3: We Can Be Heroes

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Speaker 15 Novel

Speaker 18 It's late 2009. Ben Fodor strolls into a Seattle comic book store, the Dreaming Comics and Games.

Speaker 18 He enters a hidden back room behind a bookcase.

Speaker 18 When he emerges from his secret lair, he's no longer Ben Fodor.

Speaker 18 As the comic book lovers of Seattle browse the shelves stuffed with Nightwing and Batman comics,

Speaker 18 an actual costumed crime fighter glides past them

Speaker 18 and steps out of the shop. Phoenix Jones has a city to save.

Speaker 18 A few months earlier, before he established his secret changing room, Phoenix was sitting in the same store chatting to the owner, Aaron, about crime crime fighting.

Speaker 18 At that point, he decided that he wanted to continue fighting crime, but he realized that he needed a compelling outfit, one that would make him stand out.

Speaker 18 And it would take a lot of trial and error to get there.

Speaker 15 I had a pair of jeans, no shirt, and like a ski mask.

Speaker 18 Then there was a more ostentatious look.

Speaker 15 We went all spandex with the Count Chocolate hat.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 18 Clearly, this was not a permanent solution.

Speaker 18 When I first heard about real-life superheroes, I assumed that they modeled their outfits off fictional superheroes because they thought it was cool.

Speaker 18 But there's actually a practical reason for wearing a flamboyant superhero outfit. It distinguishes you from criminals who might also be wearing a mask.

Speaker 18 If a cop gets called out to a crime and they see a guy in a ski mask, there's a pretty good chance they'll think this is the suspect.

Speaker 18 And as a superhero, that is something you want to avoid at all costs. So, Ben Ben needed a costume that would distinguish him from the criminals he wanted to take down.

Speaker 18 In some ways, I feel like what happened next was the moment when Ben Fodor really became a superhero.

Speaker 18 Up until this point, he was just a guy in spandex and a goofy hat, trying to stop crime. But his next suit was when he fully embraced the superhero image.

Speaker 15 We got this replica Batman suit off the internet and like grinded the nipples off because one was Batman forever. We like grinded the nipples off.
I remember that being a conversation.

Speaker 15 And then went out there and and I had that one for a while and I spray-painted the gold V on it.

Speaker 18 And so the newly minted Phoenix Jones, with his freshly spray-painted Nippoless Batman Halloween costume, took to the streets of Seattle.

Speaker 18 In the comic book version of this story, Phoenix would instantly start kicking ass.

Speaker 18 But this was not a comic book. This was real life.

Speaker 15 The first six months was just expose and stupid.

Speaker 18 For starters, not all of Phoenix's gadgets worked the way he hoped.

Speaker 15 I was chasing a guy. I think he'd broken into a car.
I was like, oh, I'm coming after you. I pulled out this net gun I just bought and I pop it off, but I'm running at like super warp speed, right?

Speaker 15 And the net gun catches wind and blows back and nets me and rolls up. I land in the side of like a little gutter ditch right on the side of the road.

Speaker 15 It's been raining, so there's like two inches of water in it, right? And I land belly down. And I'm like, oh my god, I'm gonna drown.

Speaker 15 So I'm like rolling up, taking breaths, and rolling up and taking breaths.

Speaker 18 At this point, Phoenix feels a pair of hands grabbing his back. He gets forcibly turned over, and there, glaring down at him, is the criminal he'd been chasing.

Speaker 18 Then, in a decidedly unheroic moment, lying in a ditch and ensnared in his own net, Phoenix gets mugged.

Speaker 15 He grabs my wallet, he punches me in the face,

Speaker 15 and I just lay belly up in this freaking rain ditch. And then finally, the cops show up and they're like, what's going on?

Speaker 15 So I explain the story to him and they're like, oh, we have to take photos for evidence, which is lies.

Speaker 18 It turns out, crime fighting is tougher than it looks.

Speaker 15 Everything you see in a crime fighting magazine, it's the pages between the panels you have to learn to live in. You know those little white bars to separate all the comic book panels?

Speaker 15 That's where the real crime fighting takes place. That's where all the superhero work really is.

Speaker 18 Phoenix explained that in the comic books, you'll often see a hero on top of a tall building chasing a bad guy.

Speaker 18 The hero might be shown swinging on a rope, but what's not shown is when he's set up where the rope would go. That's the part the superhero stories leave out.

Speaker 18 But as Phoenix was figuring out the hard way, these little details are crucial.

Speaker 18 Only weeks into his crime-fighting career, Phoenix Jones was a laughingstock, reliant on friendly members of the Seattle Police Department to fish him soaking wet out of the gutter.

Speaker 18 This would not stand.

Speaker 18 It was time to get serious.

Speaker 18 From the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, this is the Superhero Complex, episode 3. We Can Be Heroes.

Speaker 18 Hearing Phoenix tell the story of his early crime fighting failures made him more endearing to me.

Speaker 18 It was nice to hear him deviate from his over-the-top proclamations about being the only real superhero and his claims that he is, quote, perfect at crime fighting.

Speaker 18 I get the sense that his arrogance and his insistence on being better than everyone around him has been the source of a lot of the interpersonal conflict in his superhero life.

