Who is the cigar-toting, moustachioed-American named Gunslinger?

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Jules and Jez here, and every week on Not Stupid, we chat about the news in your feeds.

As well as the weird stuff in the zeitgeist that just makes us go, eh?

What?

All right, so I'm about to drag it considerably down market here.

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It's one of the most bizarre incidents ever to happen in Outbank Australia that you've probably never heard of.

It's the moment back in 1999 when an American man disappeared into the great sandy desert, triggering a meteor storm and one of the biggest and strangest searches that Australia had ever seen.

Right from the beginning, there was something different about this case.

It was a smart young man who had everything to live for, but he'd set off on foot alone, and seemingly he didn't want to be found.

This is the subject of the new season of the ABC podcast Expanse.

It's called Nowhere Man, and all six episodes are available now to binge.

But

if there is anything that I have learned in seven years of making If You're Listening, it's that there is always a couple of stories that are incredible, but don't quite fit into the natural flow of the show.

We asked Erin Park, the host of this season of Expanse, whether there were any great stories that she couldn't squeeze in.

And it turns out there was.

G'day, Erin.

G'day, Matt.

Erin, you're coming to us from Broome.

Why are you in Broome and how long have you been there?

I've been up here almost 20 years, which was never the intention, like a lot of people that end up in Northern Australia.

But the stories just keep getting better better and better.

And some of the best stories aren't happening now.

They actually happened years ago.

And that's the stuff I really love.

And that's how I ended up going down this rabbit hole three years ago, this sort of slight obsession with a man that went missing in the desert and the meaning of life, really.

Give us a short pre-see of what we can expect in the expanse itself.

It's the hunt for this man.

I want to get to the specific story in a moment, but give us a brief pre-see of what's in the full season.

Well, it's a rollicking tale of Outback survival.

It's about about some weird stuff that went down in 1999.

Do you remember the case vaguely?

Robert Baguki, the weirdo Alaskan that went into the desert, he ended up being nicknamed Kookie Baguki because his behavior was just so unconventional.

So basically, he goes out there on purpose.

Unlike most people that go lost in Outback Australia, he knew where he was and he wanted to be there, which made it very difficult for the authorities that were looking for him.

What I've ended up doing is getting in touch with Robert Baguki because spoiler alert, he did survive and went to Alaska to stay with him.

I ended up convincing him to come all the way back to the Great Sandy Desert, and that's where this tale really takes a twist.

Sounds fantastic.

So, I want to talk about this man named Gunslinger, which, I mean,

so far, so far, fantastic.

So, so who is Gunslinger and how did he come to be tied up in this story?

We really have saved the creme de la creme for your fabulous podcast, Matt, because we got to the bottom of this quite late in the piece and it didn't quite slot in the podcast.

But I'm so glad that I'm not having to go to the grave without telling this story.

That's what we're about.

We're all about the story that you can't

stop thinking about, but doesn't fit into the actual show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So basically what happens, Robert Baguki is missing in the desert and there's this official WA police search that costs $10,000 a day.

There's helicopters, there's planes, and it's so expensive.

And they're starting to realize that robert doesn't want to be found he's probably dead because he's been out there for three weeks so the official search is called off and all the locals they think that's the end of it this guy's dead it's just one of those sad weird things that happens but then his family who are quite well to do in malibu California, spent $80,000 recruiting this top private US search team to travel all the way to Australia, go out into the desert to try to retrieve his body.

And it just turns into this circus.

The media coverage escalated.

It was making the nightly news.

It had crews flying in from all over the world because suddenly I think with the Americans arriving, there was an element of the absurd about it.

And a large part of that was the man in charge, who was a man called Garrison St.

Clair.

Well, the police have done a very good job with what they had.

They're law enforcement and they do the occasional search.

Okay, we have members on this team who do 40 to 50 searches a year.

We certainly have footprints that go in two directions.

They are barefoot.

They are obviously since the last rain or since the last significant wind.

People describe him as being like a caricature of an American, larger than life, wearing army fatigues.

He was always like smoking a stogy cigar.

He talked in military parlance and he turned up with these

search cadiva dogs, like bloodhounds.

