Episode 581: Patty Hearst Part IV - The Missing Year
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All right. You ready? I'm ready, man. I'm fucking so fucking ready. We are closing this down. I feel the heat. I feel the heat. I feel the melting of the gas mask already. And it's just nice to finally be here. I just want to go to a bank and shoot some people. I know. I've been craving it. Is that weird? Ever since we started, I've been like...

This actually sounds kind of fun. Yeah, these guys are smart. They all get to go do that in a group. Because our buddies, we don't do jack shit if it's not about work. We used to rob banks all the time. Yeah, dude. We need to get back to simple friendship. Yeah. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. Getting back to simple friendship is Henry Zebrowski. Hey, no. Revolutionary. Matiti. Matiti Mawinda.

Yeah, that is me. I'm ready here. I'm holding my tits, ready for justice. Honestly, I have ingested enough leftist ideas, thanks to the SLA, that...

I've given up on deodorant. Fucking got you. I'm supporting you. It's fine. And of course, Ed Larson. Yes, I painted myself today in honor of Tico. You guys can't see. And I just want to say thank you, Eddie. Because, you know, I was doing it, but the makeup was really irritating my skin. But for those of you that just listened to the audio format, know that Eddie is in full control.

SLA makeup. Because that's what I call it. Oh, absolutely. Incognito. Yes, this is not you. This is not blackface. Yeah, no, I'm just going down to Compton, going to go chill in a house. Yeah, he...

is just trying to fit in. So when we last left Patty Hearst, she, along with Tico and Yolanda Harris, were in a motel room in Anaheim watching live footage of an army of police officers surrounding a yellow stucco house in Compton. Inside that house was the rest of the SLA. Jelena, Zoya, Gabi, Fahiza, Keju, and their leader, Sinkyu Mtube. Each name dumber.

than the last. I do love, I was watching all of the footage, like they did a lot of the, we have a lot of the running footage, we'll show you some today, of the day when the shootout happened, and it is really funny because all the cops said, you

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were coming around here. We kind of had an inkling that maybe the SLA was in the neighborhood. But then every single person came up to us to say the white people with the guns are over there. Get them out of our neighborhood. See, Sin had bought his way into this house with a hundred bucks after he received a dead drop from Tico Harris saying that the cops were on the SLA's trail.

and Sin had spent the entire day drinking Boone's Farm and telling numerous people walking in and out of the house exactly who he and these five white people were. So, when a concerned mother saw an L.A. This is my make evidence against me juice. I tell you what, fellow, what I like to do is I like to strap on five or six Boone Farms and I like to give myself out. I'm here for you.

So when a concerned mother saw an LAPD cruiser, she flagged them down and told them that a black guy, a white guy and several white women were camping out in a house on 54th Street and Compton Avenue, bragging about being revolutionaries and making bombs. They're bragging about it. Let's show them how the LAPD develops bombs.

See, the cops already knew that the SLA was in that neighborhood because Yolanda Harris had left behind a parking ticket when their van was ditched after the shootout at Mel's Sporting Goods. So the officer already had a photo spread of the SLA ready to go. So after the mother identified six members of the SLA as the ones hanging out in the house on 54th, the LAPD prepared for war.

Before the SLA even knew what was happening, over 100 LAPD officers surrounded the house around 5 p.m. on May 17, 1974. They called out 12 times over a bullhorn for the SLA to surrender.

all while a slew of TV reporters speculated live from the scene as to whether or not Patty Hearst was still inside. It was very exciting. Liquor stores were getting robbed left and right, I'm sure, with all the cops so busy. But after the 12th demand, the LAPD figured enough was enough and fired canisters of tear gas into the house.

A member of the SLA quickly grabbed the canister and threw it back outside. And after putting on their gas masks, the SLA loaded their guns and settled in for the final showdown that they'd always wanted. Guys, we're finally going to get killed.

get killed by the police. Isn't this incredible? Amazing. I feel like I'm finally on 8H. Ready for my premiere, Lord. This is actual footage from the gunfight that erupted as soon as the SLA opened fire. Play it loud. Damn.

It is crazy. Yeah. It was a huge gunfight. Massive. I can't believe so many more people didn't die. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. Now, for over an hour, the SLA fired in 30-second intervals with automatic weapons and shotguns, while the SWAT teams laid down heavy repressive fire to prevent the SLA from shooting with any accuracy. Can I say it's always been one of my fantasies? To be killed by the police? No, no, no, no, no. I want to be...

Celebrated by everyone. But I've always wanted to, when a tear can canister comes in, to kick it out a window. That's like one of my favorite moments from anything, and I've always wanted to do it. Because if you pick it up with your hand, it's super hot, right? Yeah, it can be. You grab your revolutionary flag, and you pick it up, and you throw it out. Oh yeah, a little handkerchief. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meanwhile, people in the surrounding houses laid down on their floors as soon as the gunshots started to avoid stray bullets because this was a small house in a row of houses that were all very close together.

Newsmen, meanwhile, were reporting from the scene and they actually felt SLA bullets whizzing by their heads. One dude was holding the camera canister and the bullet hit the fucking camera canister and bounced off and landed on his shirt sleeve. Because the way it sounded to the cops rolled up and they surrounded and they really were saying like,

We think Patty Hearst is inside, essentially. Send everybody out. Let's not go through this. But the way they responded was over the fucking top. The SLA just started fucking doing automatic gunfire as soon as they were outside. And it was just, and they're not good at it. Cops get super mad when you shoot at them. They're like, nah.

Chill with it. You know who does as well? Comedians. It's a pet peeve of mine to be shot at. Well, in all, the LAPD fired more rounds during their shootout with the SLA than they ever had in any assault previously done. They fired more than 9,000 bullets. Wow. Wow.

The SLA, however, also had an incredible amount of ammunition at their disposal, an estimated 4,000 bullets fired, and their ferocity forced the LAPD to bring in even more officers. Here's police scanner footage of the cops desperately calling for backup.

Ah, I can already hear the demand for more audience. It's absolutely wonderful to hear that. This is

more hullabaloo than was inspired when i played hooker with a limp in sweet cherry but incredibly even though there were over i don't know there was nearly 15 000 rounds fired during this gun battle not a single person outside of the house was killed or even wounded now we don't really know how it happened but

But somehow, after the gun battle had gone on for almost an hour, the yellow stucco house where the SLA made their last stand caught fire. I do have a theory. I got two theories. It's very similar to the Ye Olde Waco scenario. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Maybe there's something going on there. I do think

possibly one thing that old house, shitty house, you throw a couple of tear gas canisters in there, it could very well spark a fire and it could blow up the whole place. There was also rumors that there were gas canisters inside. See, they said that according to one of the police officers that I thought was interesting, I thought was a clue, was that they had some form of C4. They had light chunks of explosives. So what they were doing was like they heard, apparently in the background, you can hear a lot of the firefight. You hear a boom, boom.

which is these like essentially explosions that they're setting off. So they might have set themselves on fire. Yeah. Also, like you got to imagine you're firing thousands of rounds out of a rifle. It's going to be very hot. Yeah. And you just put that shit on a shitty carpet or a drape. It could just go up. That's very true. Oh, and then they're all bad revolutionaries. So you can hear it's like, you know how they in every old movie they'd always call for if someone got shot or like a health emergency, you just hear like, get me boiling water.

It's like that thing where we're like, I need boiling water. And so I can just see one of them, like Kaju, being like, I am not supposed to watch the pot. I know that that's an eternal old rule of age and since the beginning of time, but the longer I'm watching this pot, it's not boiling. What am I supposed to do?

I'm bleeding to death. Save me, black man. But even when the flames began jumping to the nearby houses, firefighters couldn't come close because the SLA continued their personal war against the LAPD even as the house burned down around them. The cops made one final plea for the SLA to come out before the house fell down on the SLA's heads, but were only met with one last burst of defiant gunfire.

Now, when the fire became too intense in the front, Sin and the others retreated to the rear of the house. They pulled up some floorboards and curled up with each other in the crawl space.

As they waited for the inevitable, the fire ignited the remainder of the ammunition, creating one last cacophony of noise from the ever-verbose SLA. As far as how the SLA got a hold of so much ammunition, if anyone's thinking conspiratorially, remember, they just robbed a fucking bank. They had a lot of cash on hand to go buy ammunition, and they weren't spending money on anything else. They were stockpiling for a long time. They were looking for it. That was like

one thing I realized as they were going, they were picking up piece by piece by piece. And if they are a CIA op, they had long abandoned their leaders and were now in a free reign area. Yeah, they were not getting a steady supply of ammunition.

But when the fire finally reached the back of the house where the SLA was taking refuge, Fahiza tried making a run for it by sneaking out of the crawl space in the backyard so she could move to the next house over. Gabi came out behind her, but when she saw a police officer stationed behind the house, Gabi opened fire and a single returning shot hit her right between the eyes, killing her instantly.

I told her to stop drawing that ironic target on her forehead. I said, there's nothing ironic about it unless you're shopping at the Walmart. Fahiza returned fire as well, but caught two bullets in the back, severing her spine. Jelena reached out and pulled Gabi's corpse back under the crawlspace beneath the flames. And together, the SLA let the flames take them.

just to feel like that's the dumbest way to go. Yes. And that was what the coroner said. He said that he had never in his life seen people

as the SLA behaved in the face of flames. According to the coroner's report, the concentration of smoke in the lungs of Keju, Jelena, Zoya, and Sin suggested that in their dying moments, they were actually breathing in flames as their gas masks melted onto their faces. Look! Sin, look! I'm getting a chart! Look! My dreams! They're coming true! Look!

The greatest concentration of smoke, however, was in Sen's lungs, suggesting that he was the last to die. In his final moments, Sin-kyum-tu-bay, a.k.a. Donald DeFreeze, pressed a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger, ending his reign as the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. And I would also say straight up what he was always planning to do. Yeah. Yeah.

But they were all playing. I think one person, one writer put it is that Sin committed suicide in a sort of Hitlerian ecstasy. Oh, very much so. Yeah, I could see the Hitlerian ecstasy, which I've only approached once or twice before. And it's a special place to be. It's very confident. Good old Gabi Braun. Yeah.

Meanwhile, back in the hotel room in Anaheim, Tico and Yolanda Harris were in hysterics as they watched their comrades die live on television. Through tears, Tico repeated over and over again that this was all his fault, which it was. Yep. And how he wished he was there and had died with them. So do we all. It's also kind of Yolanda's fault. Oh, definitely. Oh, no, no. It was a joint fuck-up.

