S34 E2: Highlander | Dirtbag Climber

There are places that simply exist and places that transform you.

Discover the difference in New Orleans, where dinner is more than a meal and music, oh, it finds you.

Get started at NewOrleans.com.

This is a CBC podcast.

It's early July and a heat wave is bearing down on the east coast of the U.S.

Producers Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly are walking up to a house that has seen better days.

Very strange house.

In this suburb of Boston, the houses are all far back from the winding road and the tall evergreens offer a bit of relief from the intense heat.

I don't think anybody's here right now.

They are here looking for a dead man's dad.

I'll be providing an update on a homicide case that happened in 2017 out of Squamish, B.C.

In 2017, a rock climber known as Jesse James was found dead in his burned-out truck in a campground in Squamish, B.C., where I live.

The victim's actual name remained unknown until recently.

It took three years for police to reveal his true identity.

Because, surprise, surprise, Jesse James was not his real name.

The truth about Jesse was finally uncovered when police were able to match his DNA to the DNA of a family in Medfield, Massachusetts.

They had reported their son missing in 2006.

This connection revealed that Jesse was born Andrew Britt Greenbaum.

Well, we can

pull out into the side and just wait maybe half an hour or so, eh?

Through private investigator reports, we were able to connect the Greenbaum family to this house.

But we had yet to connect with anyone who lived here.

In reality, we're not even sure if Jesse's dad is still alive.

I could also leave a note.

Yeah, we could.

Yeah.

So we leave a note in the mailbox, hoping a Green Bomb comes back to receive it.

It reads,

We would very much like to speak to you.

We know this is a tragic story, but this is the only way we can keep the story in the public eye.

After the initial flurry of news when Jesse, or should I say, Andrew's body, was discovered, Like most news stories, it kind of fell off the agenda.

But when police finally figured out who he was, the story found new life.

Three years after he was shot, police revealed that the man known as Jesse James was actually an American running from his past.

Once his real name was figured out, we learned he had been using aliases for years.

Jesse James was just one of the last.

And with each new name, a new persona, all of them very different from each other.

The question now is: which one of those identities got him killed?

You have one new voice message.

To answer this, we have to ask: who was he first?

Who was Andrew Britt Greenbaum?

Hello, this is hi Greenbaum.

I got your note in my mailbox, and yeah, I'd be happy to talk to you about my son, Britt, or Jesse James, or whatever name he was going by up there.

I'm Stephen Chua, and this is Dirtbag Climber from CBC Uncover.

Chapter 2, Highlander.

Okay?

Hi.

How are you?

Hyman Greenbaum has lived alone in this house ever since his wife Peggy died in 2019.

Probably easy is to sit right in here.

Here in his living room, it sure feels like not a lot has changed over those years.

The air is a bit stale, the house is tidy, but the decor is tired.

And Hyman is still waiting to learn who might have killed his son.

Well, I mean, I wanted to know

how and who.

I mean, I still want to know who.

You can still see and hear the sadness of a man who has lost his child.

But there are moments when it lifts, especially when Hyman thinks about sharing some of their favorite activities.

Think about all the fun we things we used to do, you know, the mountain climbing, the tennis, the chess, that sort of stuff.

Hyman knew his son lived outside of society's norms, even outside the law.

But it's very clear that Hyman loved his boy.

Even the parts of him that might have, in the end, contributed to his death.

He rented a place in Pawtucket, and while he was down there, he joined a tennis league there.

And he was having a good time in the tennis league, so he asked me if I wanted to play.

I said, sure.

And then he says, oh, and by the way,

my name there is Johnny Maverick.

So I had to enter it, but I had to enter it as Hank Maverick.

Are you serious?

Really?

So for the weekend, you were Johnny and Hank Maverick?

Yeah.

See, that's my wife.

And

this is my son as a baby.

Andrew Britt Greenbaum, their only child, was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1978.

But he was known as Britt.

My wife and I were living down there.

I was working for the, well, what's now the Naval Undersea Warfare Center down there.

