Part One: Jack Idema: The War On Terror's Dumbest Grifter

Robert is joined by Danl Goodman to discuss Jack Idema, the greatest conman of The Afghan War.

Footnotes:

1. Operation Desert Fraud
2. Bad company: 'Jack' Idema and the bounty hunters of Kabul
3. Vigilante Torturer Dies in Mexico
4. Osama-Hunter Only the Latest Terror-Fightin' Wannabe
5. Man Who Hunted Bin Laden With a Sword Now Jailed on a Gun Charge
6. The Man Who Believed Himself
7. The Shadow Warrior: Jack Idema
8. Freelance Terrorist Hunter
9. Tin Soldier
10. Convicted Torturer, Vigilante in Mexican Stand-Off
11. Jack Idema
12. Jack Idema, jailed for torturing Afghans, reportedly dies in Mexico

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Well, Robert Evans Podcast, I don't have any time for
an introduction. I have had a thought, a critical thought
that I think must be analyzed before this episode, and
it relates to to Africa by Toto. Uh because in
the opening strains of the song, the singer notes that
it's going to take a lot to get whoever he's

(00:22):
singing the song about away from him, and that there's
nothing that a hundred men or more could do. But
with social isolation ng in place, I think we have
to assume that whoever is singing the song Africa by Toto,
like whatever character that is, is in fact isolated from
the person that they said they could never be separated from,
which leads the question how many men more than a

(00:45):
hundred is the COVID nineteen epidemic powerful? Then that that
this is this is critical to analyze. Nothing else matters.
We're canceling the rest of the episode until we figet
this out. Sophie, it's more than men. Yeah, yeah, we're
not canceling the episode. This is an episode with d J. Daniel.

(01:07):
I'm not canceling that, Joy, I'm gonna keep running the
numbers on this. But while I do that, Dan You're
a fan of a lot of things, right, You're You're
big into fandoms, all sorts of stuff that you're a
fan of. Are you? Are you a fan dan of
the war in Afghanistan? Are you in Afghanistan? Get it?

(01:29):
Oh my god, Oh my god, was so good. I'm
so proud. Okay, I take it. Um Okay, Well, I
mean I'm a fan of no wars, but um, you know,
I have a feeling by the end of this I
will be even less a fan of this one. Well,
the war in Afghanistan is a real I think people,

(01:51):
It's been going on for so long that now we
all just think about it as this like endless, slightly
draining and expensive but mostly are gotten disaster that we
just can't seem to escape from. And I think we've
forgotten what a fucking crazy time the beginning of the
war in Afghanistan was, like it was. It was one

(02:11):
of the dumbest times and places that has ever collided together.
Um as a result of what I what I can
only call army grifters like this was a huge part
of the early warningt like it still is, but now
like the grifting is done by giant corporations. But in
the early days, when like U. S. Troops were first
into the country, there were a ton of just random

(02:31):
assholes who would roll into Afghanistan with whatever weapons they
could manage to smuggle across international borders and just try
to do some shit. Uh and it it we don't
we don't talk about them anymore, but it's one of
the funnest things that ever happened. And I I want
to tell you about a couple of these guys before
we get to the main subject of our episode. Yeah,

(02:53):
the first one of these beautiful bastards I want to
talk about was Gary Brooks Faulkner. Now Brooks was a
Gary I should say, was a Greely, Colorado native who
traveled by boat in a series of overland routes to
try to make his way into Afghanistan and single handedly
capture Osama bin Laden. Now he had to travel on
a boat and via smuggling himself across borders because he

(03:15):
tried was trying to get into Afghanistan with a pistol,
a knife, night vision goggles, Christian evangelical literature, and a
Samurai sword that he all brought from what that that's
his his been laden kit was a pistol, a knife
night vision goggles like, okay, so pistol, Yeah, you're gonna
want you a gun, a some sword, right, A knife

(03:36):
practical you're in the mountains, You're always gonna want a knife,
night vision goggles, share Christian evangelical literature. Okay, I doesn't
seem practical, but go off. And then samurai sword, which
really I think keisy window what Gary imagined he'd be doing.
He just wanted that slung over his shoulders, striding across

(03:57):
the back so that when you know, the sun was
beating down on him and you just saw the silhouette
of a weird o costplayer coming into this town in Afghanistan,
he would be have that sword in the silhouette off
to the side. Yeah, you know, he imagined like getting
into a duel with a couple of Taliban guys, and yeah,
he had such dreams. Gary did um. But unfortunately Gary

(04:22):
never quite made it to Tora Bora to samurai fight
the Taliban. Instead, he was arrested almost immediately in Pakistan.
Because yeah, so the good news is that obviously, once
the media heard that some guy with a samurai sword
had been arrested in Afghanistan after leaving fucking Greeley, Colorado

(04:43):
to got kidnap the world's greatest terrorist. Uh it was.
It made the news. Uh So he was sent back
home by Pakistan, and he got kind of famous, and
he did appearances on the View and The Late Show
with David Letterman. Yeah, he was described as the Rocky
Mountain Rambo, even though he saw no action of any

(05:06):
kind and was in fact on dialysis the entire time.
Oh my god, I feel comfortable saying if the police
in Pakistan hadn't arrested him, he would have almost certainly died,
even without the Taliban's help and with and with not
a word to the world about his presence or actions,

(05:26):
just disappearing off of this earth. Yeah, his kidneys would
have just given out as he was trying to hike
up the fucking Khyber Pass with a Samurai kana. Like, oh, man,
you'll you'll love to hear about it, but he obviously
like all that matters is that he got famous for
trying to take on Bin Laden with a Samurai sword

(05:47):
in a time when America was maybe the least rational
we've ever been. So everyone loved fucking Gary Faulkner, they
were fans, Okay, okay, yeah, at the time of will Ennium,
we were okay with a guy with a samre s
ord going into kick Bin. Lawton asked, yeah. Now. During
the media tour he did after his arrest, Faulkner revealed

(06:08):
that he was an ex con who had spent twelve
years in jail on a number of larceny and burglary charges,
and he kind of brilliantly pivoted off of this to
claim that as a skilled thief, he had precisely the
kind of talent necessary to track down a terrorist mastermind.
You know, that is the way you sell ship to Hollywood.

