Part One: The Finders: CIA Child Trafficking Cult or Just Normal Cult?

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to tell the tale of Marion Petty, the man whose cult was accused of trafficking children and may have been part of a CIA op. Or not! It's very unclear!

(4 Part Series)

Sources:

1. https://apnews.com/article/4c5cd8141e930159ea3e4f0492a41ade
2. https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x53vg/the-finders-cult-from-the-80s-was-patient-zero-for-epsteinand-pizzagate-conspiracies
3. https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/287890/finders-keeper/  
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/07/officialsdescribe-cult-rituals-in-child-abuse-case/11f05df1-48e0-41f7-b46d249c0bd2bc39/  
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/07/finders-group-has-its-roots-in-popular60s-hippie-refuge/2d6b5d9d-904f-4acd-a371-f560fca68b39/  
6. https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/viewr 
7. https://www.gnosticwarrior.com/finders.htmlhttps://joncohen.org/wp-content/uploads/1988/11/In-Search-of-the-Finders-New-Times-version-.pdf
8. https://www.amazon.com/Gamecaller-Mr-Tobe-Terrell/dp/1974059308

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, ah, welcome back everybody to behind the bastards
in a fresh, bright new year. Twenty twenty four took
me a second to remember which year it was, but
I'm sure it's going to be a good one, as

(00:21):
long as there's nothing like a presidential election to cause
chaos and horror across the land. Anyway, I'm just going
to continue not having read the news for the last
seven years. And welcome to the podcast our guest, Jamie Loftus.
Welcome to the show, Jamie, thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
For having me back. Twenty twenty four is our year.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I think I feel really optimistic. I've been enjoying everyone's
in and out lists.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I don't know what they're talking about most of the time.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
A lot of the things that people want in I
feel maybe signs of permanent brain damage for.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
The last no care. Yeah, yeah, but it's like with
the internet. This year is like that moment when you
know that, like when you accept because you've hit thirty
that like certain physical problems you've dealt with your whole life, like, well,
that's just one's never going to get better, right, Like
my back's never going to work the same way again.
The Exuma's not clearing up like something like that. That's

(01:22):
that's how we are. That's how I feel about social
media and what it's done to people's brains in twenty
twenty four. Like, yeah, it's permanent. We're good.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
There's certain a whole generation of adults that will never
quite be able to you know, their critical reading skills
were just like kind of demolished, and that won't be
a problem for anybody. I feel optimistic. I feel like
it's a big it's going to be a big, awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Year this time next year.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
I'm honestly trying to savor the beginning of twenty twenty
four because it's going to be so bad.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Oh yeah, No, I'm just like, this is.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
As good as it's going to get. I'm going to
share is.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Down hill folks. Yeah, ah, good times. Well, you know
what's not a good time.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Whatever we're about to talk about for three hours, I'm assuming.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, a sex cult, a child sex cult. Maybe probably
not actually, but the story of why probably not and
what they probably were is still an interesting story of
some people being real pieces of shit. Huh uh huh
uh huh uh huh. Yeah, exciting, Jamie, have you ever
heard of the Finders.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
No, I haven't.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Okay, okay, this is a big one. This is a
heavy hitter cult. So this is the cult that is
one of the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The
thirty thousand feet version of the story before we dig
into it, is that in the late nineteen eighties, during
the height of the Satanic Panic, a couple of dudes
and some little kids in a van got called in

(02:55):
by a busy body neighbor in Tallahassee, Florida, because she
thought the kids looked dirty and that they were probably
devil worshipers. And the kids were indeed dirty, and the men,
only one of whom was a father to only one
of the kids, were members of a group called the
Finders that is either a CIA spying operation or just

(03:16):
a bunch of weirdos playing games in a house they rented.
Impossible to say, it's a little.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Beside the point, but I am just like consistently like, Wow,
the nosy neighbor is never going to get it right.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
In terms of what the real alem.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Is Like, Oh, it's actually probably uh, save this God.
The Satanic's Panic sins are are bottomless.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
But yeah, interesting. Interesting, So I have taken that logic,
Jamie in my own life, and so I will do
nothing at all if I hear anything happening in my
neighbor's house. You know, if there's screams and bangs in
the night, I don't call the police because I don't
want to be part of the problem. And sure have
I woken up next to a lot of like lines
of police tape and house with blood on the front

(04:01):
door and shattered windows. Of course, of course that's gonna
happen when you refuse to take an interest in your neighbors.
But I will not continue the cycle of violence.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
I would just ask that you stop sending me selfies
of these crime scenes because it's been making my life
really complicated.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Well, Jamie, you just never have an alibi for where
you were when it happens. That's one of the fun
things about you.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
It's because I don't leave my house. There's no witnesses.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, that's what I told the FBI. There's no witnesses,
none at all to where Jamie was on the night
those people were killed. Those people were killed with the
hammer that Jamie had purchased earlier that day.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
It was bedazzled and everything, it was damning.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
It was damning what happened to me. I was set up.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
I already this story is, you know, starting horrifically, and
it also is feels like the beginning of a series
of unfortunate events novel or a well meaning neighbor u
and misses in a really horrific way.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Because it's the reality of what's happening these kids. It's
not great, but I wouldn't call it horrific. It's like
maybe slightly above a normal level of child neglect for
the nineteen eighties, like not massively, maybe a bit higher
than average, but like if the things my gen x
like relatives bragged about when they were kids are true,

(05:26):
this was not. These kids were not much worse off
than a lot of kids in that period of time,
maybe a bit in terms of parental neglect, but it's
not a story of child molestation. However, it is absolutely
a story of child molestation because the Satanic panic is
again at its height, and everyone in America immediately assumes
these people are child trafficking children all over the world

(05:47):
for a network of shadowy at wealthy individuals, right, Like
that's what this becomes, this massive and it burns out
because we don't have the Internet. It burns out in
about a year, but people who are conspiracy kind of
minded individuals never forget it. And so a lot of
what is in this story has formed some of the

(06:07):
foundational lore for Q and On. And there absolutely is
some really shady shit going on here. It's just not
the Q and On side of things. But we will
be talking about our old friends, the CIA, So don't worry.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
Oh good, I am, like, I mean, just right away,
it's like it sounds like, of course QAnon was sort
of glom onto a story like this, because it's like
taking something that there is a genuine cause for concern
and blowing it out into a global conspiracy instead of
like let's get these individual children some resources maybe, which yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, even that's because again this is happening in Florida,
So even that's complex. Now, yeah, you ready to ready
to begin?

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Is that not beginning?

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well we have begun.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
We already have some dirty kids in a van. I
assumed we had started.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, yeah, Well we're actually going to start several decks
aides earlier, many decades earlier, with Marion David Petty. He's
going to be the guy who starts this cult, the Finders,
and he was born in Culpeper, virgin I A on
December twelfth, nineteen twenty. Culpepper, at the time was a
somewhat sleepy town seventy miles from the capitol. It was

(07:19):
conservative and I would probably say dull. There was very
little in Petty's family background to suggest he would become
anything like what he winds up as his mother, Virginia
and his father David both have long lives. They seem
to have been like pretty comfortable, like middle class, maybe
upper middle class. The families largely German. Most of their

(07:39):
ancestors were carpenters, although Marian's grandpa's a grave digger. Nice,
probably good for your cardio. Yeah. As a little kid,
there were signs that Marian was peculiar and possessed of
a strange sort of charisma that made other kids want
to follow him. He organized a small gang of local
children to go grave robbing and an abandoned cemetery near Arlington. Yeah, oh,

(08:05):
they are stealing human remains very right out the bat.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Oh yeah, why remain? I thought they were stealing, Like, what.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Else do you steal? It? A grave?

