Part One: How The FBI Botched The Olympic Park Bombing

Robert begins our series of episodes about two of the most infamous fuck ups in US law enforcement history, starting with the Atlanta Olympic Park Bombing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh boy, it's Behind the Bastard's the podcast that you
listen to if you're listening to it. If you don't
listen to it, then you don't know what I'm saying.
So you know what, I hate you, but I don't
hate my guest for this episode, Courtney Kosak.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Courtney, Hello, so good to see you again.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Good to see you again. Have you been since last
we uh last we talked about somebody who was really bad?

Speaker 4 (00:31):
Yeah, well, lots of bad people that I hear about
every day in the news.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
But I have been like.

Speaker 4 (00:39):
Deep into working on my book, which is just full
of people from my past.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Oh That's what I've.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Been working hopefully not the worst people in all of history.
I have you only Yeah, I mean you did have
that longtime friendship with momark Adaffi, but you know, tragically
that ended badly. We all did. Look, he was cool
at one point in time, he was not. So Courtney,
you got something to plug you want to you want

(01:06):
to drop that before we get into our our bastard
for this episode, because we got a weird one for
you this week.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Well, yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
Just wanna My My book is called Girl Gone Wild.
It is my coming of age memoir. It's my debut.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
I'm so tempted to just ask you a million questions
about your book writing process, but we'll save that for
another podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's bad.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Yeah, I'm just so excited that it's going to be
out in March.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
It's available for pre order and it's all thrilling.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, Courtney. Uh So, speaking of my process, my process
for writing a book is mostly to get delayed writing
that book so I can continue writing podcasts. And this week,
the podcast that I have written in lieu of finishing
my book, uh is about is a weird one, right,
This is normally a podcast but the worst people in

(01:58):
all of history, And we have a bastard for this week,
and our bastard for this week is a really interesting guy.
His name is Steve Hatville, and he was recently made
Special Advisor to the Trump Administration for Pandemic Preparedness. He
has some relevant background here. He spent most of his
career as a pathologist and a biological weapons expert, training
US soldiers and how to deal with biological weapons, specifically

(02:20):
weaponized viruses, And like a lot of people in Trump world,
he's recently gotten into what we might call the alt
science side of medicine. In twenty twenty, he advised the
first Trump administration on COVID nineteen and became a major
advocate of hydroxychloroquin as a treatment. Yeah, he's one of
those guys. And in an article a couple of years ago,

(02:43):
The Washington Post cited his statements as evidence supporting the
idea that the Trump administration neglected pandemic response after losing
the twenty twenty election. Quote Stephen Hatfield, a virologist who
advised White House Trade advisor Peter Navarro, said he was
intimately involved in the pandemic response, repeatedly described in the
emails how stuff took precedence over a coronavirus even as
the outbreak surged more than two hundred and fifty thousand

(03:05):
new coronavirus cases per day in January. Now, with the
election so close, COVID is taking a back seat, yet
the disease is rearing its ugly head again, Hatfill wrote
to an outside colleague in October of twenty twenty, following
the election, which was disputed by Trump. Hatfel wrote another
email that he personally shifted over to the election fraud
investigation in November, which says a lot about like the

(03:25):
how the people close to Trump viewed themselves was like, well,
I'm a virologist and a pathologist, but I'll get involved
in the election frauds. I guess that makes sense for
me to be working on during a pandemic more than
the pandemic, right.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
The priority. I can't believe that's the priority.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
No, everybody's focusing on the election. Now. I don't care
that you're the virus guy and there's a virus. Get
on the elections.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Hit all hands on tech, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
And true true to form. During that brief window, Hatfield
traveled to Arizona to help organize a plan B for
Trump's legal fight to retain the presidency. When a colleague
email him on January fifth, task why he wasn't fixing
the virus, he replied that the election thing had gotten
out of control, and I go where my team goes,
which at that point was to contest results in Nevada. Now,

(04:12):
when it comes to this stuff, I have no trouble
condemning hat Phil. I don't like him. I think he's
a bad person. I think he's done bad things for
the world. Here's where it gets weird. He's kind of
the protagonist of our story this week, right, because this
is we're going to be telling a story, and we're
gonna be telling two stories, really, and in both of

(04:33):
these stories, the bad guy is the FBI, and in
more broadly, our entire justice system, right, and the media
and how the media interacts with the justice system around
high profile cases, you know, when people are desperately trying
to figure out who did it and at a point
at which you know, the cops decide literally we need

(04:53):
to throw some name out there, and the media decides content, content, content, right,
Like that's the evil here. We're talking about two different
tear attacks where innocent people were accused by both law
enforcement and journalists of having done terrible things. And hat
Phil is one of those innocent people. So he's like
a bad person, but he's also really unique among members

(05:15):
of the Trump administration and that all of them hate
the media. Hatfil is a really good reason to hate
the mainstream media. They did him so fucking dirty, and
it's a very weird story for that reason.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
In situation, they did him so dirty that.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
We're about absolutely absolutely completely destroyed his life for years
for no reason, like just based purely on bad police
work and lazy reporting, like that's what happened here, and
so kind of what we're talking about. In addition to
the justice system sure doesn't work very well, does it.
Cops aren't very good at their jobs, are they. We're

(05:51):
also telling a story of this is how law enforcement
and the media kind of feeding off of each other
created a month because the present day Steven hat Phil
who was a member of the Trump administration, is created
to a significant extent by how much this destroys his
life and pisses him off, Like this really radicalizes him

(06:14):
in a major way. And so it's interesting to understand
for that perspective too, because we are talking about a
bad guy, but he's not the bad guy in the
story we're telling, which I haven't done before. So I'm
excited for this kind of episode.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
I am so conflicted. I feel like you're doing me
dirty a little bit. You're like, no, the Trump guy
is the good guy.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Well he's not the good guy. Let's be really clear.
Protagonist rightist is not mean good guy. Okay, yeah, but
he's not. He's not the wronged person in his story.
But we are telling two stories, and basically this week
we're going to be talking about first the Olympic Park
bombing which occurred at the nineteen ninety six Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. Uh,

(06:57):
and we're talking about the man who was wrong blamed
for that attack and how that happened. And then and
this is where hatfil comes in, we're going to be
talking about the two thousand and one anthrax attacks in
the United States after nine to eleven, because hat Phil
is the guy who gets blamed for that, right, And
so that's what we're talking about this week, is how
both of you because these are with similar cases and

(07:19):
they are emblematic of similar problems that still exist within
law enforcement in the media to this day. Right, So
that's what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Oh, I'm on the edge of my seat. Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah, Yeah, this'll be fun. So for our first again,
I just started. If I talking about hat Phil, we're
not going to talk about him anymore in this episode
because the guy who gets wrongfully accused of the Olympic
Park bombings is not Steve hat Phil. He is a
guy who was a cop for a brief span of time,

(07:51):
although not he was not really a cop either, Like
he's we'll talk. He's a wanna bee cop who gets
to be it briefly and then is a secure, ready
guard at the time. All this happens when he actually
does some an act of legitimate heroism. And his name
was Richard Jewel. Richard Allensworth Jewel was born Richard White
on December seventeenth, nineteen sixty two, in Danville, Virginia. His

(08:13):
father worked at Chevy and his mom helped. She was
like an insurance claim adjuster type pursuit. She had some
job in that hole. But I don't think she was
an adjuster, but she was involved in the whole insurance
claim thing. Something to do with insurance. I don't know.
You don't come to this to hear about what people's
moms did for the insurance industry. They divorced when he
was four, and she remarried a guy named John Jewell

(08:34):
who adopted Richard, and that's why he's known as Richard Jewel.
Most of his life is not very interesting. The most
important thing to know about Richard Jewel, Sophie will pull
up a picture of him. This guy is like his
phenotype is cop right, like he was born with cop
in his blood. Like you just take one look at
this man. He grows the kind of mustache that if

(08:56):
you were, like, if you're biologically a cop, your body
just produces that mustache, right, Like, I don't know that
he ever had a choice in not wanting to be
a cop, Like in terms of his character and personality,
that's what he always wanted to be for the time
he's a child. Richard idolizes the police. This is the
only job he wants to do. Right, You're looking at
the picture like that, that is a cop mustache, right,