(06:29):
I mean most certainly, especially on all these interviews you're doing.
It's just like there I was. But oh my gosh,
the only thing that's missing is a wife who wouldn't
give him custody, like an ex wife who wouldn't like you.
Add that in and you've got fucking ninety minutes solid.
Oh my god, fucking early two thousands. Nicolas Cage would

(06:49):
have been the right dude to play this character. Oh
my god. So to see a hand flick somewhere and
they're just like dismissing somebody just yeah, Faulkner is a
fun one. He even told so. During his interview with Letterman,
Gary Faulkner told that he didn't need to worry about
whatever bodyguards Osama bin Laden had because quote, I'm a thief, uh,

(07:10):
which is bullet Now. The unfortunate code of the story
of Gary Faulkner is that as a felon, he was
not able to legally possess a firearm, which became a
problem for him when he was arrested for shooting a
man in self defense back home in Colorado. So that
things didn't work out great in the for Gary Faulkner. Now.

(07:32):
Another beautiful Afghan war grifter was the Syrian born Matt Meeson,
a naturalized US citizen who also attempted to kill Osama
bin Laden in two thousand and five. He got on
a plane from Detroit to Syria. Apparently there just used
to be a direct like Detroit to Damaska's route the
two big d's uh, and he was stopped by authorities
when they realized he was traveling with thirteen thousand dollars

(07:55):
in cash, a Taser bullets, pepper spray body armor, and
three Geiger After three I love the bullets because he's like,
He's like, I'm gonna be able to find with all
this cash, I'll be able to buy a gun when
I hit Syria. But I better bring my own AMMO,
and I better bring three Geiger counters. Now he had
a reason for that, I mean, okayah my gosh, yeah,

(08:19):
he's he claimed that he was. His cover was that
he was a private investigator studying the illegal uranium trade
and he was going to use the Geiger counters to
help him lure in illegal uranium buyers or something like that.
It never really made much sense. This, this is, this
is truly this is I mean, you know, all these
guys are heroes. Speaking of heroes, former British Special Air

(08:42):
Service soldier Colin Barry was the smartest of all these grifters,
except for the guy we're about to talk about. He
traveled to Afghanistan under the cover of working on housing
projects for an engineering firm, and this seems to have
been as a way to hide his activities trying to
ride intel for m I six, who he claims approached
him for aid and may in fact have done so.
Uh In any case, various time as a secret agent

(09:04):
in Afghanistan came to an end when he shot to
random Afghan citizens to death in a hotel bar in Kabul.
He was jailed for murder. Now that little bit about
the story where it's like this guy with no evidence
claims he was working for m I six, and maybe
he was. All of these guys make claims to having
worked for like m I six, the CIA, the Defense

(09:25):
Department or something like that, and almost all of them
actually did to some extent um. Because here's here's the
thing about the start of the war in Afghanistan. So
number one, by the time like we invaded in Afghanistan,
the State Department had about three hundred and forty million
dollars and bounties out for the top thirty terrorism suspects worldwide.

(09:47):
So there were tens of millions of dollars out for
dudes who could capture Al Qaeda motherfuckers or Taliban motherfucker's right,
tens of millions of these bounties were paid off. So
there's that kind of money going out. But there was
also the militaries of mult couple nations were active in Afghanistan,
and none of them knew a goddamn thing about Afghanistan.
So anyone who could come in and make a good

(10:07):
pitch about how they could gather useful intel or do
something else that was necessary had a real good chance
of making tens of millions of dollars, because again, the
like the the coalition was just shifting cash into the
open mouths of anyone who could credibly claim to be
fighting terrorism, and no one knew anything like it was
even like it was a wild West at that point,

(10:28):
right in terms of the counter terrorism industry. So you
could just roll in the country and if you looked
right and talked right, you could suddenly have fucking CIA
dollars like flowing down your fucking mouth. Um, it was.
It was a fun time. Sounds like sounds like a
fun time. Yeah. So for for a few years, Afghanistan

(10:50):
was a grifter paradise and no one exploited it more
entertainingly than Jack Edema. Jonathan Keith Adema was born in
nineteen fifty six and pau Keepsie, New York. His parents
were upper middle class and doting, and Jonathan was their
only son. His father was a former marine and a
veteran of the Second World War. Jonathan grew up beloved

(11:12):
and worshiped and surrounded by the sort of comfort and
care that few children are fortunate enough to enjoy. When
he was twelve years old, he watched the John Wayne
classic The Green Berets. Have you seen that movie? Danal,
I actually have not seen The Green Berets? Side note?
Side note? Can I put in a request to the
fans if anybody wants to remixed Gangster's Paradise by Coolio

(11:32):
and do Grifters Paradise please? There on Twitter? Yeah? Yeah,
make it happen. Also shout at the city of Poughkeepsie.
I'm familiar. I've heard of pau keeps you, but keeps
I don't Daniel a little more familiar with Okay, Daniel,
you missed him yesterday called Beyonce. Beyonce Honestly, I'm always

(11:57):
a fan. When the fans came after you for a
gop a as well, that was really funny. I love that.
I mean, it's just so great. I immediately text J. B.
Loftus and Little Recording and said, guess what fantastic And
we've been laughing about it for two days. It's wonderful.
I am so angry right now. Mostly mostly I am

(12:18):
angry at the way the State of New York names
towns that is complete. Yeah, I it's wrong, and I
don't think we should lean into that anymore. Agreed, You're
on You're on Blast New York more more main mainland name. So,

(12:41):
the movie The Green Berets was kind of the first
movie about special forces. Like now there's like a fucking
ton of those movies. It's like in every action movie
hero is gonna have some sort of Special Forces background,
but like this was the first time, like special forces
were kind of new in Vietnam, like the idea that
you would have these dudes, and The Green Berets was
a movie about them, and um, it was a very

(13:04):
a big hit. Uh, And it became John adena Adema's
very favorite movie as a little boy, and seeing this
film convinced him to give up his earlier dreams of
being a veterinarian and instead joined the military and become
a Green Beret himself. He enlisted as soon as he
was able to do so in nineteen seventy five, but
tragically he was too late to fight and maybe die
in Vietnam, but he did well enough on his entrance

