Episode 579: Patty Hearst Part II - The Liberation Zone
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Was it easy leaving the group chat when the bubbles turned green and every message was Cam likes this and Claire dislikes that? Oh yes, yes it was because I get enough overreacting at home. Like liking messaging again with WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Hi.

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Oh, God, I wish I was black. Sorry, I'm just crying. Let me just, I'm going to get ready for the episode. Just get ready for the episode. Listen here, sucker. You listen here, you mother. You mother grabber. You mother forsaker. I'm sick of you listening here, Buster Brown. No, I wish I was black. No, I wish I was black.

It's real. It's real. Welcome to the last podcast on the left. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with... I wish I was black Henry Zebrowski. I wish I was black Henry Zebrowski. And I wish I was... A woman. Ed Larson. We all do. We all do. And we're covering the Spinner Liberation Army today. Yeah.

It's a real group of spinners. So when we last left Patty Hearst, she'd finally gotten out of the closet after 57 days in captivity at the hands of the Symbionese Liberation Army. But

but by cleverly manipulating the SLA into believing that she'd bought into their half-baked philosophies completely, Patty had been let out of the closet and welcomed into the ranks of the SLA and was even issued her own gun. Are we excited? That's how you

know you're the best hostage of the group. Additionally, like all the rest of them, Patty had been given a new name for the revolution. But while some of the rest have been given pseudo African names like Tico, Fahiza and Zoya. Technically they are African names. They're just on white people.

Patty was named after one of Che Guevara's compatriots, an East German-born Argentinian named Tania Bunke. But this comes from the idea of the... Remember, there's many different types of revolutionary. We're going to cover all of them today. There's many different types. You got the real hardcore militant ones that won't take no for an answer. You got the ones that are in it because of the hats.

Right. Which I think is actually we miss out a lot on that. A lot of guys like the hats associated with various movements. I was hoping I had a beret stashed in my house somewhere. I was going to wear it today. Next week. I can't find one. I say next week we go full revolutionary because again, I'm looking at Marcus. I do feel like a 17 year old girl in a college class outside of high school that's being flirted with. Yeah.

Unfair. I see myself as more of a Berkeley professor. Yes, teaching a 17-year-old girl that it's worth a lot of money. I can't wait till you graduate. But there's another stripe. You're so mature. Has anyone told you how mature you are? Unfortunately, you're not mature enough to get out of Algebra 2. Just counting the weeks till June. Yummy, yum. I can smell you ferment. But then, uh...

Today, we're going to get into another special type of revolutionary. The romantic revolutionary. Because that's how people view Che Guevara and Tanya. Very much so. They would go and they'd fight in the Pueblo. And they'd fight out in the playa. The Pueblo? They're in fucking South Africa. Pueblo is southwestern United States. Get what I'm saying. Thousands of miles away. Where revolutions happen. They're there, right? Mixing it up. In the jungle. But then they go back to the safe part of the playa. Pueblos are in the desert. But then they go to another place.

You know, it's a scene from Braveheart when they're at the nice river. You know what I mean? Where it's the one scene where Che Guevara is there and he's just going like, ay, ay, ay, this revolution, it will be Moe Malo, won't it be Tanya? Yeah.

And she's there washing her German hair in the river. It's going like, see, Che, see, one day we will be able to kiss without the sound of machine gun fire. And he's just like, see, see, when we are all liberato. And it's that style of romance. Yeah.

Side note, Patty being given the name Tanya, that burned both Yolanda and her husband Tico's collective ass because Tanya Bunka was a hero of Yolanda's and Tico's wish to be named Camillo after another Cuban revolutionary had been vetoed by sin. He's like, nah, fuck you. You're Tico. She's like, she just wants to be Patty. Yeah. She ever wants to be Patty.

I wanted the number one slot. I wanted to be the ingenue. I'm supposed to be the lead. I'm fucking what's her name from Cabaret. But soon after Patty was given her new name, the infamous Polaroid of Patty Hearst dressed as a revolutionary aiming a gun in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag. This picture was sent to the media, along with Patty's declaration that she joined the S.L.A.,

The ensuing media frenzy was understandable, given the seemingly quick turnaround from kidnapping victim to compatriot. But mostly, the public jumped to one of two sides. Either Patty had forsaken her country and family for radical political ideologies, completely of her own free will, as it seemed many young people in America had, or she'd been brainwashed. Very few thought that Patty might be playing along just to survive.

But those numbers included her father, Randy Hurst. Nobody liked the Hurst family. There was nobody who enjoyed, even fellow billionaires hated the Hurst family. So there was nobody there that wanted to give them any shred of credit. I really do think that, especially when it comes to Patty, everybody was like already had written her off as soon as it had happened. And so I saw the picture. They couldn't wrap their minds around that she might.

be in on this because it was a very good piece of propaganda by the SLA. It's almost like if you grow up in a castle, it's hard to relate to people. You know what I heard? I actually forgot about this. Do you know really? I guess this is more rumor than anything of why William Randolph Hearst was so maddened by Citizen Kane because there was a rumor, and I forgot about this, is that Rosebud was the nickname he gave his mistress's clit. Ha!

That is completely true. That's not true at all. Look it up. Look up the rumor. The rumor. Oh, the rumor is true. Rosebud is her mistress clit. I would put clitoris for this. No, no, no, no, no, no. If he doesn't know, if the computer doesn't know what a clit is, how am I supposed to? Continue. I'll continue to research.

The near 60 days between the kidnapping and the photo had been a hellish and strange journey for Randy Hurst and his wife, Catherine. And with that Polaroid, everything very suddenly got even worse. And while Patty certainly had the harder time, her family went through their own bizarre ordeals over the course of the nearly two years that Patty was in captivity. I cannot stress that enough. Almost two years, over 500 days. Oh, and so there is a rumor.

It's definitely a rumor. I'm saying that. It just types in. It depends on what you type. About whether or not. I said, Hurst Rosebud Mistress Clit. And some say, oh, it's not real. But some say it is. I just think that while we're doing the show, you shouldn't be Googling clits. Why? This is my job. This is my job. This is what I'm here to do. I find the clits.

I find the clits. I report the clits. Well, on the night that Patty was kidnapped, Randy and Catherine Hurst were in Washington, D.C., attending the Hurst Foundation's Senate Youth Program. I hope when I grow up to be a senator, I, too, can have sex with a gay prostitute for the money...

of the U.S. government at the given name. Thank you. He's going to grow up to be a fine Republican. A fine Republican.

Well, they were asleep in their hotel room when the phone rang at 1.15 a.m. It was Ann, Patty's younger sister, and she told them that she just got off the phone with a member of the Berkeley Police Department, a guy named Sergeant Dick Berger. And I bet you that didn't give him a bad attitude at all. Oh, my God. Does everyone know?

Everybody knows Dick's a hot dog. Everybody knows. So angry. Mama, why'd you do this to me? Change our name to Hot Dog. My name's a lie. Ann told them what Sergeant Dick Berger had just told her. That Patty was missing and Steven Weed was in the hospital.

And hung up the phone and no more than 10 minutes later, the FBI was already calling to say that they were coming over to Randy Hurst's home to set up shop.

See, while Randy Hurst was more of a family man than a businessman, he was still a Hurst. Oh, yeah. So after Randy put in a call directly to the head of the FBI, a 35-year veteran of the Bureau named Dwayne Eskridge was at Randy's house within just three hours. He'd showed up to bug all the phones and attach tape recorders to each line in case the kidnappers called. But if you could honestly, what I would ask for you to do is delete all...

all the things I talk about. And all. Simply because no one should know the secret of Rosebud.

Fun fact about Dwayne, proving further that the Patty Hearst kidnapping is the Forrest Gump of true crime stories, Dwayne was the first person to issue a mayday warning when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They got every... As we go through the story, you kind of hear that Randy Hearst goes on... We'll cover this more next episode. But he goes on an adventure of all his own. He meets some of the top...

police officers in American history. As he should have. As yes, but also Randy Hurst becomes eventually the first Hurst person to ever speak to a poor person. Except for Patty. Yes, except for Patty. And so we'll get to his adventure next week, but yeah, it's very hilarious what he learns and he expands the Forrest Gump storyline. I could have made that call a little earlier.

Actually, he got in trouble for calling it too early. Oh, really? Yeah, he got in trouble. They're like, you didn't use the code. And he's like, what fucking code? The planes are right there. Now, even though Dwayne was working with out-of-date equipment that betrayed the public's image of the FBI as a crap team of super cops, he was still damn good at what he did and even knew all the usual suspects when it came to kidnapping cases.

For example, while monitoring calls to the Hearst residence after the news broke, there was a call from a woman claiming to be Patty Hearst. But after hearing the voice, Dwayne told the agent on the line to hang up. Hey, it's me. It's your daughter. It's Patty Hearst.

This woman was a kidnap groupie from Texas who was known to call the families of kidnap victims anytime they made the news. And Dwayne knew exactly who this was after just a couple of sentences.

Unfortunately for Dwayne, though, the SLA would never make a call to the Hearst residence. They didn't have a dime. Now, within just literally a dime to use to call. I'm not going to call collect. Yeah, no. This is a call from... The symbiont needs liberation. Do you accept it?

Now, within just two days of the kidnapping, news had already leaked to all the major outlets that something had happened to the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. And by that Thursday, a dozen members of the press had already set up their equipment outside Randy Hearst's home just in case this story turned out to be something big.

And indeed, when the first SLA communique was issued three days after Patty was kidnapped, the press presence grew from a scrum to an encampment. What does that mean? It went from small to big. Oh, okay. When you say scrum, from scrum to an encampment, it feels like we're just like,

I just see a bunch of hot guys in a field all licking each other's balls. Licking each other's scrum is like when they fight each other. Eat your scrum. I thought eating your scrum was like licking a guy's asshole. You got shit all over your nose. Yeah, well, that's how you win in rugby. I didn't know.

They should get some mints. Winnebago's and TV trucks lined the streets, and the press was in such a state of constant frenzy that journalists nailed portable telephones to trees so they could call in stories as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, authorities were also pumping Steven weed for information because he was in the hospital for five days because of the brutal assault he'd suffered during the kidnapping. Yeah, man, there must have been like nine of them, dude. They came from every direction. They came from the ceiling, man. Hey, listen, if you could, if you could just top my IV off with some tank, man. Okay, dude? Okay.