Speaker 3 (08:15):
And when I was a kid, I would think about
stealing stuff from gravesites sometimes because they would have toys just.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Dead little children. You are willing to steal a dead
child's toys.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
I do remember.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
I have a vivid memory of seeing like a Cinderella
doll and being like, she's not using it, which is
but not now, Jamie, you can't say these sorts of things.
But I'm like, just in the utilitarian sense, I should care.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, yeah, wow, okay, well no, they are not stealing dolls.
They are actually stealing bones from the gravest.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Keep that in. I want them.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
The grave robbing is one of those things if an
adult is grave robbing, right, If you get an adult
stealing people's bones from a graveyard, that's immediately creepy. If
there's a little kid who's organizing his friends to steal bones,
and to me, that's kind of dope. I think that's
kind of charming.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
I'm kind of and honestly, if I am a dead guy,
I'm like, let them cook, Like what are they up
to from the great beyond?

Speaker 2 (09:24):
I'm kind of like approving of this. I like it.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
I think it's interesting and already it's like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
This is the first time I'm hearing of this man ever.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
But it's you know, a lot of weird kids come
up the lower middle class unexpectedly.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
It's a real danger.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah no, and it's also a danger that they will
steal your skull after you have passed on. So the
initial impetus for like all of this corpse desecration seems
to have been that he's got this like club that
he's formed with these kids. It's like, you know, a
child gang, right, and he wants to have a human
skull that he can sit in the middle of their meetings. Right.

(10:03):
Their club is kind of it's very Calvin and Hobbes
type situation, Like they've got like a little secret society
for kids, and these are I think mostly you know,
there's not a lot of media for nerdy kids in
the UH in nineteen twenties, right in the early twenties.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Why he had to steal a skull.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, So he and his friends are like these kind
of nerdy kids and they're they're probably reading pulp magazines,
they're hanging out in the night, they're doing magic rituals,
and they want a skull for their magic rituals.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
This is again kind of like this is like the
furthest limits of little stinker behavior.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
I think we're really pushing.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
The he's goonies maxing pretty hard right now, so let's
going to reel them in. Yeah. So the primary difference
between Marion and his friends and that skull and countless
other groups of weird, nerdy kids interested in the occult
is that Marian had absolute problem breaking the law.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
There's a lot more kids who would have done this
if they had the hutspa to rob a grave. But
you know, that's that's Marian, and it says a lot
that he's able to convince a lot of other little
kids to go grave rubbing with him.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
The cadence of what you just said was very hustle culture.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Like maybe if you got.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Your ass up and went to the graveyard, you would
be leading a cult.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
I do periodically when I'm like running and listening to
different like workout mixes, I'll get one that's like because
I just want a bunch of random songs cut together
like a four or four beat or some shit. But
you'll catch one that's like they're they're putting the music
to like clearly I don't know who it is, but
some like real estate influencer yelling at you about never
giving up. It's how to achieve.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
I went through a dark hour of the soul this summer,
and I was going to a lot of cycling classes
in Maine, so just take that in. There was at
one of the classes there, I forget if I told
you about this, they were playing a techno remix of
the Kavanaugh hearing.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
He told me.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
I was just like, here, I have to get out.
I have to go home, like I don't know what I'm.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Doing here now, Jamie. Editorially in this techno remix, is
it does it come down more pro or anti kafan Off?

Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's very vague, I would say it is.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
It's completely ambivalent, and you're in it, like I mean,
to the credit of Portland, Maine. Every person in the
class was looking around like there's no way, there's no
way that this is playing.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
And then the woman, you know, the woman in the
friend is doing what all the cycling instructors do, which
is like God needs you to you know, bike And
it was I think about it all the time. That
was a clearer. I was like, I don't I have
to get out of here.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
With all My response was do I need to come
get you.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah in the morning, coming hot with the cap.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, I you know, I dabbled it. I fucked around
and I found out.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
It really is just like all of the bad sketch
comedy about spinning.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
It's like showing up for a hot yoga session and
right when it starts to get intense, they put on
the Nixon tapes. You're just hearing all of them and
butter into your fucking ears sweat.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
It's taking my chest tightened to even think about it,
Like it was just like brutal.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
So I forget why that came up, but it felt
good to get off my chest.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Yeah, nobody remembers. But Petty is stealing skulls, right, He's
got his kids, they're doing their little occult rituals. He says.
The skull is there specifically to remind his friends of
their mortality, which is great. Little kids need to know
that they too will die more often. I think we
should always be telling children that.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
I really, you know, never forget the first time you
heard Memento Maury and it.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Really hit Yeah, it really. That is actually where this goes.
Because in the interview where I found him talking about
it's a book, actually where I found him talking about
this skull. He follows, like is introducing this concept with
everybody would be better off if they did that every day.
Y'all ought to get a skull and put it up
in the middle of the circle when you have a meeting. So, Sophie,

(14:15):
I want to go expense. I know where I can
get one in Paris. I have met the guy. So
I'm just gonna need about thirty four hundred dollars to
get a human skull.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
The school is that the okay, first of all, the skull.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Guy, yeah, you can. You can find a lot of
skulls in the catacombs. And so if you're already selling
ketamine in Paris, you probably know the skulls.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
Realy good that you clarified, because being like, hey, I
know a guy who knows where to get the skulls.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
He does know where to get He's shown me several
He quoted the price. I didn't buy it. I don't
buy human remains yet, but.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
I really, I really am like surprised that the price
is that high.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Well, you know, I was a tourist in this situation.
He may have just been trying to like fleece me.
He may have just been sizing me up and being like,
I bet I could get this. I'm sure these are
flexible prices, right, That's the way I always didn't talk.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
He could have talked him down.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, I probably could have if I'd wanted to buy
human remains that day.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
He wanted that on record that you were haggling over
the skull you were buying.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Shall we if information comes out later that I own
human remains for recreational purposes, You're not allowed to judge
me because I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. I'm
saying I didn't like to have in your house to
look at.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Oh well, I own Taxiderby in my house.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
So yeah, but that's a people. Because that's cool.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
Let's just say I have taxiderby of my house, so
oh boy, it's a bird.

Speaker 4 (15:50):
Anyway, he took a class, get over it. It was
very academic.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
I'm a searcher, I'm a hobbyist.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
Uh huh, you're a finder. Well maybe not okay, So yeah,
that's his first His first fun anecdote is he convinces
some kids to desecrate human remains. And this is going
to be like a trend for him, right where the
first version you hear of what's happened, like as a
young boy, he stole human remains. It's like, well, that
could be pretty fucking wild, and he's like, yeah, it

(16:17):
was basically we were playing magic and it thought it
would make the room look cooler. And it's like, okay, well,
I understand that, like the child logic, there is not
sinister you know, it's not something that's accessible to most
children today.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
But it's like as like, yeah, if you're a kid
interested in the occult and there's skulls around all over, fortunately.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, I see it.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
I don't think it's necessarily a sign of evil quite yet.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
No, No, it is a sign though that he's very
good at talking other people into things. Yes, So, like
a lot of little kids in the nineteen forties the
Great Depression, Petty dropped out of school well before graduating.
He only makes it to the ninth grade, which is
not uncommon for young men, and my grandpa only made
it to like the eighth grade just because, like the
economy is so dire, you have to go work or

