March 27, 2025 • 49 mins
Robert, who is looking better than ever these days wow what great hair, finishes telling Ben Bowlin the harrowing story of how the U.S. murdered thousands of our nation's closest friends and poisoned incarcerated people for a modest payout.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to the podcast that this is,
which is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how to
mine prison labor for their sweet sweet blood. Uh oh, hepatitis.
Uh the story we're talking about. Yeah, whoops, all hes
(00:24):
b see all of the heps. Collect them all, folks,
if you're getting doing blood donations with needles that have
been used on dozens of other people in the prison. Anyway,
Ben Bowling my guest today, Ben ridiculous history stuff they
don't want you to know. Podcast Maven Impresario. Uh yeah,
(00:46):
how are you doing? How are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I'm doing well. I got to tell you, Robert, I
got a little bit of epaulet envy right now because
your jacket's pretty sick. I got I got a jacket
like that, but it's uh, you know, it stored away
for specific purposes. I apologize. I'm like some guy rocking
up to the White House without a shoe. God, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I mean. I live at a place where you get
to wear clothing like this regularly because it's cold. So
it's part of why I left Texas. I really like jackets,
and boy, very few places are worse for needing a
jacket than Texas.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
You heard it here first most Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, So you know, let's let's get back into talking
about talking about blood. The big be so, as I
mentioned in part one back in nineteen eighty three, HMA,
that's the company that is doing all of the healthcare
and all managing all the blood donation for the Arkansas prisons.
(01:47):
They've just been shut down, but then they got reopened
after some people who were close to the administration got
put in positions in both the prison board and at HMA.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Oh and hma is Health Management Associates Associates Incorporated. What
do we always say about innocuous names.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Right, Yeah, that's the worst thing ever. Yes, they're just
killing people. You really want to just invest in a
company called murder COO because murder co probably just produces
like cat food or something.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So they're they're founded by the They're founded by Janine Murder.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, Janine Murder. You know she's a great cat food
scientist of the New Hampshire Murders, of the.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
New Hampshire Murders. Yeah, the Granite Stude.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
As I mentioned in part one, in nineteen eighty three,
HMA had sold a boonch attainted blood plasma for inmates
who were known to be positive for hepatitis. Thirty eight
units of blood to be exact. Now, one unit of
blood there's actually varies, and I see because it depends
on like how it's but it's like a roughly a pint, right,
That's that's what you should keep in mind in your
(02:58):
head when you're hearing about a unit of blood and
the grand scheme of things, thirty eight pints or so
of blood that's tainted doesn't sound like a lot maybe. However,
as I stated in the last episode, all of these
are being mixed with tens of thousands of other blood donations,
and so these thirty eight ish pints ish of tainted
(03:20):
blood can wind up being turned into medicine for tens
of thousands of people, right because any given dose of
the plasma being given to hemophiliacs as factor eight would
be made from the blood of as many as sixty
thousand donors, and just one tainted donor can spoil the batch.
So that's great. So from just thirty eight pints of
(03:41):
donated blood, at least four one thousand doses of dangerous
tainted medicine were made and shipped overseas. At least probably
significantly more than that, many made their way into the
hands of hemophiliacs who required regular injections of factor eight.
In nineteen eighty five, the same year as Clinton that
Clinton's state cops cleared the company of most wrongdoing, a
(04:04):
UK hemophilias sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV. Now,
because the way this all works, we don't know that
Peter's tainted plasma came from Arkansas prison inmates, right, because
you can't. They just mixing it. They're not keeping track
of here's every individual whose blood is in this batch
of factor eight, right, But he'd been taking blood products,
(04:26):
including factor eight and factor four since the seventies, and
by then Arkansas was a huge part of the US
blood economy, and the odds that blood from Cummen's Prison
made it into his body are about one hundred percent, right,
just given the way things worked at that time. His
brother also suffered from hemophelia, and his brother, Stephen long Staff,
would be infected in nineteen eighty six and became one
(04:47):
of the first people to die of AIDS in the UK.
Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just
that the long Staffs weren't just dealing with the fact
that two of you know, both of their sons had
gotten sick and you know, in eighty six one of
them died. But it meant that they also became the
targets of mob panic. Per The Guardian, during Stephen's final
days in hospital, the windows had to be blacked out
(05:09):
to prevent people taking pictures. On the day of the funeral,
the family house was daubed with paint which read aids
get out of here. It was devastating to the family,
his mother said. Pete himself recalled being rescued from his
house by his GP and the police because there was
a mob outside trying to get him because he had HIV.
So when we talk about how many people are getting sick,
(05:30):
it's not just that they're getting a deadly or potentially
deadly disease that changes or in their life. It's also
they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is
where the culture is at the time, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
The secondary infection, right of outbreak, Yeah, of dickishness. Yeah.
So we could say then, yeah, we could say then
that not only is this family being targeted unfairly through
some ground swell of mob rule, but they're being targeted
(06:03):
at one of the worst possible moments of their lives.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I remember when I was in school in like the nineties,
we had like school lectures about how like, yeah, there
was a kid with HIV. I think because you'd gotten
it through a blood donation and you could still use
the water fountain that he used, it wasn't a danger
to you, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Which might sound silly to us, it.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Sounds wild now, But no, we that I remember this. Yeah,
you were there, Yeah, just like.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
You were there at the JFK assassination.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
We will you know, I know who was there, and
I know that he is currently, you know, a well
regarded US politician, But Bernard Montgomery Sanders has a lot
of unanswered questions about it. That's all ways, that's all
we need to say. That's all we need to say.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
All right, we're keeping it there, Bernie, come find us
buy some catalytic characters.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. So HMA ultimately settled with the FDA of the
blood recall that resulted from this. Their share of the
liability was about a quarter of a million dollars. Now,
we don't know how much money HMA was making off
of this program, in part because they weren't really required
to like let people like some of the regulations about
this are like, you don't really need to say in
the sense that most companies do, but at least a
(07:14):
couple of million dollars a year is probably a fair
guest based on how like what the company that takes
over for them is going to make Now. The state
police investigation largely cleared the department of any serious wrongdoing
in their plasma problem. HMA was eventually given the go
ahead to continue operating it with new safeguards in place. Thankfully,
(07:36):
the growing panic over HIV and the news of what
had happened to the long staffs in the UK prompted
some re examination and even though they were allowed to
continue in like eighty four or eighty five doing this
this plasma do Nation program, in the summer of nineteen
eighty six, a hero emerged and unfortunately in this case,
the hero is an insurance company, but like HMA's insurance company,
(07:58):
after they after they looked into the evidence, was like, oh,
absolutely not, no, you people are going to get us fucked,
Like you're so reckless, we're dropping your asses right. This
meant that the Arkansaw prison plasma donation program was again
forced to shut down, and this is going to lead
to some of the most i mean, less irresponsible actions
(08:24):
than we've had so far. So one of the things
that happens once HMA gets shut down by their insurer,
the prison board, in which the guy we heard from
last episode, Clinton Aide Bobby Roberts, is a member of
the board. They actually they're like, they they met, come
to the conclusion that, like that state police investigation might
have been shit, and they hire an outside organization to
do a better version of the internal investigation into what
(08:46):
had happened. Now, the group they picked was the Institute
for Law and Policy Planning from Berkeley, California, which is
a lot better than having the state police do it.
But the subject of the investigation wasn't the plasma donation
program itself. It was just the behavior of HMA. So
part of what they're doing here is good that we
get this info, but part of what they're doing is like, well,
(09:06):
we don't want to be like shitting on the prison system.
We want to make this company, who we already can't
work with anymore, into a scapegoat.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So they scoped in and you flatterized the WOU.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Right exactly, Yes, yeah, and this is how the paper concludes.
HMA originally may have diverted the Department of Correction payments
to support acquiring plasma centers or to other purposes that
may well warrant further inquiry. In any event, it was
early in the five year contract period that HMA established
a pattern of contract shortfalls and the ADC accepted them
(09:40):
for HMA. This must all be viewed as profit motivated
business decision making it best. At worst, it calls for
further inquiry. So just like so many crimes are going
on here. Yeah, now, even though it has concluded this again,
it's just blaming HMA. So the people running the prison
system still want to make money off of blood. So
(10:03):
the Arkansas Apartment of Corrections makes a deal with a
new company, Pine Bluff Biological Products, a for profit business
and obviously one that's not going to continue the same problems.
These guys are finally going to be ethical, up.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Up and up, someone doing blood money the right way.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yes, you know, exactly ethical, just like the ethical blood
diamonds that I wear in my my all diamond chaffon.
I don't know what a chaffon is, yeah, but you know.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yours is diamond encrusted. That's the important part of the story.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yes, and they're not blood diamonds, they're blood plasma diamonds,
which is much more ethical.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Think about it. That's why I made my money off
of platelet emerald mind.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Exactly exactly plate Let's make the best emeralds. I assume
so Roberts, Bobby Roberts would later allege of pine Bluff
Biological Products getting the new blood contract. Quote, I think
it was an insider pine Bluff deal. There were those
were companies set up specifically for doing business with the ADC. Basically,
people who were running the Department of Corrections went to
(11:10):
rich you know, entrepreneur friends of theirs and are like,
here's what you need to do to set up a
company to like make this work. Right now, I know
what you're asking now, how much money was in this
business for the prison system?
Speaker 2 (11:23):
And the answer, wait, wait, let me do it, hey, Robert,
how much money was in this for the prison system?
Speaker 1 (11:30):
The answer is less than you'd think. Here's the Arkansas Times.
According to Robert's records, PBBP reported collecting an average of
nine hundred and sixty units of plasma a week in
fiscal year nineteen eighty six calculated a conserving selling rate
of fifty dollars a unit. That volume of plasma grows
to proximately two point five million that year. According to
pbbp's contract, the ADC was to receive five dollars for
(11:53):
every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers
looked in a year when the media and income in
Arkansas was half of what it is today and when
the scury contaminated blood products was being felt around the world.