(09:18):
There's just simply no other way to describe it.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
He's like a Chicago cop.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
He's like a yes, yes, strong Chicago cop vibes. That's
what he was born to do, and he's never gonna
quite get there, tragically for Richard, so he idolizes the police.
This is the only job he ever wants. He's one
of these people who grows up believing the police are
heroes surrounded on all sides by dangerous criminals, holding up

(09:43):
society and protecting the innocence through sheer force of will
and commitment to the law. So you know, he's pretty propagandaist, right,
Like a lot of us were his kids. And when
he grows up. You know, he doesn't immediately get into
law enforcement. His first job, I think is working at
and eventually managing a Tcby yogurt shop. But he shows

(10:05):
some promise that like, oh, maybe this guy, you know,
maybe this law enforcements what he's actually going to do,
because while a manager of the store, he stops a
robbery in progress, which you're not supposed to do when
managing a retail store or a food store. You're not
supposed to do that in any store, stop a robbery.
But he does. I don't have any more details than that,

(10:27):
but it gets him written up in local papers and
it fuels his desire to get behind a badge. He's like,
oh man, this is what I made for, Like, look
at what I was able to do behind the desk
at a Tcby treaty shop. Give me a gun and
a badge. I'll really fox some shit up.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
If I can do this with ice cream. You gotta
wait and see what I got.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, exactly. It's amazing. They didn't just hand him a
gun and a badge right then and there.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
And Dan Clint East would make a movie about this guy.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yes he did, Yes he did. Okay, and we'll talk
about that because it's gross.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
When he's twenty two, Jewel got hired to Claire for
the Small Business Association, where he met and befriended a
lawyer named Watson Bryant. He's good at the job, and
he earns a reputation for being always on the ball.
He's very on time, he's very outgoing, always puts in
one hundred and ten percent. But he got placed there
through a temp agency, and when the contract ran up,
he took a job that brought him closer to his

(11:19):
dream career, working as a detective for the Marriott hotel chain.
I did not realize. I thought that was a joke
in American Dad. I didn't know hotels had detectives, but
apparently they do.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
That's the perfect job really for him. He should have
kind of stopped there.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
I think, I don't want to be mean to the
hotel detectives at the world, But imagine going on on
a date and like, so what are you hear? Like, well,
I'm a hotel detective. A hotel detective, huh are you
like trying to figure out like what the stain was
on the mattress? Was like it's come with the yeah, yeah,
just looking at up, just walking into everyone with a

(11:56):
black light going yep, yeah, huh, yep. More people coming
every day. I think somebody did cocaine off that table.
Maybe I don't know, it could be more. Come In
nineteen ninety, he gets hired as a jailer for the
Habersham County Sheriff's Office. Right now, this is kind of
a do nothing job. You're sitting in a small, smoke

(12:16):
filled room occasionally dealing with the restees. It's not what
he wants to be doing. He doesn't like it, but
it's his foot in the door. And I guess in
the nineties it was maybe there were enough the cops
weren't like today, he would just find some police department
in a big city that is offering like twenty thousand
dollars signing bonuses because there's not enough cops because people

(12:37):
don't want to do that job anyway. But I guess
back then you had to really like work your way
up to being a cop, right like, for whatever reason,
I don't know, maybe it's just where he lives in Georgia,
or maybe he's just not doesn't I don't know what.
Maybe he doesn't go at Maybe there was an easier
way to do it than he just didn't do I
don't know yet, but yeah, he becomes a cop through

(13:00):
working at the jail, right. Like, he does this for
like a year or so, and it's one of the
you can tell it's frustrating him because like working at
the jail, he's almost a real cop. He could like,
he could taste it, right, he could taste the authority,
and so he starts to get over eager. One of
my sources for this episode is an epic long form

(13:20):
article in Vanity Fair by Marie Britter, and she writes,
this is while he's still a jailer. Quote. He arrested
a couple making too much noise in a hot tub
in an apartment building where he did part time security work.
He was arrested for impersonating an officer, and after pleading
guilty to a lesser charge, was placed on probation on
the condition that he seeks psychological counseling. You get to like,

(13:41):
this guy wants to be a cop so bad it's
kind of a problem, like man.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Turning him into a peeping tom.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
First off, cops generally don't arrest people for being noisy
in a hot tub. Even a cop is usually going
to be like, hey, we got a noise complaint. Chill
out right like this guy or just like busting in
and arresting people. You have to imagine he had an
illegally carried gun on him that he was just like
these hot tub guys pull something on me. I'm just

(14:07):
gonna blast him. We're being a little mean to Richard here.
He is legitimately a hero in the end, but like,
this is funny. I'm sorry, this is just this is
just funny, Richard. This is a stupid thing that you did.
He's dead now, it's fine. It doesn't care. So if
a guy is so eager to be a cop that
the instant he gets a job, sitting in the same
room as a cop, he illegally arrests a couple for

(14:29):
a noise complaint. That might be a warning sign not
to give that person a badge and gun. But somehow
Jewel worked his way up to being hired as a deputy.
In nineteen ninety one, he goes to the North in America.
I love it. Let's go and it's one of those yeah. Well,
he goes to Northeast Georgia political Academy. He does well.
He graduates in the upper twenty five percent of the class.

(14:51):
He said that he read the Georgia Legal Code for fun,
like he's obsessed with cop stuff. So I have no
doubt that when it came to the in class portions
of it, he aced everything right, like he's been prepped
for this forever.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
I don't know how he did the obstacle.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Course that might have been harder for him. Although this
is Georgia, you know, we're not talking about a lot
of cops who are like fucking superstar athletes in a
rural Georgia sheriff's department. So he becomes a real cop.
He now has a real badge and a real gun,
and he is ready to get out there and fight

(15:27):
crime a las. Poor Richard is about to run face
to face into a reality that it's I don't know
if he ever really fully accepts it, right, But this
is like the great tragedy of Richard jules life, which
is that he wants to be a cop. And I say,
this is a guy who doesn't want there to be cops.
He wants to be a cop for what you would
say are the right reasons. He cares deeply about the law.

(15:51):
He thinks it is important to abide by the law,
and he wants to protect people. Check right, that's why
he wants to become a cop. Police And this is
not me the left wing radical saying this. The Supreme
Court has ruled police have no duty to protect people,
and it is a fact, an undeniable fact, that police

(16:12):
all over the country break the law regularly, both in
pursuing suspects and lying on the stand about them and
falsifying evidence and planting evidence and using physical force that
they are not legally supposed to be using. Cops break
the law constantly. They are not there to protect people,

(16:32):
and they do not uphold the law. These are facts, right, Robert.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Did you ever have in your young Republican days did
you ever did you think ops were good?

Speaker 2 (16:43):
I'm just curious, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I wanted
to be a cop when I was a kid, right,
And I wanted to be a cop for the worst
possible reason, because at eighteen, if you become a cop,
you get to carry a gun while off duty, and
normally take you have to wait until you're twenty one
to carry a gun, which is the wrong reason to
become a cop, right, that's why you shouldn't let eighteen
year olds become cops, which they almost did.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
You'd be the biggest crime committing cop we know.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
And when I was when I wanted to be a cop,
which is again when I was like eighteen nineteen, part
of why it was possible for me to have become
one is that Dallas had just had to can a
shitload of officers over a massive fake drug scandal, so
like recruitment was down and they were desperate for Peter right,
you could not reason. Yeah, I don't think I would
have made it long. Like literally, within like a month

(17:32):
or two of making my first calls for the police
and like setting up that starting that process, I started
experimenting with drugs. And as soon as I took two CI,
I was like, oh, I'm not going to be a cop.
Oh what the fuck? Was I thinking? Absolutely not? Are
you kidding me?

Speaker 4 (17:47):
No?

Speaker 2 (17:47):
No, no, no, no no. I want to do drugs.
That sounds way better than being a cop. And it
was for about ten years, and then at a certain
point you have to do less drugs.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
Heard, Yeah, that's.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
My that's my my dare class for kids.