They had a stint in Lakeville, Massachusetts, and then moved to the suburbs of Boston.

Because we were so close.

He was the only child, and we were just very, very close.

We never got a chance to speak to Peggy, but she did talk to journalist Brian McWilliams back in 2002 about her son, whom whom she clearly loved very much.

He was a very precocious child.

As his pediatrician told me, he had never seen a child as smart as Brett.

And his pediatrician was in his 50s.

The move to the suburbs of Boston, that was Peggy's idea.

She was worried about her son.

They would throw his...

papers, his essays, and so forth in puddles.

And this is a long duration thing, which is why we left Lakeville.

Eventually, they started teasing him, and then the teasing turned into physical abuse, where two boys would hold his hands down in homeroom, and the other boy would hit him as hard as he could on the top of his hand.

He was thrown over chairs.

With hindsight, Peggy seems to believe that the bullying was behind her son's personality problems later in life.

I'm sure Britt would not want, you know, it to be known, for instance, that he was so terribly teased

and physically abused in

grade school and right on into middle school while we lived in Lakeville.

I mean, he wouldn't want the world to know that.

And yet

that's probably the biggest part of the story of how

a child

builds up so much anger.

over the years and resentment

that it explodes one day and you in all of a sudden you have a monster.

Britstad Hyman, on the other hand, wasn't quite as concerned.

My wife thought he was being bullied.

I never really saw it myself, but she thought he was.

So

she decided we should move up to Westwood.

This dynamic of Peggy being concerned, while Hyman kind of laughs things off, it seems to have been a dynamic between the couple.

My wife thought he's crazy, but she was a little crazy too, so I don't know.

With their move to Westwood, the bullying did seem to stop, and Britt was able to find success in other places.

He

got into chess at an early age, and my wife and I both played, and so

she says he got interested because

at about age three or four, He was always moving the furniture around and creating blockades.

And

she thinks that started his interest in chess so she started playing chess with him.

Together the family would travel to tournaments.

Well he started beating me maybe when he's about 12.

I think he's beating my wife when she was about 10 so after that he would play with us but

it was just playing.

Hyman describes Britt's childhood as peaceful.

Throughout the house there are pictures of Britt and his dad atop a mountain, cuddling a dog, playing tennis.

Yeah, I mean, I used to take him up to the White Mountains a lot in New Hampshire to do hikes.

We did a lot of hikes together.

All supporting the idea that their lives were peaceful.

But Peggy started to see a change in her son when he started high school.

One day, he just, when he was 16, he woke up and he was a different person.

And I didn't know, of course, about a lot of the things that were going on.

I had no idea.

But I know now that it was 16 when all he started doing some,

well, acting out, I guess is the only way to put it.

Acting out in a big way.

This lower building is original.

That is all new.

The school was here.

Yeah, the whole school was here.

Our team traveled to Massachusetts to try and unearth the origins and character of Andrew Britt Greenbaum.

We've talked to his dad, but parents only know so much about their kids.

Our graduating class was about 120, 120.

Now I think that the classes are about over 200.

So they needed more space.

The football field's in the same place, right, Mark?

Wasn't there a football field in the middle?

This is an old classmate we are calling Zachary.

We're not using his real name because he's worried about repercussions he'll have being associated with Greenbaum.

The football field's in the same place, yes.

And this is another former classmate, Mark Seraphim.

Both Mark and Zachary only ever knew Andrew as Britt.

We knew that he was Andrew Britt, but he identified.

He always went by Britt.

Yeah, he goes, I just call me Britt.

In 1992, at age 13, Britt Greenbaum was the new kid joining Mark and Zachary's ninth grade class at Westwood High School.

He joined our class at the very beginning of freshman year.

He didn't strike me as either good or bad.

First impression was that maybe he was, you know, one one of those quiet types that was actually you know super intelligent type deals, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah, he immediately gave off the impression of being quiet, shy, maybe a little introverted.

