January 23, 2026 • 60 mins
Have you heard of the California Timber Wars? In tonight's interview, returning guest Toby Ball, the creator of Rip Current, joins the guys to explore the 1990 pipe bomb attack on radical environmental activist Judi Bari. It's a deep, strange tale involving powerful corporations, grassroots activists, allegations of terrorism, COINTELPRO and more. Tune in to learn more about Rip Current… and why this bombing remains officially unsolved in the modern day.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realists, we have something special
for you tonight. It is a strange, deep, disturbing dare
I say, shaman Alan esque Cohen hell pro esque tale
that may not be familiar to everyone in the audience.
(01:02):
The California Timber Wars.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Have you heard of it? Maybe? Maybe not.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, activists hoped to
end overcutting of redwoods throughout well Redwood's in particular, timber
in general, throughout parts of California, and there was a
particular organization involved in this called Earth First with an
exclamation point. They took direct actions. One of the leaders
(01:29):
of these efforts was an activist named Judy Barry who Well,
we'll get to it in a second. It's a deep
and crucial story that is yet to be told in full. Luckily, gentlemen, friends, neighbors, countrymen,
we are not diving in alone. We are joined by
get this, guys, none other than the legendary investigator, writer, podcaster,
(01:52):
and creator of multiple shows that we're big fans of,
our returning pal, the mythical, the legendary, the one and only,
Toby Ball.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Toby. Come on, man, thank you for showing up. Hey,
thank you. It's nice to see you, guys.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Guys behind the curtain. He's been there the whole time.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
It's crazy.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
Definitely a unicorn of a human. We've talked to Toby
about other series that he's done, including Strange, Rivals and Today.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
And Rendallshim Forrest two seasons, Rivals First Seas check them
out right now.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yes, yeah, this is.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
RIP Current season two and Toby I was I was
looking into this because I'm a fan of tangential, non
relevant research.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I think as we all.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
Are, big part of what we do here.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Yes, and one of the things that I noted, I said, Hey,
our pal mister b is coming on to the show.
For the third time. Saturday Night Live rules say that
if you make it to the fifth appearance, we have
to get you like a special jacket and throw a party.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
I want a special jacket. I've been on five episodes.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well that's motivation to the other two going there you go,
it's gonna happen.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Maybe we'll all get matching jackets. That would be cool.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
That'd be cool, especially if we roll as a group
in our jackets that do a heist.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
You know, walk away from an explosion and slash into Oh.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
There we go, and that's apropos. That's what we call foreshadowy.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Toby, can you.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Set the stage for us with a little bit of
an origin story? We throughout the phrase timber Wars? What
were the timber Wars? What about this led you to
rip current season two?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
So I even before the timber Wars and I was
actually Matt was in on this conversation at one point.
I wanted to do something sort of about environmental activism.
You know, in this period where you know the consequences
of global warming are quite clear, but there doesn't seem
(04:04):
to be this kind of hair on fire reaction to it,
Like you don't see eco sabotage trying to you know,
sabotage pipelines or other things that might slow down fossil
fuel use and things like that. So I'd spent some
time kind of researching, trying to find what would be
(04:26):
sort of a compelling story. There's other things. There was
the Green Peace boat that was sunk by the French
intelligence services, a couple of others. But I ended up
coming across the Timber Wars, and part of you know,
the rip current. The idea behind rip Current is to
look at a crime that occurs in sort of a
(04:47):
complicated social and political setting. And in this case, I
sort of vaguely remembered this because this happened in nineteen ninety,
which is like right after I got out of college.
I remember reading about it. But Judy Barry, who was
this organizer for Earth Verst, a leader uh and her
(05:08):
you know, former lover and like long times her partner
and activism, this guy Darryl Churney, were driving in a
car in Oakland and a pipe bomb went off in
it and it should have killed them both, but it
slightly malfunctioned. Judy was grievously injured. She only lived seven
more years. She died of breast cancer, but she was
(05:31):
in pain for the rest of her life. Uh, you know,
I believe had to walk aided with a cane, you know,
really just physically messed up. And then Darryl got away with,
you know, some some fairly light wounds. But it originally
came to the press and the FBI and the in
(05:52):
the Oakland police kind of put it out there as oh,
they were carrying these explosives and they and they detonated
in the car by accident, so theyre going to probably
actually do some terroristic action, but the explosive blew up
in the car, So that was kind of the central
sort of crime that could kind of focus these other
(06:15):
things that were going on. Do you want me to
go back a little bit to talk about Yea, the
timber wars themselves. Yeah, so the Redwoods used to be
this vast forest right in California, and so if you
go to sort of pre European contact seventeen hundreds, I mean,
it's huge and from basically the first time Europeans made
(06:40):
it to that area of California, they're like these these
are incredible trees. You know, you can't quite get a
sense of it from looking at pictures, but they're you know,
two hundred and fifty three hundred feet high. There's no
branches below. All the branches are very high where they
can get the sun. So this is very good wood.
It's not naughty. It's got these other properties as well.
(07:01):
They keep it from rotting and resistant from fire. So
over the course of you know, two centuries, with various means,
from two guys using a saw for a few days
to cut down one to all these technological advances, when
you get to the nineteen eighties, about ninety five percent
(07:21):
of the old growth redwoods are gone, right, and some
of these trees have been around for two thousand years,
so five percent are left. Some of that is in
public hands, so it's in state parks or national parks.
The largest bit of it that's in private hands is
owned by this place called Pacific Lumber, which was a
(07:41):
family owned and operated big lumber operation out of a
place called Scotia, which was a real company town. Like
everything there was owned by Pacific Lumber. So if you
worked there, you lived in a Pacific Lumber house and
all this stuff. So essentially teen eighty five, this guy
named Charles Hurwitz who was. I believe he was a
(08:05):
multi multi, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's
one of the first times people used junk bonds to
buy something. But he saw that Pacific Lumber, which had
been run really responsibly. They used sustainable cutting. They had
a big pension for retirees in their company. Not a
bad company down Yeah, yeah, I mean people people apparently
(08:27):
really liked it.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
They're taking care of their people, yes.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Right, But they went public a little while before that,
so they issued stock and because they were so responsible
and so healthy they were, they were very undervalued, so
that made them sort of prey to these capitalistic forces.
Hurwitz comes in, uses junk bonds to purchase Pacific Lumber,
(08:52):
and it becomes very clear that the only way he's
going to be able to pay off the interest and
make this all work is by clear cutting the Pacific
Lumber forests, which includes this huge area of old growth redwoods,
which there's not much left, right, So.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
So just Toby quickly, Yeah, the Redwood Force at this
point of the takeover by Charles hurwitzon was it maxim
his company, Yeah, yeah, So at that moment, the forest
of redwoods is already down ninety five. At that point
of old growth, there's still you know, there's second.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Growth, third growth, fourth growth, but that you know, these
are not mature trees yet. Okay, so the really old ones,
which are you know, I think in ecological terms, the
most valuable. I mean, it's sort of interesting how you
look at the value of trees, especially if you're a
lumber lumberman, you know, like what you're going to be
(09:52):
able to get out of your acreage on a sort
of year by year basis. So at that point it
becomes clear that this is probably what's going to happen
been and it starts happening, and a couple things, you know,
for timber workers, they're like, you know, this is actually
kind of awesome. You know, we're working all this overtime,
we're getting much more money because we're speeding up the cut.
(10:14):
And then you have environmentalists who are like, well, this
is you know, this is going to be the end
of a significant proportion of these old growth redwoods, which
are you know, I mean, they're like sort of quote
unquote a renewable resource because you can grow new redwoods,
but you're not going to get the same thing for
fifteen hundred years, you know, I mean, these these trees
(10:36):
have been around. You know. That was one of the
ads or pamphlets or something was like some of these
trees have been around since Christ walked the earth. Right. Yeah,
so Earth First, which is sort of, you know, on
the radical side of the environmentalists. I mean, they sort
of define the furthest radical edge at that point. You know,
(10:58):
they said, we're gon, we're going to try right and
stop this, slow it down. And that's kind of direct
led to the timber Wars. Yeah, it was. So, you know,
as with everything in this I could go on for
about twenty minutes about it, but direct action, you do, well,
it's definitely part of it. So that made you U
define that. Yeah. Yeah. So that so what direct action
(11:20):
really means is instead of just you know, protesting or
lobbying in the halls of Congress or you know, sending
stuff out to your membership, it means like blockading roads. Uh,
it means tearing up, uh, surveying spikes that they use.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
Potentially it being sabotaging equipment.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah, sabotage equipment, putting sand in gas. There's a hole.
One of the founders of Earth First, this guy Dave
Foreman published a book called Ecotage, which was all these
different ways in which you can do uh economic sabotage,
which and I go into this fair amount in the
(12:00):
in the podcast. The most controversial of all these is
tree spiking. And what tree spiking is well, start off
as and it evolved a little bit, but you basically
take a big nail and you bang it into a tree.
And that so people when they're using saws, it just
shatters the saw and it can be very dangerous. It's
(12:23):
to fly and right exactly. But but what Earth First
would do is they would go into like a grove
and this is not northern California, but this is you know, wherever.
They would do this and sometimes they would circle where
they were, uh, sometimes they would identify the grove like that.
The idea wasn't to hurt people. The idea was to
(12:45):
stop them from using their saws on the on this wood.
And you know what's what's funny is that it's not
really funny. But uh, you know, in my research, there's
only one real known incident that I could find. And
this is also like looking at senators and congressmen who've
tried to find more stuff about tree spiking and them
(13:08):
not being able to turn things up either. Was one
guy in a mill in northern California who he was
one of the guys who fed the logs to be cut,
and it hit a spike and the saw basically kind
of exploded and nearly killed him. And then there was
(13:29):
a lot of Initially it was like his earth first,
of his earth first, and it turned out although this
guy was in charge, they're fairly sure it was actually
this kind of curmudgeonly guy who didn't like the fact
that they were sawing down trees that were in his view,
so he did have to try and stop them. So
that's really the only time that there's been like a
(13:50):
real serious injury that results from tree spiking.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, let's just continue on that a little bit. Because
of that one case, as we hear in Rip Curren
season two, was used to what was used as the
argument against tree spiking and what was labeled as eco
terrorism at the time, right because it was so dangerous
because people may die, and he was maimed. It was
(14:14):
a you know, not some small incident that occurred, but
it definitely the argument then seemed to expand out as
though this tree spiking thing had killed many people, or
that was stated publicly even though it wasn't provable.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
All they need is one inciting event to then balloon
into this is you know, the precedents, and then it
gives them kind of talking points to go after a
larger movement.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Right, the timber war has become an information.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
War, right, I mean even recently. I've got a clip
and I'm trying to remember who the congressman was, but
he's from the Pacific Northwest or maybe Idaho. Anyway, he's
talking about they wanted to increase the the criminal penalties
for tree spiking, and so this guy in this mill,
same with George Alexander. So he's kind of given the
(15:05):
speech on the floor and he says and then George
Alexander and this happened to him, and then all these
other people have been killed or maimed or whatever. It's like, well,
can you name like one other person, you know, because
it's always the same guy. It's always George Alexander and
all these other guys. But I think it was Larry Craig,
who used to be a Senator, got in touch with
(15:27):
I don't know if it's a Department of the Interior
or one of the departments that said, can you give
me a list of everybody who's been harmed or killed
by tree spiking? And the only thing he got back
was George Alexander.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
So so it was bupkiss. But it does, I think
show us a little bit more about how the media
was treating this. Right, people loved, people love a convenient
throwaway phrase like eco terrorism, right or now tree spiking?