Of PBBPS two point five million in annual gross sales,
three hundred and fifty thousand went to pay inmates their
seven dollars a unit fees. The State of Arkansas collected
two hundred and forty nine thousand, six hundred dollars for
(12:14):
prison operations, and PBBP had gross revenues of almost one
point nine million. Now that sounds weirdly small for those
First off, this is not all the money that's coming
in through the program. But second, what's happening here is
the state and the prisons are getting, you know, a
little bit of this money, and most of that prisoner
money is also going back into the Department of Corrections
(12:36):
because they're using it to buy things from the prisons.
Most of the money is going to PBBP. And again,
this is a company that has been set up specifically
to interface with the Department of Corrections, generally by people
who had relationships with people in Arkansas government who were
responsible for making these calls. So they basically created a
free company to siphon off money from the prisons. Right,
(12:59):
That's kind of what's happened here.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, that's the question I think all of us hearing
this or are going to be asking naturally, is this
a cutout? Is this like a proxy to move or
sluice some money through.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That There's that's kind of that's an element of what
is going on. And there's also serious debates as to
these numbers. This is what the Arkansas Times suggests. There's
a Sophia Chase where for the William and Mary Business
Law Review that the value of a unit of blood
to the prison was about one hundred bucks and the
prison kept half of that as opposed to like five
dollars per unit, So they may have it may have
(13:34):
been a lot more going into the system. The fact
that the money on this is so unclear in its
precise details. As one of the things that's shady. Yeah, death. Now,
even if let's say it's about two million dollars that
PBBP is grossing, now that's gross, not yet net. But
they effectively have almost no costs because they don't build
(13:57):
their own facilities. They are using a plasma Faresis center
built into Cummins Prison for free. That's part of the contract.
The Department of Corrections handles all utilities and all janitorial work,
and it's also guards who are working reaching out to
prisoners to get them to sign onto the program and
busting them to Cummins. And it's still a lot of
inmates doing the work. So really PBBP is just skimming
(14:20):
two million dollars out of this program and handing it
to some people who have connections to folks who are
close to the ADC. Right, so, as far as I
can tell, all pp PBBP the company did was sell
blood without checking to make sure it was safe and
pocketed the money on paper. They were supposed to assume
(14:40):
liability for all plasma products produced through this and ensure
they provided staff to handle the draw and that those
staff were licensed professionals who would check the product. But
the ADEC also kept giving them inmates to do blood
draws and other work that, by the text of the contract,
professional PBBP employees ought only to have been doing. Roberts
described the PBBP looking at the inmates as quote, sort
(15:03):
of as little cows right here the subscription A lot
that they're like, this is these are yeah, these are
animals that we are mining for the products of their body. Now,
by nineteen eighty six, when PBBP starts, we are four
years past the point where the US has essentially soft
banned the use of domestic inmate blood. However, it continues
(15:26):
to be used for export products. Cutter Laboratories, which is
one of the companies involved in the nuts and bolts
parts of turning whole blood into like blood products, publishes
an internal memo around this time that highlights the attitude
many in the industry had to the idea of excluding
prison plasma donations. There are no data to support the
emotional arguments that prison plasma collected from adequately screened prisoners
(15:49):
is bad. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our
coagulation product would only be a soop or a gratuity
to the gay rights movement, and would presage further pressure
to exclude plays asma collected from the Mexican border and
the paid donor.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
To suit one more time.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Yeah, yeah, to exclude such plasma from manufacture of our
coagulation product would only be a sopper gratuity to the
gay rights movement and would presage further pressure to exclude
plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, Well, someone make.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Less money if we have to use blood that isn't
taken coercively by people who have an incentive to lie
about whether or not they're sick. And again, when I
talk about there being a lot more money, like what
PBP is making is the initial money for selling this plasma, right,
and both the plasma and the whole blood that's coming
(16:45):
in through these donation programs are worth a shitload more
once you spin them out into the different blood factors. Right,
So this there's a whole higher level of profit that
these companies like Cutter are making. Right. Likewise, you know,
the US has said we're not using this stuff domestically
for medicine, and like it was, our foreign friends in
(17:05):
the UK and Canada don't allow blood from prison inmates
to be used in medicine, but a system had been
devised to ensure plausible deniability. The blood that came out
of Cummins and other donor programs in the US was
sold to Continental Pharmachrino in Montreal, and this major blood
broker resells the whole blood in plasma all around the world.
(17:25):
And it also sells to a Toronto based company, Connet Laboratories,
who effectively played the role of blood launderer and sent
this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. The laundering
process was so effective that, as Sophia Chase writes, and
at least one case, the blood was sent back to
the United States. So we are also using tainted blood
in the US from inmates, even though we're not supposed
(17:47):
to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then
sold back to US sometimes like.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, excuse me, excuse me, waiter, send this blood back.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yes, send this one, but back across the border to
our good friends.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Also, blood launderer as a job.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
This is blood laundering.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, we're in the wrong business. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Also there's so much money laundering blood. Oh man, do
you ever think about that? Mm hmm, I do. I
do you know I have a shitlttle blood in my house.
I keep People always say that, Yeah, I keep it
in my basement. I don't know if it needs to
be refrigerated, but you know, make me an offer, folks,
if you need a shit little blood, I got it.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Cool Store is cool blood stored. It's a dark place.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Cool Cool Zone is getting into the blood business. So
you're legally not allowed to ask me where it came from.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, it's illegal for you guys to ask Robert that.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
It's important. It's so important we can't know.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, it's also important to realize that the fewer questions
you ask, the bigger of a price break you get.
That's right, and that seems to be an unfortunate truth
as this. We could even call it a sort of
blood economy. Yeah, begins to arise.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
That's right. That's right. And speaking of the economy, I
don't know if our sponsors sell blood, but they sell
other stuff. So go buy it and then give me
your blood. We're back. So even under PBBP, this new company,
the same problems persisted. Prisoners continue to be involved in
(19:25):
running the plasma program. They regularly overbleed each other because
it means more money for them, and neither the prison
system nor the company has a financial interest in stopping
that records are regularly falsified and destroyed. Earlier in these episodes,
we quoted from Clinton friend and prison board member Bobby
Bobby Roberts. He's been something of a whistleblower about the program,
(19:45):
but just to an extent. When the FDA published a
study alleging that prison plasma was likelier to be tainted
with blood than plasma donated elsewhere, Roberts told reporters from
the Arkansas Times this, I deny the premise. I disagree
that prison plasma blood was more dangerous than what was
coming out of the for profit centers. In the free
world out there, anybody could bleed anybody, and like, but
(20:08):
the problem isn't everyone has blood. The problem is that
it's not being checked. And there's a lot of incentives
to lie when you're sick, when you have no other
way of making money because you're in prison.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Right, Like, Also, you can't just say I disagree with
the premise.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, it's like the FDA. You're not You're Bobby Roberts,
for one thing. Your name's Bobby Roberts. I I ultimate immediately,
I'm less likely to take you seriously about medical science.
Both of your names are the same.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I just I love the idea bob Rob of Bob
Rob a hot tag base. Yeah, on something where you know,
like this guy might get arrested with a bunch of
guns with the serial numbers filed off, and they're like, hey,
we got you with a bunch of guns, you know,
in your Honda Civic and he's like, officer, I disagree
(20:57):
with the press, disagree.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
With the premise. Yeah. That article continues to summarize Roberts's argument.
Roberts basis is confidence in the state's plasma program, on
the fact that, unlike downtown plasma centers, the ADC had
medical records on every inmate who participated. It knew who
was safe to bleed, he says, and who wasn't.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
And we can we take a second to also, come on, man,
the use of.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
The word bleed like this, Yes, yeah, it was just
so safe to bleed, right to bleed? Yes, yeah. And
he's rights as records good and it often knows when
people have blood born illnesses. The issue is that they
don't care. Per the paper written by Sophie chase. Multiple
witnesses to the events claimed that the Plasma center accepted
(21:45):
some donations from prisoners known to fail the required qualifications.
A previous inmate, Lewis Sorels, described the conditions at the prison.
You had prisoners bribing prisoners, prisoners bribing officials, officials offering
certain deals for them to bleed for extra money or drugs.
Sorels himself passed away from hepatitis CEE shortly after the interview.
He became infected with this disease during his time at
(22:07):
Cummen's Prison, and because of the previous scandals under hm May,
there are more outside investigations into the plasma program after
this point. A few years after PBBP takes over, an
FDA inspector reports them for poor screening procedures and record keeping.
The prison officials who managed the program for PBBP were
(22:29):
also accused of using prison guards to recruit inmates. Despite this,
in an interview with a local reporter, prison medical director
John Bias, who is like you know, like the medical
director of the prison right, said this, we planned to
stick with the plasma program to the last day, to
the last drop we're able to sell. Wow, Okay, Well,
(22:52):
why given all of the bad stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Why it sounds like it sounds like one of those
things where the public wider audience is somehow different from
the specific audience this guy is speaking to. Yeah, maybe
he might be given some guarantees.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, yeah, folks. Now, in nineteen ninety one, a company
from New York takes the contract from PBVP and they
continue to mind prisoners for blood plasma until nineteen ninety four.