Speaker 18 The night of the disastrous net incident was humiliating. But one thing that you'll never see a self-respecting superhero do is quit.

Speaker 18 As soon as he'd waved goodbye to the police who'd rescued him, he dusted off his dirty, nipple-less Batman outfit and got back to work.

Speaker 15 I stopped my first crime that same night. I hear this girl screaming, and back in the day, there used to be a really big pickpocket and like grab iPhone and run scenario kind of deal.

Speaker 15 This guy's pulling on this girl's purse and he cuts the purse strap, right? I see him and I come up behind him. And at that point in time, I'm still at catchphrases too.

Speaker 15 I'm like really deep in the stupid. And I roll up and I was like,

Speaker 15 stop.

Speaker 15 What are you doing? You know, kind of like that. This is a terrible catchphrase, by the way.
Hey, I do what I can. You know, you think you have catchphrases until the moment happens.

Speaker 15 You know, I say, stop. The guy just turns around and just straight up stabs me right in the stomach.
And I had no armor. I was in just spandex.

Speaker 15 And all of a sudden, I realized, wait a minute, this isn't a game. You're a professional martial artist, bro.
You have skills. You are a three or four time champion at this point.

Speaker 15 There's no reason that you should be out here yelling out ridiculous corny catchphrases in spandex.

Speaker 18 In Phoenix's telling of the events, it's almost as if he'd forgotten until this very moment that he was a trained fighter.

Speaker 15 Immediately, I switch into fight stance, two left jabs and a right hand, set the dude down, flamingoed him, which is duct taping your right hand to your left leg.

Speaker 15 So you can hop around like a flamingo if you try to run. And I'm sitting next to him and the girl's taking off at this point.
I have a purse, but I don't know where the girl is.

Speaker 15 And all of a sudden, like the brightest lights shine on me. And I'm like, what's going on? I look and the cop who had just got me out of the ditch like four hours earlier, he's like, No way.

Speaker 15 He's like, Phoenix Jones, you stopped a crime. And I was like, I did.
I stopped a crime. And the the girls in the back of the car and everything, you know?

Speaker 15 And the cop comes up and goes, hey, if you got caught by this corny motherfucker, maybe crime's not for you.

Speaker 18 With his first bad guy in handcuffs, it was time for Phoenix to level up again. And how does an ambitious crime fighter stay one step ahead? You might be wondering.
Well, trampolines, obviously.

Speaker 15 I went around the city setting areas that I would have things to make me superhero up. And it was a calculated, planned out, orchestrated idea.
And it really, really blew some of the criminals' minds.

Speaker 15 You know, like little things, like hiding those little trampolines you can buy, you know, like hiding them behind dumpsters and where there's fences.

Speaker 18 Phoenix told me that he set up these sort of booby traps around town. Not traps in the sense that they ensnared criminals, but more like magic tricks that made it seem like he had superpowers.

Speaker 18 He would chase unsuspecting bad guys down Seattle's back streets.

Speaker 18 They'd flee in horror, attempting to scramble over walls, only for Phoenix to sail majestically into their path, propelled by one of his strategically placed trampolines.

Speaker 15 I'm bouncing over the fence, flying, and just land. The dude just stopped and just laid down.

Speaker 15 He's just like, fuck this.

Speaker 18 It's almost like you are breaking the magician's rule and like revealing the trick, you know?

Speaker 15 Yeah, but I think that's not the trick, right? The trick is timing, being effective, and actually having the skill to do it because there's no trick to what I've done, right?

Speaker 15 I jumped over that fence, landed in front of a a guy with a knife, and you surrendered. No trick.

Speaker 18 Well, the trick, I think, is that you had gone ahead of time and put a trampoline there.

Speaker 15 Right, but it's not a trick. See, that's the difference between being a superhero and being something that's a joke, right?

Speaker 15 It's because I'm using it as a tool to get over that fence to cut off valuable time. I'm just doing it in the mode of a superhero.
Other superheroes are doing things simply as a trick.

Speaker 18 I love the image of Phoenix leaping from a trampoline and soaring through the air to thwart criminals, but I have serious doubts about the validity of this story.

Speaker 18 It just seems crazy to me that you would know where to place the trampolines and that they would be in precisely the right spot during what I imagine is a pretty chaotic chase through darkened streets.

Speaker 18 But some of Phoenix's other tactics seem a lot more plausible.

Speaker 15 I used to laser point people all the time. Hilarious.
I had a laser pointer on the top of my thing and I'd just go, stop!

Speaker 15 And people would just stop.

Speaker 15 I was thinking like Buzz Lightyear, kind of like I'm setting my thing from stun to kill. Yeah.
And I would just laser pointer them. And I'd be like, don't make me immobilize you.

Speaker 15 And they would just stop. You know what I mean? So it's like a bluff, but really, if you came after me, you would get beat up.
Yeah. So it's not exactly a bluff, right?

Speaker 15 The laser is for your protection. You get closer to me, you're going to have a problem.
The laser keeps you at a safe distance from your own bad choices.

Speaker 18 Wouldn't it be nice if we all had lasers that kept us at a safe distance from our bad choices?

Speaker 18 Anyways, in between zapping bad guys with his Buzz Lightyear laser and getting caught in his own net gun and bouncing over fences on miniature trampolines, Phoenix did manage to stop a few crimes here and there.

