June 11, 2026 • 49 mins
In 1980, Texas Klan Grand Dragon Louis Beam was running a paramilitary training camp outside of Houston. But they weren't just training klansmen for the race war. They ran a boy scout camp on the weekends.
Sources and further reading:
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home : The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/518/993/2128255/
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/518/1017/2128803/
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/543/198/1460786/
https://www.nytimes.com/1980/11/30/archives/paramilitary-actions-irk-neighbors-of-texas-camp-charter.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/11/24/boy-scouts-taught-to-fire-weapons-strangle-opponents/1eec4466-569a-47a8-b2e1-ce60c763ffe7/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/11/23/Charge-Klan-teaches-scouts-how-to-strangle-people/2641343803600/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/11/24/Klan-member-trains-youths-at-paramilitary-camp/6144343890000/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/12/05/The-owner-of-a-10-acre-plot-of-land-used/1128344840400/
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. The sun was already starting to set
by the time the couple pulled up outside of their
apartment on November sixth, nineteen eighty seven. This trip to
Mexico had initially been pitched to Sheila as a honeymoon,
but they'd been staying in this little xpac community outside
(00:24):
of Guadalajara for more than six months. She was young
and in love, and she'd adjusted easily to her new
role as the stepmother to her husband's seven year old
daughter from a prior marriage, but she was so terribly
worried about crime. She and her husband just didn't trust Mexicans,
(00:46):
so they rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of their little
neighborhood of white Americans. That evening, Sheila went straight inside
and started bustling around the kitchen, preparing to get started
on making dinner. With the groceries just picked up. She
was standing at the scenk looking out the kitchen window
to see what was taking her husband so long when
(01:07):
she saw her worst fear. A gang of Mexican bandits
was assaulting her husband. They were holding him face down
on the hood of the car at gunpoint. At least
that's what she told a Mexican judge she thought she
saw through the window. She claimed the officers with the
(01:29):
Mexican Federal Police never identified themselves. She never would have
fired on them if she'd known they were police officers,
and maybe the judge believed her, or maybe they just
wanted to be rid of her. She spent just ten
days in a Mexican jail before all of her charges
were dropped. The officer she'd shot three times in the
(01:51):
torso was still in the hospital in critical condition. When
Sheila was deported back to the United States, she rejoined
her husband, who was being held on some very serious
federal charges. That's why they'd been hiding out in Mexico.
It wasn't an extended honeymoon. Her husband was on the
(02:14):
FBI's most wanted list. Of course, Louis Beane was no
stranger to a courtroom, and he would end up wriggling
his way out of those sedition charges in nineteen eighty eight,
just like he always did. Nothing ever, seemed to stick
to him, not even that time. He hosted a boy
scout camp where his klansmen taught teenage boys how to
(02:37):
decapitate communists. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys.
A lot of what we know about what was happening
(03:06):
on Lewis Bem's paramilitary training compound outside Houston comes for
a lawsuit that was filed in nineteen eighty one. The
suit was filed by the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association against Lewis
Bean and his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
By the late nineteen seventies, there were significant communities of
(03:26):
Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who had settled in the Gulf
Coast area. The climate was similar and there were opportunities
there for fishing and crabbing, which was how many of
those refugees had fed their families back home in Vietnam
before the war. The story of the Texas clans war
with the fishermen comes later, though. But if the Klan
(03:50):
being weird near Galveston was sounding familiar to you, that's
probably why the clans escalating confrontations and threats against the
fishermen and the subsequent lawsuit are what made that compound famous,
and the injunction in that lawsuit is what ultimately shut
the camp down and made Lewis Bean so bad that
(04:11):
he left Texas entirely for a while, but that didn't
really get going until nineteen eighty one, and locals knew
what was going on at that camp in the fall
of nineteen eighty. You see, sometimes I just want to
tell you guys one funny little anecdote, but I can't
(04:34):
just drop you off in the middle of a guy's life.
You would have so many questions about how we got there.
But it's summertime. A lot of you have kids who
aren't in school this month. Maybe you've got them signed
up for some kind of camp, some educational program. Maybe
they're going to spend some time out in nature, learn
(04:55):
some new skills, make some new friends. And this seasonal
shift reminded me of the time a bunch of teenage
boys got sent off to what their mothers believed was
a perfectly normal boy scout camp, only to find out
that their sons were being trained for the race war
and a clan compound. So we're not going to get
(05:17):
the whole picture of Lewis Beam today, but I will
at least orient us a little bit before we get
into the kid's garrotting lessons. Okay, first of all, I
have to start with a confession. I have just now
discovered that I've been saying this man's name wrong for
(05:38):
a decade and nobody ever said anything to me. I
had to take a lap around the apartment, sighing and
groaning and slamming cabinets. Are you kidding me? Louis Louis Beam,
l o U I s that could be Lewis or Louis.
(05:59):
You know, say Louis King, Louis Louis Armstrong. I don't know.
It could go either way, and I've always said Louis Beam,
And now that I'm stressing out about it, I don't
know why did I hear someone say that? Or did
I just make it up and never check. His name
(06:19):
is Louis ray Beam Junior l o UIs, but his
father is Louis Raybeams Senior l e Wis. He's named
after a guy whose name isn't even spelled the same
if they called him junior, so you gotta figure they
called the kid Lewis. I didn't want to believe it.
(06:43):
I hate to be wrong. I'm so embarrassed. Lewis Texas
Klansman Louis Beam. Everybody knew this, but me. I don't
want to say it that way, but I'll be damned.
It turns out there are actually a lot of recordings
of this man saying his own name. As someone once
(07:06):
told me, Louis, your reputation precedes you. I'm not kidding.
I didn't have to look very hard to hear him
saying his own name. And I've had this problem before,
and it is usually very hard to find a recording
of someone saying their own name. So I'll just call
(07:29):
Louis Thames name because I take you can't stand the
hate and get out of the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen.
For those of you who haven't figured it out yet,
my name's Louis. Bam. Okay, okay, I get it, I
get it. You got me, Louis. This has shaken me
(07:52):
to my core. I'm tempted to just keep saying Louis.
You know sunk cost at this point, But apparently I'm
just the only one. I was so desperate to prove
that maybe people say it both ways that I found
dozens of recordings of people saying his name over the decades.
(08:13):
The man himself, his friends, and colleagues, news anchors, an
episode of PBS Frontline Professors everybody says Louis. But if
you google Louis, beam pronounce, the AI overview says Louis
quote pronounced exactly like the name Louis or the French Louis,
(08:37):
with the s remaining completely silent. Now, normally I would
not admit to even having allowed my eyeballs to pass
over the AI overview. I need to figure outw to
turn it off because it is not a useful resource.
But in this case, I was curious what the citation
for this is, because there's always a citation. It doesn't
(08:58):
mean the information it's pulling is correct or that it
has correctly digested it. But it got this from somewhere.
And the citation for this is an essay by doctor
Lawrence Min Bui Davis, the former curator for the Smithsonian
Asian Pacific American Center. According to doctor Davis, the Vietnamese
(09:18):
population in South Texas did call him Louis Bim, and
apparently bimb is a sort of vulgar Vietnamese slang term
for vagina. So a bunch of old Vietnamese guys were
sitting on their fishing boats in the bay talking about
their enemy Louis pussy. What a fun piece of cultural history.
(09:44):
Still never trust the AI overview. I got to figure
out how to turn that thing off, because even if
you're not trying to use it, it's just there at
the top of the page making stuff up. In this case,
it was telling me something that had an element of
truth to it, and that is a cool story. But
by presenting that as the proper pronunciation, no explanation, it
(10:07):
erased an extremely specific context, and it was effectively telling
me something that is not true. Remember AI does not
know anything. AI doesn't do your research for you. But
I'm sure you knew that. So I wasn't completely alone
in calling him Louis. But I don't have a Vietnamese accent,
(10:29):
so I guess I have to start calling him Lewis.
I could have kept this whole embarrassing digression to myself,
but I think we have the kind of relationship that
prioritizes honesty, and I wanted to tell you the pussy thing.
The second earth shattering revelation I had while I was
(10:51):
researching this week came when I found out he's still alive.
I genuinely had no idea Lewis being was still. I
don't know why, but I assumed he'd been dead for years,
like twenty years maybe. I guess they'd mostly think of
him as being in his prime in the seventies and eighties,
(11:13):
and that was so long ago, you know. He was
a key figure in that time period, sort of on
the level with guys like William Luther Pierce. And Pierce
did die twenty five years ago, but he was significantly
older than Beam was. Lewis Beam is, as it turns out,
the exact same age as the President, So he'll be
(11:34):
turning eighty this summer. He dropped out of the public
eye three full decades ago, so I'm sure I wasn't
the only one who assumed he was dead. His last
public appearance was in nineteen ninety six, around the time
he announced that he was retiring after thirty years in
the movement so he could spend more time with his family.