By this point, not only was the HIV crisis more
fully understood, but the consequences of all those years of
tainted blood getting shotgunned out onto the world market had
become undeniable. And this is where we get to the
(23:35):
body count. Best as we can tell, more than a
thousand Canadian hemophiliacs were dosed with tainted blood from Cummins
prison alone. During this timeframe, forty two thousand Canadians were
infected with hepatitis C and thousands more with HIV through
tainted plasma, often including plasma imported from Cummins. Current estimates
(23:57):
expect about seven thousand totals of Canadian citizens from contaminated
blood sold by the US during this period about two
nine to elevens A little more and to be.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Clear, these are all for everyone listening. These are all
innocent people.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yes, are easily preventable deaths too, Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Easily preventable deaths. Also, this is medicine that they need.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
To Yes, yes, yes, And the shock woods in Canada,
Canada takes substantial action here, right, the Canadian Red Cross
has to declare bankruptcy and is no longer allowed to
collect blood. As a result of the fallout of this,
the Canadian government launched a commission in nineteen ninety five
to trace the blood that had poisoned so many of
their citizens, which is how we first learned that Canada's
(24:41):
blood supply had been tainted by blood from sick us
prison inmates. Right. They trace a lot of it back
to Cumments Connaught Laboratories, which is the Canadian company that's
like making the blood product. Was obviously proven negligent in
all this, largely because they had avoided checking any of
the plasma collection sites themselves and had relied on FDA records,
which were also deficient. Subsequent investigations showed that it's a
(25:04):
little bit like if you've heard the story of like
the Rust shooting, right, where like the first ad assistant
director was supposed to check the gun to see if
it was empty. Alongside the armor was also supposed to
check the gun to see if it was empty, and
the first ad didn't really do a check because he
assumed the armorer had done it right and the armor
had not done it. It's like that, right, like Connaught was,
(25:26):
just like the FDA's probably got it. We don't need
to spend any money checking, and like they really did,
the FDA didn't have it.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Subsequent investigations showed that Arkansas prison blood was a significant
contributor to Canada's hepse and HIV crisis in this period,
and that both US blood brokers and the FDA failed
to inform Canadian companies where the blood they were buying
had come from, and that much of it was being
sent from facilities which had already been linked to tainted
blood sales. There have been attempts at lawsuits over this,
(25:56):
but the difficulties of carrying out such a suit cross
border and mostly style me the efforts of Canadian humophiliacs
to get justice. As I discussed earlier, a good deal
of the tainted blood from the US also went to
Great Britain, where it helped cause what Lord Robert Winston
described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of
the NHS. Oh, all thanks to our American our American friends.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah good, the worst, the young upstarts. Yeah yeah, oh,
our shitty cousins. Yet the bag once again.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah. From that article by Sophia Chase, most of the
victims believe the blood and clotting factors they were using
came from British donors. The possibility that the blood might
have been imported did not even occur to them, much
less the prospect that it might not meet British health standards.
The disaster left four six hundred and seventy British hymophiliacs
infected with hepatitis C, and twelve hundred and forty three
(26:52):
of those were also infected with HIV. About two thousand
have died at this point right also, many of them
spread diseases to partners and children. Will never fully have
an understanding of the exact cons but at least two
thousand dead. And again there were, like, you know, investigations
into this as well. Quote it ultimately determined that a
a significant burden of responsibility for tainted blood provided at
(27:14):
British hemotheliacs rests on American suppliers of factor eight concentrate. Now,
due to the way things were done at the time,
it was not possible to determine how many of those
deaths were directly linked to Commons prison. Again, there have
been changes in how stuff is reported to try and
make it easier to trace back tainted blood, but that
didn't exist at the time. We know at least three, right,
(27:35):
so we know what was happening. It's got to be
thousands more than that, right, because it's incredibly hard to
actually trace this right, in part because one of the
things they found when they realized how many British people
had gotten HIV and hepatitis and we're dying, they found
that most of the records for blood transactions to import
blood into the UK had been shredded in the early
(27:57):
nineteen nineties. Surely oop, oops, surely nothing shady their.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Right, right? You have you ever found yourself in that situation?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh gosh, see doodles, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Whoops, you just trip with a stack of papers and
fall towards the shredder.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
I'm always shredding medical documents. That's like eighty percent of
my day job is shredding medical documents from the UK.
I don't even know what they're about, you know, they
just sending to me in boxes and I just shred.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That's how you and I got started before this podcasting.
We would just hang out and throw some stuff into
shredders and.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You would always say to each other, that's the future
of media, shredding British medical paperwork.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yeah, yeah, we were entirely wrong, but we had too
much blood.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Back when we had we did have way too much blood. Yeah,
So it may seem baffling that, like there was not
more oversight given the way things work with the NA,
especially at this point worked at the NHS. But blood
export industry in the UK was considered uniquely favored, right,
which means there was exempt from some of the same
(29:08):
oversight because number one, and this is the same in Canada,
not nearly enough British people are Canadians were donating blood,
they just didn't have enough. And the US was considered
the gold standard planet wide for blood distribution because no
one else could gather and disseminate anywhere. Again, seventy percent
of the blood products worldwide coming from the US. No
(29:32):
one else close, So everyone is just like they must
have this shit figured out right. No, but yeah, But
because our system was the largest by far, everyone relied
on it and it became the global standard, and other
national healthcare agencies and companies just sort of assumed that
US regulators had our shit together because the only other
(29:53):
option was to not have enough blood. Now that's the
bulk of this story. But before we close out here,
I should talk about something. So there is apparently an
exceptional documentary made about all this, called Factor eight, The
Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. It is made by Kelly Dudah,
(30:13):
a filmmaker and investigative journalist who won a Peabody Award
in two thousand and three for a Japanese documentary about
the cover up by the government of a HEPC epidemic.
She spent eight years researching and five years filming this movie,
which prompted an international response, and even she gets called
into a criminal trial in Enables for a company accused
of selling tainted blood products to Italian citizens. It's supposed
(30:33):
to be excellent. I haven't seen it, and I wanted to.
It is not available anywhere online that I can find.
When you look on like reddits and stuff, it will
be all it's always blamed on the Clintons, right that
they stop this documentary from getting out. I know that
Duda has alleged she received like harassment and stuff while
she was making the documentary that said, when you talk
(30:58):
about like the bad things the Clintons did, this is
especially Bill, an incredibly powerful man who was involved in
a lot of shady stuff. There's also a whole industry
of right wing content dedicated to like lying about shit,
including like the Clinton murder list and stuff. It's just nonsense, right,
So it's difficult to parse a lot of stuff out now.
There is no doubting that Bill Clinton deserves a massive
(31:20):
degree of blame for the Arkansas blood scandal because he
was the governor and because he put people who were
close to him directly in positions to manage the program.
No argument period that he does not deserve a meaningful
amount of blame for this, right, But a lot of
these other allegations, right, like the fact that are the
Clintons locking down access? Have they used their influence? It's like,
(31:45):
I mean, it's not a powerful people do that with documentaries.
But also a lot of the time I'm doing episodes,
I found out there's a twenty year old documentary about it,
and I can't find that documentary because it's not on streaming.
That just happens with media. So is the likeliest thing
the Clinton's locked, I don't. I have no evidence of that, right,
I've had this happen to a bunch of documentaries over
(32:07):
the years that said I would love to see this documentary.
So if you've got it, hit us up, and I
don't know, someone put it on fucking streaming. Now. The
most credible allegations that I've heard when it comes to, like,
you know, the corruption here, is that money from this
blood program was used to provide positions to people as
(32:30):
political favors where they could profit while doing very little.
And it's certainly true that the state Department of Corrections
doesn't make a ton from the blood program right. However,
other people in and around the state government make an
unknown amount of money acting as Greece around HMA and
then pbbp's wheels here. One example is Leonard Dunn, that
is the law or that is the guy who gets
(32:51):
brought in to run HMA right around the time of
the first blood scandal. He's a banker. A state police
investigator wrote that Dunn had advised him quote he was
host to Governor Clinton as well as a majority of
state politicians presently in office. Mister Dunn explained that he
was very fond of politics. Doune added that he was
the financial portion of the corporation as well as the
political arm. Despite this, he also claimed he never took
(33:14):
an active role in the company on a day to
day basis.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Okay, man, Oh sure, sure, good story, bro.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
But Donn does handle when HMA loses the contract. Briefly,
he is the guy negotiating with the Corrections Board so
that it can keep taking and selling plasma. And since
his company had just paid out to the FDA for
letting tainted blood out of the country, you might imagine
these would be difficult negotiations. But the main result of
these negotiations was that done in order to get the
(33:44):
Corrections Board to agree, agreed to bring in an ombudsman
to act as a compliance coordinator to ensure HMA followed
the rules going forward. This ombudsman was Richard Mays, a
Little Rock judge who had been appointed by Governor Clinton.
His job at HMA was described by the state police
as a bribe, because again, he's not really doing anything.
(34:06):
They're just like, yeah, just give another guy who like
we owe a favor a job and pay him some money.
He doesn't have to do much.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, let's make our let's make an official with our
budd Yeah your alms button.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah right yeah. Now, this specific choice to bring on
Done seems to have been made by the Arkansas Board
of Corrections Chairman Woodson Rocker Walker, who claimed that he
discussed it with Governor Clinton, who was so upset that
he held Walker personally responsible for the next provider chosen,
and Walker and Clinton jointly suggested Mays. Right, That's that's
(34:40):
what Walker claims. You know, obviously he's in trouble here.
So but you know the fact that this guy who
Clinton appoints as a judge becomes gets this bribe job.
I don't think Clinton had nothing to do with that.
The quote from Susie Parker's article hma President Done told
investigators Dune stated that Walker advised him that Mays was black,
a plus an assystem where most of the inmates are black,
(35:01):
had good qualifications, and was an outstanding attorney. According to
investigators notes.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
I like the order of operations, yes, with those commendations, Yeah,
like yes, oh, and third he's he's a good lawyer. Yeah, yeah,
he's all right at that one.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
But first, yeah, obviously I have I'm not saying he's
not a good attorney, but he doesn't have qualications qualifications
to monitor a blood plasma donation program. Yeah. Like, that's
like saying, you know, this guy's a great helicopter pilot,
let's put him in charge of making sure all the
hearts we get put in people are working. It's like,
(35:36):
you don't know how to do that, Like, yeah, we
didn't have anything. You hadn't seen him on the bird.