Speaker 18 And in the process, he attracted some followers, folks who wanted to fight alongside him and, if needed, help him get out of whatever dumb mess he'd made for himself.

Speaker 18 Even the world's greatest superhero needs a hand sometimes. Coming up, I meet Phoenix's original sidekicks.
That's after the break.

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Speaker 18 On my first trip to Seattle, when Phoenix stood me up, I'd been messaging some of his crew from way back in the day. I'd found Midnight Jack on Facebook.

Speaker 18 He and another real-life superhero, Ghost, agreed to meet me at the Northgate Movie Theater in the outskirts of Seattle's city limits.

Speaker 18 The theater was in an outdoor shopping center with a few cafes and a subway sandwich shop. It was a sunny, clear day in August.

Speaker 18 As I stood next to an outdoor fire pit, I noticed that ash was falling from the sky. I looked around and saw the alarm on the faces of other people around me.
It felt apocalyptic.

Speaker 18 Not unlike a scene out of a superhero movie where everyone is confused at the falling ash, then we all look up to see a giant explosion in the sky

Speaker 18 as two masked superheroes battle royale in the heavens above our mortal world.

Speaker 18 But it turned out it was just a large structure fire about a mile away. Eventually I smelled the smoke and saw the plume rising in the distance.

Speaker 18 And then Midnight Jack and Ghost walked up to me and introduced themselves.

Speaker 18 They were not what I expected. I guess I thought they would be more intimidating.
This was during the pandemic, so they both had masks on. Ghost looked looked like he'd just rolled out of bed.

Speaker 18 Flip-flops, gym shorts, and a t-shirt.

Speaker 18 Midnight Jack at least looked like he'd come from the gym, workout pants, coffee in hand, though I remember being surprised at how much skinnier he was than I expected.

Speaker 15 Hi, how you doing? Good.

Speaker 18 Uh, guessing you're here to look for a ghost?

Speaker 15 Yes, are you? Yeah, nice to meet you, man. Good to meet you.

Speaker 18 We decided to walk down some steps away from the shopping center to a more secluded area with a few tall apartment complexes built around a scenic bike path path that ran alongside a little creek.

Speaker 18 We could just sit maybe on that bench over there or something.

Speaker 18 As grandparents pushed strollers and couples walked hand in hand along the path, Midnight Jack and Ghost regaled me with wild stories of their past lives.

Speaker 14 A homeless dude almost ripped Cabby's dick off one time, which is funny. It's why you don't wear fucking men's leggings to street patrol.

Speaker 18 Dooley noted, Cabby, I'd later learn, was a fellow recruit.

Speaker 18 Before becoming one of Phoenix's comrades, Midnight Jack says he started out in life as a criminal with a superhero-like ability getting away with it.

Speaker 14 I have no record. I had a very serious cocaine addiction, specifically a crack cocaine addiction.

Speaker 14 If you look back at my personal information, which I won't give you, I have something crazy like 172 police contacts in three years, no arrests, no convictions.

Speaker 14 Which is not necessarily something you should be bragging about, but I mean, that's just what it was.

Speaker 18 Now, because Jack Jack won't give me his real name, I'm not able to verify his claim that he has something like 172 police contacts without ever being arrested or charged with a crime.

Speaker 18 But I will say that I find it very hard to believe that someone suffering from a severe crack addiction who claims to have been a very active criminal and gang member could have that many encounters with the police and never get caught.

Speaker 18 Maybe it's proof that real-life superheroes have remarkable superhuman abilities. Or maybe Midnight Jack is full of shit.
Yeah, I'm curious about your transition.

Speaker 18 Like what made you stop doing crime and start fighting crime?

Speaker 14 Well when you stop doing cocaine, you stop needing to fund cocaine. And so the need to commit crime slowly goes away.
So at the end of that, I left the crew I was with. I left the state for a year.

Speaker 14 And when I came back, I was sober. And I was looking to fill my time in a positive way as opposed to being a criminal, a bad guy, and a thug.

Speaker 18 I was 22 when I got back.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I had done nothing really in my entire life other than crime.

Speaker 18 Jack saw a news article about a guy stopping car break-ins wearing what he calls a rubber gimp suit. But what we know now was actually a Nippolis Batman costume.

Speaker 14 I was like, well shit, I got an old ski mask that I used to use and a baseball bat.

Speaker 15 I'll just start walking around here.

Speaker 14 So then for the next six months, I walked around with a bat and a ski mask and chased off car prowlers and we call them baiters. It's aggressive, homeless drug addicts.
We call them baiters.

Speaker 14 And yeah, that was basically my first six months of career.

Speaker 18 Jack was in a park at night, ski mask on, bat in hand, when a cop stopped him and asked for his name.

Speaker 15 I was like, uh, it's Jack.

Speaker 18 He glanced at his watch, 11:53 p.m.

Speaker 18 In a flash of inspiration, his superhero persona came to him.

Speaker 14 Midnight Jack.

Speaker 14 And the name's stuck ever since. Legends are born out of necessity.
They're not planned out or carefully created.

Speaker 18 Now that the legend was born, Midnight Jack decided it was time to join some like-minded heroes. He told me that he fell in with a crew of decidedly average Seattle superheroes.