I'll say nerdy, although I don't like that word, but he wasn't.

No, I mean he wasn't shy and he wasn't introverted and

I don't think he

sort of engaged anyone on his own, right?

I don't think he was sort of outgoing.

If you engaged him, he was

not shy and he was like lanky you know it was like like very skinny I mean he he dressed somewhat uniquely or unusually for a high school kid in the 90s he wore he would always wear like sort of long pants never jeans

he always wore a button down color shirt he always came to school ready to go to work.

It was really funny.

Mark and Zachary's assessment is pretty spot on.

In Britt's 1996 yearbook photo, he's dressed in a suit and tie, hand under his chin.

Picture an author photo on the back cover of a book.

Below, it reads, likes?

None.

Pet peeves?

Cops.

Right from the beginning, it seemed to Mark and Zachary that this new kid wasn't super interested in developing deep relationships with his classmates.

He never went to parties.

He never went to dances.

He never went, right?

No, not one.

Yeah, that one.

But we wouldn't never invite him.

No, no.

Nor would he be expecting us to invite him.

It's not like even if we invited him, probably he wouldn't come anyway.

From an in-school perspective, we were all top students, we were all in the top classes.

And again, we had a small

class.

There weren't a lot of us.

And so we were kind of all together all the time, right?

So in school, we would hang out.

Zachary and Mark don't remember Britt doing a lot of talking during class, but it was clear he was a smart guy, if not a bit lazy.

He was intelligent.

He was smart.

He was smart, but didn't like, you know, skyrocket top of the class type deal grade-wise or anything.

Could have been lack of effort.

His smarts showed up in other ways.

When he came to school, we learned, I don't know how we learned, but we learned about sort of his chess sort of

prowess, right?

Yeah, no, Britt was above.

I mean, way above.

Nobody could approach him on that level.

And I mean in the state.

I'm not talking about just in the school.

There's actually a lot about Britt's chess career online.

Through sites like uschess.org, you can track tournaments he played in, his every move.

Chess was one of Britt's true loves.

He played it throughout his life, even in squamish.

And there's a photo of him playing in Vancouver on his Instagram.

By the age of 16, he had a rating of 1800.

First title.

That's just a couple categories below master.

It was always kind of fun when we would play and how quickly he would beat all of us.

And he would laugh about it, sort of like sheepishly laugh about it.

We thought it was hilarious.

Yeah, we thought amazing he was and how quickly he would kill us.

We tried to learn from it, honestly, but he was just too fast.

But not everyone in the chess club thought it was fun being matched against Britt.

I played for fun and he played for something else.

He played for

the

I think it allowed him to demonstrate his superior tactical intelligence.

This is Michael DeLuca, another classmate of Brit's.

He was a freshman when Britt was a sophomore.

I met him at chess club.

He didn't want to play against me because I was so

he perceived me as inferior.

And then eventually, after I challenged him three or four times, he like groaningly accepted because of protocol.

Like the club required him to accept all comers, and I was a comer.

So he was listening to some heavy metal or something on his headphones and like barely looking at the board.

And he beat me in.

I'm going to guess under 30 moves.

I think I conceded.

It was embarrassing.

And

that was my introduction to Britt.

Britt's superiority wasn't just reserved for the lower grades.

It extended to Mark and Zachary, too.

And I feel like he kind of looked down on us.

All through high school, Britt tended to stand a bit to the side of social norms.

In ninth grade, he just seemed a bit strange, a bit too smart, a bit socially awkward.

But as Britt got older, he started to stand out in other ways.

Remember, he was into movies and he was into that one movie that

Highlander.

Highlander.

That's the word.

Highlander.

He was at the Highlander.

I forgot he was into Highlander.

He actually thought he was a character in Highland.

You know the guy who, I don't know if you guys see the movie, but you know, it's like it's he's, you know, it's a guy who

lives like forever.

He doesn't die.

And the only way like you can kill these people is like by chopping their heads off.

Because you were born different,

men will fear you, try to drive you away.