Yeah what I mean, Man, the way this guy flies,
he could really pick out a good kidney.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
You can just it's something in the eyes. Yeah, it's
a vibe.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Simply not the same job. There are other allegations of
kickbacks and bribery at high levels in the system. Mike
Gouster was a medical practitioner who worked in Cummins Prisoner
the height of the HMA days, and he later wrote
a fictionalized novel about his experiences and claimed that he
had to leave the company after an HMA associate demanded
he gives some of his earnings to him in order
(36:11):
to keep his job. Quote the way Arkansas works is
that once you are working within the system, the people
in charge make it clear that it is a privilege
to have that state contract. Ultimately you are expected to
pay for that privilege. This, I know guster continues without
the governor's support and protection, this disease riddled system would
have been shut down by nineteen eighty two. And again,
Clinton doesn't make the system this way, but he is
(36:32):
a guy who continues to work within a system in
order to get the stuff done that he wants to
get done right, And the fact that that system existed
before and after him does not exempt him from responsibility
for participating it.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Nor exonerate to not quite honest, you know, and I
love the point that we're bringing up here about how
easy it is to heap a probrium on someone that
you already don't care for, disagree with. But just like,
just like this soul crushing thing where someone you hate
(37:05):
makes a really good point objectively, you also have to
have that moment where even someone you might like does
really just unclean evil shit for a federal judge to
say there are evil people involved.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yes, And it's this the issue of both like it's
it is important to hold Clinton's that. I mean, he didn't,
No one held his feat, but it would have been
important for them to have done this. As a result
of this, It's also important for it not to be
what a lot of people try to make it, where
it's like, well, this is purely a Clinton scandal. Now,
I mean, this is like an Arkansas scandal. It's like
(37:41):
a blood industry scandal. This is a lot of very
important and if you're if you're picking out one of
the threads involved in this scandal, then you're ignoring all
of the other ones, and you're like it becomes clear, Okay,
well you hate Governor Clinton, But like if if a
governor you didn't hate had been doing all of the
same things, wouldn't given a shit, you know, like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
You would have been like you know, people like blood.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, these are systemic issues, and we both need to
blame and punish individual people responsible for them and understand
how the systemic part plays into it so that we
don't just put like, well, no, I like this governor,
so I'm just not going to pay attention to what's
being done in the Arkansas prisons anymore.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
You know, maybe the problem is monetizing everything.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, maybe the problem is monetizing everything. Like those early
reports said, if you make blood donation be entirely driven
by money, there's a lot of issues you have to
deal with there. The other issue is like, well, then
how do we get all the blood we need? Because
like we don't have enough, there's never enough. How do
we get the blood we need?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Yeah, it's an organ surplus.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Right, and so there's a degree to which, like, as
much as we're critiquing parts of this, there are certain
things I know that we shouldn't have been doing, like
running a blood program the way they did it come
its prison. But when it comes to like how do
we get enough blood? Well, nobody's figured that out yet.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Nobody's figured that out except for except for Robert Evans,
creator behind the Bastards. Several jars of we'll call it
gender used.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Used blint invented blood, maybe a little bit of Lamb's
blood in there. I might have thinned it out with
some coconut milk. You're good, you're good.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Take it, you're good. No refunds. Also contains x amount
of ethanol.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Now you know who else doesn't give refunds?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Who's that?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
The sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
That we're hoping to keep Roberts.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Maybe they give refunds. I don't know. I never checked.
We're back, so a good deal of the information in
this article comes from a nineteen ninety eight piece published
by Arkansas investigative journalist Susie Parker. She also published an
article on the Whitewater scandal for The New York Times,
(39:52):
which was a big scandal for the Clintons while he
was in office. That is incredibly boring today because political
scandals have gotten so much worse, Like it's so quaint
that like, oh man, remember when people were upset about
these like shady business dealings. The president might be tied
to good lord, we have.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Made a couple hundred thousand dollars illegally. Yeah, so let's
rebuild those guillotines.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Anyway, the president said, he's a king. It's just things
are a lot where I'm not saying Whitewater was okay,
I'm just saying, like, things are so much worse now.
Susie has worked for a number of publications, and she
has a particular fixation on Arkansas politics and the Clintons. Today,
she runs a local independent publication called The reckoning and
she is quite conservative, right, she is a right wing
(40:41):
at least simply more sympathetic to that. I think she
does portray Clinton's involvement as like more direct and puppet
mastery than it was. I think this was something Clinton
acceded to both because he gained some benefit from, like
you know, giving some of these positions to people close
to him, and because not messing with this allowed him
to do like a politics was a trade for him,
(41:01):
right Whereas like the other people running the Board of
Corrections and running these these were the people who were
like directly setting up the system like this. Again, I
think Clinton knew quite a bit of how bad this
was and made some choices here, but he's not the
puppet master right now. One of the issues here comes
(41:22):
that alongside some strong connections which again don't imply that
Clinton operated this program, but do in clay that he
deserves quite a lot of blame.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Or there's also at least willfully ignorant.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yes, there's also some species allegations. For example, Galster that
former doctor claims that Vince Foster was hired to squash
the state investigation. Now, this was true, and Vince Foster
is a very close Clinton associated. If this is true,
that investigation happened and in fact described some of what
was going on as bribery. And then there's an independent
(41:54):
review ordered by the prison board which had Clinton allies
on it. So I don't know. I don't know how
much I believe that this is like a big deal.
But the reason this is seen as a smoking gun
right by some people, is that in July of nineteen
ninety three, after Governor Clinton became President Clinton, Vince Foster
shot himself to death in Washington, d C. Foster had
discussed his depression with his sister over some time, and
(42:15):
he was at that moment in a lot of trouble
over a totally different controversy with the White House Travel Office.
And there's no evidence of anything here other than that
Vince was a serial political operator who was involved in
some shady shit and got disgraced, and who killed himself
because he didn't want to live with the after effects, right.
And you know that also the shit he was in,
(42:37):
to the extent that it was shady, is very common
among people who are Arkansas politicos, right. But Vince's death
has become a cornerstone of some of the more unhinged
parts of the anti Clinton movement here allegations that like
he was either murdered by the Clintons or that he
killed himself because of the blood scandal, right, the Clinton's
had him shot in order to cover this blood scandal up.
(42:58):
And again it wasn't covered up. There's a documentary on it.
People didn't care enough, but it wasn't you know, it
got out. And the reality is that the blood scandal
didn't have an impact on Bill and Hillary's lives or
political careers, not in a real massive way. And I can,
in fact believe that people as connected as they are,
you know, have contacts in the entertainment industry. But I
(43:19):
also I just don't see the evidence that this destroyed
them or that this wasn't that dangerous to them. In fact,
in nineteen ninety two, Peter Longstaff, who tested positive for HIV.
Back in nineteen ninety five after receiving blood from US donors,
tested positive for hepatitis C. And this was the same
year that Clinton ran for presidential election. The Arkansas Times
(43:42):
writs quote his former chief of staff, Betsy Wright, sent
a memo titled prison Positives. That memo mentioned four points,
including education into prison by Bill Clinton. But the first
point right listed was run cheapest system in the country,
And so you kind of get even in ninety two,
you know, the thing that, like the scandal here is
(44:02):
not on their front burner. Their front burner still for
him in ninety two, after it's very clear how bad
a lot of this is was like the prison justin
was cheap. Let's throw that in a bullet point list.
You know, you know, it's a thing to run on.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Right, keeping costs down, keeping costs down. It is the idea.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, fairly normal evil, fairly normal politics evil as opposed
to like incredibly shady conspiracy evil. That's my opinion on
the matter.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Well, I hear you there too, because there's there's this
devilishly tempting draw right to find a political force you
disagree with or you already don't care for, and then
assign them super villainous agency where you know the result is,
(44:57):
without being too godtroversial, the result is you ultimately have
to ask yourself, is there any such thing as a
completely clean potus? Right?
Speaker 1 (45:07):
And what do we need to play that game?
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, Well, and also just like perhaps if we keep
if the focus of all of these problems is like
this is I could use this huge systemic issue that
a lot of people deserve to go down for to
attack this one guy. That's all I'm really interested in.
I'm not interested in better treatment for prisoners. I'm not
interested in a safer blood treatment system. Right and likewise,
(45:34):
if you're you know, and to the same extent that,
like Bill's only interest in what happened in the prison
system during his time was I need a bullet point
of things that I can run on, right, and like, yeah,
I put some educational programs in system. Was the cheapest
you know that it's ever been. Bada bing bada boom.
I'm done thinking about the prisons and the state I run,
you know, Like all of these are parts of the
(45:55):
the why all of this kind of shit will keep happening.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yes, and that is I think one of our Look,
I know it's your show, but I think that's one
of the key takeaways. Is it is it is tempting
again to look at the headline to put a face
on a problem. Right now, I'm mad insert individual here.
The real problems are systemic and have always been and
(46:20):
shall always be slow be so, and with that, I
gotta tell you. It's a question that's been on my
mind for both of these episodes. Robert, do you want
to do you want to like buy some blood?
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yes? Oh my god, yes, do you I gotta. I
want to make sure. Will I have any idea where
the blood comes from or what is in it?
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Even better, Broke, you're not buying it. We do a
subscription service.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Oh shit, awesome.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
You know you're well. We say leasing.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah, yeah, I'll lease the blood. I'll give some back.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah, yeah, you know, we.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Gotta have blood. Leasing has to be on the organ. Lease.
I mean, we're all going to be doing our best
for the next several decades to like recreate some of
like the silliest movies from the nineteen nineties. I think
Repo Man's next.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. You have to You
have to come back on stuff they want you or
you've never been on that one. Come back on ridiculous
history while we can still call it history, right.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Feel like the Rent of Blood is just like a
sequel to Jordan Peele's Get Out.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Yeah, oh yeah, Jordan got us again. Yeah, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Anyway, rent some Blood. Have fun. I don't know why
I ended on that mark. Well, what do you? I
mean you kind of a yeah, you can do it.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Some plugs please, oh oh sure. Other than rent of Blood,
which is clearly our main focus for both of these episodes,
please check out stuff they'll want you to know which
applies critical thinking to allegations of conspiracy. Please check out
Ridiculous History, where you can hear our own friend, Robert
Evans Robert Pause Evans like that. Just check it. The
(48:15):
social security number on the on the show a couple
of times. Most importantly, most importantly, I think you guys
plug something. I'm just throwing the ball over the court here,
just doing like a halftime go for it, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, half court. Find the documentary Factor eight so I
can watch it. That's what I'm gonna plug. Somebody's got
to have it out there.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Shout out to Kelly Duda by the way for standing
tull in Italian court. That's a true story.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Good work anyway. That's the episode.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media
from or 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. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
(49:17):
at Behind the Bastards
Also media, Welcome back to the podcast that this is,
which is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how to
mine prison labor for their sweet sweet blood. Uh oh, hepatitis.
