresses in San Francisco. These were the SLA safehouses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were also just doing Huck Finn jobs with a known criminal, like just walking around painting fences, stealing apples, playing with the circles with the tire. I don't know.
ED LARSON
That's a fun game.
MARCUS PARKS
So the FBI set up around the clock stakeouts at both addresses to see who they could see. Pretty soon the agents caught their first glimpse of general field marshal Teko. And they were not able to immediately identify him because he'd grown a big bushy beard to hide his features and he dyed his hair jet black. But general field marshal Teko had a penchant for cut off jean shorts. And just below-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The weakest of the shorts. I do say that in terms of showing power.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you want the crew to believe in you, wear pants.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean I don't know, when I first met you guys, when we were first hanging out, I wore a lot of cut off jean shorts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did.
MARCUS PARKS
I loved cut off jean shorts.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you grew out of them.
MARCUS PARKS
I did, I did indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you're an adult.
MARCUS PARKS
I've not worn a pair of cut off jean shorts in many a year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because unless you've got the ass to fill out a pair of jean shorts-
MARCUS PARKS
Which I do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You do but you don't wear them. All right? Because I tried to wear jean shorts and guess what they look like? Denim culottes. I look like an OshKosh B'gosh oompa loompa.
MARCUS PARKS
Well since general Teko had a pinch for cut off jean shorts, cops were able to see a surgical scar just below the cuff. This was the very scar that Teko had incurred when he had to have surgery following his touch football injury in Vietnam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That guy touched me with both hands, it was an illegal holding! And I yelled holding and then they sent me home.
ED LARSON
You're telling me they didn't play tackle football in Vietnam?
MARCUS PARKS
Touch football, my friend. Touch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think they fucking just pushed him down and said get the fuck out of here.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this scar was deemed good enough for identification. And when Teko and Yolanda went for a jog the next day-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought they were supposed to hide as joggers! I thought jogger was the ultimate disguise!
MARCUS PARKS
No, well I guess they did take it as the ultimate disguise like hey, if we're jogging, then we're fucking having fun.
ED LARSON
Yeah. They're actors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually it's kind of incredible. They got the sneakers, they got the outfit, they're just sitting around just being like what if we just start jogging? Actually now that I think about it, it looks good. Yeah, it looks fun.
MARCUS PARKS
So when they went for their jog the next day, the FBI pounced. Now Teko, dressed in purple track shorts, he gave up immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't taze me, bro!
MARCUS PARKS
But Yolanda turned around and tried to escape. But she too was immediately taken down and arrested. And she put up a much larger fight. She was fucking kicking and screaming you sons of bitches, you motherfuckers. Teko just fucking cowed down.
ED LARSON
I thought he wanted the cops to kill him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's what I thought too, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well actually he whined as they were taking him away, he's like if we would have gotten our guns, we could have shot our way out of this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meanwhile... Oh whatever.
ED LARSON
Cuffs are tight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These hurt. Ow. Can you put the window down?
MARCUS PARKS
Now the agents hoped that Patty was going to be with Teko and Yolanda. But when she wasn't, they decided to raid the other address the Soliahs had visited just on the off chance that they were right. They thought it was a long shot and as it turned out it was the correct one. That afternoon Patty and Wendy Yoshimura were sitting at the kitchen table while Wendy wrote a very, very long letter to Willie Brandt. Patty got up to use the bathroom when she heard a commotion on the back stairs leading up to the kitchen. Suddenly she saw two heavy set gentlemen diving through the top half of the kitchen's dutch door, waving revolvers and shouting-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
FBI freeze! FBI freeze!
ED LARSON
What's a Dutch door?
MARCUS PARKS
Dutch door is the one where the top opens and then the bottom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like a farm door.
ED LARSON
Those are fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Those are fun, I love those. I love those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have one outside of the kitchen.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I love your Dutch door.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I like it much better than your Dutch oven.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not according to my family.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this was the moment Patty was dreading, the moment where the FBI would blow her away. And as a result she was so frightened that she wet her pants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is not a punishable offense, which we learned on Side Stories.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you're allowed to piss in your pants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In front of the police. And they can't arrest you for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
We spent 10 minutes on this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, this week. It was yesterday's episode.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow, that's great. That's great. So yeah, go listen to Side Stories for more on that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got a lot of messages from police officers.