And they were so worried about their feet getting burnt in the hot sand of the desert, they had little leather booties made, garrison organized.

So he sort of became the public face of this new stage of the search for Robert Berguki.

Manner showing excellent field craft.

Everything he's done has led us to believe that he knows what he's doing in the outdoors.

He stayed on roads, he stayed on tracks.

He was on the TV news every night and he helped find Robert Berguki.

It was actually a Channel 9 chopper, but it was very much because of the Americans that the media was out there.

And so Garrison St.

Clair becomes the public face, really, of this what became known as the Miracle in the Desert.

Mr.

St.

Sinclair, you must be very pleased about the fact that your American team who arrived here, in fact, in the end, led to Mr.

Baguki being found.

Well, I'm certainly pleased that he was found, and we don't take any credit for it.

I think this has always been a joint effort.

At one level, he's a tough guy, and at another level, he's kind of sweet because he's putting little booties on his dogs.

So what did the local police think of

Gunslinger and

his team?

They were worried that Garrison St.

Clair and and the Americans were going to die in the desert.

Of course.

Of course they were.

Because things were just getting weirder by the day.

And they were like, oh my God.

Yes, okay, we'll help you.

They sent some WA police officers out with the Americans.

But there was this feeling that the whole thing was just a bit weird and that it probably wasn't going to be successful because Robert was most likely dead.

I think everyone says that they were really charmed by Garrison.

Apparently, he sounds like he would have been great company.

I've not met him.

I've not been able to interview him.

But even going by the TV footage, he just was like a great storyteller, a great yarn spinner.

Sounds like he would have been great fun to have a bottle of red wine with, sort of that sort of a character.

But his military history was a big part of his identity.

He just screamed US military.

And it was only as a little bit of time passed after Robert found that that is the story that all began to unravel.

It turns out Garrison St.

Clair was not who he said he was.

Okay.

I was literally about to ask you about his military history, but you're saying that maybe he didn't have as much experience as he claimed that he did.

So the team he led was called the First Special Response Group, and they were made up of some of the top people, paramedics, like trackers, like they were real specialists from all across the United States that would come together in a voluntary capacity to deal with many body retrievals in emergency situations.

Now, there's no doubt that Garrison was involved in a lot of these operations and got really good results.

But what he said he was, he said he was ex-military, special operations, whatever that means.

He said he'd been in the French Legion.

He said he'd been to Georgetown Law School and he told these tales of Daring Dew.

Like he told one person that I interviewed that he'd been involved in a secret operation to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of an ambassador in an unnamed European country.

And I think people sort of took him at face value because he did seem very convincing.

But it was actually after Robert Baguki was found that the whole thing started to unravel.

So the Miami Herald actually got in touch with him and just wanted to do like a profile of like, we haven't heard of you before.

You've obviously making international news headlines.

Let's do a bit of a story together.

So I've interviewed this guy, a wonderful man called Curtis Morgan, who's still a senior reporter at the Miami Herald.

And he described for me the process as he started to chat to Garrison, just doing basic checks and balances.

and even the most basic elements were not quite holding up.

There were just a lot of questions.

And I think it's just standard operating procedure.

Somebody claims that they're a ex-military.

You want to verify that.

And

that could not be verified.

And so that really intrigued my interest.

So the story quickly falls apart.

Garrison was never in the military.

He was never in the French Foreign Legion.

He'd never been to Georgetown Law School.

And Curtis Morgan ends up publishing this fantastic series of investigative stories.

And he has this great line that basically says, Garrison Sinclair never served in the military, but he did serve jail time.

He'd been convicted of the federal felony offence of mail fraud.

So basically running a scam where he was charging people to publish ads in a business directory that didn't exist.

And Garrison, it turns out, had been involved in a whole stream of court cases with very serious allegations.

When this reporter confronted Garrison Sinclair, he said he couldn't really talk about his past because he was a spy, which seems to be like the go-to get out of jail card for a lot of people that are doing slightly dodgy things.

I mean, look, maybe, you know, maybe he is really,

you know, Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible stuff, and he's disappeared into the ether, and he really was a super secret operative, but there was absolutely no record.