Uh the story we're talking about. Yeah, whoops, all hes
(00:24):
b see all of the heps. Collect them all, folks,
if you're getting doing blood donations with needles that have
been used on dozens of other people in the prison. Anyway,
Ben Bowling my guest today, Ben ridiculous history stuff they
don't want you to know. Podcast Maven Impresario. Uh yeah,
(00:46):
how are you doing? How are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I'm doing well. I got to tell you, Robert, I
got a little bit of epaulet envy right now because
your jacket's pretty sick. I got I got a jacket
like that, but it's uh, you know, it stored away
for specific purposes. I apologize. I'm like some guy rocking
up to the White House without a shoe. God, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I mean. I live at a place where you get
to wear clothing like this regularly because it's cold. So
it's part of why I left Texas. I really like jackets,
and boy, very few places are worse for needing a
jacket than Texas.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
You heard it here first most Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, So you know, let's let's get back into talking
about talking about blood. The big be so, as I
mentioned in part one back in nineteen eighty three, HMA,
that's the company that is doing all of the healthcare
and all managing all the blood donation for the Arkansas prisons.
(01:47):
They've just been shut down, but then they got reopened
after some people who were close to the administration got
put in positions in both the prison board and at HMA.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Oh and hma is Health Management Associates Associates Incorporated. What
do we always say about innocuous names.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Right, Yeah, that's the worst thing ever. Yes, they're just
killing people. You really want to just invest in a
company called murder COO because murder co probably just produces
like cat food or something.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So they're they're founded by the They're founded by Janine Murder.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, Janine Murder. You know she's a great cat food
scientist of the New Hampshire Murders, of the.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
New Hampshire Murders. Yeah, the Granite Stude.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
As I mentioned in part one, in nineteen eighty three,
HMA had sold a boonch attainted blood plasma for inmates
who were known to be positive for hepatitis. Thirty eight
units of blood to be exact. Now, one unit of
blood there's actually varies, and I see because it depends
on like how it's but it's like a roughly a pint, right,
That's that's what you should keep in mind in your
(02:58):
head when you're hearing about a unit of blood and
the grand scheme of things, thirty eight pints or so
of blood that's tainted doesn't sound like a lot maybe. However,
as I stated in the last episode, all of these
are being mixed with tens of thousands of other blood donations,
and so these thirty eight ish pints ish of tainted
(03:20):
blood can wind up being turned into medicine for tens
of thousands of people, right because any given dose of
the plasma being given to hemophiliacs as factor eight would
be made from the blood of as many as sixty
thousand donors, and just one tainted donor can spoil the batch.
So that's great. So from just thirty eight pints of
(03:41):
donated blood, at least four one thousand doses of dangerous
tainted medicine were made and shipped overseas. At least probably
significantly more than that, many made their way into the
hands of hemophiliacs who required regular injections of factor eight.
In nineteen eighty five, the same year as Clinton that
Clinton's state cops cleared the company of most wrongdoing, a
(04:04):
UK hemophilias sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV. Now,
because the way this all works, we don't know that
Peter's tainted plasma came from Arkansas prison inmates, right, because
you can't. They just mixing it. They're not keeping track
of here's every individual whose blood is in this batch
of factor eight, right, But he'd been taking blood products,
(04:26):
including factor eight and factor four since the seventies, and
by then Arkansas was a huge part of the US
blood economy, and the odds that blood from Cummen's Prison
made it into his body are about one hundred percent, right,
just given the way things worked at that time. His
brother also suffered from hemophelia, and his brother, Stephen long Staff,
would be infected in nineteen eighty six and became one
(04:47):
of the first people to die of AIDS in the UK.
Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just
that the long Staffs weren't just dealing with the fact
that two of you know, both of their sons had
gotten sick and you know, in eighty six one of
them died. But it meant that they also became the
targets of mob panic. Per The Guardian, during Stephen's final
days in hospital, the windows had to be blacked out
(05:09):
to prevent people taking pictures. On the day of the funeral,
the family house was daubed with paint which read aids
get out of here. It was devastating to the family,
his mother said. Pete himself recalled being rescued from his
house by his GP and the police because there was
a mob outside trying to get him because he had HIV.
So when we talk about how many people are getting sick,
(05:30):
it's not just that they're getting a deadly or potentially
deadly disease that changes or in their life. It's also
they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is
where the culture is at the time, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
The secondary infection, right of outbreak, Yeah, of dickishness. Yeah.
So we could say then, yeah, we could say then
that not only is this family being targeted unfairly through
some ground swell of mob rule, but they're being targeted
(06:03):
at one of the worst possible moments of their lives.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I remember when I was in school in like the nineties,
we had like school lectures about how like, yeah, there
was a kid with HIV. I think because you'd gotten
it through a blood donation and you could still use
the water fountain that he used, it wasn't a danger
to you, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Which might sound silly to us, it.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Sounds wild now, But no, we that I remember this. Yeah,
you were there, Yeah, just like.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
You were there at the JFK assassination.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
We will you know, I know who was there, and
I know that he is currently, you know, a well
regarded US politician, But Bernard Montgomery Sanders has a lot
of unanswered questions about it. That's all ways, that's all
we need to say. That's all we need to say.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
All right, we're keeping it there, Bernie, come find us
buy some catalytic characters.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. So HMA ultimately settled with the FDA of the
blood recall that resulted from this. Their share of the
liability was about a quarter of a million dollars. Now,
we don't know how much money HMA was making off
of this program, in part because they weren't really required
to like let people like some of the regulations about
this are like, you don't really need to say in
the sense that most companies do, but at least a
(07:14):
couple of million dollars a year is probably a fair
guest based on how like what the company that takes
over for them is going to make Now. The state
police investigation largely cleared the department of any serious wrongdoing
in their plasma problem. HMA was eventually given the go
ahead to continue operating it with new safeguards in place. Thankfully,
(07:36):
the growing panic over HIV and the news of what
had happened to the long staffs in the UK prompted
some re examination and even though they were allowed to
continue in like eighty four or eighty five doing this
this plasma do Nation program, in the summer of nineteen
eighty six, a hero emerged and unfortunately in this case,
the hero is an insurance company, but like HMA's insurance company,
(07:58):
after they after they looked into the evidence, was like, oh,
absolutely not, no, you people are going to get us fucked,
Like you're so reckless, we're dropping your asses right. This
meant that the Arkansaw prison plasma donation program was again
forced to shut down, and this is going to lead
to some of the most i mean, less irresponsible actions
(08:24):
than we've had so far. So one of the things
that happens once HMA gets shut down by their insurer,
the prison board, in which the guy we heard from
last episode, Clinton Aide Bobby Roberts, is a member of
the board. They actually they're like, they they met, come
to the conclusion that, like that state police investigation might
have been shit, and they hire an outside organization to
do a better version of the internal investigation into what
(08:46):
had happened. Now, the group they picked was the Institute
for Law and Policy Planning from Berkeley, California, which is
a lot better than having the state police do it.
But the subject of the investigation wasn't the plasma donation
program itself. It was just the behavior of HMA. So
part of what they're doing here is good that we
get this info, but part of what they're doing is like, well,
(09:06):
we don't want to be like shitting on the prison system.
We want to make this company, who we already can't
work with anymore, into a scapegoat.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So they scoped in and you flatterized the WOU.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Right exactly, Yes, yeah, and this is how the paper concludes.
HMA originally may have diverted the Department of Correction payments
to support acquiring plasma centers or to other purposes that
may well warrant further inquiry. In any event, it was
early in the five year contract period that HMA established
a pattern of contract shortfalls and the ADC accepted them
(09:40):
for HMA. This must all be viewed as profit motivated
business decision making it best. At worst, it calls for
further inquiry. So just like so many crimes are going
on here. Yeah, now, even though it has concluded this again,
it's just blaming HMA. So the people running the prison
system still want to make money off of blood. So
(10:03):
the Arkansas Apartment of Corrections makes a deal with a
new company, Pine Bluff Biological Products, a for profit business
and obviously one that's not going to continue the same problems.
These guys are finally going to be ethical, up.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Up and up, someone doing blood money the right way.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yes, you know, exactly ethical, just like the ethical blood
diamonds that I wear in my my all diamond chaffon.
I don't know what a chaffon is, yeah, but you know.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yours is diamond encrusted. That's the important part of the story.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yes, and they're not blood diamonds, they're blood plasma diamonds,
which is much more ethical.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Think about it. That's why I made my money off
of platelet emerald mind.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Exactly exactly plate Let's make the best emeralds. I assume
so Roberts, Bobby Roberts would later allege of pine Bluff
Biological Products getting the new blood contract. Quote, I think
it was an insider pine Bluff deal. There were those
were companies set up specifically for doing business with the ADC. Basically,
people who were running the Department of Corrections went to
(11:10):
rich you know, entrepreneur friends of theirs and are like,
here's what you need to do to set up a
company to like make this work. Right now, I know
what you're asking now, how much money was in this
business for the prison system?
Speaker 2 (11:23):
And the answer, wait, wait, let me do it, hey, Robert,
how much money was in this for the prison system?
Speaker 1 (11:30):
The answer is less than you'd think. Here's the Arkansas Times.
According to Robert's records, PBBP reported collecting an average of
nine hundred and sixty units of plasma a week in
fiscal year nineteen eighty six calculated a conserving selling rate
of fifty dollars a unit. That volume of plasma grows
to proximately two point five million that year. According to
pbbp's contract, the ADC was to receive five dollars for
(11:53):
every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers
looked in a year when the media and income in
Arkansas was half of what it is today and when
the scury contaminated blood products was being felt around the world.