(17:06):
your family will starve. But in Petty's case, at least
he would claim and nearly all of our sources on
his childhood. Basically one hundred percent of it is him.
So take all of this, even the skull story, with
a grain of salt. But he would insists that I
didn't He didn't drop out because of hardship, but because
he made a choice to not go to school anymore. Quote,

(17:28):
I consider my whole life in education, and that all
I do is work on my education. I dropped out
of school because it was interfering with my education. So
that's his claim. Decades later, it's unclear. He says he
joined the army at thirteen right after this, and some
of the interviews he's given, the timeline he gives makes
it look more like he in the earliest he would

(17:50):
have joined as like sixteen, which is not uncommon. And
we're talking World War Two. A lot of sixteen year
old Americans while.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
In the army, they're taking whomever.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, they are not discriminating hardier. Yeah. It is hard
to prove exactly. And this is by the way, Petty
is actually before because this would be like thirty three,
so he's World War two has not started for him yet.
It is hard to prove what he did. Uh, he
definitely served in the Armed forces, and it's not weird

(18:23):
that in this it's not it is weird. It's not
impossible to have served as a thirteen year old in
the US Army at this period of time. The youngest
World War Two era serviceman is believed to have been
Calvin Graham, who enlisted from Houston after Pearl Harbor at
the age of twelve. So somebody he is not claiming
to be the youngest person who joined the US Army

(18:44):
in this roughly this period.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, that's a toss up because it like, I have
no reason to not believe that the US would accept
soldiers that young, and I also it also feels very
cult leader origin story he's made.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
And again I hear there are like two distinct versions
of his timeline you get, and one of them pushes
everything forward like three or four years, which would mean like, yeah,
he joined in the late thirties when he was like
sixteen or seventeen, which is not at all uncommon in
this area. That said, he claims thirteen. And you know,
it's interesting because both because as you said, this could

(19:21):
be kind of a cult leader story. But the thing
that I think might say the most about him, whether
or not it's true. Is how he claims he convinced
his parents to let him join the army right at
the age of thirteen, which is that he leaves a
newspaper clipping on the dining room table so that they
like find it when they come in for breakfast. And
it's a story about a little kid who like got

(19:44):
angry at his parents for not giving him something, and
so he murdered his father. And he was basically like,
because I was such a good kid. When they saw this,
they realized like how strongly I felt, and let me leave.
But that's that's a pretty manipulative at the very manipulative
or you want us to believe you were manipulative. Either way.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, Like there, I can see the five D chess.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
But it also why would you say that? Why would
you say that? Thoughts?

Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah, it's he has he has a real a lot invested.
He's one of these guys. He's the most like want
to be chess master type dude of any cult leader
I've seen, Like he wants to be the three D
chess guy very badly. Yeah, and I think that's why
he tells this story. Whether or not it's true, it
also could be true because like he really likes to

(20:37):
make elaborate, weird threats to compel people's behavior, and this
is a lifelong thing that he does, so you know, maybe.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
Maybe okay, yeah, there mean, I'm hearing a lot of
unhinged stories that are that are a hard maybe yeah
does a.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
Lot of these stories come from a book called The
Game Caller, which you'll understand that term later. It's about
Petty and it's written by a former cult member who
like left and had a big lawsuit with him. But
also they kind of were frenemies because he would whenever
journalist would talk to me, like I actually like him
a lot. He's just fucking me on this, so I
got to assume him. He writes a book after the

(21:16):
guy dies. I don't know whether or not we should
trust this either, but it's simply the only source we have.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
God.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Cult leaders are such motherfuckers, Jamie.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
It's just like a whole myth making game.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
And it's yeah, there's like so many sources that are
like okay, so you know, of course, say what you
will about his methods.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
There's like an air of that to everyone to like, oh.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, a lot of people, and with Petty it is
more credible than a lot of like el Ron Hubbery.
His official version of his life is that, at age
like six, he was made a blood brother of the
Blackfoot tribe for his many contributions to their people, which
simply didn't in part because the Black tribe do not
have blood brothers. That's like not a thing there. It's

(22:03):
like a thing he picked up from books later in
his life and differently petty. Everything he says, whether or
not it's true, is totally possible. Graves were a lot
easier to break into back then. People did join the
US Army that young around that time, and children have
threatened to murder their fathers, So it could all be true,
is what.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
That's the thing.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, it's I feel like if he is playing a
myth making game here, he is like hedging his beds
smarter than your average cult later.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yes, yes, and I think he was actually so. Yeah,
he decides he joins the army very young. I think
in either case, he definitely joins quite young and decides
to make a career out of it. He's going to
stay in for more than twenty years, and he is,
you know, for his weird guys, He's going to be later.
He's extremely successful and serious in the army. He's a
non commissioned officer. And for those of you who don't

(22:52):
know army stuff, the whole shebang is split, like the
army is split between You've got your NCOs, which is
like everything up to like all the sergeants, corporal sergeants,
all that good shit, right, and then you've got officers, lieutenants, captains, colonels, majors, generals.
That was not in perfect order, and so like that's
the way the Army works. I don't know how the

(23:13):
Navy the Air Force works, and I don't care. Marian
would eventually rise to the rank of master sergeant, which
is pretty high up in the non commissioned officer ladder, right,
relative of pretty a pretty small number of people who
are in the military, who are enlisted become master sergeants.
It's not the kind of thing you kind of like,
you have to really want to make a career out

(23:35):
of the army to hit there.

Speaker 5 (23:36):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
I'm not sure if he's like an or seven or
an or eight, but likes he does very well. He's
a proficient soldier. He worked well within the army, and
one of the things that suggests is like he was
reasonably good at like kind of internal politics, right that
you just getting along with people, doing favors for folks,
understanding what people want out of you. We know he

(23:58):
gets a tattoo, probably very early on in his military service.
He just says, while he's a teenager, so I don't
know there's like a five year period there. Well, yes,
it's the same tattoo Ben Affleck has. It's a giant,
full back phoenix piece. Yes, indeed, yes, indeed, that's why
we know it. He got the same tattoo Ben Affleck. Dip.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
I can't believe that Ben Affleck didn't get called out
for copying the Leader of the Finder's back tattoo.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
This is the next plagiarism case that's going to shake
this country, Jamie. Now that that Harvard shit's done, we're
going after Ben for his phoenix tattoo.

Speaker 3 (24:35):
That guy is uh yeah, that guy is shameless. He
gets away with everything.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
Uh huh, not anymore, Jamie. So one of my favorite things,
one of the early sources where I eventually found out
about this book by this cult leader was this like
weird dude substack that.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Like it's a great place to start, I don't want.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
To be mean to him because I think he's a harmless,
weird dude. But in this substack, which definitely he buys
into some conspiracy elements of it, he describes this as
an occult tattoo, and like, I don't know that it's
an ocult tattoo. It might just be a phoenix. I
don't know that that dude with a substack that was
one an occult tattoo.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Is I don't know why this is important to me?
Is it a bad tattoo? Is a tattoo on his own?

Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah, Jamie, of course, I actually think it's a chest
tattoo either.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
Way either, So I man.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
I also, I mean, honestly, down the line, if someone
were to justify my worst tattoos by saying that I
was that they were connected to be.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Occult, I would be relieved.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Sure, yeah, because the.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Truth is it was just a bad week.