No record,

and except for the criminal records and the arrests.

And so those can be verified, but the heroic side of his story just didn't stand up.

This story is starting to feel a little bit familiar.

I feel like I've run into stories like this

surrounding the Trump administration a fair bit.

People who sort of go, oh, yeah,

I can't really talk about what I used to do, but it was very serious stuff.

Wink, wink.

Yeah, I can't really talk about it, but

you can trust that I know what I'm talking about.

Okay, so when this starts to, you know, be published, how did people react to it?

People were shocked.

And people were really hurt as well.

Because, like I'd mentioned, Garrison was a really charismatic guy.

And a lot of people, the volunteers that had signed up with him to do these international missions to try and help families in really desperate desperate situations, they felt utterly betrayed because they'd spent time in the field with Garrison.

They'd had dinners with Garrison.

They'd drunk wine with Garrison.

He'd met their families and so on.

I tracked down a guy called David Covar, who I don't think has ever done an interview before.

And he was basically Garrison's 2IC in the first special response group.

And he was involved in the Robert Baguki search.

And he told me that it was during the Robert Baguki operation in the Great Sandy Desert that he first started to sort of have alarm bells going off that maybe Garrison wasn't quite the man that he said he was.

I and the rest of the team were out searching and we started hearing on the radio that Garrison had taken one of the all-wheel drive vehicles way down a track where there likely wasn't anything to be found and had driven it so hard that they had to get two different helicopter flights in to get spare parts for the vehicle to get them back out.

And the reason that was frustrating was that

by doing that, they were putting the people that were in that vehicle at risk.

So they're out in the desert.

And basically, Garrison's making these kind of slightly reckless decisions that an experienced search and rescue guy would not be doing.

And so David Kovar starts to suspect that maybe Garrison isn't who he says he was.

And then it's just a few years later,

after the truth comes out in the newspapers, that Garrison St.

Clair is found dead in quite unusual circumstances.

Okay.

What were those circumstances?

I'm worried about what this is going to be.

So basically, the truth is revealed that Garrison St.

Clair is a bit of a con man and he starts to withdraw from search and rescue operations.

And everyone's quite shocked and appalled at what's gone on.

He ends up dying the way, almost in a way that he lived, which was immersed in a bit of a scam.

He has a friend from the search and rescue community, is the way it's been explained to me, who owned a holiday house in Mexico.

And he convinces her to go and stay there.

At this point, he's very isolated because he's been publicly shamed.

And he uses what is apparently a bit of a loophole in the Mexican law that along the lines of possession is nine-tenths of the law to actually take over this property and cut her out, say she's not welcome.

And he continues to live in this holiday house in Mexico.

And that's where he is discovered dead in 2003.

And by this time, like I said, he's very much alone.

And

it's actually

David Kovar that ends up paying for his funeral because he just feels like the situation is just a bit tragic.

And the idea of him having a pauper's funeral, he doesn't want to live with that.

And so, yeah, I asked David Kovar how he felt about the whole situation after all of this came to light.

It is sad.

He did it to himself.

He alienated a community of people

that

will forgive a lot of sort of

idiosyncrasies in people's behavior,

but he absolutely did that community harm.

Because of his bravado, because of his lying,

he caused reputational and personal harm to a lot of people.

I think what he's describing there, it feels really familiar,

I think to anyone that's been let down by someone that you trusted that maybe it doesn't have to be such extreme circumstances as you faked a military history but it just seems like a really tragic kind of scenario to me that i guess anyone that's living a double life living deception living a lie like what a lonely headspace that must be and that's the thing that's come across really strongly from everyone that was involved in this saga they're like yes he did the wrong thing but i still kind of really care about this guy here's how david described it in terms of the the decision to pay for his funeral at the end of the day.

As much as he

was a fraud, his ability to get people to come together, the ability to get us through customs when otherwise it might have been difficult, the ability to get local resources, that was instrumental in our success.

And so there's a blessing and a curse sort of thing going on here, but absolutely bigger than life.

And I think a number of us were

very disappointed when when the sort of story started coming apart.