ED LARSON
Did they say yeah, go ahead, pee in your pants?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No actually there's a number of charges that you can be busted on. It is true. If they don't like you. But they said if they like you, they'll let you slide.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in Patty's case, this is the sort of thing that happens when people think they're gonna die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like she truly believed that she was about to be shot by the FBI.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
She then tried slowly sliding into Wendy's bedroom which only caused one of the agents to tell her to come out or he'd blow her fucking head off. Patty stopped moving and looked over at Wendy who was up against the wall in the hallway with her hands up. Now there was a brief moment in which Patty thought about the shotgun hidden in the wall right behind her. But finally she decided to give up without a fight. As she walked into the hall and raised her hands, the officer asked if she was Patty Hearst. When she said yes, she was handcuffed and told that she was under arrest for the Hibernia Bank robbery of April 15th, 1974. The only other witness to the arrest of Patty Hearst was the building's landlord whose mouth had dropped to the fucking floor when the cops ushered Patty Hearst down his stairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well at least now I can charge more for rent!
ED LARSON
Yeah. How many people in there!? How many? How much water you use?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have dog, you have cat?
MARCUS PARKS
But by the time she arrived at the Federal Building with her arresting officers, there was already a crowd of reporters and photographers. Finally the search for Patty Hearst was over, 591 days after she was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley. Now Patty didn't do herself any favors upon being arrested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
As the cameras flashed on Patty and her transport car, she gave a clenched fist salute. When she was booked and asked what her occupation was, she said urban guerrilla.
ED LARSON
Well I mean yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she didn't have a job. She wasn't a student.
MARCUS PARKS
Well no, she said that the person asked, she's like occupation? She's like I don't know. She's like you gotta tell me something. She's like I don't know. She's like just fucking say anything. She goes I don't know, urban guerilla.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she said it as a funny thing and then it becomes a statement.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this is partially what you wanna believe or what you don't want to believe. I think that there are things where you realize like oh people say things sarcastically and they say things funnily in a human way. But if you just write down the words, they sound different.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And later she would say that she just did and say those things because that's what she felt she was supposed to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really do believe her vibe in the book.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do. The way she talks about it. But I do know that she was also searching for reasons after the fact.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once Patty settled into jail, she started getting letters from all across the country, including one letter from a newly incarcerated Charles Manson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, nice! Oh yeah, you look different. You're my type of girl.
ED LARSON
Have you ever thought about a swastika tattoo?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of times with the swastika tattoo, the key is to flip it around. Then it means good.
MARCUS PARKS
He quite eloquently wrote Patty, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"You write to me."
MARCUS PARKS
He then added that he could help her if she did everything he instructed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
First thing you got to do is reverse the rainbow in your mind. Then the next thing you got to do is you got to kill the pig inside of you. And the third thing you need to do is send me some money for my commissary if you could honestly. I like Tic Tacs.
MARCUS PARKS
After that, letters followed from Manson girls Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good, who urged Patty to please write to Charlie because he's such a beautiful person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a good guy. He's a good guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Needless to say, Patty did not take their advice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that was a team up I do want to see.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, and Squeaky Fromme?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Christmas album. Incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Patty's first lawyer was Terry Kayo Hallinan. Kayo had a reputation for championing left wing causes but his most well known case before Patty was representing Anton Lavey against the city of San Francisco who had taken away Anton Lavey's pet lion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As they should have.
MARCUS PARKS
Anton Lavey of course is the founder of the Church of Satan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Anton Lavey painted the house black, he had a pet lion inside of this very small house in San Francisco that he essentially tortured.
ED LARSON
This is amazing. It's like all the cameos at the end of the LPN seasoner show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not even wrong. It is this. That's why we talk about this, how crazy this story is, is the cast of characters that rolls through this trial.
ED LARSON
It's like the end of Big Fish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Holy shit, Bugs Bunny was there? Milton Berle?