Yolanda, however, said that being killed would have served no purpose and Sin would want them to live and fight on for the cause. It's actually the exact opposite of what Sin wanted. Sin kept saying, I want you to die. He literally was saying, we're all going to die doing this. He said it many times. He says that was the point.

It's kind of a shitty game plan. Yeah. Yeah, Eddie. There's no follow up because you don't get to see the revolution. It's not going to happen. Yeah. The propaganda didn't make any sense because he was saying at the same time, he's like, yeah, this is going to be the Symbionese nation one day. But also we're all going to die in the making of the Symbionese nation. But we're also going to be the leaders. It doesn't make any fucking sense. If I'm seeing blue oyster coal. Right. And there is not a single member.

of Blue Worcester Colt left to see over the OG lineup, right? Like, I'm not going to go. I'm going to find that out. I'm not going to go, right? If you tell me this whole new country that started by this whole group of guys, right? But none of them lived. I mean, like, I think that's a loss. I think that if everyone's dead and there's nobody there to do it, it's just like, it just doesn't seem...

maybe I'm asking for too much. Well, I think their idea was that they would die in the revolution, but they would kick off the whole thing and everyone else would be that would, you know, reap the rewards, but they all had a death wish. We all know that if you shoot at

Cops, you're going to die. They're not happy about it. They're going to make sure if you don't die then, they're going to just keep trying. They're going to keep trying to kill you. But also with these revolutionary leaders, I also think that they forget is that no one wants a thrift one. No one wants a pre-owned revolutionary group. They want their own. Yeah.

But while Tico and Yolanda were in tears in the next room, Patty Hearst had locked herself in the bathroom in a panic. She realized that had she been there, she would have died too. Everything had played out exactly as Sin had prophesied. And from the way the authorities had cornered them to the SLA's inevitable violent deaths.

But while Patty was glad that most of the SLA was dead, she suddenly realized that the only ones left were Tico and Yolanda Harris, the ones she feared and hated the most. And she knew that their revolutionary zeal would only be intensified by the deaths of their comrades.

But perhaps most importantly, Patty had noticed that during the entire saga that had played out for them live on television, the cops never once called out for the SLA to release Patty Hearst. In fact, her name was never mentioned at all by the police. And they weren't super careful with the invasion either of the original house. So by the logic that Patty was operating upon at this point,

That meant that she was indeed considered to be the common criminal that Attorney General Saxby had labeled her as. As she put it, her fear of the police outweighed her hatred for the SLA because she at least knew that as long as she kept up the act of the revolutionary, Tico and Yolanda probably wouldn't kill her.

Therefore, the time she would spend with the Harris's between the shootout and her eventual capture would come to be known as the missing year where Patty would directly or indirectly be involved with jaunts across the country, multiple bombings, two bank robberies and one more murder. Yeah, this is the part in the movie where even I remember being like,

whoa, it's still happening? Yeah. I was like, holy shit. Yeah, like this is why this is a four-episode series. Yeah, the missing year. This missing year is...

obviously the main sticking point of why Patty Hearst got any jail time at all. Yeah. Which I think is probably okay. I think it was good that she got a little jail time. I must sum up at the end. We'll talk about it later, yeah. But this does remind me of, you know, because Jesus had a missing year. Do you know about that? About how Jesus, where apparently he had a bunch of missing years. Yeah, from like 12 to 33. Yeah, he left and he came back. And apparently during that time period, that was when he went to go invent pegging. Ha ha ha!

Did you know that Jesus Christ invented pegging? You know what? Now that you say it, I feel like I've heard it before. Yeah, Father McMahon was telling me about it. Crazy, right? All the fathers knew. All the fathers knew. Very strange. And then he died by the ultimate pegging. 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.

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Now, we're well aware that people are skeptical about Patty's claims that she was not a full fledged member of the SLA, especially after she rescued Tico and Yolanda at Mel's Sporting Goods. But Patty's claims about her state of mind can be backed up by psychological studies involving American prisoners of war. See, if you'll remember from our POWs are worth something. See,

See, if you'll remember from our MKUltra series, American authorities were baffled by the fact that so many American servicemen were not only cooperating with communist forces during the Korean War, but they were still spouting communist propaganda even after they'd come home.

Pilots were coming back saying like, yeah, I'd gone over to Korea and I'd engaged in chemical warfare. I dropped bombs over Korea that had killed, you know, hundreds of thousands of people. Never happened. Yeah, it didn't happen. They just believed it. Yeah.

Now, that phenomenon had been partially responsible for the creation of the MKUltra program because American authorities were convinced that this wild change of belief in their soldiers had been achieved through advanced Soviet psychological torture techniques. Yeah, because how could you turn against America? We got John Wayne, licorice. Licorice is more of a Swedish thing. Yeah, you're right. Grand Canyon. You can't be mad at the Grand Canyon. You can't defect against...

I mean, who cares if all your friends got killed around you? Yeah, I mean, you just can't defect. But they really did think that it required a superhuman, an entire new method of destroying the human brain and putting it back together. But it's actually kind of weirdly easy to fuck up the human brain. She was violently kidnapped. Oh, we know. Well, that's the thing. Let's get into it. In reality, this phenomenon concerning the soldiers...

It was a result of a fairly simple form of torture that was extremely similar to what Patty endured at the hands of the SLA and, as a bonus, was later used as a handbook for the psychopaths at Guantanamo Bay during the early days of the Iraq War. We're always learning. That's what's not good. It's a good lesson.

Never stop learning. Always be a student. See, in 1957, a sociologist named Albert Bitterman developed a table that illustrated the methods used to break hardened American soldiers. It's called tits, wieners, balls. Show them tits. They can't get at the tits. Get angry, right? They fight against their ropes trying to get at the tits because they're soldiers, right? Desperate for tits. Number one. Two. Fuck up their wiener real bad. Balls.

Hit them with a hammer as well. Maybe a little fire. Now, you seem to have forgotten asshole. You see, the asshole, you should be surprised, is that eventually, the more you torture the asshole, the more they begin to enjoy it. Well, this guy called his chart Bitterman's Chart of Coercion. And at the core of his theory were the three Ds, dependency, debility, and dread.

During the Korean War, Korean and Chinese interrogators had used isolation, threats, monopolization of perception, degradation, and occasional indulgences on American POWs to change their perception of reality.

These were many of the same techniques that the SLA had used on Patty. In addition to that, they'd also used so-called thought reform tactics used in Maoist China that were designed to break down a person's worldview and remake it into what their interrogators wanted. It's really not that hard. It's not. Because if you're in a group dynamic already and you're trying to make it in a group dynamic, so like when you're a prisoner...

You are, we talk about make it, meaning survive. I mean, you were trying to get out of this scenario. It's not about being a good soldier. It's not about being a good American. It's about being a live human being. And so somebody like this, it's like, it's kind of crazy just how quickly, if you want everybody to

fit in in a little circle once everybody starts digging in on everybody's purity of thought yeah it's actually extremely easy way to get somebody to fall in line yeah and i don't like to get too serious about it but you see it with battered women all the time yes you know they start like taking up the ideals of their the person who's battering them what's extremely interesting you bring that up bitterman's chart of coercion is actually also applied to domestic violence victims

Well, chief among these tactics were the criticism self-criticism sessions, also called struggle sessions, which were modeled after Maoist re-education campaigns. In these hours-long sessions, members of the SLA would heavily criticize a member, then that member would have to heavily criticize themselves.

Patty Hearst in particular endured the worst of these sessions day after day, week after week, month after month, until her view of reality and her view of herself completely changed.

So by the time of the shootout, 104 days after she'd been kidnapped, Patty believed that the authorities were going to shoot her down like a dog, just like they'd done with the rest of the SLA. And she fully believed that even if she did make it past the authorities, her family no longer wanted her back.

Furthermore, Patty believed that if Tico and Yolanda Harris caught her trying to escape, they would undoubtedly kill her. So her view of reality, especially after the shootout, was that her only chance of survival would be to go along with whatever the Harris's said. I think it really tracks. And I think that if she was in that house, she would have been very much so killed by the police. I think that she would have ran from a burning building. Yeah.

Personally, I think that she probably would have left if she wasn't been immediately shot as she was running away. You know, we saw that she didn't. Who was the one who got shot in the head? Gabby. Gabby. Gabby. Well, she didn't get shot until she fired. No, that was her job to get shot.

It always was. But yeah, I mean, they may have had, I mean, I'm sure they did have instructions like every take every woman alive. Yeah. Like men who gives a shit, but take every woman alive because one of them might be Patty and it's bad PR. Yeah.

Yeah! Yeah!

Coincidentally, Weed had been in Southern California when the shootout began, visiting a friend in San Diego. As soon as he heard the news about the shootout, he hopped in a car and sped north to the scene of the crime. If there's smoke, there's Weed.

But as Steve asked police on the scene if Patty's body was one of the five found. Let me look. This is cool. I've never seen one of these. A reporter stuck a microphone in his face on live TV and asked him what he felt at this moment.

All right, so first of all, big ups to all y'all hanging out here in the heat. Big ups. Hope everybody got water. Hope everybody's got some buddies and stuff hanging out. I just want to kind of put it out there. DJ Babe Vagoda is going to be doing an after thing after this shit. We're all going to be meeting up at Scrunch if you guys want to come out. But...

Honestly, this whole shit's a fucking bummer. Yeah, and her dad sucks. Her dad's a fucking bitch. I'm taking it now, man. For me, Randy. Speaking of which, on TV, he actually didn't respond. But I can only imagine what the Hearst felt at that moment, considering how they'd already pegged Weed as a camera hog. But I can cut to the actual video, which is like the microphone going to his face and him just going like,

You know, that look of scones not knowing what to do. In fact, Randy Hurst's final opinion on Stephen Weed can be summed up in a quote we found in one of our sources. Quote, I can see why Patty would join the SLA. It must be exciting for her to go to bed every night with three rifles and sleeping with hand grenades and getting up planning the next day's action.

It's a hell of a lot better than getting up every morning and having to look at Stephen Weed. Randolph Apperson Hurst, 1974. That is a real poker man. You're so cheeky, Randy. Yes, yes. And as I remember, I went down there and I spoke to several revolutionaries and I was almost changed. It's absolutely incredible.

