Ep 219 | Did the Deep State Kill a Journalist? Netflix 'Octopus Murders' Review | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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And now, a Blaze Media Podcast.

What if I were to tell you a story about a man investigating a computer scandal?

And then he ended up dead in a hotel room.

Half think it was suicide.

The other half are sure that he's murdered.

What if I were to tell you that this computer software scandal led a journalist down a rabbit hole filled with government corruption, stolen elections, millions of dollars of cartel money, drugs, guns, operated by the mafia under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency on an Indian reservation which had its own sovereignty.

What if I were to tell you that this all involved presidents, military coordination, local law enforcement, drug chemists, actors, computer geeks,

and operators with no oversight or no consequences calling the shots?

This story is

so crazy.

It's 30 years old.

And the people I'm going to introduce you to have spent 10 years just trying to shape the story.

So

you might, unless you've seen their documentary, you're going to be a little lost.

But believe me, it's worth it.

You have to watch the documentary.

And everybody I know said to me for weeks, Glenn, you got to watch this documentary.

You're going to love this documentary.

I don't know how I feel about this documentary

because there are times over a

four-hour period, I watched it over four days.

There are times when you're like, oh, I know exactly what's going on.

Other times, you have no idea whether to believe it or not believe it.

But it is a sign of our times right now.

This is a story that's 30 years old, but it speaks to us,

and I'm not sure what it says.

Can you pick out the lies?

The half-truths?

Is it true?

All of it?

Is all of it garbage?

Is the appeal of conspiracy so tempting that we start putting pieces together that just don't fit?

What is in us that does this?

And what is in our government that might encourage it?

My guests today have pulled America down a rabbit hole that is either the mother of all conspiracy theories or a cautionary tale about what happens when curiosity becomes an obsession.

I want to say,

I want to thank these guys for doing what they did over a number of years, risking their lives.

I think.

I think.

The filmmakers of Netflix Smash Hit American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders.

It's Zachary Treitz and Christian Hansen.

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Zach, Christian, thanks for coming in.

I've just spent five days of my life watching the documentary.

Fascinated by it.

I don't know what the hell I just watched, though.

I don't know why.

I know it was it was wild, but I went through so many different emotions.

So many times I'm like, oh yeah.

And then, well, maybe not.

And I don't, you've spent

10

years

of your life.

I feel like I don't know what I did with those five days and if it was important or not.

Was this important for you?

Yeah, it was.

Well, I'm just, I was only laughing because I was trying to picture whether you were watching it on repeat for five days or sort of

watching the five episodes.

And, you know, there were times.

Or four episodes.

Or is it four episodes?

We went and just went back and forth, back and forth.

And

it just got more and more bizarre.

Yeah.

I mean, even when

I would watch cuts as new cuts came out, and,

you know,

I found my, I I know the story so well but I I would I would be rewinding the

right wait wait what did that really happen no I told the editors and the director that this is what happened but then just seeing it in the film with the music is just mind-blowing it is

I've I understood that you thought 40 51% chance he didn't kill himself Danny right at the beginning default mode right

is to be a little bit more skeptical of those and you are 51% this is when you started 51% he did

by the time I kind of settled into my

into my whatever gallop pace

you know there were I went through a lot of emotions going through this

process of investigating this story and sometimes I was 100% certain you know but then what you know once I'd kind of like matured into it and settled into the investigation and I joined up with Zach who was sort of a ballast for me

He took 51%

suicide.

So I went ahead and settled into 51%.

And where are you now?

I think.

Yeah.

So after a multi-year process of investigating and making a film at the same time, which is, I'd say, unadvisable for most people to do both at the same time.

Sure.

Usually you want to kind of be done with the investigation.

But

the process kind of took us, you know, we were, we would vacillate widely between, you know, even hour by hour,

just talking about the evidence and finding new things as we would go along.

And we would kind of debate back and forth.

So many times, you know, I'd be just certain that

Danny had been murdered.

And sometimes I'd be absolutely certain, you know, hours later that it wasn't, that that wasn't the case.

So

I would say that essentially the official story of what happened to Danny Castellero that I found pretty compelling when I first read the Department of Justice and FBI report,

it says that, you know, Danny was kind of misled and

fell into these role of con artists who were essentially just pulling his leg, and then he wound up

broke and alone, having realized that he had basically been led astray at the end of this year-long investigation.

And their report was

very detailed and pretty,

you know,

seemed pretty accurate to me at the time.

But that overall conclusion,

I think,

I feel like is ultimately very misleading.

So that idea that like, oh, he was just dealing with con artists, it's like, I think you see over the course of the four episodes that we made that he was dealing with extremely dangerous people

who the authorities investigating his death, I think, knew were dangerous people or knew that they were criminals.

It's clear that they're criminals.

And why they didn't take those people more seriously is an open debate.

And so,

you know, just going from the official story, I do not believe the official story.

You were at the same place?

Yes.

Yeah.

So that's where I ended up, but I don't know what is true.

I will tell you,

what's his name?

Michael Michael.

Mercanosciuto.

Yeah.

I mean, he,

when he first came on camera, I'm like, that guy's the penguin.

I mean, Danny DeVito's penguin.

The guy is so clearly,

you know, not right.

And

he's an interesting guy.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a very interesting guy.

But I never.

He seemed to me to be the character that was the most

misleading or playing a game.

But at the same time, the trajectory of his life, the things that he did experience

are uncanny and

very real.

Having the sort of

relationship with the mysterious Dr.

John Philip Nichols, actually being out of the Cabazon reservation with the

doing weapons research,

having his partner brutally murdered and tortured, and having you know whose assets were stolen um by a um you know serial killer and serial serial rapist with a relationship with the fbi and possibly the cia i mean that okay that is all stuff that actually happened to this man right and then you know so he tells a few other funky stories that we can't uh verify but That alone is, you know, unlike anybody else.

It was in, I think it was the last episode when he calls.

You're kind of done, yeah, and he calls up and he's like, People are being killed, I gotta meet with you.

And then the camera is rolling when you meet with him, and he says, I'll tell you after you finish the documentary.

Yeah, and that's what I mean, that just must have been like, I'm gonna punch the guy in the face.