MARCUS PARKS
Well here's Kayo speaking to the press with Anton Lavey about the lion case.
LPOTL
(audio)
(Kayo) Play with it and the lion, if you go out there, you'll see misses him. And as homesick as he is and the wife and children are for the lion, well the zoo has continued to put further and further restrictions making it almost impossible for Mr. Lavey who of course works at night and can't get there early in the morning to visit the lion. And we are considering taking the lion back from the zoo, from the city and county of San Francisco and giving it to another zoo.
(Reporter) Wouldn't you rather keep the lion, Mr. Lavey?
(Lavey) Of course I would if I had proper facilities which I-
(Kayo) Now wait a minute, wait a minute. No, we have no plans to put the lion back in the house.
(Lavey) We have no plans to put the lion back in the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my boy! That's my fucking boy, constantly being a problem!
MARCUS PARKS
Well the problem with Kayo however is that he told Patty Hearst to sign a six page affidavit about her experience with the SLA that was both oversimplified and exaggerated. It claimed that she'd been given liquids to drink that made her feel like she was tripping on acid. Nothing of the kind ever occurred.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
She refused to sign it at first but when she was told that it was her best chance at bail, she signed. Now Yolanda Harris was in the cell right next to Patty. And when she learned that Patty had signed something, anything, she told her that she should have killed her when she had the chance. Well the worst part of it though is that even though Patty signed this fucking statement, she was never granted bail. Now when it became obvious that Kayo was out of his depth, Randy Hearst hired one of the most famous lawyers in America, a man who is now one of the most famous lawyers of all time. Before Patty, this man had saved the Boston Strangler from the death penalty and had earned an acquittal for the incredibly guilty marine captain Ernest Medina for his part in the infamous Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam. After Patty, this man was a key member of OJ Simpson's dream team. I'm talking of course about F. Lee Bailey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody's coming, dude. Everybody's coming to the cookout now.
MARCUS PARKS
Now during Patty's trial for the Hibernia Bank robbery, Bailey was putting away two or three Bloody Marys at lunch every day. So let's just say that her defense wasn't stellar.
ED LARSON
Pretty sure he got until the day he died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
F. Lee Bailey was sort of one of those types, like he was kind of manic where like sometimes he would be fucking brilliant. I mean he won the OJ Simpson case.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the shit that he did with Furman, the way that he just fucking destroyed Christopher Darden on the stand.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like F. Lee Bailey was the secret sauce of that fucking team. Other times he was too sauced to even fucking care. And this was kind of one of those times. He did not do a great job for Patty.
ED LARSON
I had a buddy who put down a bottle of scotch with him and said he had a nice time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was he disbarred?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, he was. Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Because he was bad. He fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But yes, I don't know exactly why he was disbarred but he was definitely disbarred, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seven counts of attorney misconduct.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow. Well continue.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Shoot from the hip. That was F. Lee Bailey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, hey! Hey, what are you gonna do?
MARCUS PARKS
But Bailey did bring in some heavyweights for the psychological side of Patty's defense. In another incredible crossover, Bailey brought in Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who you may remember from our MK Ultra episode as the guy who gave an elephant 500 hits of acid which made the elephant shit itself before dying.
ED LARSON
You can always have more, you can never have less.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless you're running on the beach! God, how many miles I could have run if I had 500 hits of acid.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally Bailey brought in Dr. Martin Orne who also participated in MK Ultra experiments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna talk to our conspiracy heads, right. I get it. This is one of the main issues about MK Ultra as a whole is that it is why it was such an insidious bad thing to happen. Because what it did was then every single time one of these now very, very prominent doctors that have been touched by MK Ultra and were heavily involved with MK Ultra, now we assume that every single thing that they do from before and after involves some form of deep horrible intelligence connection.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which I don't think is incorrect. But also in this aspect they're also just doctors.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are hired guns that you can put in trial. So it's weird. It's this weird thing of yes, they were MK Ultra doctors and it's fucking a very bad coincidence that they were also a part of all these various other stories and all these other things. But they were also just guys for hire.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing is that like Dr. West was just, I mean he worked at UCLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He was the guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's Randy Hearst bought.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he was the guy that you go to at UCLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And a lot of these guns for hire for trial, you gotta pay them money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To go do it.