(13:27):
tests that he qualified for the Special Forces. He was
helped in this by the fact that the post Vietnam
Special Forces had endured a serious manpower shortage since new
recruits had been scared off from joining for some inexplicable reason.
Jonathan was accepted even though he had bad eyesight. He
did a three year active duty term as a radio
operator and a weapon specialist, and then spent some time

(13:48):
in the reserves, reaching the rank of staff sergeant before
being discharged in nineteen eighty four. One of the difficulties
here is that even among credible sources, descriptions of Jack
Adema's time in the military very widely. This paragraph from
a Rolling Stone article on the man is probably as
close to accurate as you're going to get in a
story about this con man's military career. Though a demas

(14:08):
military record reflects qualification as a pistol expert and badges
awarded for scuba and parachute training, there are no indications
that he ever heard a shot fired in anger while
he was in the military. Moreover, a nineteen North Carolina
probation report quotes a military evaluator describing Adema as the
most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man I have ever known,
and a letter of reprimands cited Adema's gross immaturity, characterized

(14:32):
by irrationality and a tendency towards violence. The reprimand came
after Adema attempted to attack a senior commanding officer. So
Jack Adema is in the Special Forces, but you would
not call him like he's not he's not good at it.
I mean, if he's attacking his officer, you can't come on, man.

(14:55):
There were very few rules right after Vietnam. There were
like nobody wanted to be in the military. It was
a real ship show. Well there you go. Now. While
he was still in the reserves, Jonathan, which is the
name he still went by at the time, spent several
amous year, aimless years wandering around the small town in
New York he lived in. Who pronounces the name of
their town wrong because there jerks um, you know, just

(15:18):
kind of trying to figure out what to do with
his life. See, all john had ever wanted to do
was fight in a foreign war, but the accursed years
of relative peace after Vietnam made that almost an impossible impossibility. Eventually,
Jonathan settled on a way to still do cool looking
army type stuff without actually serving in the military, he

(15:38):
founded a counter terrorism training school in the town of
Red Hook. Now John had no real qualifications to do this,
other than the fact that he had been very bad
at being in the Special Forces UM. The exact extent
of his work is unclear, but journalists eventually confirmed that
he trained guards to protect the US government facilities in
Haiti and did some amount of like eaguely described work

(16:00):
for the Thai military. The president's son, Ron Reagan Jr.
Used his facilities at some point, and I we don't
really have a clear idea as to why UM and
training people in vague counter terrorism techniques was not John's
ownly activity. During this period, he was also breaking the
law constantly. In nineteen eighty two, he was arrested for
possession stolen property. In nineteen eight six, he was charged

(16:22):
with resisting arrest and assault with attempt to physically harm.
He received a nineteen eighty eight arrest for disorderly conduct
in a nineteen ninety arrest for assault involving discharging a firearm.
He was never convicted for any of these crimes, and
we don't really know what happened. But you couldn't stop
this dude from getting arrested. Um, so kind of go off,
go off, just you know, live your truth, get arrested.

(16:45):
This is clearly going to end in some fantastical manner.
So every move is just like I'm supporting it all
the way up and I mean it ends in Mexico,
which I think we all know in our hearts. But great.
I can't say if if Jonathan was good or not
at actually training people in counter terrorism, but he was
terrible at running such a business legally. His camp generated

(17:08):
numerous noise complaints and was eventually shut down over a
zoning violation. A DIMA moved next to Fayetteville, North Carolina,
a location he picked for its proximity to Special Forces
headquarters near Fort Bragg. Now, rather than selling terrorism training
this time, he instead set up a store dedicated to
selling non lethal military equipment and a side business running
a series of Special Operations trade shows. It proved good

(17:31):
at getting different manufacturers on board and filling big rooms
with fancy military equipment and people who wanted to look
at it. Now, some of these people were actually Special
Forces veterans or members of the Defense Department, but most
of the people who showed for these trade shows were
Soldier of Fortune readers their guys who just wanted to
look at guns and stuff. Yeah, thank you, thank you,

(17:54):
and great magazine, un fully unproblematic magazine. Yeah. So, well
tell you something. When I had to battle that seal underwater,
I used my knife fighting techniques that I learned in
the Underwater knife Fighting Technique section of Soldier of Fortune.
That seal came after me and I needed to defend myself.

(18:16):
For the listeners, I'm absolutely kidding. I have never hermed
in my life, Daniel. You we don't need to lie.
Seals are a threat and the only way to deal
with them is underwater knife fighting. I am. I focus
always on practical prepping and so like you want to
have some extra food, you want to know how to

(18:37):
deal with like a bleeding wound, how to like staunch
blood flow, and you need to know how to beat
a seal in a knife fight. Those are those are
basic practical steps we can all take. Love it. So
speaking of practical steps, so the reality of the situation
is that John Adma used his connections that he built
in his counter terrorism training school to like fill up

(18:59):
convention rooms cool military gear and people would pay to
go gawk at it, and you know it was. It
was a decent business. Um. That's the reality of what happened. Now.
John Adema would go on, however, to speak about this
UH somewhat differently. UM. He would claim in the future
that after leaving the army, he worked as a US

(19:20):
military advisor in El Salvador and Honduras. There's no evidence
for this. He claimed he worked as part of a
special mission mission unit and refused to ever elaborate as
to what that job entailed. No records support any of this. Uh.
No records support that he did anything but failed to
run a training center and then lead a bunch of
nerds through a fucking convention center. And when confronted with

(19:42):
the fact that there was no evidence of him doing
all this badass special ops stuff, he would tell journalists
that the records of his actual military service were secret records,
which he described as the ones that they don't want
to give anyone, which is really, really handy. So the
Trey shows that John ran generated enough interest from legitimate

(20:03):
experts that Adema eventually met up with a subcontractor who
was able to get him a real job training real
cops in the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania, who we
all knew. No is like the king of doing a
good background check on a guy. That's what Lithuania. Yeah, what,
the trade shows are great places to get products. I

(20:29):
can't I can't tell what you're possibly trying to lead
me into here, Daniel. Services if one of those services
is enlisting in weird you know, armies and potential terrorist organization,
I I don't know what either of you were trying
to do. But on an unrelated note, it is time