Disappointed in him, but also disappointed in ourselves for sort of falling for it.

What was the cause of death?

It was not foul play.

Right.

It was natural causes, believed to be a heart condition.

He was a textbook walking example of an unhealthy lifestyle.

I guess, you know, chain smoking cigars, being a little overweight, and living a lie is not a great sort of trio of things for a long and healthy life.

No, right.

So it wasn't as though, you know, someone that he had wronged in some way or conned, you know, caught up with him.

It was his lifestyle rather than his

personality, I suppose.

Well, look, to be honest, I still am making some inquiries, and this might end up the next series of the podcast if we do get to the bottom of things in that regard.

But I will keep you posted.

So, what can we take away from all of this in terms of,

you know, what lessons can we learn from the fact that this man managed to convince the Australian media and the global media that he was an expert in this area that he actually didn't have any expertise in?

I think that to me, where this fits in the broader scheme of things is about the folklore and mythology of Outback Australia, which is just rich with these larger-than-life characters.

And even though he was American, Garrison slotted in very well with kind of this tall tales of Outback Australia.

And then it turned out it was all too good to be true.

We like to romanticise the renegades and the

Mavericks.

And he slotted in really nicely with all that.

And you know what?

At the end of the day, he actually got things done and he did help save lives.

And so it's a kind of an interesting, yeah, moral thing about how we think about people like that.

I think, can I just mention one thing that really still tickles my fancy after all these years up here?

Have you heard the phrase the three M's?

No.

Can you guess what they are?

So this is referring to the strange characters that turn up in remote northern Australia.

Oh, right.

Madmen, magicians.

I love that.

Magicians less so.

I should say, I should say that

what I mean is the remarkable people, the people that brings, you know, people notice

when they arrive.

So usually the three M's are missionaries,

mercenaries, and misfits.

So you're up here saving souls.

That makes so much more sense than magicians.

Okay, yep.

We might have to turn it into the six M's based on this conversation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So people are up here saving souls.

They're up here to make a quick buck.

Or the biggest demographic.

And maybe this is where I've started to fit after all these years, is the misfits.

And this whole saga of Robert Maguiki, including Garrison Sinclair, everyone fits in with being one of the three M's.

And I kind of love Outback Australia for that.

Can I tell you a story, my favorite little Outback Australia story that I have recently come across and couldn't get into one of my episodes?

Okay, so we were doing this episode that was about

the rare earths trade and the rare earth elements around the world.

And I was looking at Australia's biggest rare earth mine, which is in sort of the southern half of the goldfields area of WA.

So Laverton is this town.

And I was looking up the history of Laverton.

The town was originally called British Flag when it was basically just an intersection.

It was called British Flag for whatever reason.

And then around the 1900s, a man

showed up.

saying that he was a doctor and his last name was Laver and he showed up on a bicycle and this is a town that is hundreds of kilometers from any other place that he could have come from.

But he showed up on a bicycle and he said that he was a doctor and he became the town's doctor.

And apparently, they were so taken with this man that they decided to name the town after him.

Perhaps they thought the British flag was a bit of a silly name for a town.

They decided to rename the town after Dr.

Laver.

Dr.

Laver then left the town, moved to London,

where he got married to a woman and then moved back to Laverton with her.

And I can't imagine what that transition must have been like for that woman.

She's in London.

This Australian man shows up, says he's a doctor.

She's obviously taken with him, falls in love, and marries him.

And he says, you know, there's a town named after me

in Australia.

That's my town.

My town?

Why don't we go and move there?

And she would have been like, fantastic, this sounds great.

And then she would have, you know, taken the boat to Perth and gone, wow, this seems pretty remote.

And he's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not there yet.

And then he's gone to Kalgoorlie, and she's like, oh, this is a pretty small town.

I suppose it's fine.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we're not there yet.

And then he strikes off days into

the desert

before he finally comes to Laverton and they settle there, and

that is

apparently the origin story of

the name of the town of Laverton.

I see similar things with women being dragged up to the Pilbara to work in the mining industry with their husbands as well.

Sometimes, I actually thought you were going to tell the story of the Japanese death cult that was testing sarin at a cattle station in the goldfields, but that is a whole other can of worms.