Speaker 14 All fat, out of shape, and they were so desperate to have somebody with any sort of skills or know-how whatsoever.

Speaker 18 Jack says they harassed the odd drug dealer, but they weren't about to save the world. Then one day, he saw Phoenix Jones' crew patrolling in his part of town.

Speaker 14 He came up to me and I was like, hey man, just so you know, like this crowd down here is more mellow, that one down there is a little rowdier. We already did two loops of the block.

Speaker 14 Most of the cars are parked down here and this and that and that. You got all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 15 And he looks at me and goes, who the fuck are you?

Speaker 14 And why are you telling me shit about my own patrol? How did you even get here?

Speaker 14 That was how I met Phoenix Jones.

Speaker 18 It wasn't exactly love at first sight, but it was clear to Midnight Jack that Phoenix Jones was very different from the crew he was running with at the time. Jones was the real deal.

Speaker 18 Jack says says his work ethic impressed Phoenix, but Phoenix describes their first encounter a little differently.

Speaker 15 We found Midnight Jack on the streets. He was out patrolling in a very stupid way.
He was out there just beating up people, like with no abandon. Just, you know what I mean?

Speaker 15 Just like hiding in a bush with two sticks. And then when a crime takes out, just beating someone senselessly.
So we found him and we were like, you should join our squad and like not go to prison.

Speaker 15 And then from there, it just kind of built.

Speaker 18 It might sound like an odd recruitment strategy to make a guy guy you found hiding in the bushes and beating people to within an inch of their life a member of your crime fighting crew.

Speaker 18 But Phoenix spotted a fellow costumed crime fighter and clearly saw something in Jack. By the time Jack started hanging out with Phoenix, Ghost had already been patrolling with him for a while.

Speaker 18 In fact, Ghost actually knew Phoenix back when he was just Ben Fodor.

Speaker 28 I came back from Iraq in 2009

Speaker 28 and I found out that someone I knew from high school, Ben, was doing this crazy shit out on the streets.

Speaker 18 You knew Ben in high school?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I did.

Speaker 28 We ran in similar circles. I called him up like, Ben, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing, man?

Speaker 28 And he invited me up to have a chat with him. We talked about it, and I was like, well, I'm going now.
You don't really have a say in that.

Speaker 18 I really wanted to know what Ben had been like when they were growing up. But Ghost was not particularly interested in talking.
He seemed wary of me and my microphone.

Speaker 18 At one point, Midnight Jack said that Ghost had been freaking out on the way to the interview. Jack did almost all the talking.

Speaker 18 Ghost would stand to the side, and sometimes he would wander off, like 20 or 30 yards away from us, and just stand there, watching from a distance.

Speaker 28 I don't trust anyone. Like, sometimes I struggle with some post-traumatic stress situation, and that doesn't really help things when it comes to my trust.
But I'm just doing my best.

Speaker 18 Ghost didn't want to talk much about the old days.

Speaker 18 Though every once in a while, Midnight Jack would launch into a story about a patrol from long ago, and Ghost would jump back back into the conversation.

Speaker 18 Apparently, Midnight Jack used to carry a container of baking flour to throw at people. One time, he was about to douse a local pervert in flour when ghosts stepped in.

Speaker 14 I almost flowered this homeless dude in a wheelchair that had one leg, but he had his dick out and he was following women back from the club, jacking off, yelling aggressive sexual things.

Speaker 14 You talked me out of flowering that guy because he was in a wheelchair. I was going to flower him and then I was going to push him over.

Speaker 18 I got the sense, based on this story and videos I've seen of Phoenix's patrols, that Ghost often played this role. Phoenix described him as a level-headed analyst rather than a brawler.

Speaker 15 Ghost has a specific intel-slash observational job, and he's amazing at that. But Ghost can't run into an altercation and take people out.

Speaker 18 These days, Ghost doesn't go out on patrol, but he continues to fight crime. He says his efforts are now focused on catching pedophiles online by posing as a 14-year-old boy.

Speaker 28 I set up these fake profiles and I have at least 10 detectives that work with me. And to any pedophiles out there, it's always me.
So keep that in mind.

Speaker 18 I came away from my first encounter with real-life superheroes, not really sure what to make of them.

Speaker 18 On that first trip to Seattle, before I met Phoenix, I was skeptical of a lot of their claims, but I admired their ambition and their desire to do good in the world.

Speaker 18 even if a lot of their escapades seemed a little absurd. I also got a kick out of all the petty infighting that seemed to consume a lot of the superhero's time.

Speaker 18 I was only just learning what kind of person puts on a costume and takes the law into their own hands.

Speaker 18 But maybe it shouldn't have surprised me that a lot of them have big egos that can lead to personality clashes.

Speaker 18 Despite the bickering, they did seem to have a solid system in place for organizing patrols and vetting new recruits.

Speaker 18 Sometimes, when Phoenix did interviews with the media, he would give out a phone number that people could call if they wanted to get in touch with him. That phone number went directly to Ghost.

Speaker 18 And one day, he got a call from a new guy who said he was interested in joining the team.

Speaker 29 We hit it off instantaneously because we understood that it's not a game, it's not some kind of trivial thing you could just jump into.