Now, after the shootout, Tico, Yolanda, and Patty returned to San Francisco and laid low because the Los Angeles District Attorney had announced that the three of them were wanted on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery, assault to commit murder, and a dozen other charges, all stemming from what happened at Mel's. Because

Because remember, after Mel's, they kidnapped two people. They stole cars. Oh, yeah. There was a whole run down. There was a whole Bonnie and Clyde sequence. You can go ahead and say attempted murder when you fired the gun. That is assault to commit murder. Yeah. But after every other contact in Yolanda's revolutionary address book in San Francisco rejected them, the person who eventually helped and would form the foundation of the Symbionese Liberation Army Mark II was the person at the very bottom of the list.

of Yolanda's revolutionary contact list. Her name was Kathy Salaya. I feel like I know this person. You know the person that's like, I could call Sylvia. It's the very last. It's like you don't want to involve at all. This person's a problem. We can get into the club, but is it worth him talking to me all night? I don't know.

Well, Kathy was a close friend of the now deceased SLA member, Jelena Atwood.

They'd worked as scantily clad waitresses by day before the revolution. But by night, they were both serious actors. Remember, she was in that boring fucking play. Was it Gumby Galunga? No, not Gumby Galunga. It was called like Horace Applebottom. It was one of those been like, take the vase when you leave. Like it was like dumb old shows. I was like, why do tigers wear paper neckties?

Kathy, however, had been considered too flaky to be trusted with underground activities. She wanted to be in it so bad. Say it again. That she was considered flaky.

too flaky to be a member of an underground revolutionary group which i believe is the political like equivalent of actionized flakes right isn't it ideas that you don't fit into normal society like she could she couldn't show up to enough things on time to be a terrorist

I think she might have wanted to live. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is that Kathy, who was often described as an intense character. By boring people. She'd always been disappointed that Jelena had never invited her to join the SLA. And she'd been crushed when the group had gone underground without her. You're always trying to destroy me.

Yeah, I'll help you now. But when Kathy had been reported as being a prominent speaker at a memorial rally for the slain members of the SLA. Each one of them was my friend. And here's why this is about me. Tico and Yolanda decided that they really had no other choice but to go with yet another drama kid.

So, after meeting at a drive-in movie theater that was showing a softcore porno called Teacher's Pet, Kathy told the SLA that a man named Jack Scott might be able to help them escape the post-shootout heat. I could probably call Jack. If that's what you want. Who knew that the Teacher's Pet would indeed be a young woman?

You'd assume it would be some kind of hermit crab. I was hoping it would be a dog. Shut up, white man.

Jack Scott was a so-called radical sports writer who had written a number of books about black athletes getting ripped off in organized sports. Man, this has been going on fucking forever. I don't even like things that sound like the same shit. And Cathy said that Jack ran a sort of underground railroad for political fugitives. In fact, Jack, who was also white, he openly compared himself to Harriet Tubman. Look at my babushka. So.

So, Kathy said, if anyone was going to get Patty and the Harris's out of San Francisco safe, it was going to be Jack Scott. I don't run what you'd call an underground railroad. It's more of a downstairs choo-choo train. It's a little bit more fun. It's a little more relaxing. Serving hot cocoa. Going all the way to the North Pole. I call it the tubway.

The Jack had just rented a farmhouse in Pennsylvania so he could write another book. So after he agreed to help the surviving SLA members, he came up with a plan to take them east to the farmhouse and say that they were his research assistants. Additionally, they'd even have a babysitter of sorts on the farm who could run errands.

Now, Patty and the Harris's were obviously too recognizable to fly. So Jack arranged for them to be driven out to the East Coast disguised as joggers. Because as Jack put it, no one would expect joggers being revolutionaries. And no one would expect joggers to drive. Yeah.

What's the point of dressing them as joggers to sit inside of a car and be driven? I would have said park ranger. A couple of clowns. Honestly, you could have put them in full clown makeup. No one would have said anything. They would have said, look at those clowns.

But yeah, if you're stopping for a fucking pit stop between Scottsdale and Amarillo, like no one's going to, people are going to notice the people decked out in Adidas from head to toe. Yeah. Oh yeah. They're just sitting there doing them standing up on the, trying to keep your pulse rate going. Just jogging through, just jogging.

Once they arrived at the farmhouse in Pennsylvania, they found that the so-called babysitter that Jack had promised was another revolutionary fugitive named Wendy Yoshimura. Wendy had been born in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and her family had moved to the ruins of Hiroshima after the war before returning to California 10 years later. So she loved America. Sorry!

Yeah, as I was about to say, her getting radicalized, like, that wasn't a big, that wasn't a big jump. Really wasn't a big jump. She joined a group called the Revolutionary Army with her boyfriend, a guy named Willie Brand.

A lot of Willys in this story. A lot of Willys in this story. And also, the interesting thing at this time is that the head, the leader of Germany at this time, during the whole, when Germany was dealing with their own white terrorist problem, the Baader-Meinhof group, his name was also Willy Brandt. Weird. Strange.

Wow. Good thing you didn't get in trouble for this. But much like the SLA, the Revolutionary Army was not an army at all. In fact, it was pretty much just Wendy Yoshimura, Willie Brandt, and a guy named Mike Borton.

But even so, Wendy said that their group bombed banks, nuclear laboratories, police cars, and other political targets throughout the early 70s. By her estimation, they were responsible for at least 40 bombings over a two-year period. These bombings, however, were designed to be symbolic, and no one was ever hurt or killed. Yeah, were they on a stand-up tour? Like, what do they mean it was symbolic? It was symbolic. Think of it like Fight Club. They're Fight Club.

Yeah. But what are they exploding? Oh, they're just setting off bombs in front of police stations. Just in front of them? Yeah. It's the same thing that Weather Underground did. No, but they killed themselves. That was an accident. That was an accident. But no, it was the exact... If you're just blowing up bombs on the street, it could be for any other business on the street. What if you're fighting UPS? You know what it's for. You're being obtuse. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

But Willie Brandt, the leader of the Revolutionary Army, he had stored his explosives in a rented garage in Berkeley. And when Brandt, Mike Borton and another friend went there to get more materiel, the cops were waiting. Wendy heard about the arrest on a police scanner, so she called Willie's friend Jack Scott.

And Jack Scott sent her to the same rented farmhouse in Pennsylvania where he sent the surviving members of the SLA. So it sounds like you're going to have to take the downstairs shoot you. And remember when you leave, strip the beds. You can put them in the washing machine, please. Shut off all the lights. Also, you can pay my taxes. I've left a couple of forms that you can fill. That'd be great.

As far as we know, however, Wendy and the SLA were the only people that Jack Scott, the supposed white Harriet Tubman, ever saved. I'm also never going to call him. White Harriet Tubman. You just talked. White Tub.

Now, Patty, Tico, Yolanda and Wendy Yoshimura were soon moved to a one bedroom farmhouse, formerly a creamery, where they spent a tedious summer bickering, fighting, talking and sitting around. Just yet. This is why, again, in the movie.

It's boring. No, this is... It was a theory that our friend Mike Lawrence told me about long ago, is that the movie always sucks when it goes to the farm. As soon as the movie... Remember Looper? Looper, yeah. Looper was incredible until they went to the farm. Fucking Looper. The Avengers. Walking Dead Season 2. Yeah. It's like, fucking, if you are a screenwriter, stay away from the farm. I know you want everyone to talk, and that's how you get exposition going, but...

Any other location. Any other location. I mean, when they went to the farm in Logan, that was pretty cool. Yeah, but that's, but that was, yeah. That was the beginning of the movie. It's when they go to the farm in the third act. Yeah. That's when you're like, I'm going to die here. Yeah. So now we're in the second act and there were briefly on the farm. Now, since Tico had become the general field marshal of the SLA, now that Sin was dead, he continued their regimen of calisthenics and combat drills.

He even tried bossing Wendy Yoshimura around, criticizing both her taste in books and her lack of get up and go when it came to training for the revolution. Because maybe you don't understand what the black man's got to go through in this country, Wendy. Not like me.

old Tika. Well, her argument, his argument actually was that he would tell her, like, since you're not white, you have more of a responsibility. That you need to be one of those third world leaders that comes in and leads people, and you're just sitting here like you're on vacation. I need to start saying this to random people. I like that idea. You're not white. You need to really lead the revolution. Yeah, it's going to work out fucking great for you. Excuse me, ma'am. I'm

No, you're not white. I need you to take over. Finally, though, Wendy told Tico that she didn't care that he was the head of the SLA because she wasn't in the SLA. She didn't want to be in the SLA. And she was only there taking care of them because she was keeping a promise to Jack Scott. Wendy's very cool. Yeah, Wendy's cool as shit. She's a badass. She's kind of my favorite so far. Oh, yeah. No, she's like genuinely, you could just see her like smoking and just going...

I'm not in the SLA. I don't want to be in the SLA. He's just like, I'm going to die. But a big part of why the remaining members of the SLA were sequestered on the farm was so a book could be written about the history of the SLA and their philosophy. And before long, Jack Scott arrived with an old radical friend from his Berkeley days to help write that book.

Now, this unattractive, overweight man with long, stringy hair did have a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. But his biggest claim to fame was that while he was doing academic study in London, he'd been arrested for taking a shit on a picture of Queen Elizabeth. Yes, I showed the ball. The power of intellectual protest. I'm going to change the color of her pearl necklace. Yeah, so I made a bunch of brown rounds.

I was promptly removed. But despite this ignoble distinction, this man was tapped to write the story of the SLA. I think he's the right man for the job. All of this would be told in question and answer form. But the big hitch in the story came when the SLA tried rationalizing the techniques they'd used to convert Patty into a revolutionary.

The writer was shocked when he was told that Patty had been locked in a closet for two months. But Tico tried explaining it away by saying, yeah, but it was a big closet. If you are. It certainly was not. No, it specifically wasn't. No, it was a very, very slightly bigger than a pantry. Yes. Furthermore, when it came time for Patty to answer her questions, she did so in a flat, obviously depressed tone.

She's just trying to make it through the fucking day. Yeah, you know when you're trying to not answer questions. You know when you're in the middle of a fight with a loved one, but then you ask just a normal sort of practical question and you have to answer it? But you've been just fighting, but then you have to go like...