I'm fucking dying here, dude. It's harsh. It's harsh as hell in here, man, without my fucking stuff. Tripping out here, man. I think I'm getting sick. I think you die of weed withdrawal, man.

can you give me a tv dude is the price right do we know well from steven's description of a paramilitary style assault perpetrated by a mix of black and white assailants along with the neighbor's descriptions of a well-coordinated escape the police and the fbi were collectively having a bit

of an oh fuck moment. Oh yeah, because right out the gate it seems like, oh man, we're dealing with an elite paramilitary group that is, we might actually have a problem here. Big problem. Yeah. See, along with the testimonies, police noticed that the kidnapping shared a similar MO that had been present at a murder that had occurred just a few months before.

See, the bullets recovered at Patty's apartment building had a distinct scent of almonds, indicating that they had been packed with cyanide prior to being loaded in the gun, which is fucking stupid because if you get hit, it's not going to, the fucking powder is going to burn away all the fucking cyanide. I think that it is, I don't understand where they even got the idea of cyanide bullets because what they did was that they drilled a hole into each individual bullet

and filled it with cyanide themselves, which is, again, not smart. It makes the bullet worse. It doesn't do anything. It destroys the integrity of the bullet, and it also is like, what are we doing here? Yeah. Also, you just use the cyanide as cyanide. That would require you becoming a master poisoner. Master poisoners are hard. You can't just put cyanide on a pizza. No, dude. You put antifreeze in Gatorade.

Well, those same type of idiotic cyanide bullets have been recovered from the body of Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster the previous November. So before the sun even came up on the day after the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, authorities were reasonably sure that the people responsible were the Symbionese Liberation Army. Only a specific kind of idiot would do this. Yeah.

Today's episode will therefore be devoted entirely to the SLA's almost accidental formation, including the people who made up its ranks and the crimes they committed on the way to kidnapping Patty Hearst. And we put together a large amount of sources just to track this story, because what we've realized is that not a lot of people have fully tracked Patty.

the actual formation of the SLA. And then we realized, oh, the Jeffrey Toobin book is all from the perspective of the people inside of the SLA. Mostly. He's telling their side of the story. I mean, we did find some of our sources because Carolina did a hell of a lot of work in finding these different disparate sources. They all had their own books. Yeah, and reading all these books and helping me put it all together. But yeah, Willie Wolfe

had a book about them. You know, like Camilla Hall, there was a book about her. Yes, there was just the formation of the S, the life and death of the SLA was a book. There were two books on the SLA that were written in the 70s but had gone out of print. Yeah, and we got all of them. We got all of them.

Even fucking Camilla Hall had a book about her. Yes. Like, it's fucking, it's incredible. So we put together this entire, like, you know, special fucking huge thing to Carolina for helping us put all this shit together for the story that we have today. A story that really hasn't been told in 50 years. I mean, it was a bunch of different, you know,

Not our way. Not our fucking way, dude. How were you able to determine like what was bullshit and what was not? Well, you can't, but you can cross reference and you can see like if it's, if it shows up a couple of times in each book, if it, if the same thing shows up in two different books, then you can kind of see like, okay, that's probably closer to the truth. You can look at like the character of these people and you can kind of surmise. Don't you dare give these people the tools to properly research things. Right?

We can't allow these people to know how to do this on their own because it needs to come from us. But what we do here is we do try to match up what everybody says about the same fucking thing as much as we can. Because you find out there is literally no such thing as objective truth. And it's very difficult in a story like this. Yeah. The only one who tells the truth is me.

That's how you know it's an objective view that I'm saying. Otherwise, you know. Oh, and if you want more of this fantastic research, go ahead and check out No Dogs in Space. We're back with Can Part 1. If you really want to get some fucking top-notch research, especially if you particularly enjoyed our Armamiva series, because it's all about German, baby. It's all about Krautrock. Man, you're in it. Yeah, man. I've been in Germany for like a year. Me and Carolina both. It's been awesome. I see him in the office every day, though, so...

Yeah. This is not in Germany. Metaphorically, we're in Germany. It's like the Epcot version of Germany. It's in their heads. Which I like. That's fine. Live from Northland. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Finding work-life balance can be tough, but Squarespace gives you the tools to reach your goals and have time to celebrate. Squarespace.

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choose your tone, enter what you need and get auto generated text. And that helps you save time. I know I'm sitting on about two literal wheelbarrows filled with horse pics. Now, part of the issue has been is a lot of these pictures are getting stopped at customs because some of them do depict various world leaders in horse like circumstances that seems to be

pinging a lot of these custom agents accounts. Now, so what I've done to do is like, so while I'm trying to work on hand smuggling these horse picks over various country borders, uh,

I then also have time because Squarespace is doing all the other ad work for me to go and work on my killdozer at home. So thank you, Squarespace, for allowing me to diversify in the best way possible for this country. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial when you're ready to launch. Go to squarespace.com slash left to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

But the people that made up the SLA weren't all that different from a lot of the radicals that were banging around Oakland and Berkeley in the early to mid-70s.

There were a lot of white people talking about violent revolution, but very few were willing to take it to the next level. Dude, and I'll tell you what, I was looking at some footage of like people like rioting back in the 70s and the 60s versus now. Do you know that they like they would like go in like wearing like football helmets and shit. They were ready to go. Well, now they know how to protest better than ever because all the kids are being taught how to avoid and obstruct.

school shooters so they're actually using those skills against the police. It's pretty awesome. It is very interesting. Militarize the children. They become the child military. Which we should think about. Because they won't see it coming.

We dress up a bunch of military officers as little orphans and we drop them a bunch of places and everyone thinks they're like, oh, let's help these lost children. And then the kids go like, welcome to America! Just fucking light all these guys up. That'd be fucking awesome. Henry's turning into Idi Amin. Has anyone ever thought about using kids as soldiers? No.

I can't believe I'm just not coming up with this idea. No, I'm saying everybody loves reboots. Well, honestly, I don't think it's likely that anyone in the SLA would have become as violent as they did had they not found someone to be violent for.

Just like how I doubt Susan Atkins would have found herself writing the word pig in the house of a murdered pregnant woman using said pregnant woman's blood had it not been for Charles Manson. But if she had Facebook then, I definitely could have seen her writing the word pig on a pregnant woman's Facebook wall. But the...

He got me on that one. He got me hard. But the difference between the Manson family and the Symbionese Liberation Army is that while Manson shaped his followers into what he wanted them to be, the members of the SLA shaped their leader into who they wanted to follow. It's reading this much material from the inside of the SLA, you can really see a disparate group of idiots come together and kind of create the perfect image

idiot evil soup for the SLA to be itself. They really do all throw stuff in together. Yeah.

See, these were people who had no real direction in life, but still wanted to do some good in this world, or at least their idea of being good, because no bad guy in politics ever thinks of themselves as the bad guy. No, that's why the best villains we have. Even now we talk about like in fiction, our favorite villains are the ones that have like a purpose, right? Like they believe that they are strong of purpose. And that's no one starts off as a villain. No one grows up wanting to be a junkie. No.

I think Mengele knew he was a villain. Like a little jibber-jabber laughter, being like, oof, Mengele, this one's fucked up. But these people needed a purpose. But as we'll see, the SLA's political philosophy demanded that a non-white person lead the revolution. But once they found that person, the revolution could commence.

But the story of how this loose confederation of activists, some acquaintances, some close friends, some ex-lovers, this all starts in the unlikeliest of places with the unlikeliest of people. It's me. This story starts in prison with Willie Wolf, a.k.a. Kaju. Although Willie Wolf was not himself a prisoner, nor was he a prison guard. But I wish I could have been. That's all I wanted to be.

Kaju was just some dumb college kid. And by dumb college kid, I mean like he was very intelligent, but he had zero fucking common sense. Honestly, I went to go see that Dave Matthews band. And honestly, the rhythms are a lot for me. I went to see, I saw people, I was like, this is too much. I have to leave. And I had to sit with my white noise machine in my SUV for several hours just to come down. Can we get rid of the violin already? Yeah.

It sounds like a woman screaming, and I hate that. Well, Willie Wolf was about the whitest kid you could imagine. He came from Connecticut. He was a Yale legacy, and he'd been both a varsity swimmer and the editor of his school newspaper at a fancy-ass Massachusetts prep school. So he was sick of it. Yeah. So, yeah, he's like, you know, honestly, guys...

I've done being white at the top that I can do it. I was the number one white in my whole family. And now it's time for me to be so good at being white, I can make myself black.

But after a gap year in Europe, Willie enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley, where he quickly found that the revolutionary ideas of people like Che Guevara, his eventual hero, were highly appealing. In fact, Willie came to be such a Che fanboy that he began dressing like Che, wearing a beret, smoking big dumb cigars. You guys want any Maduro?

You guys like plantains? I

I do, too. A little sweet for me, though. Willie Wolf also, like many young radicals, became heavily involved in protesting for the rights of black people in America. But let's be clear that this isn't why we're making fun of these people. No, it's just the slippery slope that led them to where they were. But it's not because of their actual beautiful leanings. Any of fighting for black people is nice. Yeah, there were plenty of whites who valiantly fought and in some cases died for the rights of others. But while Willie would die, he was in no way valiant.

Now, upon arrival at Berkeley... That's all of us. We will all die, but we are not valid. Now, upon arrival at Berkeley, Willie soon found his way to a loosely organized commune called the Peaking Man House.

This commune was so named partly as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Maoist politics and partly as a nod to the egg roll cart the residents ran on the Berkeley campus. Marcus, what's the difference between Maoism and Marxism? What is the difference between Maoism and Marxism? I think it's letters. I've learned more about dialectical materialism and various things inside. I actually want to say thank you to some of the people sending me very good emails.

Understanding some stuff or how like dialectical materialism is about the idea that societies are driven by actions, not ideas like a lot of people thought. And I do think that. But luckily, what's great is that the SLA was wrong about all of it. So I actually then didn't have to know. Yeah, they were just big on rhetoric. And yes, every but then everything that they believed eventually was wrong. It was just they didn't do it right. They did everything wrong.

Now, the people who lived at Peking Man House were actually serious revolutionaries who were associated with the largest, most radical activist group in Northern California at the time. Venceremos. Oh. Which means overcome. Yeah, cool. That happens sometimes. Yeah.