Speaker 18 The guy on the other end of the phone was about to become the latest member of Phoenix's crew and one of Phoenix's best friends. He called himself El Caballero.

Speaker 18 Of all the real-life superheroes I've hung out with, El Caballero was the one who surprised me the most.

Speaker 18 Before I met him, I had formed my opinion based on videos of him patrolling with Phoenix's team. And to be honest, I thought he was the most ridiculous of the bunch.

Speaker 18 His superhero costume was really absurd. He wore a luchador mask and a purple cape vest thing with a gold embroidered dragon and bell bottoms.

Speaker 18 He was the guy Midnight Jack had talked about who nearly got his junk pulled off on patrol.

Speaker 18 And of course, his name was El Caballero, gentleman or knight in Spanish, which for a white guy just seemed like an odd choice.

Speaker 18 Based on all of this, I had an idea in my head of who Cabi was. But then I actually met him.

Speaker 18 El Caballero agreed to meet me, of all places, at a Mexican restaurant. He doesn't live in Seattle anymore, and he asked to keep his exact location a secret.

Speaker 18 He says there are a a lot of bad dudes he's apprehended over the years who he thinks are keen to track him down and enact revenge.

Speaker 18 It's peaceful where he lives now, a small town about an hour and a half outside of Seattle. He left the city a few years ago and has settled into a quiet life with his wife.

Speaker 18 They live in a trailer park in the forest. Cabby chose the Mexican restaurant to meet because it was close to his home.
It had nothing to do with his superhero name.

Speaker 15 I got there a little early and took a seat in a booth.

Speaker 18 Mexican pottery and colorful Spanish tile lined the walls.

Speaker 18 When he walked into the restaurant, I didn't recognize him. He came over to me and introduced himself, and I was immediately entranced by his eyes.

Speaker 18 Cabby has hypnotic blue eyes that feel like tractor beams into your soul. There's a depth to Cabi that totally surprised me.
He's a deeply spiritual person, but also very intimidating.

Speaker 18 He's a big guy, covered in tattoos. He had on a denim jacket over a brightly colored shirt.
His appearance hides a gentle, thoughtful side that I hadn't expected. We sat in the restaurant for a while.

Speaker 18 I ordered some food and Cabby had a couple drinks and ordered a burrito to take home to his wife.

Speaker 18 Then we got some beers from the gas station and sat in my car chatting in the parking lot between the restaurant and Cabby's trailer.

Speaker 18 One of his neighbors saw us and wandered over to see what we were up to.

Speaker 15 Hey, how you doing? Hey, brother, good to see you, man.

Speaker 18 We're just doing an interview.

Speaker 29 We're doing an interview for the internet.

Speaker 15 All right, huh? Sounds good. All let's get to get back to what you're doing, but yeah.
Thank you.

Speaker 15 All right, thanks, man.

Speaker 29 um i'm just gonna set my levels you can i can hold actually all right how should i talk is this a good level to talk in and talk when i talk however you talk i generally talk talk like this and

Speaker 29 yeah sharing the story and telling the thing about the things of the story that sounds good cabby has lived all over the world his dad was in the u.s military and worked for NATO.

Speaker 18 So Cabby spent part of his childhood living in Europe.

Speaker 29 After I saw the Berlin Wall

Speaker 29 And then coming to America, whatever, some of my mannerisms made people think certain things or whatever. And they made judgments on me.

Speaker 29 And there was like skin heads and all this other, not traditional skins, but some negative Nazi white power skins.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 like one threw me down the steps, and teachers were like, oh, well, it's all right, it's all good, or whatever.

Speaker 29 And so I experienced that, and I was like, no one should suffer this, like, let alone myself.

Speaker 29 And so, like, I went from someone who was very sensitive and artistic, and still am, I believe, to someone who was trained to protect myself and then even trained to protect other people.

Speaker 29 I tried to join the military, but I have irregular heartbeats.

Speaker 18 Even though he couldn't become a soldier, Cabby wanted to be a protector of humanity in some way. He got into martial arts and pursued a career in social work.

Speaker 29 I was doing caregiving and helping developmentally disabled people and stuff like that.

Speaker 29 Some of my clients were really intense, had violent tendencies, and so the company I worked for sent me to them because I'd already been trained, not with them, but with other things with martial arts and de-escalation and things like that.

Speaker 18 Cabi was also an avid reader of history, and in his studies, he came across a template for the type of heroism that he wanted to emulate.

Speaker 18 The Knights Templar.

Speaker 29 It's an ancient chivalric order dedicated to protecting pilgrims and widows and orphans and the downtrodden and anyone else.

Speaker 18 Although the actual Knights Templar were destroyed around the year 1307, the revivalist group that Cabi was involved with paid homage to the medieval order and dubbed Cabi their new knight.

Speaker 29 I swore on the holy Bible in front of legal witnesses and they gave me a knighthood. In fact, I have several knighthoods now just based on the fact that I've sworn to protect humans.

Speaker 18 Cabby took his new role as a protector of humanity very seriously. He felt a deep sense of honor and duty as a member of this historic order.

Speaker 29 I felt like I wouldn't be living up to these high honors that these people gave me if I didn't do something more noble with my skills.

Speaker 29 I told Jones, I'm like, hey, it's cool you have your high school buddies, but let's bring on some real heavy hitters.