Um, so frustrating, yeah.

Did he ever tell you anything after the cameras?

Yeah, he we still talk and he still has things to say, but I don't know if it's like I don't know if he'll be able to tell me um any sort of anything

of such grand scale.

I think like he's a human.

He did have a lot of extraordinary experiences, but he's got his, I'm interested in his POV,

what he actually knows.

You know, less what he might have.

I don't have the key, the single key that unlocks the, and that's the problem with this story.

And I think that that scene, regardless of...

And Michael, if you do have the single key, you know,

unlock the door.

But it, but it's you're driving America out of its mind.

That that scene, I think, is emblematic of

dealing with Michael, but dealing with a lot of people in this story, which is the feeling of, if I just had this one more piece of information, I'll finally have who was the

journalist, the female that said, you know,

you got to make a choice to get in or out.

Oh, Sherry's.

You know, because I thought, I thought that was brilliant.

You either have a life of this or you just say, I can't, because it'll always be the next thing, right?

Yeah.

Is that barbecues and ball games?

Is this

the less?

What is the lesson of this?

I mean,

I think

what we tried to show ultimately is

a very subjective rather than like objective.

We know everything.

We do not know everything, but a very subjective view.

It was really well done, by the way.

I appreciate it.

And I like the way, I know you hated it on the, you know, doing it at the same time.

Oh, that's right.

But the fact that the phone rings and you could see the look on your face and you're like, oh, crap.

You just, it is, it's compelling because it was done at the same time.

I mean, no, it was exciting doing the investigation.

I'm just hard.

It's just nice to know exactly where you're going before you

when you call Netflix and say we want to do this thing and they're like great how's it in and you're like I have no idea and it was it was amazing for me uh because I was funded you know we were Netflix was paying for us to make a film a

show

but I you know and Zach was let me continue investigating it throughout the post-production process so I basically had like a fully funded investigation that I was working on for years and that's very rare in you know in any country right yeah but so what I was saying is just just what we wanted to say, what we wanted to do was make a very subjective view of what it feels like to go into this

hall of mirrors that is a

portrait of

the sort of governmental intelligence world, the official one, and mad

private intelligence world, and the criminal world, and where those three circles overlap.

And

the feeling, and think it's I think we show this by the fourth episode the intentional in my mind feeling of helplessness and madness that you you grasp with when everybody is slippery every truth is like hard is hard to pin down and that's I think an intentional thing oh yeah and I think Doug Vaughan one of the journalists that we talked to he says it really well when he says that um confusion leads to paralysis right and so yeah I mean you could say it's a really frustrating thing I mean I think that we maybe don't give ourselves enough credit in the show for the things that we did nail down or did expose for the first time.

I mean,

you made huge progress.

I just don't,

you know, I was just so struck by the honesty that you had on,

you got to have a choice.

Maybe I have to just go back to my life and just never know.

Right.

And, and, and,

you know, I'd like you to expand a little bit on

you said, uh,

I don't look at things the same way.

Well, watching the documentary,

I don't look at things the same way either, but

I'm not sure how I look at them yet.

I mean, I just experienced, you know, in four hours what you experienced over 10 years of your life.

So, but I'm not sure

what I'm left with.

I mean, so this to expand on your last question about sort of what's the theme.

Right.

And I'm not really very good at packaging things into themes, but one, what I wanted to say was that

at least three individuals

whose loved ones,

siblings or parents,

and also a grandparent

were

taken out in

hits by

nebulous intelligence agencies have reached out to us.

They stumbled on the show and watched it and they thanked us for having given them a way to talk about their family history.

I mean, we didn't investigate those stories, but we are aware of those stories.

You would feel absolutely crazy.

I mean, you're by design.

You are meant to feel crazy.

And I've found this in just some of the things that we've investigated, where it just gets so intentionally complex that it makes it almost insane to try to explain it.

Because you're like, no, I mean,

I saw your board where you're like, you know, you're tinfoil on your windows away from being crazy.

Yeah.

You know?

The one guy that,

well,

let me go back to Danny's death.

I haven't seen a lot of suicide scenes,

but I was, it never really addressed.

There were bloody handprints all over.

The guy cut his wrist to the tenants.

So, A, how are you cutting the other wrist?

But then, I mean, is the story that he got up and he was like, hey, I need a towel.

I mean, I've never seen that.

Yeah, I mean, we don't go into deeply into the forensics of the crime scene because we only had a a certain amount of time

in the story, and it was so complicated to tell the story that Danny was telling.

And it would have kind of been a totally different show, really.

And we're just not like forensic pathologists.

But just to explain it further,

since we did look through the autopsy and

we read the report,

they sent that report to a Connecticut forensics lab run by Dr.

Lee.

Dr.

Lee Henry Lee.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who's a very

famous guy?

He's recently come under some criticism for potentially having

made up something else in a trial that a couple people went to jail for a long time over.

But that's not good.

Kind of hurt your credibility a bit.

Yeah.

But, you know, he was famous for being at the OJ trial.

He was at that show, The Staircase.

He's a little part of that.

Anyway, and we called him actually, and he was,

maybe this is too in the weeds, but it was pretty amazing if you're aware of him, like calling him, and I started telling him about the case.

And this is 30 years after he's done

tens of thousands of autopsies and crime scenes.

And I started describing it, and he's like, oh, in the bathtub.

And there was a razor sitting on it.

And it was like he could picture the entire crime scene.

It was unbelievable.

But yes, his

analysis of it was that Danny had stood up at some point and hit the wall or brushed the wall.

But it's, yeah, I mean,

you look at the

I don't, I, I, to, to me, that doesn't necessarily mean that he was alone or not.

I mean, somebody can stand up for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and so it's hard to kind of

what did he say about cutting the tendons and how did he cut the other arm?

Well, we, we had a um we actually sent that to another medical examiner um later on a non-partial like a family friend okay yeah who had nothing to do with the case and and he

he was like well it's a suicide and we're like oh okay like tell us about that he's like well

dr.

Frost who did the autopsy didn't do you any favors and we're like what he's like there's just not a lot of detail in this report and we're like well

that is not a lot of favorite.

Like, how can you be so certain that this was.