MARCUS PARKS
But both men testified as to how the treatment Patty received at the hands of the SLA affected her and what that treatment did in terms of her culpability in the bank robbery. And I'd say that these two men as key MK Ultra participants, these are the guys that ask.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're asking how she got her brain melted, these are the guys that did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. This is how I would do it. And this is the same.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The thing is that to be honest she was kind of far too functional for what we would have done. We would have driven her completely insane, hopefully to suicide.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it comes down to the simple question as to whether Patty Hearst was guilty or not guilty of the Hibernia Bank robbery, yeah, she was technically guilty in the eyes of the law because she'd walked into a bank and robbed it with a murderous gang of thieves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The defense however argued brainwashing as their case, which has never worked before or since, because being traumatized or being in a cult is not an excuse for committing a crime in the eyes of the law. One of the DC snipers, they also tried arguing brainwashing. They also failed. As far as the prosecution went, they absolutely demolished F. Lee Bailey's defense by using Patty's actions after the bank robbery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Namely what happened at Mel's and the question as to why she didn't escape when she had hundreds of chances to do so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the problem is that it's an extremely subtle answer. It is not an easily parsed out idea of why did they stay? Why do they stay? Why does anyone stay? And it's actually extremely difficult in the eyes of the court. I watched so much trial footage and you begin to see like oh they have to have a clear line of thought that is digestible by your peers. That for the most part if they end up in jury duty, and this is not a slight against any human, it means that they have the time and the availability to be there for jury duty. Which means sometimes they're strange, right? And a lot of times their scope is limited. So you have to be able to sell them a line very, very clearly and easily, which something like this is fucking clear as... I can see why.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, it's very difficult because I mean all the prosecution has to say is go up and ask the jury, it's like okay, so what is the question here? Did Patty Hearst rob the bank? Yes. Look, that's her-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In the bank.
MARCUS PARKS
That's her in the bank, on video. That's her, that's her. Patty Hearst, did she rob the bank? Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally-
ED LARSON
How come she didn't get charged for the shooting at Mel's?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was just shooting in the air.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean she could have got-
ED LARSON
It's still illegal.
MARCUS PARKS
There's actually a lot of questions. There were a lot of crimes committed by a lot of people that didn't get charged.
ED LARSON
Is it because they are in different counties and stuff?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. There's a lot of different crimes that never got charged, so many different crimes. Like they just kind of had to pick and choose like what they could prove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's truly how I mean it works in court. Because whose word do you have to say about her shooting in the air? Like the two other terrorists or her word? It's very difficult.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Where's the evidence for all this? And is it worth it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like that's the thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What is that crime? What does that do?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And additionally the prosecution used the transcriptions from the tapes Patty had recorded at the farmhouse when they were trying to write the SLA book. But since Teko had destroyed the original tape, there were only transcriptions and Patty's statements did not sound objectively good in court.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is what I'm saying. It's like the difference when you listen to her communiques vs when you read them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, it's far, far different. The prosecution even engaged in character assassination, bringing in a psychiatrist to say that before the SLA Patty had lied in school, she'd engaged in sexual activity at an early age-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
MARCUS PARKS
And she'd experimented with LSD.
ED LARSON
That's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You mean the entire 60s?
MARCUS PARKS
The expert ended by saying that Patty enjoyed being the queen of the SLA army just six weeks after joining. It was fucking bullshit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And so after just a day of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty on all counts and Patricia Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in the Hibernia Bank robbery. Now the further away Patty got from her life with the SLA, the more she became less Tania and more Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because remember she was Tania.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. She was very much Tania and it took her months in prison before she was no longer Tania.
ED LARSON
Well also you're in prison, you wanna look tough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh Yeah. Now you have to be because now people are checking you and they're pulling your card and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well her case became a bit of a cause celeb with such unlikely figures as Ronald Reagan and John Wayne coming to her defense.