Oh, well, the dog's got to go to the grooming at 1130. You know what I mean? It's like that style. Yeah, but also she should just be at spring break. You know, like I imagine she's horribly depressed. Yeah, she's 20. No, she is. She's horribly depressed. She's 90 pounds. She goes entire days without talking to anybody when she's on the farm.

Well,

Well, the way she put it, anyone who heard the tapes would have a hard time believing that Patty was sincere when she talked about how she had been proud to participate in the Hibernia bank robbery or that she had not been kidnapped, but had been rescued from her bourgeois life by the Symbionese Liberation Army. But I find it interesting that Tecko didn't make her run it over and over again like Sinque. You can kind of see the passion's gone.

Not for lack of trying, but you could just see that that was like what Sin Q would have done was that he would have drilled her and made her do it again and again and again. And you can kind of just be like a tech out. Just be like, you didn't do any of this right. None of this is right. I can't

leave her longing for the days of Sin Q. But Tico also didn't like how he sounded, quite possibly because he didn't sound like much of a revolutionary, meaning he didn't sound black.

Remember, Tico's from fucking Indiana. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the more interviews that Tico, Yolanda, and Patty did, the more Tico came to believe that their host, Jack Scott, was more interested in publishing the SLA book than in actually helping the SLA. What are you talking about, my brother? There's no possible way. All right, now just sit down. I have some chitlins to stir and I got some greens to bubble up.

Giving in to paranoia, Tico had formulated a scenario in which Jack Scott would turn in the SLA anonymously. Then, after the inevitable shootout in which Tico, Yolanda, and Patty would die, Jack could then take the tapes and publish the SLA book himself. It's a great idea. So, Tico decided that Jack Scott and his wife, Mickey, both had to die.

Tico's plan was to wait until Jack and Mickey Scott were at the farm by themselves. Then he would take them for a walk in the woods, murder them, and bury their bodies where they fell.

But perhaps sensing something was amiss, Jack and Mickey never again showed up to the farm together. Tico declared that there was too much incriminating evidence on those tapes against the three of them should they ever be arrested. So he was going to transcribe the tapes himself and give the transcripts over once he believed it was safe to do so. Yeah, because there was no other evidence at all. No evidence.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, Jack and Mickey soon announced that everyone's time on the farm was over because the Scots were moving to Portland. Yeah, we're moving upstairs. Let's go, everybody. So wearing the same jogging clothes they'd worn to escape East, Patty and the Harris's were driven back West. Specifically, don't run. All right. I don't want you to appear parched. But I find this interesting because it's.

Very similar to how Patty sort of ghosted her way out where it's like they realized all of this was going shit. You were big. The writing was so hard on the wall. Yeah. Tecca was like just so bad at this. He's just bad at being a villain. And so watching like he probably openly seems so extremely suspicious. And then once he took the tapes, they're like, all right, now this is all. Yeah. You got to get out of here. You're you're a lost cause.

But since the Bay Area was still too hot, the remaining members of the SLA decided to settle in nearby Sacramento, where they would recruit members for the second iteration of the Symbionese Liberation Army. We're coming back! It's a reboot! Ha ha!

Now, once Team Tico returned from California, they got back in contact with a woman who had introduced them to Jack Scott, Kathy Salaya. And it was Kathy Salaya who would basically replenish the ranks of the SLA. I knew you'd come crawling back to me.

See, Kathy came from a close-knit family, and her little sister Josephine did pretty much whatever her big sister did, and their brother Steve wasn't much different. Therefore, all three Salia siblings joined the SLA, and Kathy also brought along her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore.

Now, Kathy and the rest of the new recruits thought that the SLA had focused too much on action and not enough on fundamentals. Finally, someone's saying fucking something about the reading. No one said anything this whole fucking time. And now the left wing shit, which is all about the reading, it has finally arrived. Also, none of these guys got, you know, African names. No, they didn't. Well, they got like code names, but they were just regular because they weren't.

Actually, SLA Mark two, like they're not great, but they're not the fucking morons that SLA Mark one was. Well, they became more of a genuine almost. They were trying to come more of like a quote unquote genuine ultra left political group. And then it just was too late. Yeah. I mean, they said that more people hadn't rallied to the SLA's cause because their propaganda and philosophy didn't make any goddamn sense. Yeah.

Mostly, the new members took issue with the idea that only a black or so-called third world person could lead them, saying we're all white and there's nothing we can do to deny. What if we find magic magicians?

A goose. A goose that gives wishes. A genie in a lamp. Anything but to be this horrid, horrid white. I mean, Tico's from Indiana. That's like the third world.

I'll only agree with that because the roads almost killed me when I had long COVID. The roads were so bad that I almost died. It's close. But pretty soon, the talk ended when they started running out of money again because the take from the Hibernia job had burned up with the rest of the SLA in Compton. So another bank heist was planned to replenish the SLA's funds. But the OG members of the SLA were not in charge of planning this robbery.

See, with these new members, Tico had a bit of a rival for leadership. This rival was the aforementioned Mike Borton. Could have been a bag of pennies as far as I'm concerned. Borton was a muscular, tough redhead with two chipped front teeth and a large tattoo of a dragon on one of his arms. I'll tell you the truth, I asked for a salamander. Ha ha ha!

But they made it like this. Come for me, Ticko, and see you want the rat that couldn't show you. Well, if you'll remember, Mike Borton would have been the guy who was arrested with Wendy Yoshimura's boyfriend in the garage full of explosives. So Borton had actually done time. He even had a prison tattoo. He had a clenched fist on his chest. All that's missing is the cock on the top and the balls at the bottom. Ha ha!

No, Mike Borton, too, is that it's they do have like it's not a fetish for prisoners, but they definitely respect him more because he's already committed crime. That's the thing. Since Mike had actually been in prison, he technically had been more, quote unquote, oppressed than Tico Harris. So he actually had a better claim to leadership than Tico did.

Borton, however, had no interest in leading the new S.L.A., although he did enjoy taunting Tico about how he was technically more qualified. You know that red hair is more rare and more considered a minority than brown? Shut up. Shut up, you ginger-headed, toe-headed freak. You're the freak.

Now, I don't know how well Mike would have done leading the SLA. Not well. But he was certainly a talented criminal because the bank robbery he led could not have gone smoother. It lasted just under two minutes. They came away with almost $4,000 and nobody said shit about it being an SLA job. Because it was a whole new crew. Yeah. And they didn't claim it.

Well, they didn't want to claim it. They were like, no, we just need money. Yeah, we just need money. There are more important things than going into a bank and just scaring people. That shit doesn't make any sense. All it does is bring heat on you and it doesn't accomplish anything. God forbid we give up our location again. Marcus, you mean to tell me that they left their revolutionary ideals behind? Quite possibly. It's like they're not even wishing they were black anymore. Fly from your grave.

Hey, Cam, mine's sending me over our new Wi-Fi password. Oh, sorry, Mitch, you can't be trusted. What? It's your phone. It's different than mine. Cam! And I thought I was a judgy one. No, it's just messages between different devices aren't encrypted. Okay. Since when do you know about encryption? I know what encryption is, and it's because I'm the last line of defense against any would-be Wi-Fi thieves. Cam, come on. Okay, fine. I'll send it somewhere more private. Thank you.

Safely send messages between different devices on WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.

But soon after the heist, more conflicts arose between Mike Borton and Tico because Tico was trying to run the new SLA like Sin had run the original group. Problem was, Tico was a little bitch and everyone knew it. Plus, he didn't have the blind loyalty the original SLA had given Sin just because Sin was black. It's like I'm black. Yeah.

Even so, Tico tried controlling the personal lives of SLA members and held a special meeting to call out Mike Borton's LSD consumption because drugs were forbidden in the SLA.

Mike, however, said that one of his life's greatest pleasures was dropping acid and running 10 to 15 miles on the beach. That's a fucking, that's ungovernable for me. Yeah, he said that you wasn't going to give that up for anyone. That's what I do. That's Mike.

If you take that away from Mike, you might as well take my clenched cock tattoo away from me and my sumptuous rose ginger hair. I'm Mike. I drop acid. I drop it on the beach. I don't know what I do for the rest of the 12 hours that I'm tripping balls, but for the first two hours of it, I'm running on a beach.

Well, finally, a compromise was reached in which Mike promised that he wouldn't drop acid in the safe house. But later, Mike told Patty that during his entire argument with Tico about dropping acid, Guess what? He was on acid. I'm on acid right now. This fucking guy's trying to tell me to not be on acid anymore, man. I'm on more acid than I am on normal. I ran to the beach this morning and I took more acid just to sit on the couch.

That's like Lawrence Taylor with crack. This is me. I'm LT. I need crack.

Now, while the first heist with the new S.L.A. had just been about the money, the Harris's Tico and Yolanda, they'd argue that their next action at Crocker National Bank in a suburb outside of Sacramento should be a full scale S.L.A. operation. As Yolanda put it, a bank robbery was needed to show the continued strength of the S.L.A.

All of the new members, of course, said that this was a fucking bad idea because it just brought more heat. But Yolanda argued long and hard, as Yolanda often did, and eventually she won. The next discussion was about who would lead the assault team. Imagine being so annoying that you talk people into robbing a bank. Yeah, they're like, fine, all right, let's go, all right, give me a gun. Where's the bank? I'll shoot, I'll shoot somebody. Shut the fuck up.

The next discussion was about who would lead the assault team. And most everyone voted for Mike Borton because the last heist had been so smooth. That's what I do. Yeah. I'm on acid. I agree to horrible. I mean, I'm not on acid right now. I'm winking. I'm winking. Did I say I was winking? I'm actually on acid and crack. I'm on both.

But perhaps because Yolanda was feeling insecure about new members taking over, she demanded the position of assault team leader, saying that it was sexist to think that a woman couldn't do it. It's not a woman. It's you. It's you, Yolanda. No one was saying that a woman couldn't do it. I would have voted for Michelle Obama. But Yolanda argued and yelled and basically wore everyone down until they finally said, fuck.

Fuck. Fine. You can lead the team. Job's yours, Yolanda. Good luck. And you're going to be happy with it. But because Yolanda Harris was in charge, the SLA would leave Crocker National Bank with cash, but it would come at the cost of a senseless murder that fell completely on Yolanda's head.