Speaker 18 It was time for Phoenix Jones and the Rain City superheroes to raise the bar. So for a new generation of aspiring recruits, things were about to get competitive.

Speaker 18 After the break, we sort the superheroes from the sidekicks.

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Speaker 18 Over the first couple of years of his superhero career, Phoenix Jones had built a ragtag crime-fighting posse through a bit of luck and some chance encounters with like-minded folks.

Speaker 18 This motley crew ultimately became the Rain City Superhero Movement, an organization with a mission to strike fear into the heart of Seattle's criminal underworld.

Speaker 18 If Phoenix really wanted to create the Avengers-style supergroup of his dreams, he couldn't just let anyone in. The movement needed some professionals.

Speaker 18 Like Ghost, James Marks is a veteran. He'd worked in aviation mission planning for the Army and had served in Iraq.

Speaker 18 After he got out of the service, James was surfing the internet when he came across some curious posts about a guy who claimed to be a real-life superhero.

Speaker 18 His first thought was, oh, come on, give me a break. I suspect his second thought was, is that a Nippoless Batman costume? But that's more of a guess.

Speaker 15 I remember seeing online a couple posts and screenshots of some weirdo named Phoenix Jones

Speaker 15 and just seemed a little larger than life personality and I thought it's like, what a kind of kook is this.

Speaker 18 James was skeptical but intrigued. So when he heard the superheroes of Seattle were holding an event in a bar to meet the public, he showed up.

Speaker 15 My expectations were seeing a bunch of basement dwelling cosplay nerds that put down their dice for a minute to go patrol the streets or something. And it was nothing like I'd expected.

Speaker 18 A lot of the superheroes James met that day had families and full-time jobs. They didn't seem delusional.
They seemed like they genuinely wanted to help people.

Speaker 18 After the meetup, James couldn't get the idea out of his head. He'd given up his job in the military, but he missed the feeling of being on a team, united behind a cause.

Speaker 15 I shot an email to Phoenix Jones. He left his email on the Facebook post, so I'm like, okay.
I'm wondering, you know, what's the process like? How does this work?

Speaker 15 You know, someone might be interested in joining something like this. And he responded right away in his famous cap-slocked fashion.

Speaker 15 Meet us at Second and Jackson on Tuesday morning at midnight and wear something blue. Phoenix out.

Speaker 18 So in the early hours of the following Tuesday, James waited on the street corner.

Speaker 15 I'm wearing kind of like a black hoodie and tactical cargo pants and have this blue sash, kind of a scarf.

Speaker 15 I showed up there and found out there's like eight other people also waiting around kind of dressed in various dark garb, each with an individual color.

Speaker 15 There was green, there was orange, there was me, blue, there was black, there was yellow.

Speaker 18 The superhero recruits eyed each other apprehensively. Nobody said much.

Speaker 15 A couple other people started showing up that were very much decked out in what looked like kind of superhero gear. Almost costumes.
One looked like a Mexican wrestler.

Speaker 15 There was one guy looked like Spider-Man kind of. That was Midnight Jack.
Eventually in his very famous late fashion, Phoenix Jones showed up and greeted all of us. And turns out it was tryouts.

Speaker 18 Superhero tryouts. If you want to join the gang, you've got to prove yourself.

Speaker 18 Phoenix was in his full suit and body armor and acting like his usual cocky self.

Speaker 15 He's a very, very

Speaker 15 charismatic, affable guy. Clearly very smart, like just genius smart and smile that could crack a camera lens.
He could just leap into any room and be the center of attention and the star of the show.

Speaker 18 Before the rookies got the chance to prove themselves to their magnetic leader, there was a first round they had to pass.

Speaker 15 They took us around a corner one at a time. Put your name, hold up your ID, and pull down your mask and keep it up, you know, for be anonymous in this.
But,

Speaker 15 okay. Now what's your superpower? And yeah, absolutely.
And I just kind of sat there and blinked a few times.

Speaker 15 I didn't think of that.

Speaker 15 He's like, it's okay. It's all right.
That's the right answer. We boot anyone who thinks they can fly immediately.
I'm like, all right, okay.

Speaker 15 It's like, all right, you're good to go. And, you know, one at a time, they let everyone else back.
And at least one person walked away very dejected back to their car and drove off.

Speaker 18 According to James, this part of the vetting process was essential.

Speaker 15 There had been one guy before my time, apparently went by the name the Platypus, whose superpower was poison water balloons or something, which turned out to be full of pea. So

Speaker 15 suffice to say, this line of volunteer work and activism draws a very particular crowd.

Speaker 18 Once the Rain City superheroes were satisfied that the new recruits were more or less sane, it was time for the real test, their first patrol.

Speaker 15 Phoenix Jones had a very like, all right. Everyone follow me, do what I do, don't hurt anybody, just follow my lead.
Go!

Speaker 15 He just started running and everyone's staring, blinking at each other.

Speaker 15 Okay, well,

Speaker 15 hold up.

Speaker 18 With the new recruits trailing in his wake, Phoenix led the patrol squad to Pioneer Square, an old red brick neighborhood in the city's downtown area.

Speaker 18 For a Tuesday, it was a busy night. People from the bars were spilling out onto the streets, and the motley crew of wannabe superheroes attracted a lot of attention.