And so he claimed that

the depth of the cuts in the autopsy is not specific enough to know one way or another.

But then there are also photos.

There's photos, but there's also the paramedic that we talked to, Don,

who we interview in the show.

And he talks about his, that's why we had to include his story, really, is because he was the one who had the experience of having tried to pick up the wrist.

And he says, Yeah, I I thought he was compelling.

Yeah, he's now actually, we don't mention this, he was a paramedic at the time, he's now a medical examiner himself.

So, it almost lends him more credibility in my mind.

But, um, yeah, so it the official documents do not give us quite enough to know the depth of the of the cut on the on the ligaments, so we just had to go by dawns.

And then, the woman who's at the end, who her mother

was an eyewitness, said she saw two people.

Right.

And,

you know, the drawings are pretty remarkable.

You know, you saw the drawing, you're like, oh, I've seen him in episode, you know, one and two.

Uh-huh.

Why was that never pursued, do you think?

I couldn't say.

We tried to talk to every detective still alive that was part of the

Martinsburg Police Department.

And we tried to talk to that FBI agent who reinvestigated the case, and no one wanted to talk to us.

So we would just be speculating as to the question of why.

We know that they had the information.

But my logical guess as to why is because, you know, look at me.

I spent 10 years trying to

say

what happened.

It was much easier.

You know, I didn't accept the suicide conclusion.

I wanted more answers, and that

led me down this wild path.

But to just say suicide, it's just a lot easier.

You can finish the investigation.

Have a nice summer.

Maybe go on vacation.

Yeah.

So, as I'm

watching this, because everybody said, you got to watch this, you got to watch this.

And I didn't know what to expect.

I didn't know what I was walking into.

That's a good way to go.

Yeah.

Do you remember the case?

From the 90s?

Do you remember it at all?

No, you know,

I was in broadcast at the time.

I don't, it doesn't ring a bell, doesn't mean I don't remember it,

but not off the top of my head, I don't.

Was Bill O'Reilly still in it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He covered it for Inside Edition.

Yeah.

Peralto covered the

Cabazon portion.

It was interesting to see there's a lot of older legacy media.

Leslie Stahl covered the Insula case.

Right.

Yeah.

So, so this.

This started out as a computer software story, which

I got.

I mean, it's as banal as possible.

Yeah, but no, but I mean, it makes sense that if you are in an agency, it makes sense that's exactly what they would do and are

and needed at the time and probably still doing stuff like that.

I would assume.

Yeah.

I mean, you would be remiss.

Our tax dollars wouldn't be properly spent if you weren't doing that kind of activity.

That's what these

agencies are supposed to do, yeah, but not necessarily in the way they were doing it.

We're not supposed to steal intellectual property if that's what happened.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You believe that that is what happened.

Well, I'm just being careful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

It seems like it.

Yeah, it does.

But if you're watching it, you know,

you never know.

Yeah.

So,

okay, so then that's happening during the Reagan administration, and that fits right with Iran-Contra.

Yeah.

And then, you know, also the Indian Reservation fits.

You'd be making weapons used by the,

all of this stuff fits.

If I'm looking for a place where, you know, I don't think the government actually cares about the Constitution anymore, but at the time when they at least pretended to, the perfect place to do it is in a separate nation inside our own country.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's something that I would love to see people, you know, a little more scholarship on or books or whatever, investigations of, you know, this idea of using sovereign land for

projects that are not allowed to take place in the United States because of whatever laws.

You know, um, so

that didn't even occur to me.

And when you guys showed it, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's really worse.

It's brilliant.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

John Nichols, the guy who was the tribal leader, tribal, sorry, the

administrator there,

whose backstory is, as we show in this show, pretty strange and seemingly connected, seemingly

he's in all of the right places and all the right times before anti-leftist coups happen in South America.

He shows up at this Native American reservation and has this, you know, we explained, this idea of sovereignty that they can do whatever they want on this Indian reservation

in Southern California.

And And I think it's just the,

I don't want to say sinister, but it's kind of brilliant in its own way.

And it just makes me wonder, of course, like, yeah, what else were they doing?

Was this the only place?

I'm not really.

Oh, I can't imagine it is.

I mean,

you know,

there is brilliance and evil.

You know, there's a lot of things that are happening now and in the past.

You have to look back and go,

this was really quite brilliant, the way this was

the 1980 election.

Yeah, so

tell me about that, because that would just kind of seem to be brushed over.

Well,

we have to cover a lot of ground.

Yeah, I know.

So we're just like having a lot of money.

There's like a documentary on every single piece.

It's a whole series.

Oh, yeah, there is basically on each part.

A lot of people's complaint about

crime documentaries is that they drag on for too long.

But ours is like, we just packed so much.

Oh, I know.

You'll just be like, it's, you know, the 1980 election.

And you're like, wait, what?

Wait, what?

Yeah, well, so there's really like with what's called the October Surprise, right?

There's two, I think, main stories that I'd like to put out there, which is that there's our, the one that appears in our show is Michael Ricanosciuto's version of what happened, which is he says that the promise software, which

we've talked about, is a lot of people.

Was made to tie it's brilliant software, made to tie all of the court cases and all of the files together so the justice department right so that you can sort search them and and find relationships right and so then it was used it was that it's supposedly taken um and used covertly for what purpose for spying on our you know the united states

enemies and then friends and their their own spy agencies so that you can collect the data that whatever their spy agencies one of the one of the things a smaller story that came out in the snowden revelations was that the app uh the cell phone app angry birds the game had a back door in it so basically the idea is that you give a software somebody

in one case it could be angry birds in another case it could be their intelligence agency's like database software and it has a back door into it and so whoever knows about the back door can go in and siphon out you know whatever information they want out of the back So since it was stolen for whatever reason, I'm sure Bill Hamilton would have been amenable to licensing this whatever.

Who invented the software?

But it had to be, I guess, sold through third parties to other countries.

I guess that makes sense because if he was the official licensee to the U.S.

government, then you're trying to sell it to Canada with the back door.

You'd want to sort of not have that choice.

Generally, wouldn't go, oh, well, I'm sure the United States is clean.

Yeah.

Here, Saddam.

Yeah.