Speaker 4 (18:04):
Kids.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
I'm looking I'm looking at this room, I'm seeing a
lot of seventeen and eighteen year old You guys got
a solid twelve years before you got to curtail your
drug use, you know, so really enjoy this time. You know,
test everything for fitanyl, but other than that, go wild.
You know, whatever you can fit in your body, throw
it in there. Don't ask questions, Just do it and
run off into the sunset. It'll be great when you're

(18:26):
twenty nine, and maybe start to start pulling back on
that throttle, you know, hit the brakes.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
What Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
I always give our child listeners good advice.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Nonk, no fintanyl, no trink.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
No finanyl, no trank. Maybe try crocodile. If you get
a chance to try that weird Russian drug that melts
your skin, try that shit. You know it sounds dope.
I never got to do crocodile. I regret it now
that I'm in my sober era. Gas station sober and
maybe they'll by gas station crocodile. Anyway, we were talking
about how cops break the law lot and anyway, again,

(19:03):
I have my opinions on this that are grounded in fact,
but I also want to like cite facts and if
I make a statement like cops break the law constantly. So.
A twenty sixteen study by researchers at Bowling Green University
looked into nearly six seven thousand cases of police officers
being arrested and charged with crimes between two thousand and
five and twenty eleven. They concluded, quote, police crimes are

(19:25):
not uncommon now. One of the things this study notes
is that only about a thousand officers are arrested each
year in charge with crimes. But there are a lot
more cops than that. Commit number one cops, it's very
easy for them to get away with crimes. The number
of cops who could break the law and don't get
caught because they're cops is exponentially higher than a thousand.

(19:45):
But there's also a lot of cases, and there's documentation
of how often there's interviews with other cops that'll talk
about this, of police breaking the law and having it
swept under the rug. Right. Well, they'll get a warning
from you know, maybe someone above them or something, but like, look,
you know, just get your car home. I know you're
drunk tonight. Because you're another officer, I'll let you off
you as a professional courtesy you know, protector own again,

(20:08):
there's data on this. It happens constantly. That said, the
data on win cops do actually fuck up enough to
get charged with crimes, the data on what crimes they
commit is really interesting. From a summary in a Huffington
Post article by Matt Ferner, quote, the alleged crimes cops
whore arrested fore most frequently were simple assault, driving under
the influence, and aggravated assault. Altogether, those crimes made up

(20:29):
one third of the total cases. There were also a
considerable number of sex crime cases, including forcible fondling and
forcible rape, about ten percent of all cases, and disturbingly,
the sex crimes included some victims under the age of eighteen.
If you are looking at the vast majority of child
sex abuse is people who are related to the child.
When you move out from people who are directly related

(20:50):
to the child, the most common people who abuse kids
are like members of the clergy, medical professionals, and police officers,
not in that order necessarily, but yes, because they have
access and because they have plug you know.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Yeah, so wait, sex crimes and what was the first
thing you said.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Oh, driving under the influence, cops drive drunk all the
fuck of time, and some assault just hitting, beating people,
beating spouses. You know, fifty percent of police officer homes
have domestic violence in them.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Do you remember that South Dakota? Was he a cop
or a politician.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Or sin something like that, which one.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Just a couple of years ago.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
But he fucking killed a guy and then drove home,
and that they I mean, I think he got away
with it.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well good for him. You know we all, we all
would hope to be able to get away with at
least one murder in our lives. I can't blame a
man for that, for just wanting to kill a guy
and get away with its most normal thing to want.
I don't know why I said that. So, the most
common crime committed by police is also the one they
get arrested for the least often, which is lying under oath.

(21:53):
This is so common that cops have a term for
it called testa lying. And if you know, I have
a friend who became a lawyer and was briefly a
prosecutor and stopped being a prosecutor because he was like,
I just kept going. I kept sitting down with police
officers and saying, are you sure this is accurate, and
then when it came to trial it would be like

(22:14):
they lied, right, Like that happened. That happened so many
times that I put my ass out there as a
prosecutor because a cop told me no, this is definitely
what happened, and they were fucking lying. It happens all
the goddamn time. And again there's documentation about this. This
is such a problem that in New York City prosecutors
have a secret database of untrustworthy cops. Again, a secret

(22:34):
database of cops that like, yeah, we if you're a prosecutor,
don't let this guy up on the stand if he's
telling you something it's like full of shit. But also,
we're not going to report this anywhere. More broadly, in
the nineteen nineties, the Malin Commission carried out a sweeping
investigation of the NYPD, and it found that perjury and
falsification of records were routine by police and quote the
most common form of police corruption. You might want to

(22:56):
note that those two crimes tend to be committed in
order to get a conviction against a defendant. Right, if
you are lying under oath and falsifying records, the most
likely reason you were doing that is because there was
a crime and you're pretty sure the guy you got
did it, but you can't prove it, so you're lying

(23:18):
to make it easier to secure a conviction. Right, Or
you don't know the guy did it, or think the
guy did it, you just hate him because you're a bigot,
or you want to fuck his wife or whatever. Right,
and you're doing that, you know. But the most common
crime committed by cops all over is lying under oath
and falsifying records, and that those two things are generally
done to get people convicted, right, Cops lie to get convictions.

Speaker 4 (23:44):
I love how we go around saying like lying under
oath is a felony, like your mail is a felony.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
It's like, no, you can totally do those things.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
I steal mail all the time, baby, but I don't
keep it for myself. I hand it out to other
people who don't have it off. Yeah yeah, yeah exactly.
I take mail from those It's like it's me living
out my Marxist praxis, you know, from each according to
their ability to have a lot of mail in their
mailbox to those without as much mail in their mailbox.

(24:14):
I think that's what Marx was talking about, I didn't
make it all the way through capital. I go through
all this. This is a bit of a digression from
Richard Jewel, but it's important to note that the vast
majority of criminal behavior inside our justice system is perpetrated
by police officers, and not just police officers, but by
people who are in the justice system who are attempting
to get convictions and have to futz with the truth

(24:37):
in order to secure conviction because the actual evidence isn't
strong enough. Right. That's an important point. And I know
this has been a long digression, but I need to
emphasize it a little further. So I'm going to read
one quote from a very good Slate article by Mark
Stern titled the police lie all the time? Can anything
stop them? Quote? When NYPD officers are accused of illegal behavior,
the department itself usually investigates, then conceals its findings in

(25:00):
imposes at worst a slap on the risk like brief
paid leave. Prosecutors could separately investigate, but they have little
incentive to question an officer's story. If they know an
officer is lying, they cannot legally rely on his testimony.
If they remain in the dark, they can still use
his perjury to clinch a conviction. Moreover, prosecutors and police
work together to put defendants behind bars, developing a team

(25:20):
mentality that prevents prosecutors from scrutinizing officers testimony with appropriate skepticism.
As long as officers lies cannot be proved false, prosecutors
have little reason to question their account of events. As
a New York assistant district attorney told the Maulin Commission,
taking money is considered dirty, but perjury for the sake
of an arrest is accepted. It's become more casual. Great,

(25:42):
this takes us to Richard Jewel. But first, you know
what Richard Jewel would have loved if he were alive
to see this.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Ads.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
He would have loved ads supporting podcasts. That would have
been Richard Jewele's favorite thing. Ah tragic. We're back and
we're talking about police officers lying under oath in order
to secure arrests and convictions. Right, and Richard Jewel, I tell,

(26:12):
I've just told you this guy wants to be a
cop more than anything. He idolizes cops. He is not
the kind of guy I don't think who would have
lied to get an arrest. Or to get a conviction.
He does. He is a true believer, right, and that's
gonna cause him problems, right, because I'm not saying this
to like, I don't think he's a he's not a
person I would consider. I don't consider his ethics to

(26:35):
be ethical, right, Like, I don't think it's ethical to
arrest people for making noise in a hot tub, right.
And he's very serious about a lot of stuff that
I don't agree with. But he's consistent. He's internally consistent.
He does believe in the law, and he's not a liar.