You must learn to conceal your special gift and harness your power.

And he thought he was, he was a Highlander at one point, so it was very interesting.

Living forever would become an obsession of Brits.

Maybe because of all the hours he spent watching moments like this in Highlander, with all the talk of being different and harnessing special powers.

He took it to heart, especially in Squamish, where he lived on a regimen of supplements and would espouse their everlasting benefits on social media and his blogs.

No one has ever lived past 130 years, but nobody with my genes or diet or knowledge or supplement regimen or commitment or lifestyle has existed in the past 13 billion years.

Not one person identical to me, ever.

He was posting about things like biohacking his body long before Tech Bros started hyping it on every podcast.

As you'll see throughout the series, Britt, or Jesse, was into the Manosphere before Manosphere was even a word.

But as a teenager, he was primarily interested in the weapons of Highlander.

So he actually bought a real sword.

Yeah, he collected swords.

He collected swords.

This was after that movie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Apparently, one person who was not part of our group, but I remember hearing in the hall, they're like, yeah, you know, Britt came out of the woods with a sword the other day.

I just remember hearing that, and I just remember thinking, you know what, yeah,

for us, I'm not really surprised.

And this interest in weapons didn't stop at a sword or two.

So

I was in his bedroom,

and I don't know if he wanted to show me his weapons collection, but that was...

what we did, right?

This is, I want to say, junior year now.

And at this point, he would bring weapons catalogs to school, and he would flip through them in school and he would talk about them.

Remember the ninja stars.

Yeah, and it was always like samurai.

It was always swords.

It was never firearms, right?

But he brought me into his room and I saw some of his weapons collection and it freaked me out.

I did feel unsafe.

I remember him taking like a bowie knife of some sort and doing one of those things where he would slam it into his desk right in front of me.

Police in Westwood were also aware of Britt's affection for weapons.

Once, Britt got pulled over and he admitted to having a sword in the trunk.

The police report says he told them it was used for, quote, training.

The officer's report goes on to say that Britt opened the trunk and, quote, showed me a sword approximately four feet in length.

There are other reports of police finding knives on him, more than once.

It seemed as though, whatever Britt was interested in, he was drawn to the darker side of things, including the dark side of computers.

he was a computer

whiz he was a hacker extraordinaire the man was phenomenal maliciously he was actually very maliciously like he would install software on the on the school computers he would remember that program when he went that poor teacher he he did some kind of a program where it calls this particular number every five minutes yeah he like bullied a teacher he bullied a teacher for a while is that how it was was it through an auto robo call thing robocall thing and apparently nobody knew how to like you know take it on or off or anything like that.

There were a lot of tech-savvy people, but I would argue he was probably the most tech-savvy person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When Zachary and Mark talk about Britt and what he was like at school, you can still hear the boys they were impressed with his abilities and attitude, but still a little scared, maybe.

One thing that I remember very clearly,

he had a hit list.

of in a notebook written down, right?

Of

students and teachers and, you know, who he carried grudges against right this was before columbine so nobody ever again just laughed at it right everybody just laughed at it and he showed it to us i don't think we were on it we were we were not on it yeah yeah um uh but he would show it to us um but it's one of those things where if it was after columbine right

it would have been suspended or worse, right?

It would have been a serious problem.

But again, back then, in our sort of more innocent days,

it was one of those things.

I don't know if we ever even even told the administration about it, but it's one of those things that he just did that we laughed at.

But as the boys got older, it definitely got harder to laugh at Britt.

He developed an admiration for the Confederacy.

And there were a lot of racial undertones to his rhetoric.

Zachary told us that Britt had a Confederate flag in his room and often talked about states' rights.

that he railed against a program that bust inner city kids from Boston into their school.

And Mark remembers a time when Britt made a very racist comment about a student who is black.

And Britt said, you know, you know,

despite him being smart, I've got to send them back.

I'm sorry to be just so blatantly because I gotta send them back to the plantations.

Mark says that Britt's racism stemmed from a fascination with the South, where his mother's family was from.