(11:55):
He also blamed his withdrawal on his declining health, which
he claimed was due to exposure to agent orange during
his service in the Vietnam War. I can't tell you
if the aging Klansman really was sick from exposure to
the chemical Defolian that the US military sprayed all over Vietnam,
but if he just wanted to spend more time with
his family, he picked a bad time to do it.
(12:18):
A few months after he stepped back from public life
to devote himself to his family, he didn't have one anymore.
His fourth wife, Sheila, the one who'd shot that Mexican
police officer for him a decade earlier, filed for divorce
in nineteen ninety seven, and the judge granted him very
limited access to the couple's two young daughters. His oldest daughter,
(12:43):
the one who'd been caught in that shootout in Mexico,
was returned to her mother, Beams third wife, Kara, in
nineteen eighty seven, after Mexican authority sent the girl home
to the US. Her father had abducted her during a
custodial disagreement in nineteen eighty two when she was a
top That may have played a role in the judge's
decision to give Sheila primary custody of the girls in
(13:05):
her divorce. The man had a history, but I guess
I should have started by telling you what that history was.
He's come up in passing here and there. It's hard
to avoid him, really, if you're talking about the American
far right in the seventies and eighties. He was a klansman.
(13:28):
Not just any clansman. He was kind of a big deal.
He was the architect of the leaderless resistance model of
right wing violence in the United States, that cell based
structure for terrorist attacks that makes the movement harder to
track and harder to stop. This week I returned once
(13:50):
again to one of my favorite books, Kathleen BLUs Bring
the War Home. I know I've said it before, but
it's worth saying again. If you haven't, go ahead and
pick up a copy. It really is one of the
best books out there on the white power movement in
the United States. And not to beat a dead horse,
but I did find audio of Kathleen saying his name.
(14:12):
She says Louis, because that's his name. Honestly, I trust
her more than I trust the man himself, so I
give up. Nobody says Louis. Her book isn't exactly a
biography of Louis Beam, but the modern militant far right
in America doesn't really exist without him, so it's as
(14:35):
close to one as you're going to find. The title itself,
bring the War Home, is a reference to one of
Beam's essays in his nineteen eighty three collection Essays of
a Klansman. One of the essays is called Vietnam, Bring
It On Home. Beam was a Vietnam War veteran, and
(14:58):
he wasn't done fighting when he got home. He'd fought
for the US government in Vietnam, and now he wanted
to wage war against the US government. Lewis Raybeaham Junior
was born on August twentieth, nineteen forty six, in Lufkin, Texas.
(15:20):
And I know I said I was done, meaning a
dead horse. But according to the Texas Department of Health
Bureau of Vital Statistics, the name on his birth certificate,
the name that was recorded with the State of Texas
at the time of his birth is Lewis with a W,
just like his father's. So I don't know when he
started spelling his own name wrong. But okay, I'm done.
I'm done. He was the eldest of four children born
(15:44):
to Madeleine and Louis Beam Senior. Most sources just skip
over his childhood and pick up with his enlistment in
the army in nineteen sixty five. The Southern Poverty Law
Center is biographical sketch even says that there isn't much
known about beams childhood. Obviously, the couple of hours I
(16:05):
spent poking around on my computer here in my home
office wasn't going to dig up some previously unknown primary
source that the experts missed all these years. So I
don't have a bombshell for you. I don't have any
new information about his childhood, but I did find kind
of a fun fact about his conception. Lewis Senior was
(16:27):
a soldier to He was in the Army. He was
deployed in nineteen forty three, serving in Algeria, France, and Italy.
He was injured several times over the course of the
war and received a bronze star at a purple heart.
He attended Officer candidate school in France during the war,
and by nineteen forty five he was a lieutenant and
(16:49):
in the summer of nineteen forty five he received a
new assignment. He was a prison guard at Nuremberg. The
Klansman's father was one of the soldiers standing guard over
the Nazi war criminals. He met Hermann Gurring in November
(17:10):
of nineteen forty five, after thirty three months deployed in
the European theater, Lewis Senior was granted a six week
furlough to travel home to Texas to see his wife.
He'd married Madeline in nineteen forty one before he left
Texas for the army, but he'd barely seen her since.
The Tyler Morning Telegraph ran a story about his visit home,
(17:32):
describing what he'd been up to for the last three years.
The headline was gurring looks, beaten, morose, avoids meeting eyes
of others, reports jail guard from East Texas. Based on
Lewis Junior's state of birth, he would have been conceived
about halfway through his father's visit home. So maybe some
(17:54):
residual Nazi vibes from Nuremberg had transferred directly into him
at conception or something. I don't know. Those old local
newspapers had one more curious tidbit about Louis's childhood that
I hadn't found anywhere else. When he was a junior
in high school, his mother shot his father during an
(18:29):
argument one evening at home. She shot him once in
the stomach with a German made twenty two caliber pistol.
She was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
He survived, but the marriage didn't. The divorce was finalized
the week of Louis's eighteenth birthday. His three younger siblings
(18:50):
were sent to live with their uncle. It doesn't say
what happened to Louis. Madeline Beam ended up being tried twice,
time ended in a mistrial, but she was ultimately acquitted.
In March of nineteen sixty five, a full year after
the incident, Lewis seemed to be struggling his senior year
(19:12):
of high school. A few months after his mother shot
his father, Lewis Junior was arrested on a charge of
criminal mischief in some unspecified incident involving throwing a bottle
at a house. A few months later, right around the
time of his mother's second trial for shooting his father,
an eighteen year old Lewis got a sixteen year old
(19:34):
girl pregnant. They married shortly after he graduated high school.
Marilyn Milligan was the first of Lewis Beam's five wives,
and the first of three women who would be sixteen
years old at the time of their marriage to Beam.
He was eighteen the first time, but he kept getting older,
(19:58):
and the wives stage sixteen before his first child was
even born, Louis Bean was off to the army. Maybe
he felt like he didn't have other options. His parents
were kind of dealing with their own stuff. It's not
even clear where he'd been living when he got his
teenage girlfriend pregnant. So he enlisted in the army in
(20:21):
September of nineteen sixty five. He just turned nineteen and
he had a teenage wife with a baby on the way.
He was sent to a base in Germany first, but
from the spring of nineteen sixty seven to the fall
of nineteen sixty eight he spent eighteen months in country.
He served as a machine gunner on a helicopter with
(20:43):
the twenty fifth Aviation Battalion. By his own account, he
quickly grew to enjoy the killing. He was good at it,
and his country thanked him for it. He came home
a highly decorated veteran, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross, an
Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism. He
(21:05):
claims to have killed fifty people during his year and
a half in Vietnam. All it did was give him
PTSD a taste for killing communists and the best training
a future paramilitary commander. Could ever hope for. Not to
be clear, he was already racist. Getting a free pass
(21:27):
from the US government to shoot Vietnamese people didn't implant
the notion of white supremacy in his head. A now
deleted website maintained by veterans of the twenty fifth Aviation
Battalion shows a photo of a young Lewis Beam posing
in his quarters. He's posing in front of a big
Confederate flag hanging on the wall in a little thatched hut,
(21:51):
and the caption reads, all I gotta say is vote
for Wallace. He was apparently well known for talking about
how much she liked George Wallace, the segregationist running for
president in nineteen sixty eight. According to his Essays of
a Klansman, he joined the Klan shortly after returning home
(22:12):
in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe he joined in sixty nine.
Certainly by nineteen seventy he was allegedly already carrying out
bombings for the Klan by the beginning of nineteen seventy.
His own timelines are a little scattered. In Essays of
a Klansman, he says he joined the Klan after watching
(22:34):
footage of an anti war demonstration on TV. He was
sitting at home in Texas, just freshly home from the war,
and he watched people that he calls pro Vietcong communist
sympathizers picketing outside the Capitol Building in DC, and those
demonstrators set an American flag on fire and spat on
(22:58):
its ashes. Now, it's unclear if the demonstrators in question
were actually Communists or if this is just another instance
of a reactionary labeling all of his enemies communists. That
is something he specifically did a lot, and I'm not
able to tell you with any kind of certainty what
(23:18):
day this would have occurred on. There were a lot
of demonstrations against the war, and a lot of them
featured flag burning. So this may have been a real
specific incident, or it may not have, but it represented
something that he certainly could have seen on TV. He
describes this incident as taking place in the late fall
(23:39):
quote one hundred and seven years after Fort Sumter, referring
to the battle that started the Civil War in eighteen
sixty one. So he doesn't say when this happened, but
it sounds like he's saying he joined the Klan in
the fall of nineteen sixty eight. Although in other writings
he describes having joined the movement in April of nineteen
(24:00):
sixty nine, but around then, in March of nineteen seventy,
he was briefly detained after snatching a flag from a
left wing demonstrator at a rally against the draft in Houston.