Now, the setup for the Crocker robbery was pretty much the same as the Hibernia robbery, where Patty had publicly declared herself to be a member of the SLA. This time, however, Patty was on the outside team as one of the switch car drivers who would calmly carry away the assault team after the robbery. And it should be said, Patty Hearst was distanced by the crew as...

as they were going through these various bank robberies because they were trying to keep her from being recognized. So she was never where the cameras were. So at this point now, she's been kind of, which is,

Also why I can see she stayed in because this is a much easier job. This is a thing that she could handle. It's driving a car. It's not operating a gun. It's not shooting at people. Yeah, if she had to fight someone in the bank, she's 90 pounds. She might or God knows what she would do. But this is just her driving. Well, not only that, but when these new members of the SLA came about, like they finally treated her like a human. Yeah. Like when she was on the farm with Tico, like Tico had given her four black eyes.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. No, he had been extremely abusive towards her.

But these people were treating her like a human. They were friendly, you know, and they were just like, oh, hey, Patty, what's up? And it was more normal because now it feel like, well, now she is locked in. She did shoot out to save them. Yeah. But as Patty waited nervously near a funeral home in a Volkswagen van for the assault team to show up post robbery, she saw the stolen Firebird that had been used as the getaway car roar past her going way too fast.

She pulled out and followed them. And when they stopped, the assault team piled into her van and screamed, go, go, go, go, go. Because the first one was basically Ocean's Eleven. It went off perfectly. The last one went off well. This is very much Reservoir Dogs. Yeah. You know, like when they get back in, they're all like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fucking dying over here, man. See, as opposed, I'm sorry, it's just the noise that Harvey Keitel makes. He's so good in it.

See, as opposed to the jubilation everyone had felt after the last robbery, the new SLA had settled into a miserable, nervous funk as Patty drove them back to the safe house. The only person who was stone-faced was Yolanda, even though Yolanda had been the one who'd fucked up just about as bad as she possibly could have.

Well, as soon as Yolanda walked into the door of the bank, she'd shot and killed a woman immediately. From how Yolanda later told it, she had told the woman to move, but the woman wasn't moving fast enough for Yolanda's liking. So Yolanda thrust her shotgun forward, but

But since the safety wasn't on, the gun went off. And the woman stood there for an instant after being shot before she melted to the floor. Her name was Myra Lee Opshaw, mother to four teenage children. And she'd only been at the bank that day to deposit the collection from her church. So like all the innocent things. Yeah, it's like she was a community leader. Her husband was a surgeon. Yeah, it was like he killed like the worst possible person. Like the nicest person in the bank. Yeah.

Yeah, you definitely killed the word. They are the nicest person in the bank. What was worse for the SLA, though, was that Yolanda had also come very close to shooting an SLA member, Kathy Salaya's boyfriend, Jim Kilgore.

Kilgore was on his way to his assigned position in the bank when the gun went off. And had Myrna not been in the way, Kilgore would have been killed instead. Oh, yeah. Kilgore's a name you very rarely see anymore. I think it's Kurt Vonnegut. Mm-hmm. I was going to say how much I love the name Kilgore. Yeah, Kilgore's an incredible name. Yeah. Apocalypse Now. Yeah. General Kilgore. Kurt Vonnegut. Kilgore Trout. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Yolanda Harris, however, she shrugged off the entire murder, saying that her victim, she was a bourgeois pig anyway. So what the fuck did it matter?

At that point, Kathy Salaya told Patty that she thought that Yolanda must be insane. She is. She's extremely dangerous. I'm going to go ahead and say they're all insane. And Tico was also unbothered by Myra Opshaw's murder, saying that if it hadn't been for good old Myra who'd taken all the buckshot, one of their comrades would be dead right now. I love how much time he got in a CNN documentary. Yeah.

You know what I mean? This is the guy. This is the guy. Just remember that. Every single time. I feel like it's just still, this is the guy that is the lead of Jeffrey pulling a tube in Tubin's fucking entire documentary series. Yeah. That's how shitty Tubin is. He wants to hang with Tico. He likes Tico. Yeah, he does. Now, this guy gets so much fucking camera time. Three episodes. I only made it three episodes. Maybe they get pushed back at the end of it, but they sure as fuck don't in the first three. In the beginning.

Tico is also excited that all of them were now implicated in a gas chamber offense. They could all be executed together now. This is the ultimate rush. Getting killed by cops sitting in a chair. That's awesome. I don't need that to go. I ate breakfast on them. That's free breakfast. Free death. And it was concluded that he too was probably out of his mind.

But while nobody in the bank ended up saying anything about this being an SLA action, I think after the murder, they kind of decided to not fucking denounce anything. The news still described the heist as being an SLA style robbery. It was just like Hibernia. That's like that is an L.A. Once you become a type.

That's incredible. It is. So with the modern equivalent of almost $100,000 in their possession from the heist, the new SLA left Sacramento and returned to the place where it all began, San Francisco. San Francisco. And they took that $100,000 and they started a computer company. Yeah.

A little fruit-based company you might know as Watermelon, which was a computer that didn't make fruit. Unfortunately. Now, after the murder of Myra Opshull, the SLA, like so many groups before them, it began to splinter. Well, now it's just too fucking hot for any sort of activity.

Well, once they got to the Bay—well, that's not quite true. There's still quite a bit of activity to go. Oh, I know! Once they got to the Bay Area, the SLA split into three separate safe houses. And while Mike Borton, Jim Kilgore, and Steve Saliah went back to their pre-revolutionary job of painting houses, the women began a feminist study group so they could work out the true role of women in the revolution. Man, they just left robbing banks. They just went and robbed a bunch of banks and were like, ah.

Well, book club. Let's go back. Well, they're like, you know, well, they're like, we need to go back to the drawing board. We've done a lot of action. We need to, we need to fucking get our philosophy straight here. I agree. Tico Harris, of course, couldn't help but insert himself into their discussions.

He said that no matter how hard he struggled against it, he was inherently racist and sexist because of his white middle-class upbringing. Quite suddenly, though, seemingly without prompting, Tico took the conversation into a discussion about his sexuality. Because I'm doing a lot of things to be hip, to be with it, to dig it righteous, and to sock it to me. It's just been extremely difficult. He said that it was sad but true that he'd always been uptight about having sex with a man. Oh, my God.

Specifically, he said in a voice that had a wistful, faraway quality that he was sad that he could never bring himself to specifically make love to sin. I just know I couldn't satisfy him. He had a big old hang and dong, and I know that if I struggled or cried or whatever, I know he wouldn't have liked it. And I just, God, I wish I could have been gay. LAUGHTER

So was Sinque fucking Kaju? No. No. No. He wasn't. No. Tico said that he could sleep in the same bed as Sen. I always could. I never had a problem with it. I loved his snoring. I loved his snuffling. I loved how he'd get up to pee. He could fall asleep with his arms around Sen. Yeah, because just to protect him, be near him, he was so warm and he was so nice. So hammered he didn't notice. Yeah, he was.

Smelt like ripple But he just could not bring himself To make love with sin It just wasn't I think it was all him saying no Was like the big thing Because I feel like And I'm not blaming sin I'm blaming me Look at me White

But I live in him, and I just know that if I just could have... I could have just grew pussy lips around my butt. So difficult. Well, this, Tico believed, was a major failing in his revolutionary evolution. The fact that he could never bring himself to make love to sin.

Now, after the shock of Myra Opshull's murder wore off, the new SLA returned to action with a series of bombings. And luckily for them, they had just been joined by an explosives enthusiast, for Wendy Yoshimura had returned. Oh, cool! See, Wendy had been in San Francisco since Jack Scott had kicked everyone out of the farmhouse, having refused to join the SLA in Sacramento. But Wendy Yoshimura had returned.

But when the FBI found and raided the farmhouse, Wendy's picture was plastered all over the news. And even though she despised Tico, she went into hiding with the SLA and taught them how to make bombs. Now, their first target was the Mission District Police Station in San Francisco, which had been bombed so often by radicals since the 60s that it had been reinforced with bulletproof windows and had basically been transformed into a fortress.

But even though Wendy Yoshimura was the closest thing the new SLA had to an explosives expert, Tico insisted on assembling the bombs used in SLA actions himself. And he, of course, bucked it up. Yeah, he doesn't know what he's doing. No. He'd packed the bombs meant for the police station so tight that there wasn't enough oxygen left to ignite the gunpowder.

And when the news reported that a dud bomb had been found, Mike Borton dropped by Tico's safe house the next day just to make fun of him for failing. Yeah, just so you know, I'm just coming over. Yeah, totally found the safe house. I'm better at than you. I'll fuck your fucking girlfriend. I'll fuck your father. I'll fucking rob nine banks before I go to sleep. All right, peace. Back out. Couldn't give a shit. I'm gonna go paint something. I'm like the best criminal you've ever met.

The next bomb, however, planted on a police car. That was successful. That one did go off. And they did send out a communique after. They didn't use the SLA name, but they did stupidly use the very specific and recognizable SLA motto. Yeah, because it's long. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.

Who else is going to say that? I don't know. Also, what's the point of a bombing if you're not going to claim responsibility? Well, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Also, we got to give some credit to the fact that bombs are hard to make. They're very difficult to make. Yeah. I like Wendy. Yeah.

I know, she's fun. She's fascinating. She really is. She is. She reminds me of the lady in the, like, she's like the performance artist in the Beetlejuice crew when they come up from New York to the house. She reminds me of her, just like cool and mysterious. Actually, the other Patty Hearst movie is from Wendy Yoshimura's point of view, and it's about their time on the farm together. That's very, it's fascinating. Yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but it's out there.

But with this fucking motto out in the open, death of the fascist insect preys upon the life of the people. With that, everyone now knew that the SLA was back in town.

Now, more bombings followed, including simultaneous bombings in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But their final attempt ended with the new SLA driving around L.A. arguing about where they were going to put their last two bombs. Finally, they put one bomb under a parked police car and attached another bomb to a garbage can next to another cruiser across the street.

And that bomb was set to go off when the cruiser drove away. It was basically a little string was attached to it. Oh, yeah, like old-fashioned grenade. Like what they do with it. That's like a... I always, you know, associate that with Viet Cong. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Leaving on a high, the new SLA rushed back to their motel to watch the news, which is undoubtedly going to report on a successful SLA action.

But as it turned out, when the first car drove off, the garbage can bomb just fell over. It was actually so badly built that when it was found and identified, a couple of kids were kicking it around the street. Yeah, dude. And that's where, that's amazing. And that's where, you remember the whistler? The knife, the knife, the whistling, like. Oh, the football, the whistle. Yeah, that's where this comes from. Yeah.