Speaker 4 (26:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
He's a very He described himself as a very methodical person.
He liked to plan out everything. He read the Georgia
Legal Code for fun. And he's not gonna fit in
with the Sheriff's department because he wants to be a
good cop and they have a very different idea about
what a good cop is. Right. He described the rural

(27:11):
county he worked in as like going back into the
seventies in terms of law enforcement. In other words, this
is a place where there's good old boys who enjoy
limited immunity to crimes, and there's other people, skin color
dependent who are You're much more free to harass or hassle, right,
and that's not the kind of cop Jewel wants to be,
right if this were. He's kind of like Sergeant Nicholas

(27:32):
Angel in Hot Fuzz, right, where he's like he's too
good for the rest of the department, Except he's not
very good at the job either, right, Like, he has
really good and very strict intentions, but he's not like
the most competent at police work. And he's also pissing
everyone off because he takes a lot of stuff seriously

(27:52):
that they don't take seriously, and he doesn't like it
when other people are kind of more loosey goosey with
the rules. So he gets sidelined mostly into dealing with
car accidents, right, because that's the part of the job
he does well and nobody else really wants to do it.
He works really hard, he puts in fourteen hour days.
He volunteers to host community events. He's the cop that

(28:13):
they'll he'll go talk to a school or whatever. He
loves doing that kind of shit, But his fellow officers
are kind of just after they get to know him,
waiting for an excuse to shitcan him and get him
off of the force, right, because again he's kind of
cramping their style and he's attempting to the story. He
tells us that he was trying to pursue someone and

(28:34):
he crashes his police car in nineteen ninety five, and
that's the chance these people had been waiting for, right,
So he is demoted, he loses his badge. He's offered
to stay working at the jail, but Richard is unwilling
to return to that kind of life, so he resigns
from the force and he gets the kind of job
that you get when you're a failed cop. He becomes

(28:56):
a campus cop, right, perfect, Yeah, that's the it's the
circle of cop. So Piedmont College hires him and he
immediately gets a reputation. Again, he's super diligent, like he
will absolutely write people up for every infraction he sees,
and he will pursue the kind of infractions you know.
College campus cops generally you understand like it at certain

(29:19):
times and stuff. People are going to party, there's going
to be underage drinking, and you don't always go after that,
right because, like for what they it's kind of impossible
to police it all. So you kind of triage that
sort of shit. Right, Richard can't stand any kind of
violation of the rules, and so he goes after kids
whenever he sees any kind of infraction. He's issuing tickets,

(29:40):
he's trying to arrest people. He is very aggressive about this,
to the point that the president of the college gets
calls three or four times a week from different people
complaining to him about Jeweles behavior. Right, Like, he thinks,
my job is to be a cop, and the real
job is to basically be a babysitter and make sure
kids don't.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
Die, right, Yeah, that they don't hurt themselves.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
I'm sure they love to fuck with him, though, Oh
my god, he's like the.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Dream absolutely And he again he does sound like the
most annoying campus cop. And it was during them, his
campus cop days, that Richard would notch his one real
victory in the war on crime. During a manhunt for
a suspected burglar, he spotted the culprit hiding near the
top of a tree. Writing for Vanity Fair, Marie Brynner
notes that Jewel had arguments over turf with other officers.

(30:28):
He described himself as the kind of cop who is
eager to track down people partying after hours and call
their parents. Oh and this obsession, yeah, this all clashes
with what his employers want him to do. The president
of the university repeatedly begs him, hey man, calm the
fuck down, like he's up. This is not what we
want you doing, and Richard refuses to bend, so he

(30:49):
resigns rather than accept that some kids are going to
drink on campus and maybe you need to chill out.

Speaker 4 (30:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
So, once this job falls through, he finds himself back
in Atlanta, looking for a new job and living with
his mother. Now, because of the way this all timed out,
the Olympics is coming to town, right, this is the
Atlanta Olympics. I don't know why the fuck you'd want
to hold an Olympics in a city that has such
nightmarish summer weather and horrible traffic. But they only host

(31:19):
cities in places with horrible traffic, or host Olympics in
places with horrible traffic, which is why they're doing it
in La next maybe the only city worse than Atlanta
to do the Olympics in the good fucking lucky Olympic
dick shits. I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
I remember watching this one.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Great gymnastics, Yeah, great gymnastics, great terrorism, all sorts of
good stuff in this Olympics. So Richard is excited for
the Olympics because you know, they're a disaster for any
city's economy.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
They never really work out very well in the long run,
But in the short term they work out really well
for one group of people, which is security guards, because
you need a shitload of security guards standing around all
of these different venues and you know areas of the
city that have been like walled off for the event
to tell people, hey, you can't be here, or to

(32:06):
help generally, to help people like figure out where they're
supposed to go, right, You're kind of glorified like maths.
A lot of the time. I helped desk as a
security guard in the situation. But you need a lot
of those guys, right, because it's the fucking Olympics. So
Jewele later recalled thinking, I thought working at the Centennial
Olympic Park will look really good on my resume. I
don't know that that's the case. That's the kind of

(32:27):
man Richard was. He gets the job easily enough, and
he brings the same attitude to this next gig that
he brought to his previous career as a real cop.
It was actual job, as best as I can put
it together, was to stand overnight by a sound and
light tower near the main stage area. The people who'd
planned for the Olympic Atlanta Olympics did a terrible job,
as is always the case when people planned for an Olympics,

(32:49):
and so the whole downtown area, the whole Olympic Park downtown,
which is like twenty one acres, was constantly claught. It
was a nightmare. Athletes are regularly late for their events
because they just like can't get through this shit. Almost
nobody who's in this park is from Atlantis. They don't
know where they're going anyway, and everything's like walled off
and fenced off in a weird way. It's just a
fucking Titanic mess. So his job is helping to manage

(33:12):
foot traffic and help lost people get where they're going. Now.
Marie Brynner talked extensively with Richard Jewel for her piece,
and he gives us in some of these interviews, we
get clips, like pieces of his day to day life
that do not make this sound like a demanding job.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
This is on paper supposed to be kind of a
do nothing gig quote. Jewel had a routine he would
check in and fill the ice chest he kept by
a bench at his station. Jewel liked to offer water
and cokes to pregnant women or policemen who stop to rest.
Those are the two guys who deserve cokes. Pregnant women
and cops.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
One of them probably shouldn't have cokes.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
But that's one of them. Probably shouldn't have a coke.
I don't know. Fuck it, yeah, a little bit of
a little bit of caffee. I think we get too
we're too protective of fetuses these days.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
I agree. I agree. Eat sushi whatever, it doesn't matter,
eat sush.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
She have some coffee, A little bit of crack cocaine
probably not bad for you. What just a little bit,
a little bit. It's cleaner as a hunter. Biden reminded us,
all it's cleaner than it's basically like an apple. So
very little is expected of Richard Jewel in his job
as security guard, but as usual, he takes the job

(34:23):
very seriously. This is one thing I'll say for him.
He doesn't consider in a normal instance, maybe we'd call
this sad, but he doesn't consider being a security guard
to be any less serious than being a police officer. Right.
He treats the job the same way, and thank god
he did, because he's going to save a shitload of
people's lives. This is really like a wild moment of

(34:45):
like this guy. Every other thing else I've said about
him is this is like the fucking set up to
a very depressing not Adam Sandler Rob Schneider movie, right,
or I guess Paul Blart Malcot might be a better
fucking comparison or whatever. But like, it doesn't sound like
we're setting up for this guy to have be very impressive,

(35:06):
but he is, because again, he treats this job like
it's life and death and it's about to be a
bit after midnight on July twenty seventh, nineteen ninety six,
jul is doing his rounds and he notices that the
people at Budworld, which I'm assuming was a pop up
bar sponsored by Budweiser, we're getting kind of rowdy and loud. Now.

(35:26):
I wanted to know what bud World was, so in
order in an effort to do my due diligence, I
googled bud World Olympics, which brought up this television ad
which I'm just gonna get everybody so weaken before we
move on here. Everyone just needs a little hit of
the nineteen nineties, just like just like one quick dose,
you know, just a little bump to get us through.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Oh, I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Okay, World, everyone's got to add something to the party.
In Mexico. You've got this awfu Saiti sunset. How about
two weeks were France La We'll get back to your France,
gree the hook he started the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Malaysia, Yeah, some of those Norway, you're in charge.

Speaker 4 (36:06):
Of the ice.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Uh. We got the Fudd the Bud World party during
the ninety six Summer Games.