He attacked a member of Students for a Democratic Society
and had to be protected by marchers from the Peace Coalition,
(24:21):
who escorted him at his request through the crowd towards
the police. At the edge of the rally. FBI agents
who were there that day were seen photographing the faces
and license plates of the marchers who were there to
oppose the war in Vietnam, but the police released the
violent clansmen without charges. According to an informant, he was
(24:45):
one of the klansmen responsible for blowing up a radio
station two months later. Later that year, in October of
nineteen seventy, Beam was invited to a banquet hosted by
Anna Chenault, widow of General Claire Schanalt. Anna Chenault was
an influential fundraiser for Richard Nixon, and she gave a
speech that evening about the importance of continuing the war
(25:07):
in Vietnam, and she presented Louis Beam with a Good
Citizenship award for his efforts in attacking that peace protester,
and just by wave a little bit of background on
Anna Chenault. Two years before that banquet, she was involved
in Richard Nixon's efforts to sabotage President Johnson's attempts at
(25:28):
peace talks. Now, the actual impact of the Chenault affair
on the length of the war is a matter of
some debate, but it is a historical fact that she
was working on Richard Nixon's behalf in an attempt to
prolong the war intentionally, so I guess it does make
some sense that she was giving out awards for roughing
(25:49):
up hippies and peacenicks. Beam wasn't publicly identified as a
clansman until he was arrested in nineteen seventy one for
a series of bombings that had begun over a year earlier.
He and more than a dozen other clansmen were indicted
on a laundry list of charges, including bombing that radio
station and the offices of the Houston area Socialist Workers
(26:13):
Party that was a popular target for the time period.
If you remember from the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes. That
was one of his first bombings as well, and the
Socialist Workers Party office in LA was blown up by
members of the National Socialist White People's Party, all kind
of around this same time period. It was something these
guys thought about a lot. And in the case of
(26:34):
the bombing in Houston, the defense attorney on that case
is someone you might remember from a lot of other
stories about unsolved bombings during this time period. Representing one
of beams co conspirators was National States Rights Party chairman
and serial bomber JB. Stoner. That doesn't go anywhere, but
(26:58):
that's a recurring character, So put a pin on the board,
and oddly this case disappears. In nineteen seventy one, Lewis
Beam is arrested and indicted for a number of bombings.
There's credible evidence, there are informants. One guy got convicted,
(27:20):
but the case against him just kind of never I
don't know, there's just nothing, like, there's no record I
can find that it went to trial, or that it
was dropped, or that a particular reason was given for anything.
It just disappears from the news. It's in the news
all the time throughout nineteen seventy one. I mean, Beam
is testifying for the defense several times and proceedings against
(27:41):
his co conspirators, and then there's just no more articles
about it ever. Again. Now, granted, I have limited access
to archival resources here on my computer at home, but
Kathleen Blue's book has a footnote that reads, the details
of these cases are not available in the archival material.
(28:04):
And I know Kathleen looked at all the archival material.
So there's just no explanation for this. In the mid
nineteen seventies, Lewis Beam changed teams. I mean he was
still a clansman, don't get me wrong, but he swapped allegiances.
(28:25):
He'd originally joined a Texas chapter of the Alabama based
United Clans of America, but he was starting to feel disillusioned.
I mean, the group was so heavily infiltrated with informants,
and everybody knew it. I mean people say that today
about all kinds of things, and a lot of that
is just paranoia, but they were right. Cointelbro had done
(28:49):
a real number on the UKA. So in nineteen seventy
three he struck out on his own. He wanted his
own thing, and he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan.
I wish I was kidding. There was actually already a
group in Louisiana called the Original Ku Klux Klan, and
(29:12):
he got that guy's permission to use their charter and
the name because it was I think, mostly defunct. But
he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan, which is
a silly name in the first place, and it wasn't
even the first group to be called that. But by
nineteen seventy five he'd reached an agreement with David Duke
to affiliate his organization with Duke's klan group, the Knights
(29:34):
of the Ku Klux Klan. So you know, normally we're
just talking about the Klan. That's three ks. This is
four ks. The internal politics of rival Klan groups is
something we can talk about another time, but just so
you know, he was in the Klan the whole time,
but it was three different clans. There is so much
(30:10):
more to say about Louis Bean and the Clan in
the nineteen seventies, but I got into this whole mess
to tell you a funny story, and god damn it,
I'm just going to skip to it. Louis Bean is
so integral to the history of this time period that
I'm not worried about it. We'll pick up these loose
ends in a number of future episodes. I just wanted
(30:34):
to lay a little bit of groundwork for you before
we get to the fifteen year old boys who begged
their moms not to make them go back to boy
scout camp because of the heavy emphasis on learning how
to murder people. In nineteen seventy seven, Louis Bean purchased
some land he used to grant from the Texas Veterans
(30:55):
Land Board to buy fifty acres of swamp land in
the area of Double By You in Chambers County. If
you don't have a map handy and you don't know
where Double Bayou is, the best I can do for
you is that the nearest city would be Houston, but
Double Bayou is kind of on the other side of
the bay. The land was co owned with three other men,
(31:20):
Beam's younger brother Philip, a local attorney named Dale Paschel,
and Beam's second in command in his clan paramilitary group,
Robert Cecente. Cesinte has a number of aliases, but this
is the one that's used most consistently. So we'll stick
with that. Paschell would later tell reporters that he'd only
(31:42):
purchase the land as an investment and he had no
involvement in or knowledge of how it was being used.
Philip Beam lived in Ohio, and he said if that
property was being used for anything, it was news to him.
Cesente lived on the property and he would he actively
involved in the operations there, but he claimed he had
(32:05):
no idea it had anything to do with the Klan,
and he was just an enthusiastic hobbyist with a passion
for survival training. He just liked camping. By the time
they're all making these denials to the press, Lewis Beam
is the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan. He is the highest ranking klansman in
(32:27):
the state of Texas. And they all knew that. Everybody
knew that. There's no way they didn't know that. Dorothy Skaife,
a klansman's widow by the time the compound was built,
lived in a trailer on the compound. She and her
husband had been friends with David and Chloe Duke. The
(32:48):
local newspaper ran a photo of her holding David Duke's
infant daughter at a Klan bookstore grand opening in nineteen
seventy six. None of this was a secret. You couldn't
not know that these people clansmen, and that Lewis Bean
was using the land as a training facility for clansmen.
They called it Camp Puller, named for General Lewis Chesty Puller,
(33:12):
a Marine Corps officer who served in the occupation of
Haiti in nineteen nineteen, the operation of Nicaragua in the thirties,
World War Two, and the Korean War. Puller had died
just a few years before the camp opened, but Marines
had been naming stuff after Chesty Puller for years already.
The bulldog that serves as the Marine Corps unofficial mascot
(33:34):
has been named Chesty since the fifties, when the human
Chesty was still alive. I think they're on Chesty the sixteenth.
Now it's a real dog. They just named them all Chesty.
Robert Cecente, one of the land's co owners, the one
who said he didn't know anything about the clan stuff.
He said he chose that name because he'd served with
(33:55):
Puller in Korea, and Camp Puller sounds like the name
of a real Marine Corps base. But Kemp Puller wasn't
a real military base. It was modeled after military basis.
It was intended to serve a similar function, and many
of the men running it were veterans. They used what
(34:17):
they learned in the military to replicate the experience of
boot camp for their clan recruits. Later court proceedings include
expert testimony from a former Green Beret who had reviewed
hours of footage of Lewis Beem providing classroom and tactical
instruction on the compound. In his opinion, the training was
(34:38):
consistent with what would be necessary for a viable military organization.
It was similar to the training that would be occurring
on a military base. It wasn't survival training, it wasn't camping.
It was very clear to him that the goal was combat.
(35:00):
In October of nineteen eighty, three, years after being bought
that land, the Anti Defamation League issued a report about
clan training compounds, not just this one. There were several
of these compounds in Texas. There were some in Louisiana, Alabama, California, Illinois,
and North Carolina. The one in North Carolina was run
(35:22):
by another guy we've talked about before, Fraser Glenn Miller.