(20:51):
for an ad plug. We're back and we're on the internet,
and now we're going to talk about motherfucking Jack Adema
some more. So, he manages to like kind of leverage
his his his various experiences into a job training cops

(21:14):
in the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania. So he rolls
there in nine right after the U s. S r
ns UM, and the reality seems to be that he
spent a brief period of time teaching cops in a
very uh poor nation dealing with the collapse of its
previous government. The reality for John Adema, though, is that
he stumbled immediately upon a multimillion dollar black market and

(21:36):
backpack nuclear weapons. Um. These devices known as special atomic
Demolitians munitions did exist in government stockpiles, and there were
constant rumors after the end of the Cold War that
a number of them had escaped the fall of the U. S.
S R. But there's no evidence anywhere that such a
device wound up on any nations black market. The general
incompetence of authorities worldwide, and the fact that no one ever,

(21:56):
no terrorist group ever got such a weapon as is
evidence that these were nothing more than rumors. But John
ademon knew that the story of Russian suitcase nukes was
a good one, so he started reaching out to senior
Pentagon officials while he was still in Lithuania and telling
them that he'd stumbled upon the secret nuke market. Now
the secret nuke market. Yeah, and I don't know if

(22:17):
you know this, Daniel, but if you start talking to
Defense Department officials about the fact that you know where
a bunch of nuclear weapons are being sold for cash,
you will probably wind up having conversations with the FBI.
That's just shocker. Yeah, that's just how that's gonna go.
I feel like, yeah, I feel like the easiest way

(22:38):
to get a conversation with the FBI is to like
make them believe you might know about stolen nuclear warheads.
That's a they're going to be interested in that one.
So the Bureau demanded to sit down with Jack Adema
and then demanded that he tell them who his sources were,
which is a pretty reasonable demand given the fact that
he's talking about backpack nukes. But a Deema refused to

(23:01):
give them any concrete information because, in his words, he
believed the FBI had been penetrated by Russian agents. Now
here's how Rolling Stone describes would happen next. By Adema's account,
the FBI then set out to destroy him, tiring him
with more than fifty counts of wire fraud that put
him in federal prison for four years during the mid nineties. However,
U S law enforcement officials actually began investigating a Deema

(23:23):
in May nine, more than a year before he supposedly
refused to hand over his Lithuanian sources to the FBI.
The A t F noted in a report filed during
the course of the investigation that Adema was known to
have a fictitious major's i d from the from the
army and was desparred from army contracts in June eighteenth,
nineteen ninety after he misrepresented his business as being owned

(23:43):
by a minority. So this is all very winding because
Jack lies about everything, and a lot of this is
pre the Internet really coming around. But what happened is
Jack committed mass wire fraud UM in a number of
different ways, both from like stealing hundreds of thousands of
dollars from print companies and like investments, and also running
fake businesses that he just used to funnel money and

(24:06):
loans through, and doing stuff like lying to the government
to get army contracts to provide them with equipment by
pretending his businesses owned by a minority UM. So he
wound up getting in a lot of trouble, investigated by
multiple federal agencies and convicted with fifty counts of wire
fraud and going to prison for four years. And he
later claimed that this is because he'd stumbled upon a

(24:28):
nuclear weapon market in Lithuania that the FBI had uh
not wanted him to shut down for some reason. Anyway,
it's a dumb story, but that's what happens. Yeah, that's
where I found him. But they were like no, no no, no,
it's not important. We swear a deema this guy's story.
There's so much that's hard to understand about, like what

(24:49):
happened here, because he's he's again, he's just lying constantly.
I mean, yeah, I was gonna say, it just sounds
like everybody, everybody's hearing the lies and saying like okay,
and then not doing anything about it. And he just
keeps spinning more and more webs, a lot of spider webs. Yeah. Yeah.
He goes to jail, and in his words, it's because
the FBI wanted to destroy him, And in the FBI's words,

(25:10):
it's because he just couldn't stop committing wire fraud. Um
so Adema spent yeah, in nineteen and ninety seven in
a series of federal prisons. He kept up his correspondence
with the outside world, though, and managed to get in
contact with Jim Morris, a writer for Soldier of Fortune
magazine and a former Special Forces major. Morris believed a
demon stories of being hunted by the FBI and took

(25:30):
up the cause of defending him in a series of editorials.
These actually convinced some mainstream reporters to look into the story,
and one of these reporters was Ted Kavanaugh, a former
founding partner of CNN. He brought the story to the
executive producer of Ida Eye with Connie Chung on CBS,
and they sent a real journalist, Gary Skirka, to interview
Adema from prison. The resulting documentary wound up focusing on

(25:53):
arms dealing in Lithuania and had actually like almost nothing
to do with John Adema, but it won Skirka and
Award for Investigative Reporters in nineteen. So Skirka felt bad because,
like Edema, he felt that a demon had helped him
get on the trail of a real story because obviously
there was a lot of fucking illegal weapons training going
on in former Soviet block nations, but he had like

(26:16):
he got cut from the documentary because there were no
fucking suitcase nukes being sold. But Skirka, you know, like, yeah,
he had lied about that. But Skirka likes this guy,
and he feels bad that he got cut from the documentary. Um,
and he feels kind of angry that CBS executives ordered
all footage of Adena cut a dima cut from the
final product because they realized he was a grifter. But

(26:38):
Skirka kind of falls under this guy's spell and he
stays in touch with his jailhouse source throughout a demon
sentence um and promises to help him out when Jonathan
gets freed. Now, Adema had other non journalist pin pals
during this time. He started exchanging letters with a woman
named Victoria running Wolf, who was a forty ish blonde
woman from Fayetteville, and the two had first met a

(26:59):
few months after Dema got out of prison. Um, but
they'd like been exchanging letters and she fell in love
with him while he was jailed. So we know immediately
that this is going to go well. You've got a
grifter who falls in love with a woman in prison.
Victoria later recalled quote, I knew right then I was
going to have my hands full. I knew it from
the time he said hello. Yeah. So, being the sort