Speaker 6 (25:39):
I was.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
It was a bad week and you decided to sit
down for seventeen hours while somebody dissed.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
Well because three foot I, I too have been liberated
from the constraints of my own sanity.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, no, sure, yeah, I uh, I have a I
don't know I'll figure out what kind of tattoo to
pretend I have when we come back from this ad break.
We're back.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
I've got a bear with a gun.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
Oh, bear with a gun would be a good tattoo.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
I've got to wait. Let me show you.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Oh you've got a bear with a gun.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
I've got a little militia bear.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Friend of the pod Rory Blank, who's the great cartoonist
Bone Jail. Yeah, you find them on Twitter. Did a
stick and poke for me of a little pigeon with
a switchblade.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Wow, they're cousins.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
This is from a book called The Bear's Famous Invasion
of Sicily.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Oh nice.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
They take over Sicily by force.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
They could not do a worse job in Sicily than
the Italian government. So I think that seems like a
real for Sicily. Yeah yeah, so yeah, Petty you know,
joins the army, he gets his phoenix back tattoo, he
does his he's pre aflecking, and the same year he joins,
he claims possibly the same At the same time when

(27:04):
he gets his tattoo, he claims that he loses his
virginity in a whorehouse he just like walks in as
a thirteen year old he decides, like time for me
to start having sex, and he walks into a whorehouse.
Now again, could be a lie. Also, not hard to
see this hat working out in the thirties Like that
does not seem impossible.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Depressing no matter which way ends up being true.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, bumpo, yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Okay, there's no way for this not to be gross.
But this is him talking about himself as a thirteen
year old. He describes himself as having a vigorous libido,
and would decades later claim to have had since the
age of thirteen sex at least twice a week whenever possible,
which actually for a cult leader is not high libido.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
But I do I say, twice a week is pretty
conservative if you're like, I'm the king of fucking well,
not to be critical.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, we don't have to whatever. This is what just
what he says.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
It's a gross story.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, it's a gross story. He goes to Panama. I
guess like thirteen or fourteen. He works as an army lifeguard.
He made voracious use of the library on base. This
is he's a big reader, always always. He loves reading
encyclopedias too. He's just like hoovering up trivia.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
So maybe that sounds so gross the way you said
it sounded.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Like, yeah, yeah, it's sounded like a sex thing.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
It did.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
But veraciously read encyclopedia.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Hey, okay, wow.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Fucking the encyclopedia.

Speaker 4 (28:33):
Yeah, we both had the same thought, which.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Is cancel culture.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Okay, this guy's keeping me on my toes.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
I will say, I'm gonna do yeah, all right. Whatever.
So sometimes when later talking about his time in the military,
he would focus on what a great place it was
for him to learn about human nature. Other times he
was more flippant, telling one follower, I drank and gambled
and traveled around and again, not not fun to think about,
like a little teenage getting like wasted Panama in the army,

(29:03):
Like that is kind of funny.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Yeah, generationally it's all feasible.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
Unfortunately, yes, this could very well be accurate. Yeah, he
realizes in the late thirties world War two is probably
going to happen, and being a fairly smart guy is like,
what I don't want to do is be anywhere near
where people are getting shot at. That doesn't seem very fun.
So he kind of social engineers his way into being

(29:32):
a driver for a general in the Army, a guy
named hap Arnold.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Now very thirties, name.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Very This dude couldn't be more thirties and forties, and
he is also like a very important person. There's no
air Force at the time, right the late thirties early forties.
We don't have like an air force. The air stuff
that our military does is handled by the Army Air Corps,
and the Army Air Corps eventually gets kind of carved

(30:00):
out of the Army and becomes the Air Force. Right.
Happ is the guy. He's an Army general, but he's
going to end his career as an Air Force general.
He basically is the guy who like makes the Air
Force's one of the guys who creates the Air Force, right,
and he's actually like one of our earliest He's one
of the first three rated pilots in the history of
the Air Force. So he is he's like an old
school pilot. Guy Petty would later claim that during the

(30:23):
war he becomes this guy's driver, and so his job
is he's chauffeuring not just Hap but like all of
these different people, politicians and generals and whatnot, meet with
him and he chauffers them. Around two so you know,
during this when he's kind of in his off hours,
not working, he meets a Chinese man named Joe Chang

(30:44):
who had immigrated to the United States as a fourteen
year old. Petty claims in a lengthy interview to have
learned martial arts from the man, and when asked, well,
what style of martial arts did he teach you, this
is the answer Petty gave. It didn't have a name,
but if you had to call it something, it would
be jiu jitsu. Now, the basic idea is that you

(31:06):
don't know what's going to be thrown at you, so
you want to be ready to respond appropriately to anything
without thinking about it. Chang was a natural. There weren't
many martial arts teachers back then. And here's the thing.
Number one, I don't believe that that's nay, like, that's
very big enough. No, definitely, I'm not saying.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
It's impossible that a kid from China would know jiu jitsu.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
But is it not a Brazilian It's not.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
It's not Brazilian. It is a Japanese. There is a
Brazilian jiu jitsu is a thing, but jiu jitsu is
a Japanese martial art.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Your head is Brazilian bow either way, I don't believe,
especially especially the having to walk back like, well, it
doesn't really have a name.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
You're like, yeah, that's that's not a thing.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
No, no, no, I am sure. One thing I know
about martial arts guys, be they Brazilian, Chinese, or Japanese,
is that they love giving names to the things that
they're doing. They're huge fans of that.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
I've never yeah, I've never heard someone into martial arts
be like, there's no name for this.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
I don't know what this is. I'm just throwing people.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
There's no technique, there's no philosophy connected to it.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
I'm just doing whatever.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah. No, if that were the case, no one would
know the name of Terrence Judo. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
That's we'll let it slide. We'll let it slide.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
So I don't believe this entirely. It is true. There
are some Chinese martial arts that have similarities with jiu jitsu,
at least according to a random guy on Quorra I read.
Maybe that's not accurate. I'm not a martial arts guy, not.

Speaker 6 (32:44):
The Kora source for the first half hour of the
episode to have.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
Learned Japanese martial arts from this Chinese guy that he
meets in DC while he's driving around famous people. And
this is worth mentioning because Joe Chang was a real
who was a kind of interesting background.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
He was.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
You know, he immigrates into the United States as a
kid as a fourteen year old. He's enrolled in a
Jesuit academy where he studies journalism, and then he becomes
a correspondent for a Chinese government owned news service until now,
well one of the Chinese governments, because this is during
their civil war, and then you know, he is not
aligned with the side that wins, right with the communists.

(33:27):
One of the substacker I found describes him as a
supposed Chinese agent operating under journalistic cover. Found any real
evidence that that's precisely the case that seems to be
stating it. I mean it is like a government so
yet to that extent, yeah, that makes it sound more
like school duggery and spying as opposed to like, well,
this guy's an immigrant. Sounds like he was offered a

(33:49):
job by one of the sides in that war, like
putting out information in the US, and then that side
lost and he continued his life until it ended. I
haven't found any evidence that this is as interesting as
people think it is. But it's through Marion's studying with
Chang that he would meet his wife, Isabelle. She was
a regular attendee at the same YMCA where he took

(34:12):
classes during the war. She volunteered to be a hostess
at the library that he was at. One day.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
What does that mean, like, like your librarian. I think, oh,
that's fun.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, it sounds nice. And she sees
him reading a book about Korea, and you know, this
is the forties, and so she comes over and strikes
up a conversation, and he claims she immediately is like,
do you want to go fuck? I want someone to
take my virginity. Let's go back to your place, which
could be true. Like they're definitely married. I don't know
how it happened, you.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Know, Okay. I just feel people.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Were horny in the forties too, I know.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
But I just don't. I don't know. I feel like
people who are really.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
Genuinely having sex like that do not talk about it.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
That's my theory, like if you really you're not I
don't know. Also, maybe that's just my naive world.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
The quote started with he claims, and then I was yeah,
he claims.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
He claims they are they are for sure married. I
don't know. It is like maybe in the nineteen forties,
if you're like, hey, I know how to read and
I know what Korea is, that does put you in
like the top half a percentile in terms of education.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
It sucks, like yeah, where you have to keep like
going back and being like, well in context, because my
grand my grandparents met when my grandfather was cat calling
her from the street. She was like pushing her baby
sister around as a teenager in like a little carriage,
and my grandfather pulled over and said.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Hey, is that your baby? My god, and she said.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
No, and he's like, let's go out tonight. And then
they were married for five thousand years.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, that is that the And it's like, so yeah,
maybe she maybe she'd proposed to like three other guys
and they'd all screamed when they saw the condom because
they thought it was some sort of devil. And so
she sees a man who can read, and it's like,
this is the one for me.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
He'll what a condom is?