And the ADL mailed copies of this report out to
various attorneys general. They talked to the press. The FBI
said there was nothing they could do about it, and
the local cops in Chambers County said all they'd ever
gotten were a couple of noise complaints, nothing illegal going on.
(35:47):
After the report hit the news, reporters in Texas went
to go talk to the neighbors and it turned out
they'd been having issues. On November sixteenth, nineteen e the
Houston Chronicle ran a story with the headline right wing
militants operate armed training center in Chambers County. One neighbor
(36:09):
said it sounded like there was a small war going
on next door. He told reporters he'd once discovered a
small troop of armed men and camo hiding in his bushes,
and that his elderly mother was terrified when she saw
a group of men with rifles hiding in a ditch
by the road when she was driving to church. A
trainer at the camp, who wouldn't give reporters his real name,
(36:31):
rejected that characterization. It's just survivalist training, he said, quote
it's trading that any gorilla would need, but it's also
what any boy scout lost in the woods would need.
And it's so funny that he should mention boy scouts
(36:52):
because a week later, the Houston Chronicle ran another story
about the compound. The story ran on the front page
of the Sunday paper announcing Ku Klux klansmen convicted felon
teach area boy Scouts how to kill Camp Puller wasn't
just a clan paramilitary training compound. It wasn't just adults
(37:16):
preparing for the race where it Camp Puller. It was
part of the Boy Scouts of America's Explorer program. I
think the program has a slightly different meaning within Scouting today,
but back then, older boy scouts in the Senior Scout
program could choose several different paths, and Explorer Scouts focused
(37:37):
on things like camping sounds great wholesome stuff, and the
boys did camp. But after those first stories came out
about the compound being used as a clan training camp,
some concerned mothers came forward about what else was going
(37:57):
on there. Obviously, the more important story is the four
years the Klans spent training militant racists, but the funnier
story is the few months they spent trying to convince
high schoolers that they might need to know how to
hijack a plane. In the aftermath of the revelations about
(38:19):
what was really going on at Camp Puller, it came
out that a lot of people should have known this
wasn't a good idea. A lot of people could have
stopped this. When the instructors from the camp applied to
host the Explorer Post in the fall of nineteen eighty,
they met with a representative from the Houston Area Boy
(38:40):
Scout Council, as well as Lieutenant Colonel R. L. Close,
the Marine Corps officer who oversaw the local Civil Air
Patrol Cadet program, a program for teenagers interested in the
Air Force. Of that meeting, Lieutenant Close said he'd questioned
them about their proposed curriculum. Quote. I brought up the
(39:00):
garrotting and the machete thing, he later told reporters. I
said it wasn't necessary to teach that kind of thing.
I said, I really didn't see any reason to teach
them to use a garat or a machete to kill.
He recalls that they just shrugged and they'd take his
recommendation under advisement. After that meeting, both the Cadet program
(39:25):
and the Boy Scouts Explorer program sent boys to Camp Puller.
They had this meeting, they had this conversation, they did
not get confirmation that this would not happen, and they
sent children there. The camp instructors they'd met with should
(39:48):
have sent up red flags right away, I mean, even
before they opened their mouths about the murder stuff. Joe Bogart,
the drill instructor at Camp Puller, had served four years
in the Marines as a cook. He was also a
loud and proud member of the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan. Granted that wouldn't have come up on a
background check, and the Boy Scouts of America later defended
(40:10):
themselves by saying, there's no question on the background form
that asks about things like that, So how could they
have found out. They could have found out by simply
observing Bogart's behavior because he wasn't shy about it, But
the background check should have caught. John Bryant, the Scout
leader for the program, was on federal probation. He had
(40:35):
very recently been convicted for illegally selling automatic weapons. He
was not legally allowed to handle a firearm of any kind.
Let alone hand out M sixteen's loaded with live AMMO
to groups of school children. Another potential scout master never
(40:55):
actually interacted with the children. John Allen Moser, was arrested
for murder for hire shortly before the Explorer camp got started,
but he'd been an instructor on the compound prior to
his arrest. Moser, a longtime clan member, had previously spent
time in federal prison for possession of explosives and firearms
(41:15):
that he'd stolen from the Texas National Guard armory. If
they had looked into this place at all, they would
have found out that a recent resident had just gone
to prison for murder for hire. No one wanted to
take the blame for this. John Bryant complained that people
(41:38):
were overreacting to the reports of firearm training, saying, quote,
we're not teaching these boys how to snipe. They only
shoot a few rounds, not proficiently by any means of
his lessons. On strangulation, Joe Bogart said it was perfectly
normal when he was in boot camp to strangle his
(41:58):
fellow Marines to the point of unconsciousness, but because these
were just children, quote, we didn't have the boys choke
each other out. We just showed them how to do it.
Parents reported hearing from their children that they'd received lectures
on guerrilla warfare that were laden with racial slurs. One
(42:19):
boy told his mother that he didn't want to go
back after hearing that their next lesson would be on
plane hijacking. Two separate families pulled their children out after
boys confided in a parent that the frequent lectures about
killing people were frightening them. One mother pulled her two
sons out of the program when they told her that
their next outing would be a trip down to the
(42:42):
border to watch for people crossing illegally. And by nineteen
eighty Louis Beam had rather famously been associated with a
Clan Vigilanti group at the border. So this wasn't some
idle notion. This is something that this group had done before.
There's no evidence that they ever actually took these children
(43:02):
to the border, but that may be because the camp
was canceled by the following week. In the weeks following
these initial revelations, spokesmen for various organizations scrambled between was
it really that bad to we didn't know? We couldn't
have known. There's no way we could have known. Local
(43:24):
representatives from the Boy Scouts claim they had the FBI
run background checks on the camp's instructors. The FBI explicitly
denied that that wasn't something that they even offer. That
same spokesman then defended himself, saying, well, it wouldn't actually
even be possible to look into the backgrounds of all
(43:45):
their volunteers because there were so many, and all three
of these Scout masters were already members of the Civil
Air Patrol, So why hadn't they already known about the
men's backgrounds. Cescente was pretty publicly the second in command
of the Texas Emergency Reserve, which was Lewis Beams Clan
(44:06):
Special Forces paramilitary outfit. Ccente would repeatedly deny being involved
with the clan in any way, but you can see
him out in public doing security for clan events, and
he owned property with the Grand Dragon. And again, they
(44:26):
weren't being sneaky about their intentions. Aside from Cesente's feudal
reluctance to admit he was literally a klansman. They weren't
really lying to anybody about who they were or what
they planned to do. They told everybody what was going
to happen. They had those meetings with the leaders from
the Boy Scouts and the Civil Air Patrol. They filled
(44:49):
out an application for a charter with the Boy Scouts
of America, and that charter had already been approved at
the national level by the time this happened. It was
pending with the local council. When the story broke, of course,
they rejected the application. I mean, now that everybody's complaining
about it, they know better. So Campuller's application for a
(45:11):
Boy Scout charter did ultimately get denied after the story broke,
But the county prosecutor said none of this was any
of his business. There's no crime here. The government declined
to intervene. Nobody was going to shut them down. But
in the weeks following these revelations about the Boy Scout
camp ccente said he was going to close Camp Puller voluntarily.
(45:36):
He lived on the property and he said all this
attention was making it unsafe for his family. He also
complained about it being unfair that he was being smeared
with the stigma of these clan associations, something which again
he knew nothing about. A Few weeks later, after the
Houston Chronicle dug up a photograph of Cesente wearing a
(45:56):
clan robe and an audio recording of Cesente speaking at
a clan rally where he was introduced by a clan
member who said that he also was a clan member.
He did half heartedly admit that he'd attended a clan
rallier too. Louis Beam vowed to continue training people of
(46:17):
all ages for the coming race war. At a clan
rally a few weeks after Campuller closed in December, he said, quote,
we've trade eight year olds, but I'd like to start
him even younger, maybe at six. He denied promoting racial warfare,
but he said that this military training for clan families
(46:38):
was a matter of survival for the white race, and
a few weeks later neighbors heard the gunfire start up again.
In early nineteen eighty one, the clan's violent harassment of
those Vietnamese fishermen in the bay was starting to heat up.
Don't worry about all the loups who sends this week.
(47:01):
I just wanted to tell you about race war camp
for kids. But I promise I wasn't wasting your time.
You'll hear about all these guys again. Eventually, John Bryant,
the scout master with the Federal Firearms Charge, was found
dead of an apparent overdose just a few months after
the boy Scout scandal. His death wasn't related to this scandal, though.
(47:24):
In the weeks before his death, the FBI and the
ATF had busted dozens of Nazis and Klansmen in a
massive international plot to overthrow the government of the Caribbean
island of Dominica. Bryant had apparently been recruiting aspiring mercenaries
for the invasion that never happened, and Louis Dean well.