At this point, could you tell us a little bit
(16:02):
more as we're setting the stage here about how the
local everyday folks in California felt about environmentalism. They're reading
the news. Do they think that Earth First is a
straight up eco terrorism outfit? Do they agree with them?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Like? How is?
Speaker 4 (16:24):
What's the temperature of the room there around the redwoods?
Speaker 3 (16:28):
So that's an interesting question. So at that time, and
I talked to a guy, well, I talked to a
few people who had sort of grown up there, and
they said there was really there's two sort of major
factions in northern California. One was these sort of generational
families of timber workers. The other were these sort of
(16:51):
back to the land hippies who'd moved up there. So
you really had you know, in schools they said, what
do we call It's like the rednecks and the hippies,
you know, those are the two groups. And so you
have these timber families.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
Device of all of this, then, I guess.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, exactly, So you had these timber families who obviously
saw them as a threat and as terrorists.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
And as a threat to their livelihood and their families
legacy or whatever it might be. If this is multi generational,
like they've got skin in the game in that exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And I think there was a sense that Earth First
was sort of questioning the morality or nobility of timber
work in general, so that it kind of felt very
personal to some people, like an attack identity, right right,
It's like what you what your family for generations has
(17:42):
done is sort of immoral by by cutting these you know,
majestic trees. And then that, you know, the hippie families
were more likely to be you know, sympathetic to Earth First.
It's just a very it's a very complicated time, you know.
And this is at a time when timber is sort
of descending importance in the economy and marijuana is ascending
(18:04):
as like a big export crop up there.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Is Humboldt County.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, yeah, it's Humboldy. Yeah, it's weeah yeah, so anonymous, Yeah, exactly, Humboldt.
So yeah. So it was really it was kind of
a mixed a mixed feeling. You know, the timber companies themselves,
you know, sort of try to accentuate the potential for
violence from Earth First, and you know, Earth First had
(18:30):
to take several steps, including publicly renouncing tree spiking, which
was very controversial within Earth First, to try and prove like,
we're not we're not going after you know, the individual
timber worker, like these small timber companies that are contractors
or whatever. We're really going over these corporate people like
Charles Hurwitz, who's this guy from Texas, Like wouldn't be
(18:53):
able to identify or redwood if you you know, if
you pointed him at one and it's just these people,
it's you know, it's craven greed, you know, essentially, especially
in Hurwitz's case, I mean, he's just trying to make
money and all he sees are trees, is like a
monetary asset. And that's so sort of the opposite of
(19:16):
the Earth First idea, which is that we have to
preserve this, this is our natural heritage, right.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
And just it was really there, Toby. Yeah, because the
concept of spiking trees, and we kind of talked about
it already, but the concept of doing that is to
destroy equipment, right, sabotage of equipment, which would cost the
company a lot of money, which would probably cause them
to stop cutting in that area at least temporarily if
not long term.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So it does seem like quite a non violent tactic
until you do have one person that's hurt. But it
just makes so much sense in my mind, at least
to spike trees to break the chains on chainsaws so
that that company cannot continue to function. And ultimately, if
(20:03):
the company is your enemy, as in Earth First case,
it would be really weird for a group who is
you know, who is fighting those companies to say, don't
do that thing. That is very that seems to be
very effective.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Yeah, and I think, you know, I talked to some
Earth First people who, you know, we're really angry about that,
and what what they basically said is it has been nonviolent.
You know, there's only one person you can point to.
That's why we let them know when we do it.
The idea is it's gonna it's just gonna make a
(20:40):
cost more. You know, you're going to have to go
in with like metal detectors and try and find the
spikes in the trees and remove them. It's just it
takes time, it takes manpower. It's there's no easy way
to do it. And then they got the idea of
using ceramic spikes be detected by metal detectors. So it's
(21:02):
really you know, they give the idea was we give
them enough information to not hurt their workers, right Like,
if they're sitting there workers out there with saws in
an area that we've spiked, that's them knowingly putting their
their workers in danger. You're not doing it, We're not
doing it secretly. Now it's the Timber company. Now it's
(21:25):
the evil guys from the Captain Planet episodes who are
at fault for endangering their workers because they had the information.
And this is obviously not a unique perspective. I think
this is something all of us can universally understand the
logic of. However, it seems that things begin to quickly escalate.
(21:47):
Right There's as as you already said, there's a deep division,
there's factionalism in northern California. There is a.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Narrative competition in conversation and the zeitgeist and the media
about who can be considered the bad or the good guys,
and we see we see actions escalate at an increasingly
dangerous pace. Now, we teased it a bit at the top.
(22:25):
We talked a little bit about the tragic bizarre, like
the heartbreaking attack on Judy Barry and her associate. Could
you tell us a little bit more about the I
have so many questions, folks. You're going to have to
listen to rip her At season two in full to
(22:48):
understand the depth of this story. But it's just astonishing
the way the bombing occurs and the way that the
investing negation goes. And then Falters, can you tell us
a little bit about the circumstances of the bombing and
(23:09):
a little bit more about the investigation.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Sure, at the time of the bombing, Earth Verse was
planning this thing called Redwood Summer, and the idea was
they were going to get lots of college students to
come up to the Redwoods to take place and protests,
direct actions just sort of you know, flood the zone
with people and they're sort of basing it on the
(23:33):
Freedom Summer Mississippi. It actually started off being like Mississippi
Summer in the Redwoods, I think. So anyway, the big plans,
and so they were actually down in Oakland to do
sort of a planning meeting with this group called Seeds
of Peace. But there's sort of this timeline, and maybe
it makes sense to stay up front that this pipe
(23:54):
bomb was on a timer. So there was a watch
that could be set back almost to twelve hours, like
eleven hours and fifty nine minutes, and it would go
and it hit a certain place and it would let
loose this ball bearing, and the ball bearing would go
into this little circle where there's all these wires sticking out.
(24:16):
If connected two wires together, that would detonate the bomb.
So there's you know, there's a period of time in
which the bomb could have been placed in the car.
So she has a couple of meetings up in Mendocino County,
She goes down Oakland, has a meeting at this place
Seeds a Piece, and then she goes and stays the
(24:37):
night at this guy, Dave Kemnitzer's house with Dave and
his family. It wasn't a romantic thing. And so the
next morning, Darryl Turney comes over. They get in the
car and they're driving, and it's just before noon. She
goes to take a turn. You know, obviously the ball
(24:58):
bearing is loose now that the time the timers gone off,
and it detonates and you know, right in the street
in Oakland, right across the street from a high school.
So almost immediately, the FBI shows up on scene and
takes control of the scene. Because it's a bombing, so
it's usually the ATF will take control of those things,
(25:21):
but if it seems as though it might be terrorism,
that's when the FBI has jurisdiction, is my understanding. And
so the the FBI shows up really really fast, much
faster than you'd expect. And I think the reason for
that is that they had Judy and Darryl under surveillance
at the time.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
On the list well yeah, professionalism.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, so that that that seems very clear that that's
part of the case. But they show up and this guy,
Frank Doyle, who's uh, you know, an explosive experts for
the FBI, basically says, well, the bomb was on the
back seat, and if it's on the backseat, they would
have seen it, and they must have known about it.
So that kind of puts Judy and Darryl in the
(26:07):
frame as Okay, they knew they had a bottom in
the car and something happened it blew up. If you
actually take a look at pictures of the wreckage of
the car, it's pretty clear that it was underneath her
seat and just blew out the whole bottom of the
seat and it malfunctioned a little bit and hit beneath
the doors, the front doors. So it's just very strange
(26:29):
that he said this, but it does if it was
underneath the seat, it was very possible that Daryl and
Judy wouldn't have known that it was there, right, So
for the first you know, certainly for the first forty
eight hours, and it takes a couple more weeks before
it's officially shut down. But you know they're going to
(26:50):
the press with you know, these two were the bombers.
They were bringing these explosives. We don't know what they
were going to do with them, but they're eco terrorists
and that's what terrorists do, is they blow stuff up.
And you know, Judy is you know, in the hospital,
like don't I don't know if they ever thought she
was actually gonna die, but she was in immense amounts
of pain, was for a while unable to like give
(27:12):
a statement. And then Darryl was arrested. Basically he got
stitched up and they took him to jail, questioned them
and then and then arrested them. But they were never charged,
right they It sort of came out quickly that they
really couldn't have done it. There was some sort of
blind alleys that the FBI went down about trying to
(27:33):
match nails and and things like this.
Speaker 5 (27:36):
Well, I was gonna ask, is there any evidence seems
like a really particular type of detonating device. I've never
heard of this ball bearing thing before, Not that I'm
like a bomb expert, but is there evidence of Earth
First using these types of devices?
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, they don't use uh, Earth Vers hasn't really used
explosives as far as I know, and they this is
one of those things that's like how far afield do
you go? But but like a year before in Arizona,
they basically set up this guy, Dave Foreman, who's a
founder of Earth First, And what they were trying to
get to do is they had a ATBI had a
(28:13):
provocateur in this little group of eco terrorists. Two of
them weren't even earth first, and the other one was
sort of semi earth first, and then there was the provocateur.
And then Dave Foreman, the only real earth first person,
gave them some money, which is how he got kind
of tied into it. But they wanted to use explosives
(28:34):
to blow up some towers that were holding power lines,
and they were like, you know, we don't want to
do explosives, and they ended up using a torch and
got arrested. But so explosives were like, you know, it's
coded for terrorism, right, It's like, if you're sitting explosives,
you're a terrorist. You know, if you're using a torch,
maybe it's something a little different.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
I don't want to spoil too much in the show,
but Toby, can you just go into a little bit
about how we know that that particular gentleman who infiltrated
those groups, how we know what he was doing because
of that recording?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Oh yeah, there recording. So they recorded they had all
this stuff. I mean they were there were tapping lines,
they were wearing wires, all this stuff. But at one
point the provocateurs like wearing a wire and he goes
in because he's trying to get some money from Dave Foreman,
and they want to document it. And then he forgets
to flick it off, and then they go I think
(29:29):
they made a Burger King parking lot. And they're like
chatting about what's going on, and he's like it's kind
of interesting. Like he's saying, like these people don't have anything.