Speaker 3 (36:15):
Now everybody else has culture. We got beer.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
That was my question, like who is this most racist
to because it, weirdly enough, I think it's Americans. Yes,
where it's like, oh yeah, all these other cultures got there.
I mean, I guess Norway is just being like Ice.
That's kind of fucked up too. Oh the nineties. Okay,
now that we've all gotten that, that that quick, quick,
hot hit of the nineties, let's get let's get back

(36:41):
to the terrorist attack that we're talking about. So Jewel
Richard jewel here's people getting drunken rowdy at the bud
World event where you're supposed to get drunken rowdy, right,
and worse, he sees that people have spilled out of
the event itself and there's like leaving beers on the
ground and wandering around and you know, being a problem.
And him being the campus cop who got fired for

(37:02):
being too angry at people partying, he leaps into action
and he goes off to report the trash and the
quote carousing. And this may be the only time in
history where a rent a cop being overly a buzzkill
works out because on his way to report the not
really a crime in progress, he notices something. Someone has

(37:24):
left a green military style backpack lying on the ground unattended.
So Richard reports the bag and a small team of
law enforcement bears down on the area and they start
looking around to try to find the bag's owner. And
interviews after the fact, Jewelry recalled that he didn't take
this seriously at first. They'd found a similar unattended bag
a few days ago, and he expected this to end

(37:45):
like that had, right, So as soon as he calls
out the bag and you cops start trying to figure
out who the bag belongs to. He winds up in
an argument with a group of drunk people who like
smudge a camer lens, and then he kind of realizes
like they're not finding the owner of the bag. So
he walks over to this GBI, the Georgia's Bureau of Investigation,

(38:05):
it's like the state FBI for Georgia, and he asked
the guy, are you going to open it? And then
here's Jewell quote. At that point, it was not a concern.
I was thinking to myself, well, I'm sure one of
these people left it on the ground. When Davis, that
the GBI agent, came back and said nobody said it
was theirs, that's when the little hairs on the back
of my head began to stand up. I thought, uh, oh,

(38:25):
this is not good. So he and that agent clear
a twenty five foot square. They start getting people away.
They're like, everyone needs to clear the area. Clear the area,
and they clear a twenty five foot square around the bag.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Nobody looks in the bag or like that's no, you.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
You really, because who knows if that's what triggers it, right,
if like opening it or whatever would set it off
or something you you as a security guard, and some
random guy from the GBI shouldn't like obviously bomb people,
but like you don't. You don't want some guy who
has no fucking idea what he's doing with explosives to
look into that.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
Bag, right, I just don't look at a I totally agree,
but I don't look at a backpack, and I'm like, bomb.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
But I guess in this situation you have to Yes.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Thank god he did, right, Like yeah, it is like,
this is one of those things where I have to say,
nearly everyone would have just been just a fucking bag,
but it wasn't. And Richard was in there, right, you know,
he was waiting his whole life of being like overly
paranoid and fucking serious about shit for the one time
in which it mattered and saved a shitload of people's lives.

(39:29):
So he does a circle while they're clearing people where
he starts sticking his head in different structures in the
park and basically saying, hey, get out of whatever, cause
there's you know, there's different Like you've got these like
booths where people are like filming for different day and
like yelling at people, get the fuck out now, get
the fuck out now, right, And he deserves a lot
of credit here. He flips from normal day wandering around
angry at drunk people too. I have to clear this area,

(39:51):
something really bad could be happening. And he does this
before he knows there's a bomb there. He just I
think that it must just be instinct or whatever. But
as a result, because of how many people he and
this other guy Davis clear away. When the bomb goes off,
and it's sometime after one in the morning, it's like
a little after one am, it doesn't harm nobody, right,

(40:11):
but it harms only a fraction of the people who
might otherwise have been present. Like the if the pipe bob,
if the area had been as crowded as it was
supposed to be, I mean, it could have been a
dozen or more people dead, like potentially dozens and dozens injured,
you know, and like.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
How many people died.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
Two deaths, one directly and one indirectly, and like one
hundred eleven injuries. So if they hadn't cleared the area,
it killed two people and injured more than one hundred
after they had cleared the area. If they hadn't cleared
the area, if it was still full of drunk people
and camera crews and the like, like just a nightmare.

(40:53):
Like it would have been much worse. They saved a
lot of people's lives, right, I mean, easily more than
a dozen lives. I don't know how. It's impossible to
say how many, but I would have been shocked if
it had been if it was any less than that, right,
they This really is a significant thing that Jewel does,
and Jewel and this other guy Davis do, But Jewel

(41:14):
is the guy who notices at first. Probably nobody would
have picked it out if he hadn't, right, because this
was his area and it was his job to be
on guard. And he was right, which kind of justifies
his entire life up to this point, right, you know,
And that should be a happy story, right, this kind
of happy hapless you know, guy who couldn't hack it

(41:36):
as a cop, rent a cop, never got respect. He's
finally a hero, He's legitimately a hero.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
They cleared and estimated seventy five to one hundred, one
hundred people away from the area, So again, at least
another seventy five to one hundred people would have been
in the blast radius if they had not done what
they did Nancy Coleman for The New York Times rites quote.
The pipe bomb inside the bag exploded minutes later. Alice
s Hawthorne, a spectator from Albany, Georgia, died in the blast.

(42:04):
Millie Uzannel, a Turkish cameraman running to cover the explosion,
died of a heart attack soon after. Right, so again,
and that's, you know, a death from a heart attack,
so potentially, assuming that hadn't happened, Like you're talking one
death directly from the explosion as opposed to an additional
seventy five to one hundred people being in the blast.
Ratis right, not not hard to imagine how much worse

(42:26):
it could have been. Jewel kind of becomes a hero immediately,
like he it's very clear from the jump that he's
the guy who spotted this and what he had done.
And he gets interviewed by local and national news later
that day, he tells CNN, the only thing I wish
we could have done is got everybody out of the area.
I feel for the victims and their families, and I mean,

(42:46):
it's the Olympics. It's supposed to be a time of
joy for the world, and it's a very very bad thing.
And obviously he's traumatized by the explosion. He's there, he's
at ground zero, he sees the injuries, he sees the
person who's killed, so that he's fucked up by this, obviously,
but he's also undeniably the hero. And in a better world,

(43:07):
he would have gotten the validation he'd always sought and
it probably would have been good for his career. Right.
I have trouble if this had been where the story ended.
I have trouble imagining him not getting hired by a
police department somewhere only to get the good pr of
bringing on this hero security guard. Right.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
He could definitely work for ICE now for sure.

Speaker 4 (43:25):
Right? Well?

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yeah, Unfortunately, the world is not a just place and
instead of you know, this leading to him actually having
a career, you know, in law enforcement, this nearly ruins
his life, right, Like, this absolutely shatters him for quite
some time.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
So from the trust are you about to know? Okay?

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, So as soon as the blast happens, Jules old
boss at Piedmont College, Ray Clear, sees his former employee
on TV and he gets pissed because he didn't like
they'd fallen out when Richard caught a kid's smoking pot
and insisted on arresting and charging the boy, and Clear
was like, no, just like cite him, you don't. We

(44:08):
don't need any arrests of students over marijuana. That's like, don't,
don't do that, right, And obviously Clear is in the
right here. But because he doesn't like Richard Jewel, he
doesn't trust him, and he thinks that he's because he's
kind of been He's this weird guy, right, he's like
weirdly into being a cop. He's just had rubbed Clear
the wrong way. And so Clear calls the Georgia Buer

(44:30):
of Investigation and he reports, Hey, this guy who everyone
is saying is the hero, I think he's got a
lot of attension seeking behavior and bad judgment and maybe
you should take another look into him, right, basically saying,
maybe maybe he's set it up right, and you could
almost see you can see it a logic there. Okay,
sure this guy had failed out of being a cop.

(44:50):
He wants to be a hero. Maybe he planted a
bomb so that he could get everyone away from it.
Right now, that's a stretch, and the there is not
any evidence ever that this was the case. So again,
I think this is just a guy who didn't like
Richard calling the GBI and trying to, like, out of
jealousy or something, fuck up his former employee. But the

(45:12):
tip gets passed along to the FBI, and the FBI
takes it seriously and they send out investigators to look
and do every aspect of Jules life.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
Robert, I would never out you to the FBI, I promise.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Thank you, Sophie, that that is absolutely doesn't sound like
something someone who just outed me to the FBI would say.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
I would never do that. I would never do that.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
What if I arrested a kid for smoking pot?

