Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill
Uploaded: 2020-04-16T19:00:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

I'm ready.
Okay. Tom, how are you?
Good, Joe.
Great to meet you.
You too.
I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks, and we'll tell everybody
what it's called right off the bat.
It's called Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 60s.
And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that
happened during the Manson murders is a tiny fraction of what was going on
behind the scenes.
And this is what you have, I mean, you've essentially been obsessed with this
for, how many years did it take you to do this?
Yeah, not obsessed by choice.
It kind of happened, but in the end, exactly 20 years.
We turned in the final manuscript, I think, a day to the 20th year.
And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours.
You were writing an article.
Let's fill people in.
Yeah, the beginning was I was in between magazines and not working.
And I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years, and she was at
Premier Magazine at that point, which was a monthly movie magazine.
And she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson
murders, which was 1999, happened in 69.
And I was like, eh, no thanks.
You know, never been interested.
Hasn't the story been written, you know, to death?
And she said, look, once we talk about it, you're going to see Manson comes up
much more often in popular culture than you're aware of.
Just trust me on that.
And I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story.
I go, but, you know, what about the 30th anniversary?
There's no angle.
And she goes, you've done it before.
You'll find an angle.
We had worked together a lot.
And that began a spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last year in
March when we turned the manuscript in.
That is so crazy that it took that long.
I know.
I know.
The magazine shut down five years later.
So you never got anything printed in the magazine?
Well, no.
I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too.
I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three
and a half months.
So I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any person's
life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway.
So I thought I needed the money and I needed a job.
And I knew that I could get into Premiere magazine as a contributor on the masthead,
which meant a yearly contract,
because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over.
And once I had a good story there, and this would have been the first, then I'd
be set.
So I agreed to do it.
And long story, very long story short, after a month or two, when the story
kind of started breaking open
and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them,
I had met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs,
and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence,
which was just, you know, a small portion of what I ended up having in the end,
he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue
of August 99.
And he started contracting me by the month.
And that continued for a year and a half.
All I did was report the story on Premier's dime.
He lost his job.
Because of you?
Well, that was kind of what was whispered around the offices.
I never heard that, you know, that was ever substantiated.
I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it.
He went on to a career that was fine anyway.
But when the new guy came in, he demanded the story right away.
I mean, I understood that.
And at that point, I got a book agent through a friend.
And my book agent got me out of my obligation to Premier.
So Premier essentially paid for you to start your book.
Yeah, a lot of money.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, and that's, I'm actually, because it was resolved, not in the courts, but
we all had to sign non-disclosures.
So I didn't get entirely away with it for nothing.
But at that point, though, that was, I think, 2001 or late 2000.
Then I was on my own.
I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book.
So that happened next, and finally in 2005.
And when we took the proposal out, it was book length.
It was 220 pages.
And my agent, who was big shot at ICM, who was also kind of, what I would do, I
would seduce people into the story and get them as obsessed as I was.
Like, pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book.
In the beginning, in the first years, just that the trial that had occurred
that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi had a lot of malfeasance in it by
the prosecution.
I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense
team to sabotage the defense.
I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher,
who played a big part in this, and we'll probably talk about that at some point,
lied on the stand, you know, suborned themselves in a murder trial.
And if you commit perjury in a murder trial, you could be convicted of murder.
I mean, you could be sentenced to a murder.
You could get a murder sentence, too, because of that.
So there was about a dozen of those, and none of them happened all at once.
So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for
murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they
murdered somebody.
You are subject to an actual capital.
You could be sent to the chair.
Wow.
And the five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial, once, had
I been around and able to prove this in the early 70s,
Vincent Bugliosi and the three people who lied on the stand in a material way,
you know, in a very important way, they all could have been tried for that perjury
and sentenced to the same or given the same sentence that the people who had
gotten the death sentence.
Now, I told you that I just got to the 11th chapter of your book.
Right.
And essentially what I'm getting so far, I haven't finished the book, but what
I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program where they were,
explain how they did it.
They infiltrated these hippie communities and they allowed Charles Manson over
and over and over again to get out of jail.
They knew that he was committing all these crimes.
And instead of incarcerating him.
But we have to be careful when we say they.
Who was they?