She's been out of town. Yeah, have you overcome? Nothing's like that third, just being like, now I'm just disgusting. What am I even jerking off to? It's like you just jerked off to like an old picture of Nancy Pelosi just because it was there. Just to do it.

Got it? Got it. They want to teach the Ninja Turtles. Yeah.

Perfect. Again, he's getting some of the words. But splintering aside, Venceramos was an organization of mostly white people that prided itself on street fights with the police. And they were not a group that shied away from using guns or at least shied away from owning guns.

Man, street fight. It's such a different time. Yeah, it is. Street fights with the police? And there's still a group? Sadly, we see it on the other side. It kind of reminds me a little bit of what the Proud Boys do in a way where they go to just fight people. Yeah.

In other words, Vinceremos was willing to use violence to achieve their goals. But the kicker with Vinceremos was that even though they were predominantly white, their creed demanded that the white members of the left should submit to dominant black and minority leadership. This idea would become essential to the ethos of the Symbionese Liberation Army. And it does make sense. The idea is for white people to use their privilege and their natural protections and use it to...

kind of safely harbor people of color within the movement and move them forward and have it about using that privilege to do it. But they were focused on it. And Kaju... Kaju? Kaju. And Kaju... Let's just say Willie Wolf for now. Willie. Willie. Willie was not that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, you know, it's OK to march in a Black Lives Matters march, but not to speak. Yeah, we sit there and hold space. So by the spring of 1972, Vincent Ramos was, you guessed it, starting a splinter. It's hard to keep them together. Because there were disagreements on whether they should focus on mass organization or straight up terrorism.

One of the people debating all this, leaning heavily towards terrorism, was Willie Wolf, a.k.a. Kaju. We'll come from everywhere. We'll come from the montañas. We'll come from the jungalows. We'll come from everywhere and they won't see us coming no matter what they think. Right, boys? Come on. Let's get them. Yeah!

Now, at this point, Willie Wolf was still enrolled at UC Berkeley and was wanting to do a school project on black men in prison. Can I do one of black men in prison? Excuse me, teacher, teacher, teacher. I want to do one of black men in prison. No, it is philosophical. It wasn't good. No.

So, a resident at Peking, in one of those casual suggestions in history that end up being extremely consequential, he suggested that Willie Wolfe attend one of the cultural nights that were being held at Vacaville Prison. Now, Vacaville was a prison that often seemed more like a hospital, or at least that's how it was in the 70s. The warden was a psychiatrist, and most of the inmates were there on good behavior assignments.

This was a prison with a little more freedom for people who do favors, which is why Vacaville is where Ed Kemper still rests his head every night at the age of 75. That's a big head. I can smell the brill cream. Yeah. Fucking three quarters of a century with old Bumblebutt. He's loving it in there. Yeah. But when Willie Wolf started going to Vacaville, Ed Kemper had not yet arrived. He was still about a year away. Yeah.

Now, Willie Wolf found his way into Vacaville through a teaching assistant in the Afro-American division of Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department, a guy named Colton Westbrook. He was signing up tutors for a new self-help educational program held in the prison library. Westbrook was working with a black inmate group called the Black Cultural Association, the BCA, which was founded to help black prisoners deal with the unique problems that confronted them inside and outside of prisons.

It was like a friendlier environment for guys who didn't necessarily fit into any of the various associations that run prison yards. Well, Vacaville is also a different type of place. It's still there. They still have, you know, the fucking, what is it, the AN or the Aryan Nation. They have different groups. They have various gangs, essentially prison gangs, that normally you try to fit into one.

But then the BCA was kind of created as a prisoner-led educational system to kind of basically keep their noses clean, to help them kind of find more intellectual pursuits that will help them outside of prison. But this just seems like a place where you're not going to get your ass kicked on a daily basis. That's the idea. It's like for people who want to learn. I actually think it's a fantastic idea. And I think more and more prisons who can do stuff like that, it would be great.

Well, Vacaville, it was also, it was much more possible there because if you fucked up in Vacaville, like if you caused any disturbance, you were gone. Yeah. Like if you fucked up, if you got into a fight, you're fucking out. But still prison gangs are going to form no matter what you do. Of course. Now the BCA was not a particularly militant or radical organization. It was mostly about rehabilitation with the idea of returning a more responsible person to the community by establishing communication between inmates and black communities on the outside.

In addition, they held twice-weekly tutoring sessions to help educate inmates.

On the cultural side of things, meetings opened with a clenched fist salute to the flag of the Republic of New Africa and a chant in Swahili. Wow, this is exciting. But the stylistic touches weren't really the point of the BCA. The BCA was about self-improvement, but those ritual trappings were fascinating to white visitors like Willie Wolf. I feel like I'm in White Men Can't Jump. Ha ha!

I love this. This is real. This is very, very real.

After attending his first meeting with the BCA as an observer, Willie found a culture that would fascinate him for the rest of his short life. He soon became one of the guys who tutored BCA members. And before long, White Willie was bringing the intense ideas of Vince Ramos to BCA members. Hey, because, all right, so for,

First of all, so happy to meet you. Love meeting a prisoner. This has been honestly a big deal for me. But I'm going to say right now is the first thing you should have done when you met me, fella, punch me in the face. Because I'm the problem, right? It's me. So come on. First up. All right, right here. Some sweet chin music. Come on. Come on, hit me. Hit me. Can I hold your pocket?

Well, that's the thing. These prisoners were also using Willie for their own purposes. In effect, he was like a mascot. He was a fool. They used him as a tool. Like he was like he was the first one. And they're all like, oh, this guy will get us anything we want. And he'll bring it over. And I don't feel like everybody in the BCA was trying to like milk other people for shit. No, it's just what happens. You're in prison. That guy can get me stuff outside of prison. And he's going to. And he's super excited to do it. Yeah.

But while most people rejected the ideas that Willie Wolf was bringing in, one in particular was very interested in what Willie had to say. That member was Donald DeFreeze, whom the world would come to know as Senku Mtube, a.k.a. Sen, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Now, one thing that Sin did share with Charles Manson was that they were both lifelong criminals. Starting in his teenage years with breaking into parking meters and stealing cars, Sin would spend much of his life either in jail, on probation, or on the run. And much of his crimes would involve weapon possession.

In 1964, for example, Sin was hitchhiking along the San Bernardino Freeway, but was arrested after police found a sharpened butter knife, a sawed-off rifle, and a tear gas pencil bomb in his suitcase. That was the one thing about him that I found interesting. If you read the book, The Life and Death of the SLA, he...

He does kind of start off like, how do you put it? Life never went right for him. Yeah. He was always kind of messed up and kind of involved in various criminal associations. But the worst part, honestly, was his fascination with bombs and that he did have a immediate fascination with bombs. And you're like, I feel like the cops will work with many things, but not bombs. Especially when you're just so willy nilly with them. They're just in your pocket. They're just out in a bag.

dude. That's the thing. Three years later, he ran a red light on a bicycle and when he was searched, cops found a homemade bomb in his pocket as well as a second bomb and a pistol in the bike's basket. His story was that he just found all this shit and was trying to sell all of it to help out his family. Oh, I'm just trying to sell these bombs. It's no big deal. Oh no, these bombs aren't for me. They're for sale. They're for my customers. No, I'm distributing bombs. That's it.

I'm like a dealer for bombs. But that's not illegal. I never saw that anywhere. Well, the bombs and the gun got him three years probation. But six months later, Sin was arrested for his first violent crime. After paying a sex worker 10 bucks, Sin engaged in her services, then pulled out a pistol, demanding the money he just paid her in addition to everything else she had. Rude. Bad guy.

Now, Sin was banking on this woman not going to the cops, but she immediately went to the cops. And when the authorities caught up to Sin, they found both the pistol, which was stolen, and a cache of more stolen weapons in the trunk of his car. That's when Sin turned snitch and led police to an accomplice who had 200 stolen guns in his possession.

It's rumored that Sin remained an informant because he did not go to jail for robbing the sex worker, nor did he do time for the veritable crime spree that immediately followed. My take is that he was absolutely a police informant.

Yeah. And that he would then that followed him to jail. It's the only thing that makes sense. Yes. Yeah. Otherwise, they would have just beat him to death. Well, yes, I think that he flipped and I think that he again, unlike his hero, George Jackson, Sinque was very morally weak. Yes.

Between 1968 and 1969, Sin was arrested for burglary. He kidnapped a rabbi and demanded a $5,000 ransom from his synagogue. He was caught on top of a bank with two pistols, an eight-inch dagger, and a hand grenade. I'm just hanging out and enjoying myself.

It's a nice sunny day. And he was wounded in a gun battle outside of a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles. Might have been one right around here. It might have been that one. I bet you. The Bank of America over here had that big shooting in the 80s. I feel like that's exactly what we're talking about.

No, this is 1968. Whoa, there had to have been multiple. Yeah. What finally sent Sen to prison was when he pistol whipped a Hawaiian tourist and stole a check from her purse. I'm angry even thinking about it. Yeah, then got arrested when he tried cashing the check.

Leave Artoris alone. Yeah, man. Yeah. Taking everything into account, Sin was given five years to life. But since he was probably an informant, he was sent to the relatively cushy Vacaville prison at the age of 30. So he's about eight to ten years older than most of the rest of the people. Like, he's the oldest person in the SLA. And remember that. Because remember, I do feel like this is as you... Why did this form?

These kids, they are like, I know we don't like object to the term kids because legally they are adults, but they're college kids. Yeah. They really don't know their ass from their elbow. They're deeply ensconced in reading, which makes a lot of sense. And they're very, very inspired.

When they go to meet Senku, you got to remember what we looked. I think about that sometimes, too. Natalie was looking at a picture of her at 30 years old yesterday, and I looked at it, and I was like, oh, when you were a baby. She's like, yep, at 30. And I was just like, holy shit. I'm like, at that point. I'm at that point where the 10-year gap is real. A 30-year-old to a 20-year-old looks like a fucking dub, like you're on Mount Rushmore. You know?

Now, Sin was a model prisoner at Vacaville because you had to be to stay there, and he soon became active in the Black Cultural Association, the BCA, where Willie Wolf thought he'd finally found his in to black culture. Now, just like a lot of guys in the BCA did, and as all members of the SLA would later do, Donald DeVries changed his name and took Sing Q from the man who led the revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad.

After shortening Sin Q to Sin for his day-to-day, he began giving lecture-type speeches during the Friday night meetings of the BCA. And when it came time to elect a new chairman, Sin volunteered himself as a candidate. Now, just a little bit, a couple dynamics here. Sin Q also, when he started coming through, one of the identities he tried for a while was like a

pastor. Like, so he went through various identities coming up. So we know that he was in search of a place that he belonged. And when he got to jail, he first started and he kind of sent the lay of the land. And then he started hearing these, this, the, the, what do you call like the theory about like leftist concepts? And he had a real hard time digesting what,

like a lot of people do. But then when he found George Jackson, he was like, oh, this is kind of like a simplified thing. Like, it's more simplified as direct as passion. Blood in My Eye is a beautiful book. And we'll get to Blood in My Eye here in a second. Yes, but he was like, you know, he kind of like, this was like, all right, I'll get into this. But imagine this. You show up at the BCA. These are guys that have been in jail, a lot of them, for years. They've been running this BCA thing for a long time. The phrase rolls up, and he's immediately like, y'all been waiting for me.

Like, it's been like, you guys don't know what you got here. The guys showed up. Everybody be ready for Singu. And he starts to go, like, you get really, really involved. But he's doing the classic Anders Breivik style. I can't just be a member of this group. I have to be the leader. I have to be the leader.

Now, from what we can tell, it's during these elections that Willie Wolf first became aware of Sin. Because in Willie's journals, he jotted down that one of the candidates was a con named DeFreeze. That's Sin's real last name. Sin, however, not only lost the election, but came in third. That's the second loser. This was partly because Sin rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Not least the black women visitors who also attended BCA meetings. They were just...

fucking creeped out by Sin. Well, it's because he was an extremely abusive man to every woman that was in his life. Yes. Also, I know that you're, like, taking on the name of this great person, but, like, Sin is, like, a bad thing to call yourself. Yeah. Well, a lot of people would tell... Well, it's also cool, because it's the opposite of what you did.

But like any sore loser, Sin actually threatened to sue the BCA because the outgoing chairman had spread the rumor that Sin was a snitch. Definitely was a snitch. Yeah. I'm pretty certain that he was. I'm almost positive. I mean, he was definitely a snitch when he turned over that guy that had the 200 guns. Let's just say it don't stop.

You know, like once it works for you once. Yeah. And then you kind of are in a situation where now, unfortunately, because like then the cops with their what's fun about them is they catch you in a trap, too. Yeah. So now you're sort of also kind of forced to stay informant. And so it yeah, he's fucked. Yep.

He admitted to selling bombs. Yeah. And the only other person we know who admits to sell bombs is Eddie Toons at eddietoons.com. That's right, baby. That's right. I'll write a joke about nothing.

Well, to compromise, to avoid the so-called lawsuit, Sin was given his own discussion group called Unicide. Thank you. Which would bizarrely focus study on the dynamics of the black family. Even though he was a fucking absentee father and a bad, just an all-around bad person. Yeah. The first outsider Sin asked to join his group was the very white Willie Wolf. You got it, mister! What do you need? Where do I talk?

the do-rag. Oh, I'm sorry. Is that offensive? I'm extremely sorry. Oh, God, I wish I was black so that I'd know. I just want to know. Can I touch your hair? Hair? Did you know that Rosebud was Missress's client? I just want to tell you fun things.

Well, Willie, he had just begun to bring in other young white revolutionaries to Vacaville prison to quote unquote tutor black inmates. These would be the members of the SLA. The first white brought to Vacaville was Willie's friend from the Peking manhouse, Russ Little, who would come to be known in the SLA as O.C. Yeah, everybody put your hands together. We got O.C. in the house. Hey!

Like most of the white members of the SLA, you know, 8.5 out of 10, Russ Little came from a boring middle class background and found his identity in radical left-wing politics. That was pretty much every single one of these people. They made radical left-wing politics their entire identities.

Oh, yeah, of course. Because, again, it's really exciting. A lot of it's very, very interesting and compelling. And I think that it does open your mind. And they're also very young. Yeah. And it's also, it's 1972, 1973. It's very fresh. It's very popular. It's cool. It's very cool. Yeah, but it's also, but that's the thing. It's stinky. It's stinky.

Yeah, this is when it gets dirty because like it's in 1969, a lot of like the legitimate groups like fall apart. And then once you get into the 70s, it starts getting a lot more violent. It starts getting a lot stranger and it starts getting a lot more serious. So it really is like it's dangerous to be into this shit in 1972 to 1975. Cool and sexy. Yes. Weird because they're so liberal, but yet they're also like down with the Hells Angels. Yeah. Well, it's because they don't understand. Yeah. Yeah.

But although Russ Little, well, that's the thing. I think they just didn't stay late enough at the Hells Angels party. Once we got to like 11 p.m. Yeah, it's like, I think we got, like, you get that feeling. I think it might be time to go. But although Russ Little was already radicalized by the time he arrived in California from Florida, he became even more so while living at Peking Man House and soon became laser focused on the plight of prisoners thanks to Willie Wolfe.

See, it was their belief that all prisoners were inherently political prisoners and that every prisoner in the system, no matter what the crime, was a potential soldier in the revolution to come. And I think it's really about that. It's a potential soldier. Yeah. It's like these, because I do think that there were many people in the

prison system as now. We know that it's now a politicized environment and it's always been. No, I mean, we worked with the Last Prisoner project with our weed for forever. We're still working with them. We're still an ally with them. Yeah, Eddie's done shit with a lot of shit with prisons. That's right. I love them. And so I do believe that he loves prison because

The walkouts just go to the mess hall. They're right there. He gets to go back. But yeah, any prisoner, child molester, that's a fucking soldier. Bestiality, there's your soldier. How long could you really go away for bestiality? Hey man, long enough to join a colt in jail. Ask it for a friend. Yeah.

It's a tragic buff. Well, these ideas were discussed in talks that Willie Wolf would give at Peking House in between screenings of anti-war films. These films were supplied by his roommate and an actual black guy. I know.

one. Here he is. He's right here. We have to live together. His name was Chris Thompson. But one night, Chris screened a propaganda film from Hanoi. These fucking nerds. Yeah. They're just watching propaganda films and they're like, isn't this amazing? I do understand. This was like you in Contact of the Desert. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

I know all these people. Well, the climax featured a Vietnamese woman shooting down an American bomber single-handedly after her baby was blown to bits by American bombs. Excellent. The whole room erupted into cheers as the plane went down, but the loudest voice belonged to Chris Thompson's casual girlfriend.

Her name was Patricia Soltysik, a.k.a. Ms. Moon, a.k.a. Zoya. In less than a year, she would co-found the Symbionese Liberation Army while holed up in her apartment with Donald DeVries, a.k.a. Sin-Q-Tun-Tu-Bay. Oh, yeah, man. Zoya's the scary one. Yeah. Now, Patty Hearst described Ms. Moon as difficult to know and even more difficult to like once you knew her.

And everything she did was aimed at her personal goal of proving that women could be just as horrible and violent as men. Awesome. By 1972, she dropped out of Berkeley completely, telling her friends that no one is free until everyone is free. Oh.

Wherever there is injustice, you will find her. Wherever there is suffering, she'll be there. Wherever liberty is threatened, you'll find Ms. Moon.

Now, Ms. Moon was a pet name given to her by her ex-girlfriend, Camilla Hall, who would one day be known in the SLA as Gabby. And also, she legally changed her name to Ms. Moon. She did. To be difficult. Now, it's one word, right? Yeah, one word. No, it's Ms. Moon. Ms. Moon. M-I-Z-M-O-O-N. Yeah, Ms. Moon sounds like the lady who runs the bodega. Yeah.

While Ms. Moon was bisexual, Camilla was gay, and the only time she knew happiness was when she was living as an openly gay woman with Ms. Moon in Berkeley.

Now, their relationship eventually ended, but even though Camilla did believe in revolution and justice and everything that went with it, she chose to join the SLA simply because that was the only way to stay close to Ms. Moon. Oh, yes. This inability to let go would only lead to more misery and eventually a

horrible death. And I think a lot of people could learn from that. Yeah, let go. In relationships, let go. Don't hold on to a revolutionary. They're choosing the revolution. They're not choosing you. They're not choosing the cat in the U-Haul. They're not choosing... You can't go with them to the revolution. You can't change a revolution into a Subaru nation. Revolution is not leading that. There's plenty of fish in the sea. That's not a...

Bad joke about vaginas. You're disgusting. You're a bad person. I said it's not. You're a bad man. And you're not an ally. Now, Ms. Moon was introduced to another friend of Willie Wolf's named Nancy Ling Perry, who would come to be known as Fahiza in the S.L.A.,

Nancy was working part-time at an orange juice stand called Fruity Rudy's on Telegraph Avenue. Okay. Telegraph's sort of the St. Mark's place of Berkeley. You got a lot of stands, a lot of booths. Yeah. And Willie Wolf was selling homemade bread in the booth next to Fruity Rudy's. Guess what color? White as all hell. Yeah, that's one thing we're keeping white. Okay.

The two talked and found they had common interests, but Nancy's background was much rougher than the other members of the SLA. While she'd grown up in Orange County as a straight-A cheerleader, she turned Maoist when she attended Berkeley and she subsequently married a black jazz musician.

Oh, yeah. But even after the marriage fell apart, Nancy would hold on to certain affectations. Like, she'd call everyone brother, and she'd talk in a black accent. Her accent, however, was pretty good. Yeah. Because if you'll remember, Nancy was the only person in the SLA that Patty Hearst thought was actually black, besides Sen, before the blindfold came off.

But during her dark times before the SLA, Nancy worked as a blackjack dealer in a gentleman's club where she wore a see-through blouse while the waitresses went fully topless. Cool. So she was in charge. Yeah. She had a couple people under her. I'm the one with the gauze. She soon fell into drug abuse and high-risk sex work. But after meeting Willie Wolf, Nancy found her purpose again and was eventually reborn as Fahiza.

Now, Nancy and Ms. Moon became fast friends, and they were soon going together to the Kabat gun range. It's spelled C-H-A-B-O-T. Have no idea how it's pronounced. I'm sure they're still in business. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's in Oakland. It's in Oakland. And they went there to learn their way around a weapon for when the inevitable revolution came.

There, they met a Vietnam veteran named Joe Romero, who took the name Bo when he joined the SLA. I really feel like they needed to really pull this all together, and I think what made them successful is the music of Sia. Because you think these women need to feel strong enough in order to put it all together, man. Yeah, even her hair is bringing black and white together. Yeah. Wow. That's a Sia joke. Very specific. EddieTunes.com. Very specific.

Now, Joe had truly been in the shit in Vietnam. He'd been a member of one of the war's long-range reconnaissance units. These are the guys who went behind enemy lines to try and out Viet Cong the Viet Cong. And let me tell you something, man.

It's fucking hard to do. I'm like not trying. I'm not enjoying out Viet conning the Viet con. I really honestly kind of wish that we weren't, you know, and we did this traditional with muskets and trenches. There's a lot of bugs. Well, as a result, Joe Romero was riddled with PTSD when he got back and he joined an organization called Vietnam veterans against the war. Yeah, he was legit. Yeah. But,

But at the same time, he thought that an armed revolution in America was inevitable and the left was going to need an organized military. So he began giving classes on how to use weapons at the Chabot gun range for anyone who was willing to learn.

And soon after Nancy Ling Perry and Ms. Moon started attending, Russ Little and Willie Wolf were acting as Joe Romero's assistants during these paramilitary classes. And it really was Willie Wolf's like group cuckism that drove this whole thing. Really, he really was just like, I just want to help everybody. I don't want everybody to just feel like they're a part of a fun army. We're in an army together.

Yeah. Well, they said that Willie Wolf was very affable and you just kind of wanted to hang around. Like he was just a friendly guy to be around. He's the Lionel Richie of the SLS. He brought them all together. Yeah.

Now, all while Willie Wolf was, I think, unknowingly collecting this Motley Crue. He didn't know that he was doing that. Yeah. No idea at all. Many of them were traveling to Vacaville under the guise of tutoring. But really, they were smuggling revolutionary literature to prisoners. And also drugs and alcohol and money. Yeah, the stuff that makes it all worth it. Yeah. T.

Chief among their texts was the book Blood in My Eye, which was a series of letters written by a prominent member of the Black Panther Party named George Jackson. Of course, he wrote these before he was killed in a prison break at San Quentin. George Jackson is legit. Yeah. His death was actually what inspired the Attica prison riots.

Oh, okay. Which also kicked off the prison abolition movement, the prison reform movement. Yes. George Jackson is a very important person in 20th century American history. Yes. And this book would be more or less the foundational text of the SLA. Okay.

See, it was George Jackson's view that the only way to effect change in America was through violent revolution against both the state and the corporations that propped up the American fascist regime. Because that's the idea. You're trying to take the mode of production, right? You're trying to take the means of production.

That's the idea. And the people who have the means of production are the state and the corporatocracy that runs the country. Jackson also claimed that the sheer number of prisoners in America could provide the infrastructure of the revolutionary armies. It makes a lot of sense because he kept saying, again, like the main issue with what's with kind of what communists and communists thought is kind of really talking about is.

There's so many people that are not in charge underneath the people that are in charge. And it's kind of crazy that you got one guard for every 1,000 criminals or 1,000 prisoners in this thing, and you just got to get them all together to fight against the top. Yeah, you know, the problem, though, with an army... There's more of us than them, always. ...made of prisoners is they're in prison. Well, they got to break them out. Yeah. Well, there was also many people in the revolution that were like, so, and you guys got money to buy a tank?

Anybody got a nuclear weapon? Yeah. I mean, it was, I'm not quite sure, but I think like George Jackson, it was kind of a thought exercise. It's a concept. Yeah, it's a concept. You're not literally supposed to do this shit. Unless you do do it. And then when you do do it, you have to do it right. It certainly didn't work in Attica. No. No.

Well, it also wasn't a coincidence that George Jackson had quite a few choice words to say about the families that ran America, which included the Rockefellers and who else but the descendants of William Randolph Hearst. I don't want them to know. The Rosebud is the name. No, no. About the chocolate starfish. I don't want anybody to know about my favorite little starfish in this whole world.

Oh, my little brown-eyed, brown-eyed one. Now, at this point, this group had coalesced around Willie Wolf simply because he was affable. But there was nobody on the outside who could be their leader. By their own ethos, they could not be part of a group that was led by a white person. And Joe Romero didn't count because he was only half Mexican.

That all changed, however, when Sin escaped from prison in the easiest prison break I've ever heard of. Well, this is, can I tell, why, I think, again, points to why he's a prison informant and what he knew. So he was talking throughout the prison, and for a while, like, as he read George Jackson...

He was like, yes, I want to be George Jackson. I want this. This guy means a lot to me. And he says that essentially like one of the terms that he one of the kind of thoughts that they have is that like essentially getting let out on bail. You might as well crawl out of jail on your belly.

Like, that's what he said. It was like the idea that you, like, that means you gave in. You gave in to the system. And you're probably going back. Well, you know, this idea that you played along. You played along and you should always be obstructing the system. And what he realized is, like, I don't want to be in jail anymore.

I never want to be in jail. And I feel like there's stuff out there. So during this time period, he's building these contacts with the BCA and they're like, I'm talking about, and he's kind of floating this concept of, you know, what if I'm not?

here no more, right? What if I'm not in this jail? And so what he started doing, that's why he was on his best behavior, is because he knew that when he got the detail, there was one work detail that took them outside of the prison gates. And so he spent all of his time, and I think he only even knew about that job because he was an informant. And he talked about, and he got the job because he was an informant. Maybe. We don't know if he was an informant. I just, that's just my read. Sure. Fly from your grave.

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Well, on December 11th, 1972, Sin was transferred from Vacaville to Soledad Prison and was reclassified as a minimum security prisoner. That meant that he could be entrusted with jobs that had more freedom. And as a result, he'd been assigned to work on the boiler in the CO training school outside of the main prison walls.

So while the guard was taking the second shift worker back to the prison so Sin could start the graveyard shift, Sin simply walked out of an unlocked door and climbed a chain link fence to freedom. Boom. Done. Out. Well, the guard... No razor wire or nothing? Nah. I mean, that's the thing. They're outside the main walls. Yeah, they were in the safe area. Yeah. Now, the guard almost lazily sounded the alarm because this happened a lot, and the prisoners were usually picked up within a day or so.

But before Sin could be recaptured, he talked a Mexican family into giving him a change of clothes and subsequently caught a ride to the Bay Area. Once he arrived in Oakland, Sin found a young black radical who'd served as an outside coordinator for the BCA at Vacaville.

Now, there are different accounts of this story. Oh, yes, because this is like one of those. This is one of those times in history where there are some versions of this story where Sinque was this Che Guevara-like leader, where this was like a big deal. And then there are also some of these where you...

which we believe in, that there's a little bit more hesitancy. I don't. The only people who thought that Sim was the Che Guevara type leader were the people in the SLA. And Jeffrey Dubin. Literally. And Jeffrey Dubin. No, Jeffrey Dubin also, like, fuck it, he also, like, slits Sinque's throat every chance he can. But he just liked all the rest of them? Yeah, he likes Bill Harris because Bill Harris talked to him. Yes, that's what, if he could have talked to Sinque, he would have loved Sinque.

ISIS. Jeffrey Toobin. I think that there was a lot. So this guy is an example of a guy that was connected.

to freeze while he was inside of jail. And he was super happy and super intense. And they got really intense conversations about how the revolution was going to fucking go down and all this kind of shit when he got out, right? And then he gets out and he shows up at your house and you're like, whoa, buddy. Oh, you're here at my house. And he's like, yeah, revolution time. And he's just like, I've got a wife and kids. I can't do

Yeah, this guy, this dude had a wife and three kids. So there's no way Sin's going to stay with him. Yeah, he's like, oh shit, you broke out of jail and you're here at my home? Yeah, but he was willing to drive Sin around town to find someone to take him in. Dump him on. Yes. Only problem was that this friend needed gas money. So he asked another friend if he could borrow some cash. But when that friend found out the money was for Sin, and this friend just happened to know Sin, she said...

Fuck no, I'm not giving a fucking dime to that shithead. Yeah. And finally, Mayfield talked her into lending him 20 bucks, but she made sure that he knew that she was doing it for him, not for sin. Yeah, you owe me this money. Yes. Yes.

But as Sin was driven around the Bay Area with his address book, telling his friend how he was going to, quote, I'm going to get our brothers and sisters. We're going to get them together. Yep. Door after door was slammed in Sin's face. Come on, my brothers and sisters. Come on, everybody. By the end of the night, after Sin had worked his way through every black person he knew in the Bay Area, he finally said,

Take me to the white people's house. It's really true. All of his actual black friends were all like, no.

No. I'm not going to fucking prison for you. No, dude. Like, yeah, I want a revolution, but you're now like, you have any idea how much, but honestly, it's like how much heat is on you is going to fuck us up. Well, it's not only that, but everyone thought Sin was crazy. They were like, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't read the

theory. He couldn't understand theory. Yeah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's fucking unpredictable. Like, get this fucker out of here. I'm also going to go ahead and guess that he's stinky. How dare you?

And that was how Sen showed up unannounced at Peking House looking for Willy Wolf and Russ Little. Just here peeking. Now everyone else at the commune was extremely nervous about Sen being there, but to deny him sanctuary would be to go against their revolutionary principles. They were like, how do we get this black man out of here? The compromise was that Sen could hide in the basement.

Now, sources vary as to whether Sin was down there for a day or a week. But what got him kicked out was when he came up from the basement during a house party dressed fly as fuck, but acting like he wasn't a dangerous fugitive. I'm guessing a week. If he did that the first day, that'd be wild. Also, they'd be stupid for throwing a party knowing you have a fugitive in the basement. Well, I don't know, man. It's college. Like, man, we can't cancel the fucking party tonight. We've been planning this shit for a week. I've been giving out flyers. Yeah, dude, we got all three Ks.

Well, as a result, the majority of Peking House decided that hiding sin was too risky of a venture.

So after scouting around, Russ Little found that Ms. Moon was more than willing to take Sin into her apartment. Oh, yeah. The two soon became lovers, and it was obvious to Willie and everyone else that their leader had finally arrived. Oh, goody gee. I could just... Oh, it's gonna go now. Yay. But I thought Ms. Moon was banging the other chick. No, they broke up. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Yep.

Sin, of course, was all too happy to accept this role. Oh, okay, I'll be in charge. He just knew immediately. This is kind of one of those things we talk about with cults. Does the cult find the guy? Does the guy pull it all together? Sin Q, when he got Unisite, he realized...

How much he enjoyed telling people what to do. Yeah. And then when this happened, he found this group of extremely pliable human beings. It was, I mean, this is probably one of the happiest days of his life. I'm sure. Well, he finally found someone to follow him. Oh, yeah. Now, whether they knew it or not, the Symbionese Liberation Army was quite an apt name for what was going down here.

Stupidly, the word Symbionese was the group's attempt at turning the word symbiosis into an adjective. There's already a word for that. It's symbiotic. You don't have to make up Symbionese, which again sounds like, I guess when I first heard that word, I always kind of assumed that it was like some fake country. Yeah, I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, was there an African nation called Symbia that I'd never heard of? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, very confusing. No, no, no, it's very stupid.

But the name was perfect. We're all going to Berkeley. You can't fucking find a real word? It's just a, man, it's too much confidence in one room. But either way, the name was perfect, but not in the way they thought. See, Sin found that in Berkeley, all these white kids would listen to whatever he had to say and would do whatever he wanted them to do simply because he was black. That's the only credential he needed.

In return, the white kids finally got to be revolutionaries while still following their principles that a white person cannot lead them. And Sen reinforced that by repeatedly telling them that he was doing them a favor by training them to be black revolutionaries, even though they were all white.

Now the SLA didn't really get going until May of 1973, when Ms. Moon, Nancy Ling Perry, and Sen started putting together the SLA's goals and codes of war down on paper, as well as their constitution and their ever-important logo. It's awesome. About their seven-headed cobra symbol, which admittedly is the only cool thing about the SLA, they wrote, "...the Symbionese Liberation Army has selected the seven-headed cobra as our emblem."

because we realize that an army is a mass that needs unity in order to become a fighting force. It is a revolutionary unit of all people against a common oppressor. And with the venom of our seven heads, we will destroy the fascist insect who preys upon the life of the people.

See, I imagine a seven-headed cobra would just die a horrible death. Yeah, man, how can you eat him? How many dicks is it? Now, the SLA did try to reach out to other black community and revolutionary groups, but they were turned down again and again when these groups reviewed the SLA's ultra-radical proposals, which always involved violence.

Oh, yes. Most of these groups just saw Sen as fucking crazy. Dude, it's the truth, which is he was a bad salesman for the group. Yeah. And what he couldn't understand that...

Yes. This concept of the escaped prisoner leading the revolutionary group, it makes a lot of sense in a novel. It makes a lot of sense in concept. But the heat that it begins with makes it almost impossible to get off the ground. And I think there's a lot of these guys are saying. It's like, it's not like even just that you're the wrong guy right now. It's not practical. You're not the guy. You need to make speeches and shit. Yeah, we don't need, like, technically,

we need another Malcolm X. That's not you. Yeah. Yeah.

But perhaps because they were rejected, the SLA went full sour grapes and decided that they just, they hated the Black Panthers. They hate the Black Panthers. Because they believed that the Panthers had sold out and given up their guns to embrace social activities the SLA saw as counter-revolutionary. Free breakfast programs, education, community outreach. Yeah, dumb stuff. But they did that. That's dumb, Eddie. When they kidnapped Patty Hearst. Yeah.

They tried to get it all back because of how much they had already fucked up. Additionally, the SLA thought that other violent revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground, those are the guys that had carried out numerous bombings by 1973. They thought that the Weather Underground were phony revolutionaries because the only fatalities incurred during the Weather Underground's many bombings was when two of their members accidentally blew themselves up in their Greenwich Village apartment.

I like revolutionaries who don't blow themselves up. But isn't it kind of good to not blow up people? No, they want a death. They want a chaos. It's the SLA. They want people to die. They think that the only way that the revolution is going to work is if people are killed mercilessly. The thing is, is they also sort of believe this idea of a kickoff event. Like, that's what we're leading towards. This idea that we will spark.

the revolution, which is very similar to Charles Manson's view of like our actions are going to start the race war that's going to bring the next era. Like that's what he thought. Like we're going to do a bunch of stuff and it's just going to kick off and then everybody's going to be so happy with me as in Q. Like I'm going to be the leader. Everyone's going to love it.

Now, by this point, the SLA had taken on three more recruits who had all moved together from Indiana to California in 1972. These were the theater kids. Oh, yeah, and every revolutionary group needs them. Bill Harris, a.k.a. Tico. You can call me Mr. Tico. His wife, Emily Harris, a.k.a. Yolanda. Some people call me Yolanda, but some people don't call me late for dinner. Everybody...

And there was the most theatrical of all, Angela Atwood, a.k.a. Jelena. Me? Are you talking to me? Yes. I'll join your army. Let's go, boys. Now, Angela and her husband, Gary Atwood, they were Indiana University's star drama couple. Oh, wow. Yeah.

But instead of going to Los Angeles after graduation. No, don't waste your talents on L.A. Angela and Gary went to San Francisco because Gary, who was reportedly the talented one, he got a job at a small theater in Berkeley. I'm doing this amazing production where it is normally for, it's very, very hyper specific. It's for one person at a time. What they do is they face this wall.

And I place my bare buttocks against a hole in this wall. And then the audience, in a way of kind of a, it's an immersion, it's an immersion experience. They stick their wrecked penis through the hole in this wall. And I bust.

ever so violently against the hope until they come inside of him. And that's how you know the show is over. Neither Gary nor Angela made a living acting.

But Angela did win the leading role in a production of a play called Hedda Gabler. Oh, very fancy old school play. Is it? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, you're a theater major. Hedda Gabler is like one of those. It's like, it's one of the classics. It's like the bird, what's it called? He has a lot of these fucking bullshits.

Like, do tigers wear neckties? You know what? That description is still more than we know. It's fucking horseshit. Hedda Gabler is dumb, man. I hate that fucking shit. This production of Hedda Gabler was produced by the Company Theater of Berkeley. And at this production, Angela made friends. And she was soon taking a night course in radical politics at UC. As

As Angela got more involved in women's lib and Marxism, Gary from Indiana was no longer doing it for her. But what about my gape show? So she left him in August of 1973. It's simply not enough, Gary. I need more.

Sometime after, she began dating Russ Little of the SLA. Russ Little introduced her to Joe Romero and Willie Wolf, and Angela soon found that she, too, wanted to be on the front lines of the coming revolution. Yes, and I'll know all the words, and I'll know all the steps. Man, Gary really dodged a bullet. Yeah, he's watching the news two years later and be like, whoo-hoo, man, wow.

Thank God I stuck to distributing child pornography. All right. Zip, zap, zap, everybody. He did get it done. That's what they all did. But Angela was not the only transplant from Indiana.

Soon after she and Gary moved to Berkeley, they were followed by their drama club friends, Bill and Emily Harris. Yeah, these two. Now, Bill was another Vietnam vet like Joe Romero. But despite all the bluster Bill displayed on that horrendous CNN documentary, the first thing he says is, my first day in Vietnam, I saw a man get tortured to death.

He never even unholstered his fucking gun. Yeah, I think what he meant was like the guy who couldn't get his uniform on right or whatever. I'm just so fat. And then he's just like, no, bro, you fucking look exactly like you should. You look fucking in my eyes, you're perfect. You're not going to see someone get tortured to death on your first day. Yeah. That's like two years in. You're in a prison camp.

Yeah, where is it happening? At the mess holes? Is it happening where everybody's playing, like hanging out where Jimi Hendrix is playing on the radio? The fucking rifles? McCain saw that. Yes, exactly. No, this guy's on the base. Exactly. No, the reason why he never saw combat is because he tore a ligament playing a game of touch football.

In Vietnam? In Vietnam. That's the best way to get out of Vietnam, dude. You know, everyone was so fucking jealous. Yeah, because he's just like, oh, my fucking taint. I ripped my fucking taint. Like, oh, yeah. And he's just like, look at my ripped taint.

I can't go in the jungle. Yep. And he paints himself as a big, tough motherfucker. Oh, yeah. And he is not. He was shipped out to Okinawa after just six months in Vietnam. He got to go to a blue zone? Yeah. He got to go to the beach. Yeah, this beautiful island nation. Yeah. He spent much of the rest of his time in service staffing the officer's club. After that, he was stationed at Camp Lejeune. No! Oh!

And according to the terms of the class action lawsuit, he may in fact be entitled to compensation. He may be. Good for him. Wow. Maybe he hurt his attitude. No, this time, oh, the bad water hurt his attitude? That's what happened to him. Maybe that is. It's the Camp Lejeune water. It might be. Maybe that made him an asshole.

Now, at this time, the SLA was split between two groups, above ground and underground. Bill and Emily Harris, as well as Camilla Hall and Angela Atwood, they were still working day jobs and living amongst the people. Nancy Ling Perry, Ms. Moon, and Russ Little, however, they had secluded themselves with sin in a white middle-class suburb in the East Bay in a house they called the Liberated Zone. Jesus.

Oh my God. It's so funny because no matter what they do, it sounds like fucking right wing podcast. Also, you don't have to name everything. You really do. That is a left wing thing. Yeah. That's a very left wing thing. You got to get, everything's got names and broken. Everything's got broke down. It's like, oh, everything needs organizations and groups. They argued. I bet they argued for six hours about what they were going to call it. Oh my God. I hate when I'm on a group text chain and like people keep changing the name of our group. It's like, yeah,

Nobody cares. We don't need a name. Here we go. Here we go. Somebody tell us.

But now that they had the name, the logo, a little safe house, and the codes of war, the SLA decided that they weren't going to be all talk. Nor would they stoop to community service like the Black Panthers. Yeah, because we all know how much of a pussy the Black Panthers are. Sarcasm punt. Instead, Sen felt that they needed to act and act violently. And the Panthers...

Dude, you just came fucking a millimeter away from punching me in the face. That's the story of working with Henry. He's fucking whizzed my nose like 10 times. The people who found themselves in their crosshairs was Oakland Superintendent of Schools Marcus Foster and his deputy, Robert Blackburn.

Now, Foster had proposed a plan for student IDs in schools that were experiencing particularly bad problems with violence and vandalism. This is so they could keep out non-student criminals and drug dealers. Additionally, Foster had suggested they place security guards at these same schools. Now,

Now, Willie Wolf was at the meeting where all this was proposed, and he reported what Foster had said back to Sin, and Sin immediately became incensed. Because you remember, he believed in the conspiracy theory view of this. He thought they meant the kids were being tracked, and they were going to let police in and tell everybody, the police were teaching classes and shit. Yeah, and that they would fingerprint all the kids and put them into a huge database, and it was like the first step towards like a

police state. Yes. So they decided that the public unveiling of the Symbionese Liberation Army would be the murder of Marcus Foster. They believed that this was going to be the only way to stop the ID program and the occupation of the schools by the pigs. And they also believed, without evidence, that both Foster and his deputy were CIA agents. Sounds like somebody's talking.

About themselves. There is a whole conspiracy theory about the CIA forming, like, and doing all of this stuff. Yeah, there's Operation Chaos. Yes, and all that kind of stuff. It's not. No, no, these are all just fucking morons. Sounds like something that a CIA guy would say. But in both these assumptions, the SLA was dead wrong.

Soon after that October meeting attended by Willie Wolf, Foster walked back the proposals after the community opposed them. And Foster had always been opposed to armed security in schools. He just wanted guys around to help out. We have violence in the schools. I'm trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Yes. Meanwhile, today, every school has a cop with a gun. Oh, yeah, with an assault rifle. Yeah.

No, it's Marcus Foster was a good man legitimately trying to do his best at an extraordinarily difficult job. Yes. The SLA, of course...

They never noticed the update. They never saw the walk back. And they continued on with their plan in the hopes that it would rally every revolutionary group around their cause. The effect, of course, was the exact opposite. Uh-oh! Now, if you'll remember, one of the reasons why the SLA had kidnapped Patty Hearst was because they wanted a traitor for the two comrades who'd been arrested for the murder of Marcus Foster. Those comrades were Russ Little and Joe Romero.

But as it went down that fateful night, neither Romero nor Little pulled the many triggers that killed Oakland's superintendent. Really? Yes. On November 6, 1973, at 7 p.m., Marcus Foster and Robert Blackburn had just attended a city council meeting and were walking to their cars to attend another meeting. These are hardworking motherfuckers. Yeah, dude, that sucks. Yes. Yes.

They were approached by three people. The assailants were Sin, Nancy Ling Perry, and Ms. Moon. Sin had a 12-gauge shotgun, Nancy Ling Perry had a .380 automatic pistol, and Ms. Moon had a .38 special. Tell me, are you ready to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?

Nancy fired first and hit Foster in the leg. She was followed by Sin, who fired two shots, which hit Robert Blackburn in the back. Finally, Ms. Moon walked up to Foster and fired bullet after bullet into his body, then fired the final shot into the back of his neck. They then fled to the getaway car, and that was where Joe Romero and Russ Little were waiting.

In all, Foster had been shot eight times, any one of which would have been fatal. And while the SLA fled, Blackburn staggered towards the nearest doorway and collapsed just inside the Board of Education building. But he did survive.

That means that Sin did not kill anybody. No. The murderer was Ms. Moon and Nancy Ling. Whoa. Oh, yeah, dude. And Ms. Moon would... I mean, that's... Again, this is what she's going to use for the rest of her time. Because Zoya is the real scary one. Yes. Also, like, it was just... They proved in that moment that the cyanide bullets don't work. It's very, very stupid. It's extremely, extremely stupid. Well, the Blackburn got hit with shotgun pellets. Oh, okay. Well, he read...

Didn't they, like, read about the cyanide bullets somewhere? I don't know. I looked that up, and I remember seeing somewhere why they did that. I mean, I know it's dumb. Yeah, and it doesn't work. Yeah, I've heard of this kind of stuff from, you know, people always talk about the cyanide bullets, and the guys who dip bullets in shit and stuff like that. Yeah, I think it's mostly just to tell your friends. Upon inspecting the bullets, the cops smelled the distinct aroma of almonds. Wait, let me see this. Ha ha ha!

No, let me try it some more. Throwing the bullet around his mouth. Yeah, that's cyanide. The bullets have been packed with cyanide, which would, as we know, become a calling card for the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Now, later, Nancy Ling Perry would justify the murder by saying that Robert Blackburn had immediately ducked into a crouch and tried to escape by running in a zigzag pattern, which she said had proved his CIA training.

This proves that you've learned how to escape from an alligator. Here we go. This comes from Clint John. The answer depends on multiple factors, primarily type purity and amount of cyanide delivered per bullet. I once utilized a 1-8 drill bit to enlarge the cavity of 22 CCI singers to accept a payload of pure potassium cyanide reagent because I was 15 and I thought I was a ninja. I never tested them on anything, but the amount was very small, almost significant.

Just look at this long thing. At the very least, if leave does not kill you within the hour, it will induce necrosis and turn the wound septic. Other poisons are more effective. He's more on earth. Continue. Well, this justification of him being a CIA agent was necessary because besides sin, the SLA wasn't feeling all that great about murdering Marcus Foster once the reviews, so to speak, started rolling in. After the SLA wrote a document and sent it to a radio station taking credit for the murder,

They were immediately condemned by literally everyone. Yes. And this is the action. This is an example of that. They thought they were going to do this.

and the revolution was going to start. They just thought that this was just going to kick it all off, and there was going to be blood in the streets. And then he's real bad at it. Yeah, you don't start a pro-black revolution by killing a successful black man. They are. Yep. You were right. Several sources also said that more than one prisoner at Vacaville told Willie that Sin had to go because he'd gone too far and fucked up too badly.

seemingly torn as to what to do. And this is just a rumor. It said that Willie allegedly fled to California and went back to his parents' house in Pennsylvania for a few weeks. But even though he probably felt guilty, when his father brought up the Marcus Foster murder and said it was an ugly thing, Willie still felt like he had to defend it.

And he told his father, hey, maybe Foster deserved it. Likewise, when Ms. Moon's brother brought up the murder, she told him that Foster was, quote, in it with the pigs. He was the school superintendent. Yep. It's like, yeah, it's like. But whether or not they truly felt bad, they had to double down because sin was doubling down. And by their own principles, sin was the commander and could not be questioned. Right.

Now, after the murder of Marcus Foster and the fallout that ensued, the SLA got a new safe house in the San Francisco suburb of Concord, 20 miles away from Berkeley.

This would be the first official SLA base of operations. And it was here that they began to plan their next actions while continuously performing their training exercises. We watched the scene right before we started recording from Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst. And we didn't know. We're going to watch it. I want to watch it now. I can't wait. But they do the scene of them running around going like pew.

It's crazy. It's so funny. Yeah, this Patty Hearst movie looks insane. I mean, it's got William Forsyth and blackface. Yeah, going like, I'm going to get you, sucker. I'm going to get you, sucker. And when it came to ideas as to what to do next, Bill Harris actually came up with the idea to hijack food trucks to give out food to the people, which, as we know, is an idea that would later be repurposed as a ransom demand.

But after none of them could figure out how exactly they could distribute stolen food from a stolen truck and not get caught, Sin decided that their next operation should be the kidnapping of someone important. The idea to kidnap came from George Jackson, too. Then he did it wrong.

Well, they made a list. Can I ask a question? Did all the food go bad? They didn't ever actually hijack the truck. Oh, they didn't hijack it. No, no, no. They just sat around talking about it. Oh, okay. Because that's what they did is they talked and talked and talked. There's a lot of meetings. Sorry. The chef in me got so mad. Yeah. The chef...

Well, they made a list of two dozen names that included local bankers, corporate executives, and correctional facility officials. This document was labeled Western Regional Unit 10 in what seems to be one of the first examples of the SLA pretending to be larger than they actually were. And they're just pretending with themselves. I think there was a little fake it till you make it. Yeah. I think it was kind of this idea that like...

We're really, we are the vanguard. We're going to inspire everyone. And they're trying to, I think they're also trying to pump themselves up. And it's Anders Breivik again. But on December 19th, 1973, the San Francisco Examiner announced the engagement of the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst to a Mr. Stephen Weed. Now, the article plainly stated that Patty Hearst went to UC Berkeley. So Bill Harris...

He just went to the fucking UC administration building and looked up her address in the student directory. Yeah. Well, you know, these are things that get corrected. You know? Yeah. I mean, it really was as simple as that. And after checking out her apartment and seeing that her kidnapping would be extradited,

Extremely simple. They all agreed that the kidnapping of a Hearst heir would give them the perfect victim on every level, from the ease of the crime to the symbolic nature of capturing someone whose family was name-checked in blood in my eye.

But as far as how Little and Romero got arrested, they were looking for the SLA safe house one night but got lost in the neighborhood. Their problem was that they were driving a van that matched the description of a vehicle suspected in a string of local burglaries. So when a patrolman named David Duge noticed the van driving in circles around the neighborhood, he pulled them over.

After finding Ramiro a little suspicious, Douge asked them to step out of the car. And that's when Ramiro opened fire. That's when you say...

Oh, no, officer. I'm so sorry, officer. We should move. Like, oh, I didn't know. We'll be on the lookout for those bad boys. You know what I mean? Like, that's why you don't got to get arrested. Well, he asked him to step out of the car because he wanted to pat him down. Of course. And they were armed. Oh, yeah. They're also, you know, they're dirty hippies get treated horribly. Oh, I get it. I get it. I'm just saying if you're trying to sort of like...

make the revolution go in the beginning and you need all the crew, you can't just pop off randomly. Also, just know where your fucking safe house is. It's super crucial. Ramiro and Dooge got into a small gunfight, but when Dooge retreated to his car to call for backup, Ramiro ran away on foot while Russ Little took off in the van. But,

But since Little was still lost, he ended up circling back to Douge just after backup arrived. What the living fuck am I in a Twilight Zone episode? I can't get away from this situation. Nightmare on Elm Street 4. What the fuck, man? It's just, what a moron. Also, San Francisco is extremely, this whole area is very confusing. Yeah.

Little was boxed in, and when cops searched the van, they found hundreds of freshly printed leaflets featuring the Symbionese Liberation Army's seven-headed cobra symbol. Ramiro, meanwhile, spent all night trying to find the safe house, but was caught hiding between two homes at 5.30 a.m. Tragically for him, he was only two blocks away from the rest of the SLA. He almost found it. And the address is on the flyer. Yeah.

Even worse was that Romero was found with one of the guns used to murder Marcus Foster. So Romero and Little were charged with Foster's murder even though they were just the getaway drivers during the crime. Man, we need more and different guns. I like barely

killed him. Yeah, I was just kind of hearing them kill him. Now, the SLA heard about Romero and Little's arrest within hours. And since Romero had been arrested so close to the safe house, they decided that they would burn it to the ground with everything inside to destroy all evidence that the SLA was even there. We'll be like ghosts in the night. No one

Nobody's going to know we're here. No one's going to know anything about the SLA ever. Secret organization. Except for all the communiques and all the shit that we send out. Except for the widely public ways we've been asking for attention. Nobody's going to know anything about us. Well, to do so, they soaked the house in gasoline and connected a fuse to a line of gunpowder.

The fuse was lit, and Nancy, Ms. Moon, and Sin hauled ass out of there in Willie Wolf's 1967 Oldsmobile. But guess what they didn't live in? A Looney Tunes cartoon. And you don't just sit. Like, that doesn't happen. Like, the idea of a long line of gunpowder, like, leaning to the explosion. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

This thing's called wind. Yeah. But while there was an initial blast from the gunpowder, the fire didn't catch. And in trying to destroy the evidence, the SLA led police directly and immediately to the place where all the evidence was. Honestly, I can't find any evidence. Where does this line of gunpowder lead to?

All right. It leads right to just like an open box. They just open the box and like, here's all the fucking shit. Yep. Inside, they found several typewriters, a mimeograph machine, half a dozen types of ammo, gas masks, bandoliers, stolen license plates, and three BB guns.

They also, I don't know what the fuck they had. I guess the BB guns. To fake. Yeah. To fake having guns. Yeah. They also found boxes of SLA documents and notebooks filled with Nancy Ling Perry's and Joe Romero's musings. Wouldn't it be amazing if I could kiss Cotter from Welcome Back Cotter? Mr. and Mrs. Cotter. So what, the gas didn't catch? No. It's extremely, gasoline actually takes a lot of heat to spark. Mm-hmm.

But most importantly, authorities found an incredible amount of evidence that the SLA was planning a kidnapping.

In trying to find the perfect target, the SLA had consulted the who's who in American industry, the who's who in business and finance. We need a who's who. And the watchdogs of Wall Street. These are all books stolen from the local library where Ms. Moon was working as a janitor. The local library is the most socialist thing around. Why are you stealing from the local library? It's the most socialist thing that exists. You can rent it out. $100.

fake name they're not gonna ask you also you probably would have been better off burning the books the cops also found papers detailing schedules for surveillance duty on certain targets

One of those targets was John Countryman, former chairman of the board for the Del Monte Corporation. Don't you come for my corn, Colonel! That's fruit, right? That's corn! No, fruit guys are very bad. South America, Banana Republics, all that type of shit. Oh yeah, they're very bad. I'm Bob Dole. Dole not, not.

Not fruit. Not fruit man. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. He's just guy of grit. See, Angela Atwood had been assigned to surveil John Countryman's house while Nancy Ling Perry was actually working on a communique for his kidnapping. They were going to totally fucking kidnap this guy. We're going to get him. We're going to get him good. But the plan fell apart when they discovered that John Countryman had died in 1972. Well...

We need to get our current for Who's Who. Where is he? It just turns out the Who's Who in American industry is all from like 1958. How are we supposed to? We need to kidnap Walt Disney. Ah, fuck. Pacing around an urn trying to get information out of him. Yeah, right.

But on the list that included John Countryman, as well as the vice presidents of Wells Fargo and the Bank of America, that list had the name of Marcus Foster. See, we got one. Written next to that name was the word executed. It's kind of like when you write, you have a to-do list, but you include all the things you've already done so you can feel like you've already done them. You know what I mean? You do that? I know, but I've heard...

You write a thing down that you've already done on the do list just so you can strike it out. I write a real easy thing up top. Yeah. Like something like make breakfast. Live. Yeah. But like, were they worried they were going to forget they killed us? I just think it's like, again, it's about paperwork. It's like, and you see in him, we're actually, we're making some progress here because this one we executed. Yeah.

No, it really is. It's about ceremony. It's about symbolism. Well, because again, they're also saying that these are the logs for our war. We're making war. We're an army. These are logs. This is going to be this important. It's going to carry through history. Yeah, we're making history here. Yes. And we want people to know what the Symbionese Liberation Army was doing at all times. Yes.

But just after Marcus Foster's name was who else but Patty Hearst. Written next to her name were the words, Arrest Warrant Issued.

This was mid-January, weeks before Patty Hearst was kidnapped. Nobody bothered to warn anybody on the list that they were potential targets. And as a result, just a few months later, William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter would find herself in the lobby of the Hibernia Bank with a gun, announcing to everyone present that her name was Patty Hearst and she was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. I mean, Tanya, shit! Fuck!

I'm Tonya. But after the arrest of Joe Romero and Russ Little, every above-ground member of the SLA quit their jobs and went underground with everyone else. And at Bill Harris' insistence, Willie Wolf returned from his family's home in Pennsylvania to rejoin the group he'd accidentally put together. And I'll always blame you both for not making me black. Okay.

And on the night Willie returned, as they all sat on the floor of their new safe house on their sleeping bags like it was a goddamn slumber party, Sin ceremoniously decided to make a permanent change. Here's how that scene went, according to the book An American Journey, The Short Life of Willie Wolf. Beginning tonight, Sin Q said, we'll use our revolutionary names only, so y'all know me.

I'm Sinku. Then he nodded at Ms. Moon, who said, And I'm Zoya. And at Nancy, who said, And I'm Fahiza. Next came Bill Harris, who said, Deco, that's me. And Emily, who said, Yolanda. And Angela, who said, Call me Jelena. Which left only Willie, who said with a bow, And I am Kajo. Kajo? Said Fahiza. Where did you find that? It's a Central American Indian word.

What does it mean? Unconquerable. And it's with our return to where we left the story in part one that we'll continue the odyssey of Patty Hearst. It's unconquerable. Starting with the crime that made this the biggest true crime story of the decade, the robbery at Hibernia Bank. I don't care what anybody says. I'm the strongest, blackest man I want to be.

It was amazing. You did such an amazing job, Marcus. It was a joint effort between me and Carolina. Both of you did. It's so much information, but I feel dumber knowing it. Welcome to our entire lives. Now, next week, we are going to give each other Soheili names.

But that'll be for next week. And we are not, we can't continue forward unless we do have proper revolutionary names by next week. I'll think about it. So we have to think about it. I'm already looking right now. I want to be Luke Skywalker. No, it has to be Swahili. Right now I'm looking at Cha-Cha, which means eagle. Ooh. And then there's also, I like that one. Ooh, yeah. What's testicles? Let's look it up.

testicles in Swahili. Corodani. Corodani. Corodani. Corodani. Can I be Corodani? Actually, that sounds super cool. It does. I'm Corodani, bro! You watch out, superintendents! Yeah, man. No more school for them! And I'm gonna be Matiti.

My titties? It is Swahili for breasts. Oh, great. Well, that's where it comes from. I guess so. I don't think so, actually. It's just a coincidence? Yes. I'll be Uso Wamufupa. Oh, what does that mean? Skeleton face. Oh, wow. Very specific. Well...

i'm very glad that we'll be together code donnie and me my tt and you who's so what oh so this is great this is really good yeah yeah this is really good i've been wanting to rename myself for a long time let's just work on this let's workshop this we'll come back yeah i might go back to luke skywalker you might you honestly but you make it swahili i'm just gonna say luke skywalker all right well

We'll talk about it. Patreon.com slash podcast. You're going to want to see our bodies flop around. You can do that. Give us money. Go to TikTok and also Instagram and LP on the left. You can see all of our social media content. And I know you are addicted to it.

You want to go to twitch.tv slash LPN TV. You're going to watch all the streams. Very good. On YouTube. Go look at YouTube. It's on there. We got a lot of good stuff. Good podcast is out. We got the UK store. Go if you're in the UK and you want our bullshit. Our merch. You can finally buy it. You can do it now. It's easy to do. Last podcast on left.com, but in England.

So you just do it there. You will like it. Also, come to our shows in London. We have a lot of shit. Come check us out. Can't wait. Cadigan Hall and Hackney Empire. And we're going to bring stuff. We're going to bring, obviously, we'll bring Merch Woman there. But also at the same time. But buy now so you don't have to, so you can get hammered and not bring it on with you. Don't worry. They're going to get hammered.

I'm not worried about that. And I would like to say, sadly, rest in peace, Doug Sackman, who's a friend of the show, who's a very good friend of mine, and he passed away this weekend. And it really, I don't want to do a lot of these. Yeah. It seems like since I've joined the show, is this the third one? There's been a couple of these. Yeah, I think it's because it's just, it's our age. Yeah. It's fun. But I just want to say, we are going to miss him and it's an extremely sad time for

For me. But, hey. Shout out Kabuki Man. We love you, buddy. Kabuki Man. Just make sure, honestly, if I can hit up your buddies. That's what that means.

Alright, well, that's fun. And also, No Dogs... I mean, I feel like... I mean, I need to do this. Oh, so... Oh, Mr. Plug. Oh, mister, he spent months working on his show. You didn't let me do a year. Yeah, we have the DC show, too. Yeah, we have the DC show, too. The revolution's coming, DC. You're both bastards. You didn't really wait until... How dare you both...

You needed to wait until after the plugs for the memorial. Check out the new No Dogs in Space. Doug would want this. Yes, he would. We're doing it on Can. We're doing it on the band Can. Come see us in D.C. Doug would have wanted this. Incredible band out of Germany. Can, you know their albums Togamago. You know the song Vitamin C. We're going to get into their entire journey through the world of experimental music into music legends.

It's super fucking cool. We're really proud of this series. So, yeah, please go and check it out. Do it. Hey, hail Stanton. Hail George Jackson. Sure. Yeah. Why not, right? Yeah. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors. You can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to LastPodcastNetwork.com.

Was it easy leaving the group chat when the bubbles turned green and every message was Cam likes this and Claire dislikes that? Oh yes, yes it was, because I get enough overreacting at home. Like liking messaging again with WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.

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