Speaker 3 (45:35):
Poor form? Even with enemies, I think, don't go out
of your way to fuck with someone's life like you
should be evidence.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
This guy was just like, hmmm, I don't know, he's
got to use an attention seeker. I don't trust him, even.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
A weird guy. I didn't like him.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Let me call sir.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
You were being I was on your back for the
pot thing. But you are the dick here now, right, Yeah?
And you know the initial investigation and honestly, any responsible
investigation would have looked into Jewel a little, right because
he was there, and you always like, that's not unreasonable
to look into the guy, right, But being the FBI,

(46:17):
they pursue this in the most fucked up and scummy
way possible. So two days after the bombing, Jewel gets
a phone call from a friend of his with the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation. This is like somebody that he
had been social with. I think somebody that he idolized,
because this guy is a real, you know, special agent, right,
that's kind of what I want to do, right. And

(46:37):
so the FBI when they find out that there's someone
and the jerge of Bureau of Investigation who knows Jewel,
they're like, hey, he likes you, right, he thinks you're
his friend, gets some info out of him, right, Yeah.
So this guy at the GBI calls Jewel and he's like, hey, buddy,
who I probably hadn't talked to in weeks. I was
out of work the day the bombing happened. Mind if

(46:59):
I come over to your house and you tell me
what happened. I'm just really curious about how you were
such a hero. Obviously, this guy's wearing a wire the
whole time, right. So Jewel is unaware, though he thinks
that his cool friend in the GBI is proud of
him and just wants to hear about his triumph and Mayami,
who knows, maybe I could get a job at the
GBI after this, right, you know, having just saved all

(47:21):
these people's lives. Now again, Jewel does not catch on.
But what's happened here is at this early stage, the
FEDS have gone from considering Richard Jeul a hero to
within days suspecting him of being the bomber. Right almost immediately,
he becomes their prime Like there's a couple of guys earlier,
as we'll talk about who they'd seen, but very quickly

(47:42):
he becomes the primary focus of the investigator, and the
reasoning why they focus on him boils mostly down to laziness.
And this is my opinion here, but I think there's
some professional jealousy going on here too. Because the fbis
out in at every Olympics in the US. Obviously, the

(48:02):
GBI is there because it's in Georgia. These are the
premier law enforcement agencies in the region that are supposed
to be making sure a bombing doesn't happen. They both
fuck up. A bomber gets through security with a bomb,
enters the Olympic park area and sets off the bomb
without being caught. And the only reason it wasn't worse

(48:25):
and that dozens of people aren't dead is that a
rent a cop outperformed the entire federal law enforcement apparatus,
all of the millions of dollars in gear, the bomb
sniffing dogs, the metal detectors, None of that did any shit.
None of these highly paid special agents figured out fuck
none of them caught anyone anything one Before this happened.
It was a rent a cop walking back to complain

(48:47):
about some drunk kids who spotted the bomb and saved
the day. Right, And I think that pisses off and
embarrasses the FBI. I think the attitude for a lot
of people in the bureau is like and it particularly
is we'll talk about the guy who's the director of
the BEAU at the time, is like, well, this looks
really bad for us, unless that fucker was the bomber.

(49:09):
Then then then the FBI gets to be the hero again,
right once we once we take this guy down, Right now,
you know who would never sell you out to the FBI?

Speaker 1 (49:23):
The product, Yeah, the products and services that support me.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Honestly, several of our sponsors would sell you out to
the FBI. Anyway, here's a ans we're back. So the
FBI is embarrassed, and this embarrassment also, it's not just
that like they'd fucked up and let a bomb go

(49:48):
off at the Olympic Park and the rent a cop
was the guy who caught it. But this has been
a bad This is we're talking ninety six. This has
been a bad decade so far for the FBI and
for federal law enforcement as a whole. Couple of years
ago you had Ruby Ridge and then Waco, and Waco
is still very fresh in the public mind. And then
obviously the Oklahoma City bombing happens a year before this bombing, right,

(50:11):
and the FBI fails to stop it.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
That's literally the trifecta.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, Like, they don't look good right now. And the
fact that yet another bomber bombed yet another high profile
place that the FBI is supposed to be protecting does
not make them look.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
Good, right unless this guy did it.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Unless this guy did it and then we catch him
and then we're heroes again, right, And Yeah, the more
investigators looked into it, the more it looked like there
might be a case here. Because everyone they talk to
is they reach out to the guys. Number one. A
lot of Jeweles former co workers don't like him, and
they don't like him because they were I think, as

(50:52):
a general rule, shadier cops than he was, right, and
because he's legitimately seems to have been kind of annoying, right, Like,
he was very over zealous. But none of those things
are like crime or terrorism adjacent.

Speaker 4 (51:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
But they start putting together this because they're only looking
at a narrow and this is this kind of myopic
detective blindness you get if you're only looking at a
really narrow subset of the facts, it can look well, okay,
we're just looking at jewel Oh, he's over zealous. He
really badly wants to be a cop. He do anything
to be a cop. Maybe he cooked all this up
for the benefit of his career, and it really does

(51:27):
seem like he's making the most of his fifteen minutes
of fame. He gets interviewed by CNN. The AT and
T's publicity team basically works up an appearance and makes
him wear a company shirt because he'd been a security
guard for AT and T. I guess because AT and
T wanted Americans to associate their favorite phone company with
a terroristic bombing that killed and named people. I don't

(51:49):
know why. It's a weird call at and D.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
That is weird.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Marriott for sure, Yeah, that would make sense. Richard would
later claim the idea of going on TV made me nervous.
I was not the hero. There were so many others
who saved lives, and perhaps the FBI would have concluded
its investigation without Jewel catching on. Right again, some degree
of looking into this guy is reasonable, but given what
happens next here, that winds up being impossible. And the

(52:19):
reason why there's no chance to keep this under wraps,
and the reason why everything blows up and Jewel's life
blows up is that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is
a local paper of record in Atlanta, publishes an article
on July thirtieth in which they announced that the FBI
had a suspect for the bombing security guard Richard Jewel. Now,

(52:39):
the Journal was owned by Cox Newspapers, who had flown
something like three hundred people in from other papers to
report out of the Journal's office. They had like sent
reporters around, flown them all around the world to like
study up on different sports that they could report well
on the Olympics, because they're putting out a daily special
Olympics edition and the expense they've spent millions preparing to

(52:59):
cover the Olympics. Right now, this is a time in
which there's more money in the newspaper biz. But you
got to remember whenever you're investing that kind of capital
into an endeavor, you have to make a return, right.
And so the new editor of the paper, John Walter,
is expecting the fact that there's been a bombing that's
like a huge boon potentially to the media, right, Like,

(53:21):
this is something people are going to read about. And
we're the paper of record for Atlanta. We've got to
be the ones breaking the scoops. We can't get scooped
by the big national papers. We can't let the New
York Times take this from us, right, get something out
about this, you know. And the editor is this guy,
John Walter, who is he had replaced a more traditional
ethical newsman. Walter is of this kind of generation of

(53:44):
guys who's trying to find more exciting and profitable ways
to package news content as opposed to doing good journalism,
pro vanity fair quote more and more, the paper's influence
was on what John Walter called chunklets, short bits, and
soft news style known as eye candy, published features on
couple's massage and how mushrooms grow in the rain. Walter
had fired off several terse memos to ensure that there

(54:06):
would be no more jumps of news stories to back
pages and no more unsourced news stories except on rare occasions.
I don't see any reason why you can't report hard
news in a short form, one editor told me. The
AJAC style of reporting and declarative sentences had a name too,
the Voice of God. It was omniscient because it allowed
no references to unattributed sources. Subjects such as aids, which

(54:27):
often required confidentiality, could not be covered properly in the paper.
In the opinion of several reporters, the AJAC picked up
news stories with unnamed sources from the New York Times, however,
and reporters groused about the hypocrisy of the double standard. Now,
all this was going to cause problems because the journal
can't let themselves be scooped in their hometown, but they
get reached out to They get basically a leak from

(54:50):
the FBI, who leaks them documents that make it clear
that Richard Jewel is their chief suspect, right. That's what
happens is someone from the FBI talks to them. And
this is a really ethically questionable thing because a person
who is suspected of a crime has not been charged
with it. They certainly haven't been convicted. Is it ethical
at all to report that this guy is under suspicion

(55:13):
right now, because you're going to nuke his life and
make a huge number of people think he murdered someone
and tried to murder dozens more people. Right, But on
the other hand, it's going to sell papers, so obviously
print that shit, right And so General reporter Mary Scruggs
writes an article titled FBI suspects hero guard may have

(55:35):
planted bomb, and again it uses this kind of voice
of God phrasings to where like they did they had
a source that they couldn't admit that it had reached out
to them, But they don't say that, right, Like, they
don't address that at all. And I'm going to read
a quote from the article. Richard Jewell, thirty three, a
former law enforcement officer, I fits the profile of the

(55:57):
lone bomber. This profile generally includes a frustrated white man
who is a former police officer, member of the military,
or police wannabe who seeks to become a hero.