(27:21):
of fellow who's constitutionally incapable of not scheming, Adema convinced
Victoria running Wolf to invest with him in the Ultimate
Pet Resort, a hotel for pets. And as far as
I can tell, this might have actually been a legitimate business.
And I have to emphasize the as far as I
can tell apart because the only only one of the
sources I found talks about this in any kind of depth.
And I personally suspect that this must have been some

(27:42):
kind of a con too, but it just hasn't been unraveled.
But maybe, yeah, this is a con city up in here.
Maybe he had a pet resort. It's impossible to say.
Speaking of schemes, Jonathan Adema and his journalist Pal Scarca
got together once he was out of prison, and using
Skirrka's credibility as an award winning journalist, they succeeded in

(28:05):
getting an assignment with forty eight hours on CBS reporting
on the story of retired Green Beret Colonel George Merrichik
now Colonel Marrichick was and still is one of the
most highly decorated Special Forces soldiers in history. And he
also murdered the ship out of his wife in n Um.
He was convicted. Yeah, he was convicted of this murder

(28:26):
so many times. This guy, fucking Marricheck gets convicted of
murder the way most people like going for fucking colorectal
cancer screenings like it's it's yeah, So he's murdering multiple
people in getting out of the same No, he just
kills so he kills the ship out of his wife,
and he gets tried for it, but he succeeds in

(28:47):
because he's this decorated soldier building up particularly him, like
the right wing media ecosystem like Soldier of Fortune is
big on this. He gets a bunch of people to
be like, no, he's innocent, he was framed, you know,
he didn't do it, Like this is just like a
scheme against the American hero. So he keeps getting retried,
of course, and he keeps getting reconvicted too, because he

(29:07):
obviously did it. Um it's yeah, it's so he's out
of prison now and alive, but he was convicted of
murder multiple times, but a lot of people think he's innocent.
It's a very strange story. Maybe we'll cover it the
day alive. Yeah, he's currently out of prison, although again
was convicted. I know somewhere in the US if you

(29:29):
look up fucking George Merrichick, you'll figure it out. I'm
just gonna leave it alone. Yeah, don't marry him, I
can tell you that much. I don't think I don't
think that's gonna Yeah. So John Admas sees that this
Special Forces colonel has become like the center of this
this like media blitz uh, and sees that there's fucking
money in it, and he shoves his journalist pals Krka,

(29:50):
onto the story and the two get to work investigating
the murder. But as soon as CBS sees what they're
working on, it like drops them immediately because they realized
that neither of these guys have any sense of objectivity
about the case, and we're not in any way going
to report critically on what had happened. Uh And I'm
gonna quote now from the Columbia Journalism Review. Adema and
Skirka had opened a free Merritchek office in Wilmington, North Carolina,

(30:13):
where the trial was taking place, and one witnessed alleged
that Adema and another man came to his house to
harass him the night before he was slated to testify.
A Dima also told several associates he was detained for
impersonating a police officer in an effort to get into
a Detroit prison and convince a convicted serial killer to
confess to the murder. So there's I want to talk
as a journalist here. So many as a journalist, obviously,

(30:38):
objectivity gets gets compromised all the time. There's really no
way in being perfectly objective, especially, you wind up sympathizing
with people all the time that you report on. However,
if you are impersonating prison and breaking into a jail
to trick a convicted serial killer into con confessing to
a murder, your journalistic objectivity has been I would say,

(31:02):
compromised beyond the point of acceptability. Amen to that. We
all have a different line as reporters, but I think
that crosses everyone's lot. I am. I'm not a reporter myself,
but yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, So Skurca and Adema.

(31:23):
Now that CBS has been like, no, we don't want
any of this former news website of their own point
blank news, and start publishing an investigation there, and it
might have been good work. They want a National Press
Club Award for their coverage, and I have no idea
what they actually wrote about. It's impossible for me to

(31:43):
actually analyze this coverage, but they want to fucking award
for it, So maybe maybe what they did was good.
I don't know. My gut is saying that Scarca was
a good reporter who just got conned by this guy,
and he might have actually put up some good work
about the case. Um, but it's it's really fucking hard
to say. Uh. And it's made harder to say because

(32:05):
right when Skirca and Adema were working at this, Jonathan
Skirka had another side hustle, which was filing hundreds of
frivolous lawsuits against sixty minutes, US News and World Report
and every other journalist who wrote articles about the fact
that he'd like tried to con the FBI into thinking
he had suitcase nukes in Lithuania. Um so he just

(32:26):
starts suing people left and right for reporting on the
fact that he had been jailed for while wire fraud
and was lying that it's very, very like any of
these guys. He filed so many lawsuits that trying to
like track down what they were all about and what
they were claiming was impossible. He also filed a plagiarism
suit against dream Works, claiming that the George Clooney Nicole
Kidman movie The Peacemaker had in fact been based on

(32:48):
material they stole from a movie treatment that he had
started to write but not written. Okay, yeah, I just
want the behind Bassard's hands to know that there's been
like a solid like thirty seconds just me shaking my
head at these foolish, frivolous actions and lawsuits because this
is yeah, and he's he's right now like kind of

(33:10):
we would never have written a story about this guy
if if this was all he did, because right now
it's just mostly tricking this one journalist into thinking he
had something to say and filing a bunch of bullshit
lawsuits and go to jail for wire fraud. And this
is kind of the state of affairs with Jonathan Edema
as it existed on September eleventh, two thousand one. Are

(33:30):
you aware of that date, Daniel, Yes, I am Robert,
you're aware of that date. Yeah, it was. It was,
you know, several days before the release of Big Trouble, um,
the Tim Allen film that changed America. I think we
can all say that after Big Trouble came out, nothing
was ever the same. Yeah. Now there. You may not

(33:52):
be aware of this, but there was also a terrorist
attack on New York that same day, uh, and it
was pretty significant to Yeah. Yeah, and John Adima was
he really he really was hit hard by the towers
falling and by all those planes being Yeah, as he
would later say, they blew up the fucking World Trade Center,
and my whole life changed. I'm a fucking New Yorker.