Google it, Google it.

I tell you what, the stories buried in Outback Australia, like ah, they're absolutely brilliant.

So yeah, Google Japanese death cult goldfields and you won't regret it.

I don't want to Google it, Erin.

I want you to tell me about it.

I think you'll have to come back and tell me about it again.

Next podcast series.

One last thought.

I know, you've probably got things to do.

One last thought on this.

It's fascinating that America produces these people who have this...

otherworldly confidence and the ability to convince other people that they are this incredible type of person who is able to achieve these incredible types of things.

Something that I feel like is kind of alien in Australia.

I don't know that we respond all that well to that level of confidence.

And yet also, I kind of feel like Australians would forgive this kind of character more.

We'd just kind of be like, oh, well, well, he had a crack, didn't he?

Whereas the Americans.

I absolutely agree.

I think, especially in regional areas, people do take you at face value because everyone comes from a long way away.

Yeah, people turn up here for a lot of sometimes dubious reasons.

And you know what?

If you turn up in good faith and you can get things done, it helps if you have a work ethic and a sense of humor and like to drink a beer.

People don't ask too many questions about your past, which is why, you know, I've been on the run from the law for a very long time.

It's why I'm still here.

I was going to say, well, I won't ask any questions about your past.

Erin, thank you so much for being with us.

I'll let you go back into hiding.

Thanks so much for doing for chatting to us.

Thanks so much, Matt.

It's been a joy.

There's a lot of people digging into incredible stories here at the ABC, and we are keen to bring them to you as regularly as we can.

This is actually just a message to my colleagues.

If you've got a crazy side quest story that you can't stop thinking about and you want to tell us, you know where to find us.

If anyone else needs to find us, you can email ifyourelistening at abc.net.au.

I'll catch you Thursday.

If you're keen to hear more stories about curious characters from the Outback, you are in luck because Erin's whole series of Nowhere Man is available in the feed for Expanse on the ABC Listen app now.

It's really an incredible story and here's the trailer.

Soaring temperatures, a lack of water and sand dunes every 500 meters.

It's one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

It's August 1999 and something strange is happening in the Australian Outback.

When I got there was just organized chaos.

It's one of the most extensive searches ever mounted in the Great Sandy Desert.

A well-to-do young American has dumped his belongings and walked out into the great sandy desert.

A white guy from America, what hope has he got?

They'll be looking for a body.

He sent a postcard to his parents in America just saying, I'm heading into the desert.

Goodbye.

Triggering a media sensation and one of the biggest searches Australia had ever seen.

Once the Americans arrived, it became a lot more bizarre.

We really need to be what we call sempra gumby, always flexible.

He insisted that people use his radio handle, gunslinger.

Are you taking the piss?

But there's one problem that no one's got an answer for: how do you search for someone who doesn't want to be found?

I felt it was his choice to choose not to come out of the desert.

I knew he couldn't be content with living a life unless he did this.

My name is Erin Park and I've been obsessed with this story for years.

And I'm not the only one.

Why would a fit, intelligent young man with everything to live for plunge into one of the deadliest landscapes in Australia on purpose?

It's very easy to dismiss it as crazy, but I think when you dive deeper into it, you see that it's not crazy.

It's a story spanning three decades, two continents and some strange encounters.

I really don't know how I started off in the desert in Northern Australia looking into this and now I'm in bloody Alaska looking for a porcupine.

Every little thread was even more glittery and sparkly and fascinating and cool.

And it polarised opinions the world over.

Were his actions selfish or inspired?

The backlash was pretty fierce.

And it turns out this desert where Robert Baguki went missing is keeping other secrets.

What Robert Berguki did here is just the tip of the iceberg.

We've got a lot of people missing.

It remains a mystery, you know?

At a time when so many of us feel lost, what's the most extreme thing you do to feel found?

The idea of being out here alone scares the hell out of me.

I ain't no Robert Baguki, that's for sure.

And at what cost?

Death will come, and I'll be ready for it.

This is season five of Expanse, Nowhere Man.

Find it on the ABC Listen app and all the usual places.