Speaker 3 (56:07):
That's so fucked up.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
That's so fucked up. Like, that's not even a that's
not a real profile. That's not the lone bomber. How
many loan bombers have fit this profile?

Speaker 4 (56:16):
Right?

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Also, yes, he's eager and like wants to be liked.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
I mean that's I'm sorry. I don't think the standard
Loane bomber is a wannabe cop who wants to be
a hero, in part because the guy who actually did
the bombings, who will talk about later, was an anti
abortion activist who was bombing people because he thinks abortion's murder.
He's a Christian extremist, supremacist, special Forces veteran, but.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Somehow doesn't think murder is murder.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
I think he's fine with murder. Oh, like they're all
fine with murder, just not fine with women having choices.
We understand what this is about. We don't have to
play around with their semantics games.

Speaker 4 (56:56):
There was definitely gonna be a manifesto though, that was
really involved in this, and thank you. I was worried
that this was still unsolved, so I'm so no, no, no, they.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Figured it out.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
It gets solved as shit. Okay, I'm just bringing it
up to point out, like their compl profile is completely wrong, right, yes,
Now as to how this all happen, because we don't
exactly know how they got their source, It's very likely
they get leaked by someone in the FBI, but I
don't think that that's been proven to a point of certainty.
The director of the FBI at this point was a

(57:28):
toad named Lewis free fr e H. He came into
the bombing prime to make bad decisions. One of his
closest advisors was former Deputy director of the FBI Larry Potts,
who tried to cover up FBI incompetence at Ruby Ridge three,
made himself responsible for the oversight of the bureau's efforts
in this high profile case. He comes in and as

(57:48):
immediately like I am, I am, like where the buck
stops with this case. I'm directly overseeing this as director
of the FBI, because this is like obviously, given everything
that's happen, and nothing matters more than us quickly finding
a culprit, right, and they don't, you know, initially there
had been like a suspect, a suspect who was like

(58:09):
a drunk at a bar who the night before and
made some threatening comments. So he's their first suspect. But
it turns out he's got an alibi. And this happens
a couple of times, right where they'll find someone and
he'll seem like it might this guy might have been
the one who did it, and then it'll become clear
that he could not have been the bomber, and Free
flips out at his subordinates each time. He becomes, in

(58:30):
their words, abusive, condescending, and dismissive every time they tell him, no,
it couldn't have been that guy. And whenever they start
to suspect a new person, Free will declare, we have
our man. He does that every time. And so when
they settle on and they get this leak and they
start looking in to Richard Jewel, Free is like, we've
got our guy. This is him, this has to be him.

(58:50):
Make sure it's him, right, and that there is some
evidence that suggests that Free orchestrated the leaking of information
hours after the bombing. Right because he does this seems possible.
We know he does this with the first time they
have a suspect that drunk at the bar, like there's
a leak, so the papers know the FBI's got someone,
and then it's really embarrassing to him because that guy

(59:11):
wound up not having done it right, So it's just
very likely that he did the same thing with Jewel, Right, are.

Speaker 4 (59:17):
The Olympics like going on the whole Like, yeah, yet.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Slow shit down a bit, but okay, it's more just
a matter of there is this high profile bombing at
the Olympics. The FBI still hasn't caught the guy. The
Oklahoma City bombing happened a year ago and they didn't
stop that. It's just this like, we have to prove
that we're worth all the money that the country spends
on us, because it really doesn't look like it right now. Right,

(59:42):
we're fucking we're taking a massive l in public and
I can't accept that, you know. So, for their part,
the journal avoids telling anyone how they got because it's
like a memo that they get that that lists Jewel
is the suspect, and they don't. Oh again, it's this
whole voice of God thing. They give no attribution and

(01:00:04):
they don't cite a source Atlanta Magazine describes their reporting
as quote, leaving the reader to wonder whether the claims
came from a legitimate law enforcement enforcement official or from
a proclamation of God. It's this And I have so
many issues with like the way a lot of media
works with like objectivity in this book, and this is
another example of that of like, no, this is the
way our paper sounds.

Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
We don't cite anonymous sources. We don't say that we've
been leaked something because that would be kind of that
would be breaking this voice of God that is so
important to us. Otherwise people aren't going to trust the journal.
And so what that does here is the FBI leaks
to them instead of saying, yeah, the same guy who
leaked to us, the same people who leak to us
the name or a suspect who was exonerated have leaked

(01:00:50):
again a suspect, but this guy one's totally it. Guys,
but we're not going to tell you where it came from. Right,
nobody's doing well here, you see it like it's the Meatia. Yeah,
and particularly this one publication are being slimy as shit
because it's good for business and because they've made a
series of bad decisions editorially, and the FBI is just

(01:01:12):
desperate to have to make it clear, No, we're doing
our jobs, We're on the ball, you're safe, we know
what we're doing. We know we fucked up and let
a bombing happen, but you know it's really not our
fault because it's probably the security guard. How could we
have known?

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Right, Like that's that's what they're trying to do.

Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
It's like the headlines where it's like the people in
Gaza were bombed, but it's like.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
By who exactly? Yeah right, yeah, I don't mean to
bring down the vibe.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
No, no, no, but like it is this all of
these are like continuing problems for a lot of legacy media,
right like this, like the the paper's brand and reputation
is what matters more than like making sure that we're
doing things ethically, and obviously traffic money, make sure that

(01:01:59):
makes me more than making sure we're doing things ethically. Right,
these these articles will sell, People will buy our paper
if we're covering this case. So let's just if that
means destroying Richard Jewel's life, fuck him. Right, So you've
gotten the FBI, you've got the director pressuring every lead
to be the guy, and Jewel, you know, seems like

(01:02:20):
their best bet. So that article drops on the thirtieth,
the same day that two FBI agents show up at
Richard Jewel's house and ask him if he wants to
make a training film for them, So he doesn't actually
get to see this article that the journal's published saying
that he's the FBI's main suspect. But on the same
day they show up early at his house and like, Hey,

(01:02:42):
you did such a good job. Would you make a
training video for us about how spotted the bomb? Yeah,
why don't you come in the station? And because we
just we're such big fancy maybe you've got a career
in the bureau Richard, right, Obviously there's no training film.
They want to in to review him, to see if
he will slip up or be inconsistent or lie under

(01:03:04):
the guise of recording his wisdom as a training video
for new agents. Jewell started to realize something was up
when his car was tailed by four other FBI cars
on the way to the office and they're like, oh, yeah,
I don't worry about it, it's fine, and he's like,
that seems weird. I feel like you don't need four
or five cars to take a guy to do a
fucking interview. And then they end the interview this this

(01:03:26):
training video, by asking him to sign a waiver of
his rights, and then he's like, wait a second, that's
no Actually, I think I want a lawyer now, And
as soon as he does that, they pull the standard
cop Why do you need a lawyer, Richard? You didn't
do anything right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
You know, Like, oh my fucking guy, he's just.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
So shitty, and this is he's this guy. It takes
him so long to realize what's happening because he trusts
the system, he trusts cops, he likes, He idolizes these feds,
and I'm actually surprised that he even got it then.
But you have to imagine the dawn horror as he realizes, like,
oh my god, they were lying to me about all
of this. They think I did it, and they want

(01:04:07):
they're trying to trap me, Like it's it's it's pretty
fucked up. Like I don't have a lot of inherent
sympathy for the whole desperately wanting to be a cop thing,
but you have to be sympathetic to a guy like
Jewel who believes so strongly in this just saves a
bunch of lives. And then his reward is this system
he idolizes, absolutely turning on him.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
How long does this go on?

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
For about three months?

Speaker 4 (01:04:32):
Oh my?

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
So for three months Jewel's life is turned upside down.
FBI agents stake out his house. His house is searched,
Everything related to him is searched. Right like they tear
up his home. They tear up like they're searching the
houses of people who are like close to him.