While most of the kids in their graduating class ended up going to colleges in the Northeast, like Boston University, where Mark went, Britt applied to a school in the South.

He blatantly told me, you know, I want some place that understands what, you know, what I'm all about and a place where he can kind of implement and grow.

By the time Britt was applying for colleges, his views had gone even more extreme.

And then from the Confederacy, I think, slowly developed kind of an

interest,

I guess, in World War II.

And then from World War II came Nazism.

Senior year, everybody knew about it.

He was that kid who was the neo-Nazi.

Plagued by the never-ending increases in health plan costs?

You don't have to be.

We're Claim Doc, and we can help employers save up to 33% compared to traditional health plans.

If that makes us health plan rebels, so be it.

Join us today at ClaimDoc.com.

Do you ever feel like your ideas just get lost when you're on the go?

Meet Remarkable Paper Pro Pro Move, the paper tablet that keeps up with your mind and notes wherever you are.

It's like if your favorite notebook could connect to the digital world and it slips right into your jacket pocket, so it's ready whenever you need it.

There's a better way to capture your thoughts on the go.

Get your Remarkable Paper Pro Move today at remarkable.com.

I'm Marilyn Mayo, and I'm a senior research fellow at ADL's Center on Extremism.

And I've been with ADL for 27 years.

Britt's racist views were not confined to his high school.

When he was in grade 12 at age 17, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the oldest anti-hate groups in America, caught him trying to convert people to his way of thinking.

So the first time he entered our radar was really in, I believe it was in 1996.

And that was when he and a friend, they distributed racist, anti-government, and anti-immigrant flyers in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Britt formed a group he called the Knights of Freedom.

And at that time, it wasn't a neo-Nazi group.

They actually

called themselves a pro-white political movement,

which they said, you know, was going to be

dedicated to things like freedom and order and restoration of the traditional

ideals of the nation, that kind of thing.

Zachary and Mark say that Brit never tried to recruit them into the Knights of Freedom.

But Michael DeLuca remembers a specific incident in the school library.

And I was listening to Queen,

and I must have had the disc there.

I had a disc man, and he asked me to take my headphones off, and I did, and he asked what I was listening to, and I said Queen, and he said, Princess of the Universe is a great song.

He was super excited about that, more excited than I've heard him be, really.

That's a song about, you know,

it's the theme song from Highlander, so it's a song about being the

one, the chosen one,

the great hero.

I can't reconstruct his pitch for white supremacy, but

he argued for

the white master race and the white man's burden specifically.

He took that angle, and my reaction was

sort of disbelief.

Like, I had been well educated in the Holocaust.

I was horrified.

By senior year, obviously, this was...

This was no secret in the school who he was and what he believed, right?

Everybody from students to freshmen to the administration to teachers, they all knew, right?

And teachers were legitimately concerned about him.

And all of a sudden, it's senior year, and everybody's applying to colleges.

Part of the college application process, you needed teacher recommendations.

And

I remember very specifically conversations by the teachers around what do we do.

We don't want to be on the record recommending this kid for college, not knowing, well, having an idea where that would lead.

And they didn't want that to come back to them saying, how in the world

did you recommend this person, person knowing what you knew about him for again for college and going to a place where again theoretically you know you know intellectual discourse and intellectual freedoms and where he could sort of develop his ideologies and rhetoric and and whatnot

we don't know if those teachers did write him recommendations but he did get into college and a southern college at that he'd be going to wofford college in south carolina And when he turned 18, just before he headed off to start his new life as a college student, he'd change changed his name for the very first time.

He changed it to Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

And then he goes, he goes, that's my legal name now.

You have to call me Davis.

I'm like, I don't have to call you anybody.

You know what I mean?

I said, I'm calling you Brit, you know?

Or I, oh, actually, that was the only time I told him, if you want, I can call you Andrew.

We went to Westwood, Massachusetts to try and go back to the beginning.