Speaker 15 Just a lot of cars honking as they drove by or waving of people, a couple of the security guards are on parking lots. Hey, PJ, what's up? It was like everyone seemed to know this guy.

Speaker 18 Phoenix was in his element.

Speaker 15 He must have stopped for 30 photo ops by the time we made it around the block. All the women, so many women, would want selfies with him or take pictures.

Speaker 15 Or he did this thing where he'd carry women like a bride to get a picture. I mean, that was a workout in itself.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't just a photo op. The recruits got to see some action too.

Speaker 15 There was a couple people who had clearly gotten kicked out of the club but weren't leaving yet, clearly being too intoxicated.

Speaker 15 And one of the telltale signs that shit's about to go down is you see someone pull off their shirt. You're like, oh shit, shirtless mail, shirtless mail.

Speaker 18 Phoenix leapt into the middle of the fray.

Speaker 15 We just kind of stood back and watched him get in there and talk people down.

Speaker 15 He pulled out pepper spray at one point, didn't deploy, but just waited in faces, you know, back up or else you're going to get it.

Speaker 18 A full year of patrolling later, James and three other battle-hardened recruits who'd been at the tryouts were inducted as full team members of the Rain City superheroes.

Speaker 18 And by this time, James had a new superhero name.

Speaker 15 Being a history nerd and loving a lot of things, Latin, I kind of went down the path of the Roman army and chose Evocatus. It means veteran in Latin and usually just got chopped down to Evo for short.

Speaker 18 Evo is the one I told you about before. who wears a full-faced helmet, a bit like daft punk, and motorcycle leathers with thick protective gloves.

Speaker 18 With a team that now included trained warriors like Evo, the Rain City superheroes were ready to take Seattle by storm.

Speaker 18 Phoenix even had his girlfriend along for the ride, Purple Rain.

Speaker 18 Purple focused mainly on supporting victims of domestic violence. El Caballero remembers the heyday of the Rain City superheroes well.

Speaker 29 We were really hitting the pavement.

Speaker 29 We were really doing some stuff from felons who had stabbed people, hardcore drug dealers like the cocaine and the cartel stuff, to identity thieves like we'd hit the ground running.

Speaker 18 The team held practices in the middle of the night at Gasworks Park. It's on the shores of Lake Union, a freshwater lake in the middle of Seattle.

Speaker 18 The rusting remains of an old gas plant still stand there. Late at night, by the metal ruins, the superheroes would trade skills.

Speaker 18 Phoenix taught them MMA moves, and Evo taught knife disarms and other techniques he picked up in the military. And these turned out to be necessary.

Speaker 18 According to Midnight Jack, things could get pretty gnarly out on patrol.

Speaker 14 We lived a crazy ass life.

Speaker 14 We were going to work with fucking bruises and black eyes from fist fights, broken thumbs, taped up toes, washing the mace off your body at the end of a long night so you can get two hours sleep and go in and stock shelves at Target.

Speaker 18 That's the kind of lives that we lived.

Speaker 18 The stakes were high. I had to look out for each other.
Like Phoenix says, this wasn't a game.

Speaker 15 I ended up getting stabbed and Cabby was there. And he's like, oh, it's all good, man.
Don't even stress about that. So we're talking and we're...
Don't even stress about getting stabbed. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 15 He's like, everything's fine. We're talking about our way to the car.
We're driving back to the hospital or whatever, right? And before I get in, I like can't stop tearing up.

Speaker 15 right and i'm like man i can't get in the hospital like this like there's cameras people might see it We are tearing up like. Oh, I can't stop crying because I got stabbed.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I just can't stop and get my shit together. And I wake up and I'm in the hospital bed.
And I'm like, what the happened? Cabby's like, don't worry, boss, I choked you out. What?

Speaker 15 I was like, thanks, man. You're a genius.

Speaker 18 Choking your buddy unconscious so he doesn't freak out after getting stabbed. That's true friendship.
And it's just as well, because as you might have gathered, Phoenix has a lot of stabbing stories.

Speaker 18 He got the chance to repay Cabby on another patrol in Belltown.

Speaker 15 El Caballero and I see this person, and the guy's got a knife, and he's yelling at this guy and this girl.

Speaker 15 And Cabby runs in, and the guy turns around and reaches out and grabs El Caballero straight in the crotch and starts grabbing his junk. Cabby, out of instinct, grabs the guy's arm, right?

Speaker 15 So the guy's arms kind of grabbing his junk like that, and he's got his arm around it like this, and they're going like this back and forth on the side of the street.

Speaker 15 And then I come through and I put the guy down, and Cabby steps back, and he's like, he's holding himself and he goes, you know what, man, I forgive you.

Speaker 18 So the guy who was grabbing his nuts?

Speaker 15 Wow. It was just one of those moments.
It looked like it was going to get his junk pulled off. It was hilarious.
I love Cabby that way.

Speaker 18 Until I met Cabby, I never imagined that superhero work would put your groin in so many high-risk situations.

Speaker 18 Anyway, flash forward to today.

Speaker 18 Of the individuals who made up the Rain City superhero movement in 2011 and 2012, none of them are on speaking terms with Phoenix Jones. Literally, not one.