This money would have met everything for him, Like they
don't have any money, but they're really devoted and all
this stuff, and and he's kind of talks about how
they're At one point he says, you know, Dave Foreman's
(29:50):
not the guy who's actually doing anything, but he's the
guy we kind of have to get right to send
a message. And then he's like, oh, this is still on,
just like it's just and then they find it while
they're going through uh discovery, they're they're going through all
(30:10):
these and they're like, oh my god, they not only
forgot to turn it off, but they never got rid
of it. So it's just like right there, it's really
so it's in the it's in the podcast, I mean
the recordings out there.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Yeah, and I've got to ask you about this part
the well, not even me, our audience is going to
want to know about. Uh, the line you said a
little bit earlier that we we've teased here. The FBI
shows up in the wake of the bobbing at an
extraordinarily quick time, which shows, uh, shows you, as our investigator,
(30:42):
that there was probably some monitoring. Uh. Could you talk
to us just a little bit for everybody in the
audience who hasn't heard of this before, you talk to
us a little bit about pe intel pro and why
the FBI or federal agencies would be monitoring people who
(31:04):
want to save trees.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Right. So, Cointelpro was a program. You know, it's mostly
active during the sixties. It was officially ended I believe
in seventy one, right, right exactly. I'll get to that
just a second. But the idea was that they were
going to you know, disrupt, undermine, you know, try and
(31:29):
break up what we're considered extremist groups. And in the
FBI's interpretation, that was mostly on the liberal or radical
or liberal side, like the KKK was in there. They'd
go after the KKK if the KKK did some specific crime,
but on the radical side just sort of existing turned
(31:52):
out to be enough for the FBI to kind of
run these things on you.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
So it was pitched in civil rights for instance.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Get civil rights. You know, the Black Panthers were a big,
big target, and one of the things they would do
is they get infil traders and just create this sense
of paranoia where like the even like these small groups,
Like in the first season of Rip Current, I did
a thing looking at a group called Tribal Thumb, which
(32:20):
was tiny, you know, it was probably twenty people at
its peak, and at least two of them were infiltrators
from the FBI. You know, so they kind of created
this sense of paranoia. They would start, you know, clashes.
I think they probably contributed to, you know, some death
(32:42):
sort of indirectly, but they really get blamed for the
death of Fred Hampton, which was a sort of joint
FBI Chicago Police Department sort of raid on this guy
Fred Hampton, who I think was twenty or twenty one
at the time, but was sort of really up and
coming leader of the Black Panthers, and you know, not
(33:05):
of not sort of the perceived violence side of the
Black Panthers, but really the sort of you know, helping
the social school.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Exactly things like this is an incredible speaker, right. That
was why he was considered to be dangerous because he
could bring He was attempting to bring people together from
different factions of a somewhat splintered movement, and that was
speakers that are connector ye.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
So yeah, so I you know that was a co
intel program, as it officially was, right, And then in
nineteen seventy one, during the Ali Frasier fight in Madison Square, Garden,
I think there was a break in at this FBI
office in Media, Pennsylvania and they got these they stole
these files that included things that revealed co Intel pro
(33:56):
And so it was officially shut down I think in
seventy three, but you can shut it down in name,
but the sort of techniques are still there. So rip Current,
the first season Recurrent takes place in seventy five. Co
Intel protes style stuff is definitely going on then, and
so the question becomes like how far does it keep going?
(34:18):
And then at what point is it co intel pro
and how what point is it just the way the
FBI does things. But so one of the theory is
the theory that you know, Judy and Darryl and sort
of their supporters had was that they were the victims
of a co intel pro style operation, and that, you know,
(34:43):
to really simplify it, that that the FBI and the
timber industry had kind of worked together to try to
assassinate Judy Barry.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
And took direct action of their own right exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
So the thing about this case, without getting too into
the weeds, is that there's no real physical evidence. You know,
with a bomb, a lot of that physical evidence just
gets blown up. There was a thing called the Lord's
Adventure Letter, which was a letter that was sent anonymously
(35:17):
to a journalist named Mike Janella, who I interviewed at
length for this taking credit for the bombing and another bombing,
and had all this information that was in there that
made it fairly clear that this was actually the person.
But then it's like littered with all this like weird
Bible stuff like and like anti abortion stuff, and it's
clear they're trying to point to this one guy Staley,
(35:41):
who was a former football player, big strapping guy who
was like an anti abortion zealot who they'd gotten into
kind of a confrontation with, but it most likely was
not him, and that this was just sort of a
way of trying to obscure, you know, send people off
(36:01):
on the wrong track. But what was weird is that
so this thing comes, you know, it's always weird for journalists.
It's like, do I turn this over to law enforcement?
Like that's not really our job, but it's like, well,
this seems pretty important. Turn it over to the FBI.
The FBI takes it, does whatever they're gonna do with it,
returns it to Mike's newspaper, which is the Santa Rosa
(36:27):
Press Democrat, which was run by the New York Times
at the time, and they promptly lose it, right, so
the one piece of physical evidence just gets lost. So
they really lost Toby, Like we never found lost. Well,
nobody knows. I mean I talked to Mike, and Mike
who you know. I think he's a straight shooter, which
(36:49):
is like, I don't know what happened, you know, I
don't think the New York Times was also in cahoots
with the behind the timber industries. But somehow it's gone.
Any chance that you had to do these like new
DNA techniques on it, that's gone too. So the reality
is that it'll probably never be solved. At this point
unless somebody confesses. And so there are these theories that
(37:13):
are kind of built on these connections, these weird connections.
And I can give you an example of one, which
is that the guy Frank Doyle, the FBI agent who
showed up at the scene of the of the bombing,
he had a month earlier run a bomb school to
train law enforcement in how to investigate bomb related crimes
(37:39):
up in northern California on land that was donated by
Louisiana Pacific, which was another of the lumber companies that
that earth Verst was was having a thing with. And
the Louisiana's Pacific guy who ran security from them, was
providing security for the bomb school, and he was friends
(38:02):
with Frank Doyle. So and then a bunch of the agents,
uh who are investig who are there on the scene
had actually been at that bomb school. So it's just
just just.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
Presumably they're they're teaching them at the inner workings of
various types of explosives and detonating devices first engineer and disarment,
and also they would know how to make them.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Yeah, learning how to stop something is very similar to
learning how to create it.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
See, this was the final exam of that course. That's
what that's what happened.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Yeah, that's what he That's what he said. That's what
they That's what Doyle said to one of the guys
who's been in the classes, like, well, here's your final exam.
But the thing is is that that's not the only
Like you hear that and you're like, wow, that's pretty damning.
But then there's there's several other uh, you know, suspects
or scenarios that are equally you know, sort of the
(38:59):
the optics of it are equally strong.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
Yeah, if not compelling, there there are multiple scenarios that
make you think, right, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Can we just quickly talk about the Yellow Ribbon movement
and just the general sentiment and how vitriolic some of
the talk was getting around this time.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, So the Yellow Ribbon movement was sort of a
local group that kind of grew out of this wise
Use movement, which was essentially sort of anti environmental that
it's like nature is there for our enjoyment, and not
in terms of like gazing at trees, but like taking
your ATVs and like going on races and you know,
(39:51):
doing whatever. Right you should not nothing should be off
limits basically. So the Yellow Ribbon movement was pro probably
funded by timber corporations, but they were locally run by
this woman named Candy Boak, and so they they were
(40:14):
adamantly opposed to earth First and would show up sometimes
the demonstrations and taunt Earth First people. And they were
just one of many groups. There's a group called the Stompers,
which is a little obscure who they were. I think
they may have been sort of white supremacist thugs, but
(40:35):
they sent death threats, put out you know, quote unquote bounties.
It's like not clear like if they were actually gonna
get paid for this stuff. There's another group called the
Sahara Club, which was a take on the Sierra Club,
which was run by a couple of off road motorcycle guys
who again were like they had in their newsletter like
(40:59):
we're we're looking for guys over six feet two hundred
and fifty pounds to like go up, you know, we'll
provide the baseball bats stuff like that. So it was
a dangerous, you know, what they were doing was dangerous,
like hundred percent. You know. It was like they were
doing their protests and.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
They forget that Oregon like you think of it as
this bastion of liberalism and all that, but like the
rural parts of Oregon have always been like hotbeds of
white supremacist activity in this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Of course, they were actively recruiting in the in the
timber industry because all these people were being laid off,
there was economic distress, and it's just overwhelmingly white. So
these white supremacist groups saw this as fertile territory. And
that's actually another theory of the crime.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
I think that could be part of the part of
the inspiration for rip current three. To be honest with you,
I mean, because you know, to Nole's point, a lot
of people aren't aware that Oregon in particular is the
only state that never codified chattel slavery in the United
(42:13):
States because of the racism, right.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
Founded as a white paradise.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
And to your point here, it naturally makes sense that
violence groups like supremacist groups or other domestic terror groups
would prey on the people who have gotten the short
end of the stick in an industry.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Right.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
We see this later with stuff like the failure of
the automotive industry. To be quite honest, But then is
it possible, Toby, that at some point in this yellow
ribbon stuff and the stompers and so on, it's possible
that a proxy representative of a big unnamed timber company
(43:01):
might have just had a meeting and said, hey, don't worry,
we can get you the baseball bats.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
I think it's likely that that. It's not just possible,
it's likely. Yeah, I mean, I don't. I'm not one
hundred percent sure about this. I don't, but there was,
you know, there there was definitely communication between the groups,
and there was definitely encouragement. I think it was specific.
Lumber hired a marketing firm called Hilen Knowlton that was
(43:33):
putting out fake press releases that were supposed to be
from Earth First to make it sound like they were
more violent than they were. But they did things like
spelled Darryl Turney's name wrong and just you know, just
sloppy work.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Don't We have a whole episode on Hill and Nolan.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
There was that, Yes, Okay, yes, with Narayah and uh
later with the the war for Iraq, the propaganda there,
that's what we called it. Yeah, or Toby, thank you
so much for mentioning kill and Milton do you imagine
they are huge fans of my show.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Friends of the show.
Speaker 5 (44:08):
This is yellow, this yellow ribmed movement and sentiment. I
think it's kind of still around today in the form
of like some more union or like workers write scrups
called Timber Unity, I think is one that is all
about fighting legislation aimed at addressing climate change that would potentially,
you know, put timber workers out of work.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Evolution.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
I'm against it.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
That, uh Sar.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
We've been freestyling songs recently on the show, Toby. We also,
first off, can't thank you enough for the phenomenal work
that you've been doing, not just on RIP Current season two,
but we're talking a little bit off air RIP Current
season one. We should have had you back on for
that one as well. And we've got to ask one
(44:56):
thing here as as you went through the course of
this investigation, and the show is available to listen to
now anywhere you find your favorite podcast, what do we
hope people take away from RIP Current Season two?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Well, you know, I started it off in that I
wanted to tell an inspirational story about somebody who really
like kind of put it on the line to quote
unquote save the environment, right and what I ended up
finding out was that the sort of fight over the cause,
like who caused the bomb that almost killed her, like
(45:34):
who planneted, it kind of overshadows what she actually did. So,
you know, in the podcast, I was trying to sort
of spotlight both, you know, both both her sort of
activity and achievements, which were kind of mixed, to be honest,
and then also this mystery around who tried to kill her.