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, he at least won't. He knows what that rubber
is a substance. He won't immediately screech that I'm the.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Devil slim pickens ah.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
Really shitting on our forties ancestors.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Well, I'm not claiming it's that much better.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
No, no, no, no no no. I do actually believe
that rubber is created by witches. But I just think
that's why, you know, the Witchcraft industrial complex is such
a centerpiece of American prosperity. Anyway, moving on, one claim
that is consistent across many years of interviews with Mary

(36:49):
and Petty, and is also something that other people have
brought up, is that during and right after the war
years he kind of has he gets lucky, right, he
has a great wartime experience, great early Cold War experience.
He's just driving famous people around DC. He is also
kind of an early swinger. He maintains two apartments in DC,

(37:11):
and he's basically like anyone he meets that he thinks
sounds interesting. He's like, hey, you can stay in my
apartment for free, and so a lot of them kind
of do. Now. He says this was like a con
kind of because they would always offer money and there
were so many people staying in his flophouse that it
worked out to be more than the cost of print. God,

(37:32):
I don't know. It's a weird situation.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
I mean, I feel like these kinds of like I
don't know, these kind of guys are who are just
around like they exist. They get the best stories. They
do tend to live in houses with too many people
in them.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
That's for sure. Now he is having sex with some
of these people, but not all of them. In later interviews,
he would describe this as an exper mental living situation.
He was basically, he said, I was creating a college
for myself. Quote. The idea in my head was that
they were going to teach me something about power, money,
or sex, which those aren't the only three things people

(38:11):
can teach you about. Marion. Kind of weird to frame
it that way.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Well, we've all lived in a punk house at some point.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
This isn't sounding too He said, he's going to teach
me the drums.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah again he is. He is kind
of the prototype for a sort of guy we all
lived with for at least six months back in the
early two thousands.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, and many of them do end up believing in
conspiracy theories on a long enough timeline.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Yeah, they are all people you don't want to like
check in on on Facebook right now. In conversations with
a follower later related in the book Game Caller, one
gets the idea that this was though primarily about sex.
Quote and this is Marion. Three girls lived on the
floor above, and I also had the run of their place.
There was plenty of sex in those days. During the war.

(39:02):
Everybody was sort of in a state of suspension. Nobody
knew what it was going to be like the next day,
so things were a lot freer, including sex. And I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Things things really for your including sex.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
I just would like, you know, I went just like
a pull quote from the women upstairs, and.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah, what was the.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
No, one never asked them anything.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
But we really can't be like, it's even from a
modern perspective. You can't just be interviewing the guy who
runs the.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
House, who is your friend and also who you sued
for stealing a bunch of your money. This is the
one source for your book.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
We have to like, really, yeah, that's okay, Yeah, no,
but sure the sex was awesome and everyone wanted it
from him.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Absolutely, Yes, that that is certainly his version of his life. Yeah.
He also would claim later that during this period he
as regular contact with like very powerful men through his
job as a chauffeur, which is maybe to some extent true.
He's also definitely lying, and this is how it's related
by one of his former cult members, a guy named

(40:14):
Toby Terrell. I didn't just drive half Arnold. I was
assigned to be Arnold's driver, but when he didn't need me,
I was available to drive other big wigs from the
Pentagon and the White House and Capitol Hill. When the
generals wanted to go somewhere or to have somebody picked up,
they would send me or one of the other drivers.
During the war, they had even more power than they
do now. I lived and worked down near Constitution Avenue
until they finished the Pentagon in about nineteen forty three.

(40:36):
I drove all of the famous and the powerful. Did
you ever drive the President, that's Terrell I ask, not
while he was the president. He says, they've got their
own drivers. But I drove Truman before he was the president,
and Eisenhower before he was the president, and Lyndon Johnson.
Although he didn't like me, plenty of others too. Marshall,
Patton All of the other generals j Edgar Hoover, just
about everybody in those days. Why do you think Johnson

(40:56):
didn't like you? I ask, We weren't in the same
sort of consciousness like them either. It's almost impossible to
arrive at any kind of equality with a politician. They
always have some hidden agenda going on that they think
will give them more power. It was a great job.
You overhear a lot of stuff that you can learn from.
Did they confide in you, I ask, not much, he says.
Arnold's wife did, but not the men. I would hear stuff.
If I was driving more than one person, I could

(41:18):
listen in on what they were talking about. Then I
would read about it the papers later and get some perspective.
I heard what they were saying, and I understood the context.
Then i'd see the way the press wrote about it.
Quite often it was different. Didn't they try to keep
you from hearing it? I ask, no, never, he says.
They never hid anything. They knew that it was safe
to say whatever they wanted to in front of me.
Do you remember any of the stuff that you heard?
I ask. It was mainly psychology, he says, figuring out

(41:40):
how the human mind works that we're all trying to
get some power to hold on to it. I had
opted out of that game. Plenty of times. They offered
to make me an officer, but I always turned it down.
I wanted to keep my head clear for learning. If
you've got some big hidden agenda, like getting a promotion
or being appointed to some big government job, you think
different and talk different. You filter everything through your hidden agenda,
so what comes out is designed to make you look

(42:01):
like a hero. Okay, that was a long quote, but
there's a lot.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah, okay, okay, where to begin there?

Speaker 3 (42:09):
The thing is again, on its face, do I believe that,
you know, people speak freely in front of service employees
because they're fucking assholes and don't view service employees with
the humanity they should.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
Sure do I believe that people. But that's not what
he's saying. He's like, they.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Taught me lessons about life and told my secrets.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, they just could sense that I'm kind of that bitch,
and so they like it's really.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
The like, maybe I'm just too tiny, harding piled.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
He sounds so much like Jeff Gluy's friend, who was like.

Speaker 6 (42:49):
Yes, yes, the CIA hired me blah blah blah, Like
he's just like a weird, cowardly guy who ended up
adjacent to something important once made it out to be
this huge thing.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
It's so like, oh, it's embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
Well, and there's he never gives you any details about
like mostly learned, like what's really this is as close
as we get, right, And actually, you know, I go
back and forth on some of this because like some
of it does seem more credible, right, Like here's him talking.
He says that, Yeah, here's him talking about half Arnold.

(43:26):
Arnold was a man's man. He was awkward around women
and just did what she told him. His wife. All
of the men liked him and followed his orders. He
knew how to run a big game. But he was
afraid of women. I never met any of the generals
who weren't afraid of women. I drove all their wives
at one time or another. They all knew me and
liked me. They could sense that I was on their side.
And like, I believe part of that, which is that,
like all of these guys are scared of their wives.