Yeah, we have to kind of break it all down.
Let's break it all down.
One of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson
had a parole officer, his first parole officer, who kind of had given him a get
out of jail free card for the first year after Manson was released from prison.
This was Smith?
Roger Smith, yeah.
And he was a criminologist in the Bay Area.
Manson violated his parole the day that he was released in Los Angeles.
Listen, this is one of the – you'd think it's a little lie, but it's an
important lie that Vince Bugliosi presented, not just at trial, but also in his
book.
At trial, it's much more serious.
He changed the narrative.
He said Manson had been given permission to travel to San Francisco from L.A.
when Manson was paroled.
Manson hadn't been given that permission.
He just showed up there.
They originally were going to violate him, sent him right back to prison, and
someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco,
and he was assigned to Roger Smith.
It took about a year and a half, but through a Freedom of Information Act
process, I got his federal parole file, and those were the kind of seeds of how
I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution.
For the two years, he was out of prison from 67 until the murders occurred in
the summer of 69.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but who was Smith doing this for?
Who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and to
continue to monitor him?
Well, that's the problem.
I didn't get the whole file, and the file I got had redactions.
He would report to the head office, and they would give him instructions, and
then he would violate those instructions, and there'd be no repercussions for
him or for Manson.
For instance, Manson was arrested in July of 1967, three or four months after
he got out of prison when he was under Roger Smith's supervision for
interfering with an officer who was trying to arrest one of his first young
followers, Ruth M. Morehouse, who was 15.
And he was put in jail, pled out, so he got a three-day sentence, a new
probation sentence as well, and all that was hidden.
And, like, it's not in Bugliosi's book.
The parole officer, Roger Smith, a week later wrote to the head office that
Manson was doing fine, and he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go
to Mexico and work in Mexico.
And the head parole office in the United States, since it's federal, wrote back,
and they said, that's insane.
The job that he was going to do in Mexico was surveying soil for insecticides.
I mean, it had nothing to do with—and I have all these documents showing this.
Who was hiring Charles Manson to survey soil?
It was a company in Nevada which disappeared a couple years later.
So it was a bullshit company, you think?
I believe so, yeah.
What do you think they were doing down there?
See, that's it.
I don't like to speculate because I can't prove it.
All I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only
to Mexico, but to the country that Manson had been deported from in 1959.
The last time he was a free man, he had violated his parole then.
He was arrested in Mexico, right?
He was arrested in Mexico and brought over by the federales and given over to
federal custody for—it was a drug violation and some other stuff.
So why would his parole officer send him back to this place three months after
he'd been released?
And how do you supervise somebody who's in another country?
Can I make a summary just for people who are like, what the fuck is going on
right now?
Essentially, what you're saying is that Charles Manson was a part of some sort
of a program.
Yes.
And that through this program, they were using him and using—with LSD and all
the members of the family, they were turning them violent.
And why do you think they were doing this?
Again, this is where I've got to reel it in a little bit.
Yeah, I understand.
Okay.
I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to
prove.
I understand.
What I've proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government
and the law enforcement, first in San Francisco that year.
The person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer,
Roger Smith, the federal parole officer, who was giving him leniency.
Roger was also doing drug research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic,
which opened in June of 67.
And Manson, during that period, turned into the Manson that we're familiar with
today, you know, the monster, the embodiment of evil, as Vince Bugliosi called
him, the guru who could control the minds of these followers.
So he would come into the clinic to see Roger Smith.
Well, he went for two reasons.
It was a free clinic.
It was at the height of the Summer of Love, the summer of 67.
And he would come in with the women, the girls.
He had about five or six followers then.
And they would walk behind him.
They wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them.
Any command he issued towards them, they would follow.
And they became very well known around the clinic.
And they were there principally for Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole
appointments.
And then the girls were going in for STDs and there were some pregnancies and
stuff and they were getting free treatment.
That was the summer that the Manson family formed.
And then they left in late 67, early 68 and migrated down to Los Angeles and
became this killer cult.
It's crazy how quickly this all happened.
It's insane how quickly it happened.
For people who don't understand, we're talking about two years.
We're talking about 67, Manson is in Haight-Ashbury, 69, the Tate-LaBianca
murders