(47:49):
According to the jury that acquitted him, he wasn't doing
anything but allegedly maybe, depending on who you believe. He
spent most of the eighties working behind the scenes on
a massive nationwide seditious conspiracy. Hard to say nothing ever
(48:12):
stuck to him. Weird little guys. It's a production of
Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded
(48:34):
by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtreman
and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Ory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going
(48:57):
to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. The sun was already starting to set
by the time the couple pulled up outside of their
apartment on November sixth, nineteen eighty seven. This trip to
Mexico had initially been pitched to Sheila as a honeymoon,
but they'd been staying in this little xpac community outside
(00:24):
of Guadalajara for more than six months. She was young
and in love, and she'd adjusted easily to her new
role as the stepmother to her husband's seven year old
daughter from a prior marriage, but she was so terribly
worried about crime. She and her husband just didn't trust Mexicans,
(00:46):
so they rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of their little
neighborhood of white Americans. That evening, Sheila went straight inside
and started bustling around the kitchen, preparing to get started
on making dinner. With the groceries just picked up. She
was standing at the scenk looking out the kitchen window
to see what was taking her husband so long when
(01:07):
she saw her worst fear. A gang of Mexican bandits
was assaulting her husband. They were holding him face down
on the hood of the car at gunpoint. At least
that's what she told a Mexican judge she thought she
saw through the window. She claimed the officers with the
(01:29):
Mexican Federal Police never identified themselves. She never would have
fired on them if she'd known they were police officers,
and maybe the judge believed her, or maybe they just
wanted to be rid of her. She spent just ten
days in a Mexican jail before all of her charges
were dropped. The officer she'd shot three times in the
(01:51):
torso was still in the hospital in critical condition. When
Sheila was deported back to the United States, she rejoined
her husband, who was being held on some very serious
federal charges. That's why they'd been hiding out in Mexico.
It wasn't an extended honeymoon. Her husband was on the
(02:14):
FBI's most wanted list. Of course, Louis Beane was no
stranger to a courtroom, and he would end up wriggling
his way out of those sedition charges in nineteen eighty eight,
just like he always did. Nothing ever, seemed to stick
to him, not even that time. He hosted a boy
scout camp where his klansmen taught teenage boys how to
(02:37):
decapitate communists. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys.
A lot of what we know about what was happening
(03:06):
on Lewis Bem's paramilitary training compound outside Houston comes for
a lawsuit that was filed in nineteen eighty one. The
suit was filed by the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association against Lewis
Bean and his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
By the late nineteen seventies, there were significant communities of
(03:26):
Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who had settled in the Gulf
Coast area. The climate was similar and there were opportunities
there for fishing and crabbing, which was how many of
those refugees had fed their families back home in Vietnam
before the war. The story of the Texas clans war
with the fishermen comes later, though. But if the Klan
(03:50):
being weird near Galveston was sounding familiar to you, that's
probably why the clans escalating confrontations and threats against the
fishermen and the subsequent lawsuit are what made that compound famous,
and the injunction in that lawsuit is what ultimately shut
the camp down and made Lewis Bean so bad that
(04:11):
he left Texas entirely for a while, but that didn't
really get going until nineteen eighty one, and locals knew
what was going on at that camp in the fall
of nineteen eighty. You see, sometimes I just want to
tell you guys one funny little anecdote, but I can't
(04:34):
just drop you off in the middle of a guy's life.
You would have so many questions about how we got there.
But it's summertime. A lot of you have kids who
aren't in school this month. Maybe you've got them signed
up for some kind of camp, some educational program. Maybe
they're going to spend some time out in nature, learn
(04:55):
some new skills, make some new friends. And this seasonal
shift reminded me of the time a bunch of teenage
boys got sent off to what their mothers believed was
a perfectly normal boy scout camp, only to find out
that their sons were being trained for the race war
and a clan compound. So we're not going to get
(05:17):
the whole picture of Lewis Beam today, but I will
at least orient us a little bit before we get
into the kid's garrotting lessons. Okay, first of all, I
have to start with a confession. I have just now
discovered that I've been saying this man's name wrong for
(05:38):
a decade and nobody ever said anything to me. I
had to take a lap around the apartment, sighing and
groaning and slamming cabinets. Are you kidding me? Louis Louis Beam,
l o U I s that could be Lewis or Louis.
(05:59):
You know, say Louis King, Louis Louis Armstrong. I don't know.
It could go either way, and I've always said Louis Beam,
And now that I'm stressing out about it, I don't
know why did I hear someone say that? Or did
I just make it up and never check. His name
(06:19):
is Louis ray Beam Junior l o UIs, but his
father is Louis Raybeams Senior l e Wis. He's named
after a guy whose name isn't even spelled the same
if they called him junior, so you gotta figure they
called the kid Lewis. I didn't want to believe it.
(06:43):
I hate to be wrong. I'm so embarrassed. Lewis Texas
Klansman Louis Beam. Everybody knew this, but me. I don't
want to say it that way, but I'll be damned.
It turns out there are actually a lot of recordings
of this man saying his own name. As someone once
(07:06):
told me, Louis, your reputation precedes you. I'm not kidding.
I didn't have to look very hard to hear him
saying his own name. And I've had this problem before,
and it is usually very hard to find a recording
of someone saying their own name. So I'll just call
(07:29):
Louis Thames name because I take you can't stand the
hate and get out of the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen.
For those of you who haven't figured it out yet,
my name's Louis. Bam. Okay, okay, I get it, I
get it. You got me, Louis. This has shaken me
(07:52):
to my core. I'm tempted to just keep saying Louis.
You know sunk cost at this point, But apparently I'm
just the only one. I was so desperate to prove
that maybe people say it both ways that I found
dozens of recordings of people saying his name over the decades.
(08:13):
The man himself, his friends, and colleagues, news anchors, an
episode of PBS Frontline Professors everybody says Louis. But if
you google Louis, beam pronounce, the AI overview says Louis
quote pronounced exactly like the name Louis or the French Louis,
(08:37):
with the s remaining completely silent. Now, normally I would
not admit to even having allowed my eyeballs to pass
over the AI overview. I need to figure outw to
turn it off because it is not a useful resource.
But in this case, I was curious what the citation
for this is, because there's always a citation. It doesn't
(08:58):
mean the information it's pulling is correct or that it
has correctly digested it. But it got this from somewhere.
And the citation for this is an essay by doctor
Lawrence Min Bui Davis, the former curator for the Smithsonian
Asian Pacific American Center. According to doctor Davis, the Vietnamese
(09:18):
population in South Texas did call him Louis Bim, and
apparently bimb is a sort of vulgar Vietnamese slang term
for vagina. So a bunch of old Vietnamese guys were
sitting on their fishing boats in the bay talking about
their enemy Louis pussy. What a fun piece of cultural history.
(09:44):
Still never trust the AI overview. I got to figure
out how to turn that thing off, because even if
you're not trying to use it, it's just there at
the top of the page making stuff up. In this case,
it was telling me something that had an element of
truth to it, and that is a cool story. But
by presenting that as the proper pronunciation, no explanation, it
(10:07):
erased an extremely specific context, and it was effectively telling
me something that is not true. Remember AI does not
know anything. AI doesn't do your research for you. But
I'm sure you knew that. So I wasn't completely alone
in calling him Louis. But I don't have a Vietnamese accent,
(10:29):
so I guess I have to start calling him Lewis.
I could have kept this whole embarrassing digression to myself,
but I think we have the kind of relationship that
prioritizes honesty, and I wanted to tell you the pussy thing.
The second earth shattering revelation I had while I was
(10:51):
researching this week came when I found out he's still alive.
I genuinely had no idea Lewis being was still. I
don't know why, but I assumed he'd been dead for years,
like twenty years maybe. I guess they'd mostly think of
him as being in his prime in the seventies and eighties,
(11:13):
and that was so long ago, you know. He was
a key figure in that time period, sort of on
the level with guys like William Luther Pierce. And Pierce
did die twenty five years ago, but he was significantly
older than Beam was. Lewis Beam is, as it turns out,
the exact same age as the President, So he'll be
(11:34):
turning eighty this summer. He dropped out of the public
eye three full decades ago, so I'm sure I wasn't
the only one who assumed he was dead. His last
public appearance was in nineteen ninety six, around the time
he announced that he was retiring after thirty years in
the movement so he could spend more time with his family.
(11:55):
He also blamed his withdrawal on his declining health, which
he claimed was due to exposure to agent orange during
his service in the Vietnam War. I can't tell you
if the aging Klansman really was sick from exposure to
the chemical Defolian that the US military sprayed all over Vietnam,
but if he just wanted to spend more time with
his family, he picked a bad time to do it.