(45:56):
But I do think I'd like people to walk away
and say, you know, a small group of committed people
can make a big difference, even when they're confronting these
huge corporations and a lot of capital, And I think
that's that was what I kind of came in hoping
that would be I kind of, you know, found the
reality around her legacy is a little more complicated, but
(46:19):
that would be the takeaway that I hope in the end,
it's like all this stuff is sort of a distraction
from the fact that a small group of really committed
people ended up with. You know, the final outcome of
trying to say the Redwoods is the government spent an
amazing like hundreds of millions of dollars to save a
place called the Headwaters for Us, which was the largest
(46:41):
sort of grove of old growth redwoods that was still
intact on Pacific lumber Land. And they save that, they
saved some stuff around it. So there's like an actual,
like physical location that you can go to and it's big,
that Judy and others say, and so they were able
(47:02):
to have a concrete win when this was all over.
I believe she may have already passed by the time
it was finalized, but I think she understood the direction
it was headed. So I guess that's a takeaway for me.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
I had one last tiny little thing, you know, and
watching one battle after another, which I enjoyed quite a lot,
it occurred to me that, like the group that sort
of portrayed in that sort of weather underground kind of
you know, freedom fighting group, it's dealing with immigration enforcement
and various things, there really isn't an analog to that
in real life anymore. Nor do I see, as you
(47:37):
pointed out earlier, this analog to Earth First, do you
have a sense of why that is or is it
because of the Internet, is because if things are more
you know, cyber oriented now, like why or do we
not see this kind of direct action as much, you
know in modern times.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
You know, I honestly I don't know. I would love
to have the answer to that. You know, Earth First,
like the people without Earth Verst was not extreme enough,
branched off. Some of them were old Earth First members
to become the Earth Liberation Front, and they do like
real sabotage, burning things down, all that kind of stuff.
(48:14):
But they're even smaller, right, Gretamberg Thumbird putting myself, She's
kind of done her thing. But that's all sort of
you know, bring attention to it or whatever. Stream protest
not exactly direct action, right right. It seems like the
people who really stop in like the flow of oil,
are mostly trying to like it's geopolitical stuff, not not
(48:39):
citizen action. It's interesting that you bring up that movie though,
because people said, like several people I talk to you said,
if you want to understand Humboldt Mendocino at that time,
you got to read Vineland By. I was like, oh,
you know, if you can best be described through a
Pinchion novel, there must have been some weird stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:04):
One thing that I took away from that like that
I'll never forget is there's this moment where there's a
protest going on and they lead one of the people
with the government forces says, call in Eddie van Halen,
and a dude in a van Halen t shirt and
a mask comes out, throws them all atop cocktail and
it gives them the excuse they need to like move
in and you know, escalat.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
This is just a reminder everyone that the podcast Rip
Current in both seasons is an investigative journalism pursuit, and
Toby is actually out there talking to individuals. He's you know,
this isn't just like research or watching a documentary or
reading a book and that stuff. He's out there talking
to people. And I just wonder, Toby, how much pushback
(49:45):
you encountered when attempting, you know, to find an interviewee
or somebody that you could speak to just along your journey.
And then who is the closest person to Judy Berry
and the actual bombing that you got to speak with.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Well, it's one in the same person describes both those things.
Darryl Cherney, who was in the passenger seat I finally
did end up talking to, but it took I mean
I talked to him two weeks ago two and a
half weeks ago, so I had already written all the
scripts and ten of the episodes were out before he
finally said he would do an interview with me. So
(50:22):
I did an interview with it. I actually did over
two days. I talked to him for about three and
a half hours, and there will be a bonus episode
that kind of cuts it down, like a lot of
this stuff had already been covered in the main podcast,
But we talked. I talked to him about his theory
of the crime, and talked to him about some of
his experience during the day of the bombing. But he
(50:45):
was a tough one. I mean, there's really it's still raw, man.
It's like thirty five years later and people still I mean,
the whole thing with him and me was he knew
I was going to talk to people who thought that
Judy Barry's ex husband is responsible for this, and there's
a whole other series of reasons why he is a
(51:08):
good candidate, although again there's no evidence, so you know, uh,
there's nothing to really tie him to it. But once
he heard that he was, he did not want to
talk to me, but we kept in touch. You know,
I'd send him emails. I went out to California. I said,
I'm happy to meet up for a coffee or a
beer and just chat, like off the record. We didn't
(51:29):
do it, but you know, it's one of those things
where you just keep lines of communication open and it
eventually at like as they say in British soccer at
the death h it happened. So that was really interesting.
It was interesting to talk to him, But I talked to,
you know, people who who knew her from too, different levels,
(51:52):
from different walks of life, an old Earth first guy.
Some journalists anew her stuff like that she's a She's
a very interesting and complicated person, but I think you
kind of have to be in order to have sort
of the bravery and the sort of single mindedness to
affect that kind of change.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Yeah, and this is also you know, in addition to
these exclusive interviews. I just can't thank you enough for
the phenomenal research. Right, this is a story, as we
said at the top, that needs to be shared, that
needs to be told. As I think my colleagues and
I are referencing here throughout our conversation, it becomes increasingly relevant.
(52:38):
You know, we have other stuff to explore. These threads,
Like every part of this conversation is opening a door
that leads to something deeper, like the presence of direct
action groups. Have they really lessened in their frequency? If so,
(52:59):
why or they simply not being reported as often now right?
Or are they truly being tramped down upon by whatever
The descendant of co intel pro is right. The monitoring
abilities are just far, far beyond what Hoover imagined. He
probably fantasized about it, but he did get there.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
We didn't even talk about one of the groups that
you mentioned in the show, Toby the It's got one
of those names we always talk about. It seems so
innocuous and fine, but then you find out what they're
doing are what the hell it's the Ron Arnold thing
Center for Defense of Free Enterprise.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, up there with.
Speaker 4 (53:45):
Up there with people against Halla Burton Production.
Speaker 5 (53:51):
Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, stop taking on free enterprise, y'all.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Come on, yeah, come on on, our old sort of
those guys with like an Abraham Lincoln beard, you.
Speaker 4 (54:02):
Know, yeah, you love to see it. Abraham Lincoln, by
the way, folks, one of the most famous amateur wrestlers
in United States history. We did a couple of other
things later he had a bad time at the theater,
but do support the arts.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
Toby.
Speaker 4 (54:20):
Again, we can't thank you enough.
Speaker 1 (54:23):
Man.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
We don't want to spoil the show because again not
just not just the the exclusive interviews, but I would
say even more importantly, the research, the depth of which
you to which you go here is a true credit
to your work and to I don't know, it's a
(54:45):
thing more people need to know about. So in addition
to that, we always like to end by asking where
can people learn more not just about your mission on
rip Current, but about your many other projects. And please,
can you do us a favor since we are friends,
can you tell us a little bit about Failians?
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Yeah? Okay, so I'm doing and I'm hoping that each
one of you will be on as a guest in
the near future. I've started doing a program called more
Like Ancient Failians, which is a look at It started
off just looking at ancient Aliens and sort of you know,
(55:27):
laughing at the ridiculousness of the agent theorist and stuff
we just talked about. I know, we just did an
emergency podcast about that. But also what's crazy is that
there's all this really interesting history that they try and
explain away as you know that must have been aliens,
but in fact it's like fascinating stuff. So we include
(55:48):
that and we have guests. You know, it's it's podcasters, skeptics,
a lot of comedians. Because the guy I do it with,
Brandon R. Reynolds, has a connection to that community. We've
had people who are experts on each and aliens come
and talk to us. That's it's always pretty interesting to
hear their take on these things.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Have you guys have not got That's.
Speaker 5 (56:12):
I'll forever refer to them as the big guy with
the big for you.
Speaker 3 (56:15):
We'll text of them. Yeah. So that's been fun. That's
been fun. So we got a bunch of episodes were
actually uh coming up. We have John Hodgman's going to
be a guest for a judge.
Speaker 5 (56:27):
He can to talk about what is it booking snake
secret societies.
Speaker 1 (56:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Time he got the diamond medallion, the longer diamond medallion
for Delta Travel, the.
Speaker 5 (56:38):
Must sought Diamond Medallion status. Check out his book. I
think it's out in paperback now.
Speaker 4 (56:43):
Well that's how you know, that's how you know we
made it. Well. Also, Toby, I can't speak for everyone
but I would imagine we would all love to join
you on that show, and we hope that everybody joins
us and Toby on rip Her. Right.
Speaker 5 (57:00):
Did we shout out with aliens recently when we were
talking about I think we can get credit credit was due?
Speaker 3 (57:06):
Yeah? I appreciate that. Well, it was.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
It was a nice thing for us to say, because, honestly, Toby,
we were all very personally bummed with the passage of
Von Danakin. Just a form uh, an inspiration for stuff
they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (57:21):
Right, guys, do we even mention rip currentpod dot com?
Speaker 4 (57:25):
We should mention rip currentpod dot com. Okay, let me
let me make contact camera. Everyone go to rip currentpod
dot com and.
Speaker 3 (57:34):
Good save Matt.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
Okay, Uh, Toby, be safe out there, man. We'll talk
to you soon.
Speaker 3 (57:40):
Yeah. I appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
And there you have it, folks. The legendary friend of
the show, Toby Ball, just a phenomenal researcher. As we mentioned,
UH also brought us an exclusive story UH that you
can hear in full. Get this right now, guys, what
a ride. I wasn't joking when I talked about the
(58:06):
Saturday Night Live rule. Have you guys heard about that.
It's the five Timers Club.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
Oh yeah, five Timers Club is a big deal. They
always do a sketch.
Speaker 4 (58:16):
I think Toby might be the first one to reach
five timers status on stuff they don't want you to know,
which We support the mass as the Saturday Night Live
of podcast.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
I think he and Payne Lindsay might be tied right now.
Speaker 4 (58:31):
Okay, oh yeah, okay, maybe we can maybe we can
have them both on for a double Dragon interview segment.
Speaker 5 (58:39):
Payne loves a sweet jacket.
Speaker 4 (58:41):
He does, he does, and I'm really excited about his
appearance coming up on Conversate with our pal Killer Mike.
Not to be missed. Folks, we hope you enjoyed this.
We hope you check out not just Rip Current, but
all of Toby's earlier work. In the meantime, we hope
you as the most important part of our show. Join us.
(59:03):
You can find us on the internet. You can call
us on a telephone. You can always send us an email.
As a matter of fact, I owe some people some
random facts.
Speaker 5 (59:13):
People are asking for the random facts. You love to
see it. You can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show, depending on your social media
platform of choice. You'll figure it out. But there's more
ways to get in touch with us, aren't there.
Speaker 2 (59:27):
Oh yes, we have a phone number. It is one
eight three three std wy TK. It's a voicemail system.
Give us a call, you'll talk to us, and if
we use one of your voicemails, it will go on
one of our listener mail episodes that you can find
in our audio podcast wherever you might access that. Oh
(59:47):
and you know, someddly we didn't talk about Guys Strange Arrivals,
the other show that Toby created. It has a TV version.
It does stars Demi Moore and Coleman Domingo Gonid.
Speaker 5 (59:59):
It star studying.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Yes, it's really really cool. All right, If you want
to email us, you can do that too.
Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
We are This is one of the most exciting things
for us, folks. We are the entities that read each
piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid.
Sometimes the void writes back. So join us, not just
on Netflix, not just on audio, but speak with us directly.
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realists, we have something special
for you tonight. It is a strange, deep, disturbing dare
I say, shaman Alan esque Cohen hell pro esque tale
that may not be familiar to everyone in the audience.
(01:02):
The California Timber Wars.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Have you heard of it? Maybe? Maybe not.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, activists hoped to
end overcutting of redwoods throughout well Redwood's in particular, timber
in general, throughout parts of California, and there was a
particular organization involved in this called Earth First with an
exclamation point. They took direct actions. One of the leaders
(01:29):
of these efforts was an activist named Judy Barry who Well,
we'll get to it in a second. It's a deep
and crucial story that is yet to be told in full. Luckily, gentlemen, friends, neighbors, countrymen,
we are not diving in alone. We are joined by
get this, guys, none other than the legendary investigator, writer, podcaster,
(01:52):
and creator of multiple shows that we're big fans of,
our returning pal, the mythical, the legendary, the one and only,
Toby Ball.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Toby. Come on, man, thank you for showing up. Hey,
thank you. It's nice to see you, guys.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Guys behind the curtain. He's been there the whole time.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
It's crazy.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
Definitely a unicorn of a human. We've talked to Toby
about other series that he's done, including Strange, Rivals and Today.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
And Rendallshim Forrest two seasons, Rivals First Seas check them
out right now.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yes, yeah, this is.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
RIP Current season two and Toby I was I was
looking into this because I'm a fan of tangential, non
relevant research.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I think as we all.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
Are, big part of what we do here.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Yes, and one of the things that I noted, I said, Hey,
our pal mister b is coming on to the show.
For the third time. Saturday Night Live rules say that
if you make it to the fifth appearance, we have
to get you like a special jacket and throw a party.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
I want a special jacket. I've been on five episodes.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well that's motivation to the other two going there you go,
it's gonna happen.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Maybe we'll all get matching jackets. That would be cool.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
That'd be cool, especially if we roll as a group
in our jackets that do a heist.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
You know, walk away from an explosion and slash into Oh.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
There we go, and that's apropos. That's what we call foreshadowy.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Toby, can you.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Set the stage for us with a little bit of
an origin story? We throughout the phrase timber Wars? What
were the timber Wars? What about this led you to
rip current season two?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
So I even before the timber Wars and I was
actually Matt was in on this conversation at one point.
I wanted to do something sort of about environmental activism.
You know, in this period where you know the consequences
of global warming are quite clear, but there doesn't seem
(04:04):
to be this kind of hair on fire reaction to it,
Like you don't see eco sabotage trying to you know,
sabotage pipelines or other things that might slow down fossil
fuel use and things like that. So I'd spent some
time kind of researching, trying to find what would be
(04:26):
sort of a compelling story. There's other things. There was
the Green Peace boat that was sunk by the French
intelligence services, a couple of others. But I ended up
coming across the Timber Wars, and part of you know,
the rip current. The idea behind rip Current is to
look at a crime that occurs in sort of a
(04:47):
complicated social and political setting. And in this case, I
sort of vaguely remembered this because this happened in nineteen ninety,
which is like right after I got out of college.
I remember reading about it. But Judy Barry, who was
this organizer for Earth Verst, a leader uh and her
(05:08):
you know, former lover and like long times her partner
and activism, this guy Darryl Churney, were driving in a
car in Oakland and a pipe bomb went off in
it and it should have killed them both, but it
slightly malfunctioned. Judy was grievously injured. She only lived seven
more years. She died of breast cancer, but she was
(05:31):
in pain for the rest of her life. Uh, you know,
I believe had to walk aided with a cane, you know,
really just physically messed up. And then Darryl got away with,
you know, some some fairly light wounds. But it originally
came to the press and the FBI and the in
(05:52):
the Oakland police kind of put it out there as oh,
they were carrying these explosives and they and they detonated
in the car by accident, so theyre going to probably
actually do some terroristic action, but the explosive blew up
in the car, So that was kind of the central
sort of crime that could kind of focus these other
(06:15):
things that were going on. Do you want me to
go back a little bit to talk about Yea, the
timber wars themselves. Yeah, so the Redwoods used to be
this vast forest right in California, and so if you
go to sort of pre European contact seventeen hundreds, I mean,
it's huge and from basically the first time Europeans made
(06:40):
it to that area of California, they're like these these
are incredible trees. You know, you can't quite get a
sense of it from looking at pictures, but they're you know,
two hundred and fifty three hundred feet high. There's no
branches below. All the branches are very high where they
can get the sun. So this is very good wood.
It's not naughty. It's got these other properties as well.
(07:01):
They keep it from rotting and resistant from fire. So
over the course of you know, two centuries, with various means,
from two guys using a saw for a few days
to cut down one to all these technological advances, when
you get to the nineteen eighties, about ninety five percent
(07:21):
of the old growth redwoods are gone, right, and some
of these trees have been around for two thousand years,
so five percent are left. Some of that is in
public hands, so it's in state parks or national parks.
The largest bit of it that's in private hands is
owned by this place called Pacific Lumber, which was a
(07:41):
family owned and operated big lumber operation out of a
place called Scotia, which was a real company town. Like
everything there was owned by Pacific Lumber. So if you
worked there, you lived in a Pacific Lumber house and
all this stuff. So essentially teen eighty five, this guy
named Charles Hurwitz who was. I believe he was a
(08:05):
multi multi, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's
one of the first times people used junk bonds to
buy something. But he saw that Pacific Lumber, which had
been run really responsibly. They used sustainable cutting. They had
a big pension for retirees in their company. Not a
bad company down Yeah, yeah, I mean people people apparently
(08:27):
really liked it.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
They're taking care of their people, yes.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Right, But they went public a little while before that,
so they issued stock and because they were so responsible
and so healthy they were, they were very undervalued, so
that made them sort of prey to these capitalistic forces.
Hurwitz comes in, uses junk bonds to purchase Pacific Lumber,
(08:52):
and it becomes very clear that the only way he's
going to be able to pay off the interest and
make this all work is by clear cutting the Pacific
Lumber forests, which includes this huge area of old growth redwoods,
which there's not much left, right, So.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
So just Toby quickly, Yeah, the Redwood Force at this
point of the takeover by Charles hurwitzon was it maxim
his company, Yeah, yeah, So at that moment, the forest
of redwoods is already down ninety five. At that point
of old growth, there's still you know, there's second.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Growth, third growth, fourth growth, but that you know, these
are not mature trees yet. Okay, so the really old ones,
which are you know, I think in ecological terms, the
most valuable. I mean, it's sort of interesting how you
look at the value of trees, especially if you're a
lumber lumberman, you know, like what you're going to be
(09:52):
able to get out of your acreage on a sort
of year by year basis. So at that point it
becomes clear that this is probably what's going to happen
been and it starts happening, and a couple things, you know,
for timber workers, they're like, you know, this is actually
kind of awesome. You know, we're working all this overtime,
we're getting much more money because we're speeding up the cut.
(10:14):
And then you have environmentalists who are like, well, this
is you know, this is going to be the end
of a significant proportion of these old growth redwoods, which
are you know, I mean, they're like sort of quote
unquote a renewable resource because you can grow new redwoods,
but you're not going to get the same thing for
fifteen hundred years, you know, I mean, these these trees
(10:36):
have been around. You know. That was one of the
ads or pamphlets or something was like some of these
trees have been around since Christ walked the earth. Right. Yeah,
so Earth First, which is sort of, you know, on
the radical side of the environmentalists. I mean, they sort
of define the furthest radical edge at that point. You know,
(10:58):
they said, we're gon, we're going to try right and
stop this, slow it down. And that's kind of direct
led to the timber Wars. Yeah, it was. So, you know,
as with everything in this I could go on for
about twenty minutes about it, but direct action, you do, well,
it's definitely part of it. So that made you U
define that. Yeah. Yeah. So that so what direct action
(11:20):
really means is instead of just you know, protesting or
lobbying in the halls of Congress or you know, sending
stuff out to your membership, it means like blockading roads. Uh,
it means tearing up, uh, surveying spikes that they use.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
Potentially it being sabotaging equipment.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah, sabotage equipment, putting sand in gas. There's a hole.
One of the founders of Earth First, this guy Dave
Foreman published a book called Ecotage, which was all these
different ways in which you can do uh economic sabotage,
which and I go into this fair amount in the
(12:00):
in the podcast. The most controversial of all these is
tree spiking. And what tree spiking is well, start off
as and it evolved a little bit, but you basically
take a big nail and you bang it into a tree.
And that so people when they're using saws, it just
shatters the saw and it can be very dangerous. It's
(12:23):
to fly and right exactly. But but what Earth First
would do is they would go into like a grove
and this is not northern California, but this is you know, wherever.
They would do this and sometimes they would circle where
they were, uh, sometimes they would identify the grove like that.
The idea wasn't to hurt people. The idea was to
(12:45):
stop them from using their saws on the on this wood.
And you know what's what's funny is that it's not
really funny. But uh, you know, in my research, there's
only one real known incident that I could find. And
this is also like looking at senators and congressmen who've
tried to find more stuff about tree spiking and them
(13:08):
not being able to turn things up either. Was one
guy in a mill in northern California who he was
one of the guys who fed the logs to be cut,
and it hit a spike and the saw basically kind
of exploded and nearly killed him. And then there was
(13:29):
a lot of Initially it was like his earth first,
of his earth first, and it turned out although this
guy was in charge, they're fairly sure it was actually
this kind of curmudgeonly guy who didn't like the fact
that they were sawing down trees that were in his view,
so he did have to try and stop them. So
that's really the only time that there's been like a
(13:50):
real serious injury that results from tree spiking.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, let's just continue on that a little bit. Because
of that one case, as we hear in Rip Curren
season two, was used to what was used as the
argument against tree spiking and what was labeled as eco
terrorism at the time, right because it was so dangerous
because people may die, and he was maimed. It was
(14:14):
a you know, not some small incident that occurred, but
it definitely the argument then seemed to expand out as
though this tree spiking thing had killed many people, or
that was stated publicly even though it wasn't provable.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
All they need is one inciting event to then balloon
into this is you know, the precedents, and then it
gives them kind of talking points to go after a
larger movement.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Right, the timber war has become an information.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
War, right, I mean even recently. I've got a clip
and I'm trying to remember who the congressman was, but
he's from the Pacific Northwest or maybe Idaho. Anyway, he's
talking about they wanted to increase the the criminal penalties
for tree spiking, and so this guy in this mill,
same with George Alexander. So he's kind of given the
(15:05):
speech on the floor and he says and then George
Alexander and this happened to him, and then all these
other people have been killed or maimed or whatever. It's like, well,
can you name like one other person, you know, because
it's always the same guy. It's always George Alexander and
all these other guys. But I think it was Larry Craig,
who used to be a Senator, got in touch with
(15:27):
I don't know if it's a Department of the Interior
or one of the departments that said, can you give
me a list of everybody who's been harmed or killed
by tree spiking? And the only thing he got back
was George Alexander.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
So so it was bupkiss. But it does, I think
show us a little bit more about how the media
was treating this. Right, people loved, people love a convenient
throwaway phrase like eco terrorism, right or now tree spiking?