Of PBBPS two point five million in annual gross sales,
three hundred and fifty thousand went to pay inmates their
seven dollars a unit fees. The State of Arkansas collected
two hundred and forty nine thousand, six hundred dollars for
(12:14):
prison operations, and PBBP had gross revenues of almost one
point nine million. Now that sounds weirdly small for those
First off, this is not all the money that's coming
in through the program. But second, what's happening here is
the state and the prisons are getting, you know, a
little bit of this money, and most of that prisoner
money is also going back into the Department of Corrections
(12:36):
because they're using it to buy things from the prisons.
Most of the money is going to PBBP. And again,
this is a company that has been set up specifically
to interface with the Department of Corrections, generally by people
who had relationships with people in Arkansas government who were
responsible for making these calls. So they basically created a
free company to siphon off money from the prisons. Right,
(12:59):
That's kind of what's happened here.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, that's the question I think all of us hearing
this or are going to be asking naturally, is this
a cutout? Is this like a proxy to move or
sluice some money through.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That There's that's kind of that's an element of what
is going on. And there's also serious debates as to
these numbers. This is what the Arkansas Times suggests. There's
a Sophia Chase where for the William and Mary Business
Law Review that the value of a unit of blood
to the prison was about one hundred bucks and the
prison kept half of that as opposed to like five
dollars per unit, So they may have it may have
(13:34):
been a lot more going into the system. The fact
that the money on this is so unclear in its
precise details. As one of the things that's shady. Yeah, death. Now,
even if let's say it's about two million dollars that
PBBP is grossing, now that's gross, not yet net. But
they effectively have almost no costs because they don't build
(13:57):
their own facilities. They are using a plasma Faresis center
built into Cummins Prison for free. That's part of the contract.
The Department of Corrections handles all utilities and all janitorial work,
and it's also guards who are working reaching out to
prisoners to get them to sign onto the program and
busting them to Cummins. And it's still a lot of
inmates doing the work. So really PBBP is just skimming
(14:20):
two million dollars out of this program and handing it
to some people who have connections to folks who are
close to the ADC. Right, so, as far as I
can tell, all pp PBBP the company did was sell
blood without checking to make sure it was safe and
pocketed the money on paper. They were supposed to assume
(14:40):
liability for all plasma products produced through this and ensure
they provided staff to handle the draw and that those
staff were licensed professionals who would check the product. But
the ADEC also kept giving them inmates to do blood
draws and other work that, by the text of the contract,
professional PBBP employees ought only to have been doing. Roberts
described the PBBP looking at the inmates as quote, sort
(15:03):
of as little cows right here the subscription A lot
that they're like, this is these are yeah, these are
animals that we are mining for the products of their body. Now,
by nineteen eighty six, when PBBP starts, we are four
years past the point where the US has essentially soft
banned the use of domestic inmate blood. However, it continues
(15:26):
to be used for export products. Cutter Laboratories, which is
one of the companies involved in the nuts and bolts
parts of turning whole blood into like blood products, publishes
an internal memo around this time that highlights the attitude
many in the industry had to the idea of excluding
prison plasma donations. There are no data to support the
emotional arguments that prison plasma collected from adequately screened prisoners
(15:49):
is bad. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our
coagulation product would only be a soop or a gratuity
to the gay rights movement, and would presage further pressure
to exclude plays asma collected from the Mexican border and
the paid donor.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
To suit one more time.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Yeah, yeah, to exclude such plasma from manufacture of our
coagulation product would only be a sopper gratuity to the
gay rights movement and would presage further pressure to exclude
plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, Well, someone make.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Less money if we have to use blood that isn't
taken coercively by people who have an incentive to lie
about whether or not they're sick. And again, when I
talk about there being a lot more money, like what
PBP is making is the initial money for selling this plasma, right,
and both the plasma and the whole blood that's coming
(16:45):
in through these donation programs are worth a shitload more
once you spin them out into the different blood factors. Right,
So this there's a whole higher level of profit that
these companies like Cutter are making. Right. Likewise, you know,
the US has said we're not using this stuff domestically
for medicine, and like it was, our foreign friends in
(17:05):
the UK and Canada don't allow blood from prison inmates
to be used in medicine, but a system had been
devised to ensure plausible deniability. The blood that came out
of Cummins and other donor programs in the US was
sold to Continental Pharmachrino in Montreal, and this major blood
broker resells the whole blood in plasma all around the world.
(17:25):
And it also sells to a Toronto based company, Connet Laboratories,
who effectively played the role of blood launderer and sent
this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. The laundering
process was so effective that, as Sophia Chase writes, and
at least one case, the blood was sent back to
the United States. So we are also using tainted blood
in the US from inmates, even though we're not supposed
(17:47):
to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then
sold back to US sometimes like.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, excuse me, excuse me, waiter, send this blood back.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yes, send this one, but back across the border to
our good friends.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Also, blood launderer as a job.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
This is blood laundering.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, we're in the wrong business. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Also there's so much money laundering blood. Oh man, do
you ever think about that? Mm hmm, I do. I
do you know I have a shitlttle blood in my house.
I keep People always say that, Yeah, I keep it
in my basement. I don't know if it needs to
be refrigerated, but you know, make me an offer, folks,
if you need a shit little blood, I got it.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Cool Store is cool blood stored. It's a dark place.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Cool Cool Zone is getting into the blood business. So
you're legally not allowed to ask me where it came from.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, it's illegal for you guys to ask Robert that.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
It's important. It's so important we can't know.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, it's also important to realize that the fewer questions
you ask, the bigger of a price break you get.
That's right, and that seems to be an unfortunate truth
as this. We could even call it a sort of
blood economy. Yeah, begins to arise.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
That's right. That's right. And speaking of the economy, I
don't know if our sponsors sell blood, but they sell
other stuff. So go buy it and then give me
your blood. We're back. So even under PBBP, this new company,
the same problems persisted. Prisoners continue to be involved in
(19:25):
running the plasma program. They regularly overbleed each other because
it means more money for them, and neither the prison
system nor the company has a financial interest in stopping
that records are regularly falsified and destroyed. Earlier in these episodes,
we quoted from Clinton friend and prison board member Bobby
Bobby Roberts. He's been something of a whistleblower about the program,
(19:45):
but just to an extent. When the FDA published a
study alleging that prison plasma was likelier to be tainted
with blood than plasma donated elsewhere, Roberts told reporters from
the Arkansas Times this, I deny the premise. I disagree
that prison plasma blood was more dangerous than what was
coming out of the for profit centers. In the free
world out there, anybody could bleed anybody, and like, but
(20:08):
the problem isn't everyone has blood. The problem is that
it's not being checked. And there's a lot of incentives
to lie when you're sick, when you have no other
way of making money because you're in prison.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Right, Like, Also, you can't just say I disagree with
the premise.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, it's like the FDA. You're not You're Bobby Roberts,
for one thing. Your name's Bobby Roberts. I I ultimate immediately,
I'm less likely to take you seriously about medical science.
Both of your names are the same.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I just I love the idea bob Rob of Bob
Rob a hot tag base. Yeah, on something where you know,
like this guy might get arrested with a bunch of
guns with the serial numbers filed off, and they're like, hey,
we got you with a bunch of guns, you know,
in your Honda Civic and he's like, officer, I disagree
(20:57):
with the press, disagree.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
With the premise. Yeah. That article continues to summarize Roberts's argument.
Roberts basis is confidence in the state's plasma program, on
the fact that, unlike downtown plasma centers, the ADC had
medical records on every inmate who participated. It knew who
was safe to bleed, he says, and who wasn't.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
And we can we take a second to also, come on, man,
the use of.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
The word bleed like this, Yes, yeah, it was just
so safe to bleed, right to bleed? Yes, yeah. And
he's rights as records good and it often knows when
people have blood born illnesses. The issue is that they
don't care. Per the paper written by Sophie chase. Multiple
witnesses to the events claimed that the Plasma center accepted
(21:45):
some donations from prisoners known to fail the required qualifications.
A previous inmate, Lewis Sorels, described the conditions at the prison.
You had prisoners bribing prisoners, prisoners bribing officials, officials offering
certain deals for them to bleed for extra money or drugs.
Sorels himself passed away from hepatitis CEE shortly after the interview.
He became infected with this disease during his time at
(22:07):
Cummen's Prison, and because of the previous scandals under hm May,
there are more outside investigations into the plasma program after
this point. A few years after PBBP takes over, an
FDA inspector reports them for poor screening procedures and record keeping.
The prison officials who managed the program for PBBP were
(22:29):
also accused of using prison guards to recruit inmates. Despite this,
in an interview with a local reporter, prison medical director
John Bias, who is like you know, like the medical
director of the prison right, said this, we planned to
stick with the plasma program to the last day, to
the last drop we're able to sell. Wow, Okay, Well,
(22:52):
why given all of the bad stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Why it sounds like it sounds like one of those
things where the public wider audience is somehow different from
the specific audience this guy is speaking to. Yeah, maybe
he might be given some guarantees.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, yeah, folks. Now, in nineteen ninety one, a company
from New York takes the contract from PBVP and they
continue to mind prisoners for blood plasma until nineteen ninety four.