(12:18):
A few months after he stepped back from public life
to devote himself to his family, he didn't have one anymore.
His fourth wife, Sheila, the one who'd shot that Mexican
police officer for him a decade earlier, filed for divorce
in nineteen ninety seven, and the judge granted him very
limited access to the couple's two young daughters. His oldest daughter,
(12:43):
the one who'd been caught in that shootout in Mexico,
was returned to her mother, Beams third wife, Kara, in
nineteen eighty seven, after Mexican authority sent the girl home
to the US. Her father had abducted her during a
custodial disagreement in nineteen eighty two when she was a
top That may have played a role in the judge's
decision to give Sheila primary custody of the girls in
(13:05):
her divorce. The man had a history, but I guess
I should have started by telling you what that history was.
He's come up in passing here and there. It's hard
to avoid him, really, if you're talking about the American
far right in the seventies and eighties. He was a klansman.
(13:28):
Not just any clansman. He was kind of a big deal.
He was the architect of the leaderless resistance model of
right wing violence in the United States, that cell based
structure for terrorist attacks that makes the movement harder to
track and harder to stop. This week I returned once
(13:50):
again to one of my favorite books, Kathleen BLUs Bring
the War Home. I know I've said it before, but
it's worth saying again. If you haven't, go ahead and
pick up a copy. It really is one of the
best books out there on the white power movement in
the United States. And not to beat a dead horse,
but I did find audio of Kathleen saying his name.
(14:12):
She says Louis, because that's his name. Honestly, I trust
her more than I trust the man himself, so I
give up. Nobody says Louis. Her book isn't exactly a
biography of Louis Beam, but the modern militant far right
in America doesn't really exist without him, so it's as
(14:35):
close to one as you're going to find. The title itself,
bring the War Home, is a reference to one of
Beam's essays in his nineteen eighty three collection Essays of
a Klansman. One of the essays is called Vietnam, Bring
It On Home. Beam was a Vietnam War veteran, and
(14:58):
he wasn't done fighting when he got home. He'd fought
for the US government in Vietnam, and now he wanted
to wage war against the US government. Lewis Raybeaham Junior
was born on August twentieth, nineteen forty six, in Lufkin, Texas.
(15:20):
And I know I said I was done, meaning a
dead horse. But according to the Texas Department of Health
Bureau of Vital Statistics, the name on his birth certificate,
the name that was recorded with the State of Texas
at the time of his birth is Lewis with a W,
just like his father's. So I don't know when he
started spelling his own name wrong. But okay, I'm done.
I'm done. He was the eldest of four children born
(15:44):
to Madeleine and Louis Beam Senior. Most sources just skip
over his childhood and pick up with his enlistment in
the army in nineteen sixty five. The Southern Poverty Law
Center is biographical sketch even says that there isn't much
known about beams childhood. Obviously, the couple of hours I
(16:05):
spent poking around on my computer here in my home
office wasn't going to dig up some previously unknown primary
source that the experts missed all these years. So I
don't have a bombshell for you. I don't have any
new information about his childhood, but I did find kind
of a fun fact about his conception. Lewis Senior was
(16:27):
a soldier to He was in the Army. He was
deployed in nineteen forty three, serving in Algeria, France, and Italy.
He was injured several times over the course of the
war and received a bronze star at a purple heart.
He attended Officer candidate school in France during the war,
and by nineteen forty five he was a lieutenant and
(16:49):
in the summer of nineteen forty five he received a
new assignment. He was a prison guard at Nuremberg. The
Klansman's father was one of the soldiers standing guard over
the Nazi war criminals. He met Hermann Gurring in November
(17:10):
of nineteen forty five, after thirty three months deployed in
the European theater, Lewis Senior was granted a six week
furlough to travel home to Texas to see his wife.
He'd married Madeline in nineteen forty one before he left
Texas for the army, but he'd barely seen her since.
The Tyler Morning Telegraph ran a story about his visit home,
(17:32):
describing what he'd been up to for the last three years.
The headline was gurring looks, beaten, morose, avoids meeting eyes
of others, reports jail guard from East Texas. Based on
Lewis Junior's state of birth, he would have been conceived
about halfway through his father's visit home. So maybe some
(17:54):
residual Nazi vibes from Nuremberg had transferred directly into him
at conception or something. I don't know. Those old local
newspapers had one more curious tidbit about Louis's childhood that
I hadn't found anywhere else. When he was a junior
in high school, his mother shot his father during an
(18:29):
argument one evening at home. She shot him once in
the stomach with a German made twenty two caliber pistol.
She was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
He survived, but the marriage didn't. The divorce was finalized
the week of Louis's eighteenth birthday. His three younger siblings
(18:50):
were sent to live with their uncle. It doesn't say
what happened to Louis. Madeline Beam ended up being tried twice,
time ended in a mistrial, but she was ultimately acquitted.
In March of nineteen sixty five, a full year after
the incident, Lewis seemed to be struggling his senior year
(19:12):
of high school. A few months after his mother shot
his father, Lewis Junior was arrested on a charge of
criminal mischief in some unspecified incident involving throwing a bottle
at a house. A few months later, right around the
time of his mother's second trial for shooting his father,
an eighteen year old Lewis got a sixteen year old
(19:34):
girl pregnant. They married shortly after he graduated high school.
Marilyn Milligan was the first of Lewis Beam's five wives,
and the first of three women who would be sixteen
years old at the time of their marriage to Beam.
He was eighteen the first time, but he kept getting older,
(19:58):
and the wives stage sixteen before his first child was
even born, Louis Bean was off to the army. Maybe
he felt like he didn't have other options. His parents
were kind of dealing with their own stuff. It's not
even clear where he'd been living when he got his
teenage girlfriend pregnant. So he enlisted in the army in
(20:21):
September of nineteen sixty five. He just turned nineteen and
he had a teenage wife with a baby on the way.
He was sent to a base in Germany first, but
from the spring of nineteen sixty seven to the fall
of nineteen sixty eight he spent eighteen months in country.
He served as a machine gunner on a helicopter with
(20:43):
the twenty fifth Aviation Battalion. By his own account, he
quickly grew to enjoy the killing. He was good at it,
and his country thanked him for it. He came home
a highly decorated veteran, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross, an
Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism. He
(21:05):
claims to have killed fifty people during his year and
a half in Vietnam. All it did was give him
PTSD a taste for killing communists and the best training
a future paramilitary commander. Could ever hope for. Not to
be clear, he was already racist. Getting a free pass
(21:27):
from the US government to shoot Vietnamese people didn't implant
the notion of white supremacy in his head. A now
deleted website maintained by veterans of the twenty fifth Aviation
Battalion shows a photo of a young Lewis Beam posing
in his quarters. He's posing in front of a big
Confederate flag hanging on the wall in a little thatched hut,
(21:51):
and the caption reads, all I gotta say is vote
for Wallace. He was apparently well known for talking about
how much she liked George Wallace, the segregationist running for
president in nineteen sixty eight. According to his Essays of
a Klansman, he joined the Klan shortly after returning home
(22:12):
in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe he joined in sixty nine.
Certainly by nineteen seventy he was allegedly already carrying out
bombings for the Klan by the beginning of nineteen seventy.
His own timelines are a little scattered. In Essays of
a Klansman, he says he joined the Klan after watching
(22:34):
footage of an anti war demonstration on TV. He was
sitting at home in Texas, just freshly home from the war,
and he watched people that he calls pro Vietcong communist
sympathizers picketing outside the Capitol Building in DC, and those
demonstrators set an American flag on fire and spat on
(22:58):
its ashes. Now, it's unclear if the demonstrators in question
were actually Communists or if this is just another instance
of a reactionary labeling all of his enemies communists. That
is something he specifically did a lot, and I'm not
able to tell you with any kind of certainty what
(23:18):
day this would have occurred on. There were a lot
of demonstrations against the war, and a lot of them
featured flag burning. So this may have been a real
specific incident, or it may not have, but it represented
something that he certainly could have seen on TV. He
describes this incident as taking place in the late fall
(23:39):
quote one hundred and seven years after Fort Sumter, referring
to the battle that started the Civil War in eighteen
sixty one. So he doesn't say when this happened, but
it sounds like he's saying he joined the Klan in
the fall of nineteen sixty eight. Although in other writings
he describes having joined the movement in April of nineteen
(24:00):
sixty nine, but around then, in March of nineteen seventy,
he was briefly detained after snatching a flag from a
left wing demonstrator at a rally against the draft in Houston.