(43:48):
Maybe I get.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
I'm like he's choosing his like if he is.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Lying, which I feel he is like he's choosing, he's
being pretty like plausible. I mean, the fact offered to
be a general like and then even just the vagueness
of like you know when you get into an uber
after a couple of drinks and you start talking about
the psychology of power and how to get more like

(44:13):
it's all.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
Very It's all I talk about to my uber drivers.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
How do you think?

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah? And then and then you offer them the chance
to be a general in the in the water Wars.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
Yeah, like we all have that potential, Jamie, right now.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
True, it's true, It's true.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Okay, you know who else has the potential to be
a power broker in the coming water Wars?

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Whatever, Brutal Stanley cup ad we're about to play?

Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, yeah, ideally, got god willing an ad for Blue Apron,
you know, blue like the water that is nowhere around
anymore because we have hired mercenaries to give it all
Tonesley so that they can make poison anyway.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
You know, Island is a little different these days. It's
no longer surprise, it's no longer Ji water.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
We can't do that. We can't do that, the Island
thing anymore. People believe it there's no more water. This
is why I was gonna start this episode. It's weird
that we arrived organically at joking about serial killing, because
I was going to start it by like really elaborately
denying that you were involved in like a series of
murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But then I was like, no,

(45:27):
people might people might think that Jamie is involved in
a series of murders outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, and you're not.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
People are at just like high rates of media literacy,
off the charts. Everyone's doing great.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, So don't google Jamie loftis Grand Rapids, Michigan murders,
common Hammer.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Don't do it because nothing will come up.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
I swear nothing will come up, although it would be
pretty funny if a lot of people did that, and
then that became like the first thing would people type
your name Jamie loftis raw talk, Jamie loftus murders, Grand Rapids.
That's that's that's a career maker right there.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Fuck with the Wikipedia page. See if I care, here's ads.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
And we're back. So when I think about this guy
and his stories of all the secrets these generals for
sure told him, I think about Bill Cooper. Bill Cooper
was like a right wing conspiracy radio host in the nineties.
He dies in kind of a shootout with the police.
He is the proto Alex Jones, and he during his

(46:36):
time in the Army around this time, he works briefly
in the Pentagon, right, and he spent the rest of
his life being like I saw this document that claims
this insane thing or that insane thing when I was
working in the Pentagon. Petty kind of does the same thing, right,
And he will talk later about like I met all
of the guys that were in the OSS before they
became the CIA, Like I knew all those guys. Some

(46:59):
of that's probably true because his wife is works for
the CIA, Isabelle. She winds up being in the CIA,
and he's definitely driving officers. Some of those guys would
have wound up in the CIA, So he does have
some degree of very real CIA connections.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
First of all, I'm mad at you for reminding me
about Bill Cooper.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
But.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Uncle Bill.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
But but so what is his what is his wife
doing in the CIA?

Speaker 1 (47:26):
I mean, I think it's probably like desk work, clerical work.
I don't like, I don't think there were a lot
of ladies who were agents.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
You don't think she could ruin the world.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
I think she couldn't know, Jamie, I believe I believe
tens of thousands of Latin American women and children and
men and old people. I believe she could kill cities
worth of them if she put her mind to it.
I'm just not certain because I've never actually heard anything
about what specifically she did for the agency. It is
the CIA, right, so, but.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
She but she's working there and he is still doing
his This is like a very bizarre power couple situation.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, she's he's in the military, like you know, for
most of the fifties, the first two thirds of it,
and she's in the CIA from like fifty two to
sixty one, right Oka, And yeah, that's that's kind of
their period of overlaps, like four years where he's in
the military. She's in the CIA because he joined so early.
He finishes his career at some point in the fifties.

(48:27):
His son, who knows his dad is kind of full
of shit, will say that he retired from the Air
Force in nineteen fifty six, which if that's the case,
then he would have joined at like the Army at
like sixteen, because his chunk of the armor becomes the
Air Force. That's why he leaves a different service than
he started in anyway, whatever, I think his son is

(48:48):
probably accurate, and he was pushing things again, that's the
kind of the kernel of truth. He joins the army
really young. The lie he joined at thirteen, right right.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
You're just like, what what is this adding for your
cult recruits?

Speaker 1 (49:02):
That you were just set it up a little bit, Jamie.
He's just put a little bit spin on it, you know, yeah,
sank on it.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
He's just putting some Legassi bam on it.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
I miss him, Oh yeah, I do miss Emerald. I
assume he was swallowed by the earth like everyone else
I remember from that period of time.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
It's true, he actually may have never existed. It's a
it's a complicated conversation.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah. Yeah. There is now a parody of him on Futurama,
and like two thirds of the people who have seen
it have no idea what he's based on. Good stuff.
So I found an article in the Washington Post that
interviews his son, George, and this is kind of blissfully
and George doesn't talk about most of his dad's life,

(49:47):
but whenever George comes in, I'm like, well, this is
probably pretty close to truth. George seems like he's got
his head and screwed on straight, and he knows that
his dad was full of crap. And he told the
miss quote. In the nineteen six he was a student
of the world who would spend the whole day in
the library near the family farm. Then around nineteen seventy one,
he gathered his followers in the W Street House. This

(50:09):
was the beginning of a new life for him. They
found in their communal lifestyle, a more adventurous life. Right,
So he he spends several years reading and then he's like,
he's doing the same. He's got a family farm. It's
like ninety acres at this point, he's living there. His
wife is sometimes there, but she has a separate house.
It's whatever, do what works for you in a relation?

Speaker 3 (50:30):
Yeah sure, I'm like, you know, if had either resources,
why not, couldn't hurt Yeah?

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Why? Yeah exactly? Why not? But yeah, there, So he
just starts inviting people to his farm kind of over
the sixties, and then in nineteen seventy one he gets
a bunch of followers together at like a rented house
and he's like, hey, guys, we're going to be a
cult now. We're all got to live together. We're all
going to pool our bank accounts. I've got a great plan.

(50:56):
It's going to be cool and a lot what.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
A bummer house meetings, Like No, I knew.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
I knew it was too good to be true.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Like it says a lot about the early seventies that
it seems like most of the people who are like
around him are like, yeah, right, well, I.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Mean, honestly for that, I've not done worse.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
But like, you know, for a good living situation, you'll
really can see quite a bit. Had I had a
place in like a beautiful like I had my own bedroom.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
It was like a three person.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
Apartment in Boston, and it costs four hundred dollars a month.
And the landlord was like, the only caveat is that
if the police come to the apartment, you have to
say that you're my daughter.

Speaker 6 (51:43):
And I was.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Like, yeah, all right, you know, and they never showed
and it was and I lived in Bliss for no
money for two years.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
It was awesome. Who knows what he did, I'll never know.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
We all just had There were three women who lived
in that apartment, and we all had to agree that
we would say we were his daughter.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
I think I think he murdered his daughter, is what.
I think.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
He just needed three Caucasian women in there.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Yeah, to three women who all looked close enough like
his daughter around.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
So we did, showed up, we did all.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
You know, we were all kind of tall brunettes. We
just didn't talk about it.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
Like anyway, Sure, he'll agree to a lot. We're done. Look, look, if.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
You're listening in right now, you do the same thing
next to Mit.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Are you joking?