ED LARSON
Great guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I love those guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Not close to being Nazis in any way whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No probs.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not like there was an entire genre of music in the 80s that was fucking just dedicated to how shitty these men were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is interesting though, it also shows how much time changes. Because this is actually a very sort of left wing concept to come to her aid for them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is back when people used to do things like that, be containing of multitudes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Yeah, wasn't so black and white, yeah. Well the most bizarre crossover, and this is the final one, was that Patty's biggest champion was a local congressman named Leo Ryan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember that name?
MARCUS PARKS
Getting Patty Clemency became a top priority in his office. But there was one other matter that he needed to clear up first. See a large number of Leo Ryan's constituents had left San Francisco and had settled in an obscure South American country named Guyana. They had followed a local spiritual leader named Jim Jones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Patty Hearst has gotten to Jonestown as well. Mk Ultra, Jonestown, J. Edgar Hoover, all the other type of people.
ED LARSON
Charles Manson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Charles Manson.
MARCUS PARKS
Charles Manson. We didn't even get into how she's related to the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was a whole side story that we could not include.
ED LARSON
Anton Lavey.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, Anton Lavey!
MARCUS PARKS
Ryan had decided to travel to Guyana because he'd heard some of his constituents were being mistreated. So on the day before Ryan left for Guyana for Jonestown, he wrote Patty Hearst a letter saying 'off to Guyana, see you when I return, hang in there'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
But as most of you know, Congressman Leo Ryan never came back because it was his assassination in Guyana that kicked off the Jonestown massacre in which over 900 people died.
ED LARSON
But I gotta say, I don't know how I feel about this guy but I think he was like, kind of cool and hip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he was.
MARCUS PARKS
Leo Ryan? Very much so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Very, very much so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was like an old fashioned, true-
MARCUS PARKS
Like cool San Francisco congressman. Yeah, he was a San Francisco guy, local guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But out of nowhere, on President Jimmy Carter's last day in office, he commuted the rest of Patty Hearst's prison sentence, making no comment or explanation why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he just liked her.
MARCUS PARKS
I think he did just like her. The rest of the revolutionaries however weren't so lucky. While quite a few of them spent years on the lam, none of them did any significant time considering the crimes they committed. Bill and Emily Harris, aka Teko and Yolanda, only did six years for kidnapping Patty. Otherwise they weren't charged with anything else in relation to what they did while in the SLA until 2002.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, until 2002!
ED LARSON
That's when the murder happened?
MARCUS PARKS
That year-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that was like when they got finally got charged for the bank murder.
MARCUS PARKS
That that year the inside team of the Crocker National Bank robbery were finally charged with the murder of Myrna Opsahl, which only made it to court because of a lengthy campaign from her son John. As far as the state was concerned, they were all too happy to just fucking let it go. And so in 2002, Bill and Emily Harris along with Michael Bortin and Kathy Soliah, they pled guilty to the murder of Myrna Opsahl and were very sorry for having done so, they're very, very, so very sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh well at least Michael Bortin got in there. He finally got to go back to jail. It's his favorite!
MARCUS PARKS
Actually that's the other thing, the story of what happened to the SLA mark two after Patty Hearst got arrested, like they fucking scattered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
One dude went to South Africa. I think Kathy Soliah, I think it was Kathy Soliah that got caught after a fucking America's Most Wanted episode in 1999.
ED LARSON
Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they were picked up one by one by one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they all got picked up one by one.
ED LARSON
What about Wendy?
MARCUS PARKS
Wendy, oh yeah. She got arrested with Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wendy is now a professional watercolorist.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm looking it up right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She teaches watercolor.
ED LARSON
Let's get one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's around.
MARCUS PARKS
Here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's in... It looks like in Oregon.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't that nice?
MARCUS PARKS
That's nice.
ED LARSON
Hitting happy little trees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com, Wendy Yoshimura. We really want to reach out to you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well for the murder of Myrna Opsahl, Yolanda received the longest sentence out of the four of them, eight years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn!
MARCUS PARKS
For second degree murder.
ED LARSON
After all that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Paroled in 2007. Did five years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't that crazy?