By this point, not only was the HIV crisis more
fully understood, but the consequences of all those years of
tainted blood getting shotgunned out onto the world market had
become undeniable. And this is where we get to the
(23:35):
body count. Best as we can tell, more than a
thousand Canadian hemophiliacs were dosed with tainted blood from Cummins
prison alone. During this timeframe, forty two thousand Canadians were
infected with hepatitis C and thousands more with HIV through
tainted plasma, often including plasma imported from Cummins. Current estimates
(23:57):
expect about seven thousand totals of Canadian citizens from contaminated
blood sold by the US during this period about two
nine to elevens A little more and to be.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Clear, these are all for everyone listening. These are all
innocent people.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yes, are easily preventable deaths too, Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Easily preventable deaths. Also, this is medicine that they need.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
To Yes, yes, yes, And the shock woods in Canada,
Canada takes substantial action here, right, the Canadian Red Cross
has to declare bankruptcy and is no longer allowed to
collect blood. As a result of the fallout of this,
the Canadian government launched a commission in nineteen ninety five
to trace the blood that had poisoned so many of
their citizens, which is how we first learned that Canada's
(24:41):
blood supply had been tainted by blood from sick us
prison inmates. Right. They trace a lot of it back
to Cumments Connaught Laboratories, which is the Canadian company that's
like making the blood product. Was obviously proven negligent in
all this, largely because they had avoided checking any of
the plasma collection sites themselves and had relied on FDA records,
which were also deficient. Subsequent investigations showed that it's a
(25:04):
little bit like if you've heard the story of like
the Rust shooting, right, where like the first ad assistant
director was supposed to check the gun to see if
it was empty. Alongside the armor was also supposed to
check the gun to see if it was empty, and
the first ad didn't really do a check because he
assumed the armorer had done it right and the armor
had not done it. It's like that, right, like Connaught was,
(25:26):
just like the FDA's probably got it. We don't need
to spend any money checking, and like they really did,
the FDA didn't have it.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Subsequent investigations showed that Arkansas prison blood was a significant
contributor to Canada's hepse and HIV crisis in this period,
and that both US blood brokers and the FDA failed
to inform Canadian companies where the blood they were buying
had come from, and that much of it was being
sent from facilities which had already been linked to tainted
blood sales. There have been attempts at lawsuits over this,
(25:56):
but the difficulties of carrying out such a suit cross
border and mostly style me the efforts of Canadian humophiliacs
to get justice. As I discussed earlier, a good deal
of the tainted blood from the US also went to
Great Britain, where it helped cause what Lord Robert Winston
described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of
the NHS. Oh, all thanks to our American our American friends.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah good, the worst, the young upstarts. Yeah yeah, oh,
our shitty cousins. Yet the bag once again.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah. From that article by Sophia Chase, most of the
victims believe the blood and clotting factors they were using
came from British donors. The possibility that the blood might
have been imported did not even occur to them, much
less the prospect that it might not meet British health standards.
The disaster left four six hundred and seventy British hymophiliacs
infected with hepatitis C, and twelve hundred and forty three
(26:52):
of those were also infected with HIV. About two thousand
have died at this point right also, many of them
spread diseases to partners and children. Will never fully have
an understanding of the exact cons but at least two
thousand dead. And again there were, like, you know, investigations
into this as well. Quote it ultimately determined that a
a significant burden of responsibility for tainted blood provided at
(27:14):
British hemotheliacs rests on American suppliers of factor eight concentrate. Now,
due to the way things were done at the time,
it was not possible to determine how many of those
deaths were directly linked to Commons prison. Again, there have
been changes in how stuff is reported to try and
make it easier to trace back tainted blood, but that
didn't exist at the time. We know at least three, right,
(27:35):
so we know what was happening. It's got to be
thousands more than that, right, because it's incredibly hard to
actually trace this right, in part because one of the
things they found when they realized how many British people
had gotten HIV and hepatitis and we're dying, they found
that most of the records for blood transactions to import
blood into the UK had been shredded in the early
(27:57):
nineteen nineties. Surely oop, oops, surely nothing shady their.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Right, right? You have you ever found yourself in that situation?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh gosh, see doodles, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Whoops, you just trip with a stack of papers and
fall towards the shredder.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
I'm always shredding medical documents. That's like eighty percent of
my day job is shredding medical documents from the UK.
I don't even know what they're about, you know, they
just sending to me in boxes and I just shred.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That's how you and I got started before this podcasting.
We would just hang out and throw some stuff into
shredders and.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You would always say to each other, that's the future
of media, shredding British medical paperwork.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yeah, yeah, we were entirely wrong, but we had too
much blood.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Back when we had we did have way too much blood. Yeah,
So it may seem baffling that, like there was not
more oversight given the way things work with the NA,
especially at this point worked at the NHS. But blood
export industry in the UK was considered uniquely favored, right,
which means there was exempt from some of the same
(29:08):
oversight because number one, and this is the same in Canada,
not nearly enough British people are Canadians were donating blood,
they just didn't have enough. And the US was considered
the gold standard planet wide for blood distribution because no
one else could gather and disseminate anywhere. Again, seventy percent
of the blood products worldwide coming from the US. No
(29:32):
one else close, So everyone is just like they must
have this shit figured out right. No, but yeah, But
because our system was the largest by far, everyone relied
on it and it became the global standard, and other
national healthcare agencies and companies just sort of assumed that
US regulators had our shit together because the only other
(29:53):
option was to not have enough blood. Now that's the
bulk of this story. But before we close out here,
I should talk about something. So there is apparently an
exceptional documentary made about all this, called Factor eight, The
Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. It is made by Kelly Dudah,
(30:13):
a filmmaker and investigative journalist who won a Peabody Award
in two thousand and three for a Japanese documentary about
the cover up by the government of a HEPC epidemic.
She spent eight years researching and five years filming this movie,
which prompted an international response, and even she gets called
into a criminal trial in Enables for a company accused
of selling tainted blood products to Italian citizens. It's supposed
(30:33):
to be excellent. I haven't seen it, and I wanted to.
It is not available anywhere online that I can find.
When you look on like reddits and stuff, it will
be all it's always blamed on the Clintons, right that
they stop this documentary from getting out. I know that
Duda has alleged she received like harassment and stuff while
she was making the documentary that said, when you talk
(30:58):
about like the bad things the Clintons did, this is
especially Bill, an incredibly powerful man who was involved in
a lot of shady stuff. There's also a whole industry
of right wing content dedicated to like lying about shit,
including like the Clinton murder list and stuff. It's just nonsense, right,
So it's difficult to parse a lot of stuff out now.
There is no doubting that Bill Clinton deserves a massive
(31:20):
degree of blame for the Arkansas blood scandal because he
was the governor and because he put people who were
close to him directly in positions to manage the program.
No argument period that he does not deserve a meaningful
amount of blame for this, right, But a lot of
these other allegations, right, like the fact that are the
Clintons locking down access? Have they used their influence? It's like,
(31:45):
I mean, it's not a powerful people do that with documentaries.
But also a lot of the time I'm doing episodes,
I found out there's a twenty year old documentary about it,
and I can't find that documentary because it's not on streaming.
That just happens with media. So is the likeliest thing
the Clinton's locked, I don't. I have no evidence of that, right,
I've had this happen to a bunch of documentaries over
(32:07):
the years that said I would love to see this documentary.
So if you've got it, hit us up, and I
don't know, someone put it on fucking streaming. Now. The
most credible allegations that I've heard when it comes to, like,
you know, the corruption here, is that money from this
blood program was used to provide positions to people as
(32:30):
political favors where they could profit while doing very little.
And it's certainly true that the state Department of Corrections
doesn't make a ton from the blood program right. However,
other people in and around the state government make an
unknown amount of money acting as Greece around HMA and
then pbbp's wheels here. One example is Leonard Dunn, that
is the law or that is the guy who gets
(32:51):
brought in to run HMA right around the time of
the first blood scandal. He's a banker. A state police
investigator wrote that Dunn had advised him quote he was
host to Governor Clinton as well as a majority of
state politicians presently in office. Mister Dunn explained that he
was very fond of politics. Doune added that he was
the financial portion of the corporation as well as the
political arm. Despite this, he also claimed he never took
(33:14):
an active role in the company on a day to
day basis.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Okay, man, Oh sure, sure, good story, bro.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
But Donn does handle when HMA loses the contract. Briefly,
he is the guy negotiating with the Corrections Board so
that it can keep taking and selling plasma. And since
his company had just paid out to the FDA for
letting tainted blood out of the country, you might imagine
these would be difficult negotiations. But the main result of
these negotiations was that done in order to get the
(33:44):
Corrections Board to agree, agreed to bring in an ombudsman
to act as a compliance coordinator to ensure HMA followed
the rules going forward. This ombudsman was Richard Mays, a
Little Rock judge who had been appointed by Governor Clinton.
His job at HMA was described by the state police
as a bribe, because again, he's not really doing anything.
(34:06):
They're just like, yeah, just give another guy who like
we owe a favor a job and pay him some money.
He doesn't have to do much.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, let's make our let's make an official with our
budd Yeah your alms button.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah right yeah. Now, this specific choice to bring on
Done seems to have been made by the Arkansas Board
of Corrections Chairman Woodson Rocker Walker, who claimed that he
discussed it with Governor Clinton, who was so upset that
he held Walker personally responsible for the next provider chosen,
and Walker and Clinton jointly suggested Mays. Right, That's that's
(34:40):
what Walker claims. You know, obviously he's in trouble here.
So but you know the fact that this guy who
Clinton appoints as a judge becomes gets this bribe job.
I don't think Clinton had nothing to do with that.
The quote from Susie Parker's article hma President Done told
investigators Dune stated that Walker advised him that Mays was black,
a plus an assystem where most of the inmates are black,
(35:01):
had good qualifications, and was an outstanding attorney. According to
investigators notes.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
I like the order of operations, yes, with those commendations, Yeah,
like yes, oh, and third he's he's a good lawyer. Yeah, yeah,
he's all right at that one.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
But first, yeah, obviously I have I'm not saying he's
not a good attorney, but he doesn't have qualications qualifications
to monitor a blood plasma donation program. Yeah. Like, that's
like saying, you know, this guy's a great helicopter pilot,
let's put him in charge of making sure all the
hearts we get put in people are working. It's like,
(35:36):
you don't know how to do that, Like, yeah, we
didn't have anything. You hadn't seen him on the bird.