What are you thinking about like this software?

So going from that idea of this powerful,

valuable piece of software,

and the October surprise part of that, from Michael's perspective, is that that valuable piece of software and that valuable off-the-book, off-label contract where you could sell it around the world

is given to this guy, Earl Bryan, who was was a friend of Ronald Reagan's, was in his cabinet when he was governor of California.

And by the 80s, Reagan is president.

And that this contract, this piece of software, the source code for it is given to him as payment.

I mean, this is where it gets crazy.

Payment for the work that he did getting Reagan elected.

And this is Michael's allegation.

Michael's the guy who says, I am the one who installed the back door.

I programmed the thing.

And I was over in

absolutely believable the kid I mean when he was a kid he was he's a brilliant scientist brilliant scientist okay

so he's over in Iran yeah the idea that he's over in Iran with O'Brien they're giving 40 million dollars to the Ayatollah to hold the hostages that are that are being held in the U.S.

Embassy

that that's his version of the story I just want to say we've never seen any passports from Michael that shows that he's in Iran.

We've never seen any photos with him and O'Brien.

We have

no evidence that he was there in Iran.

But there's a lot of stories and evidence about what

generally the October surprise, which I would say I would, let's call that Michael's October surprise.

And then there's this sort of more mainstream October surprise that people like Bob Perry, Robert Perry, who broke the Iran, a big part of the Iran-Contra story at AP,

and Gary Sick,

these guys who are more mainstream of the conspiracy and the October surprise.

you know, talking about William Casey, if you talk about the logic of a guy named like William Casey, who was, who, who's kind of a background boogeyman for the entire octopus

conspiracy, really, throughout Danny's investigation, the journalist Danny, who Christian was looking into the murder of, or, you know, strange death of.

William Casey's a guy, I just think he's a prism through which you can see all of this, and the October Surprise is a really important part of that, is you have a guy who's um

uh starts out in the OSS he's a lawyer who starts out in the OSS uh which is the predecessor to the CIA in World War II he then is involved with various companies and then he I mean he and he was an amazing OSS agent he um did what was believed could not be done which was to get agents into uh Hitler's inner circle right um which was like, you know, no one thought it could be done.

Right, an incredible spy.

Incredible spy.

And he

was also we don't even mention this outside counsel for this company called wacken hut which was out which was the joint venture at the native american reservation that we've already talked about they were they were in partnership with

it's like blackwater except it is it's worse it's like you know what blackwater does it's a much better

stuff that you don't know they might be doing right it was the it was the predecessor to that the private a private security company and they uh

they were they also were the first private prison in america they invented that that concept for an immigration detention center um

but uh so so out you have william casey and then he he becomes he was the campaign manager campaign manager of regan for his presidential election and then he becomes CIA director

and then the day he's supposed to show up for his hearings in Iran-Contra, he conveniently dies.

Let's not go there.

Just keep throwing logs on the fire.

I'm just throwing logs on the fire.

But I'm just saying that

Reagan was surrounded by intelligence people.

His vice president was the former head of

director of intelligence.

George H.W.

Bush.

Watch what we say here in Texas.

And you've got William Casey, who is his campaign manager.

You know, it's just

not outside of the realm of William Casey's area of expertise to manipulate world events for outcomes that he wants to happen and have the capability to do that.

Also, Bob Perry, the journalist, who wrote a book called

Trick or Treason?

Trick or Treason.

It came out in 1993.

He was able to basically prove the October surprise down to the point of

finding Bill Casey's

passport.

And, you know, he was an international businessman and super spy chief.

He traveled a lot.

So he had a lot of passport books.

And the only one that he didn't have in his archive was that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

if he had been able to,

that passport will tell you definitively

whether he was

Madrid.

Yeah.

So let me go to.

We've already gone so far afield, sorry.

I know, that's all right.

I mean, that

investments.

I know, but I mean,

that's what this whole thing is.

You could just take, you know,

roads off of any of this and just go, and you don't know where reality

begins and ends.

It's crazy.

Well, we tried to at least, I mean, we tried to do it in a way that is not as, hopefully not as crazy as how we're making it sound, which is we tried to do it step by step and back it up with as much evidence

as we could.

Thank you.

And where we don't have evidence to be very clear that we're being subjective or hearing somebody's perspective on what you're seeing, right?

But it does very quickly get into realms of, I mean, I think that some of the most damning or strange or mystifying things for me going through this experience were the things that were actually reported widely in the news.

And just when you see them, how Danny saw them, which is that they're interconnected based on the people who were involved.

Things like Iran Contra, BCCI, this bank that was working with terrorists and drug dealers and intelligence agencies,

the savings and loan crisis, which was allegedly tied up with CIA operations, all these banks,

these assassins, rogue spies.

Many of those things were reported on in the 80s and up until Danny's death, but Danny was one of the few people kind of ties in.

They're all the same people involved with all these things.

And that's what the octopus is, right?

Well, not the the savings alone.

There was not a Bush involved in that.

Let me go to

what was his name, Robert Booth Nichols.

You guys talked to some scary people.

This guy chilled me to the bone.

Yeah.

He seemed like

he just seemed very confident that

things happen and nobody's going to question me.

And

okay, maybe I've killed people.

Maybe I...

I mean, he just, he had that air about him of

stone cold killer in a business suit.

Is that what you guys?

I'm like, which door is he going to come out of?

Yeah.

Because he may or may not still be alive.

Do you believe he is?

I think he might still be alive.

There's a chance.

I think.

He would be 80, right?

Yeah, he'd he'd be 80.

So

he's 80 if he's alive.

He's still spooky.

That guy.

Was he the who is the scariest person that you encountered?

Well, okay.

Bob allegedly died in 2009?

Yeah.

And we didn't meet him, but we have a lot of documents and things like that.

We met him.

We met him.

I saw enough.

We talked to a lot of people who did know him.

And Sherry,

who we interviewed, has an amazing story about going to his apartment, which I think is,

you know.

Tell the story.

Yeah.

So Sherry Seymour

investigated mainly the west, the west coast portion of the octopus or this, this story, this Danny's story.

And she met with, she started working on it about three months after Danny died, and she was calling all of his sources, much like Christian did.