MARCUS PARKS
She is currently-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So nobody really did any time.
MARCUS PARKS
She is currently living-
ED LARSON
This is the first time they didn't wish they were Black.
MARCUS PARKS
She is currently living as a free person, as is everyone who survived their time in the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's a computer programmer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yolanda.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as Patty goes-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, she worked at MGM Studios!
MARCUS PARKS
Are you looking up the right Emily Harris? I don't-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! Yeah! No, yes I am! She worked at fucking MGM Studios at the Walt Disney Company until her second conviction.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being a computer programmer. She worked for Disney!
ED LARSON
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking crazy!
ED LARSON
That is completely insane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She worked for fucking Disney.
ED LARSON
After prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
After prison before the murder conviction.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because they only did, yeah, they did six years. They plead guilty and then they were free and they just fucking hung out.
ED LARSON
Do you think she puts the SLA on her resume?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Good at multitasking and leading a group of people.
ED LARSON
Hobbies include jogging.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jogging, pushups, Swahili naming ceremony.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as Patty goes, she married her bodyguard in 1979 when she was 25 years old. By 1982 she had written her side of the story, 'Every Secret Thing', and attended the Cannes Film Festival in 1988 when her book was adapted into the movie that we've been talking about. There she met director John Waters who was a massive fan and had even attended her trial in 1976 just as he'd attended Charles Manson's trial a few years earlier. Waters got the idea to put Patty in his next movie, Crybaby. And since then she's appeared in five John Waters movies, including this incredible scene from Serial Mom.
LPOTL
(audio from Serial Mom)
(Kathleen Turner) You can't wear white shoes after Labor Day.
(Patty Hearst) That's not true anymore.
(Kathleen Turner) Yes, it is. Didn't your mother ever tell you? Now you know.
(Patty Hearst) No, please. Fashion has changed.
(Kathleen Turner) No, it hasn't.
(Patty Hearst) (screaming)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Patty Hearst gets fucking killed by Kathleen Turner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's wonderful.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking great. Yeah. Actually they just put Serial Mom on Netflix.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so worth it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not my favorite John Waters movie but it's probably his best.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's his most accessible and it's funniest because Kathleen... Is this the cocksucker residence?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's so good.
MARCUS PARKS
It's so fucking good. Now even today, 50 years after the fact, the question as to whether or not Patty Hearst is to be believed is still a subject of heated debate. And while we can speculate all we want, the only person who knows the whole truth is Patty Hearst herself. But as far as we're concerned, the story of Patty Hearst is the story of a survivor; someone who weathered almost two years in the company of dangerous people doing dangerous things during one of the most dangerous times in American history. Not only that but Patty came out the other side of it smiling, joking about her time in the SLA during conversations with John Waters, fundraising for children in the name of Congressman Leo Ryan. She fucking once won the Westminster Dog Show with a Shih Tzu named Rocket.
ED LARSON
Is that true?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! That that was a factoid I didn't realize.
ED LARSON
That's very impressive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. She actually trained termite sniffing beagles for a little while. Like she lives a pretty happy life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, Patty Hearst is an inspiration, proof that no matter what may happen in your life, sometimes the only way out is through.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a newfound appreciation for that idea. Like as you were reading about this and talking about the subject, I think there's a lot of people that I could see why it's divisive.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that it's probably very good for Patty that she had the two years in jail. I think that it's important that she got a little bit of the punishment of this is why you don't rob banks. Right?
ED LARSON
She technically did the crime.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did the crime.
ED LARSON
Technically.
MARCUS PARKS
Like that's the whole thing. It's that like shitty thing-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's illegal.
MARCUS PARKS
That shitty law thing, that legal thing of like technically you did it. So technically you do have to go to jail for this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I think it's good.
MARCUS PARKS
A better lawyer could have gotten her off, I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh probably.