At this point, could you tell us a little bit
(16:02):
more as we're setting the stage here about how the
local everyday folks in California felt about environmentalism. They're reading
the news. Do they think that Earth First is a
straight up eco terrorism outfit? Do they agree with them?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Like? How is?
Speaker 4 (16:24):
What's the temperature of the room there around the redwoods?
Speaker 3 (16:28):
So that's an interesting question. So at that time, and
I talked to a guy, well, I talked to a
few people who had sort of grown up there, and
they said there was really there's two sort of major
factions in northern California. One was these sort of generational
families of timber workers. The other were these sort of
(16:51):
back to the land hippies who'd moved up there. So
you really had you know, in schools they said, what
do we call It's like the rednecks and the hippies,
you know, those are the two groups. And so you
have these timber families.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
Device of all of this, then, I guess.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, exactly, So you had these timber families who obviously
saw them as a threat and as terrorists.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
And as a threat to their livelihood and their families
legacy or whatever it might be. If this is multi generational,
like they've got skin in the game in that exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And I think there was a sense that Earth First
was sort of questioning the morality or nobility of timber
work in general, so that it kind of felt very
personal to some people, like an attack identity, right right,
It's like what you what your family for generations has
(17:42):
done is sort of immoral by by cutting these you know,
majestic trees. And then that, you know, the hippie families
were more likely to be you know, sympathetic to Earth First.
It's just a very it's a very complicated time, you know.
And this is at a time when timber is sort
of descending importance in the economy and marijuana is ascending
(18:04):
as like a big export crop up there.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Is Humboldt County.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, yeah, it's Humboldy. Yeah, it's weeah yeah, so anonymous, Yeah, exactly, Humboldt.
So yeah. So it was really it was kind of
a mixed a mixed feeling. You know, the timber companies themselves,
you know, sort of try to accentuate the potential for
violence from Earth First, and you know, Earth First had
(18:30):
to take several steps, including publicly renouncing tree spiking, which
was very controversial within Earth First, to try and prove like,
we're not we're not going after you know, the individual
timber worker, like these small timber companies that are contractors
or whatever. We're really going over these corporate people like
Charles Hurwitz, who's this guy from Texas, Like wouldn't be
(18:53):
able to identify or redwood if you you know, if
you pointed him at one and it's just these people,
it's you know, it's craven greed, you know, essentially, especially
in Hurwitz's case, I mean, he's just trying to make
money and all he sees are trees, is like a
monetary asset. And that's so sort of the opposite of
(19:16):
the Earth First idea, which is that we have to
preserve this, this is our natural heritage, right.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
And just it was really there, Toby. Yeah, because the
concept of spiking trees, and we kind of talked about
it already, but the concept of doing that is to
destroy equipment, right, sabotage of equipment, which would cost the
company a lot of money, which would probably cause them
to stop cutting in that area at least temporarily if
not long term.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So it does seem like quite a non violent tactic
until you do have one person that's hurt. But it
just makes so much sense in my mind, at least
to spike trees to break the chains on chainsaws so
that that company cannot continue to function. And ultimately, if
(20:03):
the company is your enemy, as in Earth First case,
it would be really weird for a group who is
you know, who is fighting those companies to say, don't
do that thing. That is very that seems to be
very effective.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Yeah, and I think, you know, I talked to some
Earth First people who, you know, we're really angry about that,
and what what they basically said is it has been nonviolent.
You know, there's only one person you can point to.
That's why we let them know when we do it.
The idea is it's gonna it's just gonna make a
(20:40):
cost more. You know, you're going to have to go
in with like metal detectors and try and find the
spikes in the trees and remove them. It's just it
takes time, it takes manpower. It's there's no easy way
to do it. And then they got the idea of
using ceramic spikes be detected by metal detectors. So it's
(21:02):
really you know, they give the idea was we give
them enough information to not hurt their workers, right Like,
if they're sitting there workers out there with saws in
an area that we've spiked, that's them knowingly putting their
their workers in danger. You're not doing it, We're not
doing it secretly. Now it's the Timber company. Now it's
(21:25):
the evil guys from the Captain Planet episodes who are
at fault for endangering their workers because they had the information.
And this is obviously not a unique perspective. I think
this is something all of us can universally understand the
logic of. However, it seems that things begin to quickly escalate.
(21:47):
Right There's as as you already said, there's a deep division,
there's factionalism in northern California. There is a.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Narrative competition in conversation and the zeitgeist and the media
about who can be considered the bad or the good guys,
and we see we see actions escalate at an increasingly
dangerous pace. Now, we teased it a bit at the top.
(22:25):
We talked a little bit about the tragic bizarre, like
the heartbreaking attack on Judy Barry and her associate. Could
you tell us a little bit more about the I
have so many questions, folks. You're going to have to
listen to rip her At season two in full to
(22:48):
understand the depth of this story. But it's just astonishing
the way the bombing occurs and the way that the
investing negation goes. And then Falters, can you tell us
a little bit about the circumstances of the bombing and
(23:09):
a little bit more about the investigation.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Sure, at the time of the bombing, Earth Verse was
planning this thing called Redwood Summer, and the idea was
they were going to get lots of college students to
come up to the Redwoods to take place and protests,
direct actions just sort of you know, flood the zone
with people and they're sort of basing it on the
(23:33):
Freedom Summer Mississippi. It actually started off being like Mississippi
Summer in the Redwoods, I think. So anyway, the big plans,
and so they were actually down in Oakland to do
sort of a planning meeting with this group called Seeds
of Peace. But there's sort of this timeline, and maybe
it makes sense to stay up front that this pipe
(23:54):
bomb was on a timer. So there was a watch
that could be set back almost to twelve hours, like
eleven hours and fifty nine minutes, and it would go
and it hit a certain place and it would let
loose this ball bearing, and the ball bearing would go
into this little circle where there's all these wires sticking out.
(24:16):
If connected two wires together, that would detonate the bomb.
So there's you know, there's a period of time in
which the bomb could have been placed in the car.
So she has a couple of meetings up in Mendocino County,
She goes down Oakland, has a meeting at this place
Seeds a Piece, and then she goes and stays the
(24:37):
night at this guy, Dave Kemnitzer's house with Dave and
his family. It wasn't a romantic thing. And so the
next morning, Darryl Turney comes over. They get in the
car and they're driving, and it's just before noon. She
goes to take a turn. You know, obviously the ball
(24:58):
bearing is loose now that the time the timers gone off,
and it detonates and you know, right in the street
in Oakland, right across the street from a high school.
So almost immediately, the FBI shows up on scene and
takes control of the scene. Because it's a bombing, so
it's usually the ATF will take control of those things,
(25:21):
but if it seems as though it might be terrorism,
that's when the FBI has jurisdiction, is my understanding. And
so the the FBI shows up really really fast, much
faster than you'd expect. And I think the reason for
that is that they had Judy and Darryl under surveillance
at the time.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
On the list well yeah, professionalism.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, so that that that seems very clear that that's
part of the case. But they show up and this guy,
Frank Doyle, who's uh, you know, an explosive experts for
the FBI, basically says, well, the bomb was on the
back seat, and if it's on the backseat, they would
have seen it, and they must have known about it.
So that kind of puts Judy and Darryl in the
(26:07):
frame as Okay, they knew they had a bottom in
the car and something happened it blew up. If you
actually take a look at pictures of the wreckage of
the car, it's pretty clear that it was underneath her
seat and just blew out the whole bottom of the
seat and it malfunctioned a little bit and hit beneath
the doors, the front doors. So it's just very strange
(26:29):
that he said this, but it does if it was
underneath the seat, it was very possible that Daryl and
Judy wouldn't have known that it was there, right, So
for the first you know, certainly for the first forty
eight hours, and it takes a couple more weeks before
it's officially shut down. But you know they're going to
(26:50):
the press with you know, these two were the bombers.
They were bringing these explosives. We don't know what they
were going to do with them, but they're eco terrorists
and that's what terrorists do, is they blow stuff up.
And you know, Judy is you know, in the hospital,
like don't I don't know if they ever thought she
was actually gonna die, but she was in immense amounts
of pain, was for a while unable to like give
(27:12):
a statement. And then Darryl was arrested. Basically he got
stitched up and they took him to jail, questioned them
and then and then arrested them. But they were never charged,
right they It sort of came out quickly that they
really couldn't have done it. There was some sort of
blind alleys that the FBI went down about trying to
(27:33):
match nails and and things like this.
Speaker 5 (27:36):
Well, I was gonna ask, is there any evidence seems
like a really particular type of detonating device. I've never
heard of this ball bearing thing before, Not that I'm
like a bomb expert, but is there evidence of Earth
First using these types of devices?
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, they don't use uh, Earth Vers hasn't really used
explosives as far as I know, and they this is
one of those things that's like how far afield do
you go? But but like a year before in Arizona,
they basically set up this guy, Dave Foreman, who's a
founder of Earth First, And what they were trying to
get to do is they had a ATBI had a
(28:13):
provocateur in this little group of eco terrorists. Two of
them weren't even earth first, and the other one was
sort of semi earth first, and then there was the provocateur.
And then Dave Foreman, the only real earth first person,
gave them some money, which is how he got kind
of tied into it. But they wanted to use explosives
(28:34):
to blow up some towers that were holding power lines,
and they were like, you know, we don't want to
do explosives, and they ended up using a torch and
got arrested. But so explosives were like, you know, it's
coded for terrorism, right, It's like, if you're sitting explosives,
you're a terrorist. You know, if you're using a torch,
maybe it's something a little different.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
I don't want to spoil too much in the show,
but Toby, can you just go into a little bit
about how we know that that particular gentleman who infiltrated
those groups, how we know what he was doing because
of that recording?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Oh yeah, there recording. So they recorded they had all
this stuff. I mean they were there were tapping lines,
they were wearing wires, all this stuff. But at one
point the provocateurs like wearing a wire and he goes
in because he's trying to get some money from Dave Foreman,
and they want to document it. And then he forgets
to flick it off, and then they go I think
(29:29):
they made a Burger King parking lot. And they're like
chatting about what's going on, and he's like it's kind
of interesting. Like he's saying, like these people don't have anything.