Speaker 3 (52:33):
It was like me and two MIT students that were like,
well he certainly did something, yeah, but hard to say anyways.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Yeah. So he says, hey, guys, we're going to do
a cult in nineteen seventy one. And you know, because
all the reading he's done, he's developed this real, this
fascination with futurism, right, and he's also he's equally interested
in like kind of pop a cult shit, the stuff
that's going to become new age. Right, this is kind
of right at the birth of New Age, and so

(53:02):
he is particularly obsessed with the writings of Carlos Castaneda.
Now a lot of people are probably familiar with carl
the Don Juan books, Right, So Carlos cassned these are
like nineteen sixties. They come out, chronicles of mystic self
exploration that are kind of one of the inciting incidents
of the New Age movement. Yeah, Castaneda was He's this

(53:25):
Peruvian writer who comes to the United States and gets
a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, and
he writes three books, starting with the Teachings of Don Juan,
which he claims are a faithful representation of his apprenticeship
of a traditional shaman of the Yaqui people in northern Mexico. Right,
that he goes and lives with this Yaqui shaman sorcerer

(53:48):
fell at Don Juan, who teaches him a bunch of
mystical stuff, right, and then, as you know, he does
get a doctorate in anthropology. He's like writing about this
experience he had as an anthropologist. He actually writes these
as part of his doctoral program at the University of California.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
I hate that I knew where he went to school. Yeah,
oh yeah, do U c l A.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Yeah he sure did, baby, he absolutely did. Now you
would think if you're a real anthropology program at a
real college, which we can all agree u c l
A is not. You would check the work of a
doctoral student, one presumes, right. I feel like that's part
of the point.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
You would think, you know u c l A. Will
UCLA ever answer for its crimes? Answer? No, half the
camp like their baseball stadium is on, like veteran owned
land whatever, They're.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Okay, So so there there. Wizards are real at.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
U c l A.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Wizards real, yes, more or less Jamie. And again, I'm
not speaking anything about actual yet key beliefs, because Castaneda
is not either. This is just a book that he writes.
It becomes immediately successful. Uh, and it is. It is beloved,
it's you get some interesting Depending on what year you're reading,
people talking about these books very different responses. There are

(55:10):
some respected academic figures who love Castaneda's work, but these
are also all drug guys, right. Their expertise is not
anthropology or the yaki, It is mushrooms. In the case
of Gordon Wasson, right, he's like a guy who really
likes his fucking mushrooms.

Speaker 3 (55:25):
And he is there and is there a more seventies
thing to do than to make a best selling book
based off of an actual belief system that you've heard of, Like.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's fun. So yeah, these
are you know, kind of like our buddy Petty. His
his lies. Castaneda lies are not like super lazy, like
there's usually degrees of real knowledge in them, are like
little pieces of it, and then he just spins it
to make kind of the Hollywood version. But he's also

(55:59):
a playerist. He plagiarizes large chunks of this. There's a
bunch of inconsistencies in it. All of this gets found out,
but it does take a while. It's harder to like
spot this stuff back then there is.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
No Huy to drop a nuclear.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Bomb, Carlos. It's also worth noting that anthropologists who have
spent time with Yaki people uh will note that the
books contain absolutely no there's no use of Yaki vocabulary
anywhere in there, Like yeah, he just does not use
any of the words that they use, which is suspicious

(56:36):
for a book of anthropology. Nothing, yeah, for.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Your doctoral thesis, what do you Okay?

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Okay, I always love talking about Castaneta, but like my
point is that these books that inspire Petty are full
of shit, but he loves them and they inspire him
to create all of these arcane rules and vaguely occult
rituals for his hanger on. And he's basically the way
he frames this is like this is a learning community.
You're all coming here to like learn more about yourselves.

(57:08):
And I'm here. I'm not really even the leader. I'm
the student. I'm going to learn from all of you.
You know, We're all going to like teach each other, right,
And he does a lot of kind of classic cult things.
He's at his farm. It's like known as a place
in the area. You can get a free organic meal
anytime you go there. So like a lot of drifters
pass through, and like if he finds them interesting or

(57:29):
if they'll do what he says, they kind of become
part of the group. Although while those people that is
a factor, a weird number of his followers are like
successful and educated. There's like PhDs there, there's Harvard graduates.
There's like businessmen who have like run successful oil companies
who are all going to fall in with him, as
he's kind of I'll explain what they're doing in a

(57:51):
second here, but like it's it's yeah, it's I can
see why there was an appeal to it.

Speaker 7 (57:58):
He's basically said that net to get folks in from Yeah,
it is, and it's we're just going to start talking
about like what exactly these people are doing because it's
a little different.

Speaker 3 (58:10):
Ye, Like, how does he get guys who are in
oil to move into his punk house?

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Yeah? Basically, this whole organization, the Finders, which he starts
calling in nineteen seventy one, is organized around what he
calls a game, and everyone is playing the game who
is in the cult? And he Mariann is the game caller. Right,
He's basically a DM for their lives. And so if
you're a member at various points, sometimes you'll all live

(58:36):
communally and like do like commune stuff, grow food. But
periodically he'll pick a number of people and he'll say
you need to go to Japan for six months. Here's
the name of a company. I want you to spy
on their operations and find out everything you can about them.
Or here is a political candidate. I want you to
go like research him, or I want you to go
do this job for two I want you to start

(58:56):
a company her startup capital, build this company with these
two other people. This is the game that you're playing
right now, and I'll tell you when it's done, and
then you'll you'll come back and you'll talk to us
about what you learned doing it. Right.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Yeah, Well, because if anything bad happens, it's nothing bad happens.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
It's just a game. It's just an arg that you're
living in.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
You can't be you can't be you know, taken to
court for things you were doing just for a fun game.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
It's also it's such a it's such an oddly specific thing.
But I think the appeal to a lot of people
is that, like even a lot of educated successful people,
is like, well, you don't have to make decisions about
what you're going to do with your life. This man
will tell you what your next thing is. And he
seems pretty smart, so maybe he knows that this is
what I need to be doing with my time. For

(59:45):
his wife's part, you don't get great context on her,
but she definitely starts living away from him during this
period of time, and her view of according to their son,
her view of his followers is like these are a
bunch of weirdos, Like you're hanging out with a bunch
of weirdos, What is wrong with you?

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
I wish I wish more uh more.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
People felt empowered to be like, no, too weird, I'm
out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Sorry, I'm out.

Speaker 7 (01:00:10):
I'm out.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
The CIA wasn't too weird for me, but you are, Mary, Yeah, you're.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Like, no that I'm gonna I'm going to return to
the safe embrace of the CIA where everyone's normal.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Marion adopts a nickname at this point for himself, the stroller,
because he takes he's every day. He'll spend like four
or five hours walking and like taking notes on the
neighborhood that he's in and like everything that happens around it.
But he just walks all the time, which is Keith
Ranieri was the same thing, where like that was his
his number one character trait other than being his sex criminal,

(01:00:45):
was that he would walk around all the time and
just you bullshit out of his mouth to whoever was
forced to follow him. Yeah. Interesting was the Carnaria was.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Huge on like wandering and like sleep deprivation.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Right, yes, yeah yeah. And the chief difference between them
is that we have no evidence that Mary and Petty
was a sex criminal, although I'm certainly not ruling it
out Jamie.

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
Yeah, based on Okay, yeah, I think we would be
unwise to rule out so his wife.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
His wife leaves him.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Now not really leaves him, but is not living with
him and seems to be kind of frustrated with him.
She dies not all that long after this. She doesn't
live a super long life. But yeah, so the game. Yeah,
they're all playing this game. And he starts calling his

(01:01:36):
group the Finders, and the name was actually based on
an old medieval like concept.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
They're literally playing D and D.