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
Embarrassing porn came up, right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Yeah, he can't go anywhere without being surrounded. He becomes
an object of obsession for reporters at the Journal. Not
only is the FBI always outside of his house, dozens and
dozens of journalists and cameras. They're always staking out his house,
waiting for him to leave, waiting for any chance to
shout questions at him, and the journal but turns themselves

(01:05:11):
into the paper of Richard Jewel. They are publishing multiple
articles a day about this one guy. On August first,
so that's the day after he has his That first
article drops in the day after he goes to the
FBI office on August first, the same day he's rated
by the FBI. The journal publishes a piece on Richard

(01:05:31):
Jewel's history as a campus cop titled a bad Man
to Cross on the Beat. Here's Atlanta Magazine. Students were
also quoted as saying that Jewel went to extremes. He
was very macho, and he could get very belligerate. Piedmont
College junior Nikki Lane said, I've seen him go from
calm to angry, back to calm, back to angry in
a matter of seconds. And like, I get that he's

(01:05:52):
a dick and he like tried to bust people for
smoking pot, But like that doesn't that doesn't mean he's
a bomber, Like you're going in fact, like he was
a bad man to cross. He tried to arrest a
kid for weed. That's pretty far from pipe bomb.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Yes, yes, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Another paragraph from that article with Atlanta Magazine gives you
a good idea of how insane the coverage win. This
is all AJC AJC columnist David Kindred, in his second
column on Jewel in Two Days, compared the scene to
the time law enforcement officers sought evidence against Wayne Williams,
the man convicted of two murders in Atlanta's Missing Children case.
When federal agents came to this town to deal with

(01:06:33):
another suspect who lived with his mother like this one.
That subject was drawn to the blue lights and sirens
of police work like this one. He became famous in
the aftermath of murder and like, yeah, it's just it's
the yellowest journalism you could possibly do. Like they are,
they are basically they're turning their whole paper into this guy,
like in his life is just hell. For three straight months,

(01:06:55):
every day there's articles not just in the AJAC but
in national pape Popers digging into his backstory, talking about
every embarrassing thing he ever did, talking to everyone who
worked with him, who didn't like him. The whole country
reviles him. He is a subject of mockery and costs.
On The Tonight Joe Jay Leno gives him a nickname,

(01:07:15):
The Una dufis right again, this man's crime was saving
a bunch of people's lives from a bomb, like the
und this the unidufis like Per The New York Times,
government officials and news organizations descended on the apartment Jewel
shared with his mother. Dozens of FBI agents scoured the
home and totaway jewels truck in an apartment complex overlooking

(01:07:37):
his building. Four stations ABC, CBSCN AND and NBC paid a
tenant one thousand dollars a day to set up a
command post in her unit. Yet he was never charged.
Inside jewel Watch TV, he read, he played video games.
He couldn't go outside, not without setting off a high
speed car chase if government vehicles and media vans anyway,
And that's just so fucked up, Like he did nothing.

(01:08:02):
You didn't do that that he saved people's lives and
everyone in the country hates him.

Speaker 4 (01:08:06):
Now I feel kind of conflicted because you know, like
that murder in Washington who killed those four college girls.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
God, yeah, yeah, yeah, Colburger.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
Right his name, so the Idaho guy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Oh yeah it was Idaho.

Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
You're right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
But like they're doing these things.

Speaker 4 (01:08:29):
You know, like I read articles where it was like
a teaching assistant that was like, yeah, he was creepy
as fuck, and in his case, I think that's correct,
but like, yes, all those tactics turned on an innocent person.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
That's horrible, and that's the thing and you don't have
and I I never like it when they do this
with someone who hasn't again, at least Coburger. I think
by the point most that came out had been charged
and arrested. You have to remember Jewel has not been charged.
She he's never charged, right, And it's one thing, and

(01:09:03):
we can there is I still have a lot of
issues with reporting on people who have been charged with
crimes like this in the breathless way the media does
when they have not been convicted, have not had their
day in court, because they're still legally innocent. But this
guy hasn't even been charged with shit, you shouldn't be
doing this at all when someone's just a suspect like
that is so that is so that such fucking malpractice. Yeah, agreed,

(01:09:26):
it's just really vile. On October twenty seventh, prosecutors send
a letter to Jeles lawyer, not to Jewel, not to
the public. They just send his lawyer your letter saying, hey,
he's not a suspect anymore. By the way, we're done.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
No, sorry, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
The FBI makes eventually they give kind of like a
half hearted apology. They admit some wrongdoing, right, but they
don't they take no effort to be like, again, the
responsible thing to do would be like oh shit, we
really got it. We got to do a full court
media press so let people know this guy is not suspected.
They're just like fuck itt, they'll figure it out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
They're like mean girls in high school. Yeah, terrorists.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
Now Jewel does sue them, He wins, sues the Justice Department,
He wins a bunch of money. He sues several papers,
including the AJAC, and he settles out of court. He
does well off of this, right like he does like
and you know, he lives out his life and I'm
not gonna talk about the rest of his life because
the man deserves fucking privacy after that. But he, uh,
he does get some degree of vengeance for what they do.

(01:10:28):
But like, man, you have the trauma of of this,
like because who can imagine unless you have been unless
the entire country has suspected you of being a mass
murdering terrorist for three or four months, Like, you can't
know what that's like, you know what kind of damage
that does do?

Speaker 1 (01:10:44):
And then and then Clint Eastwood made that fucking movie.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
And then yes, Clint Eastwood, so fairly recently Clint Eastwood
made a movie about.

Speaker 3 (01:10:54):
This literally called Richard Jewel.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Yeah, it's called Richard Jewel. Clint makes a movie in
twenty nineteen about this whole case, right, because, I mean,
conservatives are like this story because they hate the media,
and this is a great example of the media being
just as bad as they like to act, like it

(01:11:17):
always is.

Speaker 4 (01:11:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):
They didn't go to the media, didn't go after Jewel
because he was a conservative. They went after Jewel because
the FBI sent them on his case. And yeah, they
were feckless and only cared about money. But Clint's what's
really interesting to me about Clint's movie is that it
does kind of the same thing to one of the
journalists at the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they had done

(01:11:41):
to Richard Jewel, which is like defame him or her.
So the author of the first article that listed him
as the suspect was written by Kathy Scruggs. She's the
reporter who did this, and as far as we know,
she just got it or she and the I think
she worked with a colleague, got like a tip that

(01:12:03):
probably traced back to an FBI person who had been
directed by Free to put the tip out there. Right,
That's probably what happened. In the film. Kathy Scruggs is
shown as going up to an FBI agent at a
bar a couple of days after the bombing and saying,
give me something I can print. She's played by Olivia Wilde.

(01:12:25):
By the way, the FBI agent played by John Ham
says basically, I'll give you the name if you fuck me,
and so yeah, she starts like touching him, and he
says Richard Jewel, right, and then they go fuck right.
So basically it shows Kathy Scruggs, a real woman has

(01:12:45):
played by Olivia Wilde, sleeping with a source in order
to get Richard Jewele's name, which is not what happened.
No one's ever alleged that being what happened. That was
invented by our old friend Clint Eastwood or whoever wrote
the fucking movie, just because the the story didn't seem
bad enough as it was, and because I guess if
you talk about what actually happened, then you have to

(01:13:05):
be deeply critical about the FBI because this is ultimately
their fault as much as anything else, and fundamentally the
profit motive in journalism, right, Like, both of those things
are the bastards here. But Clint's not interested in that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):
Let's make it a woman.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Yeah, it's a woman. It's this woman who couldn't keep
it in her parts.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
Slutty journalists ruining the world.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
Classic bloody journalists sleeping with the FBI to get a name.

Speaker 1 (01:13:32):
Oh s, floody journalists my favorite kind.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Yeah. Anyway, that's the first part of these this story.
You know, we'll be talking about Steve Hatville and the
anthrax attacks next episode. But yeah, how are you feeling?
You're happy?

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
I've totally forgot about this Steve guy.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Yeah, I know, I know. It's wild. We haven't even
gotten to him yet. But this story is like the precursor.
Oh yes, oh yes, go out kind of.

Speaker 4 (01:14:04):
Yeah, all right, I feel like we just went on
a wild ride.

Speaker 3 (01:14:08):
I'm ready for the next part.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
Who excellent, Well, we'll get to that on Thursday.

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
Do you want to plug your pluggables one more time
for everybody?

Speaker 4 (01:14:17):
Yeah? Uh, I just my book, you guys. Maybe check
out my book. It's called Girl Gone Wild. I tell
all my secrets of the last decades that I've been
on this planet.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
So it's available for pre order.

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
Heck yeah, check that book out. And uh, yeah, you know,
go don't go to the Olympics.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
Watch it at home.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Safer Yeah, or steal it off of the Internet. Either way, they.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:15:13):
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