Speaker 18 We'll get into the drama of all that fallout later, but despite the fracture of the group, speaking to me in 2021, it was clear that they missed each other.

Speaker 29 Just kind of the calm, cool demeanor that Jones had at that time, where it was like, I'm going to take care of business and fight some crime, but I'm not going to be scared about it.

Speaker 29 That was always impressive with me.

Speaker 15 Cabby is this mix of like skilled negotiator, right?

Speaker 15 And tactical fighter. He's a tactical monster.
So he'll come in and just do something and hit somebody one time or take them down the right way.

Speaker 15 And by the time they got something to do, they're just, they're in the wrong position. I can't tell you enough about that guy.

Speaker 18 When you're risking your lives together, you get close. And Evo got to know the rest of the team particularly well.

Speaker 15 A lot of the people on the team would just kind of naturally talk to me because I kind of accidentally wound up as like the entire HR department.

Speaker 18 Evo had many roles in the Rain City superhero movement. Turns out being a superhero comes with a lot of admin.

Speaker 18 In addition to running Phoenix's social media, filling out endless paperwork, and managing the patrol schedule, Evo was also the Rain City superhero's main chauffeur.

Speaker 15 I would leave up to an hour and a half early before a patrol to start picking up team members, and I was driving a tiny forward focus at the time, and I would have it packed like a clown car full of these superheroes who couldn't drive.

Speaker 15 So I would be listening for, you know, two to three hours a night of these people just kind of venting and unwinding about everything going on in their personal lives before we hit the street and put on the mask.

Speaker 18 If there's one thing I've learned in my time in the world of real-life superheroes, it's that they have a lot of car trouble.

Speaker 18 Phoenix seems to lurch from one car crisis to the next, both with me and with his former crew members.

Speaker 18 Over the course of many, many car pools with Phoenix, Evo began to notice a pattern that made him uneasy.

Speaker 15 I guess one of the unintended consequences of me driving him absolutely everywhere is that he would tell me these stories about, you know, what's going on, or oh my god, you won't believe what she told me this time or something like that.

Speaker 15 But he tells this story to so many people that he kind of forgets who he's already told.

Speaker 18 Phoenix would reel off stories to people on the phone as they cruised around in Evo's car.

Speaker 18 Evo would also drive Phoenix to speaking engagements at summer camps and colleges where he'd tell wild tales of his crime-fighting capers.

Speaker 18 Evo started noticing that the details in these familiar stories started shifting.

Speaker 15 He would just hop on his phone and start telling different team members different versions of the same story as well, seemingly kind of forgetting like I'm in the car or that I've already heard this.

Speaker 18 As well as having concerns about the truth of Phoenix's claims, Ivo was starting to have doubts about Phoenix's leadership style.

Speaker 15 Behind the scenes, it wasn't very communicative.

Speaker 15 If it wasn't like on stage or if it wasn't in front of a crowd or anything like that, he didn't talk much or he didn't tell a lot of people like what was going on or what's the next step.

Speaker 15 It's kind of like, hey, if you want to be in this, you got to follow my every word and lead.

Speaker 18 In a team full of aspiring superheroes, there was always going to be some friction. But Evo says things got particularly bad between Phoenix and Midnight Jack.

Speaker 15 They would butt heads like an old married couple and just end up getting in yelling fights and more than one patrol, you know, one would just like, fuck it, I'm out.

Speaker 15 And they would just leave the patrol, leaving a bunch of people in line kind of like, uh,

Speaker 15 what? What did we do?

Speaker 18 When I spoke to him, Phoenix didn't deny that there'd been clashes. But to him, that misses the point.

Speaker 15 Every one of those guys didn't know shit before they met me, and I taught every single one of them how to fight crime. So

Speaker 15 people can kind of say what they will from personality conflicts. But when it comes to just facts, half of those guys would be nowhere without my crime finding.

Speaker 18 Any group of people is going to have its personality conflicts.

Speaker 18 And for a group like the Rain City superheroes, with its larger-than-life personalities undergirded by a sense of righteousness, I'm sure it was even harder to keep everyone in agreement and then throw in the high-stakes nature of their mission, the possibility of death or injury, and top it off with an arrogant, charismatic leader.

Speaker 18 And it's a wonder they were able to work together at all.

Speaker 18 But somehow, they did it. And maybe they could have kept at it.
But then they started to get attention. First from the citizens of Seattle, then the local and eventually national news media.

Speaker 18 Phoenix and his gang were about to hit the big time, and the fragile alliance they had with each other would finally start to buckle under the weight of their growing fame.

Speaker 18 That's coming up next time.

Speaker 18 The Superhero Complex is hosted and written by me, David Weinberg, and reported by me, Amalia Sortland, and Caroline Thornham. Production from Amalia Sortland and Caroline Thornham.

Speaker 18 Sean Glenn, Max O'Brien, and David Waters are executive producers. Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz.
Production management from Cherie Houston, Frankie Taylor, and Charlotte Wolfe.

Speaker 18 Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Original music is composed by Paul Housden.

Speaker 18 Special thanks to Peter Tangen, Willard Foxton, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvell, Beth Ann Makaluso, Oren Rosenbaum, Shelby Schenkman, and all the team at UTA. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

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