The second bomb was found soon after and diffused, and Tico was once again humiliated. You just don't understand what I'm doing. Okay? Just let it blow up. Just let it blow up and let everybody see it. Okay? At least say, oh, how scary it could have been. Talk about how it could have been, what it could have done. Now, after the failure of the Los Angeles campaign, the new SLA completely fell apart. But

Besides the fact that many of them hated each other for reasons ranging from romantic jealousy to plain personal distaste, the group was still stuck on the subject of black leadership. See, Tico called the SLA together one day and said, fucking great news, everyone. I found a black guy.

His name is Doc Holliday. And he's not a doctor, but it's his cool, fun name. It's like a nickname. He was the head of the black gorilla family at San Quentin. Cool, right? It's cool, cool. And he's just about to be paroled after serving 14 years for murder and robbery. He's perfect. We're going to scoop him. We're going to scoop him. Can I keep him? Can I keep him? Can I take him? I promise to take care of him.

I'll feed him. I'll wash him. Now, everyone except Yolanda rejected this idea, although I don't think Patty really said anything one way or another. At this point, she's just sort of there. This dissent, however, caused Yolanda to lament the days when the SLA was a true army, back when Sin was in charge.

At that point, Jim Kilgore snapped and loudly asked what the fuck the SLA had ever accomplished. He said, you killed a black man, you kidnapped a teenage girl, and you robbed a bank. And what the fuck did that amount to? I could just see all, everybody in the room was going like, you really haven't done much, have you? And just Yolanda, too. I'm scared of Yolanda. Yeah. And with that, Tico took his ball and went home.

He disbanded the new SLA and said that he and Yolanda were going to find a black guy. We're going to go find a black guy to lead us. All right. And anyone that's opposed to that can get the fuck out. I will find a black man to take me to an ice cream store. I will find a black man to take me to the mall. I will find a black man to take me down to the fucking DMV to help me get my license because I know I need a black man to take me everywhere. All right. So I'll see all of you in hell. White hell.

Patty's just like, does this mean I can leave? Is this whole scenario over then? Well, yeah. We'll get to that here in a second. But the thing is that the Harris's, they did finally make contact with Doc Holliday, but they found him in Golden Gate Park lying in a bush stoned out of his fucking mind. I was just like...

Trying to vibe. And even then, after the Harris's said like, okay, let's meet at a motel later on tonight. We got a proposal for you. Doc Holliday listened to him and said, fuck no. I'm not doing that. So be in charge. Let me just say this. Okay. Honestly, I know a lot of people are going to come out here. I do understand. It's hard to say. Management's hard.

You know, and if you're going to run a group, it's hard. It's a lot of responsibility. Well, not just that, but, you know, these are the two people that had survived that. These are the two people that were in the SLA. This guy was the head of the black gorilla family. Like he actually had a fucking he had something behind him, you know? Yeah. And the SLA were at this point known as the people who kidnapped Patty Hearst and then got fucking murdered by the police in a massive shootout.

And they're now known as the white black revolutionary group. And so they come to him, they're like, huh? You wanna? You wanna? Yeah? Fuck you. No. No. Absolutely not.

Now, by this point, Patty Hearst had effectively split off from Tico and Yolanda at long last. After the disaster with Doc Holliday, she moved into an apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, Jim Kilgore, and Steve Saliah. Her and Wendy, like, became friends. This sounds like a cool group. Yeah. As opposed to the Harris's, these people actually treated Patty like she was a human. And she may or may not have been dating Steve Saliah. It's unclear. She did sort of use... Not use men, but men helped her. Patty Hearst...

She liked her Steve's. She's young. She liked her Steve's. She loved Steve's. Patty Hertz is young. And I think a lot of what people kind of pour judgment on her and her behavior is actually very just kind of typical young person behavior. She fell in love with people and also used...

she had to use her sexuality to defend herself in many ways. Oh, I think that's taking it too far. I don't think she was like dating Steve Saliah because she was using her sexuality. No, I'm talking about Kajo. Oh, Kajo. I'm talking about Kajo. Well, that's a whole different thing. She faked a relationship with Kajo within the SLA in order to survive. That's a whole different thing. And this is something where you can start to see the kind of just how incredible the human brain is that you can go through all this kind of stuff and still date. Mm-hmm.

You know, like you could go through all those things and still be like, Steve's cute. You know, like, it's amazing. But what is clear here is that it was the Salaya family that would finally lead the FBI to Patty Hearst. Now, the FBI were aware of Kathy Salaya because she had made that speech at the memorial service after the original SLA was killed. Here's me and why this is about me. Ha ha ha!

After tracking her down, the FBI put all the Salias siblings under surveillance, where they discovered that the Salias frequented two addresses in San Francisco. These were the SLA safe houses. They were also just doing huck fin jobs with a known criminal. Like, just walking around painting fences, stealing apples. You know, like...

playing with the circles with the tire you know that's a fun game so the fbi set up around the clock stakeouts at both addresses to see who they could see pretty soon the agents caught their first glimpse of general field marshal tico now they were not able to immediately identify him because he'd grown a big bushy beard to hide his features and he dyed his hair jet black

But General Field Marshal Tico had a penchant for cut-off jean shorts. And just below... The weakest of the shorts. I do say that in terms of...

Showing power. Yeah. If you want the crew to believe in you, wear pants. I mean, I don't know. When I first met you guys, when we were first hanging out, I wore a lot of cut-off jean shorts. You did. I loved cut-off jean shorts. But you grew out of them. I did. I did indeed. Because you're an adult. I have not worn a pair of cut-off jean shorts in many a year. Because unless you've got the ass to fill out a pair of jean shorts. Which I do. You do. But you don't wear them. All right? Because I try to wear jean shorts. And guess what they look like? Denim culottes.

I look like an Oshkosh Pagosh Oompa Loompa. Well...

Since General Tico had a penchant for cutoff jean shorts, cops were able to see a surgical scar just below the cut. This was the very scar that Tico had incurred when he had to have surgery following his touch football injury in Vietnam. That guy touched me with both hands. It was an illegal holding. And I yelled holding and then they sent me home. You're telling me they didn't play tackle football in Vietnam? Touch football, my friend. Touch.

I think they fucking just pushed him down to get the fuck out of here. Well, this scar was deemed good enough for identification. And when Tico and Yolanda went for a jog the next day... I thought they were supposed to hide as joggers! I thought jogger was the ultimate disguise! Well, I guess they did take it as the ultimate disguise. Like, hey, if we're jogging, then we're fucking having fun! Yeah, they're married! They're actors! It's kind of incredible. They got the sneakers, they got the outfit, they're just sitting around just being like...

what if we just start jogging? You're like, actually, now that I think about it, it looks good. Yeah, it looks fun. So when they went for their jog the next day, the FBI pounced. Now, Tico dressed in purple track shorts. He gave up immediately. Don't chase me, bro! But Yolanda turned around and tried to escape. But

But she, too, was immediately taken down and arrested. And she put up a much larger fight. She was fucking kicking, screaming, you sons of bitches, you motherfuckers. Tico just fucking cowed down. He wanted the cops to kill him. That's what I actually do. Actually, he whined as they were taking him away. He's like, if we would have gotten to our guns, we could have shot our way out of this.

Meanwhile, the agents hoped that Patty was going to be with Tico and Yolanda. But when she wasn't, they decided to raid the other address the Saliahs had visited just on the off chance that they were right. They thought it was a long shot. As it turned out, it was the correct one.

That afternoon, Patty and Wendy Yoshimura were sitting at the kitchen table while Wendy wrote a very, very long letter to Willie Brandt. Patty got up to use the bathroom when she heard a commotion on the back stairs leading up to the kitchen.

Suddenly, she saw two heavyset gentlemen diving through the top half of the kitchen's Dutch door, waving revolvers and shouting, FBI freeze! FBI freeze! What's a Dutch door? A Dutch door is the one that the top opens and the bottom opens. Those are fun. Those are fun. I love those. I have one outside of the kitchen. Yeah, I love your Dutch door. Much better than your Dutch oven. Not according to my family.

But this was the moment Patty was dreading. The moment where the FBI would blow her away. And as a result, she was so frightened that she wet her pants. Which is not a punishable offense, which we learned on Side Stories. Yeah, you're allowed to piss in your pants. In front of the police, and they can't arrest you for it. Really? Yeah. We spent ten minutes on this.

This week. It was yesterday's episode. Well, that's great. That's great. So yeah, go listen to Side Story. Some more on that. I got a lot of messages from police officers. They say, yeah, go ahead. Pee in your pants? No, actually, there's a number of charges that you can be busted for. And it is true. If they don't like you. They say, but if they like you, they'll just like you.

Well, in Patty's case, this is the sort of thing that happens when people think they're going to die. Oh, yeah. Like she truly believed that she was about to be shot by the FBI. Oh, yeah. She then tried slowly sliding into Wendy's bedroom, which only caused one of the agents to tell her to come out or he'd blow her fucking head off. Patty stopped moving and looked over at Wendy, who was up against the wall in the hallway with her hands up.

Now, there was a brief moment in which Patty thought about the shotgun hidden in the wall right behind her. But finally, she decided to give up without a fight. As she walked into the hall and raised her hands, the officer asked if she was Patty Hearst. When she said yes, she was handcuffed and told that she was under arrest for the Hibernia bank robbery of April 15th, 1974.

The only other witness to the arrest of Patty Hearst was the building's landlord, whose mouth had dropped to the fucking floor when the cops ushered Patty Hearst down his stairs. Well, at least now I can charge more for rent! Help!

But by the time she arrived at the federal building with her arresting officers, there was already a crowd of reporters and photographers. Finally, the search for Patty Hearst was over 591 days after she was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley.

Now, Patty didn't do herself any favors upon being arrested. As the cameras flashed on Patty in her transport car, she gave a clenched fist salute. When she was booked and asked what her occupation was, she said, urban gorilla. Well, I mean, yeah. She didn't have a job yet.

She wasn't a student? She said that the person asked, she's like, occupation. She's like, I don't know. She's like, you got to tell me something. She's like, I don't know. She's like, just fucking say anything. She goes, I don't know, urban gorilla. Yeah, she said it as a funny thing and then it becomes a statement. This is partially like what you want to believe or what you don't want to believe. I think that there are things where you realize like, oh, people say things sarcastically and they say things funnily in a human way. But if you just write down the words, they sound different.