He attacked a member of Students for a Democratic Society
and had to be protected by marchers from the Peace Coalition,
(24:21):
who escorted him at his request through the crowd towards
the police. At the edge of the rally. FBI agents
who were there that day were seen photographing the faces
and license plates of the marchers who were there to
oppose the war in Vietnam, but the police released the
violent clansmen without charges. According to an informant, he was
(24:45):
one of the klansmen responsible for blowing up a radio
station two months later. Later that year, in October of
nineteen seventy, Beam was invited to a banquet hosted by
Anna Chenault, widow of General Claire Schanalt. Anna Chenault was
an influential fundraiser for Richard Nixon, and she gave a
speech that evening about the importance of continuing the war
(25:07):
in Vietnam, and she presented Louis Beam with a Good
Citizenship award for his efforts in attacking that peace protester,
and just by wave a little bit of background on
Anna Chenault. Two years before that banquet, she was involved
in Richard Nixon's efforts to sabotage President Johnson's attempts at
(25:28):
peace talks. Now, the actual impact of the Chenault affair
on the length of the war is a matter of
some debate, but it is a historical fact that she
was working on Richard Nixon's behalf in an attempt to
prolong the war intentionally, so I guess it does make
some sense that she was giving out awards for roughing
(25:49):
up hippies and peacenicks. Beam wasn't publicly identified as a
clansman until he was arrested in nineteen seventy one for
a series of bombings that had begun over a year earlier.
He and more than a dozen other clansmen were indicted
on a laundry list of charges, including bombing that radio
station and the offices of the Houston area Socialist Workers
(26:13):
Party that was a popular target for the time period.
If you remember from the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes. That
was one of his first bombings as well, and the
Socialist Workers Party office in LA was blown up by
members of the National Socialist White People's Party, all kind
of around this same time period. It was something these
guys thought about a lot. And in the case of
(26:34):
the bombing in Houston, the defense attorney on that case
is someone you might remember from a lot of other
stories about unsolved bombings during this time period. Representing one
of beams co conspirators was National States Rights Party chairman
and serial bomber JB. Stoner. That doesn't go anywhere, but
(26:58):
that's a recurring character, So put a pin on the board,
and oddly this case disappears. In nineteen seventy one, Lewis
Beam is arrested and indicted for a number of bombings.
There's credible evidence, there are informants. One guy got convicted,
(27:20):
but the case against him just kind of never I
don't know, there's just nothing, like, there's no record I
can find that it went to trial, or that it
was dropped, or that a particular reason was given for anything.
It just disappears from the news. It's in the news
all the time throughout nineteen seventy one. I mean, Beam
is testifying for the defense several times and proceedings against
(27:41):
his co conspirators, and then there's just no more articles
about it ever. Again. Now, granted, I have limited access
to archival resources here on my computer at home, but
Kathleen Blue's book has a footnote that reads, the details
of these cases are not available in the archival material.
(28:04):
And I know Kathleen looked at all the archival material.
So there's just no explanation for this. In the mid
nineteen seventies, Lewis Beam changed teams. I mean he was
still a clansman, don't get me wrong, but he swapped allegiances.
(28:25):
He'd originally joined a Texas chapter of the Alabama based
United Clans of America, but he was starting to feel disillusioned.
I mean, the group was so heavily infiltrated with informants,
and everybody knew it. I mean people say that today
about all kinds of things, and a lot of that
is just paranoia, but they were right. Cointelbro had done
(28:49):
a real number on the UKA. So in nineteen seventy
three he struck out on his own. He wanted his
own thing, and he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan.
I wish I was kidding. There was actually already a
group in Louisiana called the Original Ku Klux Klan, and
(29:12):
he got that guy's permission to use their charter and
the name because it was I think, mostly defunct. But
he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan, which is
a silly name in the first place, and it wasn't
even the first group to be called that. But by
nineteen seventy five he'd reached an agreement with David Duke
to affiliate his organization with Duke's klan group, the Knights
(29:34):
of the Ku Klux Klan. So you know, normally we're
just talking about the Klan. That's three ks. This is
four ks. The internal politics of rival Klan groups is
something we can talk about another time, but just so
you know, he was in the Klan the whole time,
but it was three different clans. There is so much
(30:10):
more to say about Louis Bean and the Clan in
the nineteen seventies, but I got into this whole mess
to tell you a funny story, and god damn it,
I'm just going to skip to it. Louis Bean is
so integral to the history of this time period that
I'm not worried about it. We'll pick up these loose
ends in a number of future episodes. I just wanted
(30:34):
to lay a little bit of groundwork for you before
we get to the fifteen year old boys who begged
their moms not to make them go back to boy
scout camp because of the heavy emphasis on learning how
to murder people. In nineteen seventy seven, Louis Bean purchased
some land he used to grant from the Texas Veterans
(30:55):
Land Board to buy fifty acres of swamp land in
the area of Double By You in Chambers County. If
you don't have a map handy and you don't know
where Double Bayou is, the best I can do for
you is that the nearest city would be Houston, but
Double Bayou is kind of on the other side of
the bay. The land was co owned with three other men,
(31:20):
Beam's younger brother Philip, a local attorney named Dale Paschel,
and Beam's second in command in his clan paramilitary group,
Robert Cecente. Cesinte has a number of aliases, but this
is the one that's used most consistently. So we'll stick
with that. Paschell would later tell reporters that he'd only
(31:42):
purchase the land as an investment and he had no
involvement in or knowledge of how it was being used.
Philip Beam lived in Ohio, and he said if that
property was being used for anything, it was news to him.
Cesente lived on the property and he would he actively
involved in the operations there, but he claimed he had
(32:05):
no idea it had anything to do with the Klan,
and he was just an enthusiastic hobbyist with a passion
for survival training. He just liked camping. By the time
they're all making these denials to the press, Lewis Beam
is the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan. He is the highest ranking klansman in
(32:27):
the state of Texas. And they all knew that. Everybody
knew that. There's no way they didn't know that. Dorothy Skaife,
a klansman's widow by the time the compound was built,
lived in a trailer on the compound. She and her
husband had been friends with David and Chloe Duke. The
(32:48):
local newspaper ran a photo of her holding David Duke's
infant daughter at a Klan bookstore grand opening in nineteen
seventy six. None of this was a secret. You couldn't
not know that these people clansmen, and that Lewis Bean
was using the land as a training facility for clansmen.
They called it Camp Puller, named for General Lewis Chesty Puller,
(33:12):
a Marine Corps officer who served in the occupation of
Haiti in nineteen nineteen, the operation of Nicaragua in the thirties,
World War Two, and the Korean War. Puller had died
just a few years before the camp opened, but Marines
had been naming stuff after Chesty Puller for years already.
The bulldog that serves as the Marine Corps unofficial mascot
(33:34):
has been named Chesty since the fifties, when the human
Chesty was still alive. I think they're on Chesty the sixteenth.
Now it's a real dog. They just named them all Chesty.
Robert Cecente, one of the land's co owners, the one
who said he didn't know anything about the clan stuff.
He said he chose that name because he'd served with
(33:55):
Puller in Korea, and Camp Puller sounds like the name
of a real Marine Corps base. But Kemp Puller wasn't
a real military base. It was modeled after military basis.
It was intended to serve a similar function, and many
of the men running it were veterans. They used what
(34:17):
they learned in the military to replicate the experience of
boot camp for their clan recruits. Later court proceedings include
expert testimony from a former Green Beret who had reviewed
hours of footage of Lewis Beem providing classroom and tactical
instruction on the compound. In his opinion, the training was
(34:38):
consistent with what would be necessary for a viable military organization.
It was similar to the training that would be occurring
on a military base. It wasn't survival training, it wasn't camping.
It was very clear to him that the goal was combat.
(35:00):
In October of nineteen eighty, three, years after being bought
that land, the Anti Defamation League issued a report about
clan training compounds, not just this one. There were several
of these compounds in Texas. There were some in Louisiana, Alabama, California, Illinois,
and North Carolina. The one in North Carolina was run
(35:22):
by another guy we've talked about before, Fraser Glenn Miller.
And the ADL mailed copies of this report out to
various attorneys general. They talked to the press. The FBI
said there was nothing they could do about it, and
the local cops in Chambers County said all they'd ever
gotten were a couple of noise complaints, nothing illegal going on.