This money would have met everything for him, Like they
don't have any money, but they're really devoted and all
this stuff, and and he's kind of talks about how
they're At one point he says, you know, Dave Foreman's
(29:50):
not the guy who's actually doing anything, but he's the
guy we kind of have to get right to send
a message. And then he's like, oh, this is still on,
just like it's just and then they find it while
they're going through uh discovery, they're they're going through all
(30:10):
these and they're like, oh my god, they not only
forgot to turn it off, but they never got rid
of it. So it's just like right there, it's really
so it's in the it's in the podcast, I mean
the recordings out there.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Yeah, and I've got to ask you about this part
the well, not even me, our audience is going to
want to know about. Uh, the line you said a
little bit earlier that we we've teased here. The FBI
shows up in the wake of the bobbing at an
extraordinarily quick time, which shows, uh, shows you, as our investigator,
(30:42):
that there was probably some monitoring. Uh. Could you talk
to us just a little bit for everybody in the
audience who hasn't heard of this before, you talk to
us a little bit about pe intel pro and why
the FBI or federal agencies would be monitoring people who
(31:04):
want to save trees.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Right. So, Cointelpro was a program. You know, it's mostly
active during the sixties. It was officially ended I believe
in seventy one, right, right exactly. I'll get to that
just a second. But the idea was that they were
going to you know, disrupt, undermine, you know, try and
(31:29):
break up what we're considered extremist groups. And in the
FBI's interpretation, that was mostly on the liberal or radical
or liberal side, like the KKK was in there. They'd
go after the KKK if the KKK did some specific crime,
but on the radical side just sort of existing turned
(31:52):
out to be enough for the FBI to kind of
run these things on you.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
So it was pitched in civil rights for instance.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Get civil rights. You know, the Black Panthers were a big,
big target, and one of the things they would do
is they get infil traders and just create this sense
of paranoia where like the even like these small groups,
Like in the first season of Rip Current, I did
a thing looking at a group called Tribal Thumb, which
(32:20):
was tiny, you know, it was probably twenty people at
its peak, and at least two of them were infiltrators
from the FBI. You know, so they kind of created
this sense of paranoia. They would start, you know, clashes.
I think they probably contributed to, you know, some death
(32:42):
sort of indirectly, but they really get blamed for the
death of Fred Hampton, which was a sort of joint
FBI Chicago Police Department sort of raid on this guy
Fred Hampton, who I think was twenty or twenty one
at the time, but was sort of really up and
coming leader of the Black Panthers, and you know, not
(33:05):
of not sort of the perceived violence side of the
Black Panthers, but really the sort of you know, helping
the social school.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Exactly things like this is an incredible speaker, right. That
was why he was considered to be dangerous because he
could bring He was attempting to bring people together from
different factions of a somewhat splintered movement, and that was
speakers that are connector ye.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
So yeah, so I you know that was a co
intel program, as it officially was, right, And then in
nineteen seventy one, during the Ali Frasier fight in Madison Square, Garden,
I think there was a break in at this FBI
office in Media, Pennsylvania and they got these they stole
these files that included things that revealed co Intel pro
(33:56):
And so it was officially shut down I think in
seventy three, but you can shut it down in name,
but the sort of techniques are still there. So rip Current,
the first season Recurrent takes place in seventy five. Co
Intel protes style stuff is definitely going on then, and
so the question becomes like how far does it keep going?
(34:18):
And then at what point is it co intel pro
and how what point is it just the way the
FBI does things. But so one of the theory is
the theory that you know, Judy and Darryl and sort
of their supporters had was that they were the victims
of a co intel pro style operation, and that, you know,
(34:43):
to really simplify it, that that the FBI and the
timber industry had kind of worked together to try to
assassinate Judy Barry.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
And took direct action of their own right exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
So the thing about this case, without getting too into
the weeds, is that there's no real physical evidence. You know,
with a bomb, a lot of that physical evidence just
gets blown up. There was a thing called the Lord's
Adventure Letter, which was a letter that was sent anonymously
(35:17):
to a journalist named Mike Janella, who I interviewed at
length for this taking credit for the bombing and another bombing,
and had all this information that was in there that
made it fairly clear that this was actually the person.
But then it's like littered with all this like weird
Bible stuff like and like anti abortion stuff, and it's
clear they're trying to point to this one guy Staley,
(35:41):
who was a former football player, big strapping guy who
was like an anti abortion zealot who they'd gotten into
kind of a confrontation with, but it most likely was
not him, and that this was just sort of a
way of trying to obscure, you know, send people off
(36:01):
on the wrong track. But what was weird is that
so this thing comes, you know, it's always weird for journalists.
It's like, do I turn this over to law enforcement?
Like that's not really our job, but it's like, well,
this seems pretty important. Turn it over to the FBI.
The FBI takes it, does whatever they're gonna do with it,
returns it to Mike's newspaper, which is the Santa Rosa
(36:27):
Press Democrat, which was run by the New York Times
at the time, and they promptly lose it, right, so
the one piece of physical evidence just gets lost. So
they really lost Toby, Like we never found lost. Well,
nobody knows. I mean I talked to Mike, and Mike
who you know. I think he's a straight shooter, which
(36:49):
is like, I don't know what happened, you know, I
don't think the New York Times was also in cahoots
with the behind the timber industries. But somehow it's gone.
Any chance that you had to do these like new
DNA techniques on it, that's gone too. So the reality
is that it'll probably never be solved. At this point
unless somebody confesses. And so there are these theories that
(37:13):
are kind of built on these connections, these weird connections.
And I can give you an example of one, which
is that the guy Frank Doyle, the FBI agent who
showed up at the scene of the of the bombing,
he had a month earlier run a bomb school to
train law enforcement in how to investigate bomb related crimes
(37:39):
up in northern California on land that was donated by
Louisiana Pacific, which was another of the lumber companies that
that earth Verst was was having a thing with. And
the Louisiana's Pacific guy who ran security from them, was
providing security for the bomb school, and he was friends
(38:02):
with Frank Doyle. So and then a bunch of the agents,
uh who are investig who are there on the scene
had actually been at that bomb school. So it's just
just just.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
Presumably they're they're teaching them at the inner workings of
various types of explosives and detonating devices first engineer and disarment,
and also they would know how to make them.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Yeah, learning how to stop something is very similar to
learning how to create it.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
See, this was the final exam of that course. That's
what that's what happened.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Yeah, that's what he That's what he said. That's what
they That's what Doyle said to one of the guys
who's been in the classes, like, well, here's your final exam.
But the thing is is that that's not the only
Like you hear that and you're like, wow, that's pretty damning.
But then there's there's several other uh, you know, suspects
or scenarios that are equally you know, sort of the
(38:59):
the optics of it are equally strong.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
Yeah, if not compelling, there there are multiple scenarios that
make you think, right, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Can we just quickly talk about the Yellow Ribbon movement
and just the general sentiment and how vitriolic some of
the talk was getting around this time.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, So the Yellow Ribbon movement was sort of a
local group that kind of grew out of this wise
Use movement, which was essentially sort of anti environmental that
it's like nature is there for our enjoyment, and not
in terms of like gazing at trees, but like taking
your ATVs and like going on races and you know,
(39:51):
doing whatever. Right you should not nothing should be off
limits basically. So the Yellow Ribbon movement was pro probably
funded by timber corporations, but they were locally run by
this woman named Candy Boak, and so they they were
(40:14):
adamantly opposed to earth First and would show up sometimes
the demonstrations and taunt Earth First people. And they were
just one of many groups. There's a group called the Stompers,
which is a little obscure who they were. I think
they may have been sort of white supremacist thugs, but
(40:35):
they sent death threats, put out you know, quote unquote bounties.
It's like not clear like if they were actually gonna
get paid for this stuff. There's another group called the
Sahara Club, which was a take on the Sierra Club,
which was run by a couple of off road motorcycle guys
who again were like they had in their newsletter like
(40:59):
we're we're looking for guys over six feet two hundred
and fifty pounds to like go up, you know, we'll
provide the baseball bats stuff like that. So it was
a dangerous, you know, what they were doing was dangerous,
like hundred percent. You know. It was like they were
doing their protests and.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
They forget that Oregon like you think of it as
this bastion of liberalism and all that, but like the
rural parts of Oregon have always been like hotbeds of
white supremacist activity in this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Of course, they were actively recruiting in the in the
timber industry because all these people were being laid off,
there was economic distress, and it's just overwhelmingly white. So
these white supremacist groups saw this as fertile territory. And
that's actually another theory of the crime.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
I think that could be part of the part of
the inspiration for rip current three. To be honest with you,
I mean, because you know, to Nole's point, a lot
of people aren't aware that Oregon in particular is the
only state that never codified chattel slavery in the United
(42:13):
States because of the racism, right.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
Founded as a white paradise.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
And to your point here, it naturally makes sense that
violence groups like supremacist groups or other domestic terror groups
would prey on the people who have gotten the short
end of the stick in an industry.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Right.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
We see this later with stuff like the failure of
the automotive industry. To be quite honest, But then is
it possible, Toby, that at some point in this yellow
ribbon stuff and the stompers and so on, it's possible
that a proxy representative of a big unnamed timber company
(43:01):
might have just had a meeting and said, hey, don't worry,
we can get you the baseball bats.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
I think it's likely that that. It's not just possible,
it's likely. Yeah, I mean, I don't. I'm not one
hundred percent sure about this. I don't, but there was,
you know, there there was definitely communication between the groups,
and there was definitely encouragement. I think it was specific.
Lumber hired a marketing firm called Hilen Knowlton that was
(43:33):
putting out fake press releases that were supposed to be
from Earth First to make it sound like they were
more violent than they were. But they did things like
spelled Darryl Turney's name wrong and just you know, just
sloppy work.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Don't We have a whole episode on Hill and Nolan.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
There was that, Yes, Okay, yes, with Narayah and uh
later with the the war for Iraq, the propaganda there,
that's what we called it. Yeah, or Toby, thank you
so much for mentioning kill and Milton do you imagine
they are huge fans of my show.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Friends of the show.
Speaker 5 (44:08):
This is yellow, this yellow ribmed movement and sentiment. I
think it's kind of still around today in the form
of like some more union or like workers write scrups
called Timber Unity, I think is one that is all
about fighting legislation aimed at addressing climate change that would potentially,
you know, put timber workers out of work.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Evolution.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
I'm against it.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
That, uh Sar.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
We've been freestyling songs recently on the show, Toby. We also,
first off, can't thank you enough for the phenomenal work
that you've been doing, not just on RIP Current season two,
but we're talking a little bit off air RIP Current
season one. We should have had you back on for
that one as well. And we've got to ask one
(44:56):
thing here as as you went through the course of
this investigation, and the show is available to listen to
now anywhere you find your favorite podcast, what do we
hope people take away from RIP Current Season two?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Well, you know, I started it off in that I
wanted to tell an inspirational story about somebody who really
like kind of put it on the line to quote
unquote save the environment, right and what I ended up
finding out was that the sort of fight over the cause,
like who caused the bomb that almost killed her, like
(45:34):
who planneted, it kind of overshadows what she actually did. So,
you know, in the podcast, I was trying to sort
of spotlight both, you know, both both her sort of
activity and achievements, which were kind of mixed, to be honest,
and then also this mystery around who tried to kill her.