MARCUS PARKS
I think if she didn't have a lawyer that was fucking putting down three martinis and Bloody Mary's at lunch, I think that someone else could have gotten her off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or if they had a more modern understanding of consent, of what happens inside of these types of abusive situations. Because they didn't have it then.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't talk about it like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If this happened in 2024, this trial would have been entirely different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at the Karen Reed trial which we saw recently. There's a couple.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. 1974. The changes in like how we think about just all this shit has changed. It's 50 years, fucking 50 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I just defy anybody that talks about the term innocence, especially like as a backseat driver in whatever form of life that you have. And we all say I would have done this, I would have taken out the SLA, I would have ran away. I would have done this.
ED LARSON
I would have stood up to Hitler.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I say this, the truth is is that you would have gotten shot in the head.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think that Patty knew that inside and then she did what she had to do and then when it came down to it, what got hurt? A fucking bank? Wow, my heart.
ED LARSON
Well that one woman did get killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they committed those crimes, the other people committed those crimes.
ED LARSON
Yeah, that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it'd be different. I'm talking about for Patty. Being involved in a bank heist, who gives a fucking shit? That first one was just like the money's insured, who cares? So for me justice was served and now it is extra served by what we know looking on her life from the future.
MARCUS PARKS
I personally believe that she would have been fine with probation and community service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure! Yeah!
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like give her a shitload of community service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like a lot of community service, a big fucking fine-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And put that money somewhere good. But I don't think that Patty Hearst needed to do time in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I mean-
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think she did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying that if this is how this was gonna go, this is the best thing that probably, how it could have went.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what got her out of being Tania and being Patty was just time.
ED LARSON
Time. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's all it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And time is the most important thing you can have. Time is a resource that don't come back.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So remember that, all right? Use it wisely because your time is short. Patreon. com/lastpodcastontheleft. So give your precious money for your precious time. To us.
MARCUS PARKS
Indeed. And also before we get to the plugs though, I want to thank all the people that helped on this series.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
It's a fucking monster.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is. Thanks to our researchers, our research team, Joel McKean and Madeline Shaw. Carolina Hidalgo did a fucking monster amount of work of on this series. We're gonna do a full bibliography of all the different books we used on our Instagram. Thanks also to her brother Alejandro Hidalgo for trying to explain some of the legal stuff to us. And if we didn't get it right, it's not his fault.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you say it but technically I think it is his fault.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Legally. Let's see what legally he says.
MARCUS PARKS
Legally it is my fault if I got it wrong. And of course we want to thank Ian for doing all the video editing, Rob for editing all the fucking-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
For editing all this shit. Everybody did such a fucking fantastic job on the series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What about us?
MARCUS PARKS
Y'all were fine.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Y'all did great.
ED LARSON
Thank Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I don't know if she wants to be thanked.
ED LARSON
She wrote the book!
MARCUS PARKS
She wrote the book, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, thank Patty. Yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course thank Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Without Patty, we wouldn't have any of this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We wouldn't even be able to do the show.
MARCUS PARKS
You did a lot of work, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
You did do a lot of work. And Ed?
ED LARSON
I'm here.
MARCUS PARKS
You're here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft to watch us flipping around. You're gonna love it on there. There's a lot of bullshit we're putting on there, a lot of behind the scenes stuff, you're gonna like it. Go to TikTok, social media, Instagram @lpontheleft. Go to twitch.tv/lpntv, so and see Hoop A Goo Goo was the first time we did it ever.
ED LARSON
HGx2 baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna love it. It's on Twitch, watch the replay. And also on Twitch and then on YouTube. And then go to lastpodcastontheleft.com, buy tickets to see us live.
ED LARSON
Because we're gonna be playing DC tomorrow, baby! If you're in DC, if you're at Baltimore, come fucking take that train down to us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Come say hi.
MARCUS PARKS
All you weird Baltimore fuckers. I can't wait to see you, Baltimore. I love Baltimore! Love Baltimore!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I miss Baltimore. Except for the one time that we saw that man die there.
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah, we did see that man die there. But that's...
ED LARSON
But you can miss him too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I already do. Hail sweet Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail Wendy.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I mean she still was a-
ED LARSON
I like her! I'm on record, I like her!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey Wendy, there's a married man that's looking to talk to you.
ED LARSON
I love you, baby!