But this is in 1991 and 1992.

And Robert Booth Nichols is one of, is a guy who Danny talked to extensively on the phone and met in person and was,

you know, I would say a suspect in Danny's death.

And at least for us.

And so she went over to his apartment to ask him about these things.

And

amazingly, he agreed and he was there with his wife.

And

at the end of that meeting, he

shows her this tape, puts on this tape, which

I think they were talking about sort of the manipulatability of reality and what and perception and in the media and things like that.

And

he he it's the Zapruder film, the JFK assassination film.

And he is playing it, and then it's not the one that you've seen before.

It's the one where the driver turns around and shoots JFK in the head.

And then she's like, wait, what?

And this is 1992.

When the Zapruder film isn't, you couldn't just go on the internet and watch it immediately.

And it wasn't easy to make fake

films.

And then he shows her another tape, and that tape, he says, is the one that everybody's seen on the media.

And he pauses it, and there's a half of a tree missing.

And he says, this is

the one everybody's seen has actually been manipulated.

I showed you the real one.

This one is the one that everybody's seen and it's been manipulated.

And when I heard that story, you know, I went to the internet immediately.

and i was like wait what is there a tree missing in this thing and no there there's there's no tree missing and i think that sherry's conclusion from that story is is similar to the one that i take which is that

he's showing her two manipulated tapes he's showing her one where the driver is shooting him that's been doctored he's showing her one where the tree has been cut off that's been doctored and it's in order to make it so that if she tells the story of meeting Robert with Nichols and what he told her and all the things that he said.

Then she tells that story and somebody's like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

And what else?

And there was a, and the driver killed him, and you're crazy.

Okay.

You know, just to make discredit her.

So I think it's a, it's a very powerful portrait of Bob and who he was and his, his ability to kind of manipulate people and manipulate reality and the world around him.

And

it just makes him endlessly fascinating.

But, but I think

and it makes him, it does a good job of making him seem just like a little crazy and a little weird.

But I think he was a lot more than that.

Yeah, I didn't think he was crazy.

I didn't think he was a little weird.

He was the one that didn't come off.

To me, he didn't come off crazy.

He came off like,

no, we had a deal.

This is what the deal was.

And you need somebody killed?

Okay.

We actually have his voice in the show, which I think is like

anybody who had heard these stories would be like, oh, this guy sounds like he's a JFK conspiracy theorist or something like that.

But hearing him talk and

deposition footage.

Of what happened in 2008 with him,

he's chilling.

I mean, yeah.

You asked who the most dangerous person that we encountered, you know, not necessarily met, but encountered in this.

I would have to give that prize to Philip Arthur thompson though yeah really who's the the serial killer in san francisco he's got to be

the person i would never want to meet uh right yeah he tells his story so he uh philip arthur thompson um he shows up in in episode three he's the one that like hogties michael or kanashudo's partner in such a way that his legs

are

choking him and so he's like slowly dying.

The gravity of holding up your legs, you eventually just can't do it anymore.

The way Jesus, you know,

died of suffocation on the ground.

He couldn't hold himself up.

If that story is true, too, who knows?

But

yeah, so

Philip Arthur Thompson was a serial

career criminal.

And one of the things that he liked to do was to rape and murder women.

And he also

was a

kind of a

like a major thief.

He would, you know, rob antique stores, jewelry stores.

Mainly in California.

Mainly in California, all up and down the Coast of Guinea.

He loved robbing drug dealers and stealing their guns and drugs.

Yeah.

He was a prolific criminal.

He was also a

protected FBI informant.

What exactly he

was helping the FBI out with,

that was so valuable that he should be allowed to

be unleashed onto the world.

I don't know.

I think a lot of jewelry store owners would be very resentful of that.

No, I mean, also just all kinds of people who's like,

the jewelry store.

You know, okay, I'm the federal government.

He's got something big to help us on jewelry store.

Okay.

The rape and murder and

he usually would murder the women after he'd raped them.

But one of them, I think he was working with a guy,

Mark Masterson, or convinced him not to.

And I've tracked that lady down, and she was 16 at the time.

And I tried to find her because I'm continuing my investigation of Philip Arthur Thompson.

And

she drank herself to death, you know, and I have to assume that those two events are connected, you know.

Oh, yeah.

You know, at 58, she drank herself to death.

But yeah, so he was somebody who,

when he would get arrested, would almost always find himself out of jail almost immediately on major charges, murder, you know.

You showed the newspapers saying, you know,

and then his rap sheet that shows that there's like in, out, in, out.

Yeah, and it's, it's, it's like you have somebody who's, uh,

he's going on trial for murder or something else, and then, you know, the lead witness dies.

And it's just like,

well, the lead witness was murdered before he was testified.

Like, could these events be more possibly interrelated?

And so, yeah,

he stayed out committing all kinds of crimes for years until he eventually went to jail for life

because it was just, I think the evidence was just absolutely overwhelming.

And it was a DNA case.

And I think that when he was committing these crimes,

DNA,

you know, evidence didn't exist, right?

So it was hard for them to argue against that.

So he wasn't hedging against that possibility.

But he

the good old days.

Yeah, you could just get away with whatever.

Yeah, you get away with murder and just walk away.

But it really is a scary sort of open question about what he was exactly doing with the various federal agencies, not just the FBI.

And we made a little bit of headway into that.

And I don't want to speculate too much on what it was, but it seemed to be beyond just kind of local street crimes.

It seemed to be

there was around him, there was the idea that he was helping the federal government with larger political, you know, geopolitical things

like getting like raising money and gun running and things like that.

So, anyway, you got to pick your business partners wisely.

And I would not choose Philip Arthur Thompson.

And we knocked on the FBI agent's door that

was running Philip Thompson, and that was also terrifying.

So, I mean, he's terrified.

Tell me about that.

We can't really talk too much about that, but hopefully, more on that, you know, in the future.

Zach was super scared that night.

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How much time did you guys spend?

I mean,

the whole series opens up with a phone call.

You're going to get yourself killed.

I don't know.

When you started it, you were, you know, in your 20s.

I think you're in.

2026.

Yeah.

You're in a little invincible.

How many times did you look at each other and go,

we should not be doing this?