(34:14):
I'm going to kill every goddamn one of them until
I dropped dead. Now, them that he was talking about
in that interview was al Qaeda, but also less specifically
in the Afghan people he could possibly get his hands on,
and his wife, Victoria Running Wolf, was totally supportive of this,
later telling a journalist a lot of us put yellow
ribbons on our cars or flags on our houses. My
husband decided to go over to Afghanistan and hunt the

(34:36):
bad guys, which is one way to describe what d
Bless her heart. It's weird the only things you find
about her or her being utterly supportive of him, and
then her disappearing completely from his life. Um, and there's
a story there that's not great. Yeah, isn't that. Isn't

(34:57):
that the isn't that the dentist system? Just yeah, it's
just you get really close, you connect, and you just
disappear entirely. That's that's the that's the right. He disappeared
to Afghanistan repeatedly. Ye so before he went to Afghanistan, though,
Jonathan Adema decided to get on TV and start establishing
his bonafides as a terrorism expert. Now nowadays, every fucking

(35:21):
TV channel has countless terrorism experts. There's more terrorism experts
in the world than there are fucking terrorists right now. Um.
But in the immediate wake at nine eleven, which was
again the release of Big Trouble, the Tim Allen movie,
terrorism was something that Americans suddenly cared an awful lot about,
possibly because the movie Big Trouble focused on a Russian

(35:42):
suitcase snooke getting out into the hands of some terrorists
who get it on a hijacked plane. There's there's a
c I a plot in the movie Big Trouble based
on the Dave Barry book Big Trouble, and people need
to know about it. Daniel Robert, the threat is so long,
it is, and that's how you know it's truely, So

(36:07):
just John Adema, nine eleven happens, and Adema is like,
all right, I gotta get on TV. Terrorism is going
to be like the big thing for the next forever,
and I've got to establish myself early as a TV
expert because there's gonna be some fucking money in that.
And he is not wrong on this. And on September twelve,
two thou one Adema showed up as a guest on

(36:28):
a local Los Angeles Fox News affiliate, written as a
described as a counter terrorism advisor. He told audiences that
he'd come across evidence. Yeah, he told evidence audiences that
he'd come across evidence that three Canadian airliners had also
been hijacked by al Qaida, along with a total of
four American planes. Now this was bullshit, but nobody was

(36:49):
really fact checking at all on nine twelve, So it
played well in the immediate wake of fear and terror
after the attacks and the release of Big Trouble. Now,
while he was doing media, ran says John Adima also
reached out to his all his old friends Skirka. He
informed him that he was headed over to Afghanistan straightaway,
not to kill a bunch of people, but to perform

(37:09):
vaguely defined humanitarian aid work. He told Skirka that he
had set up a deal with an NGO called Knightsbridge International,
which was run by a veteran named ed Artist and
focused on like delivering aid to the most dangerous places
on Earth. So this was like on its surface, a
good story is like this former Green Beret wants to
have his journalist friend come with him to Afghanistan to

(37:30):
help this NGO made up of veterans deliver aid to Afghanistan. Like,
as a fucking journalist, that's a great tale. So Skirka
pitches this, Yeah good story. Yeah yeah. So Skirka pitches
this to National Geographics TV division UM and he claims.
Skurka claims that he told them that Edema was a
convicted felon uh and that the two were friends, and

(37:52):
nat GEO decided that the story was still worth doing now,
so they approved this and he gets funding to do it.
So they're they're going to fucking Afghanistan. Yeah it Now,
it was not easy to get into Afghanistan in late
two thousand one. SKRCA and Adema had to charter a
plane with a group of other aid workers and reporters
from Tajikistan to Kabul in late two thousand one. And

(38:13):
I found a really fun article on Time by Kirk Spitzer,
who's a veteran war correspondent and was on that flight.
And here's what he has to say about John Adema's
behavior during the trip over to Afghanistan. Let's get it.
The plane blew attire on takeoff from the deshamb Airport
and was not replaced until late in the day. It
was agreed that rather than risk flying over the twenty

(38:34):
thousand foot Hindu kush at night in midwinter with a
dodgy pilot and a plane with no instruments, we should
wait until the next day. But among the passengers was
a group of displaced Afghans frantic to get home, who
angrily demanded that we take off right away. A Dima,
who was also a passenger and was dressed in his
customary paramilitary gear in dark sunglasses, poured fuel on the
fire by shouting that he knew the codes at the

(38:56):
Bagram air field. He said that once we were over
the runway, he could video down to the control tower
to get American troops to turn on the lights. This
was pure fantasy, of course, there were no codes. There
was no way to communicate with American troops from a
broken down Russian built cargo plane, and American ground controllers
certainly would not turn on the lights for an unidentified

(39:18):
plane that happened to show up in the middle of
a war zone. If that plane took off that afternoon,
everybody on board was going to die, including a Dima.
It wasn't until several of us dragged a Dima aside
and impressed on him the seriousness of the situation that
he finally conceded that maybe he didn't really know any
codes or radio frequencies. After all, we called the flight

(39:38):
off and everyone lived for another day, as did a
demon's flights a fantasy. So every now and then you
get like stories about this guy from people who weren't liars, uh,
and they're always like that, that's that's the best. I
love that there is truly like it wouldn't happen at
this point anymore because you know, everybody, everybody's too real

(40:00):
and takes it too seriously. And I mean, or rather,
when we rephrase that everybody's too real and takes too seriously,
I would hope they do. But it's like you can't
have any bullshit anymore in these serious situations. But I
love the genre of real bad guy that was like
actual nineties villains that people were just like looking at them, like,

(40:20):
are you are you serious? Right now? Is this person?
How did this person even get here? They were able
to get past the one to two layers of security
to get to level three when people were like, wait,
a minute. What Yeah, I mean I think the actually
bad guy they actually existed. Yeah. The explanation of how
he gets into a place like this is the thing
that I think a lot of people don't really get

(40:41):
about war reporting. Like I get a lot of questions
about like, how did you go to Iraq? How do
you get to Ukraine Syria? You you buy a plane
ticket and you walk. Uh. There's often remarkably little in
the way of people stopping you from doing anything in
places like that. And yeah, that's kind of what John
Adema takes advantage. If he just gets on this plane

(41:01):
almost gets everyone killed by being like, no, I know
the codes to the airfield, and he's just lying the
whole time. But now he's in Afghanistan with a National
Geographic uh documentary production team. Um yeah, and he manages
to link up with ed Artist and the other AID
workers at nights Bridge in November of two thousand and one.