Yeah what I mean, Man, the way this guy flies,
he could really pick out a good kidney.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
You can just it's something in the eyes. Yeah, it's
a vibe.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Simply not the same job. There are other allegations of
kickbacks and bribery at high levels in the system. Mike
Gouster was a medical practitioner who worked in Cummins Prisoner
the height of the HMA days, and he later wrote
a fictionalized novel about his experiences and claimed that he
had to leave the company after an HMA associate demanded
he gives some of his earnings to him in order
(36:11):
to keep his job. Quote the way Arkansas works is
that once you are working within the system, the people
in charge make it clear that it is a privilege
to have that state contract. Ultimately you are expected to
pay for that privilege. This, I know guster continues without
the governor's support and protection, this disease riddled system would
have been shut down by nineteen eighty two. And again,
Clinton doesn't make the system this way, but he is
(36:32):
a guy who continues to work within a system in
order to get the stuff done that he wants to
get done right, And the fact that that system existed
before and after him does not exempt him from responsibility
for participating it.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Nor exonerate to not quite honest, you know, and I
love the point that we're bringing up here about how
easy it is to heap a probrium on someone that
you already don't care for, disagree with. But just like,
just like this soul crushing thing where someone you hate
(37:05):
makes a really good point objectively, you also have to
have that moment where even someone you might like does
really just unclean evil shit for a federal judge to
say there are evil people involved.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yes, And it's this the issue of both like it's
it is important to hold Clinton's that. I mean, he didn't,
No one held his feat, but it would have been
important for them to have done this. As a result
of this, It's also important for it not to be
what a lot of people try to make it, where
it's like, well, this is purely a Clinton scandal. Now,
I mean, this is like an Arkansas scandal. It's like
(37:41):
a blood industry scandal. This is a lot of very
important and if you're if you're picking out one of
the threads involved in this scandal, then you're ignoring all
of the other ones, and you're like it becomes clear, Okay,
well you hate Governor Clinton, But like if if a
governor you didn't hate had been doing all of the
same things, wouldn't given a shit, you know, like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
You would have been like you know, people like blood.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, these are systemic issues, and we both need to
blame and punish individual people responsible for them and understand
how the systemic part plays into it so that we
don't just put like, well, no, I like this governor,
so I'm just not going to pay attention to what's
being done in the Arkansas prisons anymore.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
You know, maybe the problem is monetizing everything.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, maybe the problem is monetizing everything. Like those early
reports said, if you make blood donation be entirely driven
by money, there's a lot of issues you have to
deal with there. The other issue is like, well, then
how do we get all the blood we need? Because
like we don't have enough, there's never enough. How do
we get the blood we need?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Yeah, it's an organ surplus.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Right, and so there's a degree to which, like, as
much as we're critiquing parts of this, there are certain
things I know that we shouldn't have been doing, like
running a blood program the way they did it come
its prison. But when it comes to like how do
we get enough blood? Well, nobody's figured that out yet.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Nobody's figured that out except for except for Robert Evans,
creator behind the Bastards. Several jars of we'll call it
gender used.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Used blint invented blood, maybe a little bit of Lamb's
blood in there. I might have thinned it out with
some coconut milk. You're good, you're good.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Take it, you're good. No refunds. Also contains x amount
of ethanol.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Now you know who else doesn't give refunds?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Who's that?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
The sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
That we're hoping to keep Roberts.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Maybe they give refunds. I don't know. I never checked.
We're back, so a good deal of the information in
this article comes from a nineteen ninety eight piece published
by Arkansas investigative journalist Susie Parker. She also published an
article on the Whitewater scandal for The New York Times,
(39:52):
which was a big scandal for the Clintons while he
was in office. That is incredibly boring today because political
scandals have gotten so much worse, Like it's so quaint
that like, oh man, remember when people were upset about
these like shady business dealings. The president might be tied
to good lord, we have.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Made a couple hundred thousand dollars illegally. Yeah, so let's
rebuild those guillotines.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Anyway, the president said, he's a king. It's just things
are a lot where I'm not saying Whitewater was okay,
I'm just saying, like, things are so much worse now.
Susie has worked for a number of publications, and she
has a particular fixation on Arkansas politics and the Clintons. Today,
she runs a local independent publication called The reckoning and
she is quite conservative, right, she is a right wing
(40:41):
at least simply more sympathetic to that. I think she
does portray Clinton's involvement as like more direct and puppet
mastery than it was. I think this was something Clinton
acceded to both because he gained some benefit from, like
you know, giving some of these positions to people close
to him, and because not messing with this allowed him
to do like a politics was a trade for him,
(41:01):
right Whereas like the other people running the Board of
Corrections and running these these were the people who were
like directly setting up the system like this. Again, I
think Clinton knew quite a bit of how bad this
was and made some choices here, but he's not the
puppet master right now. One of the issues here comes
(41:22):
that alongside some strong connections which again don't imply that
Clinton operated this program, but do in clay that he
deserves quite a lot of blame.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Or there's also at least willfully ignorant.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yes, there's also some species allegations. For example, Galster that
former doctor claims that Vince Foster was hired to squash
the state investigation. Now, this was true, and Vince Foster
is a very close Clinton associated. If this is true,
that investigation happened and in fact described some of what
was going on as bribery. And then there's an independent
(41:54):
review ordered by the prison board which had Clinton allies
on it. So I don't know. I don't know how
much I believe that this is like a big deal.
But the reason this is seen as a smoking gun
right by some people, is that in July of nineteen
ninety three, after Governor Clinton became President Clinton, Vince Foster
shot himself to death in Washington, d C. Foster had
discussed his depression with his sister over some time, and
(42:15):
he was at that moment in a lot of trouble
over a totally different controversy with the White House Travel Office.
And there's no evidence of anything here other than that
Vince was a serial political operator who was involved in
some shady shit and got disgraced, and who killed himself
because he didn't want to live with the after effects, right.
And you know that also the shit he was in,
(42:37):
to the extent that it was shady, is very common
among people who are Arkansas politicos, right. But Vince's death
has become a cornerstone of some of the more unhinged
parts of the anti Clinton movement here allegations that like
he was either murdered by the Clintons or that he
killed himself because of the blood scandal, right, the Clinton's
had him shot in order to cover this blood scandal up.
(42:58):
And again it wasn't covered up. There's a documentary on it.
People didn't care enough, but it wasn't you know, it
got out. And the reality is that the blood scandal
didn't have an impact on Bill and Hillary's lives or
political careers, not in a real massive way. And I can,
in fact believe that people as connected as they are,
you know, have contacts in the entertainment industry. But I
(43:19):
also I just don't see the evidence that this destroyed
them or that this wasn't that dangerous to them. In fact,
in nineteen ninety two, Peter Longstaff, who tested positive for HIV.
Back in nineteen ninety five after receiving blood from US donors,
tested positive for hepatitis C. And this was the same
year that Clinton ran for presidential election. The Arkansas Times
(43:42):
writs quote his former chief of staff, Betsy Wright, sent
a memo titled prison Positives. That memo mentioned four points,
including education into prison by Bill Clinton. But the first
point right listed was run cheapest system in the country,
And so you kind of get even in ninety two,
you know, the thing that, like the scandal here is
(44:02):
not on their front burner. Their front burner still for
him in ninety two, after it's very clear how bad
a lot of this is was like the prison justin
was cheap. Let's throw that in a bullet point list.
You know, you know, it's a thing to run on.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Right, keeping costs down, keeping costs down. It is the idea.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, fairly normal evil, fairly normal politics evil as opposed
to like incredibly shady conspiracy evil. That's my opinion on
the matter.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Well, I hear you there too, because there's there's this
devilishly tempting draw right to find a political force you
disagree with or you already don't care for, and then
assign them super villainous agency where you know the result is,
(44:57):
without being too godtroversial, the result is you ultimately have
to ask yourself, is there any such thing as a
completely clean potus? Right?
Speaker 1 (45:07):
And what do we need to play that game?
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, Well, and also just like perhaps if we keep
if the focus of all of these problems is like
this is I could use this huge systemic issue that
a lot of people deserve to go down for to
attack this one guy. That's all I'm really interested in.
I'm not interested in better treatment for prisoners. I'm not
interested in a safer blood treatment system. Right and likewise,
(45:34):
if you're you know, and to the same extent that,
like Bill's only interest in what happened in the prison
system during his time was I need a bullet point
of things that I can run on, right, and like, yeah,
I put some educational programs in system. Was the cheapest
you know that it's ever been. Bada bing bada boom.
I'm done thinking about the prisons and the state I run,
you know, Like all of these are parts of the
(45:55):
the why all of this kind of shit will keep happening.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yes, and that is I think one of our Look,
I know it's your show, but I think that's one
of the key takeaways. Is it is it is tempting
again to look at the headline to put a face
on a problem. Right now, I'm mad insert individual here.
The real problems are systemic and have always been and
(46:20):
shall always be slow be so, and with that, I
gotta tell you. It's a question that's been on my
mind for both of these episodes. Robert, do you want
to do you want to like buy some blood?
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yes? Oh my god, yes, do you I gotta. I
want to make sure. Will I have any idea where
the blood comes from or what is in it?
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Even better, Broke, you're not buying it. We do a
subscription service.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Oh shit, awesome.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
You know you're well. We say leasing.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah, yeah, I'll lease the blood. I'll give some back.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah, yeah, you know, we.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Gotta have blood. Leasing has to be on the organ. Lease.
I mean, we're all going to be doing our best
for the next several decades to like recreate some of
like the silliest movies from the nineteen nineties. I think
Repo Man's next.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. You have to You
have to come back on stuff they want you or
you've never been on that one. Come back on ridiculous
history while we can still call it history, right.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Feel like the Rent of Blood is just like a
sequel to Jordan Peele's Get Out.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Yeah, oh yeah, Jordan got us again. Yeah, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Anyway, rent some Blood. Have fun. I don't know why
I ended on that mark. Well, what do you? I
mean you kind of a yeah, you can do it.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Some plugs please, oh oh sure. Other than rent of Blood,
which is clearly our main focus for both of these episodes,
please check out stuff they'll want you to know which
applies critical thinking to allegations of conspiracy. Please check out
Ridiculous History, where you can hear our own friend, Robert
Evans Robert Pause Evans like that. Just check it. The
(48:15):
social security number on the on the show a couple
of times. Most importantly, most importantly, I think you guys
plug something. I'm just throwing the ball over the court here,
just doing like a halftime go for it, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, half court. Find the documentary Factor eight so I
can watch it. That's what I'm gonna plug. Somebody's got
to have it out there.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Shout out to Kelly Duda by the way for standing
tull in Italian court. That's a true story.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Good work anyway. That's the episode.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media
from or 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. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
(49:17):
at Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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