Yeah, and later she would say that she just didn't said those things because that's what she felt she was supposed to do. I really do believe her vibe in the book. I believe it. The way she talks about it, but I do know that she was also searching for reasons after the fact. Yeah, but once Patty settled into jail, she started getting letters from all across the country, including one letter from a newly incarcerated Charles Manson. Hey, yeah, nice. Oh, yeah, you look different. Another type of girl.

Have you ever thought about a swastika tattoo? He quite eloquently wrote Patty, quote, You write to me. He then added that he could help her if she did everything he instructed. First thing you got to do is reverse the rainbow in your mind. Then the next thing you got to do is you got to kill the pig inside of you.

And the third thing you need to do is send me some money for my commissary. And you could, honestly. I like Tic Tacs.

After that, letters followed from Manson girls Squeaky Frome and Sandra Good, who urged Patty to please write to Charlie because he's such a beautiful person. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. Needless to say, Patty did not take their advice. But that was a team up I do want to see. Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, and Squeaky Frome? Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Christmas album? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Incredible. Now, Patty's first lawyer was Terry K.O. Hallinan. K.O. had a reputation for championing left-wing causes, but his most well-known case before Patty was representing Anton LaVey against the city of San Francisco, who had taken away Anton LaVey's pet lion.

As they should have. Anton LaVey, of course, is the founder of the Church of Satan. Yeah, Anton LaVey painted the house black. He had a lion inside of this very small house in San Francisco that he essentially tortured. This is amazing. It's like all the cameos at the end of the LPN season. You're not even wrong.

even roll that's why we talk about this how crazy the story is is the the cast of characters that roll it's like the end of big fish holy shit bugs bunny was there milton burl well here's ko speaking to the press with anton levay about the lion case

Play with it. And the lion, if you go out there, you'll see, misses him. And as homesick as he is and the wife and children are for the lion, well, the zoo has continued to put further and further restrictions, making it almost impossible for Mr. LeVay, who, of course, works at night and can't get there early in the morning, to visit the lion. And we are considering taking the lion back from the zoo, from the city and county of San Francisco, and giving it to another zoo. Would you rather keep the lion, Mr. LeVay? Of course I would, if I had proper facilities, which I could. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

No, we have no plans to put the lion back in the house. We have no plans to put the lion back in the house. Hey, hey, hey, that's my boy. That's my fucking boy constantly being a problem.

Well, the problem with KO, however, is that he told Patty Hearst to sign a six-page affidavit about her experience with the SLA that was both oversimplified and exaggerated. It claimed that she'd been given liquids to drink that made her feel like she was tripping on acid. Nothing of the kind ever occurred. She refused to sign it at first, but when she was told that it was her best chance at bail, she signed.

Now, Yolanda Harris was in the cell right next to Patty. And when she learned that Patty had signed something, anything, she told her that she should have killed her when she had the chance. Well, the worst part of it, though, is that even though Patty signed this fucking statement, she was never granted bail.

Now, when it became obvious that KO was out of his depth, Randy Hurst hired one of the most famous lawyers in America, a man who is now one of the most famous lawyers of all time. Before Patty, this man had saved the Boston Strangler from the death penalty and had earned an acquittal for the incredibly guilty Marine Captain Ernest Medina for his part in the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. After Patty, this man was a key member of OJ Simpson's dream team. On

I'm talking, of course, about F. Lee Bailey. Everybody's coming, dude. Everybody's coming to the cookout, man. Now, during Patty's trial for the Hibernia bank robbery, Bailey was putting away two or three Bloody Marys at lunch every day. So let's just say that her defense wasn't stellar. Pretty sure he got hammered to the day he died. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

F. Lee Bailey was sort of one of those types of like he was kind of manic where like sometimes he would be fucking brilliant. Like, I mean, he won the O.J. Simpson case. Yeah. Like it was his fuck. I mean, the shit that he did with Furman, the way the way that he just fucking destroyed Christopher Darden on the stand. Yeah. Like F. Lee Bailey was the secret sauce of that fucking team. Other times he was too soft to even fucking care. And this was kind of one of those times he did not do a great job for Patty.

I had a buddy who put down a bottle of scotch with him and said he had a nice time. Was he disbarred? Yes, he was. Why? Because he was bad. He fucked up. But yes, I don't know exactly why he was disbarred, but he was definitely disbarred. Seven counts of attorney misconduct. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Shoot from the hip. That was definitely Bailey. Bye.

But Bailey did bring in some heavyweights for the psychological side of Patty's defense. And another incredible crossover, Bailey brought in Dr. Louis Jolion West, who you may remember from our MKUltra episode as the guy who gave an elephant 500 hits of acid, which made the elephant shit itself before dying. You can always have more. You can never have less. Unless you're running on the beach. God, what a wonderful.

how many miles I could have run if I had 500 hits of acid. Additionally, Bailey brought in Dr. Martin Orn, who also participated in MKUltra experiments. I'm going to talk to our conspiracy heads, right? I get it.

This is one of the main issues about MKUltra as a whole. It is why it was such an insidious bad thing to happen. Because what it did was then, every single time, one of these now very, very prominent doctors that have been touched by MKUltra and were heavily involved with MKUltra, now we assume that every single thing that they do from before and after involves some form of deep, horrible intelligence connection. Yes. Which I don't think is incorrect. But also, in this aspect,

They're also just doctors that are hired guns that you can put in trial. So it's weird. It's this weird thing of, yes, they were MKUltra doctors. And it's fucking a very bad coincidence that they were also a part of all these various other stories and all these other things. But they were also just guys for hire. That's the thing is that, like, Dr. West was just, I mean, he worked at UCLA. He was the guy that Randy Hurst bought. Yeah, he was the guy that you go to.

at UCLA. And a lot of these guns for hire, for trial, you gotta pay them money. Yeah, you do. But both men testified as to how the treatment Patty received at the hands of the SLA affected her and what that treatment did in terms of her culpability in the bank robbery. And I'd say that these two men, as key MKUltra participants, these are the guys to ask. If you're asking how she got her brain melted, these are the guys that did it. This is how I would do it.

The thing is, to be honest, that she was kind of far too functional for what we would have done. We would have driven her completely insane, hopefully to suicide. But when it comes down to the simple question as to whether Patty Hearst was guilty or not guilty of the Hibernia bank robbery, yeah.

She was technically guilty in the eyes of the law because she'd walked into a bank and robbed it with a murderous gang of thieves. Yes. The defense, however, argued brainwashing as their case, which has never worked before or since because being traumatized or being in a cult is not an excuse for committing a crime in the eyes of the law. One of the D.C. snipers, they also tried arguing brainwashing. They also failed.

As far as the prosecution went, they absolutely demolished F. Lee Bailey's defense by using Patty's actions after the bank robbery. Of course. Namely, what happened at Mel's and the question as to why she didn't escape when she had hundreds of chances to do so. Because the problem is it's extremely...

subtle answer. It is not an easily parsed out idea of why did they stay? Why do they stay? Why does anyone stay? And it's actually extremely difficult in the eyes of the court. Like so much, I watched so much trial footage and you begin to see like, Oh, they have to have a clear line of thought that is digestible by your peers. That for the most part, if they end up in jury duty and this is not a slight against any human,

It means that they have the time and the availability to be there for jury duty, which means sometimes they're strange. Their scope is limited. So you have to be able to sell them a line very, very clearly and easily, which something like this.

It's fucking clear as I can see why. Yeah, it's no, it's very difficult because I mean, all the prosecution has to say is go up and, you know, ask the jury. It's like, OK, so what is the question here? Did Patty Hearst rob the bank? Yes. Look, that's her on the bank on video. That's her. That's her saying, Patty, did you rob the bank? Yes. Additionally, how come she didn't get charged for the shooting at Mel's?

Because there was no... It was just shooting in the air. Well, I mean, she could have got... It's still illegal. There's actually a lot of questions. There were a lot of crimes committed by a lot of people that didn't get charged. Is it because there are different counties and stuff? Yeah. There's a lot of different crimes that never got charged. So many different crimes. Like, they just kind of had to pick and choose, like, what they could prove. That's truly how... I mean, it works in court because...

whose words do you have to say about her shooting in the air? Like the two other terrorists or her word. And then the other, you know, like it's very difficult. Yeah. Where's the evidence for all this? Like, and is it worth it? Like, that's the thing is that what is that crime? What does that do now? Yeah. And additionally, the prosecution used the transcriptions from the tapes Patty had recorded at the farmhouse when they were trying to write the SLA book. But since Tico had destroyed the original tapes, there were only transcriptions and Patty statements, uh,

Did not sound objectively good in court. This is what I'm saying. It's like when the difference when you listen to her communiques versus when you read them. Yeah, no, it's far, far different. The prosecution even engaged in character assassination, bringing in a psychiatrist to say that before the SLA, Patty had lied in school. She'd engaged in sexual activity at an early age and she'd experimented with LSD and

Sounds cool. You mean entire 60s? The expert ended by saying that Patty enjoyed being the queen of the SLA Army just six weeks after joining. It was fucking bullshit. And so after just a day of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty on all counts. And Patricia Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in the Hibernia bank robbery.

Now, the further away Patty got from her life with the SLA, the more she became less Tanya and more Patty. Because you remember, she was Tanya. Yes. She was very much Tanya, and it took her months in prison before she was no longer Tanya. Well, also, you're in prison. You want to look tough. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now you have to be because now people are checking you and they're pulling your card and shit. Well, her case became a bit of a cause celeb with such unlikely figures as Ronald Reagan and John Wayne coming to her defense. Great guys. Yeah, I love those guys.

Yeah, not close to being Nazis in any way whatsoever. No problem. It's not like there was an entire genre of music in the 80s that was fucking just dedicated to how shitty these men were. It is interesting, though. It also shows how much time changes, because this is actually a very sort of left-wing concept to come to her aid for them. You know, this is back when people used to do things like that, be containing of multitudes. Yes, when they were, yeah, it was a black and white, yeah.

Well, the most bizarre crossover, and this is the final one, was that Patty's biggest champion was a local congressman named Leo Ryan. Do you remember that name? Getting Patty clemency became a top priority in his office. But there was one other matter that he needed to clear up first. See, a large number of Leo Ryan's constituents had left San Francisco and had settled in an obscure South American country named Guyana.