(41:22):
And once they're all together, it immediately becomes obvious to
the folks from National Geographic that Ed Artists was not
as on board with this documentary as a Deema had
led them to believe, and that John A. Dima himself
had no actual desire to report on humanitarian aid work. Instead,
he wanted to get into a gunfight as quickly as
fucking possible. All right, here's these aid guys. I'm gonna

(41:46):
go fucking find some shooting. Yeah. So one of the
members of the team of the documentary team, a Special
Forces vet named Greg Long, recalled later that a dima's
attitude changed a hundred and eighty degrees as soon as
they got into the country. So, while ed Artist and
his men's tried to deliver life saving aid uh in,
the documentary team tried to film that, John Adema got
to work attempting to hook up with the Northern Alliance,

(42:08):
an insurgent group battling the Taliban. Adema ignored the work
he'd come to Afghanistan to do and started tracking the
movements of Northern Alliance troops and attempting to make contact
with them and hopes that he could sell them weapons.
It's just now, that's that's that's the that's that's our
man right there. That that's our man right there. He
stopped participating. What were they selling? But what were they selling? Oh,

(42:31):
he didn't have anything to sell. Let's let's go to ads.
We're back from ADS, and in the break, Daniel had
to take an important phone call, and I found that
the iron bars I ordered had finally arrived. Everyone's everyone's
having a good day, Anderson's happy. I'm gonna put bars

(42:58):
on my windows like a crazy person and just go
increasingly unhinged. It's gonna be nice. I think you're probably
doing the right thing, to be honest with you, I
am now eating a banana on video chat. We're recording. Okay, alright, alright.
First of all, bana speaking of bananas. God damnit, Dan

(43:19):
speaking of bananas. Let's talk about John Adma. So yeah, yeah,
while ed artists, who was again that veteran running nights
Bridge the AID organization and his men delivered uh yeah,
life saving aid, Adma attempted to sell weapons to a

(43:41):
militant group in Afghanistan. Uh He stopped participating in any
sort of discussions about the actual documentary that he'd gone
here to make, and stopped doing anything at all to
help with the humanitarian aid. That isn't ostensibly traveled to
Afghanistan to deliver attempting to sell weapons. That's I mean,
literally the opposite of of delivering at like humanitarian aid. Now,

(44:05):
The fact that Adema had changed plans completely and was
now getting involved with the actual fighting, of course, endangered
all of the NGO workers he was traveling with. Artists
would later tell a reporter, He's the dumbest fuck I
ever met. Artists also quote. Artists also recalled that. Immediately

(44:29):
after arriving in country, in order to film a documentary
about providing humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan, John
Adema announced his desire to quote kill every fucking Afghan.
I see now, I'm not an expert at a at
a at at providing humanitarian aid. Daniel, you know that's

(44:51):
not really my bag. But I think that's poor form
that Yeah, yeah, that's not how really it goes down.
That's not really involved in the killing. The part is
not part of the No. For for example, when I
volunteer at soup kitchens to provide food for the homeless,
I don't talk about the secret item where I island,

(45:12):
where I and other millionaires hunt homeless people for sport.
You know we do it, but you don't talk about
it when you're trying to provide humanitarian aid. It's rude.
Yeah yeah, yeah, now yes, yes, uh yeah now next,

(45:34):
according from New York Magazine quote, a demon was more
than simply obsessed with the Afghan War. He was, as
other journalists on seen have recounted, absurdly came to capture
dramatic war footage, even if it meant fudging the record
of events. November eleven, A Demon and his three companions, Skirka,
Long and the cameraman. We're scouting for war footage on
a hill near the Taliban front lines. A Demon left

(45:55):
the group again, hoping to find Northern Alliance troops to
hang out with. In the meantime was Entourage, which had
met up with reporter Tim Friend, who was then with
USA Today, and a freelance TV journalist named Kevin Sites
started drawing fire from the Taliban. Skirka got hit with
shrapnel in his right leg. As the group helped Skirka
down the hill and set about dressing his wound wound,
Skirka's cameraman was capturing the scene on film, and this

(46:18):
was when Adema returned, trailing clouds of camera ready military glory.
Just when we finished dressing Skirka's leg, Keith runs up, screaming,
Friend recalls, he reaps, rips off the bandages and redresses
the wounds. Basically, he was acting in front of the camera,
so fucking his friend gets shot in Afghanistan and like,
while they're dressing the wounds, he runs up from trying

(46:39):
to befriend the Northern Alliance and sells them guns, tears
off the combat dressings and reapplies them so he can
be caught on camera helping his friend. Uh, it's awesome.
That's just that's just the best skirt head to head home. Note,
I just want to throw this out there. The smartest
person in this whole group that I've heard so far

(47:00):
is Skurkas cameraman. Oh yeah, we do not have this
person's name. No, no, this person has very cleverly omitted
themselves from the recounting of all of this, only in
the way that they have all of the footage and
none of the notoriety. It's perfect to the camera. There

(47:20):
has to have been a moment where he was like
in that all maybe when his he watched his boss
like have a wound ripped open by uh John Adma,
so that he could you know what, I think, I'm
pulling my name from this. I don't need I don't
I don't need this one on the role. Yeah, Uh.

(47:42):
Skarka had to head home to recover Uh, and, horrified
at the fact that he'd been traveling with a con
man artist, contacted him and National Geographic to withdraw his
consent to have any of their footage used if John
Adma were in any of it. So Skurka had to
cut together a documentary that cut his friend John Adma
out of it entirely, which, of course piste off John Adema.