As we start to build a picture of who Brit or Davis Wolfgang Hawk or Jesse James might really be, what has started to emerge is a boy who didn't fit in, who found ways to provoke and defy what society said was acceptable behavior.

Instead of trying to conform, this young man seemed to go in the opposite direction.

And the more we learn, the more extreme those behaviors start to seem.

Because there's one more thing you need to know about Britt to understand just how shocking his adoration of Nazism is.

And maybe you've already caught it.

Andrew Britt Greenbaum was Jewish.

I don't think he ever saw it as a conflict.

I think he saw it as a rejection of his background.

Yeah, I don't think he ever saw it as a conflict.

I think it was just a name that he was given, but he had zero identification with that background.

He had zero identification with any kind of Jewish heritage.

His dad was Jewish, Greenbaum.

People knew that and made fun of him for it.

They said that here was a kid who believed explicitly and out loud in white supremacy and

was also Jewish.

I mean I think it started quite a bit before my wife and I knew about it.

We didn't really know about it until we found out that he was running this website down in at Wofford College.

Okay.

But I think it's probably started, well, it must have started before.

Oh yeah, his friends in high school knew about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It did start before.

We know that from talking to the Anti-Defamation League and the people who went to high school with Brit.

And while I am curious to know when Hyman might have learned about his son's Nazi beliefs, I am equally curious how he, as a Jewish man, felt about it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm of Jewish heritage.

I'm not particularly religious, but my mother was Methodist, and so I I kind of, you know, sometimes attended a Methodist church, sometimes attended a synagogue, sometimes neither.

But, yeah.

But how did that sit with you?

Producer Kathleen Goldar asks the question that is on everyone's mind.

Well, I mean,

it didn't bother me in that sense in that I'm not particularly religious.

I mean, I know my son, when he turned 18, he went out and he changed his name to Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

And I think he did that because he planned on running this neo-Nazi website.

At the time, this shocked Peggy.

I was a shock because it's not the child that I knew.

But for Hyman, it was merely a means towards an end.

Well, yeah, I mean, for a while, he was into this

Nazi type stuff.

I mean, I don't think he ever took that very seriously.

I think it was more just to con people.

But, you know, I think he just got a kick out of it.

Leaving this reporting trip, our team realized that we had only just started to crack open the mystery of who might have wanted Jesse James dead.

Britt Greenbaum was bullied in elementary school, and according to those who knew him, he could be annoying and weird in high school.

But so far, nothing that seemed life-threatening.

If you'd been in class with him, you might have called him a chess nerd.

But as Davis Wolfgang Hawk, federal authorities had other ways of describing him: con man, scammer, domestic terrorist.

As the man formerly known as Britt left Massachusetts for college, his radical beliefs would expand, as would his audience.

We were up in Chesney up there and there's any other fellow that came all the way from Kansas.

He was another neo-Nazi.

He was there to kill him.

That's next time on Dirtbag Climber.

Can't wait for more?

Binge all episodes early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at CBC podcasts.

For early and ad-free listening, subscribe to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts at apple.co slash CBC True Crime.

Dirtbag Climber is a production of Lark Productions and Kelly and Kelly for CBC Podcasts.

The show is hosted by me, Stephen Chua.

It's written and produced by Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly.

The showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar.

Producers are Karen Bracken and Tina Apostolopoulos-Moniz.

Associate producer, Hadil Abdel-Nabi.

Sound design by Paul Tedeskini and Chris Kelly.

Tamara Black is our coordinating producer.

Original music by Chris Kelly.

Our senior producer is Jeff Turner.

Our digital producer is Rosh Nien Nair.

The series was developed by Ainsley Vocal, Gene Parsons, and Kristen Boychuk.

Additional reporting by Yvette Brand.

For Kelly and Kelly, executive producer Chris Kelly, executive producer Pat Kelly, business affairs producer Lauren Berkovich.

For Lark Productions, Executive Producer Aaron Haskett, VP Business Affairs, Tex Antonucci.

For CBC, executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Norani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.