What are we doing?

A lot.

A fair amount.

Yeah.

But there's also over our head was that like

we had to finish.

Because of Netflix?

Partially, and for our own reasons.

I don't think that's fair.

No, no, they pull the plug and you're going to be like, oh, I got to see it.

I'm walking.

It's worth dying.

No.

But we, no, but we, no, we did have to finish.

Like, because we started it and and and we weren't gonna like get we weren't gonna back down really like we had to finish also

Was there what was the closest moment where you were like if I if I live in a country Where you can get killed as like kind of a I'm a pretty non-threatening

Guy investigating a case from 30 years ago like Just just take me out then.

You know, just make it quick because this is it that would be absurd.

You know, I, we, this is a America.

It's a free country.

we're allowed to investigate things

i i think so an invitation um

careful what you wish for um i'm not wishing for it i'm just saying like no i know like let's yeah

no one would hope that you could do an investigation like this without and and that was our experience yeah we had a lot of people tell us that that

we would suffer dire consequences and to whatever credit we have not suffered those consequences the show has come out and what it is is what it is i mean we're

grateful for that.

The best place to survive is in the spotlight.

That's how we looked at it.

Yeah.

Was there a time where

you thought

you were this close to walking away?

What was that point, if there was?

I don't think walking away, but there were some moments where...

I mean, you can.

Or at least walking away from this line.

Well, there were times not worse.

There were times when I said to Christian, I was just like, this story or this part of the story is simply not worth dying for.

You know, it's just like, no, nobody is going to,

you know, benefit so greatly from us uncovering this thing that it was worth our lives.

You know, especially when Phil Thompson,

Phil Thompson, who we were just talking about, he,

I was like, Zach, we got to do the Phil Thompson.

We got to get Phil Thompson in here, you know, the serial murderer, rapist punk from San Francisco.

How old is he now?

He died.

He died like two years ago while we were editing.

And so then it was like, all right, so Zach, because he could have, he was a state prisoner in California, which has the most lax parole system.

And he could have at any point paroled out.

And if he didn't like the show, wreaked havoc upon our lives.

But then he died of a heart attack in prison.

And so then we were like, Zach was like, okay, fine.

We're putting him in the show.

Wow, yeah, and that was a cool thing about having a kind of

ever-evolving long project, long project, you know, that morphed and evolved and changed.

And 30 years old, and 30 years old, 30 years old, yeah.

Other people died.

Um, there was a legendary spy from um Israel named Rafaitan,

who is involved in different ways in this story, allegedly, with the promise software.

And we got his cell phone number from a friend of mine in Israel.

And

we obviously wanted to do our, we wanted to get our research under way, you know, like really know what we wanted to ask him before we called him.

We felt like if he even picked up, we'd only have one shot.

And then

within a month of getting that cell phone number, he died.

You know, he was old, you know, and people, that's kind of like,

I mean, he had a,

he captured Adolph Eichmann in South America.

Yeah, Rafi the Stinker.

That's what he was called.

So, um,

it didn't improve my

feeling of

trust

in really anything.

Um,

you know,

because it all seems

so

real and plausible.

It all seems, I mean,

if you look at it as an octopus and it's all connected,

it seems overwhelming that that could be

true.

But as you take it like you did, one piece at a time, every piece, you're like,

yeah,

that works.

Yeah, that's how we wanted it to feel was you were sort of like paddling out and you kind of go to this buoy and you're like, I can still see land, like I'm fine out here.

And then we go to the next buoy, and you're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, it's a little further away.

And then a few of those later, you're like,

I'm in the middle of the ocean, and I have no bearings anymore, which I think is what we wanted to capture of how we felt like Danny, who spent a year doing this, and Christian spent 12 years doing this, and me spending several years doing this.

That's the general feeling that you get when you go through this, and you're just like, what is real anymore?

Did your families

have 12 years?

Your family or any of your friends or anybody just go, dude, you are

you're gone.

In like the first, like 2015 was my worst

year of this, like emotionally, uh, physically, mentally.

And uh, is that explain that?

Explain that to me.

I mean, I was just like, I'd like withdrawn.

I, I, I'd had a relationship with a

business relationship with a literary agent.

And my background is as a photojournalist.

And

my first book was going to be this

insanely complicated nonfiction investigation about this, at that point, 26-year-old case.

And I was way in over my head, but I wanted to

complete this.

I wanted to get it out.

And I was like, just like really like, and I was just alone

and just struggling, not sleeping a lot, like trying to like, if I just stay up a little longer, I'll figure it out.

And, you know, I was like kind of miserable, I think, and lonely.

And I, you know, was broke.

And

my other career as a photojournalist was suffering.

I wasn't taking good care of myself.

I mean, you, I mean, I kind of block a lot of that stuff out, but you were there.

You and I.

Yeah, we, I, you know, go over to Christian's house and he's like

been sitting in the same position for two days straight.

You know, like, it's like, did you sleep?

And it's like,

like a couple days ago, you know, that kind of thing.

And it was just, it was just bleak.

And

his sisters and I and our friends all talked about it.

It was just like, you know.

Is it time to intervene?

And like, how do we get Christian?

There's, you know, the stages of grief.

There's also like the stages of conspiracy.

And I think one of the stages where you go to a dinner party or a barbecue and you try, you pick anybody from the crowd and you try to convince them of this thing that you've been studying.

Cause if you can convince someone at the dinner party and they believe you, then it will help you believe you.

Because you're like struggling with this complex, untangible.

And it doesn't really work out well, does it?

No, it doesn't.

Especially for the guests at the dinner party.

I know I'd be like, all right, I'm I'm just going to go to this barbecue and I'm not going to talk about the case.

Okay.

I'm just going to go.

I'm just going to be normal.

And then like, I'd, you know,

that would, like, was a process I, you know, kept repeating.

And I referred to it earlier in the show.

Like, I've sort of matured into this.

And I can talk about other things too now, you know, I think.

Can you?

But it's all con, but it is all consuming.

And it changes your worldview enough to where you...

even our editors that worked on it.

Sorry to keep interrupting you, Glenn, but like

all the editors that we worked with, you know, they're just like, they're guys that they cut, they cut movies and shows.