(45:56):
But I do think I'd like people to walk away
and say, you know, a small group of committed people
can make a big difference, even when they're confronting these
huge corporations and a lot of capital, And I think
that's that was what I kind of came in hoping
that would be I kind of, you know, found the
reality around her legacy is a little more complicated, but
(46:19):
that would be the takeaway that I hope in the end,
it's like all this stuff is sort of a distraction
from the fact that a small group of really committed
people ended up with. You know, the final outcome of
trying to say the Redwoods is the government spent an
amazing like hundreds of millions of dollars to save a
place called the Headwaters for Us, which was the largest
(46:41):
sort of grove of old growth redwoods that was still
intact on Pacific lumber Land. And they save that, they
saved some stuff around it. So there's like an actual,
like physical location that you can go to and it's big,
that Judy and others say, and so they were able
(47:02):
to have a concrete win when this was all over.
I believe she may have already passed by the time
it was finalized, but I think she understood the direction
it was headed. So I guess that's a takeaway for me.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
I had one last tiny little thing, you know, and
watching one battle after another, which I enjoyed quite a lot,
it occurred to me that, like the group that sort
of portrayed in that sort of weather underground kind of
you know, freedom fighting group, it's dealing with immigration enforcement
and various things, there really isn't an analog to that
in real life anymore. Nor do I see, as you
(47:37):
pointed out earlier, this analog to Earth First, do you
have a sense of why that is or is it
because of the Internet, is because if things are more
you know, cyber oriented now, like why or do we
not see this kind of direct action as much, you
know in modern times.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
You know, I honestly I don't know. I would love
to have the answer to that. You know, Earth First,
like the people without Earth Verst was not extreme enough,
branched off. Some of them were old Earth First members
to become the Earth Liberation Front, and they do like
real sabotage, burning things down, all that kind of stuff.
(48:14):
But they're even smaller, right, Gretamberg Thumbird putting myself, She's
kind of done her thing. But that's all sort of
you know, bring attention to it or whatever. Stream protest
not exactly direct action, right right. It seems like the
people who really stop in like the flow of oil,
are mostly trying to like it's geopolitical stuff, not not
(48:39):
citizen action. It's interesting that you bring up that movie though,
because people said, like several people I talk to you said,
if you want to understand Humboldt Mendocino at that time,
you got to read Vineland By. I was like, oh,
you know, if you can best be described through a
Pinchion novel, there must have been some weird stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:04):
One thing that I took away from that like that
I'll never forget is there's this moment where there's a
protest going on and they lead one of the people
with the government forces says, call in Eddie van Halen,
and a dude in a van Halen t shirt and
a mask comes out, throws them all atop cocktail and
it gives them the excuse they need to like move
in and you know, escalat.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
This is just a reminder everyone that the podcast Rip
Current in both seasons is an investigative journalism pursuit, and
Toby is actually out there talking to individuals. He's you know,
this isn't just like research or watching a documentary or
reading a book and that stuff. He's out there talking
to people. And I just wonder, Toby, how much pushback
(49:45):
you encountered when attempting, you know, to find an interviewee
or somebody that you could speak to just along your journey.
And then who is the closest person to Judy Berry
and the actual bombing that you got to speak with.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Well, it's one in the same person describes both those things.
Darryl Cherney, who was in the passenger seat I finally
did end up talking to, but it took I mean
I talked to him two weeks ago two and a
half weeks ago, so I had already written all the
scripts and ten of the episodes were out before he
finally said he would do an interview with me. So
(50:22):
I did an interview with it. I actually did over
two days. I talked to him for about three and
a half hours, and there will be a bonus episode
that kind of cuts it down, like a lot of
this stuff had already been covered in the main podcast,
But we talked. I talked to him about his theory
of the crime, and talked to him about some of
his experience during the day of the bombing. But he
(50:45):
was a tough one. I mean, there's really it's still raw, man.
It's like thirty five years later and people still I mean,
the whole thing with him and me was he knew
I was going to talk to people who thought that
Judy Barry's ex husband is responsible for this, and there's
a whole other series of reasons why he is a
(51:08):
good candidate, although again there's no evidence, so you know, uh,
there's nothing to really tie him to it. But once
he heard that he was, he did not want to
talk to me, but we kept in touch. You know,
I'd send him emails. I went out to California. I said,
I'm happy to meet up for a coffee or a
beer and just chat, like off the record. We didn't
(51:29):
do it, but you know, it's one of those things
where you just keep lines of communication open and it
eventually at like as they say in British soccer at
the death h it happened. So that was really interesting.
It was interesting to talk to him, But I talked to,
you know, people who who knew her from too, different levels,
(51:52):
from different walks of life, an old Earth first guy.
Some journalists anew her stuff like that she's a She's
a very interesting and complicated person, but I think you
kind of have to be in order to have sort
of the bravery and the sort of single mindedness to
affect that kind of change.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Yeah, and this is also you know, in addition to
these exclusive interviews. I just can't thank you enough for
the phenomenal research. Right, this is a story, as we
said at the top, that needs to be shared, that
needs to be told. As I think my colleagues and
I are referencing here throughout our conversation, it becomes increasingly relevant.
(52:38):
You know, we have other stuff to explore. These threads,
Like every part of this conversation is opening a door
that leads to something deeper, like the presence of direct
action groups. Have they really lessened in their frequency? If so,
(52:59):
why or they simply not being reported as often now right?
Or are they truly being tramped down upon by whatever
The descendant of co intel pro is right. The monitoring
abilities are just far, far beyond what Hoover imagined. He
probably fantasized about it, but he did get there.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
We didn't even talk about one of the groups that
you mentioned in the show, Toby the It's got one
of those names we always talk about. It seems so
innocuous and fine, but then you find out what they're
doing are what the hell it's the Ron Arnold thing
Center for Defense of Free Enterprise.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, up there with.
Speaker 4 (53:45):
Up there with people against Halla Burton Production.
Speaker 5 (53:51):
Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, stop taking on free enterprise, y'all.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Come on, yeah, come on on, our old sort of
those guys with like an Abraham Lincoln beard, you.
Speaker 4 (54:02):
Know, yeah, you love to see it. Abraham Lincoln, by
the way, folks, one of the most famous amateur wrestlers
in United States history. We did a couple of other
things later he had a bad time at the theater,
but do support the arts.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
Toby.
Speaker 4 (54:20):
Again, we can't thank you enough.
Speaker 1 (54:23):
Man.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
We don't want to spoil the show because again not
just not just the the exclusive interviews, but I would
say even more importantly, the research, the depth of which
you to which you go here is a true credit
to your work and to I don't know, it's a
(54:45):
thing more people need to know about. So in addition
to that, we always like to end by asking where
can people learn more not just about your mission on
rip Current, but about your many other projects. And please,
can you do us a favor since we are friends,
can you tell us a little bit about Failians?
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Yeah? Okay, so I'm doing and I'm hoping that each
one of you will be on as a guest in
the near future. I've started doing a program called more
Like Ancient Failians, which is a look at It started
off just looking at ancient Aliens and sort of you know,
(55:27):
laughing at the ridiculousness of the agent theorist and stuff
we just talked about. I know, we just did an
emergency podcast about that. But also what's crazy is that
there's all this really interesting history that they try and
explain away as you know that must have been aliens,
but in fact it's like fascinating stuff. So we include
(55:48):
that and we have guests. You know, it's it's podcasters, skeptics,
a lot of comedians. Because the guy I do it with,
Brandon R. Reynolds, has a connection to that community. We've
had people who are experts on each and aliens come
and talk to us. That's it's always pretty interesting to
hear their take on these things.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Have you guys have not got That's.
Speaker 5 (56:12):
I'll forever refer to them as the big guy with
the big for you.
Speaker 3 (56:15):
We'll text of them. Yeah. So that's been fun. That's
been fun. So we got a bunch of episodes were
actually uh coming up. We have John Hodgman's going to
be a guest for a judge.
Speaker 5 (56:27):
He can to talk about what is it booking snake
secret societies.
Speaker 1 (56:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Time he got the diamond medallion, the longer diamond medallion
for Delta Travel, the.
Speaker 5 (56:38):
Must sought Diamond Medallion status. Check out his book. I
think it's out in paperback now.
Speaker 4 (56:43):
Well that's how you know, that's how you know we
made it. Well. Also, Toby, I can't speak for everyone
but I would imagine we would all love to join
you on that show, and we hope that everybody joins
us and Toby on rip Her. Right.
Speaker 5 (57:00):
Did we shout out with aliens recently when we were
talking about I think we can get credit credit was due?
Speaker 3 (57:06):
Yeah? I appreciate that. Well, it was.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
It was a nice thing for us to say, because, honestly, Toby,
we were all very personally bummed with the passage of
Von Danakin. Just a form uh, an inspiration for stuff
they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (57:21):
Right, guys, do we even mention rip currentpod dot com?
Speaker 4 (57:25):
We should mention rip currentpod dot com. Okay, let me
let me make contact camera. Everyone go to rip currentpod
dot com and.
Speaker 3 (57:34):
Good save Matt.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
Okay, Uh, Toby, be safe out there, man. We'll talk
to you soon.
Speaker 3 (57:40):
Yeah. I appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
And there you have it, folks. The legendary friend of
the show, Toby Ball, just a phenomenal researcher. As we mentioned,
UH also brought us an exclusive story UH that you
can hear in full. Get this right now, guys, what
a ride. I wasn't joking when I talked about the
(58:06):
Saturday Night Live rule. Have you guys heard about that.
It's the five Timers Club.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
Oh yeah, five Timers Club is a big deal. They
always do a sketch.
Speaker 4 (58:16):
I think Toby might be the first one to reach
five timers status on stuff they don't want you to know,
which We support the mass as the Saturday Night Live
of podcast.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
I think he and Payne Lindsay might be tied right now.
Speaker 4 (58:31):
Okay, oh yeah, okay, maybe we can maybe we can
have them both on for a double Dragon interview segment.
Speaker 5 (58:39):
Payne loves a sweet jacket.
Speaker 4 (58:41):
He does, he does, and I'm really excited about his
appearance coming up on Conversate with our pal Killer Mike.
Not to be missed. Folks, we hope you enjoyed this.
We hope you check out not just Rip Current, but
all of Toby's earlier work. In the meantime, we hope
you as the most important part of our show. Join us.
(59:03):
You can find us on the internet. You can call
us on a telephone. You can always send us an email.
As a matter of fact, I owe some people some
random facts.
Speaker 5 (59:13):
People are asking for the random facts. You love to
see it. You can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show, depending on your social media
platform of choice. You'll figure it out. But there's more
ways to get in touch with us, aren't there.
Speaker 2 (59:27):
Oh yes, we have a phone number. It is one
eight three three std wy TK. It's a voicemail system.
Give us a call, you'll talk to us, and if
we use one of your voicemails, it will go on
one of our listener mail episodes that you can find
in our audio podcast wherever you might access that. Oh
(59:47):
and you know, someddly we didn't talk about Guys Strange Arrivals,
the other show that Toby created. It has a TV version.
It does stars Demi Moore and Coleman Domingo Gonid.
Speaker 5 (59:59):
It star studying.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Yes, it's really really cool. All right, If you want
to email us, you can do that too.
Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
We are This is one of the most exciting things
for us, folks. We are the entities that read each
piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid.
Sometimes the void writes back. So join us, not just
on Netflix, not just on audio, but speak with us directly.
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.