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
This is so oh god, they are. They are definitely
playing DNB Like eighty percent of this cold and eighty
percent of Petty's life given his childhood activities, is like O.
If this kid had D and D right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
Like, we really gotta we got him on the straight
and narrow early, he would have just been a prolific DM.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
He would have been going to three and a half
million dollars from a D and D podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:02:09):
Fine, breaking it in on Patreon, and it would have
saved everybody a lot of trouble.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Yeah. Yeah, you can go.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
To the military when you were thirteen in D and D.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Yeah, yeah, you can't make against it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
Yeah, it's always nice to introduce a liar to D
and D because you're just like.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Here, go nuts over here.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
Enjoy yourself, have fun with this. This is what you
need to control yourself. This is your riddle. Yeah, someone's
getting it angry about that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:40):
Well, I don't claim that statement, Robert. I just think
that D and D is.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
A fun place for liars. That's what I'm going to say.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
So I want to to talk more about how this
game works. I'm going to quote from an article in
the City Paper by John Cohen. Rt G I A
D Ready to go win any direction. It's the salutation
or closing found on almost every finder's report, and it's
the essence of the group. If you aren't RTGI a D,
you can't play the game calls and with the finders,

(01:03:11):
everything is a game call. Dress, diet, work, play, travel, marriage, divorce, pregnancy,
child rearing, pranks, investigations, even calling games can be a
game call. And what that means is that like he's
not as this evolves, he's not just saying, Hey, I
want you to go to this country and spy on
this thing for me, or I want you to start
a business. He's saying, like, you're only gonna wear skirts

(01:03:33):
you know, from now on until I say, or you're
only eating vegetables from now on until I say you
can't cook any of your food for six weeks. You
have to marry this person. You two should split out.

Speaker 4 (01:03:44):
So it's like Simon says, but yeah, Simon says.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Simon says, have a child with this other cult member
and raise them this way.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
Yeah, Simon says, but for your bodily autonomy and a
lot of the.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
And there are people who leave, but like there's generally
a few dozen adults who are like, yeah, why not,
let's try.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
What is the timeline on this escalation from like, hey, move.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
Into my punk house to okay?

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
But like, how quickly do we get from move into
my punk house to like Simon says, that your body
is Mine?

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Kind of starts in the late sixties, the hey, everyone
come crash with me, and then by seventy one they're like, hey,
we're the Finders, and like by the mid seventies, it's like, hey,
you should have a child now.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Okay, okay, So it is like a slow ish escalation.

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
Yeah, that's that's more as I understand it. Yeah. A
former member, Robert Terrell, who wrote the book that I've
been quoting from a bit provided more detail. In a
nineteen ninety one interview, Petty used the term pressure cooker.
The idea was to explore your own person and discover
your own true nature. You can't do that just by
sitting at a desk or on a couch in a
routine way. You have to have some experiences. So Petty

(01:04:58):
was good at structuring experiences from which you could learn.
He called himself the game caller, and what that meant
is he'd call a game for you to do something
where you'd gain experience. Examples of past games include making
followers work a temporary accounting job at a law firm,
or flying to other countries to spy on companies. Yeah, yeah,
I is so mad.

Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
If I was a cult member, that was like, you're
going to work an accounting desk job, and like that
guy got to go to fucking Japan for six months.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Yeah, you have to do people's taxes. But it does
split up like that. It's interesting because so there are
a couple of things going on. Some of this is
like very much mid century, you know, sixties inspired, Like
we're somewhat politically radical and we're willing to, you know,
look at you know, very radical cultural ideas like completely

(01:05:48):
changing child rearing or relationship free love kind of stuff.
They're exploring that. That's a part of this, but it's
also like, hey, a lot of us are spending a
lot of our time LARPing as spies. We are spying
on political movements in the area. You know, we're going
to meetings, we're joining political organizations, we're writing reports on it,
We're writing reports on companies around the world. We're doing

(01:06:09):
and one version of the story is we are LARPing
as spies, right, this is a thing people want to
feel important. They want Petty doesn't even tell us why.
He just needs the info and the other version of
this story so they're doing.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
It with no That was the other question I have
was like, are they being led to believe that there
is some sort of perceived endgame or are they just.

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
Doing that Not as far as former members say, they
were just interested in growing as people and like learning
and continuing to play the game.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
He was fine, Free Teddy, Good trips to Japan.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Free trips to Japan. You know, Petty is like, this
was all part of my learning process as a lifelong
student of the world. Now, as we'll talk about in
part two, they're allegations some of what. You're pretty credible
that like some of a lot of some of the spying,
some degree of spying absolutely wound up on the CIA's desk.

(01:07:03):
Now did the CIA wanted on their desk? That is
a question that we're going to we're going to talk about.
But there are connections there, Like his wife is a
CIA agent and he is running an amateur spy ring.
So I think you can see the direction things are
going to go in in part two to at least

(01:07:24):
an extent. But Jamie, that's part one. We're done.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Wow, that actually like didn't get as bad as I
thought it would get.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
It gets it gets a lot worse in part two.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Oh few good, I was helping something.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. This is just set up, baby,
And now it's.

Speaker 4 (01:07:42):
Time for Robert to set you up to plug your
plugg ables.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Yeah, Jamie, in addition to not even being in Grand Rapids,
when whatever happened to those people happened to them, you
can see just in Michigan. You are also the author
of the best selling book Raw Dog you are a
co host of the Bechdel Cast and you are the

(01:08:08):
future host. And I actually found this out in a
tarot reading I did last night of a podcast that Sophie.
Can we still not describe the podcast she's going to
be doing for it?

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
I couldn't we conscribe it? Can you do it?

Speaker 6 (01:08:20):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
You can. It's in a magazine, now, Jamie, you want
to talk about it?

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Yeah, it's called fifteen Minutes. It's on cool Zone, it's
on Cools.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
I never heard of it, And it's a podcast that
is going to be about the main characters of the Internet,
what happened and what happened to them. And I will
directly be telling you exactly how to feel about all
of it, each and every week starting in March.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
Now, Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong here, But isn't
it true that listening to your new podcast on cool
Zone is the only way to receive the light of
heaven after your death and be ushered into paradise.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
That's how That's what Sophie told me. And I have
to believe what Sophie tells me.

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
I was gonna say, this is a Sophie says situation.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Yeah, this is well, and also on my on my call,
I have calls with the Pope every couple of weeks.
He really he really hit that. He says he's the Pope.
He really emphasized that to me as well.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Guy named Francis that is that is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
I did my verification as a journalist. A guy said
he was the Pope, and I made sure his ID
sent Francis. I'm not responsible for anything beyond that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Everything else is from Quora.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
Also, I also want to plug We The Unhoused, the
show that I'm lucky to be producing. But it's created
and hosted by Theo Henderson, who is a formerly unhoused Angelino,
and every other Tuesday, he's covering issues from an unhoused perspective.
It's sort of hyper local, but I think if you're

(01:09:57):
unfamiliar with a lot of the issues affecting the unhoused,
he's doing a lot of incredible episodes, including coming up
like a whole roundtable discussion about philanthropy versus direct action.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
And so yeah, check that out. It's on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
If you can believe, well, wow, I can believe, and
I am excited to listen, and listeners you should be
excited to listen to, and you should also, Oh my god,
turn the wheel. Turn the wheel. The car's coming right
at you. That was a mean way to end the episode.

Speaker 5 (01:10:32):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.