Right.

And they all became like, you know, very suspicious.

And they changed their worldview of like geopolitics.

You can't unsee things.

Yeah.

You know, and so when, and,

you know, when it's,

you know, there's so many conspiracy theories out there that are just so much bullcrap.

But there are a few.

The really well-designed ones, I think, are

you, they have certain hallmarks, and it is the same like 25 people,

you know, or 10 people that are just like,

wait, wait, wait.

This connects here because of that one person.

And once you start seeing that matrix,

it's hard because you feel either alone

or

you feel like you're seeing something that nobody else is seeing and it's right there.

Does that make sense to you?

And that's usually when your friends go,

maybe you should stop talking about this.

Maybe you should stop.

Maybe

did you, before you were like, Let's roll up our sleeves and go.

Did you

was there talk about, let's get him off the set?

I mean, we did.

And it was a years-long process.

I mean, I didn't start making this.

Christian started talking about this back in 2012 or whenever.

We've been friends since before.

We were friends for,

you know, we grew up together.

And so it was mainly a process for me of like,

oh, that's an interesting story.

And then just worried about Christian for like his own mental health.

And then when he's

telling me more about the people that he was reaching out to, and then it was like worry for his physical safety.

It's like, these people don't seem like they might have your best interest at heart that you're talking to.

And then the problem is that you kind of hear enough about this story to where

it

grabs onto you.

It puts its little hooks in you, and then you're like, well, that is kind of weird.

What happened with like

family?

I think you even said this.

It's got to feel like if I just get this, we just get carrots.

This

Yeah,

and it just opens up another door of craziness.

I think that what we tried to do, though, was try to put some blinders on, and that we didn't make a movie that's about conspiracy theories or about the

social history of conspiracy theories or anything that's really past 1992 or three.

Danny died in 1991.

We didn't graft this story onto the present.

And there's conspiracy,

conspiracy theories have become this boogeyman that is in the popular culture incessantly now.

And

why isn't that?

I don't know for sure, but 1991, the year that Danny died, is such a significant year for conspiracy theories.

It's the year that the movie JFK by Oliver Stone came out.

It's the year that, do you know who David Ike is?

He's like a British conspiracy theorist.

He talks about lizard people.

He was a BBC sports announcer who goes on the Wogan show in 1991 and says that he's the reincarnation of Jesus.

Danny Castellero dies.

I mean,

Behold a Pale Horse.

This book, Behold a Pale Horse,

came out.

It was just like, I think they called that summer, 1991, the summer of conspiracies because it was right at the end of Iran-Contra.

And there was an October surprise investigation going on.

The Inislaw case was.

All these conspiracies were bubbling up in Washington.

But, you know, I don't exactly know why conspiracy theories, you know, are such a topic du jour now.

I do know the feeling of what they do to your brain.

And we don't really talk about this in the show very much.

But my theory is that

in the absence of

knowledge, of information, the human brain makes up the worst possible

fills in the gaps with the worst possible possibilities, right?

And so you're

pre-programmed to see the negative.

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I've lost, I'm losing my hearing badly.

And

what happens is your brain fills in what you can't hear,

and

it just takes bits and pieces.

And

I've heard my wife say,

just crazy things.

You know what I mean?

And I go,

what did you just say?

How do I,

what it makes no sense that she would say something, and it's just the brain filling in what it thought it heard by grabbing just a little bit.

And I think that's, I think, conspiracy theories, or the idea of like the government is doing this, or you know, these people are doing this, or whatever group you don't like is doing this.

It's a, it's a, I think it's a very natural mental process.

I think it's based on psychological concepts like negativity bias and things like that.

We won't go into it.

But what I'm trying to really get back to is for us, we really tried to put blinders on and just focus on this story.

And it's a very complicated story, but just saying like, what can we actually, what is a conspiracy theory and what's an actual conspiracy?

Which has a legal definition and where, you know, multiple people get together and do a crime.

There's a difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact.

Right.

You know, that's why they're conspiracies.

But it's gotten so muddled.

Some people refer to, some people call it conspiracy theories.

They just say conspiracy.

I don't believe in conspiracies.

In our show, when we called the FBI agent, Scott Erskine, he says, oh, you know, Danny Casalero, ha ha,

he was, well, you know, he was talking to a lot of people who were, who believed in conspiracies and were involved in conspiracies.

And we're like, okay.

But he means to say conspiracy theories.

He's considering the idea.

Yeah, but

give him the benefit of the matter.

No, I'm just saying.

I just think that that is an example of how people

become so muddled.

So

because I drew some things

to today that maybe you didn't intend at all, and that would be, I guess, a good thing.

Or is it what you want me to believe?

But

I drew,

you know, in the

in the in times where things

where you just don't have good answers.

Like, you know,

the Titanic, we're going way too fast.

What the hell are we doing going, you know, in around the icebergs at this speed?

Well, they didn't want to tell you that there was an out-of-control fire, you know, in the burners.

It wasn't going to burn everything to the ground.

They just could not control it.

So just open it up and let it run.

When you don't have the facts, you look at things and go, well, I'm not getting the truth.

And so you're more open.

And the way to stop all this stuff is to just have some transparency.

But I don't even know what's transparent anymore because the internet has made things.

You can find whatever.

And now with deep fakes, it's going to get much worse because you'll be able to make that Zapruder film.

Right.

You know what I mean?

No.

There's an Unsolved Mysteries episode about the Danny Castellero case that came out in 1993.

And at the end of it, they talk about this event that occurred at Danny's funeral where a man in a military uniform puts a medal on Danny's casket.

And then, you know, Ann Clink, who's in our show, and,

you know, different...

friends and family of Danny were like, who was that guy?

And why did he do that?

And what does it mean?

And

the way that the Unsolved Mysteries episode is, you know, it's with a recreation.

The guy looks like Colin Powell, kind of.

And like he's, you know,

and with the music and the editing, you're like, well, what was Danny like actually like a spy?

Like, why would he do that?

Like, what was he doing?

And then,

so it was very significant to me that Danny wrote about computers at a time when not many people did.

And then that led him to the story about computers that led him to all of the rest of it, you know, the promised software story.