(35:47):
After the report hit the news, reporters in Texas went
to go talk to the neighbors and it turned out
they'd been having issues. On November sixteenth, nineteen e the
Houston Chronicle ran a story with the headline right wing
militants operate armed training center in Chambers County. One neighbor
(36:09):
said it sounded like there was a small war going
on next door. He told reporters he'd once discovered a
small troop of armed men and camo hiding in his bushes,
and that his elderly mother was terrified when she saw
a group of men with rifles hiding in a ditch
by the road when she was driving to church. A
trainer at the camp, who wouldn't give reporters his real name,
(36:31):
rejected that characterization. It's just survivalist training, he said, quote
it's trading that any gorilla would need, but it's also
what any boy scout lost in the woods would need.
And it's so funny that he should mention boy scouts
(36:52):
because a week later, the Houston Chronicle ran another story
about the compound. The story ran on the front page
of the Sunday paper announcing Ku Klux klansmen convicted felon
teach area boy Scouts how to kill Camp Puller wasn't
just a clan paramilitary training compound. It wasn't just adults
(37:16):
preparing for the race where it Camp Puller. It was
part of the Boy Scouts of America's Explorer program. I
think the program has a slightly different meaning within Scouting today,
but back then, older boy scouts in the Senior Scout
program could choose several different paths, and Explorer Scouts focused
(37:37):
on things like camping sounds great wholesome stuff, and the
boys did camp. But after those first stories came out
about the compound being used as a clan training camp,
some concerned mothers came forward about what else was going
(37:57):
on there. Obviously, the more important story is the four
years the Klans spent training militant racists, but the funnier
story is the few months they spent trying to convince
high schoolers that they might need to know how to
hijack a plane. In the aftermath of the revelations about
(38:19):
what was really going on at Camp Puller, it came
out that a lot of people should have known this
wasn't a good idea. A lot of people could have
stopped this. When the instructors from the camp applied to
host the Explorer Post in the fall of nineteen eighty,
they met with a representative from the Houston Area Boy
(38:40):
Scout Council, as well as Lieutenant Colonel R. L. Close,
the Marine Corps officer who oversaw the local Civil Air
Patrol Cadet program, a program for teenagers interested in the
Air Force. Of that meeting, Lieutenant Close said he'd questioned
them about their proposed curriculum. Quote. I brought up the
(39:00):
garrotting and the machete thing, he later told reporters. I
said it wasn't necessary to teach that kind of thing.
I said, I really didn't see any reason to teach
them to use a garat or a machete to kill.
He recalls that they just shrugged and they'd take his
recommendation under advisement. After that meeting, both the Cadet program
(39:25):
and the Boy Scouts Explorer program sent boys to Camp Puller.
They had this meeting, they had this conversation, they did
not get confirmation that this would not happen, and they
sent children there. The camp instructors they'd met with should
(39:48):
have sent up red flags right away, I mean, even
before they opened their mouths about the murder stuff. Joe Bogart,
the drill instructor at Camp Puller, had served four years
in the Marines as a cook. He was also a
loud and proud member of the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan. Granted that wouldn't have come up on a
background check, and the Boy Scouts of America later defended
(40:10):
themselves by saying, there's no question on the background form
that asks about things like that, So how could they
have found out. They could have found out by simply
observing Bogart's behavior because he wasn't shy about it, But
the background check should have caught. John Bryant, the Scout
leader for the program, was on federal probation. He had
(40:35):
very recently been convicted for illegally selling automatic weapons. He
was not legally allowed to handle a firearm of any kind.
Let alone hand out M sixteen's loaded with live AMMO
to groups of school children. Another potential scout master never
(40:55):
actually interacted with the children. John Allen Moser, was arrested
for murder for hire shortly before the Explorer camp got started,
but he'd been an instructor on the compound prior to
his arrest. Moser, a longtime clan member, had previously spent
time in federal prison for possession of explosives and firearms
(41:15):
that he'd stolen from the Texas National Guard armory. If
they had looked into this place at all, they would
have found out that a recent resident had just gone
to prison for murder for hire. No one wanted to
take the blame for this. John Bryant complained that people
(41:38):
were overreacting to the reports of firearm training, saying, quote,
we're not teaching these boys how to snipe. They only
shoot a few rounds, not proficiently by any means of
his lessons. On strangulation, Joe Bogart said it was perfectly
normal when he was in boot camp to strangle his
(41:58):
fellow Marines to the point of unconsciousness, but because these
were just children, quote, we didn't have the boys choke
each other out. We just showed them how to do it.
Parents reported hearing from their children that they'd received lectures
on guerrilla warfare that were laden with racial slurs. One
(42:19):
boy told his mother that he didn't want to go
back after hearing that their next lesson would be on
plane hijacking. Two separate families pulled their children out after
boys confided in a parent that the frequent lectures about
killing people were frightening them. One mother pulled her two
sons out of the program when they told her that
their next outing would be a trip down to the
(42:42):
border to watch for people crossing illegally. And by nineteen
eighty Louis Beam had rather famously been associated with a
Clan Vigilanti group at the border. So this wasn't some
idle notion. This is something that this group had done before.
There's no evidence that they ever actually took these children
(43:02):
to the border, but that may be because the camp
was canceled by the following week. In the weeks following
these initial revelations, spokesmen for various organizations scrambled between was
it really that bad to we didn't know? We couldn't
have known. There's no way we could have known. Local
(43:24):
representatives from the Boy Scouts claim they had the FBI
run background checks on the camp's instructors. The FBI explicitly
denied that that wasn't something that they even offer. That
same spokesman then defended himself, saying, well, it wouldn't actually
even be possible to look into the backgrounds of all
(43:45):
their volunteers because there were so many, and all three
of these Scout masters were already members of the Civil
Air Patrol, So why hadn't they already known about the
men's backgrounds. Cescente was pretty publicly the second in command
of the Texas Emergency Reserve, which was Lewis Beams Clan
(44:06):
Special Forces paramilitary outfit. Ccente would repeatedly deny being involved
with the clan in any way, but you can see
him out in public doing security for clan events, and
he owned property with the Grand Dragon. And again, they
(44:26):
weren't being sneaky about their intentions. Aside from Cesente's feudal
reluctance to admit he was literally a klansman. They weren't
really lying to anybody about who they were or what
they planned to do. They told everybody what was going
to happen. They had those meetings with the leaders from
the Boy Scouts and the Civil Air Patrol. They filled
(44:49):
out an application for a charter with the Boy Scouts
of America, and that charter had already been approved at
the national level by the time this happened. It was
pending with the local council. When the story broke, of course,
they rejected the application. I mean, now that everybody's complaining
about it, they know better. So Campuller's application for a
(45:11):
Boy Scout charter did ultimately get denied after the story broke,
But the county prosecutor said none of this was any
of his business. There's no crime here. The government declined
to intervene. Nobody was going to shut them down. But
in the weeks following these revelations about the Boy Scout
camp ccente said he was going to close Camp Puller voluntarily.
(45:36):
He lived on the property and he said all this
attention was making it unsafe for his family. He also
complained about it being unfair that he was being smeared
with the stigma of these clan associations, something which again
he knew nothing about. A Few weeks later, after the
Houston Chronicle dug up a photograph of Cesente wearing a
(45:56):
clan robe and an audio recording of Cesente speaking at
a clan rally where he was introduced by a clan
member who said that he also was a clan member.
He did half heartedly admit that he'd attended a clan
rallier too. Louis Beam vowed to continue training people of
(46:17):
all ages for the coming race war. At a clan
rally a few weeks after Campuller closed in December, he said, quote,
we've trade eight year olds, but I'd like to start
him even younger, maybe at six. He denied promoting racial warfare,
but he said that this military training for clan families
(46:38):
was a matter of survival for the white race, and
a few weeks later neighbors heard the gunfire start up again.
In early nineteen eighty one, the clan's violent harassment of
those Vietnamese fishermen in the bay was starting to heat up.
Don't worry about all the loups who sends this week.
(47:01):
I just wanted to tell you about race war camp
for kids. But I promise I wasn't wasting your time.
You'll hear about all these guys again. Eventually, John Bryant,
the scout master with the Federal Firearms Charge, was found
dead of an apparent overdose just a few months after
the boy Scout scandal. His death wasn't related to this scandal, though.
(47:24):
In the weeks before his death, the FBI and the
ATF had busted dozens of Nazis and Klansmen in a
massive international plot to overthrow the government of the Caribbean
island of Dominica. Bryant had apparently been recruiting aspiring mercenaries
for the invasion that never happened, and Louis Dean well.
(47:49):
According to the jury that acquitted him, he wasn't doing
anything but allegedly maybe, depending on who you believe. He
spent most of the eighties working behind the scenes on
a massive nationwide seditious conspiracy. Hard to say nothing ever
(48:12):
stuck to him. Weird little guys. It's a production of
Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded
(48:34):
by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtreman
and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Ory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going
(48:57):
to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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