(48:02):
He'd gone to Afghanistan to build a name for himself
as a globe trotting heroic terrorism expert, and the fact
that he had been cut out of the feature entirely
severely hampered his exploits. To make matters worse, now that
National Geographic was out of the picture, John Adema had
no one to record him, so he did what all
good kan men do. He pivoted and I'm gonna read

(48:22):
again from New York Magazine. He began calling himself Jack
and telling journalists that he was working as an advisor
to Northern Alliance troops. He also described himself as a
Green Beret and claimed he was helping special forces round
up Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Back in New York.
Ted Kavanaugh, the TV producer who would originally put Skirka
onto a demon's Lithuania story, set him up with an
appearance on The Berry Farber Show, a syndicated conservative talk

(48:45):
radio program. Before long, Adema was turning up regularly via
satellite telephone on American television. He would occasionally call himself
a Green Beret, clearly implying he was on active duty,
and sometimes he would claim falsely to be working for
Partners International, which, like Knightsbridge, severed all ties with a DEEMA.
These are the two groups he went there to film mainly,
though he mischaracterized himself in telling le vague terms even

(49:07):
as he boasted about his high octane military credentials. You
must be held in high regard, he told Fox News
host Linda Vester via satellite phone on November two thousand one,
because I think you're the only person ever to get
an interview with a Special Forces qualified guy inside this country.
So you see what happens there is he loses his
access to the legitimate journalists he traveled there with because

(49:29):
he fox everything up for them, and he just starts
reaching out to reporters and basically saying, hey, you know
how everyone who's actually doing anything is too busy to
talk to journalists on the phone from the middle of Afghanistan.
I got all the time in the fucking world, baby,
and I will pretend that I'm still in Special Forces
if you will put me on TV. And that's what

(49:51):
he fucking does. Uh Yeah. Now, people who actually knew
Jackadema and knew that he was full of ship attempted
to warn the government that there was actually a scammer
in Afghanistan passing himself off as a military expert and
doing god knows what to further his unclear but definitely
shifty goals. Uh nights. Briggs reached out to American authorities
about Adema, writing Army Special Operations Command that the rogue

(50:14):
operator was both a threat to aid workers and to
the overall mission of the United States and the coalition
in Afghanistan. Partners International, who's another aid group that Adema
had sucked around with, did the same thing, but Afghanistan
was a chaotic place in late two thousand one. The
warnings went unheeded as there were too many journalists in
country during the height of the war for the warnings
to spread very far. Jack also repeatedly sued ed Artist

(50:37):
and Knightsbridgs International, locking the aid worker and his charity
and a series of interminable lawsuits and distracting them from
actually saving lives. But Adema never got distracted. He was
in Afghanistan to grift reporters and whoever else he could find,
and that is exactly what he did. There are numerous
stories of Adema during this period. The reporters who were
savvy enough to catch onto his bullshit early started calling

(50:58):
him by the very appropriate nickname Jack Shit Na. That's good,
that's good, good now. Kim Singh put Up, Paul Lashmar
and Nick Meo are journalists who were reporting in Afghanistan
for The Independent during this period of time, and I
want to close this first episode with one of their
recollections about a particularly fine Jack Adema caper quote. Some

(51:21):
of us first met Jack in two thousand one, when
the Taliban had retreated from Kabul. Victorious Northern Alliance fighters
were parading in the streets and US and British forces
were pouring into Bagram Air Base. A dapper man in
a black t shirt and combat trousers, a glock pistol
strapped in his shoulder Holster A Dee mcgrad gave a
graphic account of his supposed experiences as a former US
Army green Beret who trained with the s a S

(51:42):
as an adviser to the Tajik and Uzbek Uzbek Militia's
how he helped plan the mission operation to take out
the Afghan capital. The meeting took place at the Mustafa Hotel,
then being built in the city's center. It was another
example of the seemingly endless carpet bagging opportunities then on offer.
The owners were and continue to be a family of
Ganics patriots from New Jersey. The hotel named after one
of three brothers sipping whiskey, then retailing it a hundred

(52:05):
and forty dollars a bottle at the supermarket off Chicken Street.
A demo offered to organize a convoy to Tora Bora,
where the Taliban and al Qaeda were making It was
thought to be their last stand and where the Americans
were confident Osama bin Laden was trapped. After making a
few checks with the British military, someone was decided to
decline his offer. Those who went were robbed at gunpoint.
A quarter of the way through the journey by their
guards and made their way, but draggled back to Kabul.

(52:28):
Jack professed to be outraged. He would take this matter
up immediately with his good friends in the Afghan government
and the bandits would be executed. None of this ever happened.
He was just selling reporters to bandits. Uh. And I'm
sure getting a kind of what they stole from them. Yeah.
So he's a fun guy. I love it. He's a
good guy and the people. The fun thing about John

(52:53):
ah Dimon is that the grifts were really just starting
at this point. Um like he was. He is just
kind of dipping his feet into the great Afghan con game. Uh.
And in part two we're going to talk about what
happened after he got his feet all the way in
the water. That's not a great way to phrase this,
but that's what I said. So perfect the episodes over, Dan, Well, well,

(53:18):
I mean, this is a wonderful start. As I feel
about the political system these days, when is an adult
going to step in and pull the strings out and
just pull this person away, take the cane from the
side of the stage and just yank them out of here.
So excited for that moment to eventually happen because this
man is just going off as it were. Yeah, you

(53:42):
can find Daniel on the internet. Where's your twitch, Daniel?
What do you do? You're doing video games? Yeah, yeah,
I do the video games. I mean also, you know
what I mainly do is I edit podcast for you
and for the next continue listen to Behind the Bastards
and the Women's War, and you listen to Worst Hear
Ever and you listen to it could happen here if

(54:03):
you haven't already, listen to all the shows in the
I Heart Radio Network because it's a lot of my
work and I appreciate you all so much. You can
follow me on Twitter at DJ Underscore Daniel. You can
follow me on twitch at also twitch dot tv slash
DJ Underscore Daniel. Come find me a play video and
the Daniel is d A n L d J Underscore
d A n L. And yeah, we play lots of games.
We do stuff like jack Box and play on Rocket League.

(54:25):
I'm really into Half Life Alex right now, the new
VR game. It's mind blowing. Anyway, come check me out
there and thank you, thank you. Yes, check danil out
and check yourself out, but no one else because going
outside is dangerous. Amen. Yes, lock yourself in your rooms,
listen to more podcasts by the products advertised by those podcasts. Yes,

(54:48):
and together we can build a new humanity, humanity based
entirely around staying inside and listening to podcasts. You get
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(55:13):
merch on our t public store. Somebody on Twitter specifically
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It's awesome, It's so good you baby m