So when I was working on research for the book in the early days, I was calling people that he worked with at this computer industry trade publication called Computer Age.

And there were a few names on the masthead of the publications that I was able to track down.

And they introduced me to other people that worked there.

And they introduced me to other people that worked there.

And I met, I called this guy that worked in the print shop.

All I knew was his name.

I called him and I said, hi, my name is Christian.

I'm writing a book about Danny Castellero.

And he was like, I've been waiting, you know, 25 years for this call.

And I was like, wow.

Okay.

And he was like, have you ever seen the Unsolved Mystery show about this case?

And I was like, yeah, I have.

He's like, I'm the guy.

And I was like,

what guy?

Which guy?

You know, he's like, I'm the guy.

I'm the guy.

I'm like, what guy?

And he's like, I'm the guy that put the metal on Danny's casket.

And I was like,

wait, you were?

And he's like, yeah.

And I was like,

well, first of all, tell me the story and then tell me why you didn't come forward.

You know that there's this big question about who this person is.

And he said, well, you know, me and Danny,

we were friends at work.

We were work friends.

And after work, we'd sometimes have a beer in the parking lot of the office building where their publication was based.

And Danny used to say that he'd wished that he'd gone to war because he wished he'd gotten a medal.

And this guy was like a highly decorated

soldier from Vietnam.

He was in deep, heavy, horrible combat.

And,

you know, he's like, Danny,

you're good.

You don't want the medal.

And Danny's like, no, I wish I had the medal.

And this guy, you know, had been through hell and he had a bunch of medals to show for it.

And so he thought about that conversation the day that he was going to the funeral and he decided to put on his military uniform, like his formal attire and put the medal on, give Danny his best medal wow and um and that was just something he did for himself he just and it was something a private moment between him and his late friend that you know

so

then I was like well why did you wait like why are you not you know why why did you let this mystery surround it and he said

Look, man, if they can't figure out who I was,

they're not going to figure out what happened to Danny.

So, you know, you found me, and I want you to figure out what happened to Danny.

Something like that.

But so, like you're saying, with the conspiracy theories,

you know, your mind goes everywhere.

Who's the guy that put the metal in the casket?

Who was that?

You know, and it's just a guy, you know.

We have

in my job, I've had people come up to me and say,

I know what you were saying about such and such.

You're like, What the hell was I saying?

Well, I know what you said, but I heard you.

No, I didn't.

No.

You know, there are people out there that do want to go into this space.

I don't know why, but they do want to go into that space and

connect everything together.

And connect everything to everything.

You know, some things are connected.

Some things are not.

Uh-huh.

You know?

Yeah.

Right.

I think that that was our

main issue, right?

And we knew

we knew in the office that people on the the internet would say that the show is a limited hangout, which is a term that means that an intelligence agency admits to part of a larger thing in order to

distract and

obfuscate the larger crime.

Sacrificial lamb for the larger.

And then, sure enough,

it's on the internet that this show is supposedly a limited hangout.

But no, we did the best we could.

That's right.

So you're not CIA spies or we

would make our lives so much easier.

No, I know.

If the recruiters are out there,

probably be a lot happier, too.

Me?

No, I mean,

if you were a spy and you had the answer,

you would assume you'd get more access.

Yeah, you'd have access.

Right.

I wouldn't want to do any like wet work, though.

I'm screamish about blood.

Yeah.

Yeah, the wet work part would be.

And morality.

I've got morality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have morality.

so

final

final thought what

what do you walk away with or hope that the audience walks away because I'm not sure and those are usually the best things you'll go to a movie or you'll read something and you're like

I don't know I know that affected me I know that may have changed me but I'm not sure how yet I think and that's very rare that that happens and I think you captured that yeah I mean I think that you know we can't inherently solve every mystery that is that's brought up by the octopus, right?

But I almost, and I, and but I, we also, I don't think are leaving it with like a, oh, like, just wait for season two or like, this is a completely ambiguous ending and nobody knows anything.

It's like, I think that we bring people on a journey and show for the first time often new information and new facts and draw conclusions about the relationships between all these people and these string of murders and crimes.

But I do think that there is,

if you could say it's ambiguous, it's like I look at it like we're making almost like a nature documentary.

Like

we're studying an ecosystem, and there's no real beginning and end to an ecosystem.

You make a nature show and you see the hunt and you see the aftermath and you see the relationships between all the different animals and character you know you treat them as characters that's a little bit what we're doing with the some of these conspiracies or or political scandals or or intelligence operations like we're we're showing

our view our experience of how they relate and they work um as as as you know people who have done the research or whatever, done a lot of research.

And so I think taking away from that feeling that you can get tangible answers, but you have to be comfortable in a certain level of ambiguity.

You have to be comfortable floating just a little bit and never

coming to grips with the feeling of, okay,

I can walk away because I know at least this much information or I can keep on living my life because, I mean, for the moral for me was,

You could do this forever, but it's nice to have like other things going on in your life.

Like friendship, I think was a big part of it.

And being able to walk away and not have to know every answer to every single thing.

Correct.

And that's actually important on a personal level.

If that makes sense.

That was a huge,

that was a really blessing, I thought, a message in there.

Yeah, I think it's tragic that, you know, Danny was doing this in 1990 and 1991 alone, largely.

And I think that is sad to think about somebody you know kind of traveling through this world on their own and he had to bounce his ideas off of Robert Booth Nichols I had Zach

you had a better partner yeah you you final thought from you um I intend to keep investigating um

this this well this constellation this ecosystem and uh you know I'd love to eventually make my way into you know the modern era I don't know like I because I I only know when I've

investigated something, what I think about it.

So, no, I don't know.

It's been amazing to have

to have Zach help me out with this.

I mean, I would have been, I was pretty lost until

he joined me.

It's crazy.

It's too big of a thing to come up with any sort of little final thought, I think.

No, but I like the idea that

it's more satisfying to think of this as a study on the ecosystem

because something like this,

you know, just doesn't appear and then go away for whatever.

I mean, especially when nobody gets in trouble.

Yeah.

And people are clearly like making money.

I mean, it's worthwhile to people to be involved in that.

Guys, thank you.

Thank you so much for

just a reminder.

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