They had followed a local spiritual leader named Jim Jones. So Patty Hearst has gotten to Jonestown as well. MKUltra. Jonestown. J. Edgar Hoover. Charles Manson. We didn't even get into the fucking how she's related to the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford. That was a whole side story that we could not include. Anton LaVey. Yes, Anton LaVey.

Ryan had decided to travel to Guyana because he'd heard some of his constituents were being mistreated. So on the day before Ryan left for Guyana for Jonestown, he wrote Patty Hearst a letter saying, off to Guyana. See you when I return. Hang in there. Oh, man. But as most of you know, Congressman Leo Ryan never came back.

Because it was his assassination in Guyana that kicked off the Jonestown massacre in which over 900 people died. I gotta say, I don't know how I feel about this guy, but I think he was kind of cool and hip. Oh, he was? Very much so. Oh, yeah. He was like an old-fashioned, true... Like cool San Francisco congressman. Yeah, he was a San Francisco guy, local guy. Yeah.

But out of nowhere, on President Jimmy Carter's last day in office, he commuted the rest of Patty Hearst's prison sentence, making no comment or explanation why. You just like her. I think he did just like her. The rest of the revolutionaries, however, weren't so lucky.

While quite a few of them spent years on the lam, none of them did any significant time considering the crimes they committed. Bill and Emily Harris, a.k.a. Tico and Yolanda, only did six years for kidnapping Patty. Otherwise, they weren't charged with anything.

anything else in relation to what they did while in the SLA until 2002. Yeah, until 2002. That's when the murder happened? No, that was like when they got finally charged for the bank murder. That year, the inside team of the Crocker National Bank robbery were finally charged with the murder of Myra Opschul, which only made it to court because of a lengthy campaign from her son, John. This

As far as the state was concerned, they were all too happy to just fucking let it go. And so in 2002, Bill and Emily Harris, along with Michael Borton and Kathy Salaya, they pled guilty to the murder of Myra Opshaw and were very sorry for having done so. They're very, very, so very sorry. Oh, well, at least Michael Borton got in there. He finally got to go back to jail. It's his favorite. Actually, that's the other thing. It's like,

The story of what happened to the SLA Mark II after Patty Hearst got arrested, they fucking scattered. One dude went to South Africa. Other people, I think it was Kathy Salaya that got caught

after a fucking America's Most Wanted episode in 1999. Oh, yeah. They picked up one by one by one. Yeah, they all got picked up one by one. What about Wendy? Wendy, oh, yeah, she got arrested with Patty. Wendy is now a professional watercolorist. Really? Yeah, I'm looking up right now. She teaches watercolor. Let's get one. She's around. Here?

She's in, uh, it looks like in, uh, Oregon. Oh, okay. Nice. That's nice. Hitting happy little trees. Side stories, LPOTL at gmail.com. When he, Yoshimura, we really want to reach out to you. Yeah. Well, for the murder of Myra Opsal, Yolanda received the longest sentence out of the four of them. Eight years. Damn. For second degree murder. After all that? Yep. Paroled in 2007.

Did five years. Is that crazy? So nobody really did any time. She is currently living. It's the first time they didn't wish they were black. Exactly. She is currently living as a free person, as is everyone who survived their time in the SLA. She's a computer programmer. Yep. Yolanda.

Well, as far as Patty goes. Whoa, she worked at MGM Studios. Are you looking up the right Emily Harris? No. Yeah, no, yes, I am. She worked at fucking MGM Studios and the Walt Disney Company until her second conviction.

And being a computer programmer. She worked for Disney. Oh my God. That's fucking crazy. That is completely insane. A member of the SLA works for fucking Disney. After prison. After prison, before the murder conviction. Yeah. Because they only did, yeah, they did six years. They pled guilty and then they were free. And they just fucking hung out. You think she puts the SLA on her resume? Yes. Good at multitasking and leading a group of people.

Hobbies include jogging, jogging, push-ups. Swahili naming ceremony. Well, as far as Patty goes, she married her bodyguard in 1979 when she was 25 years old. By 1982, she had written her side of the story, Every Secret Thing, and attended the Cannes Film Festival in 1988 when her book was adapted into the movie that we've been talking about.

There, she met director John Waters, who was a massive fan and had even attended her trial in 1976, just as he'd attended Charles Manson's trial a few years earlier. Waters got the idea to put Patty in his next movie, Crybaby. And since then, she's appeared in five John Waters movies, including this incredible scene from Serial Mom. You can't wear white shoes after Labor Day.

That's not true anymore. Yes, it is. Didn't your mother ever tell you? Now you know. No. Please. Fashion has changed. No, it hasn't.

So good. Yeah, Patty Harris gets fucking killed by Kathleen Turner. It's wonderful. It's fucking great. Actually, they just put Zero Mom on Netflix. It's so worth it. It's not my favorite John Waters movie, but it's probably his best. I love that movie. Yeah, it's his most accessible, and it's funniest because Kathleen Turner, it's just a cocksucker resident. It's so good. It's so fucking good.

Now, even today, 50 years after the fact, the question as to whether or not Patty Hearst is to be believed is still a subject of heated debate. And while we can speculate all we want, the only person who knows the whole truth is Patty Hearst herself.

But as far as we're concerned, the story of Patty Hearst is the story of a survivor, someone who weathered almost two years in the company of dangerous people doing dangerous things during one of the most dangerous times in American history. Not only that, but Patty came out the other side of it smiling, joking about her time in the SLA during conversations with John Waters.

fundraising for children in the name of Congressman Leo Ryan. She fucking once won the Westminster Dog Show with a shih tzu named Rocket. Is that true? Yeah. That was a factoid I didn't realize. That's very impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She actually trained termite sniffing beagles for a little while. Like, she lives a pretty happy life. Yeah. In other words, Patty Hearst is an inspiration. Proof that no matter what may happen in your life, sometimes the only way out

is through. I have a newfound appreciation for that idea. As you were reading about this and talking about the subject, I think there's a lot of people that I can see why it's divisive. Yeah, of course. I think that it's probably very good for Patty that she had the two years in jail. I think that it's important for that she got a little bit of the

of the, this is why you don't rob banks. She technically did the crime. You did the crime. Technically. That's the whole thing. It's that shitty thing, that shitty law thing, that legal thing of like, technically you did it, so technically you do have to go to jail for this. And so I think it's good. Although a better lawyer could have gotten her off, I think. Oh, probably. I think if she didn't have a lawyer that was fucking putting down three martinis and Bloody Marys at lunch,

I think someone else could have gotten her off. Or if they had a more modern understanding of consent, of what happens inside of these types of abusive situations. Because we don't... They didn't have it then. They didn't talk about it like that. Yeah, if this happened in 2024, this trial would have been entirely different. Look at the Karen Reid trial, which we saw recently. Yeah, 1974, it's...

The changes in how we think about all of this shit has changed. It's 50 years. Fucking 50 years. But I justify anybody that talks about the term innocence, especially as a backseat driver in whatever form of life that you have. And we all say, I would have done this.

I would have taken out the SLA. I would have ran away. I would have done this. I would have stood up to Hitler. You would have gotten, and I say it true, but I say this, the truth is that you would have gotten shot in the head. Yeah. And I think that Patty knew that inside, and then she did what she had to do, and then when it came down to it, what got hurt? A fucking bank?

Wow, my heart. That one woman did get killed. The other people committed those crimes. So it would be different. I'm talking about for Patty. Being involved in a bank heist, who gives a fucking shit? That first one was just like, the money's insured, who cares? So for me, justice was served.

And now it's extra served by what we know, looking on her life from the future. I personally believe that it would have been if she... I believe she would have been fine with probation and community service. Like, give her a shitload of community service, like a lot of community service.

a big fucking fine and put that money somewhere good. But I don't think that Patty Hearst needed to do time in prison. I don't think she did. I'm just saying that if this is how this was going to go, this is the best thing that probably how it could have went. Well, what got her out of being tiny and being Patty was just time. That's all it was. And then time is the most important thing you can have. Time's a resource that don't come back. That's right. So remember that. Use it wisely because your time is short.

Patreon.com slash last podcast on the left. So give your precious money for your precious time to us. And also, before we get to the plugs, though, I want to thank all the people that helped on this series. It's a fucking monster. It really is. Thanks to our research team, Joel McKean and Madeline Shaw. Carolina Hidalgo did a fucking...

monster amount of work on this series. We're going to do a full bibliography of all the different books we used on our Instagram. Thanks also to our brother Alejandro Hidalgo for trying to explain some of the legal stuff to us. And if we didn't get it right, it's not his fault. Well, you say it, but technically I think it is his fault. It's not. It is legal. Let's see what

Legally, it is my fault if I got it wrong. And of course, we want to thank Ian for doing all the video editing. Rob for editing all the fucking... Editing all the shit. Everybody did such a fucking fantastic job on this series. Yeah, y'all were fine. Y'all did great. Thank Patty! Thank Patty!

We honestly, I don't know if she wants to be thanked. She wrote the book. She wrote the book. Yeah, I think Patty, yeah, of course. Yeah, of course, thank Patty. Without Patty, we wouldn't have any of this. Yeah. We wouldn't even be able to do the show. You did a lot of work, Henry. You did do a lot of work. And Ed? I'm here. You're here. I'm here. I'm here. So patreon.com slash last podcast on the left to watch us flip it around. You're going to love it on there. There's a lot of bullshit we're putting on there. A lot of behind the scenes stuff. You're going to like it. Go to TikTok, social medias, Instagram at LP on the left.

Go to twitch.tv slash LPNTV. Go and see Hoopagoo was the board the first time we did it ever. HGX2, baby. You're going to love it. It's on Twitch. Watch the replay and also on Twitch and then on YouTube. And then go to lastpodcastontheleft.com. Buy tickets to see us live. Because we're going to be playing DC tomorrow.

baby. If you're in DC, if you're in Baltimore, come fucking take that train down to us. Yeah. Come say hi. We're going to have a weird Baltimore fuckers. I can't wait to see a Baltimore. I love Baltimore. I miss Baltimore. Except for the one time that we saw that man died. Well, yeah, we did see that man die there, but that's, you know, you can miss him too.

I already do. Hail, sweet sake. I hug you. Hail, Wendy. Sure. Yeah, I mean, you know, she still was a... I like her! I am on record. I like her. Hey, Wendy. There's a merry man that's looking to talk to you